San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 
Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press £22.05

THE story of the US left has been pretty much ups and downs, something hardly surprising in world capitalism’s leading nation with a working class historically divided by race and ethnicity. 

Among the most startling cases is surely the California Story. 

The California Socialist Party of pre-1920 days elected mayors, guided at least some craft unions, had quite a following among displaced Yankees and a scattering of ethnic groups. The rough conditions of what would one day become known as the Left Coast meanwhile prompted IWW-like, semi-anarchist labour activism. 

It is a bitter irony that communists, the successor to all this, could not find their way until the middle 1930s. In the end, they built quite a movement but not much of a Communist Party proper. Robert Charny’s book is narrowly cast around the CP structure, membership, tactics and projects. He offers a close look at people widely known, including LA leader Dorothy Healy and not-quite-communist ILWU champion Harry Bridges, about whom Cherny’s own biography is an outstanding contribution. He also offers a view of many communists hardly known at all.

The Syndicalism Acts of California in 1921, aimed at an IWW already repressed but with capabilities in agriculture, also hit the new communist movement hard. The small collections of communists, barely emerging from the 1919 spit in the Socialist Party, limped into the internecine wars of competing communist factions, and damaged themselves badly. None could quite grasp the need for different approaches and the vast political opportunities in the complex and contradictory California scene. 

Cherny beautifully explains the flawed internal logic of the CP toward its California faithful in the 1920s to the early 1930s and this takes up the first three chapters of the book. 

In the California case, it was possible to rally large numbers behind Robert La Follette in 1924, but the national leaders went a different direction. By the early 1930s, California Communists launched major defence campaigns for imprisoned unionists but could not manage to create a “front” any more than they hold onto the Mexican-American agricultural workers, who had last supported the Wobbly efforts to organise them.

By mid-book, Cherny moves onward to 1934, anticipating the Party’s golden age. The San Francisco “General” Strike, which effectively brought the Longshoremen from relative isolation into a union of great influence and Harry Bridges from obscurity to global fame, marked a turn. Bridges himself sturdily denied affiliation with the CP, and it was as an influence within the ILWU that the left moved forward. 

Left-wing Californians had some great human material to work with, including a dedicated cadre of screenwriters, and also a wide-ranging and often unexpected members and supporters. Consider the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards, the most openly gay union in the CIO and the most obviously Red, allied closely to the ILWU. Nothing in global communist movements could have predicted this.

A section of the middle class, Yankee and Jewish, had mostly held back from the CP until the Popular Front and then entered full flush. Fundraisers could be held in Charlie Chaplin’s mansion. 

But membership did not surge in the expected European communist fashion. Men and women in the Bay Area and far beyond, building the ILWU all the way to Canada and Hawaii, would fight to the point of laying down their lives and yet feel no urge to join a communist organisation.

Cherny points to the repressive power of California conservatives and the state taking swift action at any sign of weakness. Following years of anti-fascist agitation, the CP entered isolationism 1939-41 and lost a lot of its support — regaining most of it, and more, after Pearl Harbour. 

But HUAC investigations, already begun in the “Pact Period,” would be back soon and more deadly than ever. Future California politicians, greatly aided by the FBI (Ronald Reagan’s own brother was an agent), had already set a trap that communists and their allies could hardly evade.

There is a recognition that the glorious era of the CP was really over, certainly, but also a sense, insufficiently expressed, that the country had changed. 

The unionised part of the working class had established a certain status, at least for a generation. Consumer goods, inexpensive automobiles, even blue collar suburbs could allow depoliticised leftwingers to feel as if they could live “normal” lives, especially when FBI harassment had done its career-worst and left them alone.

The links with the movements of the 1960s-70s might have been developed. Perhaps more than any other sector, aged communists of colour met up successfully with young activists in every possible venue, explaining things that had never been well understood within the “white” left. Some of the many old-timers still around, Japanese-American communist Karl Yonenda most notably, became the subject of great admiration to the new generation, offering contacts, sympathetic advice and assistance. 

All that said: a good book, a necessary book.

Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.