Earl Russell Browder (May 20, 1891 – June 27, 1973) was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. During World War I, Browder served time in federal prison as a conscientious objector to conscription and the war. Upon his release, Browder became an active member of the American Communist movement, soon working as an organizer on behalf of the Communist International and its Red International of Labor Unions in China and the Pacific region.
In 1930, following the removal of a rival political faction from leadership, Browder was made General Secretary of the CPUSA. For the next 15 years thereafter Browder was the most recognizable public figure associated with American communism, authoring dozens of pamphlets and books, making numerous public speeches before sometimes vast audiences, and twice running for President of the United States. Browder also took part in activities on behalf of Soviet intelligence in America during his period of party leadership, placing those who sought to convey sensitive information to the party into contact with Soviet intelligence. In the wake of public outrage over the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Browder was indicted for passport fraud. He was convicted of two counts early in 1940 and sentenced to four years in prison, remaining free for a time on appeal. In the spring of 1942, the US Supreme Court affirmed the sentence and Browder began what proved to be a 14-month stint in federal prison. Browder was subsequently released by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in May 1942 as a gesture to "promote national unity."
Browder was a staunch adherent of close cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II and envisioned continued cooperation between these two military powers in the postwar years. Coming to see the role of American Communists to be that of an organized pressure group within a broad governing coalition, he directed the transformation of the CPUSA into a "Communist Political Association" in 1944. Browder was expelled from the re-established Communist Party early in 1946, largely due to a refusal to modify these views to accord with changing political realities and their associated ideological demands. Browder lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity at his home in Yonkers, New York, and later in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in 1973. He wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political issues.
Early life Earl Browder was born on May 20, 1891, in Wichita, Kansas, the eighth child of Martha Jane (Hankins) and William Browder, a teacher and farmer. His father was sympathetic to populism.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, p. 308.
Career Socialist
In 1907, Browder, age 16, joined the Socialist Party of America in Wichita and remained in that organization until the party split of 1912, when many of the group's members who supported the syndicalist ideal exited the party after it added an anti-sabotage clause to the party constitution and the recall of National Executive Committeeman William "Big Bill" Haywood. Historian Theodore Draper notes that Browder "was influenced by an offshoot of the syndicalist movement which believed in working in the American Federation of Labor (AFL)." This ideological orientation brought the young Browder into contact with William Z. Foster, founder of an organization called the Syndicalist League of North America which was based upon similar policies and James P. Cannon, an IWW adherent from Kansas.
Browder moved to Kansas City and was employed as an office worker, entering the union of his trade, the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants union AFL. Foster and Browder met for the first time in 1913, when the former came to Kansas City to organize progressives in the AFL. During the winter of 1916—1917, Browder joined a committee of about fifteen intellectuals, which called itself the ”League for Democratic Control” that opposed the first world war. In 1916, he took a job as manager of the Johnson County Cooperative Association in Olathe, Kansas. Browder was aggressively opposed to World War I and publicly spoke out against it, characterizing the fighting as an imperialist conflict. After the United States joined the war in 1917, Browder was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act conspiring to defeat the operation of the draft law and nonregistration.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, pg. 309 Browder was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy and a year for nonregistration, sitting in jail from December 1917 to November 1918.
Communist
In 1919, Browder, Cannon and their Kansas City associates started a radical newspaper, The Workers World, with Browder serving as the first editor. However, in June of that year Browder was jailed again on a conspiracy charge, with Cannon taking over as editor. Browder's second prison stint, served at Leavenworth Penitentiary, lasted until November 1920, putting him out of circulation during the critical interval when the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party quit the SPA to form the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party of America. A series of splits and mergers followed, with the two Communist parties formally merging in 1921. Released from prison at last, Browder lost no time in joining the United Communist Party (UCP), as well as the fledgling Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) being launched by his old associate William Z. Foster. Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, The Labor Herald.
In 1920, the Communist International (Comintern) headed by Grigory Zinoviev decided to establish an international confederation of Communist trade unions, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or "Profintern"). A founding convention was planned to be held in Moscow in July 1921 and an American delegation was gathered, including members of the American Communist Parties and the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press.Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, pg. 316 This trip to Soviet Russia incidentally proved decisive in bringing the syndicalist Foster over to the Communist movement.
Throughout the early 1920s, Browder and Foster worked together closely in the TUEL, trying to win over the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor in the establishment of a new mass Farmer-Labor Party that would be able to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Republican and Democratic parties. In 1928, the estranged Browder and his girlfriend Kitty Harris went to China and lived in Shanghai where Browder served as Secretary of the RILU's Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a clandestine labor organization working to unify the labor movement of the Asia-Pacific. The pair returned to the United States in January 1929.James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997; pg. 37.
Lovestone
The year 1929 marked a major turn in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Party leader Jay Lovestone, having won a massive factional victory over the Chicago-based rival group headed by William Z. Foster at the 6th National Convention of the organization, ran afoul of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and the ultra-radical program which the member organizations of the Comintern were instructed to pursue. Lovestone headed a 10-member delegation to Moscow to appeal his case to the American Commission of ECCI; things did not go well for him and in the squabble over autonomy Lovestone attempted a factional coup involving the seizure of party assets.
On May 17, 1929, ECCI ordered the removal of Lovestone. He was replaced on a provisional basis by a five-person secretariat which included former Lovestone associate Max Bedacht as "Acting Secretary" as well as opposition factional leader and trade union chief Bill Foster; two relatively independent figures in the persons of cartoonist-turned-functionary Robert Minor and former Executive Secretary of the underground party Will Weinstone; and Comintern Representative Boris Mikhailov (pseudonym "G. Williams") as the unpublicized power behind the throne.
While the center of gravity in the leadership of the CPUSA was rapidly shifted, Browder remained largely outside of the ongoing machinations of power, continuing to function as an employee of the Comintern. In August 1929 Browder was dispatched to Vladivostok, located in the far eastern reaches of Soviet Siberia on the Pacific coastline, to attend the final formal gathering of RILU's Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat.
Browder returned to the United States again in October 1929, just in time for a critical plenary session of the Central Committee of the American party. Allies in the Comintern had already begun to promote the trusted Browder as the best figure to head the American Communist Party, with Solomon Lozovsky taking up his banner in Moscow while Mikhailov-Williams lent his support from America. Foster's credibility had been badly tarnished in Moscow as a result of his role as a leader of the frequently unprincipled factional war which had paralyzed the American party throughout the decade of the 1920s. Placing Browder — the man responsible for bringing Foster into the communist movement — in authority was seen as a means for shifting power decisively away from the former Lovestone group without opening a new round of factional warfare which would have inevitably resulted had the mantle been given directly to Foster.
Browder deferred from the position of party Secretary, however, not feeling himself sufficiently acclimated to the political situation in the CPUSA. The October plenum therefore returned Bedacht and Minor to a collective leadership, dropping Foster and Weinstone. Weinstone was named as the new American Representative to the Comintern,Ryan, Earl Browder, pp. 37–38. replacing the recently expelled righthand man of Jay Lovestone, Bertram D. Wolfe, in the position. Browder was added to this new three member Secretariat, named head of the party's Agitation and Propaganda department.Ryan, Earl Browder, pg. 38.
Rise to leadership
The 4th quarter of 1929 saw the wheels fall off the wagon, marked by the October 24 Wall Street Crash and the beginning of a massive economic contraction remembered in history as the Great Depression. As head of the CPUSA's Agitprop, Browder was responsible for generating party literature intended to transform the unemployment crisis into a mass movement for revolutionary change.Ryan, Earl Browder, pg. 40. Browder was instrumental in planning American activities relating to International Unemployment Day, March 6, 1930 — an international day of mass protest, set in motion by the Comintern, against unemployment. A network of Unemployed Councils were established under Communist Party auspices.Ryan, Earl Browder, pg. 41.