ABSTRACT
The highlight of the Communist campaign was a sensational report in the Daily Worker that Gidow, the candidate for Vice-President, had been kidnaped from a train at Phoenix, Arizona, and abandoned in the middle of a desert. In Communist mythology, Lovestone has been ridiculed for preaching that American capitalism was "exempt from that system's laws of growth and decay" and that "there was no prospect of an economic crisis in the United States". In fact, Lovestone, as much as any other Communist of the period, took for granted the inevitability of an economic crisis. Lovestone, however, had won too massive a majority at the convention to give it up without a struggle. For the first—and last—time in the history of American Communism, a convention was deliberately organized to disobey the Comintern and to flout the wishes of its authorized representatives.
