To the right is a short editorial of the leaders of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) and the various assorted Americans who rallied, marched and rioted under their banner during the Great Depression. The three leaders of the organization at the time were:
• William Z. Foster (1881 – 1961),
• Ella Reeve Bloor (1862 – 1951)
• Jay Lovestone (1897 — 1990)
"Communism is the greatest menace to the domestic peace of the United States today. For three reasons: The virus of its democracy-wrecking disease is not easily recognized by laymen who often mistake it for liberalism..."
On a side note, organized radicalism during the early Depression days tended to cluster around the John Reed Clubs (named for the hero of American communists) which took root in many of the largest American cities, sustaining a half-dozen local magazines and attracting impoverished and dispirited young writers. Dissolved on orders from Moscow in 1935 as seeming far too partisan, these clubs delivered their membership almost intact to the League of American Writers - which added a fair amount of professional and liberal "fellow travelers". This coterie convened four Writers' Congresses in NYC during the late Thirties in which they typed-up all sorts of resolutions and assorted manifestos and blathered-on about how swell the Spanish Loyalists were.
1939 was the year that the CPUSA was able to boast that their membership rolls had swelled as high as 66,000; when news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was circulated membership began to rapidly fall away. Among the disillusioned was the dedicated leftist Granville Hicks, literary editor of THE NEW MASSES, who had previously held Soviet weltanschauung in such high esteem. Yet, regardless of the efforts made by the leftists to swell their ranks with revolutionaries, there was no wish among the American people to overturn the government: click here to read about the mood of the American people during the Depression.
Today, CPUSA membership is believed to stand at 20,000.
A similar article can be read HERE...
In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him...
In 1887 the NEW YORK TIMES reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it...
The favorite newspaper among American communists was THE DAILY WORKER - read about it here...
CLICK HERE to read more about American communists during the Great Depression...
Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression...
In 1944 a Russian defector wrote a magazine article concerning the American Communists' collusion with Soviet operatives - Click here to read all about it...
- Mission to Moscow (Warner Brothers, 1943)
was probably their favorite movie...
- from Amazon
