U.S. Communism in the 1950s

I am going out on a limb here, and I have certainly not seen it formulated as such, but being "American" in the 1950s stood in opposition to being "Communist." Indeed, in the milieu in which I grew up, one spoke of “communist Russia or “communist China,” both pronounced as if those were the official names. The threat of communism to the American way of life, to the self-understanding of people like my parents, should not be underestimated, not so much the native, homegrown variety as represented by the American labor movement, but the socialist product already well entrenched in Europe. After all, wasn't Britain, a nation with which the U.S. had been allied in World War II, which had so recently celebrated the coronation of young Elizabeth, in the process of establishing socialism? Something of this got through to me in connection with reports of labor strikes among English unionists, which led my father to explain to me the difference between the American and the English laboring classes: if an American union worker saw you driving a Cadillac, he worked to earn enough to buy one for himself; the English worker, on the other hand, sought to deprive you of yours. That was communism in a nutshell, and even I, an eight-year-old, got the point. Cold War threats, especially after the unleashing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, strengthened our sense of this lurking evil.

At the same time, my father's relatively benign attitude toward the American labor union movement indicates that most Americans did not believe that a violent revolution of the communist variety was likely to take place in the U.S. The concern was for national security, and by 1950 there was plenty of evidence that Party members and fellow-travelers had indeed sought to undermine the security of the U.S.

Thus, it was with some interest that I came across an article yesterday by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., entitled "The Life of the Party," which appeared in The Saturday Review in July of 1949. It is a very clear-sighted analysis of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA) at that moment, when the extent of Soviet penetration and manipulation was becoming clear, but it also ends with a conclusion remarkably similar to that of my father. In Schlesinger's own words: can anyone seriously believe, he wrote in 1949, that the CPUSA is "absurd enough to contemplate a violent revolution in the U.S.?"

At the same time, Schlesinger also has this to say: namely, that the communist movement in the U.S. was, at the time of his writing, "an organized party of 70,000 members, extending its influence by means of an underground apparatus and through the collaboration of fellow-travelers; controlling a political party, several trade unions and a great many front organizations, and exerting a lingering power in cultural circles."

This was in July 1949, six months before senior government officials met in secret to discuss the "Rosenberg case," which would eventually lead to the trial and conviction of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and their execution in 1953.

Schlesinger's article begins by noting the strangeness of a communist movement in the U.S., a country that had enjoyed the longest period of liberal government in history. In his view, however, America had its "quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual, and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society." And even though, as Schlesinger writes, it was hard work to be a communist, party discipline was an attraction for such people. After all, each member acted "as if he embodied the impersonal force of history."

In the eyes of the Soviet masters, however, the American Communist Party was "one of the expendable parties. The Comintern has never exerted itself to give the CPUSA aid or to spare it embarrassment. No one in the CPUSA even knows in advance of impending change in party line." Schlesinger gives credit, however, to the domestic product, which he claims was responsible for "grass-root initiatives" that engaged in "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." I assume he is talking about the civil rights movement, which, like all such initiatives, the CPUSA infiltrated and sought to control.

So it was that in sleepy Louisville, where I grew up in the 1950s, the antagonisms of the Cold War came to our very back yard, and, for most of us, solidified the connection between communism and desegregation. It was 1954, when a white couple bought a house in a working-class white neighborhood in Louisville and then promptly turned around and sold it to a black couple. In short order, the house was bombed. No one was injured in the bombing, but, clearly, the new inhabitants were not welcome in the otherwise all-white neighborhood. The white purchasers of the house were arrested on charges of advocating sedition, and at the ensuing trial their membership in the Communist Party played a major role. Indeed, it was alleged that the white couple was behind the bombing, stirring up racial animosity for the purpose of advancing social revolution.

As in the celebrated case of Alger Hiss, the wife went to her grave in 2006 denying her CP membership. This refusal to admit being communist has always surprised me: it seemed to be a case of denying who you were. As Schlesinger notes concerning the refusal of Hollywood Leftists to own up to their political beliefs before a Congressional committee, imagine the indignation that would have followed if the Congressmen had been asking witnesses if they were members of the Klan.

Rosa Parks, 1955, with M.L. King, Jr.

I think Schlesinger was wrong, however, to give credit to what he considers "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." As Schlesinger himself points out, it was the method of the CPUSA to attach itself to "mass organizations -- that is, groups of liberals organized for some benevolent purpose" that were "designed for control by an alert minority," which they sought to do by the civil rights movement.

After all, by 1954 influential sectors of American society were already in favor of dismantling the barriers to full participation of black citizens. For instance, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces, which eventually led to the end of segregation in the services. It would have been a struggle for American blacks, for instance, Rosa Parks, to fight against discrimination, but it would have been their struggle. Instead, civil rights became a "liberal" white cause that the communists turned into a violent confrontation.

I am also of the opinion that the market, i.e., capitalism, was already breaking down the barriers. In 1947, for instance, the Brooklyn Dodgers ended a sixty-year ban on black baseball players. The management didn't integrate the team primarily for the cause of "social justice": there were good business reasons for opening the game to more talent. An example from my own experience indicates how things were changing. By 1954 I was already traveling on my own by Greyhound Bus to visit my grandmother in central Ohio. These solo trips, which indicate the relative safety of those days for a child, were broken by several rest stops, including one in the large city of Cincinnati, where I moved among the offerings of colored jello and "fruit cocktail" in the bus station cafeteria. There were plenty of black passengers on these trips, mostly black women, among whom I circulated freely at the lunch counters and in the restrooms of the bus station. This intermingling was not something I had experienced in Louisville, but I like to think that living in Louisville had made me worldly enough to accept it as normal. It was these bus trips that first impressed on me the separate existence of blacks and whites in America, and of the different kind of segregation from that which excluded my own family from the Louisville Country Club.

The aggressive participation of whites, especially of the Leftist variety, has not resulted in a color-blind society. The "courageous activity" of Leftists, even today, has always had the aim of destroying liberal democracy. The result: more divisiveness than ever before. Instead of dignified personalities like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have contentious blowhards like Al Sharpton. The Soviet Union is no more, but there remains the dissatisfied "quota" of whom Schlesinger wrote, and their legacy lives on. Is it any wonder that the first black president has been unable to heal the division?

Picture credit: Lib Com