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 only to expel the new leadership under Jay Lovestone a year later.

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. This small faction went on to form the Progressive Labor Movement in 1961.

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.

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.

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 [2] 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.

CPUSA and Cold War Espionage

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.

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.

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

See also:

• Communist party
• List of political parties in the United States

• Official website, including FAQ's
• Official newspaper
• Party's Monthly publication
• 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.

• American Communist History a peer-reviewed journal published by the Historians of American Communism. [3]