FWD from David McR: Edge Left

EdgeLeft: In Memory of Vern Davidson

(EdgeLeft is an occasional column by David McReynolds. It can be
reprinted and used without permission)




  Knowing that my old friend Vern was ill and depressed, I began, last year, 
   to write an account of his days as the campus radical at UCLA, hoping the
   article might cheer him up. Those notes  like so many good intentions, 
   were never finished in time to let Vern know  how much he had meant to me,
   and to many of us.


  In July of this year he died, in Spokane, Washington, where he had lived 
   after retiring from the faculty of Gonzaga of the Law School there. 


  I have found it devilishly hard to write these notes, in part 
   because it is also coming to terms with my own mortality. Somewhere in 
   my apartment are two snap shots, separated by fifty years. The first shows 
   Harvey Berman, Maggie Phair, myself, and Vern Davidson in my little 
   beach shack in Ocean Park, probably in 1951. I don't know who took that 
   shot of four young Bohemians, but fifty years later there was a reunion of 
   the Ocean Park crowd and Harvey's partner, Danny Boyle, took a shot of 
   the four of us, looking relaxed and cheerful - and fifty year older.


  This spring Harvey Berman died. With the death of Vern, half of that happy 
    quartet is gone. It is not with fear that one looks to the limits of life, but 
    in realizing that the ending of music is at hand, the fabric of friends, the 
    taste of chili and onions, the memory of  amorous adventures, is near. 
   One looks suddenly around the room, at the stacks of CD's, the boxes of 
   unsorted papers, the unread books, the thousands of negatives, and sees 
   these will soon enough be a burden for others.


  If there is a sadness it is for how much has been left undone, how cheaply 
   I sold the time which, to quote Brecht, "on earth was given me". 


  So to write about Vern is in part to write about a special time in history, the 
   period soon after Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the start of McCarthyism, the painful 
   dissolution of the great alliance that had fought the "Good War" (as if any 
   war was good) into two coldly warring camps. 


  And it is to write about UCLA where the four of us, Maggie, Harvey, Vern, 
   and I were students. I'm not sure when I was introduced into this cabal 
   of radicalism. I do know that someone in the Westwood Socialist Club 
   (a front group for the Socialist Party at UCLA) had the good sense to look 
   up the names of students who wrote interesting articles in the Daily Bruin, 
   the campus paper. I wrote, from time to time, voicing an almost innocent 
   radicalism. I was at the time still in the Prohibition Party (too hard to explain 
   here) and in fact in 1948, not long after starting UCLA, went out to Finney 
   County, Kansas, to work for several months as an organizer for the Prohibition 
   Party which had a candidate for State Assembly.  


  However it happened, I was tapped, on the basis of something I'd written, 
   and asked if I wanted to join the weekly lunch on the campus grounds. 
   Under an infamous (and probably unconstitutional) university "Regulation 17" 
   no political or religious activity was permitted on campus - but a lunch meeting,
   while illegal, was also essentially invisible. I gradually met the campus 
   socialists - Vern Davidson, the intellectual leader of the group, Maggie Phair, 
   sort of the Mother Bloor of it, Rina Garst, Jerry and Johny Blatt, Hilton Stanford, 
   Ralph Shaeffer, a few others.


   UCLA at that time was free of any tuition to students who were Californians. 
  We had the last of a wave of GI bill students on campus - serious young men 
   who had seen war. And significant numbers of Japanese, and African 
   American students. There were a large number of Jewish students and the 
   general makeup of the campus was working   and middle class.


  I must have passed muster as a potential recruit because Maggie Phair 
    invited me to a party being held in Ocean Park. I was lonely. Homosexual 
   without yet able to deal with that, from a Christian background, but moving 
   away from that. It took all my courage to drive my little old Model A Ford 
   down to Ocean Park. I knocked at the door with a six pack of cokes in 
   hand,  certain the group would be heavily into drinking, and probably into 
   sexual abandon I didn't share. But Maggie met me at the door, took 
   the cokes from me, said she'd put them in the fridge but would I be so kind 
   as to stand by the door and welcome new people who came in - some of 
   them wouldn't know anyone. (As I said, she was the Mother Bloor of our
  group, putting me instantly at ease). It was a little beach house with three 
  rooms. In one room some were dabbling in an adequate little red and learning
  how to dance the Hora, Israel then being the rage with everyone on the left. 
  In the main room there was . . . unheard of to someone with my gentile
  background . . . conversation. In the last little room someone was playing 
  records of Edith Piaf, the new sensation.


  This became my social base - and far more exclusive than any fraternity. 
   In 1950 or 1951 Vern Davidson approached me to say that the Westwood 
   Socialist Club had to raise their budget and they felt the easiest way to 
   raise it would be to recruit new members to the Socialist Party and they
   decided I should join. Which I did.


  I took an active part in the Socialist Party, which had shabby offices 
   near downtown Los Angeles (with a lesbian bar around the corner - the 
   SP members who occasionally stopped by for a beer - if they could 
   pass muster as 21 - were fascinated not so much by the lesbians but 
  by the men who came by, convinced that all a lesbian needed was a 
  good man). The mimeo machine in the party office was very old. Normally 
  one inked a mimeo by brushing ink on the  inside of the drum, but this 
  drum was ancient and clogged - we had to learn, Vern teaching us, how 
  to lift the delicate stencil up and brush some ink directly onto the outside 
  of the drum. Vern, a tall, slightly chubby, cheerful student, had surely 
  read Mark Twain's example of how Tom Sawyer conned his friends into 
 "helping" him white wash a fence - because Vern made the trip from Westwood
  to the dismal little office of the Socialist Party seem a grand adventure.
  He made it seem as if the greatest joy on earth on any given evening was 
  to be found in getting black ink on your hands, running the mimeo machine.


  We could get twenty five or so copies before we need to brush the ink 
   once more, very carefully, under the stencil. With such great effort we 
   produced The Spark, the campus paper of the Westwood Socialist Party. 
   As scholars know, The Spark was the name of Lenin's paper before the 
   revolution - but using the Russian word, Iskra.(The Westwood Socialist 
  Club was not Leninist in any sense, but it was left wing, and we should 
  not let history obscure the fact that, at the time it occurred, the Russian 
  Revolution had almost total support from radicals and reformers of all kinds, 
  with Eugene Debs, the great leader of the Socialist Party, declaring himself 
 "A Bolshevik from the tip of my head to the tips of my toes").

The Spark was handed out at the student bus stop - distribution on campus 
 would have been illegal - the infamous Regulation 17 at work. At some point 
(not even Wikipedia could provide the date), we set up the Students Against 
Compulsory ROTC. I was made the Chair, as we needed a "public face" 
that wouldn't have make SACRO seem a radical front - I was a virtual
unknown - but the brains behind the campaign were those of Vern Davidson.
 We were never able to recruit many students to membership in SACRO 
(in fact, the one public meeting we held on campus - for some technical 
reason SACRO, which had a faculty sponsor, escaped the dread Ref.17
 - was so badly attended we never held another open meeting). It was a 
grand campaign.One of our student opponents was in touch with someone 
in the Defense Dept. and got some funds to oppose us. This was a "less than 
courageous" young man who sold me his collection  old 78 records of Paul 
Robeson's album "Songs of a Free Man" because he sensed the time 
was coming when it would be unwise to have such an album in his possession.


We very nearly won the campaign, losing by less than 100 votes. It was during this   
campaign that I realized Vern could be a victim of moods, something of a mild 
 manic/depressive. At one point we urgently needed to have a meeting of our people 
to decide how  to run the campaign but Vern was in a depressed state and wouldn't 
call a meeting. Despite the fact Vern was  the real leader, I did call a meeting -
 in the men's Co-op (Robeson Hall, just off campus), where Vern lived along with 
several other members of the Socialist Party and where, to help pay his way,
 he served as the cook). I got Jerry Blatt to agree to host a meeting in his room,
 I let our handful of activists know. Vern burst in, furious, saying "you can't meet 
here, this is my room".  I said, "It is also Jerry Blatt's room and  we have to 
have a meeting". Which we did, and in the end everyone calmed down.

 The high point in Vern's time as the campus radical came in 1950. As part of the Cold War,
 which had begun (and would very soon get a powerful burst from the Korean War), Radio
  Free Europe - one of those front groups the CIA set up - was going to send a "Liberty Bell:
  to Berlin. This was a ten ton bell cast by the British foundry of Gillett and Johnston. The
  Bell was given a ticker tape parade in Manhattan, and sent off on a tour of 21 American
   cities before being shipped to Berlin (where, as I understand it, it is still in active use). 
   Clearly this was part of the war mood run by the US government, which, then as now, had
   no interest in freedom except as a useful tool. At that time, to refresh our memories, the
   "Free World" of Harry Truman and the Democratic Party included Franco's Spain, Salazar's
   Portugal, Chiang Kai-Shek's bloody rule in Taiwan, and a host of dictators elsewhere -
   including Batista in Cuba. As I write this there is understandable shock over the bloodshed
    in Syria, and outrage over the brutality of the Syrian dictator. But very little attention is being
    paid to the struggle for democracy in Bahrain, where an authoritarian government is propped
    up by the US because we have a naval base there - much more important than democracy.

    (The Socialist Party in Los Angeles was considered a bastion of the Party's left wing. We viewed
    Norman Thomas with some reservations. The two figures who had helped shape the politics
    of the SP were Bill and Mae Briggs, wonderful people, who transmitted a sense of democratic 
   socialism to Vern Davidson - and to all of us who who got to know them. If I write about Vern,
   I must at least mention Bill and Mae, and others in that Local, such as Charles Curtiss, 
   who had left the Trotskyists to join us. These were people whose sense of democracy and 
   socialism came out of experience as well as books, and was something meant to be lived). 

    It was inevitable that when news came that the Liberty Bell was due to arrive in
    Los Angeles the socialists at UCLA would do their best to oppose it. The student government
    had arranged a special "card display" for the Freedom Bell at a football game. Vern and a few
    others from the Westwood Socialist Club had gone to the game, gotten into the card section,
    and "became confused" when the Freedom Bell card display came up. (Folks will realize
    that these dramatic displays from a "card section" depend on the students following the
    instructions with precision).

    There was to be another Freedom Bell card display at the next football game, but Vern came
     to the Student Council and in his most earnest voice said (and I quote loosely from memory)
    "We have lots of differences on campus, and here in this room. Some of you support Radio
     Free Europe, and some of us do not. But the great thing about football is that it unites all
     of us, whether we are from fraternities and sororities or are campus independents, whether
     we are conservative or liberal or radical. Football is the time when we can put our differences
     behind us. Last week during the card display, some of us in the card section were confused
     when the Freedom Bell display was called for, and our cards were held the wrong way. We 
     are fans of football, and we will be there for this next game, and many of our people have
     signed up for the card section. We do not want to be confused if there is another Liberty
     Bell display. We ask you not to make these games a political football, but leave them as an
     event which keeps us united."

      Vern never used a threatening tone as his issued this threat. He sounded like the most sincere
      football fan in school. After discussion, the Student Council decided to skip the Freedom Bell
      display. (I, personally, have no interest at all in football, but one year UCLA won against 
      USC. Normally we lost - USC could afford to hire football players, and UCLA couldn't. We
      were always overwhelmed in the games. The year we won, students began to pour off campus,
      down the streets toward the main intersection of Westwood and Wilshire Blvd. I followed 
      along, joining in the massive student sit down at the intersection, blocking traffic. One of my
      fraternity friends, seeing me sitting down, said "David, I thought you didn't like football." I 
      said  "I don't. But in my life this may be the only chance  I have to see the masses in action 
      - if you think I'm going to miss it you are crazy").

      The political climate grew much more serious with the Korean War. The Communist Party,
       which had been able to maintain an active group on campus, vanished underground. (They
      were still there, but their front group, the Labor Youth League, folded. Relations between the
      CP group and the socialists were cold. We would turn up at their public events to ask 
       embarrassing questions. And they were convinced that we had to be government agents. 
       One of their members stopped me  one day and said "We know you are an agent - you say 
      much more radical things than we do, but none of you have been arrested". (The Smith Act 
      trials had begun).

       For our part we were convinced we would enter a period of right wing dictatorship. We knew
       the Smith Act arrests would not be limited to the Communists -  already a number of young
       pacifists were being jailed for draft resistance. We called a meeting one night at my beach 
       shack - 132 1/2 Ashland Ave. - to discuss what to do. We thought one of those present was 
      with the FBI so we waited until he left, around midnight.

       Then we had a very serious discussion of leaving for Costa Rica. One of our group was 
       learning to fly a small plane, We discussed flying down, one or two at a time, to the safety
       of Costa Rica. In the end the majority voted against it - feeling that as good revolutionaries we
       could not run from the danger but remain and face it. If this sounds melodramatic, it is 
       because we have forgotten what the McCarthy period was like. People had a hard time 
       holding onto jobs. Vern and I, both having graduated, worked as meter readers for the gas
       and electric company, and both of us were fired. I was later fired from a job working in the
       photo department of a firm that was seeking military contracts - I will always be grateful
       that the head of the department called me in to let me know that, while he wasn't supposed
       to let me know, I was being terminated because the FBI had been around.

       The draft was now confronting us.Vern refused induction and was arrested. He was given
       a three year prison term. I was arrested not too long after that but because of a technicality
       in the government's case, the case was dismissed. 

        It was around this time - perhaps 1954 - that the leader of the Communist Party
        in Southern California - Dorothy Healey - asked for a meeting with some of the young pacifists.
        I represented us at the meeting, with Harper Paulson, editor of the People's Daily World,
        speaking for their side. We met in Pasadena, in a basement, with about 15 people on each
        side. Harper gave a standard CP position, which boiled down to peace and friendship, and
        avoided any discussion of problems with the Soviet Union, or the CP's internal policy of
        democratic centralism.

        A few days later Harper called me, to say "We didn't know you believed in the things you said"
        (It had been essentially a standard A.J. Muste Third Camp position). He said they wanted to
        have another meeting. I said "You didn't really say anything - let's have another meeting with
        just a few of us on both sides to see where we can go". He agreed, then added, before hanging
        up, "You know, it is very hard for us to trust you". Those were haunting words, reminding
        me of the fears "of the other" we all have. We did meet. Dorothy Healey and Harper Paulson
        were there, Maggie Phair and myself from the Socialist Party, Bob Vogel from the Quakers,
        and a friend, Ted Yudkoff, from the "modified Trotskyist" group, the Independent Socialist
        League. As we talked about civil liberties - of central importance to the Socialist Party - Dorothy
        turned to Ted Yudkoff and said with some anger "Ted, I understand why these people (meaning
        Maggie and myself) believe in civil liberties - they are bourgeois - but you claim to be a Marxist
        and you know we can't permit civil liberties for the fascists". It was at that point, ironically,
        that my friendship with Dorothy began - hers had been the first clear honest words I'd heard
        from someone in the CP. I got to know her well, met her mother, who had been a founding member
        of the Communist Party. Dorothy eventually left the CP.

        I mention these discussions because they had a very serious impact on Vern Davidson. I 
        wrote him a letter about the first discussion - a brief report - saying I would write more unless
        I heard otherwise. Two weeks or so later, not having heard from him, I wrote a full report about
        the smaller, more frank meeting. Within the week I had a letter back from Vern saying "David,
        please do not write any more about this. Your second letter arrived yesterday. Your first 
        letter, written two weeks earlier, arrived today - clearly they were sent to Washington".

        And yes, certainly they had gone to the FBI. Vern did not get the standard parole after one
        year, but had to serve two full years of his three year term - thanks to how naive I was to have
        written so openly.
        
        There is a kind of p.s. to this. In 1954 Maggie Phair and I were stenciling "Send Dulles
         Not Troops to Indochina" on the sidewalks in Ocean Park.  This was at the moment when
        the French were losing in Indochina and Nixon wanted Eisenhower to use the atom bomb.
         It was night, the board walk was pretty empty. I had with me a thin manila folder which
         had the mailing list of the Westwood Socialist Club, some personal photos, and a "camera
         ready" page on the Vern Davidson case (an effort to rally support, in opposition to his
         being jailed). At some point I walked a bit too far from the bench where I had left the
         folder - when I went back to look for it, it was gone.

         The next day I called the FBI (in what must surely have seemed to them a bizarre call)
         to say that someone had picked up a folder of mine and if they were patriotic they would
         turn it over to the FBI, and if they did, could they give me a call so I could at least get
         the photos. They were not able to help at all, but a year later the photos, and nothing
         else, where mailed to my parents house. Their address had not been in the folder.

          When Vern was released, he came back to UCLA and enrolled in the Law School.
          The university told him that, as a felon, he couldn't become a lawyer so there was no
          reason to enroll in Law School. Vern replied that if he failed, the matter would be moot,
          but it he graduated, the matter could be taken up then.

          He made Law Review, was an honor student, graduated easily and applied to take the
          bar exam. He was told that there was no point in his taking the bar exam, since as as
          a felon, he could never be admitted to the bar. Vern said "let's find out - if I fail the
          bar exam, the matter will be moot - and if I pass it, we can see."

          He passed with flying colors and in the end a special sub-committee of the State
           Legislature met and agreed to admit him to the bar. This was 1962, and we had lost
           touch, as I'd gone to New York in 1956. He came to teach at Colombia, and we saw
           each other, then he left to teach law in Ghana and in Malawi before taking a position
           on the faculty of the law school at Gonzaga, in Spokane, Washington.

           Our last meeting was at the 50th year reunion of the Ocean Park crowd, at Bobby
           Blatt's house. Vern was in fine form. He had not remained in the Socialist party
           and in fact I think he had given up those hopes - something I didn't try to discuss.
           It seemed to me far more important to remain friends than to remain in agreement
           on all matters.  I prefer to think back not only to his good humor, but to the occasional
           jokes reality played on him. At one point in our student days the biggest book store in
           Westwood had a contest to award $25 to the student who brought in the best book
           collection. Now, probably because we had been unduly influenced by the French film
           "Infants of Paradise", our group had informally insisted everyone needed to steal something
            from the bookstore. With great reluctance I stole a thin volume of the art work of the  
            British artist, Ben Nicolson (I still have that book). Vern had stolen a most excellent
            collection. When the contest was announced, Vern put the  lot in his little Hillman Minx 
            and drove down to the book store where his collection won the first prize. Alas, the 
            Gods, ever watchful, caused the stack of books to spill as Vern drove up the hill, his 
            car hit something, and his prize  money was forfeit.

- 30 -
  
(David McReynolds, retired and living on Manhattan's Lower East Side, worked for many
years for the War Resisters League, was the Socialist Party's candidate for President in
1980 and 2000. He can be reached at: [email protected])



HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded and with more photos in June, 2012.)
 
For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at 
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63.  http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

And see My Community Organizing Mini-Course -- brimful
of practical, down to earth how-to material from decades of
personal experience. Updated into 2012:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm