The Wagenknecht family was politically radical from Alfred's early years, with his father making a cash donation to the colonization fund established by the fledgling Social Democracy of America in November 1897.

[2] Wagenknecht was drawn to radical politics at an early age, elected Organizer of the Pike Street Branch of Local Seattle, Socialist Party of America in 1903.

[4] Wagenknecht was a delegate of the SPW to the 1908 National Convention of the Socialist Party, where he fought a bitter battle with a representative of a moderate faction of the old Local Seattle organization which had been deprived of its charter by the State Committee for "political fusionism" late in 1906.

The pair argued their cases on the floor of the convention for 20 minutes each, with the body ultimately deciding not to intervene against the left wing State Committee.

Wagenknecht and the Left Wing attempted to establish themselves as a parallel National Executive Committee despite the outgoing NEC's refusal to officially tabulate the vote, and the "new NEC" met one time in Chicago in August in an attempt to assert authority over the party apparatus, with Wagenknecht declaring himself "Executive Secretary Pro Tem."

The CLP was devastated by the raids of the US Department of Justice headed by A. Mitchell Palmer and his Special Assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, coordinated actions which began in the fall of 1919 and reached their zenith with a mass operation conducted during the evening of Jan. 1/2, 1919.

The CLP was driven underground, local organizations broken up into secret "groups" of no more than 10 members who met furtively, using pseudonyms and attempting to avoid detection by the authorities.

In April 1920, Wagenknecht's former prisonmate turned Executive Secretary rival C. E. Ruthenberg left the Communist Party of America (CPA) along with a number of co-thinkers and a big portion of the organization's cash.

This Ruthenberg-CPA and Wagenknecht's CLP finally determined to achieve the organizational unity demanded by the Communist International at a secret convention held at Bridgman, Michigan, at the end of May 1920.

In 1922, a legal "mass organization" called the Friends of Soviet Russia was established by the unified CPA, and Wagenknecht was named by the CEC of the party to head it.

Wagenknecht was touted for the role of business manager of the Daily Worker in the last years of the 1920s as the "most competent comrade for the position" by the minority faction headed by William Z.

[7] He was bypassed for the responsible position by a rapid succession of three others, however, who were selected for the post based upon their loyalty to the majority faction headed by Executive Secretary Jay Lovestone.

[8] Wagenknecht was the executive secretary of the American section of the Comintern aid organization Workers International Relief in 1929 — a job which in June took him to Gastonia, North Carolina, to the scene of the acrimonious Loray Mill Strike.

[10] The group conducted a massive petitioning campaign which rapidly gathered what were claimed to be 1.4 million signatures, which Wagenknecht and a delegation of 140 presented to Congress on February 10, 1931.