Feature

f events in one’s life can be
marked out in newspaper
headlines, then a banner front
page in my life came on a hazy
August day in 1964. A friend and
I had been walking down Robson

== Street in Vancouver, when my
friend stopped short in front of the
newspaper stand outside a small
confectionery.

The headline hesitated for a moment
before it flashed on my consciousness like
a searing negative image: “Bodies of three
civil rights workers found.”

Thad followed the story of Mickey
Schwerner, Ben Chaney and Andrew
Goodman, the three young civil rights
activists who had gone to the heartland of
Ku Klux Klan country in Mississippi to
spearhead the registration drive for Black
voters, since it had first hit Canadian
newspapers following their disappearance
in June. I identified particularly with
Andrew Goodman, finding in his
determination to join the campaign an
echo of my own awakening passion for
social justice.

All that previous spring in my Grade
12 English class, I had been pounding
away on a single theme in my
open-subject essays: the injustice of racial
discrimination. One in particular I still
have, saved in an old Key-Tab notebook,

_ distinguished only because my English
teacher decided, on another warm summer
day just before graduation, to read it to the
class.

I still remember the beating of the
ventilator fan that began an intense
drumming inside my head as my own
words came back to me through the
teacher’s voice. At the end, she told the
class, her tone hinting at her own
lingering prejudice: “We may not like
what this boy has to say, but doesn’t he
write with passion and eloquence?”

I expect that few among that class did
in fact like what I’d written, nor did they »
care much for the passion or eloquence.
And fewer still, I’m sure, felt the pain and
_ despair that I did on that August day
when the news flashed around the world
that the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman
and Chaney had been found buried in a
mud dam where they’d been dumped by
their Klan murderers two months before.

o what does it matter

ago? Only that it was
two weeks after that

thousands of people around the world,
the events of 1990 have prompted me to
have a new look at the reasons why.

It’s an easy answer for others — not
me —to put it down simply to the fact that
I was a “red diaper baby” — born into a
Communist Party family. But if CP
membership seems like a quaint oddity
now, it seemed just as much out of sync ~
then. Hundreds of people of my
generation found their way into social
activism through the student movement or
the ban-the-bomb campaigns but few of
them went on to join the CP. It was still
very much the “old (and irrelevant) left.”
And it certainly didn’t get passed on
genetically — my two sisters, one older,
one much younger, both set up their lives
a long way away from the Left.

It was, in many ways, a curious and
unique culture among Communist Party
families, and the pattern probably shared
common parts with thousands of others
across the country. Most had joined the CP
during the Depression years or the
anti-fascist upsurge around World War II
when the party was an active and vibrant
movement and spoke directly to a socialist
future. It was with that future in mind that
many CP members began to raise families

Reflections
ofared
iaper baby

during the baby boom years of the "40s
and 50s. :

The feeling of activism was evident
even in everyday life: prominent figures in
the labour movement like Harold Pritchett
and Tom McEwen, as well as Tim Buck
and Harvey Murphy (it doesn’t surprise
me now that there weren’t many ‘women
on the list) were household names as well
as regular visitors. The music at home,
played on a scratchy old combination
record player and radio, consisted of 78s
of Paul Robeson and the Almanac Singers’
Talking Union. I devoured Soviet war
novels which extolled the heroism of the
partisans.

My mother taught school full-time,
attended ratepayers’ meetings, organized a
campaign to oppose oil refineries in
Burnaby and took part in a dozen other
activities while my father seemed

editor of the CP newsletter on campus, a
student from the coal-mining community
of Michel, was pre-occupied with
challenging cold war stereotypes. The
target of his editorials was invariably
anti-communism and one of his favourites
quoted the infamous gangster, Al Capone
who, following his time in the slammer,
devoted his services to the U.S, State
Department’s witch hunts.

Certainly the cold war and the
anti-communist hysteria that accompanied
it destroyed lives, perverted democracy
and distorted the direction of dozens of
organizations which had been part of the
fabric of social change in this country,
including the trade union movement.
Visits from the RCMP made people fear
for their jobs and even fear their
neighbours.

But often we became victims of the

endlessly away at meetings.

But there was also a sense of
separateness, of differences between me
and my peers that deepened as cold war
attitudes hardened. While everybody else
went to Sunday school, for us it was
strictly to be avoided. (I later played

‘softball surreptitiously for the United

Church and still harbour the resentment to
this day that even though I was team
captain, I had to forego the honour of
taking the trophy home when we won the
divisional championships.) And there ~
were times when I felt like the only kid in
the country who delivered election leaflets
door to door.

There was the moment of solidarity in
Grade 9 when a school friend, Lawrence,
leaned over the back of my desk as class
began one moming and whispered: “I hear
your Dad’s a Red, too!” But it had its dark
side'as well: the frozen silence of
high-school ostracism in the early 1960s
when the Province ran a lurid expose of
“Communist domination” of the United
Fishermen and Allied Workers Union and
The Fisherman for which my father then
worked.

Those two influences — the intense
activism, born of the belief that people
working together could change the world,
and the sense of following a separate,
different course in the face of intensifying
cold war propaganda — continued to
nes throughout my first years in the

The CP club of which I was a member
at the University of B.C. was intensely
active, working on the launching of the
B.C. Federation of Students and
organizing a campaign — ultimately
successful—to win lower bus fares for
UBC students. Ironically, however, the

cold war more than we needed to, as we
helped perpetuate the “them and us”
stereotypes. Every event seemed to have
two points of approach: imperialism’s and
the “progressive forces,” the latter
becoming, as time went by, increasingly
synonymous with the Soviet Union and
“existing socialism.” A whole body of
writing grew up among Communists ~
based on that notion and for most CP
members, it became the only material to
be trusted.

The tragic part of that process was that
it increased the alienation of CP members
from others on the left — an alienation felt
particularly acutely by those of us who
were the red diaper babies. And there were
times when it eroded the ideals of social
justice for which the Communist Party
and socialism had stood and in the cause
of which so many people had joined.

® hen the Warsaw
_ Pact tanks
rumbled into
Czechoslovakia
on Aug. 21,
1968, the

: reverberations
were felt immediately in my CP club on
the UBC campus which had its regular
meeting the following evening. The
shock over the swift military end to the
“Prague Spring” was palpable; we were
shattered that a reform movement that
seemed to be breathing new democracy
and vitality into socialism would be
choked in its infancy.

But at home, I was reminded that I
“didn’t understand history” — that the
events in Czechoslovakia were part of the
U.S.-British cold war design to “roll back
socialism” and the socialist system had to

be defended at the Czech border. Within
weeks, there was a wealth of material
from the international communist
movement affirming that contention.

I accepted it, although few others
among my generation did. With a handful
of exceptions, virtually every red diaper
baby in the province resigned from the CP,
echoing a split that rent the entire
international movement.

It’s been a long way coming back —
and it’s not surprising that many of the
ideas which refreshed the streets of
Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring
have again been on the wind during the
tumultuous events of 1990 in Eastern
Europe.

Suddenly, the impulses for equality,
social justice — and above all democracy
— that inspired Communist Party
activists two generations ago can again be
embraced wholeheartedly. They won’t be
measured any longer against the models of
existing socialism and then limited or
altered as they were in the past.

ne idea that is neither
new nor refreshing,
* however, is that of
unbridled capitalism.
» which seems to be
travelling at full
SS gallop across much of
Eastern Europe. But then it is precisely
because private enterprise and the private
accumulation of wealth are being so
promoted throughout Eastem Europe that
a socialist movement is so vital and
urgent today.

Conrad Black and Thomas Bata may
seem to be role models in Prague and
Berlin but they aren’t offering any
solutions in Canada as this country heads
into a new recession. The extremes of
poverty and wealth are starker than they
have been since the 1950s, a statistic that
will now be compounded by the changes
to the unemployment insurance
legislation. Manufacturing jobs are
shrinking and the much-vaunted service
economy is only replacing some of them,
and then only at vastly diminished wages.

It is probably one of the ironies of
history that socialism has taken a drop in
the public opinion polls at the very time
that more Canadians than at any time in
post war history see as one of the
fundamental problems of Canada the
corporate control of the economy and our
resources. But I think that’s a temporary
coincidence; it only underscores the need
for all those on the Left to expand the
vision of what a socialist alternative would
mean for Canadians, to include in it all the
breadth of the new social movements that
have emerged in the last decade and to
create a new sense of inspiration.

Twenty-six years after that decision in
1964, I come back to a different place but
for essentially the same reason. I joined
the CP because I thought my search for
social justice and a society based on
equality could only be realized by
socialism. If the events of 1990 have, in
Yeats’ words, “changed utterly” what I
and thousands of others had considered
that socialist society to be, they haven’t
really changed that belief.

Obviously the Communist Party that
existed in the form that I joined it 26 years
ago — with its notion of being a
“vanguard party” and having a blueprint
for the road to socialism — is part of
history, on which the closing chapter was
written this year. But what the party could
become —or, more to the point, what it
could be part of — is full of promise.

The dream that Andrew Goodman died
for is still be realized, and in 1990, it does
seem farther off than it did in 1964. But
suddenly, I can see that the possibilities
for realizing it are greater than they have
ever been.

Pacific Tribune, December 17, 1990 « 13