SF Reds Book Review

San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958

By Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press, 2024

San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 is the third book by Robert W. Cherny published within a seven year span covering left labor San Francisco in the twentieth century. The first two, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (2022) and Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (2017) are biographies with a strong emphasis on their subjects’ relationships with the CPUSA.  In San Francisco Reds Cherny documents the party itself, from its founding during the post-World War I Red Scare, through the glory years of the Popular Front in the 1930s and 40s, and on into its decline under unrelenting attack during the McCarthy era. 

Beyond its firm grasp of Communist activities and policy within the Bay Area’s political culture, against the backdrop of the Party’s national and international contexts, the book’s strength is its focus on several dozen individuals, for whom Cherny provides capsule biographies, tracking their lives and involvements with the party and with various social movements it supported over several decades. 

As with the previous books, the scholarly research is impressive and meticulous. Mostly relying on primary sources (archival and oral history interviews, many conducted by Cherny himself) the author also casts a wide net on secondary sources, leaning especially on California Red, longtime CPUSA leader Dorothy Ray Healey’s as-told-to memoir with Maurice Isserman. It is worth noting the lines of continuity here, as Healey (Old Left) and Isserman (New Left) were early leaders of DSA as well. 

Cherny portrays both leaders and rank and file Communists as they attempt to mold a “Soviet America” and find their way through the often treacherous thickets of policy changes and reversals mostly ordered from on high in the Communist International via the leadership of the CPUSA.  But this isn’t a story about robots and their masters (although there is some of that). Thanks to the portraits, it’s a history of passionate and mostly well-meaning people, many of whom develop tremendous organizing talents and energies, doing their best to make a better world by fighting fascism and racism, building unions, and running electoral campaigns

There’s Bill Bailey, who got himself beaten badly after sneaking aboard a German ship docked in the New York harbor in 1936 to tear down the Nazi flag it was flying. There are the young women like Caroline Decker and Dorothy Ray Healey who as teenagers moved from organizing unemployed demonstrations in the cities to the central valley fields to support strikes of farmworkers. There’s Sam Darcy, the district CP organizer who, believing his own eyes instead of the Comintern’s directives, moved decisively out of Third Period sectarianism and abstention from AFL unions to help seed west coast maritime organizing before, during and after the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. 

San Francisco Reds serves as a cautionary tale for socialists who would build a mass left wing party in the USA today, with parts reading like commentary on contemporary tasks. 

The story of the CPUSA—like that of the Socialist Party before it—makes clear that the dominant organization on the left invariably has fissures and fault lines, consciously exploited by the security apparatuses of the capitalist state to sow suspicion and dissension and weaken the potential for united action. Cherny also demonstrates how those splits are unconsciously exacerbated by members who find fighting one another more compelling than seeking points of common interest and fighting capital. 

The infiltration of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s by COINTELPRO FBI disruption? Been there and done that in the CP throughout its earlier history. It’s hard to say, though, whether the worst enemy of the party was the government and ruling class, or at times itself.  

The Party was in a tough spot as the Cold War progressed. The dire conditions of Depression and war that had fueled its earlier growth had given way to prosperity, even to the extent of some dispersal of profits to the working class. Between the undeniably better conditions (less so for non-whites), the multi-pronged legal, undercover and political attacks on the party in the McCarthy era, bitter infighting among factions, and the Khruschev revelations about the murderous Stalin era in the Soviet Union, underscored by the invasion of Hungary, the organization collapsed. 

The CPUSA lost half of its membership (from 75,000 to 37,000) between 1947 and 1950; two thirds of what remained dropped away within a year of the 1956 double whammy. 

Cherny gives short shrift to other organizations on the left. He mentions Joseph James and C. L. Dellums in connection with the fight to integrate the Boilermakers union at Marinship during World War II, but doesn’t note their Socialist Party membership. Ray Thompson, a leader in the East Bay in another site of the struggle, is given the full nod as a Communist. 

His description of the Smith Act prosecutions in the 1950s tells us that Communist maritime union leader Al Lannon, “among the first Smith Act defendants…served two years in prison.” The Smith Act, later found unconstitutional, was passed in 1940, and its first victims, in 1941, were Trotskyist leaders in the Minneapolis Teamsters union—an outcome cheered on at the time by the CP. 

We find the occasional moment of dry humor here and there in San Francisco Reds. The last section of the book resembles the documentary movie trope where we see as the credits roll what happened to the central characters after the period described in the film ends. Cherny shows us that most of the activists who dropped out of the party continued to fight for social justice in other ways later in their lives. In detailing the later activities of a prominent left wing law firm, he tells us that “Hillary Rodham spent the summer of 1971 as an intern at Truehaft and Walker but was apparently not radicalized.”

Like Isserman does at length in his If I had a Hammer, the latter portion of San Francisco Reds explores in brief the baton being handed off from one generation to the next of the left. In recounting the story of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings in the late fifties and 1960, we see how much the famed free speech struggle at UC Berkeley and less well-known sit-in battles to integrate employment in the hotel and auto sales sectors of San Francisco’s economy relied on children of the Old Left stepping up. The party’s legacy was a mixed bag. But the values it championed, however poorly, did not die with it.