Much of the literature concerning the Communist Party, U.S.A., is quite useless, even counterproductive, to an effort to make sense of the Communist experience. Too many studies are marred by the ideological distortions of partisan writers.
First and foremost are the autobiographies and memoirs of veterans of the American Communist movement. Most of those written by Party loyalists and published by Party outlets are of limited value insofar as they serve as apologetics rather than as critical evaluations of political careers. Examples include: Hosea Hudson, Black Worker in the Deep South (New York: International Publishers, 1972); William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Al Richmond, Native Daughter: The Story of Anita Whitney (San Francisco: Anita Whitney 75th Anniversary Committee, 1942); John Williamson, Dangerous Scot (New York: International Publishers, 1969); William Z. Foster, Pages from a Worker’s Life (New York: International Publishers, 1939); Joseph North, Robert Minor: Artist and Crusader (New York: International Publishers, 1956).
The best of such relatively orthodox memoirs include Wyndham Mortimer’s Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), a lively account of organizing in the auto industry, and Len DeCaux’s Labor Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), a colorful account of an old Wobbly’s role in the rise of the CIO. Both Mortimer’s and Decaux’s memoirs suffer from the same limitation as James J. Matles and James Higgins’s account of the history of UE, Them and Us (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974): a tendency to avoid the issue of the role of the Communist Party.
Accounts by ex-Communists who have “seen the light” and wish to demonstrate their newly found orthodoxy have virtually no value for the historian. Most, like Louis Budenz, This Is My Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947); Bella Dodd, School of Darkness (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1954); and Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1940), melodramatically exaggerate Communist espionage and subversion and ignore the more substantial organizing efforts that took place in various districts and involved many more people.
The most useful autobiographical material comes from those former Party members who have deserted the Party but not the cause, that is, who have remained essentially consistent in their political values and goals over decades. Such participants, most of whom spent several decades in the Party, have been better able to reflect on the contradictory qualities and consequences of American Communism. While humbled by their experiences, they have not repudiated their vision; consequently, their recollections are less melodramatic and more considered. Nevertheless, they are creatures of their pasts and inevitably engage in some self-justification. Most such memoirs are by anti-Stalinist Party reformers who split during the mid-fifties crises associated with Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress revelations about Stalin and the Soviet intervention in Hungary; a few are by members who resigned in the aftermath of the Soviet military action in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The earliest accounts are the least reflective, although they provide an excellent sense of how the failed Party reformers felt in the mid-Fifties. John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958), is useful, but the most insightful account remains George Charney’s A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), especially for its sensitivity to racial tensions and to the process of disengagement from Party orthodoxy.
More recent memoirs are more reflective. Al Richmond, A Long View From the Left (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), particularly valuable for its picture of the important West Coast Party districts; Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), which displays a rarely seen left-wing humor and provides a unique perspective on Party life during the McCarthy period; Kenneth Kann, Joe Rapoport: The Life of a Jewish Radical (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), an entertaining reflection of a twenties-generation Communist with roots in the Yiddish-socialist subculture of the garment industry.
Two other autobiographical works provide particular insight into the role of women within the Communist Party: Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Lawrence Hill, Creative Arts Books, 1977), and Vera Buch Weisbord, A Radical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). Weisbord’s account focuses on the twenties and early thirties; Dennis’s covers almost five decades of Party history. In both cases, the portrait of the author’s Party leader spouse devastatingly reveals his sexism and yet is loving and empathetic.
Much of the scholarly work on the American Communist Party is dominated by Cold War ideology and passion. Anti-Communist scholars, sometimes veterans of the intraradical battles of the twenties and thirties, sought to analyze American Communism for particular political purposes. For example, Philip Selznick, the pioneer organizational theorist, concludes in his Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952) that there must be a “denial to communists of legitimate participation in labor and reformist organizations,” and the development of anti-Communist elites as a counter-force as well (pp. 328–29). Though such scholars as Selznick, Gabriel Almond, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Louis Coser, David Shannon, and Daniel Bell have made real contributions, most Cold War-inspired studies suffer from excessive partisanship. Either they place the darkest and most sinister interpretation on every act the Party took, or they construct social-psychological typologies that correlate adherence to the Communist Party with neurotic behavior and psychopathology. The worst examples of this type include: Frank Meyer, The Moulding of Communists (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961); Max Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1957); Robert Iverson, The Communist and the Schools (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Morris Ernst and David Loth, Report on the American Communist (New York: Praeger, 1952). Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), presents useful comparative crossnational data but is marred by psychological reductionism and an obsession with “the vulnerability of the free world to Communist penetration” (p. ix). Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), is rich in data and especially insightful in matters of ethnicity.
The various histories of the CPUSA are essential reading despite their obvious anti-Party biases. There have been sufficient examples of cynical and manipulative Communist Party behavior for the following studies to include a sufficient quantity of accurate data and reasonable if harsh interpretations: Irving Howe and Louis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger Paperbacks, 1962); Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). All such accounts tend to emphasize the Party’s responsiveness to Soviet directives and its adherence to a Stalinized model of political action that dehumanized both members and those touched by the Party. Such analyses, however, have been incapable of explaining the idealism of Party members except by the most reductionist psychological means. Theories of inner and outer membership (Howe and Coser, pp. 536–42, and Almond, pp. 65, 93) account for the behavior of Party leaders but remain too crude and abstract to shed any light on the lives of most participants.
More recently, younger scholars have begun to provide us with less ideologically oriented studies. Such studies, in addition, have taken a more modest, empirical approach rather than the more abstract and theoretical accounts of the past. The broadest of such studies is Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), which provides useful data and perceptive observations concerning the national leadership of the Party but, despite its title, does not focus on the actual cadres, that is, the full-time activists who typically did not become national functionaries.
A number of younger scholars have focused on local or sectoral Communist Party experience. The most prolific and insightful work is that of Mark Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem, 1928–36” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1976); “Marxism and Black Radicalism in America,” Radical America (May–June 1971); “The Communist Party in Harlem,” Radical History Review (Fall 1976); “Harlem Communists and the Politics of Black Protest,” Marxist Perspectives (Fall 1978). Naison’s major contribution has been to provide scholars with a reinterpretation of the Party’s anti-racist and civil rights efforts, a much needed revision. Other valuable efforts include Maurice Isserman’s perceptive overview, “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism,” Radical America (March-April 1980); James Prickett, “Communists and the Communist Issue in the American Labor Movement, 1920–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, U.C.L.A., 1975); and Roger Keeran, ‘Everything for Victory’: Communist Influence in the Auto Industry during World War II,” Science & Society (Spring 1979).
A few studies of European Communist parties are particularly suggestive. Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), is informative and incisive despite its ideological biases. Donald L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow, editors of Communism in Italy and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), criticize studies that “have tended to treat ‘the party’ as a monolithic structure, ignoring the significance of local and regional differences in composition and in implementation of party policies” (p. 16).
Stimulated by the memoirs of Peggy Dennis, Jessica Mitford, and Vera Buch Weisbord, young scholars are beginning to examine the role of women within the Communist Party. Such efforts have tended so far to focus too much on Party women in leadership positions and not enough on rank-and-file and district cadres: Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review (May–June 1979); Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies 31 (Fall 1979), including a response by Peggy Dennis and an afterword by Trimberger.
Young scholars have responded to Nathan Glazer’s pioneer call for sensitivity to the issue of ethnicity within the Party. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), includes a section on Communism but is particularly useful in analyzing the Jewish-socialist subculture. The work of Klehr, Naison, Cruse, Record, and Schappes is essential; see Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1969), Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), and Morris U. Schappes, “The Jewish Question and the Left: Old and New,” Jewish Current Reprint (New York: Jewish Currents, 1970). Paul Buhle has recently contributed a thoughtful essay, “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question,” Radical History Review (Spring 1980).
Explanations of the ultimate decline of the American Communist Party are abundant and, though involving considerable controversy, fairly well defined. David Shannon argues that Soviet domination and dictation destroyed the Party, shattering its integrity and aborting any possibility of indigenous policies. Many others agree that the inability to respond to the American environment crippled Party activities (see Howe and Coser, Richmond). An adherence to Marxist-Leninist formulas further warped by Stalinist dogma made it virtually impossible for the American Communist Party to develop a native strategy appropriate to a highly industrialized democracy.
Analysts emphasize the inadequacies and contradictions of the policy imposed from Moscow but fashioned and carried out at home. Joseph R. Starobin, perhaps the most perceptive historian of the Party, suggests in American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) that the Party found itself caught between two strategies: reform and revolution, a pragmatic response to American circumstances and a dogmatic application of abstract theory. As Starobin persuasively demonstrates, “The American Communists did not choose either alternative: their story resides in having tried both, within a single decade (and at times simultaneously) and having succeeded at neither” (p. 237). James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), supports Starobin’s thesis but strongly criticizes the reformist Popular Front strategy the Party followed in the late thirties. In Weinstein’s view, neither the Fosterite syndicalist approach nor the Browderite reformist strategy offered any solutions to the problem of maximizing socialist consciousness within particular segments of the population. As the Sixties reaffirmed, rhetorical militancy and obsequiousness to foreign models do not provide socialist strategies. In fact, they often disguise their absence.
Analysts also differ over the causes of the decline of the Party in the mid-fifties. While most scholars emphasize the above-stated limitations and contradictions, others, such as Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Justice: The Smith Act, The Communist Party and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), stress governmental prosecutions under the Smith Act and the generally repressive atmosphere of the McCarthy red scare. These factors certainly guaranteed that the Party, unable to revive the Popular Front to ensure its political survival, was in a weakened state when it faced the mid-fifties crises of Khrushchev’s revelations, the exposure of Soviet anti-Semitism, and the invasion of Hungary. Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (New York: The Free Press, 1973), provides the best account of the second Popular Front of the Progressive Party period; and Richard H. Pells’s excellent Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1974) presents a framework for understanding the culture of Popular Frontism.
Whether the Party could have weathered its own international and national storms and salvaged at least the core of loyal supporters in a less repressive setting remains unresolved. New Left critics of the Party have argued that the Party’s reformism, its refusal to establish a socialist strategy in the thirties, and its propensity to maintain a “private vision” contributed to its demise. Old Left veterans and scholars have countered that the Party’s socialist vision was quite explicit during Popular Front periods and that its limited success in generating socialist consciousness was a result of deeply rooted ideological and cultural factors within the United States. (For a sample of such disputes see Max Gordon, “The Communist Party of the Nineteen-thirties and the New Left,” Socialist Revolution [January-March 1976], including a response by James Weinstein and Gordon’s reply.) New Left criticisms, somewhat tempered by a growing recognition of the difficulties of building a socialist movement, remain persuasive but at the margins of historical contingency. The CPUSA limited its ability to build a socialist presence within organized labor and in the political arena by its idolatrous relationship to the Soviet Union, its chronic dogmatism and intolerance, and its often cynical manipulation of indigenous values and liberal-reformist goals. However, it seems clear that the Communist Party’s failures stem more from repression and unique American circumstances than from its own deficiencies. Indeed, the French and Italian Communist parties suffered from the same limitations but had the differential of wartime resistance to catapult them into the status of mass, working-class parties, while the old orders were repudiated for either outright fascism or at least collaboration with the occupying enemy. The American party, despite its wartime support for the antifascist cause, was limited by the strength of its bourgeois adversary in both the liberal New Deal and the conservative Republican versions.
Finally, to revise one of Marx’s most notable comments, scholars have only interpreted radical history in various ways; the point is to change its direction toward a socialist cultural hegemony. I hope that I have made a minor contribution toward that end.