Communist Party USA

Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
Chairman	Sam Webb
Founded	1919
Headquarters	235 W. 23rd Street; New York, NY 17602
Ideology	Communism; Marxism-Leninism
International affiliation	formerly Comintern; today, none
Colours	Red
Website
	www.cpusa.org

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States. For approximately the first half of the 20th century, it was the largest and most widely influential communist party in the country, and played a defining role in the first phase of the U.S. labor movement, organizing and leading most major industrial unions and prominently defending the rights of African-Americans throughout that period.

The CPUSA was effectively eliminated as a political force by McCarthyism and the Cold War, but its supporters claim the organization is slowly regaining influence. Under the current leadership of Sam Webb the party continues to exist, based in New York City. Its newspaper is the People's Weekly World; its monthly magazine is Political Affairs Magazine. Webb claims the number of registered members is 15,000.

In the late 1980s the party became estranged from the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and criticized his policy of perestroika, leading to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cutting off its support of the CPUSA in 1989. The CPUSA's 1991 convention was consumed by a debate on the future orientation of the party following the collapse of the Eastern bloc. One faction urged the leadership to reject Leninism and take the party in a democratic socialist direction, but the party majority reasserted its classic line. Unable to influence the CPUSA, the group soon left and established itself as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

In this PWW article in 2002, CPUSA correspondents Marilyn Bechtel and Debbie Bell said of their trip to the People's Republic of China: "...we 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."

Although advocates of a socialist revolution, the party calls for a peaceful and democratic transition to a socialist system in the United States and rejects the use of violence in a U.S. uprising.

The CPUSA Constitution and Program

According to its 2001 constitution [1], 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, bisexual and transgender people…"

Among the points in the party's "Immediate Program" [2] are a $12/hour minimum wage; social welfare programs such as universal unemployment insurance for all workers, universal health care, and opposition to privatization 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 recognizes 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 classes 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 regime 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.
— source

Formation and early history (1919-1921)

In January, 1919, Lenin invited the left wing of the Socialist Party of America to join the Communist International (Comintern). During the spring of 1919 the Left Wing Caucus of the Socialist Party, buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, prepared to wrest control from the smaller controlling faction of moderate socialists. A referendum to join the Comintern passed with 90% support but the incumbent leadership suppressed the results. Elections for the party's National Executive Committee resulted in 12 leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party. The moderate incumbents struck back by expelling several state organizations, half a dozen language federations, and many locals, in all two thirds of the membership.

The Socialist Party then called an emergency convention to be held in Chicago on August 30, 1919. The party's Left Wing Caucus made plans at a June conference of its own to regain control of the party by sending delegations from the sections of the party that had been expelled to the convention to demand that they be seated. However, the language federations, eventually joined by Charles Ruthenberg and Louis Fraina, turned away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America, at a separate convention in Chicago on September 2, 1919.

Meanwhile plans led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to crash the Socialist Party convention went ahead. Tipped off, the incumbents called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out and, meeting with the expelled delegates, formed the Communist Labor Party on September 1, 1919.

The Comintern was not happy with two Communist Parties and in January, 1920 dispatched an order that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party and to follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America under the leadership of Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone did this but 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 did the trick and the parties were merged in May, 1921. Only ten percent of the members of the newly formed party were native English-speakers. Many of the members came from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Red Scare and the underground party (1919-1923)

From its inception, the Communist Party USA came under attack from state and federal governments and later the FBI. In late 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting thousands of party members, particularly the foreign-born, whom the government deported. The Communist Party was forced underground and went through various name changes to evade the authorities.

This contributed to the national debates which led to the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and caused anti-Semetic literature to be spread in the United States (e.g., Henry Ford's [1920] International Jew; John Beaty's [1951] The Iron Curtain Over America). A concern with Communist subversion under the direction of the Soviet Union was a feature of the immigration debates of the 1920s and because a substantial proportion of the CPUSA were foreign born. Beginning in the 1920s Jews whose backgrounds derived from Eastern Europe played a very prominent and disproportionate role in the CPUSA (Klehr, 1978, p. 37ff). Merely citing percentages of Jewish leaders probably does not adequately indicate the extent of Jewish influence in the CPUSA, since active efforts were made to recruit gentiles as a sort of 'window dressing' to conceal the extent of Jewish influence in the movement (Klehr, 1978, p. 40; Rothman & Lichter, 1982, p. 99).

Klehr (1978, p. 40) estimates that from 1921 to 1961, Jews constituted 33.5% of the Central Committee members and the representation of Jews was often above 40% (Klehr, 1978, p. 46). In the 1920s a majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and that an 'overwhelming' (Glazer 1961, 38, 40) percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent immigrants, a substantial percentage of whom were Jews. In Philadelphia in the 1930's, fully 72.2% of the CP members were the children of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Lyons 1982, 71). As late as 1929, 90% of the members of the Communist Party in Philadelphia were foreign born and in June of 1933 the national organization of the CPUSA was still 70% foreign born (Lyons 1982, 72-73). Jews were the only native-born ethnic group from which the party was able to recruit. Glazer (1969; p. 129) states that at least half of the CPUSA membership of around 50,000 were Jews into the 1950s and that there was a very high rate of turnover, so that perhaps 10 times that number of individuals were involved in the Party and there were 'an equal or larger number who were Socialists of one kind or another.' Writing of the 1920's, Buhle (1980, p. 89) notes that 'most of those favorable to the party and the Freiheit simply did not join'no more than a few thousand out of a following of a hundred times that large.'

During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It reemerged in 1923 with a small legal above ground element, the Workers Party of America. As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. An element of the party, however, remained permanently underground. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to co-opt CPUSA members.

By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party of the USA, recruited more disaffected members of the Socialist Party and an organization of African-American socialists called the African Blood Brotherhood, some of whose members would later play important roles in communist work among blacks.

Early factional struggles (1923-1929)

Now that the aboveground element, or "open party" as it was known, was legal the communists decided that their central task was to develop roots within the working class. This move away from hopes of revolution in the near future to a more nuanced approach was accelerated by the decisions of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern held in 1925, which decided that the period between 1917 and 1924 had been one of revolutionary upsurge, but that the new period was marked by the stabilization of capitalism and that revolutionary attempts in the near future were to be spurned. The American communists embarked then on the arduous work of locating and winning allies.

That work was, however, complicated by factional struggles within the CPUSA. The party quickly developed a number of more or less fixed factional groupings within its leadership: a faction around the party's Chairman Charles Ruthenberg, which was largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone, and the 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.

Foster, who had been deeply involved in the steel strike of 1919 and had been a long-time syndicalist and a Wobbly, had strong bonds with the progressive leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor and, through them, with the Progressive Party and nascent farmer-labor parties. Under pressure from the Comintern, however, the party broke off relations with both groups in 1924.

In 1925 Comintern representative Sergei Gusev ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's faction; Foster complied. The factional infighting within the CPUSA did not end, however; the communist leadership of the New York locals of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union lost the 1926 strike of cloakmakers in New York City in large part because of intra-party factional rivalries.

Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally, Jay Lovestone, succeeded him as party secretary. Cannon attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, hoping to use his connections with leading circles within it to regain the advantage against the Lovestone faction. However he and Maurice Spector of the Communist Party of Canada were accidentally given a copy of Trotsky's "Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern" that they were instructed to read and return. Persuaded by its contents, they came to an agreement to return to America and campaign for the document's positions. A copy of the document was then smuggled out of the country in a child's toy.

Back in America, Cannon and his close associates in the ILD such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, dubbed the "three generals without an army", began to organize support for Trotsky's theses. However, as this attempt to develop a Left Opposition came to light, they and their supporters were expelled. Cannon and his followers organized the Communist League of America as a section of Trotsky's International Left Opposition.

At the same Congress, Lovestone had impressed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a strong supporter of Nikolai Bukharin the general secretary of the Comintern. This was to have devastating consequences for Lovestone when, in 1929, Bukharin was on the losing end of a struggle with Stalin and was purged from his position on the Politburo and removed as head of the Comintern.

In a reversal of the events of 1925, a Comintern delegation sent to the United States demanded that Lovestone resign as party secretary in favor of his archrival Foster, despite the fact that Lovestone enjoyed the support of the vast majority of the American party's membership. Lovestone traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern. Stalin informed Lovestone that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".

When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and his ally Benjamin Gitlow were purged despite holding the leadership of the party. Ostensibly, this was not due to Lovestone's insubordination in challenging a decision by Stalin but for his support for American Exceptionalism, the thesis that socialism could be achieved peacefully in the USA. Lovestone and Gitlow formed their own group called the Communist Party (Opposition), a section of the pro-Bukharin International Communist Opposition, which was initially larger than the Trotskyists but failed to survive past 1941. Lovestone had initially called his faction the Communist Party (Majority Group) in the expectation that the majority of the CPUSA's members would join him, but only a few hundred people joined his new organization.

See also External link to Stalin's comments. and Exceptionalism

The Third Period (1928-1935)

The upheavals within the CPUSA in 1928 were an echo of a much more significant change: Stalin's decision to break off any form of collaboration with western socialist parties, which were now condemned as "social fascists", had particularly severe consequences in Germany, where the German Communist Party not only refused to work in alliance with the German Socialist Party, but attacked it and its members. In 1928 there were about twenty-four thousand members. By 1932 the total had fallen to six thousand members.

In the United States the principal impact of the Third Period was to end the CPUSA's efforts to organize within the AFL through the TUEL and to turn its efforts into organizing dual unions through the Trade Union Unity League. Foster went along with this change, even though it contradicted the policies he had fought for previously. He did not, however, remain head of the CPUSA: in 1932 one of his subordinates, Earl Browder, replaced him.

The Party's slogan in this period was "the united front from below". 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 and fighting evictions of farmers and the working poor. At the same time, the Party attempted to weave its sectarian revolutionary politics into its day-to-day defense of workers, usually with only limited success.

In 1932 William Z. Foster, then head of the CPUSA 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 based on the model of Soviet Russia.

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 organizations 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 organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

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 its 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 organizations influenced or controlled by the Party or, as they were pejoratively known, "fronts."

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and World War II

The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. Although membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000 [3] 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 an advocate of peace. The CPUSA accused Winston Churchill and Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler and denouncing 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. So sudden was this change that CPUSA members of the UAW negotiating on behalf of the union reportedly changed their position from favoring strike action to opposing it in the same negotiating session.

Throughout the rest of World War II, the CPUSA continued a policy of militant, if sometimes bureaucratic trade unionism to 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, 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 to better 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, 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, legitimized 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 Agard 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 [4]. 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 organizationally, 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.

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. [5] 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 French and later Italian 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": he commonly wrote under the name J. Peters—headed the CPUSA’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organizational 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 NKGB 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 favor 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. However his role as an "atomic spy" was grossly exaggerated, the only involvement in atomic espionage being the provision of a crude diagram of the core of a plutonium bomb by his brother in law, David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos. The case against his wife, Ethel Rosenberg, was even shakier, the death penalty being imposed with little legal basis in the vain hope that Julius Rosenberg would strike a plea bargain and lead investigators to other spies.

Theodore Hall, a Harvard-trained physicist and CPUSA member, 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 dedicated to the clandestine infiltration of American cultural and political institutions. This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of Communist studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes.

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 [6]

Based on views such as these, the United States government prosecuted Communist Party members on criminal charges of conspiracy.

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 crises of 1956

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 CPUSA [7]. 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 demoralized, 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 liberalize 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 Labor would come to play a role in many of the numerous Maoist organizations of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Jack Shulman, Foster's secretary, also played a role in these organizations; he was not expelled from the CP, but resigned.

Recovery after McCarthyism

The CPUSA itself was largely eclipsed by the New Left in the 1960s; while it supported and claimed to start the civil rights movement. While Communists supported Martin Luther King, Jr, and other movement leaders, civil rights leaders kept communists and former communists at arm's length for fear of being branded communists themselves. Similarly, the peace movement and the New Left rejected the CPUSA for both its bureaucratic rigidity and its association with Soviet Union.

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. However, in 1984, seeing the onslaught of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns. But in the decade ending in 1989, the membership in the CPUSA grew from 10,000 to 50,000, making it the fastest growing major party on the Left in the US.

Terri Albano, a high-ranking party member, stated in 1998 that membership was still around 50,000. During the 1990's, the party recruited heavily in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the US, particularly in Black neighborhoods. 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, 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.

Ideologically, much appears to be up for grabs. A recent CPUSA theoretical journal 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." The same article said, "Democracy is an essential element of any socialist system."

The Communist Party and Labor

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 Benajmin Davis, William L. Patterson, James Jackson, Henry Winston, Claude Lightfoot, Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson, Claudia Jones, and John Pittman contributed in important ways to 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 too numerous to list here were one-time members or supporters of the Party. The party's civil rights work continues to this day. It was instrumental in the founding of the Black Radical Congress in 1998.

Leaders of the Communist Party USA

Charles Ruthenberg, General Secretary (1919-1927), James P. Cannon, Party Chairman, (1919-1928)
Jay Lovestone (1927-1929)
William Z. Foster (1929-1932)
Earl Browder (1932-1945)
Eugene Dennis, General Secretary (1945-1959) and William Z. Foster, Party Chairman (1945-1957)
Gus Hall (1959-2000)
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 - Henry A. Wallace & Glen H. Taylor (Progressive Party)
1952 - Vincent Hallinan & Charlotta Bass (Progressive Party)
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

External links

CPUSA websites

CPUSA website, including a collection of FAQs
People's Weekly World weekly newspaper
Political Affairs monthly theoretical publication
Reference Center for Marxist Studies archives

Non-CPUSA websites

Communist Party of America (1919 - 1946) documents, officials, images and chronological history. Early American Marxism resources of Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved April 4, 2006

References

CPUSA publications

Foster, William Z. The Workers Party to the Fore PDF document. 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: Depression Era American Marxism. Retrieved May 3, 2005.
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. 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. Retrived 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.
Victor Perlo. The Economics of Racism, II. New York. International Publishers. 1996. ISBN 01717806987

References for: 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 0465003109. 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 0895264862; 2001 edition, ISBN 0709160615. 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.

Communist Party USA

The CPUSA Constitution and Program

Formation and early history (1919-1921)

The Red Scare and the underground party (1919-1923)

Early factional struggles (1923-1929)

The Third Period (1928-1935)

The Popular Front (1935-1939)

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and World War II

The Onset of the Cold War

Soviet funding of the Party and espionage

Criminal prosecutions

The crises of 1956

Recovery after McCarthyism

The Communist Party and Labor

The Communist Party and African-Americans

Leaders of the Communist Party USA

Presidential tickets

See also

External links

References

CPUSA publications

References for: Soviet funding of the Party

Further reading

Agricultural issues

Anti-CPUSA articles

Bibliography

Espionage and infiltration

Historiography

Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism

Other subjects related to the CPUSA

Union history

The CPUSA Constitution and Program

Formation and early history (1919-1921)

The Red Scare and the underground party (1919-1923)

Early factional struggles (1923-1929)

The Third Period (1928-1935)

The Popular Front (1935-1939)

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and World War II

The Onset of the Cold War

Soviet funding of the Party and espionage

Criminal prosecutions

The crises of 1956

Recovery after McCarthyism

The Communist Party and Labor

The Communist Party and African-Americans

Leaders of the Communist Party USA

Presidential tickets

See also

External links

References

CPUSA publications

References for: Soviet funding of the Party

Further reading

Agricultural issues

Anti-CPUSA articles

Bibliography

Espionage and infiltration

Historiography

Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism

Other subjects related to the CPUSA

Social, cultural and ethnic issues

Union history