H. M. Wicks
[4] When Wicks was replaced by a member of the local Foundry Workers' Union as President of the Council, he left the group, which expired after approximately 6 months of existence.
[4] Wicks was a delegate to Founding Convention of Communist Party of America and on the 9 member committee which wrote the CPA Program in 1919.
In 1920, Wicks rejoined his Michigan comrades when he became a member of the Proletarian Party of America, serving on the governing National Executive Committee of that organization.
[2] Wicks was the fraternal delegate of the PPA to the founding convention of the Workers Party of America in Dec. 1921, but he came as a foe rather than a friend, engaging in a bitter criticism of that organization.
[7] This publication was later recalled as home to "the most violent and vituperative polemics in America," provoking one Communist Party wag to refer to their rivals as the "United Toilets.
Along with most of his United Toilers comrades, Harry Wicks joined the Workers Party of America following the liquidation of the Central Caucus split in the summer of 1922.
[16] In the fall of 1929 Wicks returned to the United States briefly, running as a Communist for president of the New York City board of aldermen.
[17] In April 1930, Harry M. Wicks, using the pseudonym "Herbert Moore," his given and middle names, arrived in Sydney, Australia as a plenipotentiary representative of the Comintern.
[18] Wicks made use of the mechanism of self-criticism — ritual public confession of failings by "errant" individuals — as a means of instilling ideological uniformity and party discipline.
[20] In April 1931 the Australian Communist Party held its 10th Congress and completed the reorganization begun by Wicks in the previous year.
"[22] For his part Harry Wicks, who opened the Congress with a keynote speech lasting four hours, congratulated the loyal majority for conducting a discussion which "annihilated" the arguments of the dissidents.
In his 1940 memoir, former member of the Secretariat of the CPUSA Benjamin Gitlow asserted that "H.M. Wicks went on special missions to Germany and Central America.
[27] In 1937, Harry Wicks was expelled from the Communist Party on the basis of charges made by the Chicago Federation of Labor that he was a spy.
[29] Historian Theodore Draper later claimed, on the basis of a review of Wicks' private papers, that there was actually no convincing evidence of the veracity of these charges — which may well have been influenced by the spy-mania of the Great Purges then sweeping the Soviet Union.
He spoke periodically under the auspices of the Independent Labor League of America, the final incarnation of the Communist oppositional movement headed by Jay Lovestone, teaching a fortnightly "study class" on the subject of "Present Day Capitalism" in early 1939.
[30] Shortly after his death a book by Wicks was published on the history of the Russian Revolution and world communist movement, arguing it had been "completely negated into an instrument for the degradation and enslavement of those who toil.
