A major C.P. project of the 1930s, and a bellewether for the changing orientations of that decade, was the broad-based, but Communist-led, American League Against War and Fascism formed in 1933 as Nazism came to power in Germany. The League attracted fairly wide support and hosted many events in the 1930s. In 1937, reflecting the Popular Front turn, the name of the group was changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy and the journal to The Fight for Peace and Democracy. Both the paper and the organization closed in the wake of 1939’s Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Here is the League’s original manifesto and program.

‘Manifesto and Program of the American League Against War and Fascism’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 11 No. 156. June 30, 1934.

Adopted at the First U.S. Congress Against War, New York City, Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 1933.

Appeal to the Working Men and Women of America: To All Victims of War:

The black cloud of imperialist war hangs over the world. The peoples must arouse themselves and take immediate action against the wars now going on in the Far East and Latin America, against intervention in Cuba, against the increasing preparations for war, and against the growing danger of a new world war.

After ten years of futility, the World Disarmament Conference is meeting to perform once more the grim comedy of promises, to screen the actions of the imperialist governments which are preparing, more intensively than ever before in history, for a new war. The Four Power Pact is already exposed as nothing but a new maneuver for position in the coming war between the imperialist rivals, and an attempt to establish a united imperialist front against the Soviet Union. The rise of Fascism in Europe and especially in Germany, and the sharpened aggressive policy of Japanese militarism, have brought all the imperialist antagonisms to the breaking point and greatly increased the danger of a war of intervention against the Soviet Union. The greatest naval race in history is now on among the United States, England, and Japan. The British-American antagonism is being fought out in Latin America already by open war the so-called local wars being in reality struggles between these imperialist powers. The presence of thirty American warships in Cuban waters is itself an act of war against the Cuban revolution. The collapse of the World Economic Conference revealed only too clearly that the great powers are unable and unwilling to solve the basic international problems by peaceful means and that they will resort to a new imperialist war in an attempt to divert the attention of the masses from their misery and as the only capitalist way out of the crisis.

Fascism Breeds War.

The rapid rise of Fascism is closely related to the increasing war danger. Fascism means forced labor, militarization, lower standards of living, and the accentuation of national hatred and chauvinist incitements as instruments for the “moral” preparation for war. It sets the people of one country against the people of another, and exploits the internal racial and national groups within each country in order to prevent them from uniting in joint action to solve their common problems.

The War System.

The war danger arises inevitably out of the very nature of monopolistic capitalism the ownership of the means of production by a small capitalist class and the complete domination of government by this class. The imminent war danger is only another expression of the fundamental crisis of the capitalist system, which continues its existence only at the cost of intensification of exploitation and oppression of the masses at home and in the colonies, and of struggle among the imperialist powers for a redivision of markets and sources of raw materials.

Only in the Soviet Union has this basic cause of war been removed. There are no classes or groups which can benefit from war or war preparations. Therefore the Soviet Union pursues a positive and vigorous peace policy and alone among the governments proposes total disarmament. Serious struggle against war involves rallying all forces around this peace policy and opposing all attempts to weaken or destroy the Soviet Union.

The United States Prepares for War.

The government of the United States in spite of peaceful professions is more aggressively than ever following policies whose only logical result is war. The whole program of the Roosevelt administration is permeated by preparedness for war, expressed in the extraordinary military and naval budget, mobilization of industry and manpower, naval concentration in the Pacific Ocean, intervention in Cuba, the continued maintenance of armed forces in China, the loans to Chiang Kai-shek, the initiation of currency and tariff wars all of which give the lie to the peaceful declarations of the United States government.

Under the guise of public works, the NRA has diverted immense funds from the care of starving millions to the building of a vastly larger navy and to mechanization of the army. The widespread unemployment has been utilized to concentrate young men in so-called reforestation camps, which the War Department is using for trial military mobilizations. The military training of youth in the schools and colleges is being further developed. More and more, national holidays and specially prepared demonstrations are being used to glorify the armed forces and to stimulate the war spirit among the masses. Hundreds of factories are working overtime to produce munitions and basic war materials for shipment to the warring countries in South America and the Far East. A centralized war control of industry, along the lines of the War Industries Board of 1917, is being established. As in 1917, it is drawing the upper leadership of many trade unions into active collaboration in the war machine.

Smoke Screens for War.

This Congress Against War warns the masses against reliance upon the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pacts as effective instruments of peace. The Congress declares that this illusion becomes particularly dangerous at the present moment, especially when it is put forth as in the recent Congress of the Labor and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions as a method of combatting the war danger.

For Mass Resistance.

We can effectively combat war only by arousing and organizing the masses within each country for active struggle against the war policies of their own imperialist governments, whether these governments are working individually or through the League of Nations.

The Congress declares that the basic force in the imperialist countries for struggle against the war danger is the working class, organizing around it in close alliance all of the exploited sections of the population, working farmers, intellectuals, the oppressed Negro people and all toiling masses and all organizations and groups which are generally opposed to war on any basis. The anti-war movement allies itself with the masses in the colonial and semi-colonial countries against imperialist domination, and gives full support to their immediate and unconditional independence.

PROGRAM

The Congress pledges itself to do all in its power to effect a nationwide agitation and organization against war preparations and war. To this end we join together in carrying out the following immediate objectives:

1. To work towards the stopping of the manufacture and transport of munitions and all other materials essential to the conduct of war, through mass demonstrations, picketing, and strikes.

2. To expose everywhere the extensive preparations for war being carried on under the guise of aiding National Recovery.

3. To demand the transfer of all war funds to relief of the unemployed and the replacement of all such devices as the Civilian Conservation Camps by a federal system of social insurance paid for by the government and employers.

4. To oppose the policies of American Imperialism in the Far East, in Latin America, especially now in Cuba, and throughout the world; to support the struggles of all colonial peoples against the imperialist policies of exploitation and armed suppression.

5. To support the peace policies of the Soviet Union for total and universal disarmament, which today with the support of masses in all countries constitutes the clearest and most effective opposition to war throughout the world; to oppose all attempts to weaken the Soviet Union, whether these take the form of misrepresentation and false propaganda, diplomatic maneuvering, or intervention by imperialist governments.

6. To oppose all developments leading to Fascism in this country and abroad and especially in Germany; to oppose the increasingly widespread use of the armed forces against the workers, farmers and the special terrorizing and suppression of Negroes in their attempts to maintain a decent standard of living; to oppose the growing encroachments upon the civil liberties of these groups as a growing fascization of our so-called “democratic” government.

7. To win the armed forces to the support of this program.

8. To enlist for our program the women in industry and in the home; and to enlist the youth, especially those who, by the crisis, have been deprived of training in the industries and are therefore more susceptible to fascist and war propaganda.

9. To give effective international support to all workers and anti-war fighters against their own imperialist governments.

10. To form committees of action against war and fascism in every important center and industry, particularly in the basic war industries; to secure the support for this program of all organizations seeking to prevent war, paying special attention to labor, veteran, unemployed, and farmer organizations.

By virtue of the mandate granted by the thousands of delegates from all sections of this country and groups of the population which bear the burden of imperialist war who, though they differ in political opinions, trade union affiliations, religious beliefs, and the methods of carrying on the struggle against war, are bound together by their desire for peace, and on the strength of its unshakable conviction that the struggle against imperialist war is useful only to the extent to which it effectively interferes with and checkmates imperialist war plans, this Congress calls upon the working class, the ruined and exploited farmers, the oppressed Negro people, the sections of the middle class bankrupted by the crisis, the groups of intellectuals of all occupations, men, women and youth, together, to organize their invincible force in discipline battalions for the decisive struggle to defeat imperialist war.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n156-jun-30-1934-DW-LOC.pdf