The Roots of American Communism

Victor W. Turner, Theodore Draper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351302821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this definitive history of the evolution of the Com- munist Party in America--from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence as a legal entity in the 1920s--Theodore Draper traces the native and foreign strains that comprised the party. He emphasizes its shifting policies and secrets as well as its open activities. He makes clear how the party in its infancy "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power," a fact that Draper develops in his succeeding volume, American Communism and Soviet Russia.

In his special, prescient way, Theodore Draper himself had the final words on American Communism: "It is like a museum of radical politics. In its various stages, it has virtually been all things to all men... There are many ways of trying to understand such a movement, but the first task is historical. In some respects, there is no other way to understand it, or at least to avoid seriously misunderstanding it. Every other approach tends to be static, one-sided or unbalanced."

Draper correctly notes that the formative period of the American Communist movement has remained a largely untold and even unknown story. In part, the reasons for this are that the Communist movement, although a child of the West, grew to power in the Soviet East. But Draper rescues this chapter with deep appreciation for the fact that communism was not something that happened just in Russia, but also in the United States. This is a must read for scholars and laypersons alike.

This volume is conceived as an independent and self-contained study of the American Communist movement. Draper correctly notes that the formative period is largely untold and even unknown. In part, the reasons for this are that the Communist movement, although a child of the West, grew to power in the Soviet East. Draper appreciates the fact that communism was not something that happened only in Russia, but also took place in the United States. That experience is the focus of this volume.

1

The Historic Left

THE older native American Communists were born, with few exceptions, in the decade 1881–91. They were still relatively close to the birth of the modern American labor movement; to the infancy of socialism, trade unionism, anarchism, and syndicalism; to the heyday of radical and reform movements now only dimly remembered.

The first Marxian Socialists in the United States were German immigrants who came over after the ill-fated German revolution of 1848. These German immigrants brought with them a degree of trade-union and political consciousness then unknown in the United States. No sooner had they arrived than they set about duplicating their old-world allegiances in their new homeland. But they did not get very far until after the Civil War. The International Workingmen’s Association, the so-called First International, founded in London with the help of Karl Marx in 1864, obtained its first American section five years later.

The next and larger wave of German immigrants in the seventies and eighties however, owed their socialism less to the exiled Marx than to the romantic founder of German social democracy, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle taught that state aid through political action was the only road to the future revolution. He believed in the “iron law of wages”—that it was impossible in an economic system based on free competition for workers to receive more than the bare minimum for existence. Hence he left no room for trade unionism or at least for its primary function, the struggle for higher wages. His immigrant American followers formed “Social Democratic” and “Labor” parties but opposed trade unionism. On the other hand, the early American Marxists did not consider the time ripe for political activity. They believed in trade unionism as the best immediate medium for their political ideas. For the Marxists, the line between political and economic activity was not so sharply drawn, since Marx saw political implications in every economic struggle.

It was a fateful clash, transferred almost bodily from Europe to America. Modern American socialism had its origin in the rivalry between the Marxists and the Lassalleans. The reluctance of the orthodox Marxists to engage in general political activity was one of the main causes of a split in the American branch of the International in 1872. The Lassalleans formed a Social Democratic party of North America in 1874. It suffered from the same disruptive controversy of trade unionism versus politics. The Working Men’s party of the United States came in 1876 under joint Lassallean-Marxist auspices. When the Lassalleans gained control, they changed the name to the Socialist Labor party of North America in December 1877. This party for the first time gave organizational continuity to American socialism.¹

In those seminal years, the issues were posed in such a way that the opposing sides tended to go to extremes. In that small, immature Socialist world, it seemed necessary to choose between Socialist politics and trade-union economics. Though the Socialists suffered cruelly from their own fratricidal wars, they succeeded in stirring up a remarkably creative ferment in the labor movement. But this ferment produced an unexpected result. Out of it came ex-Socialists and former Socialist sympathizers who moved from trade-union socialism to trade unionism without socialism. Two cigar makers, Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers, traveled this road from socialism to “pure and simple” trade unionism. The American Federation of Labor, which they were largely instrumental in forming in 1886, in part grew out of the reaction against political socialism.

Also transferred across the Atlantic was the bitter feud between Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin, the son of a Russian nobleman and the father of modern revolutionary anarchism. Bakunin’s ideas and methods became the stock in trade of the nineteenth century’s revolutionary underground—the conspiratorial form of organization, the cult of violence, the loathing of all authority, the quixotic vision of liberty and equality through destruction and chaos. A Revolutionary Socialist party was organized in Chicago in 1881 by an extremist faction which split away from the Socialist Labor party. The arrival in New York the following year of a German Bakuninist, Johann Most, gave the anarchists a mordant spokesman. Most spread the gospel of the “propaganda of the deed,” “expropriation” of the rich, and the beauty of a well-placed stick of dynamite. The “Revolutionary Socialists” and the anarchists united at a convention in Pittsburgh in 1883 and drew up a platform proclaiming that “there is only one remedy left—force.” By 1885, this organization claimed about 7000 members, over twice as many as the politically minded Socialist Labor party.²

In a well-ordered society, this sort of agitation might have been dismissed as the ravings of madmen. But the United States of this time was not a particularly well-ordered society. Thousands of immigrants poured into the country from Europe each year—almost 9,000,000 from 1881 to 1900. The relations between labor and capital were largely undefined and uncontrollable except by sheer force on both sides. Employers fought labor organizations by every possible means. Strikes were ruthlessly crushed by armed guards, police, sheriffs, militia, and federal troops. Court injunctions tied the hands of unions on the mere threat of a strike. Working conditions often ranged from the primitive to the abominable. Bad times followed good times with monotonous regularity.

In this inflammable social climate, socialism, trade unionism, and anarchism were not the only panaceas. When the A.F. of L. was formed, the Knights of Labor boasted three times the membership of the trade unions. The Knights, founded in 1869, came out of a period when labor organizations were compelled to work in secrecy to overcome the lockouts, blacklists, and forcible resistance of employers. Originally conceived to promote education, mutual aid, and cooperation, it came to spend most of its energy on strikes and boycotts. In one respect, its struggles differed from those of the trade unions: the Knights organized the unskilled and semi-skilled, the trade unions the skilled workers. The decline of the Knights in the period 1886–1900 signified the ascendancy of the skilled craft labor of the trade unions, but the tradition of industrial unionism, which finally prevailed, goes back to the Knights of Labor.

The status quo was challenged from other directions. Henry George attacked land speculation as the source of all social evil and sought to stamp it out by taxing all profits from land equal to the full rental value—the “single tax.” In the great American utopian tradition, Edward Bellamy’s tremendously popular novel, Looking Backward, appeared in 1887. Bellamy’s hero awoke in the year 2000 A.D. to find a world of perfect virtue and virtuous perfection because the state had peacefully expropriated all private industrial enterprise and taken charge of the entire economy on a basis of equality and cooperation. Bellamy’s genteel and ethical vision of socialism appealed to many more native Americans than did Marx’s analysis of the class struggle, but some of those who started with Bellamy ended with Marx. The Christian Socialist movement arose in the late 1880s. Some Protestant thinkers and ministers fought sin in the guise of capitalism and sought salvation in the form of socialism. The essential ideals of socialism were scattered far and wide, and incorporated into many different systems of thought.

The official Socialist movement, however, was little more than a small, moribund, foreign-language sect until the Socialist Labor party was taken over by that imperious, eccentric, and magnetic personality, Daniel De Leon, in 1890. A lecturer on international law at Columbia University, De Leon had supported Henry George’s candidacy for mayor of New York in 1886 and had passed through both the Knights of Labor and the Bellamy movement. De Leon could not make the S.L.P. into a mass movement but he could give it an unprecedented theoretical vitality. The convert to Marxist doctrine quickly became its outstanding American interpreter and even went on to do his own thinking in order to fill the gigantic vacuum left by Marx on the nature of the future socialist state. De Leon was a doctrinaire, but a creative one, a combination rarely encountered in Marxian dogmatists. When the future Communist leaders were growing up, De Leon was already a force to be reckoned with, and he initiated some of them into the mysteries of Marxism before that other creative doctrinaire, Lenin, came along to replace him in their affections.

Industrial unionism and Bellamyite utopianism served Eugene Victor Debs as stepping stones to socialism. A former railway fireman born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs organized the American Railway Union on industrial-union lines in 1893. After a turbulent strike against the Pullman car company the following year, a sweeping court injunction, the intervention of government troops, and a debacle for the union, six months in jail for defying the injunction gave Debs the enforced leisure to start studying socialist literature. After this strike setback, Debs devoted himself to a scheme for the cooperative colonization of a sparsely settled Western state. Disappointed again, he announced his conversion to socialism in 1897. Instead of joining forces with De Leon in the Socialist Labor party, however, Debs formed a rival organization, the Social Democratic party, in 1898.

At about the same time, a rebellion began to erupt in the Socialist Labor party. The rebels, led by Morris Hillquit of New York, opposed De Leon’s domineering personal rule and his anti-A.F. of L. trade-union policy. After much negotiation and maneuvering, the forces behind Debs and Hillquit combined to form the Socialist party of America in 1901. It brought together Christian Socialists and orthodox Marxists, immigrant workers and native intellectuals, trade-union officials and millionaire social reformers. Only a few of the delegates at the first Socialist party convention “had more than the haziest intellectual acquaintance with theoretical Marxism,” writes David A. Shannon. “Certainly the anticapitalism of many of the delegates derived more from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward than from Das Kapital.”³

Those who were looking for a militant, extremist movement, however, were no longer likely to find it in socialism. The most exciting new phenomenon in the labor movement in the first decade of the twentieth century—the most impressionable early years of the future Communists—was syndicalism. It arose in the Western states where the craft unionism of the A.F. of L. could not or would not penetrate. The original impulse came from the Western Federation of Miners, formed in 1893 with William D. (Big Bill) Haywood as secretary-treasurer. The mine federation, an industrial union, had stormed out of the A.F. of L., charging lack of support, and had retaliated by setting up independent Western Labor centers, first the Western Labor Union, then the American Labor Union. Finally, a conglomeration of anti-A.F. of L. elements, including those in the American Labor Union, the Socialist Labor party, and the Socialist party, met together to form the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) at Chicago in 1905. At the outset, it was big enough to hold Debs, De Leon, and Haywood—but not for long.

Though most of the organizers of the I.W.W., including Haywood, were avowed socialists, they did not agree on the road to socialism. The fundamental dispute hinged on the old problem of political versus economic action. Should political parties or trade unions or both make the revolution? The orthodox Marxists put their faith primarily in revolutionary parties; the syndicalists, in revolutionary trade unions. The original preamble of the I.W.W.’s constitution referred to a struggle “on the political as well as on the industrial field.” This phrase did not go far enough for those who believed in revolutionary political activity and went too far for those who believed solely in revolutionary trade unionism. Debs left the I.W.W. in 1906 because he felt that it underestimated the importance of political activity. De Leon was ousted in 1908 in a coup executed by an I.W.W. group more sympathetic to anarchism than to socialism. In that same year, the preamble was changed to eliminate the reference to political activity altogether. The I.W.W. developed into an American variety of anarcho-syndicalism whose battle cries weie “direct action,” “sabotage,” and the “general strike.”

The Left Wing of the American labor movement before World War I had its deepest roots in two movements— socialism and syndicalism. Therefore it did not have a single home. It was in the main divided in its loyalties among three organizations— the Socialist Labor party, the Socialist party, and the I.W.W. But that elusive and yet indispensable term— the Left Wing—cannot be fully understood organizationally. There are usually a number of rival groups within the Left Wing, each claiming to be the only true Left. The Left Wing of one period differs from the Left Wing of other periods. This instability is characteristic of a term which does not stand for a party or a program but rather for a relative position, and often only for a vague state of mind.

Nevertheless, there has been something like a historic Left in the American labor movement. As one Left Wing has followed another, a number of basic issues have recurred again and again. Since the Left Wing was less an organization than a fluctuating body of attitudes and ideas, these issues, more than anything else, gave it an enduring character.

Politics versus economics

One of the earliest and most persistent of these issues, as we have seen, was that of political versus economic action.

It split the socialist movement at its inception in the struggle between the Lassalleans and the Marxists. In the context of the time, the pure and simple trade unionists represented the Right Wing; they were regarded with disdain by the political socialists because they worked for the immediate and partial betterment of the working class. Since the political socialists scorned such palliatives and held out for a fundamental change in the social order, they considered themselves to be the Left Wing of the period.

The Lassallean-Marxist dispute still hovered over the socialist movement when De Leon appeared on the scene. He attempted to bring about a theoretical reconciliation. De Leon taught the necessity of assaulting capitalism on the economic as well as the political front, a drastic revision of the original premise of the Socialist Labor party. Far from underestimating the importance of trade unions, he insisted upon socialist activity in the trade unions— but they had to be revolutionary, industrial unions controlled by a revolutionary party.

The Socialist party approached the problem somewhat differently. It was primarily a political organization that functioned most effectively at election time. But it recognized the vital role of the trade unions in improving the conditions of the workers. The dominant Socialist outlook, however, implied a division of labor. The socialists owed support to the trade unions in the economic field, and the trade unions owed support to the socialists in the political field. The Socialist party never tried to form revolutionary industrial unions and control them, as the Socialist Labor party under De Leon tried to do. In effect, the Socialist party could officially live at peace with the A.F. of L., even if some individual Socialists could not.

The I.W.W. brought back the old feud with renewed force. The change in the preamble and the expulsion of De Leon bolted the door of the organization against all varieties of political-actionists. Haywood himself was less one-sided. As long as he remained a member of the Socialist party, he did not rule out the political weapon. He thought of political action, however, from the viewpoint of a trade unionist who was being shot at by police and troops. Political action was a possible means of neutralizing these foes. Though the general public identified the I.W.W. with Haywood, the organizing staff of the I.W.W. looked to the General Secretary-Treasurer, Vincent St. John, for leadership, and St. John came much closer to orthodox syndicalism.

The weight of the Left Wing tradition leaned over in the direction of the I.W.W. Trade-union struggles were exhilarating and electoral activity was anemic. In their first stage, the future Communists showed the effects of this conditioning.

Unionism— “pure” and “dual”

The Left Wing did not approve of any kind of economic action by any kind of trade-union movement. The tradition of De Leon, Debs, and Haywood declared war on the A.F. of L. and sought to replace it with industrial unionism.

De Leon agreed with the old Lassalleans that seeking higher wages and shorter hours through “reformist” unions was useless. Instead of rejecting trade unions altogether, however, he prescribed the remedy of revolutionary unions, industrial in form and closely linked to the Socialist Labor party. First he tried to take over the declining Knights of Labor for this end, and when this maneuver failed, he pushed through the organization of a new federation, the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, in 1895.

The A.F. of L.’s leader, Gompers, fought back by raising an anguished cry against “dual unionism.” From that time on, any attempt to form rival unions has met with the same stigma.

De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance never caught on and he merged it with the I.W.W. in 1905. After De Leon was expelled from the I.W.W. three years later, he retaliated by setting up a rival organization in Detroit, using the same name. For years there was a “Detroit I.W.W.” and a “Chicago I.W.W.” Only the latter ever represented a serious threat to the A.F. of L. De Leon, Haywood, and Debs had a standard answer to Gompers’ charge of dual unionism. They simply refused to concede that the A.F. of L. was a bona fide trade union. For De Leon it was a band of “labor fakers.” Haywood opened the first I.W.W. convention with the words: “It has been said that this convention was to form an organization rival to the A.F. of L. This is a mistake. We are here for the purpose of forming a labor organization.”⁴ Debs wrote: “To talk about reforming these rotten graft-infested [A.F. of L.] unions, which are dominated absolutely by the labor boss, is as vain and wasteful of time as to spray a cesspool with attar of roses.”⁵

Dual unionism was never a very accurate epithet. It implied that the A.F. of L. had organized the American working class, and that any other union would merely duplicate it. This was never remotely the case, least of all in Gompers’ prime. At the turn of the century, when Gompers was storming about dual unionism, the A.F. of L. had organized about 3 per cent of the total number of gainfully employed workers in non-farm occupations. The A.F. of L.’s share in 1910 was only about 5 per cent.⁶ In that era, the A. F. of L. was largely made up of craft unions with a membership of native skilled workers, mostly located in the East. It kept out the vast majority of unskilled and semiskilled immigrant work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Historic Left
• 2. The Age of Unrest
• 3. The New Left Wing
• 4. Influences and Influences
• 5. The Left at War
• 6. The Reflected Glory
• 7. Roads to Moscow
• 8. The Revolutionary Age
• 9. The Real Split
• 10. The Great Schism
• 11. The Sibling Rivalry
• 12. The Underground
• 13. The Second Split
• 14. Spies, Victims, and Couriers
• 15. The Crisis of Communism
• 16. To the Masses!
• 17. The Revolution Devours Its Children
• 18. New Forces
• 19. The Legal Party
• 20. The Manipulated Revolution
• 21. The Two-Way Split
• 22. The Raid
• 23. The Transformation
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index