Max Bedacht Sr. (October 13, 1883 – July 4, 1972) was a German-born American revolutionary socialist political activist, journalist, and functionary who helped establish the Communist Party of America.

Bedacht is best remembered as the long-time head of the International Workers Order, a Communist Party-sponsored fraternal benefit organization.

He was the son of a single mother who worked as a domestic servant and was raised Catholic by a maternal aunt and uncle.

In the settlement of the strike, the plan for the cooperative facility was abandoned, however, and Bedacht was sued for breach of contract by the building's landlord.

While the union's members offered to pay the money for him, Bedacht decided to emigrate to the United States rather than allow this to take place.

[1] Bedacht immigrated to the United States in 1908 and joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) during that same year.

He lived and worked in Manhattan from 1910 to 1912, cutting hair by day while spending his evenings as a German-language socialist agitator.

[1] In June 1913 he moved to San Francisco to become the editor of the German-language labor newspaper Vorwärts der Pacific Küste (Forward of the Pacific Coast), a job which he retained until the paper's termination in 1917 due to draconian postal regulations being placed on the foreign language press during World War I.

He briefly moved to South Dakota to edit a paper called The New Era following the demise of the Vorwärts, but soon returned to San Francisco when he found that publication unviable, taking up the barbers' shears again.

[2] At the Chicago convention in August 1919, the Left Wing California delegation was challenged at the time the gathering was convened, placing the delegates in limbo, their fate held in the mercy of a committee firmly controlled by the "Regular" faction of National Executive Secretary Adolph Germer and James Oneal.

As a result, although they were ultimately approved by the committee, the California delegation refused to take their seats in protest and went downstairs to attend the parallel convention of the Communist Labor Party (CLP) convened by NEC members Alfred Wagenknecht and L.E.

"[3] In 1939, Time Magazine cited Bedacht in connection with the arrest of Party leader Earl Browder on charges of indicted a Federal Grand Jury in New York City on two counts connected to passport: "Possible was the bagging by Frank Murphy of such Reds as Executive Committeeman Max Bedacht, Publisher Alexander Trachtenberg.

"[8] In the 1930s, Bedacht became general secretary of the International Workers Order (IWO), a Communist Party-affiliated insurance, mutual benefit, and fraternal organization (1930–1954), whose membership peaked in the late 1940s at 200,000 members.

Mr. Bedacht: I don't know that I know myself, but, anyway, this committee is surely not a court of appeals against my expulsion, and my explanation for it would take quite a while, and you would have to listen to the other side, too.

His eldest daughter worked for a time in the National Office of the American Communist Party in the early 1930s.