Communist Party USA in the context of "Alger Hiss"

COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) 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 parties and 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 (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party), Student organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 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 (including Puerto Rican independence groups, such as the Young Lords and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party). 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.

The American Left refers to the groups or ideas on the left of the political spectrum in the United States. It is occasionally used as a shorthand for groups aligned with the Democratic Party. At other times, it refers to groups that have sought egalitarian changes in the economic, political, and cultural institutions of the United States. Various subgroups with a national scope are active. Liberals and progressives believe that equality can be accommodated into existing capitalist structures, but they differ in their criticism of capitalism and on the extent of reform and the welfare state. Anarchists, communists, and socialists with international imperatives are also present within this macro-movement. Many communes and egalitarian communities have existed in the United States as a sub-category of the broader intentional community movement, some of which were based on utopian socialist ideals. The left has been involved in both the Democratic and Republican parties at different times, having originated in the Democratic-Republican Party as opposed to the Federalist Party.

Although left-wing politics came to the United States in the 19th century, there are currently no major left-wing political parties in the country. Despite existing left-wing factions within the Democratic Party, as well as minor third parties such as the Green Party, Communist Party USA, Party for Socialism and Liberation, American Communist Party, Workers World Party, Socialist Party, and American Solidarity Party (a Christian democratic party leaning left on economics), there have been few representatives of left-leaning third parties in Congress. Academic scholars have long studied the reasons why no viable socialist parties have emerged in the United States. Some writers ascribe this to the failures of socialist organization and leadership, some to the incompatibility of socialism with American values, and others to the limitations imposed by the United States Constitution. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were particularly concerned because it challenged orthodox Marxist beliefs that the most advanced industrial country would provide a model for the future of less developed nations. If socialism represented the future, then it should be strongest in the United States. While branches of the Working Men's Party were founded in the 1820s and 1830s in the United States, they advocated land reform, universal education and improved working conditions in the form of labor rights, not collective ownership, disappearing after their goals were taken up by Jacksonian democracy. Samuel Gompers, the leader of the American Federation of Labor, thought that workers must rely on themselves because any rights provided by government could be revoked.

A fellow traveller (also fellow traveler) is a person who is intellectually sympathetic to the ideology of a political organization, and who co-operates in the organization's politics, without being a formal member. In the early history of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik ('one who travels the same path'); it was later popularized by Leon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government. It was the political characterisation of the Russian intelligentsiya (writers, academics, and artists) who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but who did not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The usage of the term poputchik disappeared from political discourse in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, but the Western world adopted the English term fellow traveller to identify people who sympathised with the Soviets and with communism.

In U.S. politics, during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the term fellow traveler was primarily a pejorative applied to those on the political left, to suggest a person who was philosophically sympathetic to communism, yet was not a formal, "card-carrying member" of the Communist Party USA. In political discourse, the term fellow traveler was applied to intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and prestige to Communist front organizations.In European politics, the equivalent terms for fellow traveller are: Compagnon de route and sympathisant in France; Weggenosse, Sympathisant (neutral) or Mitläufer (negative connotation) in Germany; and compagno di strada in Italy.

The Socialist Party of America (SPA) was a socialist political party in the United States formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America who had split from the main organization in 1899.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the SPA drew significant support from many different groups, including trade unionists, progressive social reformers, populist farmers and immigrants. Eugene V. Debs twice won over 900,000 votes in presidential elections (1912 and 1920), while the party also elected two U.S. representatives (Victor L. Berger and Meyer London), dozens of state legislators, more than 100 mayors, and countless lesser officials. The party's staunch opposition to American involvement in World War I, although welcomed by many, also led to prominent defections, official repression, and vigilante persecution. The party was further shattered by a factional war over how to respond to the October Revolution in the Russian Republic in 1917 and the establishment of the Communist International in 1919—many members left the Socialist Party to found Leninist parties including the Communist Party USA.

In United States law, the bad tendency principle was a test that permitted restriction of freedom of speech by government if it was believed that a form of speech had a sole tendency to incite or cause illegal activity. The principle, formulated in Patterson v. Colorado (1907), was seemingly overturned with the "clear and present danger" principle used in the landmark case Schenck v. United States (1919), as stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Yet eight months later, at the start of the next term in Abrams v. United States (1919), the Court again used the bad tendency test to uphold the conviction of a Russian immigrant who published and distributed leaflets calling for a general strike and otherwise advocated revolutionary, anarchist, and socialist views. Holmes dissented in Abrams, explaining how the clear and present danger test should be employed to overturn Abrams' conviction. The re-emergence of the bad tendency test resulted in a string of cases, after Abrams, employing that test, including Whitney v. California (1927), where a woman was convicted simply because of her association with the Communist Party. The court ruled unanimously that although she had not committed any crimes, her relationship with the Communists represented a "bad tendency" and thus was unprotected. The "bad tendency" test was finally overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and was replaced by the "imminent lawless action" test.