John Gates

About John Gates

Who is it?: American Communist
Birth Place: United States
Died On: May 23, 1992

John Gates Net Worth

John Gates was born in United States, is American Communist. John ‘Johnny’ Gates was an American Communist journalist and a true believer in the Marxist theory. He is well-known for leading the liberalization movement started by Communist Party of USA in the late 50s. He was born in a humble Polish-Jewish household and faced poverty as a child, which perhaps led him to believe in Marxist theory and think of it as the sole solution for all the financial and social problems in the United States of America. It influenced him so much that he left his studies in the middle to join the YCL as a Party Organizer in the steel industry, in order to come face to face with the realities of life instead of just sitting in the comfort of the classroom and think of new policies to change the situation. He joined the International Brigades, an organization that was attempting to defend the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War and spent few years of his life in Spain and France. When he came back, he was appointed the head of the Young Communist League in New York State and also became the editor of the Communist Party’s newspaper ‘the Daily Worker’.
John Gates is a member of Revolutionaries

💰John Gates Net worth: $5 Million

Some John Gates images

Famous Quotes:

"[Y]ou have to understand how and why [the CPUSA] followed [Moscow's] line. It's not a matter that someone gave orders over there and we followed it over here. It's much more subtle than that. We followed that line because we thought it was right. It's more or less like a relationship between two people. One is an aggressive, brilliant personality and the other worships that person, and that person becomes sort of an idol for him and he tends to imitate and ape everything that he does. Well that kind of relationship is a bad relationship for both people."

Biography/Timeline

1913

Solomon Regenstreif, better known by the Anglo-Saxon name he later adopted, John Gates, was born in 1913 in New York City, the son of ethnic Jewish parents who hailed from Poland. Active in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys. Gates left college prior to graduation so that he could pursue his radical political activism. Gates first worked with unemployed workers in Ohio, eventually running unsuccessfully for the city council of Youngstown.

1938

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Gates joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought in Spain. In March 1938, at the age of 24, Gates rose to the rank of battalion political commissar of the Lincoln-Washington Battalion. In this capacity, Gates gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. He later admitted he had gone somewhat overboard. In 1938, he was involved in the controversial decision to execute a deserter named Paul White who had left the lines before having a change of heart and returning, only to be executed for disciplinary reasons. The decision caused great dissension in the Lincoln Brigade's ranks, forcing the immediate declaration that no further executions would take place.

1941

The week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Gates enlisted in the American armed forces.

1948

In the summer of 1948, Gates was one of 12 "kingpin Commies" (to borrow a colorful contemporary turn of phrase from Time magazine) indicted under the Smith Act for being "dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the Government...by force and violence." Although the Smith Act had been implemented eight years earlier at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact for the altogether different purpose of fighting potential infiltration of America by secret Nazi and Communist saboteurs, at the height of the Cold War the existing law was used as a tool against national officials of the Communist Party. Prosecution of the ailing 67-year-old william Z. Foster was eventually dropped, but the 11 others, Gates among them, were convicted in 1949 and sentenced to five years in prison.

1955

Following his release from prison in 1955, Gates was appointed as Editor of the Communist Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker. In that capacity, Gates' editorial policy soon came to set him at odds with the Party leadership, he took liberal positions embracing Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin and opposing the Soviet Union's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Party Leaders were particularly upset by his support of Howard Fast, a prominent Writer who was quite critical of the Soviet Union and soon after also left the Communist Party.

1957

However, The Daily Worker was in deep trouble with significant losses in circulation due to a general disenchantment with communism, by both workers and intellectuals, and pressure from McCarthyism. Confronted with deep deficits and its inability to control Gates, on December 22, 1957, the Party suspended publication of the paper as a daily, the last daily issue appearing January 13, 1958.

1958

In a January 18, 1958, television interview with Mike Wallace, Gates attempted to Illuminate his interlocutor on the nature of the power relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the American Communist movement:

1987

Following publication of his memoirs, Gates went to work as a senior research assistant for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In this capacity, Gates helped members with workers' compensation, unemployment, and Social Security claims. He retired from the union in 1987.

1992

Johnny Gates died on May 23, 1992 in Miami Beach, Florida at the age of 78. He was survived by his wife of 47 years, the former Lillian Schwartz; a brother, Nat Regenstreif, of Hollywood, FL., and three sisters, Blanche Smiles of the Bronx, Irene Travis of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Marlene Seml of Boca Raton, Florida.