“The record shows that our aim and the purpose of reconstituting the Communist Party was to become a more influential and effective working class force in this postwar struggle to save our people from the force and violence of monopoly reaction, lynching, and atomic war….Probably most of you jurors never saw a real live Communist before you came to Foley Square. Perhaps you were surprised to find descendants of Daniel Boone and John and Priscilla Alden sharing leadership in our ranks with the descendants of heroic Negro slaves. You must have noted that about half of these witnesses were World War II veterans…. One need not be either a Communist or a Communist sympathizer or a progressive or a trade unionist to recognize the difference between people of good or evil intent. One need not understand a single Marxist principle, or agree with a single word ever written by Lenin, to recognize the real conspiracy symbolized by the prosecution and its false witnesses; or that the defendants and the defense witnesses are men and women who are dedicated to serving the interests of the American people – Negro and white, and seek to promote peace and democratic advance.” From Eugene Dennis, “In Defense of Your Freedom,” [“Foley Square Smith Act Trial, 1949”], in Highlights of Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA, 280-281.
The greatest political show trial in US history began in late 1949. The previous year, the Truman administration had indicted 12 members of the Communist Party's political bureau for “conspiracy” when they helped reconstitute the Communist Party in 1945, a public event mentioned widely in the national press at the time.
William Z. Foster, the best-known Communist Party leader, was tried separately. The other 11 stood before federal Judge Harold Medina, an old machine politician who complained that Communist agents in the court's gallery were trying to hypnotize him. Medina showed extreme prejudice against the defense throughout the trail. But the verdict was pre-ordained, since the prosecution and the judge carefully selected the jury, as in the other major political show trials of the period – the second Hiss trial and the Rosenberg trial – to insure they were unsympathetic to the defendants and unlikely to defend the rights of those with whom they had political disagreements.
These first Smith Act trials were only the beginning. Subsequent trials came after the arrest and imprisonment of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and other lesser-known Communist Party leaders. With the Korean War raging in 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto. The principle sponsor was the right-wing senator from Nevada, Pat McCarran, who also later served as the prototype for the corrupt senator in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and the film “The Godfather, Part 2.”
The law, which invented categories of “Communist-controlled” and “influenced” organizations established a Subversive Activities Control Board to force the officers of such organizations to register and present their membership lists to the Board or face heavy fines and prison sentences. The law also created a special provision, originally introduced by Cold War liberal Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, as an alternative to the bill, the compilation of a list of individuals to be arrested without due process and placed in detainment camps in the event of a “national emergency.”
Along with the various Smith and McCarran Act trials, state and local authorities began to blacklist public employees, industrial workers, and people in the arts, sciences and professions thought to be associated in any way with the Communist Party.
Nothing new
Red Scares and politically motivated repression were not new to the US. In fact, the Communist Party was first organized in a period of terroristic state and business-funded repression against the Left in 1919. But no one had ever seen anything like the repressive tactics of the US government in the 1950s. The Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s lasted only for a few years. Politically motivated attempts to take away the constitutional rights of abolitionists before the Civil War were largely defeated in non-slave states, and the previous red scares against working-class organizations were relatively mild.
In the 1950s, Communist Party leaders and some members were forced into hiding, and the government would eventually imprison many in the Party leadership. Leaders of organizations who refused to comply with McCarran Act provisions that demanded membership lists or or registration as 'subversive' were also threatened with prison. Through the entire period the Communist Party refused to register under the McCarran Act. The purpose of the law was to isolate the Communist Party and any other organization which the government disapproved of. The basic aim of the law was to draw a political color line that could be enforced by federal authorities to “protect” the general public from political dissent.
Nationally, these policies came to be associated with Joseph R. McCarthy, the mentally unstable and alcoholic Republican senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy rose to prominence in the far right in the winter of 1950 when he launched wildly unsubstantiated charges against what he claimed were scores to hundreds (the numbers constantly shift) of “Communist agents” in the State Department. Supposedly these subversives were responsible for everything from the Chinese Revolution to the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb. McCarthy quickly found that he could get away with making these charges, which the press dutifully spread. He also found that the more ludicrous and wilder the charge, the higher his star rose.
The Communist Party recognized the special danger represented by McCarthy, whom Communists and non-Communists both in the US and globally saw as a potential fascist leader. They also understood that reactionaries were cynically using McCarthy's wild claims to turn the new “anti-communist consensus” (which had already succeeded in undermining the Bill of Rights and wounding labor and progressive forces) into full-fledged hysteria.
What is so remarkable about this repression, and so instructive for students of US history, was its longevity and its multifaceted nature. By the late 1950s, Supreme Court decisions had weakened the original Smith Act and ended the prosecutions, and prominent figures like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, denied the right to travel because of their supposed ties to the Communist Party, received their passports back. The government continued to prosecute both Communists and former Communists under the McCarran Act, however. The Kennedy Administration, for example, revived the prosecution of the Communist Party for failing to register under the McCarran Act in 1961, and predictably achieved an indictment and conviction in 1962 of party leaders Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, while fining the party $120,000. Davis passed away in 1964, and the cases against Gus Hall and the Communist Party were finally overturned in 1966 and 1967, respectively.
Resisting repression
In general, the facts of the postwar period of repression are widely known. Far less is understood, however, about the Communist resistance and its contribution to both the decline of McCarthyism and the defeat of the real danger of full-fledged fascism, which in the 1950s brought with it the likelihood of a nuclear World War III.
Communists adopted the policy of what might be called a “semi-underground.” Much of the Party's leadership found itself either in hiding or fighting to keep out of jail. The general membership faced relentless FBI harassment. In many cases, Communists were forced to abandon the organizations they had helped to build in the 1940s. Throughout, Communists struggled to maintain their long-term strategic outlook, which connected the struggle for workers' rights with anti-racism and peace.
First, let’s look briefly at the deceleration of McCarthyism. Communists rallied support for the “Joe Must Go” grassroots campaign, launched initially by liberal Republicans in Wisconsin in 1952, and continued the campaign even after McCarthy’s re-election to the Senate in 1952. McCarthy liked to say that the Communist Party invented the term McCarthyism, which he, of course, flaunted in his usual egotistical way. Although McCarthy’s whole career was based on endless lies, he wasn’t completely wrong in this regard. The “anti-Communist consensus” was rooted in brutal dictatorial policies that both preceded McCarthy and continued after his downfall, acts carried out by the FBI, government bureaucrats, and politicians far less out of control than the junior senator from Wisconsin.
Truman’s “loyalty program,” the Attorney General’s list, the arrest of the Communist Party national leadership, the state-condoned racist mob attack on Paul Robeson in Peekskill, New York, and the purges and blacklists, all were crude violations of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights – whether carried out by labor leaders like Walter Reuther, Democratic President Harry Truman, or tolerated by the American Civil Liberties Union, which refused to defend Communists. Many of these abuses were justified by the claim that Communists had to be purged to save the unions or save the social gains that Communists had played a central role in bringing about. To use Adlai Stevenson’s famous description of Richard Nixon in 1952, there were many “white-collar McCarthys,” respectable McCarthys instituting and attempting to institutionalize the repression.
But with McCarthy, the extremism and injustice of the whole process could not be covered up. By focusing on McCarthy and his henchmen, Communist Party activists gave the process a face and a name and helped the broad left fight back more effectively. All this took place in an atmosphere in which anti-McCarthy demonstrations on college campuses and in communities around the “Joe Must Go” slogan – and later the university-based “Green Feather” campaign – got very little coverage in the press, but the campaigns encouraged liberals like Edward R. Murrow to take the chance of exposing some of McCarthy’s abuses on television. In Milwaukee, for example, Party activists printed and distributed over 20,000 anti-McCarthy leaflets, even through they were followed and harassed by FBI agents.
McCarthyites go too far
Eventually, the Eisenhower administration, itself threatened by McCarthy’s attempt to extort an Army commission for his henchman G. David Schine, made public some of his activities, which led to the nationally televised hearings which did great damage to him as an individual.
Anti-communism in all of its forms served as the major barrier to an effective anti-McCarthy campaign. The right attacked all who refused to kowtow before the repression as “anti-anti-communist,” and many fell into this trap, “balancing” their criticisms of McCarthy’s actions with condemnations of the Communist movement. Truman began this trend in 1950 when, in response to McCarthy’s first group of wild charges, he called McCarthy “the Kremlin’s greatest asset.” Many others chimed in to contend that McCarthy, by undermining respect for the government, was “helping the Communists.” The hip political comedian, Mort Sahl, then beginning his career, captured perfectly the warped politics of the time when he described McCarthy’s version of the “Eisenhower jacket” (the name given to a popular military surplus jacket) as “the one with the zipper across the mouth.”
Harassed by the right, many Democratic politicians used anti-communism to save their political careers. In his 1954 reelection bid, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, as the story goes, was accosted by a man who kept calling him a Communist. Humphrey replied that he was an “anti-Communist,” which led the man to say, “I don’t care what kind of Communist you are.” Humphrey shored up his base of support by sponsoring new anti-Communist legislation, which the press crudely called “The Communist Control Act.”
Still, many people saw the 1954 elections as a referendum on McCarthyism. The Democrats regained control of both Houses of Congress, which was interpreted correctly as an important defeat for both McCarthy and McCarthyism. McCarthy was quickly dropped by most of his former backers and drifted deeper into the alcoholism that was to kill him just three years later. But McCarthy didn’t change. He continued to make wild charges, and may even have come to believe some of them, although fewer and fewer people took them seriously any more.
McCarthy-like charges became little more than flimsy conspiracy theories. For example, when David Greenglass, whose testimony had sent his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair in 1953 as “Soviet spies” who stole the “secret of the atomic bomb,” came forward with the claim in 1957, after the Soviet’s launching of the Sputnik space satellite, that Julius Rosenberg had transmitted space technology to the Soviets, no one outside the ultra-right took the charge seriously.
Wild claims and conspiracy theories actually split the Republican Party. Ultra-rightists, including industrialists and retired military leaders angered by what they saw as the Eisenhower administration's shift away from their policies, formed the John Birch Society to revive McCarthyism. Their leader, candy manufacturer Robert Welch, even contended that the failures to defeat Communism and destroy the Soviet Union served as evidence that President Eisenhower was a Communist. Some of McCarthy’s supporters promoted Welch as a potential Republican presidential candidate in the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, however, McCarthyite tactics, once at the heart of the Republican Party, moved to the fringes of the ultra-right.
The discrediting of McCarthy and the deceleration of McCarthyism could also be seen also in how the FBI establishment operated its secret Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro). Aimed exclusively at the Communist Party, from its founding in 1956 Cointelpro carried out thousands of provocations against Communists. But it was compelled to do so secretly, despite in contrast to the open harassment of the Communist Party immediately after World War II.
Thus the Communist Party's anti-McCarthyism campaign helped to save Americans from the political nightmare sought by the Mcarthyite section of the right wing.
Struggles continue
The purges in the unions were especially devastating for African American trade unionists, who were in large numbers part of the left. Communists and others organized the National Negro Labor Council in 1951, which, although it was to be short-lived in the face of political persecution, served as a center for the recruitment of African American militants who were to later distinguish themselves in labor and civil rights struggles. Communists also played a leading role in the US and worldwide campaigns against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg between 1951, when the death sentence was pronounced, and 1953 when it was carried out. William Patterson, a leading African American Communist, led 3000 protesters to Sing Sing Prison in 1953 where the executions took place. This event, which the mass media refused to cover, was an act of great courage, as was the much larger demonstration in New York's Union Square as the hour of the executions approached.
Communists condemned US military intervention in Korea and exposed the fraudulence of the Truman administration’s use of the UN as a cover for war, at a time when few on the left took on the issue. In what was perhaps the Communist Party’s most remarkable achievement in the period, Party members and their allies gathered 2.5 million signatures for the international Stockholm Peace Petition against militarization, nuclear proliferation and war.
Communists also made major contributions to the struggle against the racist terror which intensified in the early Cold War period. Both white and Black Communists, along with other progressive activists in labor and community-based civil rights organizations found themselves fighting a new two-front war in defense of the civil rights of the oppressed and their own civil liberties, even as leading groups like the NAACP retreated. For example, the Civil Rights Congress, founded by Communists and allies after World War II, took on major legal battles that the NAACP feared to engage in, and helped to compile data on racist abuses even as the CRC itself became a prime target of FBI attacks.
In 1951, CRC leader William Patterson and Paul Robeson delivered “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for the Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People” to the Office of the United Nations Secretary General in New York. While the document remained largely ignored or, if mentioned at all, reviled by the mainstream US media, it was published throughout the world and introduced many people, especially in the nations emerging from colonialism, to the sordid history of racism in the US. By exposing racism globally at a time when the US was fighting a Cold War against anti-racist Communist and national liberation movements, “We Charge Genocide” helped to make US racism an even bigger liability than it already was and thus strengthened the developing civil rights movement.
Communists remained inseparable from the civil rights movement. In 1953, the Party came forward with a new program centered on advancing the struggle for liberation and justice for all people in the South. Party leader James Jackson drafted “The Southern Peoples Common Program,” which connected the abolition of segregation with the elimination of anti-labor and anti-democratic policies, and showed how doing away with such policies would achieve large social and economic gains for all working people in the South. Over 100,000 copies of the program were distributed throughout the South on a single day, an ingenious strategy that successfully defeated attempts by the FBI and local racists to repress the document.
Communists strongly supported the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, a victory that opened a new chapter in the struggle for African American equality. The Highlander Folk School, where Communists had long played a significant role, served as a center for the training of activists in civil rights campaigns both before and after Montgomery. Although historian Maurice Isserman and others have documented the role of “former party members” in these and other campaigns, the important role of those who had not left the Party and of the Party itself has yet to be studied in depth. This, in large part, is the result of the long-term distortion of the history of the civil rights movement fostered by anti-communist ideology and policy, during a period when all attacks on the Party were accepted without scrutiny or challenge.
Most of those who left the Party between 1946 and 1956 did so because of Cold War repression. Some simply dropped out of politics. Others continued to work with former comrades in new organizations like Women Strike for Peace. Anti-communists in peace, civil rights, trade union and youth organizations, however, constantly undermined those organizations by wasting time and resources on fighting “communist infiltration.” Also, once you got below the surface of a liberal or left anti-communist, it became clear that their opposition to communists centered on using the issue as a cover for their own conservative policies or their opposition to militancy in any form. Thus, those in the leadership of groups like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the early Students for a Democratic Society, and other mass organizations, who usually defined themselves as liberals, were actually “closet conservatives” seeking validation from the very power structure whose policies their organizations claimed to challenge. Like their counterparts in the trade unions, this often made them more duplicitous and vicious in their attacks on Communists and the broad left than open conservatives.
What is most remarkable about this period is that thousands of members stayed with the Party even in the face of severe repression.
Factional dispute
In 1956, a “secret speech” by CPSU General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denounced the policies of Joseph Stalin and properly called for “de-Stalinization” in Soviet institutions. A Polish defector gave the speech to the CIA, which promptly published it. Along with criticisms of Soviet policies in Poland and Hungary, the speech produced factional conflicts and loss of membership in many countries and the establishment of rival Communist parties in some instances. In the US, John Gates, editor of the Communist Party's Daily Worker newspaper, on his own decision made the Khrushchev speech the center of a series of criticisms of party leadership and policies, sparking division and conflict within Party clubs and districts. The FBI and other police agencies saw the conflict as a huge victory for their activities as they intensified their campaign to sow dissension within the Party.
The factional dispute within the Communist Party resulted in no small part from the long period of repression that saw most of the leadership imprisoned or embattled in court cases and a membership under relentless attack. Experienced Party leaders at all levels, who might have been better equipped to organize Party-wide discussions of the events in the Soviet Union, found themselves preoccupied with legal battles or in hiding and unable to respond to Gates' attacks. As the factional struggle intensified, it became front-page news throughout the US. Communists struggles against McCarthyism, for the rights of labor, civil rights and peace had been invisible in US mass media for years. Now, however, various pundits from liberal and tolerated left backgrounds came forward to call for the end of the Communist Party, to proclaim its uselessness and assert that somehow, magically, after it ceased to exist, some vague “democratic left” would arise.
Inside the Party, Gates and his supporters were voted down and left the party. Others followed suit as internal disputes accompanied by external repression simply wore them down. The struggle did not mean the end of the Communist Party, although the official story became that it no longer played a significant role in the US.
The factional struggle did significant harm at a crucial moment. The loss of membership weakened the Communist Party at a time when mass progressive forces were regrouping around civil rights and peace struggles. In trade union struggles especially, the losses reduced the possibility of a Communist and left comeback at a time when the anti-Communist clause of the Taft-Hartley Act was being defeated in the courts.
The Communist Party supported the AFL-CIO merger in 1955 as necessary in the face of the attacks on workers' rights. But the party was strongly critical of the AFL-CIO leadership’s failure to advance wages and hours protection, its support of overtime pay as a crutch to increase wages for unionized workers as opposed to increasing both wage rates and jobs, and its refusal to initiate policies that would reduce the income and employment gap between white and African American workers. Could a significantly larger Communist Party have used its industrial concentration strategy to advance more effectively progressive policies within the AFL-CIO on issues of civil rights, workers rights, and peace, or to reach out to the new social movements that blossomed in the 1960s? Of course. But we can also say that the vision and strategy articulated by the Communist Party in this difficult period continued to offer the best path to achieving long-term progressive change. Still, we can only imagine what history might have been like if the Party had developed the same membership and allies in the 1960s that it had in the 1930s.
By the end of 1959, as the Party prepared to enter its fifth decade with diminished forces, millions of Americans had repudiated the consequences of McCarthyism, that entrenched and ossified conservatism whose cultural slogans were “don’t make waves” and “look out for number one.” Meanwhile, Cold War Democrats like Senator John F. Kennedy sought to leave the witch hunts of the 1950s behind and talked about “getting the country moving again,” although he refused to say where and for what. Soon student sit-ins in the South would open a new and militant phrase in the civil rights movement, and Cold War conflicts over Cuba and Vietnam would add new impetus to peace efforts. The Communist Party, still facing extensive attacks from the federal authorities, began this new period under the leadership of three veteran Communists Gus Hall, Ben Davis and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
