Undetermined Date "History of the American Socialist Youth Movement to 1929," by Shirley Waller [circa 1946] A summary history of the early Socialist and Communist youth movement in America written circa 1946 by a member of a small Trotskyist organization, the Workers Party. This material is an extended excerpt of that first published as two small circulation WP bulletins. These bulletins quickly went out of print and were brought back only as a mimeographed pamphlet in 1959 (with additional material) by the Socialist Workers Party. Waller's history is encumbered with an orthodox Trotskyist periodization which declares a "beginning of the degeneration of the YCL" from late 1923 and makes an ahistorical declaration of an "abrupt halt" to the "organic process of the youth movement" from 1925. These dates obviously were chosen based upon the political position of one Soviet Russian Communist Party leader vis-a-vis the others rather than on the basis of objectively observed and persuasively documented historical events in the YCL itself. That said (and despite several glaring factual inaccuracies corrected here in the footnotes) this history is not without interest as a thumbnail sketch of the evolution of the Socialist Party of America's youth movement into the Communist youth movement of the 1920s.
FEBRUARY 1946
"Open Letter from Earl Browder in Yonkers, NY, to the Yonkers Club, CPUSA, Feb. 1, 1946." Defense against expulsion charges by the recently defrocked General Secretary of the Communist Party USA to the primary party unit to which he belonged, the Yonkers Club of the CPUSA, which was constitutionally charged with initiating the expulsion process. Browder defends himself point-by-point from charges preferred against him on Jan. 28, 1946 that he had "advanced Keynesian ideas" and demonstrated political passivity by failing to attend meetings of the Yonkers Club. Browder acknowledges having stayed away from meetings, but indicates that this decision was agreed upon with the Party leadership to minimize political turbulence following his removal as General Secretary. Browder had been further preoccupied finding work to support his family, he notes, as his notoriety as a Communist and his official disrepute within the Communist movement presenting dual "barbed-wire entanglements" which made his situation particularly difficult. Browder sharply denies having advanced Keynesian ideas, noting that this accusation was of recent currency via an article by nemesis William Z. Foster in the Jan. 20, 1946 issue of The Worker. A lengthy appendix to the letter to the Yonkers Club launches an assault on Foster's leadership, alleging the CPUSA had been led away from the decision of the July Convention to support the Truman Administration as the continuer and leader of the grand Roosevelt coalition. Instead war had been declared on Truman as the "chief enemy," Browder declares, with the CPUSA alone abandoning the "Roosevelt-labor-democratic" coalition to pursue a third party oppositional strategy. Browder charges that "under the slogan of 'vanguardism' Foster has put our Party membership in a situation of bafflement and unclarity, isolated form their former allies, and uncertain who are friends and who are enemies." Disaffection had emerged in party ranks as a result of this alleged "anarcho-syndicalist" turn, accompanied by wide demoralization, dropping membership figures, and a new round of destructive factionalism. A return to the July 1945 line supporting the Truman Administration as head of a grand coalition is demanded.
"Appeal of Earl Browder to the National Committee, CPUSA Against the Decision of the National Board for His Expulsion, Feb. 8, 1946." With his expulsion confirmed by the executive of the national CPUSA (National Board) on February 5, 1946, ousted General Secretary Earl Browder issued this final appeal to the governing National Committee on Feb. 8. Browder again attempts to methodically undercut the case against him, charging undue haste, violations of normal party procedure, and a series of factual falsifications and misrepresentations of his actions by his factional enemies, headed by William Z. Foster. Browder denies that he engaged in factional activities or that he in any way departed from the party line with respect to his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Browder's nemesis, William Z. Foster, is charged with possessing "fantastic factional hatred" and accused of having "stultified and confused" the labor movement by acting as an "irresponsible factionalist [chatterbox]." Browder defends his mimeographed economic commentary in the newsletter Distributors Guide (circulation: 200) and reiterates the dishonesty of the charge of organizational passivity for having skipped meetings of his local unit, the Yonkers Club. He defends his statement critical of party policy made before the executive of the Yonkers Club, declaring that "nothing that I there expressed can be made grounds for expulsion without abolishing all inner democracy within the Party." He asks for the National Committee to overturn the National Board's confirmation of his expulsion.
Post 1946 Material Commenting on Earlier Events
DECEMBER 1954
"Letter to Theodore Draper in New York City from Max Bedacht in Frenchtown, NJ, Dec. 13, 1954." This letter to historian Ted Draper from Communist Labor Party founding member Max Bedacht serves as a reminder of the limitations inherent in oral history and memoirs produced decades after the fact vs. careful examination of archival documents and the contemporary press. Despite having the benefit of whatever limited materials were available to him in his personal library in answering a number of Draper's queries, and despite having time to compose his answers in writing, the participant Bedacht is unable to reconstruct a correct timeline of major events (divergences from the archival record being cataloged here in a very extensive set of footnotes). This is intended as no reflection on Bedacht's honesty or competence -- he was both honest and competent -- but rather a much more important illustration of the inevitable deficiencies of ex-post facto memoir accounts, be they written or verbal. Historians should bear in mind always that participant memoir accounts (particularly those provided many years after the fact) are in no way the "last word" on various questions of history. Indeed, the contrary is true: distant recollections are but the first word, from which point examination of archival material and the contemporary press might be more profitably made to "settle" the various questions of history which emerge. Of particular interest to historians of the early American Communist Party is Bedacht's account here of the origin of the name of Abram Jakira's underground-oriented "Goose Caucus" of 1922: "We had given them the name of geese because they had only a few talking leaders. And when one of them flapped his wings and quacked, they all flopped and all quacked in exact imitation."
JANUARY 1955
"Letter to Theodore Draper in New York City from Max Bedacht in Frenchtown, NJ, Jan. 20, 1955." In this letter to historian Ted Draper, Communist Party leader Max Bedacht provides interesting impressionistic answers to a number of Draper's questions about the early American Communist movement. Bedacht offers an intelligent critique of Left Wing thinking in the party split of 1919: "I think I am justified in saying that all of us -- at least subconsciously -- believed that world events had relieved us and our revolutionary organizations of the tedious and patience-consuming job of weaning the American working masses away from their bourgeois illusions. Since such a belief is wrong under any conditions, the propaganda of the Left based upon it became mere radical-sounding phrases with little or no concrete meaning." He sees the division of the Communist movement into two organizational streams as a product of different paces of "sobering up" about the prospects of imminent revolutionary transformation in the USA. Bedacht also provides an extensive account of the factional division in the Communist Party which swirled around the Labor Party question in 1922-24. Bedacht testifies that "It was in the course of the discussions and deliberations about efforts for the development of a broad Labor Party movement that the concepts about the possibility and the need of a legal, respectively illegal Communist Party in America crystallized. Out of these discussions the Geese were born as an organized group. They had ghosted about before around questions such as 'force and violence.' But the discussions about our approach to the masses via a Labor Party touched off the 'final conflict.' Our side became more and more convinced that the successful and effective functioning with and within a Labor Party would require and make possible the open functioning of a legal Communist Party. The illegalists-in-principle, on the other hand, for whom control meant leadership, could see a protection for the purity of the principles of the Party only in the underground." The botched handling of the Farmer-Labor Party question in 1924 "broke up the behind the scenes bridge between us and Fitzpatrick" and "initiated the bitter and destructive fight within the CP between the Foster group and the Ruthenberg (later Lovestone) group," Bedacht recalls. "Foster accused the National Committee of the Party that it broke faith with Fitzpatrick," Bedacht notes.
MARCH 1958
"Letter to Theodore Draper in New York from Cyril Briggs in Los Angeles." (extract) [March 17, 1958] This is a fascinating first-hand account of the origins and development of the African Blood Brotherhood by its founder and leading force, Cyril Briggs. Briggs states that he was never a member of the Socialist Party, not believing that the SPA had anything of import to offer American blacks, but that he was won to the CPA by Rose Pastor Stokes, who competed with Robert Minor of the UCP in attempting to win Briggs to the movement. Briggs states that he thus became the 3rd black in the CPA, joining Otto Huiswoud and a certain Hendricks. (The rival UCP actually had a black District Organizer in this period, it should be noted, William Costley.) Briggs says that he quit The Amsterdam News in 1918 over editorial censorship at the behest of Federal authorities, and launched The Crusader soon there after. This publication preceded the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood, Briggs states. "The Brotherhood never attained the proportions of a real mass organization. Its initial membership was less than a score, and all in Harlem. At its peak it had less than 3,000 members," Briggs says, noting that most of the group's members were recruited through the pages of the magazine, which had a peak circulation of 36,000. Briggs dismisses the assertion made in the press that the ABB was behind the Tulsa race riots of 1919 as a "canard," probably related to the military-sounding name of the group's primary organizational units, "posts." The ABB morphed into the Crusader News Service, Briggs indicates, a free service which exerted a great influence in the pages of the American black press. "If organizing the Brotherhood was not inspired by any particular event or development, the creation of the Crusader News Service was inspired by our fight against certain policies and tactics of Garvey and his lieutenants. We wished to set the widest possible audience for our polemics against those tactics and policies," Briggs states. Briggs tells Draper that he is "quite correct in assuming that the Communist Party had no part in initiating the organization of the Brotherhood. Nor did the Brotherhood owe its inspiration to the Communist movement." While he is unsure of the date of founding of the ABB, Briggs believes that it was launched shortly after the founding of The Crusader in Nov. 1918 -- that is, in early 1919.
