Communist Party USA

Undoubtedly, from its origins in 1919 until the latter part of the 1950s, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was the most important left-wing organization in the United States. Reaching 85,000 members at its peak in 1942, just as America entered World War II, and with party supporters expanding the organization's strength an additional tenfold, the CPUSA enthusiastically rallied for backing the Soviet-American war effort against the Nazis. In addition, through their tireless roles as industrial union organizers during the mid-to late 1930s, Communist Party members had already become a major force in several important Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions by the early 1940s. In New York City, a stronghold of party support where Communists actively engaged in housing struggles, CPUSA candidates were elected to the city council during its zenith.

Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, two U.S. communist parties emerged from the left wing of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1919: (1) the Communist Party of America (CPA), composed of the SPA's foreign-language federations and led by the sizeable and influential Russian Federation, and (2) the Communist Labor Party (CLP), the predominantly English-language group. Although the two parties feuded with each other, and various factions broke away to establish competing communist groups, the Communist International encouraged the unification of these organizations. In 1922, the CPA merged with the United Communist Party (which was established when the CLP joined a schism from the CPA) to create the legal and aboveground Workers Party of America (WPA). When the United Toilers of America, a group that adopted the same tactics as the WPA, combined with the latter organization, the party renamed itself the Workers (Communist) Party, finally settling on the CPUSA in 1929.

During the 1920s, the CPUSA's trade union arm, the Trade Union Educational League, bore from within the craft-union-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) to promote industrial unionism. When this strategy proved unsuccessful, upon orders from Moscow, the CPUSA transformed the Trade Union Educational League into the Trade Union Unity League in 1929, which was dedicated to organizing largely unskilled immigrant, African American, and women workers into industrial unions. Although the Trade Union Unity League was not nearly as successful as the AFL, it did provide a training ground for CPUSA organizers when they became active in the CIO unions.

During the early years of the Great Depression, the CPUSA emerged as committed militants within the unemployed movement. Later in the 1930s, with approximately 65,000 members and New Deal liberalism sweeping the country, the CPUSA became influential in many aspects of life in the United States. At this time, CPUSA members became national, regional, and community leaders in liberal, cultural, and student organizations.

With the onset of the Cold War and the rise of anti-Soviet sentiment after World War II, the CPUSA increasingly came under attack. Deprived of significant influence in the labor movement when the CIO expelled 11 CPUSA-led unions in 1949 and 1950, the CPUSA suffered additional loss of power in many [Page 372]left-liberal organizations when it was subjected to McCarthyism in the early 1950s. In 1956, support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes in Nikita Khruschev's “secret speech”at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress led to mass defections from the CPUSA. Although Communists held leadership positions in several anti–Vietnam War organizations during the 1960s and 1970s, they exerted little sway in the U.S. labor movement. While the party made many significant contributions to the radical movement, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, the CPUSA's unswerving support for Stalin and the Soviet Union harmed the party, not only in the eyes of broad segments of the population but among other liberal and left-wing activists as well.

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