29 Facts About Bertram Wolfe

Bertram David Wolfe was an American scholar, leading communist, and later a leading anti-communist.

Bertram Wolfe authored many works related to communism, including biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.

Bertram Wolfe was born January 19,1896, in Brooklyn, New York.

Bertram Wolfe's mother was a native-born American and his father was an ethnic Jewish immigrant from Germany who had arrived in the United States as a boy of 13.

Bertram Wolfe was active with the Socialist Party of America in his youth and was an active participant in the Left Wing Section which emerged in 1919.

Bertram Wolfe attended the June 1919 National Conference of the Left Wing and was elected by that body to its nine-member National Council.

Bertram Wolfe helped draft the manifesto of that organization, together with Louis C Fraina and John Reed.

In 1919 Bertram Wolfe became a founding member of the Communist Party of America.

Together with Maximilian Cohen, Bertram Wolfe was responsible for The Communist World, the CPA's first newspaper in New York City.

Bertram Wolfe edited a left wing trade union paper called Labor Unity from 1920 to 1922.

Bertram Wolfe was a delegate to the ill-fated August 1922 convention of the underground CPA held in Bridgman, Michigan, for which he was indicted under Michigan's "criminal syndicalism" law.

In 1923, Bertram Wolfe departed for Mexico, where he became active in the trade union movement there.

Bertram Wolfe became a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Mexico and was a delegate of that organization to the 5th World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1924.

Bertram Wolfe was a leading member the Red International of Labor Unions from 1924 to 1928, sitting on that body's Executive Committee.

Bertram Wolfe was ultimately deported from Mexico to the United States in July 1925 for activities related to a strike of Mexican railway workers.

Bertram Wolfe was editor of The Communist, the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, in 1927 and 1928.

Bertram Wolfe was chosen as a delegate of the American Communist Party to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928.

In 1928, Bertram Wolfe was made the national director of agitation and propaganda for the Workers Party of America.

Bertram Wolfe ran for US Congress as a Communist in the 10th Congressional District of New York.

Late in December 1928, with the election campaign at an end, Wolfe was dispatched by the Lovestone-dominated Central Executive Committee of the American Communist Party to serve as it delegate to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, where he replaced J Louis Engdahl.

Bertram Wolfe refused the assignment, providing a long statement of his reasons to ECCI for this decision, according to Gitlow.

In June 1929, Bertram Wolfe was expelled from the Communist Party, USA for refusing to support the Comintern's decisions regarding the American Communist Party, which effectively removed Lovestone from power.

Bertram Wolfe became editor of the CP's newspaper Worker's Age and its chief theorist.

The CP meanwhile moved further away from the left and went through several name changes finally becoming the Independent Labor League of America in 1938 before dissolving at the end of 1940 in part because of a break between Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe on their interpretation of World War II - with Lovestone favoring American intervention and Bertram Wolfe opposing support for what he argued was an imperialist war.

Bertram Wolfe's political perspective changed with time and during the Cold War was a leading anti-Communist.

Bertram Wolfe served as a visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of California.

In 1973 Bertram Wolfe was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

Bertram Wolfe died on February 21,1977, from burns he suffered when his bathrobe caught fire.

Bertram Wolfe was 81 years old at the time of his death.