James S. "Jim" Allen (born Sol Auerbach; 1906–1986) was an American Marxist historian, journalist, editor, activist, and functionary of the Communist Party USA. Allen is best remembered as the author and editor of over two dozen books and pamphlets and as one of the party's leading experts on African American history.
Allen is credited with helping to save from execution the young black men charged in the Scottsboro case by his prompt and relentless publicity of the case, which helped make their trial a cause célèbre.
Biography
Early years Sol Auerbach, later known by the pseudonym James S. Allen, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He was the son of ethnic Jewish parents who arrived in America from the Russian Empire the same year.Peter Filardo and Elliot Silver, "Guide to the James S. Allen Papers , Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York City, 2002. Upon completion of high school, Allen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy.
A committed radical from his collegiate days, Auerbach traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927, as part of the first American student delegation there. Auerbach was expelled from college in 1928 for radical activities. He joined the Communist Party and began writing for the party newspaper, The Daily Worker. Auerbach succeeded Whittaker Chambers as "foreign news writer".Whittaker Chambers, Witness. New York: Random House, 1952; pp. 241-242.
Auerbach was soon promoted to the editorship of Labor Defender, official organ of the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party's mass organization dedicated to civil rights and legal aid matters.Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; pg. 16.
Party work in South
During his formative years in Philadelphia, Auerbach had developed a strong interest in African American life, which led to his appointment in 1930 as editor of the Communist Party's first newspaper produced south of the Mason–Dixon line, The Southern Worker.Mark Solomon, The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998; pg. 85. Auerbach adopted the pseudonym "James S. Allen" around that date and traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his wife, Isabelle Allen, to establish and edit the weekly paper.Solomon, The Cry was Unity, pg. 192.
Necessarily produced under clandestine conditions, The Southern Worker bore a false dateline claiming to be produced in Birmingham, Alabama, in an effort to confuse local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to Isabelle Allen, authorities never were able to identify the shop that produced the paper, partly due to the struggling printer's simultaneous production of a newspaper for the Ku Klux Klan, an ideal cover for a secret side job.Peter Meyer Filardo, "Introduction" to James S. Allen, "Marxist Publisher," American Communist History, vol. 10, no. 3 (December 2011), pg. 287. According to Filardo, she relayed that fact to him personally in 1970 or 1971.
The Southern Worker was launched on August 16, 1930, with a print run of 3,000 copies. Although billed as "a paper of and for both the white and black workers and farmers," the content was heavily skewed towards coverage of the daily life and problems of the region's black population.Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, pg. 17.
In this capacity Allen consistently advocated for the Communist Party's political line of the day, which included a demand for self-determination of the so-called "Black Belt" of the South, then populated by nearly half of the country's African American population.
Despite breathless speculation then and later that the communist mobilizing slogan "Self-Determination for the Black Belt" was a call for national secession, Allen later claimed that "we weren't stupid".Solomon, The Cry was Unity, pg. 113. For all the brashness of the "self-determination" slogan, historian Mark Solomon believed the actual meaning of the phrase was rather more modest:
Self-determination was defined as democracy at its essence: self-government, self-organization, social and economic equality, the right of blacks to run their own lives without the relentless terror and racism that dogged their steps and made every waking day a living hell.
Allen's actual time spent in the South was limited, as he was forced to return to New York in 1931 by the pressure of life in hidingFilardo, "Introduction" to "Marxist Publisher," pg. 287. and the "monotonous" and "depressing" job of editing an underground newspaper to which Southerners were too frightened to subscribe.Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008; pg. 119. Allen remained a member of the Party's Southern District committee, however, and in that capacity, he played a prominent role in all of the party's major regional activities during the early 1930s: the organizing of Alabama sharecroppers, the Harlan, Kentucky miners' strike and the Scottsboro case.
Scottsboro case
Allen's influence in the Scottsboro case was particularly important, with Yale University historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore contending that "we might never have heard of the Scottsboro case if Sol Auerbach, using his Party name, James S. Allen, had not arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-July 1930."Gilmore, Defying Dixie, pg. 118. Allen was listening to the radio in his Chattanooga apartment in March 1931 when he heard that police in Paint Rock, Alabama, had removed nine young black men from a freight train and charged them with rape. Auerbach promptly alerted the party's International Labor Defense, which quickly became involved in the defense.
The nine defendants in the case, collectively called the "Scottsboro Boys" after the city in which they were indicted, were aged 13 to 20 and had been traveling aboard a freight train to search for work in Tennessee.Gilmore, Defying Dixie, pg. 120. They were not traveling as a group and some did not know the others until they met in jail, pulled from the train by a mob of 200 whites following false accusations of rape by two women seeking to avoid prostitution charges.
The case was publicized relentlessly by Allen in the pages of the Southern Worker and throughout the Communist Party press, with the story crossing over to mainstream press coverage. Gilmore writes, "Without the spotlight that Jim Allen quickly focused on the trials it is most likely that the 'Boys' would have been dead by fall, lost among the thousands of unknown Southern black men executed legally and illegally."
Emissary to Philippines
At the behest of the Communist International (Comintern), Allen was sent to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, then an American protectorate, on two missions in an attempt to end sectarian squabbling and to achieve unity between the Philippine Communist Party (not to be confused with the later Communist Party of the Philippines) and the rival Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP).Philip J. Jaffe, The Rise and Fall of American Communism. New York: Horizon Press, 1975; pg. 174. In accord with the strategy of the popular front, the Comintern then sought to build broad alliances against the rising tide of fascism and was therefore interested in minimizing conflict between communists and socialists.
The first of Allen's trips to the Philippines came in 1936. Allen's mission was to convince Crisanto Evangelista, the General Secretary of the CPP, and his jailed comrades to accept a conditional pardon from Philippine President Manuel Quezon and to gain their freedom so they could lead the fight against Japanese militarism.Alfredo B. Saulo, Communism in the Philippines: An Introduction. Enlarged Edition. Manila: Anteneo de Manila University Press, 1990; pg. 27. Allen then spoke personally with Quezón and convinced him of the urgent need for Philippine unity in the face of the Japanese Empire's expansionism in the region. Allen was successful, and Evangelista and the other imprisoned communist leaders were released on December 31, 1936.
Allen returned to the Philippines in September 1938. His new mission was to expand the conditional pardons that had been granted to Evangelista and his associates to the full restoration of civil rights so that they could mobilize radical Philippine workers against fascism by public meetings and mass demonstrations.
Allen presented Quezón with petitions gathered by various labor organizations and successfully made the case for a full pardon for the communist leaders. An absolute pardon was granted on December 24, 1938, in the context of a Christmas amnesty.
Next, Allen sought to broker actual unity between the two parties, conferring both with the CPP leadership and with Pedro Abad Santos, the president of the SPP, on the matter. Allen used the utmost diplomacy in making his case to Abad Santos to bury tactical differences with the communists and to accept a merger, in the interest of constructing a stronger organization in opposition to fascism.Saulo, Communism in the Philippines, pg. 28. Unity between the organizations was achieved at the Third National Congress of the Communist Party of the Philippines, from October 29 to 31, 1938.
Allen addressed the gathering, conveying the greetings of CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, who had himself been a Comintern representative to the Philippines in 1927. The united organization temporarily took the cumbersome name "Communist Party of the Philippines (merger of the Communist and Socialist Parties)" until it later adopted the simpler "Communist Party of the Philippines" again. Evangelista was named the National Chairman and Abad Santos the Vice Chairman of the newly united organization.
Later career Allen was then assigned a position as the foreign editor of the Sunday Worker, a weekly newspaper that had been launched in January 1936 to try to reach a broader audience than that of the more intense and authoritative Daily Worker.Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973; pg. 255. The Sunday Worker was edited by Al Richmond, who later remembered Allen as "a scholarly, serene man who did the serious political commentary and analysis".
Allen was drafted into the US Army in 1944.
During the Cold War, Allen was compelled to appear as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
From the 1940s onward, Allen was a respected author in the Soviet Bloc. He was published there in connection with American imperialism, economic crisis, international economics and international political relations. Up to the 1960s, he was published in Russian, Hungarian, Chinese, German, Polish, Estonian, and Romanian.
On February 21, 1952, Allen was called before the Senate Internal Security Committee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, in conjunction with its investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations.Allen's testimony is found in Senate Judiciary Committee, Hearings, Institute of Pacific Relations — Part 13, pp. 2876–2896.
During the 1956 to 1958 factional crisis of the party, Allen placed his allegiance with the hardline pro-Soviet wing against a dissident faction calling for liberalization of internal party life and its distancing from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When the leader of the hardliners, Gus Hall, emerged triumphant and was named General Secretary in 1958, Allen became a member of the governing Central Committee.Allen, "Marxist Publisher," pg. 307. Allen was also tapped then to serve as secretary of the National Program Committee, in charge of developing programmatic and educational documents for the party, remaining until 1966. Allen then helped develop early drafts of the party program.