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brdgtCommunist Party USA Gives Its History to N.Y.U.
By PATRICIA COHEN, The New York Times, March 20, 2007
The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movement’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University.
The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights struggles.
“It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever presented itself here,” said Michael Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on Friday.
Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, “it will take us years to catalog.” But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown threat to security during the cold war.
Hill’s last rhyme — which begins, “My Will is easy to decide/ For there is nothing to divide” — was discovered in one of the 12,000 cartons. (Hill was convicted, some thought wrongly, of murder.) In other boxes were drafts of the party’s programs with handwritten editing changes and a stapled copy of its first constitution. “The Communist Party is a fact,” C. E. Ruthenberg, the executive secretary wrote on Sept. 18, 1919, days after the founders met in Chicago. A 1920 document marks the merger of the Communist Party and the Workers Party. It lists “Dix” as the secret party name of Earl R. Browder, who would later become general secretary of the party, “L. C. Wheat” as Jay Lovestone, who later turned against communism and worked with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the C.I.A., and Alexander Trachtenberg as “one of the confidential agents of Lenin in America.”
From years of being folded, many of the pages are impressed with grooved lines like wrinkled faces; others are scarred by cigarette burns and thin as onion skin. Some folders, filled with crumbling artifacts, look as if they’ve been sprinkled with yellowed confetti.
Ruthenberg underscores the “secret manner in which the party is conducted.” The Los Angeles branch, known as “XO1XO5” uses the password “ ‘Kur-heiny,’ which means: ‘Are you advancing?,’ ” he writes. “The answer is: ‘Teip,’ meaning ‘yes.’ ”
He copies a letter signed by the Russians Nikolai Bukharin and Ian Berzin that he said was hidden in the coat lining of a Bolshevik about how the Americans should operate. The two order the party to urge soldiers and sailors to agitate “against officers” and to arm workers. They warn against allowing members to engage in philanthropic or educational activities, insisting that they form “FIGHTING ORGANIZATIONS FOR SEIZING CONTROL OF THE STATE, for the overthrow of government and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship.”
Robert Minor, a cartoonist and radical who covered the Russian civil war, has a clear-eyed and lyrical account of an interview with Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, dated December 1918. Lenin was fascinated by America, calling it a “great country in some respects,” and shot question after question at Minor: “ ‘How soon will the revolution come in America?’ He did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come.” Minor, who had not yet joined the party, found Lenin a bewitching figure. “When he thunders his dogma, one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is political Calvin,” Minor says in his typewritten notes. “And yet, Calvin has his other side. During all the discussion he had been hitching his chair toward me,” he writes. “I felt myself queerly submerged by his personality. He filled the room.”
As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. “A few months ago they were ‘bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,’ ” he writes, “But now they are ‘people’s commissaries’ and ride in the fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions.” They rule “under red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the rose smells as sweetly under another name.”
That description is “very important,” said John P. Diggins, a historian at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He said he expected a lot of new dissertations and books to result from the new archives. Historians have spent too much time arguing about the party’s subservience to Moscow, he said, neglecting Communists’ work in organizing labor and fighting racism, and their philosophical take on Marxism.
Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940 newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes “to oppose the decontrol of over-$250 apartments.” There are the handwritten lyrics to Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939 denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans.
Piles of prison correspondence from activists or party members show the human hand behind the rhetoric. “My dear wife Lydia,” Minor writes in pencil after being arrested in 1930 during a labor rally in Union Square in Manhattan. “That little half-hour today seemed the shortest of my whole lifetime. And so indescribably sweet!”
The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow’s direction, said Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated the team working on the atomic bomb.
Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged its ranks. Revelations about Stalin’s crimes in 1956 disillusioned many of those who remained and dealt the party a near-fatal blow.
The Communist Party USA contacted Tamiment, which is devoted to the study of labor history and progressive politics, a year ago. Mr. Nash said he was surprised when he got the call. “I didn’t really realize it still existed,” he admitted.
During the summer, Mr. Nash said, he and a group of students scoured the party’s offices on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. They frantically packed up papers before contractors came in to renovate the space, which was being rented out. The donation includes 20,000 books, journals and pamphlets and a million photographs from The Daily Worker’s archives.
Sam Webb, national chairman of the Communist Party USA, said, “We felt that Tamiment could better maintain the collection and provide for a much wider audience.” He said hardly any of the files were reviewed before being given away.
The primary source of American party documents available to the public has been the Library of Congress, which microfilmed a batch of Communist Party USA records in Soviet archives that had been shipped there 50 years earlier for safekeeping. John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress who was the first American to examine the Soviet files, said that since N.Y.U. has a copy of the Library of Congress material, “This will give Tamiment the enviable position of being able to offer researchers access to what is in Moscow as well as the new C.P.U.S.A. collection.”
When the collection opened in 2000, the Library of Congress said, “the C.P.U.S.A. has always been a secretive organization,” and “the previous paucity of the archival record has been a major obstacle to scholarship on the history of the American Communist movement,” and a reason for “highly contentious” debates.
That contentiousness continues. In an article on The New Republic Web site last week unrelated to the donated archives, Ronald Radosh, a historian, attacked N.Y.U.’s newly created Center for the United States and the Cold War, which is partly sponsored by Tamiment Library. Looking at its spring calendar of events, he accused it of planning “completely one-sided and partisan events” and said the guests invited to Friday’s gathering are “all, without an exception, either communists or still-believing fellow-travelers.”
Mr. Nash, who is a co-director of the center, characterized Friday as a public relations event, and said overall its programs represent all views.
After flipping through boxes, Mr. Nash moved to a glass case that contained a photograph from the files, a picture of eight American officers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In the next room was Moe Fishman, 92, one of the brigade’s last surviving members, who just happened to be in the library that day for the filming of an unrelated documentary. He had carried over the battalion’s tattered blue flag. Asked if he was in the black-and-white photograph, he slowly walked over, put on his glasses and peered down. “I’m not in that,” he said, “I wasn’t an officer.” But he added, “I have the same one at home.”
Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears
By LYDIA POLGREEN, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
KOIDU, Sierra Leone — The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves of Tambaki Kamanda’s palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible even in the noontime glare.
It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said — after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.
But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.
“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. “This is my only hope, really.”
Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.
The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.
An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’
“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”
In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.
At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.
A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.
Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine as a teenager, come up empty — he has not found a stone in two months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65, which he split with his three partners.
“From all my years of mining I don’t even have one bicycle,” said Mr. Kabia, his hands trembling. “I really get nothing out of it.”
The struggle to reform Sierra Leone’s troubled mining industry is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small, impoverished nation as it tries to heal.
Sierra Leone is at peace, its economy is growing and in July it will hold a presidential election that will turn a fresh page in the country’s troubled history. But the recovery has been painfully slow. In the center of Koidu sits an enormous tank gun with a sign slung around its barrel — “War don don, we love peace,” a hopeful message in English and Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, placed there at the end of the war.
But five years later, the city still has no electricity. The crumbling streets were last paved in the mid-1970s. People live in roofless buildings left by the fighting, doing their best to scrub off the stinking mold and rig tarpaulin roofs.
Sierra Leone has struggled for much of its history to turn its diamonds into development and prosperity, but they have mainly been a source of pain.
“Diamonds, from the very beginning, corrupted Sierra Leone’s most basic sense of governance,” said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser.
Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth through careful management and control. But countries like Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled to manage what may be the world’s worst resource curse.
The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high, miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling. In 2005, Sierra Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.
But even now, the government’s share of the revenue is modest, just 3 percent. In 2006, the government’s take was only $3.7 million. Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild a nation of six million people, still broken by war.
Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government’s mining office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay and benefits of diggers — though they are scarcely enforced, miners and experts say.
“These issues are being addressed, but it takes time,” Mr. Kamara said.
At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display — hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine is divided into areas of 210 square yards, with each controlled by a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers or migrants from the Middle East or other West African countries.
Some are paid a small sum per day, usually about 75 cents, and given tools, food and shelter in exchange for about 30 percent of whatever their backers claim to be the value of the diamonds they find. And the financiers first deduct their expenses.
A few workers have no stake in their finds but are paid a wage, usually $2 a day. Still others work solely for a share of the gravel they extract from the vast, watery pits. In most arrangements, a great deal of the risk is shouldered by the laborer.
The industry has long been dominated by outsiders, feeding a nationalism that was exploited by Foday Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the brutal rebel force that claimed to be liberating the mines but instead enriched itself and terrorized the populace.
Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions have not improved much. The mine where Mr. Kabia works is operated by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive. The chief, Paul N. Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the past two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta. Mr. Saquee’s brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond dealers association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.
Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they must hand over to Mr. Saquee’s representative, another of the chief’s brothers named Tamba. He watches with hawklike vigilance as the miners dig.
Others, like Mr. Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.
Prince Saquee, the chief’s diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.
“If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price,” he said. “To me that is indirect slavery.”
But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.
“For the miners, it is different,” he argued. A digger, “he depends on you. He doesn’t know the value so you as the dealer have to tell him.”
Paul Saquee, the chief, said that despite the low pay and hard working conditions, he was providing at least some form of employment to desperate people with no alternative.
“I wish that the miners would all go back to the farm, but they are here and need work,” he said.
Part of Mr. Saquee’s role is to administer a fund that sends a quarter of the government’s diamond revenues back to the community the stones came from. Kono, home to more than half of all mining license holders, received $377,900 in 2005 for a district of 475,000 people.
“I don’t believe that diamonds are the future of this country,” Mr. Saquee said. “We need to find something else to get ourselves moving.”
Indeed, the poverty rates are highest in the mining districts — Kono’s poverty rate is 20 percent higher than that in nearby Pujehun district, which is largely agricultural.
In the central bank building in Freetown, Mustapha B. Turay sorted gleaming stones into small mounds to determine their value for taxation. On a recent afternoon the country’s largest exporter, Hisham Mackie, a longtime Lebanese kingpin, brought in $2 million worth of stones bound for Antwerp, Belgium, that night.
Most had been dug by hand by workers in places like Koidu. But the paper trail does not reach all the way back to the miner, so there is no way to know how much a miner was paid. It is a gap, said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser, that can lead to the illusion that the problems brought to light by the civil war have been solved.
Jamestown aims for prominence on anniversary
By Steve Szkotak, Associated Press, USA TODAY
JAMESTOWN, Va. — The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the nation prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many say this swampy outpost on the James River pales in comparison to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock, though fans of the buckled shoe will have to wait until 2020 to mark Plymouth's fourth century.
New Englanders easily tick off why the Massachusetts settlement trumps Jamestown — the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom, and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman in a new book on the settlement, The Jamestown Project. Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation — including a man dining on his pregnant wife — are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
"It's pulp non-fiction compared to the family-friendly tale of pious Pilgrims dining with gentle Indians," author Tony Horwitz writes in reviewing a raft of new Jamestown books for The Washington Post.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, twice were turned away from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.
Now, with Virginia amid an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown could finally outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the (Jamestown) settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," the author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Part of Plymouth's enduring popularity is pure arithmetic.
An estimated 35 million people worldwide claim to be descendants of the Pilgrims, including Miles Standish, Plymouth's own intrepid military leader, and William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony.
"A lot of Mayflower descendants are proud of their ancestors. People get attached to them," said Stephen O'Neill, associate director and curator of collections at The Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth. Among its collections: the wicker basket that carried Peregrine White, who was born in the Mayflower as it anchored off of Provincetown, Mass.
David A. Price, author of Love and Hate in Jamestown, said Virginia and Southern history became tangled in the Civil War, knocking down Smith and Pocahontas a few notches in the American consciousness.
"Most importantly," Price wrote in an e-mail, "we look back on the Plymouth colonists and see an idealized, sepia-tinted version of ourselves — hardworking, earnest, seeking religious liberty.
"We look back on the Jamestown colony and see an earthier, less appealing, but equally truthful version of ourselves: beset by jealousy and politics, motivated by dreams of money."
The Pilgrims' story has been a familiar part of every child's public education, often an inspiration for school recitals.
"Certainly, growing up in Massachusetts, everyone goes to Plimouth Plantation," said Mark Sylvia, town manager of Plymouth, which has grown to 60,000 residents. "It's ingrained in the American culture — that's where the first Thanksgiving was held."
Plymouth had an edge from the start. It was a family-based settlement, unlike the male-dominated Jamestown venture; the settlers learned to coexist with native populations for more than a half century, unlike the Jamestown gang, who had a complicated, often violent relationship with the Powhatan Indians; and it had some powerful symbols.
"They are THE PILGRIMS," Philbrick wrote. "They have an easily identifiable monument: Plymouth Rock (even if it is one of the biggest letdowns in American tourism). They have a ship: the Mayflower."
Jamestown had three ships — the Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery.
Plymouth's higher profile may have been on Vice President Dick Cheney's mind when he addressed the Virginia General Assembly in January at Jamestown.
"The history of our country did not begin on Cape Cod in 1620," Cheney said to a rousing response from legislators.
Price and other scholars would second Cheney's pronouncement. Price said if Jamestown had failed, Plymouth's settlers might have found their religious freedom in Holland, where Separatists already had established a presence.
Horn, a scholar at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said the public is poorly informed about Jamestown.
"It is a great story in terms of survival of the English and also the strategies employed by the Powhatans," Horn said.
Jamestown is still revealing itself, due to archaeologist William Kelso's relentless pursuit of history, which led to the discovery in the 1990s of the footprint of the fort in which Jamestown's settlers first sought shelter. Roughhewn locust now mark one perimeter of the fort. The site still gives up shards of pottery and, most recently, a tobacco seed — a crop that helped define Virginia for centuries.
During a warm spring day, Kelso strolled the carefully marked archaeological dig and said the work that continues at Jamestown has created a broader interest and understanding, and one that is likely to multiply.
"Jamestown was first, and it has so many legacies — private enterprise, representative government, the American Dream," Kelso said.
Most historians say any historical reckoning of Plymouth and Jamestown is a good thing because each story has much to say about our nation.
"The Pilgrims are the ones we look on more fondly, but we draw just as much of our national spirit from the Jamestown colonists," Price said.
By PATRICIA COHEN, The New York Times, March 20, 2007
The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movement’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University.
The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights struggles.
“It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever presented itself here,” said Michael Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on Friday.
Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, “it will take us years to catalog.” But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown threat to security during the cold war.
Hill’s last rhyme — which begins, “My Will is easy to decide/ For there is nothing to divide” — was discovered in one of the 12,000 cartons. (Hill was convicted, some thought wrongly, of murder.) In other boxes were drafts of the party’s programs with handwritten editing changes and a stapled copy of its first constitution. “The Communist Party is a fact,” C. E. Ruthenberg, the executive secretary wrote on Sept. 18, 1919, days after the founders met in Chicago. A 1920 document marks the merger of the Communist Party and the Workers Party. It lists “Dix” as the secret party name of Earl R. Browder, who would later become general secretary of the party, “L. C. Wheat” as Jay Lovestone, who later turned against communism and worked with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the C.I.A., and Alexander Trachtenberg as “one of the confidential agents of Lenin in America.”
From years of being folded, many of the pages are impressed with grooved lines like wrinkled faces; others are scarred by cigarette burns and thin as onion skin. Some folders, filled with crumbling artifacts, look as if they’ve been sprinkled with yellowed confetti.
Ruthenberg underscores the “secret manner in which the party is conducted.” The Los Angeles branch, known as “XO1XO5” uses the password “ ‘Kur-heiny,’ which means: ‘Are you advancing?,’ ” he writes. “The answer is: ‘Teip,’ meaning ‘yes.’ ”
He copies a letter signed by the Russians Nikolai Bukharin and Ian Berzin that he said was hidden in the coat lining of a Bolshevik about how the Americans should operate. The two order the party to urge soldiers and sailors to agitate “against officers” and to arm workers. They warn against allowing members to engage in philanthropic or educational activities, insisting that they form “FIGHTING ORGANIZATIONS FOR SEIZING CONTROL OF THE STATE, for the overthrow of government and the establishment of the workers’ dictatorship.”
Robert Minor, a cartoonist and radical who covered the Russian civil war, has a clear-eyed and lyrical account of an interview with Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, dated December 1918. Lenin was fascinated by America, calling it a “great country in some respects,” and shot question after question at Minor: “ ‘How soon will the revolution come in America?’ He did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come.” Minor, who had not yet joined the party, found Lenin a bewitching figure. “When he thunders his dogma, one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is political Calvin,” Minor says in his typewritten notes. “And yet, Calvin has his other side. During all the discussion he had been hitching his chair toward me,” he writes. “I felt myself queerly submerged by his personality. He filled the room.”
As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. “A few months ago they were ‘bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,’ ” he writes, “But now they are ‘people’s commissaries’ and ride in the fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions.” They rule “under red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the rose smells as sweetly under another name.”
That description is “very important,” said John P. Diggins, a historian at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He said he expected a lot of new dissertations and books to result from the new archives. Historians have spent too much time arguing about the party’s subservience to Moscow, he said, neglecting Communists’ work in organizing labor and fighting racism, and their philosophical take on Marxism.
Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940 newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes “to oppose the decontrol of over-$250 apartments.” There are the handwritten lyrics to Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939 denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans.
Piles of prison correspondence from activists or party members show the human hand behind the rhetoric. “My dear wife Lydia,” Minor writes in pencil after being arrested in 1930 during a labor rally in Union Square in Manhattan. “That little half-hour today seemed the shortest of my whole lifetime. And so indescribably sweet!”
The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow’s direction, said Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated the team working on the atomic bomb.
Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged its ranks. Revelations about Stalin’s crimes in 1956 disillusioned many of those who remained and dealt the party a near-fatal blow.
The Communist Party USA contacted Tamiment, which is devoted to the study of labor history and progressive politics, a year ago. Mr. Nash said he was surprised when he got the call. “I didn’t really realize it still existed,” he admitted.
During the summer, Mr. Nash said, he and a group of students scoured the party’s offices on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. They frantically packed up papers before contractors came in to renovate the space, which was being rented out. The donation includes 20,000 books, journals and pamphlets and a million photographs from The Daily Worker’s archives.
Sam Webb, national chairman of the Communist Party USA, said, “We felt that Tamiment could better maintain the collection and provide for a much wider audience.” He said hardly any of the files were reviewed before being given away.
The primary source of American party documents available to the public has been the Library of Congress, which microfilmed a batch of Communist Party USA records in Soviet archives that had been shipped there 50 years earlier for safekeeping. John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress who was the first American to examine the Soviet files, said that since N.Y.U. has a copy of the Library of Congress material, “This will give Tamiment the enviable position of being able to offer researchers access to what is in Moscow as well as the new C.P.U.S.A. collection.”
When the collection opened in 2000, the Library of Congress said, “the C.P.U.S.A. has always been a secretive organization,” and “the previous paucity of the archival record has been a major obstacle to scholarship on the history of the American Communist movement,” and a reason for “highly contentious” debates.
That contentiousness continues. In an article on The New Republic Web site last week unrelated to the donated archives, Ronald Radosh, a historian, attacked N.Y.U.’s newly created Center for the United States and the Cold War, which is partly sponsored by Tamiment Library. Looking at its spring calendar of events, he accused it of planning “completely one-sided and partisan events” and said the guests invited to Friday’s gathering are “all, without an exception, either communists or still-believing fellow-travelers.”
Mr. Nash, who is a co-director of the center, characterized Friday as a public relations event, and said overall its programs represent all views.
After flipping through boxes, Mr. Nash moved to a glass case that contained a photograph from the files, a picture of eight American officers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In the next room was Moe Fishman, 92, one of the brigade’s last surviving members, who just happened to be in the library that day for the filming of an unrelated documentary. He had carried over the battalion’s tattered blue flag. Asked if he was in the black-and-white photograph, he slowly walked over, put on his glasses and peered down. “I’m not in that,” he said, “I wasn’t an officer.” But he added, “I have the same one at home.”
Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears
By LYDIA POLGREEN, The New York Times, March 25, 2007
KOIDU, Sierra Leone — The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves of Tambaki Kamanda’s palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible even in the noontime glare.
It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said — after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.
But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.
“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. “This is my only hope, really.”
Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.
The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.
An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’
“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”
In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.
At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.
A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.
Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine as a teenager, come up empty — he has not found a stone in two months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65, which he split with his three partners.
“From all my years of mining I don’t even have one bicycle,” said Mr. Kabia, his hands trembling. “I really get nothing out of it.”
The struggle to reform Sierra Leone’s troubled mining industry is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small, impoverished nation as it tries to heal.
Sierra Leone is at peace, its economy is growing and in July it will hold a presidential election that will turn a fresh page in the country’s troubled history. But the recovery has been painfully slow. In the center of Koidu sits an enormous tank gun with a sign slung around its barrel — “War don don, we love peace,” a hopeful message in English and Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, placed there at the end of the war.
But five years later, the city still has no electricity. The crumbling streets were last paved in the mid-1970s. People live in roofless buildings left by the fighting, doing their best to scrub off the stinking mold and rig tarpaulin roofs.
Sierra Leone has struggled for much of its history to turn its diamonds into development and prosperity, but they have mainly been a source of pain.
“Diamonds, from the very beginning, corrupted Sierra Leone’s most basic sense of governance,” said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser.
Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth through careful management and control. But countries like Sierra Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled to manage what may be the world’s worst resource curse.
The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high, miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling. In 2005, Sierra Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.
But even now, the government’s share of the revenue is modest, just 3 percent. In 2006, the government’s take was only $3.7 million. Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild a nation of six million people, still broken by war.
Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government’s mining office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay and benefits of diggers — though they are scarcely enforced, miners and experts say.
“These issues are being addressed, but it takes time,” Mr. Kamara said.
At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily display — hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine is divided into areas of 210 square yards, with each controlled by a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers or migrants from the Middle East or other West African countries.
Some are paid a small sum per day, usually about 75 cents, and given tools, food and shelter in exchange for about 30 percent of whatever their backers claim to be the value of the diamonds they find. And the financiers first deduct their expenses.
A few workers have no stake in their finds but are paid a wage, usually $2 a day. Still others work solely for a share of the gravel they extract from the vast, watery pits. In most arrangements, a great deal of the risk is shouldered by the laborer.
The industry has long been dominated by outsiders, feeding a nationalism that was exploited by Foday Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front, the brutal rebel force that claimed to be liberating the mines but instead enriched itself and terrorized the populace.
Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions have not improved much. The mine where Mr. Kabia works is operated by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive. The chief, Paul N. Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the past two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta. Mr. Saquee’s brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond dealers association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.
Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they must hand over to Mr. Saquee’s representative, another of the chief’s brothers named Tamba. He watches with hawklike vigilance as the miners dig.
Others, like Mr. Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.
Prince Saquee, the chief’s diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.
“If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price,” he said. “To me that is indirect slavery.”
But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.
“For the miners, it is different,” he argued. A digger, “he depends on you. He doesn’t know the value so you as the dealer have to tell him.”
Paul Saquee, the chief, said that despite the low pay and hard working conditions, he was providing at least some form of employment to desperate people with no alternative.
“I wish that the miners would all go back to the farm, but they are here and need work,” he said.
Part of Mr. Saquee’s role is to administer a fund that sends a quarter of the government’s diamond revenues back to the community the stones came from. Kono, home to more than half of all mining license holders, received $377,900 in 2005 for a district of 475,000 people.
“I don’t believe that diamonds are the future of this country,” Mr. Saquee said. “We need to find something else to get ourselves moving.”
Indeed, the poverty rates are highest in the mining districts — Kono’s poverty rate is 20 percent higher than that in nearby Pujehun district, which is largely agricultural.
In the central bank building in Freetown, Mustapha B. Turay sorted gleaming stones into small mounds to determine their value for taxation. On a recent afternoon the country’s largest exporter, Hisham Mackie, a longtime Lebanese kingpin, brought in $2 million worth of stones bound for Antwerp, Belgium, that night.
Most had been dug by hand by workers in places like Koidu. But the paper trail does not reach all the way back to the miner, so there is no way to know how much a miner was paid. It is a gap, said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser, that can lead to the illusion that the problems brought to light by the civil war have been solved.
Jamestown aims for prominence on anniversary
By Steve Szkotak, Associated Press, USA TODAY
JAMESTOWN, Va. — The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the nation prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many say this swampy outpost on the James River pales in comparison to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock, though fans of the buckled shoe will have to wait until 2020 to mark Plymouth's fourth century.
New Englanders easily tick off why the Massachusetts settlement trumps Jamestown — the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom, and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman in a new book on the settlement, The Jamestown Project. Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation — including a man dining on his pregnant wife — are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
"It's pulp non-fiction compared to the family-friendly tale of pious Pilgrims dining with gentle Indians," author Tony Horwitz writes in reviewing a raft of new Jamestown books for The Washington Post.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, twice were turned away from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.
Now, with Virginia amid an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown could finally outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the (Jamestown) settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," the author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Part of Plymouth's enduring popularity is pure arithmetic.
An estimated 35 million people worldwide claim to be descendants of the Pilgrims, including Miles Standish, Plymouth's own intrepid military leader, and William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony.
"A lot of Mayflower descendants are proud of their ancestors. People get attached to them," said Stephen O'Neill, associate director and curator of collections at The Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth. Among its collections: the wicker basket that carried Peregrine White, who was born in the Mayflower as it anchored off of Provincetown, Mass.
David A. Price, author of Love and Hate in Jamestown, said Virginia and Southern history became tangled in the Civil War, knocking down Smith and Pocahontas a few notches in the American consciousness.
"Most importantly," Price wrote in an e-mail, "we look back on the Plymouth colonists and see an idealized, sepia-tinted version of ourselves — hardworking, earnest, seeking religious liberty.
"We look back on the Jamestown colony and see an earthier, less appealing, but equally truthful version of ourselves: beset by jealousy and politics, motivated by dreams of money."
The Pilgrims' story has been a familiar part of every child's public education, often an inspiration for school recitals.
"Certainly, growing up in Massachusetts, everyone goes to Plimouth Plantation," said Mark Sylvia, town manager of Plymouth, which has grown to 60,000 residents. "It's ingrained in the American culture — that's where the first Thanksgiving was held."
Plymouth had an edge from the start. It was a family-based settlement, unlike the male-dominated Jamestown venture; the settlers learned to coexist with native populations for more than a half century, unlike the Jamestown gang, who had a complicated, often violent relationship with the Powhatan Indians; and it had some powerful symbols.
"They are THE PILGRIMS," Philbrick wrote. "They have an easily identifiable monument: Plymouth Rock (even if it is one of the biggest letdowns in American tourism). They have a ship: the Mayflower."
Jamestown had three ships — the Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery.
Plymouth's higher profile may have been on Vice President Dick Cheney's mind when he addressed the Virginia General Assembly in January at Jamestown.
"The history of our country did not begin on Cape Cod in 1620," Cheney said to a rousing response from legislators.
Price and other scholars would second Cheney's pronouncement. Price said if Jamestown had failed, Plymouth's settlers might have found their religious freedom in Holland, where Separatists already had established a presence.
Horn, a scholar at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said the public is poorly informed about Jamestown.
"It is a great story in terms of survival of the English and also the strategies employed by the Powhatans," Horn said.
Jamestown is still revealing itself, due to archaeologist William Kelso's relentless pursuit of history, which led to the discovery in the 1990s of the footprint of the fort in which Jamestown's settlers first sought shelter. Roughhewn locust now mark one perimeter of the fort. The site still gives up shards of pottery and, most recently, a tobacco seed — a crop that helped define Virginia for centuries.
During a warm spring day, Kelso strolled the carefully marked archaeological dig and said the work that continues at Jamestown has created a broader interest and understanding, and one that is likely to multiply.
"Jamestown was first, and it has so many legacies — private enterprise, representative government, the American Dream," Kelso said.
Most historians say any historical reckoning of Plymouth and Jamestown is a good thing because each story has much to say about our nation.
"The Pilgrims are the ones we look on more fondly, but we draw just as much of our national spirit from the Jamestown colonists," Price said.
