School gushes over acquisition of CPUSA papers
New York University has trumpeted its acquisition of a large cache of materials donated by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) to its Tamiment Library. A front-page New York Times story noted that the gift includes 12,000 cartons filled with documents and photographs from the party’s newspaper. A celebratory conference to mark the event tomorrow is filled with party war horses and includes panels extolling the CPUSA’s contributions to American society and culture.
When properly inventoried and catalogued, this collection will surely benefit scholars and contribute to a richer, more complete account of one of the most controversial political organizations in U.S. history. The study of American communism has generated both a remarkably large and a particularly vitriolic literature over the years and promises to remain a growth industry.But the excitement about a new archival resource and the delight that Tamiment librarians justifiably feel over acquiring a major collection and garnering national attention for it should not be allowed to obscure the nature of the organization they are celebrating.
For nearly 70 years – from shortly after its founding in Chicago in 1919 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 – the CPUSA was a tool of the Soviet Union and its murderous leaders.
While small groups of party members periodically revolted against Soviet control, they were all either expelled or forced to recant. No one who stayed in the party for more than a few years could avoid paying obeisance to Soviet goals and policies or, for that matter, changing his or her own views when Soviet policies shifted.
You might have entered the CPUSA because of its staunch anti-fascist policies of the late 1930s, but if you wanted to remain in it after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, you had to accept that alliance as well as begin denouncing Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal as imperialistic and profess indifference as to whether Hitler’s Germany conquered Great Britain.
Soviet money propped up the party from its founding. By the 1980s, Moscow secretly and illegally supplied $2 million dollars a year to support the CPUSA.