Communist Party people: The secret history of Red America

The Red Scare on Washington Square began a week ago. News broke that New York University's Tamiment Library was giving sanctuary to the archives of the Communist Party of the USA - Lenin buttons and all - and that speakers at a planned seminar would include its current leaders.

The headline writers of Rupert Murdoch's local paper, the New York Post, predictably fulminated with headlines warning of a "Red 'Love-in" on campus. For some, it seems, the McCarthy mindset has still not lifted. Sound the alarm, there are commie subversives in our midst; the nation is in peril.

"It's annoying, but that's who they are," was the only response of Michael Nash, the director of Tamiment, which sits on the south side of Washington Square and has long served as a hub of US leftist scholarship.

Nothing is going to dampen his excitement over what he says is the most valuable trove of historical material he has ever been granted access to in 30 years of archiving.

The joke, anyway, is that the communists have always been in town, it's just that few people realised it, not even Nash. "I didn't know they were still around, until they called me." That happened in February last year. The party that America has loved to demonise was not only still alive (if not quite kicking) but housed barely a mile away in its own handsome, if dilapidated, building on West 23rd Street.

But they did have a problem. Because of a shortage of funds - Moscow stopped sending their American comrades cash in 1989 - they were being forced to rent out some of their floors to commercial tenants (capitalism eventually catches up with everyone) and that was where their enormous archives were. Would Tamiment take them, look after them, and, after cataloguing, make them accessible to the public? Those who consider Tamiment's acceptance of the archive - crammed in some 12,000 cartons - treasonable, may also want to consider this. While it includes some titbits that will only confirm them in their view that the party was a slavish proxy of Moscow bent on revolution in America, the broader picture is rather different. It reveals to a greater extent than ever before the party's role in effecting social change in America in the last century, whether it was helping grow the union movement and labour protections or, less predictably, laying the groundwork for the black civil rights struggle in the South.

Then there are the items that are plainly intriguing whatever your political bias. Already sorted from the boxes - the cataloguing work will take at least another year - and placed for public viewing in three glass cabinets in the library's lobby is a sheet of notepaper with handwritten lyrics of the song "Turn, Turn, Turn", by Pete Seeger, the singer who was once a prominent member of the party. Mostly taken from biblical scripture and commonly interpreted as a call for peace, the song was written by Seeger in 1950, but only recorded in 1962 before being covered by artists from Mary Hopkin to Dolly Parton.

Beside it lies another sheet with more writing, this time in pencil and more obviously faded by the passing of the decades. It is the original will and testament of Joe Hill, who was executed by the state of Utah in November 1915 for a murder that some still believe he never committed. Hill died before he could join the Communist Party, but is remembered still today as arguably America's most beloved folk hero of the left. He was also a writer of militant songs, many of which influenced artists including Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (whose rendition of the Alfred Hayes song, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", was one of the highlights of Woodstock) and some of which became anthems of the union movement. Foremost among them was his will itself, written in verse the night before his execution. It begins: "My Will is easy to decide/ For there is nothing to divide".

Also on view is the service sheet for Hill's funeral - "In Memoriam Joe Hill murdered by the authority of the State of Utah, Nov 19 1915" - as well as a missive sent by the condemned Hill, whose last words were "Don't Mourn, Organise", to his friend and comrade Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who later was to found the American Civil Liberties Union and become chairman of the Communist Party. "Now goodbye Gurley dear. I have lived like a rebel and I shall die like a rebel," he wrote from his cell.

The collection also includes a record of the founding of the party at a convention in Chicago in September 1919 - the day after that other celebrated early American revolutionary, John Reed (who reported on the Russian Revolution and was immortalised in Warren Beatty's film Reds), had founded the rival Communist Labor Party, which was subsumed into the main party two years later.

"The Communist Party is a fact," states a letter signed CE Ruthenberg, its first executive secretary. Another document recalls a merger of the nascent Communist Party with the Workers Party (on the orders of Moscow.) It assigns codenames to its some of its leaders, including Earl Browder, who was to be called "Dix", and Jay Lovestone, who became "L C Wheat".

Indeed, the writings of Ruthenberg reveal how quickly - after its high-profile origins - the party understood that its work would need to be conducted underground. It was a condition that eased in the 1930s and most of the 1940s, a period when it enjoyed something close to respectability in the US and gained its largest number of followers. At its peak, just before the Second World War, the party, which openly supported President Franklyn Roosevelt and his New Deal, may have had 100,000 paid-up members.

Thereafter, it was virtually shattered and many of its leaders imprisoned during the so-called Second Red Scare in the US in the years after 1948 when political opportunists in Washington, notably Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, stirred up a national frenzy of anti-communist sentiment. Hearings were held in Congress, blacklists were drawn up and scores of party members and people who were merely deemed sympathisers, including some Hollywood figures, were imprisoned or saw their careers ruined.

Ruthenberg writes about the "secret manner in which the party is conducted". The Los Angeles branch was to be known only as "XO1XO5" and was assigned a password: "'Kur-heiny', which means: 'Are you advancing?'," he wrote. "The answer is: 'Teip,' meaning 'yes'."

Intriguingly, Ruthenberg also writes of a letter signed by two figures of the Russian Revolution, Nikolai Bukharin, who was later to edit Pravda, and Ian Berzin. This was carried to America in the coat lining of a Bolshevik and contained instructions on how American communists should deport themselves. These instructed that party members should not allow themselves to be distracted by charity work but rather that they form "Fighting organizations for seizing control of the state, for the overthrow of government and the establishment of the workers' dictatorship."

Insights into the early days also come from a well-known cartoonist and sympathiser, Robert Minor, who had travelled to Moscow and met Lenin in December 1918. He reports in his own writings that Lenin considered the US a "great country in some respects". Among the questions he asked Minor was: "'How soon will the revolution come in America?' He did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come." He also added of Lenin: "I felt myself queerly submerged by his personality. He filled the room."

Nash admits he still has much to learn as they sort through the archives, which also include party pamphlets, articles from its newspapers the Daily Worker and its successor the People's Weekly World as well as countless photographs and even films.

But he doubts whether the party harboured thoughts for long of a Soviet takeover of the United States. "I don't think anyone expected Stalin or Stalinism to rule in the US. But they did think that something akin to what they took communism to mean would eventually reign in the United States."

While for a period the party fielded candidates for national office and also saw members successfully elected to municipal offices, for instance in New York, its greatest success owas in allying itself to other organisations of the left, including the unions, notably the Congress of Industrial Organisations, the CIO, and using them to widen its influence.

What's important, Nash explains, is grasping exactly what impact it had on the social reforms of the 20th century. "We don't even know everything we have," he repeated. "I certainly haven't seen everything, though I've seen a lot. I don't think the role they played has been completely understood."

He cites evidence of the work done by party workers to help organise and defend the segment of society that was more repressed than anyone in the Thirties: African Americans, especially share-croppers in the South. Most tellingly, they centred their efforts in areas such as McComb County, Mississippi, and Selma in Alabama, two places that decades later became identified with the triumphs of the civil rights movement.

"It's clear that the Communist Party played a central role in the pre-history of civil rights battle especially in the Thirties up until the Second World War," he said. "If I could say one thing it is how much influence they had in creating the pre-conditions of what happened in the Sixties. Clearly, they were helping to put up legal defences in the lynching cases and for blacks who were accused of rape." Documents also reveal how in later years, even after the culling of their numbers by McCarthy, the party contributed to varying degrees to the anti-Vietnam War effort, the battle against apartheid in South Africa, the women's movement and, more recently, the campaign for gay and lesbian rights.

Speakers at the seminar at Tamiment, held on the same day that the archives were unveiled, argued that opening them to the public would belatedly correct some of the bias injected into the history of the party by the hysteria of the anti-communist McCarthy period.

"This donation will ensure that the history of the Communist Party and its impact on American politics will be preserved for future generations," said Sam Webb, currently the national chair of the party. Gerald Home, a history professor at the University of Texas and editor of Political Affairs, added: "One of the reasons why this archive is so important is that the history of the Communist Party has been so one-sided."

Frank Barbaro, a former justice of the New York Supreme Court, agreed. "Wherever you look where there was a struggle for peace and justice you will find the Communist Party."

For some, like the editorialists on the New York Post, nothing in these archives will convince them of any such thing. Communists were traitors then and continue to be traitors today. Even darkening the doors of the Tamiment to look at Joe Hill's will or Ruthenberg's early writings may be far too distasteful. But at least the history is now available. And we have the rather startling reminder that the Communist Party of the USA, after all its decades of ups and downs, is still with us, here in Manhattan.

"As long as capitalism is around," Teresa Albano, the current editor of People's Weekly World, declared last week, "there is going to be a Communist Party."

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