Wichita Party-Line Man

...The author of this biography takes a similarly dim view, writing that "the modest Popular Front innovator of 1936 had by 1944 become drunk with success...

...I would have preferred more of those glittering nuggets of human nature that make words on paper assume the form of a living, breathing person...

...I have to confess that by the end of this unrelentingly hostile biography I was hoping the poor old duffer would somehow catch a break...

...Others will be pleased with his decision to combine sparse chronology with extensive pondering of what it all means...

...Browder was gulled into believing that he had attained the status of a presidential adviser, and was given to bragging about his White House contacts to the Soviets and to Communist Party, USA cadres...

...This, he fondly expected, would establish him as one of the giants of international Marxist-Leninism...

...A chance encounter with Stalin turned him into a life-long acolyte, while his protracted stay in Russia provided him with a Russian wife and a revolutionary rolodex of contacts in the Kremlin...

...Whatever the case, the Duclos article was taken by Washington to mean that Stalin was no longer Uncle Joe...

...Although he was primarily an administrative behind-the-scenes operator, Browder nevertheless made forays into the field, meeting with the Scottsboro Boys and showing up at major strikes...

...Earl Browder was born in Wichita, Kansas, on May 20, 1891, the son of a farmer driven off the land by debt and drought...

...To this day it is trotted out by Right-wing fanatics as evidence of Roosevelt's Red Record...

...Right-wing anti-Communists courted him, hoping to add a showstopper to their lecture circuit roster, but there was no deal...

...Browder and his comrades may have shuffled off into the coulisse of history, but he was once a pretty big shot in certain precincts...

...In 1926 Browder was again summoned to Moscow...

...The period between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Pearl Harbor was one of crisis and heartache for Browder, since he had to support Stalin's volte-face manfully while facing serious (and valid) criminal charges for his many trips to the Soviet Union on false passports...

...Throwing the caution required of a long-lived Stalinist to the wind, he extemporized that after the War, Communists would stop attacking the capitalist system, and would actually help make that system more congenial to the working class...

...imperialism, claiming that Truman had departed from the Roosevelt policies Browder had backed...

...Behind the scenes Mao Zedong and the leaders of the English and Australian parties had already assailed the Teheran Thesis...

...No matter how little Browder's career finally mattered, no matter how twisted were his means and ends, I finished this book convinced that at the very least, Browder deserved that much credit...

...Even as Browder loyally advanced Stalin's "Third Period" line that capitalism had entered its final crisis and that the Communist Party's most dangerous enemies were the "social fascists" of the Left—social democrats, that is—he cautiously began to reveal his own conviction that the future lay in alliances that would move the Communists into the American political mainstream...

...On being released he received a charter membership in the United Communist Party, since he had been in jail when it was formed by the union of two factions in 1919...

...A few years later "Browderism" was one of the enormities for which Stalin had Hungarian and Czech Communists executed...

...The conviction did not help his 1940 run for President on the Communist Party ticket (while he appealed the verdict), but it was a slight impediment compared to his dutiful defense of the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...With Foster blasting Browder for "bourgeois reformism" and talking "intellectual trash," the CPUSA was reconstituted in July 1945...

...Ryan contrasts, without much charity, the thousands who attended Eugene V Debs' funeral with the handful at Browder's memorial...

...His mother was a radical of the anticlerical variety who urged her children to read Thomas Paine...

...Some readers, I am sure, will enjoy the style Ryan uses to convey his ideas, but I found the verbal brickwork infelicitous...

...Browder was too shaken to make the obvious rejoinder, "There, but for a few more accidents of geography, history, and party infighting, stands an executioner...

...Browder proclaimed the Teheran Declaration "the greatest, most important turning point in all history...

...Browder spent the last years of his life in painful solitude, supported by stipends from wealthy benefactors like Philip Jaffe and by his own sons, who had successful careers in academe...

...Instead, Ryan castigates him as delusional for dreaming that Stalinism and Americanism could be reconciled, and at the same time holds him culpable for the personal failings—egotism, stubbornness, vindictiveness—to which he attributes American Communism's demise...

...Browder's midwestern background marked him for advancement within the largely foreign-born leadership of the party, and he was dispatched to Moscow for grooming along with Foster...

...Surely there must have been a few such nuggets in the mountains of documents Ryan shoveled through...

...and in his imagination, at least, he was a big-time big shot...

...Browder enjoyed the illusion that his views were becoming influential in Washington...

...He was arrested for advocating draft resistance, and spent most of 1918-20 in various prisons, including the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas...

...In retrospect, fate dealt Browder a pretty sorry hand when he was writ down a Communist in the Book of Life...

...Browder called for aggressive development of international markets for American goods through foreign aid, with great ""semigovernmental" agencies lending capital to the underdeveloped world...

...When the Comintern abandoned the Third Period policy in 1935 and ordered Communists to build a united front against Hitler, Browder could finally pursue that objective without disobeying the Kremlin...

...A nervous collapse eliminated Foster from the scene, and in late 1932 Moscow anointed Browder as chief of the American party...

...For Communists, opposition to Browderism now constituted a ritual of unity through the sacrifice of a scapegoat...

...Quoting the Thesis for almost half its length, the essay denounced Browderism as heresy...

...He met with Deputy Secretary of State Sumner Welles to exchange views on China, and Welles may have indeed been interested in what Browder, who had been there, had to say...

...Browderism germinated that fall, after Stalin met with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in Teheran...

...In a final humiliation, his application for membership in the reorganized CPUSA was rejected...

...In words they forever after recalled with glee, Max Shachtman topped off a rhetorical onslaught on Browder with the memorable, "There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse...

...He suggests that Stalin intended only an indirect reproof to French or Italian comrades who might imagine that their postwar coalitions meant that they were independent of Moscow...

...Browder quit school after the third grade to help support the family and joined the Socialist Party at age 15...

...He formally abolished the Communist Party, replacing it with a Communist Political Association (CPA) that would seek permanent alliances with Left-wing parties and with progressive factions in the major parties...

...Browder hurried to Russia to grasp the lifeline his Kremlin patrons had always thrown him in the past, but now all he got was time-consuming employment on the Soviet payroll that barely paid his rent...

...He joined his future nemesis William Z. Foster's Workers' Educational League, an affiliate of Foster's Syndicalist League of North America, and edited Foster's monthly, The Toiler...

...He now brought his lovely wife Raissa to work at party headquarters in New York...

...Browder's father turned to school teaching, populism and socialism...

...When the party expelled Big Bill Haywood in 1913 for advocating violence, Browder quit in protest...

...author, "Not Without Honor: The Histoiy of American Anti-Communism" By coincidence, while I was reading James G. Ryan's biography of Earl Browder I happened to see the film Donnie Brasco...

...or that Stalin meant the blistering critique as a veiled threat to Roosevelt, because Browder was by now among his most enthusiastic backers...

...since they could easily furnish American authorities with files that would result in the expulsion of his wife...

...And then, in the same month that Roosevelt died and Russian and American troops met at the Elbe, the whole thing came crashing down...

...Initially Browder received encouragement from abroad, and was saluted by Andrea Marty in France and Palmiro Togliatti in Italy...

...He did, after all, head the American Communist Party from 1932 until 1945...

...But all depended on Stalin, and his response exploded in an article that appeared under Jacques Duclos' name in the French party's theoretical journal Cahiers du Communisme in April 1945...

...The character made me think of Earl Browder, and of Browder's dream of striding the stage of world revolutionary Marxism with Georgi Dimitrov, Mao Zedong, and his idol Joseph V Stalin...

...Browder's vision of a truly American Communism buoyed him on waves of optimism, but it was deeply disturbing to some of his colleagues—notably Foster, who had become his implacable enemy...

...A sad end, I would say, though some—the author among them—would consider it exactly what Browder deserved...

...The Comintern followed with a directive that all national parties find links with native radical traditions...

...In it Al Pacino plays the over-thehill, never-could-have-been-a-contender Lefty Ruggiero ("I clipped 26 guys for them and did they move me up...

...By the 1930 Party Convention he had taken his place in a leadership troika with William Weinstone and Foster...

...Moreover, he recommended, the government should vastly increase workers' buying power to fuel the postwar domestic market, even if this meant more profits for capitalists...

...Inhis book Victory and After, Browder argued that the "owning classes" had to be indulged lest they sabotage the war effort, and that the working classes must therefore forego any struggle for socialism during the conflict...

...Soon after Roosevelt's inauguration in 1941 Browder entered the Federal penitentiary at Atlanta, where he sojourned until May 16,1942, when Roosevelt—in what Stalin, desperate for a second front, must have considered a maddeningly inadequate sign of good will—commuted Browder's sentence...

...Maybe, to paraphrase Grant on Lee, nobody ever fought for a worse cause, but Earl Browder did have guts...

...Now that his enemies were no longer nipping at his heels but tearing at his throat, Browder himself began to attack British and U.S...

...Is this the biography Browder deserved...

...In July 1935 Browder traveled to Moscow for the Comintern's Seventh World Congress, where he heard Dimitrov demand that all anti-Fascists in the United States rally around Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Class divisions, he insisted, no longer had any significance...

...The salutations "brother" and "sister" were to supplant "comrade...

...All this he outlined in a document he proudly called his "Teheran Thesis...

...Yet a second hoped-for avenue of influence, the artist Josephine Truslow Adams, was little more than a joke...

...Browder's support for Roosevelt in the 1944 election also benefited him personally when the President quietly quashed deportation proceedings against his wife...

...Ryan feels that almost everyone who read the Duclos essay in 1945 misinterpreted it...

...World War I galvanized Browder into antiwar activism...

...Latin American Communists specifically cited him as they nationalized their ownparties...

...Ryan makes the interesting suggestion that Raissa's passport difficulties (she was in the country illegally, and her Soviet espionage training and participation in the Russian Civil War made her eminently deportable) gave the Soviets an additional hold over Browder...

...On returning to the U.S., Browder toiled for Foster's Trade Union Education League, which achieved marked success as the party's beachhead in the American Federation of Labor until the AFL banned TUEL members because of Communist mischief...

...Browder's innovative attempts to reconcile Communism with national unity and capitalist war production are treated scornfully by Ryan, but there is no doubt that they were a factor in the party's surge in popularity and membership...

...The Communists' ferocious support of the Soviet Union, which now demanded total dedication to victory over Germany, turned them into wartime superpatriots...

...He finally died in 1973...

...Anti-Communists on the Left recalled bitterly the Communists' role—Browder's not least—in sabotaging prospects for unity by their slavish obedience to their Soviet sponsors...

...In the U.S..meanwhile, the CPA's morale was lifted, and 24,000 new members joined the party...

...Browder's rivals in the CPA, led by Foster, took it as Soviet endorsement for as violent a rhetorical assault as any American political figure has ever had to endure...

...His career was a stormy one, and Ryan, a professor of history at Texas A&M, fills in all the details, many of them exhumed from Soviet archives...

...On May 15,1943, the Comintern voted to disband, setting the stage for Browder's signal contribution to Communist history—"Browderism...

...Adams parlayed a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt into a voluminous, but largely one-sided postal correspondence with the First Lady, the idea being that she could serve as a conduit for Browder to the Presidential ear...

...In the long run, I imagine, this book will be most valuable for the heroically strenuous research in Soviet and American archives that went into it, and the book's footnotes will be an invaluable tool for future scholars of American Communism...

...No, they passed me by...

...Or maybe it was the dreary routine of erstwhile mob pals "clipping" one another for imagined lapses of loyalty that put me in mind of the onetime vanguard of the working class...

...Suddenly, Communism became 20th-century Americanism...

...City University of New York...

...In 1940 he was convicted of passport fraud...

...But before he went bust, he led an amazingly eventful life at the center of the most stomach-churning events of the 20th century...

...One guy I never dreamed I would feel sorry for was Earl Browder...

...The three Allied leaders had issued a communiqué vaguely promising postwar cooperation to prevent future conflicts...

...Isolated politically and personally, Browder continued to insist on the validity of his contributions to Marxist theory, but no one was buying...

...For a conspirator as immersed in skulduggery as Browder, the strange and devious nature of the Adams-Eleanor-FDR connection must have made it even more convincing...

...The logic of the Teheran Thesis compelled Browder to develop a new role for American Communism...

...He was then sent to China, where he worked for the Comintern's Pan-Pacific Trade Union Conference and edited its j ournal before returning home in 1929...