58 Facts About Earl Browder

Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA.

In 1930, following the removal of a rival political faction from leadership, Earl Browder was made General Secretary of the CPUSA.

Earl Browder took part in activities on behalf of Soviet intelligence in America during his period of party leadership, placing those who sought to convey sensitive information to the party into contact with Soviet intelligence.

Earl Browder was convicted of two counts early in 1940 and sentenced to four years in prison, remaining free for a time on appeal.

Earl Browder was released in 1943 as a gesture towards wartime unity.

Earl Browder was a staunch adherent of close cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II and envisioned continued cooperation between these two military powers in the postwar years.

Earl Browder lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity at his home in Yonkers, New York and later in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in 1973.

Earl Browder wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political issues.

Earl Browder was born on May 20,1891, in Wichita, Kansas, the eighth child of Martha Jane and William Browder, a teacher and farmer.

Earl Browder moved to Kansas City and was employed as an office worker, entering the union of his trade, the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants union AFL.

Earl Browder was aggressively opposed to World War I and publicly spoke out against it, characterizing the fighting as an imperialist conflict.

Earl Browder was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy and a year for nonregistration, sitting in jail from December 1917 to November 1918.

Earl Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, The Labor Herald.

Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press.

Earl Browder returned to the United States again in October 1929, just in time for a critical plenary session of the Central Committee of the American party.

Earl Browder deferred from the position of party Secretary not feeling himself sufficiently acclimated to the political situation in the CPUSA.

Earl Browder was added to this new three member Secretariat, named head of the party's Agitation and Propaganda department.

On November 13,1932, after extensive debate, the Comintern ruled in Earl Browder's favor, determining that Weinstone would be removed from America to serve in Moscow as the CPUSA's official representative there.

Earl Browder was an enthusiastic supporter of this new party line.

In December 1934 Earl Browder won Comintern approval for his scheme, arguing his case in person in Moscow.

Earl Browder returned to the United States at the end of the month, revealing his plan to a surprised party membership in a public speech delivered on January 6,1935.

Earl Browder was not only the leading party decision-maker but the public face of this effort.

Earl Browder made his final trip to the USSR in October 1938, where he made arrangements with Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov to establish shortwave radio communications in the event that international conflict made direct communication impossible.

Earl Browder's CPUSA claimed that Hitler's foes intended to escalate the ongoing European conflict into a counterrevolutionary offensive against the USSR.

Earl Browder declared at one Philadelphia rally that only "a dozen or so" had left the CPUSA over the change of line; but this was simply untrue.

On September 5,1939, days after the German invasion of Poland, Earl Browder appeared before HUAC, providing exhaustive testimony over the course of two days.

Midway through the first day of testimony, Earl Browder was asked in passing whether he had ever traveled abroad under a false passport.

The formal charge against him specified that Earl Browder had made multiple returns to the United States using a passport bearing his own name, but which had been obtained on the basis of a falsely sworn statement.

Earl Browder faced a two-count indictment, upon which conviction would have carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $4,000 fine.

Earl Browder reminded jurors that the trial did not concern false documents from the distant past and proclaimed that the actual charges against him were based upon a "web of technicalities".

Jury deliberations in the Earl Browder case lasted less than an hour, with a guilty verdict returned.

On March 25,1941, Earl Browder surrendered to US marshals, who transported him by rail to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

Two days later, with his face masked behind a pillowcase to hinder photographers, Earl Browder was led into the penitentiary to begin serving his four-year term.

Earl Browder discreetly returned to New York City, where he resumed his place as General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA.

Earl Browder directed Communist Party members to concentrate upon "problems of a centralized war economy and production for the war", using their place in the labor movement to help ameliorate labor discord.

Earl Browder did not personally devise the wartime policies of the CPUSA; the main elements of party policy, such as advocacy of an immediate second front, opposition to strikes, an end to racial discrimination in job hiring, and total support of Roosevelt's internal policy initiatives, were already well established by the time of his release in May 1942.

Nevertheless, Earl Browder became the public spokesman for these policies, and published a book in the fall of 1942, called Victory and After, which was frank in promoting class collaboration as essential to the cause of victory.

Earl Browder postulated that the cooperation between America and the Soviet Union would continue into the postwar period.

The speakers following Earl Browder lent individual support to the predetermined change of party name and shift in conception of the organization's role in the American political firmament.

Earl Browder allowed the Foster-Darcy letter to be circulated only to a handful of top party leaders, who at a February 1944 meeting of the Politburo voted to reject the letter.

Earl Browder was expelled from the CPA by a committee headed by Foster himself.

Earl Browder was named to replace "the man from Kansas" as party Chairman in 1945.

In January 1946 Earl Browder began publishing a mimeographed weekly newsletter of economic analysis called Distributors Guide: Economic Analysis: A Service for Policy Makers.

Earl Browder produced a total of 16 issues, each based on his vision of Soviet-American cooperation, as opposed to the unfolding Cold War between the powers.

On February 5,1946, Earl Browder was expelled from the CPUSA.

Earl Browder applied for a visa to travel to Moscow to appeal his expulsion, but he was forced to wait two months for its approval.

Earl Browder acted as a sort of literary agent for the Soviet government, receiving English translations of various books and articles and attempting to gain placement for them with American publishers.

Earl Browder claimed under oath that he had never been involved in espionage activities.

Earl Browder was never prosecuted for his perjury before the committee nor for his spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.

In March 1950, Earl Browder shared a platform with Max Shachtman, the dissident Trotskyist, in which the pair debated Socialism.

Earl Browder defended the Soviet Union while Shachtman acted as a prosecutor.

On June 2,1957, Earl Browder appeared on the television program The Mike Wallace Interview, where he was grilled for 30 minutes about his past in the Communist Party.

Earl Browder repeatedly connected Jacob Golos, a longtime Communist Party activist and Soviet agent, with CPUSA members who had offered to share sensitive information that they thought the party should know.

Earl Browder was periodically given access to important information by Golos before its transmission to his superiors in Moscow.

For some reason Earl Browder did not come to the meeting and just decided to put Bentley in touch with the whole group.

Earl Browder died in Princeton, New Jersey on June 27,1973.

Grandchild Bill Earl Browder was co-founder and head of the investment group Hermitage Capital Management, which operated for more than 10 years in Moscow during a wave of privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Great-grandchild Joshua Earl Browder is a British-American entrepreneur, consumer rights activist, and public figure.