MENACE OF OUR TIME: THE LONG WAR AGAINST AMERICAN COMMUNISM

By Aaron J. Leonard

Rutgers University Press. 224 pages. £21.99. ISBN 978-1-9788-4180-2

Reviewed by Jim Burns

The “long war against American Communism” began much earlier than the late-1940s, or even the foundation of the American Communist Party in 1919. Aaron J. Leonard, in his brisk survey of how the State conducted a continuous campaign against radicals, and the spread of their ideas, goes back to the late-nineteenth century and the early days of the twentieth century for examples of dissidents being looked on with suspicion. Communists may not have been identified as such until later, but socialists, and especially anarchists, were often targets for restriction and repression under both state and federal laws. When the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901 it triggered a “wave of paranoia”, with roundups of alleged anarchists. The New York “state legislature enacted a statute known as the criminal anarchy law, which made advocating the overthrow of the government a felony”.

There were other examples of anti-radical activity prior to the arrival of the communists as an organised group. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a syndicalist union almost always subject to surveillance and even violence by the police because of its militant policies and practices when organising workers in cotton mills, fields, factories, and other areas of employment. When America entered the First World War in 1917 the government closed down the magazine, The Masses, and put its editors on trial for opposing the war. The IWW suffered the same fate, with over one hundred of its leading activists on trial and many given long prison sentences.

In the 1920s the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian anarchists accused of a payroll robbery in which two people were killed, attracted national and even worldwide attention.  Many people thought they were sentenced to death because of what they were (anarchists and immigrants, who had also moved to Mexico at one stage to avoid conscription) and not because the evidence against them was convincing. In 1919 the government deported around 250 foreign-born radicals, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It was during this period that J. Edgar Hoover began to establish himself as a lifelong pursuer of communists.

Before moving on from what might be described as the pre-communist period, it’s worth noting that the First World War, and its immediate aftermath, brought in two pieces of federal legislation which were designed to limit radical intentions. The Espionage Act made it a crime “to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty”, while the Sedition Act (passed after the Bolshevik take-over in Russia) made it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government in the United States”. There was much more to come once the Communist Party was seen as a serious threat to the status quo.

The American Communist Party came into existence in 1919 and from its inception was subject to harassment by the authorities. It was also “riven by internal disputes” and, until 1927, two rival groups claimed to be the authentic voice of communism. The Communist Party of America (CPA) and the Communist Labour Party (CLP) were instructed by Moscow in 1927 to combine and become the Communist Party USA (CPUSA or CP). In a way, this pointed to a fact that it could never deny, that it was essentially controlled by a foreign power. It depended on the Soviet Union, not only for financial support but also for guidance in the policies it would follow. This always gave the authorities, whether state or federal, an edge in terms of persuading the public that communists couldn’t be trusted. They might claim that they were idealists, concerned to promote communism, as opposed to capitalism, as a more efficient economic system, but in practical terms, likely to appeal to anyone not concerned with ideology, this could be boiled down to the simple allegation that a communist’s allegiance was to Russia, not America.   

The Communist Party never resolved this problem, even in the days of the Popular Front in the 1930s when Earl Browder, head of the Party, proclaimed that “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism”. It was true that the Party membership grew as the Great Depression, together with the rise of Fascism in Europe, had an effect. Russia for a time seemed to hold out some hope. It was the only country, apart from Mexico in a small way, willing to provide support to the Spanish Republicans when Franco launched his offensive in 1936. No-one really knew what the true situation was in Russia. They didn’t believe, or want to believe, the stories of purges and executions, famines, and industrial expansion achieved at great human cost, that filtered through to newspapers and magazines in America. The Party press told them otherwise.

While all that was going on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other agencies, were keeping a close watch on the Community Party, which by the 1930s had become the main focus of attention. Anarchists and Wobblies (as  IWW members were nicknamed) had largely faded from the scene, other than in terms of individuals who had switched to working in the unions grouped under the banner of the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO). Some Wobblies had joined the Communist Party when they were released from prison and found that the IWW was no longer the dynamic force it had been prior to 1919.  

The popularity of the Communist Party may have increased in some circles, for example on the cultural front where numerous writers, artists, folk singers, and actors were willing to identify with communist causes and sometimes even join the Party.  But in 1939 the House Special Committee to investigate Un-American Activities arrived on the scene. It was known as the Dies Committee after its chairman, Marti Dies, and ostensibly was designed to investigate both communist and fascist organisations and their aims. It soon became apparent that its resources were primarily devoted to investigating communists. Leonard notes that, in the record of the first volume of its hearings, the Committee listed “some 640 organisations and 438 newspapers as communist controlled”. He also mentions 284 labour organisers and around 1,000 other individuals as CPUSA members. It had obviously been busy, though one wonders if the Committee tended to use “communist” in a wide-reaching way and scooped up anyone who was vaguely left-wing or even just an outspoken liberal?

The Dies Committee wasn’t the only organisation hounding communists around this time. New York State legislature had the Rapp-Coudert Committee with its objective to “drive communists and their supporters out of the public and university system, something done with a measure of success”. Leonard says that “between 1940 and the end of World War II, the committee was responsible for driving fifty faculty and staff members out of their jobs in a ‘purge’ of communists at the City College of New York”. He refers to the case of Morris Schappes, an English instructor who was accused of perjury because he said there were only four members of the communist unit at the college (the Committee believed there were fifty), and that he was the sole editor of The Teacher Worker, a party newsletter on campus. The Committee claimed there were ten. Schappes was found guilty in 1941 and sentenced to eighteen months in Sing Sing Prison. As Leonard has it, “his real crime was refusing to implicate his comrades in front of a committee set on driving them out of their jobs”.

 The Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 shocked many ordinary communists, and there was a falling off in membership. However, when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 attitudes changed, for a time at least. The Soviets were now allies of the United States. Loyal communists had previously adhered to the Party line of opposing American involvement, but had to quickly switch to one of calling for an all-out effort to defeat Fascism by, among other means, supplying the Soviets with arms and ammunition. Not all Americans were enthusiastic about friendship with Russia, and the FBI continued to monitor the movements of communists in the United States.

Post-war developments soon proved that any possibility of communists being accepted as a legitimate party operating in a democratic manner was short-lived, if it had ever existed. In 1944 Earl Browder, then head of the CPUSA, had dissolved it and formed the Communist Political Association (CPA), with a policy of co-operating with liberals and the like. It seemed a move designed to make the Party more palatable to the wider public. When the war ended, however, and there were signs that relations between Russia and America were fragile at best, he was replaced on orders from Moscow and the CPUSA reconstituted under a new hardline leader, William Z. Foster. He spoke of the “twilight of world capitalism”, which must have seemed optimistic when, as Maurice Isserman has written, “American Communists lived in a nation embarking on an unprecedented era of economic expansion and social mobility”. (See Isserman’s, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. Basic Books, 2024).

It was in the post-war years that the war against communism really got under way in America. Stalin’s intentions in Europe, as countries like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia became Russian satellites, the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, and the discovery that the secrets of the Atom Bomb had fallen into Russian hands thanks to spies working in Los Alamos, heightened the tensions experienced by American communists as they increasingly fell under suspicion. There were highly-publicised events, such as the imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten, a group of mostly screenwriters who were communists and refused to co-operate with HUAC. Their downfall led to wholesale blacklistings as many other employees, and not just writers. were fired because of their alleged political sympathies.  

It was the campaign against the leadership of the CPUSA that caused the greatest damage. Leonard provides a comprehensive account of the various trials. In 1948, for example, the “bulk of the Communist Party’s top leadership was rounded up and taken into custody”. Ten of those arrested were charged with “advocating and teaching the principles of revolutionary communism”. They were all found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison, with the exception of Robert Thompson “who was given a marginally lesser three years because he was a decorated war veteran”. Thompson had also fought and been wounded while a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, though that fact would more than likely have been held against him.

Things got worse in the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy came to the fore and made sweeping allegations about communists in government departments and the armed forces. The hysteria he provoked resulted in many innocent people losing their jobs. It was enough for McCarthy to have named someone as a communist. No-one asked to see the evidence. He wasn’t involved In the arrest, trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, who were small fry in the atomic espionage network they were a part of, but they were victims of the same sort of paranoia that he inspired.

In the meantime the FBI continued its efforts to subvert individuals in the Party into informants. They succeeded with Morris Childs, “an alienated party member who had been the Daily Worker editor and was closely associated with Earl Browder”. Leonard remarks that Childs became “the FBI’S most important resource inside the CP”. I haven’t the space to tell the whole story regarding Child’s activities, but suffice to say that he continued passing information to the FBI for over twenty years. When he was revealed as an informant the then head of the CP, Gus Hall, whose confidant Childs had been, was dumbfounded. On the face of it Childs had been a loyal and productive member, “the conduit for major funding from the Soviet Union…..By 1977 he had made fifty-two missions to Moscow on behalf of Hall and the US party”. Childs may have been the most important informant in the CP, but Leonard says that in 1975 there were 203 others passing on details of one kind or another. This was an alarming figure given that membership of the CP had by then fallen to around 3,000, if that. Leonard quotes Dorothy Healey, a leading communist in Los Angeles, on the problem of recruitment : “In the 1960s the Soviet Union had little or no appeal to young people – Black or white – as a model of revolution or of a desirable socialist society. It seemed old, staid, repressive and even counter-revolutionary to young activists”.

It's curious that the FBI still thought of the CP as a problem, given that the 1960s had seen a rise in radical movements like the Black Panthers, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Women’s Liberation groups, and more. There had been large-scale demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The FBI had launched its Counter Intelligence Programme (Cointelpro) to monitor dissident groups and individuals (Bob Dylan and James Baldwin caught the Bureau’s attention), but it additionally continued to keep a close watch on the CP, even though it was largely a spent force. Perhaps the reason was that the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed, so it, and communist parties in other countries, could be looked on as a possible threat. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 it led to a split in the American CP, and its final descent into obscurity.

Leonard says that “US communism was an instrument of an ideology anathema to everything American – God, family, and private property…..As such, the US government and the various social and cultural institutions that reinforced it were never going to passively countenance an ideology or organisation – whatever its faults – that challenged the core of its being, let alone one that held allegiance to something other than the national interests of the United States. That was true in 1920. It was true in 1946. And it was true in 1991”.

However, Leonard also asserts that “For all its ills, as a vehicle for social justice – especially in its middle years – the CPUSA contributed to moving things ahead and its cadres and its supporters paid a steep price for doing so. Not only did they – Black, white, and otherwise – join with the masses of Black people in their struggle against the American apartheid system; they were among the bravest fighters for union rights, the rights of the unemployed, the rights of tenants, and all those inhabiting the bottom layers of U.S. society. Tellingly, the scant attention paid to this is inverse to the attention to the multitude of things they did wrong”.

Aaron J. Leonard’s Menace of our Time is a relatively short book that encompasses a great many details, and does it in a way that makes it readable to a wide audience and not just those with a specialised interest in the history of the CPUSA. It is scholarly, and yet its direct and clear style never lets the information overcome the narrative flow. The practice of describing a situation, and then using an example of an individual case to illustrate it, works well.  There are over twenty pages of notes, a select bibliography, and some relevant illustrations.