Howard Fast Leaves The Communist Party Of The USA After Khrushchev's Secret Speech

This post is another instance of me stumbling over anti-communist literature, in a sense.

I read Howard Fast's novel, Citizen Tom Paine, many years ago. I have never read Spartacus or seen the movie. I think I read April Morning in high school. I think I read Freedom Road at some point. At any rate, I have the impression that reconstruction was actually a moment when it seemed America was coming closer to living up to its promise to provide liberty for all. I also read The Last Frontier at some point.

I believe I knew he was blacklisted. I hadn't known that he actually was a member of the CPUSA. Nor had I known about Peekskill or his time in prison.

Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech in February 1956. In it, he denounces the cult of personality around Stalin. I believe this is where the phrase comes from. It looked like that the Soviet Union might fulfill its promise. But by the end of that year, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to put down their revolution.

The secret speech caused Fast all sorts of struggle. When he left the communist party, he wrote a book explaining his reasons.

"I had a god who walked naked, but nobody among those I loved said so; for even as the innocent wisdom of Hans Christian Andersen held that those who could not see the king's clothes were persons of small intellect and unfit for the positions they held, so in my world, it was the conviction of millions of good and wise folk that only those who had lost all honor, dignity, decency and courage would dare to point out that this god whom we worshiped for his noble raiment was indeed naked and ugly in his nakedness.

Who would be without honor, dignity, decency and courage?

In the little town where I live, there is a little store, unimportant and of no consequence, and out of this store an old man ekes a living. This is an old man who mourns a hurt which will not heal, the kind of hurt many who read this will know intimately, for twenty years ago the young son of this man fell in Spain, fighting in the Lincoln Battalion for the Spanish Republic and the freedom of men. His son lies buried in the distant Spanish soil, and for twenty years the hurt in this old man was as if it had happened yesterday.

He had a little salve to rub on the terrible sore. This was the salve, that his son had died in the best of causes, the fight for the liberation of mankind. But in 1956, a man called Khrushchev delivered a certain 'secret report' - telling a story of Russia and the Communist movement that I and my friends had heard before but had never believed before. Now Khrushchev made proof of twenty'five years of 'slander,' and we believed. And among those who believed because they had to believe was this old man whose son had laid down his life in Spain.

I came into his store one day in that month of June and he was weeping. He asked me,

'Why did my son die?'

For had I not held, all of my thinking life and in all that I wrote, that one son of man was all the sons of man? He then said to me, but not in words - for a broken heart does not make a gentle person cruel or vindictive - not in words but with the look in his eyes -

'That I, a plain man did not comprehend this is no wonder; but you, Howard Fast, spoke and wrote and pleaded this cause - and why? Can you tell me why?'" -- Howard Fast, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, 1957.

None of this means Fast did not keep the same values:

"I am neither disillusioned nor depressed, and I have lived through grim times, but times when mankind made gigantic strides forward. Though the Communist Party is disciplined and often splendid in military action, I do not think it can claim credit for the events we have seen. Socialism, justice and the brotherhood of man are mighty and irresistible forces; they will grow to fruition in spite of the Communist Party - and Soviet socialism will not forever lie supine under the heel of the commissar."-- Howard Fast, chapter 15.