Background

Earl Russell Browder was born on May 20, 1891 in Wichita, Kansas, United States; the son of William Browder, a farmer and clerk, and Martha Hankins. Browder was the descendant of an old American family whose forebears had migrated from England to America a century before the American Revolution.

Education

One of the twentieth century's most prominent radicals, Browder was forced to leave school in the third grade to help support his family, when his father became an invalid. His going to work as an errand boy for a wholesale drug firm marked the end of his formal education, although he continued to read widely and in 1914 completed a law school correspondence course.

Career

Browder's political career began in 1907 at the age of sixteen, when he joined the Socialist party. He was, he once said, a "promising young executive" on working days, but an ardent radical on all other occasions. Browder was eventually engaged in most of the reform and labor movements of his time. He attributed his politics in part to the influence of his father, who had lost the family farm in the 1880's and who had known mostly hard times after he moved to Wichita in search of steadier employment. An active Populist before his illness, the father had encouraged wide-ranging discussions at table among his seven children, four of whom eventually joined the Communist movement.

In 1912, Browder, now a Kansas City accountant, abandoned the Socialists when the party expelled "Big Bill" Haywood, the leader of the Left. He did not join Haywood in the Industrial Workers of the World, but chose instead an association with William Z. Foster's Syndicalist League of North America, which was based on the belief that labor reform could be achieved through the American Federation of Labor. Over the next two years, Browder served as coeditor of the League's Kansas City paper, The Toiler, but late in 1914 abandoned syndicalism for trade unionism, becoming president of his local chapter in the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Accountants Union.

By 1916 he had given up trade unionism to manage a farmers' cooperative near Kansas City and to serve on the advisory board of the Cooperative League of America. He openly opposed America's entry into World War I and in 1917 was arrested and found guilty both of conspiracy to prevent the enforcement of the draft law and of nonregistration. Browder was imprisoned for a year on the second charge, while appealing his conviction on the first.

Browder emerged from jail as the Bolshevik Revolution was capturing the imagination of radicals everywhere. Prepared to support its principles in the United States, Browder rejoined the Socialist party and went to work as the first editor of The Worker's World, a pro-Communist paper based in Kansas. But in mid-1919, the appeal of his conspiracy conviction was denied, and he was sent to the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served a sixteen-month sentence. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt granted him a full pardon.

Browder's time in prison coincided with the formation of the Communist party in the United States, and although he took no part in the early stages of the party's development, he was given honorary charter membership because his radical sympathies were well known. After his release from Leavenworth, he left Kansas for employment as head bookkeeper in a New York wholesale company; in January 1921 he began his active association with Communism.

By spring he was traveling about the country recruiting non-Communist trade unionists for the American delegation to the Profintern, the first Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions, which met in Moscow in July. Serving as the delegation's secretary and using the pseudonym Joseph Dixon, Browder met Lenin and immediately declared himself a follower. In the early 1920's Browder worked tirelessly but covertly to expand the party's membership despite the legal obstacles that state and federal law had erected in the aftermath of the "Great Red Scare" of 1919-1920.

In 1926 Browder headed off to China on behalf of the Profintern. He remained there for three years, first in Hankow and then Shanghai, as general secretary of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. Returning to the United States in 1929, he began a fifteen-year tenure as head of the Communist party, taking control of the organization - with Stalin's blessing - in the aftermath of an internecine struggle that had threatened the party's existence and which, in the opinion of Moscow, demanded a change in leadership. As party chief, Browder was responsible for repairing the damage.

Throughout the next decade he moved about the country speaking wherever he could find an audience and doing whatever was necessary to convince the public that "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism." He wrote for the Communist press and published a half-dozen books, nearly all of them ideological expositions of the party line on domestic and foreign issues.

After 1935, under his leadership, the party pursued a united front policy designed to create a coalition of reform groups to bring about social change. Conciliatory moves were directed toward such anti-Communist elements as the Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy, the Socialists, trade unionists like John L. Lewis, and the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations. Browder's efforts eventually attracted many native-born Americans to a political party that previously had been identified principally with ethnic groups.

In the years just before World War II, Communist party membership swelled to a high of 100,000. During this period, Browder openly supported the New Deal, but he quickly repudiated Roosevelt when the President reacted negatively to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. Over the next two years, party membership declined dramatically, and in 1940 Browder was arrested, tried, and found guilty of unlawful use of his passport. While his conviction was on appeal, he was his party's candidate for the Presidency in that year's election. His appeals denied, he entered prison in 1941, serving fourteen months of a four-year term in Atlanta's federal prison, before Roosevelt commuted the sentence.

Despite the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the American Communists never again achieved the influence they had exercised in the 1930's. In 1946, Browder was removed from his leadership position and expelled from the Communist party as a deviationist. Except for an occasional lecture and the appearance of Keynes, Foster, and Marx, his thirteenth and final book in 1950, Browder's public career was over. After the death of his wife in 1955, he lived in virtual obscurity until his death at the home of his son, William.

Achievements

• Earl Browder was the United States Communist Party leader for almost 25 years, the period of the party’s largest membership and greatest influence. Browder's party, laying claim to native radicalism, attained a membership of 100,000 and, through a network of friendly organizations, exerted a considerable effect on American affairs. Perhaps Mr. Browder's greatest triumph was his party's role in organizing trade unions in the thirties.
  
  Among Browder's many published works The People's Front (1938), War or Peace with Russia? (1947), and Marx and America (1958) are highly acclaimed.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Communism in the United States

    (This work was hammered out in the very heat of the strugg...)

    1935
  • Democracy or Fascism

    (Earl Browder's Report to the Ninth Convention of the Comm...)

    1936
  • Marx and America: A Study of the Doctrine of Impoverishment 1958
  • Trotskyism Against World Peace 1937
  • The way out 1940
  • What is Communism? 1936
  • Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace 1944
  • War or Peace with Russia? 1947
  • The People's Front 1938
  • Victory - and After 1942
  • The Economics of Communism: The Soviet Economy in its World Relation 1939
  • Religion and Communism 1939
  • The Meaning of Social Fascism: Its Historical and Theoretical Background 1933

Religion

In his book "Religion and Communism" Browder said: "My Party stands for unconditional freedom of religious beliefs and worship, as a matter of principle, for the complete separation of church and state, for the removal of every element of coercion in matters of conscience. That is its fundamental principle in all questions of public, of governmental, policy. Within our Party we place no tests of religion whatever upon our membership, which includes, as a matter of fact today, persons of all shades and tendencies of religious belief, as well as skeptics, agnostics and atheists. The Party reserves the right, in relation to its own members, of calling up for discussion any particular opinions of any kind, religious or otherwise, which involve formulation of policy toward social and political problems, but this can never result in coercion because of the purely a voluntary nature of membership in the Party. This being the Communist position, not a new position but going back to the foundation of our movement in the teachings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels from the middle of the nineteenth century on."

Politics

At the age of 15 Browder followed his father into the Socialist party, but within a few years he moved on to the still more radical Syndicalist League of North America, led by William Z. Foster.

Browder resisted conscription in World War I, like many other political radicals, and as a result he spent 16 months in state and federal prisons. Soon after he left prison, he joined the newly organized Communist party. Two years later the underground Communist party merged with the legal Workers party to form what eventually became the Communist party of the United States, which Browder would later head. The mild-mannered Browder seemed an unlikely revolutionary. Yet during the 15 years of his leadership, the Communist party gained many new members and considerable respectability, especially within the American intellectual community.

Browder managed to ride out several sudden and spectacular changes in the official Communist line that emanated from Moscow. From violent denunciation of the New Deal as the precursor of fascist dictatorship, the party moved in the "Popular Front" period (1935-1939) to temporary cooperation with non-Communist leftists and the New Deal; then in the 20 months following the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, to insistence on strict American neutrality toward the European war; and finally, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, to wholehearted support for the Roosevelt administration and the American war effort.

On the eve of the 1944 presidential campaign, Browder announced that the Communist party, to demonstrate its patriotism and to solidify bipartisan backing for Roosevelt, had been transformed into the Communist Political Association.

At the close of the war the party's membership, boosted by the wartime American-Soviet alliance and the party's apparent patriotic fervor, stood at an all-time peak of more than 75,000. But in the spring of 1945, with the war almost over, the party officially shifted once again, from cooperation with liberal capitalism to militant opposition to both the capitalist system and to the further expansion of United States power in the world.

But Browder, an enthusiastic advocate of postwar cooperation with the established order, could not survive this latest shift in Moscow's thinking. That July a special convention of the Communist Political Association repudiated "Browderism," dissolved the association, reestablished the Communist party of the United States, and denied Browder a place on the party's national committee. Early in 1946 the party officially expelled him.

Views

Quotations: "That's right. I meant that the Communist Party and the whole communist movement was changing its character, and in 1945, when I was kicked out, the parting of the ways had come, and if I hadn't been kicked out I would have had the difficult task of disengaging myself from a movement that I could no longer agree with and no longer help."

"Am I bitter? No, I'm not bitter. What would be the use?"

"On every issue, Trotskyism enters as the poison to block unity among the workers and their organizations, to break- up the People's Front, to help the reactionaries and fascists, and, above all, to prepare the ground for war."

"If one wants to fight against fascism and war, the first battle that must be Won is to drive out Trotskyism and its influence from the ranks of the workers, farmers, and intellectuals. Without this victory over every Trotskyist influence, unity in the fight against fascism and war-unity which is the condition for any success is impossible."

"The revolutionary tradition is the heart of Americanism. That is incontestable, unless we are ready to agree that Americanism means what Hearst says - slavery to outlived institutions, preservation of privilege, the degradation of the masses. We Communists claim the revolutionary traditions of Americanism. We are the only ones who consciously continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of the day."

"The close connection between local political machines and control of election machinery by gunmen, is an organic part of the political set up. The murder and wounding of hundreds of strike pickets in the last three years are another feature of the same development. The lynching of Negroes, especially in the South, is part of the whole menacing complex of political reaction. The assassination of Huey Long is thus the eruption of this underworld into the upper circles of the ruling class which has long made organized use of it as a daily part of their rule over masses."

Membership

Earl's Browder was a member of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL).

Connections

In 1926, Browder married Russian-born Raissa Berkman. For many years they lived in a Yonkers apartment. Mrs. Browder died in 1955, and nine years ago Mr. Browder went to live in Princeton with his son William, a mathematician. In addition to William, Browder had two other sons, also mathematicians, Felix Earl and Andrew.

Father:

William Browder

Mother:

Martha (Hankins) Browder

Spouse:

Raissa Berkman

Raissa Berkmann, born in St Petersburg in 1897, graduated with a law degree from the University of St Petersburg in 1917. Since she was Jewish, being admitted to university had not proved easy and it was difficult for anyone Jewish to practice law in Russia. After the Russian Revolution she taught at Moscow University and at the Lenin Institute.

Earl and Raissa were married on 15 September 1926. The first two of their three children were born in Moscow; Felix in 1928 and Andrew in 1932. Earl Browder returned to the United States in 1929 but Raissa remained in Moscow until 1933. She joined her husband in the United States, crossing the Canadian border without a visa. In 1934 their third son, William Browder was born in New York City.

Son:

William Browder

William Browder is an American educator and mathematician, working in the field of algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Browder was one of the pioneers of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds.

Son:

Felix Browder

Felix Earl Browder (July 31, 1927 – December 10, 2016) was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000.

Brother:

Andrew Browder

Andrew Browder (January 8, 1931 – March 24, 2019) was an American mathematician at Brown University.

Grandson:

Bill Browder

William Felix Browder (born 23 April 1964) is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which was at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.

great-grandson :

Joshua Browder

Joshua Browder (born 1997) is a British-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of DoNotPay, the first chatbot that allows motorists to appeal their parking tickets automatically. In 2018, Browder launched a new version of DoNotPay that allowed users to "swipe" on court settlements and sue.

References

• Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism
  1997
• The Negro and Justice: a Plea for Earl Browder
  1941
• Earl Browder The Man From Kansas