notes

chapter 1

1. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 60–68. Trotskyists (or Trotskyites, Trots) were followers of the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who was purged and finally murdered by Stalin’s agents. Shactmanites were followers of Max Shactman; who led a break from Trotskyists in 1940.

2. C. Wright Mills, “The Politics of Responsibility,” in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), pp. 23–31; William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishers, 1961); James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), esp. ch. 3, 5, 6.

3. Erich Fromm, ed., Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969).

4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

5. Ibid., pp. 79–83, 254–57.

6. See especially Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Noonday Press, 1962), part 2.

7. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, selection in Socialist Thought: A Documentary History, eds. Alfred Fried and Ronald Sanders (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1964), p. 290

8. See, for example, Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Morris Ernst and David Loth, Report on the American Communist (New York: Praeger, 1952); Frank Meyer, The Moulding of Communists (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961). The best-known and most influential of such studies is Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1962).

9. On deviance, see Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963).

10. See Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change (Chicago: Markham, 1971), for an excellent account of who became a radical in the sixties.

11. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).

12. For the clearest and most self-righteous expression of this viewpoint, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).

13. See Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).

14. Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

15. See note 8; also Irving Howe and Louis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger Paperbacks, 1962); David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1966), and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960).

16. See Maurice Isserman’s thoughtful essay, “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism,” Radical America (March–April 1980), pp. 43–57, for a useful framework. Isserman argues that too many scholars, hostile and empathetic, “treat the people who joined the CP in the 1930s as the passive agents of a politics imposed on them from above and without.” He contends that in many ways such thirties Communists “shaped the Party to fit their own needs and expectations,” pp. 43–4.

17. Tamara Hareven, “The Search for Generational Memory: Tribal Rites in Industrial Society,” Daedalus (Fall 1978), p. 141.

18. Ibid., pp. 142, 143.

19. William W. Moss, Oral History Program Manual (New York: Praeger, 1976). To protect anonymity, interview material has not been included within footnote references, except in reference to Sam Darcy, whose national experiences have already brought him a degree of recognition.

20. Almond, Appeals, pp. xii, 401. Almond, with scanty evidence, found a high proportion of American Communist subjects viewing the Party “as a means of solving the personal problems of rebelliousness, isolation and the need for certainty and security” (p. 172). On the basis of the case studies he evaluated, he concluded that “many of the families described involved weak fathers and dominating mothers” (p. 288).

21. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. xi–xii.

22. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p. xi.

23. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 127.

24. Annie Kriegel, “Generational Difference: The History of an Idea,” Daedalus (Fall 1978), p. 29.

25. Isserman, “The 1956 Generation,” argues that it is “useful to think of the history of the CP from about 1930 through 1956 as a whole, and as the history of a single generation” (p. 46).

26. André Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

27. Stanley Moore, “utopian Themes in Marx and Mao,” Dissent (March–April 1970) and Monthly Review 21 (June 1969). As Peter Clecak notes, Moore’s piece is the only article ever to appear in both journals, Radical Paradoxes, pp. 305–306.

28 Ibid., p. 171, 175.

29. V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 542.

30. See Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 362.

chapter 2

1. See Lewis Feuer, The Conflict of Generations (New York: Basic Books, 1969), for a shrewd but reductionist Freudian approach; see also note 8, Chapter 1.

2. Annie Kriegel, “Generational Difference: The History of an Idea,” Daedalus (Fall 1978), p. 32.

3. Morton Keller, “Reflections on Politics and Generations in America, Daedalus (Fall 1978), p. 127; See also Norman B. Ryder, “The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change,” American Sociological Review (1965), Kriegel, “Generational Difference,” p. 29. The entire Fall 1978 issue of Daedalus is devoted to the concept of generations and contains some valuable and provocative material.

4. Kriegel, “Generational Difference,” p. 32.

5. For the most thorough study of the effects of the Depression on an entire generation, see Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

6. For the most comprehensive accounts of early Party history, see Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1966) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger Paperbacks, 1962), pp. 1–174; James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), pp. 26–43; Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 122–33.

7. Draper’s Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia provide the most detailed account of this process. Lovestonites were followers of Jay Lovestone, an American Communist Party leader purged in the late twenties as a “right deviationist.”

8. Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), pp. 42–52.

9. All selections from the “Little Lenin Library” of International Publishers, New York.

10. Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 175–272; Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, pp. 43–56.

11. Ibid.

12. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 92; Bell, Marxian Socialism, p. 141.

13. Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, pp. 63–64; Sam Darcy, a district organizer and national leader, stressed such local pre-Popular Front maneuvers (interview with Samuel Adams Darcy, 7 October 1978). Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian, was a Comintern official best known for his role in the development of the Popular Front strategy.

14. Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 319–24; Bell, Marxian Socialism, pp. 143–44.

15. For example, Alexander Bittleman, “The New Deal and the Old Deal,” The Communist (January 1934), called Roosevelt “a servant of Morgan and Co.” (p. 89) and defined the New Deal as fascist (p. 81). Yet by mid–1939 James W. Ford wanted to “Bring the New Deal to Puerto Rico,” The Communist (July 1939), pp. 634–40.

16. Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 319–86; Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, pp. 56–86.

17. The 1905ers’ generation combined with native-born radicals already politically active prior to the Bolshevik Revolution (Foster, Browder) to form the pioneer Party group. The twenties generation are those who joined the Party between its formation and the Depression. This group played a major role in directing Party efforts, particularly in industrial organizing drives, during the Depression years. Note the birth dates of the following pre-1917 radicals: Anita Whitney (1867), Foster (1881), Charles Ruthenberg (1882), Max Bedacht (1885), Alexander Bittleman (1890), Browder (1891), Benjamin Gitlow (1891), William Patterson (1891). Twenties-generation Communists included Harry Haywood (1898), Jay Lovestone (1898), Hosea Hudson (1898), George Padmore (1902), John Williamson (1903), Benjamin Davis (1903), and Gene Dennis (1905). Thirties-generation Communists included Al Richmond (1913) and John Gates (1913). Annie Kriegel, French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), presents a three-generation model for the French Communist Party, identifying 1924–1934, Popular Front, and Resistance generations (pp. 103–5). Two recent works on members of the twenties generation are: Kenneth Kann, Joe Rapoport, The Life of a Jewish Radical (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), and Vera Buch Weisbord, A Radical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

18. On Popular Front imagery, see Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1974), pp. 292–329. The Liberty League was an corporate-financed anti–New Deal lobby group. Father Charles Coughlin was a Detroit-based Catholic priest whose nationwide radio broadcasts agitated against Jewish “conspiracists,” Communists, and New Dealers. Huey Long, the Louisiana “Kingfish,” was considered a serious challenger to Roosevelt until his assassination in 1935. All three were considered harbingers of a rising indigenous fascism by many liberals and radicals. The Soviet push toward economic growth was organized initially with a Five Year Plan, which began such heavily publicized projects as the construction of hydroelectric plants and the Moscow subway. Stakhanov was a Soviet coal miner whose alleged productivity under piecework incentives was presented as a model to other Soviet workers under Stalin in the mid-thirties. Mussolini’s Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935. On New Deal politics, see William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), passim. On Soviet economic growth, see J. P. Nettl, The Soviet Achievement (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), pp. 115–50.

19. Dolores Ibarruri, “La Pasionaria,” was most associated with the slogan of the defense of Madrid, “no pasarán.”

20. For an evaluation of the importance of the Spanish Civil War to American radicals, see John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958), pp. 42–67, and Robert A. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus Press, 1969).

21. The revival of folk music in the period of the Popular Front was part of a populist reassertion of American values and traditions, often sentimental and nostalgic and at times even cynical. Communists and progressives were likely to have been moved by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (if not the novel, then the film) and Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, and Golden Boy. Many subjects also noted that they were influenced by Beard, especially his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, and Parrington, the cultural historian whose three-volume work Main Currents in American Thought established progressive and conservative strains in our culture. The Popular Front acceptance of mainstream, even conservative, traditions is best evaluated in Pells, Radical Visions, pp. 292–329. See also Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 145–48 for the Popular Front milieu and, overall, for a sensitive portrait of the Popular Front’s foremost culture hero.

22. Pells, Radical Visions, p. 298.

23. Ibid., pp. 292–329; Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, pp. 56–86.

24. Daily Worker, 1 May 1938, 4 July 1938. On the worship of John L. Lewis, see Len DeCaux, Labor Radical (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 222–47. For the embarrassing and puerile side of Popular Front Americana, which was well represented, see Granville Hicks, I Like America (New York: A New Modern Age Book, 1938). See also Maurice Isserman, “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism,” Radical America (March–April 1980), pp. 46, 48.

25. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), pp. 285, 135–325.

26. Headquarters later moved to 19th and Market, and later still, in the late thirties, to 250 S. Broad Street; both are downtown addresses.

27. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 6. See also Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 221. In Almond’s sample 34 percent were from “Left” backgrounds, 16 percent from liberal, “Moderately Left,” 3 percent from monarchist or fascist, 16 percent from conservative, and 15 percent from apolitical ones. The Workmen’s Circle, or Arbeiter Ring, founded in 1892, was a Jewish fraternal order with close ties to the Socialist Party and the Jewish trade-union movement. “The International Workers Order,” founded in 1930, was a multiethnic fraternal order closely associated with the Communist Party. The Bund, founded in Vilna in 1897, was a Jewish socialist working-class party in Eastern Europe. The Farband, the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, founded in 1912, was the fraternal order of the Labor Zionists. For detailed accounts of all the above, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, pp. 284–325.

28. In Gabriel Almond’s sample, thirty-four were middle-class and thirty working-class (Appeals, p. 401).

29. Peter Muller, Kenneth C. Meyer, and Roman A. Cybriwsky, Philadelphia: A Study of Conflicts and Social Cleavages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 18–22.

30. 17 August 1948, p. 1.

31. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 26.

32. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 4–9, 53–59. The Coops were the Cooperative Houses in the Bronx built in the twenties by the United Workers Co-operative Association, a Communist, mostly Jewish organization of garment workers.

33. Of the seventeen from identifiable Philadelphia high schools, six attended the academically elite Central High School, while the remainder studied at the disproportionately academic and Jewish Overbrook, West Philadelphia, Southern, Olney, Gratz, and Northeast high schools. The majority of those who advanced to college attended local schools, either the prestigious University of Pennsylvania or the more plebian Temple University. In addition, two completed specialized technical programs. At the graduate level, four completed professional school and three earned doctorates in academic programs. Sex seems to have had little or no significance as a variable in educational accomplishments. Of the ten women, two were high school drop-outs, four completed high school, and four graduated from college. All four female college graduates continued their training at the graduate level, but it is significant that they chose such sex-defined fields as elementary education, social work, and nursing. The men did their graduate work in law, medicine, dentistry, and public administration, as well as in the human service area. Among the Jews of the sample, thirteen (of twenty-three) were college graduates. All of the holders of advanced degrees were Jewish. Indeed, of the ten Jews who halted their education after high school graduation, five are women. Within the very small black sample, three of four completed college.

34. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 6; Almond, Appeals, pp. 172, 243, 288.

35. For an impressionistic picture of the thirties, see Studs Terkel, Hard Times (New York: Avon Books, 1971). For a fine cultural analysis, see Pells, Radical Visions.

36. Almond notes that only 27 percent of his sample had read the Marxist classics before joining the Party (Appeals, p. 100).

37. Liebman, Jews and the Left, p. 373; see also Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change (Chicago: Markham, 1971), for a sense of the characteristics of sixties radicals.

38. Robert D. Hess and Judith V. Torney, “Patterns of Growth in the Emergence of Political Attitudes,” in The Seeds of Politics, ed. Anthony M. Orun (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 47, designate four steps toward radical political socialization: awareness, conceptualization, subculture involvement, and active participation.

39. Richard Wright, “Memoir,” in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. 106. Wright also emphasizes that the Soviet Union’s apparent benevolence toward its own backward peoples and its theoretical positions on nationality and colonialism greatly impressed him (p. 117).

40. Gates, Story, p. 17; David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), passim; Bell, Marxian Socialism, passim. See also Hal Draper, “The Student Movement of the Thirties: A Political History,” in Orun, The Seeds of Politics, pp. 24–40.

41. Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), p. 83; Glazer, Social Basis, p. 117.

chapter 3

1. Frank Meyer, The Moulding of Communists (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961); Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952); Morris Ernst and David Loth, Report on the American Communist (New York: Praeger, 1952).

2. See Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Donald L. M. Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., Communism in Italy and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978); James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

3. See, in particular, Kriegel, French Communists. See also Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).

4. Mark Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem, 1928–1936” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), “Marxism and Black Radicalism in America,” Radical America (May–June 1971), “The Communist Party in Harlem: A Case Study in the Reinterpretation of American Communism,” Radical History Review (Fall 1976), “Harlem Communists and the Politics of Black Protest,” Marxist Perspectives (Fall 1978); James Prickett, “Communists and the Communist Issue in the American Labor Movement, 1920–1950” (Ph.D. diss. U.C.L.A., 1975); Roger Keeran, ‘“Everything For Victory’: Communist Influence in the Auto Industry during World War II,” Science & Society (Spring 1979).

5. Klehr, Cadre, p. 3.

6. Mark Naison, “Historical Notes on Blacks and American Communism: The Harlem Experience,” Science & Society (Fall 1978), pp. 330, 328; Naison charges that “too often scholars have used ‘Stalinism’ and ‘Comintern domination’ as dei ex machina to explain everything the Party did, abdicating their responsibility to make detailed empirical investigations of Party activity,” p. 328.

7. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 23.

8. See Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 24–31 on the nature of bureaucracy and pp. 61–65 on informal structures.

9. One district leader told me that the Party headquarters was not willing to cooperate with this study because of what it considers to be recent scholarly distortions of Party history. For this study I read the Daily Worker from 1929 until 1957, focusing on the information about District Three, including the Pennsylvania supplement Pennsylvania Worker from 1947 to 1956. A number of sources have also made available assorted copies of Party and district newspapers, pamphlets, and mimeographs. Finally, heavy reliance has been placed on the invaluable information provided by knowledgeable and cooperative subjects.

10. On national structures, see Gornick, Romance, p. 120; Glazer, Social Basis, p. 50; Shannon, Decline, pp. 70–74. See also Daily Worker, 8 November 1929, 7 July 1946, and 7 May 1944, which listed the following twenty-three districts: New York, New England, Eastern Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, Western Pennsylvania–West Virginia, Wisconsin, Northwest, California, Montana, Virginia-Carolinas, Minnesota, Iowa-Nebraska, Maryland, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Missouri, Vermont, Texas, and Florida. On New York’s predominance, see Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 23.

11. The Daily Worker of 12 November 1934, for example, tells of a drive for 60,000 new subscriptions. New York was given responsibility for 30,000 and Philadelphia for 3,500 (6 percent), the third-highest quota among districts. See also 14 August 1943, 3 October 1946, and 9 November 1947 for drives indicating New York’s primacy and Philadelphia’s second or third ranking, with quotas ranging from 5 to 7 percent. In Vera Buch Weisbord’s memoir, A Radical Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), she reflects the characteristic Party attitude toward Philadelphia: “Just when we were getting used to Philadelphia . . . a real assignment came: district organizer in Detroit” (p. 146). Shades of W. C. Fields!

12. On Philadelphia’s class and ethnic distribution, see Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), especially the articles by Dennis J. Clark, “The Philadelphia Irish: Persistent Peril”; John F. Sutherland, “Housing the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the Turn of the Century”; Caroline Golab, “The Immigrant and the City: Poles, Italians, and Jews in Philadelphia, 1870–1920”; Maxwell Whiteman, “Philadelphia’s Jewish Neighborhoods”; and Richard A. Varbero, “Philadelphia’s South Italians in the 1920s.” See also Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 161–223.

13. Gornick, Romance, p. 120.

14. Gornick speaks of the clubs as “the most important unit” (ibid., p. 70). She describes a New York City section consisting of twenty-eight open and two secret branches meeting every other week, public and private meetings alternating. She adds that this section contained between forty and fifty youth clubs for neighborhood children. Each year the branch sent one activist to attend the section organizers’ special classes. This was a means by which the Party discovered and trained new cadres. For branch and club membership figures, see pp. 120–22. Gornick informs us that one Lower East Side area with a population of 250,000 had a section with 3,000 members. See also Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 67–69, on branch and club life.

15. On Communist Party membership over time, see Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 141; Glazer, Social Basis, pp. 90, 92–93; Shannon, Decline, pp. 3, 364; Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 114; Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), pp. 90, 202; Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 159; Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 391; Jon Weiner, “The Communist Party: An Interview with Dorothy Healey,” Radical America (May–June 1977), p. 26.

16. Glazer claims that in early 1929 the Philadelphia district had 481 members, of whom only 50 were native-born (Social Basis, p. 60).

17. Federal Bureau of Investigation File 61–6593 Sub A Section #2 (18 June 1943–16 February 1945), copy courtesy of Samuel Adams Darcy. The file lists district membership as of 22 January 1944 as 2,489, with 1,818 in Philadelphia proper.

18. On the Darcy affair, see Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 65, 78; Daily Worker, 5 June 1944; FBI. File 61–6593, pp. 24, 25, 30. I have also greatly profited from conversations with Mr. Darcy on 7 October 1978 and 4 January 1979, and from conversations with other former district leaders.

19. Darcy claims that Jewish membership declined to approximately 50 percent by 1944, but no other source confirms such an estimate.

20. Glazer, Social Basis, pp. 41, 80; Draper, Roots, p. 392; Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p. 305.

21. In 1943, for example, the Party set up an Independent Voters Party with Jules Abercauph as mayoral candidate, after the Democrats had selected William C. Bullitt over Communist objections. The local Party attacked Bullitt vociferously as an “anti-Semite,” a “racist,” and a “fascist.” For information on the election, won by Republican Barney Samuel by a wide margin, see “Bullitt Exposed,” Worker reprint, n.d., and Samuel Adams Darcy, “The Last Crusade,” pp. 558–65, an unpublished memoir generously made available to me by Mr. Darcy. Abercauph received only 4,330 votes, less than one percent (Philadelphia Bulletin Almanac [Philadelphia: Philadelphia Bulletin, 1944], p. 492).

22. Darcy speaks of luncheons with John B. Kelly and other Democratic Party leaders (interview, 7 October 1978).

23. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 36, observes, “In Philadelphia, the Communists connected themselves through local reform movements based on the city-wide CIO Councils . . . in such a way as to exert powerful leverage on the Democrats.”

24. The more insightful efforts include Klehr, Cadre; Starobin, American Communism in Crisis; Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem,” Radical History Review; Glazer, Social Basis; Almond, Appeals. Demonological approaches include Meyer, Moulding; Ernst and Loth, Report; and, perhaps the most influential, Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1962). In a class by itself is Gornick, Romance.

25. For example, the Daily Worker, 19 April 1939.

26. For solid analysis of informal organization, see Charles Perrow, Complex Organization (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1972), pp. 97–144. See also F. J. Roethisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), passim. Almond, Appeals, after stressing formal indoctrination, nevertheless concedes, “It is indeed probable that for most individuals publications constitute only a secondary source of information about the party, while direct, first hand experience of those aspects of the party with which individuals come in contact constitutes their primary source of information. In this respect, the Communist movement may differ only in degree from most other associations in which publications and formal doctrine are far less important than communication in intimate groups and information from trusted associates” (p. 99).

27. Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock, 1957), states, “Conceptually, the network stands between the family and the total social environment” (p. 98). “In network formation . . . only some, not all, of the component individuals have social relationships with one another” (p. 58). It may be useful to view the social network of friends, relatives, and acquaintances as a subset of a subculture. For a comprehensive presentation of the radical Jewish subculture, both in Eastern Europe and in the United States in the early twentieth century, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, passim.

28. On social democratic politics, see James Joll, The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Books, 1966), and Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Collier Books, 1962). On the French and Italian Communist experience, see Kriegel, French Communists, and Blackmer and Tarrow, Communism in Italy and France. Almond, Appeals, p. 369, sees the American Communist Party (as well as the British) as an “aberration,” in contrast to the French and Italian parties, which have taken on “the proportions of a subculture.”

29. Daily Worker, 19 April 1939, 29 April 1939, 30 April 1939, 2 May 1939.

30. Gornick, Romance, p. 59.

31. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), esp. pp. 89–106, 294–340. Sennett is sensitive to the “confusion that has arisen between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning” (p. 248).

32. Gornick, Romance, p. 248, argues that this is what is most striking in the Communist: the gift for political emotion highly developed, the gift for individual empathy neglected, atrophied.”

33. Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies (Fall 1979), pp. 436–439, stresses the privatization of emotions in the Old Left; Peggy Dennis, “Response,” Feminist Studies (Fall 1979), p. 456, rebuts by emphasizing the Party interference in personal matters. I do not find these two views incompatable; Party members did privatize emotions, and yet the Party considered it appropriate to invade any domain in its own interest.

34. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

35. George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), p. 29.

36. Mitford, Fine Old Conflict, p. 236.

37. Peggy Dennis, in her Autobiography, gives evidence that such friendships were much less common at the upper echelons of leadership. She excoriates the national leaders who “gave nothing of themselves” when her husband was in prison or, later, when he was dying. On the other hand, she praises neighborhood comrades for their genuine friendship and loyalty (p. 193). Annie Kriegel, French Communists, p. 221, finds little friendship but much “camaraderie” among French Communists.

38. Almond, Appeals, p. 160, presents a table on the social network distribution within his sample. It indicates that 14 percent maintained social relations entirely. Another 23 percent did so almost entirely within Party circles. Eight percent spoke of having social relations outside the party but with people “instrumental to the party.” Among those who maintained relations totally outside of Party influence, Almond notes 22 percent who retained a “few friends,” 19 percent who retained “many friends,” and 9 percent who continued relations with most non-party friends.

39. In comparison, the Wisconsin district of the late thirties had 600 members, including 100 union officials and nearly 300 active in the CIO and AFL (Dennis, Autobiography, pp. 93–96); see also Steve Murdock, “California Communists: Their Years in Power,” Science & Society (Winter 1970), who describes a Party district of close to 9,000 members in the late 1930s and as late as 1949 (p. 482).

40. Gornick, Romance, p. 22.

41. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 235.

42. Gornick, Romance, pp. 115–16.

chapter 4

1. For useful insights about ethnicity, see Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). In the latter volume, of particular value is Orlando Patterson, “Context and Choice in Ethnic Allegiance: A Theoretical Framework and Caribbean Case Study,” pp. 305–49.

Max Weber defines an ethnic group as follows: “Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent—because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration—in such a way that this belief is important for the continuation of non-kinship, communal relationships” (“Ethnic Groups,” in Theories of Society, ed. Talcott Parsons [New York: Macmillan, 1961], p. 306). For an attempt to relate ethnicity to class, see Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, pp. 51–54.

2. Harvey Klehr, Communist Cadre, finds this model, (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), as well as sexual differentiation, useful in analyzing Party leadership, see ch. 1–3.

3. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 25.

4. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), pp. 55–69, 347–54, 311–15, 492–526, 458–64. As Nathan Glazer noted several decades ago in The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), pp. 130–31, “no detailed understanding of the impact of Communism on American life is possible without an analysis of the relationship between American Jews and the American Communist Party.”

5. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 23; Glazer, Social Basis, pp. 99–100; Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 392.

6. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 49. In 1925 there were between 3,000 and 4,000 Jews in a Party with approximately 13,000 members. See Paul Buhle, “Jews and American Communism: The Cultural Question,” Radical History Review (Spring 1980), p. 32.

7. Paul Buhle takes a more benevolent view of the Popular Front in “Jews and American Communism”: “Was not the adherence to the Popular Front of Paul Robeson, Huddie Ledbetter, Woodie Guthrie, or young Pete Seeger the nearest equivalent to the Yiddishist literary, theatrical, and choral personalities around the Freiheit a decade earlier?” (p. 24). Overall, Buhle skillfully explores the Party’s general “disrespect for cultural work” (p. 28) and yet tempers his criticism with consideration of the multiethnic environment the Party operated in. I found few second-generation Jewish Communists, however, who would fully agree that “Communism would provide . . . a vision to unify the Jewish past, the American proletarian present, and the golden future” (p. 17). See also Maurice Isserman, “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism,” Radical America (March–April 1980, pp. 46, 48.

8. They were not so comfortable with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” See Joe Klein, Woodie Guthrie: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 140–41, for Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” as a counter to Berlin.

9. Gornick presents her interviewees as “every kind of American”; yet close to 65 percent of her sample is Jewish. For the most comprehensive accounts of Jewish–American Communists, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, passim, and Klehr, Cadre, ch. 2.

10. For example, John Gates never discusses his own Jewish background or expresses any identification with Jewishness in his memoirs, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958).

11. On the three-generational pattern, see Sidney Goldstein and Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish American: Three Generations in a Jewish Community (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice–Hall, 1968), and Gordon, Assimilation in American Life.

12. On Party programs and attitudes concerning Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, see Melech Epstein, The Jews and Communist (New York: Trade Union Sponsoring Committee, 1959); Klehr, Cadre, pp. 37–52; Liebman, Jews and the Left, passim; Glazer, Social Basis, pp. 151–58.

13. For vivid examples of the kind of Jewish identification revived by the Popular Front’s celebration of ethnicity, see the letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), especially pp. 33, 70, 197, 225.

14. Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 25.

15. On the Socialist Party, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, pp. 135–356. On the Communist Party, see Draper, Roots, p. 392. The largest federation was the Finnish, which accounted for 45 percent of the total. Other important federations, beside the Jewish, were the South Slav, Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Hungarian. See also Glazer, Social Basis, p. 80.

16. On the 1905ers’ hostility to Judaism, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, pp. 502–4. Yom Kippur is the most sacred of Jewish religious holidays, a day of atonement for the sins of the past year.

17. Mark Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem in the Early Depression Years: A Case Study in the Reinterpretation of American Communism,” Radical History Review (Fall 1978), downplays ethnicity, concluding that the Party, “composed almost exclusively of first and second generation immigrants,” made great strides in fighting for black-white unity and racial equality (p. 88).

18. George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), pp. 103–4. Charney, born in 1905, was a second-generation Jewish-American Communist.

19. Ibid., p. 105.

20. Gates, Story, p. 26.

21. On name changing, see Klehr, Cadre, p. 41, and Glazer, Social Basis, p. 211. See also Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jews (New York: Viking Press, Viking Compass Books, 1973), for many insights on name changing, pp. 31–42, self-hatred, pp. 107–24, and “The Jew and the Revolution,” pp. 227–45.

22. On leadership, see Liebman, Jews and the Left, p. 527. Klehr, Cadre, pp. 39–40, finds that the proportion of Jews in national leadership declined over time. He adds that whereas foreign-born Jews were disproportionately in leadership, getting to the top early and being more Americanized than other immigrant cadres, native-born, Depression-era Jews advanced quite slowly. By the thirties, the Party was trying to make room for blacks and working-class Gentiles. See also Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 140.

23. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1969), pp. 147–70, 497, and “My Jewish Problem and Theirs,” in Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism, ed. Nat Hentoff (New York: Richard W. Baron, 1969), pp. 143–90. Cruse tends to weaken his provocative hypothesis with vitriol.

24. Cruse, Crisis, p. 163.

25. Morris U. Schappes, “The Jewish Question and the Left: Old and New” (New York: Jewish Currents Reprint, 1970), pp. 13–14. Schappes charges that the Party finally recognized black national identity but never that of the Jews.

26. Charney, Long Journey, p. 102, notes that there was “ill-concealed resentment” of such affairs and adds that affairs between black women and white men “rarely occurred.” Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 78–82, discusses the interracial sexual dynamics of the 1960s movement.

27. See Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), for an insightful analysis of the impact of racism on blacks and whites, men and women.

28. On the reformist recruitment of blacks in Harlem, see Charney, Long Journey, p. 105. On high turnover among blacks, see ibid., p. 116; Glazer, Social Basis, p. 123; Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), pp. 117–18; Henry Williams, Black Response to the American Left, 1917–1929 (Princeton: Trustees of Princeton University, 1973), pp. 26–27; Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 228.

29. Record, Negro and the Communist Party, pp. 65, 136; Richard Wright, “Memoir,” in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), pp. 106, 117.

30. Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem,” Radical History Review, pp. 68–69. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 180, idealizing somewhat, claims that “the party was the only institution in American life in which Negroes commonly worked with whites on a level of equality, which was truly colorblind, which was really indifferent to issues of race.”

31. Perhaps the tendency of black national Party leaders to be better educated than their white counterparts is the result of such discrimination in the job market. See Klehr, Cadre, p. 60.

32. Charney, Long Journey, p. 84.

33. Morris U. Schappes spoke in an interview in New York City, on 10 April 1979, of Party campaigns to discourage Jewish Communists from vacationing at Miami Beach because of its racially segregated facilities.

34. Liebman notes Jewish patronizing of Gentiles, “a mixture of hostility and superiority,” in Jews and the Left, p. 534.

35. Liebman, Jews and the Left, p. 553. See also Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), passim.

36. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 123.

37. Gornick, Romance, p. 170. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 179, charges that these campaigns “hit the Jewish membership particularly strongly” and induced a “loss of Jewish fellow-travellers.” Record, Negro and the Communist Party, pp. 243–45; skeptical of the Party in all other matters, accepts the Party allegations concerning white chauvinism.

38. Among district leaders, Stong and Dave Davis, the UE leader, seemed the most popular and respected. The least liked was clearly Robert Klonsky. Sam Darcy, the most controversial, seems to have been the most able.

39. Maxwell Whiteman, “Philadelphia’s Jewish Neighborhoods,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), pp. 231–54; Peter Muller, Kenneth C. Meyer, and Roman A. Cybriwsky, Philadelphia: A Study of Conflicts and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 14–20, 40–41.

40. One must consider the likelihood that some moves to ethnically homogeneous sections had less to do with an abandonment of integrationist ideals than with an attempt to find security and a sense of identity.

41. Morris U. Schappes, “A Secular View of Jewish Life,” in Jewish Currents Reader (New York: Jewish Currents, 1966), pp. 46–53; Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), esp. ch. 1 and 2.

42. William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 7–87.

43. For criticisms of the Party’s subordination of socialist goals, see James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), pp. 57–113. See also Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1974), pp. 292–98.

chapter 5

1. The most promising effort along such lines is the recent study of New Left women by Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). See also Ellen Kay Trimberger “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life” and “Afterword,” pp. 432–50, 460–61, Peggy Dennis’s response, pp. 451–60, and Trimberger’s afterword, pp. 460–61, in Feminist Studies (Fall 1979).

2. Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), p. 75; Annie Kriegel, The French Communists Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 59–63. Kriegel indicates that the French Communist Party was only 11.1 percent female in 1946, 20.2 percent in 1954, and 25.5 percent in 1966. She adds, significantly, that 46 percent of the 1966 female members are listed as housewives and that women’s role in the Party has always been “very modest.”

3. Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 157, 206, citing J. Joel Moss, “Teenage Marriage: Cross-National Trends and Sociological Factors in the Decision of When to Marry,” Acta Sociologica 1964, pp. 98–117, indicates that the median age for American males to marry was 24.6 in 1920 and 24.3 in 1940; for females it was 21.3 in 1930 and 21.5 in 1940.

4. On the domestic life of the foremost Bolshevik, see Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), pp. 201–11, 233–36, 239–41, 528–29.

On Karl Marx’s Victorian household, see Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (New York: Oxford University Press, Galaxy Books, 1967), pp. 70, 79–80, 159, 280; Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969), pp. 80–83, 221–556; Joel Carmichael, Karl Marx (London: Rapp & Whiting, 1968), pp. 87, 105–6, 202.

5. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), pp. 36–37. Albert Weisbord, the youthful leader of the 1926 Passaic textile strike, offered a Bolshevik relationship to Vera Buch in what she called a “businesslike way,” saying, “I want to live with you on a permanent basis. I believe you have the qualities I want in a partner. You have courage, intelligence, and the desire to be a Bolshevik. You’ll be my Krupskaya. You will go with me from one strike to another. This is just the beginning. When we have the textile industry organized, we’ll move on to steel, and so on, building the Party. You can never have children, not even a home. But you’ll be always by my side, fighting with me, helping me” (Vera Buch Weisbord, A Radical Life [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977], p. 115). The Bolshevik model was in its own fashion decidedly patriarchal, as Vera soon found out when Albert opposed her taking an important post that would separate them (pp. 140–41). Vera Weisbord also experienced the trauma of an illegal abortion alone. Albert insisted, “My responsibility is to provide the money, that is all” (pp. 165–69).

6. James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 162.

7. Michael Young and Peter Willmot, The Symmetrical Family (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 28–33; See also Elder, Children of the Great Depression, p. 287, for the continuing gradual shift toward a more companionate family model in the 1930s.

8. Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock, 1957), pp. 92–96. Bott and her associates find “no families” in which a joint conjugal role relationship was associated with “a close-knit network” and conclude that “the closer knit the network, the greater degree of segregation between the roles of husband and wife” (pp. 60, 62). This sample offers an alternative option of close-knit network with relatively equal conjugal role relationship.

9. See Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 133–34, on hostessing. Sara Evans, Personal Politics, pp. 111–12, discusses the invisibility of the paired woman, the invisible teammate of the 1960s. She admires the Old Left households for their greater political consciousness (compared with New Left marriages and relationships) about the oppression of women. Recognizing the tensions between egalitarianism and patriarchy, Evans notes that few Old Left women “became primarily housewives” and that they seem to have taught feminism to their daughters.

10. Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 155, states, “Male party members were generally urged to bring their wives into the party; and wives their husbands. As a former American party member said, “Anyone whose spouse was not a CP member was not fully trusted, and it was made clear to the person involved.”

11. Mark Tarail, “Child Psychology,” Daily Worker (Sunday supplement), 14 April 1946.

12. Daily Worker, 17 November 1946.

13. Daily Worker, 14 April 1946, 17 April 1946.

14. Ibid., 27 October 1946.

15. Dennis, Autobiography, pp. 76–77.

16. Ibid., p. 131.

17. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 3–8, describes the changes that occurred in family structure beginning in the late nineteenth century.

18. Almond, Appeals, p. 156. On the Popular Front’s effects on Party personal and family life, see James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, pp. 161–62, and Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review (May–June 1979), pp. 73–118.

19. Betty Yorburg, The Changing Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 1. Yorburg finds liberalized sexual practices developing in the 1920s among “those whose ties to traditional organized religion and to the conventional morality are weakest: the highly educated, men in general, blacks, political radicals, and non–churchgoers” (p. 63).

20. Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” argues that during the 1930s, the Party was “an important institution of struggle for women’s liberation,” but concedes that under the conformist pressure of the Popular Front it “also contained . . . strong tendencies toward the uncritical adoption of many sexist cultural traditions and toward an increasingly conservative approach to sexuality and the family” (pp. 74, 110).

21. The median and mean year of marriage was 1940, with 63 percent of those interviewed marrying between 1936 and 1945. Of the forty-eight children fully accounted for, only three were born prior to 1939, and in all such cases the marriages significantly predate the Popular Front period. Fully 63 percent of the children were born in the 1940s, nineteen during World War II and thirteen in the immediate postwar period. The average time span between marriage and the first child was approximately five years, a notable wait attributable both to the reluctance of activists, particularly men, to be tied down to family responsibilities and to the uncertainties of the times.

22. Yorburg, Changing Family, pp. 63, 125.

23. Klehr, Cadre, pp. 80, 82.

24. Dennis, Autobiography, p. 191.

25. Kriegel, French Communists, pp. 68–69. Peggy Dennis, “Response,” p. 453, argues that American Communist Party women, in contrast, typically had no children and “no permanent personal relationship.”

26. Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, p. 162.

27. Yorburg, Changing Family, p. 63.

28. Most notable is how the belief in their work and the supportive social network of the Party subculture enriched and strengthened activists’ lives. Communist couples consequently avoided to some extent the modern malaise so incisively analyzed by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 194–95: “The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs.” Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left,” p. 436, suggests that there was more opportunity for women in the Old than in the New Left.

chapter 6

1. James Weinstein offers the Debsian Socialist Party of the first two decades of this century as a plausible alternative in The Decline of American Socialism, 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

2. Irving Howe and Louis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger Paperbacks, 1962); Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951); Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); Mark Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem in the Early Depression Years: A Case Study in the Reinterpretation of American Communism,” Radical History Review (Fall 1976).

3. For oral histories of a variety of left-wing organizers, see Alice and Staughton Lynd, eds., Rank and File (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); on the Socialists, see Betty Yorburg, Utopia and Reality: A Collective Portrait of American Socialists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Bruce M. Stave, ed., Socialism and the Cities (Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1975); Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930s (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1974).

4. On political influence, see Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 319–436. On the role of blacks, see Wilson Record, Negro and the Communist Party and Naison, “The Communist Party in Harlem,” Radical History Review, pp. 68–95. The American Labor Party was established in 1936 in New York State to provide a way for radicals to vote for Roosevelt and the New Deal without becoming Democrats. The Communists elected two city councilmen, Peter Cacchione and Benjamin Davis, Jr., during the war and were a significant force behind American Labor Party candidates and officeholders like Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

5. The distribution within the sample according to Party function and role is not reflective of the district. For one thing, those who stayed with the Party for some time were more likely to become cadres or functionaries. In addition, people encountered through old Party networks are likely to have had more than the average number of years of Party affiliation. The sample is thus tilted toward cadres. Over 70 percent (twenty-six subjects) were Party cadres; only 30 percent (ten) were rank-and-filers. Of the ten rank-and-file members, one-half were women, and four of them were wives of male cadres. Among the twenty-six cadres, were three union leaders, three professionals, and six functionaries. Fully twenty subjects (54 percent), did their main Party work within the labor movement, and seven had district- or section-level status. Another ten (29 percent) worked primarily through mass organizations, of which the Progressive Party was the most prominent.

6. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 110.

7. Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 150, claims that nonfunctionaries attended four to five meetings per week. I found that most members had anywhere from six to twelve meetings a week; only least-involved rank-and-filers had fewer.

8. Gornick, Romance, p. 45.

9. The French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) pp. 1–2, 25, 27.

10. Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), pp. 86, 4–5, 6; See also Frank Meyer, The Moulding of Communists (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), p. 92. One informant described cadres as the skeleton that survives and reorganizes if the army is decimated.

11. Almond, Appeals, pp. 65, 15. “A person who has simply assimilated the pattern of political action represented in the American Daily Worker has no conception whatever of what the Communist movement really is. He has identified himself with a rather pallid champion of generalized virtue and has accepted a somewhat watered-down version of the Communist demonology” (p. 93).

12. Klehr, Cadre, pp. 6, 8; Kriegel, French Communists, p. 198; Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Communist Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), p. 18; Meyer, Moulding, pp. 132–58.

13. Selznick, Organizational Weapon, p. 20.

14. Kriegel, French Communists, p. 198. Several informants use the words interchangeably, but Selznick, Organizational Weapon, pp. 18–20, makes the useful distinction between cadre and functionary. See also Meyer, Moulding, p. 15.

15. Almond, Appeals, p. 93. Klehr, Cadre, p. 4. states that “even party veterans may not be part of the inner core.”

16. I do not wish to ignore the important debate concerning the alternative strategies available to labor organizers in the thirties. For an introduction to the issues, see Max Gordon, “The Communist Party of the Nineteen-Thirties and the New Left,” with a response by James Weinstein and a reply by Gordon, pp. 11–66, Socialist Revolution (January–March 1976). It is clear that the Party was essentially demagogic about its “hidden agenda” and that the NLRB structure shackled working-class initiative; however, Philadelphia Communist organizers almost unanimously argue that their approach was the most appropriate one, given the unionist but hardly socialist aspirations of workers. Like Max Gordon, they ask why all of the alternative, more aggressively ideological strategies failed. See also Roger Keeran, “‘Everything for Victory’: Communist Influence in the Auto Industry During World War II,” Science and Society (Spring, 1979).

17. Quoted in Paul Buhle, “Questions for the Thirties,” Radical History Review (Spring–Summer 1977), p. 123.

18. Let me make it clear that such intimidation stopped short of murder.

19. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 71.

20. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 27.

21. For purposes of this study, “Stalinism” signifies the perversion of the ideal of democratic centralism—that is, the solidification of party dictatorship over the populace and the elimination of internal democracy within the Party.

22. For example, a humane and decent person like Dalton Trumbo had no qualms about reporting the names of correspondents to the F.B.I., believing that anyone who wrote to him about his antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun after the United States and the Soviet Union entered World War II was likely to be fascist and therefore deserving of no consideration. See his Additional Dialogue (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 6–7. Communists have chronically been too quick to excoriate opponents with the most insulting and vituperative epithets. For charges of treason that, if made by a person in power, would make one tremble, see the Daily Worker during the period of World War II from June 1941 to August 1945.

23. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 208–9; see also Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 940–53; Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 115.

24. Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, p. 422, argue that cadres often avoided having to promote and implement unpleasant Party policies, such as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, by pouring themselves into their local organizing work.

25. See Gornick, Romance, pp. 33–39, for a portrait of such a transformation.

26. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), passim. Evans’s study provides some insightful observations about the organizing skills of women during the 1960s. See also Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies (Fall 1979), p. 434.

27. See James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), pp. 68–71, on Communist union officials and their status within the CIO.

28. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, calls this group “influentials” and “submarines” (pp. 39–41) and suggests that they “were living in two worlds” (pp. 187–88).

29. Harry Lore, “Apostasy at the Bar: Lawyers and McCarthyism,” and Joseph S. Lord III, “Communists’ Trials,” The Shingle (November 1978); D. Weinberg and M. Fassler, “A Historical Sketch of the National Lawyers Guild in American Politics, 1936–1968” (New York: National Lawyers Guild, 1968).

30. Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), pp. 13–15, 67.

31. George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), pp. 187–88.

32. Mitford, Fine Old Conflict, p. 67.

33. Gornick, Romance, p. 252.

chapter 7

1. William Kornblum, Blue Collar Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 34–35. Although Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 290–307, criticizes the tendency of radical intellectuals to abnegate their responsibilities through compulsive political behavior, there has yet to be an analysis of the ways in which political activists enter the realm of group loyalty. On Party contempt for intellectuals, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon Books, 1965), passim.

2. During the period of the Pact, the American Peace Mobilization, a Party front, argued that “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” that is, that the United States should stay clear of involvement in the war in Europe. See Irving Howe and Louis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger Paperbacks, 1962), pp. 387–405.

3. See Maurice Isserman, “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism,” Radical America (March–April 1980), p. 44, for an excellent overview of this Depression Communist generation and its traumatic break with the Party in the mid-fifties.

4. Robert A. Rosenstone, analyzing Lincoln Brigade volunteers in Crusade of the Left (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 266, suggests that “the chief object of hate in their world—even more so than Hitler himself—was . . . Trotsky.” Frank Warren, Liberals and Communists Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966), p. 142, argues that “the Popular Front mind could not tolerate ambiguity; it did not understand critical support.” In fact, one finds that Popular Front Communists, while suffering from such dogmatism, experienced greater ambivalence about Party intransigency than did pre-Popular Front members. Andrei Vyshinsky was the chief prosecutor during the late thirties purge trials. V. M. Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister who negotiated the Non-Aggression Pact with German Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1939.

5. Twenty-seven of those interviewed recall supporting the Pact; eight were not sufficiently involved by 1939; and one, a professional who was not formally in the Party, vigorously opposed it. Of the twenty-seven supporters, fully twenty-five maintain that support today.

6. Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 284.

7. Burton K. Wheeler was a Democrat from Montana and a leading isolationist in the thirties.

8. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 34; Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 202; David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), p. 109.

9. Of the twenty-six men in the sample, fully thirteen served in the United States armed forces during World War II; another two served in the merchant marine. Two others were too young to be draft-eligible, and nine were exempted for a variety of reasons, most often because of war-related jobs. Many of the ten women served in defense plants for at least a part of the war years.

10. George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), p. 129; John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1958), pp. 82–83. Charney exulted, “We were not only Communists, we were Americans again” (p. 60).

11. See The Communist (February, April, May, and June 1943) for typical pieces calling for action against “fifth columnists,” including Socialist Norman Thomas. For a defense of the Party’s record in organized labor during the war, see Keeran, ‘“Everything for Victory’: Communist Influence in the Auto Industry During World War II.”

12. See the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Record for daily accounts, and the Philadelphia Tribune, a black biweekly, 1–31 August 1944; see also Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 266–67, and Aden M. Winkler, “The Philadelphia Transit Strike of 1944,” Journal of American History (July 1972).

13. The political advertisement supporting federal action in the Philadelphia Tribune, 12 August 1944, p. 2, mentions a rich array of church and religious organizations, community groups, labor unions, and Party fronts.

14. Samuel Adams Darcy, “The Last Crusade” (manuscript in Mr. Darcy’s possession), pp. 542–64: Daily Worker, 8 August 1943. Samuel defeated Bullitt overwhelmingly, whereas Abercauph received only several thousand votes. See the account of the election in Chapter Three.

15. The Communist (February 1944), p. 101; Daily Worker, 5 June 1944.

16. For a sense of Earl Browder’s political positions, see The Second Imperialist War (New York: International Publishers, 1940) and Victory—and After (New York: International Publishers, 1942).

17. See The Communist (June 1944), an issue devoted to eulogizing Browder. Jacques Duclos was a leading member of the French Communist Party; his letter criticizing Browder for “revisionism” in the French journal Cahiers du Communisme in April 1945 signaled a new turn in Communist strategy. See Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, pp. 437–57.

18. As James Weinstein argues in Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 98, William Z. Foster, in repudiating Browder, remained committed to a Left-Center alliance and to reformist goals. The rub was that foreign policy considerations—the need to spearhead a militant assault on U.S. Cold War policies directed at the Soviet Union—made such an alliance impossible. See also Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (New York: Free Press, 1973), pp. 201, 206.

19. Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an American Communist (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1977), p. 159; Shannon, Decline of American Communism, pp. 3, 364. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 114, describes the Party in 1948 as having 1,700 community clubs, 3,425 industrial clubs, 300 shop branches, and 200 student clubs in 600 cities, towns, and rural areas. Belknap, Cold War Justice, p. 190, insists that from early 1946 until January 1950 membership actually increased from 52,000 to 54,174. In Philadelphia one finds that until 1948 prospects were still hopeful and membership was at least firm after wartime and immediate postwar gains.

20. Irwin Ross, The Loneliest Campaign (New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1969), pp. 18–34; Allen Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Post War Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), passim; Markowitz, People’s Century, passim.

21. Markowitz, People’s Century, pp. 201, 211.

22. Ibid., pp. 212, 246–49. On the ADA, see Clifton Brock, Americans for Democratic Action (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1962), and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).

23. Markowitz, People’s Century, passim. On Truman’s co-optation of Wallace’s domestic program, see pp. 257, 292.

24. Luce, the publisher of Time magazine and founder of the Time-Life publishing company, prophesied an “American Century” in 1941 and publicized its capitalist and democratic aspirations over the next years; see Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” in Culture and Commitment 1929–1945, ed. Warren Susman (New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 319–26.

25. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 173–77. Mike Quill was the head of the Transport Workers Union and a long-time ally of the Party until the 1948 campaign. Walter Reuther became the leader of the United Automobile Workers after defeating Communist-backed rivals.

26. In Pennsylvania, Wallace drew 55,161 votes; in Philadelphia, he received 20,745. See Philadelphia Bulletin Almanac (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Bulletin, 1949), pp. 35–38.

27. William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 156–68. The Martinsville Seven were blacks convicted of raping a white woman in West Virginia. Also executed, these men were considered by many to have been wholly innocent.

28. Michael Harrington, Fragments of the Century (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), p. 64.

29. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). On Truman’s role in establishing new loyalty procedures, see Athan Theoharis, “The Rhetoric of Politics: Foreign Policy, Internal Security, and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era, 1945–1950,” and “The Escalation of the Loyalty Program,” in Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 196–268.

30. On the political repression of the McCarthy period, see Belknap, Cold War Justice, passim; Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1978); Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

31. Daily Worker, 3 April 1950, 20 April 1950, feature editorals. Two and one half million signatures to the pledge were collected in the United States. The Stockholm Peace Pledge called for U.S. efforts at friendship with the Soviet Union in the interest of world peace. See Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, p. 478.

32. Belknap, Cold War Justice, p. 190. The Taft-Hartley Act included a provision requiring union officials to sign affidavits that they were not members of the Communist Party.

33. On suburbanization, see Peter Muller, Kenneth C. Meyer, and Roman A. Cybriwsky, Philadelphia: A Study of Conflicts and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 39–40, who discuss the pairing of the new U.S. Steel plant in Fairless Hills with the new Levittown community. See also pp. 49–55 of the same work. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 236, argues that the Party was not at all prepared for the postwar affluence. Shannon, Decline, p. 110, suggests that “the Levittowns broke up most of the Communist neighborhoods of New York.”

34. Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 117.

35. See the Daily Worker, 3 July 1949, 5 March 1950, 23 June 1950, 9 May 1951, for Party coverage of important civil rights cases.

36. The McCarran Act, or the Subversive Activities Control Act, among other repressive features, required the officers of Communist and “front” organizations to register with the Attorney General as foreign agents.

37. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 219–23.

38. Ibid., p. 223; Belknap, Cold War Justice, p. 195. Starobin says that virtually everyone who had anything to do with the underground left the American Communist movement between mid-1956 and mid–1957.”

39. Belknap, Cold War Justice, pp. 191–95; Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 198.

40. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), pp. 310–22; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 120–24, provides a favorable impression of the experiences of the children of Communists during the fifties.

41. Teachers Union of Philadelphia, The Case against the School Board (Philadelphia: Teachers Union of Philadelphia, 1955); Teachers Union of Philadelphia, 1937–1958, URB 36, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia; Robert W. Iverson, The Communists and the Schools (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), pp. 117, 335–3; Caute, The Great Fear, pp. 94, 419.

42. On the Philadelphia Smith Act prosecution and case, see Belknap, Cold War Justice, pp. 154, 167–68, 179; Joseph S. Lord III, “Communists’ Trials,” and Harry Lore, “Apostasy at the Bar: Lawyers and McCarthyism,” both in The Shingle (November 1978), give credit to the Philadelphia lawyers, both radical and mainstream, who defended those facing prosecution for their political affiliations and beliefs.

The goal of the Fletcher-Mills campaign, spearheaded by the Civil Rights Congress was to prevent the extradition of two blacks to the South for imprisonment.

43. Belknap, Cold War Justice, p. 244. Like most accounts, Belknap’s stresses the primary importance of the California trial and defense strategy. See also Richmond, Long View, pp. 331–66.

44. Many Philadelphia Old Leftists emphasized the skill and loyalty of the local Smith Act defendants’ wives.

45. Lord, “Communists’ Trials,” p. 146.

46. Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 300, suggests that Party members experienced conflict in five areas: career, personal relations and personality, non-Party group loyalties, values and moral standards.

47. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “He Loved the People,” p. 43, Political Affairs (April 1953). The entire issue was devoted to this theme, including an editorial from the Central Committee, “The Death of Joseph V. Stalin.” See also Masses and Mainstream (April 1953) for more eulogies of Stalin.

48. See the Daily Worker, 5, 6, and 10 June 1956, for publication of Khrushchev’s speech and editoral comments.

49. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 274–77. See also Political Affairs (October 1956), including an article by William Z. Foster, “On the Structure of the Communist Party,” in which he admits to three major errors: first, giving the CIO an excuse to expel left-wing unions during the Progressive Party campaign; second, failing to pay more attention to electoral possibilities in the period of the Smith Act trials; third, taking excessive and demoralizing security measures as a counter to McCarthyism. By late 1957, however, Foster was back on the attack; see “The Party Crisis and the Way Out,” parts 1 and 2, Political Affairs (December 1957 and January 1958).

50. John Gates, “Time for a Change,” and Steve Nelson, “On a New United Party of Socialism,” Political Affairs (November 1956); see also the entire March 1957 issue for both sides’arguments as they prepared for the sixteenth national Party convention. A detailed but partisan view can be found in Gates, pp. 157–91.

51. Eugene Dennis, “Questions and Answers on the XXth Congress, CPSU,” Political Affairs (April 1956). For participants’ reflections on these battles, see Richmond, Long View, pp. 367–82; Charney, Long Journey, pp. 269–85; Dennis, Autobiography, pp. 219–33. See also the Daily Worker’s extensive coverage, including the remarkable letters to the editor that filled the paper between March 1956 and mid-1957. Finally, for a sense of the personal dimension, see the correspondence in Masses & Mainstream (March, April, and June 1957) concerning the resignation from the Party of the writer Howard Fast.

52. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 313, 243; Daily Worker, 10 October 1956 through early January 1957.

53. Laszlo Rajk was a Hungarian Communist leader purged and executed in the early fifties after an induced confession.

54. Shannon, Decline, p. 248, indicates that by 1953, 60 percent of the national membership was between thirty-five and forty-five, born between 1907 and 1918, and that more than half of the membership was female. In 1955 the underground period officially ended. Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1975), p. 93, relying on FBI figures, cites Party membership in 1955 as 22,663.

55. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 537.

56. Isserman, “The 1956 Generation,” p. 44. Of those respondents who express opinions on the mid-fifties crisis, nearly 60 percent say that they felt then, and still do now, that it was “salutary”—“traumatic” and yet” a relief.” Four claim that they were oblivious to it, being absorbed by personal matters. Close to one-third (six) feel that in one way or another the Khrushchev revelations were detrimental to the movement and contributed to a heightened “revisionism.”

A majority accepted and still accept the Soviet intervention in Hungary, although with differing analyses and qualifications. Sixty-two percent (13) supported it at the time, whereas only 55 percent (9) now see it as justifiable. Many of those who accept the intervention—at least half—say that it remains a painful memory. They deplore Soviet behavior and are uncomfortable with the kinds of justifications made by Moscow and the national leadership in New York; yet they believe that there was a genuine fascist and anti-Semitic counterrevolution threatening, and so they accept the legitimacy of intervention. The “hard-liners,” critics of both Khrushchev’s speech and local reform efforts, argue that criticism of Stalin and Stalinism “made us the laughingstock of the world” and “played footsie-wootsie with the capitalist world.” One unrepentant Stalinist agrees that Stalin “did a lot of bad things and good things, too,” but “if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union we wouldn’t be sitting here today, talking as freely,” a reference to the victory of the Red Army over the Nazis. Another orthodox subject put it this way: “I disagree with Khrushchev in one respect; I don’t share his opinion on Stalin.”

57. Glazer, Social Basis, p. 164; Charney, Long Journey, pp. 148, 276, 282–83; Richmond, Long View, p. 381; Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 20–21; Almond, Appeals, pp. 149, 396; Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), pp. 23, 32, 112; Jon Weiner, “The Communist Party: An Interview with Dorothy Healey,” Radical America (May–June 1977), p. 33.

58. Liebman, Jews and the Left, pp. 517–26. See also Isserman, “The 1956 Generation,” p. 49.

59. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, pp. 20–21; Klehr, Cadre, p. 32; Almond, Appeals, p. 149.

60. Charney, Long Journey, p. 283.

61. Ibid., p. 276. Dorothy Healey, who stayed in the Party, nevertheless speaks of the mid-fifties loss of “our most able, experienced mass leaders and Party leaders, particularly from my generation of the thirties” (Weiner, “Interview with Dorothy Healey,” p. 33). See also Richmond, Long View, p. 381, and Almond, Appeals, pp. 149, 396. In Communist imagery, “Bolshevik” suggested militant behavior associated with the barricades; it was extended to cover a willingness to assume unpleasant tasks.

62. Of the small sample of five Gentiles from the thirties generation, two remained orthodox and pro-Soviet while three fought for reform before finally resigning from the Party. Those who entered after 1939 do not constitute a large enough sample for analysis. Of the seven pre-Popular Front recruits in my slim sample, four remained orthodox and pro-Soviet, and a fifth was closer to the Fosterites than to the Party reformers. The results are, at best, suggestive.

Among those of industrial working-class origins, three of four remained orthodox, while the other abandoned the Left altogether. Within the Gentile sample, four opted for orthodoxy, three for reform. Women split into a majority of five reformers, one hard to categorize, and two orthodox. Finally, among those who had a sustained working-class orientation in their organizing efforts, although not necessarily in their backgrounds, five leaned toward orthodoxy, four toward reform. Given the smallness and lack of randomness within the sample, such figures have no statistical significance.

63. Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy, p. 112. In Marxian terminology, “economistic” pertains to policies and behavior that depend on the assumed inevitability of socialism; economism denigrates the role of class consciousness and politics.

chapter 8

1. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Colophon Books, 1964), p. 57.

2. The highest proportion of subjects, nearly 40 percent, continued in or entered the human service area, including social work, education, and clinical practice; eight ultimately became administrators or directors, and six remained in direct practice. There is no significant distribution by sex of promotions to administrative positions. The second-largest category is business, small and medium-size, which accounts for seven, or nearly 20 percent, of the subjects. Four are professionals, another four are in the arts and the academic world, three are skilled workers, three are housewives, and one is a trade-union official.

A rough estimate of the social-economic status of respondents yields the following breakdown: two upper class; nine upper-middle class, eighteen middle-class; and seven lower-middle class. The estimates are based on interview comments, general observations of appearance, home, and style of living, and commentary from other respondents. Certainly, the sample can be accurately described as “affluent,” although “wealthy” would be appropriate to only the two upper-class respondents. Under the circumstances of long-delayed careers, blacklisting, and job harassment, the economic and career success of the sample’s subjects is indeed impressive. Harvey E. Klehr, Communist Cadre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), p. 115, observes, “A large number of those who left the CPUSA became quite successful.” Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 307, tantalizes his readers with the following remark: “One of the untold stories of the U.S. economic boom of the Sixties is the part played in it by former Communists.”

3. See Armand L. Mauss, “The Lost Promise of Reconciliation; New versus Old Left,” Journal of Social Issues 1971, pp. 1–20, for the “optimistic futurism” of the Old Left, as well as its sense of history, faith in central government, commitment to racial integration, and belief in democracy.

4. Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 190, describes post-Party activity as more conventional and private than this study suggests: They pay more attention to the work they do and to their family lives than they do to the stir of world events. They are on the whole excellent workers, superior in their capacity for achievement, and they occupy large and admirable spaces in nearly every sphere of American life.”

5. Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 281.

6. In an earlier study, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), Gabriel Almond describes his sample of former Party members as 41 percent moderate left, 6 percent extreme left, 12 percent trade-union activity, 18 percent indifferent, and 10 percent right-wing and/or religious. In addition, he notes that whereas 46 percent of his sample had rejected Marxism and revolutionary socialism at the point of their resignation, by the time of the interviewing that percentage had risen to 66 percent (p. 353). One must keep in mind that Almond’s sample includes many who left the Party in the 1920s and 1930s and therefore had spent many years outside the movement prior to being interviewed.

7. For a three-generational model, see Reuben Hill, Family Development in Three Generations (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1970).

8. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), pp. 116, 120, 122–24.

9. One of the limitations of Marxism, particularly of its Leninist version, is the flatness of its psychology. Its radical environmentalism, resting on a Pavlovian base, reduces the tragic to societal and class determinants. The rejection of psychoanalysis by most radicals, particularly Communists rests on a refusal to accept Freud’s assumptions about human frailty. Although one can find the gloomiest views of human nature in Freud, he was ultimately, like many Communist activists, a Promethean, always seeking to expand the frontiers of civilization, hoping to increase the margin of sublimated activity and reduce the inroads of the destructive. At the same time, Freud’s belief in the ability of psychotherapy to increase human freedom—that is, conscious choice—assumed certain limits—a bedrock of the irrational, the complicated dialectics of sexuality and aggression, sublimation and repression. As Freud proclaimed, “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct” (Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 31, ed. James Strachey [London: The Hogarth Press, 1973]. p. 96).

Yet Freud, who believed that the usefulness of work as a form of sublimation was limited to those driven not by necessity but rather by professional and artistic ambitions, allows for a less utopian and altruistic vision of socialism in asserting that “it is quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands” (ibid., p. 143). Freud made no affirmation of socialism and chastised its adherents for persisting in unrealistic theories of human behavior. He suggested that the recognition of the importance of property relations among socialists “has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature” (ibid.).

Both Lenin and Freud shared a belief and commitment to Promethean struggle balanced by an attention to human limitation. Lenin asserted that the necessary virtues of a revolutionary are patience and a sense of irony; Freud, though a bourgeois liberal, would have surely concurred. So would Old Leftists like Abe Shapiro.

Perhaps what these seminal and courageous thinkers most shared was an absence of fear that their awareness of human limitation would subvert their commitment to a humane social order. In this sense, they recall the stern but enthusiastic revivalists of the American Revolutionary period, who, in affirming that all were sinners, emphasized that all were equally sinners and thus equal. A belief in human equality does not require a faith in human perfectability, only a respect for human dignity. See Alan Heimert, Religion and The American Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

10. Kenneth Keniston, Young Radicals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 111–20.

11. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), pp. 316–21.

12. Such a group tends to identify with the perspective of I. F. Stone, the iconoclastic radical journalist, and Noam Chomsky, the linguist and Cold War critic.

13. See Harry C. Boyte, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), passim.

14. Starobin, American Communisn in Crisis, p. 235.

15. A recent article by Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review (May–June 1979), scratches the surface.

16. See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

17. A good example is J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, The Norton Library, 1970); the best effort to incorporate conservative insights into a socialist perspective is Peter Clecak, Crooked Paths: Reflections on Socialism, Conservatism, and the Welfare State (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Colophon Books, 1977).

18. See my article, “The New Left and the Cuban Revolution” and those by Martin Duberman, Ronald Radosh, and Frances Fitzgerald in The New Cuba: Paradoxes and Potentials, ed. Ronald Radosh (New York: William Morrow, 1976).

19. James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), pp. 161–62.

20. Christopher Lasch, “Politics and Social Theory: A Reply to the Critics; Symposium: Christopher Lasch and the Culture of Narcissim,” Salmagundi (Fall 1979), p. 179.

21. Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 944.

22. Ibid., p. 950.

23. Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York: John Day, 1933), p. 99.