The following adventure of the Red Poppy originally appeared in the Sunday, January 17, 1931 issue of The Daily Worker. The Poppy character was created by Arthur Carr (nee Arturo Calebresi) and ran in The Worker's Sunday Supplement from 1927 until Carr's deportation to Italy in 1953. To modern readers, the Red Poppy is most familiar as the hero of two B movies from Monogram Pictures, Vanlandingham's Secret (1932) and In Labor's House (1933), both of which starred a young Wallace Beery. The Mercury Theater's radio program, Tales of the Red Poppy, has also outlasted the original prose stories; Joseph Cotten's performance as the mighty Soviet Sentinel is felt by many to have been his best work and the scripts by Odets, Welles, and Houseman retained the best elements of Carr's style. With that said, neither the films nor the radio show fully retained the political fervor of Carr's writing, which meshed perfectly within its fevered time.

The Thirties, the years of the Great Depression, were the high water mark of the Left in America. It's a common fallacy to believe that the past was a simpler time. In fact, seventy years ago, many Americans seriously contemplated a change in government. Men such as Huey Long and Francis Townsend forced their way onto the political scene advocating redistributive policies that would not receive a hearing today. In his autobiography, A Life Spent in the Trenches, Mr. Carr noted that he felt the purpose of his Red Poppy stories was to educate the reader, to present the tenets of Communism in an entertaining manner. In this particular story, Mr. Carr achieves his goal by working in references to the Scottsboro trials, on the minds of most Americans in 1931, the raging Spanish Civil War in which Communists and Anarchist forces eyed each other as warily as they did General Franco and his Nazi allies, and the Alien and Sedition Acts, legislation pushed through by the Wilson Administration during World War I, which had acted as a restraint on free speech and the activities of union organizers. This is the sea in which Mr. Carr lived and created his work and we are happy to present one of his best known Red Poppy adventures.

-- Paul O. Miles, December 4, 2001