Young Communist League

YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE. The Young Communist League (YCL), Labor Youth League (LYL), Du Bois Clubs (DBC), Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL), and (most recently) renamed YCL have operated as the youth wing of the Communist Party. In more successful times, they reached considerable numbers of youth beyond ordinary Left circles and exerted a nearly independent force within the social movements of the day. In most times, they provided a youth corps of future Party activists and leaders, made up in large part – especially in recent decades – of Communists’ descendants.

In April 1922, as the Communist movement prepared to come “aboveground” from its persecuted and insular existence, the YCL formed secretly in Bethel, Connecticut; the next month, a “legal convention” was held for the new Young Workers League (YWL). As a document of the latter declared, the new movement sought to play its role “by participating in the struggle of the working-class youth for a better chance to live…stressing the most vital issues that confront the youth.” The two organizations merged a few years later into the YCL, with the same intent and essentially the same membership, its leaders generally drawn from prominent young members of the Communist Party proper.

The 1920s proved both a difficult and a fascinating time for the YCL. More than the adult movement, largely made up of stable, ethnic community members (such as Finns and Lithuanians) not greatly involved in the frantic factionalism of the period, the YCL was riven by efforts to follow the trends and bitter arguments of the day. At its best, the YCL/YWL recruited thousands of young, largely second-generation ethnic radicals – children of socialists or friends of socialists’ children – in urban areas, especially Jewish neighborhoods. These young recruits exhibited enormous energy, determination, and – in many threatening situations – great courage. From Chicago, New York, and smaller towns they ventured out to strike scenes in textile towns or coal patches where Communists had influence, aided logistics, distributed the Daily Worker, and attempted to organize YCL/YWL branches. (In many cases, these branches formed only to dissolve not long afterward.) In 1925, the YWL claimed a membership of 4,000 and a readership of its lively semimonthly organ, the Young Worker, considerably higher.

It is doubtful that the YCL/YWL reached a figure much higher before the Great Depression. In many places, younger Communists “assigned” to the YCL had also multiple other duties (such as work in non-English language circles, or Negro-oriented movements, or peace movements, etc.) that prevented them from serious youth engagement. However, they learned the internal logic of the Party as few others could. Among the later national leaders produced by the YCL/YWL were Jack Stachel, John Williamson, Sam Darcy, Harry Haywood, Pat Toohey, Carl Winter, and Gil Green. They also managed, in the Young Worker, to produce at times a fine account of working and living conditions as seen by rebellious, even alienated lower-class youth. Second-generation immigrants used the YCL as a mechanism to grow out of their ethnic communities and to establish themselves within the English-speaking majority culture. Holding views distant from those in “American” culture, including the English-speaking working class, the YCLers necessarily formed their own subgroup, whose intensity – and fervent expectation – overcame the sense of collective isolation, but at a cost.

In the early years of the Great Depression that cost became more evident. While the YCL blossomed to perhaps 10,000 members, it developed at first little of the momentum anticipated in an obvious social crisis. The Young Worker remained a junior version of adult Communist publications rather than a paper aimed successfully at American youth. Sectarian rancor prevented YCL members from reaching out to liberals and socialists who were also beginning, at the local level, to wrestle with the severe problems of mass poverty and lack of community organization. As in the 1920s, YCLers could be found in mass struggles – such as the Harlan County, Kentucky, mineworkers’ mobilization of 1932 – but largely by virtue of being sent in from the outside. Outstanding individual YCLers, in any case, often abandoned youth activity as such to travel to a factory sector where unionization seemed possible. Outside the ethnic neighborhoods of major eastern and midwestern cities, that shift meant nominal YCL activity.

Nevertheless, the YCL registered some major successes. Within the Trade Union Unity League organizations, youth sections were formed, through YCL prodding, to articulate the special problems of young workers. In 1932 the YCL launched its earliest efforts to build a broad antifascist youth front, a project that gained steam over the decade. In neighborhood strongholds the approach differed in important ways. YCLers began to participate in immediate struggles and to draw practical conclusions. At first engaged (with other Communists) in direct-action marches on city hall and other such dramatic (but frequently bloody and generally unsuccessful) tactics, they turned increasingly to lower-profile work among their own unpoliticized peers. Here, the leadership of 1920s YCL veterans, most of all Gil Green, became crucial. Somewhat anticipating the Popular Front, YCLers in many circumstances eased their personal isolation, abandoned the strident calls for a “Soviet America,” and began effective mass work on immediate issues at hand.

The turn toward the Popular Front, in 1934–1935, made far more effective action possible. The YCL operated, for the duration of the 1930s, at the historical peak of its influence. Its new publication, Champion of Youth (later, Champion of Youth Monthly), achieved a respectability that earlier YCLers could only have fantasized, with a much-sharpened format, a wide circulation on campuses, and contributors that included Sinclair Lewis, Robert Morse Lovett, sportswriter John R. Tunis, and City College of New York basketball coach Nat Holman.

Ironically, at no point did the YCL receive as much institutional competition as from other Communist Party units equally eager for youth and student participation. The National Student League, founded in 1931 and merged with the Student League for Industrial Democracy in 1935, occupied a far more public arena. Youth sections of the International Workers Order, especially among the more ethnically identified teens, also usurped what otherwise might have been (and had been in the 1920s) YCL terrain. The fast-rising labor movement spirited more young people away. Yet the YCL found its niche around and through these and other mass organizations of the Left and of the broader American society. In substantially Jewish, lower-class neighborhoods especially, the YCL was able to establish clubhouses with a nonpolitical cultural appeal to school friends and others outside the Left networks. At its peak, the New York YCL alone had perhaps 12,000 members, with clubs of 200 to 500 in such districts as the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Brownsville, Yorkville, Harlem, and the South Bronx.

Within Left-oriented mass-affiliated organizations, such as the American League against War and Fascism, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the American Youth Congress, the YCL placed and trained its members in organizing skills and directed their political orientation on specific issues. In sports activities (YCLers tilted toward the Brooklyn Dodgers) and music (YCLers tended to love swing), even more perhaps than in the Popular Front politics of the day, the YCL effected an Americanization more organic than any other section of the Communist movement. The admiration YCLers stirred from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, who took up the American Youth Act sponsored by the YCL, seemed to demonstrate this achievement. In all, the YCL seemingly represented, for that optimistic moment, the generation that would make the American Left into a movement of millions.

YCLers succeeded even more grandly, perhaps, outside the Left orbits proper. Hundreds if not thousands entered industry for the industrial union drive, and many achieved union leadership at the local level during the crucial years. In a scattering of sites, YCLers outnumbered Party members. Their special approach to young workers distinguished their efforts. On the international front, a majority of the 3,200 American Communists who volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were YCLers, leaving behind many enthusiastic supporters for whom that war was a peak of activity.

Despite these impressive efforts, the YCL organization did not reach far beyond the older ethnic limits of the Left or sunk in its roots deeply. With the succession of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the brief but telling Red Scare, and the national mobilization following the Pearl Harbor attack, the YCL lost its immediate prospects, the bulk of its active members, and even the tone of its periodicals. The 1943 dissolution of the Communist Party also dissolved the YCL into American Youth for Democracy, but unlike the parent group, it did not reestablish itself as such in 1945. Party youth sections grew but did not flourish, and what youth activity took place in the immediate postwar years centered around the revival of fraternal movements such as the powerful Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, friendship work with the Soviet Union (the American section of the World Federation of Democratic Youth), coalitions joined to the broader liberal movement and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for the presidency (American Youth for Democracy, succeeded by the short-lived Young Progressives of America).

The LYL, founded in 1949 on the morrow of the disappointing Wallace vote, had a timbre distinctly different from its predecessors. It aimed itself along familiar lines, with special emphasis on the Cold War crisis, racism, and the war in Korea. It reestablished Challenge as a monthly publication, pressed the government for the eighteen-year-old vote, more money for school building programs, a higher minimum wage, and similar issues intended to gather support from working-class youth. It sponsored and drew close to a journal intended to have more popular appeal, New Foundations, with a format revised in 1951 to feature cultural discussions. Given the period, the LYL carried on a remarkable array of agitation. But times had changed, a fact reflected most evidently in the GI Bill, which opened up college education to the working class for the first time. The LYL gained its basic constituency from college-bound, generally upwardly mobile intellectuals more theoretical-minded and more theoretically open-minded than their predecessors. Claiming up to 200 chapters and 5,000 members, the LYL sometimes – especially after appearances in 1953–1954 before the Subversive Activities Control Board – operated as a semi-secret organization. (On large and liberal campuses such as the University of Wisconsin, it might have “open” and “secret” members.) It did not grow to a mass movement so much as train its activists for intellectual, social, cultural, and organizational contributions to the civil rights, anti-war, and other movements in later decades. Former members loomed especially large in campus life of the 1960s, as senior advisers to the New Left.

The Communist Party dissolved the LYL in 1957, amid the internal upheavals of the Twentieth Soviet Congress. In the aftermath, a few branches of the LYL retained their name, but for the most part, new groups such as the Progressive Youth Organizing Committee, Teens Ahead, or Burning Issues grew up on the local level, sometimes successfully attaching themselves to civil rights and other current movements. During the early 1960s, CPUSA leaders – often with the help of young Communists on college and university campuses – embarked on a wave of speaking tours attended by tens of thousands of students. The tours challenged anti-communist speakers’ bans, the remnants of McCarthyism, and ultimately helped lay the groundwork for a student-led free speech movement; it is conservatively estimated that Communists spoke with one hundred thousand students during this time. In 1965, drawing initially upon local initiatives on the West Coast, the Du Bois Clubs were formed. (Richard Nixon would charge, with unintended hilarity, that the name’s similarity to “The Boys Clubs” had been intended to confuse youth.) Never more than a small number within the massive political mobilization of the time, the Du Bois Clubs were distinguished by their multiracial composition and their earnestness. Often raised within the Left, their members had organizing skills especially useful in a variety of campus and community movements, such as Bettina Aptheker in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. But persistently overshadowed, they dissolved in 1971.

The YWLL, founded that year, represented an effort to recombine campus and community activities in a broader public movement, successor to a collapsing New Left. To a certain extent, the YWLL succeeded in recruiting disappointed New Left veterans and other young people, including Judith LeBlanc, an American Indian Movement activist and participant in the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee. It hesitantly embraced such new causes as women’s liberation (not, however, gay liberation), retaining heavy stress upon racial equality and class issues. Despite activity in a broad spectrum of contemporary movements, however, the YWLL reached no more than a few thousand membership, and dissolved in 1984. The newly reorganized YCL, in effect the YWLL under a different name, made a more ambitious beginning, and enjoyed some scattered campus support until the 1989 split in Communist ranks. Thereafter, there were enthusiastic trips to Cuba and similar symbolic acts, but not much success in relaunching a youth movement.

After nearly a decade of retrenchment, the CPUSA began to rebuild the YCL in the early 2000s. Though a small organization with just a few thousand members, YCL leaders focused on building alliances with broad-based student groups, such as the United States Student Association (USSA), the Student Labor Action Project, and the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC); throughout the first decade of the 2000s all these formations – though considerably broader than the YCL – were led by Communists. Young Communists also helped to build campus clubs across the country; sometimes as YCL chapters, sometimes as broader groupings, such as Students for Progressive Action on the MIZZOU campus in central Missouri. Like their 1960s predecessors, these clubs invited CPUSA speakers as guests to their campuses. Other young Communists, helped to lead student strikes and/or campus sit-ins for workers’ rights. During this time, the YCL published Dynamic edited by Baltimore school board member Anita Wheeler, granddaughter of long-time Communist reporter Tim Wheeler. Dynamic published articles by and for the broad-based youth and student movement and merged domestic activism with internationalism; authors interviewed USSA leaders, as well as young Communists from other countries, and updated readers on on-going union organizing campaigns (often campaigns in-which YCL members were involved in).

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the Bush Administration’s drive to war, young Communists such as Jessie Marshall led NYSPC, which organized the March 2003 “Books, Not Bombs” student strike where students from 360 college and high school campuses participated in a day-long strike; Marshall was also a leader in United For Peace & Justice. Young Communists at the local level organized for peace, too; groups like Up Town for Peace and Justice in New York and the Stanford Committee for Peace and Justice were led by YCL members. Other YCL members, such as Erica Smiley, then national coordinator of the Black Radical Congress Youth Division, would go on to become executive director of Jobs with Justice, continuing a tradition of young Communists moving into important national political roles as they age out of youth work. In 2005, the YCL helped to organize 700 US youth to participate in the sixteenth World Festival of Youth and Students in Venezuela; it led the US delegation through the National Preparatory Committee. Many YCL members from this period also became union organizers in a revived, though still shrinking labor movement.

Young Communists later helped to lead the “Fight for $15 and a Union” as fast food workers and union organizers. For example, young Communist Al Neal was the midwest regional coordinator for the “Fight for $15” prior to becoming a journalist for the People’s World. YCLers were also active in the Black Lives Matter movement; at a local level Communists work with a number of BLM leaders, such as Samaria Rice – mother of slain Cleveland youth Tamir Rice – who in June 2019 spoke at the CPUSA’s national convention. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass unemployment that came with it, young Communists provided aid (bottled water, snacks, and masks) at community centers and housing projects across the country. Though small in number, with a unique emphasis on diversity, a focus on working-class organization, unity, and work within broader formations, young Communists constituted an important contingent within the broader youth and student movement.

Bart, Philip, et al., eds. Highlights of a Fighting History: Sixty Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 1979.

Buhle, Paul, ed. History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Glaberman, Martin, and George P. Rawick. “‘Champion of Youth’ and ‘Champion of Labor Monthly.’” In The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, vol. 1, edited by Joseph Conlin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Pecinovsky, Tony. Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 2019.

Young Communist League. Downloadable Documents, 1921-1946. Early American Marxism Website. http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/ycleaguedocuments.html