Daring to Use the C Word--The History of American Communism

 

Journalist Jack Reed was a key figure in the founding of the Communist Labor Party.

Note--The rapidly deteriorating Resident of the White House is becoming increasingly unhinged as everything goes disastrously wrong.  In addition to other ravings and self-destructive aggression, he has fallen back on a golden oldie he learned at the knee of his mentor, the reptilian Roy Cohn--calling every foe within spitting distance a Commie.  He has laid the brand on popular politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the victors of special elections and Democratic Primaries across the county.  He has smeared journalists, media corporations, citizen activists, Canada.  Bound to rally some of his wavering base, but perhaps not the knockout punch he hoped for.   For his minions who cannot understand the differences among Socialists, current social democrats like the recently successful Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), mainstream progressives and liberals, and bomb throwing terrorists here is a plain and unvarnished history of Communism in America.  

On August 31, 1919, at a rump meeting in Chicago of Left Wing members of the fractured Socialist Party (SP), the Communist Labor Party (CLP), a predecessor to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was founded.  It was a year of great turmoil.  Long-time Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was in the Federal prison at Atlanta for giving a speech opposing World War I.  Many socialists and unionists were aflame with passion for the apparently successful Russian Revolution.  Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with the enthusiastic assistance of the young leader of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, launched his raids against aliens and radicals.  An unheard-of era of government repression was sweeping the land. 

Earlier in the year the SP’s well-established network of language federations, each of which had its own publications and leadership, in cooperation with Left Wing state parties captured a majority on the Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC).  Alarmed, the regulars of the outgoing NEC declared the election invalid charging the language federations with irregularities.  They expelled the leaders of several federations and suspended recognition of the Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Lettish (Latvian), South Slavic, and Ukrainian federations and the entire state parties of Michigan, Massachusetts, and Ohio. The New York State Executive Committee suspended and reorganized Left Wing locals and branches representing nearly half the state's membership.  Needless to say, such high-handed tactics led to an uproar in the Party.

Anglo members of the Socialist Party Left Wing and dissident state parties found the CLP on August 31, 1919.

The language federations joined by the Michigan state party responded with a call to a founding convention of the Communist Party of America (CPA) to be held in Chicago on September 1.  Many leading English speaking left wingers, including NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L.E. Katterfeld and the dashing journalist John “Jack” Reed, lionized by the Party rank and file for his eyewitness account of the Russian October Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World, decided to stay in the SP and try to win control back from the regulars.  The Party called an Emergency National Convention in Chicago scheduled for Aug. 30.  But the regulars controlled the majority of State parties, suspended parties and federations were banned, and a credentials committee ruled against seating many other Left Wing delegates. 

John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow planned to crash the convention anyway, but officials were tipped off and called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out. Meeting in a rented room directly below the official convention the expelled delegates formed the Communist Labor Party with Wagenknecht at its head.  

....A day later on September 1st Foreign Language sections of the Socialist Party founded another Communist Party.  Both claimed support of Moscow and the Comintern.

Meanwhile, the founding convention of the Communist Party of America went ahead as planned the next day.  Suddenly there were two competing Communist Parties, both claiming allegiance to the Russian Revolution and to the Communist International (Comintern), a situation that displeased V. I. Lenin. 

Both infant parties were soon victims of the expanding Palmer Raids and leaders of both were arrested or in hiding.  Both were forced to essentially go underground by December.

In January 1920 the Comintern ordered the two parties to merge as the United Communist Party, and to follow the party line established in Moscow.  .A faction of the CPA held out for a while but was forced into line by 1921. Many English language leftists, however, soon left the Party and it is estimated that less than 5% of the membership were native English speakers.  Through the decade the Party was beset with internal dissent and was frequently reined in by the Comintern.

Although the Communists were allowed to resume operations as a legal organization, the experience in the underground and the formation of cells and the like as well as stringent control from Moscow were stamped on the Party.  The Red Scare of 1919-1920 prevented the Communists from ever becoming a mass or popular party and helped create the secretive culture and fealty to the Soviets that made it the nightmare of post-World War II of conservatives.

Former IWW organizer William Z. Foster spent most of the '20's marginalized in the United Communist Party, the forced merger of the CLP and CPA.  But the Comintern put him at the head of re-incarnated Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and endorsed his bore-from-within strategy of working inside the conservative business unions of the AFL instead of joining the IWW or organizing explicitly Marxist labor unions-

Initially many rank and file members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were enthusiastic about the new party and some leaders, like William Z. Foster, jumped to the new organization.  But the defection of William D. “Big Bill” Haywood to Moscow after the conviction of 101 IWW leaders for sedition in 1919 left a bitter taste in many mouths.  When reports by Emma Goldman and others exiled to Russia exposed the authoritarian underside of the Lenin regime, support dwindled further.  The Party began to demand that the IWW submit itself to Party leadership—a demand that was rudely rejected by the union. When party members meddled in important IWW strikes of the ‘20s, the rift became pronounced.  By the end of the decade the IWW was firmly anti-Communist.

In 1929 the Party was renamed the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).  Foster, after being frozen out at the demand of Kremlin leaders through most of the ‘20s emerged as the new Party leader and instituted the directed policy of boring-from-within the conservative labor movement and shunning the independent IWW.  CP militants helped form and establish the Congress of Industrial Organization in heavy industry during the ‘30s.

Many well-meaning idealists entered the Party in the Depression years and did heroic work in the labor movement and elsewhere.  But the fickle dictates of Moscow took a toll.  A joke around IWW circles years later was that you could tell just how naïve a leftist was by when they finally got disgusted and abandoned the CP—the 1936-38 Stalinist Purge Trials in Russia, the Hitler/Stalin Pact, the roughshod imposition of Soviet-style government over Eastern Europe in the post-war years, or the final straw for many, the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

The Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising was the final straw for many longtime Party members.

When the next great upsurge of the left occurred during the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War, the CPUSA found itself mainly on the sidelines, distrusted by the New Left and ignored as irrelevant.  Self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists split among a bewildering profusion of new parties and organizations.

With the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union the CPUSA was left a virtual orphan.  It numbers continued to dwindle to a hard core of aging militants, many of them from the decedents from those old ethnic federations and from the needle trades in New York.

Bringing Class War to Broadway—The Paterson Pageant

On February 3, 1913 workers were one week into of one of the most storied battles of the ruthless pre-World War I class war.

Just a year after cotton and woolen mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts launched their epic Bread and Roses struggle over assigning workers to tend more machines, employees in the specialized silk industry in Paterson, New Jersey found themselves faced with a similar problem.  Local employers announced the imposition of the four-loom system in January 1913.

Previously the mostly women workers tended two looms with children helping by winding bobbins, sweeping scrap, and pushing heavy carts of finished materials.  Men, mostly immigrants filled more skilled jobs maintaining and setting up the delicate machinery.  The new system not only put people out of work, but those who kept their jobs got no additional compensation for essentially double the work.  And hours were lengthened to make up for lost time as machines were fouled and shut down as exhausted workers could not keep up.  Those additional hours came at no raise to daily pay.

A woman attends a silk loom in Paterson.  A doubling of of the work load from two to four looms with no increase in pay triggered the 1913 strike

As in Lawrence, there were skeleton organizations of AFL craftsmen and a small Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) branch engaged mostly in education and general agitation but workers had no effective recognition.  Weavers at the Doherty Silk Mill got together and elected a four-man grievance committee to lay out the hardships to the bosses.  When they presented themselves at the mill office, committee members were peremptorily fired.  The next day, January 27, 800 workers at the mill went out on strike.

By the end of the week the strike had spread to 300 mills large and small in Paterson and its immediate vicinity.  Recognizing the need for experienced leadership, the strikers call on the IWW.

Many of the same figures who energized the Lawrence Strike came to do the same in Paterson including IWW General Secretary-Treasurer William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, the Italian IWW leader and anarchist Carlo Tresca, the fiery young speaker Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.  They joined the seasoned German IWW organizer Adolf Lessing who was already on the ground.

IWW organizers and leaders of the Paterson Silk Strike. Front row, from left: Hubert Harrison, later a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance; orator Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; and IWW General Secretary-Treasurer William D. “Big Bill” Haywood. Back row: unknown, Patrick L. Quinlan, unknown, and unknown.  As in the earlier Lawrence textile strike workers were organized cross ethnic, language, religious, and even racial divisions.

The Wobbly leadership empowered the strike committee and helped it organize mass pickets at the mill gates as well as provide logistical support for the strikers.  Flynn organized special meetings of women, both strikers and the wives of strikers.  As in Lawrence, the strikers were met with mass attacks by police and assaults, even gunfire, from armed thugs employed as guards by the larger mills.  Over the course of the strike three workers would be killed by the gun thugs, and two more later died of their injuries.

The IWW leaders recognized that they had to make the strike broader.  Another 1000 mills and dye houses in the area were still working.  And new silk centers in Pennsylvania with more modern equipment, many owned by the same companies that controlled the Paterson mills, could continue to meet commercial needs.  They called a general strike of the industry for the end of February.  It was successful in the Patterson area where virtually all shops downed tools and joined the strike.  Eventually more than 20,000 were out.

Some of the Paterson silk mills from a hand-tinted contemporary picture postcard.

Authorities responded with mass arrests, Heywood, Tresca, and Flynn were all nabbed as were hundreds of rank and file members.  Over the course of the strike over 3,000 were arrested and most sentenced to ten-day jail terms.  The IWW’s General Defense Committee went into overdrive trying to raise money for lawyers and to support the families of jailed strikers.

Jack Reed

The spreading strike naturally attracted the attention of the press.  While mainstream newspapers and magazines were almost universal in providing scare headlines and condemning the strikers, left wing journalists came to tell the other side, including Jack Reed, the renegade socialite and future patron of the avant guarde Mabel Dodge, and a young Walter Lippmann.  Reed was swept up in the street arrests and sentenced to jail.  He wrote columns on the inhumane conditions in the hellishly crowded jails which were smuggled out and printed in leading New York newspapers.  Exasperated authorities released him early.

Returning to New York Reed and Dodge, who were having an affair, hatched a plan to bring the stirring story of the Patterson Strike to the stage to raise popular support for the struggle and money for the strike fund.  They did not think small.  They rented Madison Square Garden.  

Dodge provided seed money and prevailed on her circle of artistic friends to help.  Reed, one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players, put together the program and wrote most of the script.  His close friend Eugene O'Neill, who had joined the IWW Marine Transport Workers Union during his days as sailor on tramp steamers, is thought to have written some of the dialogue.

An enormous electric light bulb sign was erected over the Garden featuring the shirtless figure of a worker, one arm raised, rising above a skyline of smoking mills.  The same figure, drawn by IWW poet, illustrator and editor Ralph Chaplain also adorned the program book.  For many years it would be used as the cover for the union’s famous Little Red Songbook.

Reed's lover and collaborator on the Paterson Pageant, socialite and proprietor of a famed avant guarde Manhattan salon Mable Dodge.

More than a thousand strikers—men, women, and children, came to the city to bring the strike stunningly to life on stage on June 7.  The city had never seen anything like it.  The Paterson Pageant ran four days.  It succeeded in getting the strike talked about.  Dodge would later recall,

For a few electric moments there was a terrible unity between all of these people. They were one: the workers who had come to show their comrades what was happening across the river and the workers who had come to see it. I have never felt such a pulsing vibration in any gathering before or since.

Unfortunately, the Pageant was not a financial success.  In fact it was a disaster.  There were not enough limousine liberals to fill the expensive one and two-dollar seats in the enormous building.  Instead the seats were filled at the last minute by working people who paid a dime or were let in free.  The program lost money for the Strike Fund.

Reed and Dodge did not stick around to try and clean up the mess.  The day after the show closed, they boarded an ocean liner for a trip to Europe.

The IWW had exhausted virtually its entire treasury on the strike.  Socialist Party locals had also raised money, but by midsummer they were tapped out as well.  Without the support of a strike fund to keep food on the table, workers began to drift back to work.  The bulk of them returned in July.  The IWW Textile Workers Industrial Union, which had never been able to spread the strike into an industry-wide action that it knew was key to winning, officially called an end to the strike and sent the last stragglers back to work in September.

IWW women silk weavers from Paterson march through the streets of Manhattan to Madison Square Garden for the Pageant.

None of the strikers’ economic demands were met.  Moreover, the larger companies used the prolonged strike to force smaller, “less efficient” mills into bankruptcy.  There were fewer jobs to go back to.  On top of that, the country was sliding into another one of its periodic financial panics.

There were plenty of recriminations to go around.  The AFL accused the IWW of “using” the Patterson workers to advance their revolutionary cause.  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn defended the strike in her memoirs:

What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory. For workers to go back with a class-conscious spirit, with an organized and determined attitude toward society means that even if they have made no economic gain they have the possibility of gaining in the future.

The strike was a virtual last hurrah for the Textile Workers IU.  There were a few other scattered actions during the balance of 1913 then the financial panic made calling strikes an exceptionally risky business.  By 1916 the IWW General Administration suspended the charter of the Industrial Union for lack of membership.  Active local branches continued with a direct affiliation to the GA.  There would be precious little further activity in what had been a key IWW industry.

Instead the union turned its attention more and more to the extractive industries of the West—the wheat and grain harvests, California agriculture, Pacific Northwest fruit, copper and other hard rock mining, coal mining, and the lumber industry in addition to large scale railroad and other construction projects.  Except for the mining industries, most of the workers in these industries were single transient men moving from job to job, even from industry to industry.  These were tough, militant men, but the absence of home guard workers with families and large numbers of women dramatically changed the legendary fighting union.