Bimba, Anthony
Rudolph Baranik
BIMBA, ANTHONY (1894–1982). Leading Lithuanian American radical activist, journalist, and Communist labor historian, Antanas “Anthony” Bimba,, Jr., was among the handful of immigrant Left leaders known widely outside their communities. Born in Rokìškis, the son of a skilled wood carver of sacred images, Bimba arrived in the United States in 1913, working in a New Jersey steel mill and a Maine paper mill before becoming a truck driver for a cooperative bakery. In 1915 he enrolled at Valaparaiso University (Indiana), then a popular spot for Lithuanian immigrants bent on self-improvement. He studied history and sociology and joined the socialist movement. He began writing for Lithuanian Left publications, was arrested for a speech to Gary steelworkers in 1918, and was expelled from Valparaiso the following year. He moved to New York to become editor of Darbas, the Lithuanian-language organ of Amalgamated Clothing Workers Local 54.
Soon a committed Communist, Bimba became national secretary of the Lithuanian federation and edited Kova, its organ. He led the federation’s merger with the communist movement and in 1922 became editor of the Lithuanian Communist daily Laisve, a post he retained until his death in 1982. Only Paul Novick, editor of the Yiddish Morgen Freiheit, had a longer tenure in the U.S. Left press. Bimba also edited the quarterly cultural journalist Sviesa from 1936 onward. He wrote more than twenty books in Lithuanian, his earliest, published in 1923, a description of working women’s condition.
As a public Communist spokesman, Bimba was notable first for his 1926 arrest—the earliest in the United States—under 1919 laws forbidding seditious utterance. The case was dropped. In 1927 Bimba’s History of the American Working Class Movement marked the American Communist’s entry into the writing of working-class history. Rigidly doctrinaire, Bimba’s history was nevertheless more single-mindedly class oriented than later Communist versions, and remained the standard, through a second edition, for almost a decade. His Molly Maguires (1931), a slight text, commemorated the miners’ uprising. In short, Bimba the Lithuanian American journalist had also been the first substantial American Communist historian.
Further reading
“Bimba Library Acquired.” Spectrum 5 (Winter 1988).
Mizara, Eva. Interview. Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library, New York University.
Raguotis, Bronius, Antanas Bimba: Gyvenimo, Veiklos, Kurybos Bruozai Vilnius, Lithuania: Mintis, 1974.
Anthony Bimba Papers, University of Minnesota Archival Collections.