Communist Party, USA

Communist Party USA
Party Chairman	Sam Webb
Senate Leader	N/A
House Leader	N/A
Founded	1919
Headquarters	235 W. 23rd Street New York, NY 10011
Political ideology	Communism; Marxism-Leninism
International affiliation	formerly Comintern; today, none
Color(s)	{{{colours}}}
Website	Cpusa.org

The Communist Party USA, formally known as the Communist Party United States of America ('CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. During the first half of the twentieth Century it was the largest and most influential communist party in the country, playing a defining role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s and pursuing intense anti-racist activity in workplaces.

After WWII, the CPUSA's its close collaboration with the Soviet Union led to a major Red Scare on the grounds that the party was working to overthrow the American system of democracy and capitalism. Revelations that the CPUSA had become heavily involved in recruitment and espionage activities for the Soviet KGB and GRU resulted in government prosecutions of the party not only as subversive, but also as a foreign agent.

By the end of the 50s, the party transformed its militant revolutionary line into a more evolutionary one, echoing the Soviet policy of "peaceful coexistence." By the early 1960s this conciliatory shift led to dozens of angry breakaways by more militant CPUSA members and their children who, as the New Left, continued to follow the idea of armed class war and generally turned to Mao Zedong for inspiration. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 led to further disillusionment and defections.

With continued erosion of what little mass support remained, in the late 1980s the party became estranged from the leadership of the Soviet Union itself. Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika was unpopular with the CPUSA, leading to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in 1989. The fall of the Soviet Union dealt the CPUSA a major blow. The party today continues to call for a "peaceful transition to socialism" in the U.S.

History

Formation and early history (1919-1921)

Lenin in 1920

The first political party in the United States to advocate Marxism was the Socialist Labor Party, organized in 1890, some of whose members later formed the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In January, 1919, Soviet leader V.I. Lenin invited the left wing of the SPA to join Communist International (Comintern). Buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, elections for the party's national executive committee resulted in 12 far-leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party, but moderates struck back by expelling several large state organizations, language federations, and many locals.

The language federations and others factions then turned away from the SPA and formed a new party, the Communist Party of America, at a convention in Chicago on September 1, 1919. Meanwhile, plans led by pro-Soviet journalist John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to take the SPA down the Soviet path failed, resulting in the pro-Soviet faction of the SPA forming the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919.

The Comintern was not happy with two Communist parties in the USA. In January, 1920 it ordered that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party and follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America, under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, did as ordered. However, a faction under the leadership of Nicholas I. Hourwich and Alexander Bittelman continued to operate independently as the Communist Party of America. A more strongly worded directive from the Comintern eventually re-established discipline, and the parties two parties were merged in May, 1921. Other members of the new United Communist Party were drawn from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The fit Red Scare (1919-1923)

The leadership of the First Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1919. The affiliation of the U.S. Communists with the Comintern led to the party's being forced underground as an agent of Soviet subversion.

From its inception, the party came scrutiny and attack from state and federal governments as an agent of Soviet revolution. After a series of bombings and attempted assassinations of government officials, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting large numbers of party members in 1919. Many of these were foreign-born recent immigrants, whom the government soon deported.

The party apparatus was thus forced underground and went through various name changes. It reemerged in 1923 with a small, legal above-ground element, the Workers Party of America. As concern about the Soviet revolution coming to the US ebbed and the deportations of the early 1920s diminished, the party became bolder and more open. One element of the party, however, remained permanently underground, later known as the CPUSA secret apparatus. It was through this underground operation, often commanded by a Soviet official operating in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to use a select number of CPUSA members as agents.

Factional struggles (1923-1929)

Now that the above-ground element was again legal, the party, still known as the Workers Party of America, began to devote itself to developing roots within the US working class. This represented a move away from hopes of immediate revolution, and toward a longer-term approach. It was further facilitated by decisions of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern held in 1925, which decided that period revolutionary upsurge had ended. The American Communists thus embarked then on the arduous work of locating and winning allies.

That work was, however, complicated by factional struggles. The Workers Party of America fairly quickly developed two main more or less fixed factional groupings within its leadership:

• a faction around the party secretary Charles Ruthenberg, largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone
• the so-called Foster-Cannon caucus, headed by William Z. Foster, who headed the party's Trade Union Educational League, and James P. Cannon, who led the International Labor Defense organization

The first faction drew many of its members from the party's foreign language federations, while the latter found more support among native workers and left-wing trade unionist. Foster's group had strong bonds with the "progressive" leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Progressive Party, and nascent farmer-labor parties. The Comintern, however, felt that these groups lacked adequate revolutionary potential, and the CPUSA broke off relations with both groups in 1924. In 1925 the Foster faction was ordered by the Comintern to cooperate more fully under Ruthenberg's leadership.

File:James p cannon 1922 Moskva.jpg

James P. Cannon (center) with fellow American Communists in Moscow in 1928

However, the factional infighting within the CPUSA did not end. Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally, Jay Lovestone, succeeded him as party secretary. Both Lovestone and Cannon traveled to Moscow in 1928 to attend the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, hoping to gain an advantage for their factions.

While there, Cannon was given a copy Trotsky's "Critique of the Draft Programme of the Comintern" and became convinced of its arguments that the Soviet Union had abandoned the principle of revolutionary internationalism in favor of Stalin's Soviet-centered policy. Lovestone, meanwhile, had impressed the Comintern leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a loyal supporter of Nikolai Bukharin, then the Comintern's general secretary.

Back in America, Cannon and his associates, such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, began to organize support for Trotsky's theses. As a result, Cannon was expelled from the CPUSA, and he and his followers organized the Communist League of America as a section of Trotsky's International Left Opposition.

Ironically, Lovestone's support of Buhkarin would have equally devastating consequences for his prospects when, in 1929, Bukharin was on the losing end of a struggle with Stalin. Buhkarin was soon purged from his position on the Politburo and removed as head of the Comintern. A Comintern delegation subsequently came to the United States and demanded that Lovestone resign as party secretary in favor of his other arch-rival, Foster. Lovestone, who enjoyed strong support among the CPUSA's rank and file membership, traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern. However, Stalin, whose power was now absolute, was not convinced of his friendship.

When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and his ally Benjamin Gitlow were purged from party leadership, ostensibly on grounds of his support for the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the USA, without violent revolution. Lovestone and Gitlow now formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition), a section of the pro-Bukharin International Communist Opposition. Only a few hundred people joined this new organization.

Consolidation (1929-1935)

The upheavals within the party in 1928-29 were an echo of a much more significant change: Stalin's decision to break off any form of collaboration with non-revolutionary western socialist parties, which were now condemned as "social fascists."

This, combined with a gradual awakening of U.S. communists to the reality of Stalinism and defections to the Trotskyists, resulted in a membership loss from about 24,000 CPUSA members in 1928 to approximately 6,000 members in 1932.

Another impact of Stalin's edict was to abruptly end party's investment in organizing within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), turning its efforts toward the overtly Marxist Trade Union Unity League. As general secretary, Foster followed the Soviet line, even though it contradicted the policies he had previously championed.

By 1930 the party adopted the title of Communist Party of the USA. The party devoted much of its energy in the Great Depression to organizing the unemployed, attempting to found "red" unions, championing the rights of African Americans (then called Negros), and fighting evictions of farmers and the working poor. In 1932, William Z. Foster, upon his retirement as party head, published a book entitled Toward Soviet America, which laid out the Communist Party's plans for revolution and the building of a new socialist society in the USA, based on the model of Soviet Russia.

Earl Browder now became general secretary of the party. At first Browder moved the party even closer to Soviet interests, helping to develop its underground secret apparatus within the US in cooperation with Soviet intelligence. He actively assisted in the recruitment of espionage sources and agents for the Soviet NKVD, while his younger sister Margerite was an NKVD operative in Europe until removed from those duties at Browder's request. The CPUSA's foreign policy platform came under the direct control of Stalin, who enforced his directives through the NKVD.

The Popular Front (1935-1939)

The ideological rigidity of the third period began to crack, however, with two events: the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Roosevelt's election and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 sparked a tremendous upsurge in union organizing in 1933 and 1934. While the party line still favored creation of autonomous revolutionary unions, party activists chose to fold up those organisations and follow the mass of workers into the AFL unions they had been attacking.

The Seventh Congress of the Comintern made the change in line official in 1935 , when it declared the need for a popular front of all groups opposed to fascism. The CPUSA abandoned its opposition to the New Deal and provided many of the organisers for the Congress of Industrial Organisations.

The party also sought unity with forces to its right. Earl Browder offered to run as Norman Thomas' running mate on a joint Socialist Party-Communist Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election but Thomas rejected this overture.

The gesture did not mean that much in practical terms, since the CPUSA was, by 1936, effectively supporting Roosevelt in much of his trade union work. While continuing to run its own candidates for office the CPUSA pursued a policy of representing the Democratic Party as the lesser evil in elections.

Party members also rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic during this period after a fascist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). The CPUSA, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the Lincoln Brigade, one of the International Brigades. Among its other achievements, the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis.

Intellectually, the Popular Front period saw the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life. This was often through various organisations influenced or controlled by the Party or, as they were pejoratively known, "fronts."

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and World War II (1939-1945)

The Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (The Washington Commonwealth Federation was an alleged Communist front organisation)

The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. Although membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000 by 1938, many members left the party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Nonaggression Pact of 1939. Signing of a pact with Hitler meant that the CPUSA turned the focus of its public activities from anti-fascism to advocating peace, not only opposing military preparations but also condemning those opposed to Hitler. The CPUSA accused Winston Churchill and Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler and denounced the Polish government as fascist after the German and Soviet invasion. In allegiance to the Soviet Union, the party changed this policy again after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Throughout the rest of World War II, the CPUSA continued a policy of militant, if sometimes bureaucratic, trade unionism while opposing strike actions at all costs. The leadership of the CPUSA was among the most vocal pro-war voices in the United States, advocating unity against fascism, not opposing the prosecution of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party under the newly enacted Smith Act, and opposing A. Philip Randolph's efforts to organize a march on Washington to dramatize black workers' demands for equal treatment on the job. Prominent CPUSA members and supporters, such as Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger, recalled anti-war material they had previously released.

The Onset of the Cold War

Earl Browder expected the wartime coalition between the Soviet Union and the west to bring about a prolonged period of social harmony after the war. In order better to integrate the communist movement into American life the party was officially dissolved in 1944 and replaced by a Communist Political Association.

That harmony proved elusive, however, and the international Communist movement swung to the left after the war ended. Browder found himself isolated when a critical letter from the leader of the French Communist Party received wide circulation. As a result of this, in 1945 he was retired and replaced by William Z. Foster, who would remain the senior leader of the party until his own retirement in 1958.

In line with other Communist parties worldwide, the CPUSA also swung to the left and, as a result, experienced a brief period in which a number of internal critics argued for a more leftist stance than the leadership was willing to countenance. The result was the expulsion of a handful of "premature anti-revisionists."

More important for the party was the renewal of state persecution of the CPUSA. The Truman administration's loyalty oath program, introduced in 1947 , drove some leftists out of federal employment and, more importantly, legitimised the notion of Communists as subversives, to be exposed and expelled from public and private employment. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, whose hearings were perceived as forums where current and former Communists and those sympathetic to Communism were compelled under the duress of the ruin of their careers to confess and name other Communists, made even brief affiliation with the CPUSA or any related groups grounds for public exposure and attack, inspiring local governments to adopt loyalty oaths and investigative commissions of their own. Private parties, such as the motion picture industry and self-appointed watchdog groups, extended the policy still further. This included the still controversial blacklist of actors, writers and directors in Hollywood who had been Communists or who had fallen in with Communist-controlled or influenced organizations in the pre-war and wartime years.

The union movement purged party members as well. The CIO formally expelled a number of left-led unions in 1949 after internal disputes triggered by the party's support for Henry Wallace's candidacy for President and its opposition to the Marshall Plan, while other labor leaders sympathetic to the CPUSA either were driven out of their unions or dropped their alliances with the party.

The widespread fear of Communism became even more acute after the Soviets' explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949 and discovery of Soviet espionage. Ambitious politicians, including Richard M. Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, made names for themselves by exposing or threatening to expose Communists within the Truman administration or later, in McCarthy's case, within the United States Army. Liberal groups, such as the Americans for Democratic Action, not only distanced themselves from communists and communist causes, but defined themselves as anti-communist.

One of America's most prominent sexual radicals, Harry Hay, developed his political views as an active member of the CPUSA, but his founding in the early 1950s of the Mattachine Society, America's first gay rights group, was not seen as something Communists, who feared even further political prosecution, should associate with organisationally, despite their personal support. In 2004, the editors of Political Affairs published articles detailing their self-criticism of the Party's early views of gay and lesbian rights and praised Hay's work.

1950s, 1960s and 1970s

The US government outlawed the CPUSA with the Communist Control Act in 1954. The 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Secret Speech of Nikita Khrushchev to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union criticizing Stalin had a cataclysmic effect on the previously Stalinist majority membership CPUSA.Membership plummeted and the leadership briefly faced a challenge from a loose grouping led by Daily Worker editor John Gates, which wished to democratize the party. Perhaps the greatest single blow dealt to the party in this period was the loss of the Daily Worker, published since 1924 , which was suspended in 1958 due to falling circulation.

Most of the critics would depart from the party demoralised, but others would remain active in progressive causes and would often end up working harmoniously with party members. This diaspora rapidly came to provide the audience for publications like the National Guardian and Monthly Review, which were to be important in the development of the New Left in the 1960s.

The post-1956 upheavals in the CPUSA also saw the advent of a new leadership around former steel worker Gus Hall. Hall's views were very much those of his mentor Foster, but the younger man was to be more rigorous in ensuring the party was completely orthodox than the older man in his last years. Therefore, while remaining critics who wished to liberalise the party were expelled, so too were anti-revisionist critics who took an anti-Khrushchev stance.

Many of these critics were elements on both U.S. coasts who would come together to form the Progressive Labor Movement in 1961. Progressive Labour would come to play a role in many of the numerous Maoist organisations of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Jack Shulman, Foster's secretary, also played a rôle in these organisations; he was not expelled from the CP, but resigned. In the 1970s, the CPUSA managed to grow in membership to about 25,000 members, despite the exodus of numerous Anti-Revisionist and Maoist groups from its ranks.

Current Era

In 1984, due to the popularity of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns. During the 1990s, the party recruited heavily in impoverished minority neighborhoods in the US, particularly in Black neighbourhoods. As a result, there are many young Black and Hispanic members of the CPUSA. The CPUSA still runs candidates for local office. In recent years, the party has strongly opposed the Republican Party in the US, who they term "ultra-right" and, at times, "fascist." As part of a pragmatic stance, the CPUSA strongly supports the Democratic Party against the Republicans,^{[citation needed]} as they see the Republican Party as a menace to be defeated. The Communist Party still maintains that both parties are capitalist in nature, and only support the Democrats as a means to topple conservative domination in America. Many in the communist movement disagree with this "lesser of two evils" strategy, and it may have encouraged some defections from the CP to other leftist groups.

Ideologically, much appears to be up for grabs. A recent article in Political Affairs voiced support for the Chinese Communist Party, including their heavy reliance on capitalism. The article stated, "The transition to capitalism may be more on order of decades than years, as Lenin had thought."^{[citation needed]} Other articles published by Political Affairs have been critical of this process in China as well.

In a 2002 article in People's Weekly World, CPUSA correspondents Marilyn Bechtel and Debbie Bell said of their trip to the People's Republic of China: "...[W]e came away with a new respect for the thoughtfulness, thoroughness, energy and optimism with which the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people are going about the complex, long-term process of building socialism in a vast developing country, which is of necessity part of an increasingly globalized economy."

An overview of the Communist Party's current ideology can be found in the near-definitive report, "Reflections on Socialism," by Sam Webb, the Party's national chair. The article explains the Party's support for a democratic, anti-racist, anti-sexist, immediate left-wing change for the United States. The report also covers the fall of the Socialist Bloc, claiming that democracy was not sufficiently developed in these countries. The report states that, "On the one hand, socialism transformed and modernized backward societies, secured important economic and social rights, assisted countries breaking free of colonialism, contributed decisively to the victory over Nazism, constituted by its mere presence a pressure on the ruling classes in the capitalist world to make concessions to their working classes and democratic movements, and acted as a counterweight to the aggressive ambitions of U.S. imperialism for nearly fifty years." The report stresses its dedication to revolutionary struggle, but states that Americans should look for peaceful revolutionary change. Webb says that capitalism cannot solve problems such as economic stagnation, racism, gender discrimination, or poverty. The report explains that there will be many transitory stages from capitalism, to socialism, and finally to communism. On the issue of markets in a socialist society, Webb states, " Admittedly, market mechanisms in a socialist society can generate inequality, disproportions and imbalances, destructive competition, downward pressure on wages, and monopoly cornering of commodity markets – even the danger of capitalist restoration. But this is not sufficient reason for concluding that markets have no place in a socialist economy."

The archives of the Communist Party USA were donated in March, 2007 to the Tamiment Library at New York University. The massive donation, in 12,000 cartons, included history from the founding of the party, 20,000 books and pamphlets, and a million photographs from the archives of the Daily Worker. The Tamiment Library also holds a copy of the microfilmed archive of Communist Party documents from Soviet Archives held by the Library of Congress as well as other materials which documents radical and Left history.

Soviet funding of the Party and espionage

From 1959 until 1989, when Gus Hall attacked the initiatives taken by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the CPUSA received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3,000,000 in 1987 . This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow line, in contrast to the Italian and later Spanish and British Communist parties, whose Eurocommunism deviated from the orthodox line in the late 1970s. Releases from the Soviet archives show that all national Communist parties that conformed to the Soviet line were funded in the same fashion. From the Communist point of view this international funding arose from the internationalist nature of Communism itself; fraternal assistance was considered the duty of Communists in any one country to give aid to their comrades in other countries. From the anti-communist point of view, this funding represented an unwarranted interference by one country in the affairs of another.

The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis, which forced the CPUSA to cut back publication in 1990 of the Party newspaper, the People's Daily World, to weekly publication, the People's Weekly World. (references for this section are provided below)

Much more controversial than mere funding, however, is the alleged involvement of CPUSA members in espionage for the Soviet Union. Whittaker Chambers has alleged that Sandor Goldberger—also known as "Josef Peters," who commonly wrote under the name J. Peters—headed the CPUSA’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its rôle as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organisational Secretary of the New York District of the CPUSA, is claimed to have been the operational recruiter and conduit for members of the CPUSA into the ranks of the secret apparatus, or "Group A line."

Stalin publicly disbanded the Comintern in 1943. A Moscow NKVD message to all stations on 12 September 1943 detailed instructions for handling intelligence sources within the CPUSA after the disestablishment of the Comintern. Earl Browder had been both Chairman of the CPUSA and recruiter for the NKVD (in the Venona project he is known as Agent "HELMSMAN"). In 1941, with the approval of the USSR, he disbanded the party into a committee. However, after the USSR shifted from attempted cooperation to opposition towards the USA in the years following World War II, Browder was expelled from the leadership of the CPUSA when he attempted to unify the left in a proposed renewed popular front, which included a proposal to support Truman for re-election in 1948. The NKVD thought his services worth keeping, and they succeeded in covertly financing him, by setting him up as a representative of Soviet publishers. Even then, that didn't work, as Browder was dropped after violating the Soviet line again in favour of Titoism.

There are a number of decrypted World War II Soviet messages between NKVD offices in the United States and Moscow, also known as the Venona cables. The Venona cables and other published sources appear to confirm that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage. Theodore Hall, a Harvard-trained physicist who did not join the CPUSA until 1952, began passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets soon after he was hired at Los Alamos at age 19. Hall, who was known as Mlad by his KGB handlers, escaped prosecution. Hall's wife, aware of his espionage, claims that their NKVD handler had advised them to plead innocent, as the Rosenbergs did, if formally charged.

It was the belief of opponents of the CPUSA such as J. Edgar Hoover, long-time director of the FBI, and Joseph McCarthy, for whom McCarthyism is named, and other anti-communists that the CPUSA constituted an active conspiracy, was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and whose members assisted Soviet intelligence in the clandestine infiltration of American government . This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of Communist studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, since supported by several memoirs of ex-Soviet KGB officers and information obtained from VENONA and Soviet archives.

At one time this view was shared by the majority of the United States Congress. In the "Findings and declarations of fact" section of the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 (50 U.S.C. Chap. 23 Sub. IV Sec. 841), it stated,

"although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy... prescribed for it by the foreign leaders... to carry into action slavishly the assignments given...acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations...its dedication to the proposition that the present constitutional Government of the United States ultimately must be brought to ruin by any available means, including resort to force and violence...as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger

In 1993, experts from the Library of Congress travelled to Moscow to copy previously secret archives of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) records, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party organisers. The records provided an irrefutable link between Soviet intelligence and information obtained by the CPUSA and its contacts in the U.S. government from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some documents revealed that the CPUSA was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African-American groups and rural farm workers. Other CPUSA records contained further evidence that Soviet sympathizers had indeed infiltrated the State Department, beginning in the 1930s. Included in CPUSA archival records were confidential letters from two U.S. ambassadors in Europe to Roosevelt and a senior State Department official. Thanks to an official in the State department sympathetic to the Party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.

Criminal prosecutions

When the Communist Party was formed in 1919 the United States government was engaged in prosecution of Socialists who had opposed World War I and military service. This persecution was continued in 1919 and January, 1920 in the Palmer Raids or the red scare. Many ordinary members of the Party were arrested and deported; leaders were prosecuted and in some cases sentenced to prison terms. In the late 1930s, with the authorization of President Roosevelt, the FBI began investigating both domestic Nazis and Communists. Congress passed the Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government, in 1940.

In 1949 , the federal government put Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster and ten other CPUSA leaders on trial for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Because the prosecution could not show that any of the defendants had openly called for violence or been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed revolution, it relied on the testimony of former members of the party that the defendants had privately advocated the overthrow of the government and on quotations from the work of Karl Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary figures of the past. During the course of the trial the judge held several of the defendants and all of their counsel in contempt of court.

All of the remaining eleven defendants were found guilty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of their convictions by a 6-2 vote in United States v. Dennis, 341 U.S. 494 (1951). The government then proceeded with the prosecutions of more than 100 "second string" members of the party.

Panicked by these arrests and the fear that it was compromised by informants, Dennis and other party leaders decided to go underground and to disband many affiliated groups. The move only heightened the political isolation of the leadership, while making it nearly impossible for the Party to function.

The widespread persecution of communists and their associates began to abate somewhat after Senator Joseph McCarthy overreached himself in the Army-McCarthy Hearings, producing a backlash. The Supreme Court brought a halt to the Smith Act prosecutions in 1957 in its decision in Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), which required that the government prove that the defendant had actually taken concrete steps toward the forcible overthrow of the government, rather than merely advocating it in theory.

The Communist Party and U.S. political movements

The Communist Party was heavily involved in the U.S. labour movement, especially before 1950, and was an early proponent of equality for African-Americans. Beginning in the 1960s, the Communist Party was involved in opposing U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. wars against Communist regimes and movements abroad.

The Communist Party and the U.S. labor movement

See Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937), Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)

The Communist Party and African-Americans

See main article: The Communist Party and African-Americans

The Communist Party USA played a significant role in defending the rights of African-Americans during its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Throughout its history many of the Party's leaders and political thinkers have been African Americans. James Ford, Charlene Mitchell, Angela Davis, and Jarvis Tyner, the current executive vice chair of the Party, all ran as presidential or vice presidential candidates on the Party ticket. Others like Benjamin O. Davis Jr., William L. Patterson, Harry Haywood, James Jackson, Henry Winston, Claude Lightfoot, Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson, Claudia Jones, and John Pittman contributed in important ways to the Party's approaches to major issues from human and civil rights, peace, women's equality, the national question, working class unity, Marxist thought, cultural struggle and more. Their contributions have had a lasting impact on not only the Party but the general public as well. Noted African American thinkers, artists, and writers such as Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Lloyd Brown, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Robeson, Frank Marshall Davis, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more were one-time members or supporters of the Party. The party's work to appeal to African-Americans continues to this day. It was instrumental in the founding of the Black Radical Congress in 1998.

The Communist Party and the U.S. peace movement

The Communist Party opposed the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada, and U.S. support for anti-communist military dictatorships and movements in Central America. During the Vietnam War, as a tactical move, the CPUSA did not call for an immediate end to the war, but instead for negotiations between the North Vietnamese leadership and the U.S. While some on the left have criticized the CPUSA for this position, it was in fact in line with that of the Vietnamese Communist leadership.^{[citation needed]} Meanwhile, some in the peace movement and the New Left rejected the CPUSA for what it saw as the party's bureaucratic rigidity and for its steadfastly close association with Soviet Union.

The CPUSA has been consistently opposed to the U.S.'s current war in Iraq. United for Peace and Justice, currently the largest peace and justice coalition in the U.S., includes the CPUSA as a member group, with Judith LeBlanc, who chairs the CPUSA's Peace and Solidarity Commission, being a member of the Steering Committee of UFPJ.

Notable figures of the Communist Party USA

Party Leaders

• Charles Ruthenberg, General Secretary (1919-1927), James P. Cannon, Party Chairman, (1919-1928)
• Jay Lovestone (1927-1929)
• William Z. Foster (1929-1934)
• Earl Browder (1934-1945)
• Eugene Dennis, General Secretary (1945-1959) and William Z. Foster, Party Chairman (1945-1957)
• Gus Hall (1959-2000)
• Jarvis Tyner, [Executive Vice Chair] (since 1993)
• Sam Webb (since 2000)

Presidential tickets

• 1924 - William Z. Foster & Ben Gitlow
• 1928 - William Z. Foster & Ben Gitlow
• 1932 - William Z. Foster & James W. Ford
• 1936 - Earl Browder & James W. Ford
• 1940 - Earl Browder & James W. Ford
• 1948 - no candidates, but supported Henry Wallace, the Progressive candidate
• 1952 - no candidates, but supported Vincent Hallinan, the Progressive candidate
• 1968 - Charlene Mitchell & Michael Zagarell
• 1972 - Gus Hall & Jarvis Tyner
• 1976 - Gus Hall & Jarvis Tyner
• 1980 - Gus Hall & Angela Davis
• 1984 - Gus Hall & Angela Davis

See also

• Communist party
• List of political parties in the United States
• List of Communist parties
• History of Soviet espionage in the United States
• Harry Haywood
• Earl Browder
• Dorothy Healey

Further reading

General Articles

• Bittelman, Alexander. PDF. Published as “Hynes Exhibit No. 4” in Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), pp. 435-448. Published on line by http://www.marxisthistory.org. Retrieved June 11, 2006.
• Moynihan, Daniel, et al., Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, U.S. Government Printing Office (1997)
• Nash, Michael. PDF. American Communist History, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004. Retrieved April 3, 2006.
• Retrieved Papers Shed Light On Communist Activities In U.S., Associated Press, January 31, 2001
• American Communist History a peer-reviewed journal published by the Historians of American Communism. [1]

General Books

• William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the United States, International Publishers, 1952
• Draper, Theodor, The Roots of American Communism, Viking, 1957
• Draper, Theodor, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period, Viking, 1960
• Howe, Irving and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History, Beacon Press, 1957
• Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War, Wesleyan University Press, 1982 and 1987, University of Illinois Press, 1993, trade paperback, ISBN 0-252-06336-8, reprint edition ISBN 0-8195-6111-8
• Jaffe, Philip J., Rise and Fall of American Communism, Horizon Press, 1975, hardcover, ISBN 0-8180-0817-2
• Kelley, Robin D. G., Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8078-4288-5
• Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism:The Depression Decade, Basic Books, 1984, hardcover, ISBN 0-465-02945-0, trade paperback, 1985, ISBN 0-465-02946-9
• Klehr, Harvey and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, Twayne Publishers (Macmillan), 1992, hardcover, 210 pages, ISBN 0-8057-3855-X, trade paperback ISBN 0-8057-3856-8
• Haynes, John Earl, and Klehr, Harvey, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (2000)
• Kraditor, Aileen S., Jimmy Higgins: The Mental World of the American Rank-And-File Communist, 1930-1958 Greenwood Publishing Company, 1988, hardcover, ISBN 0-313-26246-2
• Lewy, Guenter, The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life, Oxford University Press, 1997, hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505748-1
• Richmond, Al, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary. 447 pages, Houghton Mifflin, 1973. ISBN 0-395-14005-6.
• Schecter, Jerrold and Leona, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History, Potomac Books (2002)
• Solomon, Mark, "The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936, University of Mississippi Press, paperback, ISBN 1-57806-095-8
• Sudoplatov, Pavel Anatoli, Schecter, Jerrold L., and Schecter, Leona P., Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster, Little Brown, Boston (1994)
• Starobin, Joseph R., American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, Harvard University Press, 1972, hardcover, ISBN 0-674-02275-0
• Weinstein, Allen, and Vassiliev, Alexander, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999)

Agricultural issues

• Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, trade paperback, ISBN 0-8078-4288-5
• Lowell K., Dyson, Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, hardcover, ISBN 0-8032-1659-9

Bibliography

• John Earl Haynes, Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (Gala;rland Reference Library of Social Science, Vol 379), Garland Science, 1987, hardcover ISBN 0-8240-8520-5
• Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism

Espionage and infiltration

• Robert Meeropol, An Execution in the Family, St. Martin's Press, 2003, ISBN 0-312-30636-9
• Allen, Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Knopf, 1978, hardcover, ISBN 0-394-49546-2
• Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, Henry Holt, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-03-049036-7; Yale University Press, 2nd edition, 1997, trade paperback, 616 pages, ISBN 0-300-07205-8
• Earl Latham, Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy, Holiday House, 1972, ISBN 0-689-70121-7; hardcover, ISBN 1-125-65079-6
• Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1991, trade paperback, ISBN 0-19-504360-X; ISBN 0-19-504361-8
• Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy Report, Appendix A, 4. The Encounter with Communism (1997)
• Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. American Revolution into the New Millennium: A Counterintelligence Reader: PDF. Volume 3, Chapter 1. U.S. Government on line publication. No date. Retrieved May 25, 2005.
• Detailed history of Matt Cvedic and his media manipulation

Historiography

• Isserman, Maurice. The New History of American Communism Revisited. Reviews in American History, 20. 1992. 536 - 542. Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved April 3, 2006.

Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism

• David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, Simon and Schuster, 1985, trade paperback, ISBN 0-02-923760-2; Free Press, ISBN 0-02-923490-5
• Thomas C. Reeves, Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, Stein & Day, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-8128-2337-0

Other subjects related to the CPUSA

• Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, Harcourt Brace & World, 1959
• Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960, Doubleday, 1980, hardcover, ISBN 0-385-12900-9; University of Illinois Press, 2003, trade paperback, 576 pages, ISBN 0-252-07141-7
• Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950, University of Texas, 0292731388
• Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts, University of Illinois Press, 1999, ISBN 0-252-06748-7
• Robert Rosenstone, Crusade on the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, Pegasus, 1969.
• Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet's Army : Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941, Greenwood, 1977, hardcover, 281 pages, ISBN 0-8371-9030-4
• Robert Jackson Alexander and Robert S. Alley, Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s, Greenwood, 1981, hardcover, 342 pages, ISBN 0-313-22070-0
• James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,Open Hand Publishing, 1989, ISBN 0-940880-20-2
• Alexander Saxton, The Great Midland, University of Illinois Press, 1997, ISBN 0-252-06564-6

Social, cultural and ethnic issues

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, International Publishers, ISBN 0-7178-0234-5
• Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, International Publishers, ISBN 0-7178-0594-8
• Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, Basic Book, ISBN 0-465-07110-4
• Edward C. Pintzuk, Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties: Michigan Communists During the Cold War, MEP Publications, 1997, ISBN 0-930656-71-7
• Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism, Greenwood, 1974, ISBN 0-8371-7476-7
• Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978. 700 pages. ISBN 0-930720-53-9
• Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party, Hoover Institution Press, 1960, ISBN 0-685-67279-4
• Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, trade paperback, ISBN 0-8078-4288-5
• Auvo Kostiainen, The Forging of Finnish-American Communism, 1917-1924: A Study in Ethnic Radicalism, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, Series B, No. 147, University of Turku, Turku, Finland, 1978
• Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression, University of Illinois Press, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-252-00644-5; Grove Press reprint, 1985, ISBN 0-8021-5183-3
• Charles H., Martin, The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice Louisiana State University Press, 1976, ISBN 0-8071-0174-5
• Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro a Tragedy of the American South, Oxford University Press, 1972, trade paperback, ISBN 0-19-501485-5; Louisiana State University Press; 1979, trade paperback, ISBN 0-8071-0498-1
• Lawrence H. Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s, Authors Choice Press (2000), trade paperback, ISBN 0-595-12751-7
• Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 0-8078-5349-6

Union history

• Cochran, Bert, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions, Princeton University Press, 1977, ISBN 0-691-04644-1
• Harvey Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO, Greenwood, 1981, hardcover, ISBN 0-313-22072-7
• Max M. Kampelman, Communist Party vs the CIO: A Study in Power Politics (American Labor Series No. 2), Ayer Company Publishing, 1971, hardcover, ISBN 0-405-02929-2
• Ronald W. Schatz, Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-60, University of Illinois Press, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-252-01031-0; paperback reprint ISBN 0-252-01438-3
• Joshua B. Freeman, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 With a New Epilogue, Temple University Press, 2001, trade paperback 446 pages, ISBN 1-56639-922-X
• Roger Keeran, Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions, Indiana University Press, 1980, hardcover, ISBN 0-253-15754-4
• Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941, University of California Press, 1982, trade paperback, ISBN 0-520-04722-2; textbook binding, Cornell University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-8014-1284-6

Soviet funding of the Party

• The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books, 1999, hardcover edition, p. 287-293, p. 306, ISBN 0-465-00310-9. Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist who worked for the KGB. After 1972 , when the KGB established its new modern offices at Yasenovo, Mitrokhin was entrusted with transferring the corpus of KGB files from its old office at the Lubyanka in Moscow to the new offices. During the next ten years while performing these duties he copied many files which he turned over to British intelligence when he defected in March, 1992.
• Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0-89526-486-2; 2001 edition, ISBN 0-7091-6061-5. This biography of Morris Childs, who together with his brother Jack arranged for and handled the money transfers during the 1960s and 70s, contains much of the same material.

The CPUSA Constitution and Program

According to its 2001 constitution, the party operates on the principle of democratic centralism, and its highest authority is its quadrennial National Convention. Article VI, Section 3 of that constitution lays out certain positions as non-negotiable: "struggle for the unity of the working class, against all forms of national oppression, national chauvinism, discrimination and segregation, against all racist ideologies and practices… against all manifestations of male supremacy and discrimination against women… against homophobia and all manifestations of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people…"

Among the points in the party's "Immediate Program" are a $12/hour minimum wage; for all workers, universal health care, and opposition to privatisation of Social Security; economic measures such as increased taxes on "the rich and corporations," strong regulation" of the financial industry, "regulation and public ownership of utilities," and increased federal aid to cities and states; opposition to the Iraq War and other military interventions; opposition to free trade treaties such as NAFTA; nuclear disarmament and a reduced military budget; various civil rights provisions; campaign finance reform including public financing of campaigns; and election law reform, including Instant Runoff Voting.

The CPUSA recognises the right of independence-seeking groups, many of whom have been led by Communist and communist-oriented partisans, to defend themselves from imperialism, but rejects the use of violence in any United States uprising. The CPUSA argues that most violence throughout modern history is the result of capitalist ruling classs violently trying to stop social change.

“

While some governments run by people calling themselves Communists have been responsible for horrible acts of violence and repression, notably the Pol Pot régime in Cambodia, much if not most of the violence often blamed on revolutionary governments and parties is actually the responsibility of the conservative, reactionary, capitalist governments and parties. ... Many revolutions have been relatively peaceful, including the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Vietnamese Revolution of 1945 . The bloodshed comes when those formerly in power initiate a civil war, or foreign armies invade, trying to reestablish capitalist, feudal, or colonial power. …While we think that an objective, detailed analysis of most situations over the last century would conclude that capitalist and reactionary governments and parties are responsible for most of the violence, it is true that Communists have engaged in armed struggle, are not pacifists, and that some who called themselves Communists have engaged in repressive tactics.

”

External links

• CPUSA website, including a collection of FAQs
• Young Communist League USA youth group
• People's Weekly World weekly newspaper
• Political Affairs monthly theoretical publication
• Guide to the New York Workers School materials, 1926-1935. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

CPUSA publications

Past publications

• Foster, William Z. PDF. Published in The Workers Monthly. Chicago. v. 4, no. 1 (Nov. 1924), pp. 9-11. Reprinted on line in the Early American Marxism Archive. Retrieved May 3, 2005. Party official Foster defines the early Workers Party against Progressivism.
• Peters, J. The Communist Party: A Manual on Organisation. First Published: July, 1935. Workers Library Publishers, NYC. Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen. Reprinted on Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved May 3, 2005.
• Victor Perlo. The Economics of Racism, II. New York. International Publishers. 1996. ISBN 0-7178-0698-7

Recent publications

• CPUSA National Board. The Road to Socialism USA: Unity for Peace, Democracy, Jobs and Equality. Draft Program of the CPUSA. Published February 2, 2005. Retrieved June 8, 2005.
• Webb, Sam. Reflections on Socialism. June 3, 2005.
• Webb, Sam. What the Communist Party’s draft program is all about. People's Weekly World. April 14, 2005. Retrieved May 19, 2005.
• CPUSA National Board. "For the Sake of the Union: Change Congress in November". Communist Party website. Feb. 2, 2006. Retrieved March 9, 2006.
• CPUSA National Committee. "Defeat Anti-Immigrant HR 4437". Communist Party website. Dec. 22, 2005. Retrieved March 9, 2006.
• Susan Webb. "Political Storm in US—CPUSA report to the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties". Communist Party website. Dec. 22, 2005, Retrieved March 9, 2006.
• CPUSA National Committee. "Communist Party, USA: Emergency Action on Winter Heating and Fuel Crisis". Communist Party website. Dec. 22, 2005, Retrieved March 9, 2006.
• Sam Webb. "Fighting Racism is at the Heart of Our Struggles" People's Weekly World. February 25, 2006.

Non-CPUSA websites

• Communist Party of America (1919 - 1946) documents, officials, images and chronological history and Early American Marxism resources of Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved April 4, 2006
• Communism in Washington State History and Memory Project. Retrieved August 19, 2006.

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