JANUARY 1936
"Socialist NEC Lifts Charter in New York State." (Socialist Call) [Events of Jan. 4-5, 1936] In January 1936 the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, controlled by an alliance of party radicals and Norman Thomas loyalists, decided the matter of competing Socialist Party administrations in New York in the favor of the insurgents by voting to suspend the charter and reorganize the Socialist Party of New York. Called before the NEC to resolve the dispute, Old Guard leader Louis Waldman was dismissive, merely sending a letter of refusal. The investigation proceeded nonetheless, with David Berenberg -- an individual closely associated with the Rand School in the past -- charging that "The Old Guard in New York has precipitated an emergency in which only the vigorous action of New York comrades has saved the party from being shattered into fragments. As a result of a threatened purge under the guise of reorganization, which would have left the party stripped of all its vital elements, a revolt of the party membership has resulted in the establishment of a new party apparatus." The New York charter was lifted and a provisional State Executive Committee named pending formal state reorganization -- a list which in the spirit of compromise pointedly included among its 15 members, 5 representatives associated with the Old Guard's Rand School or the Jewish Daily Forward against only 3 activists of the Militant faction. In a rhetorical flourish short on introspection, Old Guard NEC member James Oneal, a chief perpetrator of the abrogation of party elections and the expulsions and suspensions of the Left Wing Section in 1919, angrily charged that the NEC's action were "unconstitutional, illegal, and unprecedented."
"The Party Controversy," by Norman Thomas [Jan. 11, 1936] Two-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate and factional leader Norman Thomas offers his take on the factional war which had shattered the New York party. Thomas upbraids Louis Waldman and Jim Oneal as "Old Guard extremists," crippled by a "communist phobia." He defends the Dec. 28-29, 1935 New York party conference at Utica as an act to "save the party" by removing "a State Committee which crowned a long list of sins of omission and commission against the Party by the wholly illegal attempt to expel from the Party everyone in any way connected with The Socialist Call." Thomas acknowledges that the extraordinary activity against the State Executive Committee in New York had "greatly weakened the Party" by giving "left-handed encouragement to secession in Indiana, to a Hearst-like denunciation of Russia, to a dozen other things wholly opposed to true Socialism." Nevertheless, he offers Waldman, Oneal & Co. an olive branch: "The cure for this is not expulsion. For individuals in the Old Guard I have a genuine affection. A good Socialist Party must be inclusive. It needs the right wing."
APRIL 1936
"To All Members of the Communist Party in the Cleveland Area from P. Margetic in Cleveland, circa April 1, 1936." This esoteric mimeographed document provides clues about the nature of party life in the non-English speaking section of the Communist Party USA, specifically the organization's Yugoslav component. As the CP's Yugoslav organization was primarily Croatian rather than Slovenian, it is not surprising that this is the language used in this document. The mimeographed circular announces changes in the Yugoslav party organization enacted by the CPUSA's Central Committee "with the help of the National Bureau in Chicago, Ill." Two new editors were appointed and others removed; 3 local organizers were named. The forthcoming local conference was to be an event at which all Yugoslav members were required to attend. Tallies of Croat, Serb, and Slovene members were to be turned in by fraction leaders to the conference and thereafter "special bureaus for these listed nations" were to be established.
"To All Members of the Communist Party in the Cleveland Area from P. Margetic in Cleveland, circa April 1, 1936." **IN CROATIAN** Same as the above. Non-machine readable pdf of the original Croatian language document, announcing a forthcoming conference of Yugoslav members of CPUSA in Cleveland, at which "special bureaus" for the Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian nationalities were to be established.
"To All Enrolled Socialist Voters: A Statement on the Primaries," by Jack Altman, et al. [Election of April 2, 1936] In an echo of previous factional wars, the 1936 New York state Socialist Party primary election saw the nomination of rival slates of candidates. This is an election message and "signature ad" targeted to primary voters by the Militant-Thomasite alliance. The statement charges the Old Guard headed by Louis Waldman and James Oneal with various sins, including the willful overlooking of union corruption, the sheltering of expelled trade unionists in their ranks, a "black record" of work with the unemployed, and continued strident attempts to undermine the political efforts of Norman Thomas. The Old Guard is similarly charged with tepid criticism of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and the use of the methods of dictatorship to win their way in the party. "They went so far as to try to expel from the Party those who disagreed with them -- comrades like Norman Thomas -- but the National Executive Committee of the Party, the highest body between national conventions, prevented it," the campaign statement notes. The list of 45 signatories which follows includes a few of the usual suspects and many lesser known trade union officials along with such "big names" as Anita and S. John Block, long of the New York Call, black leaders Frank Crosswaith and A. Philip Randolph, Jessie Wallace Hughan of the War Resisters' League, former Rand School activist David Berenberg, and Louis Waldman's fellow 1920 New York Assembly associate Sam DeWitt.
MAY 1936
"Notes on the United Front Problem," by Haim Kantorovitch [May 1936] Kantorovitch, an intellectual leader of the Socialist Party's "Militant" faction, takes aim both at the "Old Guard" defectors such as Louis Waldman, who after being soundly defeated by the SP majority in National Convention, in a party referendum, in the NEC, and in the New York SP primaries, are presumptuous enough to dictate terms under which they will return to the party fold. "It never occurred to people like Waldman that he and his followers could remain in the Socialist Party and use all the legal and ethical party channels to persuade the majority of the party members that after all the Old Guard was right," Kantorovitch observes. Instead, the Old Guard splitters had chosen to fight the party, making use of none-too-subtle red baiting tactics in the capitalist press. This involved a conscious attempt to confuse two distinct concepts, according to Kantorovitch: the United Front and "participation of Socialists in common action in which Communists also participate." In the former case, a "permanent and national agreement" between the Socialist and Communist Parties would lock the two organizations together, while in the latter case the Socialist and Communist Parties participate in joint projects as members of a still larger coalition, free to come or go or to criticize as each organization so desired. Kantorovitch sees the Old Guard Socialists as having adopted the discarded theory of social fascism and inverted it -- projecting instead the Communist Party as the "chief enemy" which must be defeated and stricken from the ranks of the labor before serious battle could be waged against capitalism, war, and fascism. Kantorovitch states that the revolutionary socialists of the Militant faction the Communists were an integral part of the labor movement -- merely one from which revolutionary socialists differed. Common action with such an organization was possible, Kantorovitch asserts, but not (in present circumstances) a United Front, which would inevitably require the Socialists to surrender their freedom and obligation to criticize particulars of Soviet Society, Stalin, and Stalinism.
AUGUST 1936
"The Communist Election Platform, 1936." [Aug. 1936] Large file. Graphic pdf of a penny campaign pamphlet by the Communist Party USA promoting the national campaign of Earl Browder for President and James W. Ford for Vice-President. Gone are intimations that the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was "social fascist" and hence the greatest threat to American workers. Rather it is "extreme reaction" which is held to be driving the nation "toward fascism and a new world war," while the Roosevelt administration is criticized only for its willingness to temporize with these "reactionary forces." The Republican Party is held up to be "the head of the camp of reaction" in this document. An explicit appeal is made for the "comrades" of the Socialist Party to change course and "unite with us and the mass of the toilers against reaction." The program of the CPUSA is outlined in detail, with the detailed agenda to be funded by a vague income-based "taxation of the rich." The slogan "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism" is used and the party's continuance of the revolutionary tradition, including that of "the revolutionary Lincoln" is emphasized. This pamphlet exists with multiple variants of pages 15 and 16 -- the Milwaukee and California versions are both included here.
"Soviets Doom Plotters." [August 29, 1936]. Short unsigned news report from the front page of The Workers Age, weekly official organ of the Communist Party USA (Opposition), the political party headed by Jay Lovestone. The report uncritically notes "the chief defendants presented all the necessary evidence for conviction in their own testimony, wherein they vied in accusations of one another, and attempted to paint themselves as more involved, more guilty than their fellow-accused." The report notes that "the trial also brought out the connection of the terrorists with the Nazi Gestapo, who, according to the testimony, furnished false passports for the Trotskyists to enter Russia."
"The Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial," by Alexander Bittelman [Sept. 1936] From August 19-24, 1936, was held in Moscow the first of three sensational public "show trials" featuring prominent former members of the Soviet elite accused of complicity in counterrevolutionary conspiracies to commit murder and overthrow the Soviet state. Chief defendants in the first trial, the so-called "Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center," were G.E. Zinoviev and L.B. Kamenev -- former members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and of the Council of Peoples' Commissars. All 16 defendants in this case were tried, sentenced to death, and executed in short order. This article, published as part of the lead essay of the September 1936 issue of the CPUSA's theoretical journal, The Communist, was an initial to orientate party members to the situation in the USSR. Bittelman accuses Trotsky of being a "petty-bourgeois 'revolutionist'" and likens his alleged criminal complicity in the plot to assassinate Soviet Communist leaders to the effort of the Socialist Revolutionaries to assassinate Bolshevik leaders (including Lenin) during the Russian Civil War. "In this 'transformation' of Trotskyism there is nothing especially new. It is no news that certain ideologists of petty-bourgeois 'revolutionism' have turned fascist. Mussolini is an outstanding case," Bittelman notes. Trotsky's critique of the Soviet constitution is likened to that of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and the implication of this purported convergence is stated with certitude in the wake of the trial by Bittelman, who declares that "Trotskyism is fascist terrorism."
"The Russian Events." [unsigned editorial from Workers Age, Sept. 5, 1936]. A semi-official statement of the Communist Party USA (Opposition), published as an editorial in its official organ. The recently completed trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, et al. is criticized not from the standpoint of its lack of veracity, but rather as politically inexpedient: "The investigation made by the Soviet Government immediately after the Kirov assassination revealed the hand of a foreign, a bourgeois government in all the plotting against the USSR. The further revelations made on the occasion of the last trial, which was an open public trail at which the defendants had every opportunity to express themselves as fully and as freely as they wanted, showed still more clearly and established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Nazi government had aided and abetted some of the Trotskyist terrorist conspirators. To some people this sounds fantastic, but if one considers the present character of the Trotsky program in regard to the Soviet Union, there is nothing fantastic about it but only quite a natural and logical outcome of the entire evolution of Trotskyism." However, "while condemning sharply the terroristic activities and complete degeneration of the Trotskyites, we must state that we very seriously doubt the wisdom and tact of the Soviet authorities in inflicting the merited punishment of death on such personages as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, etc. Other and sufficiently adequate punishment could have been meted out without resorting to executions, and thus granting some recognition to the inestimable services once rendered by these erstwhile powerful figures in the ranks of the Bolsheviks."
