"An Answer to Moses Oppenheimer:
Letter to the Editor of the New York Call," by Israel
Amter [April 25, 1919] In
this letter to the New York Call, Left Winger Israel Amter
takes on Centrist Moses Oppenheimer and his associates for bolting
a recent meeting of Local Bronx, Socialist Party. "These
comrades seem unable to grasp the first elements of democracy,"
Amter declares, adding "They complain that the meeting elected
Dr. [Julius] Hammer to the chair for three consecutive sittings.
It would appear obvious to anybody but a Right Winger that his
constant re-election was due to the confidence of the assemblage
in Dr. Hammer and to the democratic notion of majority rule."
Amter complains that after three meetings of Local Bronx held
to discuss tactics and the Left Wing Manifesto, Oppenheimer and
his comrades were intent upon "dilly-dallying" and
"preventing the assemblage from determining its own will"
by sending the matter to a handpicked committee of 15 for further
discussion. Amter indicates that the Left Wing Manifesto is "merely
a basis upon which we can get together for revolutionary action"
and adds that "no claim is made that it is a perfect document."
Amter thunders that the Left Wing "shall not rest till the
Socialist Party of America not only stands for, but lives up
to, the revolutionary ideas that it originally propagated. We
shall not rest till all the compromisers, surrenderers, and traitors
have been swept out of the party. And do not forget that there
are many more of this class in the party than left it in the
wake of those arch-revolutionists, Russell, Spargo, Walling &
Co."
"On the Charge That the Department
of Justice Has in its Service Provocateur Agents: Statement by
a Top-Level DoJ Official to Congress Answering Specific Charges
Leveled against the Department of Justice, circa May 24, 1920."
This fascinating
statement was made to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part
of extensive testimony answering charges leveled against the
Department of Justice for alleged excessive and illegal behavior
associated with the recent mass raids against American radicals,
an operation which reached its zenith during the coordinated
"Palmer Raids" of Jan. 2/3, 1920. This material (part
of a longer statement to Congress) by a very high-ranking official
in the Department of Justice -- quite possibly by Assistant to
the Attorney General J. Edgar Hoover, although his colleague
Warren Grimes, Bureau of Investigation Chief William J. Burns,
or even Attorney General Mitchell Palmer himself are also candidates
for authorship. The DoJ official declares that an instruction
issued to BoI agents immediately prior to the Jan. 2/3 raids,
that "you should arrange with your undercover informants
to have meetings of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor
Party held on the night set," had been misinterpreted --
that the raid had been planned on the "regular meeting night
in all parts of the country" and that the instruction was
meant for informers to attempt to avoid having the meeting dates
changed, not to call special sessions for the express purpose
of facilitating the coordinated raids. The DoJ official also
vehemently denies charges that CPA leader Louis Fraina was a
covert agent of the Department: "Fraina is desired by the
state authorities of Illinois for prosecution under the State
Syndicalism Law and I assume that he would be desired by the
Department of Labor, if he ever returned to this country, for
deportation, most certainly so if they followed my recommendation.
I have asked that the authorities of a foreign government in
whose custody he now is to return him to the United States. I
challenge anyone to present a scintilla of evidence to show that
this individual was at any time in the employ of the Department
of Justice or furnished it any information whatsoever."
Extensive detail is provided about the Fraina case.
"Martens Files Libel Suit
Against the Washington Post." [event of March 2,
1921] Around the
first of March, 1921, claims were made in the Washington Post
against head of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Ludwig
Martens, charging that he he was a member of the American Communist
Party, had directed secret organizations aiming at the overthrow
of the American government, had associated with and incited criminal
anarchists, and that he was himself a German revolutionist. The
Post additionally editorialized in favor of delivering
Martens "over to the tender mercies of Noske, who knows
how to deal with Sparticides, Bolsheviki, and their ilk."
Martens responded through his lawyer, former Senator Hardwick,
who hired additional counsel in order to bring suit against the
Post. "Their contention is that the above and other
allegations by the Post are utterly false and are refuted by
the official record of the Senate hearings," this news account
from the Socialist press declares. The Post's editorial
offensive against Martens was seen as part of a final effort
by an increasingly desperate Department of Justice and the Lusk
Committee of New York to justify their policy of repression of
Martens and his Soviet Government Bureau in New York.
"Account of the Executive
Committee's Work: Meetings of June 25-26, 1921 in the Kremlin."
This is a State
Department translation from the Soviet press detailing the activities
of the Executive Committee of the Communist International at
the body's final June session. This report, originally published
in Krasnaia Gazeta [Red Newspaper], quotes President of
the Comintern Grigorii Zinoviev's summary about the work of the
Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) during its first
10 months of actual operation. An average of 3 meetings per month
were held by ECCI, Zinoviev states, with an average of about
20 questions examined by the body each month. Zinoviev does not
mention America, but rather singles out France, Italy, Germany,
and Switzerland as the nations in which the "most lamentable
conditions" exist regarding the discipline and subordination
of Communists to their party and the actual tactics followed
by these parties. England and America are lumped together as
nations with "weak" Communist Parties needing to establish
closer connections with their national proletariats.
"BoI Informant's Report on
the Cleveland District Conference of the unified CPA," by
"Ryan"-"Hill" [July 3-4, 1921] An invaluable participant's account
of the first Cleveland District Conference of the newly unified
Communist Party of America by the Bureau of Investigation's top
informant inside the organization, the Pittsburgh Sub-District
Organizer hailing from the former UCP who used the pseudonyms
"Ryan" and "Hill." The BoI informer describes
traveling to Cleveland with Joseph Stilson and 3 other delegates
by train to reach the convention, which was attended by 9 delegates
from the former UCP, 8 delegates from the former CPA, and 2 fraternal
delegates. Security procedures were in place, including 3 lookouts,
"Ryan-Hill" indicates. The election of a new District
Executive Committee (DEC) for the newly unified District organization
was the prime subject of concern, and "Ryan-Hill" describes
the way in which he and 4 other leading members of the former-UCP
agreed upon a slate of 4 former-UCP candidates for the 5 member
DEC; these names were then passed along to the other delegates
hailing from the former-UCP and the caucus carried the day with
its slate. Thus, even at a small meeting such as this, a caucus
within a caucus and bloc voting along party lines was the mechanism
of election, rather than honest discussion and open elections.
"Ryan-Hill," the Bureau of Investigation informer,
describes how Stilson suspected delegate Joseph Verba of being
a spy, leading to a search for evidence and a shouting match.
"Report of the Executive
Secretary to the Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of
the Workers Party of America: New York -- June 29, 1922,"
by C.E. Ruthenberg Executive
Secretary of the WPA C.E. Ruthenberg was not a spellbinding orator
or an original Marxist theoretician, but he did possess a skill
set that made uniquely suited for the job. This first report
of his issued as Executive Secretary of the Workers Party of
America (following his April 24, 1922 release from prison in
New York on bail) demonstrates Ruthenberg's organizational prowess.
Organizational expenditures and revenues were carefully itemized,
categorized, tallied, and analyzed; Federations were surveyed
about their membership size and assets and the results were reported
succintly and coherently; the WPA's defenses situation was summarized.
Of particular interest is the fact that the WPA ran at a deficit
of just over $2,000 per month for the first 5 months of its existence
-- a considerable sum, particularly given the parallel dismal
financial situation of the underground CPA. Nearly half of this
deficit was run up through the operation of the party's weekly
English language newspaper, The Worker. A second financial
summary including the last week of May and the month of June
depicts the WPA as having turned the financial corner, running
in the black.
"Minutes of the Meeting of
the Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party of America:
New York City -- October 7, 1922." These minutes of the governing CEC of the Workers
Party give a further taste of C.E. Ruthenberg's administrative
expertise, in addition to filling in important detail about that
WPA affairs. In months #6 through 9 of the WPA's existence, the
National Office's expenditures increased to an average of nearly
$7500 per month from the $4560 per month spent during its first
5 months of existence. Despite the spending increase, the organization's
monthly operating loss, which had averaged nearly $2,000 a month
in the initial phase, had been practically eliminated. While
the party's weekly English organ, The Worker, continued
to rack up deficits, dues collections increased. In his Organizational
Report to the CEC, Ruthenberg notes that a recent trip around
the country had indicated to him that "it did not appear
that the [Aug. 1922 Bridgman] raids had in any way affected the
morale of the organization. Party work was going on everywhere
and the members showing a fine spirit." The CEC took a number
of actions at this meeting, including most importantly the establishment
of a negotiating committee of 3 to negotiate merger with remaining
members of the Legal Political Party associated with the now-liquidated
underground "Communist Party of America" of Central
Caucus faction -- the "United Toilers Party." Harry
Wicks of the UTP's English organ, The Workers' Challenge,
was to be brought on board the editorial staff of The Worker
after the liquidation of the UTP was complete, according to the
recommendation of the WPA's Political Committee. In additional
action, the CEC elected Max Bedacht, Ludwig Katterfeld, and Alexander
Trachtenberg as the WPA's fraternal delegates to the forthcoming
4th Congress of the Communist International (which started Nov.
5, 1922). Earl Browder was named the representative of the WPA
to the Young Workers League. The Political Committee's idea to
establish a research bureau in the National Office was endorsed
in principle. The Political Committee was instructed to prepare
a campaign against the Socialist Party.
"Minutes of the Meeting of
the Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party of America:
New York City -- Oct. 21, 1922." The Oct. 21, 1922 session of the CEC of the Workers
Party of America saw an important move to restructure the organization's
administrative apparatus. On the motion of Executive Secretary
C.E. Ruthenberg, a new 7 member executive committee called the
"Administrative Council" was created. Initial members
elected to this body by the CEC were Elmer Allison, George Ashkenuzi,
Alex Bittelman, Louis Engdahl, Ludwig Lore, Edward Lindgren,
and C.E. Ruthenberg. The CEC was to meet at least once every
6 weeks in the future, with the Administrative Council meeting
more frequently to handle the WPA's operational affairs. This
session of the CEC also voted to negotiate to take over the operation
of the failing New York radical political and artistic magazine,
The Liberator, with business management of the publication
to be brought into the WPA National Office under the direction
of Elmer Allison. On Allison's initiative sales of English language
party literature were to be centralized in the National Office
as well, with district offices to be merely informed of sales
to their district rather than serving as the actual conduit for
literature distribution. Federations were to continue to be in
charge of sale of party literature in their own national languages.
The unity agreement reached with the now-defunct United Toilers
Party was detailed, including a transfer of the subscription
list of Workers' Challenge to The Worker. In related
action, editor Harry Wicks of The Workers' Challenge was
brought on board at The Worker as the publication's new
Labor Editor. An agenda prepared by the Political Committee for
the forthcoming 2nd National Convention of the WPA, which was
eventually held in Dec. 1922. The convention was to consist of
50 delegates and to be held in New York City, the CEC decided.
The Political Committee's proposal for the establishment of a
Research Bureau in the National Office was also formally approved
by the CEC with Executive Secretary Ruthenberg instructed to
set up the department; Jay Lovestone was soon appointed to head
this new party bureau. The New York District Committee was instructed
not to pursue its plan to write in WPA candidates in the November
elections, as the CEC determined that only a weak showing for
the party would result.
"Political Romancing Must
Give Way to Realism," by Alfred Wagenknecht [Dec. 24, 1924]
At the end of
1924 and into the first month of 1925 there was an open discussion
in the party press on the strategy and tactics of the Workers
Party of America -- a period of frank debate that quickly degenerated
into finger-pointing and personal denigration that emphasized
the bitterly fractured state of the organization. In this article,
former head of the Communist Labor Party and United Communist
Party Alfred Wagenknecht takes aim at factional leader John Pepper
for replacing the period of underground romanticism with a period
of opportunistic legal party romanticism. The nature and revolutionary
potential of the political movement of the bankrupted farmers
has been greatly overestimated by Pepper, Wagenknecht indicates.
Pepper's so-called "big success" in establishing what
was purported to be a Federated Farmer-Labor Party including
over 600,000 rank and file unionists and farmers was revealed
to be a chimera, as "the minute we lost a few high officials,
the Fitzpatrick group in Chicago, and a few other high officials
in various other "strongholds of the labor party idea,"
the FFLP wrinkled up and died," Wagenknecht states. Wagenknecht
asks: "What was our error? We were crazy for a Farmer-Labor
Party. We saw immense masses where in reality only single crooked
leaders stood. The capitalist crisis was not severe enough to
move the workers and farmers towards independent political action."
Wagenknecht credits the Comintern's intervention with short-circuiting
the opportunistic drive of some in the Workers Party for alliance
with the LaFollette movement. Wagenknecht states the moment has
passed for the formation of a mass farmer-labor party, and that
any attempt by the WPA to forge one out of thin air with the
aid of its "near relatives" would "mean nothing
but a third debacle and a further loss of the confidence of workers'
organizations." Wagenknecht declares that "We must
at least realize that the masses of workers are not as politically
advanced as we though they were.... The tempo, the decline of
American capitalism is not at all abreast of Pepper's imagination."
"What the Communist International
Thinks of the Different Groups in the Party," by Jay Lovestone
[Dec. 26, 1924] Jay
Lovestone has long had the reputation of having been a particularly
unprincipled and vicious faction fighter on behalf of the Pepper-Lovestone
"minority" faction of the Workers Party of America.
This article from the Dec. 1924-Jan. 1925 "discussion"
of tactics gives currency to that allegation. The Pepper-Ruthenberg
faction is characterized as the "Marxian" section of
the Workers Party; the Foster-Cannon faction as "superficial,
empiric, non-Marxian" group dominated by a primitive trade
union consciousness and the Lore group as a "Left Social
Democratic group" on the "extreme Right of our party."
Lovestone seasons his charges with liberal quotations from Comintern
leader Karl Radek and additionally attempts to validate his perspective
of the Fosterites by quoting chapter and verse from Iosif Stalin's
Foundations of Leninism. Lovestone spends the most ammunition
on Ludwig Lore in a clear effort to split the governing Foster-Cannon-Lore-Finnish
Federation majority of the CEC. Foster's alliance with Lore is
characterized as an "inestimable danger" to the party
and a flagrant violation of Comintern wishes to remove Lore from
a place in party governance. Lovestone's critique of the Foster
group is ironic in retrospect in view of Lovestone's future development
as the leading exponent of so-called "American exceptionalism."
Lovestone charges that Foster & Co. followed bourgeois economists
in seeing an economic boom of American capitalism following the
election of Calvin Coolidge and seeking to delay until a more
timely moment a political offensive against capitalism. Lovestone
charges that for Foster and his co-thinkers "industrial
activity and mobilization for the same were an end in itself."
To this he contrasts the well-rounded and balanced perspective
of the "Marxian" faction headed by Comrade Pepper.
"My Position Toward the Farmer-Labor
Movement," by Ludwig Lore [Dec. 29, 1924] Odd man out in the inner party
war of 1924-25 was Ludwig Lore, editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung
and leader of a New York-based section of the party in opposition
to the New York-based Pepper-Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. CEC
member and Foster ally Lore was allowed unfettered access to
the party press, however, and thus was able to chronicle his
actual opinions on party tactics -- as opposed to the purported
views condemned by his opponents or damned by the faint praise
of the Chicago-based Foster-Cannon faction. Lore indicates his
alliance with the Foster group is ideological rather than driven
by motives of power-politics: "Taken as a whole, I agree
with the majority thesis. The farmer-labor movement is dead and
is not likely to awaken to a new existence for years to come,"
Lore says, despite his belief that such a tactic was previously
possible and in accord with the WPA's "fundamental Communist
conception." Lore indicates that the Farmer-Labor Party
line pursued most aggressively by the Pepper minority faction
was based upon "a policy of self-deception" in which
the WPA projected itself and its close allies of reflective of
the interests of the broad working class in the aftermath of
a split of the farmer-labor movement in which the farmers bolted
the Federated FLP for the insurgent 3rd party candidacy of Robert
LaFollette. Lore provides a historically valuable narrative of
the events behind the seminal decision in July 1923 to immediately
move to the formation of a Federated Farmer-Labor Party, despite
the protestations of Fitzpatrick, Nockels, and Buck, the leadership
of the Farmer-Labor Party of the US. Lore testifies that he had
attempted to avert this grave misstep -- a decision which "placed
us in so disadvantageous a position and that prompted the [Foster
group] to abandon the Federated Farmer-Labor Party almost at
birth, because it feared the active opposition of the trade union
movement..." Lore further charges that the Pepper minority
faction, for all their posturing about the need for mass action,
effectively scuttled the Farmer-Labor Party project by failing
to send out organizers to union locals at the appropriate juncture
to build the organization. "It would have been possible
at that time, in my opinion, to build up, not a gigantic movement,
it is true, but a movement that would have enabled us to galvanize
large sections of organized labor into political class action,
to establish for the revolutionary working class a sphere of
influence that would have given it a broad field for active work,"
Lore declares.
U P D A T E
"May Day Labor's International
Holiday." (leaflet of the CPA) [circa April 25, 1921] ** NEW EDITION - Fills in previously
illegible words ** Another
in a series of CPA leaflets intended to agitate for insurrection.
"The bosses - the capitalist class -- have organized to
crush you. They openly declare that they intend to smash your
unions - destroy your resistance -- reduce your wages and bring
you to the level of serfs. This May Day you must demonstrate.
Let us answer their challenge. Let us resolve this May Day to
prepare for the REVOLUTION," the leaflet declares. Unless
dramatic action were soon taken, the prospects facing American
workers were grim, in the leaflet's estimation: "What are
the prospects which confront us if the capitalist slave drivers
remain in power? Nothing but new wars, slavery, billions upon
billions of taxes, poverty, starvation, and perpetual oppression."
No punches are pulled as to the means of the necessary change:
"The Government of the US was established by FORCE; it is
maintained by FORCE; it will be destroyed by FORCE." Only
in Soviet Russia would the workers be celebrating May Day as
"free men," the leaflet states. "This May Day
let us resolve to PREPARE for the destruction of the capitalist
government and the establishment of a WORKERS' GOVERNMENT --
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat -- in America. Let us ORGANIZE
to build a SOVIET REPUBLIC in America. The road to working class
freedom lies through REVOLUTION," the leaflet concludes.
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