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The Many Worlds of American Communism

On this episode of Cosmopod, Donald and Parker welcome Cosmonaut author Josh Morris on to discuss the history and historiography of the US Communist Party. Academic accounts of the party have largely fit in two camps; Josh’s upcoming book The Many Worlds of American Communism attempts to go beyond the standard story and rethink the scholarship for a post-Cold War era. Below we have included a preview of Morris’ book which is based on the preface.

The Communist Party of Philadelphia holds a rally on May Day, 1935, across the street from City Hall.

In 2019, amidst a wet and humid June afternoon, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held its 100th anniversary conference. There, members young and old gathered to meet and greet as well as vote in the new generation of Party leaders. The conference numbered over 500 and attracted a large number of youth activists ranging from students to hard working young adults. In recent years, 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 recession. 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 theatre director, re-created an all-singing, all-dancing musical to commemorate Marx’s work in 2014. English literature professor Terry Eagleton published Why Marx Was Right in 2011 while French Maoist philosopher Alian Badiou published The Communist Hypothesis to rally activists into a new era of communist theory.1  In the 2016 American Presidential Election, the CPUSA ardently advocated for opposition against Donald Trump in a manner that mimicked their historical attitude toward the ‘lesser of two evils thesis,’ 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.

My research examines the American communist movement from its origins in the spring of 1919 until the transition into what is increasingly being called the New Communist Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I examine the role of communists in U.S. history by dividing up the narrative into multiple worlds of activity and engagement; particularly political activism, labor organizing, community organizing, and the experiences of anticommunism. I argue that American radicalism in the 20th century took on features that distinguished it from a specific effort, such as civil rights legislation or collective bargaining agreements. Whereas communism as a movement in the United States has been depicted historically as a rather exceptional and unique movement, I understand it as an expression of American radicalism. American Communism has a difficult and sometimes contradictory history; conflated between questions about ideological motivation and the practical gains netted by both American workers and citizens as a result of such motivation. American communist history is not a history of organizations, nor is it a history of how certain ideologies had effects on the actions of individuals. It is a history of people at the grassroots and how they chose to balance their lives within the context of American democracy and through the ideals of Marxian socialism. 

This research asserts that American Communism can be understood in a variety of ways depending upon the context from which the examined organizers and activists engaged with American citizens. As Perry Anderson pointed out, to write a history of a communist party or 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

People engage in social movements with a passion that expresses the very conditions of societal pressure and a desire to change specific said conditions. When one examines the work of communist political activists, they will find experiences that unveil a deeply ideological political movement. By switching to an examination of communist labor activists, one reveals a much different narrative; focused on legal strategies for obtaining collective bargaining rights, and cared less about the conclusions of a political committee than it did the demands of local workers. Finally, if one examines the work of communist organizing in the communities against institutionalized forms of societal oppression, they will find a more emotional and cultural narrative that sees American radicals trying to balance the ideals of the nation with the ideology of Marxism. 

I refer to the “many worlds” of American Communism as the variances of experience displayed in the historiographical and biographical record in an effort to unpack how American Communism meant different things to different people, and most importantly that these meanings changed with people as the years went by. American Communist history is best understood as one component of a larger history encompassing a variety of radical political, labor, and civil rights movements dating back to the late 19th century; the history of Pan-Socialist Left in the United States. 3 By the 1930s, American Communism was indeed a “world political movement,” but it also existed as a domestic movement with localized influences that varied in experience from person-to-person. As a movement in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, American Communism varied from state-to-state, dependent upon geopolitical circumstances, social tensions over issues such as race, the extent of unemployment in dominant industries, and the palatability of industrial unionism within a given workforce.

Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on American Communism has expanded as newer sources became available, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDMII/RGAJPI) digitized its archives on the CPUSA, and new methods of interpreting history, such as an emphasis on personal experiences—sometimes referred to as social history—became more widely used. James Barrett’s William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism along with Randi Storch’s Red Chicago were among the first works to benefit from newer sources and demonstrated a clear break between the ‘traditional’ and ‘revisionist’ schools of thought, as put by Vernon L. Pedersen in The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-57. The traditionalist school, best represented by Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism, viewed the ideological link between the CPUSA and the Soviet Union as the most significant aspect of this history, particularly when defining the boundaries of what made a particular strike, event, or organization “communist.”  These historians depicted American Communism as a wholly unique phenomenon; so unique that to be a member of the CPUSA was to already be considered anti-American. Seeking to understand American communism as a domestic ideological movement, the revisionist school countered with an emphasis on the “correction of injustices in American society,” with works such as Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem during the Depression and Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe:  Black Radicalism and the Communist Party of Alabama.4  

The traditionalist school suffers from a general negative perspective of communist ideology and treats it as a foreign/alien movement that only existed because of the Soviet Union. The revisionists suffer from a nuanced and overly positive perspective and make very little effort to explain why such a history requires a methodology that emphasizes context both internationally and domestically. In turn, criticism of revisionist scholarship on the subject by traditionalist historians, particularly Draper’s essays in the mid-1980s, do not take into account how by 1985 younger history scholars were in the midst of transformative academic overlapping fields of study. Michael Brown identified some of these overlaps which contributed to a shift in how revisionist scholars approached American communist history as: anthropological studies concerned with links between power and social differentiation, a more critical understanding of “resistance” and “identity,” intersectional feminism and its focus on gender and the relationship of social norms to heterogeneity, and new sociological studies on the cultural dialectics of populist activism. Both schools, however, unveil an over-arching handicap that prevents the writers and readers of the subject from fully grasping the complexity of American Communism.

At the root of the traditionalist and revisionist schools of American Communist history is the placement of the CPUSA and its leadership class as the nucleus of the entire history; where the narrative both begins and ends as a political history of dissidents and radicals. This depiction convinces the reader that they are examining a fundamentally un-American concept; a history of radicals in America as opposed to a history of Americans who turned to radicalism. Both schools use the CPUSA as the nexus from which their conclusions are drawn:  The CPUSA’s ideological link and involvement in the Comintern as well as the policies of the Soviet Union served as the foundation for traditionalist claim that American Communism was merely a front for Soviet espionage and subversive activities. The CPUSA’s promotion of African American, labor, and civil rights as a political policy served as a foundation for the revisionists rejecting the significance of traditionalist claims and focusing on the positive contributions of communists toward labor and social history. In both instances, the CPUSA is the beginning and the end of the narrative, while the externals are used as contextual links and exceptions to the rules. A prime example is the preferential use of the term “ex-Communist;” which according to Draper and Klehr does not express someone’s rejection of socialism and Marxist ideology but rather merely their former membership in the CPUSA. Additionally, the individual testimonies of low-ranking communists and communists with shared membership across various organizations are overlooked in most analyses. Rather than see leaders and ex-members of the CPUSA as the cohort of what communists were, the examination of ‘many worlds’ asserts that all participants, from leaders to rank-and-file activists to so-called ‘fellow travelers’, must be understood as involved in the movement to varying degrees in overlapping efforts, even if only some of their efforts are associated with the CPUSA.

Hugo Gellert poster for Daily Worker circa 1935

The traditionalists focus on what I call the political world of American Communism; which indeed developed into a highly centralized political movement by the 1930s, with direct connections to the Soviet Union, centered on the CPUSA; but filtered out into other organizations such as the Communist League of America (CLA), the Workers’ Party of America (WPA), and later the Workers’ Party of the United States (WPUS). Little effort was made to understand the internationalist link; instead preferring to merely depict it as an act of subversion. The revisionists focus generally on one of two different worlds, the labor and community worlds of American Communism and also tend to generalize the distinctions between the two around issues such as racial equality in the workplace and at the community despite the fact that organizing for racial equality in the workplace was fundamentally different from organizing in the community. Randi Storch was among the first scholars to abandon the approach of a single narrative history by examining the social dimension of communist political culture during the Third Period (1928-1934) and utilized a geographical approach of focusing on Chicago. While not ignoring the overt ideological connection with the USSR, Storch demonstrated that amidst the early portion of the Great Depression, American communists both inside and outside the CPUSA “learned how to work with liberals and non-Communists” by developing “successful organizing tactics and fight[ing] for workers’ rights, racial equality, and unemployment relief.”5 Jacob Zumoff expanded on Storch’s approach in his work The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, where he demonstrated that while the traditionalists were indeed correct in the overt connection between the Communist International (Comintern) and the CPUSA, they failed to address the nature of the relationship parties shared at the international level, such as how the Comintern emphasized that the CPUSA “Americanize” itself and act as a more independent political organization and did not ask of them to blindly follow the dictums of another communist party.

The division of American communist history into multiple narratives complicates the historiography and at the same time more accurately portrays the experiences of those who participated in the movement. Storch observed that the historiography had a few particular avenues; one which observes the political dimension of communist activity, one which examines the community-based organizations and localized communist activism for localized projects such as the Unemployment Councils, and one which observes the movement’s interconnection with other scholarship, such as labor and cultural studies.6 The concept of “many worlds” or “rival histories” is a common claim in the field of International Relations where “competition between the realist, liberal, and radical traditions” consistently reassess our understandings of social movements. International Relations scholar Stephen M. Walt argued this concept on a broad level when discussing the nature of international political ideology throughout the mid-to-late Cold War (1960-1991). In a subject where multiple interpretations exist in addition to multiple variances of experiences among sources, “no single approach can capture all the complexity” of a social and political movement. Furthermore, the end of the Soviet Union and the availability of new sources did little to resolve the struggle of competing theoretical interpretations of the history. Instead, it “merely launched a new series of debates” about the extent to which social movements were domestic in nature versus the by-product of international relations. For Walt, this was a matter about “contemporary world politics” using a variety of sources and contextual evidence to develop a well-rounded approach to policymaking.7 

The notion of multiple worlds of a single movement also incorporates observations from world literature scholars about how “writers frame their respective cultures as ‘windows on the world.'” Daniel Simon asks, given the subjective nature of writing about international issues, “how do we read world literature?”8 This same question applies to almost any social/political movement at the domestic level:  How do we read the histories of social/political movements that are invariably linked at the international level to various other cultures, movements, and people? The answer, whether conscious of it or not, is that we read it divided:  When we want to understand American Communism as a political movement, we look to its international roots and its ideological links abroad; when we want to understand American communist activism in labor, we look to its temperament and palatability with specific working groups, such as industrial auto workers and non-white agricultural workers; when we desire to understand anticommunism, we look to the Cold War for contextual explanations for the violation of domestic constitutional rights. The particular ‘world’ focused on―labor, community, political―is invariably written with a subconscious emphasis of the specific circumstances of each case, but rarely do historians take the next step of linking these various worlds as multiple experiences of the same history; as subjective relationships to the same movement. Instead, each approach tends to emphasize itself as the history to be examined; be it the history of American Communism’s ideological roots in Europe, the history of the American labor movement and its tendency to utilize radical and militant communist organizers, or the history of individual American communist’s resistance to racial injustice and social inequality.

The history of American Communism must be understood through a lens that emphasizes the particulars of the society within which the movement existed; American society and the traditions as well as conflicts common to American people—both communist and non-communist. American Communism as a movement possessed a reach that extended into the political, the legal, and the civil corners of the United States during multiple transformative periods of American society. While both the revisionist and traditionalist schools of thought have added important contributions to this history, they have also both suffered from an approach that treats a multi-faceted social movement as a singular, monolithic phenomenon. Despite the depiction of acting as mere conduits between Soviet policy and American communist activism, grassroots rank-and-file communists in the United States channeled increased political energy into specific areas thought to be effective at, or at least open to, organizing for social change and typically sought only tacit approval from their local Party club. For example, by utilizing a geographical approach, Storch was capable of examining outside a framework that centered on the national CPUSA from 1928 to 1935 to demonstrate how “a wide variety of communists coexisted in Chicago,” including high and low ranking Stalinist cohorts and also non-Stalinist activists engaged in social, political, and labor-oriented activities. Additionally, both the break-away CLA and the CPUSA enjoyed the increasing romanticism and popularity of the Bolshevik Revolution among youthful activists, which by 1929 had “sparked the imagination of liberals and radicals throughout the United States.”9

Elements of the pan-Socialist tradition, which in urban areas like Chicago included “socialist, anarchist, and militant trade-union traditions,” rushed to engage with their society under an increased sense of urgency. The CLA and the CPUSA sought to gain momentum by seizing control of the increasing interest in revolutionary theory, Marxism, and the idealism of the Bolshevik Revolution by a newer and younger generation of scholars and activists.10 Under this context, it should be easy to understand that the term “American Communism” does not refer to exclusively one group, one organization, or one political party—as it has been used in the past. The tendency to view the movement as a “monolith,” where the degree to which someone is or is not a communist is measured by the degree to which they are separated or under the thumb of the CPUSA, dominates the existing scholarship on American Communism. It is important, however, to understand the subtle and theoretical differences of this movement if one is to understand the totality of its impact on American history. 

The Communist International, or Comintern, played a role in the development of American Communism but it was not the sole actor as it did not have, and ultimately lacked the means of, direct influence over all communist organizations in the United States throughout the CPUSA’s heyday. Factional disputes and power struggles internally—themselves an inheritance of the first generation of communist party leaders from 1919 – 1921—contributed significantly to the redirection of local American communist politics during the Third Period (1928 – 1934). Although much of this factionalism was not alien to the Soviets and the Comintern, the acute and specific conditions of the factional disputes were linked to disputes about American labor traditions and conflicts with American political organizations, such as the Socialist Party. The CLA continued to operate throughout the Third Period, but its work focused on advancing “Left Opposition” to the CPUSA instead of pushing a general political policy for the United States. The CPUSA, in turn, resisted oppositional groups like the CLA as endemic of what they called “social fascism.”11 This dynamic forced the CPUSA to act politically and organizationally in ways the Comintern could never predict. Following the 1928 presidential campaign and the formal separation of anti-Soviet groups, the political agenda of the CPUSA “had neither a beginning nor an ending point,” as it sought to “register the extent of [the] Party’s support in the working class by mobilizing the maximum number to vote for candidates.”12 Throughout the Third Period, American Communism solidified into a social movement through the emergence of grassroots communist activism and the rise of multiple areas of strategic importance for communist work in the United States, areas that I call the many worlds of American Communism. 

The primary sources chosen for my research are broad, and for good reason:  to understand what American Communism was we must examine not just Party records and the memoirs of Party leaders but also the memories of the lived experiences of the movement across different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The sources break up into two categories. First, there are the Party’s own documents and those archived by the Soviet Union; usually referred to as the Comintern Archives. During the Third Period, the primary means of distributing communist theory in the United States was through a wide variety of Comintern and CPUSA publications, such as The Communist, The Daily Worker, and its regional variants such as The Southern Worker and The Western Worker. For communists outside of the CPUSA, such as those that filled the ranks of the CLA and the SWP, periodicals such as The Militant served as the basis for discussion and followed a format similar to that of CPUSA publications. These publications were unabashedly anti-Soviet in their rhetoric and ultimately central to understanding how communists thought domestically about issues such as unemployment, race, gender, and the day-to-day struggles of working people during the Depression. As such, these resources are the best remaining examples of American communist thought throughout the late 1920s and 1930s and include theories both constrained by and liberated from Soviet oversight, as some of the sources extend from groups disassociated from the USSR. 

Among the most significant and dominant publishers for communist literature for American communists were Progress Publishing, based out of Moscow, and International Publishers, based both in New York and Chicago. International Publishers Company started in 1924 in a joint-venture investment project started by A.A. Heller, a wealthy socialist who had ties to production industries in the Soviet Union. The publishing company struggled for over 15 years. At first, it was held up only by Heller’s overinvestment. It later gained a significant amount of support and cohort of dedicated readers from the Workers’ Party of America. The Workers’ Party of America later became the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1927, but it helped Heller find outlets for the publisher to distribute. To compete with the publication of Marxist and communist works by other publishers, International Publishers focused on books “not yet published in English” but written by prominent socialist thinkers.13 Progress Publishers, based in Moscow, printed the various works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the Comintern’s theoretical journal, The Communist, in multiple languages for communist parties in Europe and the United States. Since most American communist political philosophy had its origins in the broad theoretical traditions published by both International Publishers and Progress Publishers, they can be seen as the lens through which the political, labor, and community communist activism evolved throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

The next category of sources are personal memoirs, autobiographies, historical biographies, and oral histories. Part of this analysis accepts that party documents, government reports, and political newspapers present one interpretation of the historical narrative. But it also asserts that in between the depiction of events in official records and the memories of those events by people there exists some semblance of the truth. Autobiographies, like that of Peggy Dennis, provide insight into the way American communists thought about Party leaders and their experiences with Soviet policy decisions in the immediate aftermath of major political shifts. Similarly, autobiographies of grassroots communists, such as musician and chronic traveler Russell Brodine, do not focus exclusively on their identity as communists but rather incorporate their ideological experiences into their broader life experiences. The same case applies to the autobiography of the CPUSA’s oldest living member, Beatrice Lumpkin, who published Joy in the Struggle in 2015. Lumpkin’s work, like Brodine’s, uses her involvement in ideologically-motivated events as tangential and parallel to her overall life experience and thus provides a dynamic look into the life of a communist involved in multiple aspects of political, labor, and civic engagement. Personal memoirs, like George Charney’s A Long Journey, as well as historical biographies such as The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: Life as a Negro Communist in the South by Nell Irving Painter do a similar service of discussing communist activism as part of what these American radicals believed to be a component of their own personal and learned American ideals. Similarly, memoirs that focus exclusively on specific, chronological, and widely-known historical events, such as James Yate’s Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, help connect what grassroots communists believed to be patriotism to their ideological investment in socialism and Marxism.

Oral histories are continuing to serve historians as the ideal ways to understand what lived experiences mean to individuals still to this day. One of the most important aspects about oral histories of a movement such as American Communism is how they convey a tremendous gap between the average activist and the ideological world of politics. While possessing the fault of any primary source in terms of questionable validity, oral histories do possess a fundamentally unique trait: they are guaranteed to be real in the mind of the person telling their story. Over the course of eleven years my research has built upon over 10 oral histories of living and deceased American communists. Some of those interviewed remain active members of the CPUSA, others are part of political clubs in different parts of the country, and others prefer to remain anonymous for personal reasons. All of their stories, however, help fill in the gap of meaning for a movement that is told mostly through the lens of ideologically driven reports. In total, the sources used are intended to provide a broad examination of the American communist movement from multiple angles. The sources chosen for this research were picked because of their desire to tell their personal side of the story, and to explain why some individuals dedicated years, often decades, of their lives to a movement regardless of how the majority of the nation viewed them at any given time.

Outside of strictly industrial workspaces, individuals across the nation joined the American Communist movement for a wide range of reasons and from an even wider range of backgrounds. As a Jewish second-generation immigrant from New York City, Lumpkin spent years learning about the plight of workers from her leftist parents and family, as well as fellow community members, as the nation descended into the Depression. William Z. Foster joined after facing difficulty within AFL and syndicalist unions in the post-World War I strike wave. Danny Rubin joined after witnessing anti-Semitism in Philadelphia and linking the treatment of the local Jewish population with the general treatment of the working people in his city. Hosea Hudson joined the CPUSA in the wake of the Scottsboro case and the rising influence of the International Labor Defense (ILD) as an organization to fight discrimination. James Cannon, like many who eventually held leadership in either the CPUSA and/or other organizations such as the CLA, became inspired by the actions and tenacity of Russian Marxists to restore the “unfalsified Marxism in the international labor movement” and the romanticism of the Russian Revolution.14 Len DeCaux joined the CPUSA as a result of his perception of “herd impulses” he felt from teenage conformities while attending the Harrow School during World War I and the subsequent shortcomings of the IWW with regard to a practical plan to organize the masses. Russell Brodine joined after experiencing difficulties at his college’s local organization of fellow musicians in securing spots on the orchestra and defending against a cut of existing pay rates. In short, there never was a single particular reason as to why American communists became American communists—just like any political/social movement, American Communism attracted people by the message it delivered and the hopes it promised. The outlets for these citizens were the organizations previously mentioned and the subsequent labor and community organizations, such as the Unemployment Councils, the CIO, the ILD, and countless civic organizations that emerged out of the struggle. 

While not exceptional by American political standards, the American communist movement was without-a-doubt one of the most diverse of all communist movements worldwide. The political idealists who crafted domestic communist policy in the United States under various organizations, clubs, and union locals faced a constituency with American values and American experiences, regardless of what their ideological schools of thought taught them. Either they, their parents, or their grandparents immigrated from Europe, or were liberated through emancipation subsequent to the American Civil War, to escape political and personal persecution. Many who came to publicly identify as communist during the ‘heyday’ of the movement viewed the tenants of socialism as compatible with or parallel to the virtues of American liberty, while others viewed the American system as a viable Republic merely corrupted by the special interests of an oligarchic elite. In this sense, American communists by the late 1920s were genuinely American first, and communist second. This is not to say that the majority of communists in the United States lacked a fundamental understanding of class analysis and awareness; but rather to suggest that the majority of American communists sought to relate their American experiences to their understandings of Marxism as opposed to use Marxism as a means to alter the social conditions of the United States. Furthermore, the diffusion of communists across various organizations masks the numbers of active communists throughout the Third Period and Popular Front, as noted by more recent scholarship. Many of the organizations and unions commanded by communists were not “numerically dominated” by members of the CPUSA, the CLA, or the SPA. The International Labor Defense (ILD), for example, operated as an independent organization of 2,520 individuals but was led and organized by a small group of 150 CPUSA members, and given a substantial amount of funding to operate in cities like Detroit and Chicago. Auxiliary organizations, which combined political members with union numbers and groups such as the ILD, “suggest a much wider support base than membership numbers allow.”15

Moving forward in the subject of American communist history requires a more radical departure from traditionalist narratives than provided by revisionist scholars. The approach of understanding the complexity of a movement through its “many worlds” of experiences is not merely a new historical account of the CPUSA; it is a history of a social movement of which the CPUSA is a significant part of. A critical analysis of American Communism must focus on the everyday, the grassroots. This approach is an attempt to create what Michael Brown described as necessary for the subject:  a theoretical and methodological defense of what is legitimately unorthodox about traditionalist claims of American Communism. Rather than treat participants of a social movement as mere functionaries or as a component of a heterogeneous mass, this approach places participants at the front and center of the narrative. It also acknowledges the existing schools of scholarship on the subject as the product of an intellectual culture of all fields, not just tendencies in the discipline of history. Acknowledging the “many worlds” of American Communism is not just an acknowledgment of the complexity of the experiences of American communists, it is an acknowledgment of the complexity of all social movements—of which American Communism is one example of. It is only from that point that it becomes possible to expand upon such a method—critique it, develop it, modify it—thereby establishing some semblance of a history that is liberated from the contextual constraints of the high and low Cold War.

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Latino Radicals and the Communist Party in the New Communist Movement: A Case Study of Two Oral Histories

Josh Morris discusses the experiences of Latino/Latina organizers in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan and CPUSA, covering an often ignored aspect of US Communist history. 

Banner calling for Chicano self-determination at a 1970s rally.

On June 20th of this year, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) will celebrate its 100th-year-anniversary founding at their old hometown in Southside Chicago. There, its current cohort of activists, writers, teachers, industrial workers, service workers, and unionists will meet to plan their next 100 years in America.  Among those leading the current generation of American communists is Rossana Cambron, a member of the Party’s Central (or National) Committee since 2014. Cambron’s current work with the Party involves focusing on membership engagement and developing the Party from its current form as a series of interlinked clubs into a regional political party. Cambron, however, has a history that is quite remarkable not for the history of American communists, but also of Latino history. Cambron’s origins of interest in the CPUSA was in fact extremely personal; linked to her experiences as a Latino woman in Southern California and the efforts of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan (MEChA) to bring about equality and acceptance of her fellow students in the years subsequent to the Vietnam War.

During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, newly arrived Mexican immigrants made Hispanic Americans the fastest growing minority group in the United States. By 1980, Mexicans and Mexican Americans constituted about 60 percent of the country’s 14.6 million Hispanics. Many of these people took on the term Chicano(a), which Ruben Salazar noted as a term to describe “a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” In the early 1970s, Hispanic organizers and intellectuals called for “a militant message of cultural pluralism,” ushering in a series of attempts to address ethnic concerns on California University campuses.1 MEChA emerged in 1969 as the result of Latino students from twelve University chapters across the country who decided to meet in California to decide a course of action for the future. The organization represented a vibrant aspect of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement, also sometimes called the Chicano Civil Rights movement or El Movimiento. Latino students from the various university clubs met in Santa Barbara and drafted a document that highlighted the emotions and sentiments of their upbringings in an era where Civil Rights and second wave feminist reform seemed, to them, to focus more on the social dynamics of whites and non-whites. The founders of MEChA claimed that “[they] did not always have an organization to fight for their political rights” as Latinos, but instead commonly found themselves grouped in with all non-whites which ignored their unique cultural heritage, beliefs, and customs. MEChA set out to alter this course and provide Latinos access to a campus-based organization that would fight to sustain their civil rights as Latinos by promoting the expansion of ethnic studies programs at their local college campuses.2 

The organization by its very nature was counter-cultural, anti-systemic, and in simple terms: radically progressive. They incorporated the traditional heroes of Civil Rights and minority justice, such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also included Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong as their influential leaders. Because of this, MEChA is sometimes referenced as a contingent of the New Communist Movement (NCM), a grouping of radical organizations that emerged out of the New Left; identified by their rejection of both New Leftist approaches for progressive change as well as the “old guard” of radicals still found in the CPUSA.3 But MEChA did not achieve the broad levels of support it had by 1970 because of its ideological proclivities.  Rather, many organizations throughout the NCM attracted students and marginalized youths for their message of embracing the ideals of the counter-cultural movement and rejecting the Old Guard of the Left. The promotion and defense of ethnic studies programs at Universities was one means of doing this; however, MEChA also promoted awareness of Latino history and culture during a time that numerous ethnic groups were searching for collaborationist means to achieve progress.

Between its founding in mid-1969 and throughout most of 1970, MEChA succeeded at gaining membership across University campuses through its promotion of ethnic studies but had little to work with in terms of a struggle for national attention.  Between 1969 and 1971, MEChA operated sixteen campus chapters, including Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, Northridge, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Monica. Most of the effort to promote new ethnic studies programs were done on a campus-to-campus basis and the organization merely facilitated a cooperative approach to promoting ethnic and cultural diversity.  The moment for a national spotlight came in August of 1970, when the organization began to participate in the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War; one of the largest Chicano demonstrations in U.S. history. To draw the nation in, MEChA teamed up with the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) of Boulder , the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) of El Paso, and the Puerto Rican Student Union of New York.  In total, the demonstration numbered over 25,000 Chicano students from across the country. In their mission statement, MEChA proposed to “link the struggle against U.S. aggression in Vietnam to the struggle for Chicano self-determination in the United States.” At the demonstration, the organizations popularized the phrases “Nuestra Guerra Esta Aqui, No Esta en Vietnam!” (Our War is Here not in Vietnam) and “Vietnam y Aztlan; Los dos Venceran!” (Vietnam as Aztlan; Both will Win!).4 By 1972, MEChA operated over 24 campus chapters and expanded their reach to community colleges and California State Universities.

As is common when a radical organization promoting civil rights obtains national spotlight, MEChA quickly saw political attacks subsequent to the organization’s involvement in the Moratorium.  MEChA organizers later attributed the legal battles incurred in Southern California as the result of the FBI and local police who “used undercover agents and provocateurs to infiltrate [their] organizations and plant evidence later used to discredit the movement.” The tactics mirrored those used by the FBI against the CPUSA from 1941 to 1957, as well as the tactics of private “risk management” companies such as Corporations Auxiliary from 1916 to 1938. Although the era of the second red scare had long since passed by 1970, red-baiting, albeit in a slightly modified form, remained a canonical approach for dividing up activists.  Subsequent to the political attacks, MEChA saw a decline in both membership and activities. Many organizers, lacking new students to fill the void, turned to part-time paid staff received from the Ethnic Studies departments at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and UC Davis.

Outside of campus-based organizing, MEChA focused on the promotion of voter registration among California Latinos by urging students to join La Partida de Raza Unida, or LRUP, between 1970 and 1974.  With the help of LRUP, MEChA formed a boycott committee for the Farah Garment Strike of 1972 in San Antonio, Texas, to support Cecilia Espinoza in her case Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co (1973). Espinoza charged that the Farah Manufacturing Company violated her civil rights by refusing to hire her on the basis of her national origin (Mexico). The court held that the company’s refusal to hire Espinoza because she lacked U.S. citizenship did not constitute a violation of her rights under the Civil Rights Act. 5 The strike attracted the attention of numerous Latino rights organizations as far Northwest as San Francisco.  Latino activists argued that the strike was akin to the efforts of the United Farmworkers and “a turning point in the struggle to organize the non-union Industries of the Southwest, where Chicanos work at the lowest-paid, hardest jobs.”6 It was around this time that numerous Chicano activists of MEChA, including numerous district leaders, turned to Marxism and began studying the works of Mao Zedong; attracted by its message of collectivist action to defend the rights of marginalized, ethnic workers. At first, the organization’s university clubs promoted courses on Marxism-Leninism and contemporary criticisms of American capitalism. By 1974, when MEChA organizers began participating in the August 29th Movement (ATM), the organization experienced an upsurge in both membership and community engagement throughout the Southern Southwest Latino community, which peaked two years later in 1976.7

MEChA’s moment to shine once again came when Allan Bakke claimed that he was the victim of reverse discrimination for his refused admittance into UC Davis, which was subsequently upheld by the California Supreme Court in 1976.  MEChA’s mission was to resist efforts to attack affirmative action and special admissions and ultimately overturn the Court’s decision. In their mind, the decision represented a low point for Latinos specifically by opening the door for a return to pre-1960s conditions where Latino presence in Southern California Universities were less than 50 for every 30,000 students. Throughout 1977, MEChA organized thousands of statewide meetings and began to look for other supportive organizations to support their fight to overturn the Court’s ruling and maintain their courses on Marxism. The Los Angeles rally drew over 2,000 Chicano students and community groups who teamed up with Asian student organizations to make the movement a genuinely student-oriented, multi-cultural network of resistance.  To continue their Marxist courses, MEChA turned to the Communist Party, which had the facility, staff, and more importantly the resources to teach summer-long courses. Additionally, MEChA worked with ATM to build a collaborative relationship with the Asian American communist organization, I Wor Kuen, in September, 1978. This latter move resulted in the formation of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist).  By the end of 1979, MEChA had begun a transition to maintain their independence as an organization while retaining community-based support for the League and its goals of collaborating marginalized ethnicities.

The first time Rossana Cambron heard about communists, it was that they ate babies and murdered people with disabilities like her brother, who has down syndrome. As she remembered it, it was parallel to what she was taught about fascism and the Nazi regime, which did execute its own citizens who had disabilities. The daughter of an abusive father, Rossana, her mother, and her siblings left Texas and their family in Juarez to settle in the heart of East Los Angeles, at the Madavilla housing projects on what was then called Brooklyn Avenue (today it is called Cesar Chavez Drive), in the mid-1960s. Rossana eventually learned through her mother how her grandfather worked with the Socialistas de Muerte, a segment of socialist groups in Mexico, and gave her courage to learn more about activism and the defense of those in need, such as her disabled brother. Through her public education experiences, including college, Rossana became slowly exposed to the works of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. While studying at Loyola Marymount, Rossana identified with MEChA’s message and history of activism between 1970 and 1974, leading to her joining the organization in 1976 not long after the battle to overturn the California Supreme Court decision on Allan Bakke.8

Arturo Cambron grew up the son of a truck driver and a singer and enjoyed a somewhat reasonable upbringing despite a family of thirteen brothers and sisters. Arturo, however, had to change his name in school to Arthur to avoid ridicule from his fellow white classmates, who typically expressed their parents’ distaste for Latin American presence in their community.  For both Arturo and Rossana, the riots of South Central in 1965 represented a pivotal moment where young students began to question what would push people to the brink of rioting. Due to his conservative parents, however, Arturo remained inactive until 1970 when the schools in Montebello walked out in support of East Los Angeles. The walkouts, which attempted to address the unequal treatment of Latinos in the Los Angeles Unified School District, attracted Arturo’s attention regardless of his upbringing. In his final year of high school Arturo moved to La Habra after his father was rejected by numerous landlords, where he met young activists from MEChA. Within two years, Arturo was accepted to UCLA to study medicine and became heavily active in the MEChA chapter of the campus.9

M.E.Ch.A logo

Arturo described the UCLA MEChA chapter as “very radical” and fundamentally “Marxist” in its worldview, although their program did not necessarily reflect this identity.  Rossana and Arturo saw MEChA as a Chicano movement that coincided with the African American liberation movement as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement, and above all a movement that embraced the identity of Chicano as a rejection of the label “Mexican-American.” After joining MEChA, Arturo abandoned his goal of studying medicine to become fully involved in his community, specifically defending programs for special admissions in 1977 during the Allan Bakke incident. This particular issue was important for the Cambrons because it encapsulated the fear held by whites should their privileges be threatened by those who lack said privileges.  Arturo and his MEChA chapter responded to accusations of reverse racism by organizing students at not only UC campuses but also at Cal State campuses and community colleges. On one of his rotations across Southern and Central California, Arturo teamed up with his club to meet with other MEChA contingents at UC Davis. On the car ride he met Rossana, and within a year they were married.10

Although both considered themselves radical prior to joining MEChA, the organization represented a rallying call that they both personally identified with and could further expand upon by integrating themselves into what they called “the broader movement.”  MEChA was able to bridge the gap that Rossana and Arturo both had individually against the radical Left imposed by their parent’s generation as well as mainstream American Cold War Culture. Rossana’s upbringing of seeing communists as anti-Christian, anti-disabilities, anti-peace groups was likely destroyed by the links drawn between what she was taught in MEChA and what she later experienced in the CPUSA courses offered for MEChA.  This invariably led to a more open-minded assessment of Marxism. By 1978, Rossana felt that Marxism, as explained by her courses with the CPUSA, provided “clarity” on the various societal norms she had questioned, such as how does a society develop, what function do poor people serve in contrast to the rich, and how equality generates from social movements. Prior to her courses, Rossana did not engage with the classical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx because “there was never a kind of motivation” for such things; she grew up believing “these people were beyond [her] reach of comprehension.”  After her courses, however, Rossana no longer “felt threatened” by philosophy and theory, and instead took those lessons back to MEChA in order to reassess the organization as an operative tool for Latinos.11

To Rossana, MEChA developed her sense of collective action and power but lacked a refined political theory that could be translated into a plan for political action in the long term. Instead, MEChA focused on individual, short-term battles to slowly turn the tide away from white privilege. In her own words, by late 1977 Rossana felt she “was hitting a wall” with MEChA. MEChA’s goals for 1978 and 1979 seemed pale and minute in comparison to the grand fight envisioned for all working people presented by the theoretical system of Marx. Additionally, the CPUSA’s courses helped break the idea that such a fight was to be led by whites, as the Party has a rich and vibrant history with the struggle for both African American and Latino equality dating back to the early 1930s.12  By mid-1978, leaving MEChA and joining the CPUSA simply made sense to Rossana and her new husband, Arturo. In 1979, both began their first work with the CPUSA by gathering signatures in Southern California to place Gus Hall and Angela Davis on the presidential ballot. Throughout the 1980s, Arturo worked at an overnight delivery service called Lumas, where he focused his time and energy into the local Teamster’s Union. In a matter of years, Arturo went from pursuing a degree in medicine to battling corporate efforts to use company unions throughout California.13

A considerate component to Marxism was how its assessment of struggle translated into a viable political alternative that Rossana and Arturo believed many Americans deal with on a regular basis; a struggle of individualism versus collective action, of concern for the communities but enacting change at the national level versus the local level, and the endorsing of ideas and strategies that may be responded to with violence and hate. Rossana described being a Marxist in America as “very difficult,” where one can be firm in their stances on capitalism yet proud of their children for succeeding within it. This, in part, captures the complexity of being a radical. Rossana believes that a common misperception of communists in American history among the general public is that they lacked patriotism and respect for the United States. While throughout the early 20th century many communists made a name for themselves because of their pro-Soviet, anti-Western stances, this was not the case for the majority of American communists. Rossana did not see the entire second red scare from 1947 – 1957 as a judgment of patriotism among citizens of a certain political persuasion; she saw it as a violation of Constitutional rights.  Rossana sees no contradiction in valuing the United States as a Christian nation while simultaneously upholding the virtues of Marxism. Much like a biblical sacrifice, Rossana believed “it is a selfless act to give up your time” for your fellow citizens build on “a passion, a love for humanity.”14

The experiences of the Cambrons reveal two important factors for American history and the history of Latinos in the United States. First, their experiences demonstrate how some Latinos, especially youths, were quickly radicalized and exposed to Marxist philosophy through student-based community organizations focusing on promoting ethnic studies and Latino rights such as MEChA, UMAS, and MAYO.  Today, MEChA is going through its own internal changes as it addresses concerns about the organization’s identity that could be perceived as racially exclusive and homophobic. In April of 2019, the organization chose to end the use of certain gender-exclusive terms, such as Chicano/a.  For MEChA organizers, the 1970s was a situational moment where the fight against white privilege in the Universities mixed with the CPUSA’s need for more dedicated members and organizers for community events.15 Radicalization can occur for a variety of reasons, but one of the easiest ways to understand it is by seeing how individuals such as the Cambrons link personal experiences with the broader message of struggle.  Rossana and Arturo were attracted to MEChA because they believed it was a means for them to get personally involved in their community’s struggle against white privilege. When exposed to the works of Marx and Lenin, the personal links between struggle and oppression, already forged by MEChA, mixed with a theoretical solution to depict a plight shared by all Latinos and supported by the notion that it was not just Mexican-Americans or African-Americans experiencing this struggle: it was experienced by working-class Americans as a whole.

Secondly, the Cambrons demonstrated a continued tradition of radicalism among Latino youths that dates back to the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout its history, the CPUSA attracted Latino organizers from across the Southwest and in parts of Chicago, in large part due to the Party’s depiction of racial oppression as a component to capitalist hegemony that must be overcome.  In 1939, Emma Tenayuca became one of the most prominent Latino organizers associated with the CPUSA when she published an article in The Communist on the how Latinos were in the same position as African Americans; subjugated as a nation within a nation struggling to both integrate into mainstream society while also maintaining their cultural heritage. The New Communist Movement (NCM) that emerged out of the 1960s seized on the momentum of these people in a wide variety of groups, including the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) the CPUSA, and the more radical sects of student organizations promoting ethnic rights such as MEChA.  Rossana and Arturo’s entrance into the CPUSA by 1979 validated the fact that American communist groups still held attractive stances for minority youths, even those of modest backgrounds, and provided possible outlets to both vent their frustrations as well as study methods for engaging with their community for change.

Today, Rossana continues her passion as a Central (National) Committee member of the CPUSA, helping to try and modernize the organization’s engagement and outreach programs, including helping redevelop the Youth Communist League (YCL).  Rossana’s work with the Los Angeles CPUSA centered on civic involvement, study groups, and advocating the rights of Latinos in the workplace and public sphere. Her election to the National Committee of the Party occurred in 2014 when the CPUSA held its first major nationwide conference in almost a decade at its founding town in Southside Chicago.  Her election also marked the first Latino woman to hold such a ranking position in the Party. Despite a significant age gap in representation on the Committee, and a slow pace at reforming political theory, the work of members such as Rossana have led to a much more demographically diverse organization than the CPUSA of 60 years ago. This, if anything, is a positive development for a Party seeking to return to its ethnically and culturally diverse roots from 100 years ago.

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Building Camaraderie in the CPUSA, 1930-1950

Josh Morris investigates how the Communist Party USA created a sense of camaraderie in its organizing efforts between members, looking at how both circumstances forced on organizers as well as conscious efforts of the party helped create an organizational culture that promoted (or in some cases damaged) solidarity among workers and oppressed people. 

Communist Demonstration on Wall Street, 1929

“I remember a sea of signs, the hat-makers, the dressmakers, the pocketbook makers, the men’s clothing workers, the printers, on and on.  Everyone was a maker, a worker. Then it began to rain. ‘It’s raining Papa,’ I said, ‘Let’s go home.’ ‘Wait just a while,’ he answered. The rain kept coming down and the marchers continued to march.  Their hair got wet and the paint on their signs began to run. I did not fully understand what was going on but I was impressed. This must be very, very important, I thought. Otherwise people would never march in the rain.” -Beatrice Lumpkin1

As a small child of less than twelve, Beatrice Lumpkin experienced an emotion that takes longer to read than it does to feel. Hoisted on her father’s shoulders, Lumpkin watched the May Day parades march down the major boulevards of New York City. The meaning of May Day rested in the remembrance of idolized martyrs of the Haymarket massacre of 1886 in Chicago. But it also commemorated something else: a spirit of fellowship, a warm feeling of loyalty and brotherhood, a solidarity among comrades. Although not old enough to vote nor educated enough to understand the history of May Day, Lumpkin went home that day with a solid sense of camaraderie. Camaraderie is not strictly political, however: it also contains a vital social and cultural component.

Throughout American history, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) best exemplified the concept of camaraderie in the fullest sense of the word, that of being inclusive of both political and social elements. American communists espoused the notions of camaraderie in a way that gave them a sense of purpose both inside and outside the Party. Historian Randi Storch showed how the fraternal order had an immediate effect on how the Party’s upper and lower strata coordinated with one another, with upper-level comrades handling oversight and lower-level comrades dealing with the physical organization of workshops, but with both being seen as equal parts of a whole.2 Camaraderie differs slightly from broader concepts like solidarity, in that camaraderie implies a feeling alongside an act. As an act of expressing solidarity, camaraderie was the social and political glue for American communist organizations both large and small, and it transferred over to those they associated with during the height of their activism from the 1930s to mid 1950s.  

Politically, camaraderie solidified upper Party allegiance to the Communist International (Comintern) and local radical movements, while socially it served as a bridge to civil and labor organizations that shared a fraternal ordering such as United Auto Workers Local 600 in Detroit, creating the foundation for the Party’s support of the Popular Front. These fraternal aspects responded to and transformed under the social and political elements of camaraderie espoused by the Party, and created the conditions whereby Party members were forced to rely on one over the other. This essay explores the element of camaraderie in CPUSA history, and offers to uncover a critical examination of a solidifying yet also potentially divisive element of social activism. The fraternal sense of comradeship defined the labor movement for members of the CPUSA and supporters of international communism, starting during the Party’s rise into social activism in the 1930s and continuing well into the present.

To a large extent, it is impossible for any historian of either military or labor studies to avoid addressing the most critical element to a movement or army’s success, that being cohesion and unity among the constituent parties. In this loosely described manner, the concept of camaraderie extends back as far as Livy, who addressed the issue while discussing Quinctius’ military campaign against the Aequians and asserted that because “of [the] close cooperation between the army and its commander,” the Aequians did not attempt an offensive assault against the army. In the resulting victory, the Roman army plundered, Livy continued, taking advantage of the “valuable material, including cattle” that was stolen from Rome by the Aequians earlier in the year. Livy remarked that upon returning to Rome, “the cordial relationship between the army and its commander rendered the men…less hostile towards the Senate, which they declared had given [them] a father.”3  

What Livy described was political camaraderie, a bond between individuals of shared ideals. These ideals themselves can be almost anything political or religious in nature. We can see similar parallels between the opposing ideals of soldiers during the American Civil War. Chandra Manning describes how religion created for troops during the war a unified perception that “the hand of God is in this struggle, and the hand would not be stilled until the Union complied with God’s will.”4 The soldiers’ appeal to religion in this sense represented the political ideals of the war effort: the North fought to rid the world of “unholy” slavery. This use of camaraderie was not limited to the North, however, as Manning showed that “Confederate soldiers’ devotion to the material aspirations of themselves and their families…sustained men’s convictions of the necessity of the war.”5 The solidarity of the soldiers combined under the veil of religion and protection of family but nevertheless secured a political identity behind their solidarity. Quinctius’ men’s collective desire to reclaim the rewards of Rome was fundamentally no different from the Union’s desire to preserve the Republic, nor the Confederates’ desire to defend the institution of slavery.

Camaraderie is not limited only to the military, nor is camaraderie itself exclusively political.  While making an appeal to broad audiences on celebrating socialism, Gerald Cohen explained his interpretation of a community bond among individuals as a “common aim” to have a good time and enjoy life.  He explained this idea through the concept of a simple camping trip. A camping trip naturally has facilities as an enterprise in order to fulfill the conditions and desires of a basic camping excursion, things like wood for fire, tents for shelter, canned food, and clothing. Unlike traditional city life, however, the facilities of a camping trip are “availed to collectively: even if they are privately owned things, they are under collective control” for the duration of the trip. To an extent, Cohen stretches his argument by comparing a general desire to have fun with communal solidarity, but his text emphasizes human beings’ natural desire to work together when the time calls for it. Similarly, a worker in a factory shares the productive capacity of the factory with everyone else working it; the production process as a whole is a collective act. This understanding “ensures[s] that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection” within the specific group.6 

Cohen argued that most people, particularly in closely defined settings such as a workplace, “cooperate within a common concern,” that being everyone’s general desire to both “flourish” and “relax” at their own pace on “condition that [he/she] contributes…to the flourishing and relaxing of others.”7 Cohen used examples of competition among campers to show how individualism naturally conflicts with this social sense of camaraderie.  If a man, for example, is “very good at fishing,” he will most likely “[catch] more fish than others do.” If in the context of a camping trip he were to argue that he “should have better fish” when the group eats, the group would naturally question “why should [they] reward his good fortune?”8 Similarly, Cohen argues that rights of inheritance, such as having camped at a site ten years prior, would yield no greater support from the group for the individual claiming ownership and thus leadership over the trip. Cohen describes social camaraderie as well as its political variant. Social camaraderie is a bond between individuals of shared concerns. This is substantially different from political camaraderie: instead of sharing a bond over an abstract, idealistic concept like nationhood or God, the social element of camaraderie is concerned exclusively with practical and achievable ends. Cohen’s limitation in his argument is that he reduces society to the size of a small community. In doing so he created an “ideal” of socialism, and later questioned the feasibility of implementing this ideal in society at large: “Many would point to features special to the camping trip that distinguish it from the normal mill of life in a modern society and… consequently cast doubt on the desirability and/or feasibility of realizing camping trip principles in such a society.”9 Without going into complex Marxist language, Cohen refers to the social conditions of society that limit the feasibility of this socialist ideal.

Camaraderie as a whole is also an element in the generation of happiness among employees within a workplace. Writing for the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Dr. Armenio Rego and Dr. Solange Souto refer to the “perceptions of spirit of camaraderie” as a “predictor” of “affective well-being,” or AWB.  AWB is described as simply a “frequent experience of positive affects and infrequent experience of negative affects” within a workplace. “Workplaces play a crucial role in people’s happiness,” Dr. Rego contends, by “providing them with…resources that satisfy their primary and secondary needs.” This is similar to Cohen’s conception, but different on the issue of satisfying needs instead of ease and relaxation. Camaraderie is exceptional in that it can be “considered to be a source of positive emotions.” The most interesting finding of their study focused on camaraderie’s connection with the “need to belong” shared by all human beings.  Their conclusion stated that “on the whole, lower levels of affective well-being emerge when poor camaraderie [is combined] with a high need to belong.”10 Political ideals do not necessarily always correlate into acceptance, nor do they fully satisfy the desire of belonging. Social camaraderie can perform these functions, but it fails to emerge as strong as political camaraderie due to social camaraderie’s more general approach to happiness, and political camaraderie’s more action-oriented understanding of happiness.

The separation of camaraderie into social and political spheres is fundamental to understanding how individuals within the CPUSA express the concept as a whole. Although the bonds between the social and political aspects culminate in social unity, they nevertheless remain disconnected from what guides and solidifies the bond. Political camaraderie is, for the most part, an idealistic principle, one that has many names depending on the context, from dogmatism to nationalism, to even strict pragmatism. This can contrast sharply with social camaraderie, as it did in the context of the American Revolution: the social camaraderie against unjust taxation proved stronger than the political camaraderie of British identity, and in many ways worked to dismantle any bonds colonists had with Great Britain. Likewise, political camaraderie within the CPUSA proved to be both their defining and unraveling feature: it not only created a unity whereby the political party itself was manifested, but it also created the divisive element that contributed to the CPUSA’s falling-out with American labor and civil rights during the second Red Scare. Social camaraderie for the Party proved to be the glue that kept political camaraderie in check, typically supporting or suppressing political elements in favor of social and cultural ones by the needs of practicality.

Mitchell Siporin, ‘Workers Family,’ 1937, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

Social Camaraderie

“This good fellowship, camaraderie, usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between sexes; because men and women associate, not in their labors, but in their pleasures.  The compound feeling proves itself to be the only love which is as strong as death.”
 -Thomas Hardy

Understanding social camaraderie forces one to abandon abstract ideals of political tenants and methodology, and instead focus on the small elements that bring people together for action. Thomas Hardy’s words from his 1874 book Far From the Madding Crowd focus on the social bond one shares with a lover and how the combination of love and fellowship create an even stronger bond, one as binding and consuming as death itself. This idea of a consuming or an associated pleasure among individuals of friendship and community is fundamental to the feeling of social camaraderie. Kets de Vries argues that mankind’s “essential humaneness is found in the seeking of relationships with other people.”11 Dr. Rego pointsout that social camaraderie outside the workplace and political spheres “play a crucial role in meeting social, intimacy, and security needs, and in promoting physical and psychological well-being.”12 It doesn’t take a leader, it doesn’t take a constitution, and it certainly does not require a method.  All it requires is “similarity of pursuits,” an association “in pleasures,” or a community-sense of belonging. Social camaraderie within the CPUSA proved to be the one single element capable of keeping political camaraderie, and its propensity to divide and conquer, under relative control by defining the Party’s movement under the broad movement of socialism, as opposed to the political movement of other Communist Parties around the world. As the testimonies show, social camaraderie kept humanity within the Communist Party, while its political tenants attempted to break it down into statism and authoritarianism.

For Russell V. Brodine, social camaraderie began in the family.  Before he was old enough to work a job or even drive a car, Brodine remembered how his family “developed habits of scrounging, reusing, and recycling, as poor people did out of necessity;” habits that continued throughout his life “as a matter of ecological principle.”13 Lumpkin remembered the vivid tales of her parents; her father who was “afire with the revolution,” and her mother who “caught the flame” from her father. As the daughter of two “active participants in the anti-Czarist Revolution of 1905,” Lumpkin experienced familial solidarity at a young age, as did Brodine, the son of two Swedish immigrants who fled Europe to escape the draft in 1903.14 Because of their backgrounds, the social solidarity of young CPUSA members like Russell Brodine and Beatrice Lumpkin differed from that of the typical family. Their solidarity was invariably more politicized than the average person, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they understood the politics of it. Brodine’s parents instilled him with social values that not only benefited him but also connected him with others in his community, exemplified by his emphasis on what impoverished people of a community “do out of necessity.” Similarly, Lumpkin’s parents instilled her with a historical connection to a movement much larger than any one individual, and the stories of her father’s triumphant escape from Czarist Russia created the social identity she carried with her throughout her life.15

Party members often looked up to their parents as role models of activism, sometimes from early adolescence.  Armando Ramirez learned from Vicki Starr, a prominent Party organizer, of his father’s union efforts and Party involvement as a shop steward in the stockyards of Chicago when he was only a child in 1939. “They were all comrades,” his father told him, some “40,000 workers in four major plants” organized by the Party and through his father’s assistance.16 Lumpkin’s attendance of May Day parades with her parents, although neither of her parents was a Party member, provided role models for to admire. Lumpkin’s parents excused her absence from school, but not in the typical fashion of calling in sick. According to her, “it was considered more loyal to the cause to stand up for your beliefs and say: ‘I was absent May first because it is a workers’ holiday.'”17 Again, with both Lumpkin and Ramirez’s stories, we can see how camaraderie instilled itself by connecting individual actions to larger movements at work.  Ramirez didn’t just learn of his father’s union efforts; he learned of union efforts among a workforce of 40,000. Similarly, Lumpkin experienced May Day as a day of remembrance tied with social activism, as opposed to merely a holiday. These examples separate social camaraderie from more benign interpretations of what Dr. Armenio called “a need to belong.” Camaraderie, unlike the more basic need to belong, is naturally more pragmatic toward social acts.

Social camaraderie is engineered outside the family as well. Personal experience in social relationships proved to be the defining element that solidified camaraderie among individuals. Party member Danny Rubin, born in 1931, grew up in a region of Philadelphia where “everything was named after the Distin family, and they had a restrictive covenant: No Negros, no Jews, no dogs, no bars.” Luckily, he lived in a region of the community where the covenant did not apply strictly. In understanding camaraderie, Rubin explained that

“Life had a big impact; I can remember at the age of six, my school was made up of primarily German-Americans and there was one Jew in each class, one Negro in each class, and there was one Italian in each class.  We were, you know, the victims of various words used against each: Kyke, dirty kyke, so on and so forth. So we would be teased and hit, so on, from six years old on. The three of us, one Italian, one African, and me, we would stand up to them, all of them.”18

Here we see an example in memory of a social camaraderie between classmates. But their solidarity did not build simply by sharing a classroom or a class year, which would fit the concept of a need to belong. Rather, their camaraderie built off the tension created by the social elements of racism and anti-Semitism; their solidarity was a natural antithesis to the solidarity of the white Christian students.

But the repression and antagonism extended beyond the classroom. Rubin explained that at “every high holiday in the Jewish religion, the [local] Synagogue was defaced with Nazi swastikas and broken windows and fires built up against the building.” Rubin felt “very aware of anti-Semitism,” and even more importantly realized “that it had something to do with the way African-Americans were being treated as well.”19 For Rubin, the expression of hate against minority groups solidified his understanding of social camaraderie.  To him, it was about standing up for what’s right in the community. Rubin’s perspective on anti-Semitism at first prompted him to seek out becoming a Rabbi. By 9th grade, his concern over anti-Semitism’s connection with racism drove him to become active in the Philadelphia Campaign for Free City College in 1944, a campaign organized by the American Youth for Democracy, affiliated with the CPUSA. By age 16 he was a Party member.

Still, for others, the social element of camaraderie existed in the American political experience with fascism and the depression. It was “only the Communists,” charged Party member John Gates, who “were able to infuse youths with idealism, missionary zeal, and a crusading spirit” against the forces of fascism and the depression.  For members like Gates, the Party during the Depression “was the locomotive of the future,” that created a sense of purpose for those participating in the struggle.20  “American Communists were passionate about winning the war against fascism,” Lumpkin explained. Joining the defense industry, Lumpkin “felt that [she] was helping to win the war.” Marc Brodine, son of Russell Brodine and current Chair of the Washington State CPUSA branch, solidified his social camaraderie in resistance to Vietnam by joining peace organizations.  For him, growing up a “red diaper baby”  as Lumpkin did “wouldn’t have been enough to set [his] political path.”

The effects of anticommunism on social relationships contributed to social camaraderie among American communists as well.  Ramirez knew of a close associate of his father’s who “was immediately fired” once his Party affiliations were found out. When the man asked Ramirez to help him pass out the Party’s local newspaper to the company he formerly worked at, he “swallowed…whatever feeling of fear” he still had and took on the assignment.  After a year or two, at age 17, his father allowed him to formally join the Party.21 The fact that men like Ramirez joined the political organization out of personal concern highlighted the separation between social camaraderie and a more basic need to belong. Seen this way, social camaraderie through these social experiences helps explain the swell in Party membership by the mid-1930s across broad groups of workers, though the Party retained an extremely high turnover rate throughout the 1930s.  In 1928, the Party branch in Chicago had only 650 members. By 1934, with the impact of the depression and the rise of fascism in the background, the city’s Party local collected dues from 3,303 city residents, an increase of over 450%.22

In workshops where Party presence was a regular expectation, social camaraderie found itself performing some of the most humane tasks. Local 600 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit was known for its indirect affiliations with the local CPUSA branch of Detroit, particularly its defense councils.  Maurice Sugar, for example, was the legal representative for Local 600 during the 1930s and was open about his Party affiliation.23 A correspondence letter between Local 600 members on March 31, 1944, advised workers to avoid “so-called tax experts who will charge excessive prices” for applying their NLRA back pay to their tax returns, and instead insisted that members use the local’s own personal expert, Jack Valian.24 With a flat fee of only $3 per year, per worker, the union provided internal support for ease and efficiency. Elements of the Party’s organization efforts naturally blended into the fraternal community of Local 600 unionism. Throughout all of the correspondence minutes of Local 600, the words “brother” and “comrade” appear no less than once per paragraph. The utility of the language of camaraderie worked to further instill the social notion of solidarity among fellow employees within a specific workplace. Lastly, Local 600 supported its members beyond their employment, providing instruction to “assist [members] in seeking or obtaining employment after alleged discrimination and discharge.”25

Social camaraderie functioned in a similar way to how it was built, through social networks and personal relationships, but this occasionally led to different interpretations of solidarity. Lumpkin’s extensive 342-page autobiography made no mention of the CPUSA’s switch in policy during the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, where Stalin stunned the world by aligning with the very power he condemned as the epitome of capitalism. Instead, she covered the period of February 1939 – June 1940 with a discussion about her extensive work in organizing elections for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Local 328. Peggy Dennis, on the other hand, explained that only through elaborate discussions with her lover, Eugene Dennis, did she come to accept and understand the meaning of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a “well-written plot” by Soviet leaders for their own national defense, and the defense of the international Communist movement.26 For Dennis, social camaraderie extended beyond simply the borders of the United States to encompass allegiance to a larger, more international movement.  

When CPUSA activist and field organizer Dorothy Ray Healey was asked her opinion on the shift in political ideals by Stalin, she said that it “becomes a disastrous thing…if a radical movement in another country takes what is fundamentally a diplomatic act for a separate foreign country and makes it its own political banner.”27 For Healey, social camaraderie, unlike political camaraderie, could not extend beyond the borders of the United States if that fraternity threatened the solidarity of American workers. Danny Rubin, who joined the CPUSA during the McCarthy era, described himself as a “Marxist” before he even formally began paying his Party dues. “I’d been doing [political work] for years, all kinds of stuff,” he reflected.  By 1949, “[he] was co-head of the Labor Youth League, the official youth organization of the Communist Party [at the time].” For him, activism in the community was his “political work” and the social camaraderie he built through it was more defining of his ideology than his actual physical political membership and allegiance.28

On the whole, social camaraderie tells more of a story of human social experience than it does of a bond shared over cherished ideals. It builds off personal interaction and upbringing; it functions as a connection between shared concerns and collective action; and most importantly, it bleeds through the divisions created by political boundaries. It was not capable however, as shown, of breaking down those boundaries. In the field, political and social camaraderie intertwined in a dialectic that succeeded externally better than it did internally within the Party.

Unemployed workers rally in front of Communist Party headquarters in Union Square, 1934. (Charles Rivers, Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Political Camaraderie

“The deeps are cold: in that darkness, camaraderie does not hold.
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.”
 -Ted Hughes

Party member Alex Bittleman gave an effective description of the purpose of political camaraderie in the eyes of the Party in his essay on The Party and the Peoples’ Front.  Political solidarity intended, he stressed, “to build the Party and build the mass [labor] movement as part of an all-inclusive great task.”29 In short, unite the masses behind the political ideal of socialism. Many activists echoed the same perspective, namely that the ideal of socialism and the end of the capitalist mode of production functioned as the everlasting bond between Marxists, socialists, and communists. The political bond solidified through the ideals of specific groups, typically outside the mass majority of society. Still, differences in theoretical and tactical ideals inevitably caused tension. For radical political groups like the CPUSA, political camaraderie, unlike social camaraderie, in the U.S. labor movement required a method, a constitution, and most importantly a vision for what the future had in store for working people. Its ideological basis naturally carried with it an obvious downside: a propensity to factionalize and divide the movement as a whole when people or groups differed from the pre-established vision. Political camaraderie within the CPUSA proved incapable of bending against the will of Soviet authoritarianism, which John Gates believed manifested a “closed system of dogmatic thought, blinding its adherents to the complexities of reality.”30

The Communist Party was born out of a political division in 1919, a division that it carried through the 1920s right up through the present.  Factionalism has a long history with American radicals, particularly among socialist groups like the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Party of the United States (SPUSA).  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became chairman of the Party in the 1950s, mentioned factionalism as an element in the Party’s creation due to a split in the SPUSA. It was September, when “the Socialist Party convention was held in Chicago,” and the majority-holding “left wing”, made up of predominantly Slavic immigrants, was ousted from the conference and Party altogether.  In response, the left wing “went to the IWW hall and organized the Communist Party,” which split yet again by the end of the year.31 Thus the political camaraderie among the mostly white minority sect of the Socialist Party exemplified a refusal to submit to the political camaraderie of the mostly foreign majority.  “From its very beginning,” explained Party General Secretary James Cannon, “the American Communist movement was wracked by tremendous factional struggles.”32 Political camaraderie, as seen by the SPUSA’s rejection of the left element and the left element’s immediate re-solidification into a new body, did not naturally carry with it the seeds for social camaraderie, but rather carried the seeds of political division.  

Flynn pointed to the effort made against the post-World War I Palmer raids, which targeted labor leaders as threats to the U.S. government, and the formation of an organizational platform by the Party’s future General Secretary, William Z. Foster.  Foster’s methodology put the communists and the more radical workers who supported him at odds with existing labor institutions, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This was due to the AFL’s structure and political affiliations that excluded unskilled and non-white workers.  With Foster’s guidance, labor had, in Flynn’s eyes, “a new leader; a great organizer and strategist.” Slowly but surely, Foster’s achievements among laboring people gave him the clout to embody an ideal of political camaraderie, rallied behind the more radical approach of mass organizing the unskilled. Despite the popularity and success of Foster’s organizational platform among steel and packinghouse workers, the “AFL rejected his plans” and worked toward their own organizational platform alternative to Foster’s syndicalist approach.

Flynn pointed out that Foster succeeded in organizing over 20,000 African-Americans and broke the boundaries of racism to unite them with their “white brothers,” though she failed to connect this success with the AFL’s selective racism.33 Despite this, there nevertheless remained an element of division and internal factionalism that pitted one element of the labor movement against another, this time outside the Party’s structure.  Solidarity instilled within the workplace through political camaraderie could generate a movement as it did for Foster in the steel industry, but it does not necessarily break down pre-existing political or social barriers such as those set up by the AFL.  The Party elaborated on the AFL in 1929 in its recurring pamphlet, The Communist.  The AFL was portrayed as an organization that utilized “specific methods for specific times,” referring to the era of craft unionism that dominated during the 1860s-1890s. This “skilled aristocracy” embraced fraternalism and limited class solidarity, but “could afford to ignore the interests of the broad masses.” The failure on part of the AFL, in the eyes of the CPUSA, was their attachment to older methods and interpretations of labor that had, by World War I, lost their social applicability.  The article charged that the AFL built its solidarity only upon social camaraderie; skilled craftsmen naturally have more in common with one another than they do with unskilled laborers. The article also argued that it was the same kind of social camaraderie that drove the unskilled labor movement: “large masses of unskilled workers were drawn into the vortex of the struggles through revolutionary solidarity natural to the unskilled.”34 The only clear difference that remained, in the Party’s view, was between the AFL’s non-revolutionary methods and the unskilled working class’ revolutionary ones.  By 1920, political camaraderie solidified the ideals of the Party and helped form a cohesive strategy for organizational methodology, but, as the case of the AFL shows, tended to conflict with the practical reality of the politics of labor in the United States.  To overcome this dilemma, the CPUSA needed political recognition to separate itself from the multitude of other socialist political organizations, including its parent, the SPUSA. That support came from the Communist International (Comintern) in 1921.35 

The CPUSA saw its political support from the Soviet-run Comintern (sometimes called the Third International) as an indication that the Party was the true leader of American radicalism.36 On the 10th Anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, commemorating the establishment of the Russian Soviet and subsequently the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR), Comintern representative A. Lozovsky wrote a short essay on organizational strategy that exemplified the standard Party line throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s.  Solidarity could not build without communists first being knowledgeable on the needs and concerns of the workers in question. Winning over the masses of any country, Lozovsky stated, did not rest on “miracles,” but rather by obtaining “a clear understanding of the trend of development of the workers’ movement.” Lozovsky went on to define camaraderie “as strong political consciousness” among individuals, which follows “two lines: political and organizational.”  

As a traditional Marxist, Lozovsky attributed organizational efforts to “varied conditions of class struggle,” as opposed to a singular theory of organizational success.  “Bolshevism,” he contended, was “not a dogma, [nor] an abstract formula” for organization. As opposed to a unified blueprint for organizational success, Lozovsky emphasized that “the art of Bolshevik tactics consists of being continually in the advance-guard, not severed from the masses, not getting too far ahead, but certainly not hanging on their tail.”37 Thus organizational efforts, in the eyes of the worldwide Communist body, depended upon the specific material conditions of particular nations and working-class groups.  But Lozovsky’s theory wasn’t his own, and the source of the Comintern’s early policies usually derived from the same set of sources.

From its creation, the Comintern’s views were backed up with excessive references to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and other revolutionaries from 1905-1917.  In many respects, the publications of the Comintern through the 1920s and 30s were reflections and reiterations of conclusions previously made. In August of 1932, the CPUSA re-published excerpts from Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written almost 12 years prior, to substantiate claims made by Lozovsky and other Comintern authors who wrote in the late 1920s.  Lenin’s essay reiterated the concept of uniformity among Communists as being less important than the uniformity among the general masses. “We must not,” he said, “deem that which is worn-out for us is necessarily worn-out for the masses.”38 In criticizing those who failed to recognize this, Lenin pointed to the German Communists who, he charged, were “mere babblers.”  They embodied strong elements of political camaraderie among each other but lacked any substantial connection with the workers of Germany.  Citing the German socialist philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, Lenin asserted that “every truth, if it be ‘carried to excess,’ [or] if it be exaggerated…it can be reduced to absurdity.”39 Lenin’s message was straightforward when it came to political solidarity:  political camaraderie was only as worthwhile as it was useful and practical.  Rejecting parliamentary participation is “substance-less” when the revolutionary considers that workers generally support parliamentary procedure. In short, the perceptions of the working class create the foundation for the perceptions of a revolutionary. Thus the political camaraderie solidified through the Comintern contained strong support for Soviet leaders and revolutionaries while simultaneously urging CP locals to generate leaders and revolutionaries of their own, an aspect of their strategy that ultimately proved difficult as years proceeded.

The constant repetition of Comintern policy through the words of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin over lengthy periods of time without considering differences in circumstance inevitably created inconsistencies in carrying out policy. The Comintern’s publications remained for the most part political tenets as opposed to actual suggestions for organizational activity. The problem was not so much what the publications said, but rather the individual parties’ unquestioning loyalty to it.  Historian Peter Kenez showed how the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) utilized its Comintern influence as early as 1927 to dictate requirements for European and non-European Communist Parties to join the International. This forced a quasi-ideological agreement between Party leaders that subordinated all organizations to the Comintern and thus the CPSU. “The Stalinists,” as Kenez referred to the ardent followers of Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power, “never contemplated collaboration.”40 Their goal was control of the movement as a whole by utilizing the one body capable of doing so.  On the grounds of the Bolshevik victory, “Bolshevism became the authoritative doctrine among revolutionary circles in all the workers’ political movements of the world.”41  

The inconsistency was that the CPSU emphasized a fight against “superficial and mechanical methods” of organization while it simultaneously used superficial means of internal conformity within the Comintern in order to assure its own dominance.42 As such, Communist Parties outside the Soviet Union, including the CPUSA, dealt with the issue of organization in a two-fold manner.  On the one hand, they had to remain practical in terms of their organizational methodology; but they simultaneously had to assure that their actions and methods did not at any point contradict the boundaries of political camaraderie established by the Comintern or the CPSU. This dual nature of policy and practicality created turbulence within the political spheres of the CPUSA, often resulting in additional factional splits.

One of the largest problems the Comintern experienced during this pre-Depression period was amalgamating various communist parties into a cohesive international unit capable of dealing with factional elements of political solidarity.  In 1929, Comintern representative to the United States Otto Kuusinen wrote about how “comrades talk a great deal about analysis, about slogans, political lines…etc…concerned all too little with the organization of mass work.” His point was simple, that the political party should engage itself in the organization of labor.  This however created a factional debate within CPs. Coming from the Comintern, it was an unquestionable order put forth. The complication was how to go about doing it. Kuusinen condemned “internal shortcomings” that failed to be addressed by Party leaders, referring to the internal fractions of the Comintern. “Success,” Kuusinen emphasized, defined itself through the “permeability” of the Party “into other organizations and industries.”43 He did not imply, however, that presence equated to solidarity among the workplace.  Kuusinen focused his criticism on “some comrades” who were “in [shop] nuclei merely in the sense that…they all work in the same factory.” Thus Kuusinen argued that social camaraderie alone failed to support the revolutionary platform of the Comintern. The revolutionary function required a more abstract and idealistic element to transform social solidarity into a bond that was capable of supporting political work.  That bond was political, not social, camaraderie.

The CPUSA endorsed Kuusinen’s perspective through its monthly publication, The Communist, and it began pushing for active political organization within workshops across New England, the deep South, and the Midwest. The Party’s Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), an umbrella union organization, and the Youth Communist League (YCL), a small recruitment league for the sons and daughters of Party members, exemplified CPUSA’s perspective of using political camaraderie in organizational campaigns.  Both organizations modeled the platform of a politically-driven strategy to revolutionize workers and citizens alike. The TUUL’s model was similar to the Party’s own internal setup, but organized unions with political idealism that espoused general support for socialism. A product of Foster’s Trade Union Educational League, the TUUL “radicalize[d] established unions from the inside−Communists referred to this activity as ‘boring from within.'”44  

In contrast, Lumpkin described the YCL as an organization “of commitment, comradeship, and exploration.” At just 15 years old, Lumpkin was exposed to the “message of unity and the need to fight racism and fascism” in the YCL.  Setup not far away in the same neighborhood, was the local branch of the CPUSA. The TUUL, according to Dennis, was “a militant Left center, [an] almost lily-white AFL,” that “shift[ed], as did the Party, to a great emphasis on independent organization of the unorganized.”45 The YCL perfected the means of solidifying political camaraderie among the children of American radicals in a way similar to how the Boy Scouts of America, or the military itself, instilled nationalism and patriotism among American youths.  The TUUL as well took political camaraderie into unionism and defined organization of the unorganized as a key to success.46

Unknowingly, the Comintern put forth the perspective on organization that would ultimately become the standard Party line during the would-be Popular Front Era.  Lenin’s perspective, and its continuance by Kuusinen and men like Lozovsky, demanded flexibility of Party functioning that allowed the development of camaraderie outside political work. The Party had a dual functioning role. On the one hand, it had to remain united in its efforts to organize methodologically, but also had to “become more sensitive to the fighting moods of the masses.”47 These words, made by the head editor to The Communist in August of 1932, linked political camaraderie to social camaraderie, in that the social bonds strengthened the political ones.  The political camaraderie that solidified Party policy among constituent members responded to the social camaraderie in society. It reflected the Party’s utility of Leninism by trying to remain responsive to the general public, but as the 1930s rolled on, the Party experienced increasing confusion over the application of this theory.  Stalin’s theoretical restructuring and political consolidation in Russia caused a reassessment of theory done at the international level that was pushed down to the CPUSA through the Comintern.

The issue of confusion over Comintern policy in terms of how to ensure internal Party camaraderie became complicated when the Party began publishing and emphasizing the works of Stalin in the mid-1930s. The “negative side” of political camaraderie under the auspices of the Comintern, was working with “the Trotskyists.”48 Since the late 1920s, Stalin’s program for Russia included an effort to liquidate opposition to the Stalinist minority, including those in the Comintern. Followers and admirers of Trotsky, such as James Cannon, were labeled the “organizers of terror,” thereby creating an internal division within the international communist movement, and thus the CPUSA itself.49 Discussing the isolation created by the Comintern, Cannon stated that “the enhanced prestige of the USSR, and of Stalinism which appeared to be its legitimate representative in the eyes of uncritical people…made our oppositionist movement appear bizarre.”50 “Bizarre” in the Stalinist world was also a word for counter-revolutionary or rebellious. Stalin’s publications on loyalty policies to the Comintern and against the Trotsky movement compounded the inconsistencies between the organization’s emphasis on the practical methodology set forth by Lenin and political loyalty demanded by Stalinists. In this way the Party’s work in the early Popular Front era embodied political camaraderie but contained abrasive limits that excluded and isolated many existing members.

While CPUSA members who cited Lenin in 1929 or 1933 found themselves emphasizing a model based on practicality, members who later cited Stalin in 1934 found themselves condemning their Leninist comrades for failing to display sufficient loyalty to the Comintern. This political division among comrades deserves examination, especially considering that the CPUSA survived it. Kenez argued that Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, utilized the Comintern to respond to their growing concerns over anti-Bolshevism throughout Europe, particularly in Germany after the election of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in 1932 (which began a year later).51 Often the Party’s support for Stalinism created blind acceptance among Party members, as Dorothy Healey recollected in her interviews. “All you ever heard was the one position which the majority had agreed upon,” she explained, “you did what I did…simply accept that, of course, it’s right.”52

Despite their contributions to sectarianism, within the workplace the Party’s use of political camaraderie among workers had its periods of advantage. When Walter Reuther and Homer Martin indicted Local 600’s lawyer, Maurice Sugar, for being a Communist, the workers of the Local and the CPUSA flocked to his defense. The Union president condemned Sugar in 1939, although Sugar’s membership was fairly well known throughout the Local’s existence, including by Reuther. Reuther failed, however, to see the unity of strength behind Sugar, represented by the Local’s staunch resistance to Reuther’s attempts to complain about “reds.” Reuther’s accusations were meaningless, claimed the Local, because “under [Reuther’s] administration our union and members have been led closer and closer to company unionism.”53 Party General Secretary Earl Browder was in attendance of the meeting where Sugar was charged. He asserted that the Party’s efforts “must continue,” referring to the “hold[ing] of member meetings in various locals of the UAW.”54 Browder recognized the Party’s presence in the union and its importance to it. His goal was to “avoid a split in the UAW.” The irony of Sugar’s accusation was that it highlighted the Party’s involvement with the local and the Union as a whole, but no negative aspects of their involvement were determined. It was merely the presence of the CPUSA that warranted condemnation. By the end of the month, the UAW newspaper United Auto Worker published a further condemnation of the Party’s alleged attempt to “capture control of the UAW.” A further connection to Moscow made the article as well, although no evidence to substantiate it was referenced. The political solidarity shared by the workers of Local 600 with their Party influences, exemplified by their resounding support for Sugar despite his Party affiliation, showed the effectiveness of camaraderie when poised against strong political barriers.

For the most part, political camaraderie remained an internal element to the Party. It solidified the identity by which the Party isolated itself from other political organizations such as the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as other labor organizations such as the AFL. The labor unions that reflected the political camaraderie of the Party, such as locals of the UAW and the United Mining Workers (UMW) ended up in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Political camaraderie, however, builds off social camaraderie. It is a response to political barriers that prevent social camaraderie from extending. There must exist some element of cohesion among a group before an abstract ideal of organization and methodology can be achieved. It was this cohesion between individuals that allowed the Party to utilize its political camaraderie with focused action and practical activism.  

Political camaraderie also contains the seeds of its own destruction. As Ted Hughes’ poem suggests, in the darkness of power, even camaraderie cannot hold on.  Ultimately, Party members relied on the social camaraderie of individuals and communities to continue the activism across broader and less political organizations. It was the more humanistic element of solidarity that kept political camaraderie under control, and occasionally capitalized on the unity it created.

Communists protest against lynchings and black oppression.

Valorizing Comradeship

Both the social and political elements of camaraderie provide an explanation for the relationships shared between individuals of various social contexts, and the political context of American Marxism.  Understanding the political side of solidarity and comradeship allows the researcher to see the limits of social activism and the transformative nature of solidarity when placed under the pressure of pre-existing political barriers. Similarly, understanding the social side of solidarity illuminates the smaller connecting elements that keep a movement of people together despite overwhelming political divisions and difficulties. Men like William Foster and Maurice Sugar could not have succeeded in their efforts without the power of their political spirit of comradeship among those they represented. In a similar manner, women like Beatrice Lumpkin and men like Danny Rubin would never have looked up to men like Foster and Sugar had they lacked a social understanding of unity and solidarity through the association of concerns and interests.

Dr. Rego showed the importance of understanding solidarity within the workplace, but solidarity is much more than just a workplace trait, or an expectation among fellow employees: it is rooted in familial upbringing, the early social relationships we experience, and the moments in our development where we gain a sense of self. It can be simple and unrestricted, as well as complex and idealistic. The same qualities fit the history of the CPUSA: simple and unrestricted in the form of a justice-seeking solution to social problems, as well as complex and idealistic in the form of international committees and idolatrized leaders.  It is no wonder that words like brotherhood, comrade, and red found themselves on the lips and fingers of every communist: they embodied the symptom of solidarity that activists hoped to uncover among the rest of society. The CPUSA took solidarity to another level, fusing the social bond between community members with a strong political solidarity for social change. These two elements, political and social, worked together to support basic needs of organization, espoused ideological tenets, and prevented the Party from dominating the lives of workers in the way that other Communist Parties, such as the CPSU, did.  At the same time, the political element carried a natural tendency for factionalism, a quality that limited the solidarity between two politically opposed communists to the social camaraderie of simply being communists.

Understanding camaraderie as a social and political glue that both worked for and against itself illuminates the complexity of the CPUSA in the 20th century, as well as helping to break down the romanticizing of Party effectiveness throughout labor, civil rights, and politics, a memory that is quite strong among the existing Party membership. While the CPUSA had, and still does have, many members spread out throughout the various social organizations of the United States, including some political parties, it never operated with the full authoritarianism and unified singularity as that of the CPSU. It simply couldn’t do so, as the internal divisions created by the Comintern forced members like Lumpkin, Rubin, Sugar, and Healey to rely on the social camaraderie of the workshop and the community, while the Party gave them the background political unity for them to all call each other “comrades.” The task at hand now is to examine these elements individually in a more vigorous manner, and to understand which element is more palatable for the average American laborer. Perhaps such a study can unveil further the connections human beings find with each other through political and social means, and how those means ultimately come to define us culturally.

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Double Agent in Detroit: Anti-Communism at the Local Level

Looking at anti-communism before the McCarthyist era at the local level, Joshua Morris dissects the career of an industrial double-agent William Gernaey. We publish this not only for its contribution to the history of the US Communist Movement and industrial organizing and counter-organizing but also for its depiction of the internal day-to-day operation of the CPUSA in an era of intense class conflict and anti-communism.

The history of anticommunism in the United States in the post-war era is well documented.  Recent scholarship and the availability of newer data from primary sources in the past five years, however, has made it possible to examine the extent to which anticommunism during the interwar years influenced and set the stage for the postwar Red Scare. These developments in the historiography owe much to the work of Ellen Schrecker, whose examination of anticommunism in film, media, and academia helped dislodge the history of American Communism from a history of subversives acting for foreign interests. We now know that this history of radical political and labor activism had extensive domestic roots.  Newer scholarship specifically focusing on anticommunism, such as Jennifer Luff’s and Donna Haverty-Stacke’s works, help shed light on the domestic roots of resistance to communist organizing extending as far back as the early 1920s. This new research seeks to explore the domestic nature of anticommunism and its roots in an era prior to the Cold War era, where Communism as a foreign rival dominated US politics. 1 

According to Jennifer Luff, what we think of as “anticommunism” was a mix of decades-old resistance stemming from antiradical labor activists within the American Federation of Labor between 1921 and 1939 and anti-New Deal Republicans from 1936-1952 that took on the form of a social and political monolith. 2 The FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), had, as early as 1921, conducted regular checks on known Workers’ Party associates as well as non-Party communists.  While many civil libertarians protested the procedure of the BI, the Department of Justice viewed it as “the best way to avoid the snail’s pace of the courts” and allowed the investigations to continue throughout the late 1920s and 1930s.3 Anticommunism has roots in local communities across America, with many of its most effective organizers merely acting as informers and reporters for corporate or government bodies. One way the BI succeeded in localized operations was by relying on private companies that already had the means of infiltrating unions and shop committees. Such was the story of William Gernaey from Detroit.  Gernaey’s experience helps unveil the complex nature of both anticommunist industrial espionage as well as communist entryism tactics during the peak of the Depression and the early stages of the Popular Front.  Both industrial informants and communist infiltrators understood “the skill of semi-illegal methods of work” to avoid being discovered as well as building relationships with fellow workers on the basis of trust and cooperation.  In turn, they acted as class collaborationists to help limit the success of communist activism in industrial parts of the nation.

Born in February of 1903, Gernaey grew up the son of a tool and die maker near the east side of Detroit.  After graduating from Eastern High School in 1919, Gernaey worked a series of intermittent jobs until deciding to attend Detroit Business University, which eventually landed him a position at the Detroit Independent Oil Company.  There, his manager exposed him to Taylorism and efficiency management, as well as the growing effort to extend managerial oversight over the workforce in the midst of a growing national labor consciousness. Gernaey was a typical conservative-minded working class American and believed that the growing labor movement represented a threat to the life his parents worked hard for.  He was proud to learn about efficiency management and believed he was helping to make American workplaces both safer and more efficient, thus leading to lower prices and more available products for the average American. Through this process, Gernaey became adept at pointing out ineffectiveness and discrepancies in worker output and managerial authority. He was also popular among the workers; he gave workers the benefit of the doubt in most scenarios and called out the inefficiency of management when he saw it necessary.  After the company changed owners in July of 1925, Gernaey received an “anonymous” phone call asking if he would be interested in efficiency work for a private company.4

Gernaey in middle of photo with tan clothing.

Created in the early years of the 20th century, the Corporation Auxiliary Company (CAC), also sometimes called the Corporation Auxiliary Service, functioned as an administration of industrial espionage that hired organizers and efficiency experts to sabotage industrial organizing efforts and hubs of suspected radicalism dating back to the early 1910s.  The CAC particularly built hubs in cities like Chicago and Detroit, focusing on the parts and supply companies for the auto industry. Unlike other espionage agencies that hired gunman and violent strikebreakers, the CAC focused “exclusively on spying.” By the mid-1930s, from ’33 to ’36, the Chrysler Corporation provided the bulk of CAC’s funding, amounting to $275,000 over the course of three years.  The CAC’s promises to its clients were to penetrate union leadership positions and lower-ranking union member meetings to stimulate “racial antagonism in the union ranks” as a means to “undermine strike solidarity” and turn over the names of leading organizers to the company.5Most company spies, including Gernaey, faced exposure by sit-down strikers in 1937 and were identified to their union as company stool pigeons, effectively ending the highly influential role of the CAC on business practices in industrial cities.  Those hired by the CAC and left without a job typically turned to management services for companies such as Ford, or to the federal government and subsequently employed by the FBI.6

One such effort by the CAC in the mid-to-late 1920s involved the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and an investigation as to the extent to which communists influenced local labor union halls in cities such as Detroit and Chicago.  This was during an era of the evolution of early anticommunist strategy that attempted to rationally combat the movement as opposed to placating it publicly as a pariah. Individuals like Gernaey were “not paid to help build the Communist Party, but rather to help, in whatever way possible, to break it down.”  To facilitate this espionage, the CAC’s spies infiltrated local union efforts under the auspice of a genuine industrial worker; a tactic nearly identical to the 1920s unionist method of “entryism” promoted by leftist, syndicalist, and communist groups. Informants had to “gain the confidence of the people within” and most importantly “gain leadership” as a means to combating the persistent search for “stool pigeons.”7  When convincing employers to accept contracts, the CAC assured them that their informants and subversives would “get acquainted” with the workforce and “engineer things so as to keep organization out.”  Should this first effort fail, the informant would then “become the leading spirit and pick out just the right men” to lead the organization so as to assure its inevitable failure.8

Gernaey found his way to the CAC headquarters located in the Hoffman Building at Woodward and Sibley.  Hired to perform “efficiency work” on behalf of the local business community, Gernaey was told that his employment would be contractual with individual clients.   The company admitted to gathering data on his work with Independent Oil via their own internal sources and expressed promise in his ability to navigate between the sentiments of management and workers.  For his first assignment, the CAC sent him to Shell Oil, followed by the Wayco Oil Company. While given a position and a manager to report to, Gernaey’s managers were never made aware of his role as an efficiency expert.  Working the factory under the auspice of an average worker, Gernaey “wrote daily reports of activities, sentiment of the employees, supervisors, etc.” Gernaey also tried to imbue his fellow workers with etiquette, routinely instructing them on “how to conduct the work, give service, [and] courtesy.”  In under a year, Gernaey performed exceptionally for various oil companies in the city through CAC. He even prevented the loss of around $50,000 in oil after discovering a secret plan to steal oil reserves. To perfect his skills as a subversive efficiency expert, the CAC sent him semi-weekly lessons on “Time Study and Efficiency Detail.”  After working for the company for two years, he was given an assignment that would change his life forever.

In early 1927, the CAC tasked Gernaey with infiltrating the Chrysler plant in Highland Park just Southwest of Detroit.  After obtaining an assignment on the line, Gernaey began his observatory work and his reporting of inefficiency; such as reporting foremen who pushed workers to the point that they quit, criticizing workers who slowed down the line and encouraging fellow workers to avoid loss of material.  Like many of his previous jobs, Gernaey found it easy to get along with his fellow workers and showed little favoritism over efficiency issues. He also avoided reporting certain incidents such as theft and petty grievances because to do so would threaten his nature as a subversive for the company.  Gernaey worked in the plant for two years, until being laid off in the spring of 1929 due to the early stages of the Depression. His managers could not make an exception for the very simple fact that they were unaware of his role in the company. This did not deter his employers, however, who desired to see him continue his work in another way:  They asked him to infiltrate the local Detroit communist movement.

In 1929, the American Communist movement was emerging into its “Third Period” of organization where its goal was to contrast the goals of socialism against so-called “progressive” and “social-fascist” organizations such as the Socialist Party and segments of radicals who left the CPUSA on the grounds of their support for Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky.  In Detroit, the CPUSA focused its efforts on organizing the factory and auto workers as well as combating discrimination of non-whites. The CPUSA’s national tactic for organizing was the creation of radically-led communist unions under the umbrella of its Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), headed by CPUSA Presidential nominee William Foster. In many cities, however, such as Detroit and Chicago, the local scene of labor dictated the what path the communists would follow as opposed to the national leadership of the Party’s preferences. In the case of Detroit auto workers, entryism, or “boring from within,” was the preferred tactic.

As far as domestic anticommunism at the time, recent research suggests a pattern between the development of “armchair anticommunism” who worried about the “social anarchy” of revolution and labor anticommunists who sought to curb the political influence of radicals in both the unions and in broader society.  On the whole, however, American Communism “held little appeal for Americans” and thus the efforts to resist it as a movement were more of an attempt to expose the presence of communists as opposed to counter their methodology or philosophy.9  Most average Detroit citizens believed that “communists were all foreigners or Russians with beards and bombs” and had caricatures in newspapers to sustain this image.  The business community of Detroit was likely aware to some degree of the presence of communist organizers, but certainly not to the extent to which they had influence among the local workforce by 1929.  To find the extent of communist presence and expose it, business leaders turned to companies like the CAC and men like Gernaey because they were effective but more importantly expendable units in the effort to identify communist organizers.  

Gernaey was instructed by his adviser to attempt to join the CPUSA by “hanging around communist halls,” which he learned quickly was a mistake.  His first attempt at mingling with workers in labor-oriented bars “showed [him] that every communist is suspicious of a stranger.” To get involved, Gernaey needed a direct in and he needed more than just placement to obtain it.  He needed to build a character, and role play, with a background and an identity that gave purpose and meaning to an affinity for communism. Once he was ready, he attended a “youth mass meeting” at Grandy Hall on Theodore Street where he met Max Shapiro and Joe Siroka and two other organizers, who were the only men attending the “mass meeting.”  Gernaey told the local CPUSA and Youth Communist League (YCL) organizers that he was “a beraggled young fellow without a home, job or means to get a meal.” As the only attendee of the meeting, the four men sympathized with Gernaey, fed him, and gave him instructions on where to find the next meeting.

The next night, Gernaey went to 2984 Yemens Street, where an underground restaurant was hosting a meeting for the local CPUSA district.  In the restaurant, CP organizers and YCL leaders were spread out at different tables, talking amongst themselves about their hopes and plans for the coming months.  Once the meeting started, Gernaey learned a few things about his local communist scene, namely that “plans [were] rarely carried out” and the district local was more talkative than it was effective at agreeing on what to do.  When asked openly by the district leaders why he decided to join the CPUSA, Gernaey responded by saying “a new broom always sweeps best.” Gernaey’s commitment to his role resulted in precisely what the CPUSA wanted to hear: acceptance of the new Third Period program, rejection of the old ways.  As far as the district leader Joe York was concerned, Gernaey “was in.”

Despite “losing” his job with Chrysler, Gernaey ate for free while working with the local CPUSA, and was also offered places to stay rent-free.  At the first meeting and in subsequent months Gernaey made friends with Mary Hemoff, a Central Committee member for the Michigan CPUSA and member of the National Secretariat of the YCL.  In less than a month, the CPUSA sent Michigan leader Joe York to the Soviet Union to study labor theory, and Gernaey was handed the job of organizing Hamtramck and Northern Detroit and keeping watch on the local YCL.  Within a few weeks, Gernaey noticed common trends within the Detroit CP, such as high turnover rate for membership but low turnover for leadership. Additionally, because the CPUSA remained isolated and removed from the broad masses of Detroit amidst its shifting base membership, the leadership formed “a bureaucratic clique.” Within his local YCL meetings, he noted a tendency for the members to prefer study periods over discussions about activism. This sort of general malaise among local communists is not unknown; numerous examples of the CPUSA’s limited organizational capacity exist in the historiography, such as future CPUSA leader John Gates’ preference for attending reading seminars at college instead of organizing local workers.10 Due to his tenacity as a newer member, Gernaey was offered the chance to attend the Lenin School in the Soviet Union, but turned it down.  While accepting his role within the CPUSA as necessary for his goal as an informant, he felt that by accepting formal education in a school of Marxism he would undo his self-respect and become too caught up in the bureaucracy of the movement.11

In February of 1933, Gernaey and the local Detroit CPUSA found their first major moment when the employees of the Briggs Manufacturing facility went on strike over a wage cut.  Nationally, the CPUSA reported the strike as the result of Briggs workers suffering as “the most exploited in the entire auto industry” throughout the early years of the Depression.12 The company refused to negotiate with the strike committee on the grounds that they were communists.  Workers, in turn, denied the charge and emphasized their use of American flags and the exclusion of communists from committee leadership positions.13 Gernaey, however, reported that the Party not only had operatives within the plant including himself, they also were voted to the shop committee leadership.  As the strike committee’s lead organizer, Gernaey led “in all discussions on maneuvers and policy” and litigated employees on how to carry out the committee’s demands.14  A local radical publication, the Detroit Leader, responded in turn by telling Briggs factory workers to recognize “the class struggle” and accept that “the interest of the workers and the employers are never identical.”15 Again in 1934, because of his work during the Briggs strike, nation CPUSA leader William Weinstone gave him a chance to attend the Lenin School, and again, Gernaey turned the offer down.

From then on, Gernaey set his aims at breaking up the YCL and the overall effectiveness of the CPUSA at the community level.  To accomplish this, he took steps to disrupt the attempt of the Party to engage with the public. His first attempt occurred on May 30th, 1935, when the district CPUSA organized an anti-war demonstration in Grand Circus Park.  Gernaey told his YCL district to instead act as “nuisances” and ordered his comrades to remain isolated, avoiding the baseball crowds and masses marching for Memorial Day. Instead of marching on Grand River, where the CPUSA desired the members to be active, Gernaey held his YCL parade several blocks from the main boulevard, and began at 1pm “when the crowds [were] at their weakest.”  Gernaey also redirected pro-labor parades away from downtown regularly and avoided organizing near the major Dodge plants.16 Despite numerous successful attempts to split and slow down the local effectiveness of the YCL, Gernaey retained his leadership position until by the end of 1935 he was formally brought into the CPUSA, given the title of district organizer for the Labor Sports Union (LSU), and a weekly salary of $5.  Gernaey continued to command the local YCL as well, but his covert activities did very little to tip off local and national CPUSA leaders.17

At LSU, Gernaey met and worked with George Kristalsky and Jack Mahoney in Hamtramck to staff a local unemployment council.  Unemployment councils were the bread and butter of the early-to-mid 1930s American Communist movement. Organized as a local response to the conditions of the depression, their history was rooted in an effort to “organize the unemployed” and the semi-joint effort of the CPUSA, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), and the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA).  Between 1930 and 1932, the councils found common ground to build what they called a united front against unemployment. While never as successful in terms of policy as they were in numbers and popularity, the councils did serve as the basis for maintaining a cooperative alliance between Leftist groups in the early 1930s despite the Third Period ideology of resisting cooperative work.  In other cases, they served to further divide Leftists as was the case in Chicago, 1932.18  By 1935, the councils served as a membership recruitment system in industrial areas like Detroit.  This process began after the Socialists refused to support the CPUSA’s banners and symbolism in 1932, and as the depression worsened to increase evictions across the nation.  Gernaey watched as his YCL local became infused with numerous new “young ruffians” who turned to militant radicalism and wanted to physically resist the efforts of landlords. To maintain his leadership, Gernaey did little to stop the younger members from putting the furniture back into homes after evictions and climbing telephone and electric poles to reconnect houses to the grid.  By 1935, however, the CPUSA was beginning to change and so was their dependent unemployment councils.

Many organizations the CPUSA tacitly or overtly supported prior to 1935, such as the Ukranian Women’s Club and the Russian Workers’ Club, were liquidated to streamline meetings together and tighten up the local Detroit membership.  The Detroit Unemployment Council was renamed the Workers Alliance Local and communists were instructed to direct their attention toward the organization of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers. To secure their control over local unions, such as Teamsters Local 830, communists on the shop committee placed fellow comrades into the best positions and delegated the most difficult work to workers who refused to join.  While the union attracted numerous WPA employees who were desired for their skilled labor, communist shop leaders ensured that initial meetings were mixed with an effort to encourage involvement in local CPUSA politics. Through his work with the WPA employees, Genaey found that communist organizers were exceptionally skilled at performing their “semi-illegal” activities while simultaneously embodying the idea of an “elite” Communist Party member.  Likewise, the most active and visible communists within a union local or a community had “very little time for amusements.” As representatives of their national Party, they went from meeting to meeting, event to event, dressed as professionals and financed by the Party to appear as the most successful of workers.19

Gernaey’s work with the CPUSA continued unabated until spring of 1937 when two men entered the CPUSA office in Detroit and handed him a call letter to testify to the La Follette Committee in Washington.  At the time, the La Follette committee was exposing the work of numerous CAC informants at various levels throughout Detroit. After agreeing to testify, Gernaey was told to leave Detroit. It was the belief of his non-communist associates that the labor movement would only continue to organize and retain communists in leadership positions, effectively limiting Gernaey’s ability to remain active.  He returned all of his union-related property, such as his typewriter, books, and stationary, and severed his ties with the local CPUSA. Quickly, the union issued a request to hold a public trial of Gernaey as a possible spy, which he avoided. Only a few days after the trial, Gernaey was told that the CAC was going out of business as a result of the continued exposure of its informants. When Gernaey pressured his boss to explain how the union became aware of his testimonies, he was told that the union or the local communists likely went through his mail or had figured out a discrepancy in post office box numbers between union members and Party members.  The local CPUSA responded in full force, placing Gernaey’s photograph in the pages of the Daily Worker and labeling him and all company informants as “rats.”  Also in less than a year, Gernaey’s wife left him for a family friend and filed for divorce.20

The early work of William Gernaey is a watershed moment in the research of early American Communism and the roots of domestic anticommunism.  Gernaey went on to testify before the Dies Committee, work as a subversive within the Ford Motor Company, and eventually hired by the FBI. What is compelling about Gernaey’s story is the way it highlights anticommunism as a localized effort, and more importantly one that extends from specific business communities as opposed to industry or politics at the national level.  Such a development took the onset of the Cold War and the rampant tensions of postwar Europe. It also helps further understand domestic anticommunism as a phenomenon taken up by both companies and individuals for personal reasons. For the CAC, anticommunism was business and throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, business was exceptionally good. Gernaey’s testimony helps to show that for individual informants, much of their work was seen as a natural extension of their skills and passion for the ideals of capitalism.  It is important, moving forward, to understand anticommunism as both endemic of the postwar Cold War, but also rooted in domestic, localized business interests in terms of controlling and swaying workers’ sense of ideological commitment.