Communist Party USA

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Communist Party USA entered 2026 claiming 20,000 members, a figure it had not approached in generations. That number sits at the end of a long story. It runs through a Russian Revolution, a Great Depression, a Second World War, and a Cold War that nearly destroyed the party outright. How did an organization built to overthrow the American government survive all of that? What does it actually believe today, and why did some of its own members break away in 2024 to start a rival party? The account ahead moves through the founding struggles, the wartime reversals, and allegations of Soviet espionage. It also covers the geography of the party's support and the program it defends now.

• 2. Founding and Rapid Growth

  ›

  The Communist Party broke away from the left wing of the Socialist Party of America in 1919, shortly after the Russian Revolution. Its goal was building an American socialism grounded in Marxism-Leninism, tied to the Soviet-controlled Communist International. Just months later, by August of that year, the new party already claimed between 50,000 and 60,000 members. The older Socialist Party, by contrast, had fallen to 40,000, weakened by wartime prosecutions over its antiwar stance. Anarchists and other radical leftists joined the founders in those early ranks.

  Through the Palmer Raids of 1919 and January 1920, the government targeted the party's foreign-born rank and file for arrest and deportation. Prosecutions of socialists opposed to the First World War had already been underway before the party's founding, and Communist members inherited that same scrutiny. Party leaders were prosecuted as well, with some sent to prison.

  The party's International Workers Order organized support along linguistic and ethnic lines, offering mutual aid and cultural programs to members whose numbers peaked at 200,000. On matters of race, the young party broke sharply with convention. It opened its membership to Black and white Americans alike from day one, a step no other American political party had yet taken.

• 3. Depression, Labor, and the Popular Front

  ›

  At the start of the 1930s the party counted about 7,500 members. Within a decade that number reached 55,000, according to its own tally of the Depression years. Its visible activism on behalf of workers, the unemployed, and African Americans won the party new sympathizers. Others were drawn in by alarm over the Falangists in Spain and the Nazis in Germany, admiring the Soviet Union's early opposition to fascism.

  Under William Z. Foster and later Earl Browder, the party poured its energy into organizing workers and opposing fascism abroad. Its strike activity turned it into a genuine force inside the American labor movement, largely through its ties to the new Congress of Industrial Organizations. When a nationalist uprising against the Spanish Republic set off the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, members raised money for medical relief. Some also traveled to Spain to fight in the Lincoln Brigade.

  By the mid-1930s, the party had adopted the Comintern's 'popular front' line, favoring alliances with progressives and liberals over confrontation. It toned down its call for revolution and threw its weight behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. That shift broadened the party's acceptance, and its ranks reached an estimated 70,000 by the late 1930s.

  None of that goodwill survived the autumn of 1939 intact, when a pact between Berlin and Moscow forced the party to reverse course overnight.

• 4. The Nineteen Thirty-Nine Reversal

  ›

  On the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded western Poland, and Communist Party general secretary Earl Browder at first denounced the attack. Ten days later, on the 11th of September, Moscow sent a communique denouncing Poland's government instead. Party leaders spent the 14th through the 16th of September arguing over which direction to take.

  On the 17th of September, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland, occupying territory assigned to it under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Soviet forces then coordinated with the German army already in Poland. The party's public message pivoted away from fighting fascism, toward calls for peace and against military preparedness. It criticized British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French leader Edouard Daladier. At first it avoided attacking Roosevelt directly, blaming his advisors instead to protect American Communism's standing.

  Two slogans defined this stretch, 'The Yanks Are Not Coming' and 'Hands Off,' plastered across party literature. Organizers also kept a 'perpetual peace vigil' just outside the White House gates. Roosevelt himself was branded head of the 'war party of the American bourgeoisie,' and the party threw its support behind the isolationist America First Committee.

  In October and November, Moscow's forces pushed into Finland and pressured Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into mutual assistance pacts. The party judged Russian security reason enough to support those actions. Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov then pressed Browder to drop his support for Roosevelt. On the 23rd of October, the party turned openly against the president.

  In August 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader killed Leon Trotsky with an ice axe; Mercader was then involved with one of Trotsky's own secretaries. Browder echoed Moscow's cover story that the killer was simply a disillusioned follower. The party pivoted once more after Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, striking the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. From then on, the party fervently backed the American war effort. The Popular Front era ended in 1945, when Browder was pushed out and William Z. Foster took his place. Foster would lead the party straight into its collision with the Cold War.

• 5. Red Scare, Espionage, and Collapse

  ›

  Congress enacted the Smith Act in 1940, criminalizing any advocacy, teaching, or abetting of a violent government overthrow. Nine years later the government brought general secretary Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster, and ten other party leaders to trial under that statute. No evidence showed any defendant had called openly for violence or stockpiled weapons for revolt. Prosecutors instead relied on testimony from former members and on quotations pulled from the writings of Marx and Lenin. The trial judge held several defendants and every one of their lawyers in contempt of court, and all eleven remaining defendants were convicted. A 6-2 Supreme Court ruling upheld those convictions in Dennis v. United States, after which the government pursued more than 140 additional party members.

  Fearing informants inside its own ranks, Dennis and other leaders drove the party underground and disbanded many affiliated groups, a move that nearly paralyzed it. Senator Joseph McCarthy's overreach during the Army-McCarthy hearings triggered a public backlash, cooling the appetite for prosecuting Communists. Easing Cold War tension after the Korean War ended in 1953 also lowered fears of subversion. A 1957 Supreme Court decision, Yates v. United States, finally stopped Smith Act prosecutions. It required proof of concrete steps toward overthrow, not mere advocacy in theory.

  By 1957, fewer than 10,000 members remained, and roughly 1,500 of them were secretly informing for the FBI. Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 'Secret Speech' exposed decades of Joseph Stalin's brutality, pushing disillusioned members out of the party in droves. Congress had gone even further with the Communist Control Act of 1954, banning the party outright. That ban went largely unenforced, and Congress eventually struck down most of its provisions.

  Gus Hall led the party from 1959 to 2000, keeping it loyal to Moscow even as Communist parties elsewhere pulled away from Soviet policy. That stubborn loyalty pushed the CPUSA to the margins of the American left through the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. New Left groups there rejected its rigid line. A widening Sino-Soviet split fractured the wider Communist movement too, and some former members drifted toward Maoist or Trotskyist alternatives.

  From 1959 until 1989, the party received a direct subsidy from Moscow, growing from $75,000 that first year to $3 million by 1987. The funding ended when Gus Hall condemned Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. A receipt for that money, signed by Hall, survives in the KGB archives. Soviet records later showed that every national Communist party loyal to the Moscow line received funding the same way. The Italian, Spanish, and British parties were exceptions, having broken from Soviet orthodoxy through Eurocommunism in the late 1970s. When the funding was cut off in 1989, the resulting financial crisis forced the party to reduce its newspaper to weekly publication.

  Whittaker Chambers alleged that Sandor Goldberger, known as J. Peters, ran the party's underground apparatus from 1932 to 1938 as an arm of Soviet intelligence. Bernard Schuster, organizational secretary of the party's New York District, is said to have recruited members into that same secret network. Decrypted wartime cables from the Venona project later appeared to confirm that Julius Rosenberg had spied for the Soviets. Physicist Theodore Hall, trained at Harvard and hired at Los Alamos at 19 years old, began passing atomic bomb secrets to Soviet contacts soon after. He did not formally join the party until 1952, and prosecutors never charged him. Known to his KGB handlers as Mlad, Hall escaped prosecution altogether. His wife, aware of the spying, said their handler had told them to plead innocent if charged, just as the Rosenbergs did.

  The Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 declared the party 'an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.' It described the party as 'an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic,' acting under orders from foreign leaders. Most of Congress shared that assessment at the time. Historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes have since backed that reading, citing memoirs from ex-Soviet KGB officers and the Venona project.

  A 1993 research trip sent Library of Congress staff to Moscow, where they copied party archives shipped there earlier for safekeeping by organizers. Those documents tied Soviet intelligence directly to material the party and its American contacts had passed along from the 1920s through the 1940s. Some records showed Soviet sympathizers working inside the State Department as early as the 1930s. Letters written by two American ambassadors in Europe, meant only for Roosevelt and one senior State Department official, had somehow reached Soviet hands. A single sympathizer inside that department had passed them along.

  Brothers Jack and Morris Childs, codenamed SOLO, became FBI informants in 1952 while holding high-ranking positions inside the party. Through the remainder of the Cold War they tracked Soviet funding and even met with Soviet and Chinese leadership on trips to Moscow and Beijing. Both men were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 in recognition of that work. Morris's son later captured just how deep the access ran. 'The CIA could not believe the information the FBI had because the Communist Party of the USA had links directly into the Kremlin,' he said.

  Intelligence analyst Darren E. Tromblay says the SOLO operation and the so-called Ad Hoc Committee gave the FBI broader awareness of the Sino-Soviet split. The committee circulated a pro-Maoist bulletin inside the party, written in the voice of a 'dedicated but rebellious comrade.' It allegedly caused a real schism within the CPUSA.

  The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 cut off any remaining hope of outside support, deepening the party's financial strain and shrinking its ranks further still. What was left of the CPUSA would have to find out exactly where, on the American map, any support for it still remained.

• 6. Geography, Districts, and Demographics

  ›

  Before the Second World War, the party's support stayed fairly stable in New York City, Chicago, and St. Louis County, Minnesota. It also found unlikely rural strongholds. In 1932 the party won 22% of the vote in Sheridan County, Montana, and 4% in Iron County, Wisconsin. In 1934 it took 5% in Ontonagon County, Michigan.

  Even amid Jim Crow's grip on Alabama, the party won 8% of the vote in rural Elmore County, despite the widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters. That result came mostly from biracial sharecropper organizing carried out through the Sharecroppers' Union. The CPUSA was no open, come-one-come-all group like the Socialist Party or the NAACP. It demanded strenuous commitment from members and expelled them often.

  By 1939 the party's membership had climbed to 66,000, peaking above 75,000 in 1947. It ran candidates in every presidential race from 1924 through 1940, plus numerous state and congressional contests between 1922 and 1944, never expecting to win.

  Jewish Americans made up about 15% of party membership by the 1920s. That share grew after the Socialist Party's Jewish Federation split away in 1921, sending many of its members to the Communists instead. In 1925, roughly half the party came from its Finnish language federation. Yugoslavs and Bulgarians made up a quarter of members, and English speakers only 10%.

  By the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Jewish members made up about 40% of the party's roughly 50,000-strong membership. That share collapsed by 15 to 40 percentage points after the party backed Soviet policy toward Nazi Germany. Postwar support for Zionism later won back some of that Jewish membership. Jewish voters supplied 30% of Henry Wallace's total in the 1948 race, though only 10% of American Jews backed him, against 2% of non-Jews. Roughly a third of the party's Central Committee was Jewish across the whole period from 1921 to 2004.

  The party split the country into 15 districts that ignored state lines, plus a separate Agricultural District. Several reorganizations during the 1930s later expanded that map. Headquartered permanently in New York, the party often drew one-third to nearly half of its total membership from that single city. District 1, covering New York state, held 3,084 of the party's 6,822 members in 1930. By 1939 the figure was 25,327 out of 66,000, and by 1949 it was 25,000 out of 54,000. Chicago's District 8 held about 10% of members through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, before California's District 13 overtook it in the decade.

• 7. Race, Gender, and the Ranks

  ›

  In Alabama, the party's local chapter organized unemployed Black workers into the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union and ran numerous anti-lynching campaigns during the 1930s and 1940s. That same Alabama chapter trained young activists who later became prominent in the civil rights movement, among them Rosa Parks.

  James Ford, Charlene Mitchell, Angela Davis, and Jarvis Tyner all ran for president or vice president on the party's ticket. Tyner now serves as the party's executive vice chair. Others, including Benjamin J. Davis, William L. Patterson, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, and John Pittman, shaped the party's approach to civil rights and women's equality.

  Writers such as Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Gwendolyn Brooks lent their names to the party at various points. Its Ben Davis Club, operating out of New York City, worked alongside Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The party also helped found the African Blood Brotherhood and, in 1998, the Black Radical Congress.

  In the 1930s, the party successfully organized Mexican American workers across the Southwestern United States. It continues to view Latino voters' participation in broad left-wing movements as essential to major progress for the left.

  The party's constitution frames the American working class in its own words as 'multiracial and multinational.' It describes that class as uniting 'men and women, young and old, gay and straight, native-born and immigrant, urban and rural.' Its national program calls for equal pay for the same work and protection of reproductive rights, including access to abortion. It argues that unplanned pregnancy weighs hardest on poor women. A dedicated Women's Equality Commission works within the party's ranks toward building socialism.

  Before any of that, Harry Hay had already shaped his politics inside the Communist Party's ranks as an active member. In the early 1950s he went on to found the Mattachine Society, only the second gay rights group in the country. Many in the party at the time linked homosexuality to fascist tendencies, echoing the Soviet Union's own criminalization of it. Hay and other gay members were pushed out as an ideological liability, seen as 'vulnerable to blackmail from the FBI.'

  In 2004, the editors of Political Affairs owned up publicly to the party's early hostility toward gay and lesbian rights. That came more than ten years after the Soviet Union fell and Russia decriminalized male homosexual relations. They praised Hay's work directly in that same reassessment. A 2005 statement brought the party's formal endorsement of LGBT rights, reaffirmed a year later in a statement marking gay pride month in June 2006.

• 8. The Program and the Present

  ›

  Adopted at the party's 30th National Convention in 2014, its constitution establishes democratic centralism as its operating principle. The quadrennial National Convention stands as the party's highest authority. An earlier 2001 constitution had already fixed certain positions as non-negotiable. It committed the party to struggle 'against all forms of national oppression, national chauvinism, discrimination and segregation.' It also pledged opposition 'against homophobia and all manifestations of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.'

  The party's 'Immediate Program' calls for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, national universal health care, and an end to privatizing Social Security. It also proposes higher taxes on 'the rich and corporations,' along with 'regulation and public ownership of utilities.'

  The party frames its goal as 'Bill of Rights Socialism,' extending existing American freedoms to include freedom 'from unemployment,' 'from poverty,' and 'from illiteracy.' Echoing Marx and Engels's 1848 Communist Manifesto, it insists that socialism 'would not take away the personal private property of workers.' It targets only 'the private ownership of major industries, financial institutions,' and large corporations.

  The party has rejected the Bush Doctrine outright, opposing what it called the right to attack 'any country it wants' and to 'militarize space.' Its list of opposed wars runs long: Korea, Vietnam, the First Gulf War, and conflicts following the 11th of September in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the 2003-2011 Iraq War specifically, the party pointed to 500,000 marchers in New York alone. More than 150 anti-war resolutions passed through city councils nationwide.

  Modern membership claims trace a clear upward arc: 2,000 in 2011, 5,000 in 2017 and 2018-15,000 in 2023, and 20,000 in 2026. Former member Daniel Rosenberg offered a skeptical count in 2019. He said 'nearly half' of new joiners since 2000 had 'paid no dues,' merely signing onto a mailing list.

  On the 7th of April 2021, the CPUSA declared it was returning to electoral politics after sitting out for more than thirty years. Steven Estrada became one of its first candidates in that new push, running for Long Beach city council and winning 8.5% of the vote. In 2025 the party fielded city council candidates in Ithaca and Northampton, and both advanced from their primaries. That November, Ithaca's Hannah Shvets won her seat outright with 64% of the vote. CPUSA member Daniel Carson also won a seat on the Bangor city council that year, placing second among nine candidates.

  In July 2024, dissenting members broke away to form a rival, the American Communist Party. They pointed to CPUSA support for Democrats and what they called an abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. Online commentators Haz Al-Din and Jackson Hinkle became its founding chairman and founding Plenary Committee member. Both figures have faced criticism over populist tactics dubbed 'MAGA Communism.'

  In May 2026, co-chair Joe Sims used social media to announce that the CPUSA would bring back its long-dormant theoretical journal, Political Affairs. No date for that relaunch has been set, leaving one more chapter of the party's history still unwritten.