The Heyday of American Communism PDF
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The Heyday of American Communism THE HEYDAY OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM The Depression Decade HARVEY KLEHR Basic Books, Inc., Publishers NEW YORK Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Klehr, Harvey. The heyday of American communism. r Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Communism-United States-History-20th century. 2. Communist Party of the United States of America History-20th century. 3. United States-Economic conditions-1918-1945. 4. United States-Politics and govemment-1919-1933. 5. United States-Politics and govemment-1933-1945. I. Title. HX83.K55 1984 335.43'0973 83-70762 ISBN 0-465-02945-0 Copyright © 1984 by Harvey Klehr Printed in the United States of America Designed by Vincent Torre 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Elizabeth, Benjamin, and Gabriel CONTENTS ix PREFACE 1 The Lessons of the First Decade 3 2 To the Streets and Shops 28 3 Organizing the Unemployed 49 4 The Intellectuals Go Left 69 5 The Interregnum of Despair 85 6 United We Stand 97 7 Goodbye to the TUUL 118 8 Down on the Farm 135 9 Life of the Party 153 10 Changing the Line 167 11 Turnabout on FDR 186 12 The Democratic Front 207 13 Organizing the Unorganized Once Again 223 14 States Left 252 15 The Unemployed Meet Congress 281 16 The Youth 305 Vll 17 The Negroes 324 18 The Intellectual Merry-Go-Round 349 19 A More Popular Party 365 20 The Nazi-Soviet Pact 386 21 The Party's Over 410 NOTES 417 487 INDEX PREFACE ER a marginal palitical movement, American Communism has at tracted an enormous amount of attention. Oddly enough, however, the most important era of Party history has received very little scrutiny and has been widely misunderstood and misperceived. The 1930s marked the height of Communist influence in America. This was an era in which the Party emerged from the fringes of national life and managed to play a supporting role in some of the greatest dramas of the day-the fight for unemployment insurance, industrial unionism, collective security against fascism, and others. During the 1950s the Fund for the Republic sponsored a valuable project to study the impact of Communism on American life. Besides spawning a variety of specialized studies, the project resulted in Theo dore Draper's two-volume history of the Party in the 1920s and David Shannon's examination of the post-World War II years. Draper began, but never completed, a work on the 1930s. Since then, Joseph Starobin's American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 and Maurice Isserman's Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War have further documented Party affairs. The only serious ac count of the Party to include the 1930s, Irving H9we and Lewis Coser's The American Communist Party: A Critical History, relied entirely on the published record and is now seriously dated. The Party's activities in the IX Preface 1930s remain largely neglected; the present book is an effort to remedy that gap in the literature. The main questions I will seek to answer are: What did the Commu nist party accomplish during this era? Who made its decisions and how? How much influence did the Party have on American life and institu tions? Who were its members, and what were they like? In addition to answering such descriptive questions, I hope to explain why the Party acted as it did and what accounted for its successes and failures. The Communist party did not enter the decade of the 1930s with a tabula rasa. Neither did the end of the period neatly close an era of Party history. While the 1930s are a convenient historical era for analysis, it is necessary to go both backward and forward in time to make the period fully comprehensible. Accordingly, the book opens with a summary of the Party's first decade and some of its most instructive lessons and ends with a brief summary of the World War II years, which culminated in the removal of Earl Browder, the Party leader, from the position of power he had held for most of the 1930s. The material on the 1930s falls into several broad categories. Chap ters 2 through 9 chronicle the Party's activities during its revolutionary era. Chapters 10 and 11 detail the Party's efforts to change its course, while Chapters 12 through 19 deal with the era of the Popular Front. Chapter 20 is devoted to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its consequences. Two organizational decisions deserve special mention. I have discussed Party policy toward farmers in the early chapters because it was during the first half of the decade that Communists were most active in rural America. Chapters dealing with blacks and youth are in the section on the Popular Front. ,- No one can chronicle every Communist-sponsored demonstration or organization or discuss the Party's views on every issue without taxing his sanity and his reader's patience. Many Communist activities were either innocuous or of transient interest to all but the handful of people involved in them. I have focused on the most crucial issues and events in the Party's life, treating in some detail the evolution of Communist policy with regard to the trade union movement, the unemployed, intellectuals, and other political parties and movements. Party policy in other areas either receives more glancing treatment or has been omitted. Some areas I have dealt with in cursory fashion, such as Party activities in Holly wood or the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain, have been exhaustively treated elsewhere. One faces many problems in writing about American Communism, and these vary with the particular period on which one focuses. Until
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