Whether in its religious, utopian, or Marxist form, communism has played a muted yet significant role in American history. To a vision (or recollection) of common property-holding originating in antiquity, modern thinkers and activists added a detailed social rationale and many examples of state leadership. In the process, “communism” lost most of its religious and voluntary quality, yet it remained a key marker for twentieth century life even where, as in the United States, its popular appeal proved short-lived.
“Communism,” for millennia an imagined memory of some distant Golden Age, came alive in the early sixteenth century in the Radical Reformation uprising against monarchy and church, from England to Central Europe. Brutally suppressed, these millennialist movements were carried in a small way through disciples to the New World. Colonial and post- revolutionary Pennsylvania alone saw dozens of largely Germanic communal experiments. Amish and particularly Hutterite settlements carried on communal traditions for centuries after.
The American Shakers, similar to the German-American religious idealists in their search for a comprehensively ordered collective life, had a remarkable impact upon the American scene, from music to furniture design, even as their celibate colonies dwindled through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Assorted other “Antebell Era experiments drew outstanding intellectuals (the geologist Robert Dale Owen, travel writer and labor reformer Frances Wright, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, and novelist Nathaniel “Hawthorne, to name only a few) to projects whose scant practical success belied their greater literary popularity. Edward Bellamy’s wildly popular novel “Looking Backward: 2000—1887 (1888), induced the last major burst of enthusiasm for communal living until the l960s. These efforts had, however, long Since abandoned the word “Communism” to the political Communists.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848), named to distinguish their “scientific” doctrine from what they contemptuously dismissed as utopian “socialism, came to life when the Paris Commune of 1871 dissolved the political “state” in favor of a council of citizens. Amid the American “railroad strikes of 1877, a similar body ruled St. Louis for one week, making major decisions in the name of working people until occupying troops recaptured authority. But only in Russia in 1917, when workers’ councils (“Soviets”) briefly took over large sections of the nation’s industry, did such direct popular rule become more than a dream of left- wing socialists. As a civil war raged, the Bolshevik party steadily exerted its authority over the Soviets. Soon the State ruled absolutely, and the very meaning of “Communism” had been in many ways reversed. Although the Communist International, appealing for workers’ solidarity worldwide, rapidly became a mechanism of Russian foreign policy, the promise of revolution inspired allies in various nations; strong, admiring Communist parties in central and southern Europe; and a much weaker Communist party in the United States.
In the l930s, the rise of fascism, the impending threat of world war, and the devastating effects of the Depression gave the Communist cause a temporary but significant appeal to hundreds of thousands of Americans. Although the “Communist Party—USA won only a miniscule vote in presidential elections (80,181 in 1936), some immigrant workers, industrial unionists, reformers, intellectuals, writers, and artists embraced the Communists’ Popular Front (a coalition of antifascist forces) until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, and again during “World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. The “Cold War atmosphere of intimidation, as well disillusionment with the Soviet Union, eclipsed the American Communist party. Its surrounding milieu and faithful political descendants, however, continued, in various degrees, to influence the social movements of the l960s and 1970s, the Third World “support movements” of the 1980s, and even the revived labor movement of the l990s.
(See also Anarchism; Anticommunism; Depressions, Economic; Hiss, Mger. Hoover, I. Edgar; Industrial Workers of the World; Labor Movements; McCarthy, Joseph; Mennonites and Amish; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; New Deal Era, The; Noyes, John Humphrey; Radicalism; Rosenberg Case; Shakerism; Sixties, The; Socialist Party; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.]
*Information taken from:
The Oxford Companion to
United States History