Communist Party USA

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is one of several Marxist-Leninist groups in the United States. While the CPUSA played a significant role in organizing industrial unions and defending the rights of African-Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, it was effectively eliminated as a political force by McCarthyism and the Cold War.

The Red Scare and the underground party (1919-1923)

From its inception, the Communist Party USA came under attack from state and federal governments and later the FBI. In late 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, acting under the Sedition Act of 1918, began arresting thousands of party members, particularly the foreign-born, whom the government deported. The Communist Party was forced underground and went through various name changes to evade the authorities.

Related Topics:
FBI - A. Mitchell Palmer

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During the early 1920s, the party apparatus was to a great extent underground. It reemerged in 1923 with a small legal above ground element, the Workers Party of America. As the Red Scare and deportations of the early 1920s ebbed, the party became bolder and more open. An element of the party, however, remained permanently underground. It was through this underground party, often commanded by a Soviet official operating as an illegal in the United States, that Soviet intelligence was able to co-opt CPUSA members.

Related Topics:
Workers Party - Red Scare

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By 1930 it adopted the title Communist Party of the USA, recruited more disaffected members of the Socialist Party and an organization of African-American socialists called the African Blood Brotherhood, some of whose members would later play important roles in communist work among blacks.

Related Topics:
African-American - African Blood Brotherhood

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