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Baltimore's Red Philosopher
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This post is Part I of a multipart series on Albert E. Blumberg (1906-1997), chief of the Maryland Communist Party during the Great Depression and World War II. I chronicle his life and work from his days as brilliant scholar of philosophy from Johns Hopkins and European salons, his rise through the ranks of the Maryland CP, his unyielding support for Josef Stalin, run-ins with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and prosecution by the Federal government.
Although he is little more than a historical footnote to most, Blumberg’s story is a fascinating tale complete with intrigue, both political and personal, and even espionage. Blumberg was privy to information regarding the CPUSA’s secret work and operated in and around the same circles connected to the Soviet spy ring involving Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
Through his life we also get a picture of a Baltimore that exists only in the memory of its older citizens: a mid-20th century industrial American boomtown. The Baltimore of that age was a vibrant, bustling blue-collar city, which produced a great deal of the industrial might that led to victory over the Axis and helped create the post-war economic expansion. In short Blumberg’s life is a microcosm of the larger political/social forces at work in American life during the middle decades of the 20th century.
Introduction
George MacLeod’s interest in communism ended abruptly in the spring of 1941. MacLeod, a Baltimore native and student at the University of Alabama had become fascinated with communism and aspired to the join the Communist Party of the United State of America (CPUSA) to effect social change in the United States. Home in Baltimore spring break, he met Albert E. Blumberg, Secretary of the Maryland branch of the CPUSA, while browsing through communist literature at the Free State Bookshop on Eutaw Street.
Blumberg invited MacLeod to lunch at a Park Avenue restaurant. Anxious to impress Blumberg and to be considered “one of those people,” MacLeod thought he was impressing Blumberg when he stated that social change could be achieved by slow peaceful means. It was to MacLeod’s great astonishment when Blumberg replied that he was “more pink than red.” Blumberg became angry and agitated at the thought of slow peaceful change. Blumberg stated that “we need force and to expend blood to make major social change.” Blumberg thundered that there was, “not time for the gradual evolution to a different social system… that major social change did not come about by peaceful means, but by bloodshed.” He asked MacLeod point blank if he was ready to take a rifle and fight in the streets of Baltimore to force change.
Blumberg told Macleod that the party was interested in young men who had the courage of their convictions and were willing to fight for them. Blumberg flatly stated to MacLeod that he needed to have his thinking “straightened out” by attending a party school. Blumberg abruptly ended the lunch, along with MacLeod’s aspiration to be a good communist.
MacLeod’s recollection of his 1941 encounter with Albert Blumberg was the nail in the coffin for Blumberg at his 1956 Smith Act trial. The federal government rounded up Blumberg and other second-tier CPUSA leaders and forced them from their underground hiding during the post-war anti-communist offensive against the CPUSA. The trial was the culmination of Blumberg’s short, but infamous public career as head of the Maryland branch of the CPUSA and the party’s legislative representative to Congress in Washington, DC.
Albert E. Blumberg was the public face of the Communist Party in Maryland (CPUSA District 34) from 1937 when he was named district administrative secretary until his conviction under provisions of the Smith Act in 1956. Blumberg ran District 34 from the end of the Third Period through most of the Popular Front era just prior to Joseph Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. In his later years, Albert and his wife Dorothy Rose Blumberg, as committed a communist as her husband, lived in New York City and worked for Democratic Party organizations, and social justice causes for the elderly and Dominican immigrants. A charitable fund named for Albert and Dorothy exists and grants funds to programs for the elderly in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.
I aim to tell the story of Albert Blumberg’s life and to a lesser extent his wife Dorothy Rose. To tell the story involves answering several questions. What drove him to join the communist party? Was he a true revolutionary committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the American constitutional order? If so what was the level of his revolutionary commitment? Was Albert aware of the CPUSA’s clandestine/subversive activities carried out by its secret and illegal apparatus? Was he aware of party members carrying out espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union? This question is of special importance given that District 34 included Baltimore and Washington, DC, which were two major locations of secret party work and Soviet espionage. How did his prosecution and conviction by the government affect his commitment to communism and the goals for the American communist movement? What effect did his career as a communist leader have on his and wife’s activism in their later years in New York?
The historiography of American communism has shifted over the last decade from the “Third Wave” revisionist consensus formed in the 1970s and 1980s by scholars such as Maurice Isserman and Ellen Shrecker to a nuanced traditionalist understanding of communism in the tradition of Theodore Draper, best represented in the work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Under the revisionist consensus, American communism was a purely indigenous movement dedicated to an altruistic cause of social justice. Revisionist historians denied any connections between American communists and the Soviet Union, and if any did exist, the ties were insignificant. The notion of American communists spying or engaging in subversion for Moscow was preposterous to revisionist historians. The opening of Comintern files in Moscow and the revelations of the Venona decrypts in the late 1990s radically changed our understanding of American communism. Contrary to the claims of the revisionists, the CPUSA was deeply involved with the Comintern and Soviet intelligence. That Moscow exerted control over the CPUSA and set its policies, and American communists engaged in espionage against their own country is now historical fact.
The historiographical shift dealt mainly with the CPUSA on a national level, and with nationally known figures like Earl Browder, Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But what about the local party districts and their leaders and the rank-and-file members? The “new historians” of American communism sought to look at the party, especially its rank-and-file members disconnected from the party headquarters in New York. Two notable studies of the “new” history of American communism Robin D.G. Kelly’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression and Mark Naison’s Communists In Harlem During The Depression fall into the revisionist camp. In these works, the Party is in the background and its true nature is opaque. The books focus on individuals without connecting them back to the Party. As John Earl Haynes noted, studies like these never attempted to “comprehend the American Communist movement’s history as a whole. Most articles and books dealt with a limited geographic area, a small time-span, a single incident, a specific ethnic or racial group, a particular union, or some other partial aspect of Communist history”. Although, revisionists asserted that local Communists habitually disregarded orders from New York, in what amounted to a two-party analysis of the CPUSA’s history, they did not however, present a broad analysis showing this to be typical Communist behavior.”
Only in Vernon Pedersen’s The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919-57, a localized study of American Communism from the traditional perspective, do we see the periphery connected back to the core. That is, Pedersen avoids the “two party analysis” trap of the new historians of American communism and reveals the connections between the local party districts and party headquarters in New York and consequently Moscow. It is in Pedersen’s book that we get an initial glimpse of Albert Blumberg and his role in the party. Although Pedersen notes his importance and influence in the Maryland party and many significant details about Albert and his wife he eschews them in favor of his larger study about Maryland party. Although prosecuted under the Smith Act, Albert was not a nationally known party leader. He was a leader at the local and regional level. This presents an opportunity to study a prominent local level party leader. By answering the questions posed earlier, we can see show how his story fits into the broader history of American communism.
Up Next: Part II: Philosophy, Ideology, and the American Communist Movement
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