Alexander Leo Trachtenberg, later known to his friends as "Alex" or "Trachty," was born on November 23, 1885,[2] of Jewish parents in the city of Odessa, part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire.

[3] Soon after his return home in the late summer of 1905, Trachtenberg was arrested and imprisoned by the government for a year, during a period of political dissidents suppression.

He joined the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League at Columbia University in 1915, served as treasurer, and contributed to an anti-war petition to President Wilson after the sinking of the Lusitania.

[3] Trachtenberg left Yale in 1915 to work as an administrator and teacher of Economics and Labor at the Rand School of Social Science, founded by the Socialist Party in New York.

Trachtenberg embraced the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, but did not leave the Socialist Party in the summer of 1919 when the Communist movement in America was started.

Instead, he remained with the SPA together with journalist J. Louis Engdahl and youth leader William F. Kruse, attempting to align the organization with the Communist International.

[8] In 1921, Trachtenberg, Kruse, and Engdahl helped form the Committee for the Third International inside the Socialist Party, later splitting as an independent organization known as the Workers' Council.

[10] Trachtenberg was chosen as a delegate of the Workers Party of America to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow in the fall of 1922.

During the bitter inner-party conflict of the 1920s, Trachtenberg was a supporter of the New York-based faction headed by John Pepper, C. E. Ruthenberg, and Jay Lovestone.

[10] At the 6th National Convention of March 1929, when Benjamin Gitlow became executive secretary, Trachtenberg was elected as an alternate member of the committee.

[11] When Whittaker Chambers gave Adolf Berle his account of Soviet espionage in the Roosevelt Administration, he identified Trachtenberg as "member of the Exec.

Committee [CPUSA], Head of GPU in U.S., Works with Peters"[12] Trachtenberg led the Party's cultural efforts, particularly publication and distribution of materials.

In his memoirs, Whittaker Chambers summarized the activist's career by 1952 as follows: Alexander Trachtenberg who, as head of International Publishers, was the party's "cultural commissar" and had the New Masses and the John Reed Clubs under his wing, and, as an old Bolshevik (he was said to be a former Tsarist cavalry officer and a doctor of philosophy from Yale), was a member of the Central Control Commission.

[3] The Soviet Union clarified the responsibilities of writers in the communist movement at the Second World Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature held in Kharkov on November 6–15, 1930.

[3] Trachtenberg led the first meeting of the newly formed American Artists' Congress in the art studio of Eitaro Ishigaki on May 18, 1935.

[13] This group, replacing the John Reed Club and its many chapters nationwide, operated within the Popular Front but was organized by the CPUSA.

The Party also organized the League of American Writers, whose members include Nelson Algren, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Burke, and Erskine Caldwell.

[3] On May 1, 1935, Trachtenberg joined the League of American Writers (1935-1943), whose members included Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I.F.

)[14] With the social upheaval and economic distress of millions during the Depression, many people were searching for solutions in alternatives to American capitalism.

[15] The first offering of the Book Union was an anthology entitled Proletarian Literature in the United States, a thick volume of nearly 400 pages edited by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, Joseph North, and others.

According to a 1948 issue of Counterattack (newsletter), Trachtenberg helped Jacob Golos (who later recruited and ran Elizabeth Bentley) establish World Tourists, a Communist Party front.

[3] In addition to discussing the economics of International Publishers, Trachtenberg also told Congress that throughout the decade of the 1930s he had been the Treasurer of World Tourists, Inc.

His successor, James S. Allen, continued to reprint classics (e.g., three volumes of Lenin's Selected Works in 1967 in a "New World Paperbacks" series).

It ceased to publish books by leaders who had fallen out of favor, such as Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.