The Militant (logo)  
   Vol.66/No.29           July 29, 2002  
 
 
Charlie Scheer: celebrating
65 years of a political man
(feature article)  

BY JACK WILLEY  
ST. PAUL, Minnesota--More than 100 comrades, family members, and friends, gathered here July 14 to celebrate Charles Scheer’s 65 years of revolutionary activity in building the Socialist Workers Party. Scheer died in St. Paul in June. He was 86.

Charles Scheer "was above all, a deeply political person," said Jack Barnes, the Socialist Workers Party national secretary, in his talk at the meeting. "This is how I opened the 1998 meeting to celebrate Helen Scheer’s decades of building the communist movement," said Barnes. Seldom can you make the same statement at two meetings like this, Barnes said, but the fact that they were deeply political is what resulted in their being active cadres in the communist movement throughout their adult lives.

Helen Scheer was Charles’s companion of 50 years.

Charles Scheer was born in Eureka, Montana, in 1915. His family moved to St. Paul when he was an infant. In his early 30s during the Great Depression Scheer worked to support his family and two children pushing heavy slabs of beef in and out of the freezers in meatpacking plants, and in a paint factory.

He first came into contact with the communist movement while working on the loading dock at a Montgomery Ward warehouse. Scheer was a member of Teamsters Local 120 at the time.

A couple of years earlier members of what was then Teamsters Local 574 waged successful strikes that defeated the trucking bosses, who were assisted by the employers of the area, the state government, and the National Guard. Members of the Communist League of America, a predecessor of the SWP, were leaders of this powerful struggle that transformed Minneapolis from an open shop city, where the bosses had a free hand to act with impunity against the workers, into a union town.

A major accomplishment of this rebellion was that Teamsters were organized for the first time on an industry-wide basis. That meant that Local 574 members were in the same union regardless of whether they drove a truck, shoveled coal, or worked on the loading dock. This was immediately attractive to other workers in the area like Scheer and his co-workers.

Scheer often recalled the positive impression Carl Skoglund, a leader of Local 574 and a longtime communist, made when he spoke to members of Scheer’s union local.

A short time later Scheer participated in a strike of Local 120, spending much time on the picket line talking to a co-worker who introduced him to Marxist literature and helped recruit him to what would become the Socialist Workers Party.  
 
Charter member of SWP
The SWP was founded at the beginning of 1938. Its leaders were veteran revolutionists, like Skoglund, who had spent two decades constructing a communist party modeled on the Bolshevik party of V.I. Lenin that had led Russia’s workers and farmers to taking power in the 1917 revolution.

Scheer became a charter member of the party, joining within days of its founding convention. He was a delegate to the SWP’s second convention held in New York City in the summer of 1938.

Scheer was a member of the Twin Cities branch for the entire time he was in the movement. He served on the party’s National Committee as an alternate member from 1963–1973. For several months in 1960–61 he attended the party’s leadership school. Scheer worked as a switchman on the railroad from World War II until he retired in 1976.

More than a dozen members of Scheer’s family attended the event, including his three sons and daughter, as well his daughter-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Socialist workers and young socialists came to the event from Chicago; Des Moines, Iowa; Detroit; Omaha, Nebraska; Hazelton, Pennsylvania; Toronto; New York; and other cities.

One member of the audience was Alfonse Eiden, who first met leaders of the SWP when he was serving three years in Sandstone Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during World War II. Eighteen leaders of the SWP and the Teamsters union had been framed up by the Roosevelt administration for opposing Washington’s drive towards the war. Eiden later joined the SWP.

Another longtime comrade, Mildred Solem, from Duluth, Minnesota, who was a member of the party from the 1930s to the early 1960s, was also present, as were other former comrades of Scheer.

Samuel Farley, chairperson of the SWP branch in St. Paul which hosted the meeting, welcomed the participants to the event. He introduced Norton Sandler, a National Committee member of the SWP from New York, and Kari Sachs, the Socialist Workers Party gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, who co-chaired the meeting. Sandler began by calling participants attention to the attractive displays at the meeting. They included several photos from the forthcoming new English-language edition of The History of American Trotskyism, 1928–38, which gave participants, said Sandler, "a snapshot of the world-shaking events during the years leading up to Scheer joining the party.

"Scheer was deeply affected by the Great Depression and the labor battles that forged the CIO unions," said Sandler, "but also by the triumph of fascism in Germany and defeat of the Spanish revolution, as well as the Roosevelt administration’s march toward U.S. participation in World War II."

Soon after he joined the SWP, said Sandler, a fight broke out over the character of the party--as a wing of the party led by James Burnham and Max Schactman collapsed under the imperialist war pressure, abandoned the defense of the Russian Revolution, and split from the party. In defending fundamental conquests of the communist movement against the political course of this petty-bourgeois opposition, Scheer and other young party cadres were forced to study Marxism. Scheer passed on this enthusiasm for studying Marxist theory and communist continuity to countless others, said Sandler.  
 
Responding to new opportunities
Other panels in the display featured headlines, articles, and photos from the Militant and International Socialist Review showing the kind of activity the party was part of during Scheer’s life.

Barnes told the meeting that it is wrong to say that the Minneapolis branch that Barnes and several other students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, met in 1960 was marked by the Teamster battles of the 1930s. Like the rest of the party at the time, the Minneapolis branch was marked by the retreat of the working class under the impact of the economic boom coming out of World War II, Barnes explained.

The party was deeply affected by this retreat and, although made up of workers, was no longer able to sustain fractions of its members in the industrial unions. In the early 1960s, the strengths of the comrades in the Twin Cities branch in reaching out to new opportunities was not determined by their ability to maintain the traditions of the 1934 strikes and other social struggles of the 1930s that came afterwards, said Barnes. It was the way they successfully led the retreat during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Barnes described how the party responded in 1955–56 to a call by civil rights fighters boycotting the segregated Jim Crow bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, to bring cars to that city to help transport workers to their jobs. Scheer and others in the SWP campaigned among workers and others to raise the funds to purchase station wagons that were driven to Montgomery.

Moscow’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s revelations about the crimes of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, deeply affected the ranks of the Stalinist Communist parties around the world, including the CP in this country. Under the impact of these events, for the first time in years, party leaders like V.R. Dunne in the Twin Cities were able to speak to hundreds from Communist Party and Socialist Party milieus.

The SWP also participated in public meetings protesting Washington’s nuclear tests and other related events, Barnes said.  
 
Black struggle and Cuban Revolution
The Black struggle against Jim Crow segregation and the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 brought forward a new generation of youth attracted to revolutionary politics. Betsey Stone was part of the same group of students at Carleton College who were inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the deepening struggle for Black rights in the United States.

"We found a party in Minneapolis that supported the Cuban Revolution and was determined that working people could do the same thing in the United States," she said in addressing the meeting.

That same year students were holding sit-ins at Woolworth’s stores in the South to demand the company desegregate lunch counters. "We joined the pickets in front of Woolworth’s stores in Minneapolis, along with Charlie Scheer and other party members," Stone said.

Barnes said in later years it has become common to only recollect the role of Ray Dunne and the Scheers when looking back at the Twin Cities branch of the early 1960s. That is not accurate memory, said Barnes, who described the many workers and the relatively young comrade who was organizer of the branch at that time.

Joel Britton, a member of the SWP National Committee from Chicago, was one of more than 20 comrades and friends who sent messages to the meeting, excerpts of several of which were read by Sandler and Sachs. Britton wrote, "Charlie and Helen hosted me the first time I visited the Twin Cities branch at the end of 1963 or early 1964, to speak at a Militant Labor Forum. Charlie shared the revolutionary enthusiasm I had expressed--after attending a mass meeting in October of ‘63 in Detroit where Malcolm X had spoken. Hundreds and hundreds of workers who were Black cheered when Malcolm pointed the way forward by hailing the great revolutions of the 20th century."

"Charlie--and comrades who for me at that time were the other ‘old-timers,’ agreed wholeheartedly with the revolutionary implications of what Malcolm X was raising," Britton said.

"Over the decades since these early memories of Charlie, my appreciation for his party patriotism and campaigning steadfastness was deepened on many occasions," Britton wrote.  
 
Winning new generations
John Steele, who attended the meeting representing the Communist League in Canada, joined Ma’mud Shirvani on the speakers platform. Sandler noted in introducing them that both were recruited to the revolutionary movement while students in the early and mid-1960s at the University of Minnesota. "Charlie and others were citizens of time and the world. They had acquired the ability to patiently transmit the world program for socialist revolution to a new generation of potential communists," Steele wrote in his greetings.

Russell Johnson, from Pongaroa, New Zealand, wrote that he first met the Scheers 30 years ago. He was part of a group of revolutionary-minded youth who wanted to join and build an international movement. "There was none of the cynical and patronizing attitudes toward young rebels that I was accustomed to" from an older generation of Stalinists and social democrats in New Zealand," he wrote. Instead, they "were eager and willing to be grilled for hours on the SWP’s history and politics, and threw open their party archives to me."

In the message to the meeting on behalf of the Communist League of New Zealand, Janet Roth and Michael Tucker said Johnson’s experience working with the Minneapolis branch and with cadre of the caliber of Charlie helped "to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the political and organization character of the proletarian party and helped us develop from a group of young socialists toward building such a party ourselves."

SWP leader Joe Swanson from Des Moines, described in a message read by chairperson Kari Sachs how Scheer and two other party members came to Lincoln, Nebraska, to meet with him. Swanson was struck about how, in the course of their conversation about fights with the bosses, Scheer made sure the discussion turned to international politics as well. "This helped me think more broadly about the international working class," Swanson wrote.  
 
Example for revolutionary youth today
Arrin Hawkins, spoke at the celebration on behalf of the YS National Leadership Council. She is the organizer of the New York chapter of the Young Socialists and works in the Pathfinder printshop. Charlie Scheer was a young worker no different than the youth that socialists are meeting today, she said. Worker-bolsheviks took him seriously and recruited him to the SWP, just as he took youth seriously and worked hard to convince them to give their lives to the revolutionary struggle. She said Scheer’s life is an important example for young people today considering joining the communist movement.

"Charlie organized his life to build the party, to put the party at the center," said Tom Fiske, a member of the Twin Cities branch. Scheer was a stalwart of sales to industrial workers in front of plant gates, he said. "For years, he sold the Militant to auto workers every week in front of the Ford credit union; and it didn’t matter what type of weather," Fiske said.

Jacquie Henderson, from Houston, wrote that the Scheers "had on their desk piles of names to "call back" for Militant subscriptions organized with notes on when to call, and so forth.... It was like a military operation. They realized how much working people needed the Militant."

Paul Pederson, who joined the Young Socialists in 1996, said in a letter to the celebration that Scheer was one of the first communists he met. "I learned from comrades like Charlie that in the communist movement regardless of our age you act and are counted on as a political equal. Charlie impressed me because he was an active communist, not a retired communist."

Charles and Helen Scheer spent several years between the mid-1980s and early 1990s maintaining the party’s leadership school in upstate New York.

Sigurlaug Gunnlaugsdóttir, a Central Committee member of the newly formed Communist League in Iceland, described in her message first meeting Charlie Scheer at the leadership school in 1986. "Myself and others who had become interested in politics in the 1970s and joined a radical Marxist group in Europe had not had a conversation with, let alone worked with, comrades from Helen and Charlie’s generation. It was striking to me at the time that the SWP had members so different from what I was familiar with; they were cadres with a long history. They were real people, not legendary people."  
 
Zeal in propaganda
In addition to drafting the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels also helped draft the statutes in 1850 for the first Communist League, Barnes explained. "Membership was open to those who ‘show ability and zeal in propaganda, unswerving devotion to convictions and revolutionary energy,’" Charlie Scheer embodied these statutes, he said.

There is no such thing as a "communist type"--the movement includes a glorious variety of human material, Barnes said. "The peculiarity of proletarian revolutionaries is that the only way they do their work is together with others," he said. "They have no capital, no ownership of the mass media. A proletarian revolutionist can live only by conviction, not force," said Barnes.

"From 1937 to 2002 Charles Scheer never hesitated as a communist," Barnes said. "He understood and didn’t blanche from the fact that it will take a mighty struggle to confront the resistance by the exploiters to giving up their prerogatives. He knew that injustice, if not fought against, would spread."

Barnes read from the back cover text of the forthcoming Their Trotsky and Ours, which was drafted days before Scheer’s death. "History shows that small revolutionary organizations will face not only the stern test of wars and repression, but also the potentially shattering opportunities that emerge unexpectedly when strikes and social struggles explode," it states.

"As that happens, communist parties not only recruit many new members. They also fuse with other workers organizations moving in the same direction and grow into mass proletarian parties contesting to lead workers and farmers to power. This assumes that well beforehand their cadres have absorbed and grown comfortable with a world communist program, are proletarian in life and work, derive deep satisfaction from doing politics, and have forged a leadership with an acute sense of what to do next," Barnes read.

Their Trotsky and Ours is a tribute to Charles, and also to Helen Scheer, Barnes said. Barnes called the crowd’s attention to photos on the display of Charlie and Helen Scheer on a trip to Nicaragua in the early 1980s. In one of these photos, said Barnes, Charles is introducing Perspectiva Mundial to youth in Nicaragua.

Among those attending the meeting were workers born in Africa and Latin America employed at area packinghouses who took advantage of the translation from English that other participants provided of the meeting. Charles would have loved to know that this meeting was translated into Spanish and French, Barnes said.

The meeting launched the Charles Scheer Memorial Fund to go toward the purchase of a piece of equipment that will help advance the communist movement’s publishing program. Some $4,100 in pledges and contributions were made at the event. (Those wishing to contribute can send their checks to the Charles Scheer Memorial Fund, c/o Pathfinder Press, 410 West St., New York, NY 10014.)

Norton Sandler contributed to this article.  
 
 
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