As soon as I got well I went to Budapest and in January, 1919 enrolled in the Medical School of the Royal University of Budapest. I also obtained a job with the Gabor Institute, a private school for the problem children of the wealthy. Some of the pupils were backward, some came from broken homes or were unwanted, others were the unmanageable, the kind no other school in the country would take. I was hired to teach mathematics and physical culture after my classes at the University, in exchange for room and board plus a nominal pay. Since jobs were almost impossible to find, it was a most fortunate arrangement.

I did not relish my job. The children were spoiled and in general looked down on their tutors who, as they well knew, came from poorer families.

One of my colleagues, a brilliant chemistry major just about to receive his degree, advised me to be deferential in my relationship with the boys or I wouldn't last long, because Dr. Gabor, the head of the institute, would invariably side with his wealthy pupils in any dispute.

Kovess then urged it was high time I quit my ivory tower and took an active part in remaking society, handed me an application card, and invited me to join the Communist Party.

I was entranced. Although the sweatshop in which I worked could hardly be classified as an ivory tower, the vision held out by Kovess was truly inspiring. This was the purpose in life I had been searching for-to help elevate mankind-and now I was offered a chance to participate in it.

In the light of my subsequent experiences it would be easy to claim, as so many ex-Communists have done, that "I was duped." I hadn't been duped, nor was anyone else who ever joined the Communist Party. This is particularly true of those former Communists who joined the Party in the thirties when the great depression laid bare the glaring injustices, brutality, and fundamental weaknesses of predatory capitalism. Each of them, like me, had been led to the party by the vision of a perfect future society, each was motivated by the wish to become, as Kovess had put it, "one of the architects of the happy society of the future." I know I was. When I took that application card I was merely worried about one thing-whether my character was sufficiently strong to brave the hardships and hazards of the class struggle - whether I was indeed ready to sacrifice my material well-being for such a remote ideal. Well, time would tell, I might as well give it a try, I reasoned, as I signed the application card. Kovess was greatly pleased.

"I knew from the moment I met you that you were the right Party material, only I didn't anticipate it would take you this long to come along."

We then went for a walk and Kovess explained that since I knew English he would turn my application over to the New York District for assignment in general party work. This would put me in the mainstream of the American mass revolutionary movement. I was awed by the prospect.

Shortly after my return from Canada I moved to Ohio.... The six years I spent there as a full-time party functionary in various capacities, including that of heading the Ohio Bureau of the Daily Worker, the official organ of the party, were years of the greatest social unrest in the history of the United States since the early days of the American Revolution. There was a widely felt popular recognition of the need for a drastic change in government which was manifested most clearly in the rapid radicalization of the intellectuals-the opinion molders of society. A substantial number of writers, artists, teachers, musicians, performing artists, and even preachers not only joined the chorus of discontent but even led it by their voices. For famine stalked the land, not because of flood, drought, or other ravages of the elements, a famine caused by a failure not of crops but of men in high places in government, in legislature, in banking, and industry.

Who were the heretics in America in the thirties thus to be put to the sword?

For answer let me quote from another would-be Fascist leader who is still around, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who at the time I met him was an itinerant preacher and part-time evangelist talking folksy and preaching politics under the guise of religion. He was the convivial sort, walking around with a small, black leather-bound Bible protruding from his hip pocket. That was not a preaching Bible but merely an oratorical device. Every time he wanted to make a point, he would pull that Bible out of his pocket, hold it high in his left hand, then give it a hard punch with his right fist. That Bible must have had a special acoustic binding for it responded with a resounding "C sharp" crack.

I talked with Smith twice. He was proud of his start with the Louisiana Kingfish, that incipient Fascist Huey Long; he did not hide from me that he was out for fame, power, and the easy fast buck. He did not relish being seen in public conversing with the correspondent of the Communist Daily Worker and was somewhat guarded with me, but not so with Gerold Frank, then a reporter on the Cleveland News, and I am now quoting from the interview Frank had with him: "I am a reactionary. Reaction will produce a ruthless, intolerant, dynamic nationalistic movement which will capture the imagination of the American people. I shall lead that movement... I shall attack, and ruthlessly attack a few, or an Italian, or a Negro, or any other man because he is a Communist."

The Jarama debacle was such a closely guarded secret that not even a Party regular like Sandor Voros had any inkling of it. Though a seasoned writer of propaganda he had been taken in by glorious accounts of a Lincoln victory.... Since no one in the Party really knew how many Americans there were in Spain, where they were, or whether they were living or dead, Voros had the job of setting up an archive and historical commission. If the Republic won the war, he would stay in Spain and help restructure the Party there; if it lost, he would go to the USSR. As sweetener and accolade, he received a silk ribbon with instructions to sew it into the lining of his coat, an innocuous-looking scrap of silk that identified him as a bone fide Comintern agent.

I was still wrestling with the problem of how to write literature that was truthful and still conformed to the new united front line, how to show the Communists not as they were but as watered down anti-Fascists as they wanted to appear, when I received an urgent call from Williamson. He wanted to see me at once, he couldn't discuss it over the phone. I was apprehensive that they wanted me to fill some emergency post again and resolved not to yield.

When I entered party headquarters Williamson greeted me with a friendly handclasp although he seemed somewhat embarrassed. He asked how I was progressing with my writing and then, without any preliminary, he blurted out: "The party wants you to go to Spain."

I blinked. That was totally unexpected. True, eight months back, right after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936, I had asked for party permission to go to Spain to volunteer my services to the Loyalist government, but that permission was refused because at that time the party as well as the Comintern had completely misjudged the character of the Spanish Civil War, declaring it merely a fight between two capitalist factions and therefore of no concern to Communists.

Later, in the fall of 1936, when the Soviet Union belatedly discovered its error and decided to form the International Brigades I volunteered again, along with many other party functionaries who were also eager to take up arms against the Fascists. To our disappointment the Central Committee ruled that the party had too few leading, experienced comrades to spare any of us, that we were all needed here. Since there was no appeal from that decision, I soon put the idea out of mind.

Now Williamson had not said that I had been "granted permission to go to Spain." What he said was that the party wanted me to go. That was not volunteering, that was an order. There had to be a reason behind this unanticipated reversal, and I asked Williamson to explain it.

Williamson informed me that Comrade Mills from the Central Committee was awaiting me in the other office, that I knew Mills well and he would give me the details.

Saul Mills greeted me effusively. This was strange. Although we had known each other for years we weren't on particularly intimate terms. He was a short, stout fellow with padded broad shoulders, widely spaced eyes and with an odd, perpetual leer on his thick lips. He was in his early thirties, yet he moved with the ponderous slowness of an old, fat man - a deliberately cultivated habit to create the impression of massive strength behind his grotesque appearance.

He started out by saying that as I well knew the party had been recruiting volunteers for the International Brigades for months. I nodded, that was no longer kept secret. The Daily Worker had been publishing stories for weeks about the heroic exploits of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion which, practically unaided, had stopped the Fascists at the Jarama River and saved Madrid from Franco. I knew some of them personally, younger comrades like Joe Dallet, our Youngstown Section Organizer, Johnny Gates, our Akron Y.C.L. Organizer, who were on the lower level of leadership and thus permitted to volunteer.

Mills who was usually very loud in speech now dropped his voice to a whisper. "The party is in trouble, Voros. All that stuff you've read about the heroic Lincoln Brigade in the Daily Worker is crap. If the truth comes out and the enemies of the party pick it up we're going to have a tremendous scandal. The truth is that the Lincoln Brigade mutinied the first day it was sent into action, and had to be driven at pistol point into attack. The comrades in Spain are completely demoralized. They want to come home and many of them are deserting."

That was startling news. Published accounts of the Lincoln Brigade's heroic fight against the Fascists had generated an immense pride even in circles normally hostile to Communists. Mass meetings "To Aid Spanish Democracy and Fight Fascism" were successful beyond anything ever experienced by the party, and great sums were being collected throughout the country. Were the truth to come out it would indeed result in a mass scandal. I asked Mills for an explanation. The reason he gave was shocking.

The American party had recruited and already sent to Spain more than 2,000 young, courageous but totally inexperienced volunteers without bothering to investigate the conditions awaiting them there. Worse still, the party had been too niggardly with its leading cadres to send with those two thousand young men even a few older comrades of established prestige and proved organizational experience, to set them an example and keep up their morale.

To rectify that monstrous blunder the party had now decided to send a minimum of twelve leading comrades to Spain at once. As the Ohio District was one of the strongest in leading cadres, it was ordered to release two. Williamson had picked me as one. When would I be ready to leave?

Since none of the Americans - not even Bob Minor, the top Party man in Spain-rated either submarine or private plane to ferry top-priority personnel - the volunteers had to wait their turn to slip aboard a fishing boat or to follow a guide over the Pyrenees. In May the backlog was so great that the Control Committee put five hundred men (most of them from other countries) aboard the Ciudad de Barcelona at Marseilles. Twenty miles north of Barcelona, an Italian submarine torpedoed the vessel, carrying an unknown number including seven Americans - to their deaths. (Lifeboats locked in their davits could not be freed.) For weeks the fishermen of Malgrat salvaged unidentified bodies from a thick beach scum of oil, hemp, and lumber. An opaque curtain immediately dropped over the Barcelona disaster.

The survivors were warned not to talk about the disaster and were rushed south to Valencia, where Sandor Voros, who met them there quite by accident, saw a scoop for publicizing a "Fascist-atrocity" story in American newspapers. He collected the names and hometowns of forty-three Americans known to have been aboard and in his mind's eye saw the headlines - "LOCAL BOY TORPEDOED BY FASCIST SUBMARINE." He rushed off to Bob Minor and demanded a typewriter. But Minor became "livid with anger." Snatching the notes from Voros, he shouted, "What are you trying to do-demoralize the people back home?" Eventually the steamship company admitted that the vessel had been torpedoed but declared that it had carried no passengers - only a cargo of fish, bread, and vegetables for hungry Spain.

Finally I was able to reconstruct fairly closely what had actually happened. There were over 500 volunteers on that boat out of whom nearly half had perished: those trapped in the hold when the torpedo struck, and those who couldn't swim or stay afloat until rescue arrived. None of them knew how many Americans had actually boarded that boat; checking their stories one against another my best estimate came to between 130-135 volunteers of whom only forty-six had escaped. Once I learned those casualty figures I also lost my penchant for objectivity and retired into a corner with my fistful of notes to cable the story to the Daily Worker. Although I had not intended to continue to write for it, this story was too hot, the details too sensational; the party could make real political capital out of it. After working on it for about fifteen minutes at top speed I became aware that the volunteers were all rushing in one direction, forming a tight ring around somebody. I followed them and to my delight found that he was Robert Minor, the representative of the American Central Committee to the Communist Party in Spain. Minor was also a member of the Daily Worker editorial staff; we had known each other for years.

Bob Minor was a tall, imposing figure, with a heavy frame and silvery white hair framing his massive, bald head. He was a famous cartoonist before he turned Communist and he carried himself with dignity and poise. I had a few messages of a confidential nature for him from the Central Committee, to be delivered orally, concerning individuals some of whom were on their way to Spain and some of whom were to report back immediately to the States. I had been given only the first names; I did not know who the people were, nor was it any of my business.

I noted an indefinable change in Minor's face since the last time I had seen him in New York, about a half-year earlier, and I was puzzled about it. Minor stood impassively in the center, listening to the American volunteers crowding about him without saying a word; but to my eyes he only appeared to be listening, I had the feeling he was not paying attention. I knew he was somewhat deaf but not sufficiently so not to have heard that clamor.

I stood aside and waited until the excitement subsided, then went up to him and greeted him. He regarded me as if he had never seen me before, cold and disinterested. Realizing that my haggard face and tattered clothes after those rugged days of climbing the Pyrenees must have changed my appearance considerably, I told him my name and who I was. He cut me short abruptly; he knew very well who I was and why was I bothering him, didn't I see he was busy? I was quite taken aback by that unexpected response. I told him I had a few messages for him from the Ninth Floor and took him aside to deliver them. He cocked his ear close to my mouth and I realized he was even more hard of hearing than I suspected. I had to repeat my message twice and louder before he nodded his head that he had understood. I then told him I already had all the facts about the sinking of the Ciudad de Barcelona, the names of the American survivors, their home towns, etc., that my story was already organized, all I needed from him was a typewriter so I could knock it out in a hurry for the Daily Worker.

Minor became livid with anger.

"Give me those notes," he shouted at me and grabbed them out of my hand.

"Not a word of this must be permitted to leak out in America, do you hear? What are you trying to do, demoralize the people back home?"

Something was wrong with that man.

"Bob, this is news, sensational news, the best propaganda we could wish for to arouse the American people," I expostulated. "With the details I have, this story will be picked up by the wire services. Every home town newspaper where a local boy was involved will feature it as: Local boy killed or escapes with life from boat torpedoed by Fascists!"

"Not a word of this must leak out, you understand?" Minor roared at me.

"See here, Comrade Minor, this torpedoing has already been reported in the Valencia papers. It must have been cabled to the United States and published there already. This story will be the follow-up, it will fill in the missing details and shake up those people back home who still do not believe what Fascism really is. This is the propaganda we want, where the facts speak for themselves: Americans torpedoed and drowned on the open seas by Fascists!"

"You're not to mention a word about this to anyone, do you hear! This is an order!" With that he stalked away from me, called the Americans together, and made a speech.

He told us that we were all anti-Fascists who had come to Spain to fight Fascism. He told us Fascism was the last desperate attempt of qapitalist imperialism in its death throes to drown in blood the inevitable rise of the working class and that Fascism would meet its tomb in Spain.

He rambled on and on like a Daily Worker editorial on the glory of the Soviet Union and finally told us that we had already met the baptism of fire heroically and come out victorious. He then admonished us on our honor as anti-Fascists, as the bravest flowers of the revolutionary working class, not to let a word of that torpedoing leak out, we mustn't even discuss it among ourselves any further because that would only lend aid and comfort to the Fascists who had ears all over, who were listening everywhere, and it would also demoralize our comrades, the other volunteers in Spain.

"That is an order!" he added for emphasis, then walked briskly away.

That speech had its effect. The comrades immediately fell to discussing how they mustn't talk about the torpedoing any more, first in hushed tones, later arguing with each other loudly, citing and inventing gory incidents to prove how easily such news could demoralize comrades less firm in their anti-Fascists beliefs than they.

I was to meet Minor again a few months later, on my way back from the Cordoba front. By then I had heard enough stories about him to make me even more cynical about our top leadership. Minor had been assigned by the American Central Committee to co-ordinate the propaganda efforts of the American and Spanish Communist Parties and, incidentally, also to represent before the Comintern the interests of the American volunteers in Spain. However, Minor had also caught the bug like other leading Communists, he became convinced that he was a master strategist and a military genius. He spent his time in Spain devising military campaigns and giving unsolicited military advice to the Spanish Communist Party. At that second meeting, after listening for a whole evening to his military theories, I realized he was oblivious of the political and military developments around him and that he was becoming senile. It was this Minor who reported on Spain to the American Party from his hotel in Valencia, and when we read his analyses in the Daily Worker we wondered how such naive concepts could be advanced by anyone who had ever set foot in Spain, much less a high-ranking Party leader with access to inside information.

His answer was revealing, far more revealing than I was in a position to judge then. Although he had been in his post less than three months he had become fully impregnated with that exalted feeling of self-importance which, as I had occasion to learn later, characterized most of those comrades in Spain who had suddenly found themselves elevated from obscure party posts into positions of great authority. Trained in the dictatorial practices prevailing in all Communist Parties these comrades became drunk with power and gloried in the knowledge that here in Spain at last they were in a position to enforce their dictates by jail sentences and even the firing squad.

I cannot think of a more shocking illustration of the above point than the remark made by Dave Doran, then newly appointed commissar of the XV Brigade, at a banquet hortoring a visiting delegation of the American League Against War and Fascism. Those delegates, mostly well-meaning, liberal American women of the middle classes, were particularly intrigued by Dave's youth, he was twenty-eight, and the important position he held. They plied him with questions about the power he, as Brigade Commissar, wielded. Dave, who was visibly expanding under their adoration, straightened up in his chair and, surveying that huge table where, besides the delegates, most of the brigade staff were seated, asserted with pride:

"Well, I can have anyone seated at this table shot!"

The visiting delegates received this information with rapture, that was really something to take back home, to impress their friends with the importance of an American commissar they had encountered in person in Spain. It did not occur to any of them to inquire what could possibly have distorted the mind of a man that young to think of his position in those terms; to entertain the idea that it was within his power to order anyone in his sight, civilians and military personnel alike, placed before a firing squad and executed at his whim. The terrifying fact was that although Doran had no such authority, he had the actual power to do so and he could easily have excused such an action by charging his victims with, let's say, "counter-revolutionary Trotskyism," and even earned a further promotion thereby.

Sandor Voros, quickly outrun by the others, found a haven beside a Soviet tank. The Russian observer was scanning the hillsides to the south with binoculars. Suddenly he cursed and shouted orders down to the driver. On a far ridge six horsemen appeared. Voros expected to see the gun barrel swing around to the target and estimated that one shell might bag them all, but the tank shifted around and began to scurry to the rear. Terrified that he would be left out there alone, Voros tried to climb aboard, but the Russian threatened to shoot him. "I am a comrade!" Voros hollered, while the Russian hammered at his fingers with a pistol butt until he let go and dropped into the road. The tank soon disappeared, as did the enemy cavalry, perhaps as alarmed as the tankers.

The last time I met him (Joe Dallet) was in early October 1937, just before the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was scheduled to meet its baptism of fire by going into an attack at Fuentes del Ebro. It was around ten o'clock at night by the time I located him. I found him sitting alone in a small hut by the dim light of an oilwick. He was very lonely; he greeted me with genuine warmth this time, grateful for my presence. I had come to learn his immediate orders and plans pertaining to the impending battle but Joe was more interested in recalling the past, our personal exploits in Ohio, confiding that he felt completely isolated from everyone.

Although I assured him that in my observation his battalion was in far superior battle shape than any of our other battalions on the eve of their first battle, which could be attributed mainly to his unflagging efforts, he knew that his men were not appreciative and that he was unpopular with them.

He kept repeating he would now prove to them by his personal example that he had had only their welfare in mind in driving them hard to become good soldiers; he would be the first over the parapet to demonstrate he was not one of those "safe behind the line Albacete generals," but a leader who fully shared the dangers to which he exposed his men.

I tried to reason him out of that obsession. I remonstrated that it was a poor way to provide leadership for an entire battalion, that by jumping off with the first wave he would lose control of directing the battle, which was his main responsibility. But Joe was adamant. He insisted on proving himself to his men and I left him with a heavy heart.

He saw me shivering in the cold outdoors and presented me with his own poncho, a charcoal black, warm woolen one, far superior to those issued by the Loyalist Army, also with a pistol. Pistols sold at a high price and I couldn't afford one. Despite my position I ranked as a private and my pay was only six pesetas a day. Before we parted, Joe indulged in a, for him, unusual gesture. He put his arm around me and told me to remember him.

Joe Dallet remained true to his promise. He was the first one out of the trenches after giving the signal for the attack and was cut down immediately after advancing but a few yards toward the Fascist lines. He was hit in the groin and suffered agonies, yet he waved back the First-Aid men, refusing to let them risk sure death in an attempt to reach him. He was trying to crawl back unaided when a fresh burst from a machine gun blasted life out of him. Joe knew he had to die to redeem the prestige of a commissar, to justify in his own eyes the path he had followed in Spain - a victim of his own Communist training.

I spent three days visiting with the men in Tarazona, seeking out those early volunteers who might help me to piece together a record of the Americans from their first arrival in Spain. Captain Merriman, then Commander of the Mac-Pap Battalion, was one of those first arrivals, in fact he had been the Commander of the Lincoln Battalion when it was first thrown into action at Jarama.

Captain Merriman was one of those rare men who radiate strength and inspire confidence by their very appearance. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a ruddy bronze complexion overlaying his originally pink skin; thin flax-colored hair framed his bald pink scalp. The physical strength of the athlete combined with the reserved manners of the scholar and the introspective expression in his eyes bespoke great inner power.

Robert Hale Merriman was born in 1908 near the West Coast of Scotch-English parents. His father was a lumberjack, his mother a writer-a combination that left its marks on his subsequent career.Because of poverty he left home at an early age and worked his way through high school-as a janitor in a bank, as a part-time grocery clerk, and occasionally a window trimmer. After finishing high school he considered he had enough of an education and began traveling around the country, working now in a logging camp felling trees, sometimes as a millwright and pulp feeder, and once, for a stretch, as Number Three Man in a paper mill.

We landed in New York some time in December, 1938. The customs did not delay us long, most of us had nothing of value to declare. My possessions consisted of my notebooks, some historical documents and photographs I had managed to retain for souvenirs, a few handkerchiefs, two pairs of spare socks, an extra shirt and one extra set of underwear, all packed in a cheap paper suitcase. The customs inspector gave it one disgusted look, poked a wary index finger into the contents, nodded to me to close the top, scribbled a hasty cross on it and I was through, back in America, alive. Of the approximately 4800 American volunteers about 3500 had served with the combat troops, according to my reconstruction. Nearly three out of every four of the latter had been killed fighting Fascism in Spain. I doubt the accurate figures will ever be ascertained for no full record was kept either here or in Spain.

The editorial offices of the Daily Worker were much neater, cleaner, and better equipped than when I had last seen them nearly two years before. The comrades also were better dressed, their shirts were clean, their collars were not frayed, they all wore ties and most of them were shaved. The party and the paper had evidently prospered. They gave me a good reception. I was still a hero, albeit a smaller one - having had a hand in the making of many a proletarian hero those comrades had a better perspective.

The Daily Worker wanted to put me to work right away - they were trying to build up the circulation of the Sunday Worker and claimed I was just the right man for it. I was to take over the editorship of the Sunday Worker Supplement and turn it into a popular literary magazine written in a non-party style that every worker and housewife could understand. Such a magazine circulated by the party throughout the country in hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, would have a tremandous impact and influence on the people. It was an alluring project yet I refused, as I did the alternative offers to join the New York staff of the Daily Worker, or to revive the Daily Worker Ohio Bureau again. I told them I had a year of absence coming and intended to take it.

I had one last official piece of business to attend to. I went back to Ohio for my formal leave of absence from the party. I was a hero again, a great hero with mass meetings and public receptions scheduled. I ducked them all, including the big ceremonial banquet given by the Hungarians in my honor... I did agree, though, to address a meeting of the Cleveland Newspaper Guild. It was a cautious talk; I skirted the party line about Spain and parried questions about it. It wasn't a good lecture - the newsmen sensed I was holding back but were sympathetic enough not to press me.

The next day, Paul Bellamy, editor and publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, sent a message: would I come and see him? The party was excited about it. What a wonderful break for propaganda in the capitalist press!

Bellamy received me with cordial informality. He put me at ease quickly with a few remarks of sympathy for Loyalist Spain and then the interview began. It was off the record and by the time I finished answering him I saw the Spanish Civil War in a far clearer perspective than at any time in Spain. His questions organized my unassorted facts, my undefined thoughts and conclusions into a coherent whole and I answered him truthfully...

At the close of the interview Bellamy unexpectedly offered me a job on the foreign desk.

"But I am a Communist," I gulped.

Bellamy didn't mind that. He was gambling that I would continue to maintain the same objectivity I had manifested in our talk. My understanding of Communist aims might even be an asset in appraising the international situation which showed signs of boiling over at any moment.

My heart leaped at his answer. Here was an opportunity to do real journalistic work for a change, also financial security. This was still the depression and all I had between me and starvation was a few travelers checks, less than $200, all that was left of my life's savings. Bellamy was waiting for my decision.

I took a deep breath, thanked him, and regretfully declined his offer. After refusing to work for the Daily Worker I couldn't have taken a job on a capitalist newspaper, that would have been interpreted as a betrayal of the party.