Maximilian Cohen

Maximilian "Max" Cohen was an American

Communist Party of America

in that same year.

Biography

Early years

Maximilian Cohen was born in the United States to

Socialist Labor Party in 1904 before moving to the Socialist Party of America in 1913. He trained and worked professionally as a dentist

.

The early US Communist movement

In 1919, with the emergence of an organized

The Revolutionary Age.^[1]

Later in 1919, Left Wing Section, Local New York decided to issue its own weekly newspaper, The New York Communist. Max Cohen was made business manager of the new paper, which was edited by the celebrated

Ben Gitlow taking over the job.^[2]

Later in June 1919, the national Left Wing Section held an organizational Left Wing National Conference in New York City. There Cohen was elected Secretary of the governing National Council of this group. Cohen was one of those members of the National Council who sought to avoid a split of the emerging Communist movement by endorsing the convention call issued by the

Communist Party of America in Chicago on September 1, 1919. On this matter he came into bitter disagreement with Reed, Gitlow, and other leading members of the Left Wing Section, who sought to fight for control of the Socialist Party at its 1919 Emergency National Convention

, slated for August 30 in that same city. This disagreement over tactics led to the formation of two separate organizations — the Communist Party of America (CPA) and the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP), groups which fought each other tooth and nail for the next two years before finally merging their forces permanently in the middle of 1922.

Cohen was elected as a delegate to the founding convention of the CPA in September 1919 and served as a member of the 9 member committee of the convention which wrote the CPA's program. He was also chosen as editor of the organization's official organ, a weekly newspaper published in New York and called The Communist.

Cohen was elected a member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the CPA in 1920 and served on the "Executive Council" of that body which conducted day-to-day operations. He was the organizer for District II for that organization (New York City and environs) from January 1920 onwards as well as continuing to serve as the Editor in Chief for the organization.

At the end of 1920, Cohen — an extremely loyal supporter of the Communist International — ran afoul with a majority group in the CPA which sought to delay merger with the successor to the CLP to maximize their factional advantage in a united organization. For his outspoken criticism of the party's disingenuous "unity" strategy, Cohen was stripped of his editorship and expelled from the party on January 16, 1921. The expelled loyalist Cohen was rewarded by the Comintern when its 3-man American Agency, given the task by Moscow of forging a unified Communist Party in the USA and developing sister organizations in Mexico and South America, sent Cohen to Argentina to organize the framework of a Communist trade union movement in that country. It is unknown whether Cohen achieved anything in this role.

Later years

Cohen seems to have fallen out of the Communist Party's political leadership from that date. He periodically advertised his dentistry services in the party press in ensuing years and resurfaced in 1933 as the head of the Rose Pastor Stokes Testimonial Committee, an offshoot of the Communist Party which held a benefit dinner on her behalf on April 4, 1933, in an effort to raise funds to pay for her treatment for cancer.^[3]

Cohen was also a formal public endorser of the National Committee to Aid the Victims of German Fascism, a mass organization formed circa 1934 "for protest and relief to aid the victims and refugees of the Hitler regime." The

Martin Dies of Texas, declared in a published report that "a glance at the personnel of this committee is sufficient to indicate that it is an auxiliary of the Communist Party."^[4]

Footnotes

^ Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957. Page 145.
^ The entire run of The New York Communist was reissued in book and microfilm form in 1970 by the Greenwood Reprint Corporation of Westport, CT.
^ See Rose Pastor Stokes Papers, available on microfilm.
^ Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Appendix — Part IX: Communist Front Organizations..., pp. 1169-1170.

[1] Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957. Page 145.

[2] The entire run of The New York Communist was reissued in book and microfilm form in 1970 by the Greenwood Reprint Corporation of Westport, CT.

[3] See Rose Pastor Stokes Papers, available on microfilm.

[4] Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Appendix — Part IX: Communist Front Organizations..., pp. 1169-1170.

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