And in their effort to do so they adopted a resolution in which they repudiated all of this political statement and line that we are now talking about. That was a formal act.
Mr. TAVENNER. There was considerable testimony before this committee at the time it attempted to interrogate Max Granich and his wife, who were connected with a news facility which transmits from Europe to this country decisions of the Communist Party on an international level, and we heard a number of witnesses, including Louis Budenz, who was connected with the Daily Worker.
The testimony is very clear that that action you have spoken of was a device, not in good faith a severance or a disavowal of what had happened before. But it was a device, to keep the Communist Party from being liable under provisions of the Voorhis Act to which you have referred, of representing a foreign country.
Mr. DENNETT. Browder visited here in the Northwest during the time this action was being taken, and he explained it to our district bureau in this fashion, that the law was clearly aimed at putting the Communist Party out of business, and that the Communist Party was determined to not be put out of business, and it was going to comply with the act to the best of its ability, but that certainly did not mean that the Communist Party was going to disavow its sympathy with the working class throughout the world and the various sections of the Communist Party throughout the world.
There was great apprehension on the part of our district bureau about the action. We feared that perhaps the Communist Party was going nationalist on us, and we thought that was a heinous crime, that you should always be internationalists. And Browder was reassuring us that the Communist philosophy was still internationalist and would continue to be internationalist, but that the formal connection and the formal affiliations would have to be dispensed with.
He felt that the party was strong enough to travel along the road, as it needed to, without the direct intervention of the Comintern.
And, of course, it was shortly after that the Comintern itself was dissolved.
Mr. TAVENNER. How long did this organization, the Trade Union Unity League, remain in effect in this area? And when I say in effect, I mean in existence.