Pub Date : 2021-11-20DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.2009715
D. Lynn
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Pub Date : 2021-09-09DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1978775
A. Rodriguez
Abstract This article explores the origins of the global communist movement in the years 1914–21, with special emphasis on the Americas and Spain. It does so through the biography of Charles Phillips, a US army deserter who defected to revolutionary Mexico in 1918, where he intervened in the country’s stormy labor politics and plugged into dynamic transnational networks geared toward Soviet Russia. His contact with Soviet emissaries drove him to Moscow in 1920. He became a roving organizer for the Communist International in Europe and the Americas, helping set up communist groups in Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, and Spain. Phillips’ trajectory is representative of the generation of activists that helped transform communism into a global movement. Though far from consummate Marxists, these militants, whose radicalization was often shaped by the experience of the First World War, proved crucial organizers for the Communist International by dint of their mobility, their international networks, and their commitment to the cause.
{"title":"Deserters of War, Soldiers of Revolution: Charles Francis Phillips and the Origins of Communism in the Americas, 1914–21","authors":"A. Rodriguez","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2021.1978775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2021.1978775","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the origins of the global communist movement in the years 1914–21, with special emphasis on the Americas and Spain. It does so through the biography of Charles Phillips, a US army deserter who defected to revolutionary Mexico in 1918, where he intervened in the country’s stormy labor politics and plugged into dynamic transnational networks geared toward Soviet Russia. His contact with Soviet emissaries drove him to Moscow in 1920. He became a roving organizer for the Communist International in Europe and the Americas, helping set up communist groups in Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, and Spain. Phillips’ trajectory is representative of the generation of activists that helped transform communism into a global movement. Though far from consummate Marxists, these militants, whose radicalization was often shaped by the experience of the First World War, proved crucial organizers for the Communist International by dint of their mobility, their international networks, and their commitment to the cause.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"20 1","pages":"139 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42049552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-05DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1964272
Tony Pecinovsky
W. Alphaeus Hunton, a Howard University professor and leader of the National Negro Congress (NNC), joined the Council on African Affairs (CAA) as educational director in 1943. As an intellectual and organizational architect of what is now called the long civil rights movement, he brought with him a wealth of knowledge and experience. The Council on African Affairs is part of this long civil rights legacy. To Gerald Horne it was “the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism.” Penny M. Von Eschen referred to it as “vital and important.” It provided the connective tissue that brought together African Americans struggling for equality with Africans struggling for Black liberation, particularly in apartheid South Africa. From 1943 to 1955, the CAA and its publications, New Africa and later Spotlight on Africa, were Hunton’s main political outlets. Through the CAA, he engaged a larger Black radical diaspora that included Pan-Africanists, Communists, union leaders, elected officials, and other progressives. A scholar-activist, Hunton’s journalism spanned roughly 35 years. He not only served on the editorial board of the NNC’s publication, Congress View, but from July 1944 to January 1946, Hunton wrote a regular column for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. From November 1950 until summer 1955, he contributed to Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. And from 1961 until his death in 1970, he was an associate editor and contributor to Freedomways, the quarterly journal of Black liberation. Hunton also wrote numerous speeches, press releases, and pamphlets, and in 1957 published
{"title":"Conference Presentation 2021 Working Class Studies Association Conference Forging a cross-Atlantic ‘Red-Black Alliance’: W. Alphaeus Hunton and the Council on African Affairs","authors":"Tony Pecinovsky","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2021.1964272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2021.1964272","url":null,"abstract":"W. Alphaeus Hunton, a Howard University professor and leader of the National Negro Congress (NNC), joined the Council on African Affairs (CAA) as educational director in 1943. As an intellectual and organizational architect of what is now called the long civil rights movement, he brought with him a wealth of knowledge and experience. The Council on African Affairs is part of this long civil rights legacy. To Gerald Horne it was “the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism.” Penny M. Von Eschen referred to it as “vital and important.” It provided the connective tissue that brought together African Americans struggling for equality with Africans struggling for Black liberation, particularly in apartheid South Africa. From 1943 to 1955, the CAA and its publications, New Africa and later Spotlight on Africa, were Hunton’s main political outlets. Through the CAA, he engaged a larger Black radical diaspora that included Pan-Africanists, Communists, union leaders, elected officials, and other progressives. A scholar-activist, Hunton’s journalism spanned roughly 35 years. He not only served on the editorial board of the NNC’s publication, Congress View, but from July 1944 to January 1946, Hunton wrote a regular column for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. From November 1950 until summer 1955, he contributed to Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. And from 1961 until his death in 1970, he was an associate editor and contributor to Freedomways, the quarterly journal of Black liberation. Hunton also wrote numerous speeches, press releases, and pamphlets, and in 1957 published","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"20 1","pages":"131 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45607800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-15DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1941580
B. Palmer
During the momentous strikes of Minneapolis teamsters in 1934, a young lecturer in psychology at the University of Minnesota was drawn to the nightly mass meetings at the headquarters of the combative truck drivers. Grace Holmes, brought up in a Catholic working-class family in St. Paul, recalled, almost forty yeas later, “what a great impact the Drivers’ Strike of 1934 had on all Minnesotans ... . You were either on the workers’ side or the bosses.” (60) Grace was most definitely on the side of the workers. Educated by Catholic priests and, perhaps most influentially, by the Sisters of St. Joseph’s Academy, Grace imbibed the lessons of a Catholicism concerned with social justice issues and dedicated to serving those in need. When her mother pressured a 15-year old Grace to accompany her boilermaker father back into the struck shops of the Great Northern Railway in the fall of 1922, thinking that the presence of a young girl would shield a strike-breaker from physical attack, the teenager was distressed. She went to confession, telling the bewildered (and likely somewhat bemused) cleric that she had “helped deprive the laborer of his wages.” (9) Granted God’s forgiveness in 1922, Grace went on to graduate from High School, enrolling as an undergraduate in the all-female, Josephite-instructed, College of St. Catherine, where she majored in English with a minor in Chemistry. Her broad liberal arts education interrupted for a year as nineteen-year old Grace looked after her dying mother, graduation was postponed until 1929. The young woman then went on to do a Masters and PhD at the University of Minnesota, her area of expertise educational psychology and mental assessment techniques. University experience introduced Grace Holmes to more secular philosophical concerns. Most of her instructors were logical positivists inclined toward atheism. Focusing on the scientific method, Grace began to question some of her religious faith. Upon completion of her doctorate in 1933 and a subsequent short-term teaching stint, she was increasingly active in campus mobilizations. Her participation in the Social Problems Club, testing of the waters of class struggle in the 1934 teamsters’ strikes, and participation in student anti-war protests in 1935 signaled a drifting away from religion that would culminate in Grace turning toward secular radicalism and securing a Minnesota Department of Education position as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. Politically, Grace first aligned with the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) and she was attracted to Communist Party-led agitations of the unemployed. But the defining moment of her political coming of age was 1934 and the Local Drivers’ Union’s battles with employers, various levels of the state (including that of FLP governor, Floyd Olson), and the notorious antilabor, business association, the Citizens Alliance.
1934年，在明尼阿波利斯卡车司机的重大罢工期间，明尼苏达大学的一位年轻心理学讲师被吸引参加了在好斗的卡车司机总部举行的夜间群众会议。格雷斯·霍姆斯（Grace Holmes）在圣保罗的一个天主教工人阶级家庭长大，她回忆道，大约四十年后，“1934年的司机罢工对所有明尼苏达人产生了多么大的影响……你要么站在工人一边，要么站在老板一边。”。格蕾丝接受了天主教牧师的教育，也许最有影响力的是圣约瑟夫修女学院的教育，她吸取了天主教关心社会正义问题的教训，致力于为那些需要帮助的人服务。1922年秋天，当她的母亲向15岁的格蕾丝施压，要求她陪同锅炉制造商的父亲回到大北方铁路罢工的商店时，她认为一个年轻女孩的出现可以保护罢工破坏者免受人身攻击，这名少年很难过。她去忏悔，告诉这位困惑（可能有点困惑）的神职人员，她“帮助剥夺了工人的工资”。（9）1922年，在上帝的宽恕下，格蕾丝从高中毕业，在约瑟芬指导的圣凯瑟琳学院（College of St.Catherine）读了一名全女性的本科生，主修英语，辅修化学。由于19岁的格蕾丝照顾垂死的母亲，她广泛的文科教育中断了一年，毕业典礼推迟到1929年。随后，这位年轻女子在明尼苏达大学获得了硕士和博士学位，这是她的专业领域——教育心理学和心理评估技术。大学经历让格蕾丝·霍尔姆斯了解了更多世俗的哲学问题。她的导师大多是倾向于无神论的逻辑实证主义者。专注于科学方法，格蕾丝开始质疑她的一些宗教信仰。1933年完成博士学位和随后的短期教学后，她越来越积极地参与校园动员。她参加了社会问题俱乐部，在1934年的卡车司机罢工中测试了阶级斗争的水，并在1935年参加了学生反战抗议活动，这标志着她逐渐远离宗教，最终导致格雷斯转向世俗激进主义，并获得了明尼苏达州教育部的职业康复顾问职位。在政治上，格雷斯最初与农工党结盟，她被共产党领导的失业者煽动所吸引。但她政治成年的决定性时刻是1934年，当地司机工会与雇主、州各级（包括FLP州长弗洛伊德·奥尔森）以及臭名昭著的反劳工商业协会公民联盟的斗争。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-29DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1932376
P. Filardo
“... friendship between the[m]... and an exchange... published in... Partisan Review...” Craven, Alice Mikal, William E. Dow, Yoko Nakamura, editors, Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Cronin, Sean, James Connolly: Irish Revolutionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2020). Connolly spent some years in the U.S. Crowe, David, Hemmingway and Ho Chi Minh in Paris: The Art of Resistance, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2020). Curtin, Maureen F., “Drag and the Aesthetics of Free Speech in the Mosaic of Mary McCarthy’s Postmodern Affinities,” Women’s Studies 49, no. 4 (2020), 374–90. Cushman, Barry, “The Judicial Reforms of 1937,” William & Mary Law Review 61, no. 4 (2020), 995–1051. Return to the beginning of the Biographical & Individuals-Based Works section. Return to the beginning of the Bibliography.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1929671
Lisa Milner
This was not a one-off, but was one of thousands of plays written and sponsored by American unions, and performed by American union members. One quote explains the union movement’s support of drama: “In the case of the individual, culture may be just personal pleasure and enjoyment. But when groups, social classes, the people, are involved, culture is a tool. It serves them to strengthen the base and to extend the scope of their organisation.” The American union movement’s use of theater has a history of over a hundred years. In the past two decades, the traditional concerns of labor historians—studies of industrial action, trade unions, and working-class struggles—have been widened to include a rich array of artistic and intellectual themes, and this has served to extend the boundaries of labor history into cognate fields of inquiry, including cultural and artistic studies. A notable example is Michael Denning’s masterly 2010 work The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Whilst this new agenda has brought life to studies of various types of culture, scholarship on union theater as a component of the culture of labor has been thin on the ground. Until recent years, single studies of the more popular union productions have emerged, such as the well-known Pins and Needles, a play by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILWGU) that reached Broadway. Scholars have also studied the broad area of American workers’ and left-wing theater, as well as the short-lived Federal Theater Project, which sometimes intersected with union culture. This is despite the fact that
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1918527
Joshua J. Morris
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1919499
D. Rosenberg
Little in the way of biography has been written about Gus Hall (Arvo Halberg), General Secretary and later Chair of the Communist Party USA for a 50-year span beginning in 1959. A Soviet biography...
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1938463
Dario Migliucci
Over the last decades, several historians have analyzed the manner in which, throughout the twentieth century, members of several American legislative bodies and US government officials conducted surveillance and repressive activities in order to contain the proliferation of radical political movements. In particular, researchers have focused their attention on two specific moments of the United States history. The first period included the years between 1918 and 1920; the second period covered the years between 1947 and 1957. These periods are commonly known today as the ages of the so-called Red Scares. During the First Red Scare, the targets of political repression were activists of the radical left movements and the leadership of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, an office that the Soviet regime established in New York to defend the interests of Moscow and improve the relations between the two countries. As for the Second Red Scare—a historical period also known as McCarthyism—a harsh witch-hunt was unleashed against anyone suspected of spreading communist propaganda, including many Hollywood stars. Alleged agents of the Soviet Union had to face a merciless persecution; in 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg became the first civilians in American history to be executed for the crime of espionage. In contrast, the issue of the response of the American institutions to the proliferation of radical movements during the Great Depression era has not been considered by scholars with the same degree of attention. In the book Little ‘Red Scares’: Anti-
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2021.1925040
S. Richman
Abstract The Communist Party’s (CP) “Third Period” shift in labor policy from the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) effort of “boring from within” mainstream unions to the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) effort to create new independent “revolutionary” unions is dismissed in much of the literature. In a close study of New York’s independent hotel workers, we see a more complex story. The CP and TUEL thwarted leftwing unionists’ efforts to organize a federation of independent, amalgamated industrial unions called the Labor Unity Council in the early 1920’s. Activists who resented the hasty directive to recreate an independent “Unity” federation of radical unions a few short years later became an early pocket of left-wing anti-communism. We also see how one union, the Amalgamated Food Workers, negotiated and resisted CP directives, as well as how its breakaway TUUL competitor, the Food Workers Industrial Union, was divisive until the New Deal National Recovery Administration labor codes forced the unions into a degree of coordination and eventually merger that preceded the CP shift toward the “Popular Front.”
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