Weisbord, Albert and Vera Buch Weisbord

WEISBORD, ALBERT (1900-1977) and VERA BUCH WEISBORD (1895-1987). This dynamic couple long occupied, in the minds of observers, a singular status as insular Chicago Marxists within a Left world rife with organizational divisiveness.

The more famous of the two, Albert Weisbord, was a Russian-Jewish manufacturer’s son born in New York at the turn of the new century. Like so many others, he attended CCNY, and joined the Young People’s Socialist League. A natural educator, he taught at the Rand School as he gained a law degree, graduating in 1924. By that time, however, he was prepared to lead the majority of YPSL into the Communist Party. Two years later, he reached the apex of his fame, a dynamic organizer at the Passaic, New Jersey, textile Strike of 1926.

Like so many others, Weisbord was damaged by the factional brawling of the Communist Party through the second half of the 1920s, and by the Comintern in his own short-lived international adventures. For a time the leader of a doomed left wing textile workers union, he was hurtled from the Communist Party in 1929, soon joining the Trotskyist opposition. There, too, although holding many of the same beliefs, he received little satisfaction. Formation of the Communist League of Struggle, in 1931, led to further isolation. A prolific author on many subjects, he devoted himself in later years to his magnum opus, The Conquest of Power: Liberalism, Anarchism, Syndicalism, Fascism and Communism (1937) and settled in for a decades-long insular existence.

Vera Buch, another child of New York, attended Hunter College and shortly after, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At a sanitarium, she began to study political economy. Recovering physically, she shifted to Caldwell, New Jersey, and became involved with the Socialist Party and the IWW, Buch earned her stripes as an organizer in the Passaic strike. Afterward, she moved with to Detroit with Albert, editing labor newsletters. As an organizer for the leftwing textile union, she played a prominent role in the Loray Mill Strike of Gastonia, North Carolina, 1929, where with others she was arrested and charged with conspiracy and murder before the charge was thrown out.

The expulsion of Albert Weisbord from the Communist Party deprived Vera, too, of life in the political mainstream of the Left. But in important ways, she proved more adaptable than Albert, who she married only in 1938. In later decades a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, she became a painter, but also returned to political activity in local civil rights movements. Her memoir accounts a political life with her husband but also with her own unique experiences.

Weisbord, Vera Buch. A Radical Life. Introduction by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977.

Albert and Vera Weisbord Archives, Internet Archives, http://www.weisbord.org