Aaron J. Leonard is an American author with a particular focus on the history of radicalism and state suppression.
Aaron J. Leonard is an American author with a particular focus on the history of radicalism and state suppression.
Leonard was born in Herkimer, New York. Leonard became radicalized as a teenager, joining the Revolutionary Communist Party and writing for its newspaper for many years. [1]
He has a BA in Social Sciences and History. He graduated, magna cum laude, from New York University in 2012. He lives in Los Angeles.
He is the author of Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists (Zer0 Books 2015, ISBN 978-1-78279-534-6) [2] and A Threat of the First Magnitude—FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration: From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union.(Repeater Books, 2018, ISBN 9781910924709).
In 2020 he published The Folk Singers and the Bureau (Repeater Books). Joe Pagetta, writing in America magazine said, "Aaron J. Leonard’s new book, The Folk Singers and the Bureau, draws from almost 10,000 pages of F.B.I. files on an array of folk artists. It aims to illustrate the considerable impact that the U.S. government’s campaign against Communism had on folk artists in the 1940s and early ’50s." [3] Daniel Rosenberg, in American Communist History wrote: "Aaron J. Leonard has contributed a solid piece of research to the history of FBI repression of the Communist Party USA by tracing the surveillance, investigation, and harassment of folk singers, many of whom belonged or were sympathetic to the Party." [4]
In February 2023, his book Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion & Repression - 1955-1972 was published.(Repeater Books, 2023, ISBN 9781914420924). It focuses on folk and pop musicians that were subjects of FBI surveillance and monitoring since the 1950s. Such artists included Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk due to their affiliations with organized groups or specific political activism such as making anti-war statements and contributing to "civil unrest". [5]
In May 2024 he published Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder & Upheaval at the end of the 1970s (Rutgers Univ. Press), the story of the power shifts from late 1978 through 1979 leading to the final phase of the Cold War. He is currently working on a history of the repression directed at the Communist Party USA—to also be published by Rutgers Univ. Press—from its founding in 1919 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Leonard is also a contributor to the news site Truthout and Jacobin online.
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. Groups and individuals targeted by the FBI included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements, environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Chicano and Mexican-American groups like the Brown Berets and the United Farm Workers, and independence movements. Although the program primarily focused on organizations that were part of the broader New Left, they also targeted white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter and composer who was one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He inspired several generations both politically and musically with songs such as "This Land Is Your Land".
Ronald Radosh is an American social conservative writer, professor, historian, and former Marxist. As he described in his memoirs, Radosh was, like his Ashkenazi Jewish parents, a member of the Communist Party USA until the exposure of the truth about Stalinism began during the Khrushchev Thaw. He later became an activist in the New Left against the Vietnam War.
Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH) was a U.S. Marxist-Leninist organization that formed out of a split from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1977. After Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, died in 1976, the majority of the RCP's leadership criticized the post-Mao Chinese leadership as "revisionist" and "capitalist-roaders", saying that China was no longer a socialist country.
Venceremos was an American far-left and primarily Chicano political group active in the Palo Alto, California area from 1969 to 1973.
Political repression is the act of a state entity controlling a citizenry by force for political reasons, particularly for the purpose of restricting or preventing the citizenry's ability to take part in the political life of a society, thereby reducing their standing among their fellow citizens. Repression tactics target the citizenry who are most likely to challenge the political ideology of the state in order for the government to remain in control. In autocracies, the use of political repression is to prevent anti-regime support and mobilization. It is often manifested through policies such as human rights violations, surveillance abuse, police brutality, imprisonment, involuntary settlement, stripping of citizen's rights, lustration, and violent action or terror such as murder, summary executions, torture, forced disappearance, and other extrajudicial punishment of political activists, dissidents, or the general population. Direct repression tactics are those targeting specific actors who become aware of the harm done to them while covert tactics rely on the threat of citizenry being caught. The effectiveness of the tactics differs: covert repression tactics cause dissidents to use less detectable opposition tactics while direct repression allows the citizenry to witness and react to the repression. Political repression can also be reinforced by means outside of written policy, such as by public and private media ownership and by self-censorship within the public.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
Stanley David Levison was an American businessman and lawyer who became a lifelong activist in socialist causes. He is best known as an advisor to and close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., for whom he helped write speeches, raise funds, and organize events.
The Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, popularly known as the Lusk Committee, was formed in 1919 by the New York State Legislature to investigate individuals and organizations in New York State suspected of sedition.
New Masses (1926–1948) was an American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It was the successor to both The Masses (1911–1917) and The Liberator (1918–1924). New Masses was later merged into Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963).
Morris H. Childs was a Ukrainian-American political activist and American Communist Party functionary who became a Soviet espionage agent (1929) and then a double agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1952) until leaving both services by 1982. Beginning in 1958, Childs acted as a secret courier on behalf of the American party, briefing Soviet officials on political affairs in the American party and carrying funds to support the American Communist movement from Moscow to New York City, reporting details all the while to his FBI handlers. Over the course of two decades of activity in this role, Childs played a major part in the transfer of more than $28 million in Soviet subsidies to the American movement. For his activity as a courier on behalf of the Soviet government, Childs was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1975. His work as a spy for the American intelligence community was recognized in 1987 when Childs was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.
Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance, as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is an expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.
Susan Lisa Rosenberg is an American activist, writer, advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. From the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, Rosenberg was active in the far-left terrorist May 19th Communist Organization ("M19CO") which, according to a contemporaneous FBI report, "openly advocate[d] the overthrow of the U.S. Government through armed struggle and the use of violence". M19CO provided support to an offshoot of the Black Liberation Army, including in armored truck robberies, and later engaged in bombings of government buildings, including the 1983 Capitol bombing.
The following is a bibliography on American Communism, listing some of the most important works on the topic.
Alexander "Alex" Trachtenberg was an American publisher of radical political books and pamphlets, founder and manager of International Publishers of New York. He was a longtime activist in the Socialist Party of America and later in the Communist Party USA. For more than eight decades, his International Publishers was a part of the publishing arm of the American communist movement. He served as a member of the CPUSA's Central Control Committee. During the period of McCarthyism in America, Trachtenberg was twice subject to prosecution and convicted under the Smith Act; the convictions were overturned, the first by recanting of a government witness and the second by a US Circuit Court of Appeals decision in 1958.
The FBI Indexes, or Index List, was a system used to track American citizens and other people by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before the adoption of computerized databases. The Index List was originally made of paper index cards, first compiled by J. Edgar Hoover at the Bureau of Investigations before he was appointed director of the FBI. The Index List was used to track U.S. citizens and others believed by the FBI to be dangerous to national security, and was subdivided into various divisions which generally were rated based on different classes of danger the subject was thought to represent.
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA is a new communist party in the United States founded in 1975 and led by its chairman, Bob Avakian. The party organizes for a revolution to overthrow the system of capitalism and replace it with a socialist state, with the final aim of world communism. The RCP is frequently described as a cult around Avakian.
The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956 is a book written by Aaron Leonard.
Ernie Lazar was an American researcher and a prolific Freedom of Information Act petitioner who amassed a "vast digital and documentary archive of government records on political extremists," used by many scholars, who regarded him as a "hero of researchers."
Leibel Bergman (1915-1988) was an American Communist activist. A member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was later involved in the founding of the Maoist Bay Area Revolutionary Union and its successor organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party. Bergman represented a link between the prewar CPUSA and the New Communist movement of the 1970s. Between 1965 and 1967 he lived in China, where he met and married fellow activist Vicki Garvin. Bergman was a target of FBI surveillance for decades.
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