Communist Party of California

The Communist Party of California was a small state organization whose influence during the 1930s extended beyond its membership through labor organizing, anti-fascist coalitions, relief campaigns, and cultural and political activity. In a state transformed by Depression-era discontent, it offered one route from progressive sympathies into organized activism. Its work connected causes such as support for the Spanish Republic and better conditions for migratory workers with a broader argument about labor, civil liberties, and the direction of American policy.

Size and Political Setting

The organization grew during a period of rapid political change in California. In 1930, three out of every four voters in the state were registered Republicans; eight years later, Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one. In 1934, Upton Sinclair nearly won the governorship with his End Poverty in California platform, and in 1938 Democrat Culbert L. Olson won with the Communist Party’s open support and a campaign slogan calling for a united front against fascism. This leftward movement made Communist activity more visible, but it did not make the Party large: it remained a small minority even on University of California campuses.

In Alameda County, where Berkeley was located, the Party claimed between 500 and 600 members, including about 100 longshoremen working in the Oakland shipyards. The state organization had 2,500 members in 1936 and more than 6,000 by 1938. Those figures stood against a national Communist Party USA membership of approximately 75,000 in 1938; many new recruits stayed less than a year. Across the country, about 250,000 Americans affiliated with the Party for at least a short time during the 1930s. The California organization was generally regarded as a comparatively moderate voice within the national Party.

For many New Deal Democrats, participation in Communist Party activities did not automatically carry a stigma. The Popular Front could have cultural appeal even among people who never joined: writers attended Party-sponsored congresses, and volunteers taught at workers’ educational centers. That setting helps explain why young academics could take part in political and social activity without treating every involvement as a declaration of formal membership. It also makes the Party’s reach more legible: its influence could travel through causes, publications, unions, and social networks as well as through its dues-paying members.

Fundraising and Spanish Republican Aid

The Party’s fundraising linked local professionals to the Spanish Republic’s struggle against fascism. Thomas Addis, a Stanford physician active in organizations fighting for democracy and against fascism, approached Oppenheimer for donations to Spanish relief. Addis later proposed that money intended to help the cause should go through Communist channels, which he said would support the fighting effort. Oppenheimer thereafter made regular cash contributions, usually meeting Addis in his laboratory or at his home. He gave cash in part because he suspected that contributing to military equipment, rather than medical aid, might not be entirely legal.

When Addis suggested a more convenient intermediary, the donations went to Isaac “Pop” Folkoff, a veteran member of the San Francisco Party who headed its Bay Area finance committee. Folkoff collected money from both Oppenheimer brothers. Oppenheimer’s annual contributions for Spanish relief amounted to about $1,000, a substantial sum in the 1930s. After the fascist victory in 1939, Addis and Folkoff solicited funds for other causes, including the Party’s organizing efforts among California migratory farm workers; Oppenheimer apparently made his last such contribution in April 1942. The episode shows the practical route by which a Party organizer and a trusted local fundraiser connected private donations to political causes, while leaving open how fully donors understood the later uses of their contributions.

The Party also brought the Spanish cause into public view. In January 1938, People’s World, its new West Coast newspaper, reported that Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier, and other Berkeley professors had raised $1,500 to buy an ambulance for shipment to the Spanish Republic. That spring, Oppenheimer joined 197 other Pacific Coast academics in petitioning Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift the arms embargo on the Republic. The combination of fundraising, newspaper coverage, and petitions made aid a coalition effort involving Party members and sympathetic academics, rather than a matter confined to the organization’s formal ranks.

Labor, Civil Liberties, and Coalition Work

The Communist Party of California was active in causes that included desegregation, improved working conditions for migratory farm workers, and opposition to fascism. Its members and allies worked through a broad range of civic organizations. Oppenheimer, for example, joined the Western Council of the Consumers Union, became a sponsor of Friends of the Chinese People, and served on the national executive committee of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which publicized the plight of German intellectuals. In January 1939, he joined the executive committee of the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Later, the House Committee on Un-American Activities labeled these organizations Communist fronts, with the exception of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Labor organizing gave this coalition work a more immediate institutional form. Oppenheimer was particularly active in Local 349 of the East Bay Teachers’ Union, where he worked for four years to increase membership, rarely missed meetings, and undertook routine tasks. Haakon Chevalier recalled that Oppenheimer once stayed up with him until two in the morning addressing envelopes for a mailing to several hundred union members. The union offered a point of activity within a faculty where left-wing academics felt watched with disapproval and conservative members usually prevailed in faculty council meetings. The Party’s orbit thus included both public campaigns and the patient work of building organizations inside workplaces.

Publications and Antiwar Argument

The Party’s political writing presented social welfare and labor rights as matters inseparable from debates about war. In February 1940, the College Faculties Committee of the Communist Party of California issued a Report to Our Colleagues, signed in the committee’s name and mailed in more than a thousand copies to people at West Coast universities. Chevalier said Oppenheimer helped draft it, and Gordon Griffiths likewise recalled his involvement. The pamphlet defended the New Deal’s social programs, criticized attacks on unions and relief, and argued that growing preparations for war accompanied the abandonment of domestic reform.

A second Report to Our Colleagues, issued on April 6, 1940, carried no byline. Chevalier again identified Oppenheimer among its anonymous authors. Its argument began from society’s obligation to keep people alive, provide the means to feed themselves, and protect them from violent death. It criticized unemployment and proposed welfare cuts while noting the simultaneous increase in armaments spending. These documents used the Committee’s name rather than individual bylines and addressed university audiences, placing the Party’s domestic program within a larger critique of militarization and the narrowing of progressive politics.

The organization’s antiwar activity also took the form of personal assistance. When Chevalier asked Oppenheimer to edit an antiwar pamphlet sponsored by the League of American Writers, Oppenheimer was not himself a member of the League; he helped as a favor to a friend. He rejected the draft and dictated a replacement text arguing for keeping the United States out of the European war. He may also have helped write or edit the two faculty reports. The association between his work and the Communist Party’s committee became part of later disputes about his political affiliation, but the evidence distinguishes participation in Party-sponsored writing from proof of formal membership.

Reach and Later Suspicion

The Party’s activity was often conducted through coalitions, local organizations, and named campaigns, a structure that let people contribute to particular causes without the same degree of formal commitment. The same breadth later made association itself politically consequential. Several organizations in which Oppenheimer participated were subsequently branded fronts by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and his fundraising, newspaper reading, union work, and participation in pamphlet writing became subjects of scrutiny. The record presented here does not establish that every supporter or contributor belonged to the Party; it shows instead how its political work intersected with a wider circle of academics, professionals, workers, and reform organizations.

That distinction matters to the organization’s historical role. The Communist Party of California was numerically small, yet its influence was visible in the causes it organized, the networks it maintained, and the campaigns through which supporters acted. Its history in these episodes is neither simply a story of membership nor one of covert direction: it is also a record of practical alliances around anti-fascism, labor, civil liberties, and social provision, and of how those alliances were later reinterpreted amid rising suspicion of Communist association.