People Australia

Harry Wicks, c.1956

Wicks, Herbert Moore (Harry), known as Harry M. Wicks, Herbert Moore, or ‘WYZ’ (1889-1956) journalist, politician and Communist leader 

Birth: 10 December 1889 at Arcola, Illinois, United States of America, son of an electrical engineer. Marriage: details unknown. Death: 1956 in USA. 

• After schooling in Arcola, Illinois, USA, and Des Moines, Iowa, Wicks worked as a compositor. He was active in the Communist Party of America.
• Came to Australia with a female companion on 8 April 1930, purportedly sent by the Comintern “to oversee the party’s ‘bolshevisation’”.
• Quickly became a leader in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). From August 1930 to July 1931, as Herbert Moore, he contributed many articles to the Workers Weekly (Sydney).
• “Wicks’ authority went unchallenged in the CPA and party members were anxious to win his approval”. In 1930 he, Herbert Moxon and Ted Docker comprised the party secretariat.
• He was largely responsible for the removal from the CPA of Kavanagh, Jack Ryan and others and later Moxon, and the rise to prominence of Docker, J. B. Miles and Lance Sharkey. According to Kavanagh, “most members of the central committee plenum in June 1930 . . . kowtowed to Wicks’”.
• ‘Comrade Moore’ also dominated the CPA congress in Melbourne in April 1931. He left Australia in July 1931 and returned to the USA, where he re-emerged in Communist circles and was active in politics.
• Wicks was ultimately expelled from the American Communist party as a spy and it has been claimed that he was an undercover agent for anti-communist organisations for the whole of his party career.
• As Herbert Moore he wrote Australia and the World Crisis; political report to the 10th Congress, Communist Party of Australia (Sydney, 1931). After his death his Eclipse of October: how a revolution that proclaimed the emancipation of all who toil was negated into an instrument of Tyranny was published in Chicago in 1957.

Sources
Malcolm Henry Ellis, The red road: the story of the capture of the Lang party by Communists, instructed from Moscow (Sydney [1932), and The Garden path (Sydney, 1949); Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: a short history, (Stanford, 1969), pp 51-54; Frank Farrell, International socialism and Australian labour; the left in Australia, 1919-29 (Sydney, 1981), p 182; Barbara Curthoys, ‘The Comintern, the CPA, and the Impact of Harry Wicks’, in Australian Journal of Politics and History, April 1993, pp 23-36’; Beris Penrose, ‘Herbert Moxon, a Victim of the “Bolshevisation” of the Communist Party’, Labour History, No. 70, 30 May 1996, pp 92-114; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney, 1998), pp170-178; biographical entry in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._M._Wicks , accessed 15 January 2025.