Nor do I think that this is as abstruse and metaphysical as it sounds. Or if it is, then it is well to remember that American democracy is itself a metaphysic, blending as it does subjective truth (“the inalienable rights of man”) with moral abstractions (“liberty and justice for all”) and mystical concepts (“the will of the people”) which admittedly cannot be achieved by all the institutions ever created by man. It is, this democracy, “impractical.” It was this that the Communists took cognizance of and figured on. They did it three times between 1918 and 1942, and each time in crisis, when they thought the material values which they wished to substitute as the goal of struggle were enhanced by their very absence. The terms they used were purely materialistic too, and they applied them in a context that was unbounded by the American continent—and this was another mistake. “The American Communist Negroes,” the Communists said, “are the historical leaders of their comrades in Africa and to fit them for dealing the most telling blows to world imperialism as allies of the world’s working class is enough to justify all the time and energy that the Workers (Communist) Party must devote to the mobilization for the revolutionary struggle of the Negro workers in American industry.”[8] Then they tried to extirpate the spiritual values of democracy by extirpating Christianity. They did not carry on a full-scale campaign of godlessness among American Negroes, but the Negro poet Langston Hughes, who went to visit Russia as a Guest of the State, came back apparently spiritually callous and published the poem “Goodbye, Christ,” and the appalling fact was lost on no one. By and large, Negroes did not feel that Christ and religion were ready for the discard, certainly not before they had been tried. Indeed, their egalitarian aspirations had their roots in Biblical injunction. So the purge of the priests, the smashing of ikons, and the tearing down of the churches, which Negroes read about in the American press, were factors in the failure of the Communist Party to win the support of the black masses.