The Many Worlds of American Communism

533 Pages·2022·4.961 MB·English

by  Joshua Morris

The Many Worlds of
American Communism

The Many Worlds of
American Communism
Joshua Morris

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morris, Joshua (Joshua James), author.
Title: The many worlds of American communism / Joshua Morris.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “This book examines the multifaceted dimensions that make
up the American communist movement from its early years in the 1920s to its peak
in the years leading up to World War II. The author’s approach differentiates between
the political-, social-, and labor-oriented motivations taken by the movement’s
participants”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022027036 (print) | LCCN 2022027037 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781793631954 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781793631961 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Communism—United States—History—20th century. |
Labor movement—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Politics
and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC HX83 .M67 2022 (print) | LCC HX83 (ebook) |
DDC 335.00973—dc23/eng/20220718
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027036
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027037

∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface: The Many Worlds of American Communism vii
Acknowledgments xix
List of Abbreviations xxi
1 The Formative Years 1
2 Two Worlds, One Movement, 1921–1924 49
3 The Labor World of American Communism, 1922–1927 99
4 Politicking through the Second Period 167
5 Radical Politics 225
6 The Labor World on the March 281
7 A Moral Crusade in the Communities 349
8 Hanging In, Diffusing Out 401
Conclusion 457

Index 463

About the Author 497

v

Preface
The Many Worlds of American Communism
In 2019 the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held its 100th-
anniversary convention in its historic hometown of Chicago. There, members
young and old gathered to meet and greet as well as vote in the new generation
of party leaders. For the first time since the party was created, a bicameral
executive was initiated, with Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron taking positions
as the first “co-Chairs.” The conference numbered over 500 and attracted nu-
merous activists ranging from students to young union organizers to hard-
working young adults. Over the past decade and a half, a growing interest in
the concepts of Marxism, communism, and anarchism developed around the
world as the international economy reached a crisis point during the 2008 re-
cession. English literature professor Terry Eagleton published Why Marx Was
Right in 2011 while French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published The
Communist Hypothesis to rally activists into a new era of communist theory.
After the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century in 2013,
which unveiled systemic conditions about income inequality throughout the
modern world system, sales of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital soared throughout
Britain and the United States. He Nian, a Chinese theater director, recreated
an all-singing, all-dancing musical to commemorate Marx’s work in 2014.
In the 2016 American presidential election, the CPUSA ardently advocated
opposition to Donald Trump in a manner that mimicked their historical at-
titude to the “lesser of two evils thesis”—referring to the party’s proclivity

to avoid advocating revolution and appeasing the “vital center” of American
politics—earning them both attention and criticism from American activists,

Leftists, students, and unionists. Finally, in November of 2018, the Historians
of American Communism gathered in Williamstown to discuss the 100 years

of American communist history and its legacy in the United States. As we
vii
viii Preface
move into a phase of renewed interest in not just American Communism but
the Pan-Socialist Left in general, it is important that we question the existing
historiography of the topic and subject it to what Marx referred to as a “ruth-
less criticism.”1
This work examines the American communist movement from its origins
in the spring of 1919 until a transition during the post–World War II years
that led to the development of what is increasingly being called the New
Communist Movement (NCM) of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It examines
the role of communists in U.S. history by dividing up the narrative into
multiple worlds of activity and engagement: communist involvement in
political activism, labor organizing, and community organizing. It argues
that the American communist movement, like many other components of
the Left in U.S. history, was experienced differently by people who came
in from different backgrounds and with different agendas—not unlike the
Catholic Church, or any large institution/government. While communism
as a movement in the United States has been depicted historically as a
rather exceptional and unique movement, I understand it as a multifaceted
expression of American Left radicalism, less rooted in international affairs
than it was built upon what certain American Leftists believed was just and
fair for their society. American Communism has a difficult and sometimes
contradictory history, conflated between questions about ideological moti-
vation and the practical gains netted by working-class Americans as a result
of such motivation. This work is thus also a critique of tendencies to place
certain subjects, namely, the agency of the Communist Party as a monolith,
over others such as labor organizers, community activists, immigrants,
women, and people of color. I assert that American communist history is
not a history of one political entity, nor is it a history of how certain ide-
ologies had effects on the actions of certain influential individuals. It is a
history of certain Leftists at the grassroots who chose to balance their lives
between the practical realities of American society and the ideals of Marx-
ian socialism.
As a social movement in American history, American Communism can be
understood in a variety of ways depending upon the context from which the

examined activists engaged with their struggle for worker and civic rights. As
Perry Anderson pointed out, to write a history of a communist movement one

must take seriously a Gramscian maxim; that to write a history of a political
party is to write the history of the society of which it is a component from a
particular monographic standpoint. In other words, no history of a communist
party is finally intelligible unless it is constantly related to the national balance

of forces of which the party is only one moment, and which forms the context
in which it must operate.2
Preface ix
People engage in social movements with a passion that expresses the
very conditions of their society and a desire to change specific conditions
or advance certain ideas. In this sense, the Communist Party and its political
dimension form the context within which politically motivated American
communists operated, but it alone was not the full story. People who partici-
pate in social movements that seek dramatic, if not radical, change bring their
own personal backgrounds, experiences, and traditions into the organizations
which comprise the movements which then sets them down a specific form
of social activism. In the histories of communist political activists, particu-
larly the leadership’s memoirs and biographies, personal experiences unveil
a deeply ideological movement caught up between personal differences
over international relations and practical domestic activism. The histories of
communist labor activists, on the other hand, reveal a much different narra-
tive—one focused on the legal and extralegal strategies taken by communists
when fighting to obtaining labor rights against organized interests of capi-
tal. In the process, communists built an independent labor movement from
the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—one that was both political and
social in nature. These personal experiences demonstrate a less ideologically
defined form of activism bound to the conclusions of a political committee in
Chicago, New York, or Moscow than it did based on the demands and social
makeup of workers demanding rights. Finally, in the more recent histories of
communist organizing in the communities against institutionalized forms of
societal oppression, we find an emotional and personal narrative that unveils
the challenges of fighting the systemic nature of both racial and class-based
forms of power and the struggles individuals faced in building a social aware-
ness of such issues.
The “many worlds” of American Communism refer to these variances
of experience displayed in the historiographical and biographical record
to unpack how American Communism meant different things to different
people, and most importantly that these meanings changed among both
people and organizations as the years went by. American communist history
is best understood as one segment of a larger history, that of the American
Pan-Socialist Left—which alone has its own “many worlds” of experiences

encompassing a variety of radical political, labor, and civil rights movements
dating back to the late nineteenth century. The experiences of individual

communist activists and “fellow travelers” of the Left throughout most of
the 1920s and 1930s differed widely, and those experiences were shaped—in
many ways defined and limited—by the “world” to which specific activ-
ists belonged. By the 1930s, American Communism was a “world political

movement,” but it also existed as a domestic social movement with localized
influences that varied in experience from person to person. As a movement in

the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s, American Communism