Alexander Bittelman

Alexander Bittelman was born in Berdichev (Berdychiv), in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) on January 9, 1890. He was radicalized at an early age, joining the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Yiddish: אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין ליטע פוילין און רוסלאַנד, Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland) at just 13 years of age. Arrested by the Tsarist secret police for his revolutionary views, he served two years of political exile in Siberia.

Bittelman emigrated to the United States in 1912, settling in New York City.[2]

Bittelman was active in the Jewish Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America from 1915. A committed Marxist and revolutionary, Bittelman was an adherent of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party when it emerged early in 1919. In September of that year, he was a founding member of the Communist Party of America (CPA) and editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper, Der Kampf (The Struggle).[3]

At the convention in Chicago that founded the CPA, Bittelman was one of the nine members of the committee that wrote the program for the organization. He was a member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the Jewish Communist Federation from 1919 to 1920 and was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee of the CPA and its Executive Council in 1920. His most commonly used underground party name during this period was "A. Raphael." Bittelman also variously used the pseudonyms "Gabriel," "Williams," "Percy," "Ralph Barnes," and "Lentrov" in various circumstances.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice in 1948, Bittelman maintained as many as 14 aliases up to that time.[2]

Bittelman remained with the main CPA organization l, when Executive Secretary C.E. Ruthenberg led a group of his supporters out of the organization in April 1920 to join the rival Communist Labor Party in a new United Communist Party (UCP). He saw the way that the internecine struggle between the two organizations was sapping the strength of the revolutionary socialist movement, however, and came to be an advocate of organizational unity between the CPA and the UCP. During the first half of 1921, Bittelman formed a group advocating merger of the competing communist groups in accordance with the directives of the Communist International. That, ironically, made Bittelman persona non grata with both organizations and he was briefly expelled from the CPA. Together with his co-thinker Maximilian Cohen, Bittelman formed a third group critical of the leaderships of both the CPA and the UCP called Communist Unity Committee, in which Bittelman served as secretary.[4] Merger was finally accomplished at a convention held in May 1921, and Bittelman was welcomed back into the newly unified Communist Party of America.

Bittelman was put into the Central Executive of the unified Communist Party of America. In July 1922, he was sent with James P. Cannon to Moscow, as representatives there of the CPA. He returned later that same year to serve on the Executive Council of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party of America, the so-called "Legal Political Party" initiated and controlled by the secret CPA.

Bittelman was regularly a delegate to the conventions of the American Communist Party. He was a close factional associate of William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon against the faction headed by John Pepper and including C.E. Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone, during the bitter faction fights of the 1920s.

Bittelman was editor of The Daily Worker' Saturday magazine from 1926 to 1927.

Bittelman was a delegate to the 6th World Congress of the Comintern in 1928 and spoke in opposition to American Party leader Jay Lovestone. Summoned to Moscow in an effort to neutralize the factional war, Bittelman was named vicechairman of the Comintern's Far-Eastern Secretariat in 1929.

In 1930, Bittelman was dispatched to India as the Comintern Representative there. He was expelled by the British from the country for his activities, however, and returned to the United States in 1931, putting down roots in Southern California.

Bittelman returned to New York City in summer 1934 to work in the CPUSA's Propaganda Department. He took an active role in the editing of the monthly theoretical journal of the organization, The Communist, and he wrote the leading section of the magazine, "Review of the Month", from 1936.

Although the factional war was much more subterranean during the 1930s, there was still an ongoing battle. In this fight, Bittelman remained a close associate of National Chairman William Z. Foster in opposition to General Secretary Earl Browder. Despite his closeness, Browder's fall from grace in 1945 did not mark the end of Bittelman's tenure as a top leader of the Communist Party.

In September 1946, Bittelman authored a paper for the Communist Party's National Board predicting economic collapse and a return to depression-like conditions within two years, as wartime government spending was curtailed.[5] This report, adopted by the Board, would remain the foundation of the CPUSA's economic analysis for the next five years.[6] Imminent economic collapse and the rise of fascism in America was seen a likely scenario, and the Communist Party girded itself for a political assault.[6]

Following the end of World War II, the government of the United States quickly moved away from its wartime ally against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. A Second Red Scare swept the country, fueled by the partially-justified fear of conservative politicians that a network of spies on behalf of an aggressive and expansionistic USSR had penetrated various branches of American government, education, and popular culture. The Communist Party USA was seen by political decisionmakers as the directing center of such subversive activity.

By the end of 1947, internal pressure had grown to the point that public opinion demanded for the authority of the state to be brought to bear upon the Communist Party's members and supporters in what was seen as a campaign of national self-defense.[7] The most simple mechanism at the government's disposal was to make use of deportation proceedings against radical resident aliens, with a view to shattering the foreign-born leadership of the Communist Party and disrupting the organization.

Owing to his noncitizen status, Bittelman was selected by federal authorities as the first prominent American Communist to be subjected to this tactic.[7] On January 17, 1948, Bittelman was arrested while on vacation in Florida under a warrant obtained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[8] The government charged that Bittelman had repeatedly violated federal law during the 1930s by traveling to the Soviet Union by means of fraudulently obtained passports and that he had maintained illegal contact with the Communist International in Moscow.[9]

Bittelman was soon released from jail on bail.[10] He returned to New York City at the end of January 1948 and held a news conference to publicize what the Communist Party had characterized as a "witch-hunt," during which the 58-year-old Bittelman stoked the patriotic fire of conservative forces by declaring to reporters that he "would not fight against the Soviet Union in any war" since "any war against the Soviet Union would be an unjust war."[10] Angered by Bittelman's speedy release and defiant public comments, U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark was soon in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee to reiterate his desire to use deportation statutes "to remove from among us those aliens who believe in a foreign ideology."[11]

The wheels of the legal process turned slowly in Bittelman's deportation case, and it was not until September 1949 that a deportation hearing was held at which he was charged with illegal membership in an organization which taught the doctrine of violent overthrow of the United States government.[12] At his hearing Bittelman emphasized the distinction between "teaching the Marxist-Leninist theory of social change, including the law of violent proletarian revolution" and "teaching the overthrow of a particular government by violence."[12] The government's attempt to deport Bittelman ended unsuccessfully.

A series of prosecutions and convictions of top Communist Party leaders under the 1940 Smith Act followed. Certain that American fascism was around the corner, the Communist Party leadership went "underground," taking up a furtive and secret existence, leaving only a handful of members to occupy public party posts.[13] The CPUSA's public image thereby sustained yet another blow and its isolation increased.[13] Having witnessed the failure of similar party policies in the early 1920s, Bittelman emerged as a critic of the increasingly shrill and sectarian political line of the Communist Party, breaking with party chief William Z. Foster in the party's Administrative Committee.[13]

Early in 1953, Bittelman began to argue for the "non-inevitablility of war and fascism" and to call for an end to the underground form of party organization in favor of an open "United Front Marxist Party."[13] Bittelman's ideas were quickly rejected by the CPUSA's leadership, however, scorned as examples of so-called "liquidationism."[13]

In 1953, with the Justice Department prosecuting top Communist Party leaders in waves, Bittelman's turn arrived. Bittelman was indicted, tried, and convicted for violation of the Smith Act. He served a three-year prison term, being freed on May 26, 1957. While in prison, Bittelman received Social Security payments, which cause a change in the tax law and, enacted as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1956, Internal Revenue Code "section 3121(b)(17) provides that Social Security taxes must not be withheld from wages earned for "service in the employ of any organization which is performed (A) in any year during any part of which such organization is registered, or there is in effect a final order of the Subversive Activities Control Board requiring such organization to register, under the Internal Security Act of 1950, as amended, as a Communist-action organization, a Communist-front organization, or a Communist-infiltrated organization, and (B) after June 30, 1956."[1]

Bittelman was released to find a different Communist Party than the one he had left. In the wake of the death of Joseph Stalin and the exposure of the excesses and crimes of his regime as well as the working class revolt in Hungary, a movement grew for liberalization in the Communist Party. Bittelman was attracted to this trend and wrote a 12 part series for the Party's newspaper, The Worker, beginning on October 1, 1957. In February 1958, he published his last piece in Political Affairs, the party's theoretical magazine, in which he criticized the views of William Z. Foster and argued that only expansion of the welfare state would permit a peaceful transition to socialism.[14] Bittelman announced plans to publish his memoirs in 1959.

A hard-line faction headed by Gus Hall had by this time consolidated its hold of the CPUSA, however, and Bittelman's planned memoir was condemned by the new party leadership on October 14, 1959. Bittelman was expelled from the Communist Party in the aftermath of this decision.

Bittelman was formally expelled by his Communist Party club on November 14, 1960. This decision was confirmed by the National Committee of the CPUSA at its plenum held at the end of January 1961.

Bittelman was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to provide testimony about his former organization on November 21, 1961, but he refused to testify, citing his rights under the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Following his expulsion and refusal to testify in 1961, Alexander Bittelman lived out the last two decades of his life in quiet at Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He died in April 1982.

Bittelman left an unpublished memoir, Things I Have Learned, which resides at the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of Bobst Library at New York University. The manuscript is available there for use by researchers.

• Joel Seidman with Olive Golden and Yaffa Draznin, Communism in the United States: A Bibliography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967; pp. 53–58, 395.

• Works by or about Alexander Bittelman at Internet Archive
• Alexander Bittelman "Wall Street Sells Out the Jewish State", 1948
• Finding Aid for Alex Bittelman's Things I Have Learned, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Retrieved February 23, 2010.