I am an American citizen. I was born in Warren, O., U. S. A., on April
25, 1904. I am the youngest of the three remaining children of a family
of seven. My paternal grandfather came to this country from Ireland. He
was a basket weaver by trade and a Protestant by religion. My father was
a bricklayer by trade. He died when I was five. My mother, whose people
hailed largely from Pennsylvania, scrubbed floors, took in washings,
sewed, baked, made handiwork and sold it, worked in restaurants, and so
managed, with the help of charity, relatives, and my older sister when
she got old enough to help, to send me to grammar school and through two
years of high school. Then she died.
I was sixteen. My sister was unable to carry me further. I went to work
in the boot-and-shoe department of the Goodrich Rubber Factory at Akron,
O.
I worked there a year and found conditions and my prospects intolerable.
I applied for permission to work a part shift at night. It was granted.
This reduced my income but allowed me to go to school in the daytime.
For three years I worked at night in the factory and went to school by
day. I completed my high schooling and a year of college (Akron, O.) in
this manner.
Then I applied for entrance to the United States Army Air Service
Primary Flying School, was examined, found qualified, and admitted. One
hundred and four others were admitted to this same class. Charles A.
Lindbergh was one of them. Our status, as well as that of the other 104,
was that of an enlisted man with a flying cadet rating.
A year later, in March, 1925, I was one of eighteen who graduated from
the Army Advanced Flying School, Kelly Field, San Antonio, Tex. The rest
of the 104 had been disqualified during the course, only the eighteen
most apt being kept. Of these eighteen who graduated, four had been
chosen to specialize in pursuit flying. Lindbergh and myself were two of
these four. Upon graduating from the Advanced Flying School, I was
discharged from the army, and commissioned a second lieutenant in the
United States Army Reserve Flying Service (now Air Corps).
I went back to Akron after getting my commission as a reserve flyer and
discovered that there was no market for my newly acquired ability. I
tried to get a job as mail pilot with N. A. T. in Cleveland but was told
I didn't have enough experience. I tried to get a job with Martin
Airplane Company in Cleveland and couldn't. I was almost broke. I
decided to return to the rubber factories and go back to school the next
fall. I got a job with the Goodyear Company, in the factory.
But I couldn't take it any more. I quit the job in two months and took
my one bag and my eighty dollars and went to Columbus, O., where there
was a reserve flying field. I flew a couple of weeks there, sleeping in
a deserted clubhouse and eating at the gas station across the street. I
was earning no money, of course, the ship being available to me for
practice only. So I applied for a two weeks' tour of active duty at
Wright Field and got it. I was paid for that. While there I applied for
a six months' tour of active duty at Selfridge Field, and also got that.
I was paid an officer's (second lieutenant) salary on this duty.
At the expiration of the active duty tour at Selfridge I applied for
another six months but couldn't get it because there was no more money
available for that purpose, but I was told that there was some cadet
money left over and that if I was willing to reenlist as a cadet they
could keep me there in that status for another six months. I decided I
would try to get on with Ford first, and if that failed to accept the
cadet status.
Ford was just getting under way with his tri-motor aviation venture at
that time. He had an airplane factory at Dearborn Airport. Selfridge
Field is just outside of Detroit, so I moved into Detroit and applied
for a job as pilot at Ford's Dearborn Airport. I was told that the only
way I could get on as pilot was first to get a job in the automobile
plant, and that I would later be transferred to the airplane plant, and
still later to the airline between Detroit and Chicago as pilot. After
standing in long lines every morning for a week I finally got a job in
the automobile factory. I was given a badge with a number and told to
report to such and such a department the next morning.
Early on the morning I was to start work at the Ford factory I got on a
street car and started for the plant. I had on work clothes and my
badge. Long lines of workers sat on either side of me. Across the aisle
another long line sat facing me. They sat with hunched shoulders and
vacant faces, dinner pails on their laps, eyes staring lifelessly at
nothing. The car lurched and jolted along, and their bodies lurched and
jolted listlessly like corpses in it. A sense of unspeakable horror
seized me. I had forgotten the rubber factories. Now I remembered them
again, but I didn't remember anything as horrible as this. These men
impressed me as things, not men, horribly identical things, degraded,
hopeless, lifeless units of some grotesque machines. I felt my identity
and my self-respect oozing out of me. I couldn't become part of that. I
couldn't. Not even for a short time. Not even long enough to get into
the airplane factory and then to become pilot. Not even for that. I
wouldn't. Not for anything. Life was too short. Even cadet status in the
army was better. I got off the car at the factory. I watched the men
file into the factory. I shuddered across the street. I caught the next
car back to town. It was like getting away from a prison I had almost
been put into. I went out to Selfridge Field and enlisted as a cadet.
I began to think. What would I do when the six months was up? Go back to
Akron, the factories, and school? I couldn't stand the thought of the
factories. A college degree wouldn't be worth it. Besides, I would drop
out of aviation. But how? Stay in aviation? Stay in the army? How? As an
enlisted man? I didn't like that thought. As an officer? It would be
difficult to get a regular commission, and even so, where would I get in
the army? Go outside and take my chances? The outside was a cold
unfriendly place. I was afraid of it by then. Your percentage chance was
small outside. The army was warm and secure. O. K. I'd try to get a
commission.
Two months after my sudden decision not to work in a factory I passed my
army exams and got my commission. But unfortunately I began to read. I
had made up my mind to get the equivalent of a liberal college degree by
reading. And I accidentally ran across Bernard Shaw. I was twenty-one
years old. All my life I had been keenly aware of contradictions in life
all around me, and all my life they had worried me and I had wrestled
with them, attempting to resolve them in my own way. Shaw opened a whole
new world to me which I explored eagerly. I was transferred to Brooks
Field, Tex., as an instructor. I had a lot of fine times. I continued to
read Shaw. The idea of socialism struck me immediately as eminently
just. I agreed with the wrong of capitalism. I had already thrown over
religion. But I remember that the whole experience left me unsatisfied.
The question of what to do about it kept arising in my mind. And I
remember the inadequacy I felt for the only implied answer in Shaw's
works I could find, that to preach was the answer, and hope that the
other preachers in other generations would take up the good work, until
some hazy future generation, in the dim and distant, the beautiful, and
perfect beyond, would benefit from the preaching and start living by
it--or maybe it would just happen gradually, evolutionarily, as lungs
develop out of gills.
By 1928 I was still in the air corps, instructing, and reading Shaw.
Early in that year I was transferred from Brooks Field, San Antonio,
Tex., to March Field, Riverside, Calif., and again assigned to work as
instructor. I considered myself a Socialist by then. I also considered
myself a pacifist. To find one's self a convinced Socialist and a
pacifist and at the same time a professional soldier, at the age of
twenty-four, places one, if one is conscientious, as I was, in a
considerable dilemma.
In the days when I was instructing army flyers and reading socialism I
still had something that I fondly and innocently called morals, an evil
left-over from my early and vigorous religious upbringing. So I decided
that the only moral thing I could do was to get out of the army. Several
other practical considerations supported my "morality" in this decision.
One was the fact that I had had four years of military training as an
aviator. The other was the fact that Lindbergh had flown to Paris, and,
as a result of the stimulus that aviation received from the publicity
given Lindbergh upon his return, there existed a commercial market for
my flying ability, in which I could at that time sell that ability for a
much higher wage than the army was paying me for it.
Accordingly I resigned my commission in the Air Corps in April, 1928,
and accepted a job as airplane and engine inspector for the newly found
aeronautic branch of the Department of Commerce, and, after a little
schooling at Washington on the nature of my new duties, and after flying
Secretary McCracken on a long tour around the country, I was assigned
the charge of the Metropolitan area and headquartered at Roosevelt
Field.
I found the post very uncongenial because I found myself with no
assistant, swamped with more work than I could adequately have handled
even with a couple of assistants, and because there was too much paper
work and office work and too little flying. So, six months later, after
receiving a pay raise and a letter of commendation, I resigned from the
department and I took a job with Curtiss Flying Service, which I found
much more congenial because it was almost purely a flying job.
My work there soon attracted the attention of the Curtiss Airplane and
Motor Company, and I was asked to become their chief test pilot, which I
did in November, 1928.
I worked for them for six months, mostly on military stuff, and when I
resigned to take what I thought was going to be a better job, I was
asked to stay on with them.
For almost a year after that I was vice president of a little aviation
corporation. The company didn't do well. The depression was in full
swing. I didn't agree with the company policies. Early in 1930 I
resigned.
After my resignation from the vice presidency of the aviation concern I
did private flying--flying for private owners of aircraft, rich men--and I
experienced wide gaps of unemployment between jobs. But since I left the
army I had been reading and thinking about "social" matters. I ran
across the "radical" press in New York. I began reading Walter Duranty
in the _Times_. I read books on Russia. I fought against the idea of
communism. It seemed stupid and crude to me. But step by step--I
stubbornly fought all the way--the beautifully clear logic of communism
broke down all my barriers, and I was forced to admit to myself that the
Bolsheviks had the only complete and effective answer to the riddle of
the world I lived in.
I began to consider myself a Communist. My bourgeois friends, and they
ranged from the very elite to the petty, thought I was nuts. I, in turn,
thought they were unreasonable and talked myself blue in the face trying
to convince them of it. I became quite a parlor pink. It took me a
couple of years to realize the futile ridiculousness of my antics, of
attempting to turn the bourgeoisie to communism. It took me that long
because I didn't at first grasp the full implications of the class basis
of my convictions and did not realize that, like a fish out of water, I
was a born and bred proletarian justified by peculiar circumstances with
a position of isolation from my class and with contact with an alien
class.
And when that realization began to dawn on me--dimly at first--the
question of what to do about it again arose in my mind.
I pondered the matter a long time. I was already over the romantic
notion that the thing to do was to go to Russia, as I had had a spell of
thinking. I sensed that that, in a way, would be running away. It
occurred to me to join the party, but I didn't know exactly how to go
about it or even if I could. I furthermore didn't get a very clear
picture of just what good I could do even if I did. I was also, having
got married and begun a family in the meantime, pretty much absorbed in
personal adjustment and just the plain economic details necessary to
existence.
It finally occurred to me that I could do something for the radical
cause right where I was, in aviation, instead of going to Russia. But
what? And how? I didn't know. I decided that there were undoubtedly
people in the party who did. If you want to build a house, go to an
architect. If you want to build an airplane, go to an aeronautical
engineer. If you want to build a revolutionary organization, go to a
revolutionary leader. It was a naive but a direct, an honest, and a
logical method of reasoning, you must admit. So I found out from the
_Daily Worker_ where headquarters was and went down.
I felt a little ridiculous and abashed when I got there. I sensed,
rather than reasoned, that I was suspected because of my approach. It
didn't bother me enough to stop me, because I was sincere, but it did
embarrass me.
Shortly after that, at Roosevelt, I accidentally ran across a
mimeographed four-page paper, the organ of a club of aviation students.
I picked it up and idly began reading it. It sat me bolt upright in my
chair. It expressed everything that I felt. I had thought I was an
exception, that nobody else in the whole game felt as I did about
economic, social, and political matters. But this paper indicated that I
wasn't a complete exception. It excited me terrifically. I noted the
name of the paper and the name of the club that had issued it. I had
never before heard of either one. I ran around madly asking everybody I
knew what the club was, where it was, who it was. I couldn't find out
much, but I did find where the club rooms were and when meetings were
held. I went down to the next meeting. I joined up.
Out of that organization grew another, on a broader basis, planned to
move adequately to meet the needs of the workers as a whole in the
industry, which was still small, and of which I was an active member.
Word of my organizing activities with this group got around to my boss,
and that, together with other things, was the reason for my being fired
from my job of private pilot for a certain very rich man.
After being discharged for radical activity by my rich boss I learned
discretion, which, somebody said long ago, is the better part of valor.
And I did not lose my valor: I continued to work with the disapproved
group. But I was out of a job, and I had a wife and two small children
to support. I had also learned a few things, so that I knew them now
utterly, and not only intellectually, as I did a while ago. One of them
is the class basis of my convictions. I began inquiring, and I learned
that I was the only pilot of my training and experience that I knew of
who had a working-class background. All others that I knew, and also a
good many mechanics, had middle-class background. That accounted for the
different way I saw things.
I was now face to face with a peculiar problem. Unemployment was rampant
in this industry as in every other. In looking for a job, I discovered
that the Chinese government (Nationalist-Nanking and Canton) was looking
for a few men. I submitted qualifications to a high-ranking Chinese in
this country and was answered by him that owing to my military and
testing experience I was eminently qualified, and that he would set
machinery in motion immediately to get me a job. China, of course, was
very busy building up a Nationalist air force. I would be used as an
adviser in their school and factories.
But I was a Communist. Would the Chinese Nationalist Air Force, which I
would be helping to build up, be used against the Chinese Soviets?
Against the U. S. S. R.? And still I must earn a living. What if several
prospects I had for jobs failed to materialize before the Chinese
proposition did? Should I or should I not go? If I went, what role
should I play? How dangerous would my position be? Would I be of more
value here, now that our organizational efforts were bearing fruit? And
so on did the questions in my mind run.
At that time my wife and two small children were on the farm with my
mother-in-law and father-in-law in Oklahoma. What should I do?