American Communist History最新文献

{"title":"A “Renewed Emphasis on Youth”: The CPUSA and the Youth and Student Movement, 1958-1967","authors":"Tony Pecinovsky","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1664830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1664830","url":null,"abstract":"Most histories of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) end in 1956. The CPUSA was a “shattered organization” “afflicted with a mortal illness” and played a marginal role after 1956 as its “membership plummeted,” so the dominant, traditional narrative suggests. Just a little context. The Khrushchev revelations and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, as well as nearly a decade of domestic Red Scare repression through the Smith and McCarran Acts, weakened the Party. But it was not destroyed. Of course, there are a few excellent examples that challenge this traditional narrative. Gerald Horne’s biography of William L Patterson, Sara Rzeszutek’s biography of James and Esther Cooper Jackson, and Gary Murrell’s biography of Herbert Aptheker. But, much more needs to be done. That these challenges take the shape of biographies – and not general histories – is also worth noting. My research is largely focused on the post-1956 period, and as such I hope to help uncover some of the hidden contributions’ communists made during the 2nd half of the 20th Century. In my collection of short biographies to be published this summer, I enlarge the historical lens to focus on communist defense of the Bill of Rights, the youth and student upsurge of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war peace offensive, Charlene Mitchell’s campaign for president of the United States, and the birth of the Party-led National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), among other topics.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"325 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1664830","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48524889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a Prosopography of the American Communist Elite: The Foundation Years, 1919–1923","authors":"J. McIlroy, A. Campbell","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1664840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1664840","url":null,"abstract":"A prosopographical study of the early central committee members of the Workers Party of America.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"175 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1664840","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43240813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Passaic Textile Strike Documentary: The Role of Film in Building Solidarity","authors":"J. Zumoff","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1651159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1651159","url":null,"abstract":"From January 1926 through March 1927, more than 15,000 textile workers in New Jersey struck against a wage cut, for shorter hours, and for better conditions. Remembered as the Passaic strike, it also involved wool and worsted workers in nearby Garfield and Clifton, and silk dying workers in what was then East Paterson. The largely unskilled workers—mainly immigrants from East and Central Europe and Italy, and half women—organized mass pickets and near-daily meetings in the face of police violence. Just to give a sense of this violence: on 2 March 1926, a dozen mounted policemen and 65 policemen on foot attacked a 2,000-strong picket. During the strike, police arrested more than 1,000 strikers. The Passaic strike was the first mass workers’ struggle in which the Communist Party (CP) played a leading role. At the time, the CP had not fully embraced Stalinism and both James P. Cannon, the future American Trotskyist, and Jay Lovestone, the future leader of the pro-Bukharin Right Opposition, remained in leading positions. Since the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), the textile union recognized by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), refused to help the wool workers, Communists organized the United Front Committee of Textile Workers (UFC), which led the strike. The most famous Communist was the head organizer of the UFC, Albert Weisbord, a New York native who had recently graduated from Harvard Law School.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"269 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1651159","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47246409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between Communism and Abstraction: Kazimir Malevich's White on White in America","authors":"Allison Leigh","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1464844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464844","url":null,"abstract":"In the spring or summer of 1918, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) began a painting which is now most often referred to as the Suprematist Composition: White on White (Fig. 1). Currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York, it is a work that hovers just on the edge of monumentality without quite attaining it. Neither overly large nor altogether precious in scale, the canvas measures a perfect 79.4 79.4 centimeters; it is a geometry that feels like a reckoning in person. One is confronted first by this utter squareness; the simplicity of the barren form and the totality of its organizing principle within the four-sided frame. Within those four bounding right angles floats a square form. It is all murky, silvery gray whiteness, vibrating within the expanse of the bordering space. It is a ghostly form, like snow caught just as a shadow passed across it, making it ashen, drained, and bloodless. It is not transparent or pearly though, this white Malevich gives us; it does not have the sheen of ivory or frost. It is instead hoary cream, it has a waxen quality that is somehow both deathly and too alive. That lone square form is total presence in its absolute planarity, it faces us with an austerity that is slightly unsettling. And all around it is more whiteness, but of a different quality. The ground plane is pasty but natural; it lacks the steely ambiguity of the square shape; it is warmer and thicker than the pallid chalkiness of the square floating on its surface. Neither white can quite be described as achromatic or colorless though. Both are brought about vigorously; the hand of the artist is where present from the facture’s forthright transparency. One can see how Malevich hit the canvas with the loaded brush; the painting is a record of the weight with which he applied each mark, how he created a topography of restless energy. This is a painting that is notoriously difficult to describe. But it is an important work in the artist’s oeuvre. Some have said it represents the very end of painting, the limit","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"310 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464844","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47468025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The CPUSA’s Trade Unionism during Third Period Communism, 1929–1934","authors":"Victor G. Devinatz","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1608710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1608710","url":null,"abstract":"Before the opening of the Soviet Archives, much written on the Communist Party, USA’s (CPUSA) trade unionism during “Third Period Communism” (1929–1934) has argued that the Party’s strategy of establishing “revolutionary” or “red” industrial unions affiliated to the CPUSA-led Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), as opposed to continuing to “bore from within” the American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions through the Party-led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), was a dismal flop. At the time of the TUUL’s formation at the end of August 1929, the CPUSA’s recently expelled factional oppositionists, the left-wing Trotskyists in 1928 and the right-wing Lovestoneites in 1929, contended that creating these “dual unions” was markedly unLeninist and advocated for the Party to resume its work within the AFL unions. The opening of the Soviet Archives has provided an opportunity to reevaluate this earlier perspective in the research literature. Although the CPUSA placed much of its focus from 1929 to 1934 on building the TUUL, during this five-year period, it implemented a three-pronged approach regarding its trade unionism including continuing to construct left-wing oppositions within the AFL unions while also actively working to organize independent unions that were neither affiliated to the TUUL nor the AFL. The CPUSA continued to utilize this strategy through late 1934 until the Communist International (Comintern) shifted gears with its Popular Front strategy and ordered the dissolution of its red unions and commanded the Party to reenter the AFL. While the TUUL unions had little success in organizing in the heavy and mass production industries, these labor organizations were much more successful in organizing in light industries in New York City, where they organized under the Trade Union Unity Council (TUUC), especially after the June 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act’s (NIRA) implementation. Besides its vigorous advocacy of a multiracial industrial unionism, the TUUL’s conception of trade unionism was focused on encouraging the democratic rank and file participation of members that was dramatically different than that of the AFL which believed that union officials should be the primary decision makers concerning union affairs. In analyzing TUUL-led strikes conducted in various industries including needle trades, textile, shoe, mining, agriculture, steel, auto, maritime, etc., the time period, industry, and","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"251 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1608710","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46283283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Run Quick and Find the Reds”1: Historians’ Search for American Communists","authors":"Randi Storch","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1608515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1608515","url":null,"abstract":"I want to thank the executive committee, and especially Vernon Pederson, for asking me to speak to today and to everyone who came from far and wide to participate in this important conference. We are here today because we understand that when we research and write about American communism, we are entering an arena where the stakes are high: wars hot and cold have been fought, people gave their lives, others had them taken; and untold money was spent for the cause and to defeat the party altogether. In the end, the movement had an enormous impact on America’s political shift to the right as well as on movements that flourished on the left. And today, in Trump’s America, the history of American communism resonates. In the weeks leading up to the mid-term election, the Trump administration released a 72page report published by the Council of Economic Advisors attacking socialism. The report threatened that a democratic sweep in the midterms would likely result in the USA “becoming the next Venezuela.” The report honed in on the likelihood that democrats would force government run healthcare down the throats of American citizens, ultimately draining national coffers. A sub section of the report titled: “The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning” connects the messaging of Bernie Sanders and ElizabethWarren with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin andMao Zedong. The Socialism that appears un-American in the depictions offered by Trump and his followers, takes on a different cast among today’s socialists who are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, now larger than the Socialist Party ever was, and approaching the numbers of the Communist Party, are looking to the history of socialism generally, and the American Communist party specifically, and they are asking questions about what worked in the past and what didn’t. They want to learn from the Old Left’s organizing strategies and world view and to understand why the USA and the anti-communist left turned so fiercely on communists. The significance of our work is clear. So is its timeliness. In the USA and across the globe, rural and urban communities are confronting challenges brought by globalization, ethnic and racial nationalism and","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"79 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1608515","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43620843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Defending the Masses: A Progressive Lawyer’s Battles for Free Speech, by Eric B. Easton","authors":"L. Maher","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1516429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"169 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516429","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45346027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conference talks from “One Hundred Years of Communism in the USA”","authors":"Harvey E. Klehr, Maurice Isserman","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1599638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599638","url":null,"abstract":"Editor’s note: The following two essays, by Harvey Klehr and Maurice Isserman, were presented at the “One Hundred years of Communism in the USA” conference, which was held on November 9–10, 2018 at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. The conference was sponsored by the Historians of American Communism. They are lightly edited transcripts of the presentations. Both authors are well-known historians of American communism and have written extensively on that topic. Klehr’s most known work is “The Heyday of American Communism; The Depression Decade” and Maurice Isserman’s is “Which Side Were You On: The American Communist Party during the Second World War.”","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"88 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599638","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46872794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Voice of the People”: Sidney Roger, the Labor/Left, and Broadcasting in San Francisco, 1945–1950","authors":"Nathan Godfried","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1599631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599631","url":null,"abstract":"In July 1950, San Francisco radio station KGO canceled Sidney Roger’s news commentary program. The station, owned and operated by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), contended that Roger no longer represented the views of any “significant group in the community.” KGO-ABC officials believed that Roger’s broadcasts promoted Communist party (CP) and radical union ideas and thereby skewed the station’s news coverage. The Federal Bureau of Investigation already had a file on Roger for associating with area communists; and the California Senate’s Fact-Finding Committee on UnAmerican Activities officially branded Roger a “bona fide, iron disciplined Communist revolutionary.” These public and private sector attacks sought to remove Roger from the airwaves. But they also aimed, as Gerald Horne has argued in a similar context, to undermine “popular front” journalists engaged in an ideological/cultural war with corporations and political conservatives. Roger posed a particular threat because, contrary to the assertions of radio officials, he continued to speak to and reflect the values and interests of the Bay Area’s labor/Left public sphere: a community of radical trade unionists, civil rights and civil liberties advocates, and communists who soon rallied to restore Roger to the air. Historians and media scholars have discussed how H.V. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow, and other prominent broadcast commentators reflected and shaped the nation’s Cold War political culture. Sponsored by large corporations, these news analysts reported on and interpreted developments at home and abroad. Yet their observations rarely scrutinized the roots of a nascent military–industrial complex, a national security state, and political repression. Nor did independently minded, liberal journalists (like William L. Shirer and Don Hollenbeck), fully dissect the internal logic of the state and corporate sectors. Commentators supported by organized labor did a better job than their businessfunded counterparts of presenting alternative perspectives on domestic issues. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has explained how Frank Edwards and Edward Morgan of the American","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"56 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599631","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45052882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Crisis to Split: The Communist Party USA, 1989–1991","authors":"D. Rosenberg","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1599627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599627","url":null,"abstract":"The Communist Party USA split in 1991. As a vital force on the Left, playing historically documented roles in labor, peace, civil rights, education, housing, and other progressive movements the Party weathered the storms of Soviet and socialist crises poorly. Its contributions to such movements were thus weakened. The Party erupted along ancestral streams: democracy, race, and “real, existing” socialism, which met in the socket of the Party. The interactive flow of argument was continuous, with exacerbating milestone moments driving a two-year process finished by the 25th convention in December 1991. There was a history to these issues. The “back story” informing the course of events is extensive. Antecedent factors, especially McCarthyism, were essential to Party mores, style, and policies in the 1960 s and 1970 s. But an extended analysis of the experience of 1989–1991 comprises the core of the present study. The following article first traces the Party’s perspectives in the mid-80s, and shortly before. In this light, it discusses methods of action, leadership, and basic conceptions prior to changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It likewise pinpoints areas of incipient disagreement. The next part takes the narrative through 1990, demonstrating how problems in socialist countries impacted debates in the Party about all manner of subjects, including internal democracy and African–American oppression. Landmark conferences accentuated the bitter arguments. Finally, the article analyzes the stages culminating in the 25th National Convention in December 1991. The aforementioned ancestral streams overflowed their banks, summoning a large opposition into existence. Historians have long commented on the close relationship between the CPUSA and the USSR. To a New England member, the “huge bearing of the Soviet Union on the Party” was unmistakable: whatever problems it experienced “would be resolved in the context of socialism,” she believed. That it would end was “unimaginable.” Soviet ties embraced ideological affinity and fraternal feeling, but also extended to fiscal transfers to leader Gus Hall. With sister parties, the CPUSA believed that socialism’s time had come. “It is,” as general secretary Gus Hall said in 1969, “both a historic process and a current event.” Its triumph proved “capitalism has... lost its ability as a class to basically influence or","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"1 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599627","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43075708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}