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Earl Russell Browder ( May 20 1891 – June 27 1973 ) was a United States Communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1932 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946. EARLY YEARS Browder was born in Wichita, Kansas . He joined the Socialist Party Of America at the age of 15. During World War I he gave speeches urging the United States not to join the war, calling the conflict an Imperialist conflict. When the US joined the war in 1917, Browder and other Socialist Party leaders were arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for opposing Conscription . Browder was imprisoned, but continued to campaign against the war after his release, resulting in his second imprisonment in 1919. The left wing of the Socialist Party split to form the Communist Party Of America and the Communist Labor Party . The two parties fused in 1921 and Browder joined the unified party in 1921, becoming managing editor of the party newspaper, ''Labor Herald''. In 1928, Browder and his lover Kitty Harris went to China and lived together in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in clandestine labor organizing. The two returned to the United States in 1929. CPUSA LEADERSHIP Browder became General Secretary of the Communist party in 1930 and took over the top position of party chairman in 1932 after and became an ally of the Soviet Union . Foster tried to run for President in the 1940 Presidential Election but was forbidden by a court order from travelling around the country and won only 46,251 votes. In 1944, perceiving the end of the war and the possibility of postwar tension between Washington and Moscow, Browder made moves to distance the CPUSA from the Soviet Union, declaring that Communism and Capitalism could peacefully co-exist. This policy became known in the Party as Browderism. The CPUSA reconstituted itself as the Communist Political Association . EXPULSION FROM THE CPUSA With the end of the Great Power alliance at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, "Browderism" came under attack from the rest of the international Communist movement. In 1945, Jacques Duclos , a leader of the French Communist Party , published an article denouncing Browder's policy. With the Comintern having been dissolved during the war, the " Duclos Letter " was used to informally communicate Moscow's views. William Z. Foster , Browder's predecessor and a staunch Stalinist , led the opposition to Browder within the party and replaced him as party chairman in 1945, with Eugene Dennis taking over as General Secretary. Browder was expelled from the party in 1946. Browder continued to campaign for his views outside the party and criticized the CPUSA's domination by Moscow, writing that "The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform. But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse, the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a bad word in the American language." In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph McCarthy , Browder was willing to criticize the American Communist Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades. He falsely testified under oath that he had never been involved in espionage activities.Ryan, James G., ''Socialist Triumph as a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage,'' American Communist History 1, no. 2 (December 2002) Charged with contempt of Congress, Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally. Browder was never prosecuted for his espionage work on behalf of the Soviet Union. Browder's final public appearance was in a debate with Max Shachtman , the dissident Trotskyist , in which the pair debated socialism. Browder defended the Soviet Union and Stalinism while Shachtman acted as a prosecutor. It is reported that at one point in the debate Shachtman listed a series of leaders of various Communist Parties and noted that each had perished at the hands of Stalin; at the end of this piece of theatre, he remarked that Browder too had been a leader of a Communist Party and, pointing at him, announced: "There-there but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!" ''Is Russia a Socialist Community? The Verbatim Text of a Debate'' An attempt to reinstate Browder in the CPUSA following the Twentieth Party Congress and the move to Destalinization failed. He remained outside of the party until his death in Princeton, New Jersey in 1973. ESPIONAGE ACTIVITIES Browder is alleged to have been involved in constructing an underground branch of the CPUSA, called the ''secret apparatus''. 1Sudoplatov, Pavel Anatoli, Schecter, Jerrold L., and Schecter, Leona P., ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'', Little Brown, Boston (1994) This branch was intended to assist the Soviet Union in maintaining dominance of the CPUSA in policy issues,2Sudoplatov, Pavel Anatoli, Schecter, Jerrold L., and Schecter, Leona P., ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'', Little Brown, Boston (1994) as well as to recruit potential espionage agents for Soviet intelligence.Sudoplatov, Pavel Anatoli, Schecter, Jerrold L., and Schecter, Leona P., ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'', Little Brown, Boston (1994)3 In 1938 memorandum, Browder was personally credited with hiring eighteen intelligence agents for the Soviet Union.7Schecter, Jerrold and Leona, ''Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History'', Potomac Books (2002)Sudoplatov, Pavel Anatoli, Schecter, Jerrold L., and Schecter, Leona P., ''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'', Little Brown, Boston (1994)Weinstein, Allen, and Vassiliev, Alexander, ''The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era'' (New York: Random House, 1999) Members of Browder's family were involved in work for Soviet intelligence.8 According to a 1938 classified letter from Browder to , then head of the NKVD) requesting Marguerite Browder’s transfer. 10 Browder's niece, Helen Lowry , (''aka'' Elza Akhmerova, also Elsa Akhmerova) worked with Iskhak Akhmerov , a Soviet NKVD espionage controller from 1936 - 1939 under the code name ''ADA'' (later changed to ''ELZA'')). In 1939, Helen Lowry married Akhmerov.11 Lowry was named by Soviet intelligence agent Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts; she and Akhmerov and their actions on behalf of Soviet intelligence are referenced in several Venona Project decryptions as well as Soviet KGB archives.Weinstein, Allen, and Vassiliev, Aleksandr, ''The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - the Stalin Era'' (New York: Random House, 1999)12 SEE ALSO REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
Venona links
FURTHER READING Archives
Contemporary articles and publications
SECONDARY SOURCES
Venona secondary sources
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