Browder, Earl R.

BROWDER, EARL R. (1891–1973). One of eight children, Earl Browder was from a British family that immigrated to America before the Revolution, a fact that Communist propaganda of the Popular Front rarely failed to mention. Son of a teacher and farmer who became an invalid and grandson of a Methodist circuit-riding minister, Browder was born into a poor family in Wichita, Kansas, his ancestors having moved from Virginia to the Midwest. Forced to leave school before the age of ten, he worked first as an errand boy and then bookkeeper while he completed a law correspondence course.

As in much of Kansas before World War I, populist and socialist tendencies were present in his family. Before finding his way into the Communist movement—as did several of his siblings—Browder passed through the Socialist Party (he left after William D. Haywood’s recall) and then a local Kansas group, the Workers’ Educational League, which followed the line of William Z. Foster’s Syndicalist League of North America of working within the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1914 Browder became president of his local of the AFL Union of Bookkeepers and Stenographers and in 1916 worked for a farmers’ cooperative store in Kansas City. Arrested in 1917 for his opposition to the war, he served two jail sentences of more than a year each, which limited his political involvement. Influenced by the Russian Revolution, he rejoined the Socialist Party and, with James Cannon, took over the Kansas City local for the left wing. In 1919 he put out the Workers’ World, one of the first procommunist newspapers outside New York. In jail when the first Communist groups had been formed, he entered the United Communist Party in January 1921 and accepted the offer to organize an American trade union delegation—of which Foster would become part—to the first Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) to be held in Moscow in July 1921.

Elected an alternate member from Kansas of the first Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party at its December 1921 founding convention, Browder appeared to be a quiet and unassuming second-level functionary. He helped edit the Labor Herald, the monthly of the Communist Party-founded Trade Union Educational League, and was considered Foster’s chief lieutenant and part of the latter’s trade union group against the more “political” Workers Party leadership of C. E. Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone.

American representative to the Profintern in 1926, he worked for its Pan-Pacific Secretariat in the late twenties and served as part of a mission to China in that crucial period. Absent at the height of the factional struggles in the American Party, Browder came directly into the leadership supported by the Comintern, which appreciated his organizational abilities. Already prominent at the June 1930 Seventh Convention, he was elected general secretary at the following convention four years later.

In the early New Deal, he moved the Party out of its isolation and fought against sectarian tendencies still strongly present: he indicated that the New Deal, though moving in the direction of fascism, had not yet arrived there; he pushed forward United Front activities in 1933–1934 around farm and unemployment questions; and he opposed underestimating work in the AFL. The Labor Party policy in early 1935—adopted naturally after consultation with Moscow but perhaps initiated by Browder himself—attempted to transfer the United Front approach to the electoral arena.

The Communist Party in the second half of the 1930s emerged under Browder, through its presence in the trade union and cultural worlds and its increasing connection to the New Deal, as a genuinely American political force on the national level and in various local situations. After the official launching of the Popular Front policy, he increasingly noted the positive tendencies in the administration—especially as a seemingly antifascist foreign policy emerged. The Communist secretary showed great capacity for interacting with various New Deal and left-of-center political exponents, religious leaders, and intellectuals as well as for finding wealthy financial backers for Party enterprises. Putting forward with vigor the Party’s Popular Front image and its claim to be the continuer of the eighteenth-century revolutionary tradition, he stated in 1935 that “we are the Americans and Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century” (later he was compelled to recognize the “limitations” of this formulation). As to the final direction of the Communist movement, he maintained somewhat lamely that whatever strengthened the working class also went in the direction of socialism.

After the 1939 German-Soviet Pact, as part of a general crackdown on Communists, Browder was arrested for a minor passport violation committed in the twenties. Sentenced in 1940 to four years in jail and a fine, he received fourteen percent of the vote in a special congressional election on New York’s Lower East Side in the same year. Partially reflecting neutralist sentiment, this electoral energy also indicated that Communist strength in this working-class-immigrant area had remained constant despite the German-Soviet Pact and opposition to Roosevelt.

In May 1942, Franklin Roosevelt commuted Browder’s sentence. In these years the Communist secretary willingly put himself forward as a sort of unofficial spokesman not only for Stalin but also Mao Tse-tung and Tito among others. On this basis he corresponded and met with Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles about various international questions.

During the war, Browder’s ideas moved ever further away from classical Marxism and Leninism: as part of an all-out win-the-war effort he put forward an incentive-pay proposal to increase productivity and also supported Roosevelt’s war-service proposal; he supported a national unity that included not only monopoly capitalists but also reactionaries in the Democratic Party; and he denied the relevance of the right to national self-determination for the Black population. Americans were now, he believed, subjectively unprepared for the discussion of socialism.

After the “Teheran meeting” in late 1943, Browder affirmed not only that the Big Three would remain allies after the war and that Europe would be reconstructed on a non-fascist, capitalist basis but that an identity of interests existed between American capitalism with its increased productive capacity and the progress of the war-torn and undeveloped world in need of capital and goods. Within the United States, labor-management cooperation was to continue while the Party would dissolve organizationally with members operating in existing organisms as a left-wing pressure group.

The opposition of Foster in early 1944 to this latter proposal found support neither in Moscow nor in the Communist Party leadership: Browder’s positions seem to have corresponded to a widespread desire of members for full political integration and acceptability and to have been in step with the Party’s general direction. In the late spring of 1945, however, Browder fell from power as an article by French communist leader Jacques Duclos, undoubtedly inspired by Moscow, criticized his interpretation of the Teheran conference as something more than a diplomatic agreement between governments. Despite the existence of a genuine cult of personality, Browder’s total rejection of this criticism made removal obligatory. In July 1945 a special convention reconstituted the Party.

Knowledge that Foster’s criticism had been suppressed and that Moscow did not support the ex-secretary, added to the developing Cold War and the strike wave of 1945–1946, which negated Browder’s predictions of international and domestic tranquility, all contributed to the membership’s acceptance of this turnabout.

Browderism received little support from abroad. With its virtual elimination of anti-imperialism, it could never be very popular in Latin America, while in Europe Communist forces, although following a policy of unity, showed no intention of prematurely disbanding as an independent political force. Nor was previous friendship with the Chinese Communists sufficient to bring them in on his side.

Expelled from the Party in February 1946, Browder held a position for a few years as US representative for Soviet publishing concerns, but this in no way led to his political rehabilitation. In the years of his withdrawal from all public life, he published Marx and America: A Study in the Doctrine of Impoverishment (1958) and worked on several versions of an uncompleted autobiography. Although his name had been bandied about during the 1956 upheaval in the Party, his death in Princeton, New Jersey, 1973 went largely unnoticed.

During the favorable conjuncture of the 1930s and the war his line stimulated Party growth in numbers and influence and its entry into mainstream politics. Never considered the direct representative of a politically conscious working-class minority nor an apostle of a new socialist society, Earl Browder was primarily an able tactician capable of developing theoretical justifications.

Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

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

Ryan, James Gilbert. Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Sylvers, Malcolm. “The Communist International and the CPUSA: Channels for Influence, Political Consequences, Historiographical Discussion.” In The Communist International and Its National Sections, 1919–1943, edited by Jürgen Rojahn. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Earl Browder Papers. Inventory. Syracuse University Libraries. Special Collections Research Center. https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/browder_e.htm

Earl R. Browder Archive, 1891-1973. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/browder/