21 Facts About Fred Beal

Fred Erwin Beal was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion.

When Fred Beal decided to skip the appeal of his Gastonia trial conviction, and travel to Russia he was following his co-defendant and Communist Party comrade, Clarence Miller.

Fred Beal was sent away on a propaganda tour of Central Asia.

At the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, Fred Beal directed "Propaganda and Cultural Affairs" for a colony of several hundred foreign workers and specialists.

Fred Beal had thought of visiting Leon Trotsky in his Turkish exile, but did not have the funds to secure a visa from the Turkish consul in Odessa.

Fred Beal's story corroborated that of the paper's labor editor, Harry Lang, who had himself been to the region.

Fred Beal recalled that, against all expectations, it was the most recent immigrant groups that sustained the strike over the next two bitterly cold winter months: "the Italians, Poles, Syrians [Lebanese] and Franco-Belgians".

Fred Beal signed both with the Wobblies and with Socialist Party of US presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who despite his differences with the syndicalism of the Wobblies' One Big Union, had rallied support for the Lawrence strike.

Fred Beal dropped out of the Socialist Party and for the next three years devoted himself to local organizing within the One Big Union.

Fred Beal viewed the Communist Party as "the most effective radical organization in the field, almost the only one that was really active in behalf of the workers".

When reassigned to North Carolina Fred Beal was entertaining growing doubts.

Fred Beal had begun to make a distinction between "the Party and the cause".

In February 1938, Beal surrendered himself in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Governor Clyde R Hoey, who nine years before had been his prosecutor in Gastonia, so that later Beal wrote: "in my escape from the Soviet state, I simply transferred myself from one prison to another".

In October 1939, Fred Beal was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington.

Fred Beal repeated his claim that the CPUSA leaders deliberately made the Gastonia trial a vehicle for Communist propaganda, inflaming the southern jurors and dooming the defendants.

Fred Beal's parole was authorized by governor J Melville Broughton in 1942.

In 1947, Fred Beal appeared again before HUAC, then investigating the activities of Leon Josephson, who had been one of the ILD attorneys at Gastonia.

Fred Beal testified that he had met Josephson several times while in Moscow and that he knew him to be a Soviet secret agent.

Fred Beal worked for a while in a New York City textile company, quietly pursued union activities and lectured on Communism's threat to labor.

Fred Beal died, age 57, of a heart attack in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Fred Beal appears as a character in John Sweeney's thriller The Useful Idiot.