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

In Hammer and Hoe, his classic study of Communism in Depression-era Alabama, historian Robin D. G. Kelley illustrated that the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who organized in and around Birmingham were guided primarily by the needs of Black working people in Alabama, rather than by fidelity to Soviet policy. Distance from both Moscow and CPUSA headquarters in New York meant that party members often needed to act without guidance from the top. If this meant that local organizers did not always follow the best practices of Soviet Marxism-Leninism—for example, opening their meetings with a reading from the Bible—it was also what allowed them to develop inroads with the state’s poor and working-class Black population, including helping to lay the groundwork for much of the civil rights organizing of the 1950s and beyond.Though they diverge in significant ways, Robert Cherny’s San Francisco Reds—the first book-length history of the Communist Party in the Bay Area—echoes Kelley’s work in exploring the lives of activists navigating between the needs of their communities and the demands of international communism, as they worked to build a politics that was responsive to both. Drawing on research in Russian state archives as well as FBI files and a trove of interviews and memoirs to reconstruct the political biographies of roughly forty Bay Area Communists, Cherny shows that in San Francisco as in Birmingham, organizers were most successful either when international policy and local politics aligned, or when physical distance from the organs of power meant that strategies were dictated primarily by conditions on the ground, rather than by efforts to conform to Stalinism.Key to this story is Sam Darcy. Head of the California district of the CPUSA from 1931 to 1935—a time when the Comintern derided the New Deal as a social-fascist “Attack Upon the Toiling Masses”—Darcy deviated from the party line by meeting working people where they were. Accused by hardliners of “tailism,” “economism,” and “opportunism” (60), Darcy shot back that the sectarian rhetoric of the party’s organizers often alienated would-be recruits. “How shall we judge our policy?” Darcy pointedly asked CPUSA head Earl Browder. “By its academic corresponding to some formula, or by the results which our policy achieves in advancing the militant mass movement?” (55) In a 1996 interview with Cherny, Darcy recalled his exasperation when told that he needed to step up attacks on Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for governor in 1934. “What the hell is wrong with you guys?” he recalled saying. “You want [Frank] Merriam [the Republican candidate] to be the governor of California?” (62)In these internal debates, Darcy demanded the sort of approach that the party ultimately did embrace during the Popular Front (1935–1939), when the CPUSA positioned itself at the left-most edge of the political mainstream, rather than outside of it. Like many historians of the Old Left, Cherny finds much to admire in the relative openness and flexibility of the Popular Front, and much to condemn in the ideological rigidity of both the “Third Period” (1928–1933) and the Cold War years.1Cherny finds the Bay Area party’s greatest successes occurred where local activists were able to carve out spaces of partial independence from party discipline, particularly when this meant working in coalition with sympathetic non-Communists to improve the lives of working people. All too often, however, these victories were short-lived, frustrated by the machinations of party leadership. The history of the California Labor School (CLS) is a prime example of this phenomenon. Directed by Dave Jenkins, the CLS was an institution that, though “always present[ing] a Marxist-Leninist approach to the social sciences,” managed to “attract thousands of non-Communist students” who were treated to lectures by such luminaries of the Left as W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Pete Seeger (151). Offering benefits under the GI Bill and credits for San Francisco teachers, the CLS was the jewel of the Bay Area’s left-liberal culture, until it began to wither under attacks from a President Truman eager to establish his anti-Communist bona fides, and from a party leadership that charged Jenkins with “[r]otten liberalism and opportunist tolerance of anti-Party and degenerate elements” (166).San Francisco Reds is strongest when providing insight into the motivations of figures like Darcy and Jenkins: activists whose political commitments drew them to the only force that they believed capable of forging a more decent world, and who remained loyal to this vision long after they parted ways with Communism. Decades after the party’s collapse, Cherny found no examples of former CPers moving to the political right, and none who regretted their time with the party. “To witness an injustice and do nothing,” wrote activist and Spanish Civil War veteran Bill Bailey in his 1993 memoir, “that is the biggest crime” (203). Through these recollections, Cherny cuts against what remains of the narrative that American Communists were little more than the loyal foot soldiers of a tightly centralized conspiracy.While Cherny succeeds in getting the reader to share in the frustration of activists whose efforts were undermined by petty factionalism or insistence on doctrinal purity, there are times when the commitment to laying all blame for the CP’s failures on the party’s tendency to “[isolate] itself from the political mainstream” (160) leads him to skip important context. For example, a discussion of the election of 1948 offers no explanation for why party members might have backed Henry Wallace beyond the party’s “self-destructive” tendencies (161–64). This is one of several instances where a wider view of the politics of the moment would have been useful. Though it’s true that stalwart progressives like Walter Reuther condemned Wallace as a Communist stooge, his campaign received over a million votes at a time when CP membership was roughly 75,000. Whether or not it was strategically wise, there are clearly reasons beyond party loyalty why both Communists and non-Communists who were sincere in their hopes for racial egalitarianism and international cooperation might have cast their ballots for Wallace.If the afterlives of Communist organizing in 1930s Alabama are visible in the Black Freedom struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, the legacy of Communism in the Bay Area is more ambiguous. Ironically, the most direct impact Cherny uncovers may have been the civil liberties case law that developed due to state persecutions of Bay Area Communists like William Schneiderman, Archie Brown, and Roscoe Quincy Proctor. Among other things, these cases established that membership in the CP was insufficient proof of disloyalty to the Constitution, and that laws banning party members from holding positions in labor unions were a violation of the right of union members to select their own officers. Veterans of the CP also played a role in moving San Francisco toward a more liberal politics in the 1960s and ’70s and had some impact on the New Left that emerged alongside the final collapse of the Old. Though here it would be interesting to read more about the relationship between veterans of the CP and leading radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, including those associated with the Communist party like Angela Davis. This lack of detail on the period beyond the end of the 1950s notwithstanding, San Francisco Reds is the most thorough treatment we have on the history of Communism in the Bay Area, and a vital resource for anyone interested in learning more about San Francisco’s Old Left.