The Party continued to look to the benefit societies as a means of reaching, and helping, workers with their material needs. In 1930 Frank Borich of the South Slavic Bureau proposed a plan “on the question of unemployment in the Croatian Fraternal Union.” Borich had earlier alerted the Party’s central committee that “thousands of workers in these fraternal societies are not able to pay their dues and they are faced with expulsions from the organiza-tions. These unemployed workers are coming to the meetings of these orga-nizations demanding that the lodges should wait for dues and thereby the workers themselves are raising the questions of unemployment at the meet-ings.” Despite this, Borich noted that not one of the more than thirteen hun-dred South Slavic lodges in the country had done anything to alleviate members’ destitution. He argued that the South Slavic Bureau “should im-mediately work out the program for those unemployed members . . . unable to pay their dues.” Borich argued that leftists should make motions to
“reduc[e] the pay of Bureaucrats and to use this . . . in part for the funds for the dues of unemployed members in CFU.”28
Boleslaw Gebert, later head of the IWO’s Polonia Society, was at this meeting and endorsed Borich’s plan. He further proposed, “We should raise the question of taxing the bourgeois elements in the C.F.U. and use this tax
for dues of unemployed; . . . we should raise the question of reducing the wages of Bureaucrats.” Gebert added that these steps should be taken “to develop the sharp struggle among workers in C.F.U. for the Social Insur-ance.” Social insurance was later a frequent demand of the IWO and its eth-nic organizations. A program seeking unemployed members’ dues relief was adopted at the meeting.29
The following month, the Language Department echoed this call for all fraternal societies. “No wages, no dues!” they demanded. “We piled up the funds for our organization! . . . All funds over the minimum sick and death benefit fund be turned into unemployment dues fund!” They echoed earlier calls for enactment of social insurance and unemployment legislation as well as an end to evictions.30
Rather than opportunistic, Party factions might have seemed, to the un-employed, responsive to their genuine needs and grassroots demands. Bo-rich, after all, noted that in the South Slavic societies people out of work were already complaining of the injustice of having to continue paying dues. The complaints came from workers first, only then spurring Borich and other left-wingers to recommend a solution. With unemployment lines growing exponentially, Communist South Slavs’ plans for gaining influence within the ethnic societies might have seemed, at least to some people, charitable, not devious.
Party officials frequently expressed such demands for more systemic amelioration of workers’ suffering. In his 1930 report to the Party, “The Work of the Communist Fractions in Fraternal Organizations,” Marcus Jenks admitted that thus far, “language organizations . . . have served as a hindrance to the development of the work of the Party.”31 Jenks explained that many mutual societies
are an aid to the capitalists and government, because in reality they help to divert the struggle of the workers from fighting for social insurance and social laws in general. Who does not know that in this, the land of the billionaires, in America, there is no social insur-ance for workers, and also less protection of the lives of the workers than in any other capitalistic country in the world. And to a large extent it is due to the fact that there is no struggle going on for the establishment of laws for social insurance for workers, unemploy-ment aid etc. By being a member of some mutual aid society, the worker hopes to be taken care of in case of illness, to be buried in case of death—and that is all.32
A marginal cushion of small weekly sick benefits, Jenks added, tended to divert the masses from the struggle for their interests against the capitalists.
Still, the benefit societies should be entered by Party members “not only in
order to collect a few dollars, but for the purpose of extending its influence and of drawing in more and more workers into the revolutionary movement.
We must use these organizations to develop the class consciousness of the members.”33
Unfortunately, Jenks’s analysis did not lead to large recruiting successes for the Party. Party officials’ aspiration and assertion of “control” of the fra-ternal organizations often conflicted with ethnic bureaus’ own assessments of the situation. Bedacht confessed in a letter to General Secretary Jay Love-stone, “Now as to [the] Italian situation. It is rotten. Our N.Y. fellows work at cross purposes to me.” Bedacht worked with Luigi Candela, later president of the IWO’s Italian Section, but other Italian comrades were derided as hopeless. “I am inclined to take a fatalistic attitude. Let the crash come. We close our eyes, stuff our ears and hold our breath. And when the noise and dust of the explosion is over we will count the victims.”34
While reports to superiors sometimes asserted Party “control” over cer-tain fraternal lodges or progressive blocs within national organizations, other communications indicate this was always more aspirational than ac-tual. Members of fraternal organizations exercised a great deal of indepen-dence and balked at directions from Party officials that they regarded as unwise. The general secretary before Lovestone, C. E. Ruthenberg, told the secretary of the Hungarian faction that all work and decisions within the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Educational Federation first had to be approved by the Party Hungarian Bureau. Ruthenberg noted that comrades in the society had been alerted to this three months before, but their inde-pendence persisted. The society, which four years later would amalgamate with the IWO, had elected a secretary they knew their supposed Party mas-ters disliked. Five weeks later Ruthenberg complained that delegates to the society’s convention were still acting independently, submitting amend-ments to the convention without consultation. Party member delegates even went so far as to publicly attack the Party’s Hungarian Bureau, critiquing attempts to control the society.35
Michels has noted that for Jewish immigrants in the Party, ethnic orga-nizations and the community’s own agendas were often more important than programs and pronouncements of Party leaders. Gedicks adds a similar independence and prioritization of Finnish concerns, even among radicals, long bedeviled Party efforts to enforce discipline. Indeed, in 1923 Bedacht wrote to Ruthenberg that while some “Finnish may be drawn into our party,”
they were more likely to “degrade into social clubs and relief organizations for Karelia,” the Finnish region of the Soviet Union. Hungarians were simi-larly obdurate.36
Jacob Zumoff has argued that in the 1920s much more internal de-mocracy existed in the CP and the international Communist movement than would later be the case. This was true in the various language bureaus
affiliated with the Party. The minutes of a 1929 Boston Estonian Workers Mass Meeting documents a grassroots protest against the Party’s attempted take-over of the Estonian-language newspaper Uus Illu and “attempts to sling mud at all Workers’ Clubs that are not controlled by [the] Party, forgetting at the same time that the majority of readers of Uus Illu are non-partisan proletarians.” The Estonians declared, “We are not satisfied with such rough bourgeois ways.”37 Far from being automatons accepting of Party discipline, many radical immigrants jealously guarded their prerogatives to think and act for themselves.
Aside from the question of minimal Communist numbers in the frater-nal organizations, even before the Depression the perilous financial state of many societies was cause for concern. In 1927 the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Educational Federation was already under scrutiny from several state insurance societies as to its actuarial soundness. The secretary of the Hungarian Bureau characterized this as a dual assault by “capitalist insur-ance societies and the state itself” but thought it might become an advantage if the various ethnic fraternal societies could be convinced to merge into a larger mutual benefit society with greater assets. A crisis might become pro-gressive fraternalists’ opportunity. Three years later the movement, known as amalgamation, would lead to the creation of the IWO.38