This is from the Army Times, a periodical I have never read, but the narrative on Afghanistan could have come from practically any US news organ, left or right, bemoaning the crisis of this "withdrawal" and the affected Afghanis left at the mercy of the Taliban.

This is strange, tiresome jibberish.

You will never read, except perhaps in People's World that Afghanistan did in fact have a stable government in 1978. That government was led by a party comprised of men and women, the People's Democratic Party. That government developed social and economic programs. That government sought to unify, not exploit as the UK and US have done in the region, the various ethnic groups that make up Afghanistan. That government was bringing women and girls into all areas of social and political life.

But this government was socialist, and that was intolerable.

The women and girls we're supposed to be worried about right now; the civil society we're supposed to worry about right now; the "tribal" tensions we're supposed to worry about right now - all this and much more were brought to Afghanistan by the same force that created it: the United States of America.

The US's response to this progressive, stable government was to create the counter-revolutionary force known as the Mujahedeen, aka, the Taliban. Osama bin-Laden was one of their recruits. The US had to reach deep into the sewer to pull out such a force as would be against all that the People's Democratic Party were achieving. The US and the West have always preferred destabilization and chaos to peace and socialism. That is why it always sides with the most retrograde, reactionary, fascist elements.

So all this public fretting about the fire that our arsonist set is laborious. The self-discipline and deference required by an educated sect of US intellectuals - reporters, think-tank researchers, academics - to handwring about the fate of this West Asian society and never a word about 1978 and what the US did is extraordinary.

But Mother was a communist

 

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn and Dr. Thomas N. Hepburn

A biographer of actress Katharine Hepburn, William Mann, who wrote Kate: The Woman who was Hepburn, [Henry Holt, 2006] writes that the actress's mother, Mrs. Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, almost joined the Communist Party USA and did not.

Mann's contribution, the most recent in a line of biographies which begin with Garson Kanin's "expose," Charles Higham's approved biography, Barbara Leaming's, and Scott Berg's posthumous work, all make much reference to the actress' mother's hard-left politics. A 1940 Life Magazine article even attributed "Bolshevik" sympathies to her.

"Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist," Katharine Hepburn said about her parents in 1986 to a magazine reporter, "but Mother was a communist." 

She told Phil Donahue "I've been very lucky. I was brought up with people who had a lot of nerve and who fought for a better life for male and female in the world. Especially for people who didn't have a lot of money. And they weren't afraid to die." 

No evidence exists that the actress's mother, who co-founded Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger, was a Communist Party USA member, but abundant evidence exists she was close to the Party and its work.

Most biographical sketches end with Hepburn's involvement in the suffrage movement. Scant others will mention her role in founding Planned Parenthood.

Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association, 1911. (Mrs. Hepburn kneeling far left)

Indeed, this work itself would fill a volume - which no one has written.

Reminiscent of her daughter's film role in 1947's "Adam's Rib," the elder Hepburn led a crusade to have convicted wife pardoned of an imposed death penalty. The woman, Mrs. Bessie Wakefield was found guilty of conspiring to murder her husband. She denied it. The sentence was death by hanging. [1]

Hepburn, president of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association at the time, argued, “we protest against the extreme penalty being applied to a member of a class which has been denied the protection of representation.”

Bridgeport Evening Farmer. Nov 21, 1913

Hepburn resigned her position as president of the CWSA in 1917 over an ideological split in the suffrage movement over WWI and the importance of the suffrage fight.[2] [3] The National Women's Suffrage Association had condemned the National Women's Party for organizing protests against Pres. Woodrow Wilson and the war. The NWSA sought to de-prioritize the suffrage movement during the war effort. Hepburn and other radical women of the CWSA disagreed.

Upon Hepburn's resignation, she joined Alice Paul's NWP.

With the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920, Hepburn deepened her work with trade-unions in general and Sanger in particular.

Perhaps reminiscent of the CWSA rupture, two decades later, Hepburn hinted at taking a similar stance within the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO], a radical union forged from a break from the American Federation of Labor. Hepburn worked with the CIO intimately, and its WWII decision - along with the CPUSA's - to suspend all labor actions for the duration of the war got a similar reaction from Hepburn. 

Perhaps, we do not know, if this is the reason she considered and never joined the Communist Party USA.

Regardless, due to those close associations with CPUSA comrades and front groups, several Congressional House Committees on Un-American Activities (HUAC) throughout the late 30's, 40’s and 50’s thought she had joined.

Several citations from the House investigations from California to Washington, DC, name Houghton Hepburn - using the older, patriarchal form: “Mrs. Thomas Norval Hepburn” - as a member or affiliated with several Communist Party front groups.

The front groups were a feature of the popular front strategy the Party employed from the middle 1930's. These enabled people sympathetic to the Party's mission to participate with actual Party members in the struggle to achieve these goals. Some examples of these front groups are the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Civil Rights Congress, and Sojourners for Truth & Justice, among many others.

One of the earliest HUAC citations, from 1939, is questioning the motive and composition of the CIO's National Citizens Political Action Committee, formed expressly "for the election of Franklin D Roosevelt and a Progressive Congress." The CIO was a union federation formed from a break with the more conservative American Federation of Labor. It was not a Communist union but many of its organizers were open Communist Party members, and many of its unions were led by Communists. 

Among "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers" cited by the Committee was Houghton Hepburn. Fellow traveler is defined as "a person who is not a member of a particular group or political party (especially the Communist Party), but who sympathizes with the group's aims and policies." But remember that "overwhelming preponderance" phrasing ...

In May 1944, in a HUAC hearing, Houghton Hepburn was named as one of "11 prominent American leaders" who had signed a joint statement against a witch hunt of "29 men and women" on behalf of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism. Once again, the HUAC report reads "the overwhelming preponderance of fellow travelers on the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism is convincing proof of Communist infiltration."

Margaret Sanger [left] and Katharine Houghton Hepburn [right] at Congressional Hearings

In July 1953, progressive Garfield Bromley Oxnam, a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal church and IWW supporter, was called before the HUAC to explain his associations with communists. Houghton Hepburn was named because of her sponsorship of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

She was further cited or named in House Un-American Activities sessions by witnesses as late as 1957 when the House was investigating "Communist Political Subversion" the document reads. 

As Houghton Hepburn died in 1951, the HUAC citations after this are interesting. According to several biographies, her surviving husband, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, burned all her papers upon her death, including his correspondence with playwright and socialist, George Bernard Shaw. *

These associations can't answer the question definitively was she or was she not a CPUSA member. We're left to speculate. We're also left to speculate whether she was ever called to testify to HUAC [her daughter was allegedly subpoenaed and defied it]. Many who were merely supporters of the Party were swept up in the witch hunts and blacklist.

What's definitive is Houghton Hepburn's longtime support for these causes and her willingness to work time and time again with the Communist Party.

Why the burning of all her papers, an act which the actress-daughter has lamented? Houghton Hepburn died suddenly of a heart attack on March 17, 1951. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been arrested in July of the previous year. Their espionage trial began March 6, 1951, more than a week before her death. The Smith Act trials against Communist Party members began in 1949 and went on until the late 50's [the leadership of the Hawaii Party were rounded up in 1951]. 

The witch hunts had the desired side effect of creating fear of in any way being associated with the Communist Party USA.

____________________________

* a note on sources. It would be unforgivable to cast the elder Hepburn's politics based on HUAC documents alone. I only do so given the corroborating testimony of her family, including her actress daughter and granddaughter, and the destruction of Hepburn's own papers. In the early Life Magazine profile, Hepburn admits to being a Bolshevik sympathizer. Her great-granddaughter has recently gifted a trove of papers by another of Hepburn's daughters, who had been a CIO organizer. Hopefully, these documents will shed more light.

[1] Connecticut Suffragists and the Case of Bessie Wakefield - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)

[2] Connecticut Women and World War I - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)

[3] When Attitudes toward World War Divided the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Movement - Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project (ctdigitalnewspaperproject.org)