US president whose Fourteen Points and League of Nations failed to win the Senate’s ratification
Born in Virginia, he was president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey before winning the presidency in 1912, and in his first year imposed racial segregation across the federal bureaucracy. In April 1917 he asked Congress to declare war over unrestricted submarine warfare, and in January 1918 set out the Fourteen Points, with a League of Nations and self-determination. At the Paris Peace Conference he presided over the drafting of the League Covenant but conceded much to the other powers to get it. A stroke in October 1919 incapacitated him, and his refusal of a compromise sank the Senate’s ratification of the treaty. The Palmer Raids of the Red Scare came in the same years. He received the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize and died in 1924.
Career timeline
1902–1910President of Princeton University
1911–1913Governor of New Jersey
1913–1921President of the United States
1918Announced the Fourteen Points
1919Paris Peace Conference; chaired the League Covenant committee
From leading the Great Steel Strike of 1919 to longest-serving leader of American communism
“The only party that genuinely represents the interests of the workers is the revolutionary party.” — Pages from a Worker's Life, 1939
From leading the Great Steel Strike of 1919 to becoming the CPUSA's longest-serving leader. He rebuilt the party after Browder dissolved it in 1944 and authored major Marxist histories including History of the Communist Party of the United States.
Career timeline
1901Joins Socialist Party of America
1909Joins the IWW; Spokane free-speech fight
1912Founds the Syndicalist League of North America
1917–1918Organizes Chicago packinghouse workers; wins 8-hour day
1919Leads the Great Steel Strike of 250,000 workers
1920Founds the Trade Union Educational League
1921Joins Communist Party after 3rd Comintern Congress
1924First presidential campaign on Communist ticket
1929Becomes CPUSA Chairman; founds the TUUL
1935Elected to ECCI Presidium
1944–1945Fights Browder's dissolution; rebuilds CPUSA as General Secretary
From eyewitness of the Bolshevik Revolution to founder of the Communist Labor Party of America: an American buried at the Kremlin Wall
At the mass funeral for revolutionary martyrs in Red Square, Reed suddenly understood: the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer.
American journalist and communist. He witnessed the 1917 October Revolution and wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. He co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America and served on the Comintern Executive Committee. One of the very few Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall.
Career timeline
1910Graduated Harvard, began journalism career in New York
1913Joined The Masses; first arrest covering Paterson silk strike
1913–1914War correspondent in Mexico — 4 months with Pancho Villa's army; published Insurgent Mexico
1917Witnessed the October Revolution in Petrograd; worked with the Bolshevik Foreign Commissariat
1919Published Ten Days That Shook the World; co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America
1919–1920Comintern Executive Committee member; U.S. delegate to 2nd Comintern Congress; attended Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East
SR leader imprisoned by both Tsar and Bolsheviks, who became founder of Harvard's sociology department
In an open letter written from the Cheka basement in Veliky Ustyug in 1918 while awaiting execution, Sorokin renounced his SR party membership and declared an end to his political activity.
A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) during the Russian Revolution, Sorokin served as secretary to Prime Minister Kerensky and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Imprisoned three times by the Tsarist regime, he was sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks after 1917 and exiled in 1922 on the 'philosophers' ship.' In the United States he founded Harvard's department of sociology in 1930, becoming one of the 20th century's most important sociologists through his work on social stratification, social mobility, and the cyclical theory of sociocultural dynamics in his magnum opus Social and Cultural Dynamics.
Career timeline
1906Joined SR party; arrested and imprisoned in Kineshma
1909–1914Graduated from St. Petersburg University, Faculty of Law, in criminology
1917SR leader, secretary to PM Kerensky, Constituent Assembly deputy
1919–1922Professor at Petrograd University; founded Russia's first sociology department
1922Exiled from Soviet Russia ('philosophers' ship')
1924–1930Professor at University of Minnesota
1930–1959Professor at Harvard; founded and chaired sociology department
1965President of the American Sociological Association
"East Side Joan of Arc": from the IWW's Rebel Girl to first woman chair of the CPUSA
"We are Communist leaders, proudly and avowedly. We will prove to you that we are not a criminal conspiracy but a 33-year-old working-class political party, devoted to the immediate needs and aspirations of the American people." — Summation to the jury, Smith Act trial, April 24, 1952
American labor organizer and communist. Known as the IWW's "Rebel Girl" from age 15, she led the Lawrence strike and co-founded the ACLU. Elected CPUSA's first woman chair in 1961; died in Moscow and was given a Red Square state funeral.
Career timeline
1906First socialist speech, Harlem Socialist Club — arrested; joins IWW
1907–1916Full-time IWW organizer — Lawrence and Paterson strikes, Missoula and Spokane free-speech fights
1918Founds Workers' Defense Union to defend Espionage Act arrestees
1920Co-founds ACLU; leads Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaign
1936Joins CPUSA; writes weekly column for the Daily Worker
1940Expelled from ACLU board for Communist Party membership
1951–1955Convicted under Smith Act; serves 2 years at Alderson prison, writes The Alderson Story
1961–1964Chair of CPUSA National Committee; dies in Moscow — Red Square state funeral
The labor organizer who read Trotsky's critique in Moscow and founded the American Trotskyist movement
“They had expelled the heart of their party; Trotsky had won over all the serious young activists, leaving only a dead husk.” — after the Socialist Party expelled the Trotskyists, 1937
A Kansas-born labor organizer of Irish descent, James P. Cannon helped found the Communist Party of America in 1919 and was elected to the Comintern Presidium in 1922. In 1928, after reading a misdirected critique of the Comintern by Trotsky in Moscow, he turned to the Left Opposition, was expelled from the CPA, and co-founded the Communist League of America. He led the landmark 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and in 1938 founded the Socialist Workers Party, becoming its first National Secretary. Imprisoned for 18 months under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. entry into World War II, he remained a central leader of the Fourth International and shaped the American Trotskyist tradition across four decades.
Career timeline
1908Joins the Socialist Party of America
1911Joins the IWW; organizes throughout the Midwest under 'Big Bill' Haywood
1919Founding member of the Communist Labor Party; District Secretary for KS, MO, NE
1922U.S. delegate to 4th Comintern Congress; elected to ECCI Presidium
1925Founds International Labor Defense; serves as its first national secretary
1928Expelled from CP for Trotskyism; co-founds the Communist League of America
1934Directs the historic Minneapolis Teamsters strike
1938Founds the Socialist Workers Party; elected first National Secretary
1944–1945Imprisoned 18 months under the Smith Act for anti-war stance
1953–1974Steps down as National Secretary, becomes national chairman emeritus; dies in Los Angeles
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
1942.05Released after 14 months by President Roosevelt's commutation
194412th CPUSA Convention dissolves the party; creates Communist Political Association
1945.0713th Convention repudiates Browderism and reconstitutes the CPUSA
1946.02Expelled from the CPUSA
1958Publishes Marx and America, arguing Marxism is inapplicable to U.S. conditions
Architect of the Comintern Black Belt thesis: Southern Blacks are an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination
“The problem is fundamentally a question of an oppressed nation with full rights of self-determination.” — Negro Liberation, 1948
American communist, radicalized from the son of former slaves. He helped establish the Comintern thesis of Black self-determination in the Southern Black Belt, served on the CPUSA Politburo, and fought as a political commissar in the Spanish Civil War. Expelled in 1959 for opposing de-Stalinization, he became a leading figure in the Maoist New Communist Movement.
Career timeline
1917–1919WWI — served in US Army 8th Regiment (Black regiment), saw action in France
1922–1925African Blood Brotherhood → Young Communist League → CPUSA
1926–1930Moscow — KUTV and Lenin School; drafted Comintern resolutions on the Negro Question
1931–1938CPUSA Politburo member and Negro Department head — Scottsboro defense, Sharecroppers Union
1937Spanish Civil War — Regimental Commissar, Abraham Lincoln Battalion; Battle of Brunete
1943–1945WWII — served in US Merchant Marine
1948Published Negro Liberation — theorized Black freedom as the unfinished democratic revolution
1959Expelled from CPUSA for anti-revisionism and defending Black self-determination
1964–1978New Communist Movement — October League/CPML Central Committee; Black Bolshevik published
Finnish-American labor militant and CPUSA General Secretary for 41 years, Moscow loyalist, four-time presidential candidate
'Socialism in America will come through the ballot box' — Hall to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1996.
A Finnish immigrant's son forged in the steel strikes, Hall led the CPUSA for 41 years as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist. Trained at Moscow's International Lenin School and imprisoned under the Smith Act, he seized party leadership in 1959, hewed unflinchingly to the Soviet line through every crisis, and ran for president four times, becoming the face of American communism during the Cold War.
Career timeline
1927Joined CPUSA; Young Communist League organizer
1931–1933Studied at International Lenin School, Moscow
1935–1937SWOC founding organizer; led 'Little Steel' strike
1939CPUSA leader, Cleveland
1942–1946US Navy machinist's mate, Guam
1948–1957Smith Act indictment; imprisoned 5+ years, Leavenworth
The Cold War's last American president, who genuinely believed in nuclear abolition but would not yield on SDI
On the afternoon of October 12, 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to eliminate every nuclear weapon on earth by the year 2000. Forty minutes later, the talks collapsed when Reagan refused Gorbachev's condition that SDI research be confined to the laboratory.
Ronald Reagan went from Hollywood actor to governor of California to the 40th president of the United States, inaugurating the 1980s with Reaganomics and the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Early in his first term he denounced the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire,' yet he also held a genuine, long-standing conviction that nuclear weapons should be abolished, a conviction he brought to four summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. At Reykjavik in October 1986 the two leaders came within reach of eliminating all nuclear weapons, only for the talks to collapse when Reagan refused to confine his Strategic Defense Initiative to the laboratory. A year later they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War ended months after he left office.
Career timeline
1911Born into an Irish-American family in Tampico, Illinois
1937–1964Hollywood actor in 53 films; served twice as Screen Actors Guild president
1967–1975Governor of California; crackdown on campus protests, welfare reform
1981–198940th president: Reaganomics, military buildup, 'evil empire' speech
1986.10Reykjavik summit: near-total nuclear abolition collapsed over SDI
1987.06'Tear down this wall' speech at the Brandenburg Gate
1987.12Signed the INF Treaty abolishing all intermediate-range nuclear missiles
1994–2004Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease; died in Los Angeles, 2004
A hawkish Democratic senator who tied Soviet trade status to Jewish emigration
"The American people, above all, are committed to a human détente… to the free movement of men and ideas," he said, "on which a stable and more lasting peace must be based."
The son of Norwegian immigrants, born in Washington state, he served in Congress for over four decades as a Cold War liberal. A champion of civil rights and environmental legislation yet skeptical of détente, he drove the Jackson-Vanik amendment tying Soviet trade status to Jewish emigration. When the informal 1974 bargain with Kissinger and Dobrynin collapsed under Soviet rejection, Jackson effectively sank the 1972 trade agreement. His hawkish aides later formed the core of neoconservatism.
