Fred Beal

Fred Erwin Beal (1896–1954) was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion. In 1929 he had been a ''cause célèbre'' when, in Gastonia, North Carolina, he was convicted in an irregular trial of conspiracy in the strike-related killing of a local police chief. But having escaped to the Soviet Union, his decision in 1933 to return and bear witness to the costs of Stalin's collectivist policies, including famine in Ukraine, was disparaged and resisted by many of his erstwhile supporters.

''The New York Times'' remained committed to what it has since acknowledged was the "tendentious" reporting of Soviet achievements by its Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. It was left first to ''Forverts'', the Yiddish-language version of a New York socialist daily, and then, nationwide, to the right-wing Hearst Press to publish Beal's accounts.

In his later memoirs, Beal's disillusion with communism extended to his experience as a labor organizer with the Communist Party in the United States and with what he concluded had been the party's calculated sacrifice of his, and his co-defendants', interests in their Gastonia trial. Provided by Wikipedia