>> No, but let's not fall for the optical illusion of hindsight. First of all, these things didn't exist in the 30's either, until somebody organized them. Second, they appeared to observers at the time more as "scattered local actions" than as major events. It's only because they later led to bigger things that historians *in retrospect* treat them as important; they didn't seem all that important at the time. Third, anything organized by the Communists was perceived as a Potemkin-village front for a tiny, despised sect made up mainly of culturally heterodox immigrant Jews (with a sugar-daddy in the background providing the funds). And the perception had a lot of truth to it, until around 1933, almost four years into the Depression.
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> That's a pretty harsh judgement, too harsh IMO. Even anti-Communist historians acknowledge the outsized role played by the party in organizing the unemployed and the industrial unions, and against Jim Crow and fascism during this period. The material posted by Charles indicates that sustained and nationally coordinated activity among the unemployed and tenants began early in the Depression, prior to the New Deal. The Soviet Union was less important as a "sugar daddy" than that it was still endowed with the prestige of the Russian Revolution which served as a powerful inspiration for a large part of that generation of workers and intellectuals (Jews and non-Jews) - particularly against the backdrop of capitalist crisis and the rising threat of fascism.
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I'm not trying to deny that the party did all these good things. I'm just saying that they didn't *appear* to amount to all that much at the time. What looks to you in retrospect like "sustained and nationally coordinated activity" looked at the time like scattered local actions, stirred up by a CP that had - what, 10,000 members? A "national conference" was often perceived rightly as CP headquarters deciding to book a hall and instructing its cadre to drag enough people to it to make it look full. I'm certainly not criticizing it - far from it. I'm just saying it didn't feel like an unstoppable groundswell at the time.
SA