Washington Commonwealth Federation
Originating out of an interest to expand the End Poverty in California movement to Washington state as a means of alleviating the misery of the Great Depression, the WCF came to be dominated by the Communist Party USA beginning in the popular front years of the late 1930s.
"The CBI believed EPIC offered an excellent model for social and economic reform and struggled to find political candidates to promote its expansion into Washington State.
"[3]While the CBI in Washington did not achieve the same sort of explosive growth exhibited by the EPIC movement in California, the group still won the support of some key farm and labor organizations in the state.
[2] In the aftermath of the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1933, the Communist International began to steer the national political parties obedient to it away from the ultra-radical rhetoric of the so-called "Third Period" and towards a more moderate building of alliances with non-Communist individuals and groups, policies known as Popular Front tactics.
[1] In the United States this change in the Comintern line saw members of the Communist Party attempt to join and seek to exert influence within established political organizations, such as the Washington Commonwealth Federation.
[7] It was a time of substantial influence, with more than a dozen "concealed communists" elected to the statehouse in Olympia between 1936 and 1939, including 11 members of the Washington House of Representatives and 3 State Senators.
[7] WCF-backed politicians constituted fully one third of the seats in the 1937 Washington House, a voting bloc that enabled the passage of a bevy of bills addressing longtime progressive concerns, including repeal of the state's California Criminal Syndicalism Act, passage of a pure food and drug act, establishment of a minimum wage for state employees, establishment of a graduated income tax, and other measures.
[9] Following the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which pushed America into World War II as an ally of the Soviet Union, the political ground upon which the WCF stood shifted again.
The 1938 elections were marked by centrist "Regular" Democrats attacking WCF-backed candidates in the primaries, followed by conservative Republican opponents of the New Deal in the fall, both of which groups derided the WCF as a "Trojan Horse for the Communist Party.
The anti-WCF offensive would achieve full flower in the 1948 Canwell Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities of the Washington Legislature, which would dedicate itself to the exposure of the WCF as a surreptitious Communist front.
