Earl Browder

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Earl Browder : biography

May 20, 1891 – June 27, 1971

Browder was aggressively opposed to World War I and publicly spoke out against it, characterizing the fighting as an imperialist conflict. After the United States joined the war in 1917, Browder was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act conspiring to defeat the operation of the draft law and nonregistration.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, pg. 309 Browder was sentenced to 2 years in prison for conspiracy and 1 year for nonregistration, sitting in jail from December 1917 to November 1918.

In 1919, Browder, Cannon and their Kansas City associates started a radical newspaper, The Workers World, with Browder serving as the first editor. In June of that year Browder was jailed again on a conspiracy charge, however, with Cannon taking over as editor. Browder’s second prison stint, served at Leavenworth Penitentiary, lasted until November 1920, putting him out of circulation during the critical interval when the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party quit the SPA to form the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. A series of splits and mergers followed, with the two Communist parties formally merging in 1921.

Released from prison at last, Browder lost no time in joining the United Communist Party (UCP), as well as the fledgling Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) being launched by his old associate William Z. Foster. Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, The Labor Herald.

In 1920 the Communist International (Comintern) headed by Grigory Zinoviev decided to establish an international confederation of Communist trade unions, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or "Profintern"). A founding convention was planned to be held in Moscow in July 1921 and an American delegation was gathered, including members of the American Communist Parties and the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, pg. 316 This trip to Soviet Russia incidentally proved decisive in bringing the syndicalist Foster over to the Communist movement.

Throughout the early 1920s, Browder and Foster worked together closely in the TUEL, trying to win over the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor in the establishment of a new mass Farmer-Labor Party that would be able to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Republican and Democratic parties.

In 1928, the estranged Browder and his girlfriend Kitty Harris went to China and lived in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of RILU’s Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in clandestine labor organizing. The pair returned to the United States in January 1929.James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997; pg. 37.

The fall of Lovestone

The year 1929 marked a major turn in the Communist Party of the United States of America. Party leader Jay Lovestone, having won a massive factional victory over the Chicago-based rival group headed by William Z. Foster at the 6th National Convention of the organization, ran afoul of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and the ultra-radical program which the member organizations of the Comintern were instructed to pursue. Lovestone headed a 10 member delegation to Moscow to appeal his case to the American Commission of ECCI; things did not go well for him and in the squabble over autonomy Lovestone attempted a factional coup involving the seizure of party assets.

On May 17, 1929, ECCI ordered the removal of Lovestone. He was replaced on a provisional basis by a five person secretariat which included former Lovestone associate Max Bedacht as "Acting Secretary" and well as opposition factional leader and trade union chief Bill Foster; two relatively independent figures in the persons of cartoonist-turned-functionary Robert Minor and former Executive Secretary of the underground party Will Weinstone; and Comintern Representative Boris Mikhailov (pseudonym "G. Williams") as the unpublicized power behind the throne.