Scope and Content Note
The Radical Pamphlet Collection spans the years 1870-1980 but is especially rich in the 1930-49 period. The collection includes pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, posters, cartoons, sheet music, and prints relating primarily to American communism, socialism, and anarchism
Pamphlets written by Browder and Foster in the l930s exemplify the Party’s desire to recruit the unemployed during the Great Depression by emphasizing social welfare programs and an isolationist foreign policy. Browder’s: The Fight for Bread (1932) and Unemployment Insurance (1935) and Foster’s Roosevelt Heads for War (1940) were critical of both New Deal domestic pro-grams and foreign policy. With the attack of the Soviet Union by Germany in June 1941, criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal decreased dramatically. Emphasis shifted to cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States to win the war. As leading advocates of this CPUSA wartime policy, Browder wrote Speed the Second Front (1942), Production for Victory (1942), and Teheran and America (1944); Foster contributed The USA and USSR War Allies and Friends (1942) and Steelworkers and the War (1942).
Additional Communist Party materials included campaign literature for state and local contests in Buffalo, New York; New York City; and Alameda County, California, and pamphlets by elected Communist officials Victor Narcantonio, American Laborite member of the US Congress, and Peter Cacchione and Benjamin Davis, Communist Party New York City Council members.
An interesting part of the collection relates to Blacks in the Communist Party. Prior to 1928 the Communist Party had little success recruiting from the Black community. After the Communist Party’s much publicized defense of the Scottsboro boys, the Communist Party was increasingly perceived by Blacks as the defender of minority rights. Topics of pamphlets addressed to Blacks include lynching, the Negro in sports, and segregation in the Army and industry. Black Communist leaders such as James W. Ford, Communist Party Vice Presidential Candidate in 1932 and 1936, Benjamin Davis, and Henry Winston are represented.
Equally valuable is material dealing with the Communist Party and youth. The Communist Party through the Young Communist League and its campus arm, the National Student League, was a major force in the pacifist and isolationist movements on college campuses in the pre-World War Two era. Pamphlets such as Fix Bayonets Against Whom (1933), Students Fight War (1935), and Youth Fight for Peace, Jobs and Civil Rights (1940) reflect the Communist Party’s attempt to create a militant student body to oppose war, ROTC on campus, and conscription.
Most items relating to American socialism in this collection are found arranged under the Socialist Party of America (SP), its members, and affiliates. Included are pamphlets, broadsides, and posters of state and local campaigns in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; Buffalo, New York; New York City; Portland, Oregon; Texas; and Kansas.
The collection contains pamphlets of the longtime Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. A few items relate to his presidential campaigns; most are criticisms of the New Deal. These include: The New Deal a Socialist Analysis (1933), Is the New Deal Socialism? (1936), and the Plight of the Share Cropper (1934). Thomas’ post-war works include A Socialist Looks at the United Nations (1945) and World Government, War and Peace (1948). The Eugene V. Debs materials in the collection are scarce but noteworthy. Some examples are his famous Canton, Ohio, speech (1918) and the testimony at his sedition trial. Other Debs pamphlets are: Woman--Comrade and Equal (n.d.), Childhood (n.d), and Children of the Poor (n.d.).
Additional resources concerning socialism in America are pamphlets by Victor Berger, Socialist Party member of 68-70th US Congresses; James P. Cannon; Daniel DeLeon; William James Ghent, editor of Appeal to Reason (Publishing House, Girard, Kansas); Daniel Hoan, Socialist Party Mayor of Milwaukee; Harry Laidler, executive director, League for Industrial Democracy; the Socialist Labor Party (SLP); and the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Although most of the Radical Pamphlet Collection is associated with communism and socialism there is a significant portion relating to anarchism. Many pamphlets in the collection were written by leading figures in European anarchism, published in the United States, and addressed English-speaking native and immigrant anarchists. In the collection are works by German anarchists Johann Most and Rudolf Rocker; Russians Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Petr Kropotkin; Italians Errico Malatesta and Carlo Tresca; and Frenchman Emile Armand. The collection has many of Emma Goldman’s works including Marriage and Love (1914), Anarchism What It Really Stands For (1914), The Crushing of the Russian Revolution (1922), and the Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation (n.d.) Resources for the study of native American anarchism include pamphlets by the individualist anarchists Benjamin Tucker and William B. Greene. Of special note is the anarchist newspaper Fair Play, published between 1889 and 1990 in Valley Falls, Kansas. Native anarcho-syndicalism is represented by pamphlets, broadsides, songbooks, and posters published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "Wobblies." This material includes recent IWW items such as minutes of the 26th and 29th IWW Constitutional Conventions (1950, 1969) and strike publications from the San Francisco Bay area locals. IWW pamphlets in the collection are: What Sort of Union is the IWW Asking You to Build (n.d.), Unemployment and the Machine (1934), and One Big Union of All Workers, the IWW (n.d.).