Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 43, 25 October 1948, p. 4.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
For me, one of the outstanding events was the Canton radio speech, made possible through the combined efforts of the Akron and Cleveland comrades. That speech, honoring the memory of the revolutionary anti-war fighter, Eugene V. Debs, was an important preliminary to my debate last Sunday with war-supporting Norman Thomas, who seeks to mislead the workers in Debs’ name.
I want to express my gratitude to Ted Selander, who inspired me to make that broadcast, helped to prepare the material and introduced me over the radio to the Canton workers.
Another important event was my radio speech to the steel workers in the Mahoning Valley over the powerful ABC station in Youngstown. From special meetings with two groups of steel workers, I learned that union militants in that teeming industrial valley are beginning to give serious thought to the urgent need for independent labor political action. Many of these thinking workers heard our program through the broadcast.
I have always admired Harry Braverman for his talents, both as a 100% Trotskyist and as a highly skilled coppersmith, layout man and millwright. But when I reached Youngstown I learned that Harry is acquiring a new skill in an altogether different field. Here is the story: The Ohio comrades worked long and hard to gather sufficient signatures to put Harry on the ballot as our candidate for Congress in the Youngstown district. Then the Democratic hatchet men went to work on the petitions and disqualified him on trivial and illegal grounds.
Legal aid was secured and our case taken to court. Although the lawyers all agreed that justice was on our side, so much heat was put on them by the local capitalist politicians that they dropped the case like a hot potato.
Harry took up where the scared lawyers left off. He boned up on the law books and got off-the-record advice from a lawyer or two in preparation to argue his own case before the Ohio Supreme Court.
When I left him, he was deliberating whether he should open the argument with a demand for a writ of certiorari or a writ of mandamus.
The Westinghouse plant-gate meeting in Pittsburgh was an event long to be remembered. Especially when Eloise Gordon stood at the microphone, telegraphing her enthusiasm, determination and courage to the audience of more than 1,000 electrical workers.
While Eloise, who is a native of San Francisco, was speaking, one of our old-timers in Pittsburgh said with a proud gleam in his eye, “That’s our Frisco Flame!”
Ted Kovalesky will be interested to know that a reporter from a Pittsburgh capitalist paper asked about him. This reporter has been reading the Militant for some time and has become a fan of The Diary of a Steelworker. He thought that the worker, Kovalesky, must be a skilled professional writer of long experience.
My visit to Buffalo was cut short because of the Hartford broadcast. Nevertheless, we had a first-rate public meeting with a big turnout of auto, electrical and steel workers. The Buffalo comrades are really on the war path against the Stalinists. Several scalps are already in their trophy ease.
While in Buffalo I met a young Negro steel worker recently recruited into the party. When he grasped my hand, my eyes were drawn to his powerful arms, broad shoulders and winning smile. He reminded me of legendary “Joe Magarac,” the Paul Bunyan of the steel industry, who ladled molten steel from the furnace with his bare hands and squeezed it into rails, eight at a time, four through the fingers of each hand.
Like Joe Magarac would have done, our young steel worker celebrated his entry into the Socialist Workers Party by winning top honors in the Buffalo area during the petition campaign to put the party ticket on the ballot in New York.
The Connecticut comrades are right up in the front ranks in the presidential campaign. They performed the work of titans to put our ticket or the ballot. Then they turned loose a first-class electioneering campaign.
The state convention in Hartford was fully equipped with all the necessary paraphernalia, including a battery of radio microphones, announcers and sound engineers for a 15-station broadcast and reporters from the Connecticut press and the N.Y. Times.
The Bristol comrades managed to get me on the program of a political forum sponsored by UAW Local 626 where representatives of the Democratic, Progressive and Socialist parties also spoke.
Last night the Harlem comrades got me on a similar program here in New York, sponsored by the NAACP, where I debated spokesmen for the Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Liberal and Socialist parties.
We are getting in some good licks at these forums, and all of us get valuable training through them to prepare ourselves for future battles against our political opponents.
A number of comrades who have participated with me in broadcasts were speaking over the radio for the first time. The most recent were: Miriam Braverman, Milt Alvin, Ted Selander, Morris Chertov, Alvin Berman and Harry Press.
Despite their natural nervousness in appearing before a radio microphone for the first time, the comrades without exception turned in a top-notch performance. They were able to do so because their training in the party has given them the necessary basic understanding and experience to rise to the needs of unusual occasions.
That fundamental training, that basic know-how is what prepares the cadres of the revolutionary vanguard party to meet the new tasks of leadership during the heat of great mass actions.
Leon Trotsky had precisely these factors in mind when he wrote in a letter to the French youth, “Every comrade can and should become a general in the proletarian army.”
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Last updated: 26 March 2023