Gerry Foley Archive | ETOL Main Page
(George was fluent in Russian and used to cover the Russian dissident scene for Joe Hansen’s Intercontinental Press. Expelled along with Gerry, he went on to translate some books by Bukharin, including How it all began).
Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2012 8:15 PM
Subject: On Gerry Foley’s death today
What a blow! The loss of Gerry stuns me.
I’ll try to write a little about Gerry. A little now, and I hope more later.
He and I and Stephen F. Cohen were graduate students with “assistantships” (money paid in return for our work) assigned to cataloguing the Boris Nicolaevsky collection at Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute in the school year of autumn 1960–spring 1961.
The three of us would discuss the “issues of the day” as we wrote out library catalogue cards giving author, title, etc. in the Library of Congress transliteration system for the mostly Russian-language books and pamphlets from the old Menshevik Nicolaevsky’s extensive collection of many thousand items.
I was trying to recruit people to Fair Play for Cuba, a nationwide campaign to defend revolutionary Cuba against the media campaign that was going full blast in the fall of 1960. Mistakenly I thought the liberal Steve would be more likely to respond, but in the end, Gerry surprised me.
The campus reactionaries, mainly “Young Americans for Freedom” and the “Young Republicans” headed by a sleazeball named (if I remember right) Tom Huston, who was later an adviser to President Richard Nixon and became the author of Nixon’s notorious “enemies’ list,” were trying to deny Fair Play for Cuba the right to become a recognized campus group. We started a petition for free speech rights and the right of freedom of assembly and freedom of organization on the IU campus. We had tables in the main classroom building where hundreds of students did gather around and signed the petitions for the right of FPCC to be a recognized campus group. Gerry turned up right in the thick of that work, and probably did more than anyone in our circle of supporters to get the maximum number of names on those petitions. And we won the right to be a recognized campus group!
Gerry had earlier expressed some doubts to me about Marxism, but after that successful free-speech fight into which he jumped feet first, and for which he went all-out, he was a Marxist revolutionary and remained that for the rest of his life It was right around that same time that the Cuban revolutionaries successfully defeated Kennedy-Eisenhower’s atrocious Bay of Pigs invasion, Gerry wanted to join the Young Socialist Alliance. I and my wife Ellen had brought this revolutionary seed from the Boston area, where we had been among the founding members of the Young Socialist newspaper’s support group there in late 1958 or early 1959, and then in the spring of 1960 (if I’m remembering this right) we were among the founding members nationally of the Young Socialist Alliance. The YSA cooperated closely with the Socialist Workers Party and shared the views of that party, which represented the main stream of U.S. Trotskyism and which included many veterans from the 1930s, who had worked with Trotsky to help found the Fourth International (such as Joe Hansen, who had been one of Trotsky’s secretaries in Mexico and a leading figure in the SWP since the 1930s).
When Ellen and I, in the fall of 1960, first began our efforts to form an FPCC chapter on campus, the student newspaper of Indiana University at Bloomington, regularly ran headlines denouncing us as “Mr. and Mrs. Fair Play.”
For both the YSA and the SWP, defense of the Cuban revolution and building the Fair Play for Cuba Committee nationally and internationally were the top priority in 1960 and 1961. Among the defenders and supporters of the Cuban revolution at Indiana University who decided, like Gerry, to join and build the YSA were Jim Bingham, Ralph Levitt, Jack Marsh, and Tom Morgan. (There were others as well, and I apologize to those whose names I’m not remembering and recording right at this moment.) Bingham, Levitt, and Morgan later became well known around the country as the Bloomington defendants, ca. 1963–1964. The Republican attorney general in Indiana tried to use a McCarthy-era law against the right of the YSA to exist in Indiana at all, let alone at the IU campus in Bloomington. We won that free-speech fight also, after an expensive and exhausting legal case that took on nationwide dimensions. The courts finally threw out Indiana’s “anti-Communist law,’ which prohibited the works of Marx and Lenin and “any or all teachings of the same” – including the story of Robin Hood. That was illegal. To talk about or uphold the example of Robin Hood.
Anyhow, that is my first and best memory of Gerry, and I’ll leave it at that for the time being.
Biography page for Gerry Foley | Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism
Last updated on 22 January 2020