ALL THINGS CONSIDERED . . . ALL THINGS CONSIDERED . . .The story of the Communist Party is in some measure the story of the rise and fall of a dream of human betterment. To scrutinize the dream while respecting the dreamers is the historian’s special challenge.
—Michael Kazin, American Dreamers
In January 1950, Gerald W. Johnson, a popular white southern journalist who was not a communist, wrote an article for Harpers magazine titled “Why Communists Are Valuable.”
“If the American Communist Party had done nothing more than force the issue of racial justice onto the national agenda and energize American industrial workers, it would have accomplished a great deal,” he said. “The Party has had a very definite educational and moral value for the ordinary American. . . . Americans think more about oppressed minorities than we could have without the Communists, and labor leaders work harder and think faster than they would without them.” Johnson considered Reds “antidotes to apathy in a democracy,’ since they demonstrated that “ideas cannot be put down by law.”1
Just a month later, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy called a press conference to announce that he’d identified more than two hundred “card carrying members of the Communist Party” in the U.S. State Department. It marked the beginning of a six-year effort to flush out Reds and fellow travelers in government, in Hollywood, in schools and universities, and in the armed forces. Defenders of radical ideas became targets. U.S. communists were suspected of subversion, spying, and of operating as foreign agents. Many lost their jobs. Careers were destroyed, and families divided in the frenzied, anti-Red panic of the 1950s.
Ironically, just two decades earlier, communists were engaged in expanding the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In Powell v. Alabama in 1932, ILD attorneys appealed the Scottsboro convictions on the basis that the black teens did not receive fair, impartial, and deliberate trials and that they were denied the right to competent legal counsel guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.2
After the State of Alabama countered that the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel applied only to the federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on appeal that legal counsel is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to everyone facing a potential death sentence. This had major implications for how justice would subsequently be pursued in the state courts.
In Norris v. Alabama, three years later, the ILD charged that the Scottsboro teens were tried by all white juries and therefore not juries of their peers. The high court agreed, holding that exclusion of African Americans from jury service did in fact violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Both appeals, fought entirely on constitutional issues, saved the Scottsboro teens’ lives. This strategy prevented state courts from convicting the young men and Alabama from executing them. If the lower courts had not been so careless, the teens might have died.3
In February 1937, in Herndon v. Lowry, the ILD exposed Georgia’s use of the criminal justice system to make Angelo Herndon a political prisoner by threatening him with death for attempting to incite insurrection. In April 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that a state must show a direct connection between revolutionary speech and an actual attempt to overthrow the government in order to prosecute an “inciting insurrection” charge. Possession of radical literature was not sufficient to convict. This decision broadened the protections of the First Amendment entitlement of free speech.
Despite substantial legal, political, and even social contributions, however, the party’s failures tend to be more vividly remembered. While the Reds fought oppression of the poor, of minorities, and of the working class, while they dragged oppressors into the national spotlight and generated public outrage, they made a lot of mistakes.
Their mass protest tactics subjected them to accusations of sacrificing the Scottsboro teens for political ends, and their fight for Black equality (and nearly everything else) was often attributed to promoting Moscow’s agenda. With respect to labor, historian Theodore Draper maintains that Red organizers were “allergic to compromise, and employers were usually determined not to compromise with them. . . . A Communist strike was an all or nothing gamble.”4
It is true at the same time, however, that without the Reds’ tenacity much injustice in the United States would have gone unreported. Communists were skilled in putting oppressors on the defensive. NAACP legal counsel Charles Hamilton Houston admired the ILD’s fiery national secretary, William Patterson, for just that reason.
“Through their bold and uncompromising intervention, the communists have been the first to fire the masses with a sense of their raw potential power and the first to preach openly the doctrine of mass resistance and mass struggle.” he told the YWCA national convention in Philadelphia on May 5, 1934. “They make it impossible for any aspirant to Negro leadership to advocate less than full economic, political and social equality and expect to retain the respect and confidence of the group.”5
Fifteen years later, the NAACP’s staunchly anticommunist Henry Lee Moon wrote that “offering no quarter the Communists put the South on the defensive in the eyes of the whole world. They stirred the imagination of Negroes and inspired the hope of ultimate justice.”6
Finally, historian Michael Kazin’s more contemporary assessment maintains that the Reds’ greatest legacy may have been “putting pressure on Franklin D. Roosevelt and other New Deal liberals to dismantle barriers between people who were deemed worthy of government help and those who were not.”7
Any legacy at all, however, was threatened on February 25, 1956, when Russia’s premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered his “Secret Speech” before a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The text was subsequently acquired by the CIA and published in the New York Times several months later. Khrushchev told his comrades:
When we analyze the practice of Stalin in regard to the direction of the party and of the country, when we pause to consider everything which Stalin perpetrated, we must be convinced that Lenin’s fears were justified. The negative characteristics of Stalin, which in Lenin’s time, were only incipient, transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin, which caused untold harm to our party.
We have to consider seriously and analyze correctly this matter in order that we may preclude any possibility of a repetition in any form whatever of what took place during the life of Stalin, who absolutely did not tolerate collegiality in leadership and in work, and who practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything which opposed him, but also toward that which seemed to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts.8
Twenty-five years later, Steve Nelson, a member of the CPUSA Central Committee who’d organized countless workers and the unemployed and served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, recalled the effect of this revelation:
The words . . . were like bullets, and each found its place in the hearts of the veteran communists. Tears streamed down the faces of men and women who had spent forty or more years, their whole adult lives, in the movement. I looked into the faces of people who had been beaten up or jailed with me and thought of the hundreds that I had encouraged to join the Party. My head was swimming. I thought, “All the questions that were raised along the way now require new answers, and there’s no longer one seat of wisdom where we can find them. We’re on our own now.”9
The Communist Party of the United States was decimated as many thousands of members resigned and fellow travelers simply walked away.
Nat Ross, Rob Hall, Ralph Ellis, Lowell Wakefield, and Jesse Wakefield left the party. Angelo Herndon was expelled in 1944, Earl Browder in 1946, and Harry Haywood in 1959. William Patterson, Joe Gelders, Ben Davis, Sid Benson, Jim and Isabelle Allen, Jane and Darlie Speed, Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein, Don and Alice Burke, Hosea Hudson, Joseph Brodsky, Amy Schechter, and Al Murphy all stayed.
A higher percentage of black than white comrades remained. The Soviet Union, after all, had no history of enslaving black people. The party fought to end segregation and to achieve economic equality, and Moscow welcomed black American émigrés during the Great Depression. William Patterson and Ben Davis maintained that Moscow would never let up on the United States for its Jim Crow hypocrisy and would guarantee that segregation remained at the forefront of American political discourse. Patterson felt personal solidarity with Moscow because of the Soviet Union’s aid to national liberation movements in Africa, a cause that Washington opposed.10
Others, including fellow travelers, could not forget the decisive role that the Red Army had played in the recent Allied victory. The Russians suffered more than fifteen million casualties—the highest, by far, of any of the combatants.
U.S. party members, some naively, had accepted the Soviet model as one that could best serve the interests of the United States. During the Great Depression, those who’d visited Moscow reported that there was no unemployment there and that race discrimination was not practiced. Capitalism, they believed, could never reform itself. Communism worked in the Soviet Union because the party was organized like the military. Decisions came from the top, and orders were carried out on the ground. They had faith in this efficient interim structure as the path to full democracy.
In the 1930s, Americans benefitted from CPUSA’s involvement wherever life was hard. Home evictions were reversed; utilities were turned back on; people were fed, sheltered, and defended; labor and the unemployed were organized; and ordinary men and women found the courage to stand up to their oppressors. Many who abandoned the party in the late 1950s, regardless of their feelings about Stalin, continued to have faith in the viability of communism with a “small c.” CPUSA, after all, had addressed some of the most critical issues of the Depression era. It had shaped domestic history by helping to advance a national progressive agenda. After Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” however, comrades who’d spent their entire adult lives working to build the party felt unmoored. The revelations were mind-bending, frightening, heartbreaking, and humiliating.