In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

thirteen Junius Gladys and Barbara used to come visit me in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary . She was ten and eleven while I was there, and I’m not sure what kind of effect it had on her. It wasn’t until I went to jail that she even knew I was a Communist. The people in the neighborhood were very nice to her. And at Public School 125 she won the citizenship award. All my friends were wonderful, and every month somebody would drive them all the way to Lewisburg and back. They were wonderfully protective. I had an indefatigable committee that raised money and carried on the most varied propaganda for my release: Norman Thomas, Harold Goheen, Reinhold Niebuhr, and a lot of others. And then, Jimmy Wechsler and Murray Kempton of the New York Post were writing about my case, and it got so that there was an article or column about my case just about every week. Some of my fellow inmates got the paper and would give me the clippings. Wechsler was just relentless, and Norman Thomas went to see Bobby Kennedy , who was the U.S. attorney general at the time. Bobby Kennedy asked him to take the pressure off, and Norman Thomas says, “What do you mean, take off the pressure, what’s the alternative? We take the pressure off, then what?” And Bobby Kennedy said, “Well we’re doing everything we can, but. . . .” And apparently, it seems that he was having one hell of a time in the Department of Justice. J. Edgar Hoover’s position was that you couldn’t afford to set a precedent, that an ex-Communist had to purge himself by naming names. I wouldn’t do that. Although I suppose in a way I was quite anti-Communist, I hadn’t gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction. I certainly couldn’t go ratting on people and saying that everything that was good is really bad. A RED FAMILY 115 If I had gone to the clink a few years earlier, while still in the Party, I guess I’d have felt like a political martyr, and I would have had that to grab on to. For me, now, about the only issue of principle involved in going to prison was my self-respect. After I had been in about four months, my lawyer came up and said he felt he ought to pass on some information he had gotten from Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general. If I would simply make a statement, which they would work on with me, and name a few names, they would have me out of prison in a week. So, really, the only issue involved in my staying in or getting out was whether I had to be a stool pigeon to be an ex-Communist. J. Edgar Hoover thought I did. And Bobby Kennedy had quite a rough time and apparently put up quite a lonely fight. Being in prison, of course, is a hazardous occupation. They don’t give you insurance if you’re going to be in prison. It becomes a question of survival. You feel it every day and wonder whether you’re going to make it or not. It’s the most bestial and dehumanizing punishment I can think of. They are really out to kill you, to crush you and break you and make you something you’re not. And it’s a terrifying thing to live with. Some of the prisoners were quite good to me, really. Though some of them tried to entrap me, I suppose, so that they could rat me out to the warden. I think they were trying to get evidence that I was still in the Party or something . I found that the best method of preservation, as far as I was concerned, was simply to be consistent. I just told the truth about my political feelings to anybody who wanted to hear it. And I told the same things to everybody, friends and all. I had it better than most people. For one thing, I kept very busy. I was teaching. Well, I wasn’t exactly teaching, but I had something thrust on me known as the Literary Forum. I would tell the story of an opera and illustrate it with music in the prison library every Sunday night for two hours. Prison is such a horrible place, and everything is half-baked and done with ill grace. Most...

Share