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Baltimore's Red Philosopher Part II
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This post is Part II 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.
Part I: Baltimore's Red Philosopher
Part II chronicles Blumberg’s core philosophical-ideological beliefs, early academic career, and early work for the CPUSA.
Logical Empiricism and the Communist-Philosophical Left
Born August 10, 1906 into comfortable middle-class family of either Russian or Lithuanian immigrants in Baltimore, MD, Albert Blumberg’s commitment to communism and radicalism was most likely instilled in him at an early age. Blumberg was Phi Beta Kappa and a brilliant student while earning a bachelors degree in only three years and from The Johns Hopkins University. He earned a masters degree from Yale University then studied at the Sorbonne on an American Field Service Fellowship. He received his doctorate from Vienna University. Blumberg returned to Baltimore in 1931 and took an instructor position in the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins.
Blumberg was attracted to logical empiricism or logical positivism as it came to be known in intellectual circles. He studied under the renowned philosopher Moritz Schlick, author of General Theory of Knowledge at the University of Vienna in Austria during the 1920s. It was here Blumberg became a member of the so-called “Vienna Circle.” The Vienna Circle, which Schlick was the founding father, was group of philosophers and mathematicians that met in the cafés and parlors of Vienna to discuss their views on science, logic, and knowledge. Schlick’s influence on Blumberg was so great that in the introduction to his book General Theory of Knowledge, Blumberg wrote:
No other thinker was so well prepared to give new impetus to the philosophical questings of the younger generation. Though many of his students and successors have attained a higher degree of exactitude and adequacy in their logical analyses of problems in the theory of knowledge, Schlick had an unsurpassed sense for what is essential in philosophical issues.
Other notable members of the Vienna Circle were eminent thinkers such as Otto Neurath and Phillip Frank. Logical positivism called for a systematic reduction of human knowledge to logical and scientific foundations. That is, the only genuine form of knowledge is scientific knowledge. Logical positivism denounced metaphysics, theology, ethics, and large portions of traditional philosophy as unsound and devoid of meaning. These disciplines, according the logical positivists, were merely expressions of feelings and lacked any true meaning because they could not be scientifically proven. Logical positivism argued that philosophy should aspire to the rigor of science. In other words, philosophy should be able to verify the truth, falsity or meaning of any sentence.
Many logical positivists were passionate about cultural and social issues and sought to put their knowledge to practical purposes, that is to change society. George Reisch, in his book, How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Science noted, “The Vienna Circle specifically reached out to the wider public to popularize their critique of traditional philosophy and to popularize their…scientific world conception, as a replacement.” The Vienna School advocated a unification of the sciences “so that they could be better used as tool for the deliberate shaping and planning of modern life.” The purpose of the movement’s public outreach was to sophisticate the ordinary citizen to contribute to their preferred collective organization of society. It should be no surprise then, why Blumberg was attracted to logical positivism.
Blumberg co-authored with Herbert Feigl the paper “Logical Positivism: A New Movement in European Philosophy,” which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931. This paper is credited with giving the philosophy of the Vienna Circle the designation of “logical positivism.” Blumberg’s affinity for communism may have had its genesis in his youth, however, his promotion of logical positivism and its tenet of reducing everything to empirical facts, complimented his Marxist belief in dialectical materialism, and the class theory of history as a series of inevitable stages on the road to Communism. In logical positivism, Blumberg found not only reinforcement of his Marxist beliefs and rational science of society, but also a philosophical discipline that advocated putting the truths it discerned into action to achieve social justice. This overlap in Blumberg’s politics and philosophy is the chief reason he and others on the radical philosophical left founded the Marxist journal Science & Society in 1936. Blumberg and the thinkers who founded Science & Society were utterly convinced of the truth of Marxist theory. They hoped the journal would convert their less radical colleagues to accept the inherent truth of Marxism.
The Communist philosophical left differed with the logical positivists on one major point: the metaphysics of dialectical materialism. Whereas traditional logical positivism rejected metaphysics as non-scientific the Communist left saw dialectical materialism as the only means to organize a better society. Although many radical philosophers saw a dual commitment to Marxism and logical positivist philosophical analysis, the die-hard communists “distinguished themselves by insisting that Marxism and its social agenda required no creative interpretation on the part of intellectuals.” The means for social change was self-evident in the writing of Marx, Engels and Lenin. For those on the Communist-philosophical left there was no distinction between “philosophical practice and Communist party life.” These philosophers, Blumberg among them, saw the Party as the “living breathing fusion of theory and practice,” where they implemented their communist beliefs regarding class struggle and the evolution of society and nature.
Early Communist Party Work
In the mid 1930s politics and activism trumped philosophical and intellectual pursuits for Blumberg. Although he joined the party in 1933, Blumberg did not openly state his membership until he resigned his instructor position at Johns Hopkins in 1937 to assume leadership duties for District 34 of the CPUSA. Albert Blumberg was the epitome of 1930s Popular Front liberalism and projected the image of the professional, enlightened, technocratic, vanguard that could lead society to the sunny uplands of history. Blumberg joined District 34 during the troubled leadership of Paul Cline and Ed Williams. However, he would learn much from Earl Reno, who the National Party brought in to establish a smoother Party organization in Baltimore. Reno’s tenure as head of District 34 was a remarkable success. Reno expanded the Party’s membership base in Baltimore’s labor unions. But most importantly, Reno ended the factionalism that had plagued the party in Baltimore and many others throughout the United States during the Third Period era. Reno reorganized the Party apparatus into three committees. One of those committees was the Agitprop Committee, which Albert Blumberg served as chair. Blumberg also assisted Sam Swerdloff in promoting the activities of the American League against War and Fascism (ALWF). The ALWF enjoyed broad support among Baltimore’s working class and middle-class citizens because of its conferences and panel discussions. These panel conferences no doubt reflected Blumberg’s influence and academic background. Earl Reno bequeathed a highly functional party apparatus to Blumberg when the latter assumed the duties of district administrative secretary. Earl Reno may have created a functional party apparatus, in Maryland, but Blumberg made it successful, if only for a short time.
Blumberg recognized a low level of ideological awareness among the Party’s new members. He moved swiftly to correct this deficiency by expanding the Party’s Workers School founded under Reno’s tenure. Blumberg established committees to implement the expansion plans with a $2,000 budget and a $15 weekly salary to the District Educational Director. Blumberg planned on an enrollment of 200-250 students, as well as opening up a school in Washington, DC. The school offered classes on Communism, dialectical materialism, progressive trends in the arts, English, and history. However, the Workers School suffered from not having enough teaching personnel and the school had to deal with the logistics of planning around the workers/students shift work in many of the local industries.
Blumberg advocated using the ALWF, now called the American League for Peace and Democracy, to reach out to the working class and extend its reach. Both the league and the working class people Blumberg intended to reach rebuffed this effort. Turnout was minimal for two events held in Cumberland, Maryland and the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore.
The league was content in its middle-class composition and the workers found the leagues speeches on the Spanish Civil War irrelevant. The working class indifference to Spain perplexed Blumberg. He felt that the war was an important battle in the struggle against fascism and in it served their interest to care about the outcome. In addition, and more significantly, the Baltimoreans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were working class members of the Party. Nevertheless, Blumberg continually hounded on the issue of building up the Workers School stressing the need for “every comrade’s cooperation”. In Baltimore, Blumberg’s efforts paid off, 125 students enrolled in the fall 1937 semester. However, the Workers School in Washington did not fare as well as its counterpart in Baltimore, but Blumberg, undeterred urged Martin Chancey, head of the party in Washington to prepare their section of the school no matter how many classes they were able to arrange.
At the same time Blumberg was working to inculcate the proper communist ideology in District 34’s new working class members, Josef Stalin was purging those he deemed did not follow the correct Party and ideological lines in the Soviet Union and consequently those who might pose a threat to his rule. From August 1936 through June 1937, Stalin orchestrated the forced confessions, show trials, and executions of many old-guard Bolsheviks from the 1917 revolution including former Comintern chiefs Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin. Leon Trotsky went to Mexico in exile after his purge from the Party. A Soviet agent, acting on Stalin’s orders murdered Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940. Many others were arrested, forced to confess, and executed on false charges of acting as a fifth column aiding the Nazis. Furthermore, Stalin wiped out the top ranks of the Red Army in a bloody purge and liquidated the kulaks. Although some historians contest the estimates of the death toll, the number of victims of the Great Terror range from the hundreds of thousands to tens of millions.
The Moscow Trials met with positive reaction in District 34. Benjamin Fields, chairman of the Maryland Party noted in a lengthy analysis of the international situation that the Moscow Trials strengthened the Soviet Union. Arguing along similar lines as Blumberg—for more Marxist education—Fields argued that his comrades must learn to “see events and evaluate them in the light of Marxism.” Commenting on the Moscow Trials Fields said, “you will see to what extent fascism has been weakened during these years and the Soviet Union has been strengthened at the same time… how correct was the line of the Comintern on the struggle against Trotskyism, and that the extermination of Trotskyites in the Soviet Union, upon which Hitler relied so much to carry out his plan of conquest, was needed and very successful.” According to Fields the Moscow Trials represented a great victory for Communism over fascism and “a great victory for the working masses the world over. Needless to say that it is of enormous importance to our struggles in America.” Fields went on to note again the importance of the Workers School. Although there is no evidence of Blumberg’s reaction to the Moscow Trials or Stalin’s purges, we can infer from Fields comments that Blumberg agreed with him. They both favored a higher degree of ideological awareness and education among the working class Party members so they could indeed interpret events like the Moscow Trials as Fields did. Also, as we shall see later, Blumberg’s acceptance of the criticisms of Earl Browder contained in the Duclos Letter offers evidence that supports the contention that Blumberg approved of the Moscow Trials.
The events surrounding Stalin’s purges may not have had a negative effect on many of Maryland’s above ground communists, but the purges did distress underground communist Whitaker Chambers. The purges, especially the disappearance of Juliet Stuart Poynitz, caused Chambers to break with the Party and go into hiding. There is no clear-cut evidence that Albert Blumberg was aware of the clandestine activities of the CPUSA underground. However, as will be discussed later, there are clues that quite possibly point to the fact that Blumberg and J. Peters knew each other, Blumberg was aware of underground activities, and that Peters was involved in District 34 affairs.
Up Next: The Dies Committee, World War II and the Popular Front
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