New York – Crammed with Lenin buttons, dusty memos from the McCarthy period, and crumbling pages of internal briefings dating back a century, the 2,000 cardboard boxes handed over to New York University last month hold secrets about the Communist Party USA that make archivist Peter Filardo’s heart flutter.
Decades ago, they would have been gold mines for the FBI.
“Oh, yeah, this is it,” Filardo said, sifting through one box. “National convention material from 1919 – this is the founding convention of the Communist Party. Handwritten notes, let’s see.”
He pulled out a 1927 typewritten document bearing the words in faded ink: “READ AND DESTROY.” The memo was written By William Z. Foster. “He was probably the most prominent U.S. Communist,” Filardo said. “This is a valuable document.”
Last year, Filardo, 56, received a call from the Communist Party’s national chairman, Sam Webb, who told him the organization wanted to donate its archival collection to the NYU library. The party planned to renovate its headquarters, Webb said, and no longer had room for the cache.
Filardo’s pulse raced at the notion of rummaging through the attic of American communism. An archivist for 28 years, his passion is progressive American history. What a thrill it would be, he thought, to examine membership lists, read confidential letters intended for party leaders, sort through Daily Worker newspapers.
An exhibit of some of the contents has been started at the library.
“It’s an incredibly rich trove of documents,” said library director Michael Nash. “Most have never been seen before.”
Filardo and his crew came across revealing artifacts: instructions of theoretical perspectives that communists should follow written by Nikolai Bukharin, a leader of the Russian Revolution; party members’ secret pseudonyms like Cook, Wheat, Ward, Rafael; buttons with slogans like “I won’t live with Jim Crow” and “Free Angela Davis”; bios and files full of clippings about thousands of members.
“What we now see as the mainstream usually begins on the left, if you look on historical terms,” Filardo said. “It’s inspiring to see stories of people who make their own history and become actors on a historical stage instead of just being acted upon.”
