Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
On 30/09/2013, at 10:40 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is one of my favorite American Communists of all times. I just
> spoke with his granddaughter at a celebration for John Conyers
> tonight.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wagenknecht
>
> Alfred Wagenknecht
>
>
> Alfred Wagenknecht, 1905
>
> Alfred Wagenknecht (1881–1956) was an American Marxist activist and
> political functionary. He is best remembered for having played a
> critical role in the establishment of the American Communist Party in
> 1919 as a leader of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party.
> Wagenknecht served as Executive Secretary of the Communist Labor Party
> of America and the United Communist Party of America in 1919 and 1920,
> respectively.
>
> Contents
>
> 1 Biography
>
> 1.1 The Socialist years (1904-1919)
> 1.2 The Communist Years (1919-1956)
> 1.3 Death and legacy
>
> 2 Footnotes
> 3 Works
> 4 Further reading
> 5 See also
>
> Biography
>
> The Socialist years (1904-1919)
>
> Alfred Wagenknecht, called "Wag" (pronounced "Wog") by many of his
> friends,[1] was born August 15, 1881 in Görlitz, Germany, the son of a
> shoemaker. The family emigrated to the United States in 1884, and thus
> the German-born Wagenknecht essentially grew up as an American, living
> in Cleveland before departing as a young man for Washington state, on
> the West Coast.
>
> Wagenknecht was drawn to radical politics at an early age, elected
> Organizer of the Pike Street Branch of Local Seattle, Socialist Party
> of America in 1903. In this capacity he organized speakers for the
> branch, coordinated "street meetings" designed to bring socialist
> ideas to passersby by means of soapbox speakers, and organized social
> events such as music recitals and dances.[2]
>
> The next year saw Wagenknecht serving as the Press Agent for Local
> Seattle. He was an active member in the party's radical Pike Street
> Branch, which engaged in a long-running battle with the moderate
> Central Branch throughout the decade.
>
> In 1905 Wagenknecht married Hortense Allison, sister of party comrade
> Elmer Allison. Wagenknecht was prominent in the ongoing free speech
> fights which local Seattle had with city officials over the right to
> speak in public and hold meetings on city streets and sidewalks.
>
> Wagenknecht was elected to the State Committee of the Socialist Party
> of Washington (SPW) in 1905 and was the paid Local Secretary-Treasurer
> of a newly reorganized Local Seattle in 1906.[3]
>
> In 1907, with the return of Hermon F. Titus's left wing publication,
> The Socialist, to Seattle, Wagenknecht left the employ of Local
> Seattle and went to work for Titus as Business Manager for his
> publication.[3]
>
> Wagenknecht was a delegate of the SPW to the 1908 National Convention
> of the Socialist Party, where he fought a bitter battle with a
> representative of a moderate faction of the old Local Seattle
> organization which had been deprived of its charter by the State
> Committee for "political fusionism" late in 1906. The pair argued
> their cases on the floor of the convention for 20 minutes each, with
> the body ultimately deciding not to intervene against the left wing
> State Committee.
>
> In 1912 he was elected Assistant State Secretary of the SPW.[4]
>
> As was the case for many rank-and-file party members of the day,
> Wagenknecht was a regular candidate for public office on the Socialist
> ticket, running for US Congress in 1906, for Seattle Comptroller in
> 1908, and for Congress again in 1912 when the party's first choice,
> John Wanhope, stepped aside.[4]
>
> In July 1913, Wagenknecht became Editor of the Everett, Washington
> Socialist weekly The Commonwealth. Shortly thereafter, Wagenknecht
> went to work for the National Office of the Socialist Party of America
> for the first time, serving as a National Organizer. In 1914, he was
> elected to the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist
> Party for the first time. After his stint in Chicago came to a close,
> Wagenknecht moved his family back to Ohio, where he was elected State
> Secretary of the Socialist Party of Ohio in 1917, serving through
> 1919. He was also a delegate to the pivotal 1917 Emergency National
> Convention of the SPA, held at the Planters' Hotel in St. Louis,
> Missouri, at which the St. Louis Program against the war in Europe was
> adopted.
>
> After American entry into the war, Wagenknecht's unyielding
> antimilitarism brought him into conflict with the law. State Secretary
> Wagenknecht was indicted along with Local Cuyahoga County head C.E.
> Ruthenberg and Ohio State Organizer Charles Baker for allegedly
> obstructing the draft. The trio were tried together and found guilty
> and sentenced to 1 year in the State Penitentiary on July 21, 1917.
> This decision was upheld by the US Supreme Court on Jan. 15, 1918, and
> the three were not released until after completion of the sentence
> (less time off) on Dec. 8, 1918.
>
> Alfred Wagenknecht, c. 1918
>
> Upon his release, "Wag" was elected to the National Executive
> Committee of the Socialist Party and worked for National Office
> running the party's Propaganda Department. He was an early and fierce
> adherent of the Left Wing Manifesto authored by Louis C. Fraina and
> was active in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, the
> organized faction seeking to "win the Socialist Party for the Left
> Wing." Wagenknecht ran for National Executive Secretary of the
> Socialist Party in 1919 and was the leading vote-getter in the race,
> which was ultimately annulled by the outgoing NEC on account of
> purported voting irregularities by the language federations of the
> party.
>
> Wagenknecht and the Left Wing attempted to establish themselves as a
> parallel National Executive Committee despite the outgoing NEC's
> refusal to officially tabulate the vote, and the "new NEC" met one
> time in Chicago in August in an attempt to assert authority over the
> party apparatus, with Wagenknecht declaring himself "Executive
> Secretary Pro Tem." This effort was rebuffed by sitting Executive
> Secretary Adolph Germer and the party's Regular faction, however.
>
> The Communist Years (1919-1956)
>
> Wagenknecht was not eligible to participate in the seminal 1919
> Emergency National Convention of the SPA owing to the expulsion of the
> Socialist Party of Ohio from the party for their endorsement of the
> Left Wing Manifesto, which was portrayed by the Regular-dominated
> outgoing NEC as an automatic violation of the party constitution.
> Consequently, Wagenknecht cleverly rented a room downstairs from the
> SPA's convention at Machinists' Hall in Chicago and ran a parallel
> convention to the official one upstairs — a gathering which was joined
> by a steady stream of disgruntled Left Wing delegates bolting from the
> official gathering. Wagenknecht presided over this alternative
> convention, which on August 31, 1919, declared itself to be the
> founding convention of the Communist Labor Party. This convention
> elected Wagenknecht as National Secretary of the CLP, a role which he
> maintained throughout the organization's brief history.
>
> The CLP was devastated by the raids of the US Department of Justice
> headed by A. Mitchell Palmer and his Special Assistant, J. Edgar
> Hoover, coordinated actions which began in the fall of 1919 and
> reached their zenith with a mass operation conducted during the
> evening of Jan. 1/2, 1919. The CLP was driven underground, local
> organizations broken up into secret "groups" of no more than 10
> members who met furtively, using pseudonyms and attempting to avoid
> detection by the authorities. Wagenknecht was known variously as "Paul
> Holt," "A.B. Mayer," "A.B. Martin," and "U.P. Duffy" during the
> "underground years" of 1920-1923.
>
> In April 1920, Wagenknecht's former prisonmate, turned Executive
> Secretary rival, C.E. Ruthenberg left the Communist Party of America
> (CPA) along with a number of co-thinkers and a big portion of the
> organization's cash. This Ruthenberg-CPA and Wagenknecht's CLP finally
> determined to achieve the organizational unity demanded by the
> Communist International at a secret convention held at Bridgman,
> Michigan at the end of May 1920. This gathering determined to retain
> Wagenknecht as Executive Secretary of the new organization, called the
> United Communist Party (UCP), assigning the important role of Editor
> of the party's official newspaper, The Communist, to Ruthenberg.
> Wagenknecht also served on the UCP's Editorial Committee and on the 3
> member Unity Committee which continued to negotiate a merger agreement
> with the remaining CPA organization, headed by Charles Dirba. Unity
> with this group was finally forged at a May 1921 secret convention
> held at the Overlook Mountain House hotel near Woodstock, New York.
> Confusingly, this new unified organization retained the name
> "Communist Party of America," the same moniker shared by the Dirba
> majority and the Ruthenberg minority organizations.
>
> The merger of the UCP meant the end of Wagenknecht's tenure as an
> Executive Secretary. From June 1921, Wagenknecht served as the Manager
> of the unified CPA's "legal" weekly newspaper, The Toiler, with
> Wagenknecht's brother-in-law, Elmer Allison editing the publication.
> In 1922, a legal "mass organization" called the Friends of Soviet
> Russia was established by the unified CPA, and Wagenknecht was named
> by the CEC of the party to head it. He also sat on the Central
> Executive Committees of the (underground) unified CPA and the party's
> "Legal Political Party" — the Workers Party of America (WPA) — from
> 1922 to 1923, when the underground party was finally dissolved.
> Thereafter, Wagenknecht was made the District Organizer for the tiny
> Wilkes Barre district of the WPA, with this job beginning in May 1923.
>
> In 1924, Wagenknecht worked as a "Director of Special Campaigns" for
> the WPA, managing the fund-raising drive for The Daily Worker.
> Wagenknecht seems to have been difficult for both the
> Pepper-Ruthenberg-Lovestone and the Foster-Cannon-Lore factions and
> was shipped off to the Philippines to organize trade unions on behalf
> of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU) late in 1924.
>
> Later, Wagenknecht turned his hand to drama, producing and co-starring
> in The Passaic Textile Strike, a semi-fictional account of the 1926
> strike of 16,000 textile workers at Passaic, New Jersey, initially led
> by Wagenknecht and other American Marxist and Communist leaders.
>
> Wagenknecht was touted for the role of business manager of the Daily
> Worker in the last years of the 1920s as the “most competent comrade
> for the position” by the minority faction headed by William Z. Foster
> and Alexander Bittelman.[5] He was bypassed for the responsible
> position by a rapid succession of three others, however, who were
> selected for the post based upon their loyalty to the majority faction
> headed by Executive Secretary Jay Lovestone.[5] Lovestone singled his
> factional opponent Wagenknecht out for special criticism in the last
> pamphlet he published as head of the CPUSA, Pages from Party History,
> recalling Wagenknecht's "hesitation" and "wavering" over the
> "fundamental principle of splitting the Socialist Party" a decade
> earlier.[6]
>
> Wagenknecht was the executive secretary of the American section of the
> Comintern aid organization Workers International Relief in 1929 — a
> job which in June took him to Gastonia, North Carolina to the scene of
> the acrimonious Loray Mill Strike.[7] Wagenknecht was attempting to
> reestablish a tent colony of mill strikers which had been disbursed by
> local authorities. Instead, on June 12, Wagenknecht was himself
> arrested.[7]
>
> Wagenknecht separated from his wife Hortense in 1930 and was finally
> divorced in January 1948.
>
> With the coming of the Great Depression in 1929 and its deepening in
> subsequent years, the CPUSA began placing great emphasis on attempting
> to organize and mobilize unemployed workers. In November 1930,
> Wagenknecht was placed in charge of the National Campaign Committee
> for Unemployment Insurance, a single-purpose mass organization of the
> party aimed at organizing around the issue of unemployment
> insurance.[8] The group conducted a massive petitioning campaign which
> rapidly gathered what were claimed to be 1.4 million signatures, which
> Wagenknecht and a delegation of 140 presented to Congress on February
> 10, 1931.[8] The petition caused the House of Representatives to take
> up the matters of the Communists and their issue on the floor the next
> day, with conservatives arguing for efforts to deport alien radicals
> from America, while progressives such as Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia of
> New York argued in favor of unemployment insurance legislation as a
> means of curbing revolutionary sentiment.[9]
>
> In 1933, Wagenknecht served as the Executive Secretary of the National
> Committee to Aid Victims of German Fascism, a CP-sponsored "mass
> organization." In the fall of that year he ran for the New York State
> Assembly in District 14.[10]
>
> Wagenknecht was the State Chairman of the Communist Party in Missouri
> from 1938 to 1941 and in Illinois from 1941 to 1945.
>
> Death and legacy
>
> Wagenknecht remained a Communist Party loyalist for the rest of his
> days, dying on Aug. 26, 1956 in Illinois and honored at his passing
> with a full-page photograph inside the front cover of Political
> Affairs, the theoretical monthly of the Communist Party USA.
>
> Footnotes
>
> Jump up ^ See, for example: "Wag's Letter", The Socialist [Seattle],
> whole no. 341 (August 31, 1907), pg. 3.
> Jump up ^ Alfred Wagenknecht, "Pike Street Branch Notes," The
> Socialist [Seattle], whole no. 170 (November 8, 1903), pg. 2.
> ^ Jump up to: a b Richard Krueger, "Seattle Notes," The Socialist
> [Seattle], whole no. 320 (February 16, 1907), pg. 3.
> ^ Jump up to: a b "John Wanhope Withdraws: Alfred Wagenknecht Becomes
> Candidate for Congressman at Large," The Commonwealth [Everett, WA],
> whole no. 80 (July 12, 1912), pg. 1.
> ^ Jump up to: a b "Party Pre-Convention Discussion Section: The Right
> Danger in the American Party," The Daily Worker, vol. 5, no. 293
> (December 11, 1928), pg. 3.
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>> I always delete posts that contain only a link. If the sender isn't willing
>> to quote at least a substantial paragraph it is very doubtful that the site
>> is worth visiting.
>>
>> Carrol
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
>> On Behalf Of Bill Bartlett
>> Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2013 8:36 PM
>> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] americas-top-communists-of-all-time
>>
>> For crying out loud! That site is a nightmare to navigate and every time you
>> make a mistake you have to endure the same ad again. So I gave up in
>> disgust. I don't tolerate foolishness gladly, give it to me in plain text or
>> I'll give it a miss.
>>
>> Bill Bartlett
>> Bracknell Tas
>>
>>
>>
>> On 28/09/2013, at 10:35 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/americas-top-communists-of-all-time/2
>> 013/09/23/64d686a8-2072-11e3-b7d1-7153ad47b549_gallery.html#photo=13
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