Robert W. Cherny, <i>San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919–1958</i>

Anyone interested in the activities of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in northern California and the Bay Area need not go any further than Robert Cherny's encyclopedic San Francisco Reds. Based on extensive interviews with veteran CPUSA members, archival research in the United States and Russia, and exhaustive familiarity with the secondary sources, Cherny's book covers everything. Each chapter is divided into sections with subheadings (sometimes only tangentially related to each other but handy for his readers). The chapter on the Popular Front has a brief section summarizing Communist civil rights activities during the Second World War next to a section on the California Un-American Activities Committee and the anti-Communist legislation passed in the years just before U.S. entry into the Second World War. Most chapters have a subsection on life in the party; these are among the best parts of the book. Cherny draws on the interviews he conducted over the years researching the party's history to bring the experience of being a Communist to life. He describes the challenge of managing endless meetings in the 1930s, the excitement of work with labor unions and mass organizations during the Popular Front, and the frustrations and uncertainty during the party's post-1945 collapse.In the introduction to San Francisco Reds, Cherny states that he will not spend much time writing about Harry Bridges because he already devoted an entire book to the famous longshoreman. Some discussion of Bridges is inevitable, however, especially in the early 1930s, when he emerged as a prominent figure on the waterfront associated with the Albion Hall group, a Marxist study group led by Sam Adams Darcy, the head of the CPUSA in California and one of the editors of The Waterfront Worker, a radical paper written by longshoremen for longshoremen. In Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend, Cherny goes to great lengths to claim that Bridges was not a member of the Communist Party. He repeats a portion of that argument here, but it is unconvincing. Among the documents uncovered in Moscow were a series of letters and reports from the members of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariate (PPTUS), an underground organization located in San Francisco in the early 1930s. One of these documents from the head of the PPTUS, an unknown individual code-named “Eddy,” states unambiguously that Bridges was a party member. Cherny disagrees and devotes a lengthy footnote to considering the veracity of Eddy's statement. In the text, however, Cherny advances a weaker argument, suggesting twice, once on page 50 and again on page 51, that Eddy did not exist and was just one of many cover names adopted by Harrison George, another PPTUS official who was a bitter critic of Sam Darcy. The footnote is well argued, and readers should judge for themselves. The attempt to dismiss Eddy as an invention of Harrison George is unconvincing and easy to disprove, insofar as George, in a 1934 letter to Earl Browder, complained bitterly about Eddy's behavior, not something he would do if he himself had been Eddie. The letter, from Fisher (one of George's cover names) to Browder, 9 June 1934, stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Fond 515, Op. 1, Delo 3613, List 128, is quoted in Vernon L. Pedersen, The Communist Party on the American Waterfront: Revolution, Reform and the Quest for Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), p. 81.Cherny's book varies in tone depending on the sources he uses. The first two chapters draw on heavily redacted Freedom of Information Act documents and Communist Party letters and reports preserved in RGASPI. Portions of these chapters seem like transcriptions of Cherny's research notes recounting the comings and goings of leading Communists and summarizing the contents of the party files and government documents. That said, these early chapters are some of the most important, presenting information unavailable anywhere else. Later chapters depend less on the RGASPI files and more on direct accounts from participants in the events Cherny describes. These sources give the closing chapters of San Francisco Reds an emotional intensity lacking in the early parts of the book.Cherny devotes three chapters to the end of his story, what he calls the crisis of the party. Each chapter treats a different, overlapping time period. Chapter 7 concerns the five years from 1945 to 1950, starting with the release of the “Duclos Letter” sharply criticizing Earl Browder's transformation of the Communist Party into the Communist Political Association during the heady days of the wartime Popular Front and concludes with the expulsions and faction fighting that consumed the CPUSA as the Cold War intensified. The one bright exception to the gloom of the post-1945 era was the California Labor School, which Cherny singles out as an example of the sadly lost, creative dynamism that characterized left-labor culture on the west coast. Chapter 8, “The Crisis Deepens,” covers the period from Henry Wallace's presidential campaign in 1948 to the Smith Act trials of ten national-level party leaders and the California hearings conducted by the California Un-American Activities Committee directed at Bay Area leaders. Cherny blames the party's venture into third-party politics for the expulsion of Communists and sympathizers from the CIO unions, where they had enjoyed significant support. Chapter 9, subtitled “The Collapse of the Old Left and After,” details the implosion of the California Party in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin.The book ends with a short section of poignant statements by many of the party members and former members covered throughout the book. Cherny claims that his informants could be critical of the party, but he does not quote any of their negative comments except for one mild statement about the need to be more independent minded. Instead, the comments he quotes are entirely positive; none of his respondents regretted the time spent in the party, regarding it instead as the most meaningful time in their lives, one that shaped everything they did and everything they became. This is the main problem with the book. Cherny recounts the history of the San Francisco Party but offers little critical assessment and instead lets his informants speak for themselves. Such an approach works up to a point, but San Francisco Reds would have benefited from more of Cherny's own input.