Latvian Americans

LATVIAN AMERICANS. A small Baltic nationality group, Latvians briefly played an important role in the U.S. Left as ardent allies of Bolshevism and financial supporters of the earliest U.S. Leninists.

Latvia, like Lithuania and Estonia, was a buffer zone between major nations. Industrialization and modernization took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only in selected urban districts. Emigration to the United States centered in a very few locations, especially Greater Boston, with immigrants working mostly in light manufacturing.

Like several other immigrant socialist groups, Latvians were organized at first in the United States as a branch of the homeland party. Affiliating with the Socialist Party in 1908, they maintained close European ties. In the Latvian party, the Right had been historically weak, due largely to the difficulty of reforms and of gradual labor improvements. The dominant Left, linked more closely to Lenin than any other national party faction, early on looked to the Bolsheviks for leadership in search of socialism and national independence.

Centered in Boston, the Latvian (or “Lettish,” after the German geographical designation of “Lettland”) federation claimed sixteen hundred members by 1915. Its leader, Fricis Rozins, had been a pioneer of Lettish socialism, escapee from Siberia and close ally of Lenin. Rozins edited the federation organ Stradneeks (Worker) and finessed a brief takeover of the Massachusetts Socialist Party (weak since the early years of the twentieth century) by the Left in 1913–1914.

As a result of defeat at the 1915 state convention, the Latvians established an English-language outlet, the Socialist Propaganda League (SPL), whose manifesto boasted the names of long-standing Left-socialists and aimed at capture of the party for the Left.

In the furious factionalism of the next few years, the Latvians and the SPL frequently took the lead in espousing an ultraorthodox Leninism, as understood at the time. Letts sponsored the rise of Louis C. Fraina as a proto-Bolshevik intellectual, and the SPL put forward a campaign to recruit Americans for the armed forces in Russia (although unable to do so over U.S. State Department opposition). The Revolutionary Age (1918–1919), for a short period the premier English-language Bolshevik organ in America, was published in Boston with Lettish financial backing. In the breakup of the Socialist Party, the Latvian along with the Russian Federation and others supported withdrawal from the party into a formal Communist Party (rather than awaiting expulsion, for tactical reasons).

Factionalism and repression did not greatly diminish the Lettish following, but in the open Communist movement that emerged in the 1920s, they ceased to play a central role. Stradneeks, edited by John Knudsin and Boston-area supporters, nevertheless remained an important source of support for the Massachusetts Left for decades. The successor organ, American-Latvian, edited by Edward Maurin, closed its doors only in the 1980s, after Maurin’s death.

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

Additional information provided by Anne Burlak Timpson.