[A-List] Communist Party USA Gives Its History to N.Y.U. - New York Times

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Communist Party USA Gives Its History to N.Y.U. - New York Times


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/arts/20nyu.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=t
h&pagewanted=print 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/arts/20nyu.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=
th&pagewanted=print>

March 20, 2007


  Communist Party USA Gives Its History to N.Y.U.

By PATRICIA COHEN

The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the 
subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written 
in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and 
later put to music, became part of the labor movement's soundtrack. Now 
the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected 
historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and 
photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has 
donated to New York University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_yor
k_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>. 


The cache contains decades of party history including founding 
documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled 
directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands 
about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for 
instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).

By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to 
revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most 
contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the 
story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights 
struggles.

"It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever 
presented itself here," said Michael Nash, the director of New York 
University's Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on Friday.

Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about 
the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original 
documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can 
resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between 
American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, "it will take 
us years to catalog." But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other 
scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown 
threat to security during the cold war.

Hill's last rhyme - which begins, "My Will is easy to decide/ For there 
is nothing to divide" - was discovered in one of the 12,000 cartons. 
(Hill was convicted, some thought wrongly, of murder.) In other boxes 
were drafts of the party's programs with handwritten editing changes and 
a stapled copy of its first constitution. "The Communist Party is a 
fact," C. E. Ruthenberg, the executive secretary wrote on Sept. 18, 
1919, days after the founders met in Chicago. A 1920 document marks the 
merger of the Communist Party and the Workers Party. It lists "Dix" as 
the secret party name of Earl R. Browder, who would later become general 
secretary of the party, "L. C. Wheat" as Jay Lovestone, who later turned 
against communism and worked with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/america
n_federation_of_laborcongress_of_industrial_organizations/index.html?inline=
nyt-org> 
and the C.I.A. 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central
_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
and Alexander Trachtenberg as "one of the confidential agents of Lenin 
in America."

 From years of being folded, many of the pages are impressed with 
grooved lines like wrinkled faces; others are scarred by cigarette burns 
and thin as onion skin. Some folders, filled with crumbling artifacts, 
look as if they've been sprinkled with yellowed confetti.

Ruthenberg underscores the "secret manner in which the party is 
conducted." The Los Angeles branch, known as "XO1XO5" uses the password 
" 'Kur-heiny,' which means: 'Are you advancing?,' " he writes. "The 
answer is: 'Teip,' meaning 'yes.' "

He copies a letter signed by the Russians Nikolai Bukharin and Ian 
Berzin that he said was hidden in the coat lining of a Bolshevik about 
how the Americans should operate. The two order the party to urge 
soldiers and sailors to agitate "against officers" and to arm workers. 
They warn against allowing members to engage in philanthropic or 
educational activities, insisting that they form "FIGHTING ORGANIZATIONS 
FOR SEIZING CONTROL OF THE STATE, for the overthrow of government and 
the establishment of the workers' dictatorship."

Robert Minor, a cartoonist and radical who covered the Russian civil 
war, has a clear-eyed and lyrical account of an interview with Vladimir 
Lenin in Moscow, dated December 1918. Lenin was fascinated by America, 
calling it a "great country in some respects," and shot question after 
question at Minor: " 'How soon will the revolution come in America?' He 
did not ask me if it would come, but when it would come." Minor, who had 
not yet joined the party, found Lenin a bewitching figure. "When he 
thunders his dogma, one sees the fighting Lenin. He is iron. He is 
political Calvin," Minor says in his typewritten notes. "And yet, Calvin 
has his other side. During all the discussion he had been hitching his 
chair toward me," he writes. "I felt myself queerly submerged by his 
personality. He filled the room."

As he leaves the Kremlin, Minor notices two men drive up in limousines. 
"A few months ago they were 'bloodthirsty minions of predatory capital,' 
" he writes, "But now they are 'people's commissaries' and ride in the 
fine automobiles as before, live in the fine mansions." They rule "under 
red silk flags to protect them from all disorders. They have learned the 
rose smells as sweetly under another name."

That description is "very important," said John P. Diggins, a historian 
at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/city_un
iversity_of_new_york/index.html?inline=nyt-org>. 
He said he expected a lot of new dissertations and books to result from 
the new archives. Historians have spent too much time arguing about the 
party's subservience to Moscow, he said, neglecting Communists' work in 
organizing labor and fighting racism, and their philosophical take on 
Marxism.

Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940 
newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain 
for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the 
Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes "to oppose the 
decontrol of over-$250 apartments." There are the handwritten lyrics to 
Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939 
denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and 
detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans.

Piles of prison correspondence from activists or party members show the 
human hand behind the rhetoric. "My dear wife Lydia," Minor writes in 
pencil after being arrested in 1930 during a labor rally in Union Square 
in Manhattan. "That little half-hour today seemed the shortest of my 
whole lifetime. And so indescribably sweet!"

The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but 
achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part 
of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow's direction, said 
Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written 
several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some 
Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which 
expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated 
the team working on the atomic bomb.

Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential 
in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war 
era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled 
the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed 

by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged 
its ranks. Revelations about Stalin 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/joseph_stalin/
index.html?inline=nyt-per>'s 
crimes in 1956 disillusioned many of those who remained and dealt the 
party a near-fatal blow.

The Communist Party USA contacted Tamiment, which is devoted to the 
study of labor history and progressive politics, a year ago. Mr. Nash 
said he was surprised when he got the call. "I didn't really realize it 
still existed," he admitted.

During the summer, Mr. Nash said, he and a group of students scoured the 
party's offices on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. They frantically 
packed up papers before contractors came in to renovate the space, which 
was being rented out. The donation includes 20,000 books, journals and 
pamphlets and a million photographs from The Daily Worker's archives.

Sam Webb, national chairman of the Communist Party USA, said, "We felt 
that Tamiment could better maintain the collection and provide for a 
much wider audience." He said hardly any of the files were reviewed 
before being given away.

The primary source of American party documents available to the public 
has been the Library of Congress 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/library
_of_congress/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
which microfilmed a batch of Communist Party USA records in Soviet 
archives that had been shipped there 50 years earlier for safekeeping. 
John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress who was the 
first American to examine the Soviet files, said that since N.Y.U. has a 
copy of the Library of Congress material, "This will give Tamiment the 
enviable position of being able to offer researchers access to what is 
in Moscow as well as the new C.P.U.S.A. collection."

When the collection opened in 2000, the Library of Congress said, "the 
C.P.U.S.A. has always been a secretive organization," and "the previous 
paucity of the archival record has been a major obstacle to scholarship 
on the history of the American Communist movement," and a reason for 
"highly contentious" debates.

That contentiousness continues. In an article on The New Republic Web 
site last week unrelated to the donated archives, Ronald Radosh, a 
historian, attacked N.Y.U.'s newly created Center for the United States 
and the Cold War, which is partly sponsored by Tamiment Library. Looking 
at its spring calendar of events, he accused it of planning "completely 
one-sided and partisan events" and said the guests invited to Friday's 
gathering are "all, without an exception, either communists or 
still-believing fellow-travelers."

Mr. Nash, who is a co-director of the center, characterized Friday as a 
public relations event, and said overall its programs represent all views.

After flipping through boxes, Mr. Nash moved to a glass case that 
contained a photograph from the files, a picture of eight American 
officers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Abraham 
Lincoln Brigade. In the next room was Moe Fishman, 92, one of the 
brigade's last surviving members, who just happened to be in the library 
that day for the filming of an unrelated documentary. He had carried 
over the battalion's tattered blue flag. Asked if he was in the 
black-and-white photograph, he slowly walked over, put on his glasses 
and peered down. "I'm not in that," he said, "I wasn't an officer." But 
he added, "I have the same one at home."