Communist Propaganda in Pre-Cold War America: The Daily Worker and the Great Depression

This book shows that press-orientated agitation and propaganda efforts, delivered through newspapers such as the The Daily Worker, played a key role in the political strategy of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) as they rose to unprecedented cultural prominence and political influence.

On the eve of the Cold War, when The Daily Worker could be found on newsstands throughout the country and could boast sales of nearly 50,000, the party regarded the paper as the ’central organ’ of their political movement. Arguing that this strategy closely aligned with the desires of their Soviet superiors in the Communist International (Comitern), who regularly intervened in the paper’s affairs, Prown shows how it maintained a stringently pro-Soviet line, and its editors became not dupes or naifs, but willing Stalinist collaborators. Delving into the editorial policies and practices of The Daily Worker in those trying times, Communist Propaganda in Pre-Cold War America provides insights into the forgotten world of American Bolshevism and the murky history of political propaganda.

Henry H. Prown is the 2022-25 Temerty Postdoctoral Fellow in Holodomor Studies and an instructor in the History, Classics, and Religion Department at University of Alberta, Canada. He is a specialist on the transnational history of Communism and the relationship between Stalinism and the American media in the mid-20th Century.