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Communists, in contrast, stressed the importance of racial discrimination, saw combatting racism as a prerequisite to progress on all other issues, and insisted on individual personal commitment to antiracism as a non-negotiable part of adherence to Party discipline. While advocacy by Black activists contributed to this posture, it resulted primarily from positions developed within the Communist International (Comintern) and pushed by key Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. Communists considered the problems of African-Americans as a special case of what they called the “national question,” that is the national aspirations of ethnic groups and peoples suffering discrimination and denial of rights because of their domination within colonial empires or within multi-ethnic European Empires such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires. Communist concern with the national question derived mainly from two influences. First, the Soviet state incorporated the many discontented national groups of the Russian Empire forcing Soviet leaders to develop a national policy. They responded by creating a series of nominally independent ethnic republics or autonomous regions and reinventing the state as a theoretically egalitarian union of these republics. Second, Communists considered the massive popular discontent of colonial peoples as the Achilles heel of world capitalism and a great political opportunity to expand their global influence. Soviet and Comintern efforts attracted the attention of many prominent anticolonial leaders including a group of Black intellectuals who developed to develop the ideal and program of Pan-Africanism. While many Pan-Africanists eventually became disillusioned with Communism, this overlap between Communism and Pan-Africanism had enduring influence on Black nationalists within the United States into the 1960s even after the CPUSA ceased to be an even minimally viable organization.

New Left concern with civil rights and Black liberation derived first from the inspirational role of the Civil Rights movement, and second from the way the US participation in the War in Vietnam made activists aware of the problems of colonialism, imperialism, and relationships between developed and underdeveloped countries. New Leftists, inspired by Pan-Africanism (in some cases without full awareness of the history of these formulations) tended to think of African-Americans as a colonial people marooned within in the imperialist metropole.

Anarchist influence declined after the 1920s but small circles persisted not only preserving the anarchist tradition, but also developing new ideas that would become influential with the rebirth of anarchism in the 1960s. More recently many young anarchists seeking intellectual inspiration have gravitated toward anarchism in part because of the perceived intellectual and moral exhaustion of the Marxist tradition.

Although the collection includes examples from all of these waves of anarchism, anarchist materials are under-represented in the American Left Ephemera Collection because they could not match the resources of organizations like the SPUSA or CPUSA or even the Trotskyist parties so nearly all the material they produced appeared in very small numbers and has not been widely preserved.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the biggest focus of peace agitation was nuclear disarmament, but by the late 1960s opposition to the War in Vietnam predominated. Peace and antiwar agitation continued through subsequent decades but never reached the levels of mass support of these earlier waves. Communists also campaigned actively for peace in the late 1940s and 1950s and opposed US participation in the Korean War, but they did not generate mass support because most Americans, including those who also opposed the Korean War, believed that Communist antiwar efforts were motivated by support for Soviet national interests rather than a more general commitment to peace.

The American Left Ephemera collection includes items from of all of these eras. Communist material from the Cold War and Korean War are overrepresented, compared to the support they actually commanded, because even as the Party declined, it still had sufficient resources to support substantial publication of its materials.

Two significant cohorts of Christian Socialists operated within the orbit of the major left-wing movements from the 1890s through the 1960s: Protestants influenced by Social Gospel Protestantism and Catholics influenced by liberation theology. Both argued that the moral visions of socialism and Christianity overlapped and that you could not be a true Christian in the modern world unless you committed yourself to social and economic justice. The first group formed a Christian Socialist Fellowship affiliated with the Socialist Party that published The Christian Socialist and encouraged ministers to seek Socialist Party nominations for public office. Some of the most prominent Socialist politicians were ministers and members of the Christian Socialist Fellowship including George R. Lunn, mayor of Schenectady, N.Y. and J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley, Ca.

While several individual Catholic priests also supported the Socialist Party and the IWW, they faced concerted opposition from an overwhelmingly anti-socialist church hierarchy. Catholic support for the left expanded in the 1930s when Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement garnered support not only among lay Catholics but also among some members of the Church hierarchy. Both the rise of the CIO and the emergence of the Popular Front in the late 1930s offered more political space for radical Catholics. The former involved massive strikes and protests by industrial workers who were disproportionately Catholic and expected Church validation for their actions. The Popular Front made collaboration between religious and non-religious agitators less problematic because the Communists toned down their inflammatory rhetoric and actively sought alliance with anyone who would work with them.

By the 1960s liberation theology had become a mass movement in Latin America and radical Catholics could take prominent roles in both the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement without fearing retaliation from the Church. Religion also, perhaps, fit in with 1960s protest because of protestors’ widespread interest in mysticism and spirituality.

Federal prosecutors used three legal strategies to pursue Communists: indictment under the 1941 Smith Act (which made it a crime to conspire to advocate overthrow of the government—a legal subterfuge designed to find a way around Bill of Rights protections for speech and association); actions to revoke citizenship and deport foreign born Communists (under clauses of the immigration laws that made advocacy of violent overthrow of the government grounds for denying or revoking citizenship), and prosecution for failing to fulfill the demands of several Federal laws that required Communists and Communist front groups to register as agents of a foreign power (which, if carried out, opened those who did so to other prosecutions). In addition widespread hearings on Un-Americanism threatened those called to testify with a legal double threat. Much of the public viewed pleading the Fifth Amendment equivalent to a guilty plea, and employers frequently fired individuals who did so. But individuals who answered any question forfeited rights to refuse to answer any subsequent question and faced indictment and imprisonment for contempt of Congress if they did so. Both state and Federal governments also instituted loyalty oaths as conditions of public employment. Employees who refused to sign would be dismissed. Those who did so but were subsequently revealed to be Communists could be indicted for perjury. Private employers supplemented prosecution by denying employment to individuals known or suspected of Communist membership or sympathy. While the blacklist in the entertainment industry has been the most closely studied part of this phenomenon, the FBI routinely informed all major employers of suspected individuals employed by their firms and most employers fired such people. The FBI also released the names and addresses of suspected Communists to daily newspapers that subsequently published the lists. Individuals whose names appeared faced not only loss of employment, but also social ostracism, physical attack, and vandalism to their homes and automobiles.

Communists used three primary rhetorical approaches to seek public support in their battles against prosecution and harassment. First, they argued that their espousal of revolution was open and public, not conspiratorial, and purely rhetorical. Indeed, they vigorously opposed individual acts of violence, such as the bombings as “propaganda of the deed” advocated by some anarchists. None of the indictments against them, they pointed out, cited any specific violent acts. Second, they argued that they were a legitimate political party, functionally equivalent to the Democratic and Republican Parties. Finally they argued that harassment of Communists for their controversial views threatened the civil liberties of all Americans and stifled public discussion and thought. The first two defenses were probably valid descriptions of the frame of mind and intentions of the bulk of rank and file Communists, but prosecutors had no trouble demonstrating that Communist propaganda had frequently advocated violent revolution in the past and the necessity of revolutionary violence was a central contention of core Marxist-Leninist texts. Moreover, prosecutors had evidence (though they sometimes hesitated to present it in open court for fear of revealing details of the intelligence apparatus) that Party leaders and dozens of Party members had participated in Soviet espionage. The Communists’ third argument—that anticommunist repression stifled civil liberties and public discourse for non-Communists was true—but Communists found that liberals who they expected to support their defense on such grounds frequently refused to do so not only because of fear that they too would thereby invite harassment on themselves, but also because the Communists’ long history of sudden shifts in their public positions and vitriolic sectarian denunciations of political competitors had fundamentally undermined Communists’ credibility.

American Communists expanded their influence in the 1930s by energetic agitation for the unemployed, industrial unions, civil rights, and antifascism, especially after the shift in Comintern policy from the highly sectarian ultra-revolutionary Third Period (1927-1935) to the antifascist alliance of the Popular Front (1935-39). By 1939 they had about 75,000 members and several hundred thousand fellow travelers. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 undermined their political credibility, especially among their not insubstantial base among intellectuals and cultural producers. During the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union they regained lost membership but not the level of moral authority they had enjoyed in some circles during the Popular Front. Perhaps that is why they were so quickly politically isolated at the beginning of the Cold War. However, despite the travails of McCarthyism, the Party maintained at least a third of it peak membership until the Khrushchev speech on ”the crimes of the Stalin era” at the 1956 20th Soviet Party Congress. After a brief unsuccessful attempt to reinvent the Party around democratic socialism, veteran members fled leaving an aging vestige of probably less than 5,000 active members (although they claimed more) by the late 1950s.

Throughout the Party’s history, the CPUSA sought to expand its influence by organizing and participating in a broad array of single issue organizations. Some were genuine mass movements with handfuls of Communists amidst tens or even hundreds of thousand of members. Others were Potemkin villages with little more than an office and impressive looking letterhead. Typically Party members filled important leadership slots in such organizations and Party members exercised influence beyond their numbers because of their energy and their policy of acting as a disciplined voting bloc. Both Communists and their critics referred to such organizations as front organizations, although for Communists the usage reflected their notions of “united front’ while for critics the word evoked “false front’ as in a Hollywood movie set. For simplicity, I decided to group many publications by such front organizations in the same section with publications and other ephemera produced by the Party itself. This is not intended as an editorial position on the nature of such front organizations.

Ethnic radicals maintained cultural influence and organizational stability by creating and controlling three types of institutions: newspapers, ethnic sections of left-wing parties, and fraternal and mutual insurance societies. Left-wing newspapers and magazines published in immigrants’ native languages often had readerships many times larger than ethnic party memberships or voting totals. Ethnic restaurants, bars, breweries, shops, funeral parlors advertised in their pages. Clubs announced their meetings. Newspaper offices functioned as focis of political activity. Hundreds of such publication supported the SPUSA, the CPUSA, and the anarchist movement. Socialist Party locals and later Communist locals in ethnic neighborhoods frequently included a preponderance of members from a non-English speaking ethnic group and conducted local business in that language. The Socialist Party recognized and accommodated this tendency by allowing these ethnically based locals to amalgamate into national foreign language federations within the Socialist Party. The foreign language federations gradually increased their influence within the SPUSA, especially after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution inspired many Eastern European immigrants. Some of them, most notably the Finnish Socialist Federation, went over to the incipient American Communist movement almost en masse. Indeed, the Finns represented 40% of the CP’s membership in 1924 and its most dependable base of financial support. In the late 1920s, however, as part of the policy of Bolshevization of the CPUSA (e.g. Stalinization), the Party disbanded much of its ethnically based organizational apparatus.

Ethnic radicalism continued to flourish within the Communist orbit, especially during the Popular Front period within the traditional third leg of ethnic radicalism: fraternal and mutual insurance associations. Ethnic fraternal and mutual insurance associations offered secular alternatives to church-based ethnic community activities and sold cheap insurance benefits to working-class families who could not afford the premiums of conventional commercial insurance. Leftist exercised a disproportionate influence in ethnic fraternal life in many nationalities (e.g. Finns, Eastern European, Jews, Croatians, Slovaks). Among the most successful was the Jewish Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle). In 1929 Communists within the AR, in keeping with sectarian Third Period Comintern policies split off to form an explicitly Communist and revolutionary alternative, the IWO, International Workers Order. The IWO began with probably less than 5,000 members but expanded rapidly during the Popular Front period reaching a peak membership of over 200,000 in the mid-1940s and expanding its ethnic representation to many other nationalities beyond the original Jewish base.

Nonetheless, both parties offered political space for female activists concerned with gender issues and for thinkers with more penetrating critiques of the gender system than the standard Party orthodoxies. Women with organizational skills, oratorical flair, or literary talents gained visibility and political capital within these Parties as well as access to wider networks of political influence. Both the SPUSA and CPUSA published writings on gender issues that anticipated arguments more generally associated with post 1960s radical feminism.

Gender issues and critiques of the gender system became much more visible in the New Left than the Old. In part, that reflected the New Left’s greater emphasis on personal liberation and quality of life issues. In part, it reflected wider social changes that had started to undermine older gender norms and empowered women (globally as well as in the US)—declining birth rates and increased access to birth control; increased female labor force participation; increased female access to education.

This greater visibility of political critiques of the gender system also facilitated the emergence of radical movements among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender sexual minorities. The Old Left rarely addressed questions of sexual identity or the oppression of sexual minorities. Neither the Socialist nor the Communist Party questioned heterosexual orthodoxy, although some anarchists did so occasionally. Some ex-Communists did play notable roles in the early stages of the Gay Rights movement such as several of the founders of the Mattachine Society. But the surge of radical feminism within the New Left encouraged far greater militancy and political visibility among LGBT activists.

Since their theory told them that the working class was the agent of historical change, both parties considered participation in the daily workplace struggles of industrial workers as one of their highest political priorities. However, neither party reached consensus on how to relate to the labor movement. Both parties recruited nationally prominent labor organizers and trade union officials (e.g. Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster) as well as significant cohorts of local union officials and labor activists. But the majority of AFL (American Federation of Labor) unions subscribed to Samuel Gompers’ strategy of “pure and simple unionism” emphasizing short range limited goals such as wages, hours and working conditions and eschewing advocacy of utopian societal reconstruction such as socialism. Socialists and other radicals critical of the AFL organized the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 as a revolutionary alternative, but many Socialists considered the IWW a sectarian and schismatic division of working class solidarity. Debates over how the Socialist Party should relate to the AFL or the IWW became one of the most important sources of the factional conflict that undermined the SPUSA.

Similar debates bedeviled the CPUSA. The Party shifted back and forth from a policy of “boring from within” the AFL to a policy of attacking the AFL and sponsoring rival revolutionary unions. Generally these shifts in CP trade union policies corresponded with shifts to the left or right in the Comintern line. In the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, American Communists devoted considerable energy to recruiting the IWW to the Communist movement. As the worldwide revolutionary wave crested without successful revolutions anywhere but the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders sought to consolidate their power and to convince their followers around the world to settle in for a long period of inconclusive political struggle. They urged American Communists to abandon notions of pure revolutionary unions and seek to garner influence within the AFL instead. William Z. Foster, by far the most prominent labor leader in the CPUSA, had organized the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) for labor radicals in the AFL in 1920, and in 1922 the CPUSA and the Comintern adopted and subsidized the TUEL.

However, during the Third Period (1928-1935) as the Comintern dictated labor policies of pure revolutionary unionism, the CPUSA disbanded the TUEL and organized instead the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) as a federation of revolutionary Communist unions organized as rivals to AFL unions. With the shift to the Popular Front in 1935, the CPUSA shifted back to engagement with the mainstream labor movement. Fortuitously, this shift corresponded with the appearance of the CIO in 1935. Communists devoted themselves to the CIO and played critical roles in organizing many of the CIO’s most important unions. Their dedication to the CIO earned them the regard of many trade unionists who did not necessarily agree with Communist ideology. The political capital Communists earned within the CIO was probably the most important source of the Party’s influence in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The New Left also had difficulty deciding how to relate to the labor movement. As a middle class movement and as a movement that arose out of disappointment with the Old Left, many early New Leftists doubted Marxist formulations about the historic mission of the working class and tended to view labor union officials as part of the Establishment, e.g. part of the problem more than the solution. On the other hand, as New Leftists moved off campus to engage in civil rights campaigns or community organizing, many began to appreciate both the skills and dedication of veteran labor union activists. This shift in point of view was encouraged by small schismatic Old Left parties such as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL), both of which had surprisingly large influence within the leading New Left student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during SDS’s final years. Also, as increasing numbers of student activists graduated from universities they looked for meaningful strategies to continue radical political activity. A variety of New left offshoots, as well as such Old Left parties as the SWP and PL, encouraged them to take jobs in factories, coal mines, and trucking companies. Several thousand former SDS’s did so.

In the US, the Popular Front functioned like the left wing of the New Deal. It drew support disproportionately from ethnics and racial minorities—e.g. immigrants and their children of Eastern and Southern European heritage, especially Eastern European Jews, and African Americans and Mexican-Americans. Popular Fronters championed the CIO, supported the Spanish Republic and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and campaigned for racial equality. It was also a cultural movement as well as a political movement featuring a left-patriotic ethos and a set of stylistic preferences including topical songs in a folk motif, populist paintings inspired by the example of the Mexican muralists, agit-prop Brechtian theater, and social realist literature. A startling array of cultural producers who were either already famous or would later become so participated in Popular Front culture.

The Communists, at first, were not enthusiastic both because the Progressive Party might be a competitor on the Left and because the international Communist line was shifting toward a more sectarian posture less welcoming of united fronts. But, as the Cold War heated up, the Progressives’ anti-Cold War posture caused the CP to shift toward enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party. However, the CP’s active engagement with the Progressive Party undermined much of its non-Communist support. Wallace’s disappointing 1948 popular vote--barely more than 2% after initial projections of perhaps 10 to 20%--further discouraged those non-Communists who had stuck with the organization. The Party faltered on through the 1952 campaign, but was justifiably viewed by most non-Communist observers as little more than a Communist front.

The Party faded badly in the early 1880s because of a split between Marxists and anarchists, an upswing in the economy, and the rise of the Knights of Labor, a more credible organizational home for working-class activists than the SLP. In the early 1890s a charismatic intellectual, Daniel De Leon, took over leadership of what was left of the party. Although De Leon was an original thinker—Lenin praised him as the only American to make noteworthy contribution to Marxist theory—he was a terrible organizer, so irascible and dogmatic that he repeatedly drove people away from the organization.

Despite De Leon’s flaws the Party expanded in the 1890s benefitting from another Depression beginning in 1893, the surge of political energy accompanying the Populist movement, and publicity surrounding the announcement that railroad union leader Eugene Debs had converted to socialism. Inevitably, however, these new recruits came into conflict with the De Leonites. They joined with other socialist factions to found the Socialist Party of the United States (SPUSA) in 1901. The new party quickly eclipsed the SLP.

De Leon and his followers had one more story to tell. They played a key role on the founding of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in 1905. Inevitably De Leon had a falling out with others in the IWW leadership, and left the organization to form a rival IWW faction in 1908.

As a result of the 1919 split within their ranks between the Party’s Old Guard and those that wanted the Party to join the emerging Communist movement and the effects of government repression, the Socialist Party collapsed in the early 1920s. The Party endorsed Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette in the 1924 presidential campaign and that endorsement masked the Party’s weakness. La Follette drew nearly 17% of the national popular vote. Moreover La Follette had failed to achieve Progressive Party ballot status in several large states and only appeared there as a Socialist. Socialists could thus claim enough of the La Follette vote as their own to argue that their 1924 totals compared favorably to the percentages they had received between 1904 and 1920. But in 1928 when Norman Thomas made the first of his six presidential runs the Socialist vote was down to 0.7%.

The depression appeared to revive the Socialist Party in the early 1930s. Thomas expanded his presidential vote percentage to 2.2% in 1932, and in 1934 the Party elected mayors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Reading, Pennsylvania. Thereafter the Party found itself caught between a rapidly expanding Communist Party on one side and a Democratic Party that shifted to the Left after 1934. A substantial portion of the Party membership and leadership, including David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, leaders of International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACWU), two of the Party’s bastions, argued that Socialists should endorse FDR in 1936. When the top Party leadership refused to consider this, they seceded forming a rival Social Democratic Federation that did endorse Roosevelt. Thomas’s vote fell to 0.4% in 1936. The Party continued to run candidates thereafter—up to the present—but rarely did much better than other tiny left-wing factions such as the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) or the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

In 1934, the group entered the Socialist Party en masse, establishing a caucus within the SP. This strategy facilitated recruitment to the Trotskyist group but inevitably aggravated factionalism within the Socialist Party. In the summer of 1937, the SP began expelling Trotskyists. Those remaining left the SP and established the Socialist Workers Party in December 1937. While still a small group, they had expanded to more than 1000 members between 1928 and 1937, included a number of prominent intellectuals, and had somewhat more political prominence than might be expected from their numbers.

However the movement’s growth was repeatedly compromised by factional splits in which ideological disputes among the leadership promoted splits and formation of tiny rival organizations. In the most serious of these episodes, perhaps 40% of the SWP’s membership seceded to found the Worker’s Party lead by Max Shachtman.

By the 1960s, although the SWP still had not grown much larger than its peak membership before the Shachtmanite split it looked somewhat more significant. The collapse of the CPUSA after 1956 left the SWP as the most energetic and visible of the Old Left parties. Their endorsement of Malcolm X garnered some sympathy among Black radicals, and their support for the Cuban Revolution, such as their participation in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, also earned support among the emerging New Left generation. They likewise played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement helping to organize some of the largest demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and other major cities.

In the long run, however, none of this activity resulted in permanent expansion of the organization beyond the modest levels that had characterized it throughout its history.

Other Trotskyists

Despite its small numbers—a peak combined membership of no more than 3,000 in all of its tendencies--the American Trotskyist movement suffered from factionalism and splits throughout its history. That was probably a function of the movement’s ideological heritage and structure. While Socialist and Social Democratic Parties in the US and elsewhere also experienced factional conflict, except in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, these did not generally produce organizational splits because the parties conceived of themselves as big tent electoral coalition parties, not unlike their bourgeois counterparts. The Trotskyists, in contrast, took from their Communist heritage Leninist notions of centralized and ideologically coherent parties that enforced correct line discipline on all members. But while the Communists had an institutional apparatus—the Comintern and its successors—to establish the terms and limits of orthodoxy, the Trotskyists had no such institutional counterpart. People who believed that establishing and adhering to a correct line was the sine qua non of worthwhile political activity thus had no alternative to splits when they decided that their parent organization had erred grievously in its ideological and strategic judgments.

The largest and most enduring American Trotskyist organization was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Other Trotskyist groups represented in the American Left Ephemera Collection include the Workers Party (followers of Max Shachtman), the Spartacist League (an offshoot of the Shachtmanites), and the Workers World Party (followers of ex-CP and ex-SWP member Sam Marcy).

In its early years SDS was a tiny organization with only a few hundred members on a couple of dozen campuses. It was far smaller than the Student Peace Union, and indeed smaller than the youth organizations of Old Left parties like the CP and the SWP. But the organization began to attract attention after the publication of its Port Huron Statement in 1962 in which it criticized both sides in the Cold War, discussed how both failed to satisfy unfulfilled utopian longings, and advocated as its alternative what it called participatory democracy. SDS also attracted new members through its early collaboration with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its early opposition against the War in Vietnam. It expanded rapidly after its sponsorship of the first large demonstration against the War in Vietnam in April 1965.

By its final years SDS was the largest, indeed the only substantial, organization of the American New Left. How large is impossible to say, in part because SDS, as part of its ideology eschewed the formal bureaucratic apparatus of Old Left organizations. In theory you became a member of SDS by filling out a membership application with a small application fee and mailing it off to the national office in Chicago. In return you received a membership card and a subscription to the national organization’s newspaper, New Left Notes. But most people who considered themselves members of SDS never bothered to do that. Local chapters of SDS operated as wholly autonomous units. In practice an individual was a member of the local chapter if they showed up for meetings and participated in group events. No one had to show a membership card to vote in meetings. De facto membership fluctuated wildly. But by the end of the 1960s certainly several hundred thousand people had participated in events organized by SDS.

In its final years SDS was sharply divided by internal factions. One faction, affiliated with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), advocated a strategy of a worker-student alliance, and hoped to steer SDS in an Old Left direction. They captured the remnants of the organization after the 1969 convention in which the factions split apart. A second group, harboring romantic fantasies of domestic armed insurrection, conceived of itself as the Americong (in the words of a Jefferson Starship song). They became the Weathermen who attracted considerable press attention despite numbers that never exceeded two or three hundred. A third faction, essentially defined only by its opposition to the other two, had even less staying power. Within a year of the 1969 convention none of the factions amounted to anything. Most of the membership drifted away from all of them in bewilderment.

This sad ending reflected a broader sense of strategic impasse among New Left activists. The antiwar movement staged many of the largest political demonstrations in American history, but the war raged on. Activists talked about participatory democracy and shouted “Power to the People!” but they were painfully aware that the larger public viewed student activists with hostility even as public opinion about the war was shifting. Factional conflict within radical movements was also stimulated by the penetration of the national security state into the movement. Political authorities were sufficiently worried by the revolutionary posturing of New Leftists and Black revolutionaries that they assigned thousands of agents to monitor and infiltrate activist groups. As part of the Federal government’s Cointelpro program, undercover agents were instructed to encourage internal conflict and factional division.

When the French attempted to reassert control in 1946 war ensued until their defeat at Dien Ben Phu in 1954. By the later stage of this French-Vietnamese War, French troops had essentially become a mercenary army for the U.S. Motivated by Cold War concerns of Communist advance in SE Asia U.S. policy makers decided to pay for most of the cost of the French military effort.

Under an armistice agreement the Viet Minh troops withdrew north of the 17th parallel and an international conference in Geneva negotiated peace accords and proposed a 1956 election to determine the government for Vietnam. The election was never held in part because the U.S. feared a Communist victory. Thereafter a Communist government controlled North Vietnam and a regime allied with the U.S. controlled South Vietnam.

The South Vietnamese government was controlled by unpopular elites, many of them Catholic and French speaking and viewed by some of their population as former collaborators with the French colonialists. Fighting broke out in the late 1950s between peasant veterans of the Viet Minh in South Vietnam and troops of the South Vietnamese government. Initially the North Vietnamese were reluctant to support the guerilla movement in the South, in part because of pressure from Soviet leaders seeking détente with the U.S., but the guerilla war escalated into full scale war between the governments of North and South Vietnam by the early 1960s.

Since 1956 the U.S. had provided the South Vietnamese government with arms and financial aid and small contingents of U.S. military advisors. As the war went badly for the South Vietnamese government, these commitments ratcheted steadily upward with the number of U.S. “advisors” reaching 16,000 by 1963.

By the following year the South Vietnamese government approached military collapse, and the Johnson administration decided on a full scale military commitment to prevent Communist victory in Vietnam. U.S. troops strength peaked at more than 500,000, augmented by the most massive commitment of airpower in global military history. The U.S. dropped more tons of bombs on Vietnam than all combatants had dropped during World War II.

The last U.S. troops withdrew in 1975. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. Vietnamese casualty figures are subject to debate, but the Vietnamese government claims more than one million Vietnamese military casualties and more than two million additional civilian casualties.

American Communists and some non-Communist peace activists occasionally published accounts critical of the US supported French war in Vietnam and the US support of the South Vietnamese government after 1956, but these attracted little notice before the escalation of US military involvement. Small demonstrations against the war occurred in 1963 and 1964, but the first large scale protest against US involvement in Vietnam was an anti war march in Washington sponsored by SDS in April 1965. Thereafter the scale and intensity of antiwar protest paralleled the expansion of US military action. The movement peaked in 1970 shortly after the Nixon administration admitted expanding US military action into neighboring Cambodia (such incursions had occurred before but on a smaller scale and not publicly acknowledged). For the first time since the beginning of the US military effort, a majority in national opinion polls declared the war a mistake and said the US should withdraw.

The long war in Vietnam fueled the expansion of the New Left in the United States more than any other cause or event. The anti-Vietnam War items in the collection were produced by a diverse array of national organizations and local ad hoc action groups. As expected, a majority of the material is from the period between 1967 though 1973.