ABSTRACT
On the surface, the underground period seems like the dark age of American Communism. But something of the utmost historical importance did happen— a crisis so profound and far-reaching that the entire future of world communism was at stake in it. The crisis came because world communism could not live on the proceeds of the Russian Revolution indefinitely. The great illusion that the entire capitalist world was about to go down was as much Russian as American—in 1919. The race to Moscow started soon after Louis C. Fraina was elected International Secretary of the Communist party and Reed the International Delegate of the Communist Labor party at the Chicago conventions in September 1919. The First Congress of the Comintern in March 1919 had been so poorly attended that the second one was really the first in terms of policy and organization.
