ABSTRACT
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leadership, needing experienced and dedicated organizers, decided to use the Communists; they played key roles in one large CIO union, the United Electrical Workers, and seventeen smaller CIO affiliates with 1,370,000 unionists, a quarter of the CIO's total membership in 1945. Popular hostility to communism was such, however, that most CIO Communists concealed their Communist allegiance. The collapse of Soviet communism has opened previously closed Soviet archives to scholars, including the files of the Communist International. Crouch and Johnson, who appeared at a number of trials as witnesses against Communists, added that they had seen Bridges himself at the convention, held in New York. Researchers over the years have compiled lists of members but such lists, however, were always incomplete because the party press rarely identified more than a portion of the committee's total membership and because the memories of former Communists were not always reliable.
