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active before the Crash. But locally-oriented and locally-grounded? The common
wisdom since World War II, bolstered by volumes of Cold War scholarship, has
been that the Communist Party was always a top-down "totalitarian" organization,
that local branches blindly followed the diktats of New York or Moscow, and that
local militants were in no sense indigenous or responsive to their locales. Since the
early 1970s, however, a new historical literature has developed that draws a
different picture of the party. This revisionist scholarship demonstrates that, in
reality, Communist activists in various locales during the 1930s regularly displayed a
great deal of initiative and independence, that they frequently developed real
organic ties to local communities, and that they succeeded in initiating and
strengthening local struggles. In Baltimore the practice of the local CP often fit this
latter picture.
This is not to say that the national and international connections of the
Baltimore CP were unimportant in the early 1930s. None of the recent revisionist
scholarship on the CP nationally or on the local level denies that the overall party
apparatus deeply affected local party work; this cannot be denied in Baltimore.
How the party apparatus affected local work is less clear. The newer historians of
the CP tend to cast the party hierarchy in a basically negative light, suggesting that,
while the overall party structure was in no sense totalitarian, it largely acted to
constrain and divert the initiative of local party units to the detriment of both the
party and the mass movements. However, while there is no doubt that damaging
bureaucratic constraints existed locally, nationally, and internationally in the early
1930s, in post-Crash Baltimore the local CP's national/international connection
clearly did it far more good than harm. Perhaps paradoxically, it was the Baltimore
CP's links to the national and international organization - and the analysis,
alternate vision, strategies, tactics, and personnel that passed through these links -
that allowed the CP in this region to rise above the limitations of its Depression-
ridden locale sufficiently to effectively disrupt the post-Crash calm.
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