United States labor movement parade with banners and flags, New York The Communist Party has sought to play an active role in the labor movement since its origins as part of its effort to build a mass movement of American workers to bring about their own liberation through socialist revolution.
Soviet funding and espionage From 1959 until 1989, when
Gus Hall condemned the initiatives taken by
Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party received a substantial subsidy from the Soviets. There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. Starting with $75,000 in 1959, this was increased gradually to $3 million in 1987. This substantial amount reflected the party's loyalty to the Moscow
line, in contrast to the
Italian and later
Spanish and
British Communist parties, whose
Eurocommunism deviated from the orthodox line in the late 1970s. Releases from the Soviet archives show that all national Communist parties that conformed to the Soviet line were funded in the same fashion. From the Communist point of view, this international funding arose from the internationalist nature of communism itself as fraternal assistance was considered the duty of communists in any one country to give aid to their allies in other countries. From the anti-Communist point of view, this funding represented an unwarranted interference by one country in the affairs of another. The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis, which forced the party to cut back publication in 1990 of the party newspaper, the ''People's Daily World
, to weekly publication, the People's Weekly World'' (
see references below). Somewhat more controversial than mere funding is the alleged involvement of Communist members in espionage for the Soviet Union.
Whittaker Chambers alleged that Sandor Goldberger—also known as Josef Peters, who commonly wrote under the name
J. Peters—headed the Communist Party's underground secret apparatus from 1932 to 1938 and pioneered its role as an auxiliary to Soviet intelligence activities. Bernard Schuster, Organizational Secretary of the New York District of the Communist Party, is claimed to have been the operational recruiter and conduit for members of the party into the ranks of the secret apparatus, or "Group A line". Stalin publicly disbanded the
Comintern in 1943. A Moscow NKVD message to all stations on September 12, 1943, detailed instructions for handling intelligence sources within the Communist Party after the disestablishment of the Comintern. There are a number of decrypted World War II Soviet messages between NKVD offices in the United States and Moscow, also known as the
Venona cables. The Venona cables and other published sources appear to confirm that
Julius Rosenberg was responsible for espionage.
Theodore Hall, a Harvard-trained
physicist who did not join the party until 1952, began passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets soon after he was hired at
Los Alamos at age 19. Hall, who was known as Mlad by his KGB handlers, escaped prosecution. Hall's wife, aware of his espionage, claims that their NKVD handler had advised them to plead innocent, as the Rosenbergs did, if formally charged. It was the belief of opponents of the Communist Party such as
J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI; and
Joseph McCarthy, for whom
McCarthyism is named; and other
anti-Communists that the Communist Party constituted an active
conspiracy, was secretive, loyal to a foreign power and whose members assisted Soviet intelligence in the clandestine
infiltration of American government. This is the traditionalist view of some in the field of
Communist studies such as
Harvey Klehr and
John Earl Haynes, since supported by several memoirs of ex-Soviet KGB officers and information obtained from the
Venona project and Soviet archives. At one time, this view was shared by the majority of the
Congress. In the "Findings and declarations of fact" section of the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 (50 U.S.C. Chap. 23 Sub. IV Sec. 841), it stated: [T]he Communist Party, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic... the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders... to carry into action slavishly the assignments given.... [T]he Communist Party acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations.... The peril inherent in its operation arises [from] its dedication to the proposition that the present constitutional Government of the United States ultimately must be brought to ruin by any available means, including resort to force and violence... its role as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear present and continuing danger. In 1993, experts from the Library of Congress traveled to Moscow to copy previously secret archives of the party records, sent to the Soviet Union for safekeeping by party organizers. The records provided an irrefutable link between Soviet intelligence and information obtained by the Communist Party and its contacts in the United States government from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some documents revealed that the Communist Party was actively involved in secretly recruiting party members from African American groups and rural farm workers. Other party records contained further evidence that Soviet sympathizers had indeed infiltrated the State Department, beginning in the 1930s. Included in Communist Party archival records were confidential letters from two American ambassadors in Europe to Roosevelt and a senior State Department official. Thanks to an official in the Department of State sympathetic to the party, the confidential correspondence, concerning political and economic matters in Europe, ended up in the hands of Soviet intelligence.
Counterintelligence In 1952, Jack and
Morris Childs, together codenamed SOLO, became FBI informants. As high-ranking officials in the party, they informed on the CPUSA for the rest of the Cold War, monitoring the Soviet funding. They also traveled to Moscow and Beijing to meet USSR and PRC leadership. Jack and Morris Childs both received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 for their intelligence work. Morris's son stated, "The CIA could not believe the information the FBI had because the Communist Party of the USA had links directly into the Kremlin." According to intelligence analyst Darren E. Tromblay, the SOLO operation, and the Ad Hoc Committee, were part of "developing geopolitical awareness" by the FBI about factors such as the
Sino-Soviet split. The Ad Hoc Committee was a group within CPUSA that circulated a pro-Maoist bulletin in the voice of a "dedicated but rebellious comrade." Allegedly an operation, it caused a schism within the CPUSA.
Criminal prosecutions and
Benjamin J. Davis leaving the
Foley Square Courthouse during the
Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders, 1949 When the Communist Party was formed in 1919, the United States government was engaged in prosecution of socialists who had opposed World War I and military service. This prosecution was continued in 1919 and January 1920 in the
Palmer Raids as part of the
First Red Scare. Rank and file foreign-born members of the Communist Party were targeted and as many as possible were arrested and deported while leaders were prosecuted and, in some cases, sentenced to prison terms. In the late 1930s, with the authorization of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the FBI began investigating both domestic Nazis and Communists. In 1940, Congress passed the
Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. In 1949, the federal government put
Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster and ten other Communist Party leaders on trial for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Because the prosecution could not show that any of the defendants had openly called for violence or been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed revolution, it relied on the testimony of former members of the party that the defendants had privately advocated the overthrow of the government and on quotations from the work of Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary figures of the past. During the course of the trial, the judge held several of the defendants and all of their counsel in contempt of court. All of the remaining eleven defendants were found guilty, and the
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of their convictions by a 6–2 vote in
Dennis v. United States, . The government then proceeded with the prosecutions of more than 140 members of the party. Panicked by these arrests and fearing that the party was dangerously compromised by informants, Dennis and other party leaders decided to go underground and to disband many affiliated groups. The move heightened the political isolation of the leadership while making it nearly impossible for the party to function. The widespread support of action against communists and their associates began to abate after Senator
Joseph McCarthy overreached himself in the
Army–McCarthy hearings, producing a backlash. The end of the
Korean War in 1953 also led to a lessening of anxieties about subversion. The Supreme Court brought a halt to the Smith Act prosecutions in 1957 in its decision in
Yates v. United States, , which required that the government prove that the defendant had actually taken concrete steps toward the forcible overthrow of the government, rather than merely advocating it in theory.
African Americans The Communist Party played a role in defending the rights of African Americans during its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. The
Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party USA helped organize the unemployed Black workers, the Alabama
Sharecroppers' Union and numerous anti-lynching campaigns. Further, the Alabama chapter organized young activists that would later go on to be prominent members in the civil rights movement, such as Rosa Parks. Throughout its history several of the party's leaders and political thinkers have been African Americans.
James Ford,
Charlene Mitchell,
Angela Davis and
Jarvis Tyner, the current executive vice chair of the party, all ran as presidential or vice presidential candidates on the party ticket. Others like
Benjamin J. Davis,
William L. Patterson,
Harry Haywood, James Jackson,
Henry Winston,
Claude Lightfoot,
Alphaeus Hunton,
Doxey Wilkerson,
Claudia Jones, and John Pittman contributed in important ways to the party's approaches to major issues from human and civil rights, peace, women's equality, the national question, working class unity, socialist thought, cultural struggle, and more. African American thinkers, artists and writers such as
Claude McKay,
Richard Wright,
Ann Petry,
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Shirley Graham Du Bois,
Lloyd Brown,
Charles White,
Elizabeth Catlett,
Paul Robeson,
Gwendolyn Brooks, and others were one-time members or supporters of the party, and the Communist Party also had a close alliance with Harlem Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Gay rights movement Harry Hay developed his political views as an active member of the Communist Party. Hay founded in the early 1950s the
Mattachine Society, America's second
gay rights organization. However, gay rights were not seen as something the party should associate with organizationally. Many party members saw
homosexuality as something
done by those with fascist tendencies (following the lead of the Soviet Union in criminalizing the practice for that reason). Hay, along with all other homosexual members, were expelled from the party as an ideological risk, with leadership considering them "vulnerable to blackmail from the FBI." In 2004, more than a decade after the
fall of the Soviet Union and after
Russia had legalized male homosexual relations, the editors of
Political Affairs published articles detailing their
self-criticism of the party's early views of gay and lesbian rights and praised Hay's work. The Communist Party endorsed
LGBT rights in a 2005 statement. The party affirmed the resolution with a statement a year later in honor of
gay pride month in June 2006.
United States peace movement The Communist Party opposed the United States involvement in the early stages of
World War II (until June 22, 1941, the date of the
German invasion of the Soviet Union), the
Korean War, the
Vietnam War, the
invasion of Grenada, and American support for
anti-Communist military dictatorships and movements in Central America. Meanwhile, some in the
peace movement and the
New Left rejected the Communist Party for what it saw as the party's bureaucratic rigidity and for its close association with the Soviet Union. The Communist Party was consistently opposed to the United States' 2003–2011 war in Iraq.
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) includes the New York branch of the Communist Party as a member group, with Communist Judith LeBlanc serving as the co-chair of UFPJ from 2007 to 2009. == Election results ==