Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism

This is a critical yet balanced and engaging history of the Communist Party (CP) from its roots in earlier radical movements down to its decline in the late twentieth century. It is sympathetic with the rank-and-file men and women, if not the leadership, who built the movement, especially in the heady days through World War II. “The communist cause attracted egalitarian idealists, and it bred authoritarian zealots” (3), Isserman writes. It “helped win democratic reforms that helped millions of ordinary American citizens and championed a brutal authoritarian state responsible for the imprisonment and death of millions of Soviet citizens” (4).Some earlier scholars emphasized, perhaps overemphasized, the domestic and grassroots aspects of the movement, while others have seen it strictly as a tool of the Soviet regime. The historiographical debate has been vigorous, and Isserman is not the first to try to balance these characteristics. His assessment is based on a thorough reading of the voluminous literature, but he does not always credit earlier works that have achieved some measure of this balance. Well written and engaging, much of the narrative charts the organization’s development and decline and the changing contexts for both, but it avoids some of the tedious detail of the party’s endless factionalism, partly due to engaging sketches of the key personalities—from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, Jay Lovestone, and Earl Browder to Gus Hall and Angela Davis.A lively introduction provides the radical American background. The first chapter deals with the Russian Revolution and its early degeneration. It is essential reading, given the heavy hand of the Soviet regime in the history of the American party. Isserman explains the CP’s relative weakness not only in terms of its factionalism and deference to the Soviets, at great cost, but also to government repression during and long after the Red Scare years. “Whatever else one might say of American Communists in the 1920s,” Isserman concludes, “they had the courage of their convictions, with the convictions to prove it” (72). In the midst of all this, the Communists built a large English and foreign-language press, a vigorous network of ethnic cultural institutions, and a legal arm, the International Labor Defense.As in most recent studies, the Third Period (1928–35) is seen as a lost opportunity. The most serious economic and political crisis facing American capitalism provided real opportunities for radicals, but the rigidity and sectarianism of the international line and the party’s own factionalism hobbled the organization at a critical moment. Its activists led a series of spectacular but largely doomed strikes in mining, textiles, garment manufacturing, and elsewhere, and the organization began to attract an important group of intellectuals. (The rise of Trotskyism, weak in the late 1920s but a significant influence in the long run, is given short shrift.) During the 1933–34 labor upheavals, the party began to grow.In the Popular Front years (1935–39) the Communists consolidated this growth and, more importantly, their influence, especially in the labor movement and the cultural sphere. Rising at a rate of ten thousand per year, membership reached sixty-eight thousand by early 1939. Isserman describes how the party achieved the “Americanization” it had sought in the 1920s, as its activists immersed themselves in mass organizations—the National Negro Congress, the League of American Writers, the National Student League, and, above all, the Congress of Industrial Organizations—with others from diverse backgrounds. The new party line brought some to the battlefields of Spain. Isserman persuasively analyzes much of this transformation in terms of a new, largely native-born generation of workers who embraced the opportunity to engage the American mainstream at work, in the community, in cultural life, and antifascist movements. This was a matter not just of ideology but also of demographics and society. “For many of the next Communist generation their own country was becoming ‘ours’ emotionally in a way that hadn’t been the case a decade earlier” (137). The cost of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which brought this growth to a halt and undermined this influence, comes through clearly.Isserman was one of the first writers on the Left to come to terms with the revelations of CP involvement in espionage. This plays some role in his narrative of the Popular Front, the war years, and, of course, the repression following the war. Yet the treatment here is surprisingly brief. He is undoubtedly correct that most members had nothing to do with these activities, but given the prominence of this theme in the anticommunist historiography, which became a minor industry with the opening of the Russian archives, we might have expected him to say more.The last two chapters of the book, well developed throughout, make for depressing reading. The party met the severe government repression from 1947 on with more sectarianism, resulting in the predictable imprisonment of much of the movement’s national and state leadership. Popular anticommunism and the party’s own Cold War positions undermined every effort to mount a defense, let alone to regain any influence. In 1956, when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolution and Khruschev revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes, many of those who had survived the McCarthy period voted with their feet. A group of reformers shaped by the Popular Front and war years tried to move away from the old model and reinvent the organization as a “mass party of socialism,” but an older generation of leaders held tight to Stalin’s model as the membership dispersed. The book ends with the American party’s own “cult of personality” around Gus Hall, its rather shallow and possibly corrupt general secretary from 1959 to 2000. In the 1960s and 1970s, when it might have played some role in the radicalism of those years, the party remained largely out of touch. In the years of glasnost, perestroika, and the fall of the Eastern European Soviet regimes, when many parties throughout the world took the opportunity to redefine themselves, the American party opposed the changes in Russia and elsewhere and as a result remained a tiny, largely ineffectual sect.The history of American communism and what it means in the broader sweep of American history has been the source of great debate. Many of us have been waiting for an accessible, balanced account that could make sense of all this. We may have it now in Isserman’s Reds.