Coordinates: 40°44′40.8″N 73°59′48.5″W / 40.744667°N 73.996806°W / 40.744667; -73.996806

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement.

For the first half of the 20th century, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in the United States. It played a very prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions (which would later use the McCarran Internal Security Act to expel their Communist members) while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. Historian Ellen Schrecker concludes that decades of recent scholarship offers a "nuanced portrayal of the party as both a Stalinist sect tied to a vicious regime and the most dynamic organization within the American Left during the 1930s and '40s". In regards to the former charge, the CPUSA, claiming proletarian internationalism (while the U.S. Government called it espionage), sponsored an elaborate intelligence network on behalf of the Soviet Union, involving over 500 members acting as agents. The most prominent example dealt with the Manhattan Project in which the network was accused in giving the blueprints of the atomic bomb to the Soviets; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were thereafter convicted and executed as the chief architects of this plan. Subsequent examination of the trial record shows the testimony directly tying the Rosenbergs to the atomic blueprints was conflicted and possibly false.

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government. The name originates from the 1848 tract Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

A Communist party is, at least according to Leninist theory, the vanguard party of the working class, whether ruling or non-ruling, but when such a party is in power in a specific country, the party is said to be the highest authority of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin's theories on the role of a communist party were developed as the early 20th-century Russian social democracy divided into Bolshevik (meaning "majority") and Menshevik (meaning "minority") factions.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, argued that a revolutionary party should be a small vanguard party with a centralized political command and a strict cadre policy; the Menshevik faction, however, argued that the party should be a broad-based mass movement. The Bolshevik party, which eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, took power in Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. With the creation of the Communist International, the Leninist concept of party building was copied by emerging communist parties worldwide.

Glenn Edward Lee Beck (born February 10, 1964) is an American conservative radio host, vlogger, author, entrepreneur, political commentator and former television host. He hosts the Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks. He formerly hosted the Glenn Beck television program, which ran from January 2006 to October 2008 on HLN and from January 2009 to June 2011 on the Fox News Channel. Beck has authored six New York Times–bestselling books. Beck is the founder and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, a multimedia production company through which he produces content for radio, television, publishing, the stage, and the Internet. It was announced on April 6, 2011, that Beck would "transition off of his daily program" on Fox News later in the year but would team with Fox to "produce a slate of projects for FOX News Channel and FOX News' digital properties". Beck's last daily show on the network was June 30, 2011. In 2012, The Hollywood Reporter named Beck on its Digital Power Fifty list.

Sam Webb is an American Communist activist and political leader, having served as the Chairman of the Communist Party USA since 2000.

Samuel Webb was born in Maine on July 16, 1945, and graduated from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia in 1967. He holds an M.A. in economics from the University of Connecticut. He worked as a Communist Party state organizer in Michigan from 1978–88.

Webb led the CPUSA when it made the decision to support some Democratic candidates in the 2004 presidential election. While the Party regards both major parties as two capitalist entities in a collaborative dictatorship for established financial institutions, it believes that rule by the Democrats is preferable to rule by the Republicans, arguing that the latter puts the interests of working people in considerable danger. He has called President Barack Obama a "people's advocate" and said that some of his early decisions, in reversing President George W. Bush's policies, were praiseworthy.

He is the author of Reflections on Socialism, a paper reflecting ideas that Webb first presented at the 2005 Left Forum in New York. This paper points out that socialism is once again being discussed in the trade union and student movements, in popular magazines and certainly in the halls of power worldwide.

Gus Hall (born Arvo Kustaa Halberg; October 8, 1910 – October 13, 2000) was a leader and Chairman of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its four-time U.S. presidential candidate. As a labor leader, Hall was closely associated with the so-called "Little Steel" Strike of 1937, an effort to unionize the nation's smaller, regional steel manufacturers. During the Second Red Scare, Hall was indicted under the Smith Act and was sentenced to eight years in prison. After his release, Hall led the CPUSA for over 40 years, often taking an orthodox Marxist-Leninist stance.

In 1910 he was born Arvo Kustaa Halberg to Matt (Matti) and Susan (Susanna) Halberg in Cherry, a rural community on Northern Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range. Hall's parents were Finnish immigrants from the Lapua region, and were politically radical: they were involved in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and were early members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1919. The Mesabi Range was one of the most important immigration settlements for Finns, who were often active in labor militancy and political activism. Hall's home language was Finnish, and he conversed with his nine siblings in that language for the rest of his life. He did not know political terminology in Finnish and used mostly English when meeting with visiting Finnish Communists.