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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 Italian immigrants and nominal Catholics. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, (UC—Berkeley) in 1931, amid the Depression, but couldn’t find a job. In 1933 she was hired by the Bank of America because of her fluent Italian and ability with Spanish and French. She’d begun to move left politically at Berkeley and after witnessing the funeral march on Market Street. In early 1936 she attended a meeting of an AFL organizing committee for white-collar workers. After speaking up in the meeting, she was invited to a party recruiting session, led by Arthur Kent. She joined. Kent, however, was an informer. He gave employers the names of those who joined the union, and they were fired. Gizzi soon met Caroline Decker, who had recently been released from prison, and they became close friends. In 1937 Gizzi was elected president of a CIO organizing committee for office workers, and she continued to work as a CIO union organizer.
Estolv Ward’s efforts to found a union led him to the CP, which led him to positions with CIO unions and central bodies. He was born in Los Angeles in 1899. His father was a lawyer and former Populist who became a Socialist, and his mother was a physician, Quaker, and feminist. They moved to the Bay Area shortly after Estolv’s birth. After attending the University of California, Ward became a reporter and eventually assistant editor for the Oakland Tribune. Covering the San Francisco general strike in 1934 led him to join the Newspaper Guild, for which he was fired. He joined the CP in 1936 and held staff positions with CIO central bodies, labor publications, and Labor’s Non-Partisan League. He was executive secretary of the Harry Bridges Defense Committee in 1939. He and Angela Gizzi were married in 1939.
love that for them
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 the professional section. Membership lists were kept secret, and everyone used a code name. The code name she chose was Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century advocate for women’s rights. Having a membership card was “too dangerous,” so no one had one. She remembered the professional section as composed of several units of about eight people each; each unit met every week or two at a member’s house. Concluding that she should be a member of the working class, she quit law school, went to a business school, gave up learning to type, and got a job as a cashier at a department store in San Francisco.
ha love this
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; I was prepared to give my life and I gave an awful lot of it. But . . . no evaluation papers or applications, and not even membership books. Not even dues. Where was I going to get money to pay dues?” Dorothy Ray Healey similarly recalled, “I never regularly paid dues until 1946. When you moved around a great deal, the way I did, the bookkeeping never kept up with you.” But, like Decker, she specified that “you could still be a Communist accepted by others as a Communist, whether you paid dues or not.” She added, “There is this myth that the Party ran like some kind of well-oiled machine, but it was never that well organized internally. . . . The FBI did a much better job of keeping track of our members than we did, unfortunately.”
lol
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, including many women. Others were recruited across the country, including significant numbers from the South, both white and Black. One consequence was the expansion or development of Black communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Marin County.
Most shipyards had contracts with the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, AFL, which limited membership to whites. The 1937 Boilermakers’ national convention had created a special status for locals considered subject to “subversive forces,” that is, the CP: the national officers took direct control of such locals. Local 513, for Kaiser Shipyard workers at Richmond, was controlled that way throughout the war, with no elections or meetings. Workers at Marinship, in Marin County just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, were represented by Boilermakers Local 6, a long-established local in San Francisco. Faced with many Black workers in the Bay Area shipyards, the Boilermakers required them to pay dues to an auxiliary but denied them participation in elections or meetings.27 CP members on opposite sides of the bay took different approaches to fight this racial discrimination.
thinking about the parallels between that historical moment and our current one, with data centers for ai bullshit & silicon valley veering toward a steel-plated militarism whose targets are significantly less deserving. what is the point in merely bargaining for slightly better wages in a destructive industry? why not fight for a better world entirely? maybe because the former fight can actually be won whereas the latter seems hopelessly utopian and quixotic.
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 in Europe and Eastern Asia prevented U.S. party leaders from traveling to Moscow. The Comintern itself was dissolved in 1943. However, as Joseph Starobin has suggested, the leaders of the CPUSA carried in their heads a “mental Comintern,” an understanding that the party line in the United States should follow and accurately reflect the position of the Soviet party. Starobin was foreign editor of the Daily Worker from 1945 to 1954, in charge of the party’s peace activities, and a participant in many of the party’s high-level meetings; he resigned from the party in 1956 and later earned a PhD in political science from Columbia University. Here is his description of the way that party leaders after the 1940s sought to discern the intent of their Soviet leaders:
They lived in what can only be called “a mental Comintern,” imagining themselves part of something which did not exist. Seen in the best light, they were a species of self-proclaimed guerillas, operating in what they believed to be a world battle, but having no significant contact with any “main force” and without a perception of the battle plan. They resorted essentially to zodiac signs for guidance.8
omg lol
Other institutions joined the CLS in contributing to San Francisco’s postwar labor-left culture. People’s World continued to present reviews of art, music, literature, and film as well as sports and the party’s perspective on the news. Subscribers far outnumbered party members. In parts of San Francisco, PW had carriers making home deliveries, just like the mainstream dailies. Sidney Roger presented radio broadcasts of news from a left perspective on station KGO. He was a UCBerkeley graduate who had studied anthropology and drama and worked in the WPA Federal Theater Project. Roger never joined the CP but described himself as “very close to the Left.” He had a few CIO unions as sponsors but also set up the Sidney Roger Radio Fund, creating an early form of listener-sponsored radio. His broadcasts came to an end in 1950 when KGO canceled his contract.
nice
Left sectarianism was not the only basis for expulsions. In 1948 the party’s State Review Commission drafted a report on its work over the three years since the reorganization. Noting that its most important work had been “smashing” the left sectarian faction, the committee’s draft also reported on other investigations and expulsions: “In the course of the past three years, we conducted 300 hearings, expelling 70 members for ‘left-sectarianism’, and 10 ‘Right Opportunists’[sic] 2 stoolpigeons, 5 homo-sexuals“ [cross-out in draft, with “morally corrupt” written in with pencil].” The draft report noted that the California party had expelled some four hundred individuals over the previous fifteen years, the largest number of whom were “swindlers, thieves and financially irresponsible people,” followed by “Trotskyites and other ‘political’ revisers of Marxism” along with “paid informers and stool-pigeons.” The draft added, “In every one of the groupings, we find that the majority were guilty of [white] chauvinism or anti-semitism,” and concluded that this experience emphasized the continuing “necessity for struggle” against “rotten liberalism” (tolerance inside the party of those who disagreed with the official party line) and “such fascist ideas as chauvinism and anti-semitism.” The report singled out Harrison George: “Can Harrison George deny seeking to obtain documents from Union offices by theft? . . . Can Harrison George deny that he connived and planned to seize the People’s World through members of the Board of Directors?”
With the party under attack on all sides, and given harsh penalties under state law for homosexual behavior and smoking marijuana, the party feared that anyone charged under such laws might turn informer. One draft report noted, “Due to laws recently enacted in California re. homosexuals . . . (20 years in prison on act or failure to report and register as homo if practicing) . . . they have become greatest liability in and around the Party.” All known lesbian and gay party members were expelled or dropped. One internal draft report noted, “Certainly there are comrades who, and justifiably so, feel sorry for these comrades when they are asked to leave our movement, but we must always keep in mind the methods the bourgeoise [sic] uses to exploit these people.”40
In the late 1940s, coincident with a Soviet campaign against national chauvinism in Eastern Europe, the U.S. party launched a campaign against white chauvinism, which it described as the key underlying feature of American capitalism’s success in keeping the working class divided.45 The campaign quickly degenerated. Dorothy Ray Healey, then a CP leader in Los Angeles, reflected, “A legitimate concern turned into an obsession” and became “a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign.” She added, “Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense.” In Los Angeles, Healey estimated, the party expelled or dropped two hundred people, “usually on the most trivial of pretexts.” Healey’s description was as accurate for San Francisco as for Los Angeles. CP members who ran afoul of prominent party members were called before the Security Commission, charged with white chauvinism, and expelled or dropped.
After his discharge from the army, Keith Eickman returned to Local 6, moved from the YCL to the CP, and attended CLS classes. He was expelled or dropped from the CP in 1953, during the white chauvinism campaign, which he later called “a hysteria within the CP.” The charge against him was that in a meeting of union stewards he had disagreed with a Black steward who, Eickman later said, was and remained a close friend. Regarding the white chauvinism campaign, Eickman later said, it “was useful . . . to some people who wanted to get rid of some of the others.” He added, “They probably did me a favor. . . . It would have been difficult for me to voluntarily separate myself from the CP.”
Dorothy Ray Healey added, “One of the great ironies of the white chauvinism campaign is that we lost a large number of Black members. . . . They were just contemptuous of the whole thing because it had so little to do with fighting racism in the real world.”