In the 1930s, the Communist Party of the United States of America boasted nearly 100,000 members. Today, its few thousand remaining adherents include two full-time employees and a few splinter groups who claim the label. It is scarcely a “Red menace.”
Worldwide, communist ideology is largely spent, with China only nominally communist; Vietnam effectively a U.S. sweatshop; and Cuba’s economy highly precarious. Notwithstanding, many right-wingers use the term as a catch-all epithet for anyone on the left they disagree with.
Perhaps showing his age, “communist” has long been President Trump’s favorite smear, most recently of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. It is almost as if Trump were still an attentive young ventriloquist’s dummy perched on Roy Cohn’s knee, parroting his mentor’s lines.
“More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Trump seems determined to resurrect red-baiting as a political tactic,” wrote Amherst College’s Austin Sarat in 2023. “Calling his political opponents communists has become a regular feature of Trump’s attacks on the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and the likes of George Soros.” This tactic has accelerated since Trump’s reelection.
However, the term “communist” makes me think of my cousin Isia “Si” Podolin.
During the turbulent 1960s, my father conveyed what he thought was a cautionary tale about Si. A World War II infantry lieutenant and afterward resolutely apolitical, my dad said Si’s idealism and leftist politics forced him into self-imposed exile in France, unable to return to the U.S. An observer of the Red Scare 1940s and 1950s, Pop said the chilling lesson for me, already a vocal supporter of the emerging civil rights movement, was simple: “Don’t sign anything.”
But as I came to learn, Si’s lesson for me was actually quite different: He showed me what real American communists once looked like.
The Communist Party U.S.A. had many faults — notably blind Stalinist-Soviet Union allegiance — but the 1930s Party was admirably ahead of its time in militantly supporting trade unions and fighting for racial equality in the South. Thus, it is no surprise it drew Si’s allegiance as he was toggling between teaching and mechanic jobs.
In 1937, like many other American communists and leftists, Si joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to defend Spain’s Republic from Francisco Franco’s Nazi-supported, fascist Falange. Si became a political commissar; his battery was named for John Brown, the Harper’s Ferry, Va., pre-Civil War insurrectionist.
Soon after Si’s unit organized in Spain, a French spy betrayed them, pinpointing their location for several Nazi bomber attacks. “Thus began the strange and often frustrating corrida [run] of The John Brown Battery in the bloodied land of Don Quixote,” he wrote. Unlike many fellow volunteers, he survived the civil war until 1939, when Spanish Republican leaders, facing defeat, sent “internationals” like Si back home.
During World War II, Si tried to enlist in the U.S. Army, but family lore says the recruiters turned him away, probably for his communist ties. In 1943, he complained that the FBI had branded him a “premature anti-fascist.” Like other leftists, he had been against the Nazis too soon. Still determined to battle the Nazis, he persisted.
Through the East Coast National Maritime Union, then communist-led, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, volunteering for North Atlantic convoy duty despite its particularly high casualty rate. Twice ships were torpedoed under him, off North Africa and Ireland. Both times he survived. Yet, the Cold War and McCarthyism proved too much for Si.
In the 1950s, he traveled throughout Europe, settling in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a U.S. Sixth Fleet port of call. Ultimately, we heard, he married a Frenchwoman, opened a wine shop, and wrote for pulp magazines, as well as a non-political novel for young adults, “The Man-Eater of Shark Island.” He also wrote a series of sketches from his time in Spain for the Lincoln Brigade’s newspaper, “The Volunteer.”
I finally met Si in the 1970s, at a relative’s home. He was a crusty but good-matured guy, back in the U.S. promoting “Shark Island.” I wanted to tell him how much I admired his fighting fascism, but he and I were the only leftists in my relatives’ suburban den that day, so I didn’t. I almost immediately regretted it.
Evidence and survivors are scarce, but I imagine Si likely spent his last decades in France supporting the Communist Party, reading its newspaper, L’Humanite and demonstrating against U.S. global military interventions. Si Podolin died in France in 1999. In my mind, he was a hero — and, yes, an American communist.
Mark I. Pinsky is a Durham, N.C.-based journalist and author.
