Earl Browder, Chairman of the Communist Party USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Browder

Earl Russell Browder (May 20, 1891 – June 27, 1973) was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.

Early years

Earl Browder was born in Wichita, Kansas on May 20, 1891, the eighth child of an American-born father sympathetic to populism. He joined the Socialist Party of America in Wichita in 1907 at the age of 16 and remained in that organization until the party split of 1912, when many of the group's syndicalistically oriented members exited the organization in response to the addition of an anti-sabotage clause to the party constitution and the recall of National Executive Committeeman William "Big Bill" Haywood. Historian Theodore Draper notes that Browder "was influenced by an offshoot of the syndicalist movement which believed in working in the AF of L (American Federation of Labor)." This ideological orientation brought the young Browder into contact with William Z. Foster, founder of an organization called the Syndicalist League of North America which was based upon similar policies and James P. Cannon, an IWW adherent from Kansas.

Browder moved to Kansas City and was employed as an office worker, entering the AF of L union of his trade, the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants union. In 1916 he took a job as manager of the Johnson County Cooperative Association in Olathe, Kansas.

Browder was aggressively opposed to World War I and publicly spoke out against it, characterizing the fighting as an imperialist conflict. After the United States joined the war in 1917, Browder was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act conspiring to defeat the operation of the draft law and nonregistration. Browder was sentenced to 2 years in prison for conspiracy and 1 year for nonregistration, sitting in jail from December 1917 to November 1918.

In 1919, Browder, Cannon, and their Kansas City associates started a radical newspaper, The Workers World, with Browder serving as the first editor. In June of that year Browder was jailed again on a conspiracy charge, however, with Cannon taking over as editor. Browder's second prison stint, served at Leavenworth Penitentiary, lasted until November 1920, putting him out of circulation during the critical interval when the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party quit the SPA to form the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. A series of splits and mergers followed, with the two Communist parties formally merging in 1921.

Released from prison at last, Browder lost no time in joining the United Communist Party (UCP), as well as the fledgling Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) being launched by his old associate William Z. Foster. Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, The Labor Herald.

In 1920 the Communist International (Comintern) headed by Grigory Zinoviev decided to establish an international confederation of Communist trade unions, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or "Profintern"). A founding convention was planned to be held in Moscow in July 1921 and an American delegation was gathered, including members of the American Communist Parties and the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press.[3] This trip to Soviet Russia incidentally proved decisive in bringing the syndicalist Foster over to the Communist movement.

Throughout the early 1920s, Browder and Foster worked together closely in the TUEL, trying to win over the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor in the establishment of a new mass Farmer-Labor Party that would be able to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Republican and Democratic parties.

In 1928, the estranged Browder and his lover Kitty Harris went to China and lived in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of RILU's Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in clandestine labor organizing. The pair returned to the United States in 1929. CPUSA leadership

Browder became General Secretary of the Communist party in 1930 and took over the top position of party chairman in 1932 after William Z. Foster suffered a heart attack. During his term as General Secretary, Browder embraced the popular front tactic and led the CPUSA's tactic of expressing support for the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, while demanding that it should go much farther in terms of restructuring the capitalist system. Browder was the party's candidate for President of the United States in the 1936 presidential election but received only 80,195 votes. During this time, Browder made at least one and possibly two trips to the Soviet Union on a false U.S. passport. After admitting he had traveled on a false passport in a public statement, he was tried and sentenced to prison in 1940 for passport violations. Browder was released after 14 months when the United States joined World War II and became an ally of the Soviet Union.

In 1944, perceiving the end of the war and the possibility of postwar tension between Washington and Moscow, Browder made moves to distance the CPUSA from the Soviet Union, declaring that communism and capitalism could peacefully co-exist. This policy became known in the Party as Browderism. However, the CPUSA followed Stalin's instructions to reconstitute itself as the Communist Political Association.

Espionage activities

The 1995 release of Soviet Venona documents confirmed that Browder was involved in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, including recruiting potential espionage agents for Soviet intelligence.

In 1938 Rudy Baker (Venona code name: SON) was appointed to head the CPUSA underground apparatus to replace J. Peters, after the defection of Whittaker Chambers, allegedly at the request of Browder (Venona code name: FATHER). According to self-confessed NKVD recruiter Louis Budenz, he and Browder participated in discussions with Soviet intelligence officials to plan the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Browder himself ran an agent network, which he turned over to Jacob Golos after being sentenced to prison; Elizabeth Bentley ran the network after Golos.

While in custody, Browder never revealed his status as an agent recruiter to U.S. authorities, and was never prosecuted for espionage. Venona decrypt #588 April 29, 1944 from the KGB New York office states “for more than a year Zubilin (station chief) and I tried to get in touch with Victor Perlo and Charles Flato. For some reason Browder did not come to the meeting and just decided to put Bentley in touch with the whole group. All occupy responsible positions in Washington, D.C.” Soviet intelligence thought highly of Browder's recruitment work: in a 1946 OGPU memorandum, Browder was personally credited with hiring eighteen intelligence agents for the Soviet Union.

Members of Browder's family were involved in work for Soviet intelligence. According to a 1938 classified letter from Browder to Georgi Dimitrov, in the Soviet archives, Browder’s younger sister Marguerite was an agent working in various European countries for the NKVD. Browder expressed concern over the effect it would have on the American public if his sister’s secret work for Soviet intelligence were to be exposed: “In view of my increasing involvement in national political affairs and growing connections in Washington political circles”...“it might become dangerous to this political work if hostile circles in America should obtain knowledge of my sister’s work.” He requested she be released from her European duties and returned to America to serve “in other fields of activity.” Browder’s request was followed in short order by a classified letter from Dimitrov to “Comrade Yezhov,” (Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD) requesting Marguerite Browder’s transfer. Browder's niece, Helen Lowry, (aka Elza Akhmerova, also Elsa Akhmerova) worked with Iskhak Akhmerov, a Soviet NKVD espionage controller from 1936 - 1939 under the code name ADA(?) ADA was Kitty Harris (later changed to ELZA)). In 1939, Helen Lowry married Akhmerov. Lowry was named by Soviet intelligence agent Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts; she and Akhmerov and their actions on behalf of Soviet intelligence are referenced in several Venona project decryptions as well as Soviet KGB archives.

Expulsion and after

With the end of the Great Power alliance at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, "Browderism" came under attack from the rest of the international Communist movement. In 1945, Jacques Duclos, a leader of the French Communist Party, published an article denouncing Browder's policy. With the Comintern having been dissolved during the war, the "Duclos letter" was used to informally communicate Moscow's views. William Z. Foster, Browder's predecessor and a staunch Marxist-Leninist, led the opposition to Browder within the party and replaced him as party chairman in 1945, with Eugene Dennis taking over as General Secretary. Browder was expelled from the party in 1946.

Browder continued to campaign for his views outside the Party and criticized the CPUSA's domination by Moscow, writing that "The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform. But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse, the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a bad word in the American language."

In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph McCarthy, Browder was willing to criticize the American Communist Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades. He also lied under oath that he had never been involved in espionage activities. Browder was charged with contempt of Congress, but Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally. Browder was never prosecuted either for his perjury before the committee or for his spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.

In March 1950, Browder shared a platform with Max Shachtman, the dissident Trotskyist, in which the pair debated socialism. Browder defended the Soviet Union while Shachtman acted as a prosecutor. It is reported that at one point in the debate Shachtman listed a series of leaders of various Communist Parties and noted that each had perished at the hands of Stalin; at the end of this speech, he remarked that Browder too had been a leader of a Communist Party and, pointing at him, announced: "There-there but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!"

An unsuccessful attempt was made to reinstate Browder to the good graces of the CPUSA following the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, a period in which some within the American Communist Party briefly sought to exert its independence from Moscow. This effort at liberalization was soon defeated, however.

On June 2, 1957, Browder appeared on the television program The Mike Wallace Interview, where he was grilled for 30 minutes about his past in the Communist Party. Host Mike Wallace quoted Browder as having recently said "Getting thrown out of the Communist Party was the best thing that ever happened to me" and asked for elaboration. Browder replied:

"That's right. I meant that the Communist Party and the whole communist movement was changing its character, and in 1945, when I was kicked out, the parting of the ways had come, and if I hadn't been kicked out I would have had the difficult task of disengaging myself from a movement that I could no longer agree with and no longer help."

"I was involved in no conspiracies," Browder adamantly declared to Wallace and his television audience.

Death and legacy

Although remaining committed to the cause of socialism, Earl Browder remained outside of the Communist Party until his death in Princeton, New Jersey on June 27, 1973. He was survived by three sons, Felix, William, and Andrew, all distinguished research mathematicians who have been leaders in the American mathematical community.

Эрл Ра́сселл Бра́удер (англ. Earl Russell Browder; 20 мая 1891 — 27 июня 1973) — американский политик. В 1930—1945 годах — генеральный секретарь Коммунистической партии США.

Родился в Канзасе в семье служащего. В 1906—1912 годах — член Социалистической партии, в 1920 году вступил в Коммунистическую партию, в 1921 году избран в её ЦК. В 1921—1925 годах — заместитель председателя Лиги профсоюзной пропаганды. В 1930 году избран генеральным секретарём ЦК компартии США, в 1935 — членом Исполкома Коминтерна. В 1939—1942 годах на протяжении ряда месяцев отбывал тюремное заключение.

Во второй половине 1920-х годов Эрл Браудер был женат на Китти Харрис. Один из его сыновей — математик Феликс Браудер, родившийся в Москве в 1927 году — впоследствии стал отцом Уильяма Браудера. Другие сыновья Эрла — математики Эндрю (род. 1931) и Уильям (старший) (род. 1934).