Tea at Trianon: When New York City Was the Capital of American Communism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

When New York City Was the Capital of American Communism

From The New York Times:

For a few decades — from the 1930s until Communism’s demise as an effective political force in the 1950s — New York City was the one place where American communists came close to enjoying the status of a mass movement. Party members could live in a milieu where co-workers, neighbors and the family dentist were fellow Communists; they bought life insurance policies (excellent value for money) from party-controlled fraternal organizations; they could even spend their evenings out in night clubs run by Communist sympathizers (like the ironically named Café Society on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, a showcase for up-and-coming black performers like Billie Holliday).

What became the Communist Party U.S.A. (its name varied in the early years) was founded in Chicago in 1919 and, following a period of underground organization, opened its national headquarters in that city in 1921. But the bulk of the movement’s members were in New York, and in 1927 Communist headquarters were shifted to a party-owned building in Manhattan, at 35 East 12th Street, two blocks south of Union Square. (The building still stands, although under new ownership, and in what has evolved into a considerably less proletarian neighborhood than in the old days.)

New York would remain the capital city of American Communism from then on. Leading communists, including such figures as William Z. Foster and Earl Browder, had their offices on the top floor of the 12th Street building; accordingly, within the movement, it became the custom to refer to party leadership as the “ninth floor.” (And, for some reason, even in non- and anti-Communist left-wing circles, “the party” was always understood to refer to the Communists, rather than any rival organizations.)

Immigrants, many of them of Eastern European Jewish background, provided the main social base for the party in New York City in the 1920s: As late as 1931, four-fifths of the Communists living in the city were foreign-born. (Read more.)