The CPUSA leader who declared Communism was 20th-century Americanism, and then dissolved his own party
“Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” — July 4, 1938, beneath the Star-Spangled Banner and the red flag together
A Kansas-born CPUSA leader for 15 years from 1930, Earl Browder proclaimed 'Communism is 20th-century Americanism' and in 1944 dissolved the party into a 'Communist Political Association', a strategy known as 'Browderism.' Expelled in 1946, he broke definitively with the party.
Career Timeline
- 1907Joins Socialist Party of America at age 16
- 1912Leaves Socialist Party in 1912 split; joins Syndicalist League of North America
- 1917–1918Arrested for anti-WWI activism under the Espionage Act; serves 2-year sentence
- 1920Joins the United Communist Party of America
- 1921Sent to Moscow as U.S. delegate to RILU founding congress
- 1926–1929Secretary of RILU's Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, based in Shanghai
- 1930Becomes Secretary of the CPUSA Political Bureau — de facto party leader
- 1932–1945General Secretary of the CPUSA Central Committee
- 1935Elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI)
- 1936CPUSA candidate for U.S. President
- 1940Sentenced to 4 years for passport fraud; runs again for president
- 1942.5Released after 14 months by President Roosevelt's commutation
- 194412th CPUSA Convention dissolves the party; creates Communist Political Association
- 1945.713th Convention repudiates Browderism and reconstitutes the CPUSA
- 1946.2Expelled from the CPUSA
- 1958Publishes Marx and America, arguing Marxism is inapplicable to U.S. conditions
The Popular Front and Americanism
When the Comintern's 7th World Congress adopted the Popular Front line in 1935, Browder transformed the CPUSA from radical Third Period sectarianism into a broad anti-fascist coalition. Where the party had once attacked Roosevelt's New Deal as "social fascism," Browder now sought an alliance with New Dealers and framed communism within Jeffersonian and Lincolnian democratic traditions under the slogan "Communism is 20th-Century Americanism." Under his leadership, the party launched mass organizations: the American League Against War and Fascism (1933), the American Youth Congress (1935), and the League of American Writers (1935), and he stood as the party's presidential candidate in 1936 and 1940, drawing tens of thousands of votes. Marxist class-struggle language gave way to Rooseveltian critiques of "economic royalism," and party membership surged from roughly 7,000 in the mid-1930s to a peak of about 66,000 by 1939.
The Duclos Letter and Expulsion
In January 1944, Browder secured a unanimous vote by the party's National Committee to transform the CPUSA into the 'Communist Political Association' (CPA). With US-Soviet cooperation at its peak after the Tehran Conference, Browder argued that capitalism and socialism had begun to find their way to peaceful coexistence, and that American Communists should function as a pressure group within a broad governing coalition rather than as an independent revolutionary party. His longtime rival William Z. Foster and Philadelphia organizer Sam Darcy submitted a dissenting letter, which Browder suppressed from wider circulation; Darcy was subsequently expelled.
With the war's end and the onset of the Cold War, the international communist line shifted sharply. In April 1945, the French Communist Party's theoretical journal Les Cahiers du communisme published an article by Jacques Duclos titled 'On the Dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States,' denouncing Browder's line as 'a notorious revision of Marxism' and 'liquidation of the independent political party of the working class.' Crucially, Duclos quoted directly from the Foster-Darcy letter, a document known only to a handful of top American party leaders. American Communists immediately recognized that the attack had been orchestrated from Moscow. Post-Soviet archival revelations confirmed that the 'Duclos Letter' had been written in Russian in Moscow in early 1945, while the war was still underway, translated into French, and handed to Duclos for publication under his own name after Japan's surrender.
The CPUSA reversed Browder's line at once. He was stripped of executive power in June 1945, and a snap convention in July reconstituted the Communist Party with Foster as chairman and Eugene Dennis as general secretary. In January 1946, Browder began publishing a mimeographed economic newsletter, Distributors Guide, which the party regarded as a serious breach of discipline. On February 5, 1946, Earl Browder was formally expelled from the CPUSA. He traveled to Moscow to appeal his expulsion and met with Molotov, but was denied reinstatement; instead he was given a post as American representative of the Soviet State Publishing House.