Joshua Morris, The Many Worlds of American Communism (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2022), xxiii + 497 pp.
Audacity and ambition are to be admired in books on American Communism. We have many studies of the particularities of Communist Party (CP) experience: explorations of state and city histories abound; inquiries addressing the trade union or anti-racist aspects of Communist activity proliferate; writings on the gendered nature of the leading organisation of the Left are increasingly common; the biographical and memoir literature of cadre is now quite developed; communist artists and writers have been the subject of sophisticated commentary; an espionage industry has arisen addressing Soviet spycraft; and many scholarly inquiries explore the CP’s history within quite specific chronological boundaries. Wide-ranging attempts to present American Communism in a new light, aligning the seemingly disparate strands of the United States Party affiliated with the Comintern (Communist International/CI) in a fresh interpretive framework are nonetheless rare. They can rightly expect to be applauded.
But audacity and ambition in analyses of American Communism carry with them responsibilities. The complexity of the subject, as well as historiographic controversies that pit traditionalists, institutionalists, and anti-communists against revisionist, New Left-inflected, social and cultural studies validating American Communism as part of a radical tradition, is well established.[1] Writings have repeatedly complicated understandings of the narrative history of the antecedent organisations that, one after another, structured the changing nature of the Communist Party. To address this history anew, then, demands much of any scholar. The discipline of a rigorous research program, scrupulous handling of evidence, conceptual acumen, political savvy, and a willingness to confront awkward actualities are all required if American Communism is be reframed and a new and accurate interpretive paradigm successfully developed. If this tall order is not lived up to, the applause greeting a promised re-examination of Communism in the United States can quickly turn to catcalls.
Inner and Outer Worlds
Joshua Morris’s The Many Worlds of American Communism proposes a new understanding the Communist Party, which he situates within a broad amalgam of communist-inspired organizations, what Morris designates the Pan-Socialist Left. Drawing on a short 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs by Stephen M. Walt, suggesting that theories of a realist, liberal, and constructivist bent all provide insights into the “real world of policy”, Morris opts for interpretive diversity. He insists that social movements must be analysed with an appreciation of the “many worlds” that structured the totality of their multi-faceted nature. He then focuses on what he designates the Political, Labor, and Community “Worlds” of American Communism. He does this, moreover, over the course of decades characterised by considerable change. Not content to explore Communist Party history within the confinements of a narrow chronology, Morris takes the story of American Communism from its beginnings in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the debilitating fracturing of the Party in the Cold War of the late 1940s and early 1950s.[2]
This, then, is certainly an audacious and ambitious undertaking, one that might be expected to generate applause. And, indeed, early reviews of The Many Worlds of American Communism have generally been positive. In addition, venues like LaborOnline of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) and the eclectic Marxist site, cosmonaut.com have both showcased Morris’s publication.[3]
One reason for this early, positive reception is perhaps Morris’s seeming historiographic flexibility. He incorporates understandings drawn from institutionalists such as Theodore Draper, Harvey Klehr, and John Haynes, who have focused on what Morris considers the Political World,[4] as well as insights associated with the social and community concerns of historians like Robin D.G. Kelley, Mark Naison, James R. Barrett, and Randi Storch. For this latter analytical contingent, the Labor World looms large and the issue of race comes to the fore in a number of communities and campaigns.[5] Morris also draws productively on two important books by Jacob Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (2014) and The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (2021), their author being one of the few historians of American Communism to have explicitly attempted to negotiate the bifurcation of the historiography.[6]
At the same time, Morris sees himself standing above most of these predecessors. The Many Worlds of American Communism raises questions about both the so-called traditionalist and revisionist schools. It notes the former’s inclination to treat “the domestic communist movement as a foreign/alien force” and the latter’s “romanticized perspective”, tending to sidestep the influence of international developments on the practice and policies of American Communists. Both interpretive camps, Morris claims, “unveil an overarching handicap that prevents the writers and readers of the subject from fully grasping the complexity of American Communism”. (xi) Many familiar with this historiographic impasse, however, will raise an eyebrow when they read in The Many Worlds of American Communism that “the Trotskyist view of international communism”, with its anathema toward the “class collaborationism” of the Popular Front “served as the basis for much of the conclusions about American communist history for the first generation of historians on the subject”. (257)
There is no doubt that Morris leans unmistakably toward what might be considered the ‘second generation’, the elucidatory accent of New Leftish revisionists, which he often extols.[7] He ultimately posits the autonomy of the Labor and Community Worlds from a Political World and its “leadership class”. This latter seemingly dominant element never quite managed to keep the Communist ranks from doing what they felt must be undertaken within the Pan-Socialist Left. Again and again, Morris posits a divide, which he suggests opened almost immediately in the American Communist movement, even as early as the last months of the underground period. “Over the course of the summer and fall 1921, as the Central Caucus waged its mini-war within the Political World”, writes Morris, “labor activists built the foundation of the Labor World of communist activism”. By 1924, the Workers’ Party “possessed neither theoretical nor tactical factions but rather different worlds of experience — one deeply engrained in political solutions to societal woes, and another dug into the day-to-day struggles of the American labor movement”. As the Communist Party entered the 1930s, Morris posits a disconnection between “the ideological world of party politics and a more grounded experience in the practical worlds of organizing for workers and citizens’ rights”. (62, 50, 232) This is congruent with much that has been claimed in revisionist studies.
Reaching well past this, however, are assertions by Morris about the relations of the Workers’ Party/Communist Party and its rivals on the revolutionary left: Musteites, Socialists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites. Many of these arguments are certainly novel. They co-exist with views of the nature of specific Communist policies and practices, such as those promulgated in the Third Period, that beggar belief. It may be possible to interpret “the party’s Third Period philosophy” as one of “engaging with American workers” (242) by placing an emphasis on building unions that welcomed the shunned (blacks) and the unorganized, recently traced in a sophisticated, subtle, and scrupulous way in Michael Goldfield’s important and informative account, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (2020). It is rather difficult, however, to accept the notion that Labor World Communists sought “integrative goals” since “the start of the Third Period”, that they were strong advocates of “broad, pan-Socialist co-operatives … in cities like Chicago and New York” quite early in the 1930s, or that “grassroots communists practiced collaborative Popular Front-style organizing methods as early as 1931”. (318, 235, 361) Upon scrutiny, the analytic ambitions of this book unravel. Accuracy and actuality too often seem to be of little concern.
Problems begin with the conceptual insistence that within American Communism there were three distinct worlds, related but nonetheless separate, capable of taking their own importantly different paths. Following the trajectory of revisionist social histories of Party life, Morris claims that the “experiences of individual communist activists and ‘fellow travelers’ of the Left throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s differed widely, and those experiences were shaped – in many ways defined and limited – by the ‘world’ to which specific activists belonged. … American Communism was a ‘world political movement,’ but it also existed as a domestic social movement with localized influences that varied in experience from person to person”. (ix)
On one level, there is a commonsensical smidgen of validity in such a perspective. Yet such an analytical stand must always be balanced with other considerations, in which these so-called worlds were intimately interrelated. Accenting separation, as Morris does, takes a rather mundane and pragmatically necessary organizational distinction and elevates it to a conceptual priority.
Any social movement, radical or otherwise, will be composed of individuals with a capacity to filter their commitment through an infinitely meshed sieve of diversity. A movement dedicated to overturning capitalism and its foundational commitment to the process of exploitation and its almost infinite capacity to generate oppression will inevitably structure its resistance in specific, chosen strategic spheres, allocating its resources – human and material – to distinct realms of activity. But to call them “worlds” is undoubtedly a misnomer.
Organizations like the Communist Party attract and retain individuals on the basis of core beliefs and primary commitments. Those recruits and believers, like leaders, bring to the movement interests, skill sets, expertise and experience, all of which align them with distinct areas in which they can function most effectively. Their attraction to Communism may well allow for a range of leeways and personal understandings of motivation, but their party affiliation was also an expression of focused priorities, principles, and practices. Morris’s separation of the worlds of American Communism, especially in terms of their labour and community spheres, exaggerates a reified rank-and-file’s almost mythical capacity for autonomy from the leadership – international and domestic – that Party members accepted as authoritative in the struggle to build an alternative to capitalism.
When members of the Communist Party rose in meetings across the length and breadth of the United States, whether such forums were called to combat unemployment, protest against the treatment of blacks in Harlem, form a sharecroppers’ union in Alabama, establish a progressive arts club, or mobilise to organise the unorganised in Chicago’s mass production industries, they often rose to sing the Internationale. Its refrain echoed the need for a grand vision that reached past the limitations of specificity:
‘Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The International Soviet
Shall be the human race.
Party members, whatever their field of work, signed on to this pledge, one that demanded adherence to a certain political discipline and allegiance that, for better or for worse, depending on the particular period, defined them as Communists whose loyalties lay with the Soviet Union and most often, as well, with its leading representatives in the United States.
In the delicate interpretive balance that lies between the extremism of caricature, in which Communists are presented as mere dupes of Moscow, on the one hand, or autonomous actors pursuing social justice in free-wheeling initiatives of mobilisation and resistance, on the other, there lies the necessity of recognising the agency of opposition and the confinements of adherence to the Communist International. Over decades stretching from its founding in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution into the troubled times of the 1950s, that Comintern – and the American Communist leadership that, by the end of the 1920s, it sanctioned and that bowed to it or was dispensed with — changed dramatically. Too much of the social history of American Communism, as Geoff Eley recognized decades ago, diminishes “the significance of formal communist affiliations, leading … to a history of communism with the Communism left out”.[8]
To sustain his sense of the multiple worlds of American Communism, Morris draws on Walt’s rather banal pluralist conceptualisation of the need to appreciate rival interpretive frameworks to truly understand a field like international relations, where experiences, sources, and analytical sensibilities have been characterised by considerable diversity. This notion is hardly all that innovative. Nonetheless, it is jarring to see perspectives aired in Foreign Affairs, a policy publication of the conservative mainstream (in which George Kennan, Samuel P. Huntington, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Colin L. Powell, Francis Fukuyama, and Zbigniew Brzezinski have published their views) imported into the study of American Communism. In its embrace of pluralism, Walt’s musings resonate with a lowest common denominator postmodernism, fashionable in historiographical circles in the 1990s but waning over more recent decades. Suspicions of all master narratives and an insistence that identities are discursive and fluid promotes a kind of historical relativism that licenses a ‘what does it matter’ approach to empirical reality, allowing for interpretive reconsiderations that, especially when past writings are bypassed, fly in the face of what actually happened.
All of this is something of a subterranean maze on which Morris’s approach to American Communism rests. This analytical base allows him to avoid some fundamental aspects of the experience he reexamines, resulting in a narrative superstructure that seems at times divorced from a reasoned reading of the past. Among the most important areas skirted in Morris’s treatment are the Stalinisation of the movement he is examining, both at the international and national levels, and the ways in which, in distinct periods, the United States Communist Party operated, at best, in highly problematic ways.
“Many Worlds”, then, captures in a loose way a range of often unarticulated interpretive axioms of progressive thought in our times. Morris applies Walt’s framework to American Communism, not so much as an animating theory, which it is too weak to sustain, but as a convenient model imposed on the experience of a critically important component of the Left. The model seems rigidly brittle, a plastic encasement that fails to be helpful when applied to the Communist Party. As Bert Cochran noted decades ago in a still useful study of the role of Communists in the American labour movement, “there are times when neatness has to be sacrificed to authenticity”.[9]
Revolutionaries: The Ranked and the Ranks
Within both the historiography of American Communism, as well as in the committee structures of the movement itself, the worlds Morris identifies were understood to exist. Communist parties have traditionally been organized through specific committees, often named central, political, trade union, editorial, and the like. Pivotal early personnel in the American Communist Party, such as Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, were identified through their placement on key political committees, including the Politburo, while other leading figures, like William F. (Bill) Dunne or William Z. Foster, were more easily associated with trade-union activity. Yet these latter types also served on centrally important determinative Party bodies. None of these principal cadre would have considered themselves entirely separate from spheres of the movement where others exercised responsibility.
As Cochran argued, long ago, the relations of leaders and led within the Communist Party were complex and, of course, there was some space for limited independence to be exercised by Party leaders outside of the immediate circle of the Central Committee and Politburo. This was especially the case when these cadre were responsible for carrying out trade-union policy, always a privileged sphere within a Party dedicated to the class struggle. The dialectical relationships of Party political leaders, Communist trade-union officials, and militant, rank-and-file activists was no doubt complex, but it was hardly one of separate “worlds”. Cochran quotes Clayton Fountain, a Communist auto worker unionist during the 1930s: “I remember vividly how we comrades were hastily rounded up and called into a caucus to have the party strategy spelled out to us. Thirty or forty comrades of lesser rank, like myself, sat around listening while the powers of the party gave us the line”. Yet, at times, there were those Communists in leading positions, such as John Williamson, the Party’ organisational secretary during World War II, who claimed that interference in “the normal functioning of the trade unions” was a mistake, a position that was about to become moot given the Cold War cleansing of Communists occupying positions in the House of Labour officialdom. If Cochran insisted that “Communist leaders knowingly accepted every instruction from Russia as Holy Writ”, they also believed that Stalin’s dictates “and the historic interests of the American working class were in mystic harmony”, destined to advance the forces of progress. Disagreements over how best to implement policy were always going to happen but, on the whole, among rank-and-file members, there was a basic alignment with the Party leadership, even as this contingent sometimes divided. Communist Party members, Cochran notes, were “steeped in the party atmosphere, in which “adulation of the Soviet Union was commonplace”.[10] Any model that fractures the political, labour, and community struggles and members of the Communist Party into demarcated “worlds” perhaps obscures as much as it illuminates.
Morris even provides evidence of this in his discussion of the Passaic Strike of 1926, led by the headstrong but galvanising organizer, Albert Weisbord. Oddly, however, this critical instance of labour activism, with its dual-unionist colouring, could not be extricated from the Political World of Communism, neither national nor international. As Morris notes, “Ruthenberg and his supporters in their factional divide against the Fosterites showed more support for the Passaic Strike than nearly any major effort conducted by the TUEL”, while Foster was “hesitant to throw support” to the Passaic United Front Committee “when it could easily be labeled as a dual union to discredit him”. (156) Passaic and Weisbord were, seemingly, exemplars of Morris’s Labor World. The momentous conflict erupted in ways that stepped outside of the Party’s political commitment to “boring from within”[11] the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But it ended with an abandonment of militant independent working-class activism and a settlement that returned the strikers to the AFL fold, Weisbord’s fate sealed as something of a sacrificial lamb.
The Comintern post-mortem was little more than blunt condemnation. Solomon Lozovsky, head of the Red Trade Union International, chastised the American Party for its “overvaluation of the importance of the Fascist A.F. of L.”, tearing a particular strip off Foster for “dancing a quadrille the whole time around the AFL and its various unions”.[12]
Rare were the Central Committee members, then, who did not exercise a presence in a variety of realms that reached outside of their conventional political leadership. Foster’s trade-union credentials were unrivalled, but, almost from the beginning of his membership in the Communist movement he occupied a central place on leading Party committees. If his base was a ‘militant minority’ in the unions of the American Federation of Labor, the shock troops of his factional battalions also included the influential Finnish Language Federation. In the early 1920s these Finns comprised over 40 percent of American Communists. Rose Wortis, who joined the left-wing underground in its early days, and is portrayed by Morris as a grassroots Communist labour organiser, was an American delegate to the Fourth Communist International Congress in 1922, having played a role in the political discussion of how best to promote the new, legal, above-ground Workers’ Party, established late in 1921. Ruthenberg and Lovestone, recognised components of Morris’s Political World, also figured forcefully in the factional control of African-American Communists and the development of the Party’s approach to what was then called “the Negro Question”, an area Morris locates largely within the Community World of American Communism, a placement that would apply as well to Foster’s Finnish allies.[13]
A figure like James P. Cannon, with his Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) background and considerable interest in the Labor World, was also centrally involved in the Political World, as was his Kansas counterpart, Earl Browder. As a founder of the International Labor Defense organisation, active in defending political prisoners and orchestrating Communist strategy in united front efforts to free Tom Mooney and prevent the execution of the anarchist duo, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Cannon was embedded in what Morris sees as the Community World. He also contributed, through his writing in the Daily Worker and elsewhere, to the culture of the movement. Cannon penned homages to the Haymarket martyrs, Eugene V. Debs, William D. Haywood, and others, and offered a politicised and aesthetic reading of an emerging Communist theatre, reviewing Mike Gold’s New Playwrights representation of black-white relations and a culture of hedonistic recalcitrance in the play, Hoboken Blues.[14]
Separating Spheres
Moreover, among rank-and-file Communists, where activists would, by their very stature as Party members, be involved in workplaces and community mobilisations, rather than in leading political posts, it is impossible not to see their lives as ordered by labour affiliations and specific campaigns, which were inevitably connected to wider spheres and influences. Such ordinary Communists, who were, of course, extraordinary in their activism and beliefs, routinely interacted with, reacted to, and often followed the leaders of Morris’s interconnected worlds and the International which influenced them so decisively. This is precisely why the index to The Many Worlds of American Communism contains entries to rank-and-file Communists in the single digits while those referencing Browder, Cannon, Foster, Lovestone, and Ruthenberg run on for lines. It is simply not possible to isolate these often locally embedded but nationally and internationally connected aspiring revolutionaries and involved activists in one so-called Communist “World”, somehow separate from all other realms of engagement. Even leaders associated with specific spheres of influence and tasked with developing policy within them, hardly remained apart from what went on in other oppositional fields of work. Many rank-and-file Party militants were necessarily involved in their workplaces, in building trade unionism, just as they would inevitably have joined in unemployed protests, staffed defence guards at eviction proceedings during the depths of the Great Depression, and protested against racist policies and practices rampant in the political economy and social relations of the time. Such activists, after a time in the movement, often graduated into the upper echelons of their local Party, sitting on influential committees, recognised themselves as political leaders.[15]
Was the black unemployed railroad fireman, Mack Coad of South Carolina, who joined the CP in 1929-1930 after attending a Communist-organized meeting of the jobless, located in the Political, Labor, or Community Worlds of American Communism? Coad organised black tenant farmers, agricultural labourers, and steel workers in Alabama; agitated for free school transportation for black children of these working-class families; lectured on the frame-up of the nine African American Scottsboro teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931; battled armed racists and vigilante terrorists as he and other black dissidents faced lynching; was sent by the Party to the Lenin School in Moscow; occupied CP posts in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia; volunteered as part of the Lincoln Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War in order to “help wake the Negro up on the international field”; and, in 1938, joined with two black ministers and Party comrades to form Birmingham’s Right to Vote Club. This was an American Communist Party member, recruited as a rank-and-filer, who became a leader. All the while Coad straddled the political, labour, and community fields of activism, animated by his attachment to Moscow’s International.[16]
The problem with Morris’s approach is not that he looks at the political, labour, and community nature of American communism, but that he attempts to create separate spheres in which the overall attachment of Communists to the policies of the Party and the International to which it was affiliated is inevitably downgraded. By the early 1920s, Morris claims, with the Comintern having effectively intervened to check the factional tendencies of the leading American cadre, “the experiences of labor and politically oriented communists reached a fundamental divergence, to the point where one could legitimately ask: ‘What kind of communist are you? A political activist or a labor organizer?’” (51) The blunt reality is that this bifurcation is a separation of his own making. No evidence is presented that any Communist of this period ever asked or was confronted with such a question. Had they done so, I suspect, the Party member engaging with the query would have been dumbfounded at the distinction. Their reply would have been that, of course, the work they were doing in the trade unions was political activism, or the political organising they were committed to, whatever its focus, necessarily related to class struggle.
The Pan-Socialist Left: An Invented Tradition
Imposing analytical categories of separation on experiences that, as often as not, crossed and congealed such boundaries of distinction exposes the conceptual weakness in the so-called worlds Morris constructs. He also situates his study of American Communism within what he designates the Pan-Socialist Left. He recognises that this amalgam was sometimes tension-ridden, but, on the whole, he lays greater stress on the interactions and common work undertaken by the Communist Party, the Socialist Party (SP), A.J. Muste’s American Workers’ Party (AWP), James P. Cannon’s Left Oppositionist Communist League of America (the CLA/League), the fusion of the Muste-Cannon groups in the Workers’ Party (WPUS), and the creation of the Fourth International-affiliated Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP). The difficulty, again, is not that organisations of the revolutionary or social-democratic Left, operating outside of the CP, are somehow irrelevant in the history of American Communism. On the contrary, understanding such bodies and their relationship to those affiliated with Moscow’s Third International only enhances a deeper and more sophisticated appreciation of the Communist Party, USA itself.
In his ambitious attempt to reconsider American Communism with respect to other revolutionary and radical tendencies on the Left, Morris tackles a large and necessary subject and is to be congratulated for his widening of the analytical canvas. Broadening the field of inquiry in studies of American Communism is a useful and necessary corrective to the inclination to ignore relations developing among various communist and socialist parties. What is wrong is to counter a library of books and a plethora of experiences and events to suggest that a Pan-Socialist Left composed of often warring organisations and their memberships conducted common work with regularity and without the often harsh mediation of the dominant force among them, the Communist Party. Morris claims that, for 30 years, from 1919 to 1945, those who “identified as communist had a political refuge – a cohort of like-minded individuals, a bandwagon of ‘fellow travelers,’ and a mix of Leftist intellectuals” associated with “the SPA, the Left Wing, the IWW, the CPA, the CLP, the UCP, the WPA, the SWP, the WPUS, and the CPUSA”. (438)
This is questionable. It appears to substitute contemporary wish-fulfilment that a broad non-sectarian, essentially compatible, milieu of the Left existed in earlier times. The awkward actualities of the past suggest an entirely different reality. That history was not one of a Pan-Socialist Left’s cordial camaraderie, but of revolutionary organisations often quite hostile to one another and, from the vantage point of leaders and many members of Left parties and movements, with good reason.
Of course, instances of local, lower-level on-the-ground collaboration can be found, but these tended to be sporadic and episodic, seldom sustained. They cannot be misconstrued as a common “political refuge”. For every successful, seemingly spontaneous coalition there were counter examples of sectarian refusal of united front initiatives. These were usually promulgated by the Communist Party, most especially in, but not restricted to, the Third Period (1929-1935). Other organisations, also, might well adopt sectarian stands, and refuse to countenance aligning with the CP, which did exhibit, even during its most sectarian phases, halting half turns to pseudo-united front practices. To selectively place the accent on rare instances of common work, or to misinterpret the overall history through strangely off-kilter readings of evidence constructing an exaggerated claim of this kind of collaborative success, however, calls into question the existence of what Morris designates a Pan-Socialist Left.
In this sense, the ambition of The Many Worlds of American Communism oversteps. The book contains too much that compromises Morris’s credibility as a commentator on relations among various communist/socialist organisations. One aspect of this is a sloppiness with respect to sources that is twinned with odd idiosyncratic assertion. Factual errors are compounded by editorialising that seems strange at best and is not necessary to introduce into either the narrative of American Communism’s development or the analysis of the movement’s meaning.
A Comedy of Errors & Unexplained Editorial Licence
When the Workers’ Party changed its name to the Workers’ (Communist) Party in 1925, for instance, it was because, as Draper explained, the Communist International’s Bolshevisation campaign encouraged a “complete reorganization of the Party from top to bottom”. Members were obliged to adhere to the “program and statutes of the Communist International” and its American section. No doubt, Ruthenberg and other Party leaders, as well as the bulk of the Workers’ Party membership, accepted the notion that the organisation they led and belonged to should designate itself, officially, a Communist body. Pamphlets published at this time and membership application forms identified the Party as such.[17] It had nothing to do with “Cold War historians … adding the qualifier ‘(Communist)’ into the Party” name, as Morris asserts. (73)
Similarly, when Cannon and a Canadian Party leader, Maurice Spector, came across Leon Trotsky’s Draft Programme of the Communist International: A Critique of Fundamentals at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, publishing the document a year later, Morris comments that the pair “supposedly both came across” what he refers to as a “letter”, whose “origins or even supposed existence … has been doubted by some historians”. (197-198) The sources cited and the well-known historical record contain nothing to sustain such peculiar scepticism.
Those who joined with Cannon in establishing the Communist League of America (Opposition) are not always identified correctly. Morris places Ludwig Lore in the front ranks of this endeavour, which he characterizes as “an oppositional sect to the CPUSA”. (227) Lore, while sympathetic to Trotsky on a personal level, having met the Bolshevik leader during his brief New York stay in 1917, was never an actual advocate of the politics of the Left Opposition. He was supportive, on occasion, of the Foster-Cannon trade-union wing of the Party in its early 1920s factional clashes with the Ruthenberg-Lovestone forces, but Lore was always something of a “freelance”, mercurial and unreliable politically. Expelled from the Workers’ (Communist) Party in 1925, an early victim of the Comintern-fed endeavour to root out any hint of Trotskyist heresy, Lore retained his influence among German American socialists, largely in the journalistic field. By the early 1930s, he was writing a column for the New York Post.
Lore rarely, if ever, had anything to do with the Communist League of America. To be sure, he met with a future CLA member, the Boston-based birth control advocate and dissident Communist, Antoinette Konikow, and others in the winter of 1927-8. Lore, Konikow, Max Eastman, and Eleazer B. Solntsev, the New York representative of the Soviet trade organisation, Amtorg, convened clandestinely to discuss Trotsky and Trotskyism. This led to Eastman publishing The Real Situation in Russia (1928), an unauthorised collection of Trotsky’s key texts from the mid-1920s. The documents that Eastman possessed, translated, and published criticised Stalin and illuminated what was happening in Russia, especially with respect to supplementary material such as “Lenin’s Last Testament”. Cannon later prevailed on his old friend Eastman to donate royalties from the book, put out by a major New York house, Harcourt, Brace and Company, to the CLA’s publishing ventures, but Lore was someone with whom the American Left Opposition never had any serious contact.[18]
Nor is there any evidence that the CLA established by Cannon, which was formed as were all Left Opposition groups in the years 1929-33 as an external faction of the Communist Party, behaved as Morris suggests it did. The notion that Cannon’s League “loosely coordinated” activities with the CP and other groups “from 1929 to try and sway public sentiment further to the left and resist what they collectively called ‘social fascism’”, is not borne out by any evidence I have ever come across. (244) Cannon and CLA members never employed the term “social fascist”. To the extent that they mentioned this term, it was to pillory its sectarian use by the Communist Party, whose promiscuous denigrations of Left Opposition critics during the Third Period brought the revolutionary Left to new lows in the charged rhetoric of repudiation.
When Morris deals with this Communist Party vitriol, and worse, he offers a whitewash of the thuggery and gangsterism Stalinist opponents used in their attacks on Trotskyism. An Israel Amter-led contingent of 60 Communist Party supporters invaded a Cleveland meeting where Cannon was speaking on Trotskyism. Yelling “counter-revolutionary”, “agent of imperialism”, and “traitor”, the CP contingent created such a din that the forum’s continuity was threatened. This necessitated dispersal of the disrupters by a Workers’ Defense Guard. In referring to this as a filibuster (my emphasis) Morris misses something of the acrimony evident in 1929-30. He quotes the New York Times on what this source referred to as a “bloodless war” in a late 1928 clash of Workers’ (Communist) Party members and early Trotskyists near Union Square. But blood was spilled in a number of these Communist Party-orchestrated assaults on freedom of expression in the workers’ movement. (202) As Party leaders labelled the nucleus of an emerging American Trotskyist movement a “White Guard” enemy to be vanquished by whatever means necessary, Cannon and others described this “campaign of violence” against the CLA as a “terrible tragedy and scandalization of the whole Communist movement”. Subsequent commentators acknowledged the viciousness of the sustained attack, noting that it “surpassed anything before known in the American radical movement”.[19]
Morris’s understanding of what then developed in the mid-to-late 1930s on his designated Pan-Socialist Left is an incomprehensible muddle. The fusions, entries, and expulsions of these years cannot really be understood without an appreciation of the Communist Party’s significance, to be sure. But what happened had little to do with Pan-Socialist Left solidarities. Morris, who paints just this kind of picture, does so because he wields a coarse brush that splashes cavalierly over much of the essential features of the complicated organisational canvas of the American Left in these years. To suggest that Cannon, in the mid-1930s “tended to express hope on the topic of working with the CPUSA through the” Socialist Party of America and the Farmer Labor Party is not only wrong, but bizarrely uninformed. (256)
Errors of this sort abound. Morris claims that a Trotskyist faction existed within the Socialist Party (SP) in 1933. It did not. He misunderstands the Trotskyist orientation to the Communist International and its American section before 1933-34, when the Left Opposition constituted itself as a tendency expelled from and outside the Communist Party. Despite this political excommunication, the CLA nevertheless refused to accept its exile from the revolutionary vanguard. Rather, Cannon and the League struggled to influence the Party drifting from but still regarded as tied to the world-historic Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, battling to right its programmatic course. The CLA, like all Left Opposition groups, considered itself, in this early 1930s period, an external faction of the Party and the Comintern, even though both of these bodies regarded such dissident communists as having broken from them. This orientation on the part of Left Oppositionists would end in 1933-4 as Trotsky and his followers were pushed to reconsider their relationship to the Third International by the failure of the Stalin-led CI to effectively oppose Hitler’s rise to power. They repositioned their political stance. No longer declaring themselves an external faction of the Communist International, Trotskyists throughout the world constituted themselves, in the mid-to-late 1930s, an independent force dedicated to the creation of new parties of revolutionary resolve that would form the nucleus of a Fourth International, counterposed to the Moscow-led Third International.
Morris seems oblivious to this fundamental political shift, and thus misunderstands the changing character of relations between the CP and various Trotskyist groups. In the circumstances of 1929-33, for instance, it was, of course, understandable that the nascent Trotskyist movement would support Communist Party candidates in elections, against those nominated by both bourgeois parties and rival political organisations on the Left, such as the Socialist Party. It goes without saying that the CLA would protest police against brutalising demonstrations of the unemployed led by Communists. This was hardly evidence of a Pan-Socialist Left. It was not a “Thirst for the Popular Front”, as Morris suggests. (244) The Communist Party was committed to ostracising Cannon’s Left Opposition and regarded all other socialist and social-democratic political bodies, during the Third Period, as misleaders of the workers’ movement.
Statements that communist rank-and-filers in the CLA, the Lovestoneite Communist Party Opposition, and the CPUSA tried “to work together against the wishes of party leaders” in the aftermath of the Ford Hunger March of 1932 are made without reference to any actual evidence. Morris claims that “the earliest recorded meeting between elements of the former CLA, the new WPUS, the CPUSA, and noncommunist community organizations in terms of building a united front of radical and liberal activists occurred on May Day, 1932, in Hillside, New Jersey”. Referring to the former CLA and the Workers’ Party, a late 1934 fusion of the Muste and Cannon groups with respect to a 1932 meeting suggests how patently wrong Morris must be. Basic chronological impossibility aside, there is a further problem of evidence. The Hillside meeting is described by Morris as an attempt by “little ‘c’ communists and mid-ranking district party organizers to push the issue of a popular front at the local level”. (245)
An article in the CPUSA’s theoretical journal, The Communist, is cited as the only reference to buttress all of this. To be sure, that article does stress that the Central Committee’s directives on the necessity of united-front work in the unemployed movement have been “insufficiently applied”, but the conception of the united front put forward in this article is one in which the Communist Party is in control. Its activists are urged to build the united front against joblessness by approaching other groups to “endorse our demands and be mobilized in the fight for them”. The Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor are attacked in the article for their “fake maneuvers”, and the latter is castigated for playing a “dirty social-fascist role”. Most tellingly, however, the article Morris refers to with respect to this popular-frontist 1932 New Jersey meeting never mentions Hillside, let alone any Trotskyist organisations with which the CP ranks were supposedly making common cause.[20]
In conjuring up Communist League of America and Communist Party united-front work, Morris cannot quite pass over what he notes as the hardening political position of the Party’s “Political World” in its 1929 blockade against “fraternization” with Trotskyists. But he largely ignores abundant evidence of the CP’s attacks on the CLA, including the mobilisation of rank-and-file Communists to be the shock troops of actual physical assaults. It does not help when Morris misreads basic documentary evidence, claiming that the CLA and the CP worked together in the unemployed movement of the early 1930s, sharing a perspective on the struggles of the jobless. There was, of course, bound to be some overlap in the orientation of the CP and its Left Opposition with respect to the crisis of capitalism and the scourge of unemployment. But to claim that “grassroots communists” from these two constituencies “spread out in American communities” and “practiced collaborative Popular Front-style organizing methods as early as 1931” is easily refuted by available evidence. (361)
Relevant and cited documentation, for instance, must be read, interpreted, and presented accurately. Morris’s assertion of CP-CLA common agitational work among the unemployed rests primarily on one article by Arne Swabeck in The Militant. What Swabeck’s article does, however, is the opposite of what Morris says. It assails the CP’s unemployed strategy, rather than aligning with it. Swabeck insisted that the Unemployed Councils of the CP were anything but the achievement Morris claims. Capitalist crisis had not, in 1931, generated “a mass response to the fight for the unemployed led by the Communist vanguard”. This was largely due, according to Swabeck to “the blundering tactics of the Communist Party leadership”, resulting in the “downward curve of the working class movement”. Swabeck criticised the Communist “attempt to set up a national organization of unemployed councils, ready made by mere administrative orders from above and within the artificial limitations of the T.U.U.L”. His suggested alternative was the building of a broad united front animated by a “direct approach to the rank and file through the workshops, the breadlines, the union meetings, but also the formal approach to the organizations officially”. (My emphasis.) This was not happening during the Third Period, certainly not in 1931, and not even in the Party’s later half-turn to the united front, Morris’s allusions to a grassroots Pan-Socialist Left notwithstanding.
Cannon offered an assessment of the early 1930s diametrically different than that presented by Morris: “Whenever we tried to get into a workers organization we would be expelled as counter-revolutionary Trotskyists”, the leader of the CLA complained. “We tried to send delegations to the unemployed meetings. Our credentials would be rejected on the ground that we were enemies of the working class. We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. … The Communist Party and its vast periphery seemed to be hermetically sealed against us”.[21]
With Trotsky’s belief that a Stalinised Communist International was a spent revolutionary force, and that a new International had to be forged, political possibilities opened within what was emerging as the anti-Stalinist Left. One consequence of this was the late 1934 fusion of the CLA and the AWP that formed the Workers’ Party, US. Morris’s depiction of Cannon and the Worker’s Party as somehow critical of the Communist Party’s “refusal to collaborate on a Fourth International” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding: at the time of the fusion of the CLA and the AWP, Trotskyists were not committed to ending what is understatedly referred to as Comintern “oversight”. They had come to rethink their fundamental purpose as a Left Opposition of the Comintern and its American section, which is precisely why a fusion of Cannon’s and Muste’s forces was possible. At this point, American Trotskyists were not looking to join organisationally with the Communists, although they would, of course, have welcomed united-front actions on specific issues. But their relation to the Stalinised Communist International was now characterized by repudiation rather than paedagogy; the Third International was no longer capable of exercising leadership of the world’s revolutionary forces. It follows that Cannon and Trotskyists in the post-1934 years did not seek Communist Party collaboration in the Fourth International because they understood that it was rigidly aligned with the Comintern, which they were now decisively pitted against. (244-245, 256-257)
As Morris moves forward into the 1940s, his claims about the relations of the CP and SWP are not much better. Relying on Donna T. Haverty-Stacke’s Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR (2015), Morris offers a depiction of the state’s legal assault on Cannon, the SWP leadership, and the Trotskyists heading up the Minneapolis teamsters. This resulted in persecutions and jailings under the Alien Registration Law or Smith Act, the original trials and unsuccessful appeal occurring from 1941-3. But he still manages to get some things wrong.
Morris suggests that the SWP survived the incarceration of its leadership because women like Grace Carlson, Rose Karsner, and Dorothy Holmes Schultz “stepped up into seats of power”, adding that Carlson and Karsner “proved essential to maintaining a semblance of solidarity while Cannon and his comrades sat in jail”, performing “the essential function of facilitating meetings, organizing fund raising drives, and selling subscriptions of The Militant”. Carlson, however, could not have done so; like Cannon, she received a 16-month sentence, serving her time in West Virginia’s Alderson Federal Prison Camp for Women from December 1943 to January 1944. Morris does acknowledge that the CP supported the state’s legal assault on the Socialist Workers’ Party, but he does not probe fully the extent to which Browder and the leadership were complicit in the repression. In claiming that “little comments exist in the autobiographical record of the CPUSA’s stance on the prosecution of the Trotskyists”, Morris overrides the recantations of crucially important Communist figures such as Dorothy Healey and John Gates, both of whom would fall to the Smith Act guillotine a few years after it first descended on the Trotskyists.[22] (268-271)
Healey’s comment on the Smith Act, its passage during what some historians condescendingly refer to as the “little Red Scare” of 1940 (it was not so puny to the Socialist Workers’ Party!) and its original use against the Trotskyists in her 1990 memoir is unambiguously and appropriately remorseful:
The Smith Act … was first used against the Trotskyists in Minnesota during the war, and the Communists to our discredit, not only refused to come to their support but actually organized to prevent other people from supporting them. It was a position which would all too soon be thrown back in our faces as we attempted to gather support for our own leaders on trial.
Gates, while wrong in claiming that the CP did not support the prosecution and conviction of the Trotskyists (which, in fact, it did during the 1943 Supreme Court appeal trial), nonetheless, like Healey, recanted much. In operating “toward the Trotskyites on the Stalin dictum that they represented not a legitimate political trend but a counter-revolutionary conspiracy of spies and saboteurs, … enemies of the working class entitled to no legal rights”, Gates realised, “We reaped the harvest of the seeds we ourselves had sown”.[23]
If these are serious political omissions in Morris’s treatment of the SWP and the CP during the era of early 1940s Smith Act attack, the most egregious howler is his claim that the SWP “organized a strike of federal relief workers against the Workers Party of America (WPA)” in 1939, a part of the cause of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raids on Trotskyist offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul that culminated in criminal conspiracy charges and convictions. (268-270) The strike Morris refers to did happen. It was not entirely an SWP affair, however, involving different unemployed organisations, including the Federal Workers’ Section (FWS) of the General Drivers Union, Local 574. Leaders of the FWS, the Trotskyists Max Geltman and Edward Palmquist, were among the 160 relief strikers arrested, roughly one-third of them women. It was a bitter conflict, in which an elderly unemployed union painter, Emil Bergstrom, succumbed to injuries sustained in an epic street battle with armed police. But the WPA strike was of course not waged against any Workers’ Party, but confronted Roosevelt’s New Deal-era Works Progress Administration. Acronyms can indeed throw a spanner into the works of historical narrative, but it is astounding that a historian of labour and the Left would mistake the Works Progress Administration for the Workers’ Party of America. Suggesting that a Trotskyist organisation led a 1939 job action against the very political body that one of its key founders, James Cannon, played a decisive role in establishing in 1921, and that no longer existed by the WPA name 18 years later, is incredulous.[24]
Later in the decade, Morris’s grasp of the history of the SWP is no more sure. His assertion that “thousands of party members from both the CPUSA and the SWP turned to the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace’s campaign” in the 1948 Presidential election is simply a fabrication. (412) The Communist Party, with some rank-and-file objections and a little early prevarication, was indeed eventually all in for Wallace in 1948. The Socialist Workers’ Party, however, was an unbridled critic of the Progressive Party. Cannon delivered a forceful assessment of the Wallace campaign at the SWP’s National Committee Plenum in February 1948, calling for a denunciation of the Progressive Party by “every class criterion”. The Militant was awash with articles denouncing the precariously-constituted third party as nothing more than another capitalist electoral machine, its leader an avowed imperialist. Morris’s lumping of the Trotskyist organisation together with the Communist Party’s embrace of Wallace is yet another assertion unsupported by any cited documentation. As Communists lined up to vote for Wallace, Trotskyists mounted a relentless critique of the third-party candidate and his Stalinist supporters. Acknowledging that there were indeed working-class men and women fed up with the established Democratic and Republican parties who were prepared to vote for Wallace, the SWP called instead for the formation of a Labor Party in which the trade unions exercised actual influence. Running Farrell Dobbs for President and Grace Carlson for Vice-President, the SWP offered neither the CP nor Wallace any support in 1948, with a statement by its presidential ticket declaring: “The Stalinists are now doing the dirty work for Wallace. … To build up a capitalist party is nothing new for the Stalinists. Under Earl Browder they became experts at it”.[25]
The folly of this initiative was recognised by Communists such as Joseph R. Starobin and George Charney, the former referring to the CP’s support for Wallace as a gambling “their entire political capital on the antimonopoly coalition which they assumed the new party to be”. Charney, at first a Wallace enthusiast, was ultimately more condemnatory. When the Progressive Party candidate garnered just over one million votes, well shy of the 5-10 million predicted in Communist Party circles, Charney woke up and asked, “How could we possibly conceive of a Farmer-Labor party without farmers or labor?” As Charney correctly concluded, “The suicidal tactics we pursued throughout the period contradicted a decade and more of wisdom and experience that we had accumulated in the labor and political movement”. The Wallace debacle was, for Charney, the low point of a Party now in a downward spiral of dissolution, one that shaped “an unprecedentedly authoritarian regime” whose fate was determined in decisions made elsewhere, by Stalin and his inner circle. “1948, then, was the turning point in the decline and fall of the American Communist party”, Charney declared. The SWP, however small and inconsequential compared to the CP, had no such post-World War II Waterloo, Morris’s false claims regarding its votes for Wallace notwithstanding.[26]
The Auto Sector & the Communists
Other components of Morris’s Pan-Socialist Left fare no better in the pages of The Many Worlds of American Communism. The 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, led by Muste’s American Workers’ Party, is presented as a joint CP-AWP initiative. An original “positive role played by communists in providing the backbone to striking workers” supposedly prodded Muste to send Louis F. Budenz, his labour organising lieutenant, to open relations with the Toledo Communist Party and build public support for the struggle. There was, to be sure, mutual contributions to the strike on the part of the Communist-organised Unemployed Council and the AWP-led Unemployed League, but it was the latter that was predominant, with the former providing volunteers to shore up picket lines. It is difficult not to conclude that Morris has significantly exaggerated the Communist Party role in the conflict, extrapolating from this misrepresentation the generalisation that Communists exhibited an “ability to mix the ideals of the Labor World with the immediate demands of striking workers to create a sustainable resistance effort”. (313-315)
No other commentator, and there are many who are not referenced in Morris’s book, regards the Communists and their interaction with AWP rivals such as Budenz and Muste in this way. Most authors, in contrast, reflect on the tensions arising as the standard epithet of derision, “social fascist”, was flung at such Leftists. As early as 1931, Communists clashed with Muste supporters (and others) in a Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike. The dual-unionist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), led by Communists, refused to align with Muste or those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Solidarity, in this Third-Period scenario, was a dirty word, a cover for reformist subterfuge. An almost incomprehensible chaos of competing picket lines and multiple/separate meetings of strikers ended in a devastating defeat.
A year before the Toledo strike, the Central Committee of the CP denounced Muste as a “left social fascist”, adding, for good measure, that he was committed to holding “back the radical masses from the path of revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the C.P.U.S.A”. Remembering the nature of CP-AWP relations in Toledo, Budenz, writing as a fierce anti-communist in 1947, claimed that the Reds made no contribution to the victory of auto workers in Toledo, their role largely to stir up a “general confusion”. Muste, commenting on the Communists in a 1935 essay on “Trade Unions and Revolution”, said bluntly that the Comintern and its sections “have failed to function as revolutionary Marxian organizations”, their significance in the workers’ movement reduced to the “calamity they have brought upon the proletarian movement”. Even a historian sympathetic to the Communist Party and prone to elevate its importance in the Auto-Lite events, Roger Keeran, who is the prime secondary source relied on by Morris, noted that, “Communist denunciations of the Musteites as ‘left’ social fascists and Musteite suspicions of the Communists prevented effective cooperation between the two”. Williamson, the Party’s District Organizer in Ohio from 1933-1940, recalled in a 1969 chronicle of his life and work as an American ‘undesirable’, that only three or four older, foreign-born Communists worked in the Auto-Lite plant. The CP, he noted, was completely isolated from “organized contact with the strikers prior to the strike”. Such assessments, however, go unnoticed in The Many Worlds of American Communism.[27]
Nor is Morris any more reliable in discussions of the fluctuating Communist Party-Socialist Party relationship, where the complexities of a SP fractured into distinct groups of Right and Left, Old Guard and Militant, make for an admittedly confusing and often shifting story. The SP confronted both the extreme sectarianism of the Third Period and the blandishments of the Popular Front. A low point of CP-SP relations occurred at the end of the Third Period. A 5,000-strong contingent of Party members, led by Daily Worker editor Clarence Hathaway and Politburo figure Robert Minor, violently assailed and broke up a Socialist rally at Madison Square Garden in mid-February 1934. Events of this notoriety would not soon be forgotten, although there were SPers willing to cosy up to the Communists in the radicalising context and popular frontism of the later 1930s.
This was especially true in industrial-union circles where basic aims of organising the unorganised and securing collective agreements for waged workers long locked out of the labour movement brought an array of revolutionaries and radicals onto the same basic class struggle page. Bert Cochran noted that, by 1935-6, the Socialist Party “was in its period of greatest left ferment” with many in its ranks, including leaders like the Reuther brothers, “enveloped in the popular-front effluvium that suffused the radical milieu of the time”. This drew some ostensible leftists inside the SP to curry favour with the Communist Party, such nuances of the period gestured to lightly in Morris’s account. He tends to see the SP as ‘the odd person out’ in his Pan-Socialist Left, which he does recognise often contained those who were “politically uncollaborative and at times hostile” (235) to the CPUSA, prone to baulk at co-operation with the Communists. This was not an entirely surprising position, given the history of violence directed at Trotskyists over the course of 1929-33 and the Madison Square Garden rout. Rifts between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party often widened, rather than narrowed, as the two organisations found themselves in close proximity during industrial-union drives or building movements of the unemployed. The situation was certainly complicated; it changed, of course, with the movement from the Third Period to the Popular Front.[28]
The auto sector, for instance, was a field in which Communists and Socialists worked together on union drives in the later 1930s. At a basic level, SPers like the Reuthers, Communists such as Robert Travis, and even leading mainstream promoters of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), among them John Brophy and John L. Lewis, might well agree on some of the organisational imperatives of the moment. The early United Automobile Workers’ Union (UAW) often seemed to confirm Morris’s notion of a Pan-Socialist Left. As Cochran notes, “In those popular front-days when many Socialists thought Russia was the workers’ fatherland, there was no differentiation between what the Communists were doing in Local 155 and what the Socialists were doing in Local 174. As a matter of fact, anti-Stalinist radicals in the union thought that [Walter] Reuther was part and parcel of the Communist operation, and Reuther was criticized inside his own [Socialists] Party for being too close to the Communists”. But this ménage-à-trois of convenience among Communists, Socialists, and an emerging labour officialdom would not last.
With the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 presented to the American Party as a fait accompli by Moscow, Reuther had his rationale for breaking from his Red bedfellows. It was not long before CIO union gatherings were passing resolutions barring Communists from office. Popular-frontist non-Communist labor leaders in unions that were bastions of Party influence, like the United Electrical Workers President, James B. Carey, “bounced back to the status quote ante” of the earlier years of the Great Depression. Carey lost an acrimonious battle at the 1941 UE Convention. The political cat was now out of the temporary Pan-Socialist Left bag, with Carey writing to a UE newspaper in language that prefaced the coming Cold War in the unions. “Political acrobats in pink tights posing as labor leaders”, he proclaimed, “are a disgrace to the union and an insult to the membership”.[29]
Communists and Socialists inevitably fell out, then, as swords crossed over this or that political issue, albeit for reasons that did not always see the CP in the wrong. The American Party’s insistence on pressing black and white unity during workplace confrontations no doubt alienated some workers. Their prejudice might be pandered to by Socialist Party organisers like Adolph Germer, an old guardist SPer with notably racist and anti-communist sensibilities. Nonetheless, especially in the Third Period, Communist sectarianism often trumped the kind of solidarity that could advance working-class interests. As worker mobilisation and strikes traumatised management at a handful of Briggs auto plants near Detroit in January 1933, Communist activists played decisive roles, but they were often complemented by Wobblies, Musteites, and Socialists. The CP was, at the time fond, of characterising everyone in leadership roles outside of its ranks as “stool pigeons”. It organised mass meetings in which the only speakers allowed were Communists, and often baulked at collaboration with workers’ representatives outside of their ranks. When Norman Thomas addressed a militant rally at a Highland Park factory, obtaining a $100 donation for the Strike Committee, the Socialist Party figurehead was denounced in a Communist Party leaflet. The company simply wanted to use Thomas’s “fine talk to help break the strike”, claimed the divisive circular.
Little of this seems to register with Morris, and, in his account of the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-7, a leader of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, Genora J. Dollinger, is described as a “frequenter of Michigan’s CPUSA meetings”. Her actual political affiliation, membership in the Socialist Party, is not mentioned. (322) There is nary a glance at Sol Dollinger’s and Genora Johnson Dollinger’s Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers’ Union (2000), which offers a detailed summary of the historiography of the momentous struggle in Flint. Much of this writing discredits attempts to portray the Communist Party as the leading edge of automobile worker activism in the mid-to-late 1930s; a mythology of American Communists as architects of Flint’s successful worker occupation is demolished. Not Automatic, and the many deeply researched studies it references, present a history, not of any Pan-Socialist Left, but of factional confrontation amidst working-class upsurge, in which the Communist Party and the Socialist Party were, while at times fair-weather friends, often and ultimately at loggerheads.[30]
Errors & Erasures
All historians, especially those casting their empirical and analytical nets widely, as Morris has done, are going to falter, making mistakes, even misconstruing developments they need to get right. But the errors in this study are too frequent, the sidestepping of actualities too pronounced, and the overall presentation, however audacious and ambitious, too aligned with a distorted vision of Communist Party activity to be shrugged off as merely faux pas of a routine and inconsequential kind. They are instead markers of a deeply flawed conceptualisation that undermines accuracy. Flags of caution should be kept always at least at half-mast when reading The Many Worlds of American Communism.
How, one might ask, could this happen? A part of an answer, perhaps, lies in a failure to adequately engage with the available secondary sources. Many of these provide a different perspective and suggest qualifications and forebodings Morris would have been well advised to heed. The Many Worlds of American Communism too often bypasses standard historical accounts challenging how he has subsequently chosen to present events and developments. At times, this is not a huge problem. Nonetheless it often becomes disconcerting.
In discussing the Communist-led 1929 textile strikes that rocked Gastonia and elsewhere in the South, for instance, Morris relies largely on newspaper reports, especially the Daily Worker, Philip S. Foner’s volume, The T.U.E.L. to the End of the Gompers Era, 1925-1929 (1991), and sporadic references to a few other texts. (293-298) A vast literature, including Fred Beal’s active-participant account in Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow (1937) and Liston Pope’s fascinating exploration of the socio-cultural place of religion among the workers, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (1942), as well as more recent historical monographs such as John A. Salmond’s Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (1995), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2008), or Goldfield’s The Southern Key, goes unmentioned. In the case of Morris’s account of the 1929 southern textile strikes, canvassing a wider literature might well have buttressed his arguments. For this uncited literature highlights what Morris knows and writes about, extending his arguments empirically and conceptually. The significant ways in which Communist Party activists were not only accepted by desperate workers as champions of their cause comes to the fore in the ample literature on the southern mill strikes. So, too, does the extent to which the Party significantly advanced the struggle against racism and patriarchy in southern mill towns.[31]
In other instances, however, the impact of passing over obvious sources is glaring, the basis of misrepresentation. I have already alluded to how what is cited and not cited in Morris’s account of the Toledo Auto-Lite strike of 1934 compromise his assessment of Communist-Musteite co-operation. His failure to even allude to another major 1934 strike taking place at the same time, the battle between the Trotskyist-led Minneapolis teamsters and their adversaries among trucking employers, in government at the municipal, state, and federal levels, and within the conservative hierarchy of AFL craft unionism, seriously calls into question his insistence that within a Pan-Socialist Left the CP cultivated alliances with other revolutionary groups, sustaining labour struggles. For, in Minneapolis, there is no question that this did not take place. Repeatedly attacking the Trotskyist leadership of the Local Drivers’ Union and the three strikes it led over the course of 1934, the Communist Party separated itself from and offered relentless criticism of a notable victory for industrial unionism. John L. Lewis regarded what happened in the truckers’ strikes as a harbinger of later CIO happenings. The Communist Party, however, did nothing but rain on the Trotskyist parade. It assigned the brother of the Minneapolis strike leaders and once the best friend of James P. Cannon in the Workers’ (Communist) Party of the 1920s, Bill Dunne, to write a scurrilous denunciatory pamphlet with Morris Childs, who would later be outed as a double agent.[32]
In Woman’s Defense
Finally, even when Morris does reference established literature, he often manages to tilt it to his proclivity to present the Communist Party in ways that he considers show it in the best possible light. Mary Inman, author of In Woman’s Defense (1940), a book addressing housework as productive labour, ran into a brick wall of Party resistance to her unorthodox ideas and attempts to organize housewives’ unions. The CP’s approach to feminism in the 1940s was anything but welcoming. Its educational director, Avram Landy, put out a pamphlet, Marxism and the Woman Question, that reiterated the traditional Communist Party position that housework was not productive labour and that women should join with men in trade unions to fight capitalism. Morris cites Rosalyn Baxandall’s essay “The Question Seldom Asked: Women and the CPUSA”, but largely sidesteps her judgements. Baxandall details the avalanche of CPUSA hostility to Inman’s perspective. The dissident socialist-feminist was attacked in the pages of the Communist press, scolded by Landy in front of a Party educational class she taught in southern California, and eventually purged from the Party. Baxandall concludes that, “Organizing or discussing women’s special oppression proved too threatening for the party to handle”.[33]
Morris sees things differently. He is content to list “the needs of women” as ranking with unemployment and racial injustice as areas the Communist Party “considered most important throughout the 1930s and war years”. (349) One might quibble with the notion that women’s issues were more important to Communists in this period than industrial organizing, but the real problem lies elsewhere. Morris ends his discussion with the claim that Inman’s “work remained a large influence on communist women for years”, and that she was part of a group of “culturally artistic” Party members and sympathisers who “continued to normalize the Community World’s emphasis on grass-roots driven pressure against the ailing conditions of capitalism”.[34] (366-367)
In contrast, the most developed commentary on Inman (not cited by Morris), Sherna Berger Gluck’s interview-based assessment, notes that the pioneering socialist feminist found herself in “an escalating war with the Communist party – a war that [she] was still waging in the 1970s” and that included a 1949 self-published mimeographed pamphlet, “Thirteen Years of CPUSA Misleadership on the Woman Question”. Contrary to Morris’s claims, Gluck suggests that while Inman’s ideas, especially on housework and childcare, were essentially the same as those espoused by Marxist feminists in the 1970s, little of this early 1930s and 1940s attempt to address domestic labour survived. As late as 1972, Gluck insists, the CP, rather than nurturing Inman’s legacy, was not above renewing the attack on it.[35]
Scottsboro Trials and ‘Show Trials’
In Morris’s treatment of another sphere where special oppression and super-exploitation converged, among the toiling African American masses, the Communist Party prioritized in many an unemployment campaign, industrial unionising drive, or anti-lynching mobilisation, similar problems intrude. Conceptually, Morris tends to blur the distinction within Communist anti-racist activism between acceptance and promotion of the right to self-determination of “Negro” peoples and the more problematic politics associated with the designation, within the United States, of a Black Belt Nation. The programmatic endorsement of the latter within the Communist Party during the Third Period received little support from African American Communists, save for Harry Haywood, and none from any other organised sector of what Morris refers to as the Pan-Socialist Left. To grasp the divisions and complexities arising from how the Communist International and the CPUSA engaged with black nationalism in the late 1920s and 1930s, Morris provides a clouded gloss on a subject addressed with more sophistication and substance in Mark Solomon’s The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (1998), another book surprisingly unreferenced in The Many Worlds of American Communism.[36]
This problem of obvious sources ignored also intrudes on Morris’s discussion of major Communist Party activities, such as the national campaign that arose when nine black teenagers in Scottsboro, Alabama were falsely accused of rape. A text universally recognized as a major treatment of Scottsboro, Dan Carter’s Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1969) is surprisingly avoided, allowing Morris to bypass clear evidence of Third Period Communist Party sectarianism and the liberal anti-communism that, in part, was nurtured by the ultra-left dogmatism of these years. Carter details how organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) clashed with the CP and the International Labor Defense (ILD) within what should have been a united-front mobilisation to stop the railroading of the Scottsboro defendants to a legal execution. Referring to the NAACP, the Daily Worker deplored that organisation’s sycophantic prostration before the sham justice of the bourgeois regime. Castigating the NAACP’s legalistic approach to the Scottsboro case, Communists insisted that only a militant mass movement of hundreds of thousands would save the accused from conviction and death. Those committed to this must “throw off their blind faith in the ruling class courts of law” and break from the NAACP’s “deeply ingrained … superstitious respect for the paraphernalia of capitalist class government”, refusing to “kiss the rope that hangs their brothers, if only the rope is blessed by a ruling class judge”. For their part, NAACP figures responded in kind, eventually declining to have anything to do with Communists in their defence work on behalf of the Scottsboro defendants.
A black NAACP field worker and accomplished orator early won to collaborative work with the CP, William Pickens, ended up denouncing the Reds he felt misled him and countless others. Pickens suggested that Communists might well welcome a miscarriage of justice, even the lynching of those accused in the Scottsboro case, since it would give the CP “material for still more sensational propaganda among the more ignorant of the colored population”. Communists, Pickens concluded, were basically interested in advancing their revolutionary programme and the plight of the Scottsboro youths was “only a vehicle for that propaganda”. W.E. B. Dubois, then editor of the NAACP magazine, Crisis, deplored the actions of Communists, whom he characterised as “young Jackasses” dooming the nine wrongly accused youth by “threatening judges and yelling for mass action on the part of white southern workers”. Regardless of the political side chosen in this acrimonious early 1930s “clash of dogmas”, it hardly rests easily with Morris’s depiction of the Communist Party’s nurturing of progressive “community-oriented ideals such as defense for the Scottsboro Boys”. (318)
There is no doubt that the CP’s militancy and appropriate opposition to collapsing the Scottsboro defence campaign into legalistic cul-de-sacs appealed to many blacks, fed up with the racism of the segregated South. Equally certain is that the Communists and the International Labor Defense, headed by the Lenin School graduate and black lawyer, William Patterson, won the endorsement of the Scottsboro Nine and did much to promote the struggle to free them. In their jail cells the defendants were said to sing:
I looked over yonder and what did I see
Comin’ for to carry me home?
Mr. William Patterson and the I.L.D.
Comin’ for to carry me home.
But this does not necessarily mean, even granting its critique of the cautious “reformism” of the NAACP, that the Party did not miss many opportunities to broaden the Scottsboro mobilization because of its Third Period ultra-leftism and sectarian assaults on those outside of its ranks. When the distinguished novelist, Theodore Dreiser, worked with the CP in fundraising efforts targeting black and white writers on the Left, he was roundly chastised to “throw away your politics and your theories this once … for it would be an everlasting sin for you to use the bones of seven Negro boys to hammer the drums of social revolution”.
Morris simply avoids the problems arising from a Communist Party failure to effectively contribute to the making of a broad united front of defence. He states that the ILD offered the NAACP “help with the defense”, but “by the end of 1931 the association had fully dropped interest in the case and the ILD took the lead”, essentially leaving Communists in control of what would become the iconic anti-racist cause of the 1930s. Communists found themselves riding a wave of resentment against the injustice foisted on the obviously scapegoated Scottsboro teenagers. Instead of broadening the defence campaign, however, they often narrowed it. When the NAACP, clearly sidelined, helped to pull the ILD out of the depths of debt in 1933, paying the costs of the appeal trials of Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro defendants, the Party’s Politburo launched an attack on the defence organisation that it controlled, insisting that accepting NAACP funds was a “right opportunist error”. A Party theoretical organ bristled with righteous indignation that what needed to be emblazoned on the mastheads of struggle was the necessity of galvanising the masses to repudiate all reformist misleaders. What was lost in this critical moment was the possibility of building a concerted and combined mobilization, a united front endeavour that aligned a legal defence and a national movement of mass protest, the object of which would be to secure the exoneration of the Scottsboro Nine and galvanize black and white workers to resist Jim Crow, lynch law, and the segregationist order.
The independence of the Communist Party did not need to be sacrificed in such a united front. To be built successfully and constantly broadened to sustain the largest possible mobilisation that could thwart the legal lynching of the wrongly accused and convicted Scottsboro defendants, however, such a united front was not going to be advanced with constant denunciation of non-revolutionary elements eager to secure justice in the Jim Crow South. Many of these supporters of the campaign to defend the Scottsboro accused were from black communities and were politically unaffiliated. Such non-Communists did not appreciate the bombardment of criticism labelling them “conscious agents of the ruling bourgeoisie” supposedly intent on “smashing the movement”.[37]
If this has the air of a performative posture of classic Third-Period practice, pillorying the pervasive “social-fascist” presence, Morris would counter that the Scottsboro campaign demonstrated the capacity of the Communist Party’s Labor and Community worlds to override the authority of the Political World. The ILD decision to accept NAACP funding was but one of many examples of this autonomy. But the situation was clearly more complicated than that. Communist Party-led organisations like the ILD undoubtedly attracted non-Communists, the vast bulk of the organisation’s membership, but such progressive participants were also subject to the authority of leading figures like William Patterson and Harry Haywood, both African American CPers trained at the Lenin School in Moscow. Haywood, dispatched to organise workers throughout the South, was an active participant in the “Free the Scottsboro Boys” mobilisation, staunch advocate of the sectarian politics of the Third Period, a voice of the command centre of Communist Party decision-making, the Politburo.
Moreover, the ways in which the Political World continued to exercise sway within the Community World unfolded at the same time as Scottsboro established the Communist Party as a leading anti-racist force in the United States. “Show Trials” targeted Communist Party members guilty of white chauvinism. The most infamous of these ostensible “workers’ courts” took place in New York in 1930 or 1931. A Finnish Communist, August Yokinen, was found guilty of “white chauvinism” for refusing admission of three Black workers to a local Party dance in Harlem. Subjected to a humiliating and highly public judgement — supposedly witnessed and participated in by 1,500-2,000 who crammed into the Harlem Casino, including over 200 official delegates representing more than 130 mass organisations — Yokinen’s shaming, and consequent expulsion from the Party, was proclaimed an activist act of great achievement. It was heralded by Earl Browder as the sharp, anti-racist turn Communists took that served as a prelude to their leadership of the Scottsboro defence, catapulting them into national and international prominence.[38]
Morris, too, presents Yokinen being brought up on the charge of white chauvinism as an entirely laudatory development, one that heralded a “positive turn away from propagandistic and rhetorical activities toward practical organizing work”. The charges against and conviction of Yokinen supposedly changed Party practice to require the presence of African Americans on committees and increase the number of black delegates sent to the Comintern. In 1932, Communists nominated an African American to run for one of the highest political offices in the land, with James Ford serving as the CPUSA’s vice-presidential candidate in the 1932 election. (368-370)
Did combatting white chauvinism have to depend on staging what Morris rightly labels a “show trial”? Social-democratic critics of the Communist Party, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, pointed out that such public hearings anticipated the Moscow Trials of 1937, with their kangaroo court-like proceedings and coerced recantations. Yokinen, who spoke only halting English, was hoisted on a particular kind of petard, one that showcased him to Immigration Department officials. Attending the CP’s Harlem Casino event, these agents of the state wasted no time, after the proceedings ran their course, in arresting Yokinen. Later, the unfortunate, if flawed, Community World Communist was deported, but not before the chagrined Finn led a New York Scottsboro march ending in police clubbings and arrests. Was he really part of the separated “Worlds” of Political and Community Communism? Interrogated by agents of the state, I doubt Yokinen would have regarded the political leadership of the Party he belonged to and that brought him up on charges of white racism somehow separate from the Harlem community in which he worked, engaged in struggles, and faltered in his personal concessions to racism.
Within the supposedly collaborative quarters of the Pan-Socialist Left, Cannon questioned the “shock treatment” that Communist Party leaders proclaimed was necessary in the Yokinen case. The Trotskyist leader saw it as “insulting the intelligence of the Negro workers” with a “stupid campaign” that failed to challenge white chauvinism within the ranks of revolutionary organisations in “an atmosphere free from demagogy, hypocrisy and incitement; an atmosphere created by teachers of the proletariat, not terrorizers”. The Caribbean Communist assigned to defend Yokinen at his trial, Richard B. Moore, certainly acknowledged that the foreign-born worker erred and was guilty of white chauvinism, pleading for understanding. Given the Finnish worker’s remorse, Moore suggested that the man’s transgressions be an occasion for rehabilitation rather than retribution. Moore pointed out that “capitalist imperialism not only doubly oppresses the Negro masses … but … also the foreign-born workers”. Calling on the Party to “remember that a verdict of expulsion in disgrace from the Communist Party is considered by a class-conscious worker as worse than death at the hands of the bourgeois oppressors”, Moore would himself be expelled from the Communist Party in 1942, ironically for pressing too relentlessly the cause of African American nationalism.
Harold Cruse, writing decades later, was having none of Moore’s defence counsel theatrics: he saw Yokinen’s ritualised prosecution and other similar “White Bias Show Trials” as demagogically irresponsible, a divisive religious-like rite that, sadly, would carry forward into the 1940s and 1950s with destructive consequences. With black Party members feeling that it seemed as though it was their Communist duty to “accuse a white worker of white chauvinism” and Harry Haywood forced to denounce “Negro comrades in Harlem” for espousing a “petty-bourgeois line of replacement of white workers by Negroes”, the Communist Party that undoubtedly did much at various times to combat racism was adrift in Third-Period theatrics.
Howard Fast later reflected on the consequences of combatting racism within the Party through “show trials”, public shaming, and what Cannon designated a shabby display of terrorism.
People were expelled from the Party for speaking of a ‘Negro girl’ or of a ‘black night’ for both ‘girl’ and ‘black’ had become magical taboo words, use of which indicated that a white person had deep wells of racism within him. This particular horror mounted to a point where dozens of Communists I knew avoided the company of Negroes, so terrified were they of taboo words or actions that could lead to expulsion. Work among the Negroes collapsed completely.
As the situation worsened year-after-year, Fast noted that, eventually, in the 1950s, William Z. Foster “had to step in to halt what was becoming a threat to the very existence of the Party itself.[39]
The Fate of America’s First Black Communist: Lovett Fort-Whiteman
More tragic still was the case of the notable African-American dissident, a leader like Moore in the 1920s American Negro Labor Congress, Lovett Fort-Whiteman. A flamboyant personality and rousing, if often bombastic, orator, Fort-Whiteman, once again, bridged the worlds of American Communism Morris explores. Reputedly the first African American to join the Communist Party, the Texas-born Fort-Whiteman was dedicated to the arts, aspired in his youth to be an actor, and later turned his hand to authoring a novel on inter-racial love. He came to the Communist Party via membership in the Socialist Party and engagement with the Industrial Workers of the World. By the mid-1920s, Fort-Whiteman was committed to the Communist International and the organisation of workers, black and white, offering a 1928 document countering the Comintern’s turn toward the Black Belt Nation thesis. Morris has a confused account of Fort-Whiteman’s early remarks on the “Negro Problem” at the 1924 Fifth Congress of the Communist International, noting his factionalism and “tendency to overstep authority”, but fails to probe sources that provide a fuller exploration of this African American Communist. (190, 193) There is no doubt that Fort-Whiteman was outspoken and a critic of American Communism’s failure to adequately address the “Negro Question”. That he was a faction fighter was well known: so too were most figures of significance in the Workers (Communist) Party of the 1920s. What is unmentioned is that Fort-Whiteman was also a victim of the Stalinisation of the Communist International, a particularly lamentable one.
A protégé of Jay Lovestone and an important figure in the recruitment of blacks to Ruthenberg’s Party faction, Fort-Whiteman’s significance defies easy categorisation of political, labour, and community spheres of revolutionary activity. He lived the reverence with which many in the CP regarded the Soviet Union, ultimately to his great cost. Attending the Sixth Communist International Congress as a delegate in 1928, Fort-Whiteman apparently made the decision to opt for exile from the United States: he established himself in the Soviet Union, where he married a Russian woman and taught English-speaking students. Fort-Whiteman’s links to Lovestone, ousted from the American Party, and ties to major Comintern figures of the late 1920s – Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek – who fell afoul of Stalin in the Great Purge Trials of the 1930s, marked the African American as someone to watch within Stalin’s Moscow. Combined with Fort-Whiteman’s increasingly argumentative relations with American Communist Party figures visiting the Soviet Union this all placed him in great danger; it was inevitable that the pioneering black Communist would find himself on the outs in Stalin’s consolidating and increasingly repressive regime. By the early-to-mid 1930s, the mercurial African American Communist was marked for inclusion among the “wreckers”, “Trotskyites”, and “terrorists” targeted by Stalin’s orchestrated witch-hunt.
Fort-Whiteman was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. There, falling into ill health, and failing to meet his work quota, he was severely beaten, his teeth knocked out. The dream of a revolutionary internationalist Soviet homeland, free of racism and the exploitation of labour, ended for Fort-Whiteman in the nightmare of the gulag. His death in the winter of 1939 was reported as heart failure, but a witness to Fort-Whiteman’s last hours said he succumbed to starvation, a defeated man clearly overtaken by despair. Fort-Whiteman was, if anything, a heart-breaking, if extreme, expression of where unbridled faith in the Soviet Union under Stalin could end. He helps puts to rest, surely, any notion that the Communist Party and its adherence to the degenerating Comintern of Stalin, was the leading edge of a collaborative Pan-Socialist Left.[40]
Reader Forewarned
Like all books of audacity and ambition, The Many Worlds of American Communism does contain useful material, assembled over years of research. Readers will need to get past the misunderstandings and misreadings of evidence so decisive in Morris’s fantasised Pan-Socialist Left. Scrapping the model of many worlds ordering the book’s treatment of American Communism, focusing less on how Morris interprets the political, labour, and community dimensions of the CP and more on events and developments in these realms, will also help. Those looking at this study can, if they do not let their guard down, possibly come away with some of the fruits of the labour that went into this ambitious study. But they need, sadly, to be wary.
Morris presents a concise overview of the formative years of the Communist underground, utilising documentation relating to this early era that has now been made available online through the efforts of Tim Davenport and the Marxists Internet Archive. This complements Draper’s account in The Roots of American Communism and Zumoff’s overview of the 1912-1921 years in The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, as well as local studies like Vernon L. Pedersen’s history of the CP in Maryland. (1-48) The labour activism of William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Educational League in the 1920s and the work of the Trade Union Unity League in the 1930s, extend the empirical accounts in the volumes of Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States available to Morris. The account of such trade-union work in The Many Worlds of American Communism also supplement the biographical focus of James R. Barrett and Edward Johanningsmeier on Foster as a central figure. When read alongside studies open to criticism of Communism’s role in the labour movement of the 1920s and 1930s, such as segments of Goldfield’s The Southern Key and Bert Cochran’s more jaundiced, but still invaluable, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (1977), Morris’s book provides readers something of use, as long as they approach every page with their eyes wide open and their sceptical sensibilities honed incisively.[41]
The Many Worlds of American Communism: Dénouement
Finally, the outline of the collapse of the Political World of American Communism in the post-World War II years Morris provides is not so much enlightening as revealing. American Communism descended into factional chaos as Earl Browder promoted liquidation of the Party. Browderism jettisoned revolutionary aspirations, conceded that the struggle for civil rights had largely been won within the United States, and embraced “the spirit of Tehran” and its promise of détente, concluding that “peaceful co-existence” was now the operative politics within a world no longer divided by capitalist versus communist sensibilities. Browder proposed folding up the tent of the Communist Party in an unambiguous revisionist concession to what he considered a new political reality: Communists could join with American capitalists the better to secure peace and prosperity for a less conflictual world. Suggesting that the CPUSA could be disbanded and a “Communist Political Association” established in its place, Browder was, in effect, ending the CP’s capacity to intervene in the American electoral arena, running candidates for office. Instead, the new Association would work to encourage the formation of a broad, progressive democratic movement open to all parties.
This was too much for Stalin and his French Cominform lieutenant, Jacques Duclos, who intervened with a critique of Browderism that unleashed a tsunami of American assault on the abandonment of class struggle politics and accommodation to United States imperialism. Criticism was forthcoming, voiced especially by William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis. They had been biding their oppositional time and hedging Party bets until Moscow let it be known how it would react to Browder’s plans. Morris concludes that, “After 18 years of muted ideological division, the only thing keeping the Political World of American Communism alive by 1947 was factional divides”. (405, 414)
As it imploded in the last five years of the 1940s, the CPUSA confronted a wave of repression. A “grim world of anticommunism” unfolded in the McCarthyite assault of the late 1940s and 1950s. American Communism was brought to its knees. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, Morris turns this decline into a diffusion. He suggests that the movement was now “like a snake without a head, broken up into its various worlds of activism”, worlds which he has spent a book suggesting could operate somewhat autonomously from the Political World that was now unambiguously fractured, and that constituted “the dominant political core which had defined the meaning of such activism for years”. (449) Morris’s metaphor is perhaps most revealing to the extent that its author denies its meaning: for a snake without a head may flail around for a time, but it eventually does die. This is the contradiction on which Morris inevitably impales himself.[42]
It is thus not terribly surprising to find Morris ending his ambitious, audacious, and now ambivalent study of American Communism with an upbeat conclusion that the dissolution of the Communist Party meant quite little. The only thing that declined was “the palatability of ‘communism’ as a viable identity for activists to rally behind”. This, of course, was not something to sniff at; its passing into the Cold War night was a considerable loss.
Under the banner of defeat so often raised by ostensible leftists – ‘the struggle continues, brothers and sisters, the struggle continues’ – Morris insists that the ideas and aspirations, social policies and combativity, animating communists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s remained “not only dominant in the postwar era but also wholly continued to evolve and produce new forms of activism by the 1960s”. The extensive list of ongoing Communist commitments named by Morris, which he says have long been labelled as revolutionary, include collective bargaining rights, the ending of Jim Crow, recognition of the unique nature of women’s oppression, unemployment insurance, and “an expansion of the New Deal program”. Absent is any mention of socialism or communism. The disappearance of what Morris recognises as a “strong ideological nucleus” binding the various worlds of American Communism together, is far more of a loss than this study is willing to acknowledge. (451)
The Party that exercised such a hegemonic hold on the American Left in the 1930s squandered much and, ultimately, set the course of transformation in the world’s leading capitalist nation back, rather than enhancing the prospects of socialism and sustaining the kind of revolutionary organisation central to making socialists and developing a strategic sense of how to effectively challenge and ultimately unseat capitalism. We can value what activists in the American Communist movement accomplished, appreciating the difficult mountains of struggle they had to climb to battle entrenched and recalcitrant forces. But we cannot, in the process, fail to call out what demands acknowledgement and cries for critique.
The Communist International and its American section that promised to unite the world’s workers in successful struggle against capitalism so that a better world could be in birth did not deliver. We are much worse off because of this failure. The Many Worlds of American Communism, as audacious and ambitious an undertaking as it may be, does not really advance our understanding of why this happened. Its accuracy in reading sources and presenting the nature of various events, its grappling with the actualities of the Communist Party’s relation to other currents on the Left, to strikes and struggles of all kinds, is so often wanting that the book simply cannot be relied upon. Morris’s interpretation of a movement composed of political, labour, and community sectors that he labels “worlds” muddles too much, clarifies too little, and routinely misrepresents.
Morris is an author who does not know what he does not know: this licenses a lot. Not knowing something is, like the historian who has committed a few insignificant and inevitable errors, nothing to be ashamed of. Appreciating what needs to be researched, reflected upon, and gotten right is what all historians must do. This entails approaching at least parts of any broad study by acknowledging a lack of certainty about specific subjects. The digging – in established writings, in archives and other primary sources, and in weaving this all together analytically– then begins. Not knowing what you do not know is a treacherous occupational hazard, for it can lead to the suffocating comfort of thinking that you are in command of what you are in the dark about. This kind of pulling the wool over one’s own eyes is fatefully blinding, conditioning a cavalier handling of evidence, a slippery slope leading to mistakes and misrepresentations. The Many Worlds of American Communism is a book that may well have suffered from being on this dangerous path. A plethora of promises are not only unfulfilled; that they were never seriously questioned means that an entire interpretive edifice wilts under scrutiny. Morris’s flawed conceptualization is compounded by factual statements that turn out to be false, primary documents that cannot sustain the meaning attributed to them, and historical writing that is too often unreferenced. We are still in need of an audacious and ambitious history of American Communism, one that is an accurate representation of actuality.
Bryan D. Palmer is the author of a number of books on labour and the Left, most recently James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2022).
[1] I have commented on the complexities of Communist Party historiography in a number of writings. See Palmer, “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism”, American Communist History, 2 (December 2003), 139-174; “What Was Great about Theodore Draper and What Was Not”, American Communist History, 8 (June 2009), 15-22; and Palmer, “How Can We Write Better Histories of Communism”, Labour/Le Travail, 83 (Spring 2019), 199-232. My studies of James P. Cannon and the emergence of American Trotskyism have tried to transcend the limitations of the two main historiographic tendencies, exploring Cannon’s 1920s years in the American Communist movement and his eventual break from the Workers (Communist) Party with the realisation that the Communist International under Stalin was pursuing a different course than the revolutionary project he associated with Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. See Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2022). A ‘traditionalist/institutional’ approach, top-down in its concerns, is exemplified in the influential writing of Theodore Draper, who approached the Party’s history in two pioneering late 1950s/early 1960s studies from the vantage point of Cold War liberalism: Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1957); Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: Viking, 1960). Draper and others, such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, insist that communism in the United States was always a foreign import, originating in Moscow and unable to attract the support of the American working class. In contrast, a New Left-inflected school, associated with revisionist social historians who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, places the accent on the local experiences and struggles for social justice that Communists waged in their anti-racist campaigns or unemployment and industrial union mobilizations. At its best, as in James R. Barrett’s William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999) this social history school does attempt to negotiate the relationship of Moscow-influenced Communism and its success or failure in appealing to workers in the United States, and some of the writing on Communism and espionage reaches past old historiographic oppositions, although that field often bears the imprint of early controversies. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005) and Denise M. Lynn, Where Is Juliet Stuart Poyntz? Gender, Spycraft, and Anti-Stalinism in the Early Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). Neither of the two influential historiographic camps, in my view, adequately address Stalinism. Whatever the nuances and complexities of the developing historiography on American Communism, most studies of communism per se remain impaled on the oppositional dilemmas of a traditionalist/revisionist divide. I would argue that it is only among far-left historians with some appreciation of the Trotskyist experience and the necessity of addressing Stalinism that there have been substantial efforts to both recognise the significance of the Communist Party and engage with the negative consequences of Stalinism. See, for instance, Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race & Radicalism in the 1930s & 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Note also Goldfield’s older historiographic essay, “Recent Historiography of the Communist Party, USA”, in Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil, and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook (London: Verso, 1985), 315-356.
[2] Joshua Morris, The Many Worlds of American Communism (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2022) xii-xiii draws on a quintessential revisionist, locally-focused text, Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-1935 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007) and Stephen M. Walt, “One World, Many Theories”, Foreign Policy, 110 (Spring 1998), 29-46 to fashion his understanding of the tripartite nature of the American Communist experience. Hereafter, when quoting or referring to Morris, I will offer page numbers in parentheses. The approach bears some similarities to Fraser M. Ottanelli’s The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), although Morris is more audacious in his claims of the separation of the distinct worlds of American Communism and more ambitious in his chronological reach.
[3] For early commentary on Morris see Joel Wendland-Liu, “Joshua Morris, The Many Worlds of American Communism”, Marx & Philosophy: Review of Books, https://maxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/2104_the-many-worlds-of-american-commuism-by-joshua-morris-reviewed-by-joel-wendland-liu/; Doug Enaa Greene, “The Movements of American Communism”, Counterpunch, 4 August, 2023, https://www.counteounch.org; Randi Storch, “The Worlds of American Communism: An Interview with Author Joshua Morris”, LaborOnLine, 13 December 2022, https://lawcha.org; “The Many Worlds of American Communism”, From the Fields to the Stars! Cosmonaut, 3 June 2020, https://cosmonaut.blog.
[4] Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia remain foundational texts in coming to grips with the political development of Communism in the United States in the years from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the 1920s. Within this traditionalist approach Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984) and Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), offer overviews of a decisive decade and of the broad sweep of the Party’s 70-year life from 1919-1990. Klehr’s Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press/Stanford University, 1978) is also of fundamental importance, recently complemented by John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, “Towards a Prosopography of the American Communist Elite”, American Communist History, 18 (Nos. 3-4, 2019), 175-217; and McIlroy and Campbell, “The Leadership of American Communism, 1924-1929: Sketches for a Prosopographical Portrait”, American Communist History, 19 (Nos. 1-2, 2020), 1-50.
[5] Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism; Storch, Red Chicago.
[6] Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2014); Zumoff, The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021).
[7] As I will establish, Morris is, on too many occasions, unreliable in his reading of sources, both primary and secondary. In the preface to his book, for instance, he praises the revisionist historians for unveiling powerful truths about the influence of the American Communist movement. “[N]ot only were communists effective activists of progressive causes, such as ending Jim Crow and organizing unskilled workers, they were usually at the front of efforts to make said causes mass social movements”. (xi) Without either accepting or rejecting, nuancing or querying, the veracity of this statement, it is illuminating to note that Morris cites Venon L. Pedersen, The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-1957 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 4-5 to sustain his claim. Pedersen does note that the Maryland Communist Party made efforts to recruit blacks and challenge racism, but he also states clearly that, while revisionists make much of “the Communist Party’s advocacy of racial equality and integration”, doing so “well before the birth of the civil rights movement”, historians such as Robin Kelley and Mark Naison “suffer from a resolutely positive perspective of Party work among blacks” and the Party’s “record is not as unblemished” as these writers believe. This is hardly supportive of what Morris claims.
[8] Geoff Eley, “International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin”, New Left Review, 157 (January-February 1986), 92. Pedersen, The Communist Party in Maryland, 4-5, notes that “Communists responded like other Americans to the social forces that ‘Americanized’ the descendants of the immigrant waves of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth”, but they also “intellectually alienated themselves through a conscious and systematic process of ‘Sovietization’”. Morris makes much of Communist memoir publications as expressions of rank-and-file Party members who constituted the Labor and Community Worlds of activist struggle, somewhat apart from the Political World of the Communist leadership. An example is Beatrice Lumpkin, Joy in the Struggle: My Life and Love (New York: International, 2013). As invaluable as this book may be in its outline of a woman’s life dedicated to progressive causes, it tells us too little about the relationship of rank-and-file Communists to the Party leadership, conveying a sense, not of autonomous ‘Worlds’ of community and labor activism, but of a Communist leadership and its organisers drawing rank-and filers into the fray. The memoir conveys the righteousness of Party campaigns for unionization and refusing to be complicit in the pervasiveness of racism, but largely avoids discussion of the connection between the politics of the Communist International and such mobilisations.
[9] Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), 127.
[10] Cochran, Labor and Communism, 137, 13-15, quoting Clayton W. Fountain, Union Guy (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 69, 85.
[11] I leave aside an uncomfortable response to Morris’s language, which often, it seems to me, relies on inappropriate wording destined to confuse as much as it clarifies. For instance, throughout The Many Worlds of American Communism there is reference to what is usually designated “boring from within” as “entryism”. The strategic approach of Communists to American Federation of Labor unions in the 1920s, in which joining such conservative bodies to win influence among their members, strengthen militancy, and advance class struggle politics, rather than establishing entirely separate, or dual, labor organizations, was widely and generally referred to as “boring from within”. It was a protracted, strategic approach to trade union work. Entryism, in contrast, is more usually appreciated as a tactic of revolutionary organizations in their relationship to mass parties of a socialist, social democratic, or labor bent. In entering such organizations, smaller revolutionary bodies have the purpose of recruiting the ranks of such political formations to their politics and, eventually, leaving the entered party with enhanced numbers. Morris’s use of the term entry strikes me as idiosyncratic, if not misplaced, and there are perhaps similar difficulties with his use of sectarian, factionalism, and centrism.
[12] Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, esp. 310-312; Solomon Lozovsky, “Results and Prospects of the United Front”, The Communist International, March 1928, 146; James P. Cannon, “Trade Union Questions”, The Communist, July 1928, reprinted in Prometheus Research Library, ed., James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 (New York: Prometheus Research Library, 1992), 512-520; Zumoff, The Red Thread, 133-162.
[13] Biographical treatments of these Communist leaders include: Oakley C. Johnson, The Day is Coming: Life and Work of Charles E. Ruthenberg (New York: International Publishers, 1957); Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone — Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999); Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism; Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[14] See Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left; James P. Cannon, Notebook of an Agitator (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1958); Cannon The First Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), 150-151. On Browder, James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1997).
[15] Beatrice Lumpkin and Russell Brodine are perhaps two ‘rank-and-file’ Communists who contain index references running to lines rather than single digits in The Many Worlds of American Communism. This is because they authored memoirs Morris draws on: Lumpkin, Joy in the Struggle and Russell Brodine and Virgina Brodine, Fiddle and Fight: A Memoir (New York: International Publishers, 2001). The publication of these memoirs not only marks out their authors as distinctive, but often suggests how interconnected their worlds of Communist involvement were, addressing reverence for the Soviet Union and participation in anti-racist struggles, trade-union activism, peace campaigns, and artistic initiative.
[16] On Coad see Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 119-122; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), 398; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 25, 40-42, 95, 132, 182.
[17] Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 160-161; Draper, The Roots of American Communism, 262-263; C.E. Ruthenberg, From the Third Through the Fourth Convention of the Workers (Communist) Party of America (Chicago: Daily Worker, 1925).
[18] On Lore, see Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia; Paul Buhle, “Ludwig Lore (1875-1942)”, in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1990), 434-435; Kenneth D. Ackerman, Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016). Morris singles out Lore and the Canadian Maurice Spector as two of Cannon’s supporters building the CLA in 1929. Spector’s importance in the emergence of Trotskyism in Canada and the United States is important, of course, but his influence was largely in the literary field, where his theoretical sophistication was of considerable significance. He was decisive in early American Trotskyism’s ambitious publication programme of Trotsky’s writings, for instance, but was less involved in the consolidation of the CLA as an organised presence, doing little to build the League, especially in the 1929 period Morris identifies, and most emphatically not in the United States, where Spector was not even residing at the time. On Spector in this period, see Bryan D. Palmer, “Maurice Spector, James P. Cannon, and the Origins of Canadian Trotskyism”, Labour/Le Travail, 56 (Fall 2005), 91-148; Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938, 110-113, 127-131, 141-143, 169-170, 201-202, and, for the Lore-Eastman meeting and publication of The Real Situation in Russia, 331-335; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964), 515-516.
[19] I offer a detailed account of Communist Party gangsterism and violence in the 1929-33 years in Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 72-96. Cannon is quoted in The History of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944), 73, while Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 167-168 offer a similar judgement.
[20] S. Willner, “Organizational Problems in Our Unemployed Work: United Front Policy of he Movement of the Unemployed and Part-Time Workers and the Relations Between the Revolutionary Unions and the Unemployed Committees”, The Communist, 11 (March 1932), 215-229.
[21] The above paragraphs draw on Arne Swabeck, “The Communists and the Unemployment Crisis”, The Militant, 4 (1 February 1931); Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism, 91-92. Swabeck, incredibly, is described by Morris as “an Oehlerite after 1935”. (256) On the CP half-turn to united fronts from below (i.e., alliance with the ranks of rival organizations but called to break memberships from their leaderships) see Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, esp. 97-112.
[22] For a full account of the Trotskyist Smith Act trials, see Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution Since the Age of FDR (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015).
[23] Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 114-115; John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1958), 127. Browder’s role in supporting the prosecution of the Trotskyist Smith Act defendants is outlined in Philip J. Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), 50-52.
[24] On the WPA strike of 1939 see Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Politics (New York: Monad, 1975), 107-234; Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 132-164; Haverty-Stacke, Trotskyists on Trial, 20-34; Hermann Erickson, “WPA Strike and Trials of 1939”, Minnesota History, 42 (Summer 1971), 202-214.
[25]James P. Cannon, “A Diversion & An Obstacle”, Socialist Workers Party, National Committee Plenum, February 1948, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxiss.org.>1948.02; George Breitman, “Wallace’s Move Spotlights Need for Labor Conference: Third Capitalist Party Cannot Serve Interests of American Workers”, The Militant, 5 January 1948; James P. Cannon, “SWP Statement on Candidacy of Henry Wallace”, The Militant, 5 January 1948; Breitman, “Wallace Veto Power Shows Basic Weakness of 3rd Party Movement”, The Militant, 12 January 1948; Art Preiss, “Battle of the Demagogues”, The Militant, 19 January 1948; Breitman, “Stalinists Plan to Build Wallace Movement – by United Front From Below”, The Militant, 9 February 1948; J.R. Johnson [C.L.R. James], “Wallace’s Program and the Fight Against Monopoly”, The Militant, 16 February 1948; Joseph Hansen, “Dobbs and Carlson to Head ’48 National Ticket of SWP: Will Fight for Socialism in Presidential Campaign”, The Militant, 1 March 1948; Preis, “Henry Wallace – His Record as a Capitalist Politician”, The Militant, 8 March 1948; E.R. Frank, “Wallace, Trotsky and the Third World War Drive”, The Militant, 19 April 1948; Cannon, “Henry Wallace and the Next War”, The Militant, 10 May 1948; Preis, “Daily Worker on Dobbs”, The Militant, 26 July 1948; Preis, “The Socialist Workers Party Stands for Class Politics”, The Militant, 13 September 1948; Preiss, “Wallace – A Defender of Capitalism and Supporter of Imperialist War”, The Militant, 18 October 1948; Preiss, “The Debacle of Wallace’s Third Capitalist Party”, The Militant, 15 November 1948.
[26] Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1975), 155-194 remains a clear and useful account of the relationship of the CP and Wallace in 1947-1948, quoting 155; George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), esp. 173-181.
[27]The above paragraphs draw on and quote from Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, 103; Barret, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism, 173; Louis Francis Budenz, This is My Story (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1947); 96-97; A. J. Muste, “Trade Unions and the Revolution”, in Nat Hentoff, ed., The Essays of A.J. Muste (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 187-188; Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), 112; John Williamson, Dangerous Scot: The Life and Work of an American ‘Undesirable’ (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 104. On Toledo and the Auto-Lite strike see, as well, Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger, Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers Union (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), 3-15; Phillip Korth and Margaret R. Beegle, eds., I Remember Like To-Day: The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934 (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1988).
[28] Cochran, Labor and Communism, 110. The extensive literature on the Socialist Party figures barely at all in Morris’s discussion of the SP. See, for the most recent extensive study, Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press/Potomac Books, 2015) which notes that as the SP and CP participated in a united-front May Day march in New York in 1935, and a founder of the Socialist Party bolted to the Communists, Norman Thomas, who agonised for two years over the suggestion of the SP joining with the CP in political initiatives, confronted the actuality of a number of long-time Socialists welcoming liaisons with the feared Reds. (370-374) One of the leading SP figures sympathetic to the Communist Party in 1937, and staunchly opposed at this point to the Trotskyist entryists, was Wisconsin’s Paul Porter. See his pamphlet Which Way for the Socialist Party (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: State Executive Board, Socialist Party of Wisconsin, 1937). I address some of this in Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38, 909-927.
[29] Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions, 112, 151.
[30] The above paragraphs draw on and quote from Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Union, 92-93; Goldfield, The Southern Key, 223-229. On the Flint Sit-down Strike among many possible accounts see the best overall mainstream history, Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger, Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers’ Union (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), esp. 171-188.
[31] Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL 1925-1929, Volume 10 (New York: International, 1994); Fred E. Beal, Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow (New York: Hillman-Culr, 1937); Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1942); John A. Salmond, Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008); Goldfield, The Southern Key, esp. 262-273.
[32] On the Minneapolis 1934 strikes see Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Monad, 1972); Bryan D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014). William F. Dunne and Morris Childs, Permanent Counter-Revolution: The Role of the Trotzkyites in the Minneapolis Strikes (New York: Workers Library, 1934), a classic Third Period sectarian text, is strong evidence that the Communist Party did not consider itself part of a Pan-Socialist Left during a significant part of the 1930s. On Lewis and his recognition of the significance of the Minneapolis teamster strikes see Saul Alinksy, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 72.
[33] Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women and the CPUSA”, in Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, George Snedeker, eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 157.
[34] On culture and the arts Morris, The Many Worlds of American Communism, 364-367 is especially weak, his few pages dwarfed by the extensive treatment offered in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1996) and, for literary contributions, the unrivalled and exceedingly rich account in Alan M. Wald’s trilogy: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Trinity of Passion: he Literary Left & The Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
[35] Sherna Gluck, “Socialist Feminism Between the Two World Wars: Insights from Oral History”, in Lois Scharf and Jean M. Jensen, eds., Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Movement, 1920-1940 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), 291-295; Sherna Berger Gluck, “From California to Kufr Nameh and Back: Reflections on 40 Years of Feminist Oral History”, in Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 28-29.
[36] Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936, 38-94. Discussion of “the Negro Question” and the “Black Belt Nation” has been a staple of Communist Party historiography for decades. See, among many possible sources, Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York: International Publishers, 1948; Haywood, Black Bolshevik, esp. 218-244; Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), 54-119; Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 315-356; James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962), 227-243; Harvey Klehr and William Thompson, “”Self-Determination in the Black Belt: Origins of a Communist Policy”, Labor History, 30 (Summer 1989), 354-366; Naison, Communists in Harlem, 5-30; Gerald Horne, “The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and African-Americans in Historical Perspective”, in Brown et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, 199-238; Oscar Berland, “The Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ In America, 1919-1931”, Science & Society, 63 (Winter 1999-2000), 411-432; 64 (Summer 2000), 194-217; Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929, 249-364; Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023); Max Shachtman, Race and Revolution, ed., Christopher Phelps (London and New York: Verso, 2003); Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38, 337-378; Paul Le Blanc and Tim Davenport, eds., The ‘American Exceptionalism’ of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940: Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume I (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 408-444.
[37] Quotes in the above paragraphs from Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 67, 85, 102-103; and from Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 123-124, which has extensive commentary on Scottsboro, much of which is congruent with the discussion above.
[38] Carter, Scottsboro, 66; Naison, Communists in Harlem, 47-49, 51; Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 119; Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 139-140; Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, 76.
[39] The above paragraphs draw on and quote from Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, 328-340; Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38, 352; Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party, 209-211; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From its Origins to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 144-146; Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem – Collected Writings, 1920-1972, W. Burghardt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner, eds., (London: Pluto Press, 1988), 59; Howard Fast, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (London: Bodely Head, 1958), 113.
[40] There is extensive discussion of Lovett Fort-Whiteman in Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929; and Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 218-226, 342-246. So vilified was Fort-Whiteman in Comintern circles by the early 1930s, that a positive reference to him in Scott Nearing’s Free Born: an unpublished novel (New York: Urquart Press, 1932), 182 supposedly contributed to the CPUSA cutting the author off from “all contact with its organizations and audiences”. See Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, 343.
[41] Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL to the End of the Gompers Era (New York: International, 1991); History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL, 1925-1929; Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism; Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism; Goldfield, The Southern Key; and Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions.
[42] In his account of Browder’s liquidationism and the consequent crisis of American Communism Morris draws on Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, which is far more negative in its conclusions, among them being the statement that in the United States the “penalty of failure was self-destruction”. Starobin, anything but starry-eyed, understood that Browder’s path forward out of the World War II years failed, but he nevertheless clearly thought Browder’s revisionism and his suggestion of a peaceful co-existence of capitalism and socialism was posed with care, remarkable pragmatism, and a certain tentativeness, a combination of “modesty and theoretical daring”. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, 237, 61-64. Morris does not address Maurice Isserman’s Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), which regards Browderism as a road toward a “stable, ongoing, genuinely democratic movement” (243) that, in its rejection by Moscow, condemned the Party to defeat, rather than the diffusion Morris suggests. Isserman concludes that, “By 1956 the party had virtually no influence outside its own ranks; it had produced no first-rate leaders – no one of the stature of a Tito or Togliatti (or Debs) – who might have been able to lead it to a significant place in American life”. Those Communists who were experienced organizers in past struggles among the unemployed, industrial unionists, and anti-fascist movements largely left the Party. When a new radicalisation emerged in the 1960s what remained of the Communist Party “stood in hostile isolation from most of the new currents that grew up on the left” and veterans of the Communist movement “defeated and dispersed, could provide neither practical leadership nor philosophical guidance to the New Left”. (254-255) The Many Worlds of American Communism presents a counterposed actuality, claiming that “it is inaccurate to describe the postwar years as a decline of American Communism”. (451)
