Vol. 71/No. 22      June 4, 2007

Those present included SWP members and supporters, many of whom had worked with Ring, Young Socialists, and workers and youth new to the communist movement. People came from Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the eastern United States. A separate meeting was held in Los Angeles the same afternoon (see article on facing page).

A display depicting Ring’s decades of unbroken political activity attracted much attention during a reception before the program. The presentations were followed by dinner and dancing.  
 
How he became a political leader
SWP national secretary Jack Barnes was the featured speaker. He described how Ring became a political leader. “The struggles Harry went through in the 1930s made him the man he was,” he said.

Coming from a working-class family, Ring had few options when he graduated from high school in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936. He joined the Workers Alliance of America, which was fighting for the rights of the unemployed, like himself, and campaigning against racism, bigotry, and fascism. It was a militant group bringing together Blacks, Jews, Italian immigrants, and others.

During that time Frank Hague was mayor of nearby Jersey City. Having begun his career in the Hudson County sheriff’s office, Hague, a Democrat, turned to fascist methods to prevent union organizing. Combining political pressure with ultrapatriotic, anticommunist demagogy, Hague mobilized cops and goon squads to break up political meetings and to attack Blacks and Jews. In 1938, Jersey City cops attacked a meeting featuring Socialist Party (SP) leader Norman Thomas, brutally beating dozens and driving Thomas and 15 others out of the city.

As an SP member, Ring was involved in efforts by workers to physically defend their right to hold political meetings and to prevent attacks on homes of Jewish and other working-class families.

Soon after graduating from high school, Ring joined the Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL), the SP’s youth group. As such he was automatically an SP member. Ring was recruited to YPSL’s left wing, the Socialist Appeal caucus, which was made up of communist cadres who had joined the SP in 1936 to take advantage of recruitment opportunities among youth and workers in the party’s radicalizing left wing. In 1938, Ring was among those in the SP’s left wing who took part in founding the Socialist Workers Party. He served on the SWP’s National Committee from 1954 to 1981.

Ring developed in those early years his clear, forceful voice he is known for, Barnes said. It was out of necessity. Young workers had to be able to speak at street corners at the time, when sound equipment was hard to find. They had to be heard and be able to hold their own against hecklers.

“Harry wasn’t an educated socialist to begin with,” Barnes said. He went through direct, personal experiences of the kind necessary to become a communist. “Harry knew what capitalism will do in a crisis. He understood that we have no choice over whether there will be a bloody civil war in this country. He knew working men and women will fight to defend themselves. He learned that in the 1930s—one of the hardest things to learn in the United States today.”  
 
A party man
“Harry was totally convinced that to be a fully rounded class-struggle militant, it was necessary to do what he did—become an active, loyal, and disciplined cadre of a communist party,” said Alan Harris, a veteran leader of the Communist League in the United Kingdom, in a message read at the meeting.

It was one of more than 50 messages to the New York and Los Angeles events. Greetings came from Australia, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Militant editor Argiris Malapanis, who cochaired the program with Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the New International magazine, announced all the messages would be sent to Priscilla March, Ring’s lifelong comrade and companion.

Barnes explained how under the pressures of the U.S. build-up toward entry into World War II and the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939, a petty-bourgeois current within the SWP rejected the theoretical foundations, political principles, and organizational methods of the proletarian party. Ring, convinced of the party’s program, fought as part of the proletarian majority for the future of the party—a fight that resulted in a split.

Then in the early 1950s, under the pressures of the antilabor and anticommunist witch hunt, a group of trade unionists within the SWP began to argue that under conditions of capitalist prosperity it was futile to build a revolutionary party. Ring played an important role during that struggle in New York, arguing his conviction that it is necessary to build a proletarian party.

Within a few years, world events affirmed the correctness of that course. The mass working-class movement for Black freedom that eventually smashed Jim Crow segregation exploded in the United States. The revelations by then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev about some of the crimes of Stalin’s regime and a revolution in Hungary showed the beginnings of the inevitable breakup of the Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 brought new revolutionary forces to the world stage. Ring spent three months in Cuba in 1960 as a Militant reporter.  
 
Revolutionary journalism
Ring joined the Militant staff in 1952. He spent the rest of his life writing for and contributing to the paper, and served on its staff until 1989. His 1965 interview on WBAI radio with Malcolm X is printed in the Pathfinder pamphlet Two Speeches by Malcolm X. In 1968 he launched the “Great Society,” a Militant column that succinctly and wryly captured the injustices of class society, and wrote it until just before his death. His last byline appeared in the April 2 issue.

Arthur Hughes, a Militant copy editor from 1982 to 1990, spoke about how Ring valued “straight journalistic practices” for the socialist press. “In staff meetings, he would point to photos, headlines, and leads, posing the questions, ‘Do they catch the reader’s interest, draw them in, encourage them to go further?’

“Harry was always conscious to encourage new writers,” said Hughes. He was never condescending . “He always advised comrades new to writing, ‘In your everyday life as a communist, keep your eye out for what could make a tight little article for the paper.’”

In 1971, in response to rising struggles by Mexican immigrants and the growing movement for Chicano liberation, the Militant established a Southwest bureau based in Los Angeles. Ring was its chief until 1979, when the bureau was closed.

Olga Rodríguez, editor of Politics of Chicano Liberation, worked with Ring when she was a leader of the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance in the southwest at the time. “As a leader of the party and a communist journalist who gave voice to the movement, Harry, along with the systematic work of our branches in the fight of the Chicano people, helped the party win deep respect which stands us in good stead for the battles of our class unfolding today,” she told the meeting.  
 
Training newer generations
Ring was editor of the Militant when Mary-Alice Waters joined the paper’s staff in 1968. She said he agreed to edit the paper only on the condition that he could train his replacement. Waters became editor the next year.

In 1968, the world was opening up in new ways for revolutionaries, she noted. An upsurge by students and workers in France in May and June of that year; the continued resistance by Vietnamese working people to U.S. imperialism’s brutal assault on their country, and the related development of the antiwar movement here; and the beginnings of a movement for women’s emancipation, among other political developments, were bringing new layers of young people into the party’s ranks.

During that period Ring contributed to this growth in part by taking leadership responsibility for the party’s work in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

When the SWP made a turn to the industrial unions at the end of the 1970s, Ring’s intransigent support for the move had a deep impact on many of his generation.

“Harry contributed to the development of many generations,” said Ben O’Shaughnessy, organizer of the Young Socialists National Steering Committee.

O’Shaughnessy explained how in the fall of 2005 supporters of the Militant sold more than twice their original goal in the paper’s subscription campaign. Ring pointed to the jump in circulation in his Jan. 23, 2006, “Great Society” column and asked, “Doesn’t this call for an effort to win many to renew their subscriptions and to recruit to the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists?”

“Many young people, including several in this room, joined the communist movement through those experiences,” said O’Shaughnessy.

“Young people always felt they could relate to Harry,” said Waters. “But it wasn’t a special way of treating young people. It was his political respect for working people—their ideas, their struggles, and how they were capable of transforming themselves and society.”

Many messages pointed to Ring’s hospitality and joy of life, she noted.

Ring had the qualities of discipline, honor, and respect. Known for his irreverent sense of humor, he never made jokes to attack individuals, Barnes said. “He despised people like Don Imus,” the talk-show host recently fired by CBS Radio for racist and sexist remarks he made on air. “But above all Harry had courage. Courage to do the right thing for 71 years.”

“It’s important that he was focused on getting people involved,” Loretta VanPelt, 27, a temporary worker and graduate student from Minneapolis who attended the meeting, told the Militant. “Whether writing for the Militant or contributing in other ways.”

“His life was focused on one thing—building the revolutionary movement,” said Gabriel García, 41, a furniture worker in New York. “And he treated that seriously, but with humor. It is an individual example of the many people who dedicate their lives to building the SWP.”

A collection at the meeting for the Harry Ring Party Building Appeal brought in more than $10,000.
 

A similar event was held the same day in New York (see facing page).

The meeting took place two days after a march and rally of 5,000 protesting the police riot against a May Day demonstration here for immigrant rights.

“Harry’s whole political life prepared him to embrace and join these working-class mobilizations,” said James Harris, organizer of the Los Angeles SWP branch who cochaired the program. Ring, he noted, enthusiastically participated, supported, and reported for the Militant on such actions over the years.

About 120 people attended the West Coast celebration, hailing from Washington, Arizona, Utah, Hawaii, and California. Before and after the program, they studied displays, looked through a book of messages sent to the meetings, and enjoyed a spread of food.

Elizabeth Stone, editor of Women and the Cuban Revolution and longtime SWP cadre, described how she met Harry Ring in 1961. “I was immediately struck by his knowledge of the Cuban Revolution,” she said. In l960 Ring visited Cuba and witnessed the mass mobilizations there that led to the establishment of a workers state, “when hundreds of thousands were involved in what they called ‘interventions,’ taking over U.S.-owned factories, sugar mills, mines, and hotels.”

Miguel Pendás, who wrote the pamphlet Chicano Liberation and Socialism, highlighted some of his experiences on the Militant’s Southwest Bureau, which Ring organized from 1971 to 1979. The bureau was set up after the August 1970 police riot against the National Chicano Moratorium, in which Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar was killed and numerous people were injured and arrested.

Through the bureau, Ring organized young cadres of the socialist movement to write about the fights they were involved in, making the Militant a voice of the struggle. “Chicano activists were hungry for news, and we were among the few writing about these activities,” Pendás noted.

Pendás recalled driving thousands of miles to cover struggles from the agricultural valleys of California to Crystal City, Texas. “We learned to get up at 3:00 a.m. like the farm workers so we could see how the morning picket lines would go, before it got too hot.”

Meeting co-chair Joel Britton, who collaborated with Ring while editing the Militant during the early years of the Southwest Bureau, read messages to the meeting from José Angel Gutiérrez, a leader in the 1970s of the Raza Unida Party in Texas, and from Miguel Angel and Frobén Lozada, leaders of the fight for an Ethnic Studies program at Meritt College in Oakland.

Steve Penner, a Vancouver-based volunteer in Pathfinder’s international Print Project, also addressed the meeting. He explained how in the 1970s and ’ 80s the leadership of what is now the Communist League in Canada, of which he was part, welcomed the SWP leadership’s collaboration in the building of a communist party that was rooted in the industrial working class, and was responsive to the unfolding revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada at that time. “Comrades like Harry were a living link to our international movement’s continuity with the Communist International that came out of the Russian Revolution,” he said.

Michael Ortega, organizer of the Young Socialists in Los Angeles, met Ring as a student in last year’s socialist summer school here. “Harry put a big emphasis on education,” Ortega said. “Young Socialists owe him quite a bit for his efforts to have The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning published as a pamphlet. This is among the top weapons we use today in classes for new members and with young people becoming interested in the movement.”

Norton Sandler, a member of the SWP National Committee, described the struggles that forged Ring as a communist. Sandler noted that Ring carried national leadership responsibilities for 35 of his 71 years in the party.

A special Harry Ring Party Building Appeal raised $5,500 to help build the party to which Ring dedicated his life.  
 
 
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