Communist Party of the United States
 Communist Party of the United States  (Political Party)    | |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1919 |
| Founder | C.E. Ruthenberg |
| Headquarters | 235 W. 23rd Street, New York City, New York, 10011 |
| American Communist Party strongest in the 1930s. By the 1950s a large part of the dwindling membership was FBI informants. | |
The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), also known as the American Communist Party, is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919.
COINTELPRO
The party was one of the targets for the FBI's COINTELPRO program. In addition to phone taps and thefts of records, informants were found or planted into the party ranks. Operatives seeded rallies with hecklers, planted negative news stories, and canceled halls already rented for meetings. A "snitch jacket" was placed on William Albertson, a member of the party’s National Committee, meaning that the FBI planted a document where another party member was sure to find it, falsely implying that Albertson was an informant. He was, as hoped, thrown out of the party.[1]
In all, some 1,500 paid informants were used and 1,338 "actions" were taken in a fourteen-year period. By 1971 the party’s ranks had dwindled to three thousand, of whom a large proportion probably were FBI plants.[1]
Party Members
| Politician | Born | Died | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jay Lovestone | 15 December 1897 | 7 March 1990 | US communist who ended up working for James Jesus Angleton |
| Victor Perlo | 15 May 1912 | 1 December 1999 | American Marxist economist, government functionary, and a longtime member of the governing National Committee of the Communist Party USA - and Soviet spy. |
| Juliet Poyntz | 25 November 1886 | June 1937 | |
| Lee Pressman | 1 July 1906 | 20 November 1969 | US labor attorney and earlier a US government functionary, alleged to have been a spy for Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s. |
