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Bay Area Reds
PAUL BUHLE recommends a thorough and necessary history of communist organisation and the difficulties it faced in California
(L) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, May 29 1942. A group of Block Leaders who are drawing up the Constitution for this War Relocation Authority center - front row (L to R) Karl Yoneda [communist], H. Inouye; back row, (L to R) Bill Kito, Ted Akahoshi, Tom Yamazaki, and Harry Nakamura; (R) Dorothy Healey, chair of the CPUSA in Southern California, standing before jail cell in Los Angeles, California, June 29 1949

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. 

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