Last week, we discussed Socialism as a political party and electoral entity throughout American history. This week, we’ll discuss Communism in the same regard.
History and Origin
The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was started in 1919, effectively concurrent with the Russian Revolution. It evolved from the left wing of the extant Socialist Party of America (SPA), but the CPUSA’s goal was to establish socialism in the U.S. by means of Marxist-Leninist policies. CPUSA also aligned itself with the Communist International (Comintern), which was controlled by the Soviet Union at the time.
Less like its socialist counterpart, the CPUSA operated mostly in secret, and not without its factional schisms. The U.S. government almost immediately viewed the party as a threat, which promulgated the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920. The raids were conducted by the Department of Justice under President Woodrow Wilson (D-NJ), with the goal being to capture and arrest suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists and deport them from the country. The raids were named for their leader, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (D-PA). The Palmer Raids arrested about 6,000 people across thirty-six cities, with Italian anarchists, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and labor leaders the primary targets – many of whom were immigrants and left-wing labor activists.
The Palmer Raids saw 556 foreign citizens deported, although the bulk of the raids and deportations were harangued by officials within the Department of Labor who objected to the applied methods.
The Palmer Raids were a large part of the First Red Scare, a period of reactionary fear to Communism in the U.S. immediately following World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Despite the raids, the CPUSA increased its base among workers, immigrants, and black voters, with membership growing further during the Great Depression. Leaders William Z. Foster, of Massachusetts, and Earl Browder, of Kansas, organized primarily through labor strikes and anti-fascist movements. Foster and Browder would later fall out over opposing political strategies. Foster advocated for a radical, class-struggle platform, while Browder fought for a position on “national unity” and cooperation with capitalist influencers. Foster would later move to the USSR, where he died in 1961. He was given a state funeral in Red Square.
The CPUSA would cool their efforts slightly in the 1930s, supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (D-NY) New Deal policies. The shift allowed their base to grow, garnering some 70,000 members by the late 1930s. The CPUSA would oppose U.S. involvement in World War II in 1939, but later supported it after Germany involved the Soviet Union in 1941.
Soviet Espionage
The CPUSA would be used as a vehicle for the Soviets – namely their intelligence agencies, including the KGB. The Soviets used resident spies – mostly American Communists – to spy on the U.S. and the government through multiple rings. The rings would transmit confidential information back to Moscow, particularly of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project. Spies also proliferated propaganda operations with the hope of severing diplomatic ties between the U.S. and its allies.
Earl Browder would work as an agent recruiter on behalf of Soviet intelligence. Soviet agents would take up illegal residency in the U.S. and use false passports to travel between the nations. Browder would also make use of falsified travel documents. Jacob Golos, a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and secret police member of the USSR, would also take a senior official position in the CPUSA. Browder would fund a company called World Tourists, established by Golos, to facilitate travel between the U.S. and the USSR. World Tourists posed as a travel agency to fly under the radar. Golos would later plead guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent in 1940. He was fined $500 ($11,000 today) – and served probation in lieu of a four-month prison sentence.
Browder would also preside over the Perlo group, a set of agents working within several departments and agencies of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C.
Once the espionage became publicly known, the CPUSA would face serious headwinds at the start of the Cold War. The Smith Act was used during the Second Red Scare to prosecute leaders of the party. By the 1950s, the CPUSA’s numbers were down to about 10,000. It would remain relevant in the tumultuous era of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to civil rights, the labor movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War.
Communism on the Ballot
The CPUSA would first nominate a candidate in 1924. William Z. Foster was the nominee, receiving just 0.1% of votes – 38,669 of nearly 29 million ballots cast; Calvin Coolidge (R-MA) won the election in a landslide. He ran under the Workers Party of America line. Foster would run again in 1928, again receiving 0.1% of the nationwide vote. This time, Herbert Hoover (R-IA) was soundly elected.
Foster ran again in 1932, this time receiving 0.3% of the nationwide vote as Franklin D. Roosevelt ousted Hoover in a landslide.
Earl Browder would then pick up the mantle, taking in just 0.2% of the national vote in 1936 and 0.1% in 1940; both elections saw FDR win in landslides.
In 1948 and 1952, CPUSA ran no official candidates. Instead, they endorsed former Vice President Henry Wallace (D-MN) in 1948, with Wallace being seen as too liberal for his party at the time – and Vincent Hallinan, of California, in 1952. Hallinan would run with Charlotta Bass, of Rhode Island, the first black woman to receive a vice presidential nomination.
CPUSA presidential candidates received 0.1% of the national vote or less in every election from 1968 to 1984.
Communists have had much less luck at winning elected office than the Socialists have, especially on the local level, but some have still gotten through.
The CPUSA saw their peak during the former half of the Twentieth Century, with State House and Senate seats going to Democratic Party members who were secret members of the Communist Party. Examples include William J. Pennock and Kathryn Fogg, both of Washington who were elected to the State House in the 1940s. Some, however, were more open, with A.C. Miller, of North Dakota, who served in the State House from 1925 to 1927. A Workers Party member, Miller was one of the first open Communists to win elected office in the United States.
Another example is William F. Dunne, of Montana, who served as the editor of the Butte Bulletin in the 1920s and an editor of the Daily Worker, the daily newspaper of the CPUSA. Benjamin Gitlow, of the Bronx, was a founding member of the CPUSA. He served one year in the New York State Assembly. Seymour Stedman served in the Illinois State House from 1913 to 1915. He would later run as a vice presidential candidate in 1920 with Socialist Eugene V. Debs.
The CPUSA would also capture some local elected offices as well, predominantly throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
As of 2025, just three members of the CPUSA hold local elected office. Luisa de Paula Santos, a registered Independent but open Communist Party member, was elected to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, School Committee in 2025. Her term ends in January 2028. Hannah Shvets was elected to the Ithaca Common Council, Ward 5, this year. She ran as a Democrat, but is an open Communist Party member. Daniel Carson was recently elected to the City Council of Bangor, Maine. He ran as an Independent, but is openly Communist.
Communists have also been elected as recently as 2002 in local positions.
It’s worth noting that the vast majority of Communists who won elected office were either present or former members of the Democratic Party, a move they saw as a way to galvanize voters as part of the big tent party that dominated elections in the 1930s and 1940s.
They utilized the “popular front” approach as a means to unite liberal Democratic Party members to combat fascists and anti-New Deal Republicans. The labor movement was also heavily rooted in the Democratic Party at the time, a key constituency of the Communist Party. Communists of the day also saw defeating the “far-right” as a top priority, which meant working within or around the Democratic Party.
The CPUSA Today
The party is headed by Co-Chairs Joe Sims, of New York City, and Rossana Cambron, of Los Angeles. Both have been life-long activists in many social and labor movements.
Sims has been involved in Communist politics since the 1980s, serving first as a section chairman for the Young Workers Liberation League in Washington, D.C., and attended the CPUSA’s Milwaukee conference in 1982. He also participated in the World Federation of Democratic Youth Festival in Berlin in 1973, as well as in Moscow in 1985, and Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1989.
In 1998, Sims was part of the effort to establish the Black Radical Congress. In 2000, he served as the New York United contact for the group, and in 2001, served on the Black Radical Congress Journal’s BRC Today editorial board. He has been a People’s World co-editor since 2015. In 2021, he and several other CPUSA members started the reform of the African American Equality Commission, in which they sought to recruit members within the black community and help the “CPUSA strengthen the theoretical framework for a Marxist/Leninist understanding of the current struggles of the black community in the USA.”
The party has about 22,200 registered members and is headquartered in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
