San Francisco Communists Built Union Power
The Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer provided a brief, mass entertainment look into the motivations of Americans joining the Communist Party in the 1930’s and 40’s. The film hints at what Robert W. Cherny achieves in his landmark new book, San Francisco Reds. Cherny gives the most complete analysis yet on what motivated many incredibly smart and dedicated Bay Area activists to literally follow a Communist Party (CP) line.
The book also offers lessons for today’s activist movements. For as much as talk of the CP seems like ancient history, the CP’s thoughtful and analytical activist approach offers a positive model for today.
A Comprehensive Study
Cherny discusses fifty CP members to offer a comprehensive breakdown of who were the key CP players in San Francisco during the years covered by his book (1919-1958). It’s a remarkably thorough and deeply-researched accomplishment.
It’s also good reading. It covers an era overlapping the Popular Front when CP members embraced President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. It was a time of rising union power, and CP members played key roles. The period also covers the Hitler-Stalin Pact and 1948 presidential election, both of which triggered major internal conflicts within the Party.
I suspect most potential readers of this book will be familiar with the basic outlines of CP activities during this period. So I will not repeat them.
It’s rather jarring in 2024 to read about activists being bound by a firm set of policies/principles. Policies and principles they may have strongly disagreed with yet were required to promote. There really was a CP “Line.” Smart and savvy activists willingly subsumed their personal views to what they saw as stronger and more accurate policies promoted out of Moscow.
The New Left never accepted a Party line. Post-1960’s activism has not been driven by a central party platform.
For good reason. Cherny shows how the Party line could change literally overnight. An American CP leader followed the Party line in the 1948 Presidential race (the choice between Democrat Truman or Henry Wallace as a third-party) but then was subsequently reprimanded for doing so.
Cherny traces the intellectual challenges many CP members felt during these years. He includes biographical summaries of the fifty key activists, enabling readers to learn what they did in their post-Party lives. As in my assessment of the post-UFW careers of farmworker activists in Beyond The Fields, most CP alums remained active in progressive politics.
Potential Lessons
The CP’s reliance on study groups, frequent evening meetings, and complete life absorption into “the movement” does not reflect today’s activist movements. But there are at least two parts of the CP’s approach that could benefit activists today.
First, many of today’s activist movements are not designed for sustainability. Unlike both the CP and the UFW, names of rally and protest attendees are not kept and attendees are not directly contacted about the next event. Being “organized” and keeping records now seems suspect; yet that’s how movements are built and sustained over time.
Second, “activism” today has become more about chanting, camping, marching and sending a visual and physical message than it is about activists analyzing and debating policies. Even talking about having policy meetings seems outdated!
I understand this shift. The Communist Party went overboard on the “intellectual” side of activism. That’s one reason many 1960’s activists went a different direction. But as Cherny points out, CP members understood there was a big picture beyond the particular protest or election.
CP members were committed to a class struggle. What kept these activists going through government repression and terrible, anti-progressive actions coming out of Moscow was the belief that they were on the right track to bring greater social justice.
Cherny’s San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1938 offers the definitive account of a memorable period of U.S. and San Francisco history. He gives a much needed, complete picture of a widely misunderstood movement, which is the most we can ask from an historian.
Filed under: Book Reviews
