BY OSBORNE HART AND JIM ALTENBERG
OAKLAND, California - Paul Montauk, 76, a life-long
political activist and member of the Socialist Workers Party,
died September 29 in Oakland of complications from pneumonia.
Though the largest portion of his six decades in the communist
movement were spent in the Bay Area, Montauk also was a member
of SWP branches in New York, San Diego, and Detroit.
Paul was born in Staten Island, New York, in 1922. His father was a jeweler and watch repairman whose small business, like those of tens of thousands of others, collapsed under the impact of the Great Depression of the 1930's. After his mother remarried following his father's death, Montauk was raised by an aunt in the Bronx.
He became active for the first time in politics while in high school, participating in the American Student Union (ASU), a youth organization dominated by supporters of the Communist Party (CP). In notes he jotted down on his life in 1997 and 1998, Paul remarked that it was as a member of the ASU that he first discovered that there were two competing political tendencies in his school - those who supported the CP and those who backed the Socialist Party, then headed by Norman Thomas.
Protesting fascist New Jersey mayor
As a member of the ASU, Montauk joined hundreds of workers
and students in a 1937 protest against Jersey City, New Jersey,
mayor Frank Hague's use of massive police violence against
workers trying to organize unions in that city. Socialist Party
leader Thomas was scheduled to speak at a street meeting in
Jersey City, but Hague's cops would "wade into the crowd and
pull Thomas off the platform," Montauk recounted. "We were
forced back down the subway steps with the storm troopers
yelling `go back to Russia.' Some of the demonstrators were
badly hurt."
The protest Montauk joined was not an isolated event in Jersey City. "Boss" Hague used openly fascist methods to combat CIO unions, socialists, and anyone who spoke out in defense of civil liberties in Jersey City.
He mobilized mobs of cops, city employees, "special deputies," and right-wing war veterans to violently break up union and socialist meetings. His virulent anti-communist and ultrapatriotic demagogy was well-received by businessmen and politicians determined to choke off the growing labor movement. Hague, a leader of the Democratic National Committee in 1938, was an American fascist.
Montauk was 16 when his impoverished aunt threw him on the street. He soon quit school and tried to find full-time work. In 1938 he helped lead a unionization drive in a decorating and upholstery firm. At the same time he came into contact with the Socialist Workers Party through his sister and another activist who Paul helped recruit to the furniture worker organizing effort.
Montauk joined the Socialist Workers Party's Brooklyn branch in 1939, when he was 17. The party, which had been founded the year before, was preparing for the second interimperialist world war that broke out that year in Europe. The growing war pressures bore down hard on the working class, as the agents of bourgeois public opinion agitated for support of U.S. president Roosevelt's demagogy about fighting fascism.
The Socialist Workers Party was not immune to these pressures and a layer in the party buckled and quickly abandoned the party's principled Marxist program. A faction led by New York University professor James Burnham and Max Schactman challenged the party's defense of the Russian revolution, which, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy that had usurped political power from the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, remained a fundamental conquest of the world working class.
Years later Montauk said that as a newcomer in the SWP, the sharp debate and factional struggle initially confused him. Not fully grasping Washington's real war aims, he also held pacifist views. Not long after joining the SWP, he left New York to take a job in a government printing office in Washington D.C., a job making maps for military use. A year later he returned to New York and to active party life.
The SWP in World War II
Montauk said he remained a pacifist for a while but became
convinced of the party's explanation of the unfolding war. The
Socialist Workers Party explained that despite Roosevelt's
pronouncements and the illusions of tens of millions who would
be part of the war effort, World War II was not a war to stop
the fascist danger. It was a war between the imperialist
powers, in which the capitalist rulers of Europe, Japan, and
North America fought each other over control over the world's
markets and colonies. It was also a war by imperialism to roll
back the workers state that had emerged from the Russian
revolution, as well as an opportunity for the oppressed in the
colonial world to fight for their national liberation.
In the best revolutionary Marxist tradition, the SWP campaigned against the war. At the same time, the party recognized that the working class was not yet strong and organized enough to prevent the imperialist war, nor the inevitable draft the rulers would use to fill the ranks of its armies. Party policy was based on this reality. Young party members who were drafted joined the rest of their generation of workers and farmers in the military, gaining military skills and fighting to exercise their rights as citizen-soldiers to hold and promote their views on all questions, including on the nature of the war itself.
Faced with the draft, Paul enlisted in the Navy after discussing his options with party leaders. Before departing for active duty, Montauk recounted a meeting with SWP national secretary James P. Cannon where they talked about the war. Montauk said it was common for Cannon to take time with all the comrades who were drafted or facing military service.
While in the military, he sought to read and study.
In 1945, Montauk was stationed in San Diego, a town dominated by the Navy. Montauk described it as "a town with poor wages and harsh conditions of employment." The San Diego SWP branch had 8-10 members, including two still in the Navy. As branch organizer, Paul helped orient the branch toward the thousands of workers in the fish canneries along the waterfront. Most of them were women who crossed the border from Mexico to work during the fishing season.
As opportunities to do political work in the cannery workers union dwindled, Montauk moved to Oakland in 1946 with a few other party members to start a new branch of the SWP. There was already a large party branch in San Francisco, which included many merchant seamen and other workers in the maritime industry.
At the end of World War II, workers throughout industry launched the biggest wave of strikes ever seen in this country. Determined to win back pay and working conditions lost to wartime inflation and speedup, and to prevent a repeat of the bosses' vicious post-World War I union busting drive, some 1.7 million men and women waged strikes in virtually every industry in late 1945 and 1946. At the same time, U.S. soldiers and sailors abroad held massive demonstrations and meetings demanding that they be sent home now that the war was over. This "Bring us home" effectively blocked Washington's plans to use U.S. troops to back their puppet Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese workers and peasants.
1946 general strike in Oakland
Unionists organized by the American Federation of Labor shut
Oakland down in a general strike in December, 1946 to back
women fighting for a union in the big downtown department
stores. The strikers also demanded that the city rein in its
police from their normal practice of violent attacks on
workers' picket lines.
Paul was an active participant in the Oakland general strike. He described it in a 1975 talk as follows: "The only things moving were private autos, and they needed a permit from the Joint Strike Permit Committee to buy gas. The hastily created Permit Committee became the de facto ruling government of Alameda County. CIO longshoremen, although not officially on strike, refused to load or unload all ships here without approval from the Permit Committee. The police disappeared. Al Brown's Carmen's union took over the directing of traffic.
"Alameda County was in the hands and control of the 100,000- strong union[s]." The strike had a deep impact on workers who were involved. "This was the event," Montauk wrote, "which placed them into history and they spoke proudly of their role and contribution." The new Oakland SWP branch quickly grew from its original six to 30 members, including 20 industrial workers.
Married to Louise Keene, Montauk lived in the Peralta public housing in Oakland. There he helped organize project residents to fight government housing officials to raise the maximum amount of income workers could have to be eligible to live there. Income levels were kept so low that large numbers of workers were denied housing at a time when tens of thousands had moved to the region to work in the East Bay's massive war industries. The Peralta tenants association also fought evictions directly. When a resident was evicted and his or her possessions were moved out by the sheriff, association activists would gather and move them right back in. Montauk also joined what was to be a successful fight to close the West Oakland Lock-up, a city jail of notorious reputation for police brutality against Blacks in the west Oakland community.
Paul served as the organizer of the Oakland branch in 1946 and '47, a period when the branch pressed to get jobs in auto plants organized by the United Auto Workers, and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) unions. Montauk was one of three party members at a large shop organized by USWA Local 1304. They were aided in getting jobs in the plant by union officials, part of the union's "Militant Caucus" who wanted a counter-weight to the bureaucratic practices of the Communist Party in the local.
Witch-hunt: domestic side of Cold War
In the aftermath of the war, U.S. imperialism emerged as the
dominant capitalist power. Washington soon ended its wartime
alliance with the Soviet Union. But the U.S. rulers were unable
to carry out a military assault to roll back the Soviet workers
state. Washington launched what would become known as the "Cold
War" and prepared to use its military might to prevent the
socialist revolution, as well as the anti-colonial rebellions
well under way by the late 1940s, from making gains anywhere in
the world.
The domestic side of Washington's campaign became known as the "McCarthy-era witch-hunt." Its targets were union militants as well as anyone who dared oppose U.S. policy anywhere in the world. They faced legal as well as extra-legal attacks on civil liberties and the right of unionists to work and function in the trade unions. In the Steelworkers union, Montauk and the other socialists soon found themselves isolated, as their erstwhile allies in the Militant Caucus became virulent anti- communists and refused to distinguish between the CP and the revolutionaries of the Socialist Workers Party.
The Oakland branch of the SWP actively campaigned in defense of James Kutcher, a disabled World War II veteran and party member kicked out of a public housing and fired from a government office job he got after the war. In 1947, three CIO unions in Oakland added their support for Kutcher's fight to win back his job. A prominent Black minister in the Bay Area signed on as a national sponsor of the Kutcher Civil Rights committee that year. After an eight-year-long fight Kutcher won his job back and was able to keep his apartment and veteran's disability payment.
In the early 1950s, Montauk moved to Detroit to build the SWP branch there. The branch had been reduced to a handful following a split with a tendency known as the Cochranites, after their main leader Bert Cochran. The Cochranites recoiled from revolutionary activity under the dual pressures of relative post-World War II capitalist prosperity and the accompanying anti-communist witch-hunt. They argued that the current capitalist expansion would last for an extended period of time, which precluded the possibility of renewed struggles by working people.
Montauk was one of a half-dozen or so party members sent by the party leadership to Detroit to join the others in the branch who had refused to buckle to the pressures that had led to the split.
The SWP, as well as any serious opponent of the government, faced the state of Michigan's 1952 "Trucks Law," which made membership in organizations deemed "subversive" by the government a crime. The SWP waged a successful fight to have the law declared unconstitutional. Prevented by the employers' blacklist from working in the auto industry and being active as a socialist in the United Auto Workers union, Montauk worked as a chef - a job he would hold off and on for the rest of his life. He participated in socialist election campaigns, and joined with others in the SWP to raise funds to donate cars for use by Black civil rights fighters in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. The party campaigned nationally for cars and donations, and for solidarity with the fighters in Montgomery. Montauk often spoke at public political forums and lectures despite open police and FBI intimidation.
Party members sought every opportunity to carry out socialist political activity.
Montauk discovered that a student group could be organized at Wayne State University, the major campus of 15,000 students in the Detroit area. The "Wayne State Socialist Club" was established. Its activists published the "Wayne State Young Socialist" magazine, which as Paul explained in his memoirs, "proved to be an immediate success."
Montauk and other party member campaigned for solidarity with the embattled United Electrical Workers on strike and facing a concerted union busting drive at Square D Electric company.
Paul returned to Oakland in 1959 and remained in the Bay Area through 1976. In 1960 he married Mary Lou Dobbs, his companion for the rest of his life. Montauk had two daughters, Susan and Juliette, one from each of his marriages.
Montauk was a leader of party branches in Oakland and Berkeley. He was the party's candidate for mayor of Oakland in 1961 and 1963.
Vietnam Day Committee at Berkeley
As the movement against the Vietnam War developed,
particularly on the University of California Berkeley campus,
Montauk helped to found the Vietnam Day Committee, one of the
principal anti-war organizations in the Bay Area. The Vietnam
Day Committee began by organizing "Vietnam Day," a two-day
teach-in on the war May 21-22, 1965, at Berkeley. Montauk
served as the committee's secretary-treasurer for the event
that proved to be a significant action in the growing campus
anti-war movement.
Montauk served as an alternate member of the Socialist Workers Party's national committee from 1963 to 1973. He and others on the national committee supported a transition in leadership to a younger generation who were shouldering the major day-to-day responsibility for leading the party. Montauk continued to function as part of the broader party leadership after leaving the national committee.
During this time, Paul taught cooking in a Job Corps program. He also studied education, and received a masters degree in education from San Francisco State University in 1970. He continued to work as a teacher in vocational and public schools, and was an active member of the American Federation of Teachers for around 15 years. Prior to his retirement in 1995, Paul worked as a permanent substitute teacher at Oakland Technical High School.
In 1976, Paul and Mary Lou moved to New York to take assignments needed by the party. Paul was 54 at that time. Mary Lou worked on party finances. She edited a handbook for organizing branch finances Paul worked in the SWP's national office. Among other assignments he took was in the national education department, where he edited many of the Education for Socialists bulletins used by party members and sold in Pathfinder bookstores. These booklets, which contain reprints of important political documents and writings, provide a guide for studying important political questions faced by fighting workers.
Party turns to new openings in industry
By 1978, the party had determined that the opportunity now
existed for socialists to carry out political work on a broad
scale through organized groups of worker-Bolsheviks active in
the industrial trade unions. This had not been possible since
the early 1950's, when Montauk and other revolutionary workers
of his generation were forced to retreat from socialist
political work in the industrial trade unions. The recession of
1974-75, which was both the first worldwide recession and the
most severe since that of 1937-38, had dealt blows to workers'
illusions in the ability of capitalism to provide a secure and
stable life. This change in consciousness came on top of the
deep-going shifts in attitudes of millions of working people as
a result of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the
anti-Vietnam War protests, and the new wave of women's rights
fights in the 1960s and '70s
Taking account of these developments, the party decided in 1978 to get the overwhelming majority of its membership into the industrial unions.
Workers and peasants around the world were making significant advances in the revolutionary struggle against imperialism at the end of the 1970s. The hated shah of Iran, whose blood-soaked regime defended U.S. imperial power and oil interests throughout the Middle East, was overthrown in massive mobilizations of working people. Led by the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, workers and peasants toppled U.S. backed dictatorships and set up workers' and farmers' governments in those countries. These victories renewed prospects for an extension of the socialist revolution in the Americas, and made it possible for the Cuban workers and their communist leadership to take new steps toward building socialism and in advancing their proletarian internationalist course.
An important part of the party's response to these new developments was to establish a professional leadership or cadre school, in which party leaders could take a substantial amount of time away from the day-to-day political work to systematically study Marxism. Paul worked to find a suitable location for the school, which was set up at a large house in upstate New York. He was also instrumental in finding some of the books, including many that were difficult to locate, that would constitute the leadership school's library.
The action revolutionaries in the United States took in relation to all of these political developments would be decisive in building the Socialist Workers Party and advancing the fight against capitalism.
A sharp debate over the party's organizational and political perspectives opened up in the party, in which a layer of party members shrank back from the SWP's turn to the industrial unions.
They also refused to recognize the importance of the revolutionary advances in Central America and the Caribbean and the decisive example for workers and fighters set by the Cuban revolution and the Cuban Communist Party. A two-year-long debate over these perspectives in the party led to a split in 1983.
Paul defended the SWP's revolutionary continuity, traditions, and political course. He, along with the majority of the party, turned toward the young workers in the industrial unions and the revolutionaries in Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean. Years later, in 1992, Paul and Mary Lou visited revolutionary Cuba as part of a group challenging the U.S. government's reactionary ban on travel to the island.
An active party builder
His health declined over the last decade of his life and the
final few years Montauk was afflicted with Parkinson's disease
and other infirmities, but he continued to make an active
contribution to building the party.
In the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, representatives of Pathfinder Press traveled to Russia to save books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin from being sold for pulp. In San Francisco, the Communist Party closed its bookstore. Sensing what was happening, Montauk rushed to arrange to purchase their remaining stock of Marxist literature at fire sale prices. He and other branch members filled a pick-up truck with books containing the precious lessons of Marxism in both in English and Spanish.
Montauk collaborated with Bay Area supporter Howard Petrick in converting the SWP's entire film archive to videotape so that it would be available for future generations, including footage of party activities in the 1930s and '40s.
Paul took special pride in winning young people to revolutionary politics and the communist youth, today organized in the Young Socialists. He staffed the Pathfinder bookstore virtually every Saturday for the last years of his life, where he spent many hours talking politics with young workers and students. He participated actively in the discussions at Militant Labor Forums. Montauk always sought to guide young people toward the literature they needed to answer their questions.
During the summer of 1998, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists in San Francisco organized a summer school. Party members with long experience in the trade union and political movements joined Young Socialists and students spending the summer working industrial jobs and carrying out political work in the Bay Area to study important chapters of the history of the working- class struggle. They read and discussed the writings of revolutionary leaders James P. Cannon, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and others. Montauk was one of the most active and enthusiastic participants in the summer class series, helping prepare study materials and working with other students to effectively lead class discussions.
Paul participated in meetings of the SWP branch in San Francisco until the last two weeks of his life.
He recently explained to several comrades that he had gone through five or so major crises in his life, and that he had resolved every one of them by doing what the party had asked of him. Your problems don't go away, he said, but active party life prevents you from wallowing in them.
Montauk said that he had learned long ago that the needs of the party, based on centralized decisions and priorities, also give meaning and purpose to a revolutionary's life. It helped him get through all his crises in life, he emphasized, and made him stronger every time.
Norton Sandler contributed to this article.