The 1922 Bridgman Convention was a secret conclave of the underground

Communist Party of America The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), officially the Communist Party of the United States of America, also referred to as the American Communist Party mainly during the 20th century, is a communist party in the United States. It was established ...

(CPA) held in August 1922 near the small town of Bridgman, Michigan, about outside of the city of

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

on the banks of

Lake Michigan Lake Michigan ( ) is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume () and depth () after Lake Superior and the third-largest by surface area (), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the ...

. The convention, called by the CPA as its annual gathering for the election of officers and making of internal decisions, was attended by a delegate who was secretly an employee of the

Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. An agency of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is a member of ...

, who informed his superiors of the date and general location of the gathering. The convention was raided by local and federal law enforcement authorities on August 22, 1922, and a number of participants and a large quantity of documents seized in an operation which garnered national headlines. Two 1923 test trials of the

Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...

criminal syndicalism law resulted from the arrests, with

trade union A trade union (British English) or labor union (American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers whose purpose is to maintain or improve the conditions of their employment, such as attaining better wages ...

leader William Z. Foster freed by a "

hung jury A hung jury, also called a deadlocked jury, is a judicial jury that cannot agree upon a verdict after extended deliberation and is unable to reach the required unanimity or supermajority. A hung jury may result in the case being tried again. Thi ...

," while Communist Party leader C. E. Ruthenberg was convicted. Ruthenberg ultimately died of

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in 1927, just after his appeals were exhausted and just before sentence was enforced. No additional trials associated with the 1922 Bridgman raid were conducted.

History

The 1921 Central Caucus split

In the fall of 1921, a section of the Communist Party of America identifying themselves as a "Central Caucus," headed by Executive Secretary Charles Dirba and including Central Executive Committee members John J. Ballam and George Ashkenuzi, split from the CPA to form their own parallel organization. At issue was the decision of the CEC majority to hurriedly establish a parallel Workers Party of America (WPA), the "above-ground" and "legal" nature of which was believed to risk exposing the organization's largely immigrant membership to easy arrest and deportation.Theodore Draper, ''The Roots of American Communism.'' New York: Viking Press, 1957; pg. 353. The split came after a mere eight months of tenuous unity between Dirba and his associates with the members of the former Communist Labor Party (CLP). Dirba's "Central Caucus" group formally organized themselves as a competing organization, also known as the "Communist Party of America," at a convention held early in January 1922. This gathering, attended by 38 delegates, purported to represent 5,000 party members, fully half of the American communist movement at the time, 80 percent of whom hailed from various language federations of the old CPA. The Central Caucus faction objected to the establishment of a public Workers Party of America (WPA) to which all underground party members were required to belong. In addition to security concerns over the WPA, the radical Central Caucus group objected to the WPA's emphasis upon elections, considering this a turn away from the strategy of forcible overthrow of the

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through

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and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in accord with the Soviet model.Draper, ''The Roots of American Communism,'' pg. 354. This new split of the American communist movement was vexing to the

Communist International The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second Internationa ...

, which insisted upon one unified communist party in each country and which had struggled to unite its American factions ever since the formation of parallel organizations in September 1919. Although the Central Caucus actively campaigned with the Comintern on behalf of its position, going so far as to dispatch John Ballam to Moscow, the Comintern ruled against those participating in the new split and ordered them back into the "regular" CPA.Draper, ''The Roots of American Communism,'' pg. 357. The Comintern ultimatum declared that "All members that do not comply with the nityinstructions within two months from the time they sent out by the CEC of the CP of A stand outside of the CP of A and therefore also out of the Comintern."Cited in Draper, ''The Roots of American Communism,'' pg. 357. A convention was called for August 1922 to formally reintegrate the Central Caucus faction dissidents into the "regular" CPA and well as to decide upon various programmatic initiatives, such as the proposed dissolution of the underground organization in favor of the much more successful WPA. The dates of August 17–23, 1922, were set for the gathering, which was to be held at the Wolfskeel resort at Bridgman, Michigan, site of a 1920 convention of the

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which had gone off in secret without complications.