{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":146,"pdf_page":145,"physical_index":145,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"113c033a0a7724115293b593ba360793e2c8423bad4fc484eb37594f400d2e9d"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Hudson presents the Party’s work as like that of a nursing mother; industrial workers are the main baby. “You got to nurse that baby, but you ain’t going to let the baby over here go hungry because you are trying to nurse this one.” He presents the Party’s work as like that of a farmer: “You sow the seed.” And he presents it as a moral imperative, compelling because of the way it comes in to take the feeling that workers face every morning in the mine and turn it into something else, a source of strength that the workers feel collectively in themselves. Hudson describes writing leaflets with the industrial workers (his steel plant section published a monthly bulletin, the Hot Blast): “You tell what’s going on, tell how it’s happening, but let the workers help to write it. Don’t you write it. Involve them all the way through. Make them believe that they somebody. In other words, make them feel that they doing it, and not you doing it for them.”<sup>44</sup>\n\nPractices of reporting and checking amplify the sense of being somebody as they make each accountable to the group—one was somebody because one mattered to the collective. These practices were key to the leafleting system. Hudson’s network could cover all of Birmingham in half an hour. He describes a checkup meeting in 1933. Some in the section had talked to people in the community where a John Gordon was supposed to have distributed leaflets. The people hadn’t seen any. At the checkup meeting, members made reports about their leafleting. John Gordon talked all about where he put his leaflets, what people had said about them, how they were reading them and then giving them to neighbors. Hudson says to Gordon, “I went through there, and I found ain’t nobody know anything about those leaflets. I asked three or four people, nobody ain’t seen the leaflets.” At this point, Gordon gives in. As Hudson tells it, “You see guys go to sweating then, cause the questions getting too sharp.” Gordon “began to scratch and wiggle in his chair.” Other comrades pressure him with questions—where did he actually put the leaflets? It turns out, he put them down a sewer manhole in the street. “And then we all showed him just how he was helping the bosses against the interest of the oppressed Negro and poor white workers who could not get sufficient food to eat and clothing to keep themselves and their children warm from the cold winter weather.”<sup>45</sup> John Gordon mattered. No one was going to do his work for him, just like no one but the communists was seeing after the oppressed Negro and poor white workers. Those ten leaflets down the sewer were ten leaflets that poor Negroes did not get to read, ten missed opportunities for understanding why their children were hungry and how they could do something about it. The opportunities were now lost and exerted the force of their unrealization on the comrades. To be somebody was to be accountable and to be accountable was to feel the moral pressure of the collective. The Party expected members to do what they said they were going to do. It turns out John Gordon had been talking a lot with the Birmingham police. He was kicked out of the Party.\n\n146","previous_page":145,"next_page":147}