The photo was taken at the circus in Alkmaar, Holland, in the spring of 1985: left to right, Wendy, Lucy, Tom, Dad and Daniel.
“Always leave things as good or better than you found them.”
– advice he frequently gave his children
“You see, a body can be put in jail but a mind can’t. It can travel anywhere and with its imagination see anything….The secret is not to let our minds be imprisoned, even though sometimes we are not strong enough to keep our bodies out of jail. That’s what is happening to so many people today. They are letting their minds be jailed while their bodies are free. Don’t you ever be afraid to think, or to fight, for what you think is right, dear Rosanne.”
– letter to his daughter Rosanne, then nine years old, from the St. Louis City Jail, September 2, 1954
James Frederick Forest — born August 8, 1910, in Boston, Massachusetts — was the son of Rose Murray, an auburn-haired, brown-eyed Irish immigrant who worked as a maid and artist’s model. It was only as an adult that he learned his mother’s name; the source was Catherine Smith, a social worker who had been a vital source of encouragement during his childhood. She also told him that his father was a Jewish wool merchant from Texas, name unknown, who had immigrated to the United States from Russia.
His early memories included rescue from a tenement fire in Boston at a place where his mother boarded him while she worked. He also recalled his mother taking him to the seaside where he sensed she was saying goodbye. He never saw her again. She died by drowning. Later in life he succeeded in finding her death certificate.
Following her death in 1915, he became a ward of the state of Massachusetts. Initially he was put into an orphanage where, he said, “the soup was so thin that he said it had been flavored only by the shadow of pigeons.” The institution was later closed for mistreating and starving the children in its care.
Thanks to the special interest in him taken by social worker Catherine Smith, in 1916 he was taken into foster care by the Drown family living on Franklin Street in East Pepperell, Massachusetts. He describes his foster-father, Fred Allen Drown, as a Yankee, his foster-mother, Margaret Loretta Drown, as an Irish Catholic. There were several other foster children in the household. He was however the only one who stayed on throughout his childhood. He was fully adopted by the Drowns in 1925. He had worked hard to convince them to adopt him, but never felt sure that they loved him as a son.
He became active in the local Catholic parish, served as an altar boy, and — inspired by the pastor — planned to become a priest. He also became involved in the Boy Scouts, an event which led to his break with the Catholic Church. Another priest who had become pastor objected to any young Catholics being involved in an organization under Protestant sponsorship, as was the local Boy Scout troop. The new pastor preached against it from the pulpit. Jim left the church and didn’t return.
“I learned to work hard to establish myself and to earn money,” he recalled late in his life. “My friends were varied types. My closest friend, who built one of the first radios in town, came from a wealthy family whose father, Jay Walter, was a writer for The London Times. Another friend was a black foster child living in town. We were both ‘state kids.’ There were other friends from ‘Pollack Hill’ and still others who were ‘Cannucks.’ I had a job working with a plumber for whom I used to pick up books at the library — he was the town ‘reprobate’– a drinker — but outward looking, with a variety of ideas. Another influence was the high school principal, a mathematician, and another drinker. He encouraged me to think about getting out of the town and made me think beyond the options of ‘monkhood’ and factory work. I did a lot of reading, including books on utopian societies and about the revolution in Russia. I knew about the social protests going on and had read about the Communist Party in the newspapers. I was a champion debater and also played a good game of chess, my mentor in that regard being the high school janitor.”
While in high school he was active in the town band, playing the French horn and the tuba. He became a skilled harmonica player; later in life, on long stretches of driving, he would entertain his children by playing the harmonica and singing folk songs. His home garden won a prize which brought him to a college campus for three days, but for economic reasons he was not able to enter college after his graduation. He had been offered a scholarship to Harvard but it didn’t include money for living expenses.
Instead, in the fall of 1928, he began a course at the Bartlett School of Tree Surgery. Help offered by Jay Walter, the journalist he had known in Pepperell, led to employment as a tree surgeon on wealthy properties on Long Island, among them the Phipps estate. “One of my fellow tree surgeons,” he recalled, “taught me about Thoreau and Emerson.” While on Long Island, he lived at Old Westbury. In his spare time he was Assistant Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 113 in Westbury.
In 1929 he went to New York City to pick up credits at Columbia University in anticipation of entering the New York Forestry School–plans that went down the drain with the Wall Street Crash. During these months he supported himself as a bouncer-usher at a movie house in the Bronx.
With the Depression underway, he returned to his foster parents’ home in Pepperell where he got a job as foreman of the shipping crew at a paper mill, working the night shift: 13 hours a night, six days a week. In three months he lost 25 pounds.
In 1930 he started his own tree surgery company, working around Pepperell during the winter and in other seasons in for the State of Rhode Island. “It was while in Rhode Island, through my girl friend’s family, that I became acquainted with the terrible conditions of the factory workers.”
In the fall of 1931 he joined some friends in hitchhiking to Maine to pick potatoes in the Aroostock Valley. “I stayed with the family I was working for, an old pioneer family, and during this time saw the extent of bank control.” He also saw “thousands of acres of potatoes lying in the ground because the farmers couldn’t afford to dig them out despite the fact that there were many thousands of hungry people in the country at that moment.” His stay in Maine was ended by sickness.
Next he went to New York City where he hoped to make contact with “the revolutionary movement.” Since the time that he had worked on Long Island, he felt as if the US was approaching a revolutionary situation. “Revolution was in the air,” he recalled.
He reached the city the eve of the first Hunger March from New York to Washington. He slept in flop-houses on the Bowery and ate at restaurants that served soup at five cents a bowl. His income was from whatever odd jobs he could find.
In late November he saw a poster in Battery Park advertising a talk by a woman who had just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union. He attended and afterward talked to her about joining the Communist Party. By this time he was convinced that the solution to America’s economic and social problems was socialism with the people owning the means of production. “I saw in the Communist Party a party that took up the challenge of Depression and fought for the immediate improvement of the needs of the people.” As a result he quickly got involved with the Party-supported Unemployed Councils. Speaking on a soapbox one day, he recalls passing out from hunger.
In the spring of 1932 he was asked to join the leading body of the City Unemployed Council and became editor of the Council publication, The Hunger Fighter. The same year, longing to see the world and having heard that military recruiters were looking for volunteers to take part in a band going to China, he joined the Army. The band opportunity never materialized, nor the overseas travel.
He spent two years in the Signal Corps, stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. It was during this period that he severed relations with the Drown family. While at Fort Monmouth he met his first wife, Marguerite Hendrickson of Red Bank, recently graduated from Smith College. They were married in November of 1934, when he was discharged from the Army and returned to political work and tree surgery in New York City. Marguerite worked for the Municipal Employees Union. They lived in various apartments in lower Manhattan, including one of 14th Street and another on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. In 1935, the same year that he began full-time Party work, he adopted the name Forest. “I hadn’t yet discovered my mother’s name,” he explained. “I was also aware that in the old days names were based on what you did. I was a tree surgeon, and more than that someone who always felt at home in the forest. It seemed just the right name for me.”
In 1936, after six months training at the National Party School, he was assigned to work in the Party’s Western Section, and, after a period in Colorado, in 1937 became state organizer of Utah, based in Salt Lake City. The work included operation of the Jefferson Book Shop. He continued as a self-employed tree surgeon. His first child, James Hendrickson Forest, was born in Salt Lake November 2, 1941. Holidays were spent camping in wilderness areas and National Parks where he acquired a reputation for being “a dead shot with a camera.”
In December 1941, just after the US entered into the Second World War, he attended the Communist Party’s National Convention in New York. The following August he was assigned as the Party’s Mid-West Educational Director, based in Chicago. In 1943 he and Marguerite moved to Denver, where he was District Secretary for the Party’s Western Region. On January 24, 1943, his second child was born, Richard Douglas Forest. In the summer of 1944 he was assigned to Party work in St. Louis, Missouri.
In 1944 he was “swept off his feet” by Dorothy Baskin, a co-worker in Denver, who became his second wife. Dorothy gave birth to his third child, Rosanne, on November 30, 1944.
Drafted in January 1944, he was initially stationed in Texas, then sent to Hawaii where he was a radio operator for the 238th Military Police Company. He remained in service until demobilization in December, after which he returned to Party work, first as Educational Director in Los Angeles. Objecting to the lack of collective leadership in the local Party, he resigned his educational responsibility in April, 1948.
Re-assigned to St. Louis, he was elected Chairman of the Missouri Communist Party. Local Party work at that time was concentrated on a campaign to end the war in Korea and on various projects to promote racial justice. Party members in St. Louis were opposing police brutality, most of which had a racial dimension, and campaigning for the integration of public swimming pools.
With the Cold War and McCarthy Era moving into high gear, he was one of five Missouri Communists (another was his wife, Dorothy) arrested in September 1952 under the Smith Act, charged with conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the US government by force and violence. (Note that they were not charged with acts of violence or with advocating the use of violence but with conspiring to advocate.) Initially the court set $40,000 bail for him, the highest figure for the group. He was in the city jail from the end of September 1952 until early February 1953. He insisted on being the last to be bailed out.
The trial in Federal District Court, St. Louis, began in January 1954. He made the unusual decision of acting as his own lawyer. In his opening statement he told the jurors that he wanted to speak for himself in court so that he could personally explain what he believed and what the Communist Party stood for. Describing his youth, he said, “The ideals of the American Revolution were my ideals and still are and will remain so — the ideals of fighting for freedom, fighting for the liberation of a people from oppression, of having the courage to stand up for one’s ideas, the ideas of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence with their forthright words about how a person should believe and act toward his fellow man…” The immediate concern of the Party, he said, was to work to end racism, to hasten the end the war in Korea, to improve the condition of workers, and to prevent the emergence of an American form of fascism. The Communist Party, he emphasized, was opposed to violence as a method of achieving change in America. “In our country, as I and my co-defendants see it, [socialism] should be achieved by peaceful transition and we will continue to strive to bring that about…”
On June 4, 1954, the “St. Louis Five” were convicted. Dorothy got a three-year sentence, shorter because of her maternal responsibilities; the others were sentenced to five years.
“I’m happy to have been placed in this rather peculiar circumstance of history,” he told the court before sentencing. “Though a relatively inconsequential person, I was able to stand up for what I believe. Maybe some other people will get the idea of standing up for what they believe.” Again he insisted that neither he nor any of his co-defendants sought the violent overthrow of the government. He pointed out that the Communist Party Constitution, which had been read into the court record, expressly opposed the use of violence to achieve political aims.
The judge refused to allow the defendants to remain free while their conviction was appealed. Jim remained in prison from June to mid-August, a long, hot summer, until freed on bail. He again insisted on being the last one out. (In April 1958, the Yates Smith Act case was reversed by the Federal Court of Appeals. In October 1958 the US Department of Justice moved to dismiss more than a hundred similar convictions, including those in the Missouri Smith Act case. The District Court granted the motion.)
After his release, he moved to Los Angeles and began to work in the building trades, while working part-time as the Educational Director for the Communist Party in Southern California.
The marriage with Dorothy ended in 1960. In 1963, he moved to San Francisco where he supported himself through independent building and repair work. In 1964 he married Carla Altman. Tragically, in 1966 she was killed by a sniper as she stepped off the bus one evening.
On February 9, 1969, he married Lucy Cushing Brooks, a longtime friend. It was a marriage that proved happy and enduring. Despite the demands of full-time work, he was active in the San Francisco Communist Party and was intensely involved in the local peace movement and its many activities opposing the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he became Educational Director for the Communist Party in Northern California.
In 1969, he was appointed a Secretary of the World Peace Council, a pro-Moscow group based in Helsinki, Finland. During his five years with the WPC, he traveled (often with Lucy) in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Egypt and other countries. World Peace Council activities in that period focused mainly on the Vietnam war and setting up East-West conferences. While in North Vietnam, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong’s first question to Jim was a request for information about me, as I was at the time serving a two-year sentence for being one of the Milwaukee Fourteen, a group that burned draft records in Milwaukee in 1968 as a protest against the Vietnam War. Meeting with Salvador Allende in Chile, Allende talked with Jim about the military coup he anticipated would bring about the downfall of Chile’s democratic government, and result in his own murder — events which soon followed.
Returning to San Francisco in 1974, for the next five years he was manager of Saint Francis Square, a low to middle-income housing project with 298 units, a project funded by the ILWU and the Pacific Maritime Association. Saint Francis Square was a highly successful cooperative as well as a model for building integrated neighborhoods.
In 1977 he and Lucy moved to Santa Rosa where they were among the founders of a low and middle-income housing cooperative. “His contribution to the planning, development, construction and occupancy of Santa Rosa Creek Commons,” comments Calvin Simons, “goes back to the time he was manager of Saint Francis Square. Through friends in Santa Rosa Jim and Lucy learned about a group of people planning to start a housing cooperative. Beginning in 1978 or so, they associated with this group and began coming to coop meetings. Jim’s supportive presence and his extensive experience in construction, management, and housing cooperatives was invaluable. The dedication which Jim and Lucy felt toward this project and its success was demonstrated by the fact that they moved to Santa Rosa in 1980 where they could be close to the action. They managed two different local housing projects prior to the time they could become one of the first occupants of Santa Rosa Creek Commons.” After its opening in 1982, the cooperative was singled for several honors, including the Certificate of National Merit from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In 1980 both he and Lucy joined the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa. Jim became a member of the Fellowship’s choir. He was active in the Santa Rosa Seniors Center and often played in productions of its theatrical group, the Footlighters. In “My Fair Lady” he was Henry Higgins. He also was active with the Santa Rosa Players, appearing in “Our Town” and “The Mikado.” He was part of a singing group called The Mellowairs.
He was a member of the Advisory Council of Area Agency on Housing in Sonoma County and active with the Burbank Housing Development Corporation. On October 31, 1989, the Board of Supervisors of Sonoma County, California, presented him with a resolution commending him for nearly ten years of “exemplary service” with the Burbank Housing Development Corporation, a program for low and middle-income housing. The citation noted his involvement in nearly every aspect of the Burbank Corporation’s work, as a member of the Administration Committee, Education and Training Committee, Project Committee and Community Relations and Media Committee. (At his home at Sonoma Avenue, his closet — much resembling the closet of Fibber McGee — remains stuffed with Burbank Corporation files and folders.)
He was a person who had an extraordinary impact on many others.
One the events that I often recall happened when I was driving with Dad from St. Louis to Los Angeles in the summer when I was — I am guessing — 11 or 12. We stopped at a roadside restaurant in the Ozarks and walked up to the front door. I don’t know if I would have noticed the small sign tacked on the door if Dad hadn’t pointed it out. It said something like, “Colored people served in back.” Dad asked, “Do you think we ought to go in?” I was hungry and the food inside smelled inviting. On the other hand, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to eat in a place that only welcomed white people. I said, “No.” “Neither do I,” he said. So we got back in the car and drove on. My perception of the world and myself was never the same after that. Dad hadn’t told me what to do or given me a lecture about racism. But somehow he made me more aware of what was around me and that I had to think about choices — what doors to go through from now on.
In 1987 his daughter Rosanne taped an interview with him in which he discussed, among other things, the effects of aging.
“While I notice less adequacy, less energy and less intellectual responsiveness,” he told her, “and slower learning, socially I don’t see much difference. I have a quieter social life and I am more limited in what I can do and where I can go.”
She asked what he thought about his eventual death. “I don’t think about it with worry or concern. I accept it as part of life. It happens. I hope greatly for no period of Alzheimer’s or other major incapacity. I definitely don’t want to be a burden to anyone because of an incapable body.”
She asked how he evaluated his life. “I had some successes in trying to do something about what I think is wrong. I wish that I had been better in the work. I regret that I didn’t manage to find more time for relaxation — dancing, music, hiking and camping. I regret the tumultuousness of the transition between my first two marriages. On the positive side, I have been most satisfied by participation in efforts to change attitudes on social problems and helping develop better understanding.”
It is an evaluation those who have had the privilege of knowing him are bound to consider amazingly, but also characteristically, modest. He was one of those people who impressed and influenced not only his friends but his opponents.
More than anything else, he was a builder, a fixer, and an inspired amateur inventor and improviser who couldn’t get through a single day, as long as he had the strength to lift a hammer, without improving or repairing something. “I was always fascinated,” he said while battling with cancer and hardly able to raise his head, “with how things worked and how to fix them when they didn’t work.”
In his later years, he rarely confided his membership in the Communist Party. “What I did for housing would hardly have been possible if I had been labeled in that way,” he explained. “The stigma of the word ‘Communist’ still remains, even in these days of Gorbachev! Of course it isn’t easy to explain it. The sad thing is that most people know much more about the wrongs committed by Communists — and they were numerous! — and not very much about our good qualities, but these are numerous too. For me the Party was the best ball game in town.”
Lucy had called at the end of April, urging me to come without delay. I stayed in Santa Rosa for a week.
Even in those final days his sense of humor was still often in evidence, and his Boston accent still strong.
Dad and I talked several times about heaven. I told him that God does not erase what he has made, least of all those who have loved creation and cared for it day by day. He reached out with his right hand, gripped my hand with intensity, and said a heartfelt yes, with tears in his eyes. I said that he would at last see his dear mother, who died when he was a child. “I will be so astonished,” he said. These are things we never talked of earlier in life, though I had several times told him that he was a love-centered rather than ideologically-driven person, which he always appreciated hearing.
He died holding my crucifix. This was silver, very solid, hand-made, done in an early Romanesque style, with the Slavonic words on the back, “Save and Protect.” The work of a Serbian artist who lives in Holland, it had been given to me when I was received into the Russian Orthodox Church. Dad had immediately noticed the cross when I arrived at his bedside, asking about it. The next morning, he asked if he could borrow it. I told him I would give it to him as a gift. “No, just to borrow. I won’t need it very long.” Lucy was out of the room at that moment — he asked me not to tell her he was dying. (Of course she knew!) We talked about what the cross meant: the link between his suffering and the suffering of Christ, and the connection of the cross with the resurrection. From that moment on, the crucifix was next to him, hanging from the railing at the side of his bed as his skin was too sensitive to wear it. He sometimes told visitors it was from me, other times said it had been given him by a priest. I take the latter as an indication that it was for him a sign of connection with the Church. Lucy told me it was in his hands when he died.
While with him I wrote a biographical essay about him (the text you are reading, but in draft form). I read this aloud to him before I flew back to Holland after a week-long stay. He was alert all the time, the longest stretch of being fully awake the whole time I was there. He was so moved by it — tears running down his face. Time and again he said, “Did I really do that?” “Yes, you did.” “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he replied each time.
At times he didn’t know where he was, though generally he knew everyone who came to see him. Each day I was impressed how caring he was about the people who came to see him — friends, the nurse who visited each day, an ambulance driver. No matter how much pain he was struggling with, he wanted to know how each person was, how their children were doing, and similar questions.
Jim Forest died peacefully mid-morning May 7, 1990, at home in Santa Rosa. Lucy and several close friends were with him. He would have been 80 on August 8.
There are those on both the Left and Right who are better at ideas about improving society than enjoying people. While Dad had many ideas about how to fix and improve the world, how to make it better than it is, most of all he enjoyed people. Ideology didn’t come first. His amazing decency and kindness had its deep roots in empathy and love.
It was only after his death that it became apparent that sometime late in his life he had quietly resigned from the Communist Party. There was only a short death notice in The People’s World, the west coast newspaper of The Communist Party. Had he still been a member, given all that he had done as a Communist in earlier years, it would have been a major obituary. It was also noteworthy that only a few Communists attended his memorial service.
[Text by Jim Forest (the younger) with help from his father plus Lucy Forest, Rosanne Forest Jefferies, Ed Kehoe, Dorothy DeLacy and other friends.]
