Page:Meet the Communists (Flynn).djvu/16

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Find out for yourself what the Communist Party is and what it does. Read our papers, the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker, and our books and pamphlets, as an antidote for the poison of the Red-baiters.

Here's some big news about the Communist Party of the U.S.A. that those poisonous pro-fascists will not enjoy. On March 15, we opened our 1946 Party Building Campaign. Our goal is a comparatively modest one—to add at least 20,000 new members to our Party. Are you ready to be one of the 20,000? We are not addressing our invitation to a carefully selected exclusive list of prospective members, although we do anticipate that many with whom we have worked intimately during the period of the war and since—in shops, unions, political campaigns are "naturals" to join our Party now. If you, my reader, belong to this group, you have a real respect for our Party, I'm sure, and want to help us build a powerful Communist Party. But we are extending our invitation far beyond such immediate circles.

We especially invite veterans who may never have been in contact with us before their enlistment, but who met Communists abroad and learned to know their courage. Many American soldiers are looking for the Communists here. They met them in the Resistance Movement in France, in the Partisans of Italy and Yugoslavia. They shared their food with them. Many an American soldier owes his life to them. On a recent trip in Pennsylvania I heard from one steel worker of his son, from another of his brother, both fliers, who crashed in enemy territory and whose lives were saved by Communist Partisans. Thousands of returned soldiers view Communists with different eyes. I returned from the Women's International Congress in Paris recently on a troop transport, and I did not find a single soldier who was surprised or shocked when I told him I had represented the Communist Party. Instead they immediately asked me innumerable questions about conditions in the U.S.A., as if I must be an authority. They are not at all surprised to find American Communists in the forefront of the struggles related to them—for jobs, houses, G.I. Rights, and that our soldiers be brought home promptly out of all friendly countries. Neither the sol-

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