[4] In later years the elder Ruthenberg went into business for himself with a son-in-law, tending bar at a saloon frequented evenings by those who worked on the docks.

[7] During this time period he also worked as the bookkeeper and sales manager for the Selmar Hess Publishing Company, overseeing more than 30 salesmen throughout the Middle West.

He was associated with the far left so-called "Impossibilist" wing of the SPA, which had little hope for the efficacy of ameliorative reform, seeking instead revolutionary socialist transformation.

There he was elected to the Committee on War and Militarism and was one of three primary authors of the aggressively antimilitarist St. Louis program, along with Morris Hillquit and Algernon Lee.

That fact should make a hundred willing workers take up the work we lay down....[15] Ruthenberg, Wagenknecht, and Baker served almost 11 months of their sentence and were released on December 8, 1918.

Freed from prison in December 1918, Ruthenberg dove in with both feet to the burgeoning left wing movement rocking the Socialist Party.

A gigantic assembly was planned in Cleveland, in which four parades of marchers, many waving red flags, came together in the public square to hear speeches and rally for freedom for Eugene V. Debs and Tom Mooney and the adoption of the 6-hour day and the $1 minimum wage.

The lieutenant and his supporters were driven back to the sidewalk, the head of the line reformed, and with the red flag still flying, marched on to the Public Square.

Ruthenberg was a delegate to the June 1919 Convention of the Left Wing Section and was elected there as a member of the faction's governing National Council.

Nor did Ruthenberg owe any allegiance to the idiosyncratic Socialist Party of Michigan, led by John Keracher and Dennis Batt.

Therefore, the ambitious Ruthenberg made an ideal candidate to head the new organization, which was established in Chicago on September 1, 1919, as the Communist Party of America (CPA).

In outline terms, a fight erupted among the leadership of the CPA in 1920 and Ruthenberg, together with a group of his English-speaking adherents such as Isaac Ferguson and Jay Lovestone as well as the Chicago-based section of the Russian federation, exited the organization (along with a major part of the group's funds) in April 1920 and joined with the Communist Labor Party to form the United Communist Party (UCP) in May.

This still left a divided Communist movement, however, with the major part of the old CPA, now headed by Charles Dirba still remaining in increasingly bitter opposition.

Ruthenberg was immediately made Executive Secretary of the WPA upon his release on bail, with Abram Jakira in charge of daily operations of the parallel and underground CPA.

The above-ground WPA headed by Ruthenberg grew rapidly, boosted by the addition of the massive Finnish Federation to its ranks, while the underground party withered and died, put to bed for good in 1923.

A secret conclave had been arranged at the Wolfskeel Resort on the wooded shore of Lake Michigan to finally unite the CPA with a parallel organization maintained by its dissident Central Caucus faction.

Ruthenberg ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 20th congressional district (now abolished) as the candidate of the Workers Party of America, as the CPUSA's legal organization was then known, on his return to the United States.

The factional infighting within the CPUSA did not end, however; the communist leadership of the New York locals of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union lost the 1926 strike of cloakmakers in New York City in large part because of intra-party factional rivalries, as neither group wanted to take the responsibility for accepting a strike settlement that appeared insufficiently revolutionary [according to whom?].

His early journalism is scattered, he wrote relatively few pamphlets, and he published no books in his lifetime, save for a slim volume gathering his 1920 New York trial testimony with that of Isaac Ferguson, who also served as attorney in his case.

Nor has the CPUSA, despite Ruthenberg's iconic status in party history, published any significant portion of his work in subsequent years.