Morris Iserman
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Morris Iserman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, there were very few elected communists, if you mean elected to public office.
In the 1940s, there were two communist members of the New York City Council.
But that was about it in terms of open communists being elected to office.
Their influence was seen more behind the scenes in the labor movement, in organizing the big new industrial unions.
of the 1930s and organizing so-called front groups, anti-fascist groups, anti-racist groups, and so forth.
And the party was never huge.
At its height, at the end of the 30s, it had perhaps 75,000 members in a country then with a population of 130 million.
Now, its influence extended beyond its own membership, but it was still very much a minor party.
Growing, but minor.
Well, it failed for two reasons.
One reason was that it was repressed by the government pretty much throughout its existence in the first Red Scare immediately after the First World War.
And then again in the second Red Scare, which we commonly refer to as the McCarthy era in the late 40s and through the 1950s.
We've got to dig and root out the communists and the crooks, and those who are bad for America.
Communists were sent to jail for advocacy, for simply saying that they favored communism.
But it also failed because of its rather slavish obedience to the dictates of Soviet leaders.
When the Soviet foreign policy changed from anti-fascism, anti-Hitlerism in the mid to late 30s to kind of de facto alliance with Hitler from 1939 to 1941,
The American Communist Party obediently followed that line.
Then again, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and the Soviet Union swung back to anti-fascism.
Well, they made that turn, too.
But all of those turns gave the communists a reputation as an organization that did not really exist to serve American interests, but rather to serve Soviet interests.
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