I’ve been thinking about checking out the weekly Zoom meeting of the Denver-area Communist Party. A local economist and writer friend of mine said he thought I might fit right in.

I don’t know.

Maybe.

It just so happens that I’ve recently been reading a couple of books about Karl Marx — “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism,” by Gabriel Rockhill, and “Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx” by John Bellamy Foster.

Maybe I’m a Communist trapped in a Socialist’s body.

I was born a Socialist, although not until I was older was I able to give my orientation a name that felt comfortable and right. Am I not done changing? Am I really a Communist after all?

Growing up in the 50s, most of the dads in the neighborhood were “union men” and had fought in the war alongside Russian communists.



My grandparents had a portrait of FDR on their living room wall. They, with four children, could never have survived the Depression had it not been for the Civilian Conservation Corp and gramp’s job driving a road grader for WPA. After the “Depression Years” had become stories for the grandchildren and it was time for their generation to “retire,” they had enough — Social Security on top of a union-negotiated company pension. Roosevelt had been dead for decades, but whenever the checks arrived in the mail, grandma would cook a pot roast for Sunday dinner and end her prayer with: “And God bless you, Mr. Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt was a Socialist. He never called himself one, but others did. A self-identified American Aristocracy — the titans of industry and finance — called him a Socialist and maybe even a Communist. They called him a “A Traitor to his Class.” They tried to organize a coup to take him out. They tried to enlist the support of Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler, a national war hero, recipient of two Medals of Honor. Butler went along for a while to learn what he could, but then spilled the beans to Congress. It was big news at the time.

Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, the same year Fascists, backed by City of London and Wall Street Banks, came to power in Germany. Right away, he recognized the legitimacy of the Communist government in Russia. Although officially neutral during the Spanish Civil War, he looked the other way when thousands of young Americans joined the International Brigade, fighting and dying alongside Communists and Socialists in their struggle against Franco’s Fascist forces.

Roosevelt ended Prohibition so everybody could drink without having to look over their shoulder. He named a Woman to head the Department of Labor. He told bankers what they could and could not do. He championed Public ownership of the means of production … Western dams, TVA, rural electrification, the St. Lawrence Seaway in the U.P. He was a dangerous Socialist, all right, if not worse.

Unlike me, Roosevelt wasn’t always a Socialist. He wasn’t born that way. He was born into an  ancien regime that lived in castles looking down and out over the Hudson River Valley where the servants lived, the thems. He went to the right schools. Married a second cousin. Started a family and then started running around, a big shot full of energy, Assistant Secretary of the Navy during WWI, vice-Presidential candidate in 1920, living the life of a bon vivant in the high-powered gestalt of secrets and elites, but then he got caught cheating on his wife.

After Eleanor found out, it was Franklin’s mother who convinced her to stay for the sake of appearances.

He was thirty-nine years old in 1921 and considering a possible run for the Presidency in 1924 when he woke up one morning crippled from the waist down. It was polio.

Seeking relief and hopefully a cure, he began going to Warm Springs, Georgia, famous for its steaming hot pools of therapeutic waters where polio victims from everywhere and every walk of life went too. That’s where FDR became a Socialist. Where he came to realize that he was just like them.

I’ve been thinking about running for the Aurora, Colorado, City Council. In my mind’s eye, I can visualize the campaign posters all over town on front lawns and at street corners: “VOTE FOR GAUTHER. ENDORSED BY COMMUNISTS.”

That should turn some heads. Maybe get me a write-up in the local newspaper.