Young Pioneers of America

YOUNG PIONEERS OF AMERICA. The children’s organization of the Communist Party of the United States (CP), the Young Pioneers of America (YPA) was founded to provide “proletarian education” for working-class children between the ages of seven and fourteen. Its membership consisted mainly of children from Communist families.

The YPA was organized in 1923 as the Junior Section of the Young Workers League, which was the youth section of the Workers Party (WP). When the “legal” WP and the “clandestine” CP merged in 1926, the YPA became the designated children’s organization of the CP. The YPA retained this form until 1934, when it faded away and its role was taken over by the Junior Section of the International Workers Order (IWO), the Communist-led federation of ethnically based fraternal benefit societies. YPA publications included the Young Comrade (1924–1926), the Young Pioneer (1926–1931), and the New Pioneer (1931–1934, taken over by IWO Juniors (1934–1938).

The YPA drew upon the traditions of socialist and anarchist educational programs for children in the United States and was influenced by the development of Young Pioneers organizations in Germany and the Soviet Union. The YPA had three functions within the Communist movement: developing Communist education for its membership; organizing working-class children into political campaigns; and providing the political leadership for more broadly based children’s groups within the Communist orbit.

Communist-influenced organizations often had separate children’s sections in which Young Pioneers were expected to play a role similar to that of CP members in adult organizations. Such was the case with the Young Liberators of the International Labor Defense. During the 1926 silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey, the 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and the 1929 strikes led by the National Miners Union, the YPA mobilized workers’ children in association with the Trade Union Unity League.
The YPA was strongest among children in the Jewish working-class communities of New York and the Finnish agricultural and mining communities of the Midwest. YPA meetings involved discussions of current events and planning political campaigns. Readings were drawn from a series of Communist children’s books. The YPA campaigned against child labor, “bourgeois, reactionary” children’s organizations like the Boy Scouts, and patriotic propaganda in the schools. It fought for integrated swimming pools and free lunches for children of the unemployed. It also sponsored summer camps, often in association with other Communist-affiliated organizations.

The YPA emphasized class identities to the exclusion of ethnicity, which it viewed as nationalist and reactionary. This created a tension between the YPA and Communist parents of immigrant backgrounds who wanted to transmit their ethnic heritage to their children. This narrow understanding of culture was transformed later in the 1930s when the ethnically organized IWO Juniors replaced the YPA as the Communist children’s organization during the period of the Popular Front.

Mishler, Paul C. Raising Reds; the Young Pioneers, radical summer camps and Communist political culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Teitelbaum, Kenneth, and William Reese. “American Socialist Pedagogy and Experimentation in the Progressive Era: The Socialist Sunday School.” History of Education Quarterly 23, no. 4 (winter 1983).

U.S. Congress. House. Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities. Investigation of Communist Propaganda. 71st Cong., 2d sess., 1930. Vol. 1, pt. 3.