have attributed the left's failure to its own successes in building strong unions, but at the cost of downplaying its own political and social agendas for the sake of unity or short-term gains.
At the time of its founding, according to a leader of the party, "it would have been difficult to gather a half dozen delegates who knew anything about the trade union movement."
The Profintern, or "Red International of Labor Unions," forced the CP to change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL in order to make it a revolutionary body – what an earlier generation of SP members referred to as "boring from within."
He had led the AFL's failed 1919 strike in the steel industry and had established particularly close relations then with John Fitzpatrick, the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor.
TUEL strove to create alliances with leaders who shared some of its agenda, while trying to build a base for left unionism at the local level.
The CPUSA lost more allies when, under orders from the Comintern, it withdrew its previous enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party candidacy of Robert La Follette, Sr. for president in 1924.
That gave the International union the opportunity it needed: the Socialist leadership of the ILGWU took over the exhausted locals after they settled and their supporters were too dispirited to resist.
While the CP retained a strong base of support in the smaller Fur Workers Union, it never recovered from its defeat in the much larger garment industry; on the contrary, the ILGWU, led by David Dubinsky for the next forty years, remained resolutely anti-communist thereafter.
The TUEL led a strike of woolen industry workers in Passaic, New Jersey in 1926 — until, that is, the Comintern instructed the Party later that year to abandon any independent unions it had formed on the ground that these represented ultra-left adventurism.
While local authorities, preachers and newspapers played up the National Textile Workers' association with godless communism and its opposition to white supremacy, it is unlikely that this made much difference in the final analysis.
The authorities reacted just as violently when the much less radical AFL intervened after a spontaneous strike of textile workers erupted in other mill towns several months later.
The CP had once had a good deal of support in the internecine struggles within the United Mine Workers in the 1920s, when John L. Lewis used every weapon available to defeat his rivals for union leadership while wages and working conditions in the industry grew worse.
The CP later allied itself, for a time, with John Brophy, whose "Save the Union" slate probably would have won election to national leadership in 1926 if the vote had been held democratically.
The NMU also took on the leadership of a strike that the UMW had called in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931 with even more disastrous results, since the union was not prepared to provide the relief necessary to permit strikers to remain out for any length of time, particularly in the face of attacks by "gun thugs."
The NMU's strong opposition to racial discrimination and wholehearted support for the Soviet Union also served to alienate it from the mostly fundamentalist and predominantly white miners in Harlan County.
Sailors and longshoremen had a tradition of radical politics and more or less spontaneous job actions; the IWW had been particularly active in both east and west coast ports up through the 1920s.
These programs attracted a number of sailors and longshoremen, including Harry Bridges, who subsequently led the west coast longshore strike of 1934.
The government panels created under the NRA generally gave in to employer demands and appeared to be more concerned with preventing strikes than with protecting workers' rights or living standards.
The largest and most significant were three giant strikes for union recognition among longshoremen on the West Coast, truck drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota and automobile workers in Toledo, Ohio.
The CP's influence depended, however, on the personal charisma of Harry Bridges and the hard work put in by its members and sympathizers on the docks, rather than on the MWIU itself, which largely disappeared when its radical cadres followed the membership into the newly revived west coast locals of the ILA.
The CP similarly gained influence at first in the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, on the strength of individual members' work.
Lee Pressman, the General Counsel for the CIO and later the United Steelworkers of America, was a member of the CP and the underground Ware group involved in espionage for the Soviet Union.
In the rubber workers' strike in Akron, Ohio that represented the first test of the CIO's ability to turn mass discontent into union gains, a number of rank-and-file leaders were also CP members.
One of the most prominent UAW activists in the early years of the union was Wyndham Mortimer, who had led a strike against White Motors in Cleveland, Ohio.
The CP was anxious not to scare off its partners and employers in the CIO: its members therefore made no effort to advertise their Party affiliation and even took steps not to pack SWOC conventions.
Unlike the UAW, which was born out of tumultuous struggles in which CP activists and other radicals played leading parts, the SWOC conducted a much more top-down organizing campaign subject to close control.