James S. Allen

James S. "Jim" Allen (born Sol Auerbach; 1906–1986) was an American Marxist historian, journalist, editor, activist, and functionary of the Communist Party USA. Allen is best remembered as the author and editor of over two dozen books and pamphlets and as one of the party's leading experts on African American history.

Allen is credited with helping to save from execution the young black men charged in the Scottsboro case by his prompt and relentless publicity of the case, which helped make their trial a cause célèbre.

Biography

Early years Sol Auerbach, later known by the pseudonym James S. Allen, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He was the son of ethnic Jewish parents who arrived in America from the Russian Empire the same year. Upon completion of high school, Allen enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, where he studied philosophy.

Auerbach was soon promoted to the editorship of Labor Defender, official organ of the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party's mass organization dedicated to civil rights and legal aid matters.

Party work in South Southern counties with a population at least 40% African-American in 2000.

During his formative years in Philadelphia, Auerbach had developed a strong interest in African American life, which led to his appointment in 1930 as editor of the Communist Party's first newspaper produced south of the Mason–Dixon line, The Southern Worker. Auerbach adopted the pseudonym "James S. Allen" around that date and traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his wife, Isabelle Allen, to establish and edit the weekly paper.

Necessarily produced under clandestine conditions, The Southern Worker bore a false dateline claiming to be produced in Birmingham, Alabama, in an effort to confuse local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The Southern Worker was launched on August 16, 1930, with a print run of 3,000 copies.

In this capacity Allen consistently advocated for the Communist Party's political line of the day, which included a demand for self-determination of the so-called "Black Belt" of the South, then populated by nearly half of the country's African American population. For all the brashness of the "self-determination" slogan, historian Mark Solomon believed the actual meaning of the phrase was rather more modest:

Self-determination was defined as democracy at its essence: self-government, self-organization, social and economic equality, the right of blacks to run their own lives without the relentless terror and racism that dogged their steps and made every waking day a living hell. and the "monotonous" and "depressing" job of editing an underground newspaper to which Southerners were too frightened to subscribe. Allen remained a member of the Party's Southern District committee, however, and in that capacity, he played a prominent role in all of the party's major regional activities during the early 1930s: the organizing of Alabama sharecroppers, the Harlan, Kentucky miners' strike and the Scottsboro case.

Scottsboro case

Allen's influence in the Scottsboro case was particularly important, with Yale University historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore contending that "we might never have heard of the Scottsboro case if Sol Auerbach, using his Party name, James S. Allen, had not arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-July 1930." Allen was listening to the radio in his Chattanooga apartment in March 1931 when he heard that police in Paint Rock, Alabama, had removed nine young black men from a freight train and charged them with rape. They were not traveling as a group and some did not know the others until they met in jail, pulled from the train by a mob of 200 whites following false accusations of rape by two women seeking to avoid prostitution charges. In accord with the strategy of the popular front, the Comintern then sought to build broad alliances against the rising tide of fascism and was therefore interested in minimizing conflict between communists and socialists.

The first of Allen's trips to the Philippines came in 1936. Allen's mission was that of convincing Crisanto Evangelista, the General Secretary of the CPP, and his jailed comrades to accept a conditional pardon from Philippine President Manuel Quezon and to gain their freedom so they could lead the fight against Japanese militarism. Allen then spoke personally with Quezón and convinced him of the urgent need for Philippine unity in the face of the Japanese Empire's expansionism in the region. Unity between the organizations was achieved at the Third National Congress of the Communist Party of the Philippines, from October 29 to 31, 1938. The Sunday Worker was edited by Al Richmond, who later remembered Allen as "a scholarly, serene man who did the serious political commentary and analysis".

During the 1956 to 1958 factional crisis of the party, Allen placed his allegiance with the hardline pro-Soviet wing against a dissident faction, for liberalization of internal party life and its distancing from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. When the leader of the hardliners, Gus Hall, emerged triumphant and was named General Secretary in 1958, Allen became a member of its governing Central Committee. Allen was also tapped then to serve as secretary of the National Program Committee, in charge of developing programmatic and educational documents for the party, remaining until 1966.

Book publisher From 1951, Allen was working for International Publishers (IP). he found IP in dire financial straits when he began his second stint as a publisher in 1962:

When I returned to IP in 1962 as president and editor-in-chief the house faced bankruptcy. Its publishing program had practically ceased, its debt to the publishers' services was so great without any prospect of payment in sight that the printers refused to undertake new work and the binders refused to release our books in stock. Fortunately, Trachty had some reserve funds that I drew upon immediately. I also arranged small loans from a number of our devoted readers. I also sent out an unprecedented appeal for donations to keep the publishing house going. We were thus able to meet the payroll and office expenses, and also to pay off enough of our debt to resume publishing.

From 1962 to 1972, Allen headed IP, the Communist Party's publishing house. However, the retiring founder, Trachtenberg, had prevailed upon Allen to accept the position as chief of the financially troubled firm. During a cross-country sales trip, Allen had been convinced that the book trade was going to be dominated by the paperback format and that if IP were to survive in the new environment, it would need to retool its offerings. Fifteen titles were thus assembled at minimal cost and launched en masse onto the market, promoted by a special catalog. The inexpensive series gained ready acceptance in the market.

In 1968, Allen was selected as the American editor of the 50-volume Marx-Engels Collected Works project, a joint publishing project between IP, Lawrence and Wishart in the United Kingdom and Progress Publishers in Moscow. Whereas interest in the project on the American side outside of Allen was tepid, the British assembled a team of top party intellectuals, headed by Maurice Cornforth, to work with the Soviet publishing agency to make the massive project a reality.

Death and legacy Allen died in 1986.

Allen's papers are held by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University in New York City. "Lenin and the American Negro," The Communist, vol. 13 (1934), pp. 53–61. "The Negro Question," Political Affairs, 25 (1946), pp. 1132–1150. "The New State in the Far East," Political Affairs, vol. 24 (1945), pp. 441–447. "The New War Economy," Political Affairs, vol. 27 (1948), pp. 1055–1074. "The Pacific Front in the Global War," The Communist, vol. 21 (1942), pp. 1012–1020. "The Policy of Anti-Soviet Encirclement," Political Affairs, vol. 26 (1947), pp. 563–570. "Problems of Foreign Policy," Political Affairs, vol. 36 (1957), pp. 19–31. "Prologue to the Liberation of the Negro," The Communist, vol. 12 (1933), pp. 147–170. "The Scottsboro Struggle,"The Communist, vol. 12 (1933), pp. 437–448. "Some Lessons of the Fateful Decade," The Communist, vol. 22 (1943), pp. 258–265. "The Soviet Nations and Teheran," The Communist, vol. 23 (1944), pp. 206–216. "Die Vereinigten Staaten und der Gemeinsame Markt," Imperialistische "Integration" in Westeuropa (1962), pp. 183–195 "We Can Win in 1943," The Communist, vol. 22 (1943), pp. 680–687. "The World Assembly at San Francisco," Political Affairs, vol. 24 (1945), pp. 291–301. "Marxist Publisher," Peter Meyer Filardo (ed.), American Communist History, vol. 10, no. 3 (December 2011), pp. 285–315. —Excerpt from unpublished autobiography.

Footnotes