ABSTRACT
BILL FOSTER, for years the general secretary of the Commu-nist Party of the United States, told me once that according to his calculations, during the thirty years (at the time) of the party's existence in America, more than 600,000 men and women had signed party cards and had become members of the partymost of them leaving after various lengths of time. The membership of the party at the end of World War Two had been, along with that of the Young Communist League, close to 100,000. When I left the party, the membership had dropped to about twenty thousand. It was said that more than half of that membership resigned when I did, and by the end of 1957, the Communist Party of the United States had for all practical purposes ceased to exist.
