The Communist, the journal of the United Communist Party, carried a toned-down sequel to the ultimatum in its April 1921 issue, along with detailed Comintern instructions about the format of the unifying convention. The Communist unquestioningly accepted the Comintern's assertion of authority, proclaiming: "The Communist International has acted! . . . It is binding on the convention and on the representatives themselves. There will be no modification.... The highest authority of the Communist movement has spoken." The convention met in May, and the two parties formally merged under the name Communist Party of America.

     Soon afterward, factionalism once more rent the movement. At the third Comintern congress in June, Lenin had announced a shift in Communist policy. Asserting that expectations of an immediate, widespread proletarian revolution were an illusion, he insisted that Communist parties worldwide begin a lengthy period of proselytizing. Their first task would be to win organizational and ideological control over the industrial workers. American Communists found the new Comintern policy hard to accept. Most of them had abandoned the Socialist Party because it had failed to support immediate revolution, and the Communist Party of America had specifically organized itself on the Bolshevik model as an underground insurrectionary movement. Now, the American party found itself under Comintern orders to surface and undertake the slow task of organizing American workers. Nonetheless, the majority of\ the American party's Central Executive Committee (CEC, at that time the party's highest body) created an above-ground party, the Workers Party of America, at a convention held on 23-26 December 1921.

     A minority of the CEC balked, however. They refused to recognize the new party, called an underground party convention, and proclaimed themselves the legitimate Communist party. All the evidence suggests that this dissident, underground convention attracted the support of a majority of rank-and-file American Communists. The dissidents did not see themselves as acting independent of the Comintern, nor did they believe that they were defying Moscow. Rather, they thought that they were allowed some latitude in interpreting the Comintern's directives. As a concession to the Comintern's demand for an above-ground organization, they created the United Toilers of America as a legal front. Once again there were two Communist parties, each with an underground and an above-ground arm.

     Both factions sent telegrams and delegations to Moscow justifying their actions and requesting Comintern recognition as the legitimate Communist party. After hearing out the rival delegations, the Comintern issued document 2. This order, addressed to "All Members of the Communist Party of America," drove home the point that the American party possessed only such latitude as the Comintern chose to give it. The order ignored the issue of which faction could claim the greater support. Instead, the key question was which faction was "in harmony with the Theses of the Third Congress . . . sent to the American Party as an in