From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject California Communism and Its Afterlives: On Robert W. Cherny’s “San Francisco Reds”
Date June 6, 2024 12:55 AM
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CALIFORNIA COMMUNISM AND ITS AFTERLIVES: ON ROBERT W. CHERNY’S
“SAN FRANCISCO REDS”  
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Matt Ray and Matthew Wranovics
May 27, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ Reviewers Ray and Wranovics call this book "a welcome contribution,
and hopefully an opening towards further study of this significant and
neglected part of California history." _

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_San Francisco Reds
Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958_
Robert W. Cherny
University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 978-0-252-08793-6

WHEN SAM DARCY arrived in San Francisco in December 1930, he found an
organization in disarray. As he entered Communist Party headquarters
on the city’s “skid-road,” he found “seven or eight [men]
lying around […] dead drunk.” A fight broke out when Darcy threw
them out of the building; he had to take on two at once. A couple of
days later, he was forced to defuse a tense situation after a handful
of armed members “made a hold-up on some other Party members.”
“[W]e had all we could do to prevent the police from learning of the
situation,” he complained in a letter.
Darcy was the Communist Party’s new district organizer for
California. In New York, the son of immigrant garment workers (né
Dardeck) had distinguished himself by organizing mass demonstrations
of the unemployed. Sensing a potential rival in the “swell-head”
Darcy, national secretary Earl Browder sent him to the Party’s most
remote outpost, the American politburo’s equivalent of banishment to
Siberia. Immediately after its founding in 1919, the California branch
had been devastated by intense state repression, its leaders jailed
and deported on charges of “criminal syndicalism.” As the Party
stumbled out from the underground during the following decade, it
became mired in poisonous infighting, with rival factions occupying
its Market Street headquarters. In the late 1920s, an internal report
found that the state organization had “no functioning shop nuclei”
and had failed either to get its candidates on the state ballot or to
inform its members how to write them in. While his assignment may have
been a form of punishment, Darcy quickly realized that his new
position afforded him certain opportunities. California’s distance
from New York allowed a degree of strategic, organizational, and
ideological flexibility that was unusual in an “official”
Moscow-aligned communist party. Beginning under Darcy’s leadership,
the California CP surged in membership and political influence as it
diverged in significant ways from the Party line.

Histories of the American Communist Party often focus almost
exclusively on New York City, where the Party was headquartered and
where a plurality of its members lived. But by the late 1930s, its
other significant base was California, where it had a robust
organization based in San Francisco. At its peak in 1947, the Party
boasted nearly 10,000 California members. Other than New York, with
its 33,000 registered communists, no other regional district came near
this number. In its brief heyday, the CP came impressively close to
California’s political mainstream, with a GI Bill–accredited
school, leadership in major regional labor institutions, and a working
relationship with the Democratic governor. In an organization known
for its dogmatic rigidity, the California branch was distinguished by
a considerable degree of autonomy. In the 1930s, it bucked Comintern
policy by developing its own union strategy, vying for serious
influence in the Bay Area labor movement. Later on, CP leaders in
California defied the Party line by openly criticizing the Soviet
Union’s invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
They resisted national policies that mandated the expulsion of
Japanese members during World War II and gay members during the
postwar “Lavender Scare.” The Civil Rights Movement in the Bay
Area, the gay liberation movement, César Chávez’s farmworkers
movement, and the Berkeley student movement all had meaningful
organizational and ideological roots in the California Party.

Despite the organization’s remarkable size and reach, and its
outsize influence on the development of major 20th-century social
movements, Robert W. Cherny’s _San Francisco Reds: Communists in the
Bay Area, 1919–1958_ is the first scholarly general history of the
Communist Party in California. This is the third book by Cherny on the
world of midcentury California radicalism, following the biographies
_Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art _(2017) and _Harry Bridges:
Labor Radical, Labor Legend _(2023). All three draw heavily on Soviet
archival materials held in the Russian State Archive for Social and
Political History (RGASPI), which cast light on the Party’s inner
workings as well as its complex relationship with the Soviet Union.
_San Francisco Reds _traces the history of the Party from its founding
by socialists giddy over the October Revolution to its
near-disintegration following Nikita Khrushchev’s traumatic 1956
report on the crimes of Joseph Stalin. Cherny, an emeritus professor
at San Francisco State University, narrates what he calls the
California Party’s journey “to the mainstream and back,” as
communists allied closely with progressive liberals who promptly
turned on them at the outbreak of the postwar Red Scare. Yet, while
Cherny’s account is attentive to what historian Anthony Ashbolt
called California communism’s “distinctly regional and independent
flavor,” it fails to identify many of the Party’s more enduring
legacies.

¤

When Darcy took the helm, official Party strategy hewed closely to
Moscow’s “Third Period” line, which rejected any activity short
of immediate class conflict and insisted on the inevitability of world
revolution in the near term. CP leaders, whom he characterized as
“middle-class rejects who couldn’t make it in the bourgeois
world,” put this line into practice through agitational propaganda
and demonstrations, hectoring workers to “smash bourgeois law and
order.” Changing course, Darcy directed resources toward organizing
the unemployed. He developed an impressive program to recruit and
train new members, de-emphasizing revolutionary rhetoric in favor of
the practical and concrete. As Party membership in California doubled
in just over a year, he trained its sights on the state’s massive
agricultural industry.

Workers in California’s “factories in the fields” had long
endured some of the country’s lowest wages and most abusive working
conditions. The itinerant nature of the work, the linguistic
differences within its largely immigrant workforce, and the mainstream
labor movement’s racist indifference combined to produce an industry
that many considered unorganizable. Agriculture was not one of the
industries the CP Central Committee identified as “decisive.” Over
serious objections, Darcy deployed all the resources he could to the
fields, where organizers with shoestring budgets set to work building
the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU).

California field workers were looking for a fight in the early 1930s,
and pickers, largely Mexican and Filipino, flooded into the radical
union. Communist organizers such as 21-year-old Caroline Decker
provided crucial leadership in what were, at the time, the largest
agricultural strikes in history. In 1933, about a quarter of the
state’s agricultural workers—some 50,000 people—were on strike.
Faced with spectacular brutality from police and vigilantes, workers
armed themselves. Some died. The state came down hard on the CAWIU,
imprisoning organizers, including Decker, on criminal syndicalism
charges. Though many agricultural strikers won significantly higher
wages, they ultimately failed to secure union recognition. This
agricultural rebellion was the major antecedent to Chávez’s
farmworkers movement a few decades later.

The San Francisco office’s other consuming interest was the
waterfront, where the Party’s long-standing organizing efforts had
come to little. Third Period policy rejected working inside
established unions in favor of organizing openly revolutionary
“red” ones; the CP’s Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) had
done little more than alienate sailors and longshoremen with
“bombastic talk.” Rather than reform it, Darcy chose simply to
ignore the MWIU. He urged his members to join the AFL’s
International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), where they formed
the Albion Hall group, a “militant, but not exclusively CP,
caucus.” Harry Bridges, a preternaturally talented organizer and a
Marxist with close CP connections, quickly emerged as the leader of
this group. In May 1934, 15,000 longshoremen across the West Coast
went out on a strike that rapidly spread to other waterfront
industries. Under Bridges’s leadership, the strike would last into
the summer in the Bay Area.

On July 5 of that year, San Francisco police opened fire on strikers
while attempting to open the port to scab labor, leaving two dead.
Over 10,000 mourners gathered downtown for the slain men’s funeral
procession, in which Sam Darcy rode near the head. Shocked by
“Bloody Thursday,” the San Francisco Labor Council declared a
general strike. For four days, nearly all work in the city stopped.
The maritime workers lost control of the strike to the more
conservative Labor Council, who negotiated a deal that fell
significantly short of the ILA’s goals. Nevertheless, the union,
which soon joined the CIO and changed its name to the International
Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), emerged from the
general strike in a powerful position and with its radical leadership
intact. It soon won its demand for a union hiring hall, wresting
control from employers over a vital function in one of the region’s
largest industries. Like other Left-led unions in which the CP exerted
a strong influence, it promoted a vision of social justice unionism
that made combating racism, both from employers and among union
members themselves, a top priority. Three years before Pearl Harbor,
the ILWU refused to move Japan-bound cargo in solidarity with Chinese
victims of Japanese imperialism (in later years, the union would take
similar positions regarding South African and Israeli cargo). As early
as 1936, another CP-influenced maritime union, the Marine Cooks and
Stewards, added a stance against homophobic “queen-baiting” to its
campaigns against racism and red-baiting.

Cherny ably reconstructs the icy debates among Party officials vexed
by Darcy’s renegade strategy and its undeniable success. As it
happened, San Francisco had prefigured a shift in Comintern policy at
large. Reeling from the rise of fascism, Moscow in 1935 directed
communists around the world to abandon the sectarian fervor of the
Third Period and instead forge alliances with other progressive and
anti-fascist forces. Nowhere in the United States were they better
positioned to pursue this popular front strategy than in California.

With a foothold in the maritime unions, the CP moved rapidly into the
state’s political mainstream. They replaced the weekly _Western
Worker _and its hammer-and-sickle banner with the daily _People’s
World_, which positioned itself as a nonsectarian progressive paper
that carried articles by noncommunists, loudly boosted Franklin D.
Roosevelt _and _Stalin, and incorporated humor, sports, movies, and
“Comrade Kitty’s tips on how to be fashionable on a budget.”
Communist cells grew in more rarefied professional spaces, attracting
Hollywood writers and intellectuals at elite universities (including
the infamous physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer). By 1938, the Party was
a relatively respected partner in the state’s New Deal coalition,
helping elect Governor Culbert Olson, Senator Sheridan Downey, and
Lieutenant Governor Ellis Patterson, an ally of the CP so reliable
that some suspected him of being a member. Once elected, Olson made
good on his promises to the communists, pardoning political prisoner
and radical cause célèbre Tom Mooney and nominating CP member
Germain Bulcke to the State Harbor Commission. This honeymoon passed
quickly, as the coalition buckled under the weight of McCarthyism and
the CP’s disastrous foreign policy zigzags after the Nazi-Soviet
pact. But the Party and its allies were now entrenched in important
positions in California labor and culture. None of these allies was
more important than Harry Bridges, by this time the western regional
director of the CIO.

¤

The Australian-born Bridges was a constant target of the federal
government, who repeatedly tried to prove that he was a secret member
of the Communist Party and therefore eligible for deportation. With
the aid of RGASPI documents, Cherny devotes granular attention to the
somewhat arcane question of Bridges’s Party membership. After
close-reading the use (and nonuse) of the word “comrade” to refer
to Bridges in the private correspondence of Party notables and
examining the marginalia on a French-language list of proposed
American Central Committee members, Cherny concludes that it is
“highly unlikely” that Bridges carried a Party card or paid dues.
While probably not a member, Bridges, one of the most powerful
California union leaders well into the 1970s, was what CP officials
called an “influential”—someone who maintained a close
cooperative relationship with the Party’s inner circles but was not
under its discipline. On the question of recruiting Bridges, Sam Darcy
once said: “There was no need for it.”

The hard facts of Bridges’s membership are of definite historical
interest. But in focusing so narrowly on the question, Cherny may be
falling victim to a conception of the CP too similar to that found in
the propaganda of both the FBI and the Communist Party itself. Each
had a stake in presenting the Party as a rigidly organized group with
a totally effective, hierarchical command-and-control structure. In
reality, Party operations were a great deal messier and more ad hoc.
As Cherny points out elsewhere, membership itself was often an
ambiguous category. He quotes Caroline Decker, who endured years in
prison and the then-longest trial in California history for her Party
activities, as recalling, “I never carried a book, I never paid
dues. … As far as I was concerned, I was a member; I was prepared to
give my life and I gave an awful lot of it.”

While it certainly was a membership organization, the Party can in
some ways be better understood as the central locus of a number of
overlapping social movements, with participants operating at many
different layers of commitment and involvement. These included formal
Party membership; membership in Party-related formations like the
Young Communist League; and activity in its political “mass orgs”
(among which were the National Negro Congress and the Hollywood
Anti-Nazi League), CP-led political parties (the Farmer-Labor Party,
the Independent Progressive Party), its red unions, or its many
cultural organizations (People’s Songs, the Film & Photo Leagues,
etc.). These wide-ranging groups involved and influenced far greater
numbers of people than the CP itself ever did, and they better reflect
its impact than narrower studies of Party officialdom allow for. A
fuller understanding of the Communist Party and its place in American
history requires us to look beyond the strict questions of
card-carrying membership that were so central to legal attacks on the
Party as a “criminal conspiracy.”

No institution better demonstrates the Communist Party’s presence in
mainstream Bay Area life than its California Labor School (CLS).
Cherny writes that the school “may have been unique among the
party’s schools in major cities in the extent to which [it]
maintained a diverse curriculum that attracted thousands of
non-Communist students.” CLS was financially supported not only by
the Party but also by an impressive array of unions, cultural
institutions, Black organizations, and more. The school secured GI
Bill accreditation; it boasted nationally renowned faculty in science
and the humanities, with an art department that rivaled the San
Francisco Art Institute’s. The school had a special focus on Black
history and issues of racism and discrimination (one of California’s
first integrated marriages following the repeal of the state’s
miscegenation law was performed at CLS). Its students took lessons on
painting, chemistry, history, social science, and other subjects from
a perspective that CLS director Holland Roberts described as
“explicitly and implicitly but not obtrusively or wholly Marxist.”

At CLS, the Party blended with the city’s bohemian artistic milieu,
demonstrating an unusually high level of ease with the nonnormative
lifestyles common in that community for an organization whose official
policy banned gay people from membership. Cherny reproduces a document
from the CP’s internal “Security Commission” taking San
Francisco to task for allowing “bohemian elements, drunkards, homos,
[and] lesbians” into positions of leadership both at the school and
in the Party itself. While expulsions of gay members did occur in
California, it’s clear that national officials did not feel San
Francisco took the problem seriously.

In fact, despite the Party’s official homophobia, some of the
earliest articulations of gay liberation took place within the
California CP. Harry Hay was a Los Angeles–based Party member who
had his life “completely changed” by the San Francisco General
Strike (which he participated in with his lover, actor Will Geer of
_The Waltons _fame). Hay adapted the Marxist-Leninist theory he taught
at the California Labor School’s L.A. branch to his own situation,
using Stalin’s _Marxism and the National Question _(1939) to argue
that homosexuals constituted a “culturally oppressed minority.”
This new theory underpinned the Mattachine Society, which he founded
in the Silver Lake neighborhood in 1950 while still an active Party
member. As queer scholar Will Roscoe points out, the fact that Hay
“could make this extension of Party doctrine without feeling any
sense of contradiction or departure from Marxist principles speaks to
the spirit of the Party as [he] knew it.” Hay left the CP on good
terms the following year to avoid damaging its reputation by
associating it with his radical gay rights organization.

¤

California CP leader Dorothy Healey once complained that historians
often “present the history of the party as if the thirties were our
single great moment […] with the implication that everything that
followed was just a sort of trailing penumbra,” insisting that,
“[i]n fact, the immediate postwar years were actually our most
productive.” Although he avoids many of the clichés of CP
historiography, Cherny is somewhat guilty of the failing Healey
identifies. For example, although _San Francisco Reds _touches on the
Party’s involvement in antidiscrimination fights and on its somewhat
hysterical internal campaign to “combat white chauvinism,” the
book makes scant mention of the CP’s impressive postwar civil rights
work.

The Party founded the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which provided
legal aid to victims of racial injustice, in 1946. Its director,
William L. Patterson, considered the East Bay chapter the most
effective in the country. Black workers from the South had flooded
into the Bay Area during World War II, and the CRC led courageous,
groundbreaking campaigns against the institutional racism these
migrants faced. It defended Black victims of police brutality and
frame-ups, successfully pressured Sacramento to launch an official
investigation into racist policing in the Bay Area, bought homes for
Black families in all-white neighborhoods, fought the demolition of
Black-majority housing projects, and physically confronted violent
segregationists in the streets of Contra Costa County. As with so many
of the California CP’s most effective programs, national leadership
was unhappy with the East Bay’s focus on local injustices at the
expense of its more high-profile national campaigns. East Bay CRC’s
executive secretary Jessica Mitford quietly resolved “to fight all
the way to expulsion” if necessary rather than defer to their
judgment.

The catastrophe of 1956 was also more contained in California, where
the Party lost only one-third of its members in the wake of the
Khrushchev Report, as compared with two-thirds nationally. The ravages
of the Red Scare were less severe there, as the Left had sunk its
roots deeper and wider. Far from disappearing, the California CP
remained active into the 1960s, setting the stage in important ways
for the explosive movements of that decade.

One of the CRC’s many little-known campaigns in the early 1950s
helped save a young Black Oaklander from an onerous prison sentence.
Nineteen-year-old Mark Comfort had been hit with major assault charges
after he defended himself from a group of armed racists in a public
park. Comfort met his wife, the daughter of two Party members, at a
CRC rally held in his defense. The two would become fixtures in the
Civil Rights Movement in the Bay Area. In the early 1960s, he and CP
leader Roscoe Proctor, a Black longshoreman, organized a number of
interracial civil rights–oriented youth groups, leading to a series
of militant sit-ins against racist hiring practices across the Bay
Area. These sit-ins attracted large numbers of white college students
inspired by the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

An outraged reaction from local businesses led UC Berkeley to crack
down on student political activity, triggering the Free Speech
Movement, in which young Party member Bettina Aptheker played a
leading role. For his part, the beret-wearing, pistol-packing Comfort
would become the Bay Area’s most prominent early Black Power
advocate. He introduced the citizen’s police patrol and the black
panther symbol into the area before both were seized upon by the more
famous Black Panther Party, whose founder Huey P. Newton grew up in
Oakland during the CRC’s anti–police brutality fights and counted
CP lawyers Bert Edises and Bob Treuhaft “among his boyhood
heroes.” Discussing the development of 1960s radicalism, Berkeley
movement leader Frank Bardacke stressed the importance of these
intergenerational links, recalling, “The CP in the Bay Area was not
as isolated as it was in the East. […] So the relationship between
the new and old generation of leftists was smoother.”

¤

This April, leading neo-McCarthyite Ron DeSantis signed legislation
mandating instruction
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on the “history of communism in the United States” to the children
of Florida. The Right, at least, continues to insist on the relevance
of this long-defunct organization, if only as a fairy tale about
“evil.” Against the rise of this new anticommunism, considerably
less coherent three decades after the Cold War (and more than 70 years
after the heyday of the American Communist Party), earnest examination
of this chapter of our past is vital. _San Francisco Reds _is a
welcome contribution, and hopefully an opening towards further study
of this significant and neglected part of California history. At just
over 300 pages, the book is necessarily incomplete. Distressingly,
this incompleteness is partly due to bureaucratic failures: after
waiting 15 years to receive Harry Bridges’s FBI file, Cherny, who is
in his late seventies, completed the book without a number of files on
other key figures. Slow-moving bureaucracies are far from the only
obstacles to the thoughtful consideration of the history of American
communism, which must not be left to the likes of DeSantis and other,
pettier tyrants.

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Matt Ray and Matthew Wranovics are the founders of Left in the Bay, a
project that uncovers and retells stories of social struggle in the
San Francisco Bay Area.

* California politics
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* San Francisco Bay Area politics
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* Communist Party USA
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* working class politics
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* Working Class History
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