Remembering an American Communist
YBARRA, MICHAEL J.
Remembering an American Communist Earl Browder strove to wrap Marxism in the Stars and Stripes By Michael J. Ybarra IN 1927 THE COMINTERN DISpatched a corn-fed Kansas Communist named ...
...Congress cited him for contempt and the Justice Department sent him to federal prison twice...
...After giving almost half his life to the party, the SS-year-old Browder found himself out in the cold...
...Tagging along was William 2. Foster, an old militant union warhorse who eventually became head of the American party...
...Browder drifted through various left-wingisms, protested World War I, and was arrested in 1917 for advocating draft dodging...
...arrested him for passport fraud...
...No Gramsci, Browder’s prison writings included an accounting pamphlet...
...Classic scholarly accounts of American Communism, such as Theodore Draper’s, emphasized the latter, while New Left historians of the last couple of decades purposefully overlooked foreign domination of the party’s leadership to concentrate on the idealism of rank-and-file activists...
...Browder dragged his heels...
...When he left Leavenworth in 1921, Browder joined the fledgling American Communist Party, largely comprised of immigrants whose command of Marxism was almost as shaky as their English...
...Front groups sprouted like corn...
...Browder’s closest colleagues (almost no one called him a friend) turned on him at the drop of a hat...
...a long-suffering ideologue who sacrificed much for principle but was also vainglorious in the extreme, a reckless womanizer, and an accomplice in Soviet espionage...
...These younger scholars haven’t been heard from much in the last few years since Soviet archives began gushing documents proving most of the worst of what the party’s detractors had always claimed...
...Undaunted, he also ran for president, finishing behind a prohibitionist candidate...
...Ryan’s book, for example, started out as a dissertation that dwelled on Browder’s roots in the plains and the American radical tradition, but after a visit to Moscow Ryan shifted his focus accordingly...
...the FBI stalked his every move and Washington tried to deport his Russian-born wife until the day she died of cancer...
...Of course, this is like being the prettiest girl at a leper colony...
...Even disregarding his politics, Browder does not come across as even remotely likable, and Ryan, a professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston, is to be congratulated, if not pitied, for having the fortitude to spend years in the company of such an unpleasant subject...
...Browder turned up in court with his mustache trimmed down to a Hitlerian smudge of fur...
...Even his resistance to Moscow seems not so much a moral grappling as a matter of power politics-the story of a wannabe Stalin seelung his own path to total control...
...In the end, it wasn’t much of a contest...
...Unlike Foster, who liked nothing better than to lead the workers in a riot against the police, Browder was happiest as the radical bean counter, a New Deal cheerleader in a business suit content to nudge at American politics from the margins...
...On one hand, he desperately wanted to make the party a player in American politics...
...He was the best that American Communism could produce...
...Police in Terre Haute, Ind., arrested him for vagrancy as soon as he stepped off a train...
...Morgan to his bosom...
...The aged and embittered Foster jumped on Browder, and the rest of the party leadership wasn’t far behind...
...And in 1943 FDR and Stalin met at Teheran, which Browder felt sure was a sign that the Communist and Capitalist spheres had reached a modus vivendi for the post-war world-the “greatest, most important turning point in all history,” he gushed...
...His great rival in the American Communist Party, William Z. Foster, dismissed him as “that schoolboy” and spent years sharpening theoretical knives to stick in his back...
...He argued that the Declaration of Independence foreshadowed the Communist Manifesto and extolled Jefferson and Lincoln as exemplars of American radicalism...
...We were not only Communists,” remembered party member George Charney, “We were also Americans again...
...He offered to clasp J...
...Ryan says Browder eventually abandoned even Marx, although the book inexcusably fails to elaborate on this...
...Universities banned him from giving MICHAEL J. YBARRA is working a book about the transformation of American politics from the New Deal to McCarthyism...
...he got four years in prison...
...Browder’s faith in the American judicial system was touching...
...And the best that it deserved...
...speeches...
...American Legionnaires pistol-whipped listeners at his speeches...
...Browder became his assistant...
...In his own country, Browder was never mistaken for royalty...
...Browder, in short, was one of the great sad sacks of American politics...
...The CPUSA was re-established in July and soon expelled its leader of 13 years...
...Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1891, Browder was the son of a failed farmer and school teacher...
...Leaning on his correspondence school law course from a quarter of a century earlier, he took over his own case, maintaining that the charges against him were merely the opening salvo of a crackdown on civil liberties in America...
...Membership jumped and the party’s influence in unions grew steadily...
...That became a lot harder to do when the party line switched awn after the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939...
...a devoted revolutionary and authoritarian leader who longed to shepherd h s party into the fold of the legitimate left...
...In June 1941, three months after Browder reported to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Germany invaded Russia and the Russians joined the Allies...
...By far not the movement’s most profound ideologist, Browder proved beyond question its greatest salesperson...
...The next year Roosevelt commuted Browder’s sentence...
...Prison for Browder, as for h s Bolshevik heroes, was a school for revolution...
...Browder tried diligently to make his organization less foreign (though no less authoritarian or bureaucratic),” Ryan concludes...
...To celebrate this new move, Browder threw a fourday gala, starting on his birthday, at the Riverside Plaza Hotel, with U.S...
...flags on the stage and a huge photo of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Teheran behind him...
...Moscow even made Browder pay his own way to the Kremlin to plead his case after the American Party lacked him out and turned his name into a curse...
...Some poor party hack had spent a year listening to static on a shortwave radio when Moscow finally broke the silence by ordering Browder to go on the offensive against Roosevelt...
...Browder helped bring American Communism greater legitimacy than it had ever known before or would enjoy again ...,” writes Ryan in the aptly titled Earl Brmder: The Failure of American Communism...
...Browder died in 1973, his passing unremarked upon by any Communist paper in the world...
...Once again Browder felt he was swimming with the tide of history...
...he played chess and attended the ballet...
...Vigilantes pelted him with rotten eggs and tomatoes...
...Ryan has attempted a somewhat more tractable one: explaining how the American Communist Party could be both an indigenous social force and the subversive hireling of a Moscow-controlled revolutionary conspiracy...
...All-American converts were in great demand, and Browder soon found himself on the first of what would become an annual pilgrimage to the mother church in Moscow...
...On his visits to Moscow during the Great Purge, Browder tried not to notice that old comrades were disappearing...
...Browder excelled at domesticating the party...
...he treated colleagues badly and enemies worse...
...While free pending his appeal, Browder ran for Congress from the Lower East Side, a party stronghold...
...And yet Browder, who led the Communist Party of the United States of America from 1932 to 1945, was the greatest Communist leader America ever produced: a homegrown Stalinist who also worshiped Franklin Roosevelt...
...Ryan notes, however, that just turning up at the Kremlin in those days took some guts...
...He was sentenced to three years in prison...
...But his crooked mouth gave Browder’s face a sense of precariousness and a perpetual scowl that was softened only by growing a mustache...
...America, Browder explained to the party in his “Teheran thesis,” was unprepared for socialism, and Communist agitation would only aid the reactionaries so the party would renounce revolution...
...Ryan makes much of Browder’s looks and attractiveness to female comrades: He had straight dark hair and intense blue eyes...
...Browder’s own comrades could be almost as nasty...
...Remembering an American Communist Earl Browder strove to wrap Marxism in the Stars and Stripes By Michael J. Ybarra IN 1927 THE COMINTERN DISpatched a corn-fed Kansas Communist named Earl Browder to China to stir the revolutionary embers in Asia...
...At that very moment,” he writes, “Browder knew Soviet Communists accused of unorthodoxy were being tried, sentenced, and executed en masse, but he believed he was reconciling the American reform tradition and world Marxism...
...The general secretary of the CPUSA became the president of the CPA...
...immigration authorities, and Browder himself had done a little work as a talent spotter for Soviet intelligence...
...The only thing to spoil the party was the fact that Stalin was lining up Old Bolsheviks and shooting them down as fast as he could give them a show trial...
...Browder’s dilemma was solved when the U.S...
...As Stalin liked to say, this was not an accident...
...In Ryan5 telling, Browder comes off far better than any of his other comrades in the party...
...it taught him discipline and gave him time to read the Marxist classics and nurse hs already festering resentment against American society...
...Though he had physical courage aplenty and suffered much, he seems to have had less than the average allotment of moral courage...
...on the other, he was at heart a Stalinist with several practical reasons for not thumbing his nose at Moscow: his sister Margaret had worked for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, his wife had a revolutionary past that might not sit too well with U.S...
...By 1932 Browder managed to shoulder aside the ailing Foster and assume de facto leadership of the party during the early days of the New Deal, which the Communists (following Moscow’s “Third Period” policy of militancy) denounced as the advent of American fascism...
...middle-aged version of the all-American boy, he was a walking refutation of every Communist stereotype...
...Then he was caught by the undertow...
...he told the Jews they had nothing to fear from Hider and ignored Stalin’s various genocides...
...He took a job hawking propaganda for the Soviets, which was not a brilliant career move during the McCarthy period...
...Admittedly he had undertaken an impossible task...
...In 1944 he dissolved the party, replacing it with the Communist Political,Association...
...Still, Ryan attempts something of a synthesis by showing the struggle within Browder between the dictates of meaningful radical politics and subservience to the Soviets...
...Three years later the winds from Moscow were blowing another way and Browder found himself heralding the “Popular Front” policy where the party would work in train with the rest of the left...
...All of which makes James G. Ryan’s new, workmanlike biography of Browder a both dispiriting and fascinating read-and an important contribution to the study of American Communism...
...He left home at 21, moving to Kansas City where he found work as an accountant for a Standard Oil subsidiary...
...Browder made the cover of Time...
...In April 1945 the French Communist Jacques Duclos, whose own party was anything but revolutionary, attacked Browder in the journal, Cahiers du Communisme, referring ominously to the CPA leader as the “former secretary...
...Browder was not a remotely moral man: He left his first wife and child for politics...
...Ryan sees this as a sensible decision, a way for the party to become a bona fide part of the American political landscape and an anticipation of later attempts to reconcile Marxism with democracy, such as Titoism, Eurocommunism, and perestroika...
...He polled less than 14 percent...
...Something apparently got lost in the translation, for when the midwestern Marxist arrived in Hankow, he was greeted by banners proclaiming “Welcome the Earl of Browder...
...The party played ‘Yankee Doodle” at its meetings, decked its platforms in the Stars and Stripes, and adopted the slogan: “Communism is 20th-Century Americanism...
Vol. 29 • July 1997 • No. 7
