Reds Had Their Day in Russia, China...and Newark Too

Teaching history at a school like Arts High can truly be a thrill. As I’ve written in many blogs before this, the building is a masterpiece of Art Deco Architecture. Its elegant, marble-clad entry hall is so overwhelming, so ornate in detail, so crafted by such talented, meticulous artisans that there are times when, standing alone, I feel like I’ve been transported back to the first years of the structure in the early 1930’s. The building is a stone reminder of Newark’s rich artistic and intellectual past; a visible, living artifact of a notable era in American history.

Newark is filled with these kinds of structures, all attesting to a complicated, fascinating past intertwined with great national and international events and movements. But, and again I have said this before, one of the truly intriguing aspects of the city is what no longer stands, and how, even though these structures and institutions are long gone, their historical importance and impact cannot be ignored. Most importantly, their legacy, if recalled, reminds us that Newark’s history is America’s history. Newark’s history is global history.

This weekend, while doing some research, I found such a place, a locale of immense historical significance that today is not noted by a single plaque. No statues adorn the site. No yearly gatherings occur there to mark significant holidays or anniversaries. Yet, the ideas and men who emerged from that exact location (and others similar to it) shook the world to its very foundations, changed the lives of billions of people, and altered American history in dramatic ways.

About three or four blocks west from Arts High is 93 Mercer Street…or rather, what was 93 Mercer Street. There’s no building there now, just a patch of open green in a grassy triangular lot bounded by Mercer Street and busy Springfield Avenue. If you walk by it, as dozens of my students do every day, you wouldn’t think much of it. There’s a New Jersey Transit bus stop about 20 feet away. Today it’s merely another scrappy open space punctuating the Brick City’s concrete cover. But in the 1930’s, the address loomed menacingly large over power-brokers in Trenton and Washington, D.C. Surely its residents and visitors were central topics of thick files in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI office. There, at 93 Mercer Street, in the early 1930’s, was the city headquarters of Newark’s Communist Party.   

Communism. Now there’s a movement that most people don’t worry over today. Most of my students – at least the sophomores - have never heard of it. For many adults like myself who lived through the Cold War and saw the end of the Soviet Union, it is a thoroughly discredited ideology. While launched with good intentions, it ran like a wild boar through the 20th century, overthrowing governments, bringing maniacal dictators to power and taking the lives of tens of millions in Europe and Asia. Its failures are evident everywhere, from the crumbling remains of the Berlin Wall to the book room of the Humanities Department at Arts High. In a box, located towards the back, are dozens of copies of Orwell’s classics, Animal Farm and 1984. Both literary masterpieces still stand as brilliant critiques of an international movement that inspired, and devoured, whole nations of peoples.

Yes, Communism had its day, let there be no doubt about that. It operated in over 20 countries on varying levels and at one point embraced nearly a majority of the world’s population. Today, even in so-called “Communist China,” nobody takes it seriously, or at least, people who want to be taken seriously no longer embrace it. It promised to bring humanity into a new era of progress by establishing an egalitarian “Heaven on Earth,” but instead brought destruction on an apocalyptic level. It pledged a just distribution of wealth but wound up destroying nearly all of it instead.

All very interesting, but let us return to 93 Mercer Street. In that now-empty lot stood a building in the center of a rising movement in the 1930’s. The decade of the Great Depression saw huge gains for Communists in Newark, New Jersey and globally. It’s important to remember that Roosevelt would not enter office until the middle part of the decade (he was only first elected in November of ’33). In a city and nation filled with bank failures, growing unemployment and unnerving poverty, in the early 30’s the Communist Party was starting to make waves. Membership rolls were growing as residents of Essex County began to question the entire capitalist system, which to many seemed in irrevocable and swift decline. There were no food stamps; begging children and the exposed elderly were highly visible, and the new Deal had not yet chugged into existence. There was only the importance of money, the lack of it, and the ever-threatening possibility of being thrown out on the street.

The Brick City’s Communists, or “Reds,” as the newspapers called them, were out in force. As evictions rose, Communist protesters and activists were there to interrupt court proceedings and the efforts of the police to remove former renters, now declared “squatters.” Say what you want about them today, these Communists weren’t racists. In March 1930 the New York Times reported that several of them were arrested after standing up to authorities on behalf of an African-American family being kicked out of their apartment.

By June the Newark Communist Party had grown in numbers and confidence. It held several public demonstrations that demanded immediate aid for the unemployed and, to the alarm of many, openly advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the United States government. Communists from Newark increased their organizational efforts and ran several candidates for state and Federal offices. Their members were passionate and filled with zeal. Numerous reports from the time attest to this as many openly challenged and resisted police officers sent to (illegally) quell them. Amazing! In the 1930’s crime was apparently not as much as a problem in the Brick City as Communists!

In January of 1931, as the homeless population of the city continued to expand and the social safety net was practically non-existent, the Reds grew bolder. At one point they held a large demonstration in the Central Ward’s Military Park. Though the gathering was legal (the organizers had apparently gotten a permit), a young radical, Mary Kingston, sought to take the Party’s message of absolute, enforced equality directly to the City Council meeting. She convinced some of the demonstrators to follow her down Broad Street. Kingston then moved across Raymond Boulevard and, once near the opulent City Hall, faced the police. After a preliminary tussle, Kingston and her supporters violently clashed with the officers. Placards were torn and faces were punched with the final result being several Communists in police custody on serious charges.

Though the Communists would continue their efforts to push for their version of Revolution, the government’s overthrow never came to be. Perhaps it’s because, at least for some in Newark, the American system (eventually) worked. Unlike autocratic systems before it in Europe and Asia, change would come in the U.S. in the form of the New Deal and its massive public works and aid programs. Yes, the benefits of Roosevelt’s New Deal were massively uneven, and they did not end the Depression, but they certainly helped to stave off Red Revolution. In any case, with the outbreak of World War II, Newark’s economic picture flipped completely from a condition of mass joblessness in the early 40’s to near full employment by the summer of ‘42. Elites breathed a bit easier as Communist enrollment declined to the point of futility. Eventually their headquarters at 93 Mercer Street was abandoned and the structure itself wiped from the face of the earth.

It’s all gone now, but its worth noting that the same movement which briefly rose and fell in the Brick City would not suffer a similar immediate fate in places like Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi and Havana. In those cities Communists did take over and killed millions while trying to implement their version of ruthless nirvana on desperate populations. America had many problems, and still does.  But Newark would never witness gulags with millions of starving inmates (i.e. Soviet Russia), or horrendous famines (as in Mao’s China) that obliterated entire regions…but if those activists of 93 Mercer Street had experienced more success, who knows what might have been?