America's First Communists

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The Communist party of the USA was formed in 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution. Witness tells the story of two of those first American communists, Ella and Bert Wolfe, who in the early years of persecution had to live under false names. In 1921, they fled to Mexico where they later became friends of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to someone who knew them. . Photograph: Ella and Bert Wolfe (courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives)