The Left 101

Most supporters of the Left did not formally belong to any political party, although they might have participated in some of the Popular Front cultural and political organizations and ad hoc groups on the Left. They included

Stalinists, Fellow Travelers and Communist Sympathizers

• Communist Party USA members. The Party vigorously and unquestioningly supported Stalin who seemingly could do no wrong. They saw the Soviet Union as the embodiment of the worker state and the only true democracy, which had a unique definition for them Like all rabid ideologues they ignored or dismissed the plentiful evidence to the contrary. In addition to card-carrying Party members, the loyal band included a small number of crypto-Communists, those agents of the Party or the Soviet Union who did not hold active Party membership in order to maintain their cover. Party membership was never huge and people had a way of drifting in and out. About half of party strength was in New York. At its peak the party newspaper The Daily Worker had a circulation of 35,000 and not all of its readers were Party members. The real strength of the party was its activist core, the network of social, cultural and political organizations they set up and the leadership role they played within many unions and progressive umbrella groups. One Communist auxiliary, the International Workers Order, had 185,000 members at its peak in 1947. The dissident left had no corresponding social groups and were not as organized or disciplined. Very few rank-and-file Party members were Soviet agents, despite Right Wing propaganda to the contrary.

• Fellow travelers were a much larger group who essentially shared the world view of the Party. Many were former liberals who had become radicalized in the Thirties by the Depression and the rise of Fascism. They had an idealized view of Stalin and the Soviet Union but had a limited knowledge or acceptance of the full orthodox Communist dogma. They made up the majority of participants in Communist-led groups and organizations.

• Communist sympathizers went along with much of the Party line but reserved the right to disagree over particulars. They were less likely to idolize Stalin but felt he was less of a threat to peace and democracy than the belligerent anti-Communists in the US or the specter of a return to Fascism in Europe. They had a more arms -length relationship with the Party and its groups, but sometimes participated in broader Party alliances.

The Dissident Left

Many of the generation which had looked to the Soviet Union in the 1920s as a vanguard nation that would lead the way to a Socialist Utopia grew disillusioned in the Thirties with the Soviet Union, which they came to see as nationalistic and totalitarian. The Communist Party in the US appeared to them to be more interested in advancing the interest of the Soviet Union and its bureaucracy than the interest of the workers. Some wanted a "purer" Communism, others a democratic Socialism, while others abandoned Socialism altogether. These groups, which had few members but a large unorganized fringe, centered largely in New York, included:

• Trotskyists

  • Socialist Workers Party members and supporters who saw the Soviet Union as a "degenerated" or "failed" workers state under Stalin but held out hope for its future and defended it against its capitalist enemies and detractors.

  • The Workers Party, which split from the Socialist Workers. Its members, known as Shachtmanites, saw the political system of the Soviet Union as State Capitalism ruled by a bureaucratic class that was oppressive to workers. They saw no reason to defend it uncritically. The party only had about 500 members but included some leading intellectuals.

• Lovestoneites

Followers of Jay Lovestone who had been allied with Nicolai Bukharin, another of Stalin's victims. This group included a number of the original leaders of the Communist Party in the USA. They had believed that individual Communist parties should respect the political and cultural traditions of the countries in which they operated and argued that the situation in the US called for a more moderate, evolutionary, democratic strategy than that pursued by the Bolsheviks. They were purged from the party in 1929 as a right wing heresy and had formed a rival party which drew few members. By 1946 most had become anti-Communists. Lovestone had strong ties to the ILGWU. Although small in number, their early role in the formation of the US Communist Party and their later role in the anti-Communist movement gave them influence in the intellectual debate.

• Non-Aligned Marxist Dissidents

Dissident Marxists who were not formally aligned with any group made up one of the largest contingents on the left. Most were drawn from the ranks of former Party sympathizers but their number also included:

• • Former Trotskyists, a small but influential group that was growing increasingly distant from Communism after the War. Ironically the Trotskyites. who originally separated from the mainstream Communist movement because they felt it was not radical enough, ended up supplying some of the most prominent voices of the neoconservative movement although most moved toward democratic Socialism or New Deal liberalism. The Trotskyists were more important for the role they played in the intellectual debate on the Left than for their number. They formed the core of the group that became known as the New York Intellectuals.

  • Anarchists and radical libertarians like John Dos Passos who had been drawn to the professed Communist Party goal of the "withering away of the state" in the early days of the Russian Revolution but had grown increasingly dismayed by the totalitarianism they saw in the Soviet Union. Some were cultural rather than political radicals who had hoped Communism would be the alternative to both lingering Victorian conventions and the increased commercialization and corporatism of the modern era. Others in their group turned to a romanticized notion of the Catholic Church as the solution. Some joined both. Many had become scathing critics of the Soviet-system by 1946. In the 1950s Dos Passos, who had been among the most prominent Leftist novelists of the 1930s, was a contributor to The National Review and out of favor with the literary establishment.

  • Other disillusioned former Communist Party members, including many from the Yiddish-speaking community who were disgusted by Stalin's pact with Hitler but otherwise still held to many tenets of Communism and often had family ties to the Soviet Union. They often had fiercely conflicted views. Some made the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine their new Utopian ideal. The immigrant group, particularly those who had escaped the persecutions of Czarist Russia, had dominated the rank-and-file membership of the Party in the Twenties and Thirties but their increased apathy toward the Party had led to a decline among their number in membership.

The Socialists

The Socialist predated the Communists. Although most initially had supported the Russian Revolution as the first real attempt to put Marxist political theory into practice, in the 1920s the Socialist Party had split from the Communists after fierce internal battles. Most who remained in the Socialist Party were social democrats who supported the American political system of representative democracy but wanted a more equitable economic system. Like the early Christians, they went through a number of schisms. In the 1930s with the rise of Hitler and the Depression the party adopted a more cooperative attitude not only toward the Communists but also with the Lovestonites and Trotskyists and initially participated in the Popular Front. In the 1940s the party pulled away from cooperation with the Communist Party and moved into alliance with the liberal Democrats. Their own experience with alliances with the Communists in the US as well as the experiences of the Social Democrats in left-of-center coalitions in Europe led them to distrust the Communists and their tactics. The Socialist Party was in decline in the postwar period. After the collapse of the original Popular Front, some Socialists moved toward the Communist Party while others moved into the Democratic Party. The Socialists were part of the original coalition behind the American Labor Party in New York City but, objecting to the role played by Communists within that party, had split off to join the coalition that had formed the anti-Communist Liberal Party.

New Deal Liberals

This was the most numerous group. New Deal liberals supported a managed, regulated capitalist economic system and the welfare state achieved through the American system of representative democracy. They were wary of Soviet expansion and wished to bolster democratic governments in Europe but did not want to provoke conflicts that might lead to another world war. They were strong supporters of the UN as a way to prevent or ameliorate conflict with the Soviet Union. They often allied with the Socialists on shared goals such as civil rights and civil liberties but the issue of working with the Communists was a divisive one. Many liberal leaders distrusted the covert goals and methods of the Communists and a growing number supported purging them from liberal groups. However this clashed with their support for civil liberties, which led most of them also to oppose government witch hunts. They mostly were Democrats but they included some Republicans, like LaGuardia and a handful of Midwestern progressives.

In 1946 the Communist Party still sought to reconstitute a movement that reunited these left-leaning factions under Party leadership. In particular the Party sought to neutralize opposition to Soviet expansionism by playing up the fear of another war. Stalin, they asserted, wanted security and peace while the Republicans, Wall Street, the British and the Truman administration wanted another war. This time around they met with strong opposition from many former allies on the Left.

The Right blurred the lines between these groups, lumping them all together as Communists, Pinkos and dupes. In actuality there was fierce contention between the various factions, although the arguments were less likely to break into fistfights as they had in the heightened political atmosphere of the Thirties.