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“Communist Party USA Founding Convention”—Chicago, IL—Sept. 1 - 7, 1919 |
Chicago–Communist Paradise of the Midwest
Posted on December 12, 2013
By Al Benson Jr., Revised History
This is a reprint of an article I published on another blog spot in early 2010, however it seems that the other blog spot has chosen to remove my articles–without even notifying me.
I am not sure what the deal is at this point–maybe someone complained about something I wrote that was not politically correct and so they just took it all down, I don’t know. But this particular article was, I felt, one of the more important pieces on the blog spot so I wanted to get it up somewhere else asap.
The one site I could find that had republished it in its entirety was http://defeatcommunism.com and I am glad they reprinted the whole thing rather than just linking to it as most others did.
It seems that the “Windy City” has had a love affair with communism that goes back a long time. Originally, you can trace it back to 1860 when the Republican Party convention was held there–the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln to run for president on the Republican ticket that year. There were several “Forty-Eighter” socialists, refugees from the 1848 socialist revolts in Europe, there that year for the convention and some of these socialists, such as Carl Schurz, actually helped to write the Republican Party platform in 1860. In our book Lincoln’s Marxists Walter Kennedy and I have noted this. We stated: “In chapter one we noted the close ties between radical European socialists/communists and Lincoln. In that chapter we pointed out that we are not suggesting that Lincoln was a communist, only that for some reason, these early American socialists/communists found the new Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln very attractive.”
So Lincoln was nominated, ran, and won, with the help of these Forty-Eighter socialists/communists–and it started in Chicago. How fitting. You can check out information about Lincoln’s Marxists on http://olesouthbooks.com
Unfortunately for Chicago, that was not the last they saw of the communists. A dispatch from Chicago to the New York Times for April 24, 1878 noted: “The Police report that the communist element here already numbers several thousands, and that many drilling places are almost nightly frequented by armed men. There are three halls on the North Side having facilities for drilling purposes, and the Superintendent of Police reports that about 4000 men drill in them every week… Superintendent of Police Hickey says that the arms used by the organizations are mostly Springfield rifles of the old and new patterns.” The dispatch also noted that the communists had sent an agent from Chicago to New York to purchase more arms and ammunition. Sounds typically communist–a little intimidation to attempt to dampen potential resistance. The Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest in 1956 accomplished the same purpose.
Another New York Times article, this one for April 21, 1879, observed: “Chicago, April 20–About 1100 Communists paraded the streets to-day, and displayed inflammatory banners. About 400 of them were armed. No disturbance occurred.” These articles definitely let you know that the Communists were busy strutting their stuff in Chicago in the 1870s. With the paranoia of Chicago’s present politicians about people in that city having firearms, (except for the criminals of course) it makes you wonder where the gun control freaks were in the late 1870s.
Of course since those carrying the weapons were communists, I suppose it was alright.
And they continued to do so as the years progressed. The American Communist Party originated in Chicago in 1919. It stayed there until 1927, when Communist Party headquarters and their newspaper, the Daily Worker, relocated in New York. During the 1930s the Communist Party in Chicago managed to reach their biggest audiences. They organized the unemployed and protested evictions. They built alliances with people like Saul Alinsky the infamous “community organizer.”
By the end of the 1930s they had influenced cultural organizations, writers, and various intellectuals who should have known better but didn’t. They even started their own newspaper, the Midwest Daily Record. As long as they could agitate among minorities, the unemployed, and other seemingly disaffected groups they had a fertile field for their class struggle techniques in Chicago. By the 1950s their influence had decreased somewhat, but they never really went away and in the 1960s their radicalism appeared afresh, only under new and different groups and not under their own name.In fact, Harold Lasswell and Dorothy Blumenstock wrote: “From the birth of the American Communist Party in Chicago in 1919, Chicago has been one of the chief radiating centers for Communist propaganda in the United States.” Even as the Party itself seemed to wane, its influence never really did.
Trevor Loudon, an anti-Communist political activist in New Zealand was interviewed in September, 2009 and made some interesting observations. Mr. Loudon stated that: “Chicago was the birthplace of US communism–the party was founded there in 1919. Chicago and Detroit were the centers of Midwest communism into the 1930s.
The communist influenced ‘Black renaissance’ movement was centered in two places–Harlem and Chicago’s South Side. Chicago’s advantage in communist terms, was that of the industrial South Side with its large working class white, black, and Latino populations was bordered by the more affluent Hyde Park area, and the thoroughly communist infiltrated University of Chicago. The Marxist academics of the UC had half a city of proletarians on their doorstep to experiment with and practice on.”
Mr. Loudon noted that the goals of communists in this country were, and still are, a socialist/communist America and that the Communist Party put a strong emphasis on infiltrating labor unions, the Democratic Party, and both the US government and the “civil rights” movement. All the evidence that I’ve seen over the years tends to agree with Mr. Loudon’s assessment.
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| Frank Marshall Davis |
Mr. Loudon also mentioned Vernon Jarrett, a black Chicago journalist who, with his columns, promoted Barack Obama during his run for the Illinois Senate in 2004. Loudon was also asked to identify prominent African-Americans were part of the “Chicago (Communist) network.” He observed: “In the 40s they included William and Louise Patterson, Ishmael Flory, Claude Lightfoot, Frank Marshall Davis and Oscar Brown.
Vernon Jarrett (father-in-law of Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett) and future Chicago mayor Harold Washington were close to the network as was future Obama friend Timuel Black and close Obama associates, former Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer and one term Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun.”
Sounds like lots of well-known folks in the Chicago area in earlier days had noted Marxist proclivities and those that were not outright part of the Party network were “close” to it. Note that one of those mentioned was Frank Marshall Davis, the man who was not only Obama’s mentor but a Communist Party member in both Chicago and Hawaii. Some of this information can be checked out on http://www.datehookup.com for those interested in Mr. Loudon’s observations.
And http://patriotsandliberty.com has noted: “Manning Marable, a leader of the Communist Party offshoot Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism claims that Obama ‘understands what socialism is. A lot of the people working with him are, indeed, socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party or as independent Marxists.
There are a lot of people like that in Chicago who have worked with him for years’.” Frank Marshall Davis was quite active in the Chicago Communist Party–until he moved to Hawaii in 1948.
It has been postulated in some quarters that Frank Marshall Davis may well have known “left-wing journalist Vernon Jarrett” in post-World War 2 Chicago. This is because the Jarrett family seems to have played a role in Barack Obama’s rise to power. Both Jarrett and Davis worked for the communist-influenced Chicago Defender newspaper in Chicago in the late 1940s. As you can see, what went on in Communist circles in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s has had a very definite effect on the lives of all Americans in our own day.
It has also been noted on http://techrepublic.com in an article by Cliff Kinkaid for February 15, 2008 that: “Obama’s socialist backing goes back at least to 1996, when he received the endorsement of the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for an Illinois state senate seat…Obama’s stint as a ‘community organizer’ in Chicago has gotten some attention, but his relationship with the DSA socialists, who groomed and backed him, has been generally ignored… DSA describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.” This socialist group has “consultative status” with the United Nations. Is anyone really surprised? Given the leftist record of the UN, should we expect anything else? Finish reading at source, Revised History>>
