America's Communist Party fell to about 1,000 members, then grew again
In the late 1930s the Communist Party USA counted roughly 70,000 members and real clout in the labour movement. By 2000 one reference book reckoned it had about 1,000 and had all but vanished. Then numbers climbed again, to a reported 20,000 by 2024.
The party was founded in 1919, soon after the Russian Revolution, by the left wing of the Socialist Party of America. It aimed to bring socialism to the United States along Marxist-Leninist lines and took direction from the Soviet-controlled Communist International. Washington regarded it as subversive from the start, and the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 brought mass arrests and deportations. Through the 1920s it stayed small, militant and riven by factions.
The Great Depression changed its fortunes. Under William Z. Foster and then Earl Browder, communists were prominent in strikes, union drives within the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and anti-fascist campaigns, winning support among industrial workers, immigrants and African Americans. In the mid-1930s, following Moscow's popular front line, the party toned down revolutionary talk and backed Roosevelt's New Deal. It opposed American entry into the Second World War in 1939, then reversed itself once Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Browder was pushed out in 1945 and Foster returned.
The Cold War was devastating. As its links to Soviet espionage emerged, leaders were tried under the Smith Act, which outlawed advocating violent revolution, and membership fell below 10,000 by the mid-1950s. Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin drove out many more. In the 1960s it backed civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War but lost ground to a New Left that rejected Soviet orthodoxy, while the Sino-Soviet split pulled others toward Maoist and Trotskyist groups. Gus Hall, leader from 1959 to 2000, kept the party loyal to Moscow, and the Soviet collapse in 1991 left it short of both money and members.
Recent reported figures show a rebound: 2,000 members in 2011, 5,000 in 2017, 15,000 in 2023 and 20,000 in 2024. The party now emphasises labour rights, racial justice and environmental causes, publishes the newspaper People's World and, as of May 2026, was reviving its theoretical journal, Political Affairs.
Source: Communist Party USA
