Search Results

During this five-year period, Crouch became a district organizer for the newly renamed Communist Party of the USA. As such, he was responsible for overseeing larger Communist efforts at the state level. He worked first in Virginia, where he organized unemployment councils to help those suffering through the Depression, ran candidates for state and local offices, and tried to organize dockworkers. Those efforts amounted to little, and he was reassigned to Utah where he engineered a massive strike through the National Miners Union. Although scolded for some of his efforts during the strike wave, which ultimately failed to win workers to the Communist-led union, Crouch was promoted to district organizer and assigned to oversee operations in North Carolina and Virginia. There, he focused on organizing textile workers and creating United Fronts with liberal organizations but achieved little success as ill health and poor leadership skills doomed his efforts. Although demoted and reassigned as a result of these failures, Crouch remained committed to the Communist cause.

As the Cold War deepened, Crouch continued to serve as an anti-Communist informant. He testified in federal trials against union leader Harry Bridges and federal employee William Remington, naming both as Communist Party members. Although Bridges survived the accusations, Remington was convicted and died in prison. Crouch also spent much of the early 1950s warning the nation about the dangers implicit in the Korean War and demanding that the nation do more to attain a total war footing. When those demands fell on deaf ears, he returned to the witness stand and testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee where he offered additional information and warnings about the Communist threat to the nation. He concluded this era by testifying before the Subversive Activities Control Board which was trying to determine whether or not the Communist Party of the USA was foreign controlled. Crouch asserted that it was, and thanks to his testimony the Party was ordered to register as a foreign agent with the federal government. Crouch thus achieved some success in the early 1950s and became ever more convinced in the righteousness of anti-Communism.

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.