[lbo-talk] americas-top-communists-of-all-time

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 30 05:17:27 PDT 2013


Helen Winter , another one of my favorite all time American Communists, was Alfred Wagenknecht's daughter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wagenknecht

http://www.cpusa.org/helen-winter-1908-2001/ Helen Winter 1908-2001 » cpusa www.cpusa.org

Helen Winter, a life-long member of the Communist Party, died Dec. 13.

Armando He managed the party book store (called Modern Book Store) in Chicago when I joined the party in 1948. It was Down Town on the first floor in a building where the party had its District office. Also the AYD(American Youth for Demacracy).

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:06 PM, Bill Bartlett <william7 at aapt.net.au> wrote:
> Good stuff.
>
> 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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