Although McCarthyite legislation and official government harassment targeting the Communist Party and its members continued in the 1960s, party leaders and activists contributed to and advanced a new mass upsurge, which developed in opposition to the political reaction and social stagnation brought about by domestic and international Cold War policies. Communists also struggled to decelerate a nuclear arms race whose only logical ideological outcome, the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson contended was "exterminism."
In this decade, the civil rights/Black liberation movement, in which Communists had played a central role since the 1920s, served as a catalyst for all others, making the tactics of mass protest outlawed by cold war policy legitimate in the eyes of millions of people.
Cold War gets hot
The 1948 "Truman Doctrine" globalized "gunboat diplomacy" as the foundation of Cold War "containment." The Cuban revolution brought the first regional challenge to a seemingly undefeatable US imperialism in this decade. Up to that point, Cuba had served as the regional model for US "gunboat diplomacy" in the name of "freedom" and self determination" since the Spanish-American War. In Vietnam, the US created a "containment state," a "new South Korea" in violation of the 1954 Geneva agreements. This led to subsequent military escalation in the face of defeat that would lead to the death of millions of Indochinese people and almost 60,000 US troops. Communists in the US campaigned, as they always had, against racism and imperialism in this new period, seeking to reach out to and strengthen the mass movements of the people.
The US escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 coincided with the Johnson administration's retreat on its "war on poverty" and Great Society programs. The result produced both the urban rebellions and political and cultural radicalization. Meanwhile, Communists struggled to ally labor with the campaigns for civil rights and peace and oppose the fragmentation developing inside the Civil Rights movement. Many sought to aid the agenda laid out by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his attempt in the last years of his life to bring the movement into Northern cities and focus the campaign on the struggle for economic and social justice, developing a deeper and broader sense of the basic citizenship rights for African Americans.
Angela Davis, an African American intellectual and scholar, was through these struggles drawn to the Communist Party. In 1969, the Reagan-appointed Board of Regents of the University of California fired Davis from her teaching position at UCLA for being a Communist. In 1970, she was charged as an accomplice in a "conspiracy" that led to a shoot out in a California court and forced her into hiding. Davis held the "distinction" of being the third women on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List in its history. A jury found her not guilty in 1972, in part because an international movement came to her defense and helped her win a fair hearing in court. She later won the battle to regain her teaching position in the University of California system. Both events stood as major victories against the Cold War political culture.
Angela Davis eloquently summed up what it meant to be a Communist in the 1960s when she wrote "as a student, as an American and as a Communist I have participated in common struggles for democratic liberties, for civil rights and for peace.... I am a member of the Communist Party because as I see that Party upholds principles which combine a particularly enlightened view of society with a sense of humanity and peace not found elsewhere."
"[The CPUSA stands for] an end to poverty," Davis wrote, "an end to racism; an end to US intervention in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.... In the holy name of anti-Communism this government has conducted witch-hunts and executed and imprisoned its victims. It has waged war, overthrown governments (by force and violence).... It is time to affirm the right to be a Communist, the right of Communists to speak and act; and the right of the American people to listen and think for themselves."
The Party and the student uprising
Winning these rights to speak and act as Communists remained a difficult battle. Unlike others on the left, Communists were not even afforded what Davis' old philosophy professor, Herbert Marcuse, called "repressive tolerance," that is the creation of marginalized niches into which dissent can be voiced but isolated enough to prevent serious influence. Communists still had to fight hard for elemental First Amendment rights
Prominent CPUSA leaders, Gus Hall, Ben Davis and James Jackson, among others, struggled to regain the right to speak on college campuses. When Ben Davis was invited to deliver a speech at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1958, authorities crudely denied his right to speak and for the students who had invited him to hear him. The FBI as part of its Cointelrpo program made it a priority to block CPUSA speakers on campus.
But the students at CCNY didn't give up trying to get Davis on campus. Davis beat the bureau and its friends in the administration by gaining the right to speak at CCNY three years later. A few years after that, I, a CCNY student, saw him speak at a meeting of the Marxist Discussion Club (of which sadly I was afraid to be a member at the time). He was the first Communist I ever saw live, and I was impressed. Gus Hall, CPUSA General Secretary who was a special target of FBI harassment (outrageously they used the fact that he had been jailed under the Smith Act to deny him a wide variety of basic rights, including a drivers license), spoke to 19,000 students on a tour of Pacific Coast Colleges in 1962. In speaking about the tour, Hall emphasized the achievement but put it in a Marxist context: "The realities of the 1930s were the Depression and the rise of fascism. Compared to the present complex realities they were relatively simple."
Hall went on to say that "this wonderful new young generation" wanted discussion not agitation, understanding that the First Amendment rights of Communists were not only essential to the defense of the rights of all, but a desire to hear Communists present their analysis. But Hall conceded that the odds against Communist were "tremendous," given the power of billions of dollars spent in propaganda to both isolate the CPUSA and "distort and confuse their [the American people's] understanding of the real problem, the real enemies they face." Hall saw that isolation as "the main obstacle." A point that still resonates today...mainly we isolate ourselves.... We have to break an ideological wall that we have built between ourselves and the people."
Black liberation
Breaking down ideological walls was an important part of the Party's work in the African American freedom movement. Claude Lightfoot, an African American leader of the party in Chicago, whom the FBI saw as a major threat, wrote with sophistication on the "ghetto rebellions" in an important analysis published by International Publishers in 1968. (J. Edgar Hoover personal hatred for Lightfoot had stemmed from a surveillance report that he had danced with a white woman. Hoover derisively referred to Lightfoot as "dancer" in private.) Of the period that the establishment presses across the spectrum called "ghetto riots" at best, "race riots" at worst. Lightfoot pointed to the social factors and causes of high poverty, unemployment and poor public services - motivated by institutional racism - that pushed so many in urban areas to discontent and revolt.
If one really wished to understand what was happening in Watts in 1965 or Newark and Detroit in 1967, The Daily Worker, edited by James Jackson, an important theorist of Black liberation, was the probably the best place to go. Nor were Communists dogmatic in their analysis, as their legion of official enemies continued to repeat.
For example, in an account of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965, William Taylor, chair of the CPUSA's Black Liberation Commission, wrote appreciatively of former Harvard President James Conant's book, Slums and Suburbs, in its analysis of the event as a rebellion against the poverty against which the Johnson administration declared war. Taylor also expressed approval of Michael Harrington's work The Other America. (Harrington was an anti-Communist socialist who opposed CPUSA activists participating in mass organizations).
Militarization is a class issue
Communists also pointed to the economic foundation for US military policy in the period. Although the historian Richard Hofstadter (himself a prominent liberal establishment figure and former Communist Party member) had spoken of "military Keynesianism" a few years before, Communist Party theoretician Hyman Lumer dealt with "The Economic Role of Armaments Expenditure" at a Disarmament Symposium in 1960, a year before Dwight Eisenhower used the term "military industrial complex" in his 1961 Farewell Address - a phrase and a concept which still resonates through the world.
Lumer contended that aside form whatever short-term stimulus effect it had, military spending had taken funds away from necessary social programs, "schools, hospitals, low-cost housing and other vital social needs." Disarmament was essentially a class issue, a major arena in the US of the class struggle. In words that are, if anything, more relevant today than they were in 1960, Lumer concluded, "Since the effects [the stimulus of military spending] are temporary and limited, they can be prolonged only by further increases in military spending. Such a course of action, if persisted in, leads to all out militarization of the economy, accompanied by extreme impoverishment of the working people."
Cuba
The Cuban revolution, initially welcomed by large numbers of Americans, as it moved in a socialist direction, faced the full wrath of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The CPUSA actively supported the revolution and highlighted its achievements. In their local groups and organizations, Communist denounced the blockade launched against Cuba by the Eisenhower administration, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion carried forward by the Kennedy administration, and the Cuban missile crisis, which almost resulted in a nuclear war.
During the Cuban missile crisis, Communists worked with a wide variety of peace activists to hold protests and demonstrations aimed at de-escalating the tensions. In addition, the CPUSA pointed out that the end of the crisis, which was hailed in the US as a victory over the Soviet Union, should be the basis for sober reflection. "Glad to be Alive, Say 10 thousand at Front of UN," the Worker headline read as the crisis ended. The Worker also pointed to the absurdity of the Kennedy administration's position as it contended, "Would we want the Soviet Union to stop, search or sink or ships headed for Turkish ports? Would we want China to stop, search or sink our ships headed to Japan or Okinawa?"
Rather than simply denounce US policy, the Worker, responding to the gravity of the situation, contended that "differences with Cuba can await negotiation and settlement at the conference table but the menace of war, embraced in the foolhardy blockade cannot wait.,,, [We call upon all to] demand that President Kennedy respect the good offices of the United Nations to enter into immediate negotiations with Cuba and the Soviet Union for the sensible and peaceful settlement of all matters under dispute."
Restoring civil liberties
Communists also revived an interest in Marxism rooted in real life in the 1960s. Young people and students especially gained more interest in Marxist writing and thought, which cold warriors had sought to eras through the postwar period. In 1964, Herbert Aptheker, distinguished historian of slavery and a leading CPUSA activist, founded the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) to help support work that would bring Marxism to as large an audience as possible.
Communist youth activists also founded the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America in San Francisco in 1964. The clubs brought together student and young workers. From their inception, the Du Bois Clubs were the special target of both the right-wing and the US government. When the clubs' national headquarters in San Francisco was bombed, the FBI refused to investigate the incident. In 1967, ten years after Joe McCarthy's death, the Justice Department attempted to destroy the Du Bois Clubs. That year, the Supreme Court heard the case of W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America v. Clark. After Attorney General Ramsey Clark filed a petition with the McCarthyism Subversive Activities Control Board as a "Communist Front" organization, the Clubs struck back and sued to have the whole "Communist Front" provisions struck down as unconstitutional.
Although the McCarran Act had been greatly weakened over the previous decade, and many regarded Clark's maneuver as an attempt to frighten potential club members from joining, the court majority upheld the Justice Department's "right" to pursue their case. In that ruling, Justice William O. Douglas made an eloquent dissent, joined by Justice Hugo Black. They wrote: "The members of the Du Bois Clubs may or may not be Communists. But as I said I see no possibility under our constitution of penalizing one for holding that or any other belief. The Du Bois Clubs may advocate causes that parallel Communist thought or Communist actions. They appear, for example, to advocate the termination of hostilities in Vietnam. But so far as advocacy is concerned, I see no constitutional way of putting restrains on them as long as we have the first amendment."
The court majority made no philosophical opposition to this point, which had been developing for many years - choosing instead to rule on procedural points. Ramsey Clark, ironically, years after he left the Johnson administration, became the champion of anti-imperialist initiatives and policies often more radical than those for which Communists faced persecution. One comical side-note to this affair is that Richard Nixon carried on the campaign against the Du Bois Clubs to the point that his supporters would insist that "the Boys Clubs of America" was a Communist Front.
Although anti-Communist repression continued, the civil rights of Communists were bit by bit being restored. One important struggle in this regard centered on the Landrum-Griffin Act, an anti-Communist addendum to the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1959 allegedly to fight "labor racketeering." When Archie Brown a prominent CPUSA member, was elected to the ILWU's National Board, he was prosecuted under the law and sentenced to six months in prison for winning an election, since Communists were barred from holding union office. This time, ILWU lawyers, joined by the ACLU (which did not defend the rights of Communists a decade earlier), won a reversal of the decision in an appeals court in 1964 and then a sweeping victory in the US Supreme Court in 1965. In his decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren said that the law as it applied to Archie Brown "plainly constitutes a bill of attainder."
In essence, all of the anti-Communist laws from the beginning had been bills of attainder, i.e., laws singling out one individual or group and depriving them of equal protection under the law. For a generation few had the courage to say that. Now, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said it.
In the fight against repression of the Du Bois Clubs and of the rights of workers, Communists helped advance civil liberties and free speech in the US.
Peace at last?
Communists also contributed mightily to the development of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the US. As the Johnson administration launched its escalation in 1965, Communist Party activist Betty Gannett wrote a powerful pamphlet, "End the War in Vietnam." In it she presented a concise historical analysis of US involvement in Vietnam - the sort of analysis that it helped the peace movement develop and which today is widely accepted in a watered down version in history texts. Gannett detailed the role of French colonialism, the US support for France's post World War II colonial war in Indochina regardless of the US anti-colonial history, the violation of the 1954 Geneva agreements and the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem, a tyrant from the North on the predominantly Buddhist South, using mainstream media sources.
With a keen eye for what was important, Betty Gannett quoted a Look magazine editor who wrote from inside knowledge about Diem. "Secretary of State John Foster Dulles picked him," she pointed out. "Senator Mike Mansfield (then Democratic majority leader) endorsed him. Francis Cardinal Spellman, the rabidly anti-Communist and allegedly corrupt Cardinal of the New York Diocese, praised him. Vice President Richard Nixon liked him and President Dwight D. Eisenhower OK'd him." Pretty much, I would say, the way a cabinet member is chosen with consultation with the Senate leadership.
Young Communists also played an important role in the development of rank and file opposition to the war. In 1966, three working-class draftees, James Johnson, an African American, Dennis Mora and David Samas refused to serve in Vietnam and were court-martialed. Mora was a member of the Du Bois Clubs, and Johnson subsequently served as an editor of the Daily World. Their case became a national cause célèbre spurring draft resistance and opposition to the war within the military, although all were court-martialed and given long sentences to be served at hard labor. In an unrelated case, Donald Lockman, a Philadelphia Du Bois club member, was sentenced to 2 ½ years in the maximum-security federal prison at Leavenworth for his refusal to go to Vietnam.
Labor turns against war
The anti-Communist leadership of the AFL-CIO under the thumb of George Meany actively supported the Vietnam War. In response, Communists worked to organize a left-center anti-war bloc within the labor movement. In November 1967, anti-war union members, supported by left trade unionists in many countries, held a National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, which was addressed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Writing about the Assembly, George Meyers, Labor Secretary of the CPUSA and former president of the Maryland CIO, noted the breadth of the gathering. It included "old left" activists like Harry Bridges from the ILWU and James Matles of the UE, and Frank Rosenblum from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, left anti-Communists like Victor Reuther and Emil Mazey from the UAW, and more labor activists like Cleveland Robinson, the eloquent president of the Negro American Labor Council. Among the speakers was Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., who would announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination a month later (with the support of many of these trade unionists). McCarthy's candidacy would set in motion the Johnson administration eventual limited attempt to deescalate the war be ending three years of troop buildup and seeking negotiations.
Meyers also noted the activities of Jay Lovestone, the one-time CPUSA general secretary who later defected to the right and emerged after World War II as the AFL-CIO and CIA organizer of anti-Communist, anti-left trade union activities. Meyers called him George Meany's "Secretary of the Cold War." Lovestone had tried to intimidate trade unionists into avoiding the assembly, contending that that it "is not the practice of the AFL-CIO to send representative to bodies organized by others where policy decisions are made."
As the anti-war movement increased, so did the involvement of labor against the war. Communists also made it a major point to challenge the chauvinist worker or "hard hat" image which the mass media and the right cultivated and much of the cultural left accepted, to condemn those who wrote off the organized working class as hopelessly reactionary and racist, the beneficiaries of "white skin privilege."
Turning 50
Although CPUSA membership remained small, the party felt that it could run a presidential candidate in 1968, the first time since 1940. Although ruling circles continued to systematically deny the CPUSA access to mainstream media and contend that the "Communist Party was dead," the 1968 campaign and the re-establishment of the party paper, the Worker once more as a daily, the Daily World, was evidence that the long political repression called McCarthyism, while not dead, was losing its institutional power, along with its ideological power.
As the CPUSA turned 50, Richard Nixon, the old red-baiter whom Adlai Stevenson in 1952 had aptly called a "white collar McCarthy," was President, seeking to turn back all peoples movements and restore the cold war consensus. The CPUSA would face new and complex challenges in the next decade as the long economic expansion that began in World War II ended for the US and even more complex political and economic crises developed.
(Photo by Nicholas DeWolf, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, cc by 3.0)
