Bertrand Daily Report
The War For Our Mind & Soul Continues
Subject: Can Rep John Lewis Shake Loose His Communist Ties?
January 18th, 2017
By John Spring johnspring57@yahoo.com
U. S Representative John Lewis met Lillian Miles at a New Year’s party that was hosted by Xemone Clayton. They became close friends of Julian Bond and his first wife, Alice Clopton. I have never met John Lewis, but I did know Lillian Miles as a classmate when I was a student at Mount Vernon Junior High School and Los Angeles High School. Lillian
was intelligent and also talented in many other areas. After our
graduation from high school, during the winter in 1957, I had heard at
our class reunions that she relocated to Georgia from California where she became involved with the Civil Rights movement in the South.
Her husband, John Lewis, had received many high honors before she passed away in 2012. He has continued to be one of the outstanding African American members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
It saddens me that U.S. Representative John Lewis will not be attending the Inauguration of President Donald John Trump on this coming Friday, January 20, 2017, because he is the only living person who spoke during the March on Washington. While I am disappointed about the derogatory words he spoke about President-Elect Donald J. Trump, it was also disappointing that apparently Donald Trump was unaware of the many honors that John Lewis has earned.
At this time of division throughout America, it is still my hope that we can unite on common ground on matters of Defense and Justice because so much is now at stake while opportunities could become available for all Americans.
So
I am hoping that we, as a nation and as a people, can unite as we never
have before. While I am aware of various “groups” throughout America
have already planned disruptive and violent events and incidents, it is
my hope that none of us will allow them to succeed with their hatred
and terror. Please remain vigilant during this week and aware of tactics
that will be attempted and tried to divide and frighten us.
Unlike
so many of you, I have seen and known “both sides” of many issues that
challenge this great nation of ours. But the answer and question still
remains “It is a Republic if you can keep it.”
******************************
History of Communism and how CPUSA infiltrated the Black and Hispanic communities (Including the Democrat Party)
"Communists also gained from long-standing political contacts in the black community. Victories of black mayoral and congressional candidates
with decades — old ties to the CP — a short list would include Coleman
Young and George Crocket in Detroit, Gus Newport in Berkeley, and
somewhat more ambiguously, Harold Washington in Chicago — helped to
rehabilitate the Party image. Like the continuing struggle against
racism within unions, this public vindication brought a trickle of new
black and Latin members, although never enough to compensate for the
attrition in the aging fraternal networks."
Read Below The History of Communism in America
From The Desk of Capt. Dave Bertrand (Ret.)
Int'l Airline Freight Captain (DC-8 & B-727 & First Officer
DC-10), U.S. Army Veteran Sergeant, Law Enforcement Background. Political Analyst and Activist to help "Make America Great Again.
My
mission is to slice through the propaganda, encourage everyone to
write and share important news among our network of patriots, military,
law enforcement and selected news media sources (we trust). We are the
pulse of America and we will prevail.
Opinions and discussion of today's hard hitting topics. If you wish to be removed....reply within, or please forward.
Contact: DC8JetMan2003@Yahoo.Com
History of the Comintern. Sections
Communist Party, USA
Source: Encyclopedia of the American Left;
Written: by Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas;
Published: by University of Illinois Press, 1992;
Written: by Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas;
Published: by University of Illinois Press, 1992;
The
CPUSA was the most important American radical organization from its
factionalized 1919 origins well into the 1950s. Since that time, the
Party has played a far more modest but not unimportant role within
various social movements. During its most dynamic periods, the CP guided
a multitude of non-Party organizations and alliances with a far greater
following and more impact than the Party proper. At less auspicious
times, the CP has isolated itself or, worse, expended most of its
energies simply to survive government persecution. Through good and bad
times, the Party has had to combat the charge that its politics simply
reflect directives passed down from Moscow.
The
origins of the Communist movement can be found in the left wing of the
Socialist Party and in the alternative political and industrial
movements that sometimes cooperated with and sometimes combated the
Socialists. This radical spectrum of groups and individuals did not
ultimately set Communist policies, especially after the first turbulent
years, but they did provide the first wave of American Communists. Their
struggles and disputes also underscore the complex native-born and
immigrant roots of the new movement.
Left
disaffection with the SP had two large components. By emphasizing an
electoral politics, Socialists alienated members of the Industrial
Workers of the World and many other militants who believed the road to
revolution lay through direct or “mass” action. The same critics
generally upheld industrial unions as the primary means of organizing
and preparing the masses for revolutionary activity.
In
contrast to the IWW’s sanguine expectations, Socialists generally held a
more realistic view of the problems to be confronted in creating mass
industrial unions, and the long-run uncertainty of those unions’
political commitment. But in minimizing the importance of the
foreign-born, and maintaining a bureaucratic leadership drawn for the
most part from the early years of the movement, the SP alienated the
post-1912 influx of new members, who felt themselves less than fully
welcome. The SP position regarding world war, crucial elsewhere in
fostering Left and Communist dissent, was not a major factor in the
United States, despite rhetorical attempts to make it so. The
precipitating factor, the October Revolution and the resulting
Comintern, did not so much create as bring together earlier dissent and
give it the slogans for a formal split.
The
Socialist Propaganda League, located in Boston with the support of the
strongly pro-Lenin Latvian-American socialists, was the first to send
out a call for American Socialist adherence to the principles of the
Bolshevik Revolution. The Friends of the Russian Revolution, or Friends
of New Russia, formed at the end of 1917, and the American Bolshevik
Bureau of Information formed in 1918. Both provided positive information
about the Russian Revolution to the general American public. like the
first book popularizing the event, Louis Fraina’s anthology The
Proletarian Revolution in Russia (1917), these phenomena were American
in origin rather than responses to Russian initiatives.
Although
the Bolsheviks anticipated splits within the socialist movements as
precursive to new communist parties, they had less direct influence in
the United States than elsewhere. The course of the conflicts among the
language-federation groups and those groups’ largely Pyrrhic triumphs
within the SP proved decisive. Furious factionalism and preparations for
a split incited moderate, essentially parliamentarist-inclined
Socialists to stage their own walkout and to maneuver against a Left
seizure of organizational power. Over a six-month period in 1919, a rump
National Executive Committee was able to expel or suspend approximately
two-thirds of the SP membership.
The
left wing now quarreled over the best course to pursue. A majority
favored a continuing struggle within the SP, at least until the time of
the next national convention. A substantial minority, led by the large
and prestigious Russian Federation, called for the immediate abandonment
of the SP. Naming itself the Communist Party, this group immediately
turned its most bitter attacks upon rival leftwingers. The other,
largely English-language group remained in the SP until duly expelled at
the 1919 SP convention after a notable floor-fight; it then formed the
Communist Labor Party. These battling twins faced, in turn, the Palmer
Raids, which (along with the mass strikes of the day, and the brief
anticipation of the Russian Revolution sweeping Europe) temporarily
reinforced a near-insurrectionary sentiment.
For
the next three years, mostly “underground” but under the close watch of
federal spies, the Communists accelerated the internecine propaganda
war, largely against each other or against other Left groupings. Each of
the parties sought membership in the Comintern, and each was told that
Moscow would not favor one over the other and that they would have to
unify. Each of the original Communist organizations suffered various
schisms with departing groups often appropriating the organizational
name. Efforts also continued to unite the multiplying factions into a
single organization. In 1922 those who had remained in the original
Communist Party of America joined with the United Communist Party (a
merger of the Communist Labor Party and a faction of the Communist Party
of America) to establish the Workers Party of America as a unified
aboveground entity. The Workers Party of America was able to gain the
adhesion of most other Communist formations within a matter of years,
most notably the United Toilers of America, which had also presented
itself in 1922 as an aboveground Communist party seeking unification.
The new merger was named the Workers (Communist) Party, a name which
prevailed until 1929 when it was changed to Communist Party, USA.
During
the underground period, the Communists had lost some five-eighths of
their initial Left adherents within the SP, including the vast majority
of American-born and older-generation supporters. Two of the most
significant segments, the Jewish and German federations, sat out most of
the warfare, negotiating their entry at a late point in the process.
Much of the working-class membership had in practice done the same,
ignoring the internecine political excitement for the more customary
Left social and cultural activities.
The
emerging Workers (Communist) Party bore the stamp of a new Communist
international strategy, the United Front. Conceived by the Comintern to
meet the perceived delay in the world-revolutionary process, this policy
entailed a strategic reorientation of major proportions. Unlike the old
left-wing Socialists and the IWW, the Communists would work within
non-Left, mass institutions, including the AFL and labor or labor-farmer
parties. Many moderate socialists had long urged these policies, but
with their revolutionary aims, Communists were forced to carry out their
work in semiconcealed fashion. The tarring of Bolsheviks as bearded
bomb-throwers had by this time been so successful, and the general
defeat of the revolutionary left so complete, that concealment of one’s
affiliation and ideology seemed necessary. No satisfactory theoretical
articulation followed from the Communist leadership to address the
complex and difficult implications of this maneuver. At a minimum, it
tended to make the Communists’ electoral efforts in their own name
essentially propagandistic and pro forma. Communists did not seriously
expect to be elected, and for that matter no longer held the socialist
faith in transforming society primarily through patient, open
educational efforts.
Through
much of the 1920s, the Communists’ own internecine warfare continued
unabated, although with shifting lines of controversy. Midwestern
enthusiasts of industrial unionism put most of their energies into the
International Labor Defense, while mostly Eastern and predominantly
Jewish veterans of the needle-trades struggles called for a more
directly political-educational approach. The second group, more content
in a sense with the enclave status of the Party’s stubborn ethnic
support, proclaimed an “American Exceptionalism” based on the unique
status of being the home base of the foremost capitalist power and
prescribed a patient, strategic advance upon state power. This view was
tolerable to the Comintern during the brief ascendence of Bukharin, but
it could not ideologically survive Stalin’s wide Left turn in 1928, and
seemed disproved in actuality by the stock-market crash of 1929. The
Communist theoretical monthly, the Communist, a generally difficult
publication reached its apex of readability during this period but
swiftly declined thereafter to wild attacks upon perceived heretics
(such as literary editor V. F. Calverton), and reaffirmations of current
doctrine.
The
Communist factions thus engaged in organizational jousting and traded
fierce polemics over the appropriate application of the Russian example
to the American scene. With the dubious counsel of Comintern
representatives (themselves actors in a far larger, international
factionalism), American Communists struggled first of all to create a
Left presence within the AFL. The Trade Union Educational League, the
most successful of their efforts, indeed rallied many traditional
unionists for a fighting program. The rightward retreat of the AFL,
along with a number of Communist tactical blunders, ended the adventure
and returned many activitists back to the budding fraternal, ethnic
institution-building over which the Party had little direct control. The
second major effort at mass influence, the formation of a Left-oriented
farmer-labor movement, failed for the same internal and external
reasons, resulting in the Communists’ isolation from the Progressive
Party campaign of 1924 headed by “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. The third
and last major effort, the Trade Union Unity league, set out to form new
unions of unorganized and unskilled workers. The TUUL filled some of
the vacuum left by the IWW collapse and by AFL indifference toward the
unskilled. It would be remembered, in later years, for the “shop papers”
published by activists with particular grievances aired — a clear
anticipation of and preparation for the CIO. On the debit side, the
TUUL’s presence tended to pull Left activists away from some important
points of influence (such as the needle trades) without being able to
build up self-sustaining organizations.
Along
the way, the Party had critically reduced its ethnic base in a variety
of ways. “Bolshevization” — an attempt to eradicate the Balkanization of
the Party and produce a single, unified leadership — proved widely
unpopular and among some groups catastrophic. The attempted breakup of
language sections in favor of geographic organizations successfully
discouraged for a time the insular cultural activity derided as “Banquet
Socialism,” and demonstrably weakened language-federation authority.
But in the hostile political climate of the 1920s, public activity
proved difficult and even economically hazardous to immigrant workers
and their middle-class supporters. In any case, the struggle to build up
ethnic radical institutions had its own dynamic within working-class
life, a factor often regarded too casually by Communist leaders in these
early years. In deprecating the priority of choral and theatrical
groups, literary circles, clubhouses, language schools for children, and
the like, Party political decisions weakened the capacity of the
working-class Left to speak for, and build a lasting base within, the
immediate community. Ethnic workers, for their part, often came to
regard the Russian authority as unerrant, but the American Communist
movement as confused and misled.
Among
the casualties of this cultural conflict could be counted the Italian
group, mostly older men who had never entirely given up the
anarcho-syndicalist faith of their younger days; and the Finns, who
bolted in large numbers at the insistence upon Party control of their
cooperatives’ financial resources. The simultaneous emigration of Finns
by the thousands to work in Soviet Keralia permanently weakened the
Finnish-American Left. The Party also lost widely on several other
fronts, for a variety of international reasons. Polish nationalism,
detached from socialism, buried Left influence for some years to come.
South Slavs, who had supported World War 1 for nationalist reasons,
remained largely in the SP or became politically inactive. Jews,
bitterly alienated in large numbers by the Party’s characterization of
the 1929 Palestinian riots as a liberation struggle rather than a pogrom
or manipulated conflict between two oppressed peoples, fled the Party
and (perhaps more important) its mass organizations in significant
numbers. Even Armenians, roused to a high level of mobilization by the
Turkish slaughter of homeland nationals and by the Red Army defense of
Armenians, lowered levels of activity by the end of the 1920s as the
Armenian crisis eased.
Relative
to these major losses, the expulsions of “Left” and then “Right”
deviationists was less destructive in terms of numbers or influence
immediately lost. Only in the needle trades did the expelled carry many
members out of the Party with them, and those were mainly a thin stratum
of leaders. The long-term impact of the expulsions, however, was
considerable. The actions were judged to be the result of direct Soviet
interference in leadership of the American Party and reflected struggles
about the direction of the USSR rather than that of the United States.
Those driven from the Party charged that its basic policies were now
being set by the Comintern and that the Comintern reserved the right of
final approval of Party leadership. These accusations reinforced popular
perceptions of Communism as an inauthentic national movement.
The
rightist group led by Jay Lovestone soon formed a relationship with
anticommunist labor leaders and would play a major role in the
continuing effort to deny Communists any role in the trade union
movement. Lovestoneites became particularly influential in the
post-1950s reunited AFL-CIO. The Left faction headed by James Cannon
founded American Trotskyism, which presented itself as a genuine
Leninist movement and a democratic alternative to the Stalinist policies
of the CP. The Trotskyists provided a continuing critique of the USSR
that gradually won a wide intellectual following. Many of the charges
brought against Stalin by the Trotskyists would be validated by future
Soviet leaders, tentatively by Khrushchev in the late 1950s and more
emphatically by Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
In
short, Communists entered the era of the Great Depression — at
approximately 18,000 members and a following perhaps five times that
size — considerably weaker than might have been expected from earlier
levels of activity. They had made, however, several important gains.
Despite much confusion and sectarian posturing, they had placed black
liberation on the Left political agenda as it had not been placed
before, and had taken preliminary steps to appeal to poor blacks north
and south. Second, they had in their labor work increasingly encouraged
the cadre whose groundwork most definitely prefigured the CIO. Third,
they had regularized many internal institutions (such as the Daily
Worker) and functions (such as the ethnic-based International Workers
Order established in 1932) that could serve better as the Party emerged
from sectarianism.
That
emergence took some years and exacted considerable costs. William Z.
Foster’s 1932 book, Towards a Soviet America, demonstrated little
appreciation for the unique qualities of the American mentality even in a
potentially prerevolutionary situation. His presidential campaign of
that year, despite the backing of noted intellectuals, had little impact
relative to Norman Thomas’s Socialist effort, which recorded almost a
million votes. Moreover, wild sectarian attacks upon Socialists and
reformers delayed or prevented potential alliances against the worst
effects of the Depression. Marches upon city halls frequently evoked
more violence than a wide potential following felt itself prepared to
accept. Some of the best work, rent strikes and related neighborhood
relief efforts, grew up among the unprestigious women supporters of
largely Jewish neighborhoods, and the lessons sunk in slowly. Veteran
youth leaders, such as Gil Green, seemed to grasp most readily the need
for a broad new orientation. Hundreds of young Communists entering
factories strove to put their ideas into practice but without a general
Party line that would facilitate this work. Perhaps only southern
Communists, offering a virtual black insurrectionary line, found a
constituency whose dire condition might instill faith in Communism — and
here, with repression so intense, little opportunity for open
organizing existed.
The
San Francisco General Strike of 1934 signalled the changing attitudes.
Labor activists fought their way to rejoin a sluggish but awakening
left-of-center. Permitted to move into wider spheres, with fewer
ideological restrictions, activists in many arenas began to find a wide
acceptance. Communist participation in the movement for social security
indicated another measure of political realism. Harlem activists dared
to work with controversial evangelist Father Divine on the one hand, and
invite the participation of noted jazz musicians to protest events on
the other. Ethnic fraternalists, now striving to reinterpret their
cultural traditions in a radical way and to argue openly for the
survival of these traditions, began to find new links with economic
discontent and labor yearnings around them. Students of socialist,
communist, and liberal leanings started to share podiums and finally
united a few years later into one organization.
The
Communist approach to the 1936 election set the tone for the virtual
abandonment of its traditional strategies and slogans. Roosevelt’s
promulgation of a “Second New Deal,” replete with real and promised
social benefits, had won over millions of immigrant voters (or previous
nonvoters), including the mass base of industrial unions. As veteran SP
notables abandoned their party to support Roosevelt, Communists
pronounced a de facto support of Roosevelt against Alf Landon — the
first time an official U.S. Marxist organization had taken such a
position. In a broader sense, the Communists had gone over to a
Center-Left alliance with measured emphasis upon the Left.
Shifts
in the Communist press reflected this broad reorientation. The New
Masses became a popular magazine among the left-liberal middle classes,
especially in the East, and the Daily Worker toned down its earlier
sensationalism for a more workmanlike approach to creating a solid Left
journalism. The Communist, however, revealed the most dramatic shift.
long an arid mechanism of doctrinal self-justification, in the hands of
political-intellectual chief Alexander Bittelman the monthly became
notably more strategic and tactical-minded. His own editorial essay,
considered at the time the definitive up-to-the-moment political
statement from the Party, shrewdly argued for something like an advanced
social democracy.
At
the climax of this reorientation, in the later 1930s, the Party reached
65,000 members and attained a very wide following in many sections of
American life. Providing national, regional and local leadership of many
important industrial unions as well as liberal, student, and cultural
organizations, Communists and “fellow travelers” served as a dynamic
wedge of radicalism within the dominant New Deal liberalism. Left
activists had, in an important sense, followed the inclinations of their
own constituencies toward Roosevelt. For the moment, this strategic
adaptation largely coincided with imperatives set out by the Comintern.
Influence
in labor, especially, grew rapidly after John 1. Lewis agreed to use
Communist organizers in the nascent CIO. Communist leaders, rising out
of the ranks, won wide approval through their fearlessness and their
dedication. Communists in New York State’s American Labor Party (which
repeatedly sent the radical Vito Marcantonio to Congress), in
Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, and in the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party, came to be looked upon as agents not of Moscow but of
the democratic agenda. Influential Communists could be found in cinema,
the theater, music, and the graphic arts. The vital social theater and
mural art of the Works Progress Administration, especially, were at
their highest creative levels, often quite pro-Communist in sympathies.
Communist identification of racism as the running sore of democracy and
the mark of incipient fascism, combined with Communists’ ardent efforts
to uplift the cause of minorities both politically and culturally,
prompted liberal respect almost bordering upon awe.
Communist
efforts in international affairs had more mixed results. The Spanish
Civil War became a liberal cause celebre, and its fallen heroes the
martyrs of a generation — even if millions of unquestioning American
Catholics did not think so. For many East European immigrants, anti-Nazi
Russia with all its flaws seemed vastly preferable to its
alternativesuch as the collaborationist regimes in Hungary, Yugoslavia,
Lithuania, and other nations. Liberals, dismayed by the lack of
resistance against fascism from democracies like France and Great
Britain, were likewise willing to forgive Soviet shortcomings. Jewish
support for the Communist movement rose precipitously.
On
the other hand, the public portrayals of Russia as a virtual paradise
for workers and peasants required great credulity, even in the best of
times, and the later 1930s were far from the best of times. Stalin’s
purges of the “Old Bolsheviks through the Moscow Trials required
ideological overkill from American Communists, which baffled and pained
their liberal allies. The unquestioning acceptance of such positions by
ordinary Communists raised serious questions for non-members. The
undemocratic character of American Communism’s inner organizational life
did not greatly exceed that of the Republican or Democratic parties,
but the perceived gap between deed and word expanded just as Communists
staked their claim upon being the tribunes of democracy.
The
Hitler-Stalin Pact and the turn of Communists to extreme antiwar
positions permitted conservatives their long-awaited opportunity at
legal repression. The pact might have been defended as a forced
necessity, but Communists mercilessly attacked those who held to the
anti-Hitler front, alienating themselves from the very groups with whom
they had been most intimate. loss of Party membership was slight, but
sympathizers were stunned at the sudden shift in directions, broadly
rekindling old fears of American Communism as a Soviet pawn. Opponents
of the Party within the CIO and liberal circles took advantage of the
opportunity to puncture Communist moral authority. Congressional
committees played upon public fears to savage the most left-leaning New
Deal programs. Party leader Earl Browder went to jail on a passport
violation, reminding Communist regulators that their gains in American
life had never been secure. Roosevelt’s new “Doctor Win-the-War”
strategy signaled the virtual collapse of the liberal agenda, but
Communists had long since come to the point of no return. To remove
themselves from the Democratic Party coalition meant isolation.
Following
the German invasion of the USSR, the Communists again switched their
line to unrelenting opposition to the Nazis. Under the Democratic Front
policy the Party worked with all other democratic forces to rally new
levels of popular support for Soviet-American cooperation. Party
membership would hit its all-time peak of 85,000 in 1942. If there was a
moment when the Communists might have totally surfaced all their
members in the trade union movement and other organizations, this was
it. Earl Browder, in fact, attempted to tailor his organization to
American conditions by formally abandoning the designation of “party”
for the Communist Political Association, which indicated the
organization would now function as a political pressure group.
The
Communist influence in certain regions became considerable in the
1940s. In New York City neighborhoods where housing struggles continued
to be popular and where Communists offered the only thoroughgoing
perspective for the creation of a multiracial and multicultural
democracy, Communist candidates were elected to municipal offices.
Moreover, major social-political figures considered close to the Party,
notably Harlem’s Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, exerted even wider influence.
Simultaneously, and for the first time, Communist spokespersons, such
as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in her Daily Worker column, began to argue for
a forceful advancement of women’s rights, not merely protective
legislation or special consideration as women workers. In such matters,
especially in relation to liberal organizations of many types, subtle
shifts from proletarian to lower-middle-class orientations served the
Party well.
Despite
the obvious strengths of the Communist movement, there were numerous
handicaps. The frequent zigzagging in political line, with equal
ferocity brought to instantly changing positions, had sapped its
intellectual credibility. The near-fanatical attachment to wartime
national unity seemed all too characteristic of past adaptations Across a
wide spectrum of efforts, the Party paid a heavy price, as Popular
Front organizations (e.g., the Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples)
that had been created under difficult conditions were now suddenly
abandoned or dissolved. In like manner, Communist insistence upon the
no-strike pledge in war industries and other curbs on militancy, while
not universally applied, nevertheless created hostility among some of
the most militant industrial workers. Support of the Smith Act usage
against Trotskyists and support of the confinement of Japanese Americans
raised serious doubts about Communist commitments to civil liberties.
The
Party also had an unrepresentative geographic spread, being
concentrated mainly in a few urban areas, particularly New York.
Communist membership on the New York City Council and a factory base not
unlike modest-size European Communist parties were totally
unrepresentative of national Communist strength. A majority of the Party
was female and worked from neighborhood rather than factory bases. Many
male Communists who joined the armed forces would return from war
greatly changed and in many instances would be propelled from the
working class by benefits offered in the GI Bill.
By
the time the war drew to a close, the Communist accommodation to the
liberal and labor establishment swelled to a crescendo without, however,
winning over or neutralizing stubborn opponents who awaited an
opportunity to isolate the Party. The emerging Cold War soon placed
Communists at an enormous disadvantage. The problem was compounded when
Browder was removed as leader of the Party after Russian disfavor was
signaled via a critical letter issued by the head of the French CP.
Considerable internal confusion ensued and Americans already skeptical
of CP independence saw Browder’s fall as another sign of the Party’s
domination by a foreign power.
The
Party, now gravely weakened, reestablished its form in 1945, but its
leadership was in disarray. Organizational feuding resulted in numerous
individual expulsions and in collective cynicism among many longtime
supporters. left ethnics faced a considerable influx of new, largely
middle-class, and in some cases, formerly collaborationist refugees
bitterly hostile to Communism. They, as Communists in general, also
faced the hard reality of oppressive Russian rule in Eastern Europe and
growing perceptions about the long-term prospects for Stalinist
restrictions on rights and liberties. Rapid reorientation of the Left
under these conditions became almost impossible.
The
first hints of a cohesive anticommunist campaign — from Cold War
liberals and social democrats to far Right organizations to government
agencies — offered disturbing glimpses of the future in store. The Union
for Democratic Action, predecessor of the Americans for Democratic
Action, announced Communist exclusion as one of its main tenets. The
more conservative CIO and AFL leaders began to pinpoint Communist
centers of influence to be eliminated, and to buttress significant labor
support (the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists offered a semimass
base, while liberals such as the Reuther brothers supplied
organizational muscle) behind a drive to marginalize the Party faithful.
In
response, the Party led a spirited antiCold War effort across many
sectors. Among liberals who hoped for postwar detente between America
and Russia, the Progressive Citizens of America used celebrities such as
Frank Sinatra and a compulsive mobilization of well-placed activists to
fight the lure of President Truman’s mix of domestic reforms and
international aggressiveness. The American Veterans Committee, farm
groups, race leaders, and others rallied opponents of American leaders’
de facto plan to dominate the postwar world through economic power and
atomic weapons.
The
Party threw itself desperately into the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948,
and suffered dire consequences both before and after Wallace’s
ignominious defeat. By pressuring friendly union leaders to support
Wallace, at a time when the CIO had shifted rightward on foreign policy
and was simultaneously cracking down bureaucratically on its own
rebellious ranks, the Party propelled some of its former stalwarts and
their unions out of the left orbit. Individuals who accepted CP
positions faced expulsion from the CIO in 1949, either from their office
or with their entire unions. With ever fewer institutional defenses to
support liberal and labor activists, the Red Scare tactics of government
and business found ready prey. Thousands of activists, members and
former members of the CP or Left-linked movements, were grilled by FBI
agents, their family and fellow workers intimidated, mail and phone
service intercepted, and (especially for those in conservative
districts) a public outcry incited against them by the active Right.
Desertions
accelerated on all sides. For instance, while the Party shifted away
from support of third parties after the Wallace defeat, many
“progressives” such as those grouped around the National Guardian
asserted their independence, taking up causes such as Vito Marcantonio’s
last Congressional campaign, which was viewed askance by the Party. For
such people, the Communists had ceased to be the center-point of
progressive politics, not only because of the Party insistence upon
unquestioning loyalty to Soviet pronouncements, but also because
Communists could no longer deliver organizational muscle.
The
anticommunist movement that had been building since the 1940s with a
full panoply of public and private acts thus fell upon the Party at its
weakest moment. With most leaders and celebrities already gone,
investigators could pick off remaining supporters through a combination
of jail threats and deprivation of public access. Communist opposition
to the Korean War impelled wide fears about a coming world conflict,
with American Communists as a “Fifth Column” subverting defense efforts.
Newspaper tabloids whipped up a frenzy, with headlines like FBI TO
STRIKE AT 20,000 REDS, identifying Communists with potential military
subversion. The Hiss case, the Rosenberg case, and a host of others were
orchestrated — with careful preparation by the FBI, often in the form
of prompting witnesses with pat answers — to demonstrate that America
had “lost” China and the A-bomb secrets due to Communist infiltration of
government. Meanwhile, fishing-expedition hearings essentially demanded
of witnesses that they repudiate their past Left activities, and
further more give testimony against their trusted friends and co-workers
of many years.
Two
sectors suffered especially from these varied forms of repression. The
fraternal international Workers Order, a financial backbone of the Party
and a symbol of Communist respectability among aging European
immigrants and many of their descendants, was quashed. Communists lost
contact with several generations of working-class activists who, without
joining, had taken Party teachings and local representatives seriously.
Fraternal and folk-dance groups, summer-camps, shuls, choruses, and
other activities remained, but far smaller and more insular. Second, the
youth sector, reorganized in 1949 as the Labor Youth League,
practically had to operate underground. The Party lost, in effect,
virtually an entire generation that might have bridged the gap to the
New left.
Political
opportunities to advance the Lef-tliberal program therefore fell by the
way. Urgently needed contemporary reform projects — such as the
National Negro Labor Congress, established with wide black support to
further racial equality within the labor movement — attracted only
hostility from liberal-minded non-Communists. Remaining local activists
worked on their own at any rate, as the foremost Party leaders had gone
underground, and (preparing for the worst by reducing themselves to
hardened cadres) the organization dropped many faithful members who had
merely neglected their membership renewals.
Two
international events of 1956 brought new chaos to the Party: the Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and revelations of Stalin’s
misdeeds at the Twentieth Soviet Congress. Individuals long faithful to
the Party now felt betrayed and wondered privately and openly if their
political lives had been built upon self-delusion.
Self-appointed reformers centered around the Daily Worker
briefly sought an internal transformation into an open, democratic
movement. An unprecedented wave of collective self-criticism appeared in
the pages of the Party’s national organ. The departure of many
like-minded members, filled with despair or disgust, contributed to
their defeat by doctrinaire loyalists. With the victors stood a
considerable section of the ethnic faithful, many of whom had personally
experienced the Palmer era repressions and now refused to be cowed by
or to accept the various revelations as sufficient cause to leave the
movement. Their now increasingly prominent presence, in a smaller
organization, revealed a new demographic reality: the Party had been
aging. This process was not as abrupt as it seemed. Recruitment of young
people had peaked in the 1930s. That tendency would now become a
dominant trend.
Greatly
weakened as the Party ranks were, they still included many
extraordinary individuals, and within the Party’s surviving peripheries
were many more. Ironically, the Party’s weakness made for better work in
alliances. Party activists rarely felt the necessity, much less the
opportunity, to impose their positions on non-Communists. Some of their
opponents in mass movements had also grown weary of ideological and
organizational struggle. frequently having moved upward to bureaucratic
office or occasionally recognizing the harm done to labor and reform
movements by the old internecine squabbling. Anti-Stalinism lacked
left-wing credentials in a society whose obsessive anticommunism had
become a primary public rationale for the arms industry, unrecalcitrant
racial segregation, and the unhampered political activity of FBI and CIA
operatives. All this did not mean that future fellow activists with
Communists accepted the persistently claimed virtues of the
Communist-led nations, only that the issue had been put aside as less
pressing than matters at hand.
As
the Cold War eased, and Third World liberation struggles replaced great
power face-offs as the immediate focus of foreign policy. Communists
began to reemerge. Communists played a key role in the new
Africa-support movement, in many cases educating church people to the
real effects of neo-colonialism and helping to establish liaisons
between liberals and the newly independent states. CP supporters,
meanwhile, continued their longtime pioneering work in the South.
quietly establishing themselves within the new civil rights movement,
although never becoming the dominant or manipulative force that
conservatives imagined. Freedomways
magazine, established with Party assistance, had an authoritative
quality among many, especially older, black activists. Comparable
political work was accomplished in northern industrial areas with
minority populations and militant trade unions. The Party retained
pockets of labor strength, especially among officials and older
rank-and-filers among the West Coast longshoremen, but also in other
scattered industries and locations. The ethnic networks, however
reduced, continued to maintain a sufficient following for a dozen daily
presses and a variety of other activities.
When
a renewed radical movement took shape in the 1960s, the CP — for the
first time in its existence — was not the dominant force on the Left. In
major cities, the CP network of trade union contacts — seasoned
veterans of Left-liberal coalitions and ethnic activists — could be
counted upon to form broad alliances against war and racism, but there
were other radical formations of equal or greater strength. Frequently,
Party commitment to work within the Democratic Party and the broad
liberal spectrum put local Communists at a disadvantage within the
embryonic New left. In 1964 nearly all activists could agree upon the
defeat of Barry Goldwater as a pressing priority. Thereafter, the role
of the Democratic Party mainstream gave the arguments for liberal
coalitions more obvious contradictions. Communist political sniping at
New Leftists, while never reaching the orchestrated heights of
1930s-1940s anti-Trotskyism, precipitated an uncomfortable generation
gap between many veteran militants and their own children or
grandchildren, a conflict that New Leftists’ own youthful arrogance
personalized and exacerbated.
As
a result, while Communists took a leading role in some specific fronts
of the anti-Vietnam War movement, pacifists and Trotskyists ultimately
staffed most of the movement’s infrastructure. The new W. E. B. DuBois
Clubs (organized in 1965) renewed campus activism but with far fewer
members than Students for a Democratic Society and fewer chapters than
the Young Socialist Alliance. Successful CP mechanisms among youth, such
as the Che-Lumumba Club of Los Angeles, tended to be local in nature
and dependent upon particularly accommodating CP leaders. One strong
point, the Party’s fraternal links with revolutionary movements in
Vietnam, Mozambique, South Africa, Cuba and elsewhere in the Third
World, gave the Party its highest contemporary prestige and influence,
without however prompting any wide-scale recruitment even among Third
World support activists.
The
Communists had few contacts with the emerging sexual liberation
movements, notwithstanding the past Party membership of the Mattachine
Society founders and past Popular Front links with some senior women’s
liberation figures such as Bella Abzug. While some parts of the now “Old
Left” would rally to the gay movement as it emerged, the CP remained
aloof. Likewise, while the CP had long supported women’s rights as part
of the progressive agenda, it was not prepared for an autonomous
feminist movement that appeared to replace class with sex as the primary
contradiction. Like the painfully antifeminist perspectives of some
black liberation leaders, Communist fears of black women not supporting
black men’s activities betrayed a lack of fundamental commitment to
gender issues. Communists could not place themselves on record for so
mild a measure as the Equal Rights Amendment, and therefore benefited
little from the women’s liberation movement with all its ramifications.
Little
improvement could be seen with the collapse of the New Left.
Trotskyists and, especially, Maoists rather than Communists recruited
most of the New Left activists turning toward Leninism in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Intense factionalism and disillusionment with the
Chinese regimes soon destroyed hopes for a “new communist party” with
the strength of the old CP, but relatively few younger activists on
campus (many now notably influenced by religious ideas) or in
communities turned to the Party for leadership. Continuing uncritical
support for the USSR, especially in the face of Eastern European dissent
and occasional uprising, sustained the anxieties of the middle 1950s
and provoked further internal discontent. The resignation of West Coast
leader Dorothy Healey in 1973 was taken as a signal to many outsiders
that the established Party leadership had determined to remain
impervious to the democratic challenges heard in Eurocommunism.
Nevertheless,
American Communism had over the decades acquired an invaluable asset
upon which it would now draw freely. The most historical-minded
generation in the American Left, graduating from campus and community
activism, collaborated with Party stalwarts and sympathizers as well as
non-Communist radicals in celebrating American traditions of militancy. A
wave of documentary films, written histories, memoirs, and public
events, some widely acclaimed and even government-funded, commenced in
the middle 1970s. At the local level, high officials turned out for
prestige banquets to sanctify and vindicate the lives of elderly
Communists. Over the objections of many critics, and despite the virtual
end of controversial public funding in the Reagan era, American
Communism became a recognized and even respected part of American reform
history.
Communists
also gained from long-standing political contacts in the black
community. Victories of black mayoral and congressional candidates with
decades — old ties to the CP — a short list would include Coleman Young
and George Crocket in Detroit, Gus Newport in Berkeley, and somewhat
more ambiguously, Harold Washington in Chicago — helped to rehabilitate
the Party image. Like the continuing struggle against racism within
unions, this public vindication brought a trickle of new black and Latin
members, although never enough to compensate for the attrition in the
aging fraternal networks.
The
CP managed to emerge from the 1970s in far better organizational shape
than might have been expected and much stronger than any of its
immediate political rivals. The perenially fractured SWP had shrunk to
its pre-1960s size and influence, and was in the odd ideological
position of emphasizing the theories of Fidel Castro over those of Leon
Trotsky. None of its numerous breakaway groups, all of which were closer
to original Trotskyist doctrine, had attracted a significant following.
The Maoists, whose various organizations had had a combined membership
in the thousands, had all but disappeared as had would-be successors to
SDS. The only other large Left group was the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA), which remained smaller than the CP (which still claimed
it had over 10,000 members), and had a less activist rank and file. Both
DSA and the CP could boast of more than a few trade union members,
officials, and sympathizers. But only the CP was strong enough to
maintain a daily newspaper, the Daily World.
The
emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the USSR in 1985 gave
American Communists an unexpected, if also sometimes unnerving burst of
new interest and new issues. With the Cold War fast fading and the USSR
increasingly seen as the superpower most committed to ending the nuclear
arms race, the CP could claim vindication for its long-term
foreign-policy orientation. As many Americans voiced enthusiasm for
Gorbachev’s reforms, the CP stood to gain more public visibility.
Although Communists were no longer central to movements such as those
opposing apartheid in South Africa or supporting the Sandinista
revolution in Nicaragua, they had placed themselves respectably within
those broad currents. CP influence also extended into the newer
political refugee communities (notably the Chilean, but also the
Salvadorean, among others). Like smaller ideological groups but with
generally more public impact, the CP campaigned vigorously against
political repression of native-born and immigrant racial minorities.
The
new Soviet candor also freed the Communists, at least in theory, from
the need to support every regime in Eastern Europe and from the need to
maintain that the Bolsheviks executed by Stalin had been truly the
“agents of capital.” By the end of the 1980s, the Party had not yet
embarked upon its own programs of glasnost or perestroika, and the Gus
Hall leadership evinced little eagerness to do so. Yet an avenue for
internal reform had been opened. The irreversible decline of the
Communist Party into insignificance — long predicted with great
confidence by its critics — seemed at the very least decidedly
premature. See also: Abraham Lincoln Brigade; African Blood Brotherhood;
Allerton Avenue Co-ops; American Committee for Protection of the
Foreign Born; American League Against War and Fascism; American Negro
Labor Congress; American Slav Congress; American Soviet Friendship;
American Student Union; American Writers Congress; Anticommunism;
Antirevisionism; Aptheker, Herbert; Armenian Americans; Berry, Abner;
Birmingham, Alabama; Bloor, Ella Reeve; Bridges, Harry; Brodsky, Joseph;
Browder, Earl; Bulgarian Americans; Cannon, James P.; Chinese
Americans; Civil Rights Congress; Congress of American Artists; Daily
Worker; Davis, Angela; Davis, Benjamin; Federal Bureau of Investigation;
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley; Foner, Philip; Foster, William Z.; Fraina,
Louis C.; Freiheit; Gastonia Strike; Gellert, Hugo; Gold, Michael;
Green, Gil; Grey, Eula; Hall, Gus; Haywood, Harry; Healey, Dorothy;
HitlerStalin Pact; Hollywood Blacklist; Hollywood Left; Hudson, Hosea;
Hungarian Americans; ILGWU; ILWU; Inman, Mary; International Publishers;
International Workers Order; Jefferson School; Jones, Claudia;
Krushchev Revelations; Latvian Americans; Lawson, John Howard;
Lithuanian Americans; Lore, Ludwig; Lovestonites; McCarthyism;
Mainstream; Minor, Robert; Moscow Trials; National Maritime Union;
National Woman’s Commission; New Masses; Olgin, Moissye; Paterson,
William; Patterson, Louis Thompson; Peekskill; People’s World; Popular
Front; Progressive Party; Public Sector Unions; Puerto Ricans;
Rapp-Coudert; Radical Filmmaking; Red Daiper Baby; Red Scare; Reed,
John; Rent Strikes; Robeson, Paul; Rosenberg Case; Ruthenberg, Charles;
San Francisco General Strike; Scales, Julius Irving; Share Croppers
Union; Southern Negro Youth Congress; Southern Worker; Rose Pastor
Stokes Summer Camps; Taft-Hartley Loyalty Oath; Teachers Union;
Toveritar; Trade Union Educational League; Ukrainian Americans;
Unemployed Movements of the 1930s; United Farm Equipment and Metal
Workers Union; UCAPAWA; UPOWA; Vanguard Party; Williams, Claude;
Winston, Henry; Workers Schools; Working Woman/Woman Today; Young
Communist League.
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