The Long Voyage Home

On the common in Lawrence, Mass., a skinny Yankee youngster in knee pants worked his way eellike through an agitated mob to the foot of the bandstand. He looked up at a one-eyed giant who slashed at the air with great fists, roared like the Bull of Bashan: "Only by one big union of the working class and mass action can we hope for the final victory ... I would smash the ballot box with an ax!"

The giant was Big Bill Haywood, leader of the Wobblies, who had come to take over--and win--the bitter Lawrence textile strike of 1912. The towheaded boy of 15 was Fred Erwin Beal, a millworker and a striker. Both were to take refuge one day in Russia: Haywood to die there, Beal to live and taste Communism curdling in his mouth.

The Communists' Creature. The 62-day-long Lawrence strike made Fred Beal a radical for life. He drifted from mill to mill, became a labor organizer, helped lead the big textile strike in New Bedford, Mass., was jailed briefly. Then he joined the Communist Party.

In the spring of 1929 he was sent to the restless South. The "lint-heads" in the Tennessee and Carolina mills, ridden with pellagra, beaten down by the stretch-out, were showing signs of kicking over the belts and bobbins. Beal went to North Carolina, where he organized and directed the Gastonia strike (at the Manville-Jenckes Co.'s Loray Mill). One night there was violence, and Gastonia's Police Chief 0. F. Aderholt was killed.

Beal and 15 other strikers were indicted for first-degree murder. Their trials became famed in the history of U.S. radicalism. The first, at which the prosecution wheeled in a life-size plaster effigy of Chief Aderholt, was declared a mistrial because a juror went insane. At the close of the second, Beal and six others were convicted of second-degree murder. All jumped bail and fled to Russia.

In the Soviet Union Beal became a hero who lectured throughout the land, wrote pamphlets on the Workers' Paradise. But in three years paradise had begun to look like a very different place. Wrote he: "I found just the conditions against which I was fighting over here . . . The workers were hungry ... in rags. I never saw the equal of that misery in this country."

He returned to the U.S., lived the life of a well-publicized fugitive, skipping from town to town. He wrote an autobiography, Proletarian Journey. In 1938, he was arrested at a brother's home in Lawrence, and sent back to prison in North Carolina. After four years, he was paroled.

Full Circle. Last week Fred Erwin Beal had come full circle. He returned to Gastonia to be restored to the U.S. citizenship he had lost. In the summer-hot courtroom he stood, a heavy-waisted man of 52, and told Judge Wilson Warlick earnestly: "I am one of the greatest foes of Communism in America. I would rather be an American prisoner than a free man in Russia."

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