[Lightly edited for flow and clarity and annotated by Bruce Hartford. Annotations are set off within brackets.]
Claire Brown Iceland Hartford Horstein — Interviewee
Bruce Hartford — Interviewer and Claire's eldest son
Aaron Hornstein — Commentator and Claire's third husband
Table of Contents
[This interview picks up the thread of Claire's life in 1937 when she was hired as a full-time, paid organizer for the American Communications Association (ACA), a CIO union organizing telegraph, telephone, and radio communication workers. For some years previously, she had done volunteer work for the union in New York City helping them organize bicycle messengers — teenage boys — who delivered telegrams.]
Claire:
Well, she was still living in Brookylyn [referring to her mother Rose Brown]. I think by that time, she had moved to Brighton Beach. My older brother, Leon, was still working for my Uncle Saul, but went to his factory in Massachusetts someplace. Had a better job there. So my mother was with my younger brother, Ben, your Uncle Ben, and she moved to Brighton Beach and we were all helping to support her.When I told her that I was going to Chicago [to be a union organizer in 1937], she said, 'How can you leave your husband [Ben Iceland] and go to Chicago?'
[Claire's husband Ben was secretly in Spain fighting against fascism during the Spanish Civil War.]I said, 'Well, he got a better job in another state.' 'And what are you going to do in Chicago?' I thought fast, and I said, 'Oh, I'm going to be a social worker.' I figured, you know, after all, I am --
Bruce:
Close enough.
Claire:
Yeah. Helping people is social work. So, she didn't like the idea, but still, she had to accept it. My poor mother. I really lied to her a lot. And she was so innocent of everything. When I came home one night [at age 15] when we were still living in Saratoga Springs [NY], I had been, I had been drinking gin and smoking, and smoking cigarettes. She wanted me to kiss her goodnight, she was already in bed. I went to kiss her. She said, 'Oh my God, I smell smoke, you've been smoking.' The fact is, it was gin on my breath, she didn't —
Bruce:
She didn't recognize it.
Claire:
No, she didn't recognize. You know, I fooled her all the time. She was very innocent and I thought I was very sophisticated.
Bruce:
As your son, I can say that you, too, were very innocent and easily fooled, as a mother.
Claire:
True. You, too? You did that to me?
Bruce:
Oh, yes.
Claire:
And here I thought I knew everything.
Anyhow, so now I get to Chicago and my first experience, I'm met at the train by a guy named Lou Goyet. Very dapper, French guy with a little thin mustache. He was the regional director [of the union] in Chicago. I'm just a little organizer, Okay?
He takes me to, I think it was the La Salle Hotel. There was a conference going on of union leaders. There was Curran, Joe Curran of the Maritime Workers, there was Mike Quill of the Subway Workers, there was Ben Gold of the Fur Workers. There was a whole bunch of them.
Bruce:
Harry Bridges?
Claire:
I don't think he was at that meeting, no. No.They were in the midst of a discussion. So I'm brought into the room. They were around a table. They were discussing a real problem. This was soon after the Republic Steel strike where the workers were, several workers were shot and killed [10 dead, 40 shot, 90 injured all by police].
And also there was an ordinance in Chicago that you could not distribute anything that was affected by the law of gravity. In other words, you couldn't give out a leaflet if it had the propensity to fall on the ground. Which was, of course, a horror to the unions because our main activity was to give out leaflets and have the workers know of us.
Anyhow, I came in, I was introduced and there were the usual cracks about, oh, pretty girls, you know, you can — oh, what's his name? Bill Bliss? Anyhow. The two leaders of our organization were there and they were congratulated on picking a pretty girl as an organizer.
Bruce:
Were there very many female organizers?
Claire:
No. No, absolutely not. We had a Secretary-Treasurer of the union, the whole union, was Josephine Tibb. She was a telegraph worker/ She had a full-time job as Secretary-Treasurer of the union, but there were no other women organizers.
Bruce:
What about in other CIO unions?
Claire:
In the Textile, there were. At the Garment Workers, there were, but that wasn't CIO, that was AFL. In the Office Workers there were. There were very few. And I don't know of anyone, except on the West Coast — I think they finally hired somebody in San Francisco who was a woman — but I was just about the only woman organizer [in a CIO union outside of the traditional womens-work' occupation like clerical and textile]. .So they were discussing this question of the leaflet distribution. They knew that somebody had to get arrested, and a case had to be made, a legal case, to overthrow that ordinance. So they decided at that meeting that I should be the one to test it. It would be easier if a girl, or woman, was arrested. It would make better publicity and it would have a better outcome, they thought.
Bruce:
How long after the Republic Steel strike massacre was this?
Claire:
About a month or so, it was very close.
Bruce:
And they decided they wanted you because you were a woman?
Claire:
Yeah, yeah.
Bruce:
This is not how you told the story at other times, but go ahead.
Claire:
How did I tell it other times? Tell me.
Bruce:
That they were, that this was very shortly after the massacre.
Claire:
It could have been.
Bruce:
And police were still raiding union offices and arresting everybody, and they were afraid that they could not get to the Loop because they'd be arrested.
Claire:
No.
Bruce:
No?
Claire:
Never told you that.
Bruce:
I wonder where I got that, then.
Claire:
I don't know. You may have, well, I think I know. The atmosphere was bad. There was, you know, a lot of goons and a lot of stool pigeons in the unions, and there was a lot of anti-union activity.But as they discussed it at that meeting, they felt — how did they put it? I think, Bliss, I forget his first name, somebody. He said, 'Oh, let's get some — ' They were talking about getting somebody, have a test case made, and have the lawyer ready and everything. Then the guy from our union said, 'Hey, wouldn't it be good if we start giving out leaflets, have a girl give out the leaflets, have her get arrested?' So it sounded logical to them. So they said to me, 'How would you like to put your fair, white body on the firing line?' And I resented that terribly, and I told them so. I said, 'You know, there may be a reason to want a woman, you know, I won't get clubbed like you might get clubbed, but I don't like that whole idea,' and so on. But anyhow, I was elected to do that.
Bruce:
What didn't you like about it?
Claire:
'Put your fair, white body on the firing line'. I hated that. To me —
Bruce:
Why?
Claire:
I hated it because it didn't have any organizational, it was outside the context of organization. It was, you know, a female. You can do what you want with a female, or the sexist orientation bothered me.
Bruce:
And it was disparaging.
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. It was, I wanted to be absolutely equal with them. You know, if they had said, 'You're gonna give out leaflets and a good place to start is at Telegraph [office] and why don't you do that?' that would be different.But they were jesting. It was like a game or a trick or something, at the expense of females, I thought.
Although my union, I was actively engaged, and I wasn't conscious about it, but I hated when they made sexist remarks in the context of organizing, and they did that very frequently. Sometimes I mention part of this in the book.
[Referring to Fragile Roots, Claire's self-published roman-a-clef fictionalized biography.]I always used to fight with them about it. I didn't know I was a feminist, there was no such thing as being a feminist then, but I was innately so. I wanted absolutely to be accepted as their equal, and I must tell you, I never was. At any rate, I fought the fight long before it was popular.
Now that night — so after the meeting, Lou said, 'Where are you staying?' And I realized I had no place to stay, and I never thought about it. The union people in the national office in New York had never said a damn word about it. Now you would think today, if you're hired by somebody, you get a job and it's out of town, wouldn't they discuss lodging or where you're staying?
Bruce:
They never did in the civil rights movement.
Claire:
Oh, well, all right. They didn't. I said, 'Well, I guess I'll stay in the hotel.' So Lou said, 'You know, I have a little one-room studio apartment. It has a pull-down bed. There's also a sofa, a sleep sofa.' He said, 'You know, we have to support and pay for the union office and the rent and everything,' which was the first I knew about it, by the way. That had never been discussed.
Bruce:
You mean, you had to pay for the union office [and organizing expenses] out of your pay?
Claire:
Exactly.
Bruce:
Which was how much?
Claire:
Thirty-five dollars a week. [Equal to $809/week, $3236/month, or $38,832/year in 2026 dollars.]
Aaron:
That was a lot of money in those days.
Claire:
Yeah. So, he said, 'Since we have to already, you know, pay for expenses, it might not be a bad idea to share the apartment.' Well, I wanted to appear sophisticated, so — I didn't know what to do. I was pretty innocent, really. I said, 'Well, I said, you know I'm a married woman, and there's not going to be any hanky-panky or anything.' 'Oh, of course not,' he said.
Bruce:
Was that the term you used? 'Hanky-panky?'
Claire:
No, it wasn't. I don't remember how I put it. I probably said, 'Now you're on the level, aren't you? You don't mean anything by it, do you?' He said, 'No, of course not, it's just to save money.' Okay.So it turned out to be a small, little room with a pull-down bed and a sofa bed and one closet. I got undressed, I went in the bathroom. I hung up — I didn't unpack my suitcase. That was a question in my mind: should I? But I decided not to. Took out my bathrobe, my nightgown, went into the bathroom, got undressed, and he pulled down the bed and I got into the bed. He went into the bathroom, got undressed and the minute he came out of the bathroom, he comes and sits on the bed.
The man starts to put his arms around me and start. I said, 'I thought we had agreed that there was nothing gonna go on here.' He said, 'You're kidding?' I said, 'No, I'm not kidding. That's what we talked about, didn't we?' And he said, 'Oh, come on now.' He says, 'You know better than that.' He starts to grapple with me and I start resisting him and pretty soon it's a full-fledged struggle going on. He's trying to rip my bathrobe off and my nightgown off, and I'm clawing at him.
I don't know what to do, and I'm panicked. I'm really panicked. So I said finally, 'You know, Lou,' I said, 'I've been around. I don't mind sleeping with anybody, but I have to be attracted to them, and you repulse me.' I said, 'You're an old man, and you have absolutely no physical appeal to me.'
Well, that did it. He was such a vain womanizer, he thought he was the cat's meow. That cooled his ardor very quickly. He said, 'What?' He said, 'A lot of women find me attractive.' I said, 'Well, then, just go with those women, because I don't find you at all attractive.' So he left, and I didn't sleep all night, of course. I was nervous.
Anyhow, the next morning came and I, you know, I had to find a place to stay. Went to the office with him, and it occurred to me that I ought to check in with the [Communist] Party office, which I did. I called the Party office. He didn't know whether I was a Party member. I didn't know whether he was a Party member, either. So I made this call quietly. I said, 'I have to leave, I'm looking for a place.' I went to the Party office, and that's where I ran into Ethel. Remember Ethel Shapiro?
Bruce:
Bertolini.
Claire:
Yeah, [she] later became Bertolini. She was an old-time revolutionary. You want to hear this? You know this, don't you?
Bruce:
This is, this is, you know, when we transcribe this, someday I'll give this to Ken and Mark [Claire's grandsons].
Claire:
I see, Okay.
Bruce:
So just because you've told me these stories — every time you tell these stories, you tell them quite differently.
Claire:
Really?
Bruce:
Um-hum.
Aaron:
That's not surprising.
Bruce:
No. [Laughing]
Claire:
Well, it's as I remember them. You know —
Bruce:
So some of it is new to me and — but other stuff, you know, some day they may want to —
Claire:
Well, a lot of this is in the book.
Bruce:
Yeah, but the book is fiction.
Claire:
Yeah, but it's true fiction.
Bruce:
Yeah, Okay, some. But this is in your own words.
Claire:
Okay, so —
Bruce:
This is not to replace the book.
Claire:
No. So, I met Ethel. Now, she looked very mannish. Wasn't bad looking, you remember her?
Bruce:
Yeah, she always looked very mannish.
Claire:
She said, 'Where are you living?' I said, 'This is why I came to talk. Do you know a place I could live because we have to pay for the union,' and I told her the story of what had happened. And she was horrified along, you know —
Bruce:
Now was he in the Party, Lou, this guy?
Claire:
I never — no, he wasn't [a Party member].
Bruce:
If he had been in the Party —
Claire:
That would have been different.
Bruce:
Why would it have been different?
Claire:
I would have brought him up on charges.
Bruce:
Could you have brought him up on charges?
Claire:
I would have tried.
Bruce:
Would the Party have respected that? I mean, would the Party —
Claire:
I think that, I think they would have. Because we were supposed to save, we were going to save money on expenses, and it was unethical for him after we had discussed it, to change course.
Bruce:
Because everything I've heard is the Party was just as sexist as —
Claire:
No, the Party believed in free love, but they didn't believe in forced love. No, I think they would have supported me. Since I mentioned him, she would have said, 'Oh, that's so-and-so,' you know, but she didn't. So he really wasn't [in the Party]. He had come from the marine operator side anyhow. The radio, radio something, radio operator.
Bruce:
Like Bruce Risley used to —
Claire:
Yeah. So she thought, and she thought, and she said, 'You know, I have a room in a comrade's house, two old comrades, a couple. It's a very nice room and actually there are two beds there, and I don't mind sharing it with you because I could use the money, you know.'
Bruce:
Because you'd go halves?
Claire:
Yeah. And it sounded pretty good to me. I felt safer. So we agreed that that's what I would do.
Bruce:
She was working in the Party office, or she was —
Claire:
She was a full-time [Party] functionary.
Bruce:
What was her position?
Claire:
She was section organizer.
Bruce:
A section organizer was over many branches?
Claire:
Yeah.
Bruce:
And what did you call, not branches, but —?
Claire:
Units. That whole district, the downtown district. So I liked that and we arranged, you know, how I would move in and so on. She would talk to the old couple who were also comrades and so on.
Then I came back, went back to the office because we were having a meeting that night. I was to be introduced to the executive board. All right. So I told Lou that I had a place to live with a friend that I knew, and he was surprised. I asked him to drive me there after the meeting that night. Okay.
So the meeting comes, starts at 7:00 o'clock. In troops this bunch of people, all of who were old enough to be my parents. I'm introduced by Lou, and there's a girl by the name — 'My name is Brown, Helen Brown.' I'm introduced to her. She was, like, the leading figure there. Very —
Bruce:
So you were using your maiden name, not —
Claire:
Yeah, I was Claire Brown.
Bruce:
Why was that? Why not Claire Iceland?
Claire:
I don't know. Don't ask me. I was just Claire Brown. I had not been married that long. I didn't, I never took the name Iceland. At that time, you didn't give up your own name.[At that time Ben Iceland, Claire's husband, was in Spain fighting in the Spanish Civil War against fascism as part of the Lincoln Brigade. But under U.S. law, that was illegal, so his participation and her link to him needed to be kept somewhat quiet.]
Claire:
So she [Helen Brown] looks me up and down, and then there was, oh, God, I can't remember all these — there were a bunch of women, a bunch of men. They were all in their 40s at least, if not more. Helen was sort of the leader. She was a pretty brazen, brown-haired, tough-looking gal, and spoke tough. She was a multiplex operator.They didn't like me at all. First of all, they didn't expect that a woman would be sent as an organizer. Second, I was young [23]. They didn't think I had any experience. So I didn't make much of a hit that night.
Aaron:
Especially among the woman.
Claire:
Yeah, well —
Aaron:
They thought you were going to take their lovers away.
Claire:
Yeah, they — I didn't say much, either.
Aaron:
You didn't have to.
Claire:
Then later as the meeting broke up, I said, 'Oh, let's go out and have something to drink. I'm thirsty.' So they said, 'Great.' That was the best thing I said all night. So they go to a place, and I'm too stupid to realize it's a bar kind of place. I thought it was a cafe of some kind where they served sodas.What I really wanted was a chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream, a black and white. We sit down, everybody orders, and I'm not paying any attention to what they're ordering. The waiter comes over, I said, 'I'll have a black and white.' I thought he knew I meant the soda. He comes with a little glass of liquor. It was black, you know, there's liquor called black and white.
Bruce:
Yeah, it's a cocktail.
Claire:
I said, 'What's this?' He said, 'Your black and white.' I said, 'A black and white is a chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.' Well, the whole group were doubled up. They were so hilarious. They thought that was the best thing they had ever heard in their lives. They guffawed and they laughed. What the hell did New York send them? So that was my introduction. It wasn't great.
Bruce:
I would have laughed, too.
Claire:
You would have?
Bruce:
Of course. [Laughing]
Aaron:
You [Claire] are right now.
Claire:
So, that ended that night. Anyhow, I began to —
Bruce:
Well, what happened with the gravity law and —
Claire:
Oh, I'm getting to that. So a couple of days later, we have a leaflet ready which I had written, and we arranged that I would be distributing at 7:30 in the morning for the 8:00 o'clock shift, and that Lou Goyet would be two doors down. When the police came, he would alert the lawyer and so on. I started to give out leaflets, and they were receiving them and everybody —
Bruce:
This is — you're leafleting workers going into Western Union or Postal Tele —?
Claire:
Postal Telegraph. So they received the leaflets very happily and — I'm trying to remember. Was it Postal Telegraph or Western Union? I think it was Postal because we organized that first.So, along comes the policeman. It was, like, choreographed. He says, 'Young lady, you can't do that.' I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'There's a law against it.' I said, 'It's not a — there shouldn't be a law against it. They have every right to receive reading material, and I have every right to give it to them.' He said, 'That's not the law. Pack it up and go away or there'll be trouble.'
I said, 'I'm not going away. It's a wrong law, and I'm not obeying it.' He said, 'You're gonna get arrested.' I said, 'Well, that's too bad.' Anyhow, so he said, 'Okay, I'm taking you in.' Well, Lou saw all this and he left and he called, he went to call the lawyer, and I was arrested. The workers were very startled to see all this as they were coming in, and they started, you know, in groups and they were whispering and, you know, showing support in a moderated way.
Bruce:
This is the second time you were arrested?
Claire:
Yes. So I'm brought to the, I'm brought in the police car to the court, and I'm — there's a judge or somebody sitting, and the policeman tells him what this is all about. He looks at me, he says, 'You knew you were violating the law, did you not?'I said, 'Yes. It's a bad law and it shouldn't be in existence. You're denying me my rights. You're denying the workers their rights.' He said, 'Young lady, you're going to be in trouble.' I said, 'So be it.' By this, he says, 'Well, if you have a lawyer, you're allowed to call.' I said, 'My lawyer is on the way.' Sure enough, he came by very quickly.
Nice young man. He established bail, and he said, 'Oh, let me take you out to breakfast.' So he took me out to breakfast. I'll tell you, all the guys — he asked about me. I told him that I had a husband, and he had gone to Spain. He said he was divorced, would like to see me. I said, I can't think of that now. So anyhow, I was bailed out, and I won the case. It came up several months later, and I won the case.
Bruce:
Because they overturned the law?
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. I don't remember now how it was overturned or what happened, but it was ruled unconstitutional in some way.
Bruce:
Well, it's a pretty obvious way. [Laughing] It's not a difficult constitutional case.
Claire:
At any rate, that was a nice victory, and then we started to give out leaflets and we got a response. Remo was always sending information about what the top guys [at the company] were going to do. One of the bits of information was that the AF of L was going to organize. Sure enough, it was the AFL Communications Union.[At that time, labor unions were grouped into one of two major federations. The older American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized on a craft-basis — plumbers in one union, machinists in another, radio operators, in a third, regardless of who they were employed by; so a large factory might have several different unions each representing only the skilled worker by their crafts.The newer group — just recently formed — was the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) organized unions by employer and industry such as auto, steel, communications, and so on; for each employer or plant there would be a single union that included all of the blue-collar employees regardless of their craft — including the large number of 'unskilled' lower-paid workers that the AFL did not organize at all.
The two federations were fierce, bitter, and occasionally violent rivals. They frequently contended with each other over who had jurisdiction to represent employees and often competed against each other National Labor Relations Act elections.]
Bruce:
The CWA.
Claire:
No, it wasn't the CWA. It wasn't the Communications Workers of America which is the CWA. It later became that, but at that time, it wasn't. So we had competition.As a matter of fact, our union office was in a building where the IBEW was. Yeah, the International Brothers of Electrical Workers. A very bad union. A guy came down from the union, from their union, one day who said, 'You know, we're organizing the telegraph workers.' We said, 'No, you're not, we have a charter to do it from the CIO.' He said, 'Well, we have a charter from the AFL.' Well, they didn't have a charter from the AFL, it was another organization that had the charter for communications workers, but they were such a rotten union, they wanted [it] too. They didn't get very far, but they threatened us. Did you ever hear of Umbrella Mike Boyle?
Bruce:
No.
Claire:
He was a union gangster. He was the head of the IBEW. It was a typical Chicago gangster-run union. They had never had any, any legal organization work done there. So this guy said, 'You've heard of Mike Boyle?' I said, 'No, I never did.' I hadn't. Umbrella Mike, they called him. Why? Because he had a — he used to walk around with an umbrella in which was a lead piece of something which he would hit people with and get rid of them. So the guy warned us about this. Well, Lou and I, what we gonna do? Leave the union office and move elsewhere? So we said, 'Okay, organize.'
Bruce:
Now, it's just you and Lou. I mean, there wasn't any other union staff?
Claire:
Not at that time. So we started to have meetings, and Helen Brown and I began to get quite chummy. She respected me. She said, 'You have a lot of guts.' She liked what I did, you know, getting out the leaflets. She liked the fact that I was arrested and had the guts to fight it. She began to be my friend and supporter. The minute I won her over and Margaret, another one from Teletype Operators, and Bonnie Clurg, and even the guys, they began to respect me.How it happened, I don't know, but they felt that I was honest and that I knew my stuff and that I was courageous, and it began to work. We were doing very great, really great. We were organizing. Then Willard Bliss, he was the vice president of the union. He said that what we — that the national office had decided that in order to win Chicago, what we had to do was organize sit-down strikes in the perimeter cities around —
[END TAPE ONE, SIDE A]
[BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE B]
Claire:
— there were, like, a hundred of us. I didn't tell you, I have to tell you, I was already married by this time. Now let me backtrack.
Bruce:
All right. Back up.
Claire:
That year [1936? 1937?], Ben graduated from NYU.
Bruce:
What was he studying? What was his major?
Claire:
Latin. He was a Latin teacher. Very helpful [laughing]. There were no jobs, obviously, so he applied as a social worker. The department of welfare — we had one, you know, welfare and so on from President Roosevelt. So he applied as a social worker. They were all applying as social workers, and he happened to get a job. So he said, 'Well, let's get married.' So we went to City Hall, we grabbed a witness or somebody, and we got married. Of course, my mother was devastated. Her idea of a Jewish wedding with all the relatives and all of that down the drain, and who did I marry? Somebody without any prospects. I could have had a pharmacist and a drug store.
Bruce:
Instead you got a Communist.
Claire:
A Communist from a terrible family. His father was a writer for The Jewish Day, Der Tog.
Bruce:
The Jewish Forward, or the —
Claire:
Der Tog. That was the Republican paper [meaning it was politically conservative, as opposed to the Forward]. Although his father was Mormon. Is the tape running out?
Bruce:
No, go on.
Claire:
You know, she didn't think much of the family. And he wasn't living at home, he had a mistress on the East Side who was a poetess, Rosa.
Bruce:
Ben, not the father?
Claire:
His father, yeah. The father had the mistress, not Ben. He had left the home and was living with Rosa. She was a famous poetess, by the way, famous Jewish poetess.Anyhow, he was a writer for Der Tog. Everybody read that paper. The Forward was sort of a half-ass Socialist paper. Der Tog was like The New York Times, compared to them, a more liberal paper.
So, we decided, that's what I was gonna say — we got married, both families were very unhappy, but Ben's mother loved me. She was a delicate, bird-like — she was a delicate, bird-like creature and I always felt so sorry for her. She loved me and she would always say to Ben, 'Don't you do wrong by that Claire. You mustn't seduce her. You mustn't do all these terrible things.'
The terrible thing happened, I did become pregnant and I did need an ab— well, that came later, that came later. I'm a little mixed up in my time sequences 'cause it all runs together. I did become pregnant before we were married, that's right.
[Moved here from later in the interview.] Well, as I say, I became pregnant [by Ben, her then lover and later husband], I wasn't married yet and had to arrange an abortion. We had no money. That was a horrible thing. Some girlfriend had told me about somebody up in the Bronx, a very seamy episode, I don't even want to go into it. It was dreadful. Then right after the procedure was done by a doctor whose face I never even saw, we had to take the subway home, we didn't even have money for a taxi. I stayed at Ben's sister's house, and she was very nice, and she was very angry with her brother [for getting her pregnant].
Claire:
I already had a [volunteer] assignment with the union. Because they had seen me well-dressed, I had joined the Office Workers' Union when I worked for Dr. Hare [a dentist]. At that time, I was still dressing very nicely.[Claire's father had been wealthy before he went bankrupt after the stock market crash in 1929. By 1930, when Claire was 16 or so, her father had disappeared and she and her mother were living in a Brooklyn tenement-flat that had been in her mother's name and therefore not seized by the bankruptcy court. Claire was attending Washington Irving High School (an all-girls school in Manhattan) so as to be near her boyfriend Ben who was an NYU student. But Claire still retained the expense wardrobe that her father had bought for her before the crash.]The head of the union, who happened to be Dick Lewis, you remember Dick Lewis who lived — he died, course. He was the president of the local. The Party, the Communist Party, wanted somebody who could meet with an official of Western Union —
Bruce:
Now, wait a minute. Wasn't this, this was after you were working with the ACA?
[Tape turned off]
Bruce:
Okay. So, you weren't with the Office Workers' Union.
Claire:
I was a member of the Office Workers' Union.[After working for the dentist, Claire got a secretarial job with the Federal Theater Project in New York which was under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In that job, she joined the small, left-wing, Office Workers Union.]
Bruce:
But you were just a member, you were not an organizer.
Claire:
That's all I was. I wasn't an official. They [the Party] wanted somebody who could [secretly] meet with this official in restaurants and so on who wanted to help organize the Telegraph Workers.
Bruce:
And why did the Office Workers' —?
Claire:
They felt that that was the union. There was no other union at the moment. They felt that the Office Workers' union was the logical place for — because they're teletype operators, Morse [code] operators and so on.[The Party was looking for a union to start organizing in the growing telecommunications industry so they initially started with the left-led Office Workers union. After the CIO formed, the ACA was established as a separate union.Anyhow, so this guy wanted to meet with somebody, and they decided that I was the one. So they gave me that assignment. I remember having to meet with some Party official to look me over.
Bruce:
Now you were in the Party or in the —
Claire:
YCL [Young Communist League]. I met with this guy from the Party, I remember. And he looked me over and was questioning me about a lot of things. He said, 'You know, you have to be very careful when you meet with this man and so on and so forth.' Because he was quite an important person, he was like a vice president of the company.
Bruce:
And he was willing to give information to —
Claire:
Well, the reason was, which I found out later, he had once been a, worked on a ship as a marine [radio] operator, or something. He had met all kinds of people and he had read all kinds of things and he had come to Marxism on his own, but nobody knew that. He felt that what was happening in the Soviet Union was great, and he was all by himself. He wanted to do something good, so he decided to help the union, a union, to organize telegraph, and he would give information. He had to meet in very nice restaurants with somebody who looked like they really should go to such nice restaurants. They picked on me for that.[Probably meaning that if any of his acquaintances happened to see them, they'd assume Claire was his young lover or mistress.]
Bruce:
But you weren't supposed to sleep with him or anything?
Claire:
No, no. I was just his contact. So, anyhow, I had the meeting with this guy who I knew his name — I didn't know his name. I called him, I forget what's —
Bruce:
Saturn.
Claire:
Saturn, yeah. He was interested in the stars, and so he picked the name [as a code name]. Of course, I did know his [real] name [Remo] after a while. He fell in love with me. He was married. He had a child of about three or four. He was in his 40s, early 40s. I thought he was an old man.
Bruce:
All these old men always falling in love with you [laughing].
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. He gave me information all the time, and we would put out leaflets [using the information]. We got the messengers interested, and we had — the office was a big, long room. You climbed a flight of stairs and there was a big, long room, and across the street — it was on 14th Street near 8th Avenue or something — and across was an armory and there were windows in the armory, and those windows could look right into the second floor windows of the Office Workers' union. I'd have meetings, like 100, 200 messengers.[In New York, and other large urban centers, most telegraph messengers were teenage boys who wove through downtown traffic at breakneck speeds on cheap, single-gear bicycles that might (or might not) have had brakes. Before convenient and inexpensive long-distance phone service, a good deal of inter- city corporate communication was by telegram.]
Bruce:
What do you mean, you would have meetings?
Claire:
Well, there was Abe Dubrowski, two of the kids, we had an executive board.[Meaning an executive board of the sub-unit of messenger boys that Claire had organized.]
We got the kids to give out leaflets. We had an executive board, but I was responsible for it.
Bruce:
How come you were responsible? Were you an organizer?
Claire:
No. I was organizing them. With the information this guy gave me, I would write leaflets. I would get the kids to give them out.
Bruce:
The 'kids' meaning the messengers.
Claire:
The messengers. We'd sign them up, and we used to hold our meetings in that big Office Workers' room. Now Dick Lewis and the others I would report to, they didn't want to be bothered. They were busy organizing Orbachs and Kleins [department store sales clerks].Dick Lewis, I remember, he said, 'Claire, you can't, you know, we're busy organizing. You have to handle it yourself.' Here I was, you know, nothing, and yet I had that responsibility.
Bruce:
Even though you were not, officially [employed by] the union. You were just a member.
Claire:
Just a member who had been assigned a task [by the Party], and I was doing that task, and trying to get the officials of the union to help me, and they were too busy.
Bruce:
With important things.
Claire:
With important things, right. So one night, we were planning a strike. I got wonderful information from Saturn, really, he would say 'The company is saying this. Here's how they're going to respond to your leaflet. Here's what they're gonna do.' So we were a step ahead of them all the time because of him.So one night, we had a meeting and just before I went to the front of the office of the meeting room to get the guys to start the meeting, there was af flurry in the back and there're two or three, two guys, I guess, came in — two guys came in, they looked like gangsters, and they were gangsters.
We said, 'What do you want? Who are you?' And they wouldn't, didn't tell us their names. They said, 'We want to talk to you.' So this Abe who was the president of the group, of the messengers, Abe and I sat down at the desk —
Bruce:
How old were you?
Claire:
I would say I was about 22 by this time. Yeah, five years had passed. I think about 22.
Bruce:
So what year would this have been? 1936?
Claire:
No, about '35, yeah. '35 or '36, maybe.
Bruce:
How old was Abe?
Claire:
Abe was 17. I was pretty old.
Bruce:
You were the old one.
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. These crazy kids, you know, to get them to be quiet at a meeting, I would have to be very firm and I would say, 'I'm kicking you all out. You either sit down in your chairs instead of standing on them.' You know, they were throwing rubber bands and stuff at each other.And they all had uniforms for which they had to pay. They had to pay for their bikes, the upkeep of their bikes. They were getting 25 cents an hour [equal to about $5.90 in 2026 dollars]. They were responding to the leaflets.
Anyhow, so it turned out, these guys said, 'You're organizing the messengers we're organizing. We have a union of messengers.' I said, 'What's the name?' you know. And they pulled out guns and put them on the desk. Real guns. To me, they looked like toys. I'd never seen a real gun. They said, 'Here.' They pointed to the guns. 'We are organizing the union, not you.'
I said, 'You see that we're organizing the union. All these kids are out here.' Well, they said, 'We're warning you, and if you don't stop this meeting, you will be beaten up.' They said, 'Look out your front windows and you will see.' So we said, 'Well, we're too busy, go away, go away.' I was still too, we were too young and too stupid even to be really afraid. Even though we saw the guns, we thought they were toys they were threatening us with.
So, we look out the window and there's pandemonium in the hall. The kids are all fooling around, about 100 or 150. Outside there's a big, black car, and these guys are getting into it. By this time, we began to get a little nervous. All I could think of doing was, I remembered that there was the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League, and that they would —
Bruce:
These were World War I veterans.
Claire:
Yes. And that they would always have demonstrations to protect us, or something. I called, and thank God somebody answered the phone, and told him what was happening. He said, 'You don't go out. We'll come by' and so on. So we started our meeting, and we voted a strike. What we wanted was that there should, they should not have to pay to have their uniforms cleaned, and that the company should pay for cleaning the uniforms, and that they should get a nickel an hour raise.
Bruce:
To 30 cents.
Claire:
To 30 cents an hour.Couple of other things I forget. As a matter of fact, a couple of years later when there was an investigation by the government of unfair labor practices or something. We went to Washington and we testified about these gangsters coming.
Anyhow, so we voted for a strike and the guys, some big guys from the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League came. They marched us down the back way out of the building, put us in cars and took us where? To the cafeteria, the workers' cafeteria in the building where the Communist Party headquarters was. There had been a cafeteria. They got us in the back door, and we sat there, and we weren't followed, and they stayed with us until it was about 2:00 in the morning and they said, Okay, you can go home.
So we got in the subway, and we went home. And that was the end of that. I got a call right away the next morning from Saturn — Remo was his name. Remo, yeah, but he also, Saturn. He said that they knew about the strike. There were stool pigeons at that meeting, of course. They wanted to give the kids that raise. So we did win.
Bruce:
Very good.
Claire:
Yeah. But do you think that influenced Dick Lewis or Laura Shepard? No.
Bruce:
Who's Laura Shepard?
Claire:
She was the Executive Secretary of the union and he was the president of the local. This local [of the Office Workers union] was affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League which was a combination of all the unions. Okay.[The Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) was small grouping of left-led unions in opposition to the AFL before the CIO was formed. After the CIO came into being, TUUL unions merged into it as part of the Party's 'Popular Front' political strategy.]
Bruce:
Which was before they went to support the CIO.
Claire:
Exactly. Right. The CIO was beginning at that time.
Bruce:
Right, it was actually before the CIO.
Claire:
Yeah. A little later on, a few months later on, we heard there was a union, the Marine Operators, Marine Telegraph Operators union, I think it was. I forget exactly what it was. They were given the charter by the CIO to organize all telegraph, land lines as well as merchant marines. That's how they took over the organization.
Bruce:
That became the ACA.
Claire:
Exactly.
Bruce:
American Communications Association.
Claire:
Yes.
Bruce:
Okay. So, meanwhile, you're married to Ben.
Claire:
I'm married to Ben, right. He has a job with the Department of Welfare investigating families who had applied for relief.
Bruce:
And Saturn is in love with you and wants to marry you, but you —
Claire:
No, no. He doesn't want to marry me, he's not gonna leave his — I remember —
Bruce:
He wants you to be his mistress.
Claire:
Now listen to this little incident. His wife knew he was seeing somebody. Of course, he was calling me his 'Little Red Flame' and all these endearments. He was a very — when I think of him now, he was quite a figure. I should have married him. [Laughter]He was big and well-built, dressed marvelously. Fascinating man. He was more informed than any person I had ever met. He knew everything. He was so well read. I said, 'How did you get all this? He said when he worked for the merchant marine, he, you know, he did a lot of reading. He was informed on everything. He knew operas; he knew — no matter what it was, he knew it. He was a very impressive guy, but I treated him like dirt. We had made a date to meet once at Camp Unity. He was going to come up that day and meet with me, and I was gonna be there for the weekend.
Bruce:
What was Camp Unity?
Claire:
Camp Unity was a camp that Communists went to. It was a Communist camp. Like Camp Nitcadike [phonetic] at — these were two wonderful camps where mostly, you know, left-wing people would go to it. It was marvelous.
Bruce:
It was like a summer camp.
Claire:
Summer camp, yeah. Right. You know, vacation camp. So we were going to meet and have a long conference. So I was given the key to a cabin where I was going to sleep. I open the door, I don't — no, the door was open, I had the key, but the door was unlocked and there was a woman in there. She said, 'Are you Claire?' I said, 'Yes.' She says, 'I'm the wife of — ' and it was his wife. She had found out about it.He wasn't there, but she had come. She looked me up and down. She said, 'You know, you're nothing but a child.' I looked very young. I said, 'You know, you really don't have to worry. I am, I wouldn't think of having, of being in love with your husband. You know, I'm not competing with you in any way. He's like a father. He's like an old man to me.' So she was very reassured, and she realized that she had nothing to fight about.
But it didn't end there.
Bruce:
Well, then what happened if it didn't end there?
Claire:
All right. So now we go back. The CIO had given [us] the charter to organize telegraph. Remo, I prefer to call him Remo. He liked Saturn, but I called him Remo. Remo said, you know —Oh, [by then] I had lost my job at the WPA.
Okay. He said, 'You know, I'm gonna get you a job as an organizer with this new, with CIO.' I said, 'How are you gonna do that?' He says, 'Because I'm gonna talk to Earl Browder who was the head of the Communist Party.' I said, 'You're going to talk to Earl Browder?' He says, 'Yes.'
By golly, he did. I was on the list to be hired as an organizer. When they got the money from the CIO, the ACA began seriously to try to organize the telegraph, the land-line telegraph companies. They were hiring people, and I was one who was hired. Thanks to him.
He continued to give us information even when I was sent to Chicago. See, I was hired and sent to Chicago. In the meantime, my husband, Ben, who had always felt guilty that he had got me so involved through him, and he was really ashamed. He had never joined [the Party], and he despised his sister who — I was very close to his sister — I liked her very much. I was her protege. She was so proud of me.
As a matter of fact, she moved to the West Coast to a retirement home. What was her husband's name? Dave. Dave Halperin died many years ago. She lived alone. So she moved out here because she had two daughters, one of them who lives out here, I think in Southern California.
Anyhow, so Ben had always felt guilty, and he was very stirred by what was happening in Spain. At that time, they were starting the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, or the American section of it, anyhow. He felt that he ought to go. I felt he was crazy. He said, 'Oh, with all your talk, when it comes close to home you're not such a, you know, you're not so great.' So I felt guilty that I — do you want to stop?
Bruce:
No, continue.
Claire:
It's a long story. It's a long life.
Bruce:
That's why we have lots of tape.
Claire:
Which you don't know how to use. [Laughing]
Bruce:
Which I don't know how to use. [Laughing]
[This was Bruce's first effort at recording an oral-history.]
Claire:
So — there was a real quarrel between us. I didn't want him to go and so on and so forth. He felt he ought to go. He hated his work in the welfare department, you know, sneaking up on people to see whether they were really as poor as they were supposed to be in order to get relief.That's where we met the Hutchinsons because — Hutch, remember the Hutchinsons? He also, he was a co-worker of Ben in the Department of Welfare. They all hated it because they really had to snoop into the lives of these people.
So, the union, when I was hired, they said that I would be assigned to Chicago. Well, Ben was waiting to get his orders when to leave and it was all very hush-hush, you know, because you couldn't get a visa to go to Spain to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They have to go via France or Italy, go over the Pyrenees and into Spain. I had to go to Chicago, and I left him, and we agreed on what the password would be when he phoned me to tell me when he was going.
By this time, we had an apartment — I got to tell the story of our apartments. Are you interested in that?
Bruce:
Of course. I'm interested in whatever you want to talk about.
Claire:
What about you [to Aaron], I really should be alone, you know, you really don't have to come —
Aaron:
— all the information you can give me.
Claire:
The first apartment we had when we got married was on East 18th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. Between Avenue A and Avenue B, even further east. It was a little, it was on the third floor, a one-room with a little kitchenette thing. The landlord told us what the rent was and, of course, we really didn't have much money. 'Cause, oh, I had to continue to support my mother along with my brother, Leon. We went down to the landlord to find out about the rent and everything else. He had an apartment on the bottom, basement. We see this big, beautiful urn. I said, 'Oh, that's a beautiful urn.' He said, 'That's my wife.'Well, you know, we had all we could do from absolutely bellowing out laughing. It struck us as so funny. 'Your wife, in there?' 'Yes, those are her ashes.' Then when we looked at the apartment, around the tub were beautiful pictures hand-painted, he had hand-painted around the tub. Anyhow, we took the apartment and there were mice there, and there — it was a very dilapidated building. The rent was cheap. I couldn't stand it. I once opened my drawer where I kept my underwear and a mouse jumped out. It was really not for me.
So, that was the first apartment. The second apartment — Oh, so we went looking for an apartment. There was an ad, East 17th Street between Second and Third Avenue. Not far from Gramercy Park. It was a lovely building; it had three stories, and a little hunchback was the manager of the building. He led us up to the third floor, and he opened the door. This was the most beautiful, sunny, big room, and on the right as you walked in the little hall there was a lovely kitchen with a pull-down table and two benches in like a closet. All bright and lovely, tiled bathroom. It was like heaven compared to where we were living. He told us the rent, and we looked at each other. He liked me right away, this little hunchback. I said, 'You know, I don't even know if we can afford it.' Ben said, 'It's a little more than we expected to pay.' He said, 'You know, I like you two people.' He said, 'If I came down five dollars, would you consider it?' We said 'Yes.'
Bruce:
Do you remember what it was?
Claire:
Like $25 [Equal to $600 in 2026 dollars].
Bruce:
A month.
Claire:
A month. Ridiculous, you know, when I think of it now. Then there was another vacancy and Rebecca, Ben's sister's, in-laws, her husband, she was already married to Dave. Dave's brother, Murray Halperin and his wife took the other apartment. So it was lovely. In this apartment, one night — oh, I didn't tell you about Albert.
Bruce:
Your brother, Albert.
Claire:
My half-brother. He was in Brockman State Hospital; it was a mental hospital. One very cold, rainy night in the wintertime, there's a knocking at our apartment door. There is Albert with another man. They had escaped from the mental hospital.Ben worked for the Department of Welfare. He said, 'You can't, you have to report these guys. They're escapees from a mental institution. They might be psychotics. They may be dangerous.' I said, 'My brother is not dangerous.' What to do. So we decided that what we would do is give them some money for a room, at least for one night. And then we would decide to get my brother a WPHR. Somehow. Get him on relief. So that's what we did. He got a job as a doorman in one of the fancy apartment houses.
He wasn't really that crazy. He had problems, but he was very intelligent, and he loved to gamble on the horses. He had a great sense of humor, and he was really a very gentle person, even though he had tried to rape me in Saratoga [Saratoga Springs NY where they lived as children before their father went bankrupt]. I think you know that. He lived his life; he got married. And I think we saved him and didn't report him as missing. So that was our second apartment. For some reason — Oh, that's where we met the Sykes. They were in the next building. Our building was nicer, though, our apartment, and that's how we became friends.
Bruce:
I thought they were in the same building.
Claire:
No, no. They were in the next building. Theirs was not modernized. Ours was. We had moved, then Ben and I moved to Long Island, to Sunnyside, Long Island.
Bruce:
Why?
Claire:
I don't know. I don't remember. I think it was a step up. It was a nicer place. We wanted to get out of the city, but he had already applied to go to Spain. I was already being sent to Chicago, and we had to give up that apartment. So Ben stayed there while I went to Chicago, and then two or three —
[END TAPE ONE, SIDE B]
Time break. Some potion of the interview possibly not recorded.
[BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE A]
[Now discussing events around 1941 when Claire was 27.]
[Political context as understood by Bruce: At that time, U.S. Communist Party (CP) positions on foreign and military affairs followed the political line of the Communist International (ComIntern) as determined by Stalin. In the 1920s, the Party opposed 'imperialist' wars — a position widely shared by many Americans in revulsion against the slaughter of World War I.With the rise of fascism in the mid 1930s, the CP adopted a 'Popular Font' position against Hitler and Mussolini, they strongly supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (as did the Soviet Union), and they urged the U.S. government to take a stand against fascism and build up its military strength.
the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed on August 23, 1939, created an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union which opened the door for Germany's attack against Poland and the commencement of World War II in Europe. The CP immediately shifted its position back to anti-war, anti-militarism, and opposition to American efforts to rebuild its military.
That anti-militarism position lasted until June 22, 1941, when Germany suddenly invaded the Soviet Union, its former ally. Once again, the CP 'turned-on-dime' (their phrase) back to support for U.S. a military build-up, the draft, and immediate military intervention against Germany. It was in that context that Claire's union adopted its no-strike pledge.]
Bruce:
So you had come out [to Chicago in 1937 and by the 1940s had made significant progress in organizing telegraph]. The union had signed the Fair Employment Practices, endorsed the Fair Employment Practices.[By the beginning of 1941, America was rapidly re-arming, had re-instituted military conscription, and was greatly enlarging the armed forces. But it was on an entirely segregated basis. Most defense contractors refused to hire nonwhites and the military itself was rigidly segregated. A. Phillip Randolph and the NAACP called for a mass March on Washington of 100,000 to demand that defense industry jobs payed for by tax-dollars be opened to all races and that the military be desegregated.To forestall the march, President Roosevelt issued the emergency Executive Order 8802 prohibiting employment discrimination in defense-related industries which included communications. Though the military remained segregated, the march was called off. Defense-related employers and unions were required to sign compliance agreements. But despite the order, many corporations took advantage of defense preparations as excuses to resist unionization, evade racial fair-hiring practices regulations, and ignore labor board rulings.]
The [telegraph] company in retaliation was going back on things they had agreed [to in negotiations] and refusing to sign [a contract] with the union and disobeying [rulings by] the Labor Board.
Claire:
Well, they also wanted the fact — the war preparations, they thought they'd take advantage of it by taking away benefits that had been earned, or had been won by the union. So the combination of all those factors gave a springboard to the companies to go backwards.So we [key ACA staff] were all called into New York to see what could be done. We were having a meeting there when — we didn't know what to do. We did not want to revoke the no-strike pledge because we were in favor of the war at this time. So I happened to mention that Mrs. Roosevelt had said if I was ever in trouble, to call her.
[As one of the very, very, few women on the CIO organizing staff, Claire had been introduced to the First Lady when Eleanor Roosevelt addressed a labor meeting.]
Bruce:
So you [the Party] were supporting the war effort.
Claire:
Yes.
Bruce:
Which means, then, that this had to be between June of '41 and December of '41, because the Party position before June of '41 was to oppose [American re-armament efforts]. Then when the Soviet Union was invaded, the Party position flipped and everyone was — so that was when you signed the no-strike pledge.
Claire:
Yeah, if you have a copy of Fragile Roots, the time is much more accurate than what I'm telling you.
Bruce:
Yeah, this had to be because you wouldn't have gone against the Party in signing the no-strike pledge.
Claire:
That's right.
Bruce:
And they didn't say, go out for the war effort until the Soviet Union was invaded.
Claire:
Absolutely, yeah. That we were against the war and then we were for it.
Bruce:
This had to be before Pearl Harbor because then — this was before the war had started for the U.S. because after that, you know, everything was under war-time regulations.
Claire:
I think it's very clearly written in the book.
Bruce:
Yeah, Okay. I'm just saying.
Claire:
I'm confusing you this way because I'm not remembering.
Bruce:
Right. So this was sometime in the latter part of '41?
Claire:
Right. I [told the meeting] I could call Washington, they said, 'Do it, do it.'
Bruce:
Because Eleanor Roosevelt had said if you ever needed anything —
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. She said if I ever needed help. Well, obviously, we needed help because the companies were taking things away.So, I called and I got Malvina Thompson, her secretary, and I said, 'Do you remember me? Claire Brown.' She said, 'Oh, yes, of course. How are you?' I said, 'Remember that Mrs. Roosevelt said that if we ever needed help to call, so we do need help and I'm calling.' I told her the situation and she said, 'Are you free Friday night?' I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'How about, would you take the train to Hyde Park [NY] and the President's car will meet you, and luckily the President and Mrs. Roosevelt will both be here for the weekend.'
[Hyde Park was the Roosevelt family estate on the Hudson River north of Poughkeepsie. About a three hour train ride from New York City. Today it is the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site.]So that was arranged. I got all dressed up. I told the guys 'I'm meeting with the President in Hyde Park.' I took the train and sure enough, the big automobile was there with a chauffeur. Picked me up and then I was ushered into the mansion. On the left was a library, nicely furnished with sofa and so on. In the midst of this was a coffee table, and it had all kinds of magazines, Forbes and Nation, you name it, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post.
There I see sticking out is a copy of The New Masses. Now The New Masses was the literary magazine of the Communist left. All the prestigious writers of the left would write articles in that. It was a great honor to be in that magazine. I picked it up, I was so surprised to see it in the President's house. So I was holding it and the cover was obviously showing, when I hear this voice saying, 'I suppose you think I'm a Communist because I have that magazine.'
Well, I turned on him and he's [FDR] in the doorway being held up by a man on each side. I said, 'No, if you were a Communist you wouldn't be doing what you're doing [to the unions].' So he says, 'And what are the unions doing? They're bucking me. They're fighting me. I'm trying to get a Fair Employment Practices Act.' I said, 'We supported you on that and what do you think the companies did? They're taking away benefits,' and so on.
I said, 'And we signed the no-strike pledge because you asked for it and what are you doing and we're having such trouble.' He's answering, and we start a fight. It was like arguing with my father. I never realized what I was doing or who I was talking to. Now that sounds silly, but it's true. I was so caught up in what, you know, in what monstrous developments were occurring where we were in danger of losing the union because of our support of him, and he's telling me that we're not helping him?
And among other things that were said, when he said, you know — when I said, 'You can't be a Communist with the things you're doing' and so on. He said, 'I want you to know that I'm the best capitalist this country ever had.' He said, 'I know that there would be a revolution or something if I didn't do the things I'm doing with the projects and welfare and helping the people.' And he said, 'I am being called a Communist because of it.'
I again said, 'Communist? You're nothing like a Communist.' I can't remember everything. It was a long conversation, it took about a half hour. In the meantime, it was time for dinner, and so every — did I mention that a lot of other people had come in? About 20 of them. I don't know if I was introduced or not because we were still arguing. So we walked down the hall. I sit down at the table, and we're continuing our discussion to the — ignoring everybody else.
Then Mrs. Roosevelt said, 'Franklin will you stop tormenting that child?' And he said, 'I like to see the fire in her eye.' I was just about getting ready to start eating something when somebody at the door makes, announces, and the butler comes over and said that I would have to leave to make my train back.
So I got up and I thanked everybody, you know, I said goodbye to everybody, got on the train. It was late Friday night, so Saturday morning, I got back to the national office and everybody, 'well, what happened, what happened.' I said, 'I had a fight with the President.' 'That's it? Did you accomplish any —?' 'I don't know, I just had a fight with the President.' I told them what had happened.
They said, you better call Washington again before you go back to Chicago. So I spoke to Malvina on Monday morning and said, 'You know, I don't know what to say.' [I said] 'I want to thank you. You did what you could, but all I did was argue with the President and I got no place.' She said, 'Why don't you go back to Chicago and don't worry about it? I think it will be all right.'
In the middle of the week, I did get a call, the companies must have been contacted, because it was an entirely different situation. Now we're all supporting the war, and no benefits are going to be taken away, and so on. All out for the war effort. And that's what happened. So this is 1941. Okay.
Bruce:
Before we go farther than 1941. Let's go back. There's a good story you missed.
Claire:
What?
Bruce:
Which was the story of your love affair with the premier of France.
Claire:
Yeah. [Laughter]
Bruce:
Which had to be during the Spanish Civil War [1936-1939].
Claire:
Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. The left, the left people were trying to get support for the Spanish Republic and support for the veterans who were fighting there. I didn't dare, even though Ethel whom I was living with at the time —
Bruce:
In Chicago.
Claire:
In Chicago, [the Party] wanted us to pass a [union] resolution supporting the Republic of Spain [against the fascists]. I had said that I felt that it was too political to raise. So we didn't raise it, but everybody was trying to at least send telegrams to Premier Blum —
Bruce:
Leon Blum.
Claire:
Yeah, Leon Blum, to open the Pyrenees so that the veterans could get over there and not to block weaponry from going into Spain.
Bruce:
Right. So it's to stop the arms embargo —
Claire:
Yes.
Bruce:
— that was preventing the Republican side from getting arms.
Claire:
Exactly. While Italy and Germany were sending all kinds of supplies, and it was the democratic countries that had the embargo, especially the United States. So, I decided that I will send a personal telegram to Leon Blum, which I did.Of course, stupid me, I didn't realize that if I send a telegram with my name on it to, you know, everybody in the operating room is going to know about it.
Bruce:
Because they're all telegraph workers.
Claire:
That's right, it goes through the office. Well, I get a call and the [union shop] steward, or a couple of stewards — 'Oh my God, the place is in pandemonium.' Why? 'You, the rumor is that I was secretly married to Premier Blum.' Everybody knew I was married, but... That I was here to spy on the government or something, and that basically that was a love message or something with information that I was sending to Premier Blum, and it had nothing to do with the war.
Bruce:
Which they knew nothing about.
Claire:
That's right. They didn't know about it.
Bruce:
But they knew you were married, but you never talked about your husband because he was in Spain and that had to be kept secret.
Claire:
Right. Right. Well, you know, at first I laughed. Me, married? To the Premier of France or something. Okay. Well, everybody was terribly upset so they had to call a meeting, a membership meeting. So they decided —
Bruce:
Didn't you go to the Party and ask what to do?
Claire:
No.
Bruce:
One time you told the story that way, but go ahead.
Claire:
No, I don't think I did. It was too ludicrous to begin with. I would have been ashamed.Anyhow, would you believe it? There were a few hundred people, and many of them were drunk. Right away, we took up this question. So I got up and I said, 'You know, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry that you would fall for such a thing. First of all, why would I be, if I'm the wife of the Premier of France, it's like the wife of the President of the United States — why would I be wasting time bothering with you and your grievances?'
So it was that kind of a speech, and I showed them how ludicrous — and then I did speak about why I felt the way I did about the Republic of Spain. That here was a government of the working people, of a democratic people, and the fascists are taking it over and trying to war, and why should we have an embargo and not help them when fascists are helping — so I did make it political, but basically I said, and I wouldn't waste my time here with you. So pretty soon everybody was laughing.
Bruce:
You said he was 70 years old.
Claire:
Yeah, yeah, I did. I said, oh yeah, I said, 'Besides which, you realize that this is a man of 70 years old. Do you think I would be married to a man 70 years old? For God's sakes.'
Bruce:
Of course, now you're married to a man who's 88 years old. [Laughing]That's true. But at that time, anybody 40 years old was old, as far as I was concerned. So that ended that. Okay. Now we are — war.
Claire:
Ken and I are married quietly.[Claire had fallen in love with Ken Hartford a fellow ACA union organizer assigned to the southern states. She and Ben had amicably divorced.]He gets notice of being drafted, and we were very upset. This was after Pearl Harbor. When was Pearl Harbor?
Bruce:
December 1941.
Claire:
Okay. Well, Pearl Harbor happened. I remember we were in our little apartment. We had a little apartment in South Chicago. Ken had been reassigned from the South to Detroit. He was up there to organize the telephone workers. He would come on weekends, and we had this little apartment.
Bruce:
You were already married?
Claire:
Yeah. I think — I guess so. Yeah, we were already married.
Bruce:
Which meant then, that you were married long before you got pregnant with me?
Claire:
No. We were married in '43.
Bruce:
Okay. So this was before you were married?
Claire:
That's right, but we were living together.
Bruce:
You were shacking up.
Claire:
We were shacking up.
Bruce:
Okay. Well, there goes my moral fiber. [Teasing her.]
Claire:
Right. That was a period very few people shacked up together. And we kept it secret from the Chicago bunch. Because he was organizing in Detroit, he would come in weekends. So, once he came in with what I thought was a chicken to cook. Now I had never done any cooking, really. You know, I was not much of a cook to begin with.
Bruce:
Yeah, we know this.
Claire:
That's not true. [Laughing] I became a good cook. Just that you never liked vegetables or anything. So, I looked at this chicken. I said, 'It doesn't really, it looks like it's spoiled.' It was broad in the back and —
Bruce:
Was it a turkey?
Claire:
Well, I looked at it. He said, 'It's fine, roast it.' I said, 'No, it must be poisoned or something because it does not look like a chicken should look.' So we put it in the oven nevertheless. After 10 minutes I said, 'We're gonna throw it out.' I ran and got the pot and brought it over the incinerator and threw it in. He said, 'This is a duck, it's not a chicken.' It was too late by that time. I'd never seen a duck. So that was my cooking skills.
Bruce:
So you — Pearl Harbor?
Claire:
Yes. It was a Sunday afternoon, I remember, and we heard the news on the radio. We were absolutely aghast and Ken said, 'Well, he's gonna have to go in the Army.' That he's going to enroll. Well — wait a minute. The President didn't get into the war right away. Did he? After Pearl Harbor?
Bruce:
Yeah, yeah. Immediately . But the draft had started two years earlier in '39. But then a lot of people went down to the recruiting station to volunteer [right] after Pearl Harbor. So possibly that's what you're thinking.
Claire:
Right. He said he had to volunteer, and I —
Bruce:
But he said he went down to volunteer.
Claire:
I was very upset, again. Here he's gonna go off to war. I just had one husband that had gone to war, and that's enough. Luckily, they rejected him. He had flat feet. That was a great relief to the union, as well as it was to me. Then he went to speak at the Army Communications Corps. They had a — and I was asked to speak. You saw the picture of me at the —
Bruce:
War bond rally?
Claire:
It was either the war bond rally or at the Communications Corps or something. We were all speaking, you know, we were communications workers and so we did that. Timeframe, the book is much more accurate than what I'm telling you. Okay.
Oh. Somewhere along the line, I became [Midwest] regional director [of the ACA], finally. No, not yet. I was pregnant when I — God, how years get melded one into the other and you really don't know where you're at.We were living with a couple. Now what year was that? I think, we gave up the apartment 'cause Ken had to be away so much, and it didn't pay me because I would travel to the Loop. So there was a couple of comrades who were relatives of friends of ours from New York. The Frumkin sister and her husband. They had a little girl of about three or four years old, very cute. They had a spare room in their apartment in the heart of the city, you know, not far from the union office. So we rented a room there.
I was very impressed with her husband because he had every nail in a separate little box, he had a whole wall full of tools and this and that. Everything lined up perfectly, and I used to, Ken and I used to make fun of it because everything was so meticulously organized. We were supposed to share the food, the cost of the food. Well, I would have meetings every night and often didn't come home and Ken only came in on weekends. So they felt that it was unfair, and they would put aside the food we didn't eat so that when we came, we'd have to eat all that old food.
Bruce:
'Cause you would have to pay for it.
Claire:
Right. So once we invited somebody for dinner. I forget who. And all the food is put out, and the table is sort of divided like a fence. On one side is the leftover food for us to eat, and on the other is the new food that she cooked for tonight. It was a very strange situation.
Bruce:
Good Communists, I see.
Claire:
Yeah, yeah, they were very meticulous about everything. Then what happened. I don't know whether it was — I'm still not pregnant. Oh. We got married. We weren't married at that time. We're at '41, '42? We got married on a trip down South, for some reason. We got married in Covington, Kentucky.Then we were officially married. Ken was working in Detroit at the time, and we rented an apartment in the mid-town, sort of. Where was that apartment? Near North Side, not far from the lake. The Communist Party, or the section organizer or something, at that time called us, they knew we had — you know there was rent control and everything else. It was hard to get an apartment.
But [the Party] knew that we had gotten an apartment, and they asked if we would put up somebody. He can't go to a hotel, it has to be hush-hush. Somebody from, I don't know, either were from foreign country or a big-shot of the Party, and so on. And they decided that we should be the ones.
So we put him up. He was a very strange and interesting man. He was absolutely an American. Had no accent whatsoever. He would stay in his room all day and night. He would ask us a few questions now and then, but we never got to know him. It turned out he was an FBI agent, eventually.
Anyhow, so we got married in '43, and we had this apartment. Then I think we — oh, I got pregnant while we were sharing this room in the other apartment, these friends. And that's when we got a room and then after that, this guy — I forget his name already — rented from us. We told him he'd have to leave because we're expecting a baby. Now the problem was, if I am going to leave the union, who's going to take my place? It was after that that we —
Bruce:
Your place was regional director?
Claire:
Yes. That Ken came in, that they said, 'Okay, well, Ken will have to take over.' That's how he became, he took my job. But we had other organizers at the time — I forget her name, a nice clerk. She was one of the clerks. She was working fulltime. Ronnie Kleinschmidt, she was the president of our local at that time, and she was working full-time.So Ken took over when I had to stop — oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute — no, no, no.
By this time, I was quite pregnant, and we had negotiated a contract and it, had to have every contract approved by the War Labor Board in Washington. We had finished our negotiations, presumably the Chicago Labor Board had submitted it to Washington. We weren't hearing a thing. Here I am in the eighth month of pregnancy and would go storm up to the office there, the War Labor Board, the Chicago district. I said, 'I'm gonna have this baby right here on somebody's desk if we don't get this approved. I cannot leave the union until the — national office tells me I can't leave the union until it's signed.' Well, you can imagine.
So, in the meantime, I was so busy being an organizer, and I knew nothing about babies. Absolutely. I'd never seen a little baby anyhow. Wait a minute, oh, that was later. Okay. So, the union people were wonderful. They gave me little books to read. They told me 'how to' pamphlets. They organized layettes and stuff and stuff. Got me settled, you know, so that I had the baby. I don't know if you want to go into that. No? Okay.
So there you were, and I was so afraid of you. Didn't know how, but Ken was wonderful. He knew, I don't know, I guess they're brought up with babies [in Kentucky where Ken was born and raised]. Everybody takes care of babies, and he had no fear of you whatsoever. I was afraid to hold you.
Besides which, you had problems. You could not, oh. In the hospital, we had a little bit of a problem with the nursing, so they decided to stop the nursing and put you on a bottle. Which was all well and good, except you could not tolerate the other regular milk or whatever it was. We had to get you goat's milk. The union members would go every day and get goat's milk from a special place. You were allergic. So, anyhow, aside from the fact that I had to learn, Ken teaching me. What are you afraid of? You know, it's bone like you have. It moves like a person. So it cries, it won't be terrible, so you pick it up.
I said, 'But you have to hold the head.' Giving you a bath, my God, he did it. Showed me how. Anyhow, gradually, gradually I became a mother. Ken continued to replace me. Now how long did that go on? Stop it a minute, I have to regroup.
[Tape turned off]
Claire:
What I should tell you is, my association with the Party during all of these events and crises in the union, there was always a dichotomy between what we wanted to do in the union and what the Party wanted us to do in the union. They wanted us to politicalize and to get votes of the membership of us on political issues.We had a membership, many of them up from the South, who hadn't the slightest idea what's going on in the world. So it was a constant struggle. I remember fighting with Ethel all the time. I'm not going to raise the, you know, the question of Nazism. I'm not going to raise the question of this or that or the other thing. Of course, when we were against the involvement of the war —
Bruce:
When the Party was —
Claire:
Yeah, the Party was against it. That was easy. I didn't have to do anything. But when it turned the other way, they expected us to get votes.
Bruce:
By votes you mean resolutions passed.
Claire:
Yeah, resolutions, yeah. I once tried something. I forget now what it was that, well, after my experience with Premier Blum because I had sent that telegram, I shied away from getting involved. Of course, I was criticized [by the Party], and when Ken took over, he was criticized, but we both felt the same way. We just didn't feel that we could use the union at all to do this.By the way, we met a lot of people there; we made friends with all the unionists. The Packinghouse Workers were very active, I remember Herb — what was his name? Travis? March. Herb March of the Packinghouse Workers [a largely Black CIO union]. Then there was a guy named Travis Steel, and Otto and all of them. We used to meet and discuss what we should do and what we shouldn't do. All of us were in the same boat.
Bruce:
Were you all in the same branch?
Claire:
Yeah, there was a period we were, yes. While we didn't officially say we would not do certain things, it so happened that none of the unions took political positions. So, I was always at loggerheads with Ethel, you know, she always was pushing me, pushing me.
Bruce:
They were probably pushing her.
Claire:
Well, she —
[END TAPE TWO, SIDE A]
[BEGIN TAPE TWO, SIDE B]
Claire:
— was like secondary to our main activity. How we justified that, I don't know, because I can understand the Party's position. They would expect more from us than they got. Now, the ins and outs of the Party's position, the interesting thing is that we would always find a reason to support it so that they were right.
Bruce:
That the Party was right?
Claire:
Yes. Like when Stalin, when they signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. I remember having a big fight with Ben. And I had a big fight with his father who was a journalist. Who was saying, 'Well, how do you feel about your Joe Stalin now?' We said, 'Well, the whole world wants to annihilate the Soviet Union, and they're just buying time so they can prepare, you know, to defend themselves, and so on.' We always had a reason to support it, what they were doing.In retrospect, I must say that we were cognizant that there was a dichotomy between what we wanted to believe and what we did believe. But we always wound up saying, 'Well, the Party is justified. Whatever it's doing, the whole world is against it.'
Bruce:
A dichotomy in you personally?
Claire:
Yes.
Bruce:
Between what you personally believed —
Claire:
Yes.
Bruce:
— and what the Party told you was right and you accepted —
Claire:
Yeah, yeah. Some were more bold in questioning them, and if you were too bold you were brought up on charges. I mean, even like silly things, like — I mean, this was years later [1950s]. We were living in Altadena [an L.A. neighborhood next to the town of Pasadena].The hot issue was, of course, the Blacks and so on. I think it was — oh, [the Party] banned watermelon from a picnic because it would be 'offensive' to the Blacks, you know, Blacks are associated with watermelon, and that would be insulting. And Ken said, I remember we were at Dorothy Taverse's house in Altadena when that question came up, and Ken particularly was absolutely indignant. He said, 'You mean, we're not going to have watermelon because the Blacks might think that that's an insult because there're cartoons or something about them eating watermelon? Now isn't that ridiculous?'
Bruce:
[It is] ridiculous.
Claire:
But that's what it was. We were brought up on charges.
Bruce:
Yeah, yeah, because he brought a watermelon to a picnic.
Claire:
That's right. So crazy things like this. When you read about it — like, a friend of Rose Steinman, a friend of mine, she was — Rose Macklin was a child when her family who were Communists decided to immigrate to Russia. It's a good book; I want you to read it. So she lived, her family got disgusted; they got back, but somehow she couldn't get back. She couldn't leave. And the story —
Bruce:
Leave the Soviet Union.
Claire:
Yeah. The story of what she lived through and the way things operated there is a real eye-opener. She touches on all these questions, too. That even there, the Americans wanted to believe, even though it was so obviously wrong what was going on. Okay.
Now to get back. You were born, and I took a leave. Ken operated in Chicago and in Detroit, and it was pretty hectic. His mother came to live with us to help out when you were a tiny baby.Then I went back to work partially, and then, what happened? Oh, during the war, right after the war — it was before the war ended, but it had started.
The national office wanted to replace somebody in San Francisco and Ken, who had traveled here by motorcycle, etc, wanted that assignment, and so he got it. We were all prepared to move to San Francisco. Lo and behold, just as we were about to give up the apartment and everything, we find out that Bruce Risley had returned from the Army and they were going to give him the job back because that was his post. So that's how we got assigned to Los Angeles.
Bruce:
This must have been right after the war. Otherwise, Bruce Risley would not have been demobilized.
Claire:
Right. Well —
Bruce:
So it must have been '45 or '46.
Claire:
You were about a year and half old when we moved to Los Angeles. [1946]So we went, decided that my mother had to see you. She was living in Florida. She could never reconcile Ken was a non-Jew. So we decided to go for a visit to Florida and have her see you. And meet Ken. She had never met Ken, but she used to write letters. If you marry a goy, he's gonna get drunk every Saturday night, and he's gonna beat you.
Bruce:
Which everyone knows that goys do [laughing].
Claire:
Yeah. Anyhow, but she made the best of it. She never introduced us as anything but Hartman, Hartfield, Hartstein, whatever [Jewish-sounding names rather than 'Hartford']. She saw you and was pleased and so on. When you were born, by the way, we got a one-word telegram: 'Circumcise.' [Laughter]
Claire:
All right. So here we are. Ken went ahead with a trailer. You know that home, home-built thing that he had built? Did you ever, do you remember that?
Bruce:
Yeah. We went all over the West in it. Dan slept in the drawer.
Claire:
Yeah, when we went East with it.Now, Ken went ahead, he had to be in Los Angeles, San Bernardino. He was organizing telephone workers. For some reason, when you and I followed, we got off [the train] in San Bernardino. And I guess the reason was he had parked the trailer there and was organizing San Bernardino at that moment, and so that's where we got off.
Then it was later that we got into Los Angeles. Of course, we had only that trailer. It was a horrible trailer. You know how I feel about trailers. But it was also during the war was still going on in '45 [actually is was after the war in 1946]. There were no apartments available. It was virtually impossible, and anything available wouldn't accept a child. So we were kind of troubled trying to — we had only to live in the trailer, and in the trailer parks they wouldn't accept a child.
For a while, we would be parking on city streets. It was a mess. Then we, one of the workers had a house in City Terrace [neighborhood on L.A's east side], and behind it was a garage, and on top of the garage was a little apartment, and that's what we rented. That's where we lived.
Then we moved to Altadena. There was a house for rent.Do you remember, you remember that little girl you played with? Well, you were very fond of her until the FBI came and spoke to her mother, and then she wouldn't let you play with her.
Bruce:
No. I don't remember.
Claire:
So, Ken was an organizer for a while. Then something happened with the union, and they couldn't afford to keep him or something. So he luckily got a job with the Community —
Bruce:
Community Chest.
Claire:
Community Chest, yes, to raise money for the unions.
Bruce:
I thought that that was because that was the beginning of the whole McCarthy, Red-baiting, get Reds out of the union —
Claire:
Yeah, well, the unions were in trouble because of that. The Red-baiting hadn't started in earnest yet. It started when you were already going to school, when it was really bad. You were like 8 or 9 [1953-53]. The union was already hurting, the AF of L was making inroads, and they just couldn't afford him as an organizer. So he started to work for the Community Chest, I guess as a fundraiser, to raise funds from the unions or whatever. Let me see, how long did that last?Oh, yeah. Then I had an offer to become an organizer for the dressmakers' local, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union [ILGWU]. I took it. There was a progressive group in that local. The president of the local, what was —
Bruce:
The president of the International, Dubinsky?
Claire:
No. I'm talking about the Los Angeles, the local that hired me. There was a group of leftists who really ran it, but the president of that chapter, local, I think Sadie Devorkin, no. Something. She was very non-political, non-everything. So actually, the leftists ran the union, and they hired me.The Taft-Hartley bill was being discussed at that time, and all the unions were against it. Even the ILGWU said that they were opposing it. Anyhow, I was hired, and I had somebody taking care of you. Well, the labor situation in Los Angeles at the time, they had all these factories, these sweatshop factories, where a lot of Mexicans and a lot of Black people worked, and it was all open- shop.
[Meaning either no union-contract with the employer, or a minimum terms contract but no requirement that employees had to join the union or pay union dues.]So I was pretty successful. Did I tell you about the strike we were — no? So we were trying to get a contract with all these shops, and we went out on strike. The minute we went out on strike, a guy comes into the office, and he introduces himself. His name is Spindle, and he was sent by Dubinsky to keep on eye on us, to 'help' us. The first thing he did was call off the pickets. He pats me on the head and says, 'Why don't you go home and rest, I'll take care of it.'
So I had been working day and night. He went and made a deal with the companies without discussing it with me, who was heading the drive, or the workers or anybody, and he sold out the strike. He settled for recognition of the union and maybe a few pennies of wage increases, but most of the leaders were fired of the union. I called them back the next morning, and I hear what's happened. I was just absolutely floored. I ran up to him, I shook him, I hit him with my fist, I said, 'You son-of-a-bitch, you rotten bastard, you sold out these workers.'
He laughed and he said, 'Ah, calm down, don't get aggravated, it will work out in the end.' Anyhow, a few days later, Dubinsky comes. There had been a demonstration against the Taft-Hartley and all the garment workers participated, and I participated. Anyhow, when Dubinsky descended on us, he was in a hotel, very fancy hotel suite, and the president, this woman president of the local, and a couple of other people and I went to pay our respects to Dave Dubinsky, and I'm introduced, and he says, 'I know who she is.' He had a very bad accent. 'I know who she is, and she didn't sign the Taft-Hartley bill.' You had to sign —
Bruce:
[An affidavit] that you were a non-Communist —
Claire:
That you weren't Communist. Right. So I said, 'I'm not supposed to sign it. I'm not an officer of the local. The bill only applies to officers of the local, and besides, our union is opposed to it.' 'I want you to sign,' he says. I said, 'How can you want me to sign? We had a demonstration against the bill and against people in office, you know, in locals signing, and you're asking somebody who isn't an officer to extend the coverage of this bill.''I want that, you do as I say, I know all about you,' he says. I guess he did. He said, 'You come from a Red union.' Well, you know, most of the people on the committee were also left-wingers because he didn't have control of that local. Anyhow, that was my introduction to Dave Dubinsky whom I abhorred.
Bruce:
Well, I mean, he was shown later in history to be working hand-in-glove with the FBI, right?
Claire:
Right. I guess, I don't remember, but he was a faker. And the gangsters like Spindle did all the negotiating. They didn't want to tolerate a person like me around.So we go back; we have a membership meeting, and he told them they had to fire me. They were very upset; they didn't want to fire me. So somebody came up with the idea, 'All right, don't call her an organizer. Let her stay as the janitor.' So they voted that I would remain as the janitor. Well, when Dubinsky heard this, he was beside himself. He sent a telegram: 'If [Claire is] not out of there within two days, they're taking over the local.' So I left. I mean, we couldn't chance it. That was my experience with the ILGWU. In the meantime —
Bruce:
Dubinsky's famous for that kind of stuff.
Claire:
I was pregnant with Dan. Why are you looking — oh, yeah, five minutes. I had become pregnant again and it was just as well. While it was very interesting working with the garment workers, they were just wonderful people. A lot of them were pretty old by this time, and they were all planning to go to Petaluma and do the chicken —
Bruce:
Chicken farmers.
Claire:
— farmers. Did you read that book?
Bruce:
No, but I know the story.
Claire:
It's wonderful. I will send you that book 'cause I think it's out of print, but I have it. Everybody loves that book. They were all telling how they want to retire and go there and so on and so forth. When I gave birth to Dan [1948], they came to Altadena to bring presents and so on. So it was a very good experience.
Bruce:
And in those days, these garment workers were still the Jewish garment workers from —
Claire:
Yes. Well, the organized ones. The unorganized with whom I worked were Mexicans, blacks, Italians. The real —
Bruce:
The Jews were being replaced by —
Claire:
Exactly. So I had started to make inroads into that by organizing these shops, and that's when we had the strike. Our leaders were fired, and Dubinsky did nothing. It was no —
Bruce:
He was probably being paid off, you know, he's famous —
Claire:
I was so unhappy at that point, I felt ashamed. I felt I had betrayed them somehow. Okay.
[Tape turned off for dinner]
Bruce:
Okay. You said you had — there were things you forgot to say when we were taping that you remembered when you weren't taping. So what were they?
Claire:
Well, I don't think of them right now.
Bruce:
Oh, but you just said that a minute ago.
Claire:
Yeah. Well, one of the things was, Dan was born on Labor Day, would you believe it? I labored on Labor Day. Ken had you in a parade; there was a big Labor Day parade. I think it was in Compton or someplace like that. Or Long Beach.
Claire:
[With a sign saying] "Mom's in the AFL, Dad's in CIO, I'm for labor unions."
Claire:
I remember Ken telling me, I was in the hospital, he said —
Bruce:
[I remember] a little cut-out clipping from The People's World [newspaper] that had a picture in there. I was —
Claire:
Okay. Anyhow. Let me see, what else did I want to tell you? Oh. I was having real problems with my Party unit. When I was off work, you know, after you were born and everything, I belonged to a street branch, a unit, neighborhood.
Bruce:
Why didn't they just keep you in the union organizers' unit because you were gonna go back to it?
Claire:
I don't know why, but they felt that since I'm living on the Near North Side [of Chicago], I should be on the Near North Side unit because they need people to give out leaflets and go door-to-door. They felt that I should give out, go door-to-door and give out leaflets, Communist Party leaflets, and I didn't want to do it. So they called a meeting, and they had me up on charges, and I said, 'I absolutely, this is not my cup of tea. I have a young infant. I'm not working. I'm not going to do that.'
Bruce:
Do what? Pass out leaflets.
Claire:
Go door-to-door in apartment houses.
Bruce:
Oh, canvassing.
Claire:
Canvassing. Giving out leaflets.
Bruce:
And talking to people about —
Claire:
Yeah, ringing their doorbell. Well, Ethel was beside herself that her protege, me, was being so disobedient, but I continued. They didn't expel me or anything, they just told me I ought to re-think my values, my prejudices, my pride, my bourgeois background, all of that stuff. I said I would. Re-think it.
Bruce:
Why didn't you want to go door-to-door?
Claire:
I hate that sort of thing.
Bruce:
But you didn't mind going and ringing on doorbells for workers to sign them up, to organize.
Claire:
No. I just didn't feel right about it. I can't explain. I hated the thought of doing it.
Bruce:
When you were organizing a plant or a, you know, organizing, you would go up, you had no trouble going to a worker's house and saying, 'Hi, I'm Claire, the organizer. Do you want to talk about the union?' Did you ever do that?
Claire:
No.
Bruce:
Oh, you never did that?
Claire:
I gave out leaflets in front of the company, and I talked to workers.
Bruce:
But you never went to their homes?
Claire:
Not really. In Milwaukee, I did go to Fred Miles' home, I think I told you.
Bruce:
Yeah, but he was a leader. You weren't going, just saying to introduce yourself.
Claire:
No, I didn't go to anybody's home. I never did that sort of a thing. This was one of the big, the big operations of the CP was to have their members go door-to-door at apartment houses, tenements and so on. I never did it. I always refused. I just didn't like to —
Bruce:
Well, I hate canvassing, too. I feel the same way you do. I always hated that.
Claire:
Yeah, and I'm a, you know, garrulous person. I'm not socially —
Bruce:
Well, I don't know. It's been like pulling hens' teeth to get you to talk on this tape [teasing her]. It's been terrible. [Laughing]
Claire:
At any rate. So these were some of the thoughts. Now, where were we?
Bruce:
Dan had been born and you said you'd been thrown out of the ILGWU by Dubinsky. And then now you said, 'now it gets interesting.' I have no idea what you were referring to. You probably don't either.
Claire:
Yeah, well, I — oh, now it gets interesting. Yeah. [Los Angeles] county had passed a county ordinance that anybody, any parents who are accused of being Communists or who they say are Communists, their children will be taken from them. They did not have the right to their children because —
Bruce:
They were unfit parents because they were Communists.
Claire:
Right. Well, that caused such consternation, you can't believe it. Everyone was panicked. This was just in the county. L.A. County, not the City of L.A. Well, we met with a lot of friends, and we said, 'If your kid is taken, if you're taken, arrested, we'll take your kid, and vice versa and so on.' There was a lot of that going on. But Ken and I felt, this is ridiculous. Why should we live here in the county? Let's move to L.A., the city, where this law doesn't exist. So that precipitated our moving to 43rd Street.
Bruce:
What ever happened with that law in the county? It must have been declared unconstitutional, obviously.
Claire:
Yeah, right, as was another county law on immigrants. If you didn't have, if you were an immigrant, even if you had gotten citizenship, but you had been declared a Communist, you had to be deported. Ethel was involved in that.
Bruce:
Right. She was hiding in our basement for awhile.
Claire:
Yeah, it was affecting — do you remember Rose —?
Bruce:
But that wasn't a county law, that was the McCaren Act. That was a Federal law.
Claire:
Oh, that's right, that's right. But that was strictly an L.A. County law.
Bruce:
The one about the parents.
Claire:
Anyhow. So did I tell you about our hassle with the rent, the price control? No. Backtrack a little bit. When we were living in City Terrace over the garage, we heard about a house on West Atlanta Avenue that was for rent in Altadena.So we look at at it, it was a house, and we were just thrilled, and we rented it. Well, you know Ken. He wanted to improve it. He put lights in the closet; he had shelves all over where necessary. He put in about, it would cost — now his labor, extra lights and extra bells and a whole bunch of stuff to make the house even more perfect. We were paying, I don't know what we were paying for rent, but there was supposed to be price control.
We mentioned it to Porter — what was his first name? John Porter — he was with the [law] firm of Margolis, that we were paying X number of dollars rent. He said, 'Is it, you have a rent controlled house.' I said, 'I guess so.' So he looked it up for some reason. He says, 'You're over, being overcharged.' He said, 'I'll go to court, and we'll get you a lot of money for all this time you've been overcharged.' So we were very thrilled. He said he'll handle the case for nothing.
We go to court and make a case, you know, that we were so overcharged, and the lawyer for the owner of the house said, they listed everything that Ken had done. Light here, shelves there, all the improvements, that he had no right to do that. It wasn't his house. So the judge looks very sympathetic at us. He says, 'You know, I really [hate] to make it, to have to tell you that you're gonna have to pay the fine for doing things to a property which was not yours, even though what you did was wonderful.' Can you imagine?
Bruce:
I imagine it very well. I've lived in this society all my life.
Claire:
So that was a terrible experience. I'll never forget the look on John Porter's face.
Bruce:
Thank you, John Porter.
Claire:
Yeah, he really thought he was doing us a favor. So then [after fleeing Altadena] we bought this house on 43rd Street. I forget the address.We rented the house that I just finished telling you the story, then we bought a house two or three doors away from that [in Altadena], and that was the house we lived in until we moved to 43rd Street.
I think the Red scare, the McCarthy committee was in its beginnings at that time. Well, actually, it had started while were still living in Altadena. That's why we left the county. The guy on one side of the house was an absolute monster. If you or Dan were outside with a bicycle or tricycle or Ken had built something for you that the two of you were on, if you so much as stepped an inch onto his lawn —
Bruce:
I remember him.
Claire:
Remember? So he was a real problem, and he would eavesdrop if we had meetings and things like that. I'm sure that he either informed on us that we had meetings or —
Bruce:
Oh, I'm sure.
Claire:
I'm sure he would. Well, you know, the same thing is gonna go on out here. Okay. Now you remember Edith Perlmutter?
Bruce:
Of course.
Claire:
You know she committed suicide when she felt she was sick and would not recover.
Bruce:
Yeah.
Claire:
We had visited her only two months before. We played bridge; she had a boyfriend, one of her many boyfriends. She was a —
[END TAPE TWO, SIDE B]
[BEGIN TAPE THREE, SIDE A]
Bruce:
Okay. So, we're living on 43rd Street; you're looking for work.
Claire:
So I'll forget Edith, Okay? I'm trying to remember what work I did at that time. I did something. But anyhow, Ken's mother came to live with us, and she was quite partial to Dan. That annoyed me. I also expected of a mother — I was working, I was working absolutely, because this whole story —
Bruce:
You were always working.
Claire:
This whole story is based on my working. I expected that if his mother came to live with you, she would make dinner when you came home and have a meal with the children. She never touched anything. Why? She felt that it was my kitchen, and she should not interfere in any way. Well, I wanted her to interfere. I wanted her to cook and do all the things that a mother should do. I needed the help, because when I got home at 4 or 5, you know, the kids, you kids were clamoring for attention, I had to put stuff up for dinner.
Bruce:
We never clamored for attention.
Claire:
Not much. You were normal kids.
Bruce:
We knew you were out being a revolutionary and saving the world, and we respected that, and we didn't make any demands on you. Don't be ridiculous. [Teasing and laughing]
Claire:
No, no, absolutely not. So there was a famous author who Ken was introduced to or had been at a lecture to him. He wrote about the Far East. I can't remember his name. I get a telephone call from Ken saying, 'I'm bring so-and-so home for dinner. He has to give a lecture at UCLA and in the evening at 8:00, but he'll be home for dinner.' I had just come back from work. I had a roast beef I was going to cook and so on, but I could have killed him for deciding that, by anyhow.So Danny was not even two, he wasn't even [toilet] trained at that time, and you were about five or six. So the guy comes in, very famous writer of Chinese, Japanese stuff, and he was a liberal and he was being paraded as a speaker. So he comes and I say, 'Sit down,' give him a drink, and the kids, baby comes in, Dan. You were running around wild. He wants to, the guy wants to be friendly with the baby, picks him up, puts him on his lap and all of a sudden his face changes. Danny wet him. All the way through the diaper, his pants are wet. I rushed to get a towel; I got a towel and start trying to wipe him.
Okay, well, that over, I start a conversation, a political conversation, and Ken's mother is sitting there. She's not hearing a word. Suddenly I smell something burning. I say, 'Oh, excuse me,' and he continues to talk, to tell the story. He thinks that she's —
Bruce:
That she's listening.
Claire:
And she doesn't know anything, what he's saying. Anyhow, we finally sit, then finally Ken came home, and I gave him a lot of dirty looks and everything. I finally got some dinner on the table. I'm serving the roast beef and, oh, before that, before that, before even Ken came home, [the speaker] needed the bathroom. I showed him where the bathroom, I lead him into the bathroom, and I hear a timid voice, this professor who's going to speak tonight, a timid voice, is there any toilet paper anyplace? I was so embarrassed. So I had to give him the toilet paper, and this dignified gentleman who had just returned from the Orient —
Bruce:
He lived in the Orient? Nothing you did was anything new.
Claire:
Well, Okay. Then we sit down to dinner, and I'm holding the platter of roast beef which had a lot of gravy, and I'm trying to help him, lean towards him so that he picks the piece he wants, and the gravy spills, again on his lap. And again I'm with the towel scrubbing him. This poor guy was so — you know, he came in looking well-dressed, dapper, he's going to UCLA to speak. He left our house —
Bruce:
And you destroyed him.
Claire:
He left our house looking so bedraggled. Ken and I sat down and absolutely howled. It was the funniest episode. That was really crazy. Okay. I was working, and I can't remember now where I was working —Anyhow, I was working at that time. I don't know where though; I forgot. I was very active, there was a movement started in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, and the name of it was People for the Progressive Way, or something like that. I don't know whatever came of it exactly with that.
We had to move because it was getting so bad there, we were so nervous about this.
Bruce:
With the guy next door, yeah.
Claire:
Yeah. That we moved to Arlington. Arlington Avenue.
Bruce:
Which is only a few blocks away.
Claire:
Yeah, right.
Bruce:
This is in South-Central Los Angeles.
Claire:
Right. Of course, the McCarthy committee was in full swing by that time. Oh, Ken was already working for the Community Health Center [which offered affordable health care to workers and the community].The [anti-Red] committee got after the doctors who worked at the Community Health Center. Ken had hired progressive nurses and stuff like that, but the Party began to decide that they wanted to run it. In other words, he had to report to them who we hired. He had to hire this one, not that one, and began to dictate so many things. Well, there was much consternation because Ken had to deal with the doctors, some of whom were just liberal, some of whom were Party members, and he wasn't about to have the Party dictate the medical scene.
You know, it was such chutzpah for them to even think of it. So he had it out with the Party. He went down, and he told them, 'You're not gonna run it.' This is a medical center sponsored by the Furniture Workers. It was the first [racially] integrated medical center, low-cost clinic; it was a wonderful operation. It was the first of its kind in the whole area.
Bruce:
This was then it was over on Western, not in that —
Claire:
I don't know if it still exists.
Bruce:
No, at this time, the story you're telling.
Claire:
Yeah, oh, I don't know where it was.
Bruce:
It was on Western and then they moved to some old house, big house. But this was on, it was still like in an office building, brick.
Claire:
Right, yeah.
Bruce:
It was right on the border between the ghetto, the Black ghetto, and white working class [where we lived on Arlington].
Claire:
You know, I don't know where it was.
Bruce:
It was on Western. Around Western, Western Avenue.
Claire:
How do you remember all that?
Bruce:
I remember places much better than people.
Claire:
That's interesting. So, I was helping, I helped Ken, but I wasn't paid for it. Anyhow, so we had a real go-round with the Party. They didn't expel Ken, but they were close to it, and we lost a lot of friends at the time, like, can't think of her name. She was the head of the anti-deportation committee, Rose —
Bruce:
Rose Chernin? She became an — you lost her as a friend?
Claire:
Yeah. She heard that we were uncooperative, that Ken was determined to oust the Party from having anything to do with the medical center. Rose Chernin's sister was a nurse, Party member, and she was one of the people involved that he decided he didn't want anymore because she wasn't doing her job. She was so busy recruiting and doing everything else. So we even lost her as a friend.
Bruce:
Years later she bailed me out of jail in one of the civil rights demonstrations. [With funds from the American Committee to Protect the Foreign Born.]
Claire:
Who, Rose?
Bruce:
Yeah.
Claire:
Oh, she did a wonderful job on that.
Bruce:
She used to bring around briefcases full of money to bail people out of jail with.
Claire:
She was really a great person, no question about it. Her sister's name was Lil something.
Bruce:
She probably didn't even know I was your son.
Claire:
No, probably not. I wonder if she's still alive?
Bruce:
Oh, I doubt it. Her daughter, I think, wrote several books, though, about that.
Claire:
Yes. Who was her daughter?
Bruce:
Somebody Chernin. [Kim Chernin]
Claire:
In My Mother's House [name of Kim Chernin's book]. So, where was I?
Bruce:
So, Arlington.
Claire:
Yeah. All right. I had been invited to address the PTA meeting on something. There was a newspaper article about the medical center being investigated and Ken Hartford. So there was a lot of publicity, and I was disinvited by the PTA.
Bruce:
Right, 'cause you were a dangerous Communist, radical. [Laughing]
Claire:
That was the beginning of our problems. And then they subpoenaed — there was a State committee similar to the Dies committee. It was headed by a guy named Burns, Senator Burns. Ken was called before the committee and they said that the medical center was a Red operation, and there was that exchange. I don't know if I can remember — Alice-in-Wonderland. Anyhow. Ken had a real sparring thing. This was all in the newspapers. [Ken likened the hearing to the 'off-with-her-head' kangaroo-court scene in Alice].Our name was mud, and I think you had some repercussion in school at that time?
Bruce:
Yes, I did.
Claire:
I had gotten a job along about that time at Lindberg Nutrition [health food store].
Bruce:
As a bookkeeper.
Claire:
Yeah, as a bookkeeper. I was in charge of all their financial stuff. The funny thing is, I don't know bookkeeping. I never studied it. So I worked there; it was a very nice job, and I got Bob Kahn's mother a job. She ran the luncheonette. It was a very nice job. My office was up on the balcony; I could overlook the whole store.I was their favorite employee until one day the two guys with the trench coats, the FBI, came to the store. I saw them speaking to Mr. Lindberg, and I saw them looking up at the balcony, and I knew my job was going to end. Sure enough, a few minutes later he comes up the steps and he says, 'You know, Claire, something has happened and I'm going to have to let you go. You're the most equipped to get a job elsewhere. I can't fire anybody else 'cause they would have a harder time getting a job than you.'
I knew right away. I said, 'Those two gentlemen you were talking to downstairs. Did that have anything to do with this?' 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no.' He was in such a hurry. I tried to clear out my desk, he said, 'I'll help you and go out the back way.' It was so weird. So that was —
Okay. So now we're really in trouble. The medical center is closing down because of, some of the doctors wouldn't work, they were afraid to get subpoenas themselves. A lot of them were working free there anyhow. They didn't want to get into trouble. Then I lose my job. That was the beginning of hard times. Really hard times. And on this we'll end, and I'll pick up —
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
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