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BRING AMERICAN COMMUNISTS OUT OF THE SHADOWS — AND CLOSETS  
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David Bacon
August 15, 2024
Jacobin
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_ 20th century American Communist Party members were portrayed as the
Red Menace, an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary people
with extraordinarily complex intellectual, political, social, and
romantic lives that deserve to be chronicled. _

Communist Party USA members participate in a demonstration for
unemployed relief during the Great Depression in San Francisco,
California., Bettmann / Getty Images

 

Review of _San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area,
1919–1958_ by Robert Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2024)
and _Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s_ by
Bettina Aptheker (Routledge, 2023)

When I was eight, two men in dark suits and fedoras stopped me on my
way home from Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, California. “We
want to talk to you about your parents,” they said. My mom and dad
had warned me this might happen and told me how to respond. “You
have to talk with them,” I said.

I don’t know if the FBI agents ever actually went to our house. I
doubt it. My parents had been visited before, and they told the agents
they had nothing to say. Talking wasn’t the point of stopping me
anyway. It was to send a message: _You’re vulnerable. We can hurt
you. Be afraid._

Fear was something I grew up with. It’s why I’m an Oakland boy,
not a Brooklyn boy. Our family left New York City the year the
Rosenbergs were tried. My dad, head of his printing and publishing
union, was blacklisted. We got in the car and drove across the country
to the Bay Area, where he’d found a job in the printing plant of the
University of California. I was five. Two years later, the Rosenbergs
were executed.

For better or worse, my mother laughed when she told me stories about
those years. She’d been given the job of Alameda County organizer
for the Communist Party after they found an apartment in West Oakland.
When she had meetings with the party’s district organizer, Mickey
Lima, they’d go out to the end of the Berkeley fish pier, where they
were sure they couldn’t be overheard.

She was frustrated to leave New York. In the years before we drove
west, she’d begun teaching at the Jefferson School, a Marxist
adult-education school where the Communist Party held classes for its
own members and other left-wing activists. After teaching about
children’s literature (she eventually became a children’s
librarian and author), “I was finally tapped for a more prestigious
political course,” she remembered in a contribution to a collection
of memories of senior radicals, _Tribute of a Lifetime_
[[link removed]].
After World War II, she had been the editor of a party newsletter on
the “woman question” with Claudia Jones (“the most beautiful
woman I have ever met,” she called her). And so she became the Jeff
School teacher of this subject, as emotionally charged then as it is
now.

In 1952 and 1953, my mother recalled, she was struggling with her
students and herself over how to teach it. “I had read extensively
from Engels to Simone de Beauvoir, but what good did it all do when an
African American woman accused me — quite rightly — of ignoring
her life experience in favor of book knowledge?”

She gave the course three times, the last time to a disproportionate
number of young men. “Their expressions and their remarks were both
aggressive and sheepish — a curious combination that I did not
understand at first. I finally discovered they had all been sent to my
class by their Communist Party clubs as a punishment for sexist
remarks and behavior. I still wonder how they turned out.”

A couple of months later, our family moved to California.

Betty Bacon was able to laugh, and teach what she believed, even when
it wasn’t popular among many party members. Yet at the same time
she, my father George, my brother Dan, and myself were all leaving the
city, their union had been destroyed in the purge of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations. In those years, party leaders were already
in federal prison and more were on trial. Staying meant potentially
being called before a committee, getting arrested, or worse.

The lives of most people who were in the Communist Party are unknown
to social-justice activists today. The Second Red Scare and ensuing
secrecy have hidden not only the identities of party members but also
the quality and texture of the lives they led. Yet what they thought
and did, their day-to-day political work, how they socialized and
maintained families, and the ideas they tried to bring to an
increasingly hostile society should be important to us. They struggled
with many of the same questions as organizers for social change do
today, and frequently had deep and meaningful discussions about them
that yielded profound insights. As my mother told me, “I can’t
help being annoyed at the casual assumption of some of today’s
radical activists that they invented the woman question.” Denying or
forgetting this history denies people fighting for social change today
the ability to consider the experiences and knowledge of those
who’ve come before.

Two recent books help dissipate that cloud of secrecy: _San Francisco
Reds_ [[link removed]] by Robert
Cherny and _Communists in Closets _
[[link removed]]by
Bettina Aptheker. Each presents important material that helps us
assess part of the US radical experience in ways we haven’t been
able to before.

Cherny’s_ San Francisco Reds_ focuses on the history of the
Communist Party in San Francisco and its surrounding area, which had a
profound impact on the politics of California and the country.
Aptheker’s _Communists in Closets_ discusses the history of gay
and lesbian party members, revealing the huge contradiction within a
party that proposed radical social change while maintaining some of
the most backward homophobic and anti-woman prejudices.

Because _Communists in Closets_ tells the stories of individual
people, often in great detail, it brings us closer to the actual
experience of belonging to the Communist Party. The book is in good
part Bettina Aptheker’s account of her own life in the party, and
her increasing difficulty reconciling the politics she was raised with
and her growing awareness of her own sexual identity. It also profiles
several other gay and lesbian party members, highlighting their
courageous commitment to radical social change, and often the pain and
tragedy the contradiction brought to their personal lives.

Aptheker identifies with the fear that led many to stay in the closet,
and with the liberation at letting the world know who she really is.
Despite dwelling on very frustrating and painful experiences with
homophobia and party hypocrisy, _Communists in Closets_ is a very
loving book — and one that makes Communist lives vastly more
imaginable.

_San Francisco Reds_ is a much more impersonal account, painting a
detailed portrait of the Communist Party through its presence in the
city. Cherny says in his preface that the book “takes a somewhat
biographical approach to political behavior, as I’ve followed nearly
fifty individuals from the time they joined the CP, through the
party’s changing policies, to the point when most of them left the
party, and what they did afterward.” It too is a notable
contribution, helping fill in the parts of our memory that have been
erased.

Writing in the Blank Pages of History

Cherny moves back and forth between capsule biographies of Communist
Party members, using a few at a time to illustrate each turn, as he
sees it, in Communist Party policy. Several hint at historical
phenomena that could fill volumes in their own right. Some
Californians, for instance, mostly immigrants themselves, went back to
the Soviet Union to start communal farms, an experiment that lasted
until the mid-1930s.

Colorful personalities from the party’s history make appearances,
from labor militant Mother Bloor to writer Bertram Wolfe. Rather than
recounting their personal experiences, however, Cherny presents them
as actors in the party’s efforts to craft and implement political
directives coming from the Communist International in the 1920s and
’30s, and in the factional fighting that accompanied them. National
characters loom large, like William Z. Foster (labor organizer and
later CP chairman) fighting with Jay Lovestone (expelled CP leader and
later the link between the Central Intelligence Agency and the
AFL-CIO) and then Earl Browder (longtime CP general secretary expelled
for dissolving the party in favor of a Communist Political
Association).

The Second Red Scare and ensuing secrecy has hidden not only the
identities of party members but also the quality and texture of the
lives they led.

_San Francisco Reds _documents the involvement of California
Communists in these fights. Some of the state’s leading reds, like
William Schneiderman, who headed the state party for two decades, were
themselves national players. Cherny describes in detail how national
factional disagreements were replicated in deep local divisions,
sometimes paralyzing political work. He presents the disagreements as
largely personality-driven, often using political theory or policy as
a pretext for personal feuds. Those he accuses of keeping those fights
going, such as Harrison George, don’t come off well.

One hero of Cherny’s account is Sam Darcy, described as a talented
organizer willing to put practical needs ahead of unworkable
directives. Darcy helped organize the largest farmworker strike in US
history: the 1933 cotton strike by the Cannery and Agricultural
Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU), one of the industrial unions the
party started as left-wing alternatives to the conservative ones of
that era. Growers shot down strikers, and violence in the San Joaquin
Valley reached terrifying levels, but workers won pay increases,
although not union recognition. The Communist Party grew because it
played a big role not just in planning and strategy but also in
providing food for thousands of striking families to eat, building
tent cities, and freeing people from the clutches of racist sheriffs
and courts.

The next year Darcy was in San Francisco, where he mobilized party
members to support longshoreworkers as they fought one of the critical
battles that built the CIO. The entire city struck for three days when
police fired on strikers in their effort to herd strikebreakers onto
the piers to unload the paralyzed ships.

Cherny presents Darcy as the reality-based organizer locked in
conflict with doctrinaire functionaries, such as Harrison George,
whose long critical diatribes to party headquarters in New York are
quoted in the book. Yet Darcy was a functionary too, and both before
and after the two strikes spent time in Moscow at the Comintern
offices trying to create an international structure for Communist
activity.

Two of Cherny’s other heroes are Louise Todd and Oleta O’Connor
Yates. Both San Franciscans are largely forgotten now, but their names
were familiar to thousands of city residents for two decades. They
were Communists who repeatedly ran for supervisor and other public
offices. Much of Cherny’s analysis of party activity in the city is
based on these campaigns — how many votes they got and, by
implication, the size of the party’s popular base in San Francisco.

 

Cherny is a thorough researcher, and much of his material comes from
folders in the Russian state archives. The book includes discussions
in the Comintern, reports made by party officials, and polemics about
the general direction of the Communist movement. Two debates had a
great impact on California Communists. In one, the party discarded
policies that led to organizing left unions like the CAWIU, advocating
instead a broad “Popular Front” to oppose fascism. Party policy
was based on the defense of the Soviet Union — first as the
socialist xxxxxx against fascism before World War II, especially in
Spain’s Civil War, and then when it negotiated a pact with Adolf
Hitler, and then finally as it was forced into an all-out war to
defeat Nazism (a war in which the Soviet Union lost 22 million
people).

Much of Cherny’s book concerns how these debates played out in the
political life of San Francisco Communists. While defending the Soviet
Union and existing socialism as they saw it, most party members found
reasons to excuse news of the purge trials of revolutionaries in the
1930s and the development of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and the
network of prison camps. Cherny quotes Peggy Dennis, a national leader
who lived (and left a son) in Moscow, and was married to CPUSA general
secretary Gene Dennis: “We cannot claim that we did not know what
was happening. We knew that the Comintern had been decimated. . . . It
was as though we could not trust ourselves to open that Pandora’s
box.”

As Ed Bender, who organized unemployed councils and then fought in the
Spanish Civil War, explained in _Tribute of a Lifetime_:

In the beginning I was very inspired by the Soviet Union. They were
building the new society. Over the years there has been some
disillusionment; but I still believe in socialism and a just society.
The class struggle is still here.

After hearing about Stalin’s repression in the 1956 report by Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev, Bender simply stopped attending party
meetings. Nevertheless, like many others, he continued to work as a
social-justice activist.

Keeping Pandora’s box closed meant giving no ground to the
government and media’s hostility toward and hatred of socialism —
and, by extension, the Soviet Union. That hard defense had roots in
repression. San Francisco Communists often spent time in prison, long
before the McCarthy witch hunts. Louise Todd, for instance, was
indicted during the San Francisco general strike for falsifying
signatures on ballot petitions. At the federal prison in Tehachapi,
she joined Caroline Decker, who was jailed for leading the 1933 cotton
strike. Although classified as “incorrigibles,” Cherny describes a
constant stream of visitors — not just other Communists, but
socialist author Upton Sinclair, journalist Anna Louise Strong, and
even Hollywood celebrities. Todd served thirteen months. Decker was
let out after three years.

By the 1950s, that esprit was largely ground down by the terror of
committee hearings and Smith Act trials. Yet San Francisco reds proved
more flexible and politically savvy than their New York party
leadership. When the national party told key activists to go
underground, interpreting the moment as five minutes to a fascist
midnight, California disagreed. Oleta O’Connor Yates, Mickey Lima,
and eight codefendants insisted on defending the party’s legal right
to exist. They mounted a strong defense at their Smith Act trial in
1951, after national party leaders in New York had refused to mount a
defense and had gone to prison or underground.

Five years later, their appeal finally reached the Supreme Court, and
in 1957 their conviction was overturned. Dozens of others indicted
under the Smith Act in cities nationwide saw their charges dropped. By
then the party, which had 100,000 members during World War II, had
been reduced to a few thousand. The attrition could be attributed to
the impact of McCarthyism, the party’s own internal divisions, and
the revelations about Stalin.

Cherny’s book is a necessary and revealing chronicle of the life of
the San Francisco party, but it’s not without omissions. Some of the
people who kept the party alive through this period and advocated for
an open presence, particularly Mickey Lima, are unmentioned.

Nor is there much description of the vibrant cultural life of
Communist painters, poets, and writers — particularly the influence
of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the Mexican muralists,
which held on in San Francisco even through the Cold War. Likewise,
the San Francisco Film and Photo League, a group with strong left-wing
activist credentials and party connections via the New York Photo
League, left a radical imprint on California documentary photography
that was felt for many decades. Cherny wrote a separate biography of
an important Communist in this movement, _Victor Arnautoff and the
Politics of Art_ [[link removed]],
and some of the history recounted there would help to create a fuller
picture here.

Finally, because Cherny relies so heavily in _San Francisco Reds_ on
official documents, particularly reports in the party press and
archives or state archives in Moscow, he focuses on what they contain.
He details the factional fights extensively, but the participation of
party members
[[link removed]] in
the mass movements of their times is often hard to see. One result is
a general absence of the experience of black CP members, as well as
immigrants and other people of color.

The Legacy of People of Color in the San Francisco Party

Black Communists were very visible and vocal in California, and they
played a fundamental part in the state’s Communist and labor
movements.

For example, William L. Patterson, born in San Francisco, headed the
International Labor Defense, which defended political prisoners for
several decades until the Civil Rights Congress took its place.
Patterson’s mother was a slave, and he worked his way through the
city’s Hastings Law College in part by labor on the railroad. He was
arrested several times for protesting the execution of Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and went on to defend other prisoners of
racism and class war. In 1951, at the height of Cold War terror, he
and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations
documenting the history of lynching, titled “We Charge Genocide.”
Like Robeson and Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, Patterson’s passport was
revoked in retaliation for his political activity.

The friendship between poet Langston Hughes and William and Louise
Patterson, along with Matt Crawford and Evelyn Graves Crawford, is
documented in the collection _Letters From Langston_
[[link removed]]_. _Their
correspondence, collected by their daughters Evelyn Crawford and
MaryLouise Patterson, testifies eloquently to the vibrant cultural
life of African American reds. While the Pattersons, who moved around,
don’t appear in _San Francisco Reds_, the Crawfords, whom Cherny
does discuss, became stalwarts of the East Bay left.

Black Communists were very visible and vocal in California, and they
played a fundamental part in the state’s Communist and labor
movements.

Black Communists were leaders of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU), some openly Communist and some not. As a
result of the pact between the city’s African American community and
longshore strikers, the exclusion of black workers from most
waterfront gangs ended after 1934. Today ILWU Local 10 is a
majority-black union. Communists played a part in making it so, as
well as integrating the longshore clerks’ Local 34.

Other leaders who briefly walk on and off Cherny’s stage include
Mason Roberson and Revels Cayton. But others don’t appear at all,
like Roscoe Proctor, a leader of black workers in the ILWU, or Alex
and Harriet Bagwell, who became beloved singers and music historians.
Because their activity is hard to see, their ideas about the
relationship between African American liberation and class struggle
are absent too.

African Americans became Communists, MaryLouise Patterson and Evelyn
Crawford say, in part because “white and Black Communists were in
the streets and neighborhoods, fighting against evictions and racist
violence — especially in its most heinous form, lynching — not
just talking about it on the street corners or writing about it in
their newspapers.” International Labor Defense campaigns in San
Francisco defended the Scottsboro youth in Alabama and Angelo Herndon
in Georgia. Even at the height of 1950s repression, the Civil Rights
Congress sent two white Bay Area Communists, Billie Wachter and Decca
Treuhaft, to the South to support Willie McGee, an African American
man falsely charged with rape and later executed. In Oakland, Bob
Treuhaft, Decca’s husband, stopped the execution of Jerry Newsom,
another railroaded black man, and won his freedom.

In his forward to _Letters From Langston_, historian Robin D. G.
Kelley posits the question of why the Pattersons and Matt Crawford
chose communism, and answers:

Because they believed that, through relentless global struggle,
another world was possible — one that was free of class
exploitation, racism, patriarchy, poverty and injustice. They thought
that an international socialist movement offered one of many possible
paths to a liberated future.

Cherny does mention the remarkable life of Karl Yoneda
[[link removed]], a Communist born
in California to Japanese immigrant parents. But he does not mention
the existence of other Japanese American Communists and radicals.

The absence of people of color in _San Francisco Reds_ is especially
notable in relation to San Francisco’s Chinese community. Chinese
San Franciscans have a long history of Communist activity, which also
deserves acknowledgment.

The city’s legacy of violent racism toward Chinese people goes back
to its origins in the years of the gold fever, when immigrants came
from Guangdong province to work on railroads, drain the delta, and
mine gold before they were driven, along with the Mexicans, from the
mines.

San Francisco was a base for organizers of the Chinese Revolution. Sun
Yat-sen, who planned the overthrow of the last Manchu empress and the
founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, spent time in the city. He
is honored with a statue by radical sculptor Beniamino Bufano in St
Mary’s Square. Like radicals in other migrant communities, Chinese
revolutionaries balanced efforts to support the movement back home
with organizing against virulent racism and exploitation in the United
States.

Chinese workers had a history of anarcho-syndicalism. In the late
1920s, a Chinatown branch
[[link removed]] of
the Communist Party was organized, and it met until the start of the
Korean War. In the 1930s, the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association
was organized by laborers returning from the Alaska fish canneries. It
held classes in Marxism and published writings by leaders of the
Chinese Communist Party. Min Qing, the Chinese American Democratic
Youth League, had both men and women officers and spread radical ideas
among students. The _Chinese Daily News_ and the_ Chinese Pacific
Weekly_ were only two of the many newspapers that promoted
progressive community politics.

 

When the revolution triumphed in China in October 1949, Chinese
Communists in San Francisco organized a celebration with guests from
the ILWU and the California Labor School. It was attacked by
forty right-wing nationalist thugs
[[link removed]].
As the Cold War developed, Chinese leftists were hounded by the FBI,
while the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a campaign
to terrorize the community, revoking the citizenship and
naturalization of hundreds of people. It focused especially on left
activists. At least two were deported. Four members of Min Qing were
prosecuted for immigration fraud, and in 1962 left-wing journalist and
Min Qing member Maurice Chuck was sent to prison.

One of San Francisco’s biggest Cold War trials was that of William
and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman. They published a
magazine, _China Monthly Review_, in China during the Korean War,
listing the names of POWs and exposing the use of chemical and germ
warfare. In 1956, after they returned to San Francisco, they were
charged with treason. The government was forced to drop the charges
five years later.

Political and legal defense was always a big part of Communist Party
activity, including the defense against deportation. Cherny describes
the trials of ILWU founder Harry Bridges in his biography _Harry
Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend_
[[link removed]], but the party’s
anti-deportation work was also widespread. Though absent from _San
Francisco Reds, _this work grew critical as deportation became a key
weapon in the government’s fight against Communists.

In 1933, the party helped to create the American Committee for
Protection of Foreign Born
[[link removed]], which had its
headquarters in New York. It had an East Bay subcommittee and a Los
Angeles office, and it provided deportation defense throughout the
Southwest. One celebrated case was that of Lucio Bernabe, an organizer
who went to work for the CIO’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and
Allied Workers union in the 1940s. After that union was destroyed in
the right-wing purge of the CIO, Bernabe became a leader of fruit
workers in the South Bay in ILWU Local 11. Immigration authorities
accused him falsely of entering the United States illegally, and his
case ground on for years.

Cherny’s tight focus on San Francisco (although broadened to include
the 1933 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley) means he doesn’t
look at the party’s activity in the counties surrounding the city,
where Mexican and Filipino farmworkers were concentrated. Those
communities, however, also had a strong presence in San Francisco
itself.

In the late 1940s, party members participated in organizing the
Asociación Nacional México Americana (ANMA, or the National Mexican
American Association), a pioneering anti-racist and pro-labor group
with chapters throughout the Southwest. According to Enrique
Buelna’s _The Mexican Question: Mexican Americans in the Communist
Party, 1940–1957_
[[link removed]],
Mexican American members participated actively in forming the party,
including those in the left-led Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter
Workers. Party members felt ANMA “would merge both the culture and
heritage of the Mexican people with the struggles for first class
citizenship.”

According to Bert Corona
[[link removed]],
ANMA’s organizer in Northern California, chapters brought food and
support to strikes by _braceros_ in the exploitative contract labor
program for growers. Some braceros even organized chapters of their
own, facing inevitable deportation as a result.

The San Francisco chapter had three hundred to four hundred families,
and there were others in Richmond, Oakland, Hollister, Santa Rosa,
Napa, Stockton, and Watsonville. ANMA was put on the attorney
general’s list of subversive organizations, and its members
eventually joined other organizations, including the Community Service
Organization led by Cesar Chavez.

Omitting Mexicans and Latinos from _San Francisco Reds_ amounts to
more than a lack of acknowledgment of certain people and
organizations. It’s a historical oversight, as sections of the
Communist Party in San Francisco were the products of the political
development within those communities, defined by immigration and
national origin.

Justin Akers Chacón makes the case in _Radicals in the Barrio_
[[link removed]] that
a stream of radical, anti-capitalist thought and activity among
Mexicans in the United States extends back to the rebellions following
the War of Conquest of 1848. Anarchists and socialists organized the
Mexican Liberal Party in US barrios in the years prior to the Mexican
Revolution. The decision of many to organize in the US Communist Party
was a product of that political development and of the communist
movement within Mexico itself.

Akers Chacón criticizes the idea that Mexican farmworkers were only
interested in effective organization and not radical politics, writing
that they “had their own radical politics that did not have to be
taught by Communists, but rather were compatible.”

A similar process developed among the Filipino migrants who came to
the United States following the brutal colonial war of 1898, in which
the United States seized the Philippines. Abba Ramos, a Communist who
worked as an organizer for the ILWU, explains that

The manongs [a term of respect for older Filipinos] who came in the
1920s were children of colonialism. They were radicalized because they
compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos’
own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found here.

Ramos was born on a sugar plantation in Hawaii into a radical union
family. When FBI agents came to his parents’ home and told them
their union was led by Communists, “my father said ‘if winning
better wages and making us equal here is Communist, then we are
too.'”

Ramos learned radical ideas from Filipino Communists, who migrated
between work in Alaska canneries and field labor in the fields of the
San Joaquin Valley. As Filipina historian Dawn Mabalon
[[link removed]] wrote, “Many of the
members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes
of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and were tough leftists, Marxists,
and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own
militancy.”

Because it consisted of people who moved with the work, their radical
network existed
[[link removed]] wherever
they were. During part of the year, many lived in San Francisco’s
Manilatown. The militancy of the International Hotel housing battle in
the 1970s, perhaps the city’s most famous tenant uprising, owed to
the fact that it was the place where many manongs lived at the end of
their lives. This radical Filipino history is woven into the history
of Communism in San Francisco, but missing from _San Francisco Reds_.

Queering Communist Party History

Bettina Aptheker’s _Communists in Closets_ takes a very different
approach to the Communist Party’s history. In recounting the lived
experience of gay and lesbian Communists, she gives a deep look into
their position in the party, and especially the way the development of
their political ideas interacted with their sexuality, open or
closeted.

Aptheker’s book contains several shorter accounts that support four
long expositions describing the lives of four exceptional individuals.
This she combines with historical material about the party’s denial
of the existence of gay and lesbian people in its membership,
especially following the watershed Stonewall rebellion. During
Stonewall and its aftermath, young activists formed radical
organizations like the Gay Activist Alliance, debated emerging
concepts of gay and lesbian liberation, and appealed for support from
the party. They were rejected with a stony silence.

Harry Hay began bringing gay Communists together, eventually
organizing the Mattachine Society, in which he tried to combine class
politics and gay identity.

Aptheker begins by describing her research process, heavily dependent
on the personal archives of her chosen subjects and oral histories
produced by herself and others. The tone of Aptheker’s book is more
personal than Cherny’s, as she references her own personal struggles
and experiences in coming out. She also expresses her love and
admiration for the people she meets through personal networks and
through her research.

One smaller biographical vignette concerns Maud Russell, who lived in
China before joining the US party and returning to do political work.
Aptheker describes her long partnership with Ida Pruitt, who was born
and lived in China for many years herself. Aptheker can only speculate
about whether they were lovers. She judges Russell’s support for the
violent Cultural Revolution as a contradiction to her life of
“loving and compassionate service.” However, Aptheker adds, “I
also know how many Communists, including myself, denied the atrocities
in the Soviet Union, for example, because of a blinding emotional
commitment to a political ideal that was not the reality. In my case,
and perhaps in Maud’s, this emotional need was connected to a secret
lesbian sexuality.”​​ To live in the closet is to live in fear
of exposure and social ostracization. Perhaps that fear can enhance a
person’s attachment to sources of stability, security, identity, and
belonging.

Other short biographies range from artist Elizabeth Olds, about whose
sexuality Aptheker again can only speculate, to composer Marc
Blitzstein, to Dr W. E. B. Du Bois’s adopted son David Graham Du
Bois. More contemporary figures include Victoria Mercado, who grew up
in a Watsonville farmworker family and worked on Angela Davis’s
defense before her murder at thirty. Marge Frantz grew up in the
South, helped found the Civil Rights Congress, and ended her life
teaching with Aptheker and Davis at the University of California at
Santa Cruz. The book’s description of the eccentric living
arrangements between Frantz, her husband Laurent, a well-respected
constitutional lawyer, and her lover Eleanor Engstrand show that life
for Communists and former Communists could be as bohemian as any.

The book’s major contribution consists of four biographies: Harry
Hay, Betty Millard, Eleanor Flexner, and Lorraine Hansberry. The
intersection between Marxism and the politics of being gay in America
is most evident in her account of the radical politics of Harry Hay,
whom she calls “most decidedly a Communist revolutionary.”

Hay was a Communist Party activist through the 1930s and ’40s,
joining street actions from the San Francisco general strike in 1934
to the animator’s strike at Disney studios in 1949. He taught
courses at the California Labor School with titles like “Music . . .
Barometer of the Class Struggle” and “Imperialist Formalism.”
And as the Cold War started, Hay began bringing gay Communists
together, eventually organizing the Mattachine Society, in which he
tried to combine class politics and gay identity.

Aptheker describes the political theory Hay eventually elaborated
[[link removed]],
in which he asserted that gays and lesbians were a “historically
oppressed cultural minority,” as a concept that evolved out of his
educational work in the Communist Party. “There were no women in the
membership of the original Mattachine Society,” she notes, but
“the photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) often attended
Mattachine meetings and joined in their intense political
discussions.” Bernhard, an open lesbian, was a mainstay of gay and
lesbian subcultural events and was widely celebrated for her
photographs of the female form.

Apetheker writes:

As a Marxist scholar of unusual innovation, Harry was trying to argue
that gay and lesbian people, because of their persecution and outsider
positioning, had the potential to develop a particular consciousness
of themselves that could also be a radical or revolutionary
understanding of class and racial oppression. . . . Hay thought that
gays and lesbians as an oppressed minority experienced the material
conditions to make for a specifically gay consciousness distinct from
that of the dominant society, and that such a consciousness held
revolutionary implications.

Hay patterned this train of thought on the way the party had come to
define African Americans as a people who suffer racial and national
oppression, distinct from and in addition to their exploitation as
workers. “He thought such an oppositional gay consciousness had a
culturally revolutionary potential for upending all of society and its
conventions.”

 

The Mattachine Society was a civil rights organization as well, and
mounted the first successful legal challenge to police entrapment of
gays and lesbians (with a lawyer from the National Maritime Union). In
his theoretical framework, Hay regarded entrapment as the “weak
link” in the capitalist oppression of his community. Neither the
cases nor his expositions got any coverage in the left press however.
After organizing the Mattachine Society and coming out as a gay man,
Hay resigned from the Communist Party in 1951 because of its ban on
gay membership. The party then expelled him to prevent him from
rejoining.

Betty Millard also, not without controversy, used the analogy of black
oppression in one of the Communist Party’s first attempts to
theoretically define the oppression of women. Millard wrote two essays
in the party journal _New Masses,_ which were then published as a
pamphlet called “Women Against Myth
[[link removed]].”
In it, Millard sought to weave together a Marxist and feminist
analysis. “The way Betty structured her arguments,” Aptheker
explains, “also revealed what I would call a queer sensibility in
that her lived experiences as an independent woman and a lesbian,
however closeted she was, allowed her to see that ‘woman’ and
‘femininity’ and the constraints on women’s lives were the
purely (convenient) social constructions of male supremacy. There was
nothing natural about them.”

Millard began by deconstructing the way language incorporates the
inferior status of women. In using her essay for her course, I can
imagine the expressions on the faces of those sheepish young men as my
mother tells them that, when they curse with the word “fuck,”
their expression of anger and aggression has its roots in violence
against women.

In “Women Against Myth,” however, Millard describes the boredom of
housewives as a “deadlier kind of lynching.” Claudia Jones
challenged her middle-class orientation, and Millard changed
“deadlier” to “quieter” but didn’t retract the comparison.
Both Jones and Millard articulated the triple oppression of black
women through the intersecting systems of domination: race, class, and
gender. Jones wrote to Millard, “Does not the inferior status stem
now as in the past primarily from women’s relation to the means of
production?” Aptheker notes that Jones “did not include sexuality
as a key part of the system of domination.”

In 1949, amid this ferment, Louise Patterson organized a national
conference on “Marxism and the Woman Question” at which Jones was
the lead speaker. My mother’s courses in subsequent years must have
followed and been influenced by this debate. She idolized Jones, and
used as a text her clarion call “An End to the Neglect of the
Problems of the Negro Woman!
[[link removed]]”
Jones was indicted under the Smith Act for writing another article,
“Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security
[[link removed]],”
imprisoned for a year in 1955, and deported to the UK when she was
released. Millard went on to represent the Congress of American Women
internationally, until it was destroyed in the McCarthyite hysteria.

Aptheker describes in moving detail the emotional trauma and
roller-coaster experience of Millard and her other subjects as they
try to come to terms with their sexual orientation. Eleanor Flexner,
who wrote the first scholarly history of the woman suffrage movement
in the United States, lived with her lover Helen Terry “in real
harmony and mutual enjoyment” for three decades. Playwright Lorraine
Hansberry, Aptheker says, “was encouraged, nurtured and mentored by
Black Communist artists and a collective of Black Communist
intellectuals and activists,” but nevertheless suffered paralyzing
depression and loneliness. Her liberation came with acknowledgment of
her lesbian sexuality.

In the book’s final section, the Communist Party finally ends its
ban on homosexuality. Aptheker presents contemporary portraits, for
example of Rodney Barnette, an activist in Angela Davis’s defense, a
Communist warehouse worker, and San Francisco’s first black owner of
a gay bar. We also meet Eric Gordon, who today reports on culture
for _People’s World_, and Lowell B. Denny III, who cofounded Queer
Nation, a left-wing political movement that took direct action to
combat discrimination against gays and lesbians. After Michael Brown
was killed in Ferguson in 2014, Denny joined the Communist Party, and
today also writes for _People’s World_.

_Communists in Closets_ ends with Angela Davis, Aptheker’s comrade,
coworker, and friend for most of each other’s lives. Davis speaks
about her long romantic relationship with Gina Dent, a colleague in
feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
celebrates their work together organizing the prison-abolition
organization Critical Resistance. “I am fine with queer” as a
personal descriptor of herself, Davis tells Aptheker, “but I prefer
anti-racist and anti-capitalist” as self-identifiers, since they
describe the heart of her political work. That lifetime of work was
honored last year when the San Francisco longshore union, ILWU Local
10, made her its third honorary member, joining Nelson Mandela and
Martin Luther King Jr.

Aptheker recalls Davis’s 2009 speech before an audience that gave
her a “warm, loving welcome.” She discarded her notes to tell them
they had to embrace transgender people as part of “our movement,”
regardless of whom it made uncomfortable, insisting that “we must
constantly expand our idea of freedom.”

A Fuller Account of Life in the Party

Both Cherny and Aptheker include great detail in the presentation of
their arguments. With Cherny, we get the broad strokes of party
history in San Francisco, albeit with some blank spaces. With
Aptheker, we get deep insight into the trials of individual members
— beyond San Francisco, but applicable to many San Franciscans —
as they seek to realize their political ideas in an environment of
repression, not just from the power structure they oppose but also
from their own party.

The figures on their stages are mostly (though not entirely) leaders
and organizers. Through them, we see a lot of the history of the
Communist Party’s policies and political strategy, and the cost to
those who were out in front. But behind leaders were the ordinary
party members who made it all work. They got signatures on the
petitions. They staffed Camp Seeds of Tomorrow, the summer camp for
the children of party members and their friends. People like Bob
Lindsey, who sat behind the counter of the bookstore on San Jose’s
First Street, or those who staffed the one on Bancroft Way in
Berkeley, or the one in Downtown San Francisco.

I think of my parents, who were not national leaders or important
people in the sense that many are in these two books: My mom in her
classes, and later writing children’s books. My father as he sought
a job that could keep our family going in the wake of the blacklist,
even if it meant moving across the country.

In _Tribute of a Lifetime_, published by the Committees of
Correspondence after the party split in 1992, I found a piece that to
me sums up this kind of contribution. The party had an expression that
honored the ordinary work of political organizing. As party member
Alice Correll described it:

From the time I was recruited into the YCL [Young Communist League] in
1937 I have been a Jenny Higgins [men were called Jimmy Higgins]. I
was the one who kept the books, collected the dues, baked the
casseroles, washed the fund-raiser dishes, and always paid my dues
(the secret of my popularity!). In Seattle, in New York City during
the wide open Browder period, later in San Francisco when we met only
in tiny “cells,” I have always been a private in the army. Where
would the sergeants and the generals be without us?

_DAVID BACON [[link removed]] is a California writer and
documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents
labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for
human rights._

_If you like this article, please subscribe
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* U.S. history
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* Communist Party
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* Feminism
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* LGBT Rights
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* San Francisco
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