Word: gitlow
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...CONFESS-Benjiamin Gitlow-Dutton...
...letter day in the Red career of big, soft, heavy-eyed. 48-year-old Benjamin Gitlow came on May 14, 1929. The scene was Moscow's regal Red Hall. The occasion: a full meeting of the Praesidium of the Communist International. Purpose: to whip the recalcitrant U. S. delegation (Gitlow, chairman) into line behind Boss Stalin. In charge was Stalin himself. It was 4:00 a. m. Leaden-eyed, grey-faced with weariness and capitulation, the world's top Communists had heard Stalin denounce the U. S. comrades as Right Wingers, "rotten" diplomats, Hooverites, Babbitts, bourgeois opportunists...
Then Comrade Ben Gitlow rose to speak. He knew he was licked. But he knew U. S. workers were not quite ready for a Bolshevik revolution. Again he pleaded that Stalin not completely hogtie U. S. Communists with Russian foreign policy. Concluded Gitlow: "Not only do I vote against the decision, but when I return to the United States, I will fight against it!" Followed a moment of heavy silence; then a low whewing whistle of collective shock...
Forthwith Comrade Ben Gitlow was expelled from the Executive Committees of the Communist International and Pro-fintern (Red International of Trade Unions), replaced by William Foster as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U. S. A. Back in the U. S. a month later, he refused the CPU's offer of a job in Latin America to keep his mouth shut, was kicked out altogether...
...that year, he said, Stalin swallowed the U. S. party, cleaned out its personnel, put in his puppet Browder. To Browder's claim that funds no longer flowed through the Moscow pipe line, Witness Gitlow replied that they used to come at the rate of $100,000 a year, probably still...