The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.16           April 27, 1998 
 
 
Helen Scheer: A Worker-Bolshevik For 54 Years  

BY DOUG JENNESS
MINNEAPOLIS - Helen Scheer, a veteran cadre of the communist movement for more than half a century, died here of cancer on April 11. She was 76 years old and had been an active member of the Socialist Workers Party since 1944.

Most of her political life was spent in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where her example and experience helped to recruit and educate scores of young people as they were drawn to and became active in the communist movement. She also served for 12 years on the SWP's Control Commission, a national, elected body that investigates matters related to the party's security, integrity, and democratic functioning.

Helen was born Oct. 24, 1921, on her parents' farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her family name was Holloway. Helen and a younger brother assumed responsibility for chores and field work at an early age when the difficulties created by the Great Depression that began at the end of the 1920s forced her father to seek additional employment off the farm. When she was old enough to reach the pedals, she drove a truck and acquired confidence with other machinery.

As was often the case in that part of Maryland, Black tenant farmers lived and worked small plots of land on her family's farm. Jim Crow segregation was strictly enforced in the Eastern Shore, a bastion of chattel slavery in the old Confederacy. Helen and her brother worked alongside the Black workers and developed a respect that only comes from working together. She recounted more than one example of co- workers rescuing her from accidents that could have been more serious. This experience clashed with the institutionalized segregation that so dominated the area and brought Helen increasingly into conflict with the racist attitudes of neighbors and parents.

The independence and self-confidence that came from doing the same work as her brother and other male co-workers led her to prefer this work to the tasks traditionally left to girls, including helping in the kitchen and other household chores. She liked sports, although work on the farm made it difficult for her to be as active in extracurricular activities as she would have liked. When she was able to participate she chafed at not being able to compete in the same races as boys. She sometimes lined up on the sidelines of the school racetracks and ran along side the boys. Her recollection was that she usually beat them.

Helen loved to read as a child and was a good student. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class. Her parents proposed she go to a nearby business school, but she wanted to get away from home and opted to attend Antioch College in southern Ohio. One reason she chose this school was its program of alternating work and study.

Repelled by racism and social injustice
At Antioch she played on the field hockey and lacrosse teams. However, she didn't feel that she fit in so well because most of the students were from cities and their experiences and backgrounds were dissimilar to hers. Moreover, she was at loose ends trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. During this time she was first introduced to the Militant and came in contact with the Socialist Workers Party. A co-worker in the college library was married to an at-large member of the SWP, and Helen became friends with both of them. At that time Helen didn't yet consider herself a socialist, although she was opposed to racism and social injustice and knew that such opposition placed her against the stream of the propertied powers in this country.

After three years at Antioch, Helen dropped out and with the help of friends found a job on a farm in the Ozarks in Missouri. While working there she enrolled in nursing school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, graduating three years later. World War II began while she was in nursing school and she recalled later that she was opposed to the war, not from a thought-out class perspective, but for humanitarian reasons. She suffered a direct blow when her brother, with whom she had been close, was killed on a boat sunk by the German military after he enlisted in the armed forces.

Helen first came to Minneapolis as part of an exchange program that the University of Missouri nursing school had with a big hospital there. Her friend from Antioch urged her to look up the SWP there. She did and became friends with Elaine Rosen, a young SWP member who she would later room with. She returned to Missouri to finish nursing school, graduating in 1944. She then moved to Minneapolis where she joined the SWP in the fall of 1944.

At the time Helen joined the SWP many of the leaders of the Minneapolis branch were serving time in federal penitentiary for their uncompromising opposition to imperialist war and refusal to subordinate to the war drive their class struggle trade-union leadership and working- class political propaganda. They were framed up on charges under the Smith "Gag" Act of "conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government." Altogether there were in prison 18 local and national leaders of the SWP and of the Minneapolis-area Teamster veterans, then members of General Drivers Local 544-CIO.

Many of the prisoners had been leaders of the labor battles in the 1930s that led to the large-scale unionization of truck drivers and warehousemen in the Twin Cities and throughout the Midwest. These struggles, led by class-conscious revolutionaries, marked not only the labor movement in the area but the SWP branch that Helen joined. More than any other single local organization of the SWP, the Twin Cities branch was the branch stamped by the seriousness, discipline, and the best habits of the workers' movement of the 1930s.

Helen collaborated closely with and took her lead from Vincent Ray Dunne, one of the central leaders of the Teamsters battles, a founding member of the communist movement in Minnesota, and until his death in 1970 the central political leader of the SWP in the Twin Cities.

One of Helen's first experiences after joining the SWP occurred while selling the Militant at the Labor Temple in Minneapolis. She and another party member were selling the paper when a goon squad from the Stalinist Communist Party attacked them. Helen's companion was beaten and his papers torn up; Helen was able to get away and save her papers. The Communist Party at the time was the most strident and aggressive force in the labor movement supporting the U.S. imperialist war effort and acted as thugs within the working- class movement trying to choke off all voices of opposition to the imperialist war aims.

Gained confidence working in industry
For a little more than a year after she joined the party, Helen worked as a nurse. She was a good nurse, and the discipline - and recognition that all deeds have consequences, and not just for one's self - she developed in that occupation stayed with her throughout her life. At the same time, she disliked the work. Nurses then were poorly paid, worked long and odd hours, and had no union rights or protection. Most importantly, the work schedule prevented her from participating in many political activities. In 1946 Helen quit nursing and got a job in a General Mills-owned home appliance factory working as a punch press operator. The United Electrical Workers union (UE) organized the workers in the plant. There was a lot of motion in the labor movement at the time with a postwar explosion of strikes throughout the country. This had an impact on many of the men and women that Helen worked with.

During a panel discussion at a 1974 Socialist Activists and Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, on the experiences in the labor movement of women who are revolutionary socialists, Helen explained that she was quiet until she got off probation. The Stalinists of the Communist Party dominated the leadership of the UE at that time and she didn't want to get herself fingered as a Trotskyist and fired unnecessarily.

During seven years at this plant Helen participated in a wide range of fights, including for safety and better wages and against piecework. Hers became a voice many of her militant co-workers looked to. She served as a shop steward, on the grievance committee, and as a delegate to the Hennepin County CIO Council. In the 1974 panel Helen stated in a typical self-effacing manner, "I want to point out that I became a leader in the Home Appliance Division, among the women and throughout the plant, primarily because I was a political person...and understood, from being in the socialist movement, what the purpose of the union was - to fight the bosses and work for members and to build the union bigger and stronger. And we did that, not through collaboration and deals with the bosses, but through struggle. I consulted with the party all the time. I was inexperienced and young and I was ultraleft and, you know, would make mistakes here and there; there isn't anybody who doesn't. But I consulted with the party and had their help. And it was our policy that the workers responded to, not me."

Helen also described the faction fight that led to a split in the UE in 1949. The Stalinist-led UE was expelled from the CIO without putting up a serious fight. The CIO then attempted to win for the newly established International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) bargaining rights held by many of the UE locals. The SWP opposed the split and didn't support either side. But once it was done, the question remained as to what stand to take in the fight for representation. Helen pointed out the party's approach "was that the best interests of the union would be served by staying in the CIO. The CIO encompassed the mainstream of the organized American working class and a union could better organize and fight to protect its members and make advances and gains by being in the CIO...." Helen was a leading activist in the campaign for representation by the IUE and in fighting to prevent it from becoming a red- baiting campaign.

In 1947 Helen married Charles Scheer, a party member in the Twin Cities and a switchmen for the Milwaukee Road Railroad. They remained life-long companions and comrades and raised two sons, Bill and Hank, who were born in the early '50s.

Reenergizing impact of Cuban victory
During the 1950s, primarily under the pressure of the long post-war economic expansion, the labor movement as a whole retreated, as did its vanguard, including the SWP. This also affected Helen, who began to settle into the rhythm of family life. Helen repeatedly insisted that the victory of workers and peasants in Cuba in 1959 politically reenergized her, and others of her generation in the party. The Cuban revolution made it possible to recruit a layer of youth to an example of genuine mass communist politics, many of whom became party leaders later, she would point out. At the same time it also re-recruited an older layer of party members for the long haul. Helen became active in defense of the Cuban revolution, an activist and organizer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the Twin Cities, and continued to participate in many actions in support of Cuba for the rest of her life.

The new rise of the struggle for Black freedom and the powerful and growing example of Malcolm X as a revolutionary leader of the Black nationality and the working class, simultaneously reinforced the reenergizing impact of the Cuban revolution.

Twenty years later, when the example of the Cuban revolution was extended by Grenada and Nicaragua, Helen was active in the solidarity actions in defense of the working people in those countries. In 1983 she and Charles visited Nicaragua on a tour sponsored by the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. On their return she spoke about the trip at a Militant Labor Forum in the Twin Cities. This was one of the few times that Helen agreed to speak at a public event.

During the first year of the Cuban revolution, Helen had another experience that helped deepen her political understanding and confidence. She was nominated by the Minneapolis branch to be a student for six months in 1959-60 at the ninth session of the party's national school, then called the Trotsky School. Charles attended the tenth session one year later. Fred Halstead led the school Helen attended and much of the course of study was based on reading and discussing together Capital, by Karl Marx.

As an experienced activist in the Minneapolis branch, Helen was often elected to the branch executive committee and assumed many responsibilities - including organizing branch finances, election campaigns, sales drives, fund campaigns, forums, defense and security, and more. During these years she worked in various nursing and administrative jobs in health care.

In seven elections at national SWP conventions between 1969 and 1979, delegates judged that Helen's seriousness and maturity were sound credentials for electing her to the party's Control Commission. One of the challenges of serving on that national leadership body at the time was addressing questions posed by the rise of the women's liberation movement. This movement was forcing massive changes among working people on how to view many social questions, including family violence and abuse against women. It was essential that the party, to safeguard its security and integrity among other things, clarify and assert that if an action in public was incompatible with membership so was the same action behind closed family doors.

During the late 1980s and early '90s, taking advantage of their retirement, Helen and Charles accepted the assignment to several long stints helping to take care of the facilities for the national party leadership school in upstate New York. True to working-class traditions in which they had been trained in Minnesota, they never left their stint without personally purchasing and installing a new piece of equipment for the school.

Helen tended to shy away from public responsibilities such as being a candidate for public office or speaking at forums. However, she wasn't shy, and one of her notable characteristics was that she could easily make conversation with customers that walked into the Pathfinder Bookstore, participants in Militant Labor Forums, or people she was asking to sign election petitions or buy a Militant subscription. For many years she was one of the top petitioners and Militant sellers in the branch. Into her 70s she was sometimes still among the top five sub sellers. Helen always assumed that workers, students, and others would be interested in the party's ideas; at the same time she engaged them in discussion about what they were politically interested in.

Never tired of talking socialism
Helen was a bedrock of hundreds, maybe thousands, of literature tables and petitioning teams during her years in the SWP. She never grew bored with this activity. To the contrary, she had so internalized the importance of this kind of work for meeting new people and winning them to the communist movement that she received satisfaction each time she did it. Each time out selling or petitioning, Helen would bring back stories about new people that she met. Each experience was a fresh one, because each person Helen met she met as an individual.

Helen also set an outstanding example to scores of young people who met and joined the Young Socialist Alliance, and later the Young Socialists, and the Socialist Workers Party simply by her habits of work. She worked hard, she didn't waste time, she paid attention to detail, and she would follow through on suggestions that she made rather than leaving it to someone else. A few weeks before she died she did her final stint staffing the Pathfinder Bookstore. After her shift she wrote a brief note to the bookstore director explaining that she had cleaned the shelves under the counter. She fastened to the note several items that she didn't want to throw out without broader consultation. One item was a damaged book that she suggested be returned to Pathfinder, and she volunteered to do it. She made extra time during her two-hour shift to help improve the bookstore.

Helen was diagnosed with colon cancer in January 1997 and had two operations and six series of chemotherapy treatments. But she remained an activist up until a couple of weeks before she died. She attended the SWP convention last June, and participated in many Militant Labor Forums and SWP branch meetings. And this old farm girl simultaneously carried out a long-postponed project-planting a big garden, which all who saw it admired.

Since November 1997, when it became clear that the cancer was spreading rapidly and the chemotherapy was stopped, Helen participated in three actions to protest U.S. war threats against Iraq, two protests against police brutality, and a prochoice picket line initiated by the Young Socialists. Just two weeks before she went into a hospice, she made the rounds to bookstores to place the Militant.

Helen was truly a working-class soldier of the Continental line. She remained confident in the enormous capacities of her class and dedicated her entire adult life to helping to build the only instrument that can lead the working class to power. She lived this reality, even more than she preached it, and drew pleasure out of seeing so many young workers and students she touched, including both her sons, become active revolutionaries in the communist movement. And no single individual touched more of those who did take this course than Helen Scheer.

Doug Jenness is a member of United Steelworkers of America Local 9198.  
 
 
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