History of the Communist Party USA

Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is an American political party with a communist platform that was founded in 1919 in Chicago. The history of the Communist Party USA is deeply rooted in the history of the American labor movement and the Communist Party USA indeed played critical roles in the earliest struggles to organize American workers into unions as well as the later civil rights and anti-war movements. The history of CPUSA is ideologically complex and tied to communism, labor movements, and Marxism. Many party members were forced to work covertly due to the high level of political repression in the United States against Communists. CPUSA faced many challenges in gaining a foothold in the United States as they endured two eras of the Red Scare and never experienced significant electoral success. Despite struggling to become a major electoral player, CPUSA was the most prominent leftist party in the United States. CPUSA developed close ties with the Soviet Union, which led to them being financially linked.

Membership of the CPUSA peaked in the late 1940s, with over 75,000 members in 1947. But their influence spanned beyond just their membership as some candidates in national elections garnered over 100,000 votes. However, the CPUSA began to decline in membership in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, presumably due to the Red Scare where the US government publicly tried and convicted Communists and CPUSA members on the grounds of the Smith Act. CPUSA faced challenges when the Dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, as they lost their main source of funding. The Communist Party USA is still alive today but its membership and activity have shifted to a more online medium. Despite staying active through various challenges, including a significant fracturing in the 1990s, they have never managed to reach their previous heights.

History

1919–1921: Formation and early history

The first socialist political party in the United States was the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), formed in 1876 and for many years a viable force in the international socialist movement. By the mid-1890s, the SLP came under the influence of Daniel De Leon and his radical views led to widespread discontent amongst the members, leading to the formation of the reformist-oriented Socialist Party of America (SPA) around the turn of the 20th century. A left-wing gradually emerged within the Socialist Party, much to the consternation of many party leaders. The new Left wing of the SPA attempted to win a majority of executive positions within the party's internal elections, after the election results, in which the Left wing of the party succeeded in electing many candidates, moderate leadership subsequently invalidated the 1919 elections. This flouting of democracy within the party set the stage for factions to split off to begin forming a new Communist Party.

In January 1919, Vladimir Lenin invited the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party to join the Communist International (Comintern). During the spring of 1919, the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, buoyed by a large influx of new members from countries involved in the Russian Revolution, prepared to wrest control from the smaller controlling faction of moderate socialists. A referendum to join Comintern passed with 90% support, but the incumbent leadership suppressed the results. Elections for the party's National Executive Committee resulted in 12 leftists being elected out of a total of 15. Calls were made to expel moderates from the party. The moderate incumbents struck back by expelling several state organizations, half a dozen language federations and many locals in all two-thirds of the membership.

The Socialist Party then called an emergency convention on August 30, 1919. The party's Left Wing Section made plans at a June conference of its own to regain control of the party by sending delegations from the sections of the party that had been expelled to the convention to demand that they be seated. However, the language federations, eventually joined by C. E. Ruthenberg and Louis C. Fraina, turned away from that effort and formed their own party, the Communist Party of America at a separate convention on September 1, 1919. Meanwhile, plans led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow to crash the Socialist Party Convention went ahead. Tipped off, the incumbents called the police, who obligingly expelled the leftists from the hall. The remaining leftist delegates walked out and meeting with the expelled delegates formed the Communist Labor Party on August 30, 1919.

The Comintern was not happy with two communist parties and in January 1920 dispatched an order that the two parties, which consisted of about 12,000 members, merge under the name United Communist Party and to follow the party line established in Moscow. Part of the Communist Party of America under the leadership of Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone did this, but a faction under the leadership of Nicholas I. Hourwich and Alexander Bittelman continued to operate independently as the Communist Party of America. A more strongly worded directive from the Comintern eventually did the trick and the parties were merged in May 1921. Only five percent of the members of the newly formed party were native English-speakers. Many of the members came from the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).Buhle, ''Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day'' (1987)

1919–1923: Red Scare and the Communist Party USA

From its inception, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) came under attack from state and federal governments and later the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation. In 1919, after a series of unattributed bombings and attempted assassinations of government officials and judges (later traced to militant adherents of the radical anarchist Luigi Galleani), the Department of Justice headed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting thousands of foreign-born party members, many of whom the government deported. The Communist Party was forced underground and took to the use of pseudonyms and secret meetings in an effort to evade the authorities.

The party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It re-emerged in the last days of 1921 as a legal political party called the Workers Party of America (WPA). As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. However, an element of the party remained permanently underground and came to be known as the "CPUSA secret apparatus". During this time, immigrants from Eastern Europe are said to have played a very prominent role in the Communist Party.Klehr, Harvey. ''Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite''. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press. A majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and an "overwhelming" percentage of the Communist Party consisted of recent immigrants.Glazer, Nathan ''The Social Basis of American Communism.''

1923–1929: Factional war

Now that the above ground element was legal, the Communists decided that their central task was to develop roots within the working class. This move away from hopes of revolution in the near future to a more nuanced approach was accelerated by the decisions of the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern held in 1925. The Fifth World Congress decided that the period between 1917 and 1924 had been one of revolutionary upsurge, but that the new period was marked by the stabilization of capitalism and that revolutionary attempts in the near future were to be stopped. The American Communists embarked then on the arduous work of locating and winning allies.

That work was complicated by factional struggles within the Communist Party which quickly developed a number of more or less fixed factional groupings within its leadership: a faction around the party's Executive Secretary C. E. Ruthenberg, which was largely organized by his supporter Jay Lovestone; and the Foster-Cannon faction, headed by William Z. Foster, who headed the party's Trade Union Educational League (TUEL); and James P. Cannon, who led the International Labor Defense (ILD) organization.

Foster, who had been deeply involved in the Steel strike of 1919 and had been a long-time syndicalist and a Wobbly, had strong bonds with the progressive leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) and through them with the Progressive Party and nascent farmer-labor parties. Under pressure from the Comintern, the party broke off relations with both groups in 1924. In 1925, the Comintern through its representative Sergei Gusev ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's faction, which Foster complied. However, the factional infighting within the Communist Party did not end as the Communist leadership of the New York locals of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) lost the 1926 strike of cloakmakers in New York City in large part because of intra-party factional rivalries.

Ruthenberg died in 1927 and his ally Lovestone succeeded him as party secretary. Cannon attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 hoping to use his connections with leading circles within it to regain the advantage against the Lovestone faction, but Cannon and Maurice Spector of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) were accidentally given a copy of Leon Trotsky's "Critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern" that they were instructed to read and return. Persuaded by its contents, they came to an agreement to return to the United States and campaign for the document's positions. A copy of the document was then smuggled out of the country in a child's toy. Back in the United States, Cannon and his close associates in the ILD such as Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, dubbed the "three generals without an army", began to organize support for Trotsky's theses. However, as this attempt to develop a Left Opposition came to light, they and their supporters were expelled. Cannon and his followers organized the Communist League of America (CLA) as a section of Trotsky's International Left Opposition (ILO).

At the same Congress, Lovestone had impressed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as a strong supporter of Nikolai Bukharin, the general secretary of the Comintern. This was to have unfortunate consequences for Lovestone as in 1929 Bukharin was on the losing end of a struggle with Joseph Stalin and was purged from his position on the Politburo and removed as head of the Comintern. In a reversal of the events of 1925, a Comintern delegation sent to the United States demanded that Lovestone resign as party secretary in favor of his archrival Foster despite the fact that Lovestone enjoyed the support of the vast majority of the American party's membership. Lovestone traveled to the Soviet Union and appealed directly to the Comintern. Stalin informed Lovestone that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporter of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".

When Lovestone returned to the United States, he and his ally Benjamin Gitlow were purged despite holding the leadership of the party. Ostensibly, this was not due to Lovestone's insubordination in challenging a decision by Stalin, but for his support for American exceptionalism

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