Accordingly I resigned my commission in the Air Corps in April, 1928, and accepted a job as airplane and engine inspector for the newly found aeronautic branch of the Department of Commerce, and, after a little schooling at Washington on the nature of my new duties, and after flying Secretary McCracken on a long tour around the country, I was assigned the charge of the Metropolitan area and headquartered at Roosevelt Field.
I found the post very uncongenial because I found myself with no assistant, swamped with more work than I could adequately have handled even with a couple of assistants, and because there was too much paper work and office work and too little flying. So, six months later, after receiving a pay raise and a letter of commendation, I resigned from the department and I took a job with Curtiss Flying Service, which I found much more congenial because it was almost purely a flying job.
My work there soon attracted the attention of the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, and I was asked to become their chief test pilot, which I did in November, 1928.
I worked for them for six months, mostly on military stuff, and when I resigned to take what I thought was going to be a better job, I was asked to stay on with them.
For almost a year after that I was vice president of a little aviation corporation. The company didn’t do well. The depression was in full swing. I didn’t agree with the company policies. Early in 1930 I resigned.
After my resignation from the vice presidency of the aviation concern I did private flying—flying for private owners of aircraft, rich men—and I experienced wide gaps of unemployment between jobs. But since I left the army I had been reading and thinking about “social” matters. I ran across the “radical” press in New York. I began reading Walter Duranty in the _Times_. I read books on Russia. I fought against the idea of communism. It seemed stupid and crude to me. But step by step—I stubbornly fought all the way—the beautifully clear logic of communism broke down all my barriers, and I was forced to admit to myself that the Bolsheviks had the only complete and effective answer to the riddle of the world I lived in.
I began to consider myself a Communist. My bourgeois friends, and they ranged from the very elite to the petty, thought I was nuts. I, in turn, thought they were unreasonable and talked myself blue in the face trying to convince them of it. I became quite a parlor pink. It took me a couple of years to realize the futile ridiculousness of my antics, of attempting to turn the bourgeoisie to communism. It took me that long because I didn’t at first grasp the full implications of the class basis of my convictions and did not realize that, like a fish out of water, I was a born and bred proletarian justified by peculiar circumstances with a position of isolation from my class and with contact with an alien class.