L. E. Katterfeld - Biography - Communist Party Years (1919-1929)

Communist Party Years (1919-1929)

L.E. Katterfeld was a dedicated member of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party from its earliest days in 1919. He was one of the Left Wing's endorsed candidates in the 1919 party election for National Executive Committee, the results of which election were overturned by action of the outgoing NEC on which he sat.

Katterfeld was a delegate to the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party on August 30, 1919, and was one of the first to bolt to the previously arranged alternative convention downstairs. After two days, this alternative "Socialist Party" convention organized itself as the Communist Labor Party (CLP). Katterfeld was one of five people elected to the governing Central Executive Committee of the CLP and served as Organization Director from 1919. Katterfeld remained one of the top leaders of the CLP and its organizational successors, the United Communist Party of America and the unified Communist Party of America (CPA) into the middle 1920s.

Katterfeld was a defendant in the July 1920 trial of the Communist Labor Party, at which Clarence Darrow served as chief attorney. Katterfeld was found guilty of violating the state's criminal syndicalism law and sentenced to 1 to 5 years in the state penitentiary and fined $2,000.

Freed pending appeal, Katterfeld did not immediately serve time on this sentence, instead serving as Executive Secretary of the unified Communist Party of America, using the pseudonym "John Carr," from July 27 through October 15, 1921, and which time the Central Executive Committee of the CPA dispatched him to Moscow as the representative of the CPA to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Katterfeld occupied this position from November 1921 through March 1922. He was elected by the 1st Expanded Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International to the Presidium of ECCI on March 2, 1922.

Back in the United States, Katterfeld was elected by the ill-fated 1922 Bridgman Convention of the CPA once again to the governing National Executive Committee of the party. He also served provisionally as Executive Secretary for the organization for about two weeks at the end of August and into September 1922.

The CEC once again named Katterfeld its representative to the Comintern in Moscow on September 5, 1922, ending his brief stint as party chief. He made his way to Soviet Russia once again, where he served as CI Rep until the first week of December, when he turned over his job to Otto Huiswoud and returned to the United States, due to the needs of his 1920 legal difficulties. Katterfeld was one again elected to ECCI by the 4th World Congress of the Comintern in December 1922.

While he was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Workers Party of America by the 3rd Convention of that organization at the end of 1923, Katterfeld was at the time in prison at Joliet, Illinois in connection with his 1920 conviction. He sat one year in prison, assisting with the bookkeeping at the institution.

Katterfeld was the manager of the eastern agency of the Daily Worker Publishing Co. in 1926 and 1927. Whittaker Chambers described in his memoirs at some length:

Katterfeld looked like the type of Communist I had hoped to find on my first visit to the English-speaking branch. He was a German-American, humorless, grave, with a lined, austere face. He had been an unsuccessful Kansas wheat farmer, graduating from a native school of agrarian radicalism. Poverty was a vocation with him. His frayed overcoat was the uniform of his faith, and, like everything else about him, it was of a piece with a revolutionary integrity that shone from him more purely than from almost any other American Communist I knew. He lived in a little house on Long Island in the same woods where I had wandered as a boy, for, like me, he did not like cities. He had a big family of boys and girls, and, when I had come to know him better, he once confided to me with wistful dismay that his children "regarded the Communist Party the way Communists regard capitalism—as a cause of poverty and exploitation." They wanted to live like other people and detested Communists and Communist meetings. During the party's underground days Katterfeld had briefly been the party's acting secretary. But his revolutionary intelligence was not quite up to his revolutionary spirit. Both made him something of a butt for men who were less good and less devout, but brighter. He was an extreme leftist and held that the Communist Party should have remained permanently underground, sensing, I think, that the underground experience inevitably winnowed out men less dedicated than himself, and thus left a core of hardened professional revolutionists. He could not face the fact that Lenin had tirelessly taught that, when a whole Communist party is outlawed, it is almost wholly paralyzed because it can no longer send into the surrounding community the filaments whereby it spreads its toxins and from which it draws its strength and life. That a hard core of devoted men like himself existed was more important to Katterfeld than what they existed for. When the Lovestoneites took power in the party, Katterfeld withdrew from it.