The Contradictions of American Communism

The challenge that any history of the CPUSA faces is coming to terms with the party’s contradictions. Members of the party were unquestionably in the forefront of political efforts attempting to transform the United States into a more progressive country, but did so under the auspices of an organization whose lodestar was Joseph Stalin’s terrifically repressive Soviet Union. While recruiting members with the attractive prospect of being part of an international movement for human liberation, the party’s grueling antidemocratic internal culture produced burnouts, resentful defectors and expellees, and petty authoritarians. And despite the party leadership’s supposed mastery of Marxist analysis, it repeatedly engaged in a series of tragicomic strategic miscalculations, which limited its appeal at every turn.

The troubled and paradoxical experience of the Communist Party, terminating with its implosion after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations regarding Stalin’s crimes, has led to critical appraisals of the long arc of its history. Both previous scholarly attempts to capture the story of the party in a single volume, the socialists Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s 1957 The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) and the traditionalists Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes’s 1992 The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, bemoaned the American Communist experience as a tragic waste of political potential that could have been channeled into less benighted organizations.

Isserman agrees with the party’s harsher assessors that the CPUSA’s history is “a cautionary tale of what went wrong, and certainly not a blueprint for a contemporary American Left to follow, save to its own disadvantage.” But he also writes against “demonology” of the party, instead offering “not in any sense a ‘usable past,’ but rather an exercise in gaining historical perspective.” Isserman tells the story of American Communism as an integral part of twentieth-century American history, with Communists “as social critics and agents of much-needed social change, and, for much of that time, as targets of official repression and mass hysteria.” It is only by squarely facing the party’s many contradictions, and refusing to fall into either apologia or narrow condemnation, that Isserman is able to capture the vicissitudes of CPUSA history.

Formation, Zigzags, and Fall

The basic outlines of the Communist Party’s historical trajectory are well-known and Isserman hews to its accepted periodization. It had its origin in a pair of competing parties splitting from the Socialist Party in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Owing to guidance from the Comintern, these factions united to form a single organization before embarking on the confrontational “Third Period” in 1928.

Subsequently embracing a more pluralistic approach during the 1930s “Popular Front” won the CPUSA its heyday of influence, before squandering its popularity by championing the Hitler-Stalin pact. Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union prompted the party to reverse its position yet again and back the anti-Nazi war effort. However, the party’s patriotism was rewarded by all manner of government harassment and ostracism by its erstwhile political allies, intensifying after the party’s unwise support of the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. A mass exodus of members following official Soviet acknowledgement of Stalin’s misdeeds in 1956 marked the end of the party’s significant influence in American political life.

In recounting this history, Isserman retells the triumphs of the CPUSA which are the bread and butter of revisionist historiography. Brushing aside accusations of Communist “infiltration” of labor unions, Isserman points out that Communists had a key role in building the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions in the first place. On issues of combating US racism, through the Scottsboro legal campaign and other efforts, “Communists were indeed acting as a vanguard.”

The party’s greatest material contribution to anti-fascism, the celebrated Lincoln Brigade, fought valiantly, although ultimately unsuccessfully, to repel Francisco Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. In eras of heightened popularity, the party managed to attract rings of “fellow travelers” — “not necessarily a synonym for being a naive puppet, or useful idiot, or the other pejoratives often attached to the term” — to multiply its influence. Mercifully, Isserman relegates the party’s espionage activities, a tedious fixation of traditionalist historians, to an appropriately limited page count.

These touchstones of CPUSA history are familiar, but Isserman also highlights less widely known episodes in the party’s development. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was an anti-racist legal defense effort similar to the Scottsboro one, except on behalf of accused Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. The replacement of soldiers shipped off to fight in World War II with female members enabled the party membership to achieve gender parity toward the war’s conclusion. And among the many included anecdotes enlivening the text, Isserman recounts an amusing episode of Ernest Hemingway falling out with the CPUSA, stopping by party headquarters to leave a note to “Tell [party columnist] Mike Gold that Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.”

Only rarely does Isserman’s evenhanded touch desert him. In one such case, Isserman argues that the Communists’ 1920 decision to go underground was a rejection of American democratic “norms.” Retrospectively, the party’s repeated ventures underground seem strategically unwise, but which American democratic norms Isserman believes they were violating by doing so is unclear. Communists had at least understandable reasons for such a decision, given the period’s “American Midnight” of government repression, which claimed other radical organizations as victims — most notably the International Workers of the World. Evidently, America was not living up to its own professed civil libertarian “norms.” And Isserman can’t restrain himself from parenthetically ridiculing the limitations of the CPUSA’s incipient Trotskyists. But these are minor departures from an otherwise astutely narrated account.

A Usable Past Is Good, Actually

Isserman has written that he was inspired to pen Reds by virtue of the large numbers of Americans, mostly young, who became interested in radical politics over the past decade. For these new arrivals to leftism, Isserman’s book can serve as an informative introduction to the history of the Communist movement in the United States. But will any of them be inclined to read it, much less be convinced of the Communists’ inability to offer a “usable past” to the Left of today? Isserman’s recent unfortunate statements on present politics make that possibility less likely.

Still apparently haunted by the specter of the implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), of which he was a member in the 1960s, Isserman recently announced to the world that he was renouncing his current membership in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), due to the supposed scourge of Lenninist “entryists” infiltrating the organization. This is a profound misreading of DSA’s situation — ironically, in a reversal of SDS’s history, the rise of DSA has caused more severe crises for Leninist organizations than vice versa. But ultimately Isserman’s exit seems to have been prompted by the increased intolerance for Zionist politics within DSA. His farewell statement, marred by a tendentious reading of DSA’s positions regarding Palestine, will leave his intended audience questioning whether his counsel is worth heeding.

And what is Isserman’s advice to the American left today? In line with the attitude of the traditionalists, he advises avoiding the “mistakes” of the CPUSA by a complete repudiation of a “flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state.” It is true that there are certainly many aspects of the Communist record that do not recommend emulation. However, those earnestly interested in unearthing a “usable past” cannot afford the luxury of a blithe dismissal of the hitherto most successful left organization in American history.