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.

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