Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 19:28:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Fred Baker: 50s radical, chapter one (lnp post 2)


Fred Baker produced and directed the legendary documentary "Lenny Bruce
Without Tears." The film-maker, like his subject, defies conventional
expectations. While Fred Baker has worked both sides of the camera in the
film business, and has extensive credits on the Broadway stage and
television, what sets him apart from the rest of show business are two
passions that have little to do with making money or winning the approval
of critics or audiences. They are radical politics and open, even raw,
sexuality. 

I ran into Fred in November 1996 at an art gallery opening in Manhattan's
west twenties. I knew him casually in the early 1980s but lost touch after
he moved to Hollywood. He had now returned to New York for good. 

Fred told me once that he sang in Communist Party choruses of the 40s and
50s. This period weighed on my mind lately since I identified strongly
with "50s radicals," who were rebels against bourgeois normalcy in those
desperate times. Now that I was a "90s radical" and wandering about in a
different sort of desert, I wanted to examine and write about that earlier
period. 

I decided to invite him to be interviewed a "50s radicals" project. I had
already lined up legendary socialist and pacifist David MacReynolds, a key
figure in the Vietnam antiwar movement. I told Fred that I was not
interested in his background in organized politics as such, but more in
his identification with the CP culture of his youth. Fred was born in 1932
and had been engaged culturally and artistically with leftist causes for
the better part of fifty years. I wanted to find out how his early
experiences in the CPUSA cultural milieu had shaped his later life. 

While the party no longer enjoyed the support it had during its heyday, I
marveled at how many people continued to be touched and inspired by
membership in the organization or the front groups it sponsored. A new
socialist movement would have to draw from what was positive in all the
important left formations of the last 100 years. This meant studying the
IWW, Debs's Socialist Party or the Communist Party, the most compromised
of all the major groups.

My 60s generation of the 1960s accepted without question that the CPUSA
was pure evil, as was Stalin. We decided to do everything completely
different from the stodgy "old left" CP. This was a huge mistake since
there was much of value in the legacy that the CP left. The party had sunk
deep roots in American society while the ultra-radical groups we spawned
withered on the vine. Our biggest problem was that we didn't know how to
relate to the ordinary working person.

The New Leftists held the Archie and Edith Bunker figures of their
imagination in contempt, but made no attempt to get past the stereotype.
Trotskyism and Maoism paid all sorts of lip-service to the "proletariat"
but was always too wrapped up in dogma and rhetoric to make any kind of
serious breakthrough the way the CPUSA had. 

Fred liked my proposal and agreed to participate. There was one proviso:
since he was making a movie about his own life, he wanted to film my
interviews with him. Since Fred had learned eight years earlier that he
was HIV positive, the film would have an urgency that none of his previous
projects did. A number of other well-known writers and film-makers with
the illness had also created important works lately. One of the was Harold
Brodkey, whose brutally self-aware New Yorker articles contrasted sharply
with the glitzy ads and articles editor Tina Brown favored. 

Fred made it clear to me that his film would unstinting. One of his goals
was to make sense of his life and his artistic accomplishments.  He made a
number of artistically significant films, but he also made pornography. He
was a family man, but he also was a debaucher. He believed that he
contracted the AIDS virus while making the rounds in Philippine
whorehouses. His mother once warned him not to "krich arein", Yiddish for
"wander about." Idiomatically, the phrase means something closer to crawl
around in the garbage when used with the proper facial expression and tone
of voice. 

The film had not yet touched on his political commitments and that was
where I would fit in. He would be happy to let me interview him just as
long as I would agree to be part of the film. I was cast as the
Interviewer, my first screen role. My questions were just what he needed
to draw out his leftist past. Up till now, the film was mostly about his
sex life, including his 5 year battle with HIV. He was now all set to talk
about politics, because that was just as much a party of his story as sex. 

Fred's family was Communist to the core in the 1930s, long before
McCarthyism gave the party a dirty name and before Stalin's crimes had
become widely known to the general public. Identification with the Soviet
Union came easy for many poverty-stricken immigrants during the
depression, especially Eastern European Jews. The Soviet Union seemed like
the only nation on earth that was ready to defend Jews and working people
against Hitler. 

This fact and the willingness of the Communist Party to fight for trade
union rights and social justice in the USA made it particularly attractive
to working-class Jewish New Yorkers, especially those in the garment
industry. These "Jews Without Money", as CP novelist Mike Gold put it, saw
themselves as exploited. Moreover, their class identification was much
stronger than their religious or ethnic identification. The holocaust and
the Zionist response, combined with growing affluence in the Jewish
community, eroded this class outlook. 

The famous trade union battles of the 1930s in cities like Chicago and
Detroit, led by people like the young Walter Reuther or Jimmy Hoffa,
brought powerful industrial unions like the UAW or the Teamsters to birth.
Without these unions, working people would have never been able to enjoy
the relative affluence WWII and Cold War military spending created. Before
the 1930s there were no industrial unions. In shops where unions did
exist, they were organized along craft lines.  This meant that in a big
factory machinists belonged to one union while welders to another, and so
forth. Furthermore, unskilled workers very often had no union
representation whatsoever. They were poorly treated and underpaid. 

In an industrial union, everybody who worked in the same factory belonged
to the same union, ideally not only within the shop but throughout the
entire nation. When all steel workers, teamsters, miners or auto workers
go on strike at the same time, their power is magnified. At the start of
the Great Depression the Communist Party placed a great emphasis on
building industrial unions everywhere. By increasing the economic power of
workers, their political power would be increased as well. 

Not only did the bosses the bosses exploit craft divisions, they took
advantage of racial, national and gender differences as well. This was an
especially big problem in the garment industry, where many workers in the
same factory often came from different European nations and regarded each
other's nationality as a bitter foe. Beginning with the IWW, American
radicals had been fighting to overcome these differences for more than a
generation. The Communist Party was simply the latest expression of this
fight for unity among the ranks of labor and industrial unions would be
the crowning victory. 

What many people would be surprised to find out is that the furriers of
New York were among the first to put their bodies on the line to create
industrial unions. Fred's father Harry Baker, a fur industry cutter, was
in the middle of one of the most important trade union organizing fights
of the 1930s, one that took place in the garment district of New York. 

The garment district occupies the west side of Manhattan between 14th
Street and 42nd Street. In the 1920s and 30s most of the workers were
Jewish. In the 1990s entrepreneurs have converted many of the old garment
lofts into high technology workshops, or trendy art galleries of the type
where I met Fred. However, many continue to turn out fur coats and slacks
the way they used to in the 1930s, using nearly the same tools.

Today many of the workers are Chinese and Latino and work in non-
unionized sweatshops. Working conditions and wages are as bad as they were
before radicals transformed the garment industry. The oppressive
conditions many workers face today are a product of the great purge of the
Communists in the 1950s, most especially those who had led the heroic
Furriers Union. 

Harry Baker eventually quit the furrier trade and the CPUSA to open up New
York's celebrated Second Avenue delicatessen. He left the working-class,
but the union movement remained very much on his mind. Fred remembers his
father in a hospital bed as he lay dying of emphysema, drifting in and out
of consciousness. Several days before his death, Harry gripped his son's
hand and told him how anxious he was about the upcoming furriers union
convention in Atlantic City, an event that took place forty years earlier
in 1939. 

That convention had resulted in the merger of the furrier and leather
workers unions. Some officials in the leather workers unions officials
opposed the merger because they feared losing their posts. The leather
workers had a much larger union and a mostly Irish membership.  These
officials tried to red-bait and Jew-bait the furrier union leaders Ben
Gold and Irving Potash, but the rank-and-file workers ignored them and
voted for merger, putting class interest above petty prejudice. 

(The eight year old Fred Baker, his two sisters and mother stood outside
on the boardwalk and passed the time as the two sides battled over the
merger question inside. They struck up a conversation with a group of
vacationing Midwesterners who soon joined them in singing the popular song
"Roll Out the Barrel". Fred's mother was worried that the vacationers had
stuck a new verse into the song, "Let's get the Jews on the run." It was
1938 after all.) 

Long after the labor battles of the 1930s had ended, Harry Baker often
drove miles out of the way on his way upstate to the Jewish resort area
for summer vacations. He wanted to show his family the scene of one of the
most memorable organizing drives of the furriers union. This was one the
Middletown plant of A. Hollander and Sons, one of the biggest and cruelest
employers in the fur dressing and dyeing industry in the 1920s and 30s. 

This company had the reputation of being the "Ford of the Fur industry"
since like Ford Motors it was infamous for terrorizing union organizers in
during the 1930s. Middletown was a mostly gentile farming community that
had much more in common culturally with the rest of New York state than
the heavily Jewish Sullivan County, their destination and home of many
famous resort hotels such as the Concord and Grossingers. As he drove
slowly past the plant, Harry Becker would point at the plant and remind
his children of the battles his union fought there. 

One of the martyrs in the fight with Hollander was Morris Langer. He led
the organizing drive at Hollander plants in Newark where workers made $6
to $10 for sixty to seventy-two hour weeks. On March 22 1933 he fell
victim to a car-bomb and died 4 days later. Ten thousand garment workers,
including Harry Baker, marched in the funeral procession that night. They
started on 28th street in Manhattan and moved slowly up Seventh Avenue to
40th street, then eastward to the Queensboro Bridge to the cemetery in
Long Island where they buried Morris Langer. In the hall of the furrier's
union, they placed a sign beneath Langer's picture that stated, "We Will
Remember Morris Langer By Building A Greater Union."

Who murdered Morris Langer? There is little doubt that it was the
gangsters who operated in collusion with corrupt garment union officials
and anti-labor employers like Hollander. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter and Jacob
(Gurrah) Shapiro led a powerful gang that intimidated boss and worker
alike. Their gang was part of the infamous "Murder Incorporated"
syndicate. When I was growing up in the Catskills, everybody was aware of
the cruelty of this underworld mob. Swan Lake, in Liberty, not ten miles
>from my home was the place where Murder Incorporated hit-men threw their
victims. 

The real life Jewish gangsters of Murder Incorporated had none of the
raffish charm of characters in the movie "Bugsy Siegal", a well-known
Murder Incorporated member. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, who made his living
as an extortionist in the garment industry, came from a very conventional
middle-class background. Lepke had the same appetites as any noveau-riche
businessman in the garment district, but satisfied them through
intimidation and murder rather than ordinary exploitation of the working
class. His hulking and dull-witted partner Gurrah provided the muscle for
the rather unimposing Lepke. 

The notion that organized crime owes its start in prohibition is not
entirely accurate. While some hoodlums made their fortunes in
prostitution, bootlegging or drugs, many gangsters such as Lepke and
Albert Anastasia got their start hiring out as strike-breakers. They also
went to work for craft unions in the garment industry who preferred to
hire mob muscle to intimidate the employer at contract time, rather than
rely on the strength of the rank-and-file. Communists like Ben Gold and
Irving Potash believed that gangsters had no place in the union movement.
This put them on a collision course with manufacturers like the Hollanders
and old line craft union bureaucrats. Gangsters, allied to both factions,
had no interest in clean and democratic unions. That was why they staged
an assault on the Furriers Industrial Union headquarters on April 24,
1933. 

At ten am on that date, fifteen members of Lepke's gang stormed the union
building at 131 West 28th Street. Armed with revolvers, knives and lead
pipes, they found twenty or so workers in the union offices on the ground
floor and attacked everybody in sight. The receptionist screamed
"Gangsters! Gangsters!" into the intercom connected to second-floor union
offices where Ben Gold and other leaders were meeting. 

Gold and the other men then raced downstairs and began to fight with the
gangsters. They had no fear of Lepke's sluggers. Irving Potash had fought
with them at a picket line three years earlier and suffered stab wounds so
grievous that doctors at New York Hospital were sure he would die. As soon
as the wounds healed, he went back to union affairs. 

The furriers were prepared this time. Somebody from the union ran out onto
7th Avenue and blew a whistle in a prearranged signal and started
screaming, "Gangsters in the union building!" Immediately hundreds of
furriers downed their tools and ran to the union lobby where the fighting
was in progress. They braved bullets and knives and attacked the gangsters
>from all sides. One furrier, Harry Gottlieb, died from bullet wounds.
Harry Baker was one of the furriers who came to the aid of their union
that day and lived to tell of it. 

By the time police arrived, the gangsters had either been beaten into
submission or fled. Police arrested the six gangsters who furriers had
knocked the stuffing out of. A New York Daily News photo in the next day's
edition shows the dazed and beaten thugs stretched out on the sidewalk
surrounded by cops. They dab bloody noses while holding their tattered
suits together. 

New York's garment unions were highly politicized during the 1930s.  The
divisions mapped to the great schism that the Russian Revolution caused
within the socialist movement. The old time craft unions identified with
the Menshevik faction in Russia while the radicals who were trying to
build industrial unions looked to Lenin and Bolshevik Party for
inspiration. After the great stock market crash in 1929, the more radical
vision of the Communists began to make a lot of sense to many workers and
they flooded into its ranks. 

The left wing that emerged out of this split in the socialist movement not
only fostered the growth of industrial unions. It also inspired the growth
of an important neighborhood-based left-wing organization called the
International Workers Order (IWO) that was much larger than the Communist
Party itself. In Jewish working-class neighborhoods of the 1930s and 40s,
the IWO had a massive membership, including many of the Jews who toiled in
the garment industry. The IWO was a very important part of the daily life
of the Baker family, including Fred himself. 

Indeed the young Fred Baker was never a member of the CPUSA but was
instead deeply involved with IWO activities. His early experiences in IWO
cultural and political activities have had lasting power, just as might
membership in the party. However, these experiences did not leave a scar
they way they had for Harry Baker when he quit the CPUSA in disgust. They
have instead been a source of warmth and inspiration throughout his entire
life. 

The fact that the IWO never required a blind loyalty to party line
explains why membership was a much less wrenching experience for the tens
of thousands of people who passed through its ranks than CPUSA membership.
For most people the IWO provided the sense of community that various
social movements of the 1960s and 70s provided. What was different about
the IWO is that it was not a middle-class youth group, but a powerful
working-class organization that united senior citizens and the very young
in common action. 

The IWO originated as a split from mutual aid society called the Workmen's
Circle. Two garment workers, Harry Lasker and Sam Greenberg formed the
Workmen's Circle in 1892 on the lower east side of New York in order to
provide welfare and cultural benefits for an immigrant Jewish community.
The most important benefit it provided was insurance. The Circle tried to
make the adjustment to American life as smooth as possible for the vast
migrations from the Pale and Eastern Europe during Czarist repression. 

Many leaders of the Workmen's Circle belonged to the American Socialist
Party. At the 1919 convention of the party, the more radical members of
the group bolted and joined the recently formed Workers Party, the
official Communist Party. By 1922 there was an official Jewish section of
the Communist Party with its own daily newspaper called the Freiheit.
Jewish members of the Socialist Party put out their own newspaper called
the Daily Forward. Inside the Workmen's Circle the two blocs constantly
fought. 

In the late 1920s Communists everywhere received instructions from Moscow
that a "left turn" was necessary since new revolutionary struggles were
bound to break out. Organizationally, this meant that the CP's formed
their own unions and mass organizations. It turned out that this call was
premature and needlessly sectarian since there was no political upturn
until a few years into the depression. Even then it made more sense for
the CP to ally itself in united actions with socialists, no matter how
resentful they were of the more moderate faction. 

In some cases, however, the "left turn" was beneficial. The Communist
Party launched the IWO and instead of becoming an isolated, sectarian rump
formation in the immigrant Jewish community, it became a powerful social
movement. On March 30, 1930 3,000 former members of the Workmen's Circle
gave their backing to the new organization at a delegated convention in
New York City. The membership came from the radical branches of the
Workmen's circle that had heavy Communist representation. These branches
had maintained an extensive educational and cultural program for a number
of years and looked to the newspaper Freiheit for political guidance. The
founding statement of the International Workers Order concluded with these
words: 

"The International Workers Order is a fraternal organization. Its primary
purpose is to insure its membership against sickness and death. In other
words: the Order is an organization of mutual aid. 

...But this is not the whole story. The International Workers Order is
more than an insurance organization.. It is part of the fighting front of
the working class. It helps the workers not only to insure themselves for
the emergency of sickness and death, but it helps them to improve their
lives. It helps them to fight for a better living." 

The IWO followed the CPUSA's initiative on most domestic and foreign
policy questions. However, it would be a mistake to think that people only
joined it for political reasons. There were reasons for its rapid growth
in the 1930s that had nothing to do directly with politics.  It was a
mutual aid society that delivered solid benefits to its working-class
base. People joined because they could get low cost insurance even if they
worked in high-risk occupations. Garment workers who could easily lose a
finger in a sewing-machine mishap had nobody else to turn to for
insurance, other than the IWO. 

In the loosest sense of what it means to be "left", the IWO was the
largest left formation in American history. At its peak, just before World
War Two, it would contain among its friends and members celebrities such
as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Rockwell Kent, Jimmy Durante, Irwin
Corey and Zero Mostel.

The IWO's Jewish section placed a great emphasis on education.  Classes in
socialism or Jewish history were usually held at IWO lodges; other times
they took place at classrooms at public schools that the organization
rented on weekends. In New York City, Stuyvesant High School was used on a
regular basis. The education continued during the summers. Two IWO summer
camps in upstate New York, Camp Kinderland and Camp Lakeland, provided
vacations for fifty- five thousand children over the years, including Fred
Baker himself. 

Politics, trade union activity and social life were tightly integrated in
the Harry Baker household. The family consisted of Harry, his wife Freida,
Fred and two sisters Esther and Rosalie. Esther was six years older than
Fred and a dedicated Young Communist, while Rosalie was two years younger
than him and less passionate about politics.

In their working-class neighborhood of Bathbeach, Brooklyn, the Bakers
were among many other families with similar beliefs and associations. Most
were of Jewish origin but there were many Italians as well. The Italians
were also swept up by the great radicalism of the 1930s in great numbers,
especially those who came from Sicily where socialist traditions were
strong. 

A typical evening at the Baker household would consist of the family
discussing current events over a dinner prepared by Freida who had a
well-deserved reputation as a "berrieh." "Berriehs" are women of
remarkable energy, talent and competence. In Jewish households, there was
no such thing as "just a housewife." Leo Rosten illustrates what it means
to be a "berrieh" with a traditional Yiddish joke: 

"The doctor examined the eighty-three-year-old woman and said, 'Some
things not even modern medicine can cure...I can't make you any younger,
you know.'

'Who asked you to make me younger?' retorted the berrieh. 'I want you to
make me older.'

Harry Baker enforced a moral code in the household that his wife and
children shared without question. Racist remarks were absolutely
forbidden. In the unlikely event that Fred or his sisters uttered a word
like "nigger" or "wop", they would get their face slapped on the spot. As
the depression began to wind down with the arrival of war spending, Harry
Baker's wages went up and he was able to afford a servant to help his wife
out. She insisted that the household call her by her name "Cecilia" and
not refer to her as the "girl," as many middle-class Jewish families
referred to their black servants. That was disrespectful.

Harry Baker was also strict about what the family read. Tabloids like "The
Daily News" were forbidden, as were comic books. He approved of the CPUSA
newspaper, "The Daily Worker" and the left-liberal newspaper PM which had
many party members on its staff. 

An evening out might mean a trip over to the IWO lodge for a social event
or a lecture. Lectures would be about important world events, such as the
Spanish Civil War or some important American strike like-minded leftists
were leading. After the lecture, the family would join other families in
the cafeteria downstairs and have coffee and strudel and discuss the
lecture. This was a remarkable social phenomenon prior to the days of
television, consumerism and political apathy: dozens of politically
engaged families gathering socially to discuss ideas and taking pleasure
in this act. 

While the heads of the household regarded questions of race and class to
be deadly serious, this did not mean that the atmosphere at home was
somber. All of the Bakers were sharp-witted and the dinner table would be
an occasion for good-nature teasing. The most important source of pleasure
for the family was music. Everybody could carry a tune and Esther and Fred
in particular had beautiful singing voices. 

The music that they loved crossed boundaries. They knew dozens of protest
songs, but they were also in love with the Broadway musicals of the time.
The 1930s was a time of tremendous creativity in the musical stage.
Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, and Irving Berlin were all producing classic
musicals that often appeared concurrently on Broadway. Esther took Fred to
the theater to see a musical when he was in his early teens and he was
swept away. He knew from that moment on that he wanted to act and sing. 

Fred's first opportunity to perform publicly arrived when Esther organized
the three Baker children to go out and rally support on the streets of
Brooklyn for the "good fight." His sister Esther, thirteen years old at
the time and a dedicated Young Communist League activist, recruited
Rosalie and Fred to join her after school to rally support for the Spanish
Republic. She wore a Young Communist League uniform, a gray jumper with
red stripes, and would lead her two younger siblings in impromptu song
recitals on sidewalks of their working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. The
three gifted singers would launch into Spanish Civil War anthems and as a
crowd gathered, they would start to sell the Daily Worker or raise money
for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. 

Fred remembers the pleasure singing before these audiences gave him when
he started out as a six-year-old. This was the start of a powerful
political and artistic musical experience that was nourished by IWO and
CPUSA summer camps. He also took part in a very important institution
called People's Songs that expressed the deep affinity between the Popular
Front and the more deeply-rooted tradition of folk singing in American
society. It is out of this rich musical culture that the folk music
revival of the 1950s arises. It is also where Fred developed the skills
that would allow him to launch a career as an actor and a singer. 

Louis Proyect




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