Popular Front

POPULAR FRONT. The Seventh Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in the summer of 1935, crystallized the line of the Popular Front, although the Comintern and several of its constituent parties had already been moving in that direction since the victory of Nazism in Germany and the threat posed in other countries. The defense and extension of the bourgeois democratic system, with collective security against the fascist powers, derived from the concept that a bourgeois democratic regime was substantially different from a bourgeois fascist one and that the advance of fascism could be halted short of a socialist revolution. Such an outlook took a special course in the United States.

The top leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CP), William Z. Foster and Earl Browder, were on hand at the Congress, and Browder served on the presiding committee. Key secondary leaders, on hand as well, included Sam Darcy from California; Gil Green of the youth movement; Benjamin Careathers, a Black leader in Pittsburgh active with the unemployed; and Martha Stone, from the Williamsburg area of New York, one of the few women present. The Congress dealt very schematically with the United States, despite American capitalism’s leading role in the world economy and its vigorous presence in the Far East. Nonetheless, the main speech of Comintern Secretary G. Dimitrov stated clearly that a victory of fascism in the United States would profoundly modify the entire international situation, since this country was so obviously in a different category from “Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, and Latvia.” He proposed a farmer-labor party as the specific form of the mass, antifascist Popular Front in the States. Such a party would have a program directed against the banks, the trusts, the monopolies, and the principal enemies of the people; would struggle for real social legislation, land reform in the South for Black and white sharecroppers, abolition of farm debts, and legal equality for Blacks; and it would defend the interests of small shopkeepers, artisans, and professionals. For his part, Browder spoke of the absorption by the Communist Party of the country’s revolutionary traditions, but he especially concentrated on the relationship between the government, the conflicts within the capitalist class, and the fascist threat.

If Browder criticized President Franklin Roosevelt’s demagogy and insisted that his policy had worsened the conditions of the working class, Foster went much further, declaring that the politics of the president gave an impetus to fascism. Directly in opposition to these views, Dimitrov, in his concluding speech, gave a decisive push to the evolution of CP policy by insisting that it would be a sign of schematism to suggest that the New Deal showed the evolution of the bourgeoisie toward fascism. Rather, the most reactionary forces of monopoly capital now attacked Roosevelt, stimulating and organizing the fascist threat. Thus did the Comintern direct official, if critical, support of Roosevelt by American Communists.

For the CPUSA as for other communist parties, the Popular Front can be dated from this Congress until the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. In reality, the roots go back further, to the first glimmerings that world revolution was not around the corner, and the policy would be picked up again during the war and the alliance with the Soviet Union. Indeed, the idea would not disappear entirely even during the Cold War, as American Communists continued to put forward, in different forms, a Popular Front strategy of alliances.

Since Browder had assumed dominance in the Party in the early 1930s, the CP had, often in rather subtle ways, moved toward mainstream society. Its participation in the strike wave of 1934–1935 and in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) could be viewed by unionists themselves as a maneuver, unity with other workers at the base but also with non-Communist organizations on issues like antifascism and defense of the rights of Blacks and the unemployed, and the goal of forming a labor-farm party. All of these could be considered steps on a common path before the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, whether taken instinctively or in consultation with higher authorities. Browder himself emerged the Party’s outstanding speaker for and symbol of its Popular Front positions. His desire to enter into the mainstream gained strength and credibility with a noticeable shift in the positions of the New Deal in early 1935. All of this allowed for the encounter, however hesitant and polemical at first, more directly supportive as the 1930s advanced, of the CPUSA with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The Seventh Congress and the Popular Front line permitted greater flexibility and less concentration on convincing allies to accept specific Communist positions.

The Farmer-Labor Party remained for the Communists a key objective until 1938. By then, except for a few specific states, it was deemed no longer possible. Browder then transformed the Popular Front line into what was called the Democratic Front, stating that the regrouping in any case had already begun, with all the progressive forces in Roosevelt’s camp, implying that this had in some way transformed the president’s party. The Communist slogan for this Democratic Front was “Jobs, Security, Democracy, Peace,” and most programmatic elements remained constant: a battle against the domestic fascist threat; extension of political democracy and the rights of the working class and raising its material standards; isolation of the fascist powers through collective security; and an alliance with the Soviet Union. As the New Deal ran out of steam in 1937–1938, the CP found itself a principal if not the only force insisting on the Roosevelt coalition’s progressive nature. In order to continue to pursue a Popular Front policy, the CP increasingly reduced the policy’s content or meaning. If Roosevelt was to be continually criticized for his domestic hesitations, ever more attention would be paid to what was considered the antifascist nature of his foreign policy.

Despite the absence of a fundamental realignment in the American political scene, the CP did achieve links to many progressive forces, including elements high and low within the Roosevelt administration. Unlike the Popular Front in France and Spain, the CP assumed no governmental responsibility and achieved no formal alliances. Nor was there any unity with the Socialist Party, which, influenced by the Trotskyists, grew increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union and opposed to the New Deal in the name of socialism. The American Communist path took a powerful, but very different forms.

The yearning of “ethnic” communities, mainly first- and second-generation immigrants from Europe, for defense of democracy in their homelands but also for a recognized place equal to the WASP hierarchy, played a unique role. Slovenes and Croats, Hungarians, Finns and others became central to the success of the CIO, and their respective national movements under Communist or near-Communist auspices grew strong within their blue-collar communities.

The New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration and Federal Theater enrolled thousands of Communists or their supporters, giving a popular face to the American Left absent since before 1920. CP activity among the unemployed, non-whites and slum-dwellers grew but also changed form: rather than protests of various kinds, activity shifted toward negotiations with government officials, whenever possible. At the local level, in Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, but also in the South as well as in many cities of the industrial Midwest, the Party thereby became an important force in politics. In various organizations, many liberals and progressives experienced the dedication and capabilities of the CP militants and, for their own part, more freely and openly associated with Communists in common causes. In this sense, the Popular Front had grown beyond the ideas of the Seventh Congress. Indeed, the CIO itself could be viewed as a Popular Front organization. The umbrella group named the American League for Peace and Democracy actively fought for extending the typical New Deal domestic programs and worked for international solidarity with the battles against fascism in Spain, Germany, Italy, China.

The enormous transformation in the CP line from the years immediately before the proclamation of the Popular Front through the end of the 1930s could not but bring significant changes in Party ideology, organizational structure and actual demography. Fascism came to be seen no longer to be a threat within the government but as something from without, from the leading circles of finance and monopoly capital and from abroad. American revolutionary traditions came to be defined in an ever broader and less strident ways. Party internal education increasingly concentrated on New Deal politics and trade unions rather than on traditional Marxism-Leninism and the history of Russian Bolshevism. Militant atheism lost its luster, as the CP reached out to all religious groups, especially the Catholics essential for work among the industrial working class. Work in immigrant organizations already underway continued to be reevaluated (Dimitrov himself had spoken about being a good Communist and a good Bulgarian) because of its growing importance in an antifascist foreign policy. Meanwhile, within the and among its followers, the proportion of Jewish Americans and, more specifically, lower middle class (rather than proletarian) Jews rose sharply, as Nazism threatened but also as the Party became a more respectable organization.

Party districts and sections shifted in many places to conform to the divisions of electoral districts. Communist factory units came to be seen as an obstacle to unity, and Communist shop papers declined as readers turned to the left-guided CIO News. The key role of Party militants also declined, as the party tried to function like a “normal” American political grouping, and as activity in one of the many Popular Front organizations now often substituted for Party activity. All these ideological and organizational developments pointed in the direction of Browder’s aims after the Teheran conference: the end of class war within the United States and the abandonment of the Communist Party for a “political association.”

The Popular Front policy certainly did lead to a general extension of Party influence. Membership rose during the 1930s from 10,000 to 65,000 at its end and more than 80,000 in wartime. Despite turnover, the Party could credibly claim an expanded working-class base. Perhaps more important, the Party had become integrated within the New Deal, seen accurately as the leftward edge of the broad coalition.

These changes did not take place without a certain uneasiness evident in the contrast of Foster to Browder. Uncertainty and intrigues anticipated the dramatic 1944–1945 events in the Party, with apologies and expulsions galore. If the Comintern had rejected earlier intrigue as sectarian, leaders and cadres now focused on the problem of “hiding the face of the Party.” Rank-and-file Communists neither made a point of their Party membership nor put forward CP positions different from those of the organizations in which they operated. As a result, actual CP membership concentrated more within the leadership than within the base. Such behavior worked to disadvantage militants, who were later denounced as “subversive” and “clandestine.”

The Popular Front proved highly effective in the United States by strengthening elements of progressive democracy within the New Deal in opposition to racist, antilabor, culturally conservative and outright fascist tendencies in the country at large. Its many cultural elements, usually embedded within the New Deal, not only engaged millions of Americans directly and indirectly. It influenced future Lefts more than any subsequent movement would do, in music, narrative drama, and interracial culture of every kind. The Popular Front helped prepare millions of Americans for the war against fascism and gave them hope for a more cooperative social order. On the negative side, the shift away from world revolution underestimated the role of the United States as an imperial power that entered World War II for its own reasons and emerged a superpower.

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