“My father [coalminer Andria Erlich] was an undemonstrative man, but the night in 1929 when I came home and told him I had joined the Communist Party, he took me in his arms and danced around the dining room table, tears of happiness in his eyes.”
In its Winter 2006 issue Traces magazine published my article “Triumph over Travail: The Kathryn Hyndman Story.” It began: “On October 7, 1952, two agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested 45-year-old Kathryn Hyndman in her Gary home. The agents took her to the Crown Point jail, where she was incarcerated for nearly ten months in a cell blocks with prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers. Two years before, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress had passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which called for the deportation of alien subversives. The wife of a Gary steelworker, Hyndman had immigrated to America at the age of five from Croatia and had joined the Communist Party, following in her father’s tradition. Her criminal record for coming to the aid of a black woman and three children in Chicago who had been evicted and whose possessions she had spotted on the street proved an insurmountable obstacle in her subsequent efforts to become an American citizen.”
On Wednesday I received this email from Bill Pratt:
I am a retired history professor [from the University of Nebraska at Omaha] who has been researching the CP and farmers for years. Katherine Erlich was sent to District 10, which covered about that many states (including Nebraska) as district organizer in 1932. Tonight I came across a reference to Katherine Hyndman and learned that you had written an article on her. Obviously, I would like to see this article, but if sending me a copy of it is inconvenient, if you would provide a citation, I will try to obtain it through inter-library loan. The deportation of Communists (often former Communists) is an overlooked topic, but a relevant issue today in regard to how immigrants are treated. I don’t think very many people have any idea what happened to the IWO (International Workers Order) and its affiliates, in the post-World War II era. I have spent some time in recent years studying left-wing Finns, who had one time, have a very strong network of social and economic institutions that ultimately disappeared by the early 1950s. That’s another story, but one related to what you looked at in the case of Katherine Hyndman.
I responded: “Email me your mailing address and I’ll send you a Steel Shavings magazine that includes excerpts from her jail diary (the full diary is at IU Northwest’s Calumet Regional Archives). I also wrote about her in my “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and in the Winter 2006 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. Kathryn was interviewed by Staughton and Alice Lynd and it appears (under a pseudonym) in the 1973 “Rank and File” book. The interview took place in Gary’s Glen Park neighborhood near IU Northwest in the Communist bookstore storefront. Kathryn’s nephew is alive and an Episcopal priest at Gary’s St. Augustine church. They were very close. In 2018 I attended an International Oral History Association conference in Finland and learned about the bloody civil war a century before between the Whites and the Reds. Afterwards, I stayed in Helsinki with Joe Davidow, a musician whose father Mike was a CP member and the author of ‘Cities without Crisis.’”
Nephew David Hyndman told me: “Aunt Katie was a private person as much as she could be, given her [civil rights and antiwar] activism. She was not very large and afflicted with curvature of the spine. She walked with a kind of a limp but never let anybody walk over her. Her name was in the paper on a number of occasions in connection with her politics. In fact, someone threw a brick through their apartment window after the Post-Tribune included her address. She wrapped the brick up and marched down to the newspaper, past publisher H.B. Snyder’s secretary into his office. She dropped it on his desk, made a comment about him being responsible for what happened, and walked out. That’s how feisty she was.”
Kathryn wrote: “For me the word ‘communism’ came from community and that in a perfect society the people would be the base and the majority would have the last word in any decision. To me it was not enough just to live for yourself. It was necessary to belong to something that went beyond one’s own petty grubbing, a cause that would some day have the common people’s support. I was a member of the CP for a little over 30 years. There were two basic reasons why I dropped out. First, I felt it had outlived its usefulness after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations concerning mass repressions under Stalin. Second, after moving back to Chicago, I was assigned to a group led by a woman that I suspected was an FBI agent. Others dropped out at the same time.
Until her death in 1978 Kathryn frequently wrote letters to public figures on social issues. Nephew David told me, “Aunt Katie never lost her fierce passion for social justice. She was not ashamed about going to jail because she was convinced she was right and the government wrong.”
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