Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers

by Junius Irving Scales, Richard Nickson

On November 18, 1954, Junius Irving Scales, the Communist Party district organizer for the upper South, was arrested on a quiet Memphis street by FBI agents. Charged with violation of the Smith Act of 1940, Scales spent the next six years ensnared in a legal system that was in thrall to a daunting McCarthyism. Scalesâ s case twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court; ultimately, his lower-court guilty verdict was upheld. Scales served fifteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary before his six-year sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in 1962.Cause at Heart follows Scales from his privileged southern upbringing through the awakening of his social conscience, his civil- and labor- rights work for the Party across the South, his arrest and trials, his disillusionment with the Party, and his time in prison. Even behind bars Scales refused to cooperate with his prosecutors, to “name names.â In their foreword, Vernon Burton and James Barrett draw chilling parallels between the Smith Act, the legal grounds on which Scales was convicted, and contemporary restrictions on individual rights such as the Patriot Act. Today, as it did sixty-plus years ago, “Congress has radically expanded the description of what constitutes a threat to the U.S. government.â

462 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1987

Reviews

[Bill Tyroler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Junius Scales is, as the publisher of his autobiography says, "the only American ever to be convicted solely for being a member of the Communist Party." He was sentenced to 6 years but released by presidential commutation after serving a little more than a year at Lewisburg. Here's the 1961 Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_ca.... The elements of the offense were more or less that 1) the CP advocated violent overthrow of the government; and 2) the defendant was an "active" Party member with knowledge of the Party's advocacy and possessing specific intent to bring about that result. In other words, it wasn't necessary that Scales had actually *done* anything himself other than sign up for membership. Basically, it was guilt by association.

Far as I can tell, without doing much research, the decision remains good law; the 7th Circuit cited it with approval as recently as 2008 for the idea that someone may be convicted for active membership in an organization that advocates violent overthrow of the U.S. government so long as there is "clear proof that a defendant 'specifically intend[s] to accomplish [the aims of the organization] by resort to violence.'" (Boim v. HLF).

As to Scales himself: his grandpappy was a slave-owning Confederate officer who served time in a Yankee prisoner of war camp. Scales, possessed of a dry wit to complement his keen intelligence, allowed that serving time in federal prison must run in his family, but that his grandfather came much closer to overthrowing the federal government than he ever did.

There's much to be said about Scales. Not by me, though. Daphne Athas devotes a chapter to him in her wonderfully evocative retrospective, "Chapel Hill in Plain Sight" ("Carolina Red[,] The Perilous Journey of Junius Scales"). From the left, Louis Proyect proclaims Scales's account "the finest ever written about the Communist Party experience." (https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/...). I'll take Proyect's word for that. From the right, Arch T. Allen takes a somewhat more jaundiced but nonetheless respectful view. (https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2128...). A mystery remains, though, unanswered even by Scales's own account: what exactly drove a 19-year-old scion of southern aristocracy to publicly pronounce himself a Communist? Sure, he was intellectually precocious, and morally and physically courageous to boot. He was decades ahead of his time in terms of race relations. That helped, but can't really answer the question. I have my own half-formed notion but ultimately it's trite and unworthy of articulation. Daphne Athas might just have her finger on it -- she dearly wanted to ask Scales just what made him tick only to realize, "what makes one tick cannot be answered and is even irrelevant. It is only time that ticks." Maybe she's right. No matter. Whatever the motive force, Scales by all accounts led an heroic life, worth sharing for its sheer drama. Though written 3 decades ago, his story is deserving of a wide contemporary audience.

[Bap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thsi is a sometimes hearbreaking account of a southern idealist from a wealthy family who spends most of his life as a member of the communist party in the south. He is arrested in Chapel Hill and convicted under the Smith Act that made it a crime to be a member of the communist party. During his trial, one of the few to testify on his behalf is Raymnd Adams, our landlord in Chapel Hill, a Thoreau scholar. I got the strong impression that the father of one of my law school mates may have been the person whose testimony sent him to prison. He was finally pardoned by President Kennedy and became a proof reader at the NY Times and a member of NY Typographical no. 6. My father who became President of the Local soon after Scales became a member of the union was approached and asked what he was going to do about Scales. My father who had no use for party members but refused to be a red baiter, replied that as long as he pays his union dues, he would do nothing. Scales by this time had left the Party disenchanted by the revelations that Stalin had run a police state. Scales in this memoir acknowledge that he blindly followed an unworthy model but he makes no apologies for fighting for social justice and to end racial discrimination.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

just got in the mail! my gradmother's cousin...interested to learn more!