Robert W. Cherny

Robert W. Cherny is professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University. His books and journal articles deal with American politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and with the history of San Francisco, California, and the West in the 20th century. His most recent book, San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 (2024), explores the history of the local Communist Party through the experiences of some fifty individuals, most of whom joined in the 1920s or 1930s, and most of whom left the party in late 1950s. His Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (2023), the biography of the long-time leader of the Pacific Coast longshore and warehouse union, deals with labor and politics on the Pacific Coast from the 1930s to the 1980s. Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (2017), examines New Deal and Cold War art and politics through the life of an artist. The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco (forthcoming in late 2024) expands on the history of New Deal art by focusing first on the once controversial murals at Coit Tower in San Francisco and then looking more generally at the influence of those murals and at recent controversies over New Deal art in San Francisco.