A Century of Russian Disinformation: Part Four

Tents: A Parable

We have all seen the recent tent encampments at universities across the country that cropped up to call for divestment in Israel. Commentators likened the phenomenon to other college protests of the past, such as those calling for divestment in South Africa in 1980s or against America’s military involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s; few commentators, however, gave much attention to how the protests became ripe material for Russian disinformation campaigns. When I looked at photos of tents on college quads across the country, I didn’t think about the 80s, or even the 60s. My mind went all the way back to the 1920s.

On April 1, 1929, over a thousand non-unionized workers at the Loray Mills in Gastonia, North Carolina declared a strike. Their demands? A raise in pay, a 40-hour working week, equal pay for women, and recognition of their union.

What the strikers did not know was that the Soviet Union was watching their movements closely. As I described in the inaugural stack of this series, the Communist Party of America was from 1921 treated as an arm of the Kremlin. By 1929, any member of the party who protested Moscow’s shadow direction of this ostensibly American political organization had been expelled. Stalin, thinking ahead to his own expansion plans, had become ever more interested in weakening the power of capitalist countries worldwide. At a 1928 meeting of the delegates of the world’s communist parties in Moscow, Stalin had declared that their task was to exploit anti-imperialist sentiment in capitalist countries and colonies. In practice, this meant sending organizers to America’s southern states to provoke chaos and even more hopefully (from Stalin’s point of view), another civil war.

Accordingly, the Communist Party of America sent their seasoned organizer, Fred Beal, from the mills of New Bedford, Massachusetts where he had overseen a failed strike to Gastonia, North Carolina where he was to accelerate a strike action. Shortly after his arrival, the strike was called. When the mill owners responded by evicting the workers and their families from mill-owned housing, the strikers set up a tent colony outside the factory.

The tent colony served two purposes: It sheltered the strikers and kept them ever visible as a symbol of the struggle.

The mill owners and the police hated the tents. They were well aware that the organization that provided them, Workers International Relief, was a Communist front organization, as was the National Textile Workers Union that the strikers claimed represented their interests. On June 7, 1929, the police raided the encampment; in the ensuing chaos, Police Chief Aderholt was shot and killed. Scores of strikers were detained and sixteen, including Fred Beal, were held to stand trial.

The Communist Party was thrilled by this development. Absolutely thrilled. The goal of their involvement in Gastonia had never really been to win the strike. The goal had been to create chaos. By arresting the strikers, the police had played right into their hands. Now there was a group of prisoners that the Communist Party could hold up as martyrs and use to raise funds.

The importance of Gastonia to the party’s strategy is spelled out most clearly in the documents from the Soviet Union’s own archives. The Communist Party of America viewed the Gastonia prisoners as a potentially galvanizing (and money-making) cause. They hoped that they would provide the windfall in terms of membership and money that recently imprisoned anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had provided for most of the 1920s. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 had been a huge blow to the American Communist Party’s finances; it could no longer could raise funds from the public for the prisoners’ “defense” (funds that were often funneled straight to Moscow). With the imprisoned strikers of Gastonia, the party felt it had a case that could once again provoke public outrage. The party sent out a letter in July to their district organizers, instructing them how best to use the Gastonia crisis:

“The Party must utilize the Gastonia events agitationally. The attack on the tent colony in Gastonia gives an excellent basis for the widest agitation among the working masses to arouse in them class hatred.”

The party also sent several of their top leadership down to Gastonia to intervene in local defense efforts so as to maximize the trial’s political implications, even if doing so imperiled those standing trial—including their own comrades in the party, mind you. Party leaders conceded that the local defense’s strategy of claiming the shooting was self-defense might help the defendants’ case, “but it is utterly wrong as a political approach.” They preferred a defense based in Marxian principles, in the historic conflict between capitalism and communism. Using Gastonia “agitationally” meant dragging the case out and turning the trial into political theater.

Party leaders also fired off a telegram to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow (the body that directed the actions and policies of communist parties worldwide) to make Gastonia a focus of international alarm. Tellingly, their telegram used the word “requests.” Moscow sent commands to the American Communist Party. The American Communist Party sent “requests” to Moscow.

The trial produced exactly the chaos the party wanted. It was so dramatic, one juror went insane and a mistrial declared. Six of the defendants, including Fred Beal, were convicted of conspiracy to murder in the retrial. On advice from superiors in the Communist Party, Beal and another defendant emigrated to the Soviet Union before their appeals. (Moscow would increasingly throughout the 1930s encourage Americans to move to the Soviet Union to embarrass the capitalist United States.)

Beal returned several years later to turn himself in to the North Carolina police, figuring an American jail was no worse than life in the Soviet Union. He published a book detailing the party’s manipulation of him and the horrific conditions he encountered abroad, including the scale of the famine in Ukraine which had resulted from Stalin’s collectivization of all agriculture.

That’s not even the worst part. The mistrial had fueled anti-Communist hysteria in Gastonia itself. On September 14th, 1929, a vigilante mob chased a truck full of strikers and shot one, 29-year old Ella May Wiggins, to death. Though the party declared that the working class as a whole would adopt her five young children, they were all sent to orphanages. Nobody from the party attended her funeral.

The strike by that time was a total failure. The mill’s scabs had continued production throughout the entire conflict. At the end of October 1929, Wall Street crashed, kicking off the Great Depression. The party had just been gifted the greatest avenue of attack on capitalism they ever had.

And Gastonia was dropped from the headlines.