Forgotten Radicals: Communists in the Pennsylvania Anthracite, 1919-1950

Abstract

Forgotten Radicals tells the story of the Communist party in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania from the end of World War I until the beginning of the McCarthy period. Like so much of Communist history, this is a book about a small group of committed radicals, labor militancy, and the successful efforts by anticommunists to destroy the party and the radical tradition that it represented. The broad outlines of Walter T. Howard's narrative are very familiar. He tells of the Communist party's emergence from the 1919 split in the Socialist Party of America; its roots in the southern and eastern European foreign-language federations; the Comintern's role in imposing discipline, particularly during the so-called Third Period when the party worked to create a network of militant trade unions to contest the authority of the mainstream labor movement; and the party's meltdown during the post-World War II red scare. Howard demonstrates that while the anthracite Communists followed the Comintern's instructions, they usually operated in ways that were sensitive to local conditions as they attempted to give voice to rank-and-file militancy. For example, during the early 1920s, when the directive was to “bore from within,” the Communists worked closely with the opponents of United Mine Workers (umw) President John L. Lewis and played prominent roles in the “Save the Union Movement.” Similarly, between 1928 and 1934, when the party directed its members to create dual unions in opposition to the American Federation of Labor, the anthracite Communists supported the National Miners Union, but they operated in a way that emphasized practical objectives such as higher wages and improved working conditions while maintaining their ties to the dissidents within the umw. Recognizing the futility of organizing a union to compete with the umw, the anthracite Communists devoted most of their energy and resources to organizing the unemployed. They created a Workers Alliance that welcomed the involvement of Socialists and other progressives. It was this leadership in the fight for the rights of the unemployed during the depths of the Great Depression that led to the party's greatest success in the anthracite region. While it is doubtful that membership ever exceeded four hundred, Communist-led unemployment marches often attracted as many of five thousand participants.