OPPRESSED PEOPLES as a WHOLE and YOUTH and WOMEN generally.”Kinney served as Chair of the Ferdinand Smith Waterfront Club and the 37 th District Community Club, Communist Party USA, and in that capacity forwarded books on behalf of the Club to the Douglas-Truth Library in Seattle in 1981.
As Northwest Editor of the People’s World from 1969 to 1979, she prepared a draft of “Press and Party Fall Action Plans” wherein she enumerated basic goals: end the war, free Angela Davis, build a “rank-and- file movement to Smash the Nixon Wage Freeze.” Her use of capital letters revealed her concern about “class. Consider for example, Marion Kinney, who wore many hats in the Seventies and Eighties. A Party member since 1937, she had served as Vice-President of the Washington Commonwealth Federation in the early 1940s. Marion Kinney was Northwest Editor of the People's World from 1969 to 1979. Perhaps that 1998 dramatic presentation was a bittersweet reminder that their greatest moments were now consigned to the past by a society no longer interested in their message.Individual members zealously devoted themselves to the Party cause in the last decades of the twentieth century. The future of this aging almost relic-like organization as the new century began was in direct contrast to the energy expended in the earlier decades, an energy once necessarily pent-up lest members be victims of persecution. Members still confront the negative perception engendered in the Fifties, and are wary enough of their once-pejorative label to be circumspect, partly because of their diminishing numbers and waning influence. Mangaoang, who had gone “underground” for a year in the Fifties, and Irene Hull each recount the emotional impact of the “Red Scare.” In fact, that night’s audience would hear B.J. In the audience that night were veterans of those events, former Party members who had waited half a century for Seattle to come to grips with its Cold War history. Accused of being Communists, threatened with prison for refusing to testify, the couple lost their theater in 1950 and Burton James died soon after. The Playhouse Theater had once been known as the Repertory Playhouse and its founders, Florence and Burton James, had been victims of the Canwell Committee. They were there to see Mark Jenkins's acclaimed play "All Powers Necessary and Convenient," an historical drama that recreated the 1948 Canwell Committee hearings. Calling itself the "Voice of the Left," the PW covered all sorts of events and issues relating to labor, civil rights, and social justice movements - as the headlines in this issue of Janusuggest.On a February evening in 1998, a capacity crowd filled the Playhouse Theater on the University of Washington campus. Beginning in the 1960s, the People's World moved beyond Party promotion and tried to make itself into a newspaper of broader interest.