Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-1935

Abstract

Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-1935. By Randi Storch. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 297. $25.00.) In previous accounts of American Communism during the Third Period (1928-'35), the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and its members were often painted as rigidly sectarian and staunchly dogmatic. While this was indeed often the case, Randi Storch, in Red Chicago, urges readers to move beyond this simplistic view by arguing that the period was not as sectarian as once believed, nor were orders given by party leaders in Moscow carried out unwaveringly and robotically by party faithful on the grass-roots level. Storch not only uses the records of the Chicago Communist Party to discern the degree to which local Communist Party members in Chicago did indeed accept orders, but also to what degree they dismissed these orders in favor of a more localized, personalized, and relevant agenda in the effort to organize local people, mainly workers, into the party. While Storch utilizes a multitude of primary sources in offering her analysis, most noteworthy is her use of the recently released archives of the Communist Party in Moscow organized as the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. These archives include the records of local Communist Party chapters outside of Russia. Storch uses these records to analyze the involvement of Chicago's Communists in such organizations as the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the Young Communist League (YCL), as well as their large-scale participation in the rent strikes during the early years of the Great Depression. As a result of this analysis, Storch persuasively argues that the Third Period, on the local level, included many characteristics that have been traditionally attributed to the era of the Popular Front. She shows that Chicago Communists in the period learned to work with liberals and nonCommunists and in the process developed successful organizing tactics and fought for worker's rights, racial equality, and unemployment relief and against imperialism. (2) Storch also challenges the standard narrative offered by various revisionist scholars, many of whom over- romanticized the CPUSA by depicting] Communists as idealized, organic radicals. (3) One of the ways in which she does this is by providing a candid analysis that shows that many Communist activists in Chicago made mistakes that discredited the movement, such as physically attacking workers who were deemed social fascists because they neglected to view working conditions in step with Communists or in establishing a revolutionary trade-union policy that only served to alienate the majority of Chicago's working-class. …