Communist Party of the United States of America

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States.

Early years

It was formed in 1919 as a splinter group of the left-wing of the Socialist Party over the issue of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The left wing socialists supported Lenin and Trotsky, and broke off the SP to form two rival parties: the Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party. Under pressure from the Communist International, these two communist parties officially merged in Chicago in 1919. From its inception, the Communist Party, USA came under attack from the FBI and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for defying the Sedition Act of 1918. Consequently, the Communist Party went underground and went through name changes to evade the authorities.

During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It reemerged in 1923 with a small legal above ground element, the Workers Party of America. As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. An element of the party, however, remained permanently underground. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to co-opt CPUSA members. The Comintern supplied the American Communist movement with the equivalent of several million dollars in valuables, an enormous sum in the 1920s. [1] By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party of the USA.

In the 1930's the CPUSA recruited several hundred persons among thousands of new employees hired by the federal government under the impact of the New Deal's rapid expansion of governmental programs. Federal regulations forbade partisan political activity by federal employees, and open membership in the Communist Party brought discharge. The CPUSA evaded the law by organizing caucuses of government employees that met in secret. Joseph Peters, a senior member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA, headed the party’s underground apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities.

Earl Browder assumed party leadership after 1929 and actually dissolved the party in 1944 replacing it with a Communist Political Association. For this he was in turn expelled and James Z. Foster became head of the party. Foster was to lead the party until he retired in 1958 and was succeeded by Gus Hall.

Whittaker Chambers testified that Sandor Goldberger AKA "Joseph Peters" and commonly wrote under the "Josef Peters" and commonly wrote under the name J. Peters, a Comintern apparatchik who worked in the Fourth Department, a Comitern functionary, headed the party’s underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1937 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organizational Secretary of the New York District of the CPUSA was the operational recruiter and conduit for members of the CPUSA into the ranks of the secret apparatus, or "Group A line".

Popular Front

The CPUSA was adamantly opposed to fascism during the Popular Front period. In fact, the Popular Front was motivated by a fear of fascism, and the possible threat to the Soviet Union that Nazi Germany posed. Although membership in the CPUSA rose to about 75,000 [2] by 1938, nearly a third of its members left the party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Nonaggression Pact of 1939 pact with Hitler. A committed core remained in the ranks. The CPUSA even went so far as to accuse Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler. The CPUSA went so far as to denounce the Polish government as fascist after the German and Soviet invasion.

Stalin publicly disbanded the Comintern in 1943. A Moscow NKVD message to all stations on 12 September 1943 detailed instructions for handling intelligence sources within the CPUSA after the disestablishment of the Comintern. Earl Browder had been both Chairman of the CPUSA and recruiter for the NKVD (in the Venona project he is known as Agent "HELMSMAN"). He was expelled from the leadership when Soviet policy shifted. His crime had been to follow Moscow’s orders in 1941 and “disband” the party in a show of unity with the US Government. But the NKGB thought his services worth keeping, and they succeeded in covertly financing him, by setting him up as a representative of Soviet publishers. Even then, that didn't work, as Browder was dropped after violating the Party Line again in favor of Titoism. Lovestone said of Browder, "There, but for an accident of geography, walks a dead man".

It was the belief of opponents of the CPUSA such as J. Edgar Hoover, long-time director of the FBI, and Joseph McCarthy, for whom McCarthyism is named, and other anticommunists that the CPUSA constituted an active conspiracy, was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and dedicated to the clandestine infiltration of American cultural and political institutions. This is the "traditionalist" view of some in the field of Communist studies such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes.

In the "Findings and declarations of fact" of the United States Congress in passing the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, in 50 U.S. Code Chapter 23 Subchapter IV Sec. 841, that,

"The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States...the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders...members of the Communist Party are recruited for indoctrination with respect to its objectives and methods, and are organized, instructed, and disciplined to carry into action slavishly the assignments given them...the Communist Party acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations upon its conduct...gives scant indication of capacity ever to attain its ends by lawful political means. The peril inherent in its operation arises not from its numbers, but from its failure to acknowledge any limitation as to the nature of its activities, and its dedication to the proposition that the present constitutional Government of the United States ultimately must be brought to ruin by any available means, including resort to force and violence. Holding that doctrine, its role as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger to the security of the United States. It is the means whereby individuals are seduced into the service of the world Communist movement, trained to do its bidding, and directed and controlled in the conspiratorial performance of their revolutionary services. [3]

References

• The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books, 1999, hardcover edition, p. 287-293, p. 306, ISBN 0465003109. Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist who worked for the KGB. After 1972 when the KGB established its new modern offices at Yasenovo, Mitrokhin was entrusted with transferring the corpus of KGB files from its old office at the Lubyanka in Moscow to the new offices. During the next ten years while performing these duties he copied many files which he turned over to British intelligence when he defected in March, 1992.

• Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0895264862; 2001 edition, ISBN 0709160615. This biography of Morris Childs, who together with his brother Jack arranged for and handled the money transfers during the 1960s and 70s, contains much of the same material.

External links

• Cold War Counterintelligence

• Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy Report, Appendix A, 4. The Encounter with Communism (1997)

• Article: Communists Should Not Teach In American Colleges, 1949, by Raymond B. Allen, President of the University of Washington, Seattle.

• Article: Guilty as charged by Arnold Beichman, survey of Soviet documents on Communists in America Hoover Institute - Hoover Digest 1999.

• Marxist Internet Archive

Further reading

• American Communist History a peer-reviewed journal published by the Historians of American Communism. [4]