H. M. Wicks - Views of Harry M. Wicks By His Contemporaries

Views of Harry M. Wicks By His Contemporaries

• Oakley C. Johnson, a member of the Socialist Party of Michigan and founding member of the Communist Party of America along with Harry Wicks was a bitter critic of his views and personality traits. In a 1966 memoir, Johnson recalled:

"Another Keracher adherent, but a strange and undependable one, was Harry M. Wicks, for whom I bore a secret dislike. He was a master of profanity and invective, and his speeches and articles were full of both. He had extraordinary intellectual vanity (knew everything, was always right), and very little charm. He was a fattish man, with plump hips, eyes that were round and small, and a red face."

• Benjamin Gitlow, a former member of the Secretariat of the CPUSA who later turned to conservative anti-communism emphasized Wick's aggressiveness as a soapbox speaker at the Passaic Textile Strike of 1926:

"The Committee had sent Mary Heaton Vorse to Washington to line up Congressional support for a Congressional Investigation of Passaic... Mrs. Vorse also sharply attacked H.M. Wicks for the kind of a speech he made before the strikers, Wicks had the reputation of being the most vitriolic speaker in the party. In the speech she referred to he said: 'Let the American Legion come on... Bring with you your Red Cross ambulances and nurses.'"