Communist Party of the United States

The Communist Party of the United States is a recurring political reference in Native Son, but the novel offers little direct account of its membership or organization. Instead, the Party becomes visible through printed pamphlets, suspicion surrounding Jan, and the competing explanations characters devise for the case. Its name gives Bigger material for a calculated defense, while others invoke Communist influence as a possible source of scandal or crime. The distinction between documented evidence and accusation is central: the Party's presence in the story is mediated by what characters fear, infer, and try to make others believe.

Pamphlets and Bigger’s strategy

On the morning he must take Mary Dalton’s trunk to the station, Bigger finds the pamphlets Jan gave him among his belongings. He considers discarding them along with a purse and knife that could expose his actions, then decides instead to keep the papers as potential evidence in his favor. Their titles include Race Prejudice on Trial, The Negro Question in the United States, and Black and White Unite and Fight. A hammer-and-sickle image and the publisher’s identification, the Communist Party of the United States, make the Party connection explicit on the printed material.

Bigger reads the pamphlets not as an invitation to political commitment but as an opportunity to explain his association with Jan. He plans to tell investigators that he fears Communists, did not want to accompany Jan and Mary, and joined them only because driving them was his job. He also intends to describe the meal with Jan as something he was made to attend. These claims are part of a story Bigger is preparing to tell; the episode does not establish that he belongs to the Party or that he has accepted the pamphlets’ ideas. The papers matter because he believes their presence may support his account of reluctance and distance from Jan.

The pamphlets also contain an image of a white hand clasping a Black hand. Bigger connects that printed image to Jan’s earlier handshake with him, a moment he remembers as painful and humiliating. In his planned explanation, this encounter becomes evidence that he had not wanted closeness across the racial line. The Party’s printed language of solidarity and Bigger’s fear of being associated with Jan therefore meet in a sharply ironic way: he intends to use the pamphlets to deny a political and personal connection that the image appears to represent.

Suspicion around Jan

The investigation turns Jan’s presumed politics into a working suspicion. When Mr. Dalton learns that Jan has been at the Labor Defender Office, he identifies him to Britten as a Red. That remark rests on an association with an office, not on evidence presented here that Jan is a Party member. Britten’s subsequent question to Bigger about his unit similarly treats Communist affiliation as a possibility to be tested, rather than a fact already established.

Mr. Dalton’s response also shows that suspicion of the Party shapes how he wants the inquiry conducted. Although he agrees that Jan should be seen, he rejects having him picked up, anticipating that the Reds would publicize the matter and create trouble in the papers. His concern is not only whether Jan can explain Mary’s disappearance; it includes the prospect that the investigation itself might become a political controversy. In this scene, the Party’s imagined influence over publicity affects a decision about police action even though the conversation supplies no proof of Party involvement in the disappearance.

The Party as a speculative explanation

As the false kidnapping story circulates, a character guesses that Reds may be raising money. The suggestion is speculation, prompted by the demand for money, rather than a finding about who is responsible. The conversation compares the rumor with a claim about the Lindbergh kidnapping and Nazi fundraising, further showing how characters reach for political explanations by analogy. Nothing in this exchange establishes that the Party planned or carried out the supposed kidnapping.

Taken together, the references show how the Party’s name can be made to do different work. Bigger sees the pamphlets as props for distancing himself from Jan; Mr. Dalton anticipates political pressure in the press; and another speaker uses a Red fundraising theory to explain a ransom demand. These are not equivalent kinds of evidence. The printed attribution on the pamphlets is concrete, while the claims about Jan’s affiliation, a possible media campaign, or Communist responsibility for the kidnapping remain assumptions or suspicions in the passages presented.

Political context and limits of the portrait

The Party is not given a developed platform, internal structure, or sequence of organized actions in these episodes. Its most tangible presence is the pamphlets, whose titles join discussion of racial prejudice and Black life to an explicit call for interracial solidarity. Yet the narrative’s attention falls less on how the organization operates than on how its perceived presence alters the conduct and explanations of others. Political association becomes especially useful to Bigger as a defense he can prepare in advance, and especially alarming to Mr. Dalton when he considers how the case might appear in the press.

The inquest and Max’s later argument bring the story’s institutional and economic inequalities into view, but the cited proceedings do not establish that Max’s argument is made on behalf of the Communist Party. His questions expose the higher rent charged to the Thomas family, their overcrowded and unhealthy room, and a housing policy that keeps Black residents in one area; his courtroom address likewise describes the restrictions imposed on where Black people can live, study, eat, and work. These passages provide a broader social context for political conflict, not evidence that the Party directs the investigation or the defense.

The novel’s treatment of the Communist Party is therefore defined by a tension between material presence and imagined power. The pamphlets are real objects in Bigger’s hands, and their wording and symbols are specific; the larger political claims attached to them are often conjectural. By keeping that difference visible, the narrative presents the Party both as a source of political language and as a name that characters use to explain, redirect, or manage a crisis.