<P> By August 1919, only months after its founding, the Communist Party USA claimed 50,000 to 60,000 members . Members also included anarchists and other radical leftists . In contrast, the more moderate Socialist Party of America had 40,000 members . The sections of the Communist Party's International Workers Order meanwhile organized for communism along linguistic and ethnic lines, providing mutual aid and tailored cultural activities to an IWO membership that peaked at 200,000 at its height . </P> <P> The ideological rigidity of the Third Period began to crack, however, with two events: the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president of the United States in 1932 and Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933 . Roosevelt's election and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 sparked a tremendous upsurge in union organizing in 1933 and 1934 . Many conservatives equated the New Deal with socialism or Communism, and saw its policies as evidence that the government had been heavily influenced by Communist policy - makers in the Roosevelt administration . Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff argues that socialist and communist parties, along with organized labor, played a collective role in pushing through New Deal legislation, and conservative opponents of the New Deal coordinated an effort to single out and destroy them as a result . </P> <P> The Seventh Congress of the Comintern made the change in line official in 1935, when it declared the need for a popular front of all groups opposed to fascism . The CPUSA abandoned its opposition to the New Deal, provided many of the organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and began supporting civil rights of African Americans . The party also sought unity with forces to its right . Earl Russell Browder offered to run as Norman Thomas' running mate on a joint Socialist Party - Communist Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election but Thomas rejected this overture . The gesture did not mean that much in practical terms, since the CPUSA was, by 1936, effectively supporting Roosevelt in much of his trade union work . While continuing to run its own candidates for office, the CPUSA pursued a policy of representing the Democratic Party as the lesser evil in elections . Party members also rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic during this period after a Nationalist military uprising moved to overthrow it, resulting in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). The CPUSA, along with leftists throughout the world, raised funds for medical relief while many of its members made their way to Spain with the aid of the party to join the Lincoln Brigade, one of the International Brigades . Among its other achievements, the Lincoln Brigade was the first American military force to include blacks and whites integrated on an equal basis . </P> <P> Intellectually, the Popular Front period saw the development of a strong communist influence in intellectual and artistic life . This was often through various organizations influenced or controlled by the Party or, as they were pejoratively known, "fronts". The CPUSA under Browder supported Stalin's show trials in the Soviet Union, called the Moscow Trials . Therein, between August 1936 and mid-1938 the Soviet government indicted, tried, and shot virtually all of the remaining Old Bolsheviks . Beyond the show trials lay a broader purge, the Great Purge, that killed millions . Browder uncritically supported Stalin, likening Trotskyism to "cholera germs" and calling the purge "a signal service to the cause of progressive humanity". He compared the show trial defendants to domestic traitors Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, disloyal War of 1812 Federalists, and Confederate secessionists, while likening persons who "smeared" Stalin's name to those who had slandered Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt . </P>

What impact did the social reformers of the late nineteenth century have on american life