Communism & American Radicals
American Communism and Soviet Russia.
by Theodore Draper.
Viking Press. 558 pp. $8.50.
Theodore Draper’s previous book, The Roots of American Communism, covered the early years of American Communism from the Russian Revolution to roughly the end of 1922. It also subjected to close scrutiny the pre-Communist radical movements and the factions within these movements from which most of the American Communist leaders were recruited. The present book brings the story up to the autumn of 1929, closing with the final defeat and expulsion of Jay Lovestone and his followers after their futile resistance to the orders of the Comintern, ultimately of Stalin, to abandon their exclusive leadership of the American party which had been ratified by a party convention earlier in the year.
Draper’s ultimate goal is to write the history of the party up to 1945. Since the party achieved its greatest influence in the 1930’s and early 40’s, one may be disposed to regard the first two volumes as an extended prelude to the main part of the historian’s task. And since the two books together are over a thousand pages in length, one may wonder with awe how many more will be required to achieve Draper’s aim. But the present book persuades us that such a view is a misconception and that the rest of the story will amount largely to the study of variations on a theme, at least so far as the internal life and structure of the party is concerned. “At every crisis and turning point,” Draper writes, “such as the outbreak of war in 1939 or the downfall of Earl Browder in 1945, the leaders seemed to be responding to influences and pressures out of the distant past rather than to the immediate present. . . . The more I dug, the more I became convinced that the first decade of the American Communist party’s existence was the basic one for an understanding of its fundamental nature.”
Previous students of American Communism have described the defeat of the Love-stoneites, following the earlier ouster of the supporters of Trotsky, as the final phase in the “Stalinization” of the party that reduced it to the docile instrument of Soviet policy it has been ever since. This judgment is correct enough if by “Stalinization” is meant the ending of the open factional conflicts that dominated the party’s life through its first decade of existence. Afterward—with the exception of the short-lived group led by John Gates that tried in 1957 to reorient the party after the Hungarian Revolution—differences over theory and policy within the party could only, as in the Soviet Union itself, be expressed in muted, Aesopian form. But if “Stalinization” is equated with the direct intervention of the Soviet leaders in the affairs of the American party and the willing acquiescence of American Communists to Moscow’s orders even when these orders contradicted their own recently expressed opinions and policies, then the party was, as Draper shows, “Stalinized” from the very beginning. Hence his title, in some ways a misleading one.
Draper modestly suggests that his use of previously unexplored materials may pave the way for future researchers on American Communism. But it is hard to see how anyone can hope to match the present volume in richness of sources, let alone in the lucidity and objectivity with which the story is told. Its position as the definitive work on the first decade of American Communism seems almost impregnable. Not only did Draper uncover the confidential minutes of the top committees of the U.S. party between 1919 and 1929 and stenographic copies of discussions in Moscow bearing on the American party, but he had numerous long personal interviews with such former leading Communists as Lovestone, Browder, James Cannon, Bertram Wolfe, and many others. Communists, he remarks, do not usually write memoirs, so, except in the improbable event that future defections occur among the few remaining veterans in the top American leadership, further material from personal sources is unlikely to appear.
Draper’s project was conceived as part of the series on Communism in American Life supported by the Fund for the Republic. Six years ago, when the series was first planned, its subject was one of the most controversial and politically explosive issues in American life even though the CP had long since passed the peak of its influence. Now, happily, even retrospective fascination with domestic Communism has waned. So although Draper’s studies are no longer as relevant to public controversy, McCarthyism has nevertheless yielded an unexpected return to scholars of American radical history.
But why should anyone who is not a specialist be interested any longer in so voluminous and detailed an examination of a Communist party which, in contrast to those of several other countries, has always been small and sectarian, except for a few brief moments in the 30’s? American radicalism doubtless has a future, but not one that is likely to draw inspiration from the Communist experience in any but a negative sense. Illusions about the Soviet Union or Chinese Communism may very well be revived as the cold war waxes and wanes, sympathy for the appeasement of or even capitulation to foreign Communist powers conceivably might develop, but it is hard to believe that Russia (or China) will ever again be upheld as a model to which it is passionately hoped and believed American history will eventually conform. For it was just such hopes and expectations that led the American Communists to subordinate themselves to Moscow, to “exchange the nationalism of their own countries for the nationalism of another country—in the name of internationalism,” as Draper put it in The Roots of American Communism. The transformation of a native radical movement into a Soviet fifth column—who can believe that this could happen again, that the decline of American Communism is not in this sense a permanent one?
One cannot help raising this question, but it is the measure of Draper’s achievement that he succeeds in inducing the reader to forget it and become engrossed in his story. Without ever giving in to the temptation to sensationalize his material, he manages to convey the pathos of the careers of several of his leading figures and the drama of the interaction between Moscow and the American party. Without violating the sober, even pace of his narrative, he suggests the sinister chill evoked by an angry Stalin shouting at the defiant Love-stone and Gitlow, “When you get back to America, nobody will stay with you except your wives. There is plenty of room in our cemeteries.” This in that year of innocence 1929.
No, it will not happen again. And the Communist party never became a maker and shaker of American life. But it did thrive once, almost extinguishing the flickering spirit of American radicalism, a spirit we may still find uses for in the future.
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