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.

[1] 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.

[2] 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.

When Beal decided to skip the appeal of his Gastonia trial conviction, and travel to Russia he was following his co-defendant and Communist Party (CPUSA) comrade, Clarence Miller.

Early in August 1933, he managed to persuade Kharkiv authorities that he had Moscow's permission to secure an exit visa in order to renew his American passport abroad (the USA had no consular offices in the Soviet Union until 1934).

[19] To better serve Hearst's new policy of opposition to diplomatic recognition of Moscow, in articles written by Thomas Walker the eyewitness accounts were made to appear more current than they were.

It is a charge Douglas Tottle repeated decades later in a book that purports to expose the "Ukrainian genocide myth": Beal had sold out for money and hope of a reduced sentence.

[23] Beal acknowledged that, in the eyes of Communists and those he described as "their liberal lackeys", having his story placed (he claimed by an agent) in the Hearst newspapers "completely blotted out" his record as a strike leader and as a victim of the "Gastonia frame up".

[24] But the Hearst papers, he argued, had published a "host of Communist and near-Communist writers" and were "essentially" no more suspect than "other capitalist journals and magazines to which the Stalinists contribute their propaganda".

[24] Beal's memoir of mill work and labor struggles in the United States, and of life as a foreign worker under Stalin, was published as Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow by Hillman-Curl, New York, in 1937.

This coincided with an offering in Britain from the Left Book Club: a panorama of the Soviet Union (Comrades and Citizens, by Seema Rynin Allan) in which Kharkov's new tractors were celebrated for assisting with "the biggest harvest Russia every had".

[27] But Beal's condemnation of "Stalin land" was too sweeping to accommodate Trotsky's insistence that the Soviet Union remained, albeit "degenerated", a workers state.

Rather, for the editor of the Socialist Appeal, Max Shachtman, Beal's description of the Soviet party-state bureaucracy as a "new exploiting class"[28] was to be a point of departure in a break with Trotsky.

As he moved with his supporters to an avowedly Marxist version of democratic socialism, Shachtman denied that the "bureaucratic collectivism" of the Soviet Union was "in any sense" socialist.

Beal recalled that, against all expectations, it was the most recent immigrant groups that sustained the strike over the next two bitterly cold winter months: "the Italians, Poles, Syrians [Lebanese] and Franco-Belgians".

In a signature move “Big" Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arranged the public transport of hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.

In the midst of the post-World War recession and the Red Scare of 1919–20, Beal tried to revive the local IWW organization by forming a Rank and File Committee of Textile Workers.

His fellow Socialists he had come to view chiefly as “middle-class intellectuals who loved to theorize about Utopia” and felt they were bringing it about when at every election they voted against the major parties.

La Follette (who had changed his previous pro-Moscow stance after visiting the Soviet Union in late 1923)[33] was supported as a "progressive" by the Socialists and by the American Federation of Labour.

The failure of his campaign to check Calvin Coolidge's clean sweep of the northern industrial states, persuaded Beal that "the American workers would never be won over to the political side.

Acting on party instructions, witnesses went beyond testimony about the circumstances of the shooting of the Police Chief Orville F. Anderholt: a sequence of events in which strikers were attacked and Beal's fellow NTWU organizer and the balladeer of the struggle, Ella May Wiggins, was killed.

[48] The prosecution made "the overthrow by force of the constitution of the United States of America", advocated by a party that was "a branch of the Soviet Union of Russia", the effective charge.

This had already been in the making, with party-controlled International Labour Defense (ILD) raising funds on the cry "SHALL SACCO and VANZETTI HAVE Died in vain?, Help Smash the Gastonia Murder Frameup".

[54] The ILD was notably silent, but a non-partisan committee for his defense was joined, shortly before Communists helped secure his ouster as president of the United Auto Workers,[55] by Homer Martin; by Congressmen Thomas Ryun Amlie of the Wisconsin Progressive Party and Democrat Jerry Voorhis (who in California was to be the first political opponent of a red-baiting Richard M Nixon); by the sociologist and pacifist Emily Greene Balch, the New York attorney and feminist Dorothy Kenyon and the free-love advocate and poet Sara Bard Field.

Beal repeated his claim that the CPUSA leaders deliberately made the Gastonia trial a vehicle for Communist propaganda, inflaming the southern jurors and dooming the defendants.

[62] With Norman Thomas, Socialist presidential candidate, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union standing as references, in 1948 Beal had his U.S. citizenship restored.

"[70] In the novel, his counterpart, Fer Deane, under constant threat of assassination leaves much of the work to Irma Rankin and the chief protagonist Mamie Lewes, characters recognizable as Beal's assistants Vera Buch Weisbord and Ella May Wiggins.

[71] In Call Home the Hearth (1932),[72][73] Olive Tilford Dargan (writing as Fielding Burke) has the Wiggins character, Ashma Waycaster, saving Beal/Amos Freer from a murder plot, while she contends on every side, including the Communist Party, with male presumption.