ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
Chicago’s reds in the 1930s
Randi Storch
Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots,
1928-35
University of Illinois Press, 2007
320 pages $35
Review by MARTIN SMITH
AS THE Daley machine makes backroom deals to bring the
2016 Olympic Games to Chicago, it is worth recalling a very different sort
of Olympiad held in 1932. In Red Chicago, Randi Storch reveals how the
Communist Party (CP) organized a counter-Olympics protest at
Chicago’s Stagg Field that brought together nearly four hundred
athletes, with at least a quarter being African American—a figure in
stark contrast, she points out, to the four Blacks included as members of
the official U.S. track and field team at the LA Olympics of that year.
The CP’s organizing among athletes is just one of
many revelations in Storch’s new community study on the Party, a work
that reclaims the hidden history of Chicago’s Depression years by
focusing on the CP at its grass roots. The work concentrates on the
CP’s Third Period in which the Party’s sectarian approach
focused on building dual unions—revolutionary unions in opposition to
the conservative AFL leadership—and condemning Socialists and
liberals as “social fascists.”
In the lineage of Mark Naison’s study of CP
practice in Harlem, Storch argues that rigid Stalinist policies were never
fully implemented at the local level and were, in fact, contradicted by the
actual experiences of members in Chicago’s CP strongholds,
particularly in its ethnic neighborhoods and the South Side. Storch even
goes so far as to claim that the Popular Front (1935–39) was
implemented in Chicago much earlier. According to Storch, Chicago’s
Third Period was, ironically, one where “Communists learned how to
work with liberals and non-Communists: they developed successful organizing
tactics and fought for workers’ rights, racial equality, and
unemployment relief and against imperialism.”
The mass character of the period’s radicalization
was channeled into a desire for organization, even if many found the
CP’s official policies objectionable. Storch claims that past
histories have failed to consider the diversity of membership that included
the stalwart cadre, middle members, and then the less-integrated rank and
file of the Party, an assortment of “shades of red.” The
Chicago Party appealed to “African American, ethnics, students,
artists, writers, workers, and women” who often carried out Party
policy as they saw fit, and as “rule breakers” often voted with
their feet, thumbing their nose at party directives.
This eclecticism helped Chicago’s CP grow
enormously throughout the Third Period, increasing membership in 1934 to
3,303 dues-paying members—five times its 1928 level—and
recruiting more African Americans to the Party than in any other city.
Storch’s scholarship shines as she unveils the
ability of the CP to unite white and black; native-born and foreigner; men
and women; and workers, students, and artists in the daily life of the
party. Her gripping narrative about the building of Chicago’s
Unemployed Councils (UCs) and anti-eviction work speaks to the present
moment of mass foreclosures.
The CP organized the UCs from block committees in
neighborhoods where party fractions would operate and get experience in
mass organizing. Storch reveals that the Party “organized citywide
rallies and conferences, staffed councils with unpaid Communists, suggested
slogans for councils for rallying support and organized a signature
campaign for the passage of unemployment insurance in the councils’
name.” The Party emphasized Black self-activity in their work, and
African Americans took key leadership positions and made up of quarter of
Chicago’s UCs membership.
The interracial unity forged through the CP’s
work in the UCs was best expressed in August 1931, when council members led
over 500 in a march down South Dearborn St., the center of Chicago’s
Black Belt, and placed the furniture of an evicted 72-year-old woman from
the street back into her home.
Given orders by Chicago’s politicians and real
estate executives to stop anti-eviction work, the police charged the crowd
and shot and murdered Abe Grey, “one of the best Negro organizers in
the Party,” and two others. In the ensuing melee, one unknown Black
man who had joined the protest attempted to shoot one of the police
officers.
Later, one of Grey’s friends was found mutilated
and shot through the head. It was clear to CP members that he had
“been taken for a ride by the police” to serve as a warning.
In response, the CP linked the demand for civil rights
and racial justice to a critique of the city administration, organizing
speak-outs and rallies that drew thousands to Washington Park in anger at
police brutality. The UCs organized a mass funeral and protest for the
victims that drew at least one hundred thousand Black and white workers. As
the bodies lay in state at the Odd Fellows Hall, according to Storch,
“a spotlight drew observers’ eyes to a picture of Lenin,
paintings of white and black hands clasped together, and murals of upraised
fists.”
Anecdotes like these, common throughout the book,
provide a refreshing antidote to the obsession by recent scholars,
particularly Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, to interpret the history of
the CP from the lens of Moscow spy networks. As Storch found in the
newly-opened Moscow archives, “Instead of intrigue, local [Chicago]
sources reveal the efforts of the revolutionary party to make itself
relevant and provide a clearer understanding of the way the majority in its
orbit experienced American Communism.”
However, Red Chicago ultimately rests among a school of New Left revisionist
works that have failed to adequately address the utter betrayal of
Stalinism. The author’s analytic sharpness is dulled by her liberal
preoccupation with the Popular Front, which she describes as a perspective
based on “practical politics and tactics.” This common
romanticized view of the Popular Front argues that, during this period, the
Party finally broke from its isolation and became a “realistic”
social movement.
The invention of Popular Front tactics during the Third
Period supposedly came from the less-integrated members, the “rule
breakers.” While Storch may be correct that local processes impacted
the Chicago Party, we still need to grapple with how the party produced an
institutional form that transformed these “rule breakers” into
little Stalins who held back working-class self-activity with disastrous
results. The idealization of the Popular Front ignores how Stalinism and
the CP’s alignment with Roosevelt’s New Deal destroyed any hope
of a potential independent third party; dashed workers’ militancy by
accepting no-strike pledges on the job; disposed of its principled
opposition to imperialism and racism; and deadened the world working-class
movement as a whole through its alignment with bourgeois parties
internationally.
Ironically, Storch herself refutes much of the
fascination with the Popular Front period by uncovering that throughout the
entirety of the Depression, the CP was able to conduct mass work and
recruit enormously—a feat that was accomplished by grassroots
organizing itself rather than by any anticipation of the Popular Front.
Unfortunately, Storch also conflates Leninist organizing with its
distortion under the Stalinized CP apparatus, thus portraying grassroots
organizing as somehow separate and distinct from the process of
party-building.
Despite these flaws, the nuance of Storch’s
bottom-up approach makes the work a must-read and a thrilling story for
anyone interested in learning the tactics and hidden history of the
CP’s mass organizing in the 1930s. What’s more, with
Daley’s plans to take over Washington Park to build a stadium for the
2016 Olympics—the very site where the CP launched its mass marches,
and still a major resource for African Americans on the South
Side—Storch’s scholarship is a reminder that Chicago is best
remembered as a city of red instead of gold.