Bedacht, Max

BEDACHT, MAX (1883–1972). One of the leading functionaries of the American Communist Party from the 1920s through the 1940s, Max Bedacht was born in Munich, Bavaria, to an unmarried ethnic German woman who worked as a domestic servant. He was raised by his mother’s brother and his wife before being apprenticed at a young age to a shoemaker, eventually escaping to a less oppressive apprenticeship to a barber.

After serving his time and gaining journeyman status, Bedacht traveled throughout Germany and Switzerland, cutting hair and helping to establish a trade union for his fellow journeymen barbers.

Bedacht was politically active from a young age, joining the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland in 1905 and elected president of the national barber’s union in 1907. A failed effort to launch a cooperative shop forced a hasty emigration to the United States in 1908 to beat a landlord’s breach of contract suit. There he immediately joined the Socialist Party of America and continued to work as a barber.

After a few years, Bedacht moved from the service industry to a career in journalism, landing in San Francisco in June 1913 as editor of the Vorwärts der Pacific Küste (Forward of the Pacific Coast). He would remain in this position until the paper was shut down by the US Post Office as part of its anti-German and anti-radical campaign during World War I.

Already sentimentally drawn to the anti-reformist “impossibilist” wing of the Socialist Party, Bedacht was further radicalized by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. He was an early and fervid supporter of the organized Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party in 1919 and stood for election to the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in 1919 as a candidate of the left wing.

Elected to attend the 1919 emergency party convention in Chicago as part of the California delegation, Bedacht was active in leading the walkout of left wing delegates to form the Communist Labor Party and was elected to its five-member National Executive Committee. He ran afoul of the US Department of Justice during the so-called Palmer raids of 1920 but did not ultimately serve prison time.

In 1921 Bedacht was sent to Soviet Russia as the Communist Party of America’s delegate to the Communist International under the pseudonym “James A. Marshall.” He was elected a delegate of the American party to the Third (1921) and Fourth (1922) congresses of the Comintern, after which he returned to the United States.

A close political associate of factional leader C. E. Ruthenberg, Bedacht was one of the top figures of the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction in Chicago during the bitter internal party war of the 1920s. He was part of the ten-member committee chosen by Workers (Communist) Party in 1929 to defend the position and policies of party leader Jay Lovestone before the Executive Committee of the Comintern. After Lovestone defied Comintern authority and moved to initiate a formal party split, Bedacht adroitly recanted his previous views, denouncing Lovestone and his factional associates, thereby remaining in the good graces of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Comintern leadership.

As a repentant Lovestone factionalist, Bedacht made an ideal caretaker leader for the newly rebranded Communist Party of the United States of America during the second half of 1929. He served as first among equals on the party’s Secretariat for about a year, before being shunted aside in favor of Earl Browder, regarded by Moscow as having greater political reliability. The talented Bedacht was moved out of the Communist Party’s inner leadership circle and inserted as chief the International Workers Order, ostensibly a mass organization fulfilling the role of a fraternal benefit society for the party’s extensive ethnic membership. Bedacht would retain this position for the better part of two decades.

Bedacht was expelled from the Communist Party in 1948, a casualty of factional battles that swept the party in the post-World War II years. He was reinstated to the party’s good graces in 1960, spending his declining years writing a book-length memoir, On the Path of Life, which remains unpublished.

Anti-Communist writer Whittaker Chambers claimed that Bedacht had solicited him to serve Soviet intelligence in the summer of 1932 in an underground capacity, a charge which Bedacht vehemently denied. The extent of Bedacht’s relationship to Soviet intelligence remains to be uncertain.

Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.

Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1960.

Zumoff, Jacob A. The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929. Chicago: Haymarket Books, Reprint Edition, 2015.

Max Bedacht, 1883-1972 Library. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bedacht/index.htm