External links
- The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-42 on-line exhibition: Student Rebels
- CUNY Digital History Archive: Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-42
The National Student League was a Communist led organization of college and high school students in the United States.
The organizations founding came about as a result of a case of censorship on the campus of the City College of New York in 1931. The Social Problems Club had begun publishing a new magazine, Frontiers, in March 1931 that contained an anti-ROTC editorial. College president Frederick C. Robinson had copies of the magazine confiscated and suspended the charter of the Social Problems Club. When Club members published a leaflet protesting this, he suspended them as well.
The students formed a broad alliance with left leaning groups in other New York colleges to form a protest and letter writing campaign in favor of the suspended students, who were eventually reinstated. They organized themselves permanently as the New York Intercollegiate Student Council, composed of eleven student groups on seven local campuses. Later that fall they reorganized as the New York Student League and finally as the National Student League over the 1931-1932 Christmas break. [1]
Unlike other "mass organizations" of the time, the initial impetus for the NSLs creation did not come from Communist Party or Young Communist League leadership, but began as a "grassroots" effort of Communist and Communist sympathizing students at CCNY and the other New York colleges. The YCL was focusing more on blue collar youth at the time and was hesitant about recruiting among "bourgeois" college youth. The YCL approved the group's creation, however, and provided some of the initial contacts to create an inter-campus organization. [2]
The NSL began making a name for itself by involvement in the TUUL-led Harlan County miners strike. Inspired by the example of Waldo Frank and Theodore Dreiser's writers' delegation, the group decided to send a student delegation to Harlan County to provide relief for the striking miners and to investigate conditions in the area. About eighty students departed New York for Kentucky by bus on March 23, 1932. The students were met by angry crowds and police harassment and were unable to aid the strike, though the trip generated a large amount of publicity for the strike and the NSL. [3]
That April the NSL became active in the campaign to defend Reed Harris, editor of the Columbia Spectator who had been expelled after writing a series of editorials on conditions in Columbia's dining halls. The NSL quickly came to Harris's defense, organizing protest meetings which drew hundreds of students and, on April 6, 1932, the first collegiate student strike of the decade. Despite opposition from the faculty, athletes and the local fraternities, enough pressure was kept on the Columbia administration to persuade it to re-instate Harris on April 20. [4] The NSL participated in a number of free speech fights, protests against student fee hikes and anti-war activity until its merger with the Student League for Industrial Democracy to form the American Student Union in December 1935.
One of its most dramatic activities was organizing the National Student Strike Against War on April 13, 1934 and 1935, commemorating American entry into the First World War. The first strike, coordinated with the SLID, drew 25,000 students nationwide, 15,000 of whom were in New York City. The second demonstration, however, in April 1935, drew 175,000 students, 160,000 of whom outside of New York, and was co-sponsored by the National Student Federation of America, the National Council of Methodist Youth, YMCA, YWCA, the Interseminary Movement, and the youth section of the American League Against War and Fascism, among others. [5]
An important aspect of the two annual strikes was an Americanized version of the Oxford Pledge, in which students pledged "We will not support the government of the United States in any war it may conduct." This became a point of tension in the period of negotiation on the merger with SLID, because the NSL, following the Comintern line after the Seventh World Congress in summer 1935, came out in favor of a Popular front against fascism and Collective security which seemed at odds with the isolationist and pacifist spirit of the pledge. [6]
With the NSL and the SLID working together so often, sentiment in favor of amalgamation began to form within both groups. The NSL took the first steps toward unity by inviting the SLID to the Student Congress Against War in Chicago in December 1932. Though organized on the basis of the Communist-led World Congress Against War that had been held that August in Amsterdam, the NSL succeeded in toning down the Third Period anti-socialist rhetoric, and succeeded in getting the SLID behind the Congress, as well as many pacifist organizations. [7] The NSL's conference later that month officially proposed a merger.
Despite being rebuffed, the NSL passed another pro-amalgamation resolution the next year. The SLID was initially suspicious of the NSL's proposals; SLID regarded itself as the more genuinely democratic group and was wary of the NSL's uncritical view of the USSR. Nevertheless after the success of the April 1935 peace strike and growing sentiment in favor of anti-fascist unity in the face of repression, the SLID merged with NSL and a group of unorganized liberal students to form the American Student Union in December 1935. [8]
Gus Hall was a leader and chairman of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate. As a labor leader, Hall was closely associated with the so-called "Little Steel" Strike of 1937, an effort to unionize the nation's smaller, regional steel manufacturers. During the Second Red Scare, Hall was indicted under the Smith Act and was sentenced to eight years in prison. After his release, Hall led the CPUSA for over 40 years, often taking an orthodox Marxist–Leninist stance.
The Young Communist League USA (YCLUSA) is a communist youth organization in the United States. The stated aim of the League was the development of its members into Communists, through studying Marxism–Leninism and through active participation in the struggles of the American working class. The YCL recognized the Communist Party USA as the party for socialism in the United States and operated as the Party's youth wing. Although the name of the group changed a number of times during its existence, its origins trace back to 1920, shortly after the establishment of the first communist parties in the United States.
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The Socialist Youth League was the youth group affiliated with the Workers Party, a splinter Trotskyist party led by Max Shachtman. The parent group changed its name to the Independent Socialist League in 1950. In February 1954, the Socialist Youth League merged with a faction of the Young People's Socialist League and changed its name to Young Socialist League. The YSL merged with a later incarnation of the YPSL in August 1958, around the same time that the ISL was merging into that group's parent body the Socialist Party – Social Democratic Federation.
The City College of the City University of New York is a public college of the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. It is the oldest of CUNY's 24 institutions of higher learning, and is considered its flagship college.
John Gollan was a leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
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Joseph P. Lash (1909–1987) was an American radical political activist, journalist, and author. A close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lash won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award in Biography for Eleanor and Franklin (1971), the first of two volumes he wrote about the former First Lady.
The American Student Union (ASU) was a national left-wing organization of college students of the 1930s, best remembered for its protest activities against militarism. Founded by a 1935 merger of Communist and Socialist student organizations, the ASU was affiliated with the American Youth Congress. The group was investigated by the Dies Committee of the United States House of Representatives in 1939 over its connections to the Communist Party USA. With the group's Communist-dominated leadership consistently supportive of the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy, the Socialist minority split from the group in 1939. The organization was terminated in 1941.
The Young People's Socialist League (YPSL), founded in 1907, was the official youth arm of the Socialist Party of America. Its political activities tend to concentrate on increasing the voter turnout of young democratic socialists and social democrats affecting the issues impacting that demographic group.
Challenge was a tabloid-sized monthly newspaper established in Chicago in April 1933 that served as the official organ of the Young People's Socialist League, the youth section of the Socialist Party of America. The publication was subsequently renamed The Challenge of Youth and continued in existence through 1946.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America was a national youth organization sponsored by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and launched at a national convention held in San Francisco in June 1964. The organization was active in the American student movement of the 1960s and maintained a prominent presence on a number of college campuses including Columbia University in New York City and the University of California in Berkeley. The organization was dissolved by decision of the CPUSA in February 1970 and succeeded by a new organization known as the Young Workers Liberation League.
The Intercollegiate League for Industrial Democracy was the official youth section of the League for Industrial Democracy and a de facto junior section of the Socialist Party of America during the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. The organization merged with a student organization sponsored by the Communist Party, USA in 1935 to form the American Student Union.
The Young Pioneers of America or Young Pioneers League of America was a children's organization affiliated with the Communist Party USA, under its various names, from 1922 to 1934. It began as the Junior Section of the Young Workers League of America, and was reorganized as the YPA in 1925, when the YWL became the Young Workers (Communist) League. The organization was disbanded in 1934, with its activities taken over by the Junior Section of the International Workers Order, a CPUSA mass organization.
The Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) of 1946 to 1959 was the second incarnation of the League for Industrial Democracy's student group. It changed its name to the Students for a Democratic Society on January 1, 1960, and severed its connection to the LID in 1965.
The Young Communist League (YCL) is the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1921 to 1988. Since 1991, the YCL has been the youth section of the Communist Party of Britain.
The League for Industrial Democracy (LID) was founded by as a successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1921. Members decided to change its name to reflect a more inclusive and more organizational perspective.
Frederick Bertrand Robinson served as the fifth president of the City College of New York between 1927 and 1939.
Morris U. Cohen was an American professor of chemistry, dismissed in 1941 from the City College of New York (CCNY) following investigations by the Rapp-Coudert Committee and alleged of Soviet espionage during 1953 hearings of the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS).
