Gitlow, Benjamin (1891–1965)

ONE OF THE COFOUNDERS and most prominent early leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA or CP), Benjamin Gitlow later broke with communism and became one of its harshest critics, allying himself with McCarthyite anti-communism. Today, he is best remembered for having instigated a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded constitutional protection for freedom of speech—even though he lost the case.

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and ardent socialists, he worked as a cloth cutter while studying law at night and joined the Socialist Party. In 1917, he was one of ten Socialists elected to the New York State Assembly; by the end of his term, however, he had quit the party after an unsuccessful attempt, together with fellow Bolshevik supporters John Reed and Louis Fraina, to take control of the socialists.

In 1919, he, Jay Lovestone, and Charles Ruthenberg formed one of two competing U.S. Communist parties; they were eventually ordered by the Comintern in Moscow, Soviet Union, to merge, but Gitlow's group—known as the Goose faction, because its critics said “they cackle like geese”—remained dominant. Though its foreign-born leaders at first were disdainful of native communists, Gitlow later wrote, “they realized that without an English-speaking wing, it would be impossible to organize a Communist Party in the United States.” That same year, Gitlow was one of many leftists arrested in a nationwide crackdown on alleged subversives. He was convicted of criminal anarchy by the state of New York for having published a pamphlet entitled Left-Wing Manifesto, saying it incited the overthrow of the government: It had demanded “mass strikes,” as well as “expropriation of the bourgeoisie” and establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” His case [Page 193]reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction by a 7–2 vote, with Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes dissenting; the latter declaring that “every idea is an incitement.” But the majority decision, while ruling against Gitlow, established a critical precedent for all future First Amendment cases. For the first time, the court established that the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause covered liberty of expression—meaning that freedoms and liberties, as well as personal property, were entitled to protection from state, not just federal, infringement.

Though sentenced to a term of five to ten years, Gitlow went free after serving less than four years, after receiving a pardon from New York's Governor Al Smith. During his imprisonment, the Communist Party's electoral arm, the Worker's League, tried to run him for mayor, but he was disqualified from the ballot when the Board of Elections ruled that he was a legal resident of Sing Sing, not New York. (He would appear on the ballot in 1924 and 1928 as the Communist candidate for vice president.) Meanwhile, the party distributed his speech to the trial jury in a pamphlet, The Red Ruby, taken from the prosecutor's accusation that Gitlow “would make America a red ruby in the red treasure chest of the red terror.”

In 1929, the Comintern moved to cement its control of the U.S. Communist Party: Gitlow and Jay Love-stone were ordered to step aside for having committed “right-wing deviationism” and insisting that communist ideology in America had to be determined by domestic political events; they were also cited for failing to end factionalism within the CP. When the pair and their followers tried to resist Josef Stalin's directive, they were expelled from the party.

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