"Keynote Address to the 1917 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party, St. Louis, MO -- April 7, 1917," by Morris Hillquit The 1917 St. Louis Emergency Convention of the SPA was held immediately on the heels of the American declaration of war on Germany, called to bring together 200 delegates of the party to set policy in the new drastically changed situation. The anti-militarist tenor of the gathering was fanned by Morris Hillquit, who delivered this keynote address to the convention. The SPA had been in decline since its previous convention in 1912, Hillquit noted, with fewer members, a diminished press, and a general loss of enthusiasm and energy. The collapse of the International Socialist movement associated with the eruption of hostilities in Europe had a profoundly depressing effect on the American movement. Now the war had come to America, said Hillquit, and "millions of our boys will be sent to the trenches to murder millions of other boys in foreign countries, and they will be for the most part boys of the working class on both sides." Furthermore: "War means reaction at home. War creates a mob spirit of unreason. War creates conditions under which all the powers of reaction, all the predatory powers of the country, can satisfy their desires, and accomplish their attacks upon popular liberty, upon popular rights with absolute impunity." Only one organization, the Socialist Party, "still retained a clear vision, an unclouded mind, in this general din of confusion, passion, and unreason; and it falls to us to continue our opposition to this criminal war, even now after it has been declared," said Hillquit. The war would ended by "the rebellious working class of Europe," in Hillquit's estimation, and he called on his comrades to fight against militarism and to stand ready to join the movement when the world once again resumed its struggle for liberty and social justice under the banner of International Socialism.

 

"The Price We Pay," by Irwin St. John Tucker [May 1917] A searing polemic prose-poem by the head of the Socialist Party's Literature Department. Tucker served only briefly at this post, leaving after but a few weeks due to a personality clash with Executive Secretary Adolph Germer, but this blistering statement of anti-militarist rage placed Tucker firmly in the Wilson Administration's gunsights. For this vitriolic explosion Tucker was prosecuted as part of a case which included Executive Secretary Germer, Congressman and newspaper publisher Victor Berger, editor of the SPA's official organ J. Louis Engdahl, and head of the party's youth section William Kruse as part of the Wilson regime's attempt to decapitate the Socialist Party. The five Socialists each received 20 year prison terms under the so-called Espionage Act, later overturned. The SPA distributed over 600,000 copies of this piece in leaflet form in May and June of 1917.

 

"Report of the National Convention at Chicago," by John C. Taylor [Sept. 26, 1919] First-hand account of the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party and the founding Convention of the Communist Labor Party from California SP State Secretary John C. Taylor, not included in volume 1 of Draper. Taylor provides the best account of Adolph Germer's use of the Chicago police to "clear the hall" of those delegates not carrying a white card issued by Germer. Taylor charges bad faith on the part of the Germer clique in the distribution of such cards, these not being mentioned the day prior to the convention during conversation with Germer and his associates. Removed by a plainclothesman and "fully a dozen" uniformed officers already standing by, Taylor and his comrades were excluded from the hall from 10 am until after 1 pm, at which time they were only permitted to stand in an adjacent room in the heat. Taylor detaiils the machinations of the credentials committee, which operated in slow motion until the Germer clique was certain of the stability of their majority. Taylor remarks on that several votes were decided by a tally of 88 to 33 the first day, giving an indication of the relative strength of the two factions among uncontested delegates, and details the walkout of the Left Wing delegates when the convention moved to conduct business before the resolution of all delegate contests. Taylor's account of the founding convention of the CLP downstairs is unfortunately less valuable, emphasizing the songs sung by the delegates but providing little additional substantive detail.

 

"The American Revolutionary Movement Grows: An Analysis of the Many Achievements of the Third National Convention of the Workers Party," by C.E. Ruthenberg [Jan. 13, 1924] An upbeat and positive account of the recently completed 3rd Convention of the Workers Party of America [Dec. 30, 1923-Jan. 2, 1924] by the Executive Secretary of the organization (whose faction lost majority control of the incoming Central Executive Committee to the Foster-Cannon-Lore alliance). Ruthenberg emphasizes the continuity between the past an forthcoming CECs, noting that the Convention voted to approve the policy laid down by the previous CEC. Through its United Front efforts (Foreign-Born Workers, Farmer-Labor Party, Bridgman Defense) the Party had gained a foothold in the American political culture for the first time, Ruthenberg asserts, while he optimistically adds that the Party had "at last consolidated its forces and that the period of splits and factional struggles was over..." Ruthenberg's language is measured in this account published in the new Daily Worker, but he does note major controversy over the United Front policy of the Chicago organization (i.e. the Foster group) and John Pepper's tactical decision to remove the devisive issue of the relationship of the WPA to an anticipated petty bourgeois Third Party in America from the Convention agenda to the Comintern for final decision -- thereby smoothing the way with the "15-odd" of the 53 convention delegates loosely affiliated around Ludwig Lore in opposition to any collaboration with such a party. This episode incidentally demonstrates once again the circularity of the American relationship to the CI in this period, in which appeal to outside authority was actively used BY THE AMERICANS to mitigate factional controversy. The Comintern's organizational model to be implemented by all parties, based on the shop nucleus, is sidestepped, with the convention agreeing to establish shop units in parallel with the current organizational system, based on language branches. "The Convention left to the next National Convention the question of extending this work," Ruthenberg notes.

 

"The Farmers and the American Revolution," by John Pepper [Jan. 19, 1924] One of John Pepper's most interesting and thoughtful analyses of the state of American agriculture and the Farmer-Labor movement -- an exposition of the core of his strategic thinking about contemporary American economic development from the perspective of a revolutionist. Pepper cites the statistics of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as to the extent of the deep crisis which rocked American agriculture throughout the 1920s: even though the 1923 harvest had been vast, high costs of tariff-protected manufactured goods and other production expenses and low market prices for agricultural commodities had combined to make agricultural profoundly unprofitable. Citing Wallace, Pepper states that about 8.5 percent of grain-belt farmers had already lost their farms to creditors with an additional 15 percent in a technical state of bankruptcy, surviving due to the leniency of creditors. This American agricultural crisis was the flipside of the industrial crisis then wracking Germany and Great Britain, with factories shuttered and millions of workers unemployed due to an inability to sell manufactured goods to an impoverished world. Over "big opposition in our Party" to the idea, Pepper stated that the agricultural crisis was not temporary and that "the most important revolutionary fact" of the January WPA convention was the decision to make a "bold attempt to place ourselves at the head of the farmers' revolt." Pepper analyzes the composition of the American working class and the WPA which mirrors it and concludes that "a revolutionary movement in the United States, which embraces only the foreign-born proletarian workers of the basic industries and only a narrow stratum of the native-born workers, has no real hope of gaining power without the support of the millions of native-born, working farmers." In short, in Pepper's view the potentially revolutionary condition was emerging in crisis-riven agriculture, not in the trade union movement, thus his seemingly obsessive drive to construct a class (i.e. Communist-led) mass Farmer-Labor political organization.

 

"Letter to the Central Executive Committee, Workers Party of America in Chicago from M. Hansen, Secretary of English Branch - Seattle, WPA, July 17, 1924." The July 10, 1924 decision of the National Executive Committee of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party (controlled by 5 WPA members of the 7 member body) to abruptly terminate the candidacies of Duncan MacDonald for President and William Bouck for Vice President came "as a bolt from the blue" to rank and file supporters of an anti-LaFollette "real Farmer-Labor Party." This letter from the Seattle English Branch to the center demands an explanation, as the reasons for the abrupt shift advanced in The Daily Worker are said to have "lacked sincerity." Hansen, the Branch Secretary, writes: "There is in Washington a considerable sentiment for a political organization so rooted in the economic life of the organized producers as to be permanent and enduring, and especially is this true of the delegates who attended the Convention, and who were so favorably impressed with the attitude of our Party. They had been convinced thoroughly that they did not want LaFollette, which to them meant the death of their hopes for a real F-L Party. Neither did they hold any hope for reaching any considerable number of the masses through the WP direct. They were enthusiastically behind the candidacy of the men named in the Convention, and the withdrawal leaves them out on a limb with our organization in the position of sawing it off next to the trunk."

 

"Letter to M. Hansen, Secretary, English Branch - Seattle, WPA, from James P. Cannon, Assistant Executive Secondary, WPA, July 22, 1924." Reply of the Central Executive Committee to the July 17, 1924 letter addressed to them by English Branch - Seattle seeking complete and accurate information as to the WPA's rapid change of course with regard to the Presidential campaign of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party. Cannon replies that the reports in The Daily Worker were, in fact, accurate and that the WPA determined that dspite its best efforts to create a United Front Farmer-Labor Party, this project was unsuccessful. The two non-WPA members of the FFLP National Executive Committee and a large section of the FFLP's supporters were in the process of going over to the mass independent campaign of Senator Robert LaFollette. Cannon states that after through discussion, "the conclusion we finally arrived at, on the basis of the facts staring us in the face, was that the Farmer-Labor United Front in the present campaign does not exist, with the possible exception of two or three states such as Minnesota, Montana, and Washington." Rather than running a watered-down Farmer-Labor Party campaign, around which there was no mass support, Cannon states that the Communists were duty bound to run a campaign under their own banner, and thus Foster and Gitlow were named as candidates, to run a campaign "on a clearly defined revolutionary basis." "Communists have to approach all these problems from the standpoint of the Communist Party, which is identical with the immediate and ultimate interests of the working class and which is the only Party that stands for these interests.," Cannon says, adding that the comrades of Local Seattle should talk frankly with "such well-informed leaders of the Farmer-Labor movement as John Kennedy and William Bouck" about the reasoning behind the WPA's decision.

 

"Letter to C.E. Ruthenberg, Executive Secretary, WPA, in Chicago from Norman Tallentire, WPA District 12 Organizer in Seattle, Sept. 19, 1924." While historians of the American Communist movement are aware of the importance of the party's "District Organizers" in the abstract, there is surprisingly little in the literature detailing the actual job functions of those individuals. This report to the center by Norman H. Tallentire is particularly valuable in this regard. Tallentire, formerly a District Organizer in D9 [Minneapolis] who moved to D12 [Seattle] to replace outgoing DO William F. Bowman, describes the Washington and Oregon District in utter disarray -- Local Portland in the midst of an expulsion binge with an organization down 70 members to "40 or 50," other Branches disbanded or out of contact with the district office, some key party members gone with remaining members demoralized. He also describes Ruthenberg's National Office as seemingly incapable of handling simple change of address information, noting a chronic tendency to mail to bad addresses in spite of all instructions otherwise, including in one case mailing to a member expelled a year previously as a suspected spy. Tallentire details an impressive list of organizational meetings conducted or planned in his first month and notes the meeting of a Washington state convention and reorganization of the District Executive Committee. Tallentire outlines plans for the organization of new Locals in Washington, pleads with the center for accurate district financial records, and asks that the forthcoming information he provides be used to update the mailing records not only of the national office, but also of TUEL, The Liiberator, and The Daily Worker. He is sharply critical of the recent Federated Farmer-Labor Party fiasco, in which the FFLP's campaign for President and Vice President was arbitrarily terminated by WPA decision, an event which Tallentire characterizes as a "grave error" which alienated and embitterred the WPA's closest non-party allies in Washington state.

 

"Letter to C.E. Ruthenberg, WPA Executive Secretary in Chicago from Alexander Trachtenberg, International Publishers in New York, Oct. 24, 1924." While International Publishers of New York is today the official publishing arm of CPUSA, its origin was completely independent of the Communist Party, as this October letter from IP head Alexander Trachtenberg makes clear. Trachtenberg states that IP had been in negotiations with the Labour Publish Co. of London for rights to an English edition of Franz Mehring's Life of Marx, but learning the fact that the party was interested in the sale of the book through its Literature Dept. was "sufficient reason for giving up our project." Trachtenberg states that "I would not work for a firm if it should want to injure the party in any way. Com. [A.A.] Heller, I am sure, will discontinue his financial interest in it under similar circumstances. On the contrary, we hope to be of assistance to the party. There are books which the party would like to see published (I have in mind large books) but because of lack of facilities and involved risks, it cannot undertake the task itself."

 

"Circular Letter to the Finnish Branches and Members of the Workers Party of America from Fahle Burman in Chicago, Dec. 4, 1924." The Finnish Language Section of the Workers Party of America was far and away the largest division of the organization during the first years of its existence. Secretary of the Fnnish Federation was Fahle Burman, a member of the WPA's 13 member Central Executive Committee, a loyal factional adherent of the Foster-Cannon majority group. This circular letter from Burman to the membership of the Finnish Federation offers a fascinating new perspective on the WPA's factional war. Burman urges Finnish Federation members to fully participate in the delegate-election process to the forthcoming convention and to thus exert their full influence on the Party's political line and the composition its leading strata. The CEC had decided to join the spontaneously emerging Third Party movement "for the purpose of imbuing it, if possible, with a class charater," Burman says, a policy to which the Comintern had given its consent. The Foster-Cannon group initially did not take much interest in this policy, confirming the question in principle, but commenting upon "the erroneousness of the tactics which were to guide us in the control of said movement, as the tactics were mainly based on the endeavor to get mechanical control" of the young Farmer-Labor Party movement -- a top-down conception, Burman states. By way of contrast, The Foster-Cannon group believed "that members of trade unions and other workers' organizations have to be educated in the class spirit and must be encouraged to act independently of other classes, which is tantamount to building up the Party from the bottom." The logic of the Pepper-Ruthenberg Farmer-Labor Party policy would be the establishment of a parallel political organization, with the WPA reduced to a guiding "party of Communist theorists." Burman alludes that the pursuit of this policy would effectively mean a renewal of the parallel Legal WPA/Underground CPA organizations -- a conception which was extremely unpopular among the members of the Finnish Federation. With the failure of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party to emerge as an authentic mass organization and with the Comintern vetoing collaboration with LaFollette, "the majority of the Committee were all but convinced that in the event of LaFollette declaring his candidature at the time of the [CPPA] Cleveland Congress on July 4th, there would be nothing left for us but to abandon the Farmer-Labor Party altogether and to appoint candidates from the Workers Party."

 

"Letter to C.E. Ruthenberg, Executive Secretary, Workers Party of America, in Chicago from Norman H. Tallentire, WPA District 12 Organizer in Seattle, Dec. 13, 1924." This brief note from Seattle DO12 Tallentire to the center documents the continued existence of an organized irreconcilable holdovers of the 1921-22 Central Caucus Faction as late as the end of 1924. A Latvian named Gus Pudnich is said to have come up to Seattle from San Francisco and was conducting agitation against the Workers Party of America in the Lithuanian and Latvian communities, attempting to "get them to organize in the pure underground 'Communist Party.'" Tallentire seeks multiple copies of the WPA's Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian papers for a month to more effectively "offset the propaganda that these people are putting up when they represent themselves as being the American section of the Communist International."

 

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