On Jul 6, 2008, at 5:32 PM, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> I have a question that is a bit esoteric, but what ever did happen to
> Earl Browder. I know he got thrown out of leadership of the party
> after the popular front period, but I'm curious what happened to him
> afterwards.
You mean in detail beyond Wikipedia?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Browder>
> Browder continued to campaign for his views outside the party and
> criticized the CPUSA's domination by Moscow, writing that "The
> American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.
> But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet
> Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick
> collapse, the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became
> merely a bad word in the American language."[citation needed]
>
> In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate
> Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph
> McCarthy, Browder was willing to criticize the American Communist
> Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former
> comrades. He falsely testified under oath that he had never been
> involved in espionage activities.[4] Charged with contempt of
> Congress, Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he
> felt the committee had not acted legally. Browder was never
> prosecuted for his espionage work on behalf of the Soviet Union.
>
> Browder's final public appearance was in a debate with Max
> Shachtman, the dissident Trotskyist, in which the pair debated
> socialism. Browder defended the Soviet Union while Shachtman acted
> as a prosecutor. It is reported that at one point in the debate
> Shachtman listed a series of leaders of various Communist Parties
> and noted that each had perished at the hands of Stalin; at the end
> of this piece of theatre, he remarked that Browder too had been a
> leader of a Communist Party and, pointing at him, announced: "There-
> there but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!" [5]
>
> An attempt to reinstate Browder in the CPUSA following the
> Twentieth Party Congress and the move to destalinization failed. He
> remained outside of the party until his death in Princeton, New
> Jersey in 1973.
His grandson is a fund manager specializing in Russian stocks who nonetheless got thrown out of Russia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Browder>.
Doug