Communist Party—USA

Communist Party—USA. Two American communist parties were founded in 1919: one by non–English speaking immigrants, the other led by the journalist John Reed (1887–1920), author of an admiring history of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Forced to unify by the Communist International, the Communist Party–USA (CPUSA) spent the 1920s as a marginal force in American life. Dominated by Finnish, Slavic, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the party was torn by factional warfare between Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, on the one hand, and William Z. Foster, a radical trade union leader, on the other. Frequent Comintern mediation culminated in 1929 with Lovestone's deposition as party leader through Joseph Stalin's personal intervention.

In the early 1930s, the CPUSA led militant strikes and protests from Gastonia, North Carolina, to California's Imperial Valley. The party's ultrarevolutionary posture did not lead to substantial membership growth, however; in 1934, after five years of economic depression, it had only 26,000 members. Membership grew once the Comintern adopted the Popular Front against fascism in 1935, reaching nearly 100,000 by 1939, many of them native‐born Americans. The CPUSA became a political force in several states, notably New York, Minnesota, and California. Communists were influential in several of the newly organized CIO unions, as well as in groups representing African Americans, immigrants, writers, and intellectuals.

The Nazi‐Soviet Pact of 1939 reduced communist influence, but the CPUSA rebounded during the American‐Soviet alliance of World War II. In 1945, however, party leader Earl Browder was deposed after Moscow denounced his policy of cooperation with American capitalism. Party members rallied behind Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive party presidential campaign. As the Cold War gathered momentum and American communists faced legal attack and became pariahs, the party created an underground organization and sent many members into hiding. Events abroad completed the party's decimation. Revelations of Stalin's crimes, Soviet anti‐Semitism, and the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1957 reduced the CPUSA to fewer than three thousand members by 1958. The crisis of communism in the Soviet Union led to still another factional war in 1989 that left Gus Hall, party leader since 1959, as head of an organization with barely one thousand members.
See also Anticommunism; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Hiss, Alger; Labor Movements; McCarthy, Joseph; New Deal Era, The; Rosenberg Case; Scottsboro Case; Smith Act; Socialism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Irving Howe and and Lewis Coser , The American Communist Party, 1957.
Harvey Klehr and and John Haynes , The American Communist Movement, 1992.

Harvey Klehr