William Wolf Weinstone (1897–1985) was an American Communist politician and labor leader. Weinstone served as Executive Secretary of the unified Communist Party of America, the forerunner of today's Communist Party USA, from October 15, 1921, to February 22, 1922, and was an important figure in the party's activities among the auto workers of Detroit during the 1930s.
Background
William Weinstone was born December 15, 1897, in Vilnius, then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Will was the son of Jewish parents who emigrated from Russia to escape that nation's pervasive antisemitism during the late Tsarist period. His original surname was "Weinstein," a name which he Americanized when he was older.
Career
Early years
In June 1919, Weinstone was elected as an alternate delegate to the Left Wing National Conference held in New York City, at which he was seated to replace a regular delegate on the last day of the gathering.
Weinstone was elected as a delegate to the founding convention of the Communist Party of America, called to order in Chicago on September 1, 1919.
During the first years of the 1920s, the Communist Party of America was forced underground by the mass operation of the U.S. Department of Justice remembered as the Palmer Raids. During this interval, Weinstone served as Executive Secretary of the secret party organization from October 15, 1921, to February 22, 1922, under the pseudonym "G. Lewis."
In the summer of 1929, following the removal of Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow from the leadership of the Communist Party, Weinstone was added to the ranks of a new collective leadership called the Secretariat. Although he had aspirations of permanent leadership, Weinstone was ultimately unable to retain the top leadership, which soon fell to Earl Browder, a longtime factional rival.
In July 1929, Weinstone ran for Mayor of New York City. Following the campaign, Weinstone was selected by the Communist Party as its representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow, a post which he occupied until 1931. On January 15, 1931, William Albertson was to serve as secretary of a "Provisional Anti-War Youth Committee" of New York State to hold a rally for a Liebknecht Memorial and Anti-War Demonstration at the Star Casono at Park Avenue and 117 Street in Manhattan; CPUSA executive Weinstone and YCL leader Gil Green were to attend.
Weinstone ran for U.S. Senator from New York in 1932.
As an executive officer of the Communist Party in Michigan during a wave of Great Depression union activity during the mid-1930s, Weinstone played a significant role in the founding of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) in May 1935, pressing the unionized workers to make use of the sit-down strike, a tactic first employed by the Industrial Workers of the World union. The union's wave of successful sit-down strikes culminated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937, in which the striking UAW workers occupied several General Motors plants for over forty daysrepelling the efforts of the police and National Guard to drive them from the auto plant's premises.
A member of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party during the same period, Weinstone concurrently worked on the party's cause on behalf of oppressed African Americans in the segregated southern states. Writing for such Communist publications as The International Communist, he was a strong champion of the defense of the falsely-accused Scottsboro Boys, whose successful legal defense was organized by the Communist-funded International Labor Defense, as was the famous case of young African American organizer Angelo Herndon.
In 1938 Weinstone was named Director of the New York Workers School, the Communist Party's ideological training school located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He served in that role until 1944.
Later years
Still publishing material for the communist cause into the twilight of his life, Winestone, together with Theodore Bassett and Philip A. Bart, was also co-editor of Highlights of a Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA, a broad selection of speeches, essays, and documents from the party's history; his recollection of organizing work during the autoworkers' sit-down strike was published in The Great Sit-Down Strike, a work produced by the party-organized Workers Library Publishers in 1937.