Jewish Influence in the Communist Party of the United States of America 1919-1926
The Shocking Truth
One of the most frequent arguments used by critics of the jews historically as well as currently is that jews were inordinately involved in Bolshevism in the Soviet Union and in fact were involved well out of proportion to their numbers in terms of population. What has often been overlooked when making this argument - which although often massively overstated is often remarked on by historians of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet Union in general - (1) is the significant involvement of jews in the formation of the Communist Party of the United States of America in the crucial early years of 1919 to 1926 when it began to grow as an organised and conspiratorial force, which eventually ran numerous spy and espionage networks for the Soviet Union as well as its own above and underground parties. (2)
In the below list I have outline the influence of jews in terms of position and their relative numbers in the key positions that they occupied in the various formative parties and periods of the Communist Party of the United States of America. The most complete list I have been able to find was that offered by the Marxist Internet Archive (or MIA) which I have used to create this listing. (3)
The problems offered by this list and Communist history in general are several:
Firstly due to the conspiratorial, subversive and generally paranoid nature of Communists internationally at this time - and the Communist Party of the United States of America were not an exception to the rule - pseudonyms were usually used in official and unofficial correspondence and documents so that it requires a large amount of backtracking and historical detective work to comprehend who is who in the documents concerned. This was exacerbated in the Communist Party of the United States of America by the raid at Bridgman on 22nd August 1922 (4) and leads to the situation - which has occurred in the MIA list - whereby we know the ethnic identity of an individual leader (due to whom they were representing usually) but we do not know their actual name.
Secondly parties of the far left - Marxist and non-Marxist - have historically tended to be extremely factious in nature and this has lead (and still leads to) numerous factional breaks and the creation of majority and minority groups within the parties themselves. In the case of the Communist Party of the United States of America this lead to numerous splinter groups, arguments, dissolutions, reformations and unity coalitions, which to a reader unacquainted with the tendencies of the far left can seem utterly disconcerting and even confusing at times. Part of the reason that I opted to use the MIA list was due to the fact that it offered it in an easy to understand format so that the reader could check what I had said against the MIA master list.
Thirdly the tides of influence and power within the Communist Party of the United States of America (and the far left in general) are notoriously difficult to chart and we can only largely guess and extrapolate from events what the power shifts were and on what basis they came about. This can make relative numbers somewhat deceptive, but for the sake of clarity we should state the reader will notice that several jewish individuals were largely in power throughout the 1919 to 1926 period in the Communist Party of the United States of America. Jay Lovestone in particular deserves mention as he was an extremely influential jewish figure inside the Communist Party of the United States of America and was only removed due to his support for Bukharin against Stalin in the power struggles inside the Bolshevik Party in Russia. In fact had Bukharin won the power struggle then Lovestone would have become the leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America as opposed to Stalin’s chosen acolyte: William Z. Foster. (5)
If we bear this slight caveat in mind that numbers do not necessarily equate power although they do give us a fair approximation of it. We can begin to see a pattern in the following list of jewish officials in the Communist Party of America from 1919 to 1926:
1919 Communist Labour Party of America
National Executive Committee: No jews out of six members. Two jews (Finkelberg and Benjamin Gitlow) out of five alternative members as of January 1920.
Editorial Board: One jew (Ludwig Lore) out of three members.
Labor Committee: One jew (Benjamin Gitlow) out of five members.
1920 Communist Party of the United States of America
International Delegates: No jews out of four members. Three jews (Daniel Elbaum, Alexander Bittelman and Jay Lovestone) out of four alternative members.
Additional Executive Committee Members: Five jews (Alexander Bittelman, Maximilian Cohen, Daniel Elbaum, Jay Lovestone and Rose Pastor Stokes) out of eight members. Three jews (Rose Pastor Stokes, Meyer Lunin and Morris Kushinsky) out of six alternative Additional Executive Committee Members.
Language Federation Secretaries: One jew (an unnamed jewish individual) out of seven members.
Executive Council (after January 20th 1920): Three jews (Maximilian Cohen, Jay Lovestone and Alexander Bittelman) out of seven members.
Executive Secretary (after July 20th 1920): Louis Shapiro
Central Executive Committee (at the end of 1920): Four jews (Maximilian Cohen, Louis Shapiro and two unnamed jewish individuals) out of nine members.
Editor of Party Publications (at the end of 1920): Maximilian Cohen
Language Federation Secretaries (at the end of 1920): One jew (Morris Kushinsky) out of six members.
Assistant Secretary (after February 20th 1921): Louis Shapiro
Editorial Committee (after February 20th 1921): One jew (Louis Shapiro) out of three members.
District Organizers: Two jews (George Ashkenazi and one unnamed jewish individual) out of six members.
1921 (Unified) Communist Party of America
Executive Secretaries (from May 31st 1921 to April 1923): Two jews (William Weinstone and Jay Lovestone) out of five appointees.
Central Executive Committee Members (from May 31st 1921): Three jews (William Weinstone, Jay Lovestone and George Ashkenazi) out of eleven members.
Central Executive Committee Members (from December 1921): Four jews (William Weinstone, Jay Lovestone, Meyer Lunin and Alexander Bittelman) out of ten members.
Central Executive Committee Members (from April 17th 1922): Two jews (Jay Lovestone and Alexander Bittelman) out of ten members.
Secretariat (from January 26th 1923): One jew (John Pepper aka Jozsef Schwartz) out of three members.
Executive Council (from January 26th 1923): Five jews (Israel Amter, Benjamin Gitlow, Ludwig Lore, Jay Lovestone and John Pepper) out of seventeen members.
1923 Workers Party of America
Executive Council: Three jews (Alexander Bittelman, Ludwig Lore and Moissaye Olgin) out of eleven members.
Central Executive Committee: Eight jews (Israel Amter, Alexander Bittelman, Jay Lovestone, Moissaye Olgin, John Pepper, Rose Pastor Stokes, Alexander Trachtenberg and William Weinstone) out of twenty-five members.
1924 Workers Party of America
Representative to Comintern (ECCI): Israel Amter
Central Executive Committee Members: Six jews (Alexander Bittelman, Benjamin Gitlow, Ludwig Lore, Jay Lovestone, John Pepper and Martin Abern) out of thirteen members.
Political Committee: Two jews (Jay Lovestone and John Pepper) out of seven members.
Organization Committee: Two jews (Martin Abern and John Pepper) out of five members.
Secretariat: One jew (John Pepper) out of three members.
Education Committee: One jew (Alexander Bittelman) out of three members.
Daily Worker Management Committee (as of May 1924): One jew (Moritz Loeb) out of five members.
1925-1926 Workers (Communist) Party
Central Executive Committee Members: Six jews (Martin Abern, Philip Aronberg, Jacob Stachel, Benjamin Gitlow, Jay Lovestone and William Weinstone) out of twenty members.
We can see from this list that as time went on the number of jews in positions of influence in power both increased and solidified with numerous jews - notably Alexander Bittelman, Jay Lovestone, William Weinstone, Ludwig Lore, Benjamin Gitlow and John Pepper - becoming exceptionally powerful and long-lasting in positions of power within the Communist Party of the United States of America. It is worth noting that while we have these members of enduring power we also have a considerable turnover of jewish individuals within the officials of the Communist Party of the United States of America with there being a particularly high general representation in the Central Executive Committees.
It is worth noting that when jews are represented at the highest levels of the Communist Party of the United States of America that they tend to be so in significant and disproportionate numbers. We see for example in the Central Executive Committee of 1923 to 1924 that the amount of jews is fifty percent of the total number of members and this is obviously wholly disproportionate to the amount of jews in America at this time.
Opponents and detractors of anti-Semitism may try to explain away such notable disproportionate involvement as this, but their arguments are usually based more on begging the question (asking why it is significant in the first place) rather than actually providing a reasonable thesis for why it is the case. The idea that the jews were oppressed is a common argument of type, but this ignores the fact that if we consider the jews to have been oppressed then we cannot specifically answer why they should turn to the Communist Party of the United States of America in significant and disproportionate numbers and the equally oppressed Germans, Swedes, Irish, Italians and others should not turn to the Communist Party of the United States of America. (6) Let alone of course rise to the top of the Communist Party of America which jews certainly did disproportionately and in significant numbers as this list illustrates.
This is yet to be reasonably explained by opponents of anti-Semitism and has tended to be attacked as ‘baseless conjecture’ by some: the tendency has been to show that jews were significantly and disproportionately involved in far left wing politics in the United States throughout its long and nefarious history and not to look at the two pieces of information together. In so far as if the Communist Party of the United States of America was an openly subversive and revolutionary organisation and the jews; as a group, were significantly and disproportionately represented in its leadership then we can only conclude that jews acted the part of a hostile elite in the Communist Party of the United States of America much as Kevin MacDonald has argued they did in early Soviet Russia. (7)
References
(1) On this point please see Benjamin Pinkus, 1988, ‘The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York and Erich Haberer, 2004, ‘Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
(2) On this point please see Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, 1995, ‘The Secret World of American Communism’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven.
(3) http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/cpa/cpaofficials.html [Last Accessed: 04/01/2011]
(4) A very useful and readily available contemporary account of just what was found in this raid can be found in R. M. Whitney, 1924, ‘Reds in America’, 1st Edition, The Beckwith Press: New York (reprinted in abridged form; largely removing the mention of jews, in 1970 by Western Islands: Belmont [a John Birch Society affiliated imprint]).
(5) For more on Jay Lovestone please see Ted Morgan, 1999, ‘A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, anti-Communist and Spymaster’, 1st Edition, Random House: New York.
(6) The only similar and brief exception to this rule is surprisingly Finns who in 1923 made up 45 percent of Communist Party of the United States of America’s members although not its leaders. See Leon Poliakov, 2003, ‘The History of Anti-Semitism’, Vol. IV, 1st Edition, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, p. 383, n. 58
(7) This list should be seen in the conjunction with the numerous jews involved in spying and espionage activities in the United States who were directly and indirectly named by Whittaker Chambers, 1952, ‘Witness’, 1st Edition, Random House: New York and Louis Budenz, 1950, ‘Men Without Faces: The Communist Conspiracy in the U.S.A’, 1st Edition, Harper & Brothers: New York.