San Francisco Reds documents the involvement of California Communists in these fights. Some of the state’s leading reds, like William Schneiderman, who headed the state party for two decades, were themselves national players. Cherny describes in detail how national factional disagreements were replicated in deep local divisions, sometimes paralyzing political work. He presents the disagreements as largely personality-driven, often using political theory or policy as a pretext for personal feuds. Those he accuses of keeping those fights going, such as Harrison George, don’t come off well.
One hero of Cherny’s account is Sam Darcy, described as a talented organizer willing to put practical needs ahead of unworkable directives. Darcy helped organize the largest farmworker strike in US history: the 1933 cotton strike by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU), one of the industrial unions the party started as left-wing alternatives to the conservative ones of that era. Growers shot down strikers, and violence in the San Joaquin Valley reached terrifying levels, but workers won pay increases, although not union recognition. The Communist Party grew because it played a big role not just in planning and strategy but also in providing food for thousands of striking families to eat, building tent cities, and freeing people from the clutches of racist sheriffs and courts.
The next year Darcy was in San Francisco, where he mobilized party members to support longshoreworkers as they fought one of the critical battles that built the CIO. The entire city struck for three days when police fired on strikers in their effort to herd strikebreakers onto the piers to unload the paralyzed ships.
Cherny presents Darcy as the reality-based organizer locked in conflict with doctrinaire functionaries, such as Harrison George, whose long critical diatribes to party headquarters in New York are quoted in the book. Yet Darcy was a functionary too, and both before and after the two strikes spent time in Moscow at the Comintern offices trying to create an international structure for Communist activity.
Two of Cherny’s other heroes are Louise Todd and Oleta O’Connor Yates. Both San Franciscans are largely forgotten now, but their names were familiar to thousands of city residents for two decades. They were Communists who repeatedly ran for supervisor and other public offices. Much of Cherny’s analysis of party activity in the city is based on these campaigns — how many votes they got and, by implication, the size of the party’s popular base in San Francisco.