Kailin, Clarence Schwid

KAILIN, CLARENCE SCHWID (1914 - 2009). Born and raised in a leftwing Jewish household in Madison Wisconsin, Clarence Kailin attended the University of Wisconsin High School, created for gifted individuals. Awakening to Marxism as a teenager, he joined the Communist Party and looked to the Soviet Union as a beacon of social reconstruction.

During the Great Depression, he was active in Madison, organizing against poverty and racism. In 1937, he and his long-time closest friend, John Cookson, went to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion to fight against fascism. Cookson died in the Spanish Civil War, Kailin survived, and, after being wounded battle, he returned to Wisconsin. He married Margaret “Maggie” Coogan in 1939 and began a new round of organizing activities.

Wisconsin in the 1940s was still a largely agricultural state and dependent on migrant farm workers. In 1949, hearing that a farm in nearby Mazomanie kept a crew of mostly black farmworkers as virtual prisoners, withholding pay and restricting their ability to leave, Kailin and his wife launched a successful fight for better working conditions and back pay for the workers. Thanks to this and other activities, Clarence developed deep and long lasting ties with the small, local Black community, ties that survived McCarthyism and the Cold War.

During World War II, Kailin worked at the Gisholt Machine Company then at its industrial apex, with around 1,300 workers. He helped bring in the United Steelworkers Union, a rare CIO victory in a mostly non-unionized city with little other manufacturing. His status as a union leader ended soon. In 1948, Kailin naturally rallied local supporters for the Progressive Party and its candidate, Henry Wallace. In retaliation, Clarence and fellow communists were fired and blacklisted, as happened often with the support of their own unions, which were subordinated to the Democratic Party and Harry Truman. Through the 1950s, facing great personal and economic difficulties, Clarence worked to maintain the Communist Party, sturdy in the conviction that only a class conscious, disciplined party could bring socialism to the United States.

A skilled photographer, Kailin gained employment at the University of Wisconsin Photomedia Center, remaining there until his retirement. In his own way, he was also a teacher. Madison public schools had no meaningful curriculum dealing with Black history or the struggle for equality. Through the 1960s, Kailin fought to have such material available and solved part of the problem directly by writing Black Chronicle, a locally-published book to be used by the school system as a teaching aid. Finally successful in gaining inclusion in local school curricula, he took satisfaction when, in 1974, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction officially recognized it as a teaching resource.

Clarence Kailin remained in the Communist Party until the Soviet Union collapsed. Creating homemade buttons with the label, “Madison’s Last Communist,” after a local newspaper ran an article heralding the demise of the Party. He left the Communist Party in 1991, later joining a revitalized local chapter of the Socialist Party. In 1992, he launched the Socialist Potluck, a nonsectarian monthly event that continued for more than two decades. Kailin played a critical role in Madison’s Anti-Apartheid movement and in the movements in opposition to U.S. wars in Latin America and the Middle East. In 1996, Kailin became the first North American veteran of the Spanish Civil War to receive honorary citizenship from the government of Spain at a ceremony in Chicago. After seeing the monument created by Seattle vets to the Lincoln Brigade vets, Kailin organized the production of a similar monument in Madison in 1999, which includes plaque cast with the names of all Wisconsin’s veterans. In his last years, the local Veterans For Peace group renamed their chapter for Clarence Kailin. He died following a long illness exacerbated in part by his many hours in the cold outside a local supermarket, collecting signatures at age 95 to sponsor a referendum against the U.S. war in Iraq.

Black Chronicle, archived at the U.S. Department of Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED354179.pdf

“Democracy Now,” April 30, 2007, rebroadcast of an earlier interview with Clarence Kalin. https://www.democracynow.org/2007/4/30/fighting_fascism_the_americans_women_and

Veterans for Peace, Clarence Kailin Chapter 25, Madison, Wisconsin. http://madisonvfp.org/about/