Communist Influence

Communist Influence in the United States

Communism: Communist Influence in Noncommunist Countries United States

The communist movement in the United States began to take shape after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Leftists in the Socialist Party of America, buoyed by the revolution, broke from the group in 1919 to form two rival parties: the Communist Party, composed primarily of recent Russian and Eastern European immigrants; and the Communist Labor Party, led by American journalist John Reed. Both parties claimed the communist mantle. They fused under instructions from the Comintern in 1922. The party was known as the Workers (Communist) Party of America and other names before renaming itself the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in 1929.

The party’s first years were marked by turbulence and internal division. After World War I, fears of foreign sabotage led to the “Red Scare” of 1919 and 1920. Federal and local police forces launched raids on American radicals and arrested thousands of Communists, wrapping the infant party in suspicion. Members clashed over the appropriate degree of subservience to the Comintern and over the desirability of maintaining a secret branch of the party. Jay Lovestone, the party’s general secretary, was purged and expelled in 1929 for opposing underground operations and advocating purely open political activity.

The CPUSA attained its greatest influence on American politics and labor between 1930 and 1945, under the leadership of Earl Browder. Benefiting from the hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression and from the rise of fascism in Europe, the party found a ready audience in the expanding industrial trade unions and among academics and intellectual luminaries. The American writers John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser all signed party-inspired petitions and betrayed some degree of approval of its aims. Communist party membership peaked at about 80,000 in 1939. However, many members left the party after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, repelled by Soviet cooperation with the Nazi regime. Its reputation recovered in World War II after the United States allied with Stalin’s Russia. In 1944 Browder formally dissolved the party in favor of a new organization, the Communist Political Association. He claimed the new group could more wholeheartedly back the war effort. In 1945 the CPUSA reorganized and replaced Browder with a more hardline leadership.

The outbreak of the Cold War after World War II dealt the CPUSA a blow from which it never recovered. The deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union put pressure on sympathizers to choose between the party and American patriotism. Renewed fears over national security, tied to concerns about infiltration of the government by communist subversives, led to intensified scrutiny of the CPUSA and other political groups considered radical. In 1947 President Harry Truman approved a law that permitted authorities to investigate federal employees and fire those found to be disloyal to the government. That same year the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings into communists’ presence in the motion-picture industry; ten Hollywood screenwriters were imprisoned for a year in 1950 for refusing to testify. Other Hollywood artists and writers suspected of being communists were blacklisted and shunned by the industry. In 1949, 11 top leaders of the CPUSA were convicted under the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act) of 1940, which made it illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the American government. The Internal Security Act of 1950 required the registration of communist and communist-front organizations (communist organizations that conceal their true nature).

From 1950 to 1954 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin used congressional investigations to attack communists, who he claimed had infiltrated the Department of State and other government offices. Most of McCarthy’s charges were never substantiated, and he was ultimately censured by the Senate for his investigative abuses. However, the successful prosecution of Soviet agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, and later revelations from the Soviet archives, leave no doubt that some American communists cooperated in espionage and put ideological convictions ahead of their duty as citizens.

The CPUSA’s membership plummeted from 60,000 in 1948 to 25,000 in 1953 and 10,000 in 1957. It recovered only slightly in subsequent years. Self-styled Marxist-Leninist groups cropped up in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s, but the CPUSA made little impact on events and slipped into ever-greater obscurity. The party might have weathered the adversity of the postwar decades had it been better attuned to core American values, including individualism and capitalism, but its disdain for those beliefs isolated it from grassroots opinion. (1)

In this Section: Communist Influence, Communist Influence in United States and Communist Influence in Canada.

Resources

Notes and References

  1. Encarta Online Encyclopedia

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