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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 79/No. 47 December 28, 2015
Frank Forrestal joined the party and never looked back
BY JOHN STUDER
MINNEAPOLIS — “I first met Frank at a Militant Labor Forum,” Rafael
Espinosa, from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, told a
Dec. 13 meeting at the Labor Centre here to celebrate the life and
political accomplishments of Socialist Workers Party cadre Frank
Forrestal. “I was surprised to see him working on the line at the Dakota
Premium Foods packinghouse a couple weeks later. We worked together to
make sure he made probation and the boss couldn’t fire him.
“When we decided we were going to fight to get a union in Dakota, they
laughed at us, saying immigrant workers couldn’t do it. Well, we did it.
And the SWP worked with us.
“When the bosses finally found out Frank was in the SWP, they treated
him just like the rest of us Mexicans,” Espinosa said.
“The picture of Frank on the leaflet for this meeting shows him sitting
with a group of miners in Turkey comfortable and relaxed, talking about
conditions in their mine and fights to win safer workplaces,” said
Norton Sandler, speaking for the SWP National Committee. “It could have
been workers in the Red River Valley locked out by American Crystal
Sugar or coal miners in western Pennsylvania. That was Frank, talking
and joking, and showing them the Militant newspaper and books on
working-class history.”
Three attractive displays traced political developments during
Forrestal’s life and his activities building the party, and two booklets
contained messages sent to the meeting.
David Rosenfeld, organizer of the Twin Cities SWP branch, chaired the
meeting and introduced David Vasquez, who had been one of Forrestal’s
co-workers at Dakota Premium; Frank’s three sisters, Nancy Becker, Jane
Forrestal and Patti Higgins; and members of the Minnesota Cuba Committee.
“We look forward to following his example of confidence and
determination in building the proletarian party,” Joe Young of the
Communist League in Canada told the meeting, “the greatest tribute we
can give him.”
“The SWP and our world movement have jumped at opportunities to join
struggles that have exploded around the world,” said Militant editor
John Studer, “to meet those fighting, tell their story in the Militant,
win solidarity and make lasting contacts.
Teams to Ukraine, Turkey
“When the mass Maidan mobilizations in February 2014 overthrew the
Moscow-backed regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, the party put
together a team of worker-correspondents to go.”
“I met Frank, John and their comrades in Maidan Square,” Oksana
Demyanovych, who agreed to come along as a translator one day before
they left for Ukraine, wrote in a message. “From the beginning I saw a
man who gave all his heart and soul to defend the rights of working
people worldwide.”
“Oksana threw her plans aside and stayed for our whole trip,” Studer
said. “And she came back for the other two trips we’ve made.”
“We visited Chernobyl and learned about the Stalinist regime’s
responsibility for the 1986 nuclear disaster there,” he said. “We met
with former Komsomol leaders who had approached the Cuban ambassador to
see if the revolutionary government would help care for the thousands
who suffered from the radiation. Cuba’s leadership acted decisively to
extend internationalist aid and treat over 25,000 victims from 1990 to
2011.”
“When we went the third time this summer, Frank was getting sicker, but
volunteered to go,” Studer said. “Oksana saw we functioned as a team.
When she wanted to ask us something, she would call us ‘Frankjohn.’ We
were the party.”
“In 1998 the SWP organized a conference in Pittsburgh to respond to a
rise in working-class resistance that posed new opportunities,” said
Alyson Kennedy, chair of the Illinois SWP. “In Pittsburgh, where Frank
was assigned, comrades worked to get jobs in coal. He was the first to
get in.
“He went wherever there was a fight, or where the mine bosses’ drive for
profit led to disasters that killed and maimed fellow miners. He would
write about it for the Militant, look to win aid and solidarity, and get
the paper out and win subscribers.
“Frank was the party’s candidate for mayor in September 2001, when
al-Qaeda’s attacks brought down the World Trade Center. In the face of a
ferocious ruling-class campaign against Muslims and working-class
rights, he explained how the rulers were using the terror attack to
expand their imperialist war in Afghanistan and go after our political
rights.” It was one of many times Forrestal served as a party candidate.
“Frank joined me on a 2014 reporting team in Turkey, when workers rose
up after a mine disaster killed hundreds in Soma,” Kennedy said.
“Frank grew up in New Jersey, where his father was an executive for
Borden Foods,” Sandler said. “He became political during the 1970s,
under the impact of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the
Soweto uprising against apartheid rule in South Africa, the battle for
busing to desegregate the schools in Boston and the revolution that
overthrew the Washington-backed dictatorship of the shah in Iran.”
“Whatever his family background, his experiences led him to the fight
for revolutionary change,” Sandler said. “He worked with the Liberation
News Service when he ran into the party in 1978, and within weeks he was
working on the production line in the Ford plant in Metuchen, New Jersey.”
‘Factory production worker’
“He never looked back and led the rest of his life through the working
class and his party. When he went into the hospital a couple weeks ago,
his companion, Diana Newberry, had to fill out all kinds of paperwork,
much of which asked what his occupation was. She wrote ‘factory
production worker,’ and that was the life Frank chose.
“He thought this was the only way to effectively advance the fight to
overthrow the dictatorship of capital,” Sandler said. “He served on the
party’s National Committee for 20 years and worked in rail, auto, coal
mines and packinghouses.”
Forrestal set an example campaigning to free the Cuban Five
revolutionaries. “It was Frank’s arrival to our committee that made sure
that their liberation and return to Cuba became a priority for us,”
August Nimtz, a leader of the Minnesota Cuba Committee who was at the
meeting, wrote in a message. “I think no place in the world had as many
showings of the paintings and cartoons of respectively Antonio Guerrero
and Gerardo Hernández, two of the Five, as the Twin Cities.”
One of the last things Forrestal did was to write a review for the
Militant of Visions of Freedom, Piero Gleijeses’ powerful book about how
Cuba sent tens of thousands of volunteers to Angola to help defeat
apartheid South Africa’s efforts to overthrow the victorious
independence struggle there.
Forrestal spent nearly a decade working in the party’s print shop,
producing the Militant and books on revolutionary politics published by
Pathfinder Press.
“Like most cadres in the shop, Frank had no previous experience in
printing,” Sandler said. “So he didn’t know what we couldn’t do, only
what we needed. We put out beautiful four-color book covers on a
one-color press.”
“Last summer I joined Frank to speak at a Communist League meeting in
Montreal. I found him sick in the bathroom at the airport,” Sandler
said. “When he and Diana Newberry, his companion in the party for 17
years, got the cancer diagnosis, they set an example in how they handled
themselves.
“Frank was proud Diana continued to help lead the Minneapolis party
branch. Whenever he had enough energy, Diana encouraged him to get out
into politics. They reinforced each other.
“Over the last year, the Minneapolis SWP has lost three members — Frank,
fellow national committee member Tom Fiske and his companion Becky
Ellis,” Sandler said. “Tom and Frank were a real team, and worked
together to make the branch one of the party’s strongest.”
Supporters of the party did a bang-up job preparing a spread of food and
flowers, as well as drinks afterward. Most of the 70 participants stayed
around sharing experiences and talking politics.
“The best way to celebrate our comrade Frank’s life and the
contributions he made as a worker-Bolshevik — make more efforts to
follow his example,” Joe Swanson, who came up in a carload from
Nebraska, wrote in a message to the meeting.
Related articles:
Betsy McDonald: 45-year cadre of the Socialist Workers Party
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