News From Rain Shadow Country
Tim Wheeler
(Booklocker.com £15.95)

TIM WHEELER is the national political correspondent of People's World, the online newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and this book is an eclectic mix of autobiography and memories woven into a collection of his articles for different CPUSA journals going back 50 years.

His aim is to show that the class struggle is alive and well and these bite-sized glimpses into radical campaigns uphold that view.

Wheeler describes his family as “cold war refugees.” Because his communist father was blacklisted under McCarthyism and lost his government job, they moved to Washington State to farm. The persecution followed them across the country, but their new home was welcoming in an area with a history of labour radicalism.

Washington had been a stronghold of the Socialist Party and its leader Eugene Debs announced a plan to turn the state towards socialism, recruiting colonists to set up co-operative farming settlements and Seattle became the headquarters of The Industrial Worker, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) newspaper and the IWW became a major force in trade unions, especially logging.

The split in the Socialist Party produced key leaders for the new CPUSA and its strength in Washington pushed the Democratic Party to the left, resulting in a radical campaigning state, not only in trades unions but also in local and state elections and in First Nation, Asian and Black American struggles for equal rights. As Franklin D Roosevelt said, “There are 47 states in the Union plus the Soviet of Washington.”

Wheeler's book has a fairly conventional chronology of his own family's personal and political history, with his articles mostly dating from the 21st century. There's a mixture of reporting on current campaigns and reviewing past struggles, with glimpses of Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen appearing throughout, alongside Barack Obama senior, Martin Luther King, Bernie Sanders and numerous unsung grassroots fighters.

Some of the issues he writes about will be familiar to political activists in Britain — the war in Spain, McCarthyism and the Black Lives Matter movement while others, particularly those dealing with local issues, are not so familiar but equally interesting.

Today Seattle has progressive elected officials and dynamic movements across the state campaigning successfully on the living wage and trades union rights, dam-removal projects to restore salmon fisheries and the restoration of rights to First Nation people.

Wheeler documents these and other current issues in a personable and upbeat style. His sincere optimism in the strength of people united shines through, with his enthusiasm for the struggle as strong now as when he was a young man.

As he says, “My life has been filled with much joy, being a part of the class struggle, sharing the trials of people fighting against the exploitation of the billionaire class.”