Stanley Levison’s Financial Role in the Civil Rights and Communist Movements in the 1940s to 1960s: A Rank-and-File Perspective

ABSTRCT

This is a biographical essay about Stanley Levison, who is the subject of Ben Kamin’s Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers (2014). Levison was a communist and friend of Martin Luther King. The review focuses on the limitations and strengths of the book, of Levison and of the Civil Rights Movement. At a time when the Communist Party was facing difficult challenges, Levison was not totally a failure in helping to uphold the aspirations of the underprivileged.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil Rights Movement
• communism
• Stanley Levison
• Morris Childs
• William Weiner

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Toby Terrar is an adjunct in the Department of History, City University of Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he majored in history. He has published essays in Journal of San Diego History, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice and The Journal of Military History. His web page is http://www.angelfire.com/un/cwp/.

Notes

1 The gap in Civil Rights Movement scholarship can be seen in the fact that King’s other SCLC collaborators, Bayard Rustin (1912–87) and Ella Baker (1903–86) have been remembered in a dozen biographies. Kamin, as Levison’s first biographer, helps fill the gap. Biographies about Rustin and Baker include Anderson (1997), Haskins (1997), Levine (2000), Podair (2009), Brimner (2007), Miller (2005), D’Emilio (2003), Houtman, Naegle and Long (2014), Dallard (1990), Grant (1998), Moye (2013), Bohannon (2005) and Ransby (2003).

2 Levison’s (2015) FBI record is 11,000–pages in length. Kamin uses David Garrow (1981) and Taylor Branch's trilogy (1988), (1998) and (2006).

3 The FBI sources do not state the reasons (financial, academic or other) for Levison's abbreviated college career.

4 The FBI file states that Stanley was registered in a “major political party.”

5 The American Law Students was established on December 27, 1936 (Levison 2015, pt. 11, 59; Bailey 1979).

6 According to Levison (2015, pt. 11, 38), Levison was “medically deferred from military service” during World War II, being classified 4F on February 20, 1943 (see also, Garrow 2002, 85). The only specific medical problem mentioned in his FBI file is hemorrhoids during the 1960s.

7 Kamin (2014, 36), writes negatively of Kennedy:

This “Mr. Kennedy” (a pseudonym) was eventually found out as a major FBI snitch that pursued a notorious career of infiltrating other people's lives, from Frank Sinatra to Gene Kelly to Belafonte. This Mr. Kennedy was also Belafonte's personal manager and financial adviser—much to the calypso singer's eventual consternation and disbelief.

8 Among other things, Cammer was one of the defense lawyers during the anti-communist prosecutions of the party leadership in the 1950s. Loewi was president of Michael Brothers Furniture Co., director of the Federation of Jewish Charities and a member of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce (Levison 2015, pt. 11, 35).

9 When Kennedy moved to California, Levison managed the Kennedy firm until 1949, when they had a falling out (Karier 1986, 337).

10 Stern rejected the list because it was out of date.

11 According to David Garrow (1986b, 409; see also, Levison 2015, pt. 1, 30 and pt. 3, 24), Weiner's family migrated from Russia to America when he was a child. He joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and worked as an assistant editor of the Freiheit, which was a party-related newspaper. In 1927–28 he was a party section organizer in New York and in 1933 became the party's financial secretary. As will later be discussed, he was also the president of the International Workers Order (IWO) and a member of the party's national board. He was convicted of passport fraud in 1940 for having stated he was born in America. He received a suspended sentence.

12 Biographer John Barron (1996, 262), records that beginning in 1946 Weiner and Levison conferred frequently and that Levison consulted Morris Childs about setting up party businesses in Chicago and Michigan. Childs had been a party official in Chicago for many years.

13 Dougher maintains that much of the defense funds never served their intended purpose. He writes:

The person in the Party who had the records of who had the money, came to us and told us that large sums of money were being lost to the Party. This was so because some of the leaders who had it were leaving the Party and keeping it; sometimes as much as four hundred thousand dollars in the possession of one person. . . . All of the top district leaders and national leaders who left the Party with the money went into businesses such as service stations, parking lots, exterminating businesses, trucking businesses, or what have you. Some opened snake ranches, motels, bars, apartment buildings, just like any other manipulating scoundrel in business. Some of the National Committee members negotiated with each other to see how much each would leave the Party with. Some of them who were district and national leaders now are in business. I am sure the CIA and FBI agents in the Party could have used it against the leaders, although they could not use it now because the statutes of limitation have passed. I am sure in the past they used it as a club over their heads to keep them in line to mislead the workers and the rest of the people; the same as the Labor Reporting Act is used to keep union officials in line by the IRS, the Secretary of Labor, the CIA and the government. (Dougher 1974, 47)

14 Unfortunately, Garrow's article does not cite where he obtained this information. One scholar, Marc Schneier (1999, 50), maintains that, “Though no conclusive evidence ever supported its contention, the FBI was convinced that Levison managed money for the Communist Party in the United States.” That is, in Schneier's view, some of the non-footnoted “facts” concerning Levison in Garrow's Atlantic Monthly article may not be accurate.

15 Ben Kamin, in referring merely to “an FBI memo” without giving any further information as to where it is located, gives a few more details of the dealings between Jack Childs and Levison:

The FBI monitored a cloak-and-dagger type meeting between Morris and Stanley in front of the New York Public Library on a gray, blustery day in November 1952. In time, the Childs brothers divulged and uncovered a vast inventory of rendezvous, documents, bank records, hotel receipts, and conversation trails that unequivocally linked Stanley Levison to the top financial levels of the Communist Party-USA. Stanley even acquired various business firms and interests to which he consigned a percentage of profits to the Party and its work. (Kamin 2014, 47–48)

16 The major donors included Frederick Vanderbilt Field (1905–2000), Harry Herman Kaplan, who was a Brooklyn, N Y builder and Abraham A. Heller (b. 1874). The latter was the founder of the International Oxygen Company, a source of tanked oxygen for the Allies during World War I. He helped establish International Publishers. At one point he contributed $110,000 to the publishing company (Starobin 1972, 279; Field 1983, 219, 276; Davis 1998, 139; Swearingen 1971, 592).

17 When the party held its 16th convention in February 1957, the membership was down from 100,000 in 1950 to 3,000. The organization's finances were reduced not only by the loss in dues income, but by the decline in party press sales and litigation expenses (Lannon 1998, 148; Johanningsmeier 1994, 347; Garrow 2002, 82).

18 In mid-June 1956, Wofsy was still meeting Levison at least weekly, probably because Levison was holding a large portion of the Reserve Fund's cash assets.

19 Party-activist Erwin Marquit (2014, 143), gives an example of the Childs’ influence:

At that time [1965] relations between the CPUSA and the Communist Party of Cuba had been strained because the CPUSA felt that the Cuban support for armed struggle in Latin America would hurt rather than advance the struggle for socialism. It was only several years later that the Cubans recognized this. When Bea Johnson went to Cuba to serve as liaison between the CPUSA and the Cuban party, she was initially treated only formally, and was denied access to the Cuban Communist Party leadership. After some time, however, she finally was received by the Communist Party leadership and cordial fraternal relations were reestablished between the two parties. How this came about was not described in the oral history that my wife and I taped in the 1980s. Apparently, she did not know the details herself. I found the explanation in Operation Solo: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin. . . . The Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker, who had long been a prominent member of the CPUSA National Committee, told me that he never could understand why Morris Childs was always seated in prominent positions at Party conventions, although he never had anything to say. During a visit to Moscow in 1965, Morris was told to inform the Cuban Communist Party leadership that the CPSU wanted them to mend their relationship with the CPUSA. Jack Childs went to Havana to convey this to the Cuban party leaders. The Cubans cooperated with the request, and Bea's subsequent access to the Cuban party leadership signified restoration of party-to-party relations.

20 Charney (1968, 253, 280–83) lists Khrushchev's 1956 attack on Stalin and Hungary as demoralizing many in the New York district, but of little influence in the Midwest and Western districts.

21 Similarly, the Chinese political scientist, Li Shenming argues that the million-dollar book contracts that Gorbachev and his wife received from Western publishers did more to undermine the Soviet Union than the World War II Nazi invasion. Li (2011, 183) writes, “We can safely conclude that bribes in US dollars played a considerable part in causing the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downfall of the Soviet Communist Party.”

22 The membership went up by a half from below 10,000 in the 1970s to 15,000 immediately after the campaign (Andrew and Mitrokhin 1999, 292).

23 As union and party organizers in the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s party leadership knew how to live cheap. In the earlier period, they stayed with friends, hitchhiked, remained single and their wages, which were from $12 to $25 per week in 1935 for a Chicago organizer, were sometimes more theoretical than real. A factory worker averaged $1,000 per year (Gates 1958, 29–30; Davis 1998, 140; Barron 1996, 29). Party member Hope Davis (1994, 70) comments, “There were unknown comrades in the South living on almost nothing—eating with the sharecroppers they were trying to organize—alone and always in danger of being beaten up or shot.” John Gates (1958, 111), who was one of its editors, describes in heroic terms the production of the party newspaper with minimal funding:

It had always been extraordinarily difficult for a radical movement in the United States to sustain a daily newspaper because of high costs and lack of advertising. The Daily Worker was a deficit operation which had to be subsidized by the heroic efforts and sacrifices of all too few readers. For the last ten years of its existence the Daily Worker operated under an annual deficit of $200,000 which was raised chiefly by the Herculean labors of the Communist Party. The existence of the Daily Worker as a daily newspaper for 34 years was a small miracle, admired by radicals in general and by many in the newspaper profession who knew what it meant to get out a daily paper on a shoestring and with our tiny staff.

24 Starting with its founding, the International Working Men's Association (The First International), which existed between 1864 and 1876, made rank-and-file dues payers their funding base. In 1866, the dues payers exercised their power of the purse by forcing a reduction from the initial three pennies per member per year to ½ penny. A history of the International (Anonymous 1964, 45–46) summarized, “It seemed unlikely that any organizations would pay the more onerous rate and the impoverished council sought to get at least some money rather than none.” The organization's secretary, its only employee, initially worked without pay and later with minimal wages (Braunthal 1967, 108). Similarly, in most of the Soviet party's existence, it was entirely supported by membership dues and literature sales. The dues were 4% of wages, while the income tax was 7% of wages (Belova and Lazarev 2007, 444; 2013).

25 In his study of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Kevin Morgan (2006, 30), similarly finds that periods of self-financing were marked by greatly enhanced political effectiveness. As he puts it, “When recipients of Moscow ‘gold’ were forced to fall back on ‘proverbial workers and their pennies’ for support, the fund raising strategy provided a form of bonding, commitment and motivation essential to any broadly-based political movement.”

26 Marquit was among the rank-and-file who resisted the center because of its approach to democratic centralism. He (2014, 445) wrote about the problem:

The election to the National Committee followed the traditional undemocratic practice that prevented any delegate from being elected from the floor that was not on the list recommended by the outgoing National Committee. A valid ballot had to have effectively as many votes for as many candidates as were on the recommended list. To elect a person nominated from the floor, supporters of that candidate would have to get the majority delegates to agree not to vote for a particular recommended candidate and vote for the newly nominated one. This practice essentially continues to this day, although a slight lowering of the percentage of candidates that have to be voted on is being introduced.

In 1991 a third of the comrades, including Marquit, exercised their power of the purse and stopped paying dues because of this problem. In Marquit's view, the center is in a difficult position. If it becomes activist, the government will go after its resources. If it opens to the rank-and-file, its jobs will be lost to the youth.

27 As a youth, Marquit learned about the limitations of democratic centralism from his communist father. He (2014, 47) explains:

One day, upon coming home rather confused after reading a pamphlet entitled Lenin in October, I asked Leo [Erwin's father] about something Lenin had written that disturbed me. Toward the end of September 1917, Lenin was convinced that the Bolsheviks had the support of the majority of the Workers Councils (Soviets) in Moscow and Petrograd and that the time was ripe for the revolution for which they had been preparing. He was unable at the time, however, to convince the majority of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks of the correctness of his assessment. He complained that his viewpoint was being suppressed by those who favored an electoral path, which he was convinced was not really open. In despair, he sent a letter to the Central Committee in which he wrote, “I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hereby do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the rank and file of the Party and at the Party Congress.” I asked Leo, “Isn’t this a violation of democratic centralism? When can you do this?” “When you are Lenin,” replied Leo.

28 If rank-and-file biographies are any indication, the high-living Morris Childs would have been unmasked had he been attending a neighborhood club. Party leader Dorothy Healey did not know about Childs, but she explains the inharmonious relations at the center caused by the top-down funding:

There are all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which [general secretary] Gus Hall has learned to reinforce his power. There are extra funds available for vacations for Party leaders, and he gets to decide who gets those. When Party delegations are made up to travel to the Soviet Union or Cuba, his choices will get first priority. If you want to publish a book Gus can make it very easy for you to do so, through International Publishers or by finding you a ghost-writer if that's what you need. It's a very effective patronage system. (Healey 1993, 176)

29 Under the club system, there were no membership records at the center, which made it difficult for the government to learn who were party members (Bedacht 1951, 3555).

30 Lapitsky and Mostovets (1985, 48) summarize the rank-and-file concern in the 1944–45 episode:

In practical terms, Browder's course obliterated the distinctions between the Communist Party and the democratic movement, abandoned the basic Marxist–Leninist principles concerning the leading role of the Party and led to a renunciation of an independent proletarian policy and, subsequently, to the actual dissolution of the Party. The Communist Party was going through a painful period of ideological and organizational confusion. In 1940, it withdrew from the Communist International. Gus Hall criticized this move. He wrote that the withdrawal was due not only to anti-communist legislation but also to the deep-rooted opportunism and Browder's revisionism. In turn, the withdrawal itself fed opportunism and revisionism.

31 H. Davis (1998, 143) goes on to comment that during the time that Lovestone headed the party, he (Lovestone) would single-handedly exert pressure on sources of which only he knew the source and present them with a great flourish, as if to say, as Davis puts it, “See how I always manage to save the party in times of trouble.”

32 As described by Starobin (1972, 119), with the war came a disruption in communications between the American and Soviet parties that was not restored until 1951. During the war the Soviets through Lend–Lease received “Washington gold,” in contrast to “Moscow gold” going in the opposite direction.

33 Other mass organizations that helped the party included the American League Against War and Fascism/American League for Peace and Democracy, Friends of Soviet Russia/Friends of the Soviet Union/National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, International Labor Defense/Civil Rights Congress, Trade Union Educational League/Trade Union Unity League, World Peace Congress and Women's Liberation Movement (Goldstein 2009; Cohen 1993; Horne 1988).

34 Bedacht was a party leader in the 1920s and its acting secretary in the interim between the expulsion of Lovestone and the establishment of the secretariat, of which he was a member, which led the party until Earl Browder's leadership became stabilized in 1934 (Starobin 1972, 249). Bedacht remained a party leader, but as Starobin describes it, the specific preoccupations of running his own organization kept him at a “discreet” distance from the centers of power. In the later 1940s, Bedacht was critical of the party support to the Progressive Party and its position on the “Jewish question.” He was one of many old-timers who were expelled as “leftists” during the Foster-Dennis leadership. His appeal to the 14th National Convention, August 1948, was published in the oppositional Manhattan Communist Bulletin, No. 3, which was published in April 1949.

35 While the government shut down the IWO in the 1950s, the AJC, which was liberal controlled, continued to function and was Levison's donor base for SCLC funding (Garrow 1986a, 168; Levison 2015, pt. 4, 46 and pt. 7, 20; Kamin 2014, 35).

36 The AJC's Manhattan branch was to the left of the national body.

37 See also, Margaret Fuchs Singer (2009, 121), which discusses the employment advantages and disadvantages which party membership offered for lawyers. Yuri (Gregory) M. Stekloff mentions a typology for the First International that is similar to that outlined by Garrigues. Stekloff (1968, 369) writes:

The First International contained the rudiments of all three of the fundamental trends of the contemporary international working-class movements: revolutionary communism, the moderate socialism of the class-collaborationists, and anarchism. . . . In the First International they existed side by side, worrying along somehow under the one roof.

Party leader William Foster outlined a similar motivation typology in the trade union movement. They are: pure and simple, social democratic, and anarchist-syndicalist (Foster [1955] 1968, 157).

38 Garrigues (1936, 8, 39, 189) maintains that the value which is attached to concepts such as proletarian dictatorship, class struggle, the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism and democratic centralism is related to the communist types.

39 Kamin in this passage quotes Garrow (2002, 82). Garrow in turn cites an FBI report, without giving its exact location.

40 Garrow (1981, 28) describes Levison's negative view toward commerce.

41 Murray Friedman (1998, 109) notes that Levison always traveled economy and, when forced to dine out, ate in cheap restaurants.

42 Levison, as quoted in Garrow (1981, 28), called commercial skills “abhorrent.”

43 Kamin (2014, 222) mentions other examples of Levison's union work including incorporating into the movement union officials such as Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers. Similarly, he helped write speeches for King that promoted unity with labor. An example is when King addressed a union meeting of District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Unions, American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) at New York City's Madison Square Garden on October 23, 1963. The speech that Levison worked on urged that the union work for strong civil rights legislation (Karier 1986, 463–75, quoted in Kamin 2014, 178).

44 Levison, as quoted in Kamin (2014, 60), told King during the planning period:

Well, it can’t just be a march. The demonstrations must be carefully organized and peaceful. That's the biggest challenge, that everything be peaceful. The Kennedys will try and prevent it but they can’t knock it down if it is really peaceful. There need to be nonviolent sit-ins outside congressional offices and rallies and other strategic sessions with congressmen and senators. And we can’t do this by ourselves. We need to bring in all the big labor unions to make it work as a message for jobs. Kennedy doesn’t relate to “civil rights.” He does relate to jobs.

45 Illustrative were his comments about the 1960 student sit-ins, which he called a “new stage” in the attack on “state power.” Kamin, quoting Garrow (1981, 27), who quotes from an undated letter from Levison to King in the King papers at Boston University, Drawer, writes:

Levison had been disappointed by SCLC's and King's relative quiescence in 1958 and 1959, and when the spontaneous college student sit-ins began in Greensboro on February 1, 1960, he welcomed them with special relish. “This,” he wrote to King, “is a new stage in the struggle. It begins at the higher point where Montgomery left off. The students are taking on the strongest state power and demonstrating real will and determination. By their actions they are making the shadow boxing in Congress clear as a farce. They are by contrast exposing the lack of real fight that exists among allegedly friendly congressmen and presidential aspirants. And by example they are demonstrating the bankruptcy of the policy of relying upon courts and legislation to achieve real results.”

Kamin (2014, 100) discusses the NAACP–SCLC acrimony.

46 The ILD became the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) in 1945, and was led by William L. Patterson (Horne 2013).

47 The thinking of Harry Truman and Winston Churchill in desiring to bleed the Soviets is illustrative. The scholar Erwin Marquit (2014, 50) writes:

After the Soviet Union had been attacked by the Nazis in 1941, Harry S. Truman, then a U.S. senator, said that if the Germans are winning, we should help the Soviets, and if the Soviets are winning, we should help the Germans, so that the two could kill each other off. This sentiment persisted among reactionary politicians in both the United States and Great Britain. As a result, the opening of a second front in Western Europe was delayed until the Soviet Red Army had driven the German troops back to the Polish border. In 1942, however, President Roosevelt, with the support of U.S. chief of staff General George C. Marshall had assured the Soviets that the Western allies would open the second front in Western Europe that same year. Later in 1942, after it became clear that the Roosevelt administration had given in to the demand by Churchill that landing of British and U.S. be deliberately delayed to bleed the Soviets, progressives raised publicly the demand for the opening of the second front. This demand was even joined by some segments of monopoly capital that did not want to risk a possible Nazi victory in Europe or cause any further delay recovering their investments in Europe.

48 Another communist, Steve Nelson (Nelson, Barnett and Ruck 1981, 253), who was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, summarized a similar view in his biography, “Those of us who had some military experience analyzed the nonaggression pact as a device to allow the Soviets a chance to prepare for war.” American Jews, as discussed in Helen Camp (1995, 149), reported that their relatives in the Polish-occupied Ukraine welcomed the Red Army in 1939 and joined it against the Nazi and the former Polish governments.

49 Kelley (1990, 190–91) goes on to comment:

For his rather mild defense of the Soviet Union's actions, Joe Gelders was accused of being a Communist, prompting several SCHW members to call for his immediate expulsion. Gelders denied the allegation, claiming only a perfunctory knowledge of Marxism and a soft spot in his heart for any defender of civil liberties. So adamant were his denials that during the 1940 campaign for city commission, Gelders threatened to sue candidate W. B. Houseal for calling him a Communist. Lying about his Party affiliation was undoubtedly a painful experience for a man who had desired to be an open Communist from the moment he joined.

Randi Storch (2007, 216), reports the same pattern in Chicago:

Communists’ newfound popularity made the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its consequences particularly difficult for local activists. The agreement devastated Communists’ allies, especially those who were Jews, intellectuals, and/or middle-class sympathizers. Yet even with the loss of some fellow travelers, the party's own forces were not seriously depleted during this year-and-a-half-long hiatus in the Popular Front. Local party experiences explain their persistence in Chicago; the Soviet Union's about-face in 1939 did not seriously affect the work of most local Communists who pushed for civil rights, fought for the unemployed, and organized industrial unions. As Claude Lightfoot states, “From 1935 onward, the Black and labor movements became the main spark plugs igniting the engines of the struggle.” Ties Communists had forged in the black community, in unemployed organizing, and within the labor movement offered them local network and concrete issues that overshadowed unpopular international twists.

50 Milt Felsen (1989, 161), writes about his 1940 military indoctrination class given by a West Point lieutenant colonel:

“Forget everything you ever were taught about honor, truth, decency, fair play, or your instinct for ethical behavior,” he began. “Your life will depend on being able to lie, cheat, and deceive and to kill quickly, silently, and without hesitation. You must think dirty and fight dirty.” In other words, we were to become morally indistinguishable from the enemy. Is it always true, I thought, that you become those you fight?“So what do you think?” I asked Irv Goff afterward.“If I read von Clausewitz correctly,” said Irv, “it's a good argument for settling disputes other than by war.”

51 Dorothy Healey (1993, 85) notes that even those who are party members go on leave when they take a job that restricts party membership. They remain communists but not party members.

52 Ellen Schrecker (1998) discusses those convicted for perjury.

53 Biographer Margaret Singer discusses those in her father's professional club who could not be deterred from participating in mass organizations. At one point she quotes his description of their intransigence, “I have seen also situations in which a group, persistently arguing with the boss, finally has its way” (Singer 2009, 123). In his autobiography the New York district organizer, George Charney discusses the “members at large” with which he worked. He writes:

Perhaps it is an odd footnote that the most intransigent supporters on the “left” came from the professional groups—doctors, lawyers and assorted businessmen classified as members at large (MAL). They operated in tightly knit circles far from the center of party life. Ideology was the decisive question. In some respects the best educated, they were also the most indoctrinated and the most rigid. Their party life was untouched by big disasters. They were fund raisers and fund givers, and at regular intervals, if doubts arouse about the progress of the party, a representative would come to give them reassurances. I was often that representative. (Charney 1968, 284)

54 See also, Jane Foster's (1912–79) biography (1980, 103). She likewise dropped her party membership upon entering government service during World War II:

I did not feel that I was contributing much to the war effort. One of my friends asked me to transfer to the Board of Economic Warfare, the head of which was Henry Wallace, the Vice President, where I could be more useful, which I did. I was put to work in a section called “Reoccupation and Rehabilitation of Liberated Territories.” It would have been great, except that, in 1942, there was nothing to reoccupy. Before leaving New York I had been told by the Party that, if I went to work for the U.S. Government, I would have to turn in my Party card to my last unit organizer. The question never arose for me, as my card was either lost or stolen before I left for Washington.

At other times, such as the 1930s, entire party units were comprised of government workers (Davis 1994, 69, 100, 138).

55 If Levison's first wife told the FBI, one would think it would be in his FBI file. But it is not.

56 Kamin (2014, 30) also mentions Levison's attendance at Young Communist League (YCL) events in the 1930s as evidence of his party membership. But the YCL was not the party.

57 Garrigues (1936, 8, 39, 189), points out that only the club treasurer would know who at a meeting is a dues payer and who is only a sustainer or friend.

58 Biographer Helen Camp (1995, 279) summarizes the historiography about Dennis:

David Shannon has described him as “a cautious party bureaucrat with a damp finger always in the air to detect both rank-and-file and Kremlin breezes.” On a more earthy note, Junius Scales later remembered that whenever the New York delegation to the 1957 party convention took a controversial vote, Dennis could be found “haunting” the men's room. Dennis's wife Peggy remembered him as a poor factionalist, trying vainly to stay above the fray and to convince others by cool, rational argument. She saw him as trying to function as a balance wheel between the two extremes: to keep the party intact by propitiating the Foster faction while protecting the Gates wing from the “old man's” retaliation. . . . Dennis often blocked any effort to expel outspoken members for their heretical views; the party was dwindling fast enough as it was.

59 Soviet academician Leonid F. Ilyichov (1974, 217, 238) writes about Engels's contrasting views on party work and commercial participation:

By the terms of his agreement with his brothers he could not leave the firm until July 1, 1869. Until then, he could only yearn for deliverance from the “accursed commerce” which, he wrote, “completely demoralizes me with its waste of time. . . .” When Engels’ contract with Gottfried Ermen, his partner, ran out on June 30, 1869, he was able to end his hateful work in the firm. . . . On July 1, 1869, he was able to write to his friend: “Dear Moor! Hurray! Today, it's all over with doux commerce and I’m a free man!” Eleanor Marx later recollected: “I was with Engels when he reached the end of this forced labour and I saw what he must have gone through all those years. I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed: ‘For the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to the office. . . .” At long last, Engels could devote himself entirely to party work and science. “Of course, I need not say how glad I am that I am free of this damned commerce and can again do what I choose, and especially that it happened now, when things in Europe are getting warmer and when, one fine day, the storm may break out quite unexpectedly.”

60 Ellis (2004, 90) writes, “There is no doubt that parts of the Jewish community have their own recently acquired idols: capitalism, patriotism, and national security.”

61 As seen in Levison (2015, pt. 20, 32), those whom Levison cultivated were the politicians Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana, and John Conyers, Detroit Congressman (Levison 2015, pt. 14, 59), the entertainers Harry Bellefonte and Sidney Poitier (Levison 2015, pt. 20, 64), and the leaders of the Teamsters Union, Packing House Workers, Hospital Workers and the United Auto Workers (Levison 2015, pt. 14, 91; pt. 20, 5, 17, 29, 72).

62 Levison feared loss of revenue, but King saw his Vietnam involvement as enhancing revenue. Levison (1966) acknowledged the problem that Vietnam presented for his fundraising:

The Vietnamese War is increasingly seizing the emotions of the people and is reducing their civil rights concerns to a very secondary level. The impression that people gained that the civil rights struggle is over with the passage of legislation and anti-poverty funding further reduces civil rights appeals and the absence of dramatic events takes attention from the needs and still further reduces interest and concern. Finally, the recent stock market decline has an effect.

63 See Louis Budenz (1947, 329) for a negative description of dealings between Weiner and Childs in 1938.

64 In 1971 a tip from Childs led to the arrest of Angela Davis (Barron 1996, 8).

65 Horne (2013, 12–13) writes about Childs's sabotage:

As is now well known, the party had been penetrated at the highest levels by Washington's agents, and they were adroit in blocking his ambitious plans, particularly those that spelled black freedom. Thus, in 1957 he met with the CP's leading international representative, Morris Childs, who also happened to be the authorities’ main agent within the ranks—and who spent an inordinate amount of time kneading Patterson's capacious plans into curlicue knots. They were in the basement of the CP headquarters in Lower Manhattan on a summer day when Patterson indicated that—assuming he could get a passport (not a given)—he would like to tour Latin America to rally support for US Negroes. With bureaucratic deftness, Childs replied that such a journey would require discussions with and permission from the “entire leadership” of the CP and that, besides, it might be dangerous. Childs took careful note of Patterson's idea of obtaining funds from Eastern Europe for such a venture, as the plan was suffocated in embryo. Nevertheless, Patterson continued to push aggressively for global support for the unfolding civil-rights movement in the face of Childs's bureaucratic jujitsu and FBI interference.

66 In March 1963 an FBI report quoted in Garrow (1981, 60, 257 [note 31]), stated that Jack Childs had learned from a Levison acquaintance that he was “disenchanted” with the party.

67 Similarly, in the East and Midwest districts it was business as usual. Daniel Rosenberg (2008, 189) writes:

The Communist Party retained its legality, despite legislation that would have outlawed it. Pressures to conform notwithstanding, critics in press and public could and did speak out. The Daily Worker, accused of “sedition” for opposing the Korean War, continued to publish. The Party held public meetings in New York, for example, at a center in Brighton Beach (where classes and dances also took place), and operated several public headquarters. In the most difficult moments, Communists ran for electoral office and spoke on the radio and television. Radio station WSAR in Fall River, Massachusetts even extended a “frequency discount” to the Communist Party for using its airwaves so often in 1940 and 1950. The Party's national office stayed open for business, reachable by telephone through its listed number. While leading members were railroaded to trial and prison, the Party and other organizations, such as civil rights groups (whose leaders were investigated) and labor unions (whose rights were restricted) struggling for justice and reform were not outlawed. . .Communists in Michigan participated energetically in civil liberties and civil rights endeavors. Members in St. Louis gave much attention to movements for integrated education and housing. A Cleveland club joined a campaign to end segregation at a public swimming pool. A biographer characterizes a Chicago Party stalwart as “not intimidated” by the FBI, adding: “He did not go underground and did not stop organizing.” In fact, persistent interaction with neighbors and co-workers “helped him survive the McCarthy repression of the ’50s.”

According to Eugene Dennis, who was general secretary between 1945 and 1959, party membership was at 25,000 in January 1957, down from 80,000 in 1945. See Harris (2010, 463).

68 As noted, Levison was treasurer for the Manhattan branch of AJC in the 1950s (Garrow 1986a, 168; Levison 2015, pt. 4, 46 and pt. 7, 20; Kamin 2014, 35).

69 In 1966 as treasurer for the SCLC, the annual budget was $1 million dollars. In Levison (1966), he listed the following as donations:

$400,000 Direct mail

$200,000 Foreign affairs

$50,000 Al Duckett project

$150,000 Wachtel

$100,000 Miscellaneous

$40,000 Chicago benefit

$50,000 General drive among unions, churches, etc.

$990,000 Total donations

70 See also Larry Garner and Roberta Garner (2011, 95), who likewise discuss the effect of Soviet influence:

The effect of the competitive factor was stronger globally than it was inside the United States, since it was possible to “play off” socialist and capitalist patrons against each other in an effort to obtain foreign aid and military support: but even in the United States, competition with the Soviet Union had many salutary consequences. The USSR had an important role for example in fighting racism and segregation in the USA and in the success of the civil rights movement, because in competition for the hearts and minds of the new nations de jure segregation had to be brought to an end. The Soviet Union also showed leadership in integrating women into the work force as independent wage earners, in providing universal health care, and in instituting educational policies that promoted rapid social mobility of peasants’ and workers’ children into the intelligentsia and managerial strata.

71 How the rank-and-file made the Freedom Ride an international crisis is seen in the biography of Terry Sullivan (2010). For more on Sullivan's work as a rank-and-file freedom rider, see Branch (1988, 484) and Perry (2013, 371).

72 Gerald Horne discusses the thinking of black communist William Patterson, whose focus in the party was connecting the movement to the international forces. Horne (2013, 12) writes:

Implicit in his farsighted remarks was the notion that white supremacy was so ingrained in the United States that weighty global forces were necessary to erode it. Domestic forces were insufficient—and, at that juncture, only the organized left had the necessary global network.

73 Gerald Horne's Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party is about New York City councilman Ben Davis, who was one of the black communist leaders imprisoned in the 1950s (Horne 1994). In his discussion, Horne lists some of the full-time, black “revolutionaries” that participated in the Civil Rights Movement. He writes:

The party was still one of the few national organizations with a disciplined and sophisticated core of full-time black revolutionaries that included figures with many contacts and allies still within the emerging movement. William Patterson, Doxey Wilkerson, Henry Winston, James Ford, James Jackson, Augusta Strong, Bill Taylor, Abner Berry, Claude Lightfoot and Geraldine Lightfoot were just a few of the black comrades. That they would take advantage of the moment to play a role in the movement, recruit, and help to blare headlines abroad trumpeting the fight against Jim Crow was of grave concern to the authorities. (Horne 2013, 12)

A party organizer in the South, Junius Scales (1920–2002), in his biography (Scales and Nickson 1987, 293) notes “with pride” that a black communist was one of the organizers of the 1955 Montgomery boycott that brought Martin Luther King to prominence. At the time Scales himself was being prosecuted in the federal courts under the Smith Act for his activism.

74 Historian Terry Sullivan complains that his mid-century CORE group ended up a disappointment. Arguably this was because it started off in the 1940s with an orientation that was both narrow and anti-communist. He writes:

Jim Peck was active in CORE until he and other remaining whites were pushed out by the black nationalists (and the careerists who pretended to be militants) who took it over after 1965. What was left of the CORE by the end of the 1960s was a small gang of pistol-packing, capitalist-oriented hoodlums. . . . How did something so good turn into something so bad? (Sullivan 2010)

75 Hosea Hudson (1979, 25–26) goes on to comment:

Stalin had done more than anybody else for the rights of the Negro in the South, because Stalin, way back there in the early stages of the Party, along in the late ’20s, first of the ’30s, he called a conference of some of the Negro American comrades, and out from that, they discussed the Negro question in America. You know, how can we approach it. And they came out with the slogan of the right of self-determination. . . . Stalin did something nobody else had done, to make it possible for us to be able to struggle.

76 Contrary to Kamin, Robin Kelley (1990, 38) maintains that the party's program in the 1930s South was broad ranged, embodying the mass popular demands among blacks and whites. Kelley (1990, 38) writes:

The first taste of the party's rural organizing was in northern Alabama among a small group of white tenant farmers who had asked the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) for help obtaining government relief. Then, in January 1931, an uprising of some five hundred sharecroppers in England, Arkansas, compelled Southern Communists to take the rural poor more seriously. Birmingham Party leaders immediately issued a statement exhorting Alabama farmers to follow the Arkansas example: “Call mass meetings in each township and on each large plantation. Set up farmers Relief Councils in these meetings. Organize hunger marches on the towns to demand food and clothing from the supply merchants and bankers who have sucked you dry year after year. Join hands with the unemployed workers of the towns and with their organizations which are fighting the same battle for bread.” The response was startling. The Southern Worker was flooded with letters from poor black Alabama farmers.

77 There were similar fundraising counterparts to Levison in the earlier period, such as the communist rabbi, Benjamin Goldstein, who led Temple Beth Or in Montgomery, Alabama. He raised what Kelley (1990, 48) describes as “crucial financial and moral support for Communist activities in Birmingham, Montgomery and the cotton belt.” Like Levison, who was forced out of the Civil Rights Movement, Goldstein was run out of Montgomery. Goldstein's financial support of the International Labor Defense (ILD) brought his banishment (Kelley 1990, 87; see also, 63, 196, 228, 230). The ILD aided working people involved in the Southern legal system. As noted, more sympathetic to Levison's and Goldstein's activism than Kamin is the liberation theology of those like Marc Ellis (2004, 117).