Activity

The Comintern had always been the most important channel for information from Moscow to New York, both through written material and, more importantly, through regular visits by top CPUSA leaders to Moscow for in-person discussions. Those channels were seriously interrupted from 1939 onward, as wars…

During the war the Bay Area became the largest shipbuilding site in the world. New shipyards and expansions of existing ones constructed some fourteen hundred ships, averaging more than one a day. This rapid expansion of shipbuilding produced a huge demand for workers. Some new workers were local, …

Observers then and later have disagreed regarding the degree to which the CP succeeded in its ambition to be a tightly disciplined organization. Even membership could be ambiguous. Caroline Decker recalled, “I never carried a book, I never paid dues. . . . As far as I was concerned, I was a member;…

Arnstein graduated in 1935 and then continued for another three semesters, including some time in the law school. In 1936, while in law school, she became section organizer for the party’s professional section. She later recalled “everything was so secretive” that she didn’t even know who was in th…

For Brown and Yoneda, party membership led them into union activity. Angela Gizzi’s experience provides a different pattern. Her interest in the left led her to union activism and then to the CP. She was born in San Francisco’s North Beach, an Italian neighborhood. Her parents were middle-class Ita…