Communist Party

The Communist Party appears in the book not through an account of its wider organization, but through Ragen’s brief, intensely personal effort to find a local cell. Leaflets, a bumper sticker, a neighborhood printing shop, and an evening meeting draw him toward what he sees as the people’s struggle. The sequence ends when Arthur takes control and walks out, leaving Ragen’s hoped-for political belonging suspended between conviction and interruption.

Ragen’s Search for a Cause

A week after returning from delivering marijuana to a car dealer in Indiana, Ragen stopped in Columbus for dinner. As he got out of his car, he saw an elderly couple distributing Communist Party leaflets while several hecklers stood nearby. He asked whether he could help. The woman asked if he sympathized with their cause; Ragen declared himself a communist and invoked what he had seen of slave labor in sweatshops and factories. His response frames his interest as more than curiosity: he connects the printed material to an existing belief that working people are oppressed.

The man gave Ragen a stack of leaflets describing the Communist Party’s philosophy and attacking United States support for dictatorships. Ragen walked up and down Broad Street, handing them to passers-by. When only one remained, he kept it for himself and searched several blocks for the couple. He wanted to know where the meetings were held so he could join. In his reasoning, the workers he had watched at Lancaster Electro-Plating had shown him that improving the lot of the down-trodden masses required a people’s revolution. The book thus presents his politics as a conviction he carries into the encounter, strengthened by his interpretation of labor he has observed.

From a Sticker to a Meeting

Ragen noticed a bumper sticker on his car bearing the workers’ call to unite. He concluded that the elderly couple must have put it there. The sticker’s lower corner carried the name of a Columbus silkscreen company, which he took as a possible route to finding the local communist group. He looked up the address in the telephone directory, drove to the company, and watched the shop from his car before approaching it.

The address proved to be a residence with a small sign identifying a printing business in the first-floor window. Ragen saw a long desk, a hand printing press, and a mimeograph machine in the front living room. He was surprised by the absence of hammer-and-sickle posters; the operation looked modest, though vibration beneath his feet suggested that presses were running in the basement. Karl Bottorf greeted him, and Ragen said that he wanted to work for the revolution. Bottorf told him that his background would have to be checked, but saw no reason he could not help the cause. Ragen spoke of his admiration for Fidel Castro and his belief that Cuba had achieved equality, then accepted Bottorf’s invitation to attend a meeting of the local cell that afternoon.

The Local Cell and Arthur’s Departure

Bottorf led Ragen by car to a wealthy-looking neighborhood near Westerville. The setting disappointed him: he had expected the meeting to take place in the slums. Introduced to the other attendees as a Yugoslavian, he sat at the back and watched. The speakers’ abstractions and slogans soon lost his attention. Ragen struggled to stay awake, telling himself that a short nap would leave him alert again. In his mind, he had found the people he had wanted to join and the movement he understood as a struggle against oppressive capitalism.

As Ragen nodded off, Arthur took control. He had seen only the latter part of Ragen’s trip, but the meeting’s rhetoric and Ragen’s enthusiasm struck him as a contradiction. Arthur considered communism a monolithic dictatorship rather than a route to popular power, and set it against the freedom of conscience and opportunity he associated with capitalism. He also pointed to the gulf between Ragen’s revolutionary self-image and his involvement in bank robbery and narcotics traffic: Ragen could profit from those activities while persuading himself that he served the liberation of the people. Arthur stood, looked at the assembly, said, “Balderdash,” and left. The account records the invitation and attendance, but ends with Arthur’s exit rather than any decision by Ragen to join the cell.

Political Idealism and Contradiction

The episode gives the Communist Party a concrete, limited presence: a couple distributing leaflets, printed material circulated in Columbus, Bottorf’s invitation, and a local gathering outside Westerville. It does not offer a broad institutional portrait. Instead, the party becomes the focus of a conflict inside Ragen’s understanding of himself. He treats the movement as a possible answer to exploitation and imagines himself among people pursuing a shared cause; Arthur sees the meeting’s abstractions as incompatible with Ragen’s actual conduct and beliefs.

The route from street leaflet to meeting also gives the episode its shape. Ragen follows small, material clues—the saved leaflet, the sticker, the company name, the telephone listing—to reach the group he hopes will give his political commitment a place. Yet reaching the meeting does not settle his belonging. Arthur’s sudden departure breaks the scene before that aspiration can become an established affiliation, leaving the Communist Party in the narrative as both an object of Ragen’s sincere search and a measure of the contradictions Arthur sees in him.