My Review of Maurice Isserman's "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism"

Original Sin

Maurice Isserman, a man of the Left and a history professor at Hamilton College, has written an important history of the American Communist Party. Isserman tells two stories: one of misplaced idealism of those who supported labor rights and civil rights in support of a socialist America and the other of a group of Americans who bowed to every wind coming out of Moscow. The latter is the original sin of American communism by blindly following the party line coming out of Moscow which twisted its members into pretzels.

 

From the beginning in 1919 the American Communist Party was subsidized by “Moscow gold” to 1989 when Gorbachev finally cut them off. Isserman thoroughly recounts the changes in the party line from calling for outright revolution, supporting existing trade unions to supporting dual unionism, and with the rise of fascism in Europe working in a broad coalition of leftists to form the popular front. All that would come to an end with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 calling World War II a capitalist war until the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941.  Of course, during the 1930’s American communists refused to believe that there was mass starvation in Ukraine and looked the other way as the purge trials in Moscow led to the deaths of their former heroes. Along the way we meet Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and Dashiell Hammett, among others affiliated with the party.

 

If there are heroes in the book, they are those communists who helped build the CIO, Earl Browder, and Dorothy Healey.  Browder, who as leader of the party, actually changed the party to a political association to make it easier to participate in the normal political processes. However, his reforms went array when Moscow criticized him via what was called the Duclos letter in 1945. Within a year he was expelled. Isserman underplays the Duclos letter because it was a harbinger of the Cold War to come. His other hero was Los Angeles communist Dorothy Healey who was also a reformer, be she stayed with the party through Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin, the Hungarian revolt, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She wouldn’t leave the party until 1972. This highlights the fact how hard it was for long-term members to quit; their whole lives were bound up in it. As an aside I was once acquainted with Healey.

 

I have three criticisms of Isserman. The first is that although he discussed the use of party members in the Soviet spying apparatus, he doesn’t show how deep the penetration was in the New Deal and in the role of the Rosenberg spy ring. He wrote that rank and file members were oblivious to the secret work those communists were involved in. I don’t think they were that naïve.

 

My second criticism is that he underplays the role of the Comintern’s American Commission which Stalin actually chaired. Theodore Draper, in his “American Communism and Soviet Russia” highlighted its importance. Simply put, under the orders of Stalin, such leading communist officials as Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, and Bertram Wolfe were purged. That sent a message to the American party that the knee must be continually bent towards Moscow. Thus, there would be no Titoist party in America, meaning the party could not adapt to the unique conditions in America.

 

Third he doesn’t fully cover the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that run entirely by the Communist Party. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The World that Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century" ) Today we would call that foreign election interference.

 

Those criticisms aside, Isserman has written an important book about a movement that enthralled more than a few Americans and far more fellow travelers. In a very real sense, the taint of Soviet Russia has haunted the American Left for decades. Isserman tells us in a very interesting way what went wrong.