The Many Worlds of American Communism

Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations January 2019 The Many Worlds Of American Communism Joshua James Morris Wayne State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Morris, Joshua James, "The Many Worlds Of American Communism" (2019). Wayne State University Dissertations. 2178. https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/2178 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. THE MANY WORLDS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM by JOSHUA JAMES MORRIS DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2019 MAJOR: HISTORY (American) Approved By: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ © COPYRIGHT BY JOSHUA JAMES MORRIS 2019 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have so many to thank for this project, starting with my mom and my dad for always believing in me. I also want to thank my committee, Elizabeth Faue, Fran Shor, Aaron Retish, Vicki Ruiz, and Louis Jones, without which I would not have been able to fully develop my research. My inspiration to continue studies in history I owe to Harold Marcuse and John Lloyd; they always made history something to embrace as both a passion and a challenge. I want to give a special thanks to Ronald Aronson for helping me with some of my research here in Detroit. I also want to give a tremendous thank you to all those whom I interviewed and took part in this project: Armando Ramirez, Beatrice Lumpkin, Danny Rubin, Marc Brodine, Rossana Cambron, Arturo Cambron, Luis Rivas, Rita Verner, Michele Artt, Scott Marshall, and Betty Smith. ii PREFACE: THE MANY WORLDS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM In 2014, amidst a hot and humid June afternoon, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held its 95th anniversary conference. There, members young and old gathered to meet and greet as well as vote in the new generation of Party leaders. The conference numbered over 700 and attracted a large number of youth activists ranging from students to hard working young adults. In recent years, a growing interest in the concepts of Marxism, communism, and anarchism developed around the world as the international economy reached a crisis point during the 2008 recession. After the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital In the 21st Century in 2013, which unveiled systemic conditions about income inequality throughout the modern world system, sales of Karl Marx's Das Kapital soared throughout Britain and the United States. He Nian, a Chinese theatre director, re-created an all-singing, all-dancing musical to commemorate Marx's work. English literature professor Terry Eagleton published Why Marx Was Right in 2011 while French Maoist philosopher Alian Badiou published The Communist Hypothesis to rally activists into a new era of communist theory.1 In the 2016 Presidential Election, the CPUSA ardently advocated for opposition against Donald Trump in a manner that mimicked their historical attitude toward the 'lesser of two evils,' earning them both attention and criticism from American activists, leftists, students, and unionists. In November 2018, the Historians of American Communism gathered in Williamstown to discuss the 100 years of American Communism and its legacy in the United States. Finally, in the summer of 2019, the CPUSA will hold its centennial celebration as one of the oldest radical political parties in the nation. This dissertation examines the American communist movement between 1928 and 1957 by dividing up the narrative into worlds of activity; particularly political activism, labor organizing, and community organizing. It argues that American radicalism takes on features that distinguish it from a specific effort, such as civil rights legislation or collective bargaining agreements. As a radical tradition, American Communism has a difficult and sometimes contradictory history; conflated between questions iii about ideological motivation and the practical gains netted by American workers and citizens as a result of such motivation. American communist history is not a history of organizations, nor is it a history of how certain ideologies had effects on the actions of individuals. It is a history of people and how they chose to balance their lives on the virtues of American democracy and the ideals of Marxist egalitarianism. This research asserts that American Communism can be understood in a variety of ways depending upon the context from which the examined organizers and activists engaged with American citizens. Social movements take on meanings that are very personal to those who experienced them, as well as to those who examine them. When one examines the work of communist political activists, they will find experiences that unveil a deeply ideological political movement. By switching to an examination of communist labor activists, one reveals a much different narrative; one focused on legal strategies for obtaining collective bargaining rights and that cared less about the conclusions of a political committee than it did the demands of local workers. Finally, if one examines the work of communist organizing in the communities against institutionalized forms of societal oppression, they will find a more emotional and cultural narrative that sees American radicals trying to balance the ideals of the nation with the ideology of Marxism. I refer to the "many worlds" of American Communism as the variances of experience displayed in the historiographical and biographical record in an effort to unpack how American Communism meant different things to different people, and most importantly that these meanings changed with the individuals as well. American Communist history from 1928 to 1957 is best understood as one segment of long-standing tradition encompassing a variety of radical political, labor, and civil rights movements dating back to the late 19th century.2 By the 1930s, American Communism was indeed a "world political movement,” but it also existed as a domestic movement with localized influences that varied in experience from nation-to-nation. As a movement in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, American Communism varied from state-to-state, dependent upon geopolitical circumstances, iv social tensions over issues such as race, the extent of unemployment in dominant industries, and the palatability of industrial unionism within a given workforce. Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on American Communism has expanded as newer sources became available, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDMII/RGAJPI) digitized its archives on the CPUSA, and new methods of interpreting history, such as an emphasis on personal experiences, became more widely used. James Barrett's William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism along with Randi Storch's Red Chicago were among the first works to benefit from newer sources and demonstrated a clear break between the 'traditional' and 'revisionist' schools of thought, as put by Vernon L. Pedersen in The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919- 57. The traditionalist school, best represented by Theodore Draper's The Roots of American Communism and Harvey Klehr's The Heyday of American Communism, viewed the ideological link between the CPUSA and the Soviet Union as the most significant aspect of this history, particularly when defining the boundaries of what made a particular strike, event, or organization “communist.” Seeking to understand American communism as a domestic ideological movement, the revisionist school countered with an emphasis on the "correction of injustices in American society," with works such as Mark Naison's Communists in Harlem during the Depression and Robin Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Black Radicalism and the Communist Party of Alabama.3 The traditionalist school suffers from a general negative perspective of communist ideology and treats it as a foreign/alien movement that only existed because of the Soviet Union. The revisionists suffer from a nuanced and overly positive perspective and attempts a 'so what' attitude to the counterevidence revealed by the opening of the Russian archives. Both schools, however, unveil an over-arching handicap that prevents the writers and readers of the subject to fully grasp the complexity of American Communism. At the root of the traditionalist and revisionist schools of American Communist history is the placement of the CPUSA and its leadership class as the nucleus of the entire history; where the narrative v both begins and ends as a political history of dissidents and radicals. Both schools use the CPUSA as the nexus from which their conclusions are drawn: The CPUSA's ideological link and involvement in the Comintern served as the foundation for the traditionalist claim that American Communism was merely a front for Soviet espionage and subversive activities. The CPUSA's promotion of African American, labor, and civil rights as a political policy served as a foundation for the revisionists rejecting the significance of traditionalist claims. In both

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