School of Darkness:

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“This is the memoir of Bella Dodds. Ms. Dodds was a union organizer and lawyer, who became active active in the Communist Party in New York City between 1920 and 1949. She eventually became a member of the national committee of the Communist Party, where she observed the hypocrisy, hatred and malice that made up Communism. She was expelled in 1949 and returned to the Catholic Church.

If the devil's greatest trick has been to make the world believe that he doesn't exist, the Communists are not far behind. Today, Communists are presented as loveable goofballs, who didn't threaten anyone, except where they are presented as being a non-existent bogeyman. If you read Bella's memoirs, you will be amazed at the extent of Communist power and infiltration into, at least, New York politics. Communists had wealth supporters and its own financial agents and operated their own night clubs. They had politicians who were their mouthpieces in state and federal government and in New York they were often able to swing the vote so as to decide who would be elected. Bella casually mentions the murder of a Republican precinct captain who stood in the way of a Communist election victory, and how that murder was never solved.

If you read this memoir, you will be disabused of the myths about Communism: Communism was real, it was a was a tightly knit conspiracy, it was corrupt and corrupting and it murdered people and wrecked lives.

This memoir works on two levels. On one level it is an insider's account of the Communist Party during its heydays, in the decade before and after the Great Depression. Bella explains how she became involved in Communism. Although she makes the traditional nod toward her desire to help the poor, we actually see how she is influenced by her teachers who presented Communism as synonymous with “progress”:.

“In the days that have gone since we enunciated these statements so confidently I have had many occasions to see that this cataloging of people as either “right” or “left” has led to more confusion in American life than perhaps any other false concept. It sounds so simple and so right. By using this schematic device one puts the communists on the left and then one regards them as advanced liberals -after which it is easy to regard them as the enzyme necessary for progress”.

And:

“More and more I wanted to talk and act only in terms of the future, of a future that would have none of the corruption of the present. It depressed me that people close to me could accommodate themselves to such a present. Only people I did not know, the great mass of unknown human beings, began to awaken in me a poignant sense of kinship. In fact, I began to transfer my personal feelings to this wholly unknown defeated mass. And so it came about that I began to seek my spiritual home among the dispossessed of the earth.”

One of the interesting features about reading this book is how many of Bella's teachers and fellow communists were women. Although we are led to believe these days that women were kept out of education and tee professions, Bella casually mentions how she went to law school in New York of the late 1920s. She certainly doesn't discuss fighting against glass walls and sexism, albeit, without a doubt women were underrepresented in law and education, but apparently not so much that she was touting herself as either the “first” or the “only.”

It seems that education was a significant factor in radicalizing young men and women, even in the 1920s:

“Nationalism.” I studied closely A. A. Berle and Gardiner Means who wrote of the two hundred corporations that controlled America at the end of World War I. I read widely on imperialism and began to be critical of the role my country was playing. I discovered the John Dewey Society and the Progressive Education Association. I became aware of the popular concept of the social frontier. I also repeated glibly that we had reached the last of our natural frontiers and that the new ones to be sought must be social. There would be, we were told, in the near future a collective society in our world and especially in our country, and in teaching students one must prepare them for that day.

As a result of that year's study of American history and national politics, as well as in the direct experience of my students and myself in local politics, I now began to tear apart before my students many respected public groups - charity, church, and other organizations - that were trying to better conditions in old-fashioned ways.”

This leads to another great part of this book; it shows how our present is a product of our past. Listen to these excerpts and ask if they do not resemble the culture that has developed in college campuses by the year 2016:

Hatred of America:

“Again we were to despise our own country as an exploiter of the workers.”

Opportunistic use of civil liberties:

“When a person conditioned by a totalitarian group talks about the right not to incriminate himself, he really means the right not to incriminate the communist group of which he is only a nerve end. When he talks of freedom of speech, he means freedom for the communist group to speak as a group through the mouth of the individual who has been selected by the higher intelligence”

Repeatedly refashioning historical understanding based on the current political fashion:

“Before 1935, for instance, the Party had preached hatred of John L. Lewis as a labor dictator. No stories about him were too vile. He was accused of murder and pillage in his march to power in the Miners Union. Suddenly, in 1936, Lewis became the hero of the Communist Party. Again in 1940, when the Party decided to support Roosevelt against Willkie, and John L. Lewis risked his leadership in the CIO by calling on the unions to vote for Willkie, the Communists screamed invective, and in private meetings Roy Hudson and William Z. Foster, in charge of labor for the Politburo, vilified Lewis. When the Communists shifted their support, Lewis was dropped as president of the CIO and Philip Murray was elected in his place.”

Group hate:

“During my years in the Teachers Union I gradually got used to these bitter expressions of hate. And since hate begets hate, often those under attack also responded with hate. Hearing them, I began to take sides and in the end accepted the Party's hates as my own.”

Opposed to the traditional family:

“The bourgeois family as a social unit was to be made obsolete.”

Politically-motivated change of standards:

“Before June 1941 it had been an “imperialist war” for the re-division of markets, a war which could have only reactionary results. But when the Soviet Union was attacked, the war was transformed into a “people's war,” a “war of liberation.”

The American Communist Party dropped all its campaigns of opposition. Its pacifist friends were again “Fascist reactionaries” and all its energy was employed in praise of France and England as great democracies. The fight against the Board of Higher Education had to be brought to an end because the Party regarded Mayor LaGuardia as a force in the pro-democratic war camp.”

Hatred of opponents:

“Even more significant was the fact that I had made their hates my hates. This was what established me as a full-fledged Communist. In the long ago I had been unable to hate anyone; I suffered desperately when someone was mistreated; I was regarded as a peacemaker. Now, little by little, I had acquired a whole mass of people to hate: the groups and individuals who fought the Party. How it came about I cannot tell. All I know as I look back to that time is that my mind had responded to Marxist conditioning. For it is a fact, true and terrible, that the Party establishes such authority over its members that it can swing their emotions now for and now against the same person or issue. It claims such sovereignty even over conscience as to dictate when it shall hate.”

Bella experienced Communist-hate when she was expelled for insufficiently hating the deposed CPUSA president, Earl Browder:

“I was dismissed. As I walked down the dingy steps my heart was heavy. The futility of my life overcame me. For twenty years I had worked with this Party, and now at the end I found myself with only a few shabby men and women, inconsequential Party functionaries, drained of all mercy, with no humanity in their eyes, with no good will of the kind that works justice. Had they been armed I know they would have pulled the trigger against me. I thought of the others who had been through this and of those who were still to go through this type of terror. I shivered at the thought of harsh, dehumanized people like these, filled with only the emotion of hate, robots of a system which was heralded as a new world. And I sorrowed for those who would be taken down the long road whose end I saw, now, was a dead end.”

Individual worth subsumed into group-ideology:

“What I had failed to understand was that the security I felt in the Party was that of a group and that affection in that strange communist world is never a personal emotion. You were loved or hated on the basis of group acceptance, and emotions were stirred or dulled by propaganda. That propaganda was made by the powerful people at the top. That is why ordinary Communists get along well with their groups: they think and feel together and work toward a common goal.”

Deliberate attacks on the Catholic priesthood and history:

“I was silent as we drove to Chevy Chase. All the canards against the Catholic Church which I had heard and tolerated, which even by my silence I had approved, were threatening the tiny flame of longing for faith within me. I thought of many things on that ride, of the word “fascist,” used over and over by the communist press in describing the role of the Church in the Spanish Civil War. I also thought of the word “Inquisition” so skillfully used on all occasions. Other terms came to me — reactionary, totalitarian, dogmatic, old-fashioned. For years they had been used to engender fear and hatred in people like me.
A thousand fears assailed me. Would he insist that I talk to the FBI? Would he insist that I testify? Would he make me write articles? Would he see me at all? And then before my mind's eye flashed the cover of a communist pamphlet on which was a communist extending a hand to a Catholic worker. The pamphlet was a reprint of a speech by the French Communist leader Thorez and it flattered the workers by not attacking their religion. It skillfully undermined the hierarchy in the pattern of the usual communist attempt to drive a wedge between the Catholic and his priest.”

Opportunistic accusations of racism:

“Close friends of many, years' standing became deadly enemies overnight. Little cliques, based on the principle of mutual protection and advancement, sprang up everywhere. Some shouted slogans from Jacques Duclos. Some shouted down anyone who suggested logical discussion of problems. The mood, the emotions, were hysterically leftist with the most violent racist talk I ever heard.”

And:

“But the communist leadership heard with delight that Bella Dodd had appeared as “attorney for a landlord.” At last they had the excuse for getting me politically, the excuse for which they had been looking. Of course they could have simply expelled me but this would involve discussion of policies. They were looking for an excuse to expel me on charges that would besmirch my character, drive my friends away, and stop discussion instead of starting it. What better than to expel me for the crime of becoming a “hireling of the landlords”?
They must have realized that such an argument would scarcely be cogent to outsiders. Even to many of the Party it was weak. They must add something really unforgivable to make me an outcast in the eyes of the simple people of the Party. They did this by spreading the story that in my court appearances I had made remarks against the Puerto Rican tenants, that I had slandered them, and showed myself a racist, almost a fascist. And last of all, a charge of anti-Negro, anti-Semitism, and anti-working class was thrown in for good measure.”

An attentive reader will appreciate why college campuses have become such a cesspool of political correctness and intimidation of those who step outside of group think through the artifice of faux-moral outrage.

Bella also explains how Communists were so effective at infiltration of other organizations, a subject explored in Lewy's The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life:

“This use of fractions made the Communist Party effective in noncommunist groups. They went prepared, organized, trained, and disciplined with a program worked out in detail, and before other groups had a chance to think the Communists were winning advantages. They worked in every convention as an organized bloc. In other organized blocs the Communists had “sleepers,” assigned to protect Communist Party interests. These “sleepers” were active members in noncommunist blocs for the purpose of hamstringing and destroying the power of the opposition.”

What we also pick up from Bella's book is how Communism filled in a spiritual void in the life of Communists. The Party was their life, their friends, their purpose. Being excommunicated from the Party was a death sentence because it meant that an old life had been lost. Bella describes her life after her expulsion from the Party as “learning to unbecome a Communist.” What is also interesting about her memoir is how she counterpoints her Communist life with her non-Communist life; in the latter, people were allowed to be human, and to not hate:

“As he and the other men discussed various matters, I realized why these three talked so differently from the little groups I had been with at tables like this in the communist movement. Here there was no hatred and no fear. We talked of books and television and of communism too, and Father Keller referred to the latter as “the last stage of an ugly period.”

A final point is this phenomenal image of mercy and conversion:

“By what right, I thought, was I seeking the help of someone I had helped revile, even if only by my silence? How dared I come to a representative of that hierarchy?
The screeching of the brakes brought me back to reality. We had arrived, and my friend was wishing me luck as I got out of the car. I rang the doorbell and was ushered into a small room. While I waited, the struggle within me began again. Had there been an easy exit I would have run out, but in the midst of my turmoil Monsignor Fulton Sheen walked into the room, his silver cross gleaming, a warm smile in his eyes.
He held out his hand as he crossed the room. “Doctor, I'm glad you've come,” he said. His voice and his eyes had a welcome which I had not expected, and it caught me unaware.”

A final nice element of this book is that it puts “flesh on the bones” of the people who lived during this time and on the time itself. I have known of Sheen, but until reading this, I didn't really know him