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.

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.”