What If: The USA went communist during the Great Depression

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is my favorite intriguing alternate history scenario: What would have happened if America had gone communist during the Great Depression (1929-1939)? I chose the Great Depression because I feel that is the only period in American history that communism really would’ve had a chance to take root.

The hows and whys aren’t that important, or at least I’d rather not have 50 replies of “it’d never happen because of this” or “it’d never happen because of that”. Obviously, it didn’t happen. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the speculation on if it had happened.

What would’ve been the immediate effects of a communist coup or government taking power in the USA? Would there have been a second Civil War? For the sake of the thread, let’s assume that if there was a second Civil War, the communist side (perhaps we’ll call them the Citizen’s Liberation Army) won, and established the United Socialist States of America.

America already had a tradition of Manifest Destiny; would that have led to ‘liberating’ our northern neighbor Canada and our southern neighbors in Central and South America? Expansion into Oceania?

Would our citizens have been reassigned to till the vast farmlands in the Midwest and Western states? Perhaps one of the emptier, desert-ish states, such as Nevada, would’ve been utilized as our Siberia, where ‘enemies of the people’ would’ve been sent, a la Stalin’s forced re-settlement of ethnic Koreans, Crimean Tartars, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, Kalmyks, etc. Or, for that matter, Alaska: vast, empty, very cold.

I could see a lot of our iconography and history being repurposed to fit communist and socialist ideals. You could easily turn “All men are created equal” into a communist slogan, for example. The USSA could spin the American Revolution as the revolt of the idealized American yeoman farmer against the exploitative British aristocracy. The Confederacy could be portrayed as the boogeyman, elitist landowners exploiting both blacks and poor whites and manipulating them into war against the Union, which sought only to redistribute wealth and land.

What effect might communist ideals have had on the rights of the opressed minorities, such as blacks? Would they have been given equal rights earlier or even forcibly integrated into mainstream American society?

Would religion have been as aggressively extinguished as in the USSR or the PRC? Would churches have been torn down?

I also find possible scenarios for World War II very interesting. Imperial Japan, for instance, would’ve been caught in a vice between all three communist powers: Russia, China, and America.

2

The communists took over China in 1949, after World War II ended.

3

What I find intriguing is how communism would have evolved with competition from a different socio-historical perspective (e.g. Russian history vs American history) and which brand would have won.

4

Yes, but the Chinese Red Army was in control of a chunk of the country before that, wasn’t it? It’s not like they came out of nowhere in 1949, they’d been fighting the KMT since 1927.

5

Have you read Back in the USSA by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman?

6

All those guys who fought like Hell for the Confederacy, even though they themselves didn’t own slaves but only small, single-family farms? They’d really fight like Hell if the Federals were intent on collectivising those small farms.

7

Thereby proving that they’re counter-revolutionaries who place their own retro-feudalist petit-bourgeoisie class interests above the needs of the urban proletariot.

8

or the “Kulak Klux Klan” for short

9

As it stands, of the 5 remaining communist countries (Cuba, China, N. Korea, Laos, Vietnam) all but North Korea & Cuba have abandoned economic communism and gone on to far higher GDP growth rates.
It really depends. Stalin was a sociopath with an iron grip on the USSR. Once he was dead many of the purges and deaths stopped. So it would depend on who was in charge in the US in part.

But I think with a centrally planned economy, we would be much poorer today than we are now. What effect that would have had on our international military adventures, I do not know. But yeah, I do think that we would’ve exported those philosophies by force into nations, especially those which had raw materials we needed to function (so heavy involvement in south/central america).

No idea about religion and non-whites. I’d assume they’d be addressed, but I think communism in the US would be mainly devoted to the interests of working class and working poor white people. As a result of that minorities and hostility to religion probably wouldn’t pick up the way they did in some other nations.

It really depends on the nation. The communist takeover in Cambodia was different than what happened in the USSR or Cuba, which was different than the party in Greece.

I’m WAGging that any US communist party would be more economic than anything else. Other communist movements seemed motivated by decolonialization and nationalism (something we weren’t dealing with), or rabid ideology (which I don’t think would apply either).

So mostly economic reforms addressed at lower class whites, I would assume that would be the primary agenda.

10

One of the key differences between Russia and the United States was that the US was already heavily industrialized by 1930 whereas the USSR hadn’t even gotten started outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow.

A second Civil War would have by no means been a foregone conclusion; granted the newly displaced bourgeoisie would have fought back, but a well-organized, nationally coordinated revolution that had made a point of reaching out to the rank and file of the military well beforehand would have made that fightback a lot harder. Keep in mind, also, that a large part of the Russian Civil War was fought by invading foreign armies. A communist revolution in the US would have aroused a bigger wave of sympathy among the world working class and there would likely have been a lot more sentiment against sending troops in to crush it. To say nothing of the fact that the Russian Revolution of 1917 caused a wave of uprisings and revolts across Europe in response - how much bigger would that response have been had the US done the same thing?

Even assuming a second Civil War, the devastation to the infrastructure would never have matched the magnitude of the destruction wreaked in Russia. After the Civil War there, economic productivity was estimated to be roughly equivalent to England in 1688. The only way the US could have dropped that far back in the 1930s would have been through war of total annihilation. Therefore even with a Civil War, the newly socialist US would be on a much sounder economic footing as regards productivity.

A successful communist revolution in the US would also have had to entail an actual break with Stalin and his policies, since at that time the CPUSA held him to be the ultimate authority on revolution and his policy was “socialism in one country” and an outright criminal foreign policy that basically required the CPUSA to support Roosevelt and the Democrats to one degree or another, and to downplay the possibilities and opportunities to push things further to the left. In order for a communist revolution to even be on the agenda, the CPUSA would have had to be won over by the Trotskyists who hadn’t yet been expelled. A successful revolution in the US would have completely eclipsed Stalin and moved the mantle of defender of the revolution onto the shoulders of the Americans, something he didn’t want to happen under any circumstances.

On the wilder end of speculation, I think it’s not outside the realm of reason to believe that this break with Stalin and a successful revolution in the US would have meant Trotsky coming back to New York to lend a hand. Were that the case, it would be definite that Stalinist policies like forced collectivization and a forced march towards heavy industrial development would not have been on the agenda - again, partly because US industrial and agricultural development in 1930 would have rendered it unnecessary.

Internationally, as I mentioned earlier, a successful revolution in the US would have sent shockwaves around the world, much as 1917 did, but much deeper and much farther. It would have been a tremendous boost for socialist and communist parties everywhere, especially in Western Europe. A fresh example of a revolution in an industrially developed country would have given the German socialists and communists something to point to, and perhaps pulled them away from Stalin’s criminally passive policy of “first Hitler, then us”. Not to mention the workers of Germany seeing a concrete example of the way out of the depression that pulled the rug out from under Hitler’s feet. Nazism suffers a perhaps fatal blow; the potential for a communist revolution in Germany increases, and thereby the potential for establishing fraternal economic and political links with the American revolution. The Greatest Generation could have been known for building a new world instead of fighting to prevent the old one from falling to ruin.

Stalin, no longer Comrade No. 1, with any luck passes into obscurity as the old guard Bolsheviks he had just begun to marginalize come back into force, the US (and Germany, if it successfully revolts) pour their industrial might into helping Russia develop in exchange for sharing in its increased agricultural output, and Russia is spared the atrocities now used to illustrate how bad ‘communism’ is.

11

Communists in Harlem during the Depression by Mark Naison is an excellent illustration of who the Communists were really reaching out to, and why your assumption is unfounded.

12

John Dos Passos’ exellent USA trilogy – The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money – written in the 1930s and which I’ve just read, deals with how tensions between capitalism and communism shaped the early decades of the 20th century. The communist characters give a pretty good feel for the thinking at the time.

13

This could be interesting.

Let’s suppose the USSA, after a long and costly civil war, does make the mistake of attacking Canada. Britain comes to Canada’s aid. Mexico attacks from the south with Spanish assistance. Texans don’t like Mexicans, but they like Commies even less, so the Mexican army is let through on the promise - negotiated by the Spanish with the British - that they’ll recognise Texan independence. But the real zinger depends upon the exact date of the war, because it’s entirely possible that that renowned anti-commie Hitler would get involved, just as he did in Spain. Hitler’s navy would be a potent addition to the Royal Navy. I’m not sure if he could send the Luftwaffe to Mexico. With the USSA still recovering from its civil war there’ll be a lot of ‘White’ Americans (q.v. White Russians) who’ll welcome the British and Mexicans with open arms. At this point in time, the USSR doesn’t have the ability to help, and even if it could, there are the Japanese and the British in the way.

The ‘American experiment’ will be deemed to have failed. North America will be split between a Greater Canada and Mexico, with Texas becoming independent. Japan may gain the American dependencies in the East. I can see Hawaii becoming independent, too, but it would more likely become a British Dependency, perhaps with a reinstated monarchy.

But there would be ramifications in the rest of the world. The price Hitler would ask for his help would likely be help in the conquest of Russia, at least to the Urals, and if Churchill has become PM, then this would likely be given, under the guise of continuing the attack against ‘the evil forces of communism’. Then Hitler gets his lebensraum - as well as the vast agricultural treasury that is the plains of Russia - and there’s no need for WW2. He still exterminates the Jews, alas, but no one notices. Edward VIII still abdicates over Wallis Simpson, but he is installed as a puppet Tsar in Russia, a constitutional monarch, not an absolute one. With communism being seen as a failed ideology, China never becomes communist. Mao still wins, but governs under a capitalist ideology, and starts to industrialise. Britain lets Japan get access to oil so there’s no British-Japanese conflict as in WW2. India still becomes independent in due course, probably sooner.

I’m not sure what would happen to Russia east of the Urals - picked up by Mongolia, perhaps?

There’s no halt to the mass emigration from Europe to (now) Canada.

With resurgent Chinese, Greater Canadian, and Mexican economies, the world enters pretty much the same economic boom as it did post WW2, but the competition is between Greater Canada, Greater Germany, and (later) China.

The European countries maintain vastly higher militaries, wary of Germany, but Hilter has enough on his plate with the conquest of Russia.

Canada and Germany both become world superpowers (q.v. America and USSR). Britain manages to stay a major power. There’s still an arms race, resulting in nuclear technology, and a race to the moon. Which nation wins each is immaterial because there is no conflict between the two. There’s no Cold War. Germany, with its relative lack of oil, develops and masters nuclear power, which it sells to the world.

At some point, Texas may petition Canada to become a province. Or, if drugs become popular, it may descend to anarchy, much like the northern provinces of today’s Mexico.

As Hitler grows old, he looks to his succession and invites his old friend Tsar Edward to become a constitutional Emperor of Great Germany and transfer Germany back to a more democratic base (c.f. Franco). Once that happens, moves start for a European Union.

Hitler goes down in history as a great man who destroyed Communism and restored Germany.

14

Just to expand slightly. In the late 1950s, Canada, having become one of the dominant powers in the world, starts to think about gaining full independence. But visits from Queen Elizabeth charm them, she impresses as a statesman, and measures are put on hold until she dies. In 2012, shortly after celebrating her diamond jubilee, Queen Elizabeth dies and Charles assumes the throne. Decidedly unimpressed by Charles, and impressed by his courage as an officer and pilot, Canada invites Prince Harry to assume the throne of Canada.

Cry “God for Harry, Canada, and Saint Jean!”

15

The phrase ‘your assumption is unfounded’ is pretty harsh, I prefer the term ‘you are making things up’.

I really don’t know what role empowering minorities would play in US communism. I know the communists paid for the legal defense of the Scottsboro boys, however I do wonder what role racial backlash would play in the communist party if they attempted too hard to include blacks. When the republicans included blacks in the 1860s, nearly all the whites in the south became democrats. When the democratic party included blacks in the 1960s, almost all the whites in the south became republican. And the contemporary GOP is very anti-communist both ideologically and economically.

So I don’t know if they’d be drawn between attempts to include minorities vs. attempts to maintain the loyalty of lower class rural whites.

16

The South was heavily Democrat before there was even a Republican party. Hell, the Democrats are the party that started the Civil War in the first place, so you can’t attribute any of that to the Republicans reaching out to the Black population - in fact just the reverse. The Republicans reached out to the Blacks because the South was heavily (racist) Democrat. As for the 1960s, after the Democrats managed to position themselves as the party of civil rights and social justice, the Republicans reached out via Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to the disaffected remnants of the Dixiecrats and the diehard Klan members. In both cases it wasn’t the voters reacting to the policies of the two major parties, but rather the parties strategizing around the already existing racism.

As for what Communists did in the South in the 1930s, Robin DG Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe is well worth your time.

17

In the alternate-history book Back in the USSA, by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman, Eugene Debs leads a successful Socialist revolution in 1917 – but, I don’t think the authors mean to seriously propose that as a viable point-of-divergence; it’s really a framing device for a series of stories in which the U.S. takes the role of the U.S.S.R. throughout the 20th Century. (Al Capone plays the role of Stalin, J. Edgar Hoover is head of the Federal Bureau of Ideology, etc.) Still a fun read, though.

18

Hijack: What if the Technocracy Movement had come to power in the Depression? See also Technocracy Incorporated.

I’ve read exactly one AH treatment of that: “You Could Go Home Again,” by Howard Waldrop. (It’s mainly about Thomas Wolfe if he had lived longer.) You can find it in his 1998 collection, Going Home Again. Waldrop provides an afterword to the story which explains, among other things, technocracy:

Of course, FDR’s brain trust also did a suck-job on some of the best Socialist Party proposals, such as Social Security. Which was perfectly consistent with FDR’s stated vision for the New Deal: Don’t follow any all-encompassing theory, just try things and keep them if they work.

19

I just glanced at the first few pages of that book on the Amazon site. I had no idea there was that much old-school leftist activity there… it would explain the flag of Birmingham.