Ludwig Erwin Alfred "Dutch" Katterfeld (15 July 1881 – 11 December 1974) was an American socialist politician, a founding member of the Communist Labor Party of America, a Comintern functionary, and a magazine editor.
Katterfeld (he seems to have generally used his initials in daily life) was born on July 15, 1881, in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire.
was sent away alone to live in the United States with a "godfather" in Nebraska at the end of 1892, arriving in New York on January 17, 1893, aboard the steamer Friesland.
Katterfeld was attracted to radical politics from an early age, joining the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1905 as a college student.
On June 18, 1914, in accordance with the wishes of the National Executive Committee of the SPA, a "Unity Conference" joining the bitter factions of the Washington state party was held.
At the convention, Katterfeld was a strong supporter of the party's vigorously antimilitarist St. Louis resolution against American participation in World War I.
Back in the United States, Katterfeld was elected by the ill-fated 1922 Bridgman Convention of the CPA once again to the governing National Executive Committee of the party.
[6] He made his way to Soviet Russia once again, where he served as CI Rep until the first week of December, when he turned over his job to Otto Huiswoud and returned to the United States, due to the needs of his 1920 legal difficulties.
While he was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party of America by the 3rd Convention of that organization at the end of 1923, Katterfeld was at the time in prison at Joliet, Illinois, in connection with his 1920 conviction.
Whittaker Chambers described in his memoirs at some length: Katterfeld looked like the type of Communist I had hoped to find on my first visit to the English-speaking branch.
His frayed overcoat was the uniform of his faith, and, like everything else about him, it was of a piece with a revolutionary integrity that shone from him more purely than from almost any other American Communist I knew.
He could not face the fact that Lenin had tirelessly taught that, when a whole Communist party is outlawed, it is almost wholly paralyzed because it can no longer send into the surrounding community the filaments whereby it spreads its toxins and from which it draws its strength and life.
[7]The scientific theory of evolution was a hot-button political issue during the decade of the 1920s, fueled by the sensational "Scopes Monkey Trial" of July 1925.
In December 1927, Katterfeld launched a new magazine published in New York City called Evolution, at which he worked as managing editor.
"[9] The non-political and independent status of Evolution proved to be a problem for Katterfeld with respect to his continued membership in the Communist Party, however.
[10] Contributors to Evolution include both scientific-minded figures from the socialist movement, such as Maynard Shipley, Ernest Untermann, Allan Strong Broms, and V. F. Calverton, leading rationalists like Joseph McCabe, and figures from the academic world, including Harry Elmer Barnes, Federic A. Lucas, and William K. Gregory.
While he did not leave papers to a university library, in 1956 Katterfeld shared his recollections of the early Communist movement with historian Theodore Draper, then engaged in research on his book The Roots of American Communism, published by the Viking Press in 1957.