I spent years studying American communism. Here’s what I learned | Maurice Isserman
I’ll leave it to future historians to puzzle out the reasons why, but in the second decade of the 21st century, in the unlikely setting of the most thoroughly capitalist country in world history, large numbers of Americans, mostly young, displayed a new interest in socialist ideas, values and policy proposals, and in turn in the often neglected history of socialism and communism in the United States.Having written three books early in my scholarly career dealing with one or another aspect of the tangled history of American communism, the last appearing in 1990, I figured I’d said all I had to say on the subject, and turned to other topics. Enough time had passed by the time of the 2010s socialist revival that the several score ageing communists and ex-communists whom I’d interviewed for my early books were now long dead.But in 2020 an editor at a New York publishing house, noticing the upswing in interest among young Americans in leftwing (although non-communist) politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, contacted me wondering if there might be a readership emerging for a new narrative history of the Communist party USA, from its founding in 1919 to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.We decided there was, and the result, out this month, is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.A lot of what I had written in earlier books on the subject still seemed valid to me. But some things needed to change. For one thing, no one writing on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s had any real idea of the extent to which the party was involved in Soviet espionage activities in the 1930s and 1940s. More generally, what struck me as I returned to the topic was the mystery of why so many often highly intelligent and in many ways admirable people, as communists were when considered individually, could have remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement that never had a chance of success in the US.Most of the interviewees I met while researching my earlier books, starting when I was a graduate student in the 1970s, were in their 60s and 70s by the time I sat down with them, armed with my primitive cassette tape recorder. I came to think of them as the “YCL generation”: teenagers or young adults who had joined the Young Communist League in the early days of the Great Depression, graduating to the adult movement in the course of the decade, some of them fighting in Spain, others organizing unions of steel workers in Ohio and agricultural workers in California, some writing for and editing publications like the Daily Worker in New York and the People’s World in San Francisco.Not a few of them wound up spending time in federal prison in the 1950s for violating the Smith Act, a law that made it a felony to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government. Most had left the movement before the 1960s, disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in Moscow in 1956, in which the then Soviet leader indicted his recently deceased predecessor, Joseph Stalin, as a bloodthirsty tyrant.By the time I met them, after the passage of another two decades, these American ex-communists, and the few who remained in the party, generally as dissidents, had had a long time to think over the errors they’d made, and the crimes they’d apologized for, in younger days.And because they were, as a rule, so thoughtful, introspective, self-critical, and eager to share their insights with a then twentysomething-year-old researcher – hoping in doing so, I imagine, to persuade a younger generation via my books not to repeat their mistakes – I forgave them a lot. I like to think I didn’t apologize for their blindness to Stalin’s crimes, or for their willing support of a movement that, had it actually come to power in the US, might well have been responsible for similar crimes.But I don’t think I fully understood, or at least fully conveyed, how the elderly men and women from whom I learned so much might not have seemed so appealing to me if I’d encountered their younger selves decades earlier, when they were still true believers. And this, despite the fact that some of them told me as much: “I was a little Stalin,” Dorothy Healey said of her early years as a Los Angeles communist party leader. “I’m not talking about anybody else.”The central contradiction of American communism – one that defined it from its founding in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution to its essential demise with the end of the Soviet Union 70-odd years later – was, as I write in Reds, that it “attracted egalitarian idealists, and it bred authoritarian zealots”. Some clung longer to their idealism and resisted the authoritarian temptation better than others, but only at the price of concealing their true feelings.Mary Heaton Vorse, a free-spirited feminist and socialist from Greenwich Village, was a labor journalist who seemed to be on the scene of every major moment that American labor challenged the power of capital, from the 1912 textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the 1937 auto workers’ strike in Flint, Michigan. She noted in her diary in the early 1920s that the people she met in the newly-established Communist party all seemed to have “closed minds, so certain, so dull. They bore me, bore me, bore me,” underlining the last words for emphasis.A few years later, however, she joined the party herself, and remained a member into the 1930s. But she retained the habit of confiding to her diary her dislike for many of her comrades. “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be,” she wrote in 1931. “But I am a communist who hates communists and communism.”Writing the history of American communism requires an appreciation of such contradictions. Somewhere along the line, I showed a draft of an early chapter of Reds to a friend and fellow historian familiar with my earlier works. Getting back to me a few days later, he said he liked it well enough, and saw how it grew out of my first books on the topic. But, he added: “You seem less patient with the communists than you used to be.”That was a shrewd observation. Now that I’m in my 70s, roughly the age of those I interviewed back when I first began studying the history of American communism, now that I’ve had ample time to reflect on some of my own youthful political follies in the 1960s, I probably am (in retrospect) less inclined to be patient with my interviewees in their younger days. Understanding, yes. Patient, not so much. As the great British historian EP Thompson, himself a former communist, wrote in his 1963 masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class, understanding the “obsolete”, “utopian” and “deluded” English working-class radicals of the early 19th century required rescuing them from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.Condescension, historically, can take the form of a patronizing dismissal of those who came long before us for failing to live up to the high standards of moral intelligence and practical knowledge we like to imagine we possess. But it can also take the form of cutting our ancestors perhaps too much slack.In the case of American communism, the appeal of the Soviet “experiment” in the 1930s and 1940s in a world racked by the Great Depression and menaced by domestic and foreign fascism is perfectly comprehensible. At the same time, it shouldn’t have taken a speech by Khrushchev to reveal Stalin’s all-too-evident crimes against humanity in his three decades of misrule over the Soviet Union; lots of people, including many on the American and international left, had figured that one out for themselves long before.In the end, studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits. I hope that in Reds I have avoided both (readers, please advise), and thus have been fair to my old and now departed friends, those veterans of the communist movement, whose memories and insights I taped so many years back.American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes.
Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism More
