Jack Stachel

Jacob Stachel, known to all his contemporaries by his nickname "Jack," was born of ethnic Jewish parents on January 18, 1900 in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[1] His father, Moses/Moishe, emigrated to America in August 1910 and young Jacob arrived with his mother, Rose, and three siblings, Lena, Clara, and Max, in January 1911, landing in New York City and making a home there.

"[8] Stachel was elected to the 37 member Central Executive Committee of the Workers (Communist) Party of America in 1926, retaining a seat on that body until 1940 amidst the factional tides.

[5] Historians Irving Howe and Lewis Coser have characterized Stachel in this period as the "chief assistant in Lovestone's less savory projects" and charge that he "planned and led a raid upon the private apartments of the Trotskyist leaders, rifled their files, and stole whatever was likely to burn well in the factional fires.

"[11] The primary source of this information, former factional associate Benjamin Gitlow, notes that the burglary of James P. Cannon's residence was conducted by Stachel and a party comrade named Ravitch, business manager of the Daily Worker.

[18] Stachel was actively sought by the federal government in the fall of 1939, in hopes that he might be compelled to testify against party leader Earl Browder who faced charges of passport fraud.

[16] Alerted to the government's desire to take him into custody, Stachel went underground, disappearing from the radar of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from October 1939 until February 1942,[16] by which time America had entered the war and the political climate faced by the Communist Party had changed.

After his reappearance, Stachel was made Associate Editor of the Communist Party's English-language newspaper, the Daily Worker — a post in which he remained until October 1945.

[16] Following his departure from the Daily Worker, Stachel was appointed Chairman of the CPUSA's "Education, Agitation and Publications Department" (AgitProp), which job he formally held through 1950.

Stachel was arrested on June 1, 1948 on a deportation warrant obtained by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, which charged him with illegal entry into the United States as well as membership in an organization which advocated the overthrow of the US government through "force and violence.

[5] On July 20, 1948, "stocky Jack Stachel" was one of 12 "kingpin Commies" (to borrow colorful contemporary terminology from Time magazine) indicted under the Smith Act for being "dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the Government...by force and violence.

"[19] Although the Smith Act had been implemented eight years earlier for the altogether different purpose of fighting potential infiltration of America by secret Nazi saboteurs, in the fearful atmosphere of the Second Red Scare the existing law was used as a tool against national officials of the Communist Party.

[22] During the Communist Party's period of internal discord following the so-called Secret Speech of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Stachel cast his lot with the CPUSA's pro-Moscow loyalists, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall.

Following his death, Jack Stachel's life work was effusively extolled by CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall in a five-page memorial in the party's monthly magazine, Political Affairs.