Red Storm Rising: The Struggle for the American Communist Party

The people, see the people, understand what they need, is a voice to express it for them and an organization to rally them.

And people are going to march forward, with the people who belong the victory The American radical tradition is the part of our history that was largely ignored before the 1960s.

Earl Browder became the head of the American party in 1932, and under Browder's leadership, the party really achieved its greatest influence in American life.

William Z. Foster was an important figure in the emergence of the American Communist Party.

Foster thought of Browder as someone who was, you know, going to play a subsidiary role.

We're talking about a relationship that is going to be sour for about 20 years.

This program is made possible in part by Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit Marymount University in the heart of Los Angeles.

Learn more at lmu.edu.

Let's talk about the Communist Party today in the United States.

I understand that only last week you called one of the party's top men, William Foster, an evil man who all his life has been motivated by a mania for personal power.

I've been attempting to tell what I know for the last ten years and received very little encouragement.

I receive a great deal of encouragement to tell what other people think they know, but I am not in the world to tell other people's stories for them.

William Z. Foster was a itinerant worker who, after he left Philadelphia at age 19, in the year 1900, traveled all over the United States.

He traveled around the world.

Foster grew up in extreme poverty.

He grew up in a house on a back alley in a notorious slum area of Philadelphia called Skidereen.

He had experienced this extreme poverty.

It was a real bitter sort of, childhood in many ways.

Foster inherited a certain amount of radicalism from his father, a dedicated Fenian who was for the overthrow of the British garrison in Ireland.

His mother was very different.

Devout Catholic.

Who hoped, I think, that, Foster William Foster, as a smart kid, you know, would wind up in the seminary.

I think neither of those influences left a great impression on Foster.

He never identified much, ethnically as Irish.

And he certainly left religion very far behind.

and he was kind of anti religious in some ways.

Foster had no explicit sort of political ideas up to that point.

Foster was introduced to working class struggles and radicalism and working class organization and demonstrations and protest at an early age in Philadelphia.

I mean, this was a crucible for him.

One formative moment, and he talks about it later in life would have been called a soap boxer.

This particular guy happened to be from the Socialist Party.

So he says that this was the first time that he really encountered socialist ideas and the socialist ideology from the soap boxer or on the corner.

Here was a socialist, a stranger, perhaps, who represented the kinds of, feelings of oppression that he felt as a worker.

Foster was a young man, and this must have been a real epiphany to him, and a revelation.

He traveled to Europe, in 1910, where he witnessed a huge event in the history of, syndicalism, actually, the French, general railroad strike of 1910.

Syndicalists believed that capitalism would be overthrown not through a political process, not in the ballot box, not by electing congressmen or presidents, but rather through naked class struggle.

At the point of production.

So strikes, were the way in which the working class would build his power, until finally there was some great strike, general strike at the end that would topple capitalism.

According to syndicalists, real change could only come through direct action, especially strikes or boycotts and possibly sabotage.

At the point of production.

Foster would like to kind of militant economic action, the big strikes.

That was what he'd come out of at the end of the First World War.

He'd been a strike leader.

Foster was a leader and central figure in the Great Steel Strike of 1919.

He was widely considered, you know, the organizing genius.

It ended up becoming the largest strike in American history at that time.

He was able to move in this kind of progressive Chicago Federation of Labor, which was a central grouping of labor unions in Chicago at the time, and gained a certain amount of respect.

He was called on increasingly, to, you know, assume more responsibilities.

The idea was trade unions and labor unions as the nucleus and nuclei of the future society.

Earl Browder was born into a troubled world, and a troubled country.

So we're talking about poverty in a small Kansas town, Wichita, a poverty which certainly caused Earl to always doubt the American dream.

The one constant in Browder's life was a questioning of capitalism, the one cause that the young romantic Browder found, to be the closest to his heart was resistance to American intervention in World War One.

The United States entered World War One in 1917.

World War One was one of the most unpopular conflicts in American history.

Browder was arrested for, conspiracy to, evade the draft for telling young men that they didn't have to serve.

Foster and Browder had these amazing personalities, but at the same time, they reflect a vast personal histories and experiences.

These are people who are working together in the same organization, and both are seen as essential to the organization.

But they didn't like each other.

The world in the late 19th century had just gone through the second greatest change in human history: The industrial revolution, where muscle power was replaced with machine power.

And so there's a lot of change and ferment, and there's a great sense that our society is moving in the wrong direction.

Haymarket was really the beginnings and an early part of this larger, what we would call the great upheaval.

What is going to start to happen is there's going to be an enormous strike wave.

And so on May 1st, 1886, there's a huge parade.

It's a big strike.

People are to take to the streets.

About 100,000 people in Chicago turn out for this big May 1st demonstration for the eight hour day, on the kind of momentum of this discontent with the way that capitalism has developed with the greed that many working people felt was characterizing this system.

Socialists and anarchists call for a meeting at Haymarket, where they want to have a forum to talk about this violence that the state is enacting against working people, about the ability of working people to be able to assemble, to have rights in the workplace.

And that's when the Chicago police kind of arrive in military formation to break this event up, because you can visualize, you know, the police marching into Haymarket, and you can really see how it all went down.

And someone throws a bomb into the police and into their formation.

And the explosion sets off chaos.

And the aftermath of this was a heightened frenzy to arrest anybody who had been questioning capitalism.

The focus ends up on eight of these socialists and anarchists and the the ones who are hung are known as the Haymarket Martyrs.

And to many radicals from the 1880s and the 1890s onward, Haymarket represented the most evil features of American industrial capitalism, repressing the workers.

I think Foster would have heard about Haymarket even early in life.

Foster talked about it, and, I think it for him, it's symbolized this sort of, brutal confrontation between the radical working class elements, on the one hand, and employing class on the other Browders entire generation did consider Haymarket one of the inevitable atrocities that capitalism would breed.

In 1917, as the First World War was raging, a revolution occurred in Russia brought about by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, who became the Communist Party.

This is the beginning of the Soviet Union.

Never before had a movement dedicated to socialism ever controlled the national government.

The Communist Party ruled as a one-party state and inspired disaffected socialists all over the world.

After that, World War One came to an end.

The Soviet Bolsheviks were the ideological inspiration, for the American movement.

One of the first things the Soviet Union did is the successful Russian revolutionaries did was to form a Communist International in 1919, and its goal was to plant communist parties in every major capitalist country.

So those leaders in the United States who were going to come to the fore, including, Browder, Earl Browder and, William z. Foster and others, were those who bet right on the sweepstakes in Moscow.

This is the only place where a worker's revolution has succeeded.

They must have something right.

And so it is worth leaving the Socialist Party and joining with this revolutionary force.

Federations of radicals, who didn't speak English and were not part of the Socialist Party, also sought to form a Communist party.

These two communist parties, were created in the late summer of 1919.

They competed against one another for, a few years until they were forced into a United Communist party, the Communist Party, that it was the result of Russian pressure for Americans to have one Communist party, not several.

Earl Browder was was in jail, from early 1918, got out of jail near the end of 1920.

He left a wife and son in Kansas, went to New York and began looking for a way to enter the Communist Party.

The party was founded in December of 1921.

It had been preceded by frightful raids and persecution of communists and socialists and pacifists during the Palmer Raids.

Attorney General Mitchell Palmer had led numerous raids on radical offices and radical meetings, and so the infant American Communist Party lived an existence that was part underground and part public.

In the United States, at no point in the history of the communist movement in this country was it possible for, say, workers in factories to be known as communists.

So when Browder reached New York, he simply couldn't walk into party headquarters.

Most of the party, in 1920, was underground.

Earl Browder struck out dramatically.

He became the best symbol the American Communist Party had ever developed.

Browder's blue eyes, his his ruddy complexion, gave a clear American slant to a party that had very quickly been stereotyped as a party of Eastern Europeans.

Foster was interested in the Communist Party for obvious reasons.

The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was something that had a tremendous effect on American radicals.

Foster's organization was an organization that had advocated a unionizing of people who did unskilled labor.

Browder had been, a part of one of Foster's syndicalist leagues in Kansas City, all the way back in 1912 and 1913.

So I think that's how they made their initial acquaintance.

Soviet communist were looking to recruit radicals of all kind, including people like Foster.

Browder had invited Foster to attend the Profintern Congress.

Foster was a well-known radical.

When Earl Browder invited him to go to Moscow.

The communists offered Foster a quasi-independent role in the American Communist Party as their head of labor organizing.

For the first time, the communists had a connection with the American labor movement, and also they had as one of their cohort, you know, the organizer of the Great Steel Strike.

To him, the politics of the Communist Party was secondary.

I mean, he was very impressed by Bolshevik revolutionaries.

This was the first worker's state that had been established by revolution.

He witnessed incredible demonstrations of Soviet military power, and he wrote back to one of his friends from Moscow, referring to the tremendous power that he witnessed there.

He said, you can tell my enemies to go to hell.

Foster and Browder returned from Moscow.

Foster joined the Communist Party.

Foster was looking at the Soviet party as a potential resource for his establishing a radical labor movement in the United States.

Foster treated Browder as has his kind of office boy, I guess you could say, and patronized him and treated him in that kind of condescending way.

And I think that set the stage in a lot of ways for their later conflicts.

Communism is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization with many different levels of commitment and many different kinds of people who are bringing their cultures and their experience and their history with them.

It pulls on the loyalties of people who are formerly in the Socialist Party, and they're in what's considered the left wing of the Socialist Party, but they're drawing from people who are former anarchists.

There's the Socialist Labor Party.

I mean, there's all manner of experiences that people are going to bring with them.

We fought for almost two years and led by C. Rosenberg, to form a legal party in December 1921.

The leadership was constantly in factional struggle, but among the rank and file, many of us went into various fields to try to organize workers and lead them.

The Passaic strike of woolen workers in 1926 lasted 13 months.

Workers who AFL craft unions were just not interested in organizing.

The Communist Party, knew that this was a huge vacuum that they wanted to fill.

Foster saw the Passaic strike as an exercise in futility.

He believes the plan of establishing separate revolutionary industrial unions is wrong, and instead, the only effective way forward is to work through existing unions.

The idea that certain communists had, who had very little experience in actual labor organizing, their idea that they could just go into industrial communities and establish communist unions as viable bargaining unions, was a pipe dream.

I think Foster was always most comfortable on the role of oppositionist he finds congenial the emphasis that the Communist Party, in its most revolutionary periods, right after the First World War, again in the early 1930s, had on class against class.

Foster was very interested in helping, but the people who needed Foster got a very bad treatment.

Browder worked for Foster, and he worked very hard, but he was not very appreciated.

Foster always considered Browder to be inferior in talent and ability to Foster.

Browder came to resent being treated as Foster's boy.

And that's what opponents often referred to Browder as, Foster's boy.

Everywhere Browder assisted Foster, and nowhere did he feel appreciated.

The first moment when Browder showed the resentment that he felt toward Foster occurred in 1924 1925, in Moscow.

Foster had gone to Moscow to get a judgment on one of the many intra party disputes, and he sent for Browder to come help him, Browder arrived in time for the very final meeting.

At this final meeting, Joseph Stalin showed up.

Stalin asked Browder at the end of the meeting to give Browders opinion on a question that was in dispute at the time, but Browder feared Joseph Stalin, so Browder demurred, and for that Foster became enraged.

Foster expected his assistant to echo his points of view, and as a direct result, Foster left Browder in Moscow to stay there, and Browder would spend most of the rest of the decade outside the United States.

This is going to be very important, in building Browder's career, and it's going to be very important in, the growth of the antagonism between the two men.

As the 1920s went on, the Soviet party became increasingly rigid and doctrinaire.

As Stalin's power increased and he defeated all of his factional enemies, he insisted on complete ideological control of the Soviet party, and he extended that to the foreign parties as well.

If the faction that was in control of the party was not acceptable to the Soviets, they required that it be replaced by leaders who were acceptable.

The leadership of the party switches back and forth a number of times in the course of the 1920s.

The American party was as torn by factionalism as the whole international was.

One group, which was headed by Bill Foster.

strove for leadership in the American Party.

Charles E. Rosenberg, having having been one of the founders of the American Communist Party controlled the Communist Party, the Foster grouping in opposition.

There was constant inner struggles, often with the most violent language used of the contending factions.

Foster's faction was often just referred to as the trade union guys.

The second faction were intellectually relatively more sophisticated people.

They were focused more on political ideology and even theory, sort of Marxist-Leninist theory.

Ruthenberg died suddenly.

Lovestone from his group assumed leadership.

Foster and his group fought against that, and the Communist International took a position against Lovestone and urged the party to remove him.

Browder came back to the United States at the very end of the decade of the 1920s.

And when he came back to the United States, he wasn't quite as willing to put up with Foster's patronizing attitude.

Browder was jealous of Foster's tremendous popularity and his name recognition, and the fact that he was someone who had a tremendous recognition and reputation as an American radical that Browder just lacked.

And so Browder joined a factional opposition to Foster The comintern, recommended lessen the situation by taking out the two major leaders of both side.

By 1931, the troika included Foster Browder and William W. Weinstone.

Foster may have thought that he could control Browder, but I think he was mistaken.

In 1929, a depression began, and that would become the worst depression in American history.

And it is in this atmosphere that the Communist leadership in Moscow and in New York expected great gains.

The communists were really the only leftist organization that provided a viable option for direct action, and militancy.

And indeed, the communists were the first group to begin massive protests against, American capitalism shortly after the Great Depression began in the fall of 1929.

From 1928 to 1935, there's enormous growth in the party.

This is I mean, it's exponential.

Communist militants, in the trade union movement, played a significant role in the spread of unionism.

And as a result of that, and the development of a movement in which we who had taken the the initiative and help to organize it immediately assumed the tremendous, roles of leadership and had tremendous influence.

The Browder Foster rivalry is a fascinating example of the kind of mixture of the personal and the political.

They were both, in their own ways, militant Bolsheviks out of that, tradition, but, with different emphases.

Foster was the the harder political infighter.

Browder tended to think more in terms of political coalition reaching out.

Browder began his ascent to power in the early 1930s with Foster's mistreatment of him in mind.

Foster told me later that he proposed Earl Browder as a compromise man to be national secretary, because he figured he would really be the secretary.

because Browder was only his office man, Browder was able to consolidate power, in part because of the weakness of one of his rivals, and in part because of a, a personal tragedy suffered by the other rival.

Again, the three members of the, triumvirate were Browder, Foster and William W. Weinstone.

Weinstonee and Browder clashed.

The argument went to Moscow.

Browder won, a decisive victory over Weinstone and where Weinsto was effectively removed from the triumvirate.

This left Foster and Browder, as the two leaders of the Communist Party.

In 1932 was a presidential election year.

The candidate that the communists nominated was William Z. Foster.

The workers, the American people need a strong Communist party, and it will be built despite Wall Street profiteers and exploiters.

Even in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist party felt that Foster was indispensable, crucial to maintaining its contacts with the American labor movement.

He traveled extensively all across, the United States.

I think it was a very stressful time for him.

He ended up having a what was described as a complete nervous breakdown and a serious heart attack.

Browder eliminated Foster as much as he could and he eventually developed a full full scale struggle against Foster and got himself, elected as the national secretary of the party.

I think the best American patriots are those who strive by word and deed to unite America with the Soviet Union and a common policy for a durable and prosperous peace.

Foster would not play an important role in the American Communist Party again till 1935.

Earl Browder became the head of the American Party in 1932, and under Browder's leadership, the party really achieved its greatest influence in American life.

He was from Kansas.

He was a, you know, a real Native American.

He spoke English with a Kansas twang, not with a, you know, a Slavic accent, as some of the earlier party leaders had.

He had begun to think of himself as a world class figure.

Browder, who was in no sense a working - class leader.

He had been a bookkeeper in a pharmaceutical firm.

He never belonged to a union, and all his life he never attended a street demonstration.

He not only never spoke at one, he never attended one.

He always feared that the people in the field would, eventually, break the hold be had by the maneuvering and the national office.

And so one after the other, he went after these leaders.

And as time went on, especially after Browder got control, there was no freedom at all in the party.

But there was a constant demand for discipline.

So these young people who were coming into the party, second generation Americans, were craving assimilation, finding ways out of, restricted ethnic backgrounds, playing important roles in the union movement or in American politics through the mechanism of the Communist Party.

Here's this moment in time where people are coming together and making demands on the state and actually successfully pushing the government, you know, to make fundamental changes.

There was a kind of an American movement within it that was trying to be born.

Organizers move into new territories, new cities built up by 1938, the party has representation in 48 states.

When the American Communist Party is growing slowly, the 50,000 people in the United States was experiencing the very worst years of the Great Depression.

And then there were tremendous, gigantic demonstrations that took place in funeral demonstrations.

And the case of three workers who were shot in Chicago and in lesser known cases, so that there was this constant confrontation.

The Popular Front was a policy formally announced in 1935, in Moscow at the seventh World Congress of the Communist International.

We communists have declared that we will set up a united progressive front against reaction, fascism and war.

The Popular Front was the golden age of American Communism, and it too began with a Soviet initiative.

And in this period, communists are excited about the opportunity to be able to reach out beyond their organization to all kinds of progressive groups.

Communists were working for the first time, openly and cheerfully and in a forthright manner with noncommunist groups.

The ultimate Marxist goal of revolution was simply postpone.

That in the fight against fascism and war, what was needed was a broadest front of unity of all forces.

We all had this bigger enemy in fascism.

The Popular Front is is really thought to be the heyday because this is the moment of a surge in membership.

Communists are almost, almost mainstream in many places in the United States.

Browder began a search for an indigenous radical heritage in America.

Browder began an offensive that became known as the Americanization campaign, and what this campaign involved was a series of speeches by Browder, usually to sell-out crowds in Madison Square Garden, emphasizing the role of various radicals throughout American history.

When William Z. Foster came back from his recuperation in Moscow, Foster wasn't just any communist leader.

He still was party chairman.

But Browder, as general secretary, had successfully reduced the role of party chairman to virtually nothing.

Foster started to return to active involvement with the party, just as the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was formed.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations was a committee of industrial unions that was brought about in 1935 by John L. Lewis, who was leader of the United Mine Workers at the time.

It was unlike the already existing American Federation of Labor, the AFL.

The CIO was designed to organize workers in mass production industries like auto and steel, who were often semi-skilled and perhaps transient, including women and African-Americans.

You know what was going to be the Communist Party's role in the CIO?

The new CIO relied heavily on dedicated and knowledgeable communist labor organizers who had been involved in numerous strikes in a variety of industries in the 1920s and in the early years of the depression.

The CIO was always going out and hiring communists to work as organizers because they were good.

Foster always felt that the Communist Party or Communist organizers in the CIO werent establishing enought of an identity for thems as a more militant, group within the CIO.

He believed that, Browder was encouraging a attitude within the CIO in which the organizers would be more subject to the discipline of, you know, the mainstream CIO leaders.

Foster was someone who had a contempt for Popular Fronts, non labor elements.

Browder was more interested in organizing a Popular Front on a community wide basis, and not on a factory basis.

Foster believed that the Communist Party should be, in the end, a vehicle for representing a radical, revolutionary perspective among workers.

So when he decided to raise objections to Browder's Popular Front, you know, Foster was physically and politically in a weakened position.

Foster was given the genteel treatment, as the Communist called it, when he asked for a significant assignment, he was told, Bill, you have to watch your health.

At the highest levels of the comintern, Browder complained that, Foster was openly challenging his leadership.

The ahead of the Comintern, replied that, you know, Foster was essential with the American working class that was, you know, crucial to the party's functioning.

Foster's sense that Browder was lording it over him and deliberately humiliated him.

Maybe Browder's fear that Foster was perpetually plotting against him had, turned those political differences into a deep, kind of personal animus.

Browder was able to convince the Soviet leadership that the Communist Party should support the Roosevelt administration, that that Popular Front should be broadened to what Browder called a Democratic front.

And this Democratic front, envisioned by Browder, was for the Communist Party to act as a left-wing junior partner of the New Deal.

Moscow proposed that the CPUSA simply endorse President Roosevelt.

Browder convinced the Russian leadership that the Republicans would declare that Franklin Roosevelt was the Communist candidate for president, and Browder's answer was that he would run for president.

We agreed that even though the two save Franklin Roosevelt from red baiting, we would run Browder for president, but we wouldn't support him, we wouldn't do anything about it.

And this led to the slogan vote for Earl Browder.

And what the communists were saying to the public was vote for Franklin Roosevelt.

Browder's campaign in 1936 was a massive publicity stunt, and it worked very well because it got him on the front page of most of the major newspapers in the country.

Browder thought of himself as a leader of a mass movement, a national leader, an American leader of a genuinely radical movement.

So Browder's ego becomes almost as crucial to his identity as his American nationalism and his Stalinism.

He's a very curious blend of seemingly irreconcilable elements.

Molotov and von Ribbentrop got together, and the Nazis and Communists signed the pact.

And it was a betrayal by the communists.

On August 24th of 1939, the Soviet Union startled the world by signing a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

The Nazi-Soviet pact was on the surface a simple agreement of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

There were hidden corpuscles in the Nazi-Soviet pact that provided for a partition of Europe.

The Popular Front was based on world unity against fascism, led by the Communist Party and then the Communist Party signed a treaty with Nazi Germany.

The Popular Front was dissolved.

Because Browder had not supported the Nazi-Soviet pact, it outraged his enemies, especially William Z. Foster.

Foster tried to have Browder removed as a CPUSA leader, and implicitly to have Foster replace Browder as leader.

Browder couldn't challenge basic Soviet policies.

Now, when, push came to shove with the Nazi-Soviet pact, he loyally, mouthed the words he needed to about imperialism and how the pact was necessary and denounced Roosevelt.

Communists are going to have a very difficult time with this.

They're really having to do some soul searching.

Most of the loss happens in the Jewish community, which makes sense, but most of the rest hangs on.

The hard line... Faithful followed the party blindly, more out of faith then out of reason.

It was almost as if it were a religious choice rather than a political choice.

Party.

People who believed but what they were doing was right that this is a hiccup in this larger road on the way to revolution.

They just put their heads in the sand and soldiered on.

Shortly thereafter, the United States government arrested Browder.

Browder is indicted for passport fraud.

He had obtained the passport under another name and traveled on international communist business.

The arrest of Browder took him off the hook.

Browder had not wanted to criticize President Roosevelt.

Full support of the Nazi-Soviet pact would certainly have implied a disagreement with the Roosevelt administration.

Browder's imprisonment gave Foster the hope that Foster could take over leadership of the party.

Browder specifically gave his blessing to a personal friend, Robert Minor, an individual who clearly could not do the job, and the point of this was to keep Foster away from leadership.

When Nazi Germany was unable to bomb Britain into surrender, Adolf Hitler suddenly ordered an attack on the Soviet Union, despite the existence of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Once the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union overnight, the American Communist Party redefined the Second World War.

So I think the conflict with Browder, which was always there below the surface, really comes out more sharply in the period of the Second World War.

Browder's psychological state underwent a dramatic change when his imprisonment was suddenly ended by a commutation of his sentence from President Roosevelt himself.

There was a great new flowering of Browder's ego.

After all, he had been set free by the leader of the United States himself.

Then Browder comes back, and in 1942, at another moment when the emphasis is all on cooperation and coalition.

We're back in the Popular Front swing of things.

American communists bought war bonds, American communist led rallies for the Allied cause, joining the military.

For many, many people, this is a huge relief because this is where their heart was in the Popular Front, and now they're able to truly live it.

And in the war years, they're able to be more American, more patriotic.

Now, for many people, they can never swing back.

Once they saw this shift, they believed these communists could never be trusted.

In 1943, Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Communist International, the Third International, and that was, again, on his part, a purely cynical maneuver.

He wanted to reassure his Western allies that he wasn't in the business of overthrowing their governments.

Foster looked at it as Stalin is doing what he needs to do, but, it doesn't really change the score in terms of what the postwar relations are going to be like.

In December 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill and Generalissimo Stalin met in Iran and the city of Tehran, and they drew up a statement of common policy.

Browder was very impressed by this.

This was the first meeting of the Big Three.

The amazing thing is that he was bold enough to come up with this notion of the Tehran thesis that the cooperation was going to continue internationally after the war, and that there would be a, long term lull in the class struggle being somewhat social democratic, you know, being a kind of a continuation of the New Deal.

Peace between labor and capital in the United States.

And also, you know, internationally.

He wrote two books declaring that the Tehran conference signified the acceptance of communism as a permanent force in the world.

That meant that for the long term, there was going to be less emphasis on class struggle and more emphasis on a coalition.

And this, of course, was heresy for William Z. Foster.

We're going to postpone revolution to a distant future.

To publicly disagree with the leadership was to lead to expulsion.

So Foster had to sit back and silently watch Earl Browder deform the party that Foster loved.

Foster argued in private, meetings of the top communist leaders that this was selling out the revolutionary mission of the Communist Party.

I was called in January of 1945 to a meeting of the Central Committee.

When I got there, Browder made this famous speech that he made about liquidating the Communist Party and forming association and all that other stuff that he put in there, this phony business about terror and the no strike policy and so on.

Browder had the Communist Party of the United States formally transform itself into what he called the Communist Political Association, and Browder defined this communist political association, or CPA, as a left-wing lobbying group that would work in Washington to support progressive candidates regardless of their party.

According to Foster, this was just, you know, this was just dreaming.

You know, it was something that went against, Marxism-Leninism, in a fundamental way.

The following week, I called Foster and said, Bill, that you agree with this?

No, Foster had written out his speech with my help.

And while it wasn't a great achievement of literature or oratory, it it did all right.

And then he was supposed to speak with the political side of Browder speech and criticize it.

And I was to speak on economic side.

And I took the thing to pieces, of course.

Well, then the Duclos letter almost a year later.

What happens to bring an end to, Browder's daydream of a peaceful, Cold War, peaceful postwar era and, class peace at home was, that, in May of 1945, a French communist, magazine, published a opinion piece by a French communist leader, Jacques Duclos, in which Duclos seemingly speaking as the leader of French communists, said, you know, we've considered Comrade Browder's propositions and we reject them.

This came as a tremendous shock, to American communist leaders, because it was instantly recognized that this was from Moscow.

This article from the Soviet Union was seen by Foster as proof that the Soviets no longer wanted Earl Browder as leader.

That seemed to vindicate Foster.

He emerged out of this in a kind of militant hard line, Marxist-Leninist approach to all different kinds of problems.

You can almost feel Foster's the delight, and when suddenly, out of nowhere, Browder's power and authority is given a definitive knock from the Soviet Union in the form of the Duclos article in the spring of 1945, and he's once more back in power.

I do think, within a political context, in this case, the history of the Communist Party, to consider psychological factors, or at least the personalities involved.

And I think if we're comparing Foster and Browder, these are two very different personalities.

These are political issues, but they're also, personal, hatreds playing, playing themselves out.

Browder was removed as the leader of the American Communist Party, by, the initiative of William Z. Foster, virtually everyone who had been close to Browder saw the handwriting on the wall and rushed not only to denounce Browder, but to make humiliating confessions of their own complicity.

Foster replaced Browder as the head of the party, and he certainly was his chief ideological spokesman.

His health wasnt that good Eu Denis, who had been number two under Browder, who continued as number two under Foster.

The combination of the Cold War, the American anti-communist campaigns and then the devastation that occurred to the party in 56, after Khrushchev's revelation of Stalin's crimes, you know, the party was reduced to a few thousand diehards.

Until his death in 1973, Earl Browder was one of the loneliest men in America.

But Browder had become accustomed to addressing sell-out crowds in Madison Square Garden.

He had become accustomed to hearing the cheers.

He had become accustomed to seeing his photograph on the front page, of the New York Times.

And losing this was something he never got over.

His loneliness and isolation continued at his funeral in 1973, there were fewer than ten people in attendance.

Foster at the time was seen as the primary defender in the American Communist Party.

Many people thought that Foster had himself had a beneficiary of Stalin's favor, so he came under a great deal of criticism after 1956 within the American Communist Party.

Foster was in ill health.

At the end of his life, he didn't feel like he could get adequate medical care in the United States.

So he went to the Soviet Union, and in January of 1961 and March of 1961, he was visited at his hospital bed by, Khrushchev and Suslov and others.

He died, in September at the sanatorium in Moscow, and there was a funeral cortege through Red square with high ranking Soviet officials as pallbearers.

His ashes were brought back to the United States, and he was interred in the Waldheim Cemetery, not far from the, from the Haymarket martyrs, who had, inspired in his early career.

Foster was someone who was dedicated, I think, in the end, more to American workers and the empowerment of the American working class and the eventual downfall of American capitalism.

And if somebody like Foster, whatever potential was there that was lost and it was lost, through the character of this particular political organization, and you can say that both Foster and Browder were failures in terms of their political projects, but I don't think that absolves us of, you know, from facing, these kinds of issues that, after all, they were trying to face in their own way, Americans were participating in politics rooted in their local communities and their workplaces and their neighborhoods but connected to international politics and movements and excitement that that motivated them to demand a better lives for themselves and for their neighbors.

These kinds of movements and politics are a part of our our, our American tradition.

The Communist Party and the whole communist movement was changing its character.

And in 1945, when I was kicked out.

The parting of the ways had come, and if I hadn't been kicked out, I would have had the, difficult task of disengaging myself from a movement that I could no longer agree with and no longer help.

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