Fred E. Walker, Communist, just appears out of nowhere, struts briefly across the Pacific Northwest political stage, and then vanishes back into nowhere.

Having a "Party name," or alias was standard fare for members of the Communist Party in that era. Ludwig Katterfeld, the 1916 Socialist Ungovernor, became "J. Carr" when he later joined the CP. In Walker's case, it is difficult to ascertain if "Fred E. Walker" was a genuine or fake name. We do know he was a native of Oakland, California, born around 1907-1909, and had Finnish-American inlaws in Woodland, Wash. He is the first Ungovernor we have encountered who was born in the 20th century. And quite possibly the youngest ever, being 23 or so at the time he ran in 1932.

We first encounter Walker in the late 1920s (about the same time Katterfeld was kicked out of the CP) in connection with the Young Workers (Communist) League summer schools. One was held in Winlock, Wash. in 1927 and another in Woodland in 1928. Finnish Americans seemed quite open to the idea of communism and with Winlock being a community of Finns, it was natural to have the school situated there.

The 1928 summer school in Woodland's Finnish Hall raised more eyebrows. One local letter to the editor described the school's philosophy as "animated by the fermenting Muscovite cauldron of cabbage and vodka." On a field trip to Portland on July 4, the students heard Communist speakers, including young Fred Walker, who gave a speech on "Workers Education."

The Stock Market crash of Oct. 1929 played right into the hands of the Communists. Having been chased into the shadows in the 1920s, they began to resurface, realizing that millions of jobless Americans were receptive to political change. And the government hit back. Oregon had a legal tool called the Criminal Syndicalism Act which had not been used since the post WWI Red Scare. It was dusted off and employed as an excuse to imprison or deport undesirable troublemakers. In the initial wave of arrests late 1930/early 1931 the first test case in court was a Russian ditchdigger named Ben Boloff (born 1893). Fred Walker was among those arrested but made bail.

While he was free Walker made the most of his time. He was one of the leaders of a small army of unemployed marching in protest at Portland City Hall on Feb. 10, 1931. This was one of many such protests taking place that day up and down the Pacific Coast. The Morning Oregonian Feb. 11, 1931 recorded the event:

ARMY OF 600 GOES TO CITY HALL FOR AID

Unemployed And Radicals Among Crowd

Demands Include $1,500,000, Free Street Cars, Auditorium, Houses, Books and Police Cut.

Six hundred men-- many of them unemployed and some of them admitting that they were communists-- stood for an hour yesterday in front of the city hall on Fourth street while Fred Walker, the spokesman, presented the 13 demands of the unemployed from a soap box.

Mayor Baker stood beside the speaker, and answered him directly when he had finished. He made no speech from the platform, he distributed no cigarettes and he confined himself to a few brief sentences.

The unemployed, according to Walker's speech, demanded that the city raise a fund of $1,500,000 to be turned over to them and to be used for their relief; free street car rides for the unemployed and their families; the use of the public auditorium for meetings; the use of city property and vacant buildings for the housing of unemployed; that the city stop the eviction of the unemployed who could not pay rent; that no city official should receive more than $2500 a year in salary; that the police force be cut in half; that the censor board funds and the Community Chest funds be turned over to them; that there be placed in force a special tax on property in excess of $2500; that the interest on sinking funds for city bonds be diverted to relief; that free textbooks be given to children of the unemployed; that the vagrancy laws be abolished, and that the commuinists now in jail be released.

Walker, who is out of jail under $2500 bail on a charge of criminal syndicalism, brought the meeting to a dramatic point by asking directly for the reply of the city to these demands.

Mayor Baker said that it was illegal to meet these demands; that it was impossible; that the city was powerless, and that Walker would be "wise to watch his words" because of the large number of Americans "out there."

Previous to presenting the demands in public, a committee from the group called at the mayor's office; he was not there at the time, but returned soon.

The Boloff trial, which took place the following week, included Walker as a witness for the defense. An undercover police officer testified, among other things, about the CP's dissemination of propaganda at public schools and their plans to rob banks as a way of financing the overthrow of the capitalist system. During breaks in the trial, Walker gave speeches on the street just outside. On Feb. 23, Walker was the primary speaker at a pro-Boloff rally in Astoria, probably in the Finnish section of town. The Associated Press reported that Walker was "speaking in English," suggesting either he and/or his audience had a different first language. As a point of trivia I cannot resist, Maila Nurmi, also known to my generation as "Vampira," was another Astoria Finn, although she didn't live there until later in the decade.

Boloff was convicted the day after the Astoria rally and sentenced to ten years in prison. "If he doesn't like the Stars and Stripes," declared Judge Ekwall, "let him go back where he can look at the Red flag every day." Boloff contracted tuberculosis within 15 months of imprisonment and was released to the Multnomah County Poor Farm (now McMenamin's Edgefield Manor) as he neared death. He died in the summer of 1932.

Meanwhile, Walker went to trial in March, 1931. According to The Vanguard (Seattle) in an article entitled "Boss Class Court Tries Communist," the writer claims: "The prosecution wanted to get Walker after Boloff because he is an active, efficient and militant fighter. Radicals in the Northwest regard these trials as a direct attack on the Communist Party for its militancy and further as a threat to all aggressive working class action." Walker was found not guilty. Another CP leader named John Moore was also not convicted, and as a result all the remaining suspects had the charges dropped. Historian Albert F. Gunns noted Walker and Moore were "far more culpable and dangerous to the state than Boloff ... Thus Boloff was left holding the bag." So the Portland CP gained a martyr.

In late 1931 Walker became involved with the efforts of the International Labor Defense to repeal Oregon's Criminal Syndicalism Act (it finally happened in 1937). During this time, he helped recruit a teacher named Eugene V. Dennett. In his book Agitprop: The Life of an American Working-Class Radical (1990), Dennett writes he first saw Walker at an ILD meeting, "A representative of the Communist party, Fred Walker, spoke spiritedly of the need for all believers in democracy to rally behind this legal case to insure that the principles of democracy be preserved."

Dennett decided to join the CP and went through a rigorous screening and investigation. After a series of passwords, and treasure-hunt type directions, made it to his first CP gathering:

"At that first meeting I learned that Fred Walker was the Section Organizer in charge of all Communist party activity in Oregon. He gave out assignments to many different members. I was ordered to attend a new members' class and labor history class. These classes kept me quite busy outisde of my teaching duties."

"It soon became apparent that most of the other new members, who were mainly middle class liberal intellectuals, were learning abstract ideas-- book learning-- in these classes, while I was finding confirmation and academic explanations of my own class experience. Before I realized what was happening I found myself teaching some of those classes. Then I was elected to attend a Communist party district meeting in Seattle. Fred Walker arranged everything, including a stop at a farm near Woodland, Washington, run by some Finns, to whom he was related by marriage, where we were treated to sauna baths and banquetlike meals both going to Seattle and returning to Portland."

Seattle's top Communist was a fellow by the name of Alex Noral. Historian Albert Anthony Acena called Noral "dogma-bound and unimaginative." Locked in an intra-party political battle, he wanted Walker to join him in Washington State. But as Dennett explains, "Walker considered that to be an incorrect move because he had so many irons in the fire in Portland which he had to continue to attend to. He stressed that he just couldn't leave because there were not enough capable leaders in Portland to carry on all the campaigns he had started." Instead, Walker got Dennett to go north.

But Noral was not appeased. When the CP higher ups sent three unseasoned party members from New York to help in the July 4, 1932 hunger march in Olympia, Noral ordered the proven protest organizer Walker to Washington State as backup.

The CP plan was to basically hijack the hunger march on the State Capitol from the Unemployed Citizens' League and United Producers of Washington. Members of the UCL had camped out in Priest Point Park the previous evening. The next day about 1000 marchers gathered on the Capitol campus, with about 1500 bystanders. According to historian Terry R. Willis:

"The participants broke into two factions, with the unemployed leagues and United Producers' League on one side and the Communist-led National Council for the Unemployed on the other."

"League members formed into columns to march to the capitol building. A Post-Intelligencer reporter, Lester Hunt, took notes as a band of Communists, uninvited, stepped to the front of one of the columns to lead the march, 'with an array of flaming placards carrying characteristic slogans.' The marchers whose column had been usurped fell back and regrouped behind the Seattle League's banner. When they reached the capitol steps, Hunt reported, 'The reds camped on one side of the steps and the unemployed hoisted their banner on the other.'"

According to Dennett, Walker was in the thick of things at this event. Gov. Hartley had quietly crept out of town before the march. To make matters worse, several fistfights erupted between the factions, resulting in many injuries. The League marchers destroyed the Communist banners. The publicity was all bad, with the violence gaining more attention than the original intention of the march. As Terry R. Willis wrote, "The altercation at the state capital on the Fourth of July did nothing to endear the Communists to the leaders of the Unemployed Citizens' League."

Walker had been a Washington State resident for less than a year when the CP nominated him for Governor. Noral was nominated for the U.S. Senate. At the time Walker was named, the newspapers picked up on the fact he was 23 years old, making him the youngest person ever nominated for Governor. In early 1931 he was also reported as 23 years old, so his actual year of birth is questionable.

 

Needless to say, his campaign was not widely covered by the media. I did find one mention of an upcoming rally for Oct. 3 in the Issaquah Press (courtesy of Footnote), but the event itself was not reported. If there ever was an American election year ripe for the CP, 1932 was it. But FDR and the Democrats rose to the occasion and managed to institutionalize some very radical (for the time) ideas, stealing the thunder of several third parties.

Walker placed 5th out of seven candidates with 2,532 votes. He fared best in Southwest Washington, placing 4th in Grays Harbor County (223), Thurston (112), Pacific (54) and Lewis (47). It is probably safe to assume many of his votes came from the Finnish community.

And now Walker starts to fade. Noral was bumped out of his Seattle district organizer role in 1933 by the CP big bugs. It would seem that Walker returned to Portland, but by 1934 was in the Soviet Union.

According to the United Press, a roundup of Communists on July 15, 1934 accused of meddling in Pacific Coast port labor disputes resulted in nearly 400 arrests. Among those nabbed: "Mrs. Fred Walker, wife of the leader of the Young Communist League here, now in Russia allegedly at expense of the Soviet Government. She was released to care for her child."

So what happened to Fred E. Walker? Did he perish in what The Onion headlined as "Stalin Announces Five-Year 'Everybody Dies' Plan"? Did he return to the Bay Area and die in 1970?

I do have one clue why he was in Russia. Noral had attended the Lenin Institute, an international school designed to spread the gospel of communism. Being an alum of that place gave one a certain prestige among your peers back home. Perhaps Walker went there.

If he did, one of his classmates might have been a Finnish-American named Arvo Gustav Halberg (1910-2000). Arvo took the name Gus Hall and ran as the CPUSA candidate for President 1972-1984. Hall visited Olympia during the 1972 campaign.