I, Alfred Wagenknecht and Hortense Allison Correspondence, Photographs, and Other Material

This series contains correspondence, photographs, postcards and memorabilia created or collected by Alfred Wagenknecht and his wife Hortense Allison Wagenknecht mostly in the 1910s-1930s. Correspondence consists primarily of letters from the 1920s between Alfred and Hortense. Letters provide details of Alfred Wagenknecht's professional work for the Communist Party USA, the Communist International (Comintern), and the Jimmy Higgins Bookshop in Greenwich Village, managed by Wagenknecht's brother-in-law, Elmer Allison. Includes letters and related photographs from a trip by Wagenknecht to Germany for a conference in 1922 as a delegate of American Friends of Soviet Russia, and to visit his hometown of Goerlitz. Letters from 1926 provide details of Wagenknecht's work as one of the CPUSA's organizers of the Passaic Textile Strike. Many of the travel, documentary and street photographs in this series appear to have been taken by Alfred Wagenknecht himself and include annotations on their backs. These include photographs from a trip to the Philippines, China and Japan in 1924. Several of these photographs were published in the Communist Party's Workers Monthly, including a photograph of Sun Yat Sen. Photographs from his 1922 trip to Europe include a series documenting a demonstration in Berlin the day after the assassination of Walter Rathenau, and several photographs that include Willi Munzenberg, an organizer of Workers International Relief. This series also includes a photo album documenting the Wagenknecht-Allison family between 1919 and 1925, as well as studio portraits and passport pictures of Wagenknecht and others, postcards from travels to Germany and Asia, and negatives.