Adrienne's Special Archives

I think I'll make a set of videos on Joe McCarthy. This video will likely be PART 1 of that set. I want to find out if Joe was a fraud. But mainly I want to find out if the "Red Scare" was justified. [From Wiki] The Left Wing of the Socialist Party split from the SPA to eventually the United Communist Party. Earl Browder joined the UCP, as well as the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) launched by his old associate William Z. Foster. Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, The Labor Herald. In 1920 the Communist International (Comintern) headed by Grigory Zinoviev decided to establish an international confederation of Communist trade unions, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or "Profintern"). A founding convention was planned to be held in Moscow in July 1921 and an American delegation was gathered, including members of the American Communist Parties and the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press.[3] This trip to Soviet Russia incidentally proved decisive in bringing the syndicalist Foster over to the Communist movement. Throughout the early 1920s, Browder and Foster worked together closely in the TUEL, trying to win over the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor in the establishment of a new mass Farmer-Labor Party that would be able to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Republican and Democratic parties. In 1928, the estranged Browder and his lover Kitty Harris went to China and lived in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of RILU's Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in clandestine labor organizing. The pair returned to the United States in 1929. [In 1944, perceiving the end of the war and the possibility of postwar tension between Washington and Moscow, Browder made moves to distance the CPUSA from the Soviet Union, declaring that communism and capitalism could peacefully co-exist. This policy became known in the Party as Browderism. The CPUSA reconstituted itself as the Communist Political Association. In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph McCarthy, Browder was willing to criticize the American Communist Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades. He falsely testified under oath that he had never been involved in espionage activities.[7] Browder was charged with contempt of Congress, but Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally. Browder was never prosecuted for his espionage work on behalf of the Soviet Union.