Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950-2000), Volume I. Edited by Jay Schaffner, Paul Friedman, et al. (Goleta, CA: Punctum, 2026), 406 pages, $27 (paperbound).
There’s little doubt that the Communist Party USA (CP) had a major impact on this country’s political, social, and cultural life during the three decades after the group’s 1919 founding, but it’s easy to underestimate its importance in the later part of the century. Weakened by government persecution and by revelations of Soviet crimes from the Stalinist period, hadn’t the U.S. party largely disappeared?
Not at all, according to the first installment of Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000), a projected three-volume collection of essays and reminiscences by activists who were members during the later years.
This opening volume, subtitled Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements, is the work of sixteen former members, mostly from the generation born during or after World War Two. Citing their own experiences, they show that the CP remained a significant influence on the country’s political development into the 1990s. That influence was often beneficial, they conclude, but not always.
The Struggle Against Racism
One of the party’s main attractions was its “clear-minded approach to fighting racism,” Peter Hodes, a white trade unionist, writes in his contribution.
The CP worked from its founding to make sure Black people and their struggles were central to the organization and its work. In the early 1930s the party’s legal defense group led the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, while the widely respected civil rights activist Henry Winston was elected to the party’s National Board in 1936 and served as national chair from 1966 until his death in 1986. A later generation of party leaders included prominent Black activists like Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell.
Although other socialist groups supported the fight against racism, Black organizer and journalist Geoffrey Jacques writes that they “always seemed less militant” than the Communists. Jacques admired the “nondogmatic approach” of socialists like Michael Harrington, but when he attended the 1982 founding convention of Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jacques noticed that despite “a number of Black speakers, the overall participation was overwhelmingly white.”
In contrast to many of his generation’s white party members, Jacques wasn’t born into a CP family, but he grew up amid “a hotbed of radicalism” in Detroit. Many Black elders there “seemed to come from or had been active in the Communist Party and its milieu.” The late journalist Sharon Steward had a similar experience. Her working-class family “struggled with questions about racial, political, social, and income inequality,” but she writes that her interest in the CP started after college while she was working as the sole Black reporter for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. In her experience the CP was the group that “best exemplified a multinational, racially diverse workers’ party.”
‘It Was in the Culture to Be a Worker’
The contributors also highlight the CP’s stress on maintaining an organic connection with working people. The group had its share of academics and other intellectuals, but most members came from working-class families or else took on blue-collar jobs as part of their political work.
“It was the culture in the Communist Party to be a worker and a rank-and-file activist,” longtime healthcare worker Marilyn Albert observes. Others came to the party through their union work. Labor activist Judy Atkins’s first political efforts were in protesting the Vietnam war while in college, but she ended up later working at a machine shop in Brattleboro, Vermont. “Everyone got fed up with the company and decided that I should get in touch with a union,” she explains. “I looked up machine unions in the telephone book.”
The only response came from United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE). This and the healthcare workers’ District 1199 were the two unions with the largest participation by CP members. Atkins soon joined the party.
Most of the contributors remain proud of their work in the labor movement, but they sometimes offer criticisms of the party’s approach to union activism. Labor journalist and organizer James Williams points out that the CP referred to members in the labor movement as “colonizers.” “Yes, we used that unfortunate term,” he admits. Far from “colonizing,” Williams himself, like many in the party, grew up in a blue-collar family.
Labor Faces a ‘Changing Landscape’
The party had an equally unfortunate view that some parts of the working class were less worthy of its attention than others.
Like most left groups at the time, the CP focused its labor activism on the industrial workers who had been socialists’ base earlier in the century. But “by the 1970s and especially the 1980s, the landscape was changing,” writes Dave Cohen, the former president of a UE local in Massachusetts. Companies had already begun shifting industrial work to the Global South, producing a dramatic reduction of membership in the very unions that the CP had been prioritizing—and this shift came just as U.S. workers were also being hit hard by the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s. But for a while the party’s leadership remained wedded to its emphasis on industrial unions, sometimes to the exclusion of organizing among other sectors.
Judy Atkins notes that “Unemployed Councils were springing up” here and there in the early 1980s, potentially opening up avenues for cooperation between unionists and the jobless, as they had during the Depression. But the party leadership decided that “the union and unemployed initiatives were becoming ‘too democratic,’” according to Atkins. CP members were pulled out of the organizing, she writes.
In fact, party leaders seemed less than fully supportive of union organizing, despite the CP’s overall focus on this work. Atkins reports that the party sometimes criticized even the UE as “too democratic,” and according to Dave Cohen, longtime general secretary Gus Hall “oftentimes said that people who spent their life working in the labor movement wasted their lives. The only way to really be a Communist was to work for the CP.”
‘Like Religious Fundamentalists’
The party also underestimated the social movements that were gathering strength in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“There was a definite slowness to see the importance of the women’s movement,” according to Marian Gordon, who grew up in a working-class Communist family. Getting the party to recognize “the validity, let alone the importance,” of the LGBTQ movement was another “very long and painful fight,” she charges, and “in hindsight” the party also failed to see “that the whole concept of Zionism, of a specifically Jewish state, is a racist idea”—a problem in much of the U.S. left at the time.
Another failing, Gordon holds, is that U.S. Communists “were too often like religious fundamentalists in our beliefs, especially about the Soviet Union.” The party’s initial refusal to acknowledge the worst crimes of the Stalinist regime led many members to leave after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations. The split between the Soviet and the Chinese Communist parties was another blow, as was the overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s reformist government by Soviet troops in 1968.
Red Lives features many other criticisms of a leadership that many considered too rigid, too sectarian, and too bureaucratic. One of the book’s editors, Jay Schaffner, points to incidents in which criticism of official positions was suppressed in the name of “democratic centralism.” According to Atkins, the head of the group’s Central Review Commission, actually produced “lists of who not to associate with and what not to read.”
‘A Non-Marxist Cult’?
The year 1986 brought what labor organizer Chris Townsend calls a “seismic event,” the death of party chair Winston.
“The national committee immediately abolished [Winston’s] position, rather than allot it to either Angela Davis or Charlene Mitchell. For the first time in decades we had no public Black-white unity at the highest levels of the Party,” Townsend writes. “The Gus Hall forces had lit the fuse that didn’t go off until 1991”—the year when a large part of the membership left to form the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). By then, Dave Cohen concludes, “the Party had become a non-Marxist cult around Gus Hall…. a caricature of Communists a created by J. Edgar Hoover.”
But Hoover’s name is a reminder that the CP’s problems weren’t all internal. Like other leftists—the Wobblies in an earlier period, for example, and the Black Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s—Communists faced severe repression from the U.S. government. Hall spent more than five years in a federal penitentiary during the 1950s. Winston was jailed from 1956 to 1961; the failure by prison authorities to provide adequate medical treatment left him permanently blind. Many other members—and even chance associates—were imprisoned, fired from their jobs, excluded from ordinary social life.
This Second Red Scare directly affected a number of the volume’s contributors. Jay Schaffner writes that his immigrant parents left the CP to avoid possible deportation, but the FBI continued to visit offices where his mother worked. “The result was always the same—she would lose her job.” Peter Hodes spent much of his childhood in China because his father, a physiology professor, was unable to find work in the US.
Even small children suffered their own kind of blacklisting. Naomi Chesman Smith’s parents were Communists; her father, a teacher, was blacklisted. While in college Chesman Smith got to be friends with a fellow student who had lived nearby when they were little. One day the friend apologized for having snubbed Chesman Smith back then, explaining that “everyone was told, ‘Don’t play with Naomi. She’s a Communist.’”
Old Questions, New Prospects
The McCarthy Era and the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s might not seem terribly relevant to a new generation of activists. The struggles in Red Lives are as remote for a young socialist canvasser now as the First World War and the Russian Revolution were for many activists in the 1960s and 1970s. But the old questions remain, and the left still needs to confront them.
How can we stay unified without compromising democratic rights? Maintain a clear political perspective without sliding into sectarianism? Express solidarity with struggles in other countries without covering up for errors, excesses, or actual crimes? And there’s no reason to think government repression is off the table now, as we can see from the decades-long sentences handed down last month to anti-ICE protesters in Texas.
Still, Schaffner concludes his contribution on an optimistic note: he expects a “new Left” to form
based in part on mass support for the ideas that were thrust into public consciousness by the Occupy movement, by Bernie Sanders, and now by a whole new wave of progressive and socialist candidates. It will work on different levels, in different forms, in community after community. Out of this new Left will also come a new socialist movement. I am not sure what it will be called, what it will look like, but I know that I will be part of it.