Who's Who in the History of the Washington State Communist
Movement
By Gordon
Black
Below are
short biographical sketches of selected leaders and activists who have played a
role in the history of the Communist Party in Washington State: Marc
Brodine,
Howard Costigan, John Caughlan, Eugene
Dennett, Henry "Heinie"
Huff, Frank Jenkins, Marion
Kinney, B.J. Mangoang,
Terry Pettus, Morris
Rapport,
Clayton Van Lydegraf
Marc Brodine
Marc Brodine
was born in St. Louis in 1962, the son of social activists Virginia and Russell
Brodine (link). In 1968, he moved to Seattle where he quickly became involved in
party issues. In 1970, at the age of 18, he visited Cuba as part of the
Venceremos Brigade. Brodine was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War
and worked in hospitals as an alternative to military service. During this time
he became active in union Local 1488. He was also active in the Seattle People's
Coalition for Peace and Justice, representing the Young Workers' Liberation
League. In 1980, he was campaign manager for Marion Kinney in her run for the
state legislature. He succeeded BJ Mangoang as chair of the Communist Party in
Washington and in July, 2001 he was elected to the National Committee at the
party's 27th annual convention.
Howard
Costigan
Born in
1904, Howard Costigan grew up in Seattle but graduated Centralia High School,
where he became president of the student body. He was also a member of the
Centralia High debate club for three years. He said he witnessed the infamous
assault on the IWW (Wobblies) Hall in Centralia by American Legionnaires on
November 11, 1919, an event that shaped the direction of his life to fight for
social and economic justice. He attended Whitman College and Bellingham Normal
School and trained as a teacher. Costigan rose to prominence as a result of
nightly and then twice-nightly political commentaries on KPCB radio. He was also
the leading force in publishing the Washington Commonwealth Builder, the journal
of the Washington Commonwealth Federation [link to web site on WCF material from
earlier class]. In 1936, with the ban on Communist participation in the WCF
lifted, he was asked to join the party. This was the era when the WCF became one
of the "front" organizations of the Communist Party. The party was
then adamantly anti-Nazi and supportive of the Roosevelt administration. But
following the 1939 Non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, the CP
position on Roosevelt changed, which put Costigan in a tough spot, he later told
the Canwell Hearings [link]. The Soviet invasion of Finland furthered his doubts
about the Party. According to Eugene Dennett, Costigan went on a religious
retreat in 1940. He left the party soon afterwards and testified before the
Canwell hearings in 1948. By this point, Costigan had become bitterly opposed to
the Communist Party as "undemocratic." Following his testimony, he was
vilified by the Communist Party's newspaper, "New World." Revelations
that he was an ex-Communist also cost him his broadcasting job, and he came to
hate the Canwell Committee to the degree he disliked the Communist Party. He
twice ran (1944 and 1946) for the Democratic nomination in opposition to
Congressman Hugh Delacy, who was closely linked to the Communist Party.
Costigan lost both times but in 1946 Delacy was subsequently defeated by a
Republican in the general election. Costigan moved to California in the fifties,
settling first in the Los Angeles area and then in Fresno, where he died, aged
81, in 1985.
Note: there
are papers pertaining to Costigan in the Robert E Burke collection at the
University of Washington Special Collections Library.
John
Caughlan
John
Caughlan was instrumental in championing the civil rights of Communist Party
members in a legal career spanning six decades. Born in Missouri in 1909 and
raised in Seattle, he returned to the Northwest after completing a law degree at
Harvard in 1935. He worked briefly for the King County Prosecutor's Office
before taking a leave of absence to defend Communists during a red scare in
Grays Harbor County. After representing the Grays Harbor Civil Rights Committee
he was blocked from returning to his job at King County after refusing to
denounce the Soviet Union. Thereafter, he went into private practice and took on
some of the most celebrated cases involving Communists and unions in Washington
State. He won the right of the Communist Party to field candidates in Washington
State elections, defended Communists in proceedings and trials to prevent
deportation or incarceration for being members of the Communist Party. He even
successfully defended Grays Harbor CP member Dick Law, who was accused by
authorities of murdering his wife amid the hysteria of a red scare. His defense
of a Seattle machinist charged under the McCarran Act ended up in the US Supreme
Court. Although he publicly denied membership in the Communist Party, Caughlan
acknowledged, in an unpublished biography, that he joined a "unit" of
the party in late 1937 or early 1938. He died, aged 90, in 1999.
Note: papers
from Caughlan dated 1947-62 are housed at the University of Washington Special
Collections Library.
Eugene
Dennett
Dennett, the
son of socialists who named him after socialist presidential candidate Eugene
Debs, was born in Massachusetts in 1908 and raised in Oregon. He trained as a
teacher and was living in Portland when he joined the Communist Party in 1931.
The following year, he quit his job to become district agitprop in Seattle.
Working in both Seattle and later Bellingham, he became active in the Inland
Boatmen's Union and helped to recruit members for the party. As a result of a
red scare arising from early inquiries of the state committee on Un-American
activities set up by Senator Albert Canwell [link], Dennett was rumored to be an
FBI informant, a charge he denied. During meetings with the disciplinary arm of
the Communist Party, the District Control Commission, Dennett was accused of
being "subjective" and of holding an "anti-leadership
attitude." Northwest party chairman Henry Huff and district organizing
secretary Clayton Van Lydegraf signed his expulsion letter from the Communist
Party. Although he was only a party member for 16 years, Dennett's legacy
extended well beyond his period of membership. He was an aggrieved party member
who ultimately sought to redress his unfair treatment by providing testimony to
the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. This, in turn, further
alienated him from many in the Communist Party and on the Left, though he
continued to be active in the Steelworkers' Union. He was expelled from it in
1954. Dennett's book, Agitprop The Life of
an American Working-Class Radical: The Autobiography of Eugene V. Dennett is
one of the few comprehensive accounts written by someone inside the Communist
Party in the Northwest.
Note: there
are some papers on Dennett in the Robert E Burke collection at the University of
Washington Special Collections library.
Henry "Heinie"
Huff
Henry Huff
was a charter member of the Communist Party in Washington State and was chairman
of the party in the Northwest for 10 years. During the 1930s he helped organize
unemployed workers through Unemployed Councils set up by the Communist Party. As
executive secretary of the Grays Harbor Communist Party, Huff became embroiled
in an ugly red scare involving the Finnish community in Aberdeen. Along with six
other leaders of the Communist Party in Washington, Huff was indicted and
convicted under the Smith Act in April, 1953. The other defendants in what
became known as the [link from Kinney's entry] "Seattle Seven" were
John Daschbach, William Pennock, Paul Bowen, Karly Larsen, Terry Pettus and
Barbara Hartle. The case was defended by lawyer John Caughlan and won on appeal. Huff died, aged 92, in 1986.
Frank
Jenkins
Frank
Jenkins campaigned for race rights in the workplace. As a black labor
leader he was among those who pushed for anti-discrimination language in the
constitution of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU).
Jenkins grew up in Seattle after moving from the Philippines
with his parents. As a child in Seattle, he endured racial taunts at school. In
the workplace, he was refused membership of the Boilermakers' Union because of
his race. When the International Longshoremen's Association became among the
first unions to accept members regardless of race, he joined that union. It
later became the ILWU, lead by the legendary Australian, Harry Bridges. Jenkins
was involved in the huge west coast port strike of 1934, in which the union
ultimately won recognition and control of the dockworkers hiring hall. Jenkins
was on the executive board of the ILWU Local 19 from 1936-40, and remained
active in the union until his retirement in 1967. He was also a personal friend
of Seattle civil rights leader Edwin T. Pratt, who was assassinated at his home
in 1969; his assailant was never found. Jenkins died, aged 69, in 1973.
See
Black
Longshoreman: The Frank Jenkins Story by: Megan Elston
Marion
Kinney
Marion
Kinney was born Marion Camozzi in the small eastern Washington town of Colfax in
1912. She joined the Communist Party in 1938 and became particularly active in
an organization with close ties to the Communist Party - the Committee for the
Protection of the Foreign Born. She was executive secretary of the Washington
branch of this group, which developed in response to legislation such as the
1940 Smith Act and the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. Both acts were a
clear attempt to curb Communist activities and target CP members and
sympathizers. She was active throughout the major red scares in Washington
State, including the trial under the Smith Act of seven CP members ("The
Seattle Seven" [link]) and was summonsed to appear before the Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1954 and 1956, but refused to testify. She led efforts
to prevent the deportation of Hazel Wolf to England in 1960. That same year she
helped create the Washington Cultural Cooperative, which set up the Frontier
bookshop. In 1980, she was a candidate for the Communist Party for the
Washington House of Representatives.
Note: papers
from Kinney dated 1919-81 are housed at the University of Washington Special
Collections Library.
B.J.
Mangaoang
Born Baba
Jean Sears in Bellevue in 1915 to an attorney father and homemaker mother,
Mangaoang joined the Communist Party while studying for an MA in American
Literature at the University of Washington in 1938. She quit her studies a year
later to spend her time working for the party, including involvement with the
front organization, Washington Commonwealth Federation. In the late forties, she
first met Ernesto Mangoang, a Philippine-American union activist in the Cannery
Workers' Local during a trial to deport him: they married in 1954. Ernesto died
of cancer in 1968, aged 66. In the 1950s, BJ went underground. More recently,
she ran for mayor of Seattle (in 1979 and 1985) and for governor of Washington
in 1988. Between 1976 and 2001 she chaired the party in Washington.
Terry Pettus
Terry Pettus
was born in 1904 in Wisconsin and claimed to be a socialist by the time he was
16. After working as an office boy at a newspaper, Pettus entered journalism,
working for various newspapers in Minnesota. He moved with his wife to the
Seattle area in the late Twenties, where they joined the Cherry Street Art
Colony. After a brief stint with the Seattle Star, Pettus moved to the Tacoma
Ledger in 1928 and was instrumental in establishing a union agreement covering
the then three Tacoma newspapers. Pettus was elected president of the Newspaper
Guild, and lead a bitter 91-day strike over union recognition for the guild in
Seattle. In 1938, Pettus joined the Communist Party and between 1939 and 1948
was editor of the Washington New Dealer and its successor, The New World. He
also became editor of the People's World. During the red scare of the fifties,
he was one of the Seattle Seven accused of conspiracy under the Smith Act. He
was sentenced to five years but was released after the case went to the US
Supreme Court on appeal. He had already spent 73 days in jail for contempt after
refusing to name others in the witch hunt for communists. He left the party in
the late fifties but remained active - challenging the city of Seattle over
plans to restrict Lake Union houseboats. Pettus died in 1984 at the age of 80.
Note: there
are paper pertaining to Pettus in the Washington Pension Union and Robert E
Burke collections at the University of Washington Special Collections Library.
Morris
Rapport (aka Morris Rappaport)
Morris
Rapport come to the Northwest in 1933 as district organizer for the Communist
Party, a post he held until succeeded by Henry Huff. In 1936, he was one of six
people taken after a police raid on what the Argus newspaper called the
"Communist College" in the Burke Building in downtown Seattle. He was
released and never charged. According to Eugene Dennett, Rapport was expelled
from the Communist Party in 1941.
Clayton
Van Lydegraf
Clayton Van
Lydegraf was active in a wide range of political and social movements, in
addition to the Communist Party in Washington State. These included the American
Friends Service Committee, Anti-Fascist Front, Seattle Committee to End the War
in Vietnam, Progressive Labor Party and trade unions. Van Lydegraf worked as a
machinist at Boeing and was a member of the International Association of
Machinists. He was expelled from the IAM Lodge 79 in 1947 for being a member of
the Communist Party, along with some 40 others accused of being Communists,
including the husband of Marion Kinney, Glen Kinney. Van Lydegraf was a
prodigious writer, penning treatises on such subjects as Marxism, Negro rights,
civil rights and challenging authors of alternative and left-wing publications
on their articles. He was deeply involved in resisting the Vietnam War draft. As
Secretary of the Progressive Labor Party he advocated working class power,
Marxism and revolutionary organization. He was also an advocate for the Black
Panthers and an opponent of redevelopment and road-building in Seattle.
Note: papers
from Van Lydegraf dated 1945-70 are housed at the University of Washington
Special Collections Library.
