First Published: Political Affairs, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, April, 1954.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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On March 5, 1954, following the terrorist attack upon Members of Congress, the National Committee of the Communist Party of the United States issued a statement signed by William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Pettis Perry. The text of the statement follows:
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THE TRAGIC SHOOTINGS in the House of Representatives on March 1 have had repercussions throughout the country and the world. What should concern us immediately is the attempt on the part of the McCarthyite camp to manufacture a “Red plot” out of this incident. The hysterical headlines of the Hearst press are nothing short of a call for a lynch spirit against the Puerto Rican people and the Communists. But these lurid, police-planted tales of some mythical “tie-up” with the Communist Party, its literature and its leaders, have not a scintilla of evidence ğr logic on which to rest their lying allegations.
With the mad rush of a bull, House Speaker Martin has come forward to direct an “inquiry” with the prejudgment that the assailants, “undoubtedly were Communists.”
Inspired by the State Department, Fernos-Isern, Puerto Rican resident “Commissioner” in the House of Representatives, gave it out as gospel that the three Nationalists were “carrying out a Communist plot.” And in the New York Herald Tribune, David Lawrence went so far as to charge a “connection” between the Puerto Rican Nationalists and Communists–with what supporting evidence? None that he could muster; for this exists only in his lying mind.
These provocations can be viewed only as an attempt to give fresh aid to the discredited fascist McCarthyites who endeavor to seize on this incident to ride roughshod over all democratic rights and to step up attacks on the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in the U.S., as well as against the foreign-born generally. These provocations spell further dangers to the oppressed Negro people, who have 300 years of bitter experience of intensified victimization with each new racist attack. These provocations have to be viewed, further, as an attempt to bolster up the flimsy fascistic Smith Act indictments, in the face of obvious failure, with all the fabrications and legal hocus of the Department of Justice, to prove their lying charges of “conspiracy” and “force and violence” against the Communist Party.
In keeping with its propaganda of lies and evasions, reaction tries to silence the truth about the underlying responsibility of Wall Street imperialism for this shocking act of terrorism.
It is an unchallengeable truth that the Communist Party of the U.S.A., in keeping with the principles of scientific socialism, has always stood opposed to acts of terrorism and violence and disassociated itself from them. Our Party condemns all such methods as injurious to the very aims which the working class and the nationally oppressed peoples struggle to achieve. Our Party has constantly warned that reaction either deliberately provokes such acts or exploits them for further repression against the masses and particularly the nationally oppressed peoples at home and in the colonies.
But neither police-inspired stories nor inflammatory McCarthyite headlines can disguise the fact that the intense 55-year-long oppression is what recurrently arouses this type of desperate actions.
With a brazenness that ill conceals the fear of desperation of Wall Street, the New York Times editorially tries to reduce the broad popular national-liberation struggle to isolated acts of terrorism, by a tiny group pushed by “fanaticism” and “irrationality.” It attempts to cancel out the existence of the sweeping upsurge of the freedom-striving peoples in the colonial countries with such statements as: “Contemporary nationalism is a destructive force which often has a high content of xenophobia–the hatred of the foreigner.”
The fight for national freedom in Puerto Rico, in Guatemala, Indo-China, the Philippines, Malaya, British Guiana, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Sudan–is destructive, yes, but to the chains of imperialist enslavement, and the foreigner who is hated is the foreign subjugator.
In vain the attempts of Wall Street and its spokesmen to disguise that “foreigner” in Puerto Rico as a visiting benefactor.
How hollow sound the assurances of the “democratic process” in Puerto Rico from the lips of John Foster Dulles whose role in Caracas is that of whiplash to subdue the ardent strivings for freedom and democracy by the peoples of this hemisphere.
Indeed, it is the spectre of these strivings that drives the New York Times in that same editorial to spin the yarn that, “The ’Yankee Imperialism’ that we will be hearing about in Caracas, where the Tenth Inter-American Conference is in session, is a ghost of the dead past.” But some ghosts will not be buried. Banquo’s ghost has come to confront the killer. The history of 55 tragic years stands up to charge American imperialism with monstrous crimes. What are these crimes? The crime of national subjugation, that has reduced the people of Puerto Rico to colonial slaves.
The crime of colossal robbery of land and the people’s wealth. The crime of deliberate destruction of the Island’s natural resources, and the systematic prevention of its economic development.
The crime of subjecting the nation to a one-crop economy, for foreign imperialist exploitation, The crime of miserable wages of $14 to $8 a week, perpetual unemployment, mass starvation and excessive taxation, enforced by a policy of super-exploitation.
The crime of splitting and undermining the trade-union movement of the Puerto Rican workers. The crime of the destruction of the people’s health, the wretched living and housing conditions, and the shortening of the life-span, brought on by the diseases of chronic poverty and hunger, evidenced by the high mortality rate from tuberculosis.
The crime of seeking to corrupt the people’s culture and traditions and to stamp out the sense of national dignity and legitimate national aspirations.
The crime of converting Puerto Rico into a war base for Wall Street’s expansionist designs upon all of Latin America.
The crime of conscription of Puerto Rican youth for Wall Street’s wars of aggression.
The crime of forcing hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to migrate to the United States, only to face here unspeakable chauvinist oppression, discrimination and denial of democratic rights as a national minority.
The crime of persecution, imprisonment and bloody repressions of countless Puerto Rican patriots who have held high the banner of national freedom.
What price the vaunted claim by the Eisenhower Administration of “Commonwealth” status and self-government for Puerto Rico?
It is a sham of shams to say, as Dulles stated in Caracas, that “the people of Puerto Rico by their own choice have freely chosen their status.”
The long array of counts in the above indictment of Wall Street’s rule stands today as yesterday. The stench of colonialism by any other name stays as strong.
The situation demands of our working class, of all democratic Americans, that they be alerted to take a stand against the new dangers of terrorism directed at the Puerto Ricans, both in Puerto Rico and in the United States. The American working class should recognize its task to support the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. It needs to realize that the beaten-down living and working conditions of the Puerto Rican masses are bound to drag down the condition of the workers here, while the super-profits from colonial exploitation are raked in by the big trusts.
The situation demands of all democratic Americans to act quickly to prevent the McCarthyite attempts to rush through anti-labor and anti-Communist legislation. It demands of all progressive, freedom-loving people to speak out against the role of Dulles at the Inter-American Conference at Caracas designed to corral the Latin-American countries into a war bloc under Wall Street’s direction.
The hour calls for solidarity and support by the people’s forces in the U.S. to the demand for true Puerto Rican independence!