Guide to the American Left Ephemera Collection, 1875-2015 AIS.2007.11

Series  I. African Americans and the Left 

Scope and Content Notes

This series focuses on the role African Americans played in leftist movements and on left wing support for campaigns against racist practices and for Black civil rights, including the major role Communism played in the Civil Rights Movement before the 1950s, and influence of Black Liberation on the New Left. While the Socialist Party gave nominal rhetorical support to racial equality, most Socialist Party leaders considered racial discrimination (or gender, ethnic, or religious discrimination) as distinctly secondary to the class struggle, and a significant minority within the Party harbored racist views. Blacks folks suffered, SP leaders argued, primarily because their labor was exploited and that would only be solved by socialism.

Communists, in contrast, stressed the importance of racial discrimination, saw combatting racism as a prerequisite to progress on all other issues, and insisted on individual personal commitment to antiracism as a non-negotiable part of adherence to Party discipline. While advocacy by Black activists contributed to this posture, it resulted primarily from positions developed within the Communist International (Comintern) and pushed by key Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. Communists considered the problems of African-Americans as a special case of what they called the “national question,” that is the national aspirations of ethnic groups and peoples suffering discrimination and denial of rights because of their domination within colonial empires or within multi-ethnic European Empires such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires. Communist concern with the national question derived mainly from two influences. First, the Soviet state incorporated the many discontented national groups of the Russian Empire forcing Soviet leaders to develop a national policy. They responded by creating a series of nominally independent ethnic republics or autonomous regions and reinventing the state as a theoretically egalitarian union of these republics. Second, Communists considered the massive popular discontent of colonial peoples as the Achilles heel of world capitalism and a great political opportunity to expand their global influence. Soviet and Comintern efforts attracted the attention of many prominent anticolonial leaders including a group of Black intellectuals who developed to develop the ideal and program of Pan-Africanism. While many Pan-Africanists eventually became disillusioned with Communism, this overlap between Communism and Pan-Africanism had enduring influence on Black nationalists within the United States into the 1960s even after the CPUSA ceased to be an even minimally viable organization.

New Left concern with civil rights and Black liberation derived first from the inspirational role of the Civil Rights movement, and second from the way the US participation in the War in Vietnam made activists aware of the problems of colonialism, imperialism, and relationships between developed and underdeveloped countries. New Leftists, inspired by Pan-Africanism (in some cases without full awareness of the history of these formulations) tended to think of African-Americans as a colonial people marooned within in the imperialist metropole.

Series  II. Anarchists 

Scope and Content Notes

Several waves of anarchists participated in left-wing movements in the U.S., sometimes in tension with the Marxists who led the SPUSA, the CPUSA, and other left-wing organizations. From the late 1800s through the 1930s anarcho-communists predominated in anarchist circles. Like Marxists they considered private capital ownership inherently exploitative, but since they considered all authority illegitimate they criticized Marxists’ commitment to state ownership of the means of production. Other tendencies including syndicalism, communitarianism, and individualist libertarianism also influenced anarchist thought and practice.

Anarchist influence declined after the 1920s but small circles persisted not only preserving the anarchist tradition, but also developing new ideas that would become influential with the rebirth of anarchism in the 1960s. More recently many young anarchists seeking intellectual inspiration have gravitated toward anarchism in part because of the perceived intellectual and moral exhaustion of the Marxist tradition.

Although the collection includes examples from all of these waves of anarchism, anarchist materials are under-represented in the American Left Ephemera Collection because they could not match the resources of organizations like the SPUSA or CPUSA or even the Trotskyist parties so nearly all the material they produced appeared in very small numbers and has not been widely preserved.

Series  III. Anti-War Propaganda 

Scope and Content Notes

Four waves of peace and antiwar activity played major roles within the twentieth century American Left. First Socialists before and during WW1 opposed military preparation and American participation in the war after 1917. In the 1930s revulsion against the memory of WW1 and fear that the world was drifting towards an even more devastating world war fueled large scale antiwar and peace agitation. Antiwar activity overlapped with antifascism (as in the title of one of the largest organizations—The League Against War and Fascism) because activists perceived the militarized fascist right as the primary source of war threats. College students played a key role in the movement circulating mass petitions urging draft refusal and staging several one day national strikes for peace. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the biggest focus of peace agitation was nuclear disarmament, but by the late 1960s opposition to the War in Vietnam predominated. Peace and antiwar agitation continued through subsequent decades but never reached the levels of mass support of these earlier waves. Communists also campaigned actively for peace in the late 1940s and 1950s and opposed US participation in the Korean War, but they did not generate mass support because most Americans, including those who also opposed the Korean War, believed that Communist antiwar efforts were motivated by support for Soviet national interests rather than a more general commitment to peace.

The American Left Ephemera collection includes items from of all of these eras. Communist material from the Cold War and Korean War are overrepresented, compared to the support they actually commanded, because even as the Party declined, it still had sufficient resources to support substantial publication of its materials.

Series  IV. Christian Socialism 

Scope and Content Notes

Both the Marxist and anarchist traditions usually opposed religion because they conceived of rationalism as the only path to human liberation. Religion, they argued, befuddled the masses in two ways. First, by basing itself on the supernatural, religion encouraged irrational thinking and discouraged the masses from developing rational capacities. Second, by promising rewards in a future life for dutiful behavior in this life, religion encouraged passivity and discouraged protest. However, these arguments ignored how radical social movements had been inspired by egalitarian elements in Judeo-Christian theology from the peasant wars of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance mobilized by dissenting Protestants and heretical Catholics to the radical wing of the English civil war inspired by radical Christian sects to the abolitionist movement in which evangelical Christians had played an overwhelming role.

Two significant cohorts of Christian Socialists operated within the orbit of the major left-wing movements from the 1890s through the 1960s: Protestants influenced by Social Gospel Protestantism and Catholics influenced by liberation theology. Both argued that the moral visions of socialism and Christianity overlapped and that you could not be a true Christian in the modern world unless you committed yourself to social and economic justice. The first group formed a Christian Socialist Fellowship affiliated with the Socialist Party that published The Christian Socialist and encouraged ministers to seek Socialist Party nominations for public office. Some of the most prominent Socialist politicians were ministers and members of the Christian Socialist Fellowship including George R. Lunn, mayor of Schenectady, N.Y. and J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley, Ca.

While several individual Catholic priests also supported the Socialist Party and the IWW, they faced concerted opposition from an overwhelmingly anti-socialist church hierarchy. Catholic support for the left expanded in the 1930s when Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement garnered support not only among lay Catholics but also among some members of the Church hierarchy. Both the rise of the CIO and the emergence of the Popular Front in the late 1930s offered more political space for radical Catholics. The former involved massive strikes and protests by industrial workers who were disproportionately Catholic and expected Church validation for their actions. The Popular Front made collaboration between religious and non-religious agitators less problematic because the Communists toned down their inflammatory rhetoric and actively sought alliance with anyone who would work with them.

By the 1960s liberation theology had become a mass movement in Latin America and radical Catholics could take prominent roles in both the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement without fearing retaliation from the Church. Religion also, perhaps, fit in with 1960s protest because of protestors’ widespread interest in mysticism and spirituality.

Series  V. Citizens Party 

Scope and Content Notes

Dissatisfaction with the Carter administration led a diverse array of activists to form the Citizen’s Party in 1980 around a program combining environmentalism with calls for “economic democracy.” The party nominated environmentalist Barry Commoner for president. Commoner’s candidacy initially attracted both press coverage and endorsements by several prominent labor leaders and liberal Democratic elected officials, but the campaign was not well-organized and many initial supporters ending up voting for Carter out of fear of a Reagan victory. Commoner received only 221,000 votes. A handful of party candidates won local offices in 1980 and after, but the 1984 Citizen’s Party presidential candidate, Sonia Johnson, received less than a third of Commoner’s total (72,000) and the party disbanded. In Pennsylvania the Citizen’s Party achieved ballot status in the Consumer Party’s (a previously existing Philadelphia based) third party line.

Series  VI. Communists and Civil Liberties 

Scope and Content Notes

Communists and their supporters issued most of the items in this section during the period following World War II when the Federal Government, several state governments, and numerous private organizations began systematic surveillance, prosecution, and harassment of Communist Party members, close fellow travelers, and former Communists suspected of still harboring sympathy for communism. While many observers call this the McCarthy Era, after Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy who garnered substantial publicity for his speeches asserting the threat of a Communist conspiracy within the Federal government, the repression began well before McCarthy’s first major speech on the question in 1950 and continued well after his censure for procedural excesses in 1954.

Federal prosecutors used three legal strategies to pursue Communists: indictment under the 1941 Smith Act (which made it a crime to conspire to advocate overthrow of the government—a legal subterfuge designed to find a way around Bill of Rights protections for speech and association); actions to revoke citizenship and deport foreign born Communists (under clauses of the immigration laws that made advocacy of violent overthrow of the government grounds for denying or revoking citizenship), and prosecution for failing to fulfill the demands of several Federal laws that required Communists and Communist front groups to register as agents of a foreign power (which, if carried out, opened those who did so to other prosecutions). In addition widespread hearings on Un-Americanism threatened those called to testify with a legal double threat. Much of the public viewed pleading the Fifth Amendment equivalent to a guilty plea, and employers frequently fired individuals who did so. But individuals who answered any question forfeited rights to refuse to answer any subsequent question and faced indictment and imprisonment for contempt of Congress if they did so. Both state and Federal governments also instituted loyalty oaths as conditions of public employment. Employees who refused to sign would be dismissed. Those who did so but were subsequently revealed to be Communists could be indicted for perjury. Private employers supplemented prosecution by denying employment to individuals known or suspected of Communist membership or sympathy. While the blacklist in the entertainment industry has been the most closely studied part of this phenomenon, the FBI routinely informed all major employers of suspected individuals employed by their firms and most employers fired such people. The FBI also released the names and addresses of suspected Communists to daily newspapers that subsequently published the lists. Individuals whose names appeared faced not only loss of employment, but also social ostracism, physical attack, and vandalism to their homes and automobiles.

Communists used three primary rhetorical approaches to seek public support in their battles against prosecution and harassment. First, they argued that their espousal of revolution was open and public, not conspiratorial, and purely rhetorical. Indeed, they vigorously opposed individual acts of violence, such as the bombings as “propaganda of the deed” advocated by some anarchists. None of the indictments against them, they pointed out, cited any specific violent acts. Second, they argued that they were a legitimate political party, functionally equivalent to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Finally they argued that harassment of Communists for their controversial views threatened the civil liberties of all Americans and stifled public discussion and thought. The first two defenses were probably valid descriptions of the frame of mind and intentions of the bulk of rank and file Communists, but prosecutors had no trouble demonstrating that Communist propaganda had frequently advocated violent revolution in the past and the necessity of revolutionary violence was a central contention of core Marxist-Leninist texts. Moreover, prosecutors had evidence (though they sometimes hesitated to present it in open court for fear of revealing details of the intelligence apparatus) that Party leaders and dozens of Party members had participated in Soviet espionage. The Communists’ third argument—that anticommunist repression stifled civil liberties and public discourse for non-Communists was true—but Communists found that liberals who they expected to support their defense on such grounds frequently refused to do so not only because of fear that they too would thereby invite harassment on themselves, but also because the Communists’ long history of sudden shifts in their public positions and vitriolic sectarian denunciations of political competitors had fundamentally undermined Communists’ credibility.

Series  VII. Communist Party USA (CPUSA) 

Scope and Content Notes

The Communist Party U.S.A., successor to the multiple left-wing factions that split off from the Socialist Party U.S.A. at its 1919 convention, did not develop significant influence until the mid-1930s. While they initially commanded at least nominal support of perhaps 70,000 of the SPUSA’s 110,000 members, that support drifted away as the rival Communist factions operated as secret undergrounds and refused to cooperate. The Comintern pressured them to combine into as an open political party, the Workers Party of America, in 1922, but they maintained a dual underground structure for several years thereafter, and continued factional squabbles. Ultimately the Party only achieved working unity between 1927 and 1929 by expelling the significant portions of the leadership who identified with Stalin’s factional rivals in the Soviet Party. The Party, thus, entered the Depression unified but isolated with a membership not much bigger than 10% of the combined membership of the 1919 Communist factions. Their dependence on Soviet intervention to settle disputes shaped the Party’s subsequent political culture. While all Communist Parties had to adhere to Comintern policy as a condition of membership, the CPUSA usually maintained less independence from Soviet direction than many other Communist parties.

American Communists expanded their influence in the 1930s by energetic agitation for the unemployed, industrial unions, civil rights, and antifascism, especially after the shift in Comintern policy from the highly sectarian ultra-revolutionary Third Period (1927-1935) to the antifascist alliance of the Popular Front (1935-39). By 1939 they had about 75,000 members and several hundred thousand fellow travelers. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 undermined their political credibility, especially among their not insubstantial base among intellectuals and cultural producers. During the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union they regained lost membership but not the level of moral authority they had enjoyed in some circles during the Popular Front. Perhaps that is why they were so quickly politically isolated at the beginning of the Cold War. However, despite the travails of McCarthyism, the Party maintained at least a third of it peak membership until the Khrushchev speech on ”the crimes of the Stalin era” at the 1956 20th Soviet Party Congress. After a brief unsuccessful attempt to reinvent the Party around democratic socialism, veteran members fled leaving an aging vestige of probably less than 5,000 active members (although they claimed more) by the late 1950s.

Throughout the Party’s history, the CPUSA sought to expand its influence by organizing and participating in a broad array of single issue organizations. Some were genuine mass movements with handfuls of Communists amidst tens or even hundreds of thousand of members. Others were Potemkin villages with little more than an office and impressive looking letterhead. Typically Party members filled important leadership slots in such organizations and Party members exercised influence beyond their numbers because of their energy and their policy of acting as a disciplined voting bloc. Both Communists and their critics referred to such organizations as front organizations, although for Communists the usage reflected their notions of “united front’ while for critics the word evoked “false front’ as in a Hollywood movie set. For simplicity, I decided to group many publications by such front organizations in the same section with publications and other ephemera produced by the Party itself. This is not intended as an editorial position on the nature of such front organizations.