The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States. For many years (1959-2000) it was led by Gus Hall. Perhaps the most famous ex-member of the CPUSA is Angela Davis.

It was formed in 1919 as a splinter group of the left-wing of the Socialist Party over the issue of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The left wing socialists supported Lenin and Trotsky, and broke off the SP to form two rival parties: the Communist Party of America and Communist Labor Party. Under pressure from the Communist International, these two communist parties officially merged in Chicago in 1919. From its inception, the Communist Party, USA came under attack from the FBI and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for defying the Sedition Act of 1918. Consequently, the Communist Party went underground and went through name changes to evade the authorities.

Since its inception, the CPUSA was known for closely following the direction provided by the world's communist parties affiliated with the Communist International (“Comintern”). This was evident in 1928 when, upon the orders of Stalin, the CPUSA expelled James Cannon and the Trotskyist Left Opposition from the organization. A year later Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow, considered right oppositionists allied with the Soviet faction led by Nikolai Bukharin were also purged. Stalin's comments

In the 1930s, the Party helped to organize unions in basic industries, such as steel, mining, auto, rubber, longshore. They were also active in organizing garment workers and farm workers. Communists organized the unemployed and fought successfully for unemployment insurance and what eventually became social security. They fought against evictions and housing repossessions. The CPUSA was the only political party at that time that explicitly denounced racism and fought for reforms in that area of US social life.

After 1929 the party was led by Earl Browder who actually dissolved the party in 1944 replacing it with a Communist Political Association. For this he was in turn expelled and William Z. Foster became head of the party. Foster was to lead the party until he retired in 1958 and was succeeded by Gus Hall.

The 1956 invasion of Hungary and the Secret Speech of Nikita Khrushchev to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union criticising Stalin had a cataclysmic effect on the CPUSA [1]. Membership plummeted and the leadership briefly faced a challenge from a faction who wished to democratise the party. However most of its critics left and after 1958 Hall also purged the party of a small faction who wished to return to a Stalinist course, for example, Jack Shulman. This faction, which was not numerous, but very energetic, began independent operations as the Progressive Labor Party, the October League, Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America) and "International Struggle Marxist-Leninist" (ISML) supporting the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Stalinist regime in Albania.

The CPUSA initially opposed the rearming and aggressive posturing of Nazi Germany. This Stance changed when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact, also know as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with Hitler in 1939, the CPUSA turned from fighting fascism to advocating peace. The CPUSA even went so far as to accuse Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of provoking aggression against Hitler. The CPUSA once again changed its stance on Hitler and Nazi Germany after the Soviet Union was attacked with the launch of Operation Barbarossa on June 22,1941.

In 1948, Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster and other CPUSA leaders were arrested under the Alien Registration Act. This law, passed by Congress in 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United States "to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government".

The case began in March, 1948. It was difficult for the prosecution to prove that the twelve men had broken the Alien Registration Act, as none of the defendants had ever openly called for violence or had been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed revolution. The prosecution therefore relied on passages from the work of Karl Marx and other revolutionary figures from the past.

Although the CPUSA vehemently opposed prosecution of its members under the Smith Act in 1948, when Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party became the first to be prosecuted under the Smith Act in 1941, CPUSA boss Gus Hall as well as the CPUSA board supported the prosecution and convictions. This can be traced to the party’s subservience to Moscow and Stalin’s particular dislike for Leon Trotsky and his followers.

Another strategy of the prosecution was to ask the defendants questions about other party members. Unwilling to provide information on others, they were put in prison and charged with contempt of court. The trial dragged on for eleven months and eventually, the judge, Harold Medina, who some say made no attempt to disguise his own feelings about the defendants, sent the party's lawyers to prison for contempt of court.

After a nine month trial the leaders of the American Communist Party were found guilty of violating the Alien Registration Act and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. They appealed to the Supreme Court but on 4th June, 1951, the judges ruled, 6-2, that the conviction was legal.

This decision was followed by the arrests of 46 more communists during the summer of 1951. This included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was also convicted for contempt of court after telling the judge that she would not identify people as Communists as she was unwilling "do degrade or debase myself by becoming an informer". She was also found guilty of violating the Alien Registration Act and sentenced to two years in prison.

In the 1970s, the CPUSA managed to grow in membership to about 25,000 members, despite the exodus of numerous Anti-Revisionist and Maoist groups from its ranks. However, in 1984, seeing the onslaught of Ronald Reagan's anti-Communist administration and decreased CPUSA membership, Gus Hall chose to end the CPUSA's nation-wide electoral campaigns, and the CPUSA has endorsed the Democratic Party in every national election ever since. The CPUSA still runs candidates for local office.

Throughout most of its history the Communist Party has been under pressure from the United States government, especially the FBI and was heavily infiltrated. Following the McCarthy years, membership and activities of the Communist Party were kept secret with very few visible members, although many community leaders thoughout the United States were affiliated with the Party.

From 1959 until 1989, when Gus Hall attacked the initiatives taken by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Party received a substantial subsidy from the Soviet Union. (There is at least one receipt signed by Gus Hall in the KGB archives. [2]) Starting with $75,000 in 1959 this was increased gradually to $3 million in 1987. This substantial amount reflected the Party's subservience to the Moscow line in contrast to the French and Italian Parties whose Eurocommunism deviated from the orthodox line. The cutoff of funds in 1989 resulted in a financial crisis resulting in cutting back publication in 1990 of the Party newspaper, the People's Daily World to weekly publication, the People's Weekly World. [References for this section are provided below.]

During its most active years the English language newspaper of the Party was the Daily Worker which was published from 1924 to 1958 when publication was suspended due to reduced circulation and an editorial dispute with John Gates, its last editor who took a disagreeably liberal point of view.

Communist party members consider Party membership an honor and often work very hard toward realization of the idealistic goals of communism. Generally the life of a Communist is organized around Party activities with the expectation that they will in a disciplined way advance the goals of the Party.

Like most political parties, Communists have often participated in the organization of independent organizations (front groups) which support some aspect of their platform or serve organizing goals. In addition, Communist Party members, working together within an organization such as a labor union proceeding skillfully, were often able, together with others who supported them (or at least did not actively oppose them), to rise to leadership positions and in some cases to dominate the organization. In some cases, especially in labor organizations such as the Screen Actors Guild this practice resulted in a backlash as more conservative members such as Ronald Reagan [3] competed for control of the organization. Many conservatives opportunistically used red-baiting to attack and force the expulsion of Communists form union leadership and even their jobs.

With the declasification of the FBI's files on the CPUSA, Russian archives holding the records of the Communist International and the CPUSA, and decrypted World War II Soviet messages between KGB offices in the United States and Moscow, also known as the Venona Cables, the extent of the CPUSA's involvement of espionage is now becoming public knowledge. Much of the record produced by Venona is contradictory and incomplete.

Documentation released since 1991 from fromer Soviet states confirms [anti-Communist] suspicions that Soviet money continued to flow into the United States and buy influence within the CPUSA. Funding paid organizers, published newspapers and other Communist propaganda, and supported a variety of fraternal, educational and Union activities influenced by the CPUSA. Sometimes these funds were transferred as unspecified subsidies, but often they were earmarked by the Comintern for various uses. While the prominence and activity of the CPUSA was greatly reduced after the 1950's, the recently released documents evidence transfers of Soviet money as late as 1987. Records show Communist leader Gus Hall requesting two million for the publication of the Daily Worker and the rental fees for the CPUSA headquarters. A receipt of these funds by Gus Hall is also documented.

For example, it is now known that on April 10th, 1943 KGB agent and New York resident Vassili M. Zarubin met CPUSA official Steve Nelson in Oakland and discusses espionage. Even Robert Meeropol when pressed on PBS’s Frontline, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg admitted that his father may have participated in espionage after reading Venona transcripts which spoke of Julius Rosenberg's meeting with KGB and NKVD agents. Meeropol argues in his book, An Execution in the Family (St. Martin's Press, 2003, ISBN 0312306369), that Venona completely exonerated his mother, and that in any event both of his parents were killed for crimes they did not commit. David Greenglass, who is indicated in the Venona transcripts as a greater espionage figure than Julius Rosenberg, was not tried or convicted after he named his sister Ethel and Julius as spies.

Theodore Alvin Hall, a Harvard trained physicist and CPUSA member began passing information on the atomic bomb to the Soviets soon after he was hired at Los Alamos at age 19. Hall, who was known as Mlad by his KGB handlers, escaped prosecution for his crimes. Hall's wife, aware of his espionage, claims that their KGB handler had advised them to plead innocence, like the Rosenberg’s did, if formally charged. Historian Ronald Radosh questions whether Joseph Stalin would have given Kim Il Sung the green light to invade South Korea had the Soviet Union not posses atomic weapons thus sparing the millions of lives lost in the conflict.

The current National Chair is Sam Webb. The newspaper is the People's Weekly World. The monthly journal is Political Affairs

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• Article: Communists Should Not Teach In American Colleges, 1949, by Raymond B. Allen, President of the University of Washington, Seattle.
• Article: Guilty as charged by Arnold Beichman, survey of Soviet documents on Communists in America Hoover Institute - Hoover Digest 1999.

• The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books, 1999, hardcover edition, p. 287-293, p. 306, ISBN 0465003109. Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist who worked for the KGB. After 1972 when the KGB established its new modern offices at Yasenovo, Mitrokhin was entrusted with transferring the corpus of KGB files from its old office at the Lubyanka in Moscow to the new offices. During the next ten years while performing these duties he copied many files which he turned over to British intelligence when he defected in March, 1992.
• Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, John Barron, Regnery Publishing, 1996, ISBN 0895264862; 2001 edition, ISBN 0709160615. This biography of Morris Childs, who together with his brother Jack arranged for and handled the money transfers during the 1960s and 70s, contains much of the same material.

• American Communist History a peer-reviewed journal published by the Historians of American Communism. [4]