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Dorothy Ray HealeyAmerican social and political figure
Date of Birth: 22.09.1914
Country:  USA |
Content:
- Dorothy Ray Healey: A Life in Communism and Beyond
- Political Activism
- The Cold War Era
- Breaking with the Party
- Later Years
Dorothy Ray Healey: A Life in Communism and Beyond
Early Life and FamilyDorothy Harriet Rosenblum was born in Denver, Colorado, on April 13, 1914, to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Her father's family, the Rosenblums, emphasized their Hungarian heritage and identified more closely with Austro-Hungarian culture than with Judaism. On the other hand, her mother's family was orthodox Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was a shochet, a ritual slaughterer.
Healey was known as a "red diaper baby." Her mother was exposed to socialism as a teenager and joined the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in 1900. Her father, by contrast, was apolitical and worked as a traveling salesman for a grocery company.
Political Activism
At the age of 14, Healey joined the Young Communist League (YCL), the youth wing of the Communist Party. She became a full member of the CPUSA in 1932. Her first organizing experience came from working in a peach cannery on the orders of the YCL for 12 cents an hour.
Healey became a prominent figure in the Communist Party, serving as a union organizer and chair of the CPUSA in Southern California. She was eventually elected to the national leadership. She mentored many young communists and labor activists.
The Cold War Era
In the 1950s, Healey and 14 other Californians were convicted under the anti-communist Smith Act for "conspiring to advocate the forcible overthrow of the government." She faced five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but the Supreme Court overturned the verdict.
Healey faced another prison term and a large fine under the McCarran Act, a McCarthy-era law requiring the registration of "agents of a foreign government" (the logic being that the CPUSA was under Soviet control). In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled the registration provision a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Breaking with the Party
A turning point for Healey came in 1956 when she read Nikita Khrushchev's speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," which revealed the crimes committed by Joseph Stalin in the USSR. From that point forward, she openly advocated for the CPUSA to embrace democracy and loosen its ties to the Soviet Union.
While many others, such as writer Howard Fast, left the CPUSA after the revelations of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Healey attempted to reform it from within. Her story is recounted in her book with historian Maurice Isserman, "Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party" (1990), which reveals "the aspirations, convictions, illusions—and eventual disillusionment—of a generation of young Communists" who joined the movement before and during the Great Depression.
Healey resigned her leadership post in the party in 1968 after Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sanctioned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush its "socialism with a human face" movement. She remained in the party until 1973 but continued to criticize its leadership.
Later Years
In 1974, Healey joined the New American Movement (NAM) and became a member of its interim national committee in 1975. In 1982, she supported NAM's merger with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). She provided a bridge between the activists of the 1930s and the younger generation of "New Leftists" inspired by the anti-Vietnam War movement. She influenced hundreds of young activists who later made significant contributions to the labor movement and community organizations in the Los Angeles area.
Healey moved to Washington, D.C., in 1983 to live with her son, Richard Healey, and help raise her grandchildren. In Los Angeles, she had hosted a show on Pacifica Radio since 1959, and in Washington, she and Richard co-hosted "Dialogue," an hour-long show on WPFW on Wednesday mornings.
Dorothy Ray Healey was married to, in her words, "three good men": Lon Sherman, Don Healey, and Philip Connelly. All three marriages ended in divorce.
She once wrote: "My hatred of capitalism, which degrades and devalues human beings, is as strong today as it was when I joined the Young Communist League in 1928. I remain a Communist to this day, though without a party."
Healey died of respiratory failure and pneumonia on November 13, 2006, at the age of 91, at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland.
An extensive collection of Healey's papers and other materials on Communist Party history is housed at the California State University, Long Beach, Library Archives. Healey appeared in two documentary films: "Seeing Red" (1983) and "Dorothy Healey: An American Red" (1984).
As a leading figure in the California Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, Healey became an outspoken critic of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and increasingly at odds with the orthodox pro-Soviet party leadership of Gus Hall. She eventually left the CPUSA to join the New American Movement and became a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982.
