Epilogue

The epilogue appraises the state of radical labor and Civil War memory surrounding the war’s semisesquicentennial. What Eric Hobsbawm terms “the patriotism of the Left,” including the cultural symbols of the Civil War era, was critical to political fights against right-wing nationalism and anti-liberalism. Emancipationist memory was especially central to the political culture of the Communist Party USA, as well as to the broader “Americanization” movement within the Popular Front. However, the “Good War” against fascism provided powerful nationalist mythologies surrounding “Victory Culture” that were less bound by class. Further, the Cold War--and a mass culture of domestic anti-communism--scuttled the revolutionary memory of the Civil War as a precursor to broader class emancipation.

Framing William Albertson: The FBI's “Solo” Operation and the Cold War

William Albertson, who was executive secretary of the New York Communist Party and a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was framed as an informant for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1964. Only in recent years have newly released FBI records enabled scholars to understand why the FBI undertook the operation and how much damage it did to the CPUSA. In 1964 two leaks from the FBI hinted that the bureau had a high-level informant in the CPUSA who was providing information about secret Soviet subsidies. The leaks were accurate and endangered one of the FBI's most successful intelligence operations, Operation Solo, which involved the use of two brothers, Morris Childs and Jack Childs, who were confidants of CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, as key informants. The framing of Albertson was intended to deflect CPUSA and Soviet attention from the real FBI informants to a bogus one. The ploy succeeded. The forged documents the FBI planted convinced Hall and other senior CPUSA officials that Albertson was the FBI informant. Despite Albertson's vehement denials and energetic defense, he was expelled. The CPUSA thought it had eliminated the informant, and the Childs brothers were able to continue in their role until old age forced their retirement in 1977.

Afterword

This afterword explores conservative purges, which have not received adequate attention because the conservative movement and its apparent opponents have agreed on certain seemingly innocent misrepresentations, which need to be corrected. Purges have not been limited to removing undesirables from the masthead of conservative magazines nor to breaking social and professional relations. More typically, this shunning has been accompanied by campaigns of character assassination that have sometimes lasted years. What happened to M. E. Bradford was all too typical of this process of defamation. Conservative movement leaders have behaved in a way that one might have expected in an earlier age from the Communist Party USA. In all likelihood, however, American Communists would have been generally better read and more cerebral than those who draw their picture of reality from conservative media stars.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: WEB Du Bois, Left-Wing Radicalism, and the Problem of Interracial Labor Unionism

This article identifies and systemically analyzes a “core assumption” of WEB Du Bois’s social and political thought: the assumption that class-based, interracial cooperation among white and Black workers is extremely unlikely, if not totally impossible. It is argued that this assumption undergirds and informs most of Du Bois’s mature scholarship, serving as the theoretical grounding for his condemnation of the large-scale attempts to organize workers interracially on the basis of class, and explaining his uneven personal relationship with the Communist Party USA. Further, it is argued that this assumption leads Du Bois to attribute a methodologically untenable transhistoric logic to white working-class behavior, which has been adopted largely uncritically by contemporary analysts of white supremacy in the USA. The untenability of this Du Boisian logic is illustrated through historical analysis of interracial labor unionism, emphasizing the instances of interracial organization that Du Bois specifically denounced.