American Youth Congress

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American Youth Congress (AYC) was an early Comintern affiliate youth voice organization composed of radical youth from all across the country in the 1930's. It met several years in a row - one year it notably met on the lawn of the White House. The delegates are known to have caused a disturbance when they attempted to access the United States Congress. They focused on the draft, which was taking youths at age 18 off to war. At the time in the United States one was not legally an adult in any way until one was 21. They also focused on the economic exploitation of youth.

On July 4, 1936, the AYC issued a Declaration of the Rights of American Youth, which addressed several issues, mainly inalienable rights issues that affected youth, and the economic issues. The AYC came under the patronage of Eleanor Roosevelt; however most people dismissed it as being part of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and was largely regarded as one of the Comintern's most successful front organizations.

Contents

Dies investigation

By 1939 the movement claimed 4,697,915 members in 513 affiliated organizations nationwide. The same year the Dies Committee subpoenaed leaders of the AYC, consisting of a core from the Young Communist League. Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance at the hearings and afterwards invited the subpoenaed witnesses to board at the White House during their stay in Washington D.C. The First Lady went so far as to lobby the Committee to not brand the AYC as a Communist front organization.[1]

Joseph P. Lash, who later married Trude Lash, described his defection in 1937 from the Socialist Party in the Communist weekly, New Masses, was one of the boarders at the White House during the hearings. Another officer, Abbott Simon, staff member of the CPUSA publication, Champion, slept for two weeks in Lincoln's bed during the hearings.

Communazi era

Delegates to an American Youth Congress convention assembled on the south lawn of the White House in February, 1940 to hear a speech by the President. FDR referred to a resolution, passed by one of the Youth Congress, against the granting American aid to Finland on the ground that such action was "an attempt to force America into the imperialistic war." Roosevelt said,

“ In the early days of Communism, I recognized that many leaders in Russia were bringing education and better health and, above all, better opportunity to millions ... I disliked the regimentation ...I abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims ....

I heartily deprecated the banishment of religion - though I knew that some day Russia would return to religion for the simple reason that four or five thousand years of recorded history have proven that mankind has always believed in God in spite of many abortive attempts to exile God.

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forwardlooking democracy at that.

...As Americans you have a legal and constitutional right to call yourselves Communists...and openly to advocate certain ideals of theoretical Communism; but as Americans you have not only a right but a sacred duty to confine your advocacy of changes in law to the methods prescribed by the Constitution of the United States - and you have no American right, by act or deed of any kind, to subvert the Government and the Constitution of this Nation.[2]

”

It was one of the few occasions in his life when Roosevelt was booed and hissed to his face by an audience of Americans. Soon afterwards, many of the same youth picketed the White House as representatives of the American Peace Mobilization. Among them was Joseph Cadden, one of the overnight guests.

In 1940, despite Eleanor Roosevelt's publication of reasons called Why I still believe in the Youth Congress, the American Youth Congress was disbanded. Mrs. Roosevelt sponsored a new organization called the International Students Service. Joe Lash returned under her sponsorship as the secretary of that organization at $4200 a year.

See also

References

  1. ↑ House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1940-41.
  2. ↑ Roosevelt and Hopkins : An Intimate History, Robert E. Sherwood, New York Harper and Brothers, 1948, pgs. 156 - 157 pdf.
  • California Legislature, Joint Fact Finding Committee, Fourth Report, Un-American Activities in California, 1948: Communist Front Organizations; (Sacramento, CA, 1948) p. 180.
  • John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948)

External links

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