J. Louis Engdahl

One of the leading journalists of the Socialist Party of America, Engdahl joined the Communist movement in 1921 and continued to employ his talents in that organization as the first editor of The Daily Worker.

Engdahl was also a key leader of the International Red Aid (MOPR) organization based in Moscow, where he died in 1932.

Engdahl was intelligent and well educated, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1907, having paid his way through school by working as a telegraph operator and as City Editor of the Minneapolis Daily News.

In February 1918, Engdahl's aggressive antimilitarism caused him to run afoul of the US Department of Justice, who targeted him as editor of the Socialist Party's weekly newspaper under the Espionage Act for undermining the American military conscription program.

Along with his party comrades Adolph Germer, Victor L. Berger, Bill Kruse, and Irwin St. John Tucker, Engdahl was indicted by a grand jury.

The jury found all five guilty as charged, and Judge Landis imposed a draconian sentence of 20 years in the Federal Penitentiary upon each.

Instead, Engdahl remained in the Socialist Party as a leader of the Left Wing faction, which congealed as the Committee for the Third International in 1920.

From 1920 until July 1921, Engdahl served as editor of the Chicago Socialist, publication of Local Cook County of the SPA, until he was finally removed for political reasons.

After the disappointment of the 1921 Convention of the SPA, the Committee for the Third International left the party to mark the world with a short-lived existence as part of the Workers Council group — a small group of Communist adherents who sought to turn their backs on the sectarian infighting of the underground Communist parties.

In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers described him thus: The paper's nominal editor was J. Louis Engdahl, a Communist in his late forties or fifties, who seldom paid any attention to what was going on, for, at the time, he was a prey to both political and emotional stresses of great intensity.

When you had about decided that he had forgotten you, he would turn around and fix you with his big round lenses that magnified his eyes to a slightly mad expression.

[5] Engdahl remained in Moscow as the representative of the American Communist Party to ECCI until late in December 1928, when he was replaced by Bertram D.

He was buried on November 23 following a service attended by many prominent communists including future East German president Wilhelm Pieck.