Rev Left Radio - Menace of our Time: The Long War Against American Communism

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

For over a century, the U.S. ruling class has waged war on communists, anarchists, and radicals. From the Palmer Raids of 1919 to McCarthyism in the 1950s, from COINTELPRO in the Cold War to today’s MAGA rhetoric about “woke communists" and his crackdown on "Antifa Radicals", state repression has always sought to crush revolutionary politics before they could take root; especially in times of capitalist crisis.  In this episode, historian Aaron J. Leonard joins us to discuss his new book Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism. We trace how the U.S. developed its arsenal of anti-radical laws and FBI surveillance programs, and how these were deployed against generations of activists, workers, and organizers. We talk about the Communist Party USA’s early growth, its leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder, and its contradictory relationship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who both advanced social reforms hated by capitalists and cracked down on communists in his time. Leonard explains how McCarthyism and COINTELPRO not only repressed communists but created a climate where the majority of Americans came to accept mass violations of civil liberties in the name of anti-communism.  As Trump and the far right recycle the language of anti-communism to justify repression in 2025, Leonard argues that knowing this history is not just an academic exercise -- it’s a weapon for the struggles ahead. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, we have back on the show multiple-time guest, Aaron J. Leonard, to discuss his newest book, Menace of Our Time, The Long War Against American Communism. And this really covers huge swaths of the 20th century from the perspective of not only the Communist Party, of the USA and the surrounding and related cultural, political, social movements, but also the state crackdown from the first red scares, from the reaction to the McKinley assassination by an anarchist in Buffalo in 1902 through the Smith Act, the Palmer raids, McCarthyism, and the rise of Cointel Pro during the Cold War period. We touch on contemporary issues like the

Charlie Kirk assassination, as well as how the Trump administration and the reactionary right today still carry on the rhetoric, policies, and worldview of this anti-communist movement that has been present in the United States since communism was a thing, since socialism or anarchism were a thing. And so I think it's really, really important to understand this history to get a better understanding of the present and also learn lessons on how the capitalist state reacts to organized radical revolutionary left-wing movements in what we we can learn from that, as well as what we can learn from the successes and failures of previous iterations of American socialist and communist movements in our society. So a really, really

fascinating conversation. It goes a whole bunch of different places. And I think people with any interest in the history of socialism, communism, Marxism, or just American history writ large, will get a lot out of this episode. As always, Rev. Left is 100% listener funded. We could not survive without you and if you want to support the show and in exchange be a part of the Buddhist sangas we run be a part of the situation rooms that we have open Zoom meetings whenever a really big story breaks so us as a community can discuss the event and make sense of it together in real time as well as bonus monthly episodes that I put out exclusively for for patrons you can join us at patreon.com forward slash revel left radio for only

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It allows us to put food on the table of our families, me and Dave, who's the other half of Rev Left. And in this period of time where I am in an apprenticeship program for a trade, for a trade union, you know, I make apprenticeship wages and I'm making, you know, in the teens, an hour, a lot of the people that are entering this program are young guys without families. And so I could not survive on just that wage alone. It is the Rev Left family and the Rev Left world that allows, you know, me to feed and provide for my family and allows this show to keep going forward. So thank you so much to everybody who supports the show. And without

further ado, here is my wonderful, fascinating, deep historical conversation with Aaron J. Leonard on his newest book, Menace of Our Time, The Long War Against American Communism. Enjoy. Okay. Hi, I'm Aaron Leonard. I, Aaron J. Leonard. I'm an author and historian. with a focus on the interplay of political radicalism and governmental state repression. Yeah, and you have been on the show many, many times at this point. A recurring guest, one of my favorites. You put out a lot of important work, specifically on the history of communist movements

and co-intel counter-communist movements, counter-socialist movements in the last century of American life. you bring your own personal experience, having organized with various communists and left-wing organizations through the years, as well as a deep academic approach to the history of it, which I really appreciate, learn a lot from, and anybody on the contemporary American left should engage with your work, I believe, to get an understanding of the unique conditions in which we operate. So before I actually get into that first question, do you just want to talk a little bit about this new book itself, kind of why you wrote it and just kind of give people who might not be aware of it an introduction to what it's all about. Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me back. I really, this is

one of my favorite shows to be on. It allows me to talk to an audience who I think understands things on a level beyond a more intermediate approach. So, you know, it's good to be able to kind to talk more freely in that sense. So this book is Menace of Our Time, The Long War on American Communism. I was actually going to write a book about the secret apparatus of the Communist Party USA, kind of a fascination of mine, you know, how an entity in the United States did work that attempted to allude the gaze of the authorities, the gaze and the unwanted attention of the authorities.

But as I started to research this, I just kept getting pulled in the direction of the repression that was aimed at the group as a whole and could not put it aside. I thought I would be a project far too ambitious, but it turned out it was the book I had to write because everywhere I looked for the period approximately between 1920 and 1991. It was just soaked through and through with the government's effort to stop it on every level, not just the FBI wiretapping, but you know, state laws, federal laws, you know, media that was, you know, dead set on villainizing this group. So, you know, that in short is what the book is about. Absolutely. And for people, I just wanted to quickly remind people, you've been on for your other books like the

Folk Singers and the Bureau, heavy radicals, the FBI secret war on American Maoists, meltdown expected, crisis, disorder, and upheaval at the end of the 1970s and more. So I just wanted to remind listeners that there's many other episodes with Aaron. So if you're interested in this sort of historical analysis. I'll link to the other episodes we've done together in the show notes. But yes, this one is about the long strain of anti-communism, anti-socialism, institutionalized anti-communism and anti-socialism, going back through American history. And we usually end these conversations on sort of bringing it up to contemporary implications. But maybe I'll start there today because your book argues that anti-commonism.

communism wasn't just like hysteria in isolated moments, like sometimes, you know, the McCarthyism period is presented as, but really a century-long, ongoing systemic project. How do you see that legacy directly feeding into today's far-right authoritarianism and even the contemporary Trump administration and how he uses terms like the radical left and the Marxists, et cetera? Well, it's a question that operate, you know, I would have to answer it on a couple levels, but just contemporarily, I recently wrote a piece for truth out which speaks directly to this. I mean, the people in this Maga Trump universe are invoking anti-communism frequently and voraciously. Christy Noam basically says the Democratic. Party is communist Stephen Miller, you know, standing in the midst of Union Station in Washington, D.C., surrounded by National Guard and military. You know, he's being heckled by heckled, I guess is not the word, but there are protesters outside, and he's just dismissing them as communists and saying they're not going to run things. You know, Trump himself has used the words of the radical left and communist.

So it's just pervasive. You know, you would think that there was a huge communist movement in the U.S. that was attempting, you know, some kind of revolutionary overthrow, which is not the case. I mean, we are in a world in which that particular ideology is, you know, sitting on the extreme margins of things. But then I was thinking about it is like, so what's the... Aside from just the demagogic aspect, I mean, this is a phantom that haunts, you know, a certain stratum of rulers in the United States. I mean, even looking at the world today, you have countries like Vietnam and Korea, Cuba, and China, you know, which are still nominally communist.

I mean, their economies are really integrated into the world capitalist system, but they're part of the legacy of the 20th century, and the legacy of the 20th century was communism, you know, such as it was, which controlled like, I believe, something like a third of the year, the Earth's population in economy. So, you know, this is not just some notional, you know, troll population. hold out of the thin air. I mean, there's actually some materiality of it. And, you know, history continues to unfold. I mean, what kind of social system and dynamic is going to rule humanity in the next 100, 500,000 years, I think is still an open question, which means, you know, the, you know, capitalism in the U.S. and large parts of the world does reign supreme right now. but it's not a foregone conclusion that that's the end of things. So kind of two answers on that.

One is there's some demagoguery about the Trump people and, you know, who knows where that's all going to end up, not to dismiss the awful power and the terrible things they're doing at the moment. But then there's the bigger question of, you know, which ideology, which social system, which economic system is going to guide humanity going forward is still, you know, in many ways an open question, even though it doesn't feel that way right now. Yeah, no, I totally agree that it's an open question. And in fact, I've long argued that the system as it's currently instantiated, I mean, you know, global capitalism,

imperialism is fundamentally unsustainable. And more than that, it is the material cause of so many of the problems in our society that get obscured through ideology. So, for example, you know, the right wing is obsessed with this question of like young men you know young men have no future they you can't provide for a family they're listless you know masculinity's on the attack whatever um you know you can talk about like immigrants taking our jobs they need to be deported so we can have more american job all this stuff is right wing ideological fog in obscurantism that is covering up and and distracting from the real material cause of all of these issues which is a faltering highly unequal, unsustainable economic system that is chewing up human life and

spitting it out for the immense profit of a relative few. And that leads to a whole bunch of social disfunctions, which are fundamentally symptoms of a deeper disease. But that is where fascism comes in, right? When capitalism falters in such a structural way, fascism comes in to give a whole different analysis that completely skews one's perspective away from any sort of analysis of the economic order and puts it on to often powerless, you know, people that have a hard time defending themselves and they'll advance, you know, racialist and hyper-identarian sort of political movements, anti-immigrants, blame the immigrants for our economic problems, as you vote for, you know, an ostensible billionaire who is clearly part of the economic elite

and the economic material causes of all the problems that are impacting you and making life so difficult and impossible for regular people. So it's just fascinating how that works. And yeah, do you have thoughts on that really quick? Well, you know, it's actually a whole episode. You know, we should do at some point. But it does, one thing I realized in writing this, book about the Communist Party USA is there was a strong industrial working class, industrial proletariat. I mean, the way things were produced in the 20th century, at least the early maybe two-thirds, you know, was in factories, you know, these huge, you know, monoliths where tens of thousands of, you know, mainly men were brought in to do, you know, routine labor. And that did kind

lay the material basis for, you know, struggles and unions and things like that. And, you know, after World War II into the 60s, increasingly you see automation and you see more and more of these jobs just disappearing. I mean, the whole question of young men today is really a fascinating question. And I'm curious about the materiality of it all. You've just got, you've got huge sections of the population, not just young men. but older people, people who are infirm with disabilities, just sitting outside of the whole production process in a country like the U.S., and it's just having a degenerative effect on human society and life in general.

But the story of the 20th century is this, you know, the industrial working class plays a really kind of a super prominent role. Yeah, without question. And we'll get into that. We'll talk about William Z. Foster, the CPA USA, Earl Browder, all these things. Before, and I want to even go back and start even with the red scares, because I think we hear that term sometimes, but we forget it was multiple iterations of this, figures like the IWW, which I still draw inspiration from to this day. We're heavily implicated in those. But before we do, I just wanted to make one more exclamation point on your answer to this first question, which is we're sitting in the,

the wake a couple days out from the assassination of Charlie Kirk and one of the things that I've noticed in the wake of that is the immediate shift and framing of the killer who we still know absolutely nothing about right everybody's projecting onto this this kid their various ideological priors but there's very very little reliable information about you know where this kid comes from and there's a sick game that America plays after every Every act of public violence after school shootings, whatever it may be, public murders, assassinations, where we play this blame game where, you know, the left tries to blame the right and the right tries to blame the left and they go back and forth, leading absolutely nowhere until the next act of insane public, nihilistic violence occurs and then we run the scheme all over again. It's a real sickness at the core of our society. but after the assassination, I saw, and I'm tuned into this, right, multiple right-wing figures

blame it on Marxism, right? High sub-count reactionary YouTubers immediately frame it as a Marxist shooter. Curly, Charlie Kirk himself often talked about Marxism and quasi-Marxism being the fundamental problem. Somebody like Jordan Peterson would even present identity politics, liberal identity politics as a form of inverted Marxism, where it's still the exploiter and the exploited but turned into racial identitarian terms. And even as capitalism fails, right, people on the right are trained to blame it on communism, right? Joe Biden is a communist. The reason our economy is so terrible is because it's ran by communist. The Democratic Party are communist. So even the failures of capitalism get blamed on communism, which is really

a profoundly useful thing for the ruling class to be able to do, even if it's only half the population that it can convince of it of any given time. But yes, I just wanted to show and really highlight before we get into the history of it, the ubiquity of the communist charge and the contemporary relevance that that accusation absolutely still carries, even in the most recent breaking news that we're all operating in the wake of. Yeah, well, just an observation on that. I don't know. It's the word talism, but the word communism, it's used in such a way that it contains such a negative energy and connotation without any actual real understanding. And there are certain words like that. I'm thinking like the word pedophilia or genocide even.

You know, they're just kind of put out there without like a deeper understanding of, what they actually mean. And I hope what my work is doing is, especially with the word communism, is giving a deeper meaning. And, you know, in my book, I'm not embracing or cheerleading, you know, the work of the Communist Party USA. I'm attempting to take a critical look in the deepest meaning of the word at what it means. And I think people who, you know, long for a better world really do need to, you know, will help themselves by doing the hard work of understanding things more deeply and be able to combat, you know, the demigodgery of various forces who just kind of sling these terms,

hoping to latch on to superficial understandings that basically vilify a certain cohort of people. Yeah. Yeah, and while it's almost, it's definitely true that you are a man of the left, I do appreciate the critical analysis, the dispassionate and objective analysis you bring to this history because I think it's really important and more useful for us to be able to have that sort of critical taking stock of failures and successes that we can have an objective analysis of that history so that we can actually learn from it. And that does us much more service than a hyper-romanticized version of it or what we usually get, which is just this hysterical anti-communist framing of this

history, if it's told it all. And, you know, I think the predominant approach in American society to this history is just a complete erasure of it in its totality. So you're resurrecting this history and you're coming at it with a critical, objective, dispassionate analysis that doesn't fall into hysterical anti-communism or, you know, apologia or romanticism. So that's why your work, I think, is important. Just a note on that. Neil deGrasse Tyson has this line, which I really appreciate. He says, you know, he loves to make mistakes because it allows him to learn and move forward. And I don't want to trivialize, you know, some of the things like the Communist Party U.S.A. But, you know, the fact that people blunder, organizations blunder and forces that want to propel things, you know, far into the future make, you know, huge mistakes. you know, should be seen as something to try to more deeply understand and hopefully learn and move forward from. I mean, that's, I mean, that's what we got.

Otherwise, you know, you can just point your fingers and blame and, you know, rant and rave, which I guess feels good for a little while. But the object of the game is to move forward. Couldn't agree more. That's true in our personal lives as much as it is in our political, social, and historical lives. So let's go ahead and move forward. and let's get into the second question, which is about the red scares. Again, we've all heard the term more or less, but for those less familiar, what exactly were the red scares?

And how did the first and second red scares sort of differ in their perhaps causes, methods, impacts, et cetera? Well, you know, so the, you know, I start with the assassination of William McKinley by this anarchist in Buffalo. It's funny because Buffalo is having this big expeditious. position in 1902, and they've got a big display. I think it's a banner saying, welcome William McKinley, president of our country and empire. I'm paraphrasing, but the United States, excuse me, and coming into the 19th century, you know, has just fought the Spanish-American War, where they grabbed Cuba, the Philippines, you know, Hawaii is, is, brought under their control.

You know, it's interesting because, you know, when Trump invokes McKinley, you know, that particular aspect of, you know, what he was doing isn't really mentioned. It just circulates around tariffs and stuff. But McKinley is assassinated, you know, by this anarchist. And New York State passes a law against criminal anarchy because there's a left socialist movement that it has considerable influence. Actually, McKinley's assassin is arrested, tried, convicted, and put to death all within like two months. People seem to think that the United States has this long history of judicious consideration and fair appeals.

But the brutality and the ruthlessness of it stands out. And that's one thing that comes through in this book. is that there were laws on the book that were put in place in the early 20th century that stayed in place well into the 60s, which prescribed to all manner of activity and free speech. So fast forward from McKinley's assassination to 1919, you know, the Bolsheviks had ceased power in the Soviet Union shocking, you know, the capital. advocates throughout the world, including in the United States, you know, this small organized group just seizes power from this monarchy, you know, which had been engaged

in World War II. And it just looks like, you know, this could be a contagion that spreads. So in the United States, the anarchists, there's a group of anarchists that are very much into excitative terror. They do a number of bombing campaigns, and one of the moms they do is at the Attorney General's office. Palmer in Washington, D.C. Actually, Franklin Roosevelt lives across the street. Palmer survives, but in the wake of it, him and the new up-and-comer in the Department of Justice, Jaeger Hoover, you know, basically unleash an effort to round up communists and anarchists in the United States. Meanwhile, in New York, which is the most populous state in the country and the largest

concentration of communists, you know, mainly made up of foreign-born communists from Russia and the Baltic in various countries in Europe. New York had had this commission called the Lusk Commission investigating communism. So in the wake of the Palmer bombing, a wave of roundups is conducted. Thousands of people are taken in custody, including the nascent leadership of what will become the Communist Party USA. Hundreds are ended up being deported. The rest of the people end up through various machinations in the legal system being released. But there is a period in 19, 19, 1920, where there's just this shrill cry against communism.

And it is, you know, this is what becomes the first red scare. That abates. Then we go through, you know, the period of the Great Depression through the first, through the Second World War. And coming out of the Second World War, you have not just the World War, you have not just the Bolshevik revolution, which had put a period on the end of World War I in World War II, the Soviet Union was the co-victor in World War II and dominated huge chunks of Europe. And Harry Truman, who was president at the time, basically drew a line and said, you know,

the Soviets were not going to allow them to advance any further into Europe, Greece, at that point was in the midst of civil war and the U.S. basically sided against the communist insurgents such as they were. This was the Truman Doctrine and that ushered in a second Red Scare which was

a qualitatively different thing because there was a communist party in the U.S. that had close to 100,000 people I think anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 members. Obviously, the hardcore cadre would probably be just several thousand, I'm kind of guessing a little bit, but a bigger, broader membership. But there was a concerted effort to destroy the Communist Party's influence in the United States, but it was also part of a larger social effort to just chill the atmosphere and allow the U.S. to do what it needed to do in its new position of being.

the greatest empire on earth. So those Red Scare 1 and Red Square 2 are kind of, you know, in the history books in this way. And then in the second Red Scare in particular, you have the emergence. So the Red Scare 2 starts in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine. Then around 1950, you have this character, Jill McCarthy, who kind of wades into the atmosphere to, you know, to vilify and call out and accuse all manner of people in the government and some of the social and cultural institutions is communism. And he becomes the, he becomes the bogey man, if you will, for the second Red Scare. And they call it the McCarthy era, which is not really helpful if you actually understand the history.

I could talk more about that, but I don't want to. just kind of, you know, get stuck on that particular point. But I think in short, those are the two things. But in my writing, what I discovered is, you know, the two red scares are particular feverish episodes, but it's not like the space in between was one of, you know, a patient toleration of communism. There's this low-level insurgency, if you will, you know, throughout this period and low level with some sharp qualitatively repressive aspects. Yeah. And I think once you start getting a grasp of this history, you see the, really the unceasing

nature of it. You know, in retrospect, we go back and we look at history and we break it into chunks and we give it labels and names and apply concepts to it. But this is really a singular process that in many, many, many ways, as we've already discussed, it's still alive and well today from the 1902 McKinley assassination. But, of course, even before that, there is the, the, this. bubbling up of of these concerns around you know immigrants and you know radicalism coming from Europe and and then the industrial working class coming together into factories and class struggle

manifesting out of that the rise of the IWW in the in the 19 teens and of course they were a main subject of that first red scare and that crackdown and then you talk about you know the the ostensibly the second red scare and then leading into McCarthyism but even in 1940 kind of in between these two periods. We had the Smith Act, which I'm going to ask you to explain here in a second. And then throughout the, even before that, of course, you have the Great Depression and out of economic turmoil and tumult and collapse comes, you know, people looking for different alternatives. And so you've already had the Bolshevik revolution 10 to 15 years before, you know, establish itself as a possibility in the minds of people. And then you have

the, you know, the world capitalist system really collapse economically. And that gives a certain sort of energy to these radical, you know, left-wing visions of what economic organization could look like. And so that, that obviously is something that the, the capitalist state is constantly wrestling with. But I really wanted to emphasize that these red scares are situated historically during and directly after world wars, where, there is a certain existential concern on part of the ruling class, right?

You're fighting enemies abroad and there seems to be an undermining within your own society. And this has happened in every major war during the Iraq war to a lesser extent, you know, but there was still was a somewhat of an anti-war movement during Vietnam, of course. You know, that's a huge example of

an internal dissent around an external war. It might not be as existential concerning as a world war inherently is we're looking down the barrel of i mean several military engagements at the very least proxy wars a genocide in palestine now we're bombing you know in and around perhaps venezuela sending troops in that direction um Israel very well could continue its attack on iran ratcheting up tensions that the Taiwan issue looms in the background and so the the possibility of of world war three is not off the table by any means we already see a Trump administration blaming, wanting very fervently to crack down and the certain

part of his base, fervently, obviously wanting some sort of martial law to be declared and some sort of low-level civil war or at least state crackdown on the so-called left, whatever that means in these people's minds. And so you can only imagine if a real war broke out in this environment, how we would see the immediate reemergence of this sort of red scare state crackdown. So I just wanted to give people a sense of that history and really to see this as a process, not as these isolated incidents and iterations that we look back and apply to history, but really as an ongoing process with more acute and less acute phases, right? Yeah, it's, I, they actually is making me think of a,

number of things, but I realized I kind of left something out in talking about William McKinley, one of the things to come out of that was New York State immediately passed this law, making it a felony to advocate revolution. It was called a criminal anarchy law. Benjamin Givlow, who had been one of the founders of the Communist Party, he ended up becoming a renegade. But at the time, he was arrested and put in jail under this criminal anarchy law, and he appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court. Before, actually, I want to read what the court actually said. But in what you were saying, it made me realize, yeah, these disruptions,

these major catastrophes of world war underscore the impermanence of societies, you know, which, you know, attempt to enshrine themselves as everlasting, that they're going to be around for hundreds and thousands of years. But in fact, you know, empires rise and fall states, borders change. And, you know, the people at the pinnacle of power, some of the more learned ones understand it. You know, others do not. You know, they don't have the vision. I think a lot of the people in the Trump administration don't. have the vision to kind of see that they're overseeing a United States, which is in a far more precarious position than they imagine. Regardless, back to the Supreme Court in this criminal anarchy law, Benjamin Gitlo is in New York State prison, and he's saying he shouldn't be in

prison because it's a matter of free speech to advocate revolution. I mean, it's the First Amendment. And the court comes down and says, it cannot be said that the state is acting arbitrarily or unreasonably when in the exercise of its judgment as to the measure necessary to protect the public peace and safety, it seeks to extinguish the spark without waiting until it is enkindled the flame or blazed into the conflagration. So the court is basically saying, you know, we can stamp this stuff out even before it begins. And this is the law of the land, the Supreme Court, circa, something around 1920, and it stays on the books until the 50s.

And it's not really until 1969 that this whole concept of advocacy is decriminalized. I mean, people have all these notions that, well, we need to get this society back on track and, you know, the democracy needs to operate the way it should. But the way it has always operated has been to protect the status quo in the most powerful and richest people. And that is something that comes through. I mean, we all grew up some, you know, you're a bit younger than I am, but we grew up with this notion of free speech, free organization, free press. But it's always been the case that certain ideas have been criminal. And, you know, I think what we're seeing now is, you know, there's laws on the books

to make things criminal, but then there's larger public opinion. I mean, I think right now in the wake of the Kirk thing, there's a whole move about, you know, people who are quoting Charlie Kirk are being called to task for quoting Charlie Kirk, making him look bad. I mean, you know, what is that, but a suppression of free speech, a kind of a soft way, but, you know, very effective. I mean, just to make a contemporary point, but it's, it was shocking to me to see that, you know, the Supreme Court, you know, the whole right-word pull of it is not some new phenomenon. I mean, there are some particular, particularities about it. And, you know, we're not just in a repeating loop. But that was,

the implication of the McKinley thing, and it was pretty quickly used against the emerging communist. The law has passed in the early 1900s, and by the 1920s it's being leveled at communists. Not only that, New York passes this criminal anarchy law, and within, I believe, 10 years, 33 other states had put criminal anarchy or criminal syndicalism laws on their books and they will be routinely used against radical socialist, but particularly communists. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned that this entire, you know, sort of American project has first and foremost been about protecting the interests of an economic elite. And it really goes back to the founding, before the founding, even after the founding of this country in iterations

like Shay's Rebellion, which was the sort of this decisive decision early on, despite the, rhetoric around radical democracy and Jeffersonian ideals of democracy, that at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, this system is going to clamp down on these bottom-up movements that are interested in redistribution or in any sense of economic justice, whether that be Shea's rebellions and his ragtag group of farmers, up through the populist movements, through these more anarchist socialist and communist inflected movements. And obviously up until this day, even as this system fails to provide, as it has in the past, right, it fails to provide for more and more people. It still insists on the perpetuation of the interests of the elite. And so it's just an

interesting history to understand. And you mentioned the ruling class and there are some figures within it that are learned. I think that was more true perhaps in the past. I mean, as I look at this decaying, rotting ruling class in the U.S. today, even outside the Trump administration, in the Democratic Party, in the so-called deep sea, state. These people are less and less, you know, intellectually impressive. Even figures that we disdain from the past, they still had this sense of, of an education, some sense of a grasp of history, you know, some sense of an understanding of the global political realm. And I think that's just less and less true, which means a more and more fragile and more prone to

disintegration, right? Ruling class as a whole. And I think most people in one way or another, whether they grapple with that at that conceptual level or not, have a real disdain for the elite because in part they'd have no sense of their own place in history and they have no sense of the struggles of regular working people in this country and have really no interest in trying to understand. And I think Trump is just the most explicit, grotesque form of that. But it's actually, you know, pretty ubiquitous throughout the entire ruling elite. You just reminded me, I forget that I can't make the proper reference, but I was listening to somebody talking and I wish I had their name at the tip of my tongue, but they made the point that stupid people are dangerous because they are sure of what they're doing. And that, you know, history has turned on the actions of stupid people. I mean, people who are more thoughtful and doubtful, you know, you can talk to them, you know, and maybe they'll see things different. But, you know, Trump is incredibly stupid.

I mean, and people like J.D. Vance are incredibly opportunist. I mean, they don't really have any core set. But Trump is extremely stupid. I don't know if you ever, I know this is an aside, but go back and watch the movie Quo Vadis in its, I think it's a 50s, you know, epic. view of the decline of Rome and Peter Eustinov plays Nero and it's just, it's just fascinating to see how ignorant and narcissists the guy is and just kind of make the contemporary connections. But yeah, stupid people are dangerous. You know, ignorance is not bliss. It's actually, it's a very dangerous condition. It's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a malignancy in a certain

sense. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why it's incumbent upon all of us as thinking people to not fall into the self-righteous comfort of extreme dogmatism and insularity, but to constantly be challenging ourselves and to humble our own egos so that we are actually receptive to reality as it actually is and in criticisms even of some of our deeper core values or beliefs because that is the that is the possibility of growth that's the possibility of maturation and what this world needs more than ever is not more certain ignorant people but more people that have less of an ego that are more open to analysis of objectivity and objective reality and are more willing to you know update their ideas and tether themselves to reality as it actually changes

unfolds rather than to insist on whatever that makes them feel good inside. And this is not just a problem of the right, right? This is on the center. This can obviously, it has been, and still is on various parts of the left. And I think there's something undignified about it, right? And there's something undignified about insisting on the certainty of your own ignorance. And it always comes with a barbed-wired ego that cannot relinquish control over, you know, its own narrative. or even see itself objectively. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, it's good for a little dopamine burst,

but, you know, it's not good for running marathons, which, you know, that's kind of what life is. Amen. All right, really quickly, I want to move into the next phase, but I just want to, can you just quickly remind us what the Smith Act was? This was in 1940, so this is kind of between the two periods, but it's part of this broader process.

I think it's an important iteration. Yeah, the Smith Act, it was conceived as an anti or an immigration law, but it was actually codified the, essentially the strictures of the criminal anarchy law of New York basically made it a felony to teach the desirability of revolution. So it wasn't a matter of, you know, I mean, look, making revolutionary, organizing people to engage in the kind of political violence that would topple the U.S. government, I mean, that's a non-starter. You know, that was illegal from the start. But the Smith Act took it further by saying, you know, you can't teach this. You know, and if you're

teaching this by selling a newspaper with a, which is saying that revolution is a desirable thing, and, you know, we need to think about it. You know, that became a. a felony. It was used initially against the Socialist Workers Party, I believe in Minnesota, because they stood against World War II. Some of their people were convicted and sent to prison. I think it might have been overturned on appeal. I'm not, my legal mind tends to have a little bit of a slippage in the facts, but it was drive on against the Trotskyist. and the Communist Party USA basically stood on the line cheerleading because for them the Trotskyists were as bad if not worse than, you know, the capitalists.

Of course, the law turned around and bit them in the backside because, you know, their leadership was put on trial in 1949 and sent to prison under the Smith Act. Yeah. Yeah, well, there's a lesson right there for the American left is to not support crackdowns on inter-left disputes and oppositions because that will always be used against you eventually. And I guess this podcast stands in stark violation of the Smith Act for the crime of offering a vision of a world liberated from class society. But we'll set that

aside for now. Let's go ahead and move into this next question because, you know, in your book, you cover many, many different figures, but two of the figures that I admittedly, and with some shame know only very little about actually are William Z. Foster and Earl Browder. Can you kind of talk about them and their role in this history, what differences existed between them, and kind of the challenges they faced as outspoken and relatively famous communists in the 30s, 40s, and 50s? Yeah, it's, I mean, they're interesting. I mean, to this day, people in a certain section of the left, I mean, there's huge controversy about. both of them. Both of them at certain points led the Communist Party USA. Foster actually led the party

coming out of the second Red Scare into the early years of the Depression. He was a labor organizer and was a leader in the 1919 big steel strike. But he joined the party and led to the preeminent position. Earl Browder also came about at the same time. Browder was actually put in prison during World War I for advocating against the war. He came out of Kansas. His, I think his grandson, Bill Browder, is a prominent public figure these days in the whole Russia-Ukraine stuff. So that's just a kind of an interesting way things turn out. Browder led the party in the 30s into World War II, and he oversaw the party's biggest influence. He's also considered a pariah for the – he's the template for revisionism because of his willingness or accommodation, if you will, to work with the U.S. ruling class.

Foster, you know, his leadership of the party was overturned in the early depression, I believe, because the Komen Turn intervened. And they said, you know, we want Browder to be there. And Browder was big during the party's anti-fascist popular front period. And both of them, I mean, you know, dis and there's a whole universe to talk about about them. But what struck me about them is both of these guys went to jail. You know, Browder in particular was in jail a couple times in federal prison. You know, if you were a communist in the United States, you know, between 1920 and 1960, there was a pretty good chance you were going to land in jail if not in prison. And it just seems to be one of the things that, you know, my old friends in the left don't seem to be too aware of is, you know, as, I mean, is rough and as it is to be, you know, to hold this ideology that is an ethema to larger society, you know, in the last 20 or 30 years, by and large you can go out on the street and, you know, screen your lungs out about what needs to happen without facing prison.

But these people, basically when they did that, they knew what the stakes were. And, you know, they rose to it. And, you know, you do have to give them credit for those moments where they stood up and they didn't bend. I mean, then, you know, we can talk critically about them, you know, their various actions and such after. Browder in particular is he leads the party into World War II and he's really waving the American flag. He actually does this tactical thing of nominally disbanding the party and turning it into the communist political association in an attempt to have more broad appeal. Stalin through the French Communist Party basically intervenes and say, no, no, no, you can't do that. And then there's a whole internal struggle in the Communist Party, USA, circa, 1944, 1945.

And then Browderism becomes, you know, this huge campaign, you know, kind of like an anti-Trottskyism, anti-Revisionism, anti-Brouderism. So Browder is, you know, historically he's looked on as this pretty awful figure. But, you know, I would argue that, you know, it's one. more complicated than that you know sure yeah and i appreciate your point about you know the real self-sacrifice of of these people at a at a time where as you said it's almost certain that you're going to face unbelievable backlash and prison time and and they did but to just kind of put a point on the on the brouderism thing yeah this was an attempt to kind of integrate american nationalism patriotism, into Marxism, and that gives ways to a whole bunch forms of deviation, right?

Deviationism and revisionism that are counter to Marxism, Leninism. Lenin talks in the lead up to world or during World War I, you know, we are not going to go and fight these imperialist wars, right? The workers on each side of this conflict have more in common than we do with our ruling classes who we are fighting for, and really took a hard stand and really shaped Marxism and Leninism after that, right, and conflicts after that that, that we are not taking the side of our bourgeoisie in these inter-imperialist conflicts. And Brouderism in an attempt, or Browder in an attempt to ingratiate communism,

make it more popular, dilutes it, and tries to, you know, wave the American flag without contradiction, you know, next to the red flag. And that gives rise to a whole bunch of errors and probably in Stalin. for whatever you may think of him still understood Leninism was a Leninist right and so could see that that is a a really crucial crucially important error and deviation that could that could really lead to problems and did lead to problems so I just kind of wanted to explicate that a little bit more for people because there are still you know manifestations of the American left that more or less try to recreate this this fusion of Marxism, Leninism and American

veganism, U.S. nationalism, patriotism. And so I think it's an interesting historical precedent to an ongoing phenomena. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. Another figure I really want to cover here is FDR, right? So I'm very interested in your analysis of FDR. You certainly touch on them in this book. And, you know, FDR is a sort of ambiguous figure for the revolutionary wing of the American left. He was derided as a as a communist by the right, right, called Franklin, Delano, Stalin or whatever they said for him. He even faced an attempted fascist coup. He famously said, I welcome the hate of the big capitalist, the big industrialist. Yet, on the other hand, he cracked down on communists and is said to have considered saving capitalism from communism

to be one of his greatest achievements. And I don't know if that's apocryphal or not, but that's a phrase and a quote that I've heard. So how do you handle FDR? What's FDR's role in all of this? And what are the contradictions in his legacy? Yeah, well, you know, it's a good question because it just makes me think that during the campaign for president, Trump called Kamala Harris a communist. I mean, and that's kind of what's the currency now is, you know, these people on the far right are vilifying the Democrats. And not even the left Democrats, not even Bernie Sanders, mainstream Democrats are the far left. And, you know, they're not.

I mean, they're very much they want to protect the overall socioeconomic system in place. So FDR, you know, 1936, the Depression is deep going on. And he basically is answering his critics. He says, we in the Democratic Party have not. not been content merely to denounce this menace, you're referring to the communist menace, we have been realistic enough to face it. We have been intelligent enough to do something about it. And I think that is his stepping off point. He's not pro-communist. He's not sympathetic to them. I mean, there's a certain toleration of them during World War II when

And the Communist Party had something along the lines of 13,000 people joining the military. I mean, he was more than willing to take that. But, you know, as the country approached World War II, he conferred enormous power on the FBI, basically gave it the power to do internal security investigations, which would be the mandate that they carried into the 70s. You know, FDR, you know, rounded up tens of thousands of Japanese and put them in concentration camps. And it wasn't just an anomaly.

I mean, it was a concerted, you know, undertaking. He advocated wiretapping and, you know, of his enemies and such. So, you know, yes, you know, he, as you say, he was an agent to, try to preserve the capitalist system. But, you know, he was, well, I mean, what's his biggest legacy? I mean, is, I think, you know, in the top five, it's maybe if not the top one, is the development of nuclear weapons. You know, maybe at the time it wasn't obvious, you know, where all that would lead. But, you know, we live in a world today where, thanks to him and Harry Truman, And, you know, humanity can be obliterated basically within, what, 24 hours, things like that.

So, I mean, you know, I don't get all misty-eyed for FDR. I mean, he's just, he's just a Democrat who, you know, played a role historically. You know, he kind of rose to the moment in terms of the powers to be. But his legacy is not, it's pretty fraught to put it judiciously. Yeah. And I always think there's something sort of darkly amusing about the fact that FDR is the most, I mean, objectively perhaps the most left-wing president in American history. And he was still obviously a rabid anti-communist and interned Japanese people, et cetera.

So, I mean, that's just the reality of the American Empire and the system we live and it goes back to its founding and it still is alive with us today. But I do have a follow-up question about the New Deal itself, because the New Deal obviously gave rise to, I think it's fair to say, the highest quality of life for the most amount of Americans in American history. And it's interestingly a time that right-wingers today, among other people, but, you know, the conservative right, when they say make America great again, and you really ask them, when was America great, if you push some of the more knowledgeable ones that have any sense of

history, they'll point to, you know, perhaps the 50s. Now, the 60s are a little too tumultuous for them, the 70s and the 80s, you know, 80s is Reagan, so they might point to that. But the 50s is when they kind of point as like this wonderful time. And that was undergirded by this radical shift coming out of the Great Depression in World War II in the tax rate and the redistribution of wealth in America. public safety nets and public investment that really made up the material basis for whatever nostalgia of people today have about that era. And yet that materialist dimension is erased from

the conservatives mind. And they think that what made that time period so great wasn't unions or 90% taxes on the rich or massive investment and redistribution. But basically the cultural more raise of the time, right? The fact that a man, you know, ran his family and, you know, the women knew their place and they know, the white man ran things. Like, that's kind of the cultural stuff is what they go back to, even though sort of amusingly, it's the actual left-wing economic stuff that actually made anything good about that period of time for, you know, not all people, of course, but for some people

even possible. So my question to you is, how was the new deal? shaped by these bottom-up threats coming out at this period that FDR himself clamped down on and rejected, right? Socialism, communism. But they posed at some point a real threat. How did they shape the New Deal, if at all? And would the New Deal have happened from a purely liberal administration that did not have, not only the Bolshevik threat internationally, but the communist and socialist threat domestically? You know, let me answer that within the parameters of what I can because I'm not an expert on FDR in the New Deal in general.

But as you were speaking and kind of contrasting the period of the 30s to the 50s, the thing that springs to mind and the thing that springs to mind about the assent of the Communist Party in this country is it does correspond with the U.S. becoming the most powerful country in the world. That's not just a matter of will or ideology. It's a matter of, you know, the United States had this enormous productive capacity. Not only did it have, you know, industry and, you know, socialized production, but it had enormous natural resources that it could exploit. And that coupled with, you know, two oceans protecting it from incursions from other countries. I mean, there was a reason the U.S. became the most powerful country in the world. I think Marx had had some observations on that.

In the 1950s was the pinnacle of that. You know, industry in the U.S. manufacturing was at its peak. Starting in 1960, industry and manufacturing started to decline. And the things would decline is it's like a drip, drip, drip. So into the 60s, into the early 70s, It doesn't seem like it's becoming a deindustrialized society, but then suddenly in the late 70s into the 80s, you know, things start to change. The power of the U.S., it does seem to me, I mean, this is a hypothesis, and maybe I'm missing something, the power of the U.S. seems to be diminishing in tandem with its economic power. I mean, the main power of the U.S. these days is in technology, which is mainly.

This may be something you and I talked about before, but a lot of the high-tech is essentially creating, quote-unquote, efficiencies in which, you know, labor is no longer needed. You know, AI is going to eliminate huge swaths of the economy. Well, that's where we are in the U.S. Well, in FDRs, America, United States, you know, it was a different thing. I mean, there was the ability to, you know, take this. surplus value that was being generated and impasse it back for social peace.

I mean, there were huge unemployment demonstrations and great social political instability in the 30s. In FDR, there was a material basis for him to allay that with things like unemployment insurance and social security. You know, before that, it was just a matter of Catholic charities or Protestant charities and otherwise people were just on its own. Not surprising to see, we are tilting back toward that. You know, we have a different economic template, and now we're seeing Medicaid being withdrawn. The matter of social upheaval and resistance is critical here.

You know, governments want to survive, and they'll, you know, if they can do it peacefully through concessions or, you know, maintain power violently, you know, this is what they're going to try to do. But I guess that's a little bit of a, a longer stretch in answering your question, but my sense of the New Deal is, I guess I would say it was possible to do this. I mean, in Germany, the way they dealt with the Depression was by grounding and gearing up to go to war, which is fine.

I mean, you can, you know, if you can get out of economic problems by going to war, but the one caveat is you have to win the war. if you lose the war you know all bets are off yeah no i like that answer a lot because it definitely takes into account this survivalist instinct within all governments and when you have a bottom-up populist threat you know you can either repress that violently and they certainly did but when push comes to shove you also maybe if you're able to hand out concessions to satiate at least enough elements of that bottom-up pressure to kind of act as a pressure valve release and and you you know, diminish that radical revolutionary energy, which seemed to work. But I think what you said that's crucially important there is the even deeper materialist

analysis than the one I offered, you know, when I'm talking about high tax rates and social redistribution and investment, is this amazing productive capacity of the American economy. Not only during war, there's a certain, you know, economic engine of war itself. But coming out of it, the main competition for America is, you know, over in Europe. And Europe is in ruins, whereas the American, you know, an infrastructural base of society is actually pretty intact because we're protected by these two oceans and we often go to other places to fight wars. Very rarely do we fight them here unless we're fighting one another. So that allowed for a very unique period of economic hegemony in the U.S.

with an already existing powerful, productive base that created the material of foundations for the possibility. of a new deal that that i would argue and i think you alluded to no longer exist today so even though we'll hear ideas coming out of like bernie sanders or to some extent aOC of the new new deal or green new deal some of that is possible right public investment and new tech and green tech that's certainly possible and china is showing what we can do with massive publicly directed investment and kind of a subordination of capital to the state so there's still a possibility there but the redistributionism that was possible under the New Deal rooted in this productive capacity of U.S. industry, that has been gutted by the neoliberal period and even, you know,

leading up to it and certainly in its aftermath. And so that, that strips, I think, a lot of the possibility of a new, new deal at this moment, right? Even though it's clearly something that could or should happen, that's not there. And also, I think the organized bottom up pressure of radical revolutionary movements that was present at that time aren't there either. So what we get in the lieu of those two things is something like this emerging techno-fascism. Yeah, if I can just offer an anecdote on that. So I had the privilege of going to Australia and New Zealand last fall to speak about my book, Folk Singers in the Bureau. So I was in Auckland, New Zealand, which was you know, really delightful.

But I'm walking around downtown Auckland and I'm seeing all these Chinese tourists. And these were not the kind of tourists I was used to seeing in Los Angeles and New York who were more kind of upper middle class. These just seemed to be like, you know, regular Chinese people who were, you know, more, I guess, working class.

But, you know, they didn't have the effects of being, you know, super privileged, but, you know, they seem to be doing okay. And they're all walking around downtown and, you know, having a good time. And I had to research it coming home. It was, because I was there in October and it was around the National Day celebrations in China, which are, you know, pretty big time off. You know, you get to take vacation and stuff. And I was realizing, you know, it's like, well, these folks in China, they're probably, working in industry or, you know, some kind of, you know, maybe manufacturing or, you know, tech or whatever, and they're able to go from China to New Zealand on vacation. Well, in the

United States, you know, you've got a bunch of people who can't do that anymore. You know, they can't take these vacations. They can't buy a boat. You know, they can't, you know, have a little, you know, summer cottage, you know, on the lake and things like that. That's all kind of disappeared. and it's gone somewhere else. I mean, that's anecdotal, but it did make me think. Yeah, absolutely. And it represents these historical shifts we've seen between, you know, one society that at a time was hegemonic in decline while another one is on the upswing.

And it's very clear that the U.S. is on a decline domestically, internationally, and that China is on an upswing. A lot of people predict that the China thing is unsustainable. It's not going to happen. But they've been predicting that for decades. in China has still, despite many, many challenges and obstacles, still seem to be climbing uphill and importantly giving their people a higher and higher quality of life. And part of that possibility comes from, as I said, the main difference, regardless of what you want to call

China system, the main difference is that in China, capital is subordinate to the state, and in the United States, the state is subordinate to capital. And I think that speaks volumes to the very different outcomes you see between the two societies. And unless something radical changes, I think that's only going to continue throughout the 21st century. So let's go ahead and continue to move forward. A lot of your book focuses, of course, on the CPUSA. And we've talked about the CPUSA a little bit, but let's dive deeper into that organization and the program operating against it. We've talked about the McKinley assassination, the Smith Act, the Red Scares, McCarthyism.

That all, of course, is the lead-up to the Cold War. and what many leftists understand as the, you know, the co-intel period, the crackdown on the Black Panther Party, all these other things that we've talked about in previous episodes. But you emphasize that at a certain point, 60% of co-intel pro operations were directed at the Communist Party of the United States of America. So what were the most destructive tactics used and what do these operations reveal about the FBI's real priorities during the Cold War in particular? Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because there's been a kind of a thread flowing through all of my books, which is to try to understand Co-Intel Pro in a different way. So just kind of Co-Intel Pro 101, it's an acronym for Counterintelligence Program. So counterintelligence is essentially when you are,

facing an adversary, generally a foreign power, and you want to undermine them. You want to undermine their ability to spy on you, but you also want to try to denigrate their forces and such. So the fact that Cointelpro evolved in the United States against groups like the Black Panther Party, the socialist workers, in the new left, didn't really, you know, wasn't really targeted at foreign agents in that sense. But the name itself was targeted against the Communist Party USA, and it started in 1956. And it really kind of demarks a shift in the way the U.S. FBI and the U.S. power structure is

looking at the CP USA. Because in 1956, Khrushchev denounces Stalin, and the party is decimated as a result. I mean, some people adhere to Stalin. Some people are just so disoriented that they basically move more toward the Democratic Party or just as independent progressives. But the party in 1956, even though it had been under unrelenting assault through Smith Act prosecutions and various other measures, its leadership had been put into prison for five years, years and they were kind of operating, you know, in a marginal way, they'd still retain

10 or 20,000 people, which, you know, was pretty significant given everything they were confronting. But when Khrushchev came in, they shrunk down to a few thousand people, if that, which is kind of how they went forward into the next decade. They also retained their affinity for the Soviet Union. The one thing they never relented on was their fealty to the Soviet Union. So as such, even though they're not the political challenge, modest as it what, may have been up to 1956, they were not that political challenge. They were seen as the agent of a foreign power. So in that sense, co-intel pro, the actual meaning of, you know, fighting a foreign power actually starts to make sense.

And Cointel Pro is aimed at the Communists Party USA. 60, something like 60% of the measures are there. And, you know, the other big cohort is the black hate and new left. I'm actually working on a book on the Cointel Pro against the new left, which I just signed a contract. So I'm still in the process of synthesizing all this. The biggest measure against the CP is Co-IntelPro and Operation Solo. So Co-Intel Pro itself is, oh, it's nasty.

So I'm having some mental slips on some. Oh, Ben Davis, who is a city councilman from New York, African-American man, kind of prestigious, well-known. he's dying of cancer, all these guys smoke cigarettes, so they're all dying, you know, in their 60s and 70s. But the FBI is trying to approach him, you know, as he's dying or considering this. I mean, he dies before they can pull it off. They want to try to get him to denounce communism because it hasn't been vociferous enough in fighting for civil rights, which, you know, Davis had felt, you know, there was weakness there. And they wanted to get him to publicly turn on the party.

So they, you know, do all these measures to do that. They, you know, they call out certain leaders. Well, so they, this is kind of a combination of co-intel pro, but also a larger effort is. So they've got this operation solo where they've recruited this guy, Morris Childs, and his brother, Jack Childs, who had been pro-browder and had been more or less dropped from the party. So stumbling into the 1950s, Morris Childs is sick, disenchanted, his wife has left him because he had been kind of Browder-like.

Do I have that right? I think that's right. Well, check that. Put a parentheses around that. Anyway, Morris Childs is not doing well. the FBI sends an agent out to him to basically befriend him, to listen to his troubles, offer him medical care, and basically flips him. Morris Childs had been an editor at The Daily Worker,

so he was an ideologue, he was sophisticated, and now he is an FBI informant, which he will be throughout the 50s into, I believe into early 1980. He will be Gus Hall's right-hand man, Secretary of State. He's the guy who goes to the Soviet Union and he meets Mao Zedong, but he regularly goes to the Soviet Union, makes, you know, something on the level of 33 trips to meet with high leaders of the Soviets. There's actually pictures of Morris Childs and Gus Hall meeting with Brezhnev and other top Polo Bureau leaders. And he's an FBI informant. He's going to the

Soviet Union and he's bringing back, you know, bags of money, which are basically fundering this floundering group of a couple thousand people, which doesn't have the dues paying base they used to have, but, you know, they're getting millions of dollars from the Soviet. So this is enormously successful. This head of the New York Party, William Albertson, is basically called, the FBI basically does a whole scheme where they label him as an informant. They actually plant a letter in his car, which is supposed to be evidence of him being an FBI informant. And the reason they do it is because a newspaper article had appeared suggesting that somebody in the top leadership of the party was an FBI informant.

So rather than the FBI wanting to lose their critical informant Morris Childs, they burned somebody else. That's probably the biggest thing they pulled off. A lot of the other stuff, some of it's infantile, but it's also relentless, excuse me, you're making fun of Gus Hall, making fun of Herbert Aptheker, the chief theoretician,

you know, printing a fake newspaper, ridiculing their bookstore, you know, it's all meant to be undermining. And, you know, it's, Cointelpro is just a very, very small percentage of what the FBI is doing. I mean, a large part of what they're doing is maintaining their security index, which is knowing where people live so that they can be arrested and put into detention camps if the order is given. go and tell pro, a big thing that they do, which was striking to me, was leveraging the anti-Semitism that existed in the Soviet Union and popularizing that in the various media and tying the CPSA with the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. And this goes on, and I'm seeing

it too in the new left. So this anti-Semitism thing, which is still very much you know, a challenge that's being thrust on the left is operating then against the CPUSA. But, yes, oh, yeah, and then there was this one thing. This just really disgusted me is there is this communist in Philadelphia named Aaron Libson, who is a closeted gay man. He goes to, in the mid-60s, he goes to a tea room in a park. in Philadelphia. Tea Room is a slang for a gay hookup venue. He gets arrested, charged with sodomy. The FBI learns of it. They go to their press contact and basically make sure it makes

the papers. So Libson is, you know, he wakes up in the morning and he sees, oh shit, you know, I'm being publicly outed as being gay. And, you know, he's dropped from the Communist Party he's publicly humiliated. The FBI counts it as a success. So I'm reading this, and then I find an article in a Philly paper from not long ago talking about Lipson. And he describes how when he read the paper, he said, oh, well, this is it. I have to put in practice my plan, which is basically to kill myself, you know, because I just can't live with this kind of,

information out there. So he goes to a YWCA. He tries to drink some Drano or something like that. It doesn't really kill him. He's sitting then on the ledge of a window kind of getting ready to end things. I guess he must have had some ambivalence because a friend basically comes and literally talks him off the ledge. And, you know, he goes on to, you know, have a good life. And, you know, because the gay rights movement was successful, he was able to live openly and stuff but it was just nasty business

William Sullivan said well you know this was a dirty dangerous business you know not for us but for the people we target it you know he's absolutely correct yeah well yeah the anti-Semitism thing is absolutely fascinating and I think yeah the

you know the utilizing and the weaponizing of someone's sexual orientation against them and these are very reactionary times is brutal, and it speaks to the necessity of these social movements that have occurred since then, including the gay rights, LGBTQ movements for dignity and equal rights, which are still, of course, perpetually under attack. And, you know, trans people in particular are perpetually held up by the right in contemporary discourse as, you know, menacing figures, not unlike the terrorist or the immigrant or the communist from pastimes. And so I think that,

redoubles our efforts in affirming and defending the dignity and the rights of our, of our gay, trans, lesbian, and queer brothers and sisters. So I'm glad that you mentioned that and brought that up because that was clearly a part of of that entire apparatus of trying to delegitimize people and brutalize people's reputations, et cetera. So I want to, like, touch on now the CPUSA's weaknesses and their strengths. We talked earlier about how you, you know, unflinchingly cover both aspects of it. So let's just go back to back.

And let's talk first about their weaknesses, right? You mentioned dogmatism, sectarianism, certain subservience to the Soviet Union, which, you know, sort of diminish their autonomy to operate in their own conditions in certain ways. And which of these internal contradictions or even ones I didn't mention do you think most undermine the organization's ability to resist repression? and build lasting strength. Yeah, just a little bit before I answer that is, you know, these, you know, the Communist Party, especially in the 30s, really attracted the best. I mean, people, you know, people who joined the party really wanted to, I was, so I was actually in, as I said, I was in Oceana, you know, New Zealand and Australia, and it occurred to me

that, you know, there's all these criticisms hurled at the communists and there's all these books about how screwed up the Communist Party USA is and things like this. I was actually talking to my colleague Connor Gallagher and basically asked him, you know, so on the whole, you know, was the Communist Party a good thing or a bad thing, you know? And, you know, it was a good thing. I mean, it's like, and there was,

there was nothing in the 20th century which was such a brutal period to have utopian ideas and conceive of a whole different liberated world was a valorous thing you know it was a good thing to do the 20th century was a very cold place and to have these kind of ideas was it was a matter of attempting to look at humanity beyond where it was in the moment. And I think they attracted the best people or among the best people. You know, in that period, they fought for unemployment insurance and Social Security.

They were, you know, unparalleled in many ways in fighting against racism and lynching. I mean, sure, all of this was stamped in notions at the time, you know, the matters of gender, sexuality, women's rights were all fraught and problematic, but, you know, the party did have women leaders, you know, it was, unfortunately, most of the gay people, if they were in the party, would have been closeted and stuff. So, yeah, there's all this fraud nature, but these people were really, look, they were trying to do the best with what they have. You have to give them that. And, yeah, you can look at them critically. to say that. But then their biggest failing, I thought that was a very good question. I mean, one thing is, you know, raising up the American flag and trying to reconcile Americanism with

communism, it's just a kind of a losing project. One thing is going to win out. Exactly. But putting that aside, there was this article in 1921, it was called the Workers' Council. It's a comb and turn newspaper. I have a footnote for it in my book, but they write this thing, and they say, as the article on legate, this is from my book, as the article on legality in the Workers' Council had pointedly noted, among the perils of working underground was the fact that the secrets, quote, carefully kept from the membership, close quote, actually, quote, become in short time the property of the authorities, thanks to the espionage system that is its inevitable accompaniment. So this is 1921, is basically saying, look, if you've got, I mean, I'll put this in my words, if you got this hierarchical, democratic centralist,

top-down organization, you know, you're going to be really vulnerable to getting screwed over by the authorities if they can get somebody in the top tier. This is something I wrote about, kind of a discovery in my first two books, heavy radicals and threat of the first magnitude, where I realized the FBI actually had a doctrine of trying to get informants in the leadership of these groups. Well, the CPUSA's worst repression, anti-repression failing was to not see Morris Childs as an FBI informant.

I mean, he basically, I mean, and this is in, you know, the post-1956 period before then. I don't know if I'm really prepared to go fully into that right at this moment. But Morris Childs penetrating, basically compromised a group from 1956 to 1980. That was a pretty big screw-up. And it was based on, you know, the inability. of the membership as a whole to be responsible for the, for lack of a better word, purity or integrity of the group. Yeah, fascinating.

So, yeah, I really appreciate your point about their strengths, this critical role in fighting racism, defending labor, standing up for the unemployed, facing, you know, harsh repression themselves, often self-sacrificing. It's always been the case, you know, whether anti-communists will ever admit this or not. all the many flaws and errors and failures in our tradition, that this vision of a better world, of a liberated world from all forms of exploitation and oppression, attract the most morally and intellectually progressive people in any given society. I think that's still true to this day. And our vision of a better world, our vision of a mature human civilization, where we

cooperate as equal human beings to create the highest quality of life for all of us and our families is still the vision that we must, you know, lead on and advance. And it is the inheritance of everybody who came before us. Despite their very human, they're all too human flaws and foibles, they still handed down and carry the torch for a vision of a liberated humanity, which I think represents, you know, the best of our species in some sense. And I am, you know, I'm always honored to play my tiny, tiny, tiny role in the perpetuation of that vision and the carrying forward of that torch to the generation that comes after me, the generations that come after me and come after us. And, you know, your point about their core weakness being this sort of hierarchy of power

that separated the leadership from the base of the party in the form of certain secrets or certain, you know, knowledge that the upper echelons have, that they, that weren't passed down. And I think, you know, you mentioned democratic centralism, and I just want to give a quick defense of it because I think it is often used wrong. I think it is often used in a way that that creates and reifies these hierarchies of power and knowledge within organizations that are bad and do undermine it. But ideally, right, theoretically, the way that that should work is the emphasis on the Democratic part is that everybody in a properly Democratic centralist organization should be able to participate in the knowledge. decision making of that organization, and then the idea is that once the organization as a whole has come to a democratic conclusion, even if you're on the losing side of that conclusion, then you come around and you support the organization's decision and you move forward

despite your individual misgivings or disagreement with that decision. So I think there's a way in which democratic centralism can work, but I think to your point, Aaron, it has often been used and bastardized in a way that reified that separation. between the upper echelons of an organization and the base of that organization and thus, you know, critically weakened it. And in the case of facing state repression, the state played on that, that division to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the organization as a whole. Well, let's go ahead and move forward.

All right. I'll touch on this question about culture, which I know is close to your heart and you've written other books on. And, you know, we have whole episodes on this. We could probably, I'll link to in the show notes, people can go listen to more about, but what role did culture, you know, music, film, literature play in both advancing and perhaps undermining the communist movement in the United States? And how did the, how did the state respond to this particularly cultural front? You know, it's really interesting

because, I mean, especially during the second Red Scare, there was just this whole notion that the communist had subverted the culture. And, you know, in the communist, did have this concept of music as a weapon, you know, or agitation propaganda. But, you know, in their better periods, they actually supported pretty broad cultural forms. So my book, Folk Singers in the Bureau, you know, I mean, there was a, there was a certain embrace of folk music, you know, is part of the kind of popular front or popular. kind of aspect of the CPUSA. So, you know, as a result, we've got Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Best Lomax, Best Lomax. Her, if people want to have some fun, go call up the song MTA by the Kingston Trio, who they do a kind of tongue in cheek, but it's a fun little song. But, you know, Woody Guthrie. You know, Guthrie is, you know, the air he breathed was was the whole, you know, the communist is the word aesthetic.

And Guthrie's music, it's just pretty enduring. And not only that, Guthrie gave us, you know, no Woody Guthrie, no Bob Dylan. I mean, people have seen the movie a complete unknown, which I would have a lot to say about, but, you know, it does show you the confluence of those two, you know, brilliant artists. they had the composers collective in the 30s, so, you know, all these great, I'm trying to think of some of the names now,

but the CP actually had a kind of a more conservative tilt because they had a big foreign-born population, so there was big choirs and singing groups, but also classical music was very popular. John Hammond, who was a fellow traveler, you know, he's instrumental in Cafe Society, and Cafe Society gives us Billy Holiday. And then you have the Hollywood 10 in 1947, which is, you know, the government is claiming there's been, you know, this whole communist subversion in Hollywood screenwriters. So, you know, they take the intellectuals, the writers mainly. I mean, there's a few directors in there, and they claim they've been trying to put their ideas into films.

And a lot of the stuff they had done were actually pro-World War II films. But it was a way of saying, you know, that these ideas were being insinuated into U.S. society. And, you know, how dare anybody do that, which is, you know, ironic because there's a movie in the early 50s with John Wayne called Big Jim McCabe, which is a whole Pian and Valentine to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Talk about overt propaganda in the form of film. So, you know, so, I mean, you know, I mean, there's this whole notion of the cultural front

and there's some who argue that, you know, the CP's role has been overstated in this. And, you know, it's a good argument to have. But I think if you pull the CP out of it, culture is going to be different. You know, well, the thing is, you can't pull the sepia out of it. It's lived history. It's what we've got.

They were there. They had an impact. It was profound. They allowed black, white, Jewish men, women to, you know, construct art in common and together. You know, no, it wasn't, you know, a grand, you know, hippie, you know, it wasn't like a Grateful Dead concert. It was fraught. but but it happened and it gave us you know some great things which some enduring things you know which we you know can still celebrate and enjoy yeah well said and I could not agree more

huge shout out of course to Woody Guthrie I visited Tulsa Oklahoma a few times and I always say like you know as somebody born and raised in Omaha Nebraska Tulsa feels very much like a sister city it feels like Omaha with a cowboy hat on and they have a Woody Guthrie center there and a big mural on the side of the wall that says, you know, it's a Woody Guthrie playing his guitar that says, this machine kills fascists. And I took a picture in front of it. It's a wonderful, cool little place. But yeah, his legacy definitely lives on. In your book, the folk singers in the bureau touch on many of the things that you just alluded to. And of course, I'll remind people, I'll link to that in the show notes so you can learn more about that. I think you ended that

very well. So let's, unless you have any last words you want to say, let's wrap it up on that point, That sort of optimistic note and that gesture of appreciation for the CPUSA and the cultural milieu out of which it came and it also turned around and influenced. So any last words you might have and then just letting listeners know where they can find this book and when it comes out, et cetera. No, it's really always a pleasure talking to you, Brett. I mean, you allow me to not only talk a long time, but kind of puzzle over my. myself about what I actually think. So I do appreciate that. And I appreciate your listeners taking the time. I mean, there's a lot of stuff to be listened to and taken in. So anybody taking the time to listen to this, you know, tip of the hat, I do appreciate it. Go to my website,

Aaron Leonard.net. So if you've seen the K-N-P-N-P-L-N-E-N-E-N-A-N-A-N-A-R-D-N-E-O-N-A-R-D dot net, the K-N-P-E-N-P-E-N-Pel sketch of the substitute teacher who, you know, mispronounce or pronounces the names of his students, these white middle-class students in a very peculiar way. It's always funny. But, yeah, Aaron-Leonord.net. that's the way to find out what's happening.

I'll certainly once this video post, I'll make sure there's a link there. And so that's where you can find me. Wonderful. And I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you once again for coming on, Aaron. I look forward to your next book, and we'll absolutely have you back on to discuss that.

It's always a pleasure and an honor, my friend. Okay, Brett. Thank you. All right, listen up, y'all. I'm your substitute teacher, Mr. Garvey. I taught school for 20 years in the inner city. So don't even think about messing with me. Y'all feel me?

Mm-hmm. Okay, let's take a roll here. Jay Cuellin. Where's Jay Quillin at? No Jay Quillin here? Yeah. Do you mean Jacqueline? Okay, so that's how it's gonna be.

Y'all wanna play. Okay, Dan. I've got my eye on you, Jay Quillan. New J. Quillan? Balake. Where is Balakai at? There's no Balak here today. Yes, sir?

My name's Blake. Are you out of your goddamn mind? Blake? What? Do you want to go to war, Balaki? No. Because we could go to war. No.

I'm for real. I'm for real. So you better check yourself. D-Nice. Is there a D-Nice? If one of y'all says some silly-ass name, this whole class is gonna feel my wrath. Now, D-Nice.

Do you mean Denise? Son of a bitch! You say your name right, right now. Denise? Say it right. Correctly. Denise. Right. Denise.

D. Nice. That's better. Thank you. Now, A.A. Ron. Where are you? Where is A.A. Ron right now? No A.A. Ron. Well, you better be sick, dead, or mute, A.A. Ron.

Here. Oh, man. Why didn't you answer me the first time I said, huh? Huh? I'm just, you know, I'm just asking, you know, I said it like four times. So why didn't you say it? the first time I said A-A-RON. Because it's pronounced Aaron?

Son of my! You done messed up, A-A-RON! Now take your ass on down to Osag Hennessy's office right now and tell him exactly what you did! Who? Oshag Hennessy! Principal O'Shaughnessy? Get out of my goddamn classroom

before I break my foot off in your ass! Insubordinate! And Cherlish. Timothy. Present. Thank you. Thank you. You know,