Īss atskats Ciānas draudzes vēsturē
The 1922 Song Festival
The cover story for the secret meeting was a choir convention. This sounded suspiciously close to a song festival and caught my attention. In August 1922, the Communist Party of America (CPA) held a secret conclave near the small town of Bridgman, Michigan. This gathering was dubbed the "Unity Convention at Bridgman" with the purpose of uniting various elements of the nascent Communist movement in the United States. Specifically, dissidents from what was known as the "Central Caucus," headed by Executive Secretary Charles Dirba and including Central Executive Committee member John J. Ballam.
The journey to Bridgman began in Chicago in August/September 1919. The CPA was founded Sept. 1, 1919. To complicate things the Communist Labor Party (CLP) was formed a day earlier, also in Chicago. Many delegates attended both events. The CLP’s first steps were portrayed in the 1981 movie “Reds” (starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton). Two rival parties were formed almost simultaneously and set the stage for continuing acrimony and disfunction.
The founding convention of the CPA was variously reported as having 137 or 138 delegates. This included five Latvian Americans: John J. Ballam, John Schwartz, Thomas Shisky, Charles Dirba and A. Forsinger. It should be noted that I have identified at least one Latvian CLP founding delegate: Victor Saulit of Oregon.
Photo: https://www.marxists.org/
John J. Ballam was born in London or possibly Boston in 1882. The more popular version is that he was born in England and emigrated with his parents soon after. He was fluent in Latvian and used various radical Latvian American groupings and factions as his power base. It’s obvious that he was comfortable with the Latvian language and integrated successfully with activists arriving from Latvia. During the bitter factional warfare of the 1920s, Ballam was a consistent supporter of the Communist Party faction headed by John Pepper, C.E. Ruthenberg, and Jay Lovestone. He later quickly broke with Lovestone when he fell out of favor with Joseph Stalin.
The founding convention of the Communist Party of America, Chicago, Sept. 1-7, 1919. | https://www.peoplesworld.org
Kārlis (Charles) Dirba was born in 1887. He studied at Kalnciema Pagastskola and later at Riga Polytechnic Institute. After taking part in the 1905 revolution, he emigrated to the United States in 1907. He joined the Socialist Party of America a year later. Dirba is a mysterious and shadowy figure who held various official and clandestine positions. He used the codename "Lapin" and "K. Lapin". He is prominently mentioned in Whittaker Chambers’ 1952 memoir Witness. Congressman Richard M. Nixon, a California Republican, gained national prominence as a result of the Chambers-Hiss affair. Chambers defected from the American Soviet-supporting underground and implicated various prominent individuals, including Washington, D.C. lawyer and former government official, Alger Hiss. Dirba was described by the Lithuanian-American newspaper Draugas as an agent of The Communist International or Comintern.
The road to one single, unified U.S. Communist party was convoluted and included realignments, splits and reengineering. Moscow was not pleased, and it viewed the "Central Caucus” or Dirba/Ballam as an obstacle to party development. John Ballam traveled to Moscow to plead their case but to no avail. They were ordered to reintegrate with the CPA, and--as a result--the secret unity meeting at Bridgman was organized. Unity was being impeded by the Latvian duo and needed to be fixed.
The Wolfskeel resort was chosen. This was a modest facility run by Karl and Albertina Wolfskeel near the small town of Bridgman, Michigan, located on the banks of Lake Michigan, about 90 miles (140 km) outside of the city of Chicago. The resort offered seclusion deep in the dunes, with only one road in. Secrecy was considered paramount, and attendees took circuitous routes to the site. For instance, one route started in New Jersey and continued on to Philadelphia followed by Cleveland, Grand Rapids and finally to nearby St. Joseph, Michigan. About 75 delegates attended the convention.
The Wofskeel’s were struggling farmers who built rental cabins to supplement their income. Eventually, they sold large sections of their property to Edward K. Warren, a successful businessman and inventor. Warren stitched together other properties that he had purchased, and the result is Warren Dunes State Park.
Current and former students and teachers of Garezers (Latvian) Summer High School will easily recognize the terrain. For many years this has been a destination for the school’s annual outing to enjoy Lake Michigan, the dunes and natural beauty. The large dune adjacent to the parking area is called Tower Hill. Adventurous students, over the years, would climb to the top and run back down resulting in all kinds of twisted ankles and other minor injuries. The secret conclave meetings were held in the woods on the other side of Tower Hill. Essentially, I can place the Garezers students within one hundred yards and one hundred years of the secret gathering.
Among the attendees was a federal informant known as Comrade Day, or K-97, who was Francis Morrow. He gave his handlers general guidance about the approximate location of the secret gathering. Federal agents along with Berrien County Sheriff’s deputies worked to uncover the exact location, which they did on the third day. However, law enforcement presence was observed and all but 17 managed to evacuate. Prominent communist William Z. Foster and three Comintern representatives left first taking a cab to Chicago. Foster was arrested the next day in Chicago for violating Michigan's 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Act. Syndicalism is defined as "the doctrine advocating crime, sabotage, violence or other methods of terrorism that might be used to accomplish industrial or political reform."
Documents and other evidence were quickly recovered using handwritten maps and other information provided by Comrade Day, or K-97. This included buried burlap-lined barrels full of convention records, typewriters, and copying equipment. The most damaging document was the program and constitution of the Communist Party, which " urged the complete destruction of the government and of American society by sabotage, arson, murder, and armed revolt." This, along with calls for the replacement of the U.S. government by a "dictatorship of the proletariat,” were considered damming evidence. Follow-up attempts to prosecute the attendees were muddled and the entire matter was finally dropped in 1933. The case against C. E. Ruthenberg ended with his death in Chicago in 1927. He was a founder and first executive secretary of the CPA. His cremated remains were later placed in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
The practical effects of the conference were significant, even though it was cut short. The communist movement in the United States was divided between an underground party and a legal party known as the Workers Party of America (WPA) which all underground party members were required to belong. This division had been strongly opposed by Dirba/Ballam as a threat to immigrants and a turn away from militant action. Ironically, the Latvian American Nicholas Dozenberg was a candidate for Chicago City Council in 1925 under the WPA party label. Please see: https://www.cikaga.com/dozenberg
In 1926, Ballam heralded the appearance of the Lettish (Latvian) Communist weekly Amerikas Zihna (Cīņa) or Struggle in the Daily Worker. The article titled ‘Uphold Your Revolutionary Traditions!’ bemoaned waning revolutionary zeal among his ethnic brethren: ”these former comrades have succumbed to the ‘softness’ of a comparatively easy existence — farmers who are more or less prosperous; craftsmen that have been corrupted by the wages paid under American imperialism to skilled workers; former workers that have acquired an education in bourgeois schools and are now more 'American' than the Americans.”
Ballam died in 1954 in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Dirba carried on until his death in 1969 at the age of 82. He was the editor of Amerikas Cīņa (Struggle of America) (1926–1934). He was associated with the Boston-based periodical Amerikas Latvietis (American Latvian). Dirba held various party positions and in 1957, he served as treasurer for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s unsuccessful campaign for election to the New York City Council as a communist. Flynn died in the Soviet Union in 1964 and was accorded a state funeral in Moscow’s Red Square, which was attended by Nina Khrushchev, wife of the Soviet leader.
Dirba visited Latvia at least once in 1959 as noted in various publications. The trip coincided with the 42nd anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. The events that culminated with the storming of the Winter Palace the seat of the provisional Kerensky government in Petrograd, then capital of Russia. The anniversary was described as the primary reason for the visit. He also visited the village of Kalnciems, the place of his birth. Soviet entry visas to Latvia from the United States during that period were infrequent and permission to travel outside of the capital Rīga even more so. He was interviewed on Soviet Latvian TV and radio.
I taught at Garezers for several years and was a Warren Dunes trip chaperone. It’s a nice day and a great tradition. Knowing the students and staff I can say without hesitation that we were a galaxy apart from Dirba/Ballam, who dedicated their lives to the expansion of Soviet rule, including 29 years under Stalin.
----- Artis Inka
Daily World
The Daily Worker
https://www.peoplesworld.org
Heritage History | Reds in America by Richard M. Whitney
"Raiders of the Lost Marx" The Bridgman Convention and Red Raid.
https://revolutionsnewsstand.com
Bridgman / Lake Township Historical Society
Rīgas Balss
Dzimtenes Balss
Komunists (Liepāja)
Zemgales Komunists (Jelgava)
Draugas
Warren Dunes State Park
Wikipedia
https://www.heritage-history.com