Paul Bass Photo
1989: Forces of freedom breach the Berlin Wall. Communism begins collapsing worldwide.
2012: Forces of freedom converge on New Haven’s Howe Street to confront a surviving outpost of the Red Menace and the pinko governor trying to prop it up.
At least that’s what the Republican politicians, Vietnam vets and motorcycle club members from throughout Connecticut portrayed their mission Friday when they massed for a protest outside the red-brick New Haven People’s Center.
They said they had sniffed out a real live plot to infiltrate state government and send $300,000 in taxpayer dough — not to fix crumbling VFW halls, but to keep alive a Communist-connected community center in that reddest of red-state metropolises, New Haven.
They assembled to beat back an effort to have the state approve $300,000 in bonding to repair the decaying Howe Street building, which since 1937 has hosted political events, including some Communist Party-sponsored events as well as labor, peace, and immigrant rights doings.
A not-for-profit group owns the building. At Friday’s rally, organizer Tom Scott, a former Republican state senator from Milford who came within 2 percentage points of beating Rosa DeLauro in the 1990 U.S. Congressional election and went on to become a talk-radio host, noted that one of the People’s Center’s driving forces is Communist Party member Joelle Fishman. Fishman, like Scott, once ran for Congress, in 1980 (against Larry Denardis and Joe Lieberman) back when Communists ran Eastern European governments. She serves as the New Haven “bureau” of the national party’s People’s Weekly World newspaper, which was known as the Daily Worker back when some of the vets assembled in New Haven Friday or their parents had traveled the globe to fight real gun-toting Communists.
Waving American and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and patriotic placards, the speakers called on Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to change his mind and remove the $300,000 request from Monday’s State Bonding Commission agenda.
This isn’t just a matter of New Haven or Connecticut political wrangling or budgeting, said one of the event’s speakers, Republican state Sen. Len Suzio of Meriden. This has historic and worldwide implications.
Suzio called the People’s Center crew “people who are hell-bent on destroying the American capitalist system.”
“The governor owes it to Connecticut,” he said, “to have a better sense of priorities” rather than “squandering” “precious taxpayer dollars.”
(As of 3:42 p.m. Friday, the Malloy forces at the Capitol were refusing to surrender. The bond money is “not going to a Communist organization,” insisted gubernatorial spokesman Roy Occhiogrosso. “It’s going to a building that has great historical significance in the community, especially in the African-American community; a building in which a lot of important programs are run every day. The governor thinks it’s a worthwhile project.”)
Suzio (at left) with rally organizer Scott (right).
Suzio pointed out that Communists still run North Korea. That’s not working out so well, he noted.
Both Suzio and Scott emphasized that their rally did not seek to shut down the People’s Center. Rather it sought to prevent taxpayer money from shoring it up.
“The people who run this organization are ideological misfits,” Scott declared. “That said, they have the right to exist. I would go up against the wall to defend their right to exist and their right to exist.”
But, he added, “they shouldn’t get one nickel of my money or any other taxpayer’s money to rehab their building.”
Some of the assembled vets picked up on that theme. Barry Bernier (pictured) described how he and fellow volunteers spend their own money to keep up a vets’ community center in Norwich’s rundown Civil War-era Buckingham Building. Bernier said he served in the Air Force’s target intelligence unit in 1990 “developing the large bombs that we would drop on the bunkers” in Operation Desert Storm.
Veterans hospitals deserve government money more than Communists do, declared Mike Rogalsky, who served in an Army hospital evacuation unit in Vung Tao, Vietnam, in 1968. He called Malloy’s support for the People’s Center a “total disrespect to any and all veterans who have fought” Communism.
Another Vietnam vet, former Marine Rick DePinto (at right in photo), occupied the People’s Center’s steps with his buddies from Waterbury’s Rat Pack while the formal speeches took place on the sidewalk. Afterward he offered a more succinct take on the $300,000 bonding request: “It sucks.”
A Long Line Of “Struggles”
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
Using different verbs, Al Marder (pictured at a 2010 event celebrating a planned boathouse for Long Wharf) took the same view — of the protest, and of the effort to block the center’s $300,000.
In a conversation conducted after the protest troops marched victoriously out of New Haven, Marder, like the demonstrators, put the event in a worldwide historic context.
He argued that the $300,000 bond request should be seen as having to do with preserving “an historic building that’s been serving the community” for 75 years—not with Communism. He portrayed the opponents as locked in irrelevant 1950s-style red-baiting.
He questioned why opponents attack him and others in the group for openly belonging to the Communist Party rather than mentioning their many other communal activities. Marder, for instance, runs New Haven’s Peace Commission, chairs the state Freedom Trail organization, presides over the Amistad Committee.
“Everyone’s concerned about my politics beliefs. They are the same beliefs I have had since I was 14,” he said, “that a social society can meet the needs of people and create a society of equals.”
Marder is 90 years old. He knows the history of the People’s Center building. He has helped make that history happen.
Marder presides over Progressive Education and Research Associates, the not-for-profit that owns the People’s Center building at 37 Howe. Marder has run that group since it bought the building in 1973. (“I believe in long careers,” he said.) He can reel off dates of the building’s history: Constructed in 1851. Purchased in 1937 from an Italian-American social club by the Jewish People’s Center. He remembers how that Jewish People’s Center grew out of a breakaway faction of the former Workmen’s Circle left-wing Jewish organization housed across Howe Street. He even remembers the reasons for the break: The Workmen’s Circle failed to oppose World War I or to “recognize the Soviet Union as a socialist state.”
He remembers the 1950s anti-Communist “Red Scare” when those connected with the People’s Center regularly encountered public attacks like the ones leveled at Friday’s event.
“I’m so glad it’s not 1950 [anymore], because I think the American people have moved away from that and are concerned about jobs and education and health and the issues that the society is not able to provide,” Marder said. “I think that was a very tragic period in American life. It [anti-Communism] was used to create a Cold War atmosphere to justify U.S. foreign policy and to create an atmosphere within our country where good, decent people were blamed.”