Jay Lovestone

Jay Lovestone (15 December 1897 – 7 March 1990) was an American activist. He was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL–CIO and various unions within it.

Biography

Background and early life

Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein (Яков Либштейн ''Yakov Libshtein'') into a Lithuanian Jewish family in a '' shtetl'' called Moǔchadz in Grodno Governorate (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Grodno Region, Belarus). His father, Barnet, had been a rabbi, but when he emigrated to America he had to settle for a job as '' shammes'' (caretaker). Barnet came first, then sent for his family the next year. Lovestone arrived with his mother, Emma, and his siblings, Morris, Esther and Sarah at Ellis island on September 15, 1907. They originally settled on Hester Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but later moved to 2155 Daly Avenue in the Bronx. The family did not know their dates of birth precisely, but they assigned Jacob the date of December 15, 1897.

Young Liebstein was attracted to socialist politics from his teens. While imbibing all the ideological currents in the vibrant New York Yiddish and English radical press, he was particularly attracted to the ideas of Daniel De Leon. It is not known whether he ever joined de Leon's Socialist Labor Party, but he was one of the 3,000 mourners who attended his funeral on May 11, 1914.

Liebstein entered City College of New York in 1915. Already a member of the Socialist party, he joined its unofficial student wing, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He became secretary and then president of the CCNY chapter. He also met William Weinstone and Bertram Wolfe in ISS, who would go on to become his factional allies in the Communist Party. He graduated in June 1918. In February 1919 he had his name legally changed to Jay Lovestone, the surname being a literal translation of ''Liebstein''. (During the early 20th century such name changes were a common practice for Jewish immigrants who encountered widespread antisemitism in American society.) That year he also began studying at NYU Law School, but dropped out to pursue a career as a full-time Communist party member.

The Communist years (1919–1929)

His first foray into what would become the American Communist movement began in February 1919, when the left wing elements in the Socialist Party in New York began to organize themselves as a separate faction. Lovestone was on the original organizing committee, the Committee of 15, with Wolfe, John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. That June he attended the National Conference of the Left Wing. He sided with the Fraina/Ruthenberg faction that opted to create a National Left Wing Council that would attempt to take over the Socialist Party. He stayed with this group after it reversed its stance, and joined the National Organizing Committee in founding the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, at a convention in Chicago.

In 1921, Lovestone became editor of the Communist Party newspaper, ''The Communist'', and sat on the editorial board of ''The Liberator'', the arts and letters publication of the Workers Party of America. Upon the death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927 he became the party's national secretary. From about 1923, the CP developed two main factions, the Pepper– Ruthenberg group and the Foster–Cannon group. Lovestone was a close adherent of the Pepper–Ruthenberg tendency, which was to be centered in New York City and to favor united-front political action in a "class Labor Party", as opposed to the Foster–Cannon group, which tended to be centered in Chicago and were most concerned with building a radicalized American Federation of Labor through a boring from within policy.

In 1925 the leader of the Pepper–Ruthenberg faction, John Pepper, returned to Moscow for work in the apparatus of the Communist International, raising Lovestone's status to that of a chief lieutenant in a new Ruthenberg–Lovestone pairing. Foster and Cannon, on the other hand, parted ways, with Alexander Bittelman assuming the mantle as Foster's chief factional ally, while Jim Cannon built his power base in the party's legal defense mass organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD).

With the Soviet Bolshevik party riven by a succession struggle following Lenin's death in January 1924, the factions in the US eventually corresponded with factions in the Soviet leadership, with Foster's faction being strongly supportive of Joseph Stalin and Lovestone's faction sympathetic to Nikolai Bukharin. As a result of his trip to the Comintern Congress in 1928 where James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector accidentally saw Leon Trotsky's thesis criticizing the direction of the Comintern, Cannon became a Trotskyist and decided to organize his faction in support of Trotsky's position. Cannon's support for Trotsky became known before he had fully mobilized his supporters. Lovestone led the expulsion of Cannon and his supporters in 1928.

The Communist opposition years (1929–1941)

When Stalin purged Bukharin from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, Lovestone suffered the consequences. A visiting delegation of the Comintern asked him to step down as party secretary in favor of his rival William Z. Foster. Lovestone refused and departed for the Soviet Union to argue his case. Lovestone insisted that he had the support of the vast majority of the Communist Party and should not have to step aside. Stalin responded that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".

When he returned to the US, Lovestone was forced to pay for his insubordination and was expelled from the party for his support of Bukharin and the Right Opposition and for his theory of American exceptionalism

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