Pub Date : 2019-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1664830
Tony Pecinovsky
Most histories of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) end in 1956. The CPUSA was a “shattered organization” “afflicted with a mortal illness” and played a marginal role after 1956 as its “membership plummeted,” so the dominant, traditional narrative suggests. Just a little context. The Khrushchev revelations and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, as well as nearly a decade of domestic Red Scare repression through the Smith and McCarran Acts, weakened the Party. But it was not destroyed. Of course, there are a few excellent examples that challenge this traditional narrative. Gerald Horne’s biography of William L Patterson, Sara Rzeszutek’s biography of James and Esther Cooper Jackson, and Gary Murrell’s biography of Herbert Aptheker. But, much more needs to be done. That these challenges take the shape of biographies – and not general histories – is also worth noting. My research is largely focused on the post-1956 period, and as such I hope to help uncover some of the hidden contributions’ communists made during the 2nd half of the 20th Century. In my collection of short biographies to be published this summer, I enlarge the historical lens to focus on communist defense of the Bill of Rights, the youth and student upsurge of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war peace offensive, Charlene Mitchell’s campaign for president of the United States, and the birth of the Party-led National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), among other topics.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1664840
J. McIlroy, A. Campbell
A prosopographical study of the early central committee members of the Workers Party of America.
美国工人党早期中央委员会成员的形态学研究。
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Pub Date : 2019-08-19DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1651159
J. Zumoff
From January 1926 through March 1927, more than 15,000 textile workers in New Jersey struck against a wage cut, for shorter hours, and for better conditions. Remembered as the Passaic strike, it also involved wool and worsted workers in nearby Garfield and Clifton, and silk dying workers in what was then East Paterson. The largely unskilled workers—mainly immigrants from East and Central Europe and Italy, and half women—organized mass pickets and near-daily meetings in the face of police violence. Just to give a sense of this violence: on 2 March 1926, a dozen mounted policemen and 65 policemen on foot attacked a 2,000-strong picket. During the strike, police arrested more than 1,000 strikers. The Passaic strike was the first mass workers’ struggle in which the Communist Party (CP) played a leading role. At the time, the CP had not fully embraced Stalinism and both James P. Cannon, the future American Trotskyist, and Jay Lovestone, the future leader of the pro-Bukharin Right Opposition, remained in leading positions. Since the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), the textile union recognized by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), refused to help the wool workers, Communists organized the United Front Committee of Textile Workers (UFC), which led the strike. The most famous Communist was the head organizer of the UFC, Albert Weisbord, a New York native who had recently graduated from Harvard Law School.
从1926年1月到1927年3月，新泽西州有15000多名纺织工人举行罢工，反对减薪、缩短工作时间和改善工作条件。它被称为帕塞伊克罢工，还包括附近加菲尔德和克利夫顿的羊毛和精纺工人，以及当时东帕特森的丝绸染织工人。面对警察的暴力，大部分非技术工人——主要是来自东欧、中欧和意大利的移民，其中一半是女性——组织了大规模的纠察和几乎每天的集会。1926年3月2日，12名骑警和65名步行警察袭击了一个2000人的纠察队。在罢工期间，警方逮捕了1000多名罢工者。帕塞伊克罢工是中国共产党领导的第一次群众性工人斗争。当时，共产党还没有完全接受斯大林主义，未来的美国托洛茨基主义者詹姆斯·p·坎农(James P. Cannon)和未来的亲布哈林右翼反对派领袖杰伊·洛夫斯通(Jay Lovestone)仍然担任领导职务。由于美国劳工联合会(AFL)承认的纺织工会美国纺织工人联合会(UTW)拒绝帮助羊毛工人，共产党人组织了纺织工人统一战线委员会(UFC)，领导了罢工。最著名的共产主义者是UFC的主要组织者阿尔伯特·韦斯博德(Albert Weisbord)，他是纽约人，刚从哈佛法学院毕业。
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Pub Date : 2019-08-07DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1464844
Allison Leigh
In the spring or summer of 1918, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) began a painting which is now most often referred to as the Suprematist Composition: White on White (Fig. 1). Currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York, it is a work that hovers just on the edge of monumentality without quite attaining it. Neither overly large nor altogether precious in scale, the canvas measures a perfect 79.4 79.4 centimeters; it is a geometry that feels like a reckoning in person. One is confronted first by this utter squareness; the simplicity of the barren form and the totality of its organizing principle within the four-sided frame. Within those four bounding right angles floats a square form. It is all murky, silvery gray whiteness, vibrating within the expanse of the bordering space. It is a ghostly form, like snow caught just as a shadow passed across it, making it ashen, drained, and bloodless. It is not transparent or pearly though, this white Malevich gives us; it does not have the sheen of ivory or frost. It is instead hoary cream, it has a waxen quality that is somehow both deathly and too alive. That lone square form is total presence in its absolute planarity, it faces us with an austerity that is slightly unsettling. And all around it is more whiteness, but of a different quality. The ground plane is pasty but natural; it lacks the steely ambiguity of the square shape; it is warmer and thicker than the pallid chalkiness of the square floating on its surface. Neither white can quite be described as achromatic or colorless though. Both are brought about vigorously; the hand of the artist is where present from the facture’s forthright transparency. One can see how Malevich hit the canvas with the loaded brush; the painting is a record of the weight with which he applied each mark, how he created a topography of restless energy. This is a painting that is notoriously difficult to describe. But it is an important work in the artist’s oeuvre. Some have said it represents the very end of painting, the limit
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1608710
Victor G. Devinatz
Before the opening of the Soviet Archives, much written on the Communist Party, USA’s (CPUSA) trade unionism during “Third Period Communism” (1929–1934) has argued that the Party’s strategy of establishing “revolutionary” or “red” industrial unions affiliated to the CPUSA-led Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), as opposed to continuing to “bore from within” the American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions through the Party-led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), was a dismal flop. At the time of the TUUL’s formation at the end of August 1929, the CPUSA’s recently expelled factional oppositionists, the left-wing Trotskyists in 1928 and the right-wing Lovestoneites in 1929, contended that creating these “dual unions” was markedly unLeninist and advocated for the Party to resume its work within the AFL unions. The opening of the Soviet Archives has provided an opportunity to reevaluate this earlier perspective in the research literature. Although the CPUSA placed much of its focus from 1929 to 1934 on building the TUUL, during this five-year period, it implemented a three-pronged approach regarding its trade unionism including continuing to construct left-wing oppositions within the AFL unions while also actively working to organize independent unions that were neither affiliated to the TUUL nor the AFL. The CPUSA continued to utilize this strategy through late 1934 until the Communist International (Comintern) shifted gears with its Popular Front strategy and ordered the dissolution of its red unions and commanded the Party to reenter the AFL. While the TUUL unions had little success in organizing in the heavy and mass production industries, these labor organizations were much more successful in organizing in light industries in New York City, where they organized under the Trade Union Unity Council (TUUC), especially after the June 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act’s (NIRA) implementation. Besides its vigorous advocacy of a multiracial industrial unionism, the TUUL’s conception of trade unionism was focused on encouraging the democratic rank and file participation of members that was dramatically different than that of the AFL which believed that union officials should be the primary decision makers concerning union affairs. In analyzing TUUL-led strikes conducted in various industries including needle trades, textile, shoe, mining, agriculture, steel, auto, maritime, etc., the time period, industry, and
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1608515
Randi Storch
I want to thank the executive committee, and especially Vernon Pederson, for asking me to speak to today and to everyone who came from far and wide to participate in this important conference. We are here today because we understand that when we research and write about American communism, we are entering an arena where the stakes are high: wars hot and cold have been fought, people gave their lives, others had them taken; and untold money was spent for the cause and to defeat the party altogether. In the end, the movement had an enormous impact on America’s political shift to the right as well as on movements that flourished on the left. And today, in Trump’s America, the history of American communism resonates. In the weeks leading up to the mid-term election, the Trump administration released a 72page report published by the Council of Economic Advisors attacking socialism. The report threatened that a democratic sweep in the midterms would likely result in the USA “becoming the next Venezuela.” The report honed in on the likelihood that democrats would force government run healthcare down the throats of American citizens, ultimately draining national coffers. A sub section of the report titled: “The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning” connects the messaging of Bernie Sanders and ElizabethWarren with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin andMao Zedong. The Socialism that appears un-American in the depictions offered by Trump and his followers, takes on a different cast among today’s socialists who are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, now larger than the Socialist Party ever was, and approaching the numbers of the Communist Party, are looking to the history of socialism generally, and the American Communist party specifically, and they are asking questions about what worked in the past and what didn’t. They want to learn from the Old Left’s organizing strategies and world view and to understand why the USA and the anti-communist left turned so fiercely on communists. The significance of our work is clear. So is its timeliness. In the USA and across the globe, rural and urban communities are confronting challenges brought by globalization, ethnic and racial nationalism and
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1516429
L. Maher
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1599638
Harvey E. Klehr, Maurice Isserman
Editor’s note: The following two essays, by Harvey Klehr and Maurice Isserman, were presented at the “One Hundred years of Communism in the USA” conference, which was held on November 9–10, 2018 at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. The conference was sponsored by the Historians of American Communism. They are lightly edited transcripts of the presentations. Both authors are well-known historians of American communism and have written extensively on that topic. Klehr’s most known work is “The Heyday of American Communism; The Depression Decade” and Maurice Isserman’s is “Which Side Were You On: The American Communist Party during the Second World War.”
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1599631
Nathan Godfried
In July 1950, San Francisco radio station KGO canceled Sidney Roger’s news commentary program. The station, owned and operated by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), contended that Roger no longer represented the views of any “significant group in the community.” KGO-ABC officials believed that Roger’s broadcasts promoted Communist party (CP) and radical union ideas and thereby skewed the station’s news coverage. The Federal Bureau of Investigation already had a file on Roger for associating with area communists; and the California Senate’s Fact-Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities officially branded Roger a “bona fide, iron disciplined Communist revolutionary.” These public and private sector attacks sought to remove Roger from the airwaves. But they also aimed, as Gerald Horne has argued in a similar context, to undermine “popular front” journalists engaged in an ideological/cultural war with corporations and political conservatives. Roger posed a particular threat because, contrary to the assertions of radio officials, he continued to speak to and reflect the values and interests of the Bay Area’s labor/Left public sphere: a community of radical trade unionists, civil rights and civil liberties advocates, and communists who soon rallied to restore Roger to the air. Historians and media scholars have discussed how H.V. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow, and other prominent broadcast commentators reflected and shaped the nation’s Cold War political culture. Sponsored by large corporations, these news analysts reported on and interpreted developments at home and abroad. Yet their observations rarely scrutinized the roots of a nascent military–industrial complex, a national security state, and political repression. Nor did independently minded, liberal journalists (like William L. Shirer and Don Hollenbeck), fully dissect the internal logic of the state and corporate sectors. Commentators supported by organized labor did a better job than their businessfunded counterparts of presenting alternative perspectives on domestic issues. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has explained how Frank Edwards and Edward Morgan of the American
1950年7月，旧金山KGO电台取消了西德尼·罗杰的新闻评论节目。该电视台由美国广播公司（ABC）所有和运营，声称罗杰不再代表“社区中任何重要群体”的观点。KGO-ABC官员认为，罗杰的广播宣传了共产党和激进的工会思想，从而扭曲了该电视台的新闻报道。联邦调查局已经有罗杰与地区共产主义者有关联的档案；加州参议院非美国活动实况调查委员会（Fact Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities）正式将罗杰称为“真正的、纪律严明的共产主义革命者”。这些公共和私营部门的攻击旨在将罗杰从广播中删除。但正如杰拉尔德·霍恩（Gerald Horne）在类似背景下所说，他们的目的也是破坏与企业和政治保守派进行意识形态/文化战争的“大众前线”记者。罗杰构成了一个特别的威胁，因为与电台官员的说法相反，他继续与湾区劳工/左翼公共领域的价值观和利益对话，并反映这些领域：一个由激进工会主义者、民权和公民自由倡导者以及共产主义者组成的社区，他们很快就团结起来，让罗杰重返舞台。历史学家和媒体学者讨论了H.V.Kaltenborn、Edward R.Murrow和其他著名广播评论员如何反映和塑造国家的冷战政治文化。在大公司的赞助下，这些新闻分析师报道并解读了国内外的事态发展。然而，他们的观察很少仔细审视新生的军工复合体、国家安全国家和政治镇压的根源。独立思想的自由派记者（如威廉·L·希勒和唐·霍伦贝克）也没有充分剖析国家和企业部门的内部逻辑。在对国内问题提出不同观点方面，有组织劳工支持的评论员比商业资助的评论员做得更好。Elizabeth Fones Wolf解释了美国的Frank Edwards和Edward Morgan
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Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1599627
D. Rosenberg
The Communist Party USA split in 1991. As a vital force on the Left, playing historically documented roles in labor, peace, civil rights, education, housing, and other progressive movements the Party weathered the storms of Soviet and socialist crises poorly. Its contributions to such movements were thus weakened. The Party erupted along ancestral streams: democracy, race, and “real, existing” socialism, which met in the socket of the Party. The interactive flow of argument was continuous, with exacerbating milestone moments driving a two-year process finished by the 25th convention in December 1991. There was a history to these issues. The “back story” informing the course of events is extensive. Antecedent factors, especially McCarthyism, were essential to Party mores, style, and policies in the 1960 s and 1970 s. But an extended analysis of the experience of 1989–1991 comprises the core of the present study. The following article first traces the Party’s perspectives in the mid-80s, and shortly before. In this light, it discusses methods of action, leadership, and basic conceptions prior to changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It likewise pinpoints areas of incipient disagreement. The next part takes the narrative through 1990, demonstrating how problems in socialist countries impacted debates in the Party about all manner of subjects, including internal democracy and African–American oppression. Landmark conferences accentuated the bitter arguments. Finally, the article analyzes the stages culminating in the 25th National Convention in December 1991. The aforementioned ancestral streams overflowed their banks, summoning a large opposition into existence. Historians have long commented on the close relationship between the CPUSA and the USSR. To a New England member, the “huge bearing of the Soviet Union on the Party” was unmistakable: whatever problems it experienced “would be resolved in the context of socialism,” she believed. That it would end was “unimaginable.” Soviet ties embraced ideological affinity and fraternal feeling, but also extended to fiscal transfers to leader Gus Hall. With sister parties, the CPUSA believed that socialism’s time had come. “It is,” as general secretary Gus Hall said in 1969, “both a historic process and a current event.” Its triumph proved “capitalism has... lost its ability as a class to basically influence or
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