BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND TONY LANE
ST. PAUL, Minnesota - One hundred and ten comrades, friends, and family members of Helen Scheer gathered here April 26 to celebrate her life and example. As Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes put it in his talk at the meeting, "Helen was a deeply political person, which gave organizational direction to her entire adult life."

Scheer, a veteran cadre of the communist movement for more than half a century, died in Minneapolis of cancer on April 11, at age 76. She had been an active member of the SWP since 1944.

In addition to those present from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, where Helen spent most of her political life, a significant number participated from Des Moines and Chicago. Others came from as far as Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Toronto.

As participants entered the Machinists Banquet Hall here for the reception before the program began, a display of messages caught their eye. They were sent by many friends and comrades of Helen's from across the United States, as well as from the United Kingdom, Iceland, and New Zealand. Merilee Light, Helen's hospice worker for the last few months, who took part in the meeting, wrote in her message: "I loved talking with Helen. Our conversations would meander from gardening, family, computers, the arts, world events.... No matter what the topic, Helen was involved and interested. She was alive to all aspects of the world around her."

Opposite the messages, an attractive display made by party supporters generated a lot of interest. It included photos from throughout Helen's life and highlighted major political developments in Minnesota and around the world that spanned her five and a half decades as a worker- bolshevik. From the Teamsters strikes and Midwest organizing drives of the 1930s, which built a fighting union movement in Minneapolis and paved the way for the CIO; to the defense campaign for 18 leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters union who were imprisoned for their communist views and opposition to World War II in the early 1940s; to socialist workers election campaign activities in the 1950s and demonstrations and forums in the next 30 years - the pictures painted the decades of struggle Helen took part in and the movement she devoted her life to building.

The displays were set off by a spread of food and refreshments, also organized by party supporters. One of the speakers remarked during the program that among Helen's favorite phrases was the motto from Teamsters Local 544 in the 1930s, "Whether it's a picnic or a strike, we do it right." This meeting in tribute to Helen stood in that tradition.

The local Pathfinder bookstore produced for the event a booklet with the article by Doug Jenness, "Helen Scheer: a worker-bolshevik for 54 years," from the April 27 Militant. It also contains "Socialist women and labor struggles, 1934-54: A report by participants," from the March 1975 International Socialist Review. This compilation includes the transcript of a talk Helen gave as part of a panel discussion at the Socialist Activists and Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, August 1974. In it, Helen recounts her experiences as a trade unionist from 1946 to the early 1950s. Participants bought 30 copies of the booklet, helping defray some of the expenses of the meeting. (It can be obtained from the Twin Cities Pathfinder bookstore, see address on page 12, for $5 per copy plus $1.50 for shipping and handling.)

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, and Doug Jenness, organizer of the Twin Cities SWP, co-chaired the meeting. In introducing the program, they gave a brief summary of who Helen was and what she was a product of.

Jenness said that the Minneapolis branch that Helen joined in 1944 was "the party unit most deeply stamped by the labor upsurge of the 1930s and the best habits of the workers' movement of that time, with leaders like Carl Skoglund, Oscar Coover Sr., and V.R. Dunne." Of these, Jenness said, "Helen worked most closely with Ray Dunne. From him she learned discipline, hard work, pride, party patriotism, and attention to detail -the importance of party forums, a bookstore, a library, and a culture of reading."

`Honor graduate' of Minneapolis SWP

Waters read a message from veteran SWP leader Harry Ring, who said, "Like many young people of the depression era, I was pretty much devoid of personal ambition. But after I joined the SWP, I acquired an ambition. I wanted to someday be a member of the Minneapolis branch. I never realized that ambition, but I don't think it was wasted."

Waters added that "Helen was an honor graduate" from the school in party building for which the Minneapolis branch was famous. When she first met Helen in the spring of 1961 as a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Waters said, "I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life yet. But I knew what I didn't want to do." Waters joined the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) about a year later. Helen's warmth and genuine interest in the young people attracted to communism at the time made you understand that what you did with your life was important. Helen was a working-class woman with a family who never let that prevent her from carrying out what was necessary politically and what she wanted to do. This included taking a six-month leave in 1959-60 to participate in the party's national leadership school in New Jersey.

In addition to her contributions in party building in Minneapolis, Helen 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 Scheer fund appeal
At the conclusion of the program, Waters presented the Helen Scheer Memorial Fund Appeal. The printed program for the event explained that contributions will provide seed money for the capital fund needed to purchase equipment that will make it possible to keep in print the 350 titles in the arsenal of Pathfinder Press and do so with lower costs and less labor (see text of appeal below). At the meeting, $7,859 was collected in donations and pledges, and more continues to come in. Thank-you letters have been sent out to contributors with a reminder to those who pledged that the deadline for payment is May 20.

In the program, speakers described their experiences with Helen extending back more than three decades. They recalled how she had helped recruit and educate them, and scores of other young people, as they were drawn to and became active in the socialist movement, and in particular, the books Helen sold them.

Mámud Shirvani remembered meeting Helen at a Militant Labor Forum in 1964 when, as a student from Iran, he was studying at the University of Minnesota. At the time, he had told some youth that he was looking for a genuine Marxist group. "Two days later I got a phone call from YSA members inviting me to the forum," said Shirvani. "They impressed me as being serious."

After the forum, Shirvani said, Helen sold him The Third International after Lenin by Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the October 1917 Russian revolution. "I couldn't put that book down," he said, and was "even reading it as I was doing laundry." Shirvani said he knew about the 1945-46 revolution in Azerbaijan, when a workers and farmers government came to power but was defeated. "The rise and fall of revolutionary movements, and how to avert defeats, was a burning question for me." Through studying the book Helen sold him, Shirvani said, he began getting answers to his questions.

As party members plunged into the anti-Vietnam War movement and other activities at the time, Shirvani said the example of people like Ray Dunne, Helen, and her husband Charlie Scheer (who was a railroad worker) and their connections to the struggle of the working class helped win him to the communist movement. Shirvani, currently an editor for Pathfinder, concluded he would always remember Helen for "putting a weapon in my hand when I desperately needed it."

John Steele, a leader of the Communist League in Canada who works at Ford Electronics in Toronto, said he showed the Militant article "Helen Scheer: a worker-bolshevik for 54 years" to a fellow union member. The worker said he found it interesting but commented skeptically, "How can someone fight for 54 years and not get there?" Then he asked, referring to the title of the story on Helen's life, "What is a worker-bolshevik?" The break ended before Steele could explain, but he pledged to help answer that question for his co-worker when he returned. "Helen Scheer once again touched another member of our class," Steele said.

Steele met Helen at the Friday Night Socialist Forum in Minneapolis, while he was a student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s, and explained how she helped win him to the SWP. "Helen wanted to know what you thought, she was genuinely interested in what you had to say," he noted. After U.S. immigration deported him to Canada, Steele joined the communist movement there. "Helen practiced party- building steady as she goes for a lifetime. She is not replaceable as an individual. But her 54-year-long contributions helped ensure that reinforcements are in the room."

Betsy Farley was one of a group of nine young activists in Minneapolis called the Peoples' Press collective who joined the YSA in 1971. Before they joined, she said in her remarks at the meeting, she recalled visiting the party bookstore to purchase Marxist literature. Helen helped steer her and the entire group toward The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and State and Revolution by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. Later, she said, it was Helen and Charlie Scheer who "spent a lot of time with us, invited us to their house time after time for political discussions with party leaders." Farley is today a member of the United Auto Workers and the organizer of the SWP in Philadelphia.

Propaganda and proletarian habits
Verónica Poses spoke on behalf of the National Committee of the Young Socialists. Poses met Helen when Helen was 73, she said, after a number of YS leaders moved to Minneapolis to set up the organization's national office there after the first national YS convention in April 1996. "Many of us came for a few days and ended up staying over a year," Poses said. The YS national center is now in Chicago. It was Helen, Poses said, "who welcomed us, drove me around, said to ask her if there was anything I needed as I had just moved here from Miami."

Poses recounted experiences with Helen from a number of YS leaders who had recently lived in the Twin Cities but were now doing political work in other cities - Chicago, Birmingham, and some who are volunteers in the party's print shop in New York. They all had two things to say about Helen, Poses said. One was "her total conviction of the central role that propaganda plays in the class struggle - seeking to get the Militant and Pathfinder books into the hands of workers and young people."

Secondly, the YS members had all been impressed by Helen's professionalism. Poses said she saw a great deal of Helen because Helen staffed the bookstore at least every other day. Poses pointed to Helen's proletarian habits. "She would make sure the bookstore was clean, that the plants were taken care of - the basic things that not all of us pay too much attention to," she stated.

"You can read a lot about the need for discipline," Poses said, "but the biggest impact comes from working with comrades like Helen who, in every single thing they do in daily life, set the example of how it can be done and why it is necessary."

Helen was a political person
SWP national secretary Jack Barnes referred to the presentation that Helen had given at a conference in Oberlin, Ohio in 1974. It is one of the few contributions of Helen's that is in print. Just in case anyone thought she had special qualities, Barnes pointed out, Helen insisted that what she accomplished in the labor movement in an earlier period was because she was political.

In the 1974 talk, Helen explained that she was in the United Electrical Workers union (UE) from 1946 to 1953 - a period encompassing both the upsurge in the labor movement after World War II and the reaction and witch hunt that followed. She worked in a General Mills-owned appliance factory, participated in a wide range of fights on the job, and served as a shop steward, and on the union grievance committee. "I want to point out that I became a leader of the Home Appliance Division, among the women and throughout the plant, primarily because I was a political person," Helen said, "and understood, from being in the socialist movement, what the purpose of the union was - to fight the bosses and work for the members and to build the union bigger and stronger."

In speaking about these experiences, Helen was part of preparing for the opportunities to get the big majority of party members back into the industrial unions, Barnes said. What she was announcing, was that the next time the party went into industry it would be universal for both women and men.

The SWP leader said that the fact that Helen was a political person was what gave organizational direction to her entire adult life. "It didn't come from anything that wasn't available to others. It did not come from special attributes. What we accomplish, we accomplish because we are deeply political, because we know the conscious organization of working people is the only hope for humanity to put aside the muck and mire and horror that is capitalism."

Barnes pointed to a message sent to the meeting by Jon Hillson, a party supporter. "It was a wild Minnesota winter day, frigid, alternating between sleet and hail, a black sky in the morning, then sunshine in the afternoon, then snow," Hillson said, referring to a day he had a discussion with Helen. "I was complaining about it to her, and I asked how she could endure this for so many winters. Because, she said, eyes wide, big smile, `It's so exciting.'" Helen was answering a slightly different question than the one asked, Barnes said. For many people under capitalism, blue skies and sunshine can be boring or demoralizing. Helen found interest in all aspects of life, as Marilee, her hospice worker noted, because she loved politics. And she surrounded her political activity with other interests that gave a glow to her party building work.

Cuban revolution reenergized Helen
Helen lived through three interconnected periods in the communist movement, Barnes pointed out. The first was the period of labor upsurge after World War II. The McCarthyite witch-hunt that followed marked some of the dog days of the revolutionary movement, when, under the pressure of the long postwar economic expansion, the labor movement and its vanguard retreated. The pace of political activity slowed down and divisions grew. This affected Helen too, who began to settle into the rhythm of family life.

Helen pointed out later that the Cuban revolution "saved her," Barnes said. The triumph of the first socialist revolution in the Americas in 1959 posed the reversal of the retreat of the previous decade. That was the third period in Helen's life.

By being political, Helen meant she understood the fact that the decline and crisis of capitalism are inevitable. The question is what you do about it, especially when it becomes possible to win new generations to a revolutionary course and activity.

For communists, a victorious socialist revolution - the practical demonstration in life of how the working class can do it - is the decisive test of everything they've previously learned and done. It revitalizes revolutionary ideas and produces a commitment to press forward the struggle in new ways. The working class has only experienced this twice this century, coming out of the October 1917 Russian revolution and then after the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s.

Barnes said he already considered himself a revolutionist before he met the internationalist cadres of the SWP who recruited him to the communist movement, while he was a student at Carleton College. After returning from a trip to Cuba in the summer of 1960 - when most foreign-owned mines, factories, and utilities were expropriated and nationalized - Barnes said he was on the lookout for people who would be like the Cubans, who would work to emulate the Cuban revolution in the United States. This is what the core of the Minneapolis branch of the SWP was like, Barnes said, people for whom the Cuban revolution was their own. Helen, he pointed out, never went to Cuba. But one does not have to go to Cuba to be a great defender of the Cuban revolution.

Helen became an activist and organizer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the Twin Cities, and continued to take part in many actions in defense of Cuba until the end of her life.

Barnes pointed to a photo on display with Helen and Charlie Scheer when they visited Nicaragua in 1983 on a tour sponsored by the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. That was four years after the victory of the revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship and put in power a workers and farmers government -extending the example of the Cuban revolution. Helen and Charlie's faces on that photo, Barnes said, are the faces of revolutionary workers in a sea of magnificent fighters who have taken their destiny in their own hands and are proving that sí se puede! (yes, we can do it).

Like others, Barnes commented on the books that Helen introduced him to when he first met her. "She didn't hand them to me, she sold them to me," he noted, and told him there was a sale on.

He added that Helen knew which books the group he was part of had, and which one they didn't. "She wanted me to get History of American Trotskyism, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, and In Defense of Marxism."

A month later, Barnes said, Helen was selling more books. "I said, `I have that.' She said, `it's a much bigger sale now and this is the best thing you can give to people.' "

Barnes explained that through reading and studying In Defense of Marxism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, he learned that attributes of character, ways of organizing, one's approach to other human beings, discipline -all have a class character to them. These are qualities that are not just part of one's personality, or moral attributes.

Helen, Barnes said in concluding his remarks, was truly a selfless person, truly objective in politics. She was always straight with herself and with other people. She was never gratuitous or cruel. She always remained the person who welcomed a whole layer of youth - with her characteristic smile - many of whom became party leaders later. To her last conscious days, she never stopped being this person. That's how she redeemed those who came before her. The example of Helen, and the comrades of her generation, is something we must live up to, Barnes said. "If you emulate them, it will be the finest thing you can do as a human being."

Tony Lane is a member of International Association of Machinists Local 1833 in St. Paul, Minnesota.  
 
 
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