Communists & Wobblies
The Roots of American Communism
By Theodore Draper
Viking. 498 pp. $6.75.
The I.W.W. (reissued, with a new preface)
By Paul Brissenden
Russell and Russell. 438 pp. $7.50.
Much respectable opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, the American Communist party did not spring fully armed from the head of Lenin. It was the natural, if illegitimate, offspring of a union between Russian Bolshevism and an indigenous American radical movement which almost died in the act of childbirth. Each parent contributed something to the lineaments of American Communism, though its resemblance to the traditional American left has tended to be that of a caricature.
To get a sense of the basic alteration that Communism wrought in American radicalism, it is advisable to read Brissenden’s classic study of the IWW (an organization that more or less represented the culmination of the native radical tradition), now reprinted thirty-eight years after its first appearance, together with Draper’s history of the birth of the Communist movement in this country. The latter is the first comprehensive account of how Russian and American factors combined to produce a domestic Communist movement. After a discussion of American radicalism before November 1917, Draper describes the process by which, under the aegis of Moscow, the Communist party in its present form emerged from a complex series of fissions, mergers, and reorganizations. While much of the earlier part of the book covers material which has also been treated by Brissenden—and by Daniel Bell and David Shannon in their studies of the Socialist party—Draper’s discussion of the early development of the Communist movement forms a unique contribution.
In a way that is very difficult for one who did not actually live through the period, Draper recaptures the atmosphere of the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution. Even people who personally experienced those days are apt to forget the apocalyptic aura which surrounded them. All things seemed possible; whether for good or evil depended on one’s point of view. In every country, including our own, Armageddon appeared to loom. (And not only in political terms; I well remember Judge Rutherford proclaiming from innumerable billboards and subway posters the message of Jehovah’s Witnesses: “Millions now living will never die.”) The war had uprooted all that was settled; manners and morals were in flux, and cherished beliefs vanished overnight. Great empires had crumbled; men who only a little while before had been helpless prisoners, hunted fugitives, or frustrated exiles were now in the seats of the mighty. A Soviet government seized power in Hungary; Germany hung in the balance; the “liberating” Red Army seemed likely to overrun Poland, in which case all Central and Eastern Europe might be expected to embrace Bolshevism; even the victorious nations of the West were beset by military mutinies and mass political strikes.
Nor were portents lacking in the United States. Great strikes threatened the citadels of industrial power, such as steel. There was ubiquitous and large-scale violence; usually, to be sure, its perpetrators were the forces of “law and order,” but this was not always the case. When the coal miners of West Virginia marched against the non-union mines of Logan and Mingo counties, it took the United States Army to stop them. The United Mine Workers and the Railroad Brotherhoods were demanding the nationalization of their industries. In various parts of the country the Socialist vote was skyrocketing. To many—and not only on the left—such incidents as the Seattle general strike and the Boston police strike seemed to presage imminent revolution. To some, the futility of parliamentary methods seemed proven when the New York State Legislature and the United States Congress excluded duly elected Socialists. There was excitement in the air; and revolutionary manifestoes which seem farcical in retrospect were taken seriously enough at the time, both by their authors and by the government.
These manifestoes proliferated even faster than the bewildering succession of factions and parties that issued them—first the various left-wing groups in the Socialist parry and then the Communist party, the Communist Labor party, the Proletarian party, and all the other parties that resulted from their mergers and splits. Draper, who feels that the infancy of American Communism determined its mature character, sees the factional fights of the early years as the first instance of a clash between sectarian and opportunist tendencies that was to recur again and again in the subsequent history of the Communist parry. To a great extent the events are susceptible of such an interpretation, but they do not seem to me to impose it. Rather, I am inclined to believe that most of the early internecine battles anticipated subsequent Communist history in a different respect-namely, that they arose very largely not from real, substantive differences of opinion, but from successive struggles for power, the issues of “principle” and “program” being little more than weapons used in the struggles. Moreover, it seems at least probable that the Communist movement would have become what it has been in recent years and is today even if these early factional fights had never taken place. The nature of American Communism was determined on the one hand by the requirements which Moscow imposed on all Communist parties, and on the other by the conditions of the American scene. If Louis Fraina had never existed the history of factional battles within the movement would have been different, but the end result would almost certainly have been the same. But this, of course, is speculation; events occurred as they did, and it is the historian’s task to trace them. This task Draper has performed with consummate skill.
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Nevertheless, there are points on which his interpretation is open to serious question. He seems to me to underestimate Communist influence during the underground period (1919-22), particularly in the labor movement. Bill Dunne, for example, whom Draper himself discusses, dominated the labor movement of Butte, Montana, as editor of the Butte Daily Bulletin, and (at a time when the Communists rejected parliamentary action!) was a Democratic member of the Montana Legislature. Dunne was not an isolated phenomenon. Clarence Hathaway held the positions of district secretary of the Machinists and vice-president of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor. Communist influence was also important in the labor movement of Seattle, where the Central Labor Union sent an official delegate to the first meeting of the Red International of Labor Unions (known as the Profit tern, an abbreviation of its Russian name). Even the foreign language federations, the least “American” part of the movement, had their quota of active unionists. Nick Dozen-berg of the Lettish Federation had been president of a Machinist’s local; Fahle Berman of the Finnish Federation had been Secretary of the iron mining district of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers; Ludwig Lore’s followers in the German Federation controlled a fairly strong independent union in the food trades. Communists were active in the Shop delegate leagues in the needle trades, which later became the basis of their powerful movement there. But it is true that until Foster joined the party and made the Trade Union Educational League an annex of it, these trade union activities were conducted by individual Communists, without any significant party direction or coordination. There was, indeed, a notable gap between the theology of the underground Communist party and the practical activities of many individual Communists. But when the theology changed, the party had the material for carrying out its new line: it was not forced to build a trade union base de novo.
On the whole, Draper’s account of Communist history from the organization of the Left Wing (1919) to the establishment of the Workers party (1923) is an exceptionally sound piece of scholarship. In his treatment of American radicalism in general before 1919, however, the perspective is somewhat distorted by selecting and emphasizing those elements in the picture which form a direct line back from the 1919 Left Wing. This is a not unnatural consequence of writing in terms of the history of Communism, and it results in spotlighting interesting and hitherto neglected details; but at the same time it gives such details a causative importance which I do not believe they possessed. The Communist movement was the product of an entire milieu, and not of the particular organizations or publications through which its initial activities happened to be channeled. Lenin’s ideas may have been brought to this country by Rutgers, Bukharin, and Kollontai, but they only called forth substantial echoes when they were embodied in a victorious revolution.
Draper—perhaps because he takes left-wing charges at their face value—also underestimates the extent of general Socialist opposition to the war after the United States had entered. Socialist agitation during the war was predominantly pacifist in character; thus the war issue dominated the New York Socialist campaign of 1917, in which the late August Claessens hailed Morris Hillquit as “the American Liebknecht.” It is true that later there was some slackening in opposition to the war, particularly on the part of the Jewish Daily Forward and those sections of the party under its influence. But this was primarily due to their strong sympathy for the Bolshevik revolution, which they felt was threatened by the German army and the demands made by Germany at Brest-Litovsk.
Draper is also following left-wing tradition when he says that the IWW was not truly dual to the AFL, because it organized those whom the AFL never touched. This was partly true at its height, but of its initial period, Brissenden points out that “The IWW devoted very little attention at that time to the unorganized; its energy was chiefly centered on the reformation of the craft unions—a policy of dual unionism. The Federation lost rather heavily in some quarters to the IWW, the disaffection proving most marked among the brewers and machinists.” In this, it resembled the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance before it and the Trade Union Unity League after it. Again, Draper shares the commonly held but erroneous belief that the IWW practiced violence and sabotage on a large scale and that these are what is meant by “direct action.” The Wobblies certainly talked a lot about sabotage and violence, but in practice they were less given to these methods than were many AFL unions. Most of the violence in IWW strikes was directed against the Wobblies; they were, indeed, pioneers in the use of mass non-resistance. And “direct action”—as distinguished from political action—usually meant simply the strike, the sitdown, the slowdown (which the Wobblies called “sabotage”), the boycott, and similar methods. Nor do I think that it is correct to say that “With rare exceptions, IWW strikes failed to win any immediate demands. . . .” The most spectacular strikes were apt to be the least successful economically—though a wage increase was won at Lawrence—(but the small local strikes in agriculture and lumbering very often won significant gains. On some of these points, Brissenden gives a more accurate picture.
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This volume is to be followed by two more studies also sponsored by the Fund for the Republic: another book by Draper covering the history of the Communist Party up to 1940, and one by David Shannon covering the period since then. In a sense, these two books should be less difficult to write than the one reviewed here; the Communist movement after 1923 presents a somewhat less complex picture than it did in its first years. But in another sense, they may be more difficult, for the controversies of the later years are in many cases still very much alive, while the controversies of 1919 and 1920 are now largely the stuff of history.
But in the later period, as in the earlier, the Communist movement in the United States is a thing of many facets. On the one hand, tactics and ideology shift in a tortuous pattern; on the other, factions and personalities rise and fall. The two processes are not the same, but they interact and affect each other. The causes of both are mainly in Moscow, but the effects in the United States are no less real, and quite beyond the power of Moscow to determine. And these effects in turn affect the men who carry out the policies which produce them, and sometimes alter the relation between those men and the Kremlin. Leaders adopt positions which they think will win Moscow’s approval and its support for their claims to leadership. And then they find that the climate in Moscow has changed, and the ideas they had selected as weapons in the internal party struggle for power have turned out to be boomerangs. Sometimes a man who has faithfully followed each turn of the line suddenly finds that he has fallen one turn behind; expelled, he is frozen in his last position like some Pompeian taken unawares by the lava flood, and holds it forever after.
The IWW was never like that.
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