NEW YORK (AP) -- In recent years, the most dangerous thing about the Communist Party USA may well have been an explosive item stashed away in a closet on Manhattan's West Side. "It could have blown up the street," Michael Nash, a New York University archivist, said tongue-in-cheek about a 1920s documentary film that was turning into volatile nitrate at the party's headquarters. The footage is part of the entire archives of America's Communist Party, donated last month to New York University.
Reaching back a century, the once secret materials shed new light on the "Red Scare" of the McCarthy era. The 2,000 boxes also contain evidence that American-born communists were crucial to the civil rights struggle, including women's and gay rights. Among the mysterious code words, personal letters, Lenin buttons and directives smuggled from Moscow, some prominent left-wing names pop up: Pete Seeger, Elia Kazan, Betty Goldstein (later Friedan), W.
E.B. Du Bois, John Dos Passos, Angela Davis, Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Paul
The archives offer a new take on some of America's hottest modern history. "The Communist Party is a fact," says a letter signed by its first American executive secretary, C.E.
Ruthenberg, on Sept. 18, 1919 in Chicago. A day later across the street, John Reed -- played by Warren Beatty in the film "Reds" as he reported on the Russian Revolution -- founded the rival Communist Labor Party, which soon joined the main party.
Almost a century later, the Communist Party USA is still alive in an eight-story building on Manhattan's West 23rd Street. Its 3,000 or so members include several Protestant ministers in Iowa, a young woman who leads its Young Communist League, and some elderly New York women who once spearheaded "the revolution," and now help stuff envelopes while offering passionate commentary. "Good morning, Communist Party!
" says the cheerful voice of Gabe Falsetta, who answers the phone at headquarters in Chelsea. About a mile downtown in the East Village are the 2,000 cardboard boxes, stored in a defunct Tower video shop near NYU's campus. Lining row after row of metal shelves, the boxes contain documents linked to Americans who were demonized by the U.
S. government for decades. There are also gems of popular culture.
On display in an NYU library are the handwritten lyrics to "Turn! Turn! Turn!
" -- a 1950 peace song by Pete Seeger, who told The Associated Press that he had been "a card-carrying party member." Also on display is the original will of songwriter and labor organizer Joe Hill, written in verse with a pencil just before his 1915 execution by firing squad in Utah, for a murder some believe he didn't commit. The verse, "My Will is easy to decide/For there is nothing to divide," later was part of a labor anthem.
Hill inspired Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, who sang "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" in 1969 at Woodstock. If the archives had been released, say, 25 years ago, "the first call we'd be getting would be from the FBI," said Nash, co-director of NYU's Center for the United States and the Cold War. The materials must now be catalogued for NYU's Tamiment Library, which specializes in the political left and labor.
The deteriorating silent-film footage remains a fine example of early documentary filmmaking -- about the 1926 strike by textile workers in Passaic, N.J., against wage cuts and for the right of free assembly.
Party members helped organize the first U.S. labor unions, while working for black rights in Mississippi and Alabama and providing legal defense for lynching victims, documents show.
"It's clear that the Communist Party played a central role in the civil rights battle, especially in the Thirties, and through World War II," Nash said. It wasn't until the 1950s that fears about "commie" subversives among ordinary Americans peaked in national hysteria fueled by Sen. Joseph McCarthy that is well documented in the archives.
Nash had no idea the archives existed when he first got a call from the Communist Party's national chairman, Sam Webb, about a year ago. Nash's NYU library team spent months at the party's offices. In sweltering heat, with the air conditioning mostly not working, they scoured the dusty letters, journals and pamphlets, plus 20,000 books and a million photographs from The Daily Worker and other party newspapers (their successor, the People's Weekly World, is still published).
"It was a mess, and we were sweating," said Nash. Webb said the donation "will ensure that the history of the Communist Party and its impact on American politics will be preserved for future generations." The New York Post called it "NYU's Red Love-in.
" Walking among the boxes, Nash pulled one out here and there, reaching in for the yellowed, aging documents and photos, some with cigarette burns. Robert Minor, a radical who was arrested in Manhattan's Union Square during a 1930 labor rally, noted that Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin had called America "a great country in some respects." Minor interviewed Lenin in 1918, typing up his observations.
He noticed that Lenin's top aides moved around Moscow in limousines and lived in mansions -- not quite the lifestyle of workers toiling under their supposedly egalitarian rule. The American communists weren't that fancy, instead sticking to the communist ideal of equality for all. At its peak, in the 1930s, the American party had as many as 100,000 members.
New York was a hub of radicalism, especially among intellectuals like Emma Goldman, who was a friend of Reed's. The closest the communists got to real power was to get members elected to municipal offices like the New York City Council. After 1948, the "Red Scare" ravaged their ranks, as did the 1956 revelations about Stalin's atrocities.
The Communists have occupied their Manhattan headquarters since 1977. They decided to donate the archives that filled several floors now rented to a record company, an art store and a real estate agent. That money is helping renovate the remaining floors into airy, avant-garde new party offices to be occupied this summer.
Libero Della Piana, a 35-year-old Harlem resident who calls himself "a big black Italian communist from Salt Lake City," is the chair of the New York State Communist Party. The Brown University graduate represents the party's new generation: "For us, the party is about the struggles in this county for peace, justice and equality. There's no question about loyalty to a foreign power.
News RSS