Earl
Browder, the son of William Browder, a schoolteacher, was born in
Wichita, Kansas, on 20th May, 1891. After an elementary schooling
he worked as a cash boy for the Wallenstein & Cohen Dry Goods
Company. When he was 15 he joined the Socialist
Party of America. Later he attended business college he found
employment as a bookkeeper for the Potts Drug Company.
Browder, like most members of the Socialist
Party, believed that the First World War
had been caused by the imperialist competitive system. Between 1914
and 1917 Browder made several speeches explaining why he believed
the United States should not join the war.
After the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, several party members, including Browder, were
arrested and charged with violating the Espionage
Act. Found guilty of opposing the draft, Bowder was imprisoned
(1917-18). When Browder was released he continued to campaign against
the war and was imprisoned for a second time (1919-20) .
In 1919 several members of the Socialist
Party left to form the American Communist
Party. This included John Reed, William
Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
Ella Reeve Bloor, Claude
McKay, Michael Gold and Robert
Minor. Originally a revolutionary party, it evolved into a group
advocating a popular front approach. Browder joined this new party
in 1921.
Browder became managing editor of the Communist newspaper, The
Labor Herald. He was appointed general secretary of the
American Communist Party in 1930 and
when William Z. Foster suffered a heart
attack in 1932, he became leader of the party. He was the party's
presidential candidate in 1936 but won only 80,195 votes. He also
stood in 1940 but the government imposed a court order forbidding
Browder to travel within the country. His campaign efforts were limited
to the issuing of written statement and the distribution of recorded
speeches. In the 1940 election he won only 46,251 votes.
In 1940 Browder was found guilty of passport irregularities and sentenced
to prison for four years. When the United States joined the Second
World War and became allies with the Soviet
Union, attitudes towards communism changed and Browder was released
from prison after only serving 14 months of his sentence.
When Browder controversially announced in 1944 that capitalism and
communism could peacefully co-exist, he lost his position as party
secretary. Two years later, after being criticised by leaders in the
Soviet Union, Browder was expelled from the American
Communist Party. He was later to argue: "The American Communists
had thrived as champions of domestic reform. But when the Communists
abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet Union openly contemptuous
of America while predicting its quick collapse, the same party lost
all its hard-won influence. It became merely a bad word in the American
language."
In April, 1950, Browder was called before the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee investigating communist influence in government. Questioned
by Joseph McCarthy, Browder was willing
to criticize the American Communist Party
but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades.
Charged with contempt of Congress, Judge F. Dickinson Letts, ordered
his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally.
Earl Browder, who wrote several books on politics including The
People's Front (1938), War or
Peace with Russia? (1947) and Marx
and America (1958), died in Princeton, New Jersey, on 27th
June, 1973.
(1)
Agnes
Smedley,
letter to Florence Lennon (23rd October
1921)
In Moscow, amid great poverty, Ella Reeve Bloor wore lace dresses
over silk coloured slips; also long strings of coloured beads, rings,
etc. And she lived with an idiot. Earl Browder, a young, dainty man
of some 25 or 26 who bought (and wore) baby-blue silk Russian smocks
in the market; and long black silk ribbons which he wore as belts.
And then he, with his baby white skin and fair toothbrush moustache,
posed in Moscow as the delegate from the Kansas miners. So help me
gawd!! It was awful! I was so disgusted I couldn't even protest. I
hate female men above all. And then to have them say they represent
miners when I know they haven't been within a thousand miles of a
mine. And Mother Bloor posed as the representative of five or six
organizations, from the far West to Massachusetts!
(2)
The Witchita Eagle (30th June, 1936)
Earl W. Browder, native Wichitan who was nominated to the
presidency of the United States Sunday on the Communist ticket, had
a leaning toward Socialist politics in his early youth, Wichita friends
recalled today.
Earl had a grade school education and before he attended business
college worked as a cash boy for the Wallenstein & Cohen Dry Goods
company. He was a mannerly boy, hard working, and a favorite with
the store's employees. Other members of the Browder family were also
in the employ of this company for a number of years, former friends
here recalled today.
After attending business college Earl secured a position as a bookkeeper
for the Potts Drug company. He was efficient and was the average young
man in a business office. He had a fair personality, his associates
recall, but his political ideas which then began to take shape, gave
him a different slant on life and after a time he left the drug company
in search for something better.
He secured a position in the bookkeeping department of the bank headed
by the late L.S. Naftzger and John Moore. Earl was then dividing his
time between his job and the activities in the Socialist party until
at length his political ambitions became too much for his employers
and he lost his job, so it was said by a former neighbor.
(3)
Cliff Stratton, Topeka Capital (September, 1936)
Browder is an interesting person. He has a keen sense of social
injustice, tho probably he would claim it is a sense of social justice.
In school at Wichita he was always insisting upon the rights of students
who were discriminated against by their teachers. He led fights for
student rights expression. He was the vocal friend of all underdogs
in school--and is such now in a much larger field.
So far as this election goes, Browder talks more like a New Deal orator,
than a dyed in the wool Communist--if dyed in the wool is the proper
adjective. Very frankly, Mr. Browder does not expect to win this election.
"The United States," he says, "is economically ready
for Socialism, but it is not politically ready for Socialism. The
division which is coming later is not yet clear to many Americans.
But the trend is such that it is only a matter of time until we have
honest division in the United States."
(4)
Kansas City Times (23rd January, 1940)
Earl Russell Browder, Kansas born Communist leader, was convicted
of passport fraud in federal court today and was sentenced to four
years in prison and fined $2,000.
The jury of eleven men and a young woman deliberated only forty-five
minutes after hearing Browder himself plead for his freedom for more
than an hour.
The sentence was pronounced immediately after the jury was polled
and a defense motion for delay was denied. It specified that 2-year
sentences on each of two counts must be served consecutively. The
maximum prison sentence would have been ten years.
Browder presented a defenseless case after acknowledging at the outset
that he had traveled incognito to and from conferences with Soviet
leaders in Moscow.
He was accused specifically of borrowing the names of three other
men and affixing them to passport visas.
(5)
Earl Browder, speech at New York City's Webster Hall on
30th March, 1950.
Marxism
is an interpretation of history which explains the progress of society
as a product of the expansion of the forces of production of the material
means of life, that is, the development of economy. The stage of the
development of the productive forces determines the political and
ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into
a system of social organization. The social system grows rigid but
the productive forces continue to expand, and conflict ensues between
the forces of production and the social conditions of production.
This conflict finally reaches a stage in which a fundamental change
of the social conditions becomes necessary to bring them in harmony
with the continued growth of production. This is the stage which produces
revolution, a relatively brief period in history in which outmoded
social forms are discarded and new ones are created which free the
shackled productive forces for a new leap forward in their expansion.
Marxism
traces this process in past history from the primitive tribal commune
through slavery, feudalism, early capitalism in the form of simple
artisan manufacturing, the rise of modern capitalism in power-driven
machinery, and the final stage of capitalism marked by huge trusts
and monopolies and the trend toward state capitalism, in which state
power becomes the collective capitalist. Marxism conceives of the
new system of socialism as the necessary outcome of all previous history
made possible and necessary only by that previous history. Because
capitalist society has expanded the productive forces so enormously,
the social conditions under which it arose lag behind and become fetters
holding back the further growth of productive forces.
Socialism
is nothing more nor less than the social, political and ideological
system which breaks the fetters upon economic growth created under
capitalism and opens the way to a new period of economic and social
expansion on a much larger scale. So long as bourgeois society, that
is, capitalism, reigned supreme throughout the world and dominated
the lands of free capitalist development, the dispute between various
schools of thought was conducted primarily on the level of theory,
that is, the struggle between ideas, as to which most correctly foreshadowed
the next stage of development in history which had still not appeared
in fact, in life.
The new
system called socialism came to power in Russia about one-third of
a century ago. It took over a backward, shattered and defeated country,
the chief laggard among the great powers. It had been defeated and
shattered precisely because of its backwardness, its huge heritage
of medieval reaction that had crushed the potentialities of progress
of its peoples for centuries, keeping its vast area and population
outside the main current of historical progress. Under its new system
called socialism, the Russian people and the smaller nationalities
which had formerly composed the Russian Empire speedily forged ahead
from last place among the great powers of Europe and Asia to a position
of unchallenged preeminence as the first. In the whole world, only
the USA is today at all comparable in power and influence with the
USSR. This radical transformation of world power relationships reflects
primarily in the case of both the USA and the USSR the growth of the
productive forces. Not only did the new socialist system overtake
and surpass all other powers in Europe and Asia; in its rate of growth
it has already surpassed America. In broad historical outline, this
fact is seen in the span of 150 years required for the rise of America
to its present position as one of the two world giants compared with
the span of 30 years required by the USSR to make the same transition.
(6)
Topeka Capital (9th March, 1951)
Earl Browder, one-time leader of the American Communist Party,
went on trial Thursday for contempt of Congress.
He is charged with refusing to answer questions last April 27 before
the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee investigating the Communists-in-Government
charges leveled by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.
Browder, taking over his own defense in U.S. District Court, pictured
himself as a "co-operative witness" who refused to answer
only questions he considered "improper."
In an opening statement to the jury, he admitted he declined to answer
16 questions put to him by Sen. Bourke B. Hickenloper. These questions
are the basis of the contempt indictment. Browder said he also declined
answers to another 10, but did respond readily to 66 queries put by
Hickenloper.
Most of the questions in the indictment dealt with a New York meeting
in 1945 between Browder and Tung Pi Wu, a Chinese Communist then a
member of the Chinese delegation to the conference that established
the United Nations.
Hickenloper wanted to know if others present included John Service,
State Department envoy; Owen Lattimore, Far Eastern expert, and Philip
Jaffe, editor of the now defunct Amerasia Magazine. Browder would
not reply.
(7)
Kansas City Times 15th March, 1960)
The breaking of a 15 year silence by Earl Browder, former
leader of the American Communist party, in an article written for
the March number of Harper's magazine comprises and interesting disclosure
of how Browder and his party were "purged" by Stalin in
1945.
The purging followed Browder's adoption of the principle of a stable
peace at the close of World War II based on the Tehran pact signed
by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill - Stalin "with tongue in cheek."
The pact, in Browder's view, implied the doctrine of co-existence
and, in principle, a repudiation of the cold war which "Stalin
adopted to take the place of the hot war then coming to a close."
Browder, now 68, a native of Wichita with three sons teaching mathematics
in American universities relates how his "apostasy" was
disclosed and his purge announced in the famous "Duclos letter,"
allegedly penned by Jacques Duclos in a French Communist journal in
1945, but actually Kremlin-dictated. This letter, widely circulated,
denounced Browder for interpreting the Tehran pact as a "political
platform for class peace in the United States - and sowing dangerous
opportunistic illusions."
He declares that the American Communist party "need not have
died such a shameful death as William Z. Foster (ultra-left sectarian
who succeeded him), under the inspiration of Stalin and the cold war,
inflicted upon it." He states that he had personally led an Americanization
trend in the party based on Jeffersonian principles and representing
a denial of Marxist dogmas.
"The Duclos letter," Browder writes, "halted and reversed
the process of Americanization. The party quickly turned anti-American.
Foster published a 'new history' of America, which was highly praised
in Moscow, translated in many languages and made a handbook of anti-American
propaganda all over the world.
"This extraordinary book interpreted the history of America from
its discovery to the present, as an orgy of 'bloody banditry' and
imperialism, enriching itself by 'drinking the rich red blood' of
other peoples. Foster even joined in the Thorez declaration (by Maurice
Thorez, French Communist leader: that if the Soviet armies found it
necessary to occupy all Western Europe the working people would greet
them as liberators; the only thing missing was a direct welcome to
Soviet armies in America itself.
"It was this that killed the Communist party. Its former mass
following melted away. Its membership shrank to a hard core of fanatics.
The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reforms.
But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet
Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse,
the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a
bad word in the American language."
Americans should realize, Browder believes, that "the only solid
representatives of Stalin among the American Communists were a little
band of 'old timers,' occupying strategic posts in the party apparatus.
For them communism was a religion, Stalin was Mohammed and Moscow
was Mecca.
(8)
Earl Browder, Harper's Magazine
(March, 1960)
The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.
But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet
Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse,
the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a
bad word in the American language.
I knew I could not maintain that leadership in open struggle against
Moscow influence. Only two Communist leaders in history ever succeeded
in doing this - Tito and Mao Tse-tung. I confined my resistance to
the Duclos Letter to declaring publicly that it was a disastrous mistake
which I would never approve. But I made no efforts to organize my
supporters to hold on to the apparatus. Consequently I was soon expelled
and my followers, who did not change coats overnight, quietly left
or were expelled from the party.
I have opposed the Communist cold war line ever since, both by public
utterance and by private help to trade unionists breaking free from
the Communist influence. I abandoned the party apparatus to Stalin's
adherents in order to prevent them from capturing the party's former
mass influence almost a decade I have not considered myself a Communist,
nor even a Marxist in the dogmatic sense.
By the 1950s, my break with the Russians had led me into a basic re-examination
of Marxist theory, and I followed in Marx's footsteps with the declaration:
'I am not a Marxist.' My personal revolution in thinking is, of course,
of importance only as an example of how the shattering years of the
cold war have broken up the old patterns of thought - behind the iron
curtain as profoundly as in the West, although there it is revealed
mainly in the lightning flashes of mass discontent and revolts.
What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the
conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world,
and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by
any supposed national interest. I can only hope that Khrushchev's
new line of talk portends a new line of action to which America can
respond in kind. Such hopes are, however, tempered by years of disillusioning
memories, which remind us all that it takes two sides to make a peace.
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