Socialist years (1908–1918) Ruthenberg's first political attraction was to
Tom L. Johnson, a
Single Taxer and reform
mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909. Ruthenberg was drawn to more
radical left-wing politics, and in mid-1908 began calling himself a socialist. During his time at Columbia University, which he entered in 1903, he first became involved with anarchist groups. During this time Ruthenberg traveled to many cities throughout the
American Northeast and
Midwest, speaking to
labor groups,
trade union organizations, and anti-war groups, building a network of contacts. He was associated with the
far left so-called "
Impossibilist" wing of the SPA, which had little hope for the efficacy of ameliorative reform, seeking instead
revolutionary socialist transformation. Ruthenberg was a frequent candidate on the ticket of the Socialist Party. His first electoral failure came in 1910, when he ran for Ohio's state treasurer on the Socialist ticket. In 1911 he ran for
mayor of Cleveland, in 1912 for
Governor of Ohio, for
U.S. Senate in 1914. In 1915 he ran again for mayor of Cleveland and in 1916 he ran for
United States Congressman. In 1917 he made his third run for mayor of Cleveland (receiving 27,000 votes of 100,000 cast), followed by his second run for Congress in 1918. His fourth and final run for mayor of Cleveland came in 1919. 's War Committee at the 1917 Emergency National Convention. Ruthenberg was a delegate to the seminal 1917 Emergency National Convention of the SPA. There he was elected to the Committee on War and Militarism and was one of three primary authors of the aggressively
antimilitarist St. Louis program, along with
Morris Hillquit and
Algernon Lee. rally in
Cleveland, 1917 After
American entry into World War I, Ruthenberg continued to publicly attack the imperialist conflict and America's participation in it. He was charged with violating the
Espionage Act, accused of obstructing the
draft in connection with a speech given at a rally on May 17, 1917. Also charged at the same time were
Alfred Wagenknecht and
Charles Baker. They were tried together in July 1917 and sentenced to one year in the
Ohio State Penitentiary, a decision upheld by the
U.S. Supreme Court on January 15, 1918. Informed of this decision, he issued a statement declaring: The Supreme Court has decided we must spend a year in jail. The crime for which we are convicted is truth telling. We believe in certain principles; we fought for those principles, and we go to jail ostensibly for inducing a certain Alphones Schue not to register. The charge is merely an excuse.... The important fact is that the ruling class feared our message to the workers and tried to silence that message. That fact should make a hundred willing workers take up the work we lay down.... , and
Charles Baker in the potato patch of the Canton Workhouse from a 1917 pamphlet collecting speeches from their trial. Ruthenberg, Wagenknecht, and Baker served almost 11 months of their sentence and were released on December 8, 1918.
1919 Cleveland May Day Riot rally in
Cleveland, 1918 Freed from prison in December 1918, Ruthenberg dove in with both feet to the burgeoning left wing movement rocking the Socialist Party.
May Day of 1919 was an event of enormous enthusiasm and great fear. A gigantic assembly was planned in Cleveland, in which four parades of marchers, many waving red flags, came together in the public square to hear speeches and rally for freedom for
Eugene V. Debs and
Tom Mooney and the adoption of the 6-hour day and the $1 minimum wage. As many as 20,000 people are said to have participated in the march, with 20 to 30,000 more people lining the streets to watch. Ruthenberg later described the events that followed: When the head of the line was within a block of the Public Square the first trouble occurred. An officer in the uniform of the Red Cross jumped from a "Victory" Loan truck and endeavored to take a red flag which a soldier in uniform was carrying at the head of the procession. A scuffle followed in which other soldiers from the truck and some businessmen joined. During the scuffle one of these businessmen drew a revolver and wildly threatened the workers in the procession. In five minutes, however, the struggle was over. The lieutenant and his supporters were driven back to the sidewalk, the head of the line reformed, and with the red flag still flying, marched on to the Public Square. Suddenly, the police made their appearance: They came down Superior Ave., which divides the "Square" into northern and southern sections, headed by the mounted squad, followed by auto load after load. The newspapers later reported that 700 men had been concentrated at the Central Station, who now descended upon the marchers.... The first thousand or so of workers marched onto the square and took possession of the "Victory" Loan speakers' stand, which had been built over the stone blocks placed on the Public Square for the use of speakers at public meetings... The chairman was about to introduce [me] as the first speaker when an officer and a few soldiers tried to climb to the platform, demanding that the soldier that held the red flag give it up... [Then], without warning, a squad of mounted police dashed into the audience, driving their horses over the assembled workers and clubbing them as they went." A riot ensued, pitting the police and their supporters (backed by tanks) against the marchers. Two marchers were killed in the fighting, hundreds injured, and about 150 arrested in this
Cleveland May Day Riot. Ruthenberg was charged for incitement to murder in connection with this event but no conviction was obtained.
Formation of the CPUSA Ruthenberg was an early endorser of the
Left Wing Manifesto written by
Louis C. Fraina and around which the formal
Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party congealed. He was a Left Wing-supported candidate for the Socialist Party's governing National Executive Committee in the party election of 1919, the result of which was overturned by the outgoing NEC ostensibly on the grounds of election fraud carried out by some of the branches associated with the party's
language federations. Ruthenberg was a delegate to the June 1919 Convention of the Left Wing Section and was elected there as a member of the faction's governing National Council. He was initially supportive of the tactic of continuing to fight "to win the Socialist Party for the Left Wing" at its forthcoming
1919 Emergency National Convention in Chicago, but in the face of federation pressure for immediate formation of a
Communist Party USA and the apparently hopeless task faced by Wagenknecht & Co., he shifted his support to the Federations and their call for an immediate Communist Party. Dominated as it was sure to be by the Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Latvian language federations, the anglophonic Ruthenberg was a valuable commodity to federation leaders like
Alexander Stoklitsky,
Nicholas Hourwich, and
Joseph Stilson. Nor did Ruthenberg owe any allegiance to the idiosyncratic
Socialist Party of Michigan, led by
John Keracher and
Dennis Batt. Therefore, the ambitious Ruthenberg made an ideal candidate to head the new organization, which was established in Chicago on September 1, 1919, as the Communist Party of America (CPA). While decisive authority on the floor of the convention and on the Central Executive Committee which it elected remained in the hands of the so-called "Russian Federations," He was elected by the Chicago conclave as the first Executive Secretary of the new organization. Ironically, it was his old Ohio party comrade and prison mate, Alfred Wagenknecht, who was elected to head the rival
Communist Labor Party of America in the aftermath of the failed effort to win control of the Socialist Party at its August 1919 Convention. A period of bitter and acrimonious rivalry followed, in which both of the competing American communist organizations sought to win the favor (and financial support) of the
Communist International (Comintern). Adding to the complexity of the situation, the
Socialist Labor Party of America and the Socialist Party of America sought affiliation with the Comintern as well. The Comintern was adamant about its structure, however, and it sought one and only one centralized organization in each country. Merger between the CPA and CLP was demanded. 1920 The fulfillment of the Comintern's demand for unity proved to be no simple task, however, and the history of the next three years are a complex tale of splits, mergers, secret conventions, organized caucuses, and parallel organizations that lies outside of the scope of this presentation. In outline terms, a fight erupted among the leadership of the CPA in 1920 and Ruthenberg, together with a group of his English-speaking adherents such as
Isaac Ferguson and
Jay Lovestone as well as the Chicago-based section of the Russian federation, exited the organization (along with a major part of the group's funds) in April 1920 and joined with the Communist Labor Party to form the United Communist Party (UCP) in May. Wagenknecht headed this new joint organization with Ruthenberg placed in charge of the party press. This still left a divided Communist movement, however, with the major part of the old CPA, now headed by
Charles Dirba still remaining in increasingly bitter opposition. It was not until the end of 1922 — after another merger, split, and merger — that this rift was finally resolved, with the establishment with a new unified Communist Party of America and its parallel "Legal Political Party," the
Workers Party of America (WPA). During much of this complicated dance, Ruthenberg was in jail. In October 1920, he was tried together with his associate Isaac Ferguson in New York for alleged violation of the state's
criminal anarchism law, said to have been breached by the Left Wing Section when it published Fraina's Left Wing Manifesto the previous year. The pair were tried and sentenced to five years' confinement in the State Penitentiary on October 29, 1920. The pair sat in
Dannemora Prison until finally released on a $5,000
bond on April 24, 1922. Ruthenberg was immediately made Executive Secretary of the WPA upon his release on bail, with
Abram Jakira in charge of daily operations of the parallel and underground CPA. The above-ground WPA headed by Ruthenberg grew rapidly, boosted by the addition of the massive
Finnish Federation to its ranks, while the underground party withered and died, put to bed for good in 1923. Thereafter he was the sole Executive Secretary of the American Communist Party (still calling itself the Workers Party of America) — a position which he retained for the rest of his life, despite spending much of the 1920s as a leader of a minority faction within the party. The criminal anarchism convictions of Ruthenberg and Ferguson were ultimately overturned by the New York Supreme Court In July 1922, just in time for another round of prosecutions, this time related to ill-fate August
1922 Unity Convention of the CPA held at
Bridgman, Michigan.
1922 Bridgman Convention and its aftermath .
Back row, L-R: T.J. O'Flaherty, Charles Erickson,
Cyril Lambkin,
Bill Dunne, John Mihelic,
Alex Bail, W.E. "Bud" Reynolds, "Francis Ashworth."
Seated L-R: Norman Tallentire,
Caleb Harrison, Eugene Bechtold, Seth Nordling,
C. E. Ruthenberg,
Charles Krumbein,
Max Lerner, T.R. Sullivan, Elmer McMillan. A secret conclave had been arranged at the Wolfskeel Resort on the wooded shore of
Lake Michigan to finally unite the CPA with a parallel organization maintained by its dissident
Central Caucus faction. The site was regarded as relatively safe, having previously been used for a secret convention of the United Communist Party in the spring of 1920. This time, however, an informant of the US Department of Justice had managed to win election to the gathering as a delegate and the authorities had been notified. . Ruthenberg in front, shackled to
Charles Krumbein." 1922. The forced merger did not, however, end the rivalries between the two groups. Ruthenberg and his supporter
Jay Lovestone were at odds with a rival faction led by
William Z. Foster, who had strong ties to organized labor and who wanted to direct the party's work toward organizing within the American-born working class, and
James P. Cannon, who led the
International Labor Defense organization. Ruthenberg ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the
U.S. House of Representatives from
Ohio's 20th congressional district (now abolished) as the candidate of the Workers Party of America, as the CPUSA's legal organization was then known, on his return to the United States. In 1925,
Comintern representative
Sergei Gusev ordered the majority Foster faction to surrender control to Ruthenberg's faction; Foster complied. The factional infighting within the CPUSA did not end, however; the communist leadership of the New York locals of the
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union lost the 1926 strike of cloakmakers in New York City in large part because of intra-party factional rivalries, as neither group wanted to take the responsibility for accepting a strike settlement that appeared insufficiently revolutionary . In 1926–27 his
First Amendment case,
Ruthenberg v. Michigan, was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court had voted 7–2 (with
Brandeis joined by
Holmes dissenting) against Ruthenberg. But Ruthenberg died shortly before the Court rendered its ruling, rendering the case
moot; thus the opinions in the case were never published. It has been argued that Brandeis' adapted his unpublished opinion in
Ruthenberg into his famous defense of free speech found in the 1927 case
Whitney v. California. ==Personal life and death==