Communist Party of the U.S.A. Collection

A collection of approximately 3,700 titles incorporating materials not only from the Communist Party of the U.S.A. but also from a number of Trotskyist groups including the American workers party, the Communist League of America, the Revolutionary Workers League and the various youth branches and front organizations of the Left for the years between 1919 and the fifties. There are anti-communist materials from governmental agencies and commercial publishers as well. Included are several hundred books, significant holdings on internal party affairs (discussion papers on theoretical issues, policy questions and intraparty disputes, minutes of meeting, etc.) and over 3,000 pamphlets covering politics, labor, women and minorities, the economy, foreign policy and other issues. In addition, there are groupings of curricular material from the Jefferson School, the Workers School, and the Lenin School in Moscow.

Featured among the serials are the Call Magazine (1917-18), issued on the eve of the formation of CPUSA; Class Struggle (1917-19), a rare theoretical Marxist periodical; Coastwise Unity (1935-46), issued by the Communist Party dock unit, International Press Correspondence (1929-38), one of the most important single sources for the study of the communist international; and the Hearst Worker, 1936, published by the "Communist Party Nucleus in the Hearst plant."

Special Collections Division

Michigan State University