Radical’s Journey
A Life in Two Centuries: An Autobiography.
by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Introduction by Leonard Schapiro. Stein & Day. 728 pp. $29.95.
This is a disappointing book, but it is so for reasons largely beyond the author’s control. When Bertram Wolfe died in 1977 at the age of eighty-one, he had managed to bring the story of his life only up to the outbreak of World War II, which left his memoirs a half-told tale. This made a particular difference in Wolfe’s case, because his careers before and after the war were so radically opposed to each other.
Before the war, Wolfe belonged to the revolutionary Left: a left-wing Socialist in 1917, a founder of the American Communist party (CPUSA) in 1919, and, even after he had been tossed out of the Comintern and the CPUSA in 1929 by Stalin, a dedicated Marxist-Leninist throughout the 1930’s. But after the war, in the part of his story he did not live to tell, he emerged as a committed, if non-fanatical, anti-Communist. The book that brought him his greatest fame, Three Who Made a Revolution, published in 1948, remains a classic account of the origins and practice of Bolshevism, and those who read it without blinkers are unlikely to retain any romantic illusions concerning the principles or behavior of Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin. In the end, then, this engaging autobiography leaves us frustrated, not because of its own, mostly minor, flaws, but because it does not come far enough forward in time to account for what we want most to understand: the transformation of Wolfe’s political beliefs.
Still, there are compensations. For the time that is covered, Wolfe has provided a lively, vigorous recounting. Although it is his years as a political activist that offer the greatest historical interest, readers might well find Wolfe’s recollections of his childhood in Brooklyn and his early manhood as a student at CCNY the most compelling parts of the book. The remembrance of his boyhood crisis of religious faith, for example, is as sensitive and affecting a depiction of the making of an agnostic as one is likely to encounter. Wolfe writes of those years with unself-conscious charm, and gives us a portrait of the young man that reveals more of his personality than can sometimes be glimpsed in the story of the mature, political years. It is in these early pages that we get the most vivid sense of the qualities that marked Wolfe’s personality and that led him first to be attracted to the Communist faith and later to reject it: enthusiasm and openness to begin with, accompanied by intense intellectual curiosity and, above all, a stubborn independence of spirit.
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Wolfe came to Communism by an indirect route. A child of the 19th century, that stable era of “peace and progress” whose effective, if not chronological, boundaries are 1815 and 1914, Wolfe, like so many of his contemporaries, found the outbreak of the Great War a shattering, almost incomprehensible, experience. Total war seemed to Wolfe a monstrous and brutalizing break-point in human history. He hated the war itself and hated almost as much the mobilization of opinion and suppression of dissent that accompanied it. He became a Socialist when America entered the war in 1917 because the Socialists, at least the most radical of them, opposed the war despite the pressures for patriotic consensus. Commitment to the anti-war cause and to left-wing Socialism developed together, and by 1919 Wolfe joined the more militant members of his party in founding the CPUSA.
For the next twenty years, Wolfe remained an active, if sometimes heterodox, Communist. In his wanderings around the United States and Mexico, with the FBI occasionally on his trail, his involvements in party affairs were always at the center of his life. More often than not, his various jobs as writer, editor, and teacher involved radical causes. He served as a delegate to the Fifth and Sixth Congresses of the Communist International in Moscow in 1924 and 1928 respectively, the first time as a representative of the Mexican party, the second time as part of the American delegation. Life for Wolfe in the 1920’s was an adventure, and his book communicates that sense to us, even if at times it seems as discontinuous and full of abrupt breaks and ramblings as the experience it records.
For Communists, sectarian intrigues came with the membership card. In the end, of course, Moscow spoke as authoritatively to its adherents as Rome did to pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics, but in the periods before or between binding pronouncements, party members engaged in endless internecine warfare. Wolfe inevitably got caught up in that warfare, and it eventually led to his expulsion from the party.
In the late 20’s, Wolfe was a member of the faction of the American party led by Jay Lovestone, and in 1929 Stalin, for reasons having to do less with ideological purity than with a desire to demonstrate his personal authority, moved against the Lovestoneites. Denouncing the presumed heresy of “American exceptionalism,” Stalin required of the Lovestone group that they submit to party discipline and confess their errors. As good “internationalists,” Lovestone, Wolfe, and their allies were willing to accept the ultimate authority of the Comintern, but they would not prostrate themselves by repudiating positions they were sure were correct. And so Stalin, acting with the cold efficiency, if not the murderous finality, of the later purges, kicked them out of the party.
Wolfe and his friends showed courage in standing up to Stalin, but one cannot be certain how much of the break occurred over principle and how much involved choosing the wrong side in a power struggle. The ostensible issues, aside from the degree to which the American experience could be understood as deviating from the imperatives of Marxist historical development, included matters of intraparty democracy, Russian domination of American party affairs, dual unionism, and Moscow’s insistence on designating all non-Communist leftists as “social fascists.”
On all these questions, the Lovestonites took relatively more “liberal” positions than their opponents, but the differences were mostly marginal or tactical and the “deviationists” never questioned fundamental Marxist-Leninist principles. They broke with Stalin—more properly, he broke with them—but they continued for years to call themselves Communists. Love-stone, indeed, supported Stalin’s brutal policies within the Soviet Union during the early 30’s and even held out the hope of eventual reconciliation with Moscow. It was only in 1936 that he came to agree with Wolfe’s judgment concerning the Stalinists that “between us and them, a river of blood has flowed that no decent man will cross.”
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Wolfe was never other than a decent and honorable man, but aspects of his behavior remain difficult to comprehend. If he never joined with Lovestone in apologies for Stalin’s actions in the 1930’s, neither did he see fit to speak out about Soviet realities until the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. (Even as his anti-war sympathies had first drawn him to Communism, now they helped lead him away.) In general, it seems not unfair to suggest that it took longer than it should have done for Wolfe to understand that the problems of Communism went deeper than the pathologies of Stalin’s personality.
It is not apology that we look for in this matter, but explanation. Wolfe simply does not tell us enough of what it was that attracted him to Communism in the first place and that kept him an at least nominal party member for so long. Many people, after all, opposed World War I and the Red Scare without taking the road to Moscow. The few paragraphs out of this very large book that Wolfe devotes to the lures of the Marxist faith are astute, but they are insufficient. There is nothing here of the emotional resonance one finds, for example, in the various remembrances gathered in The God That Failed. We never get from Wolfe the feel of what it meant to attach oneself to or detach oneself from the Communist party.
Nor is there adequate intellectual explanation. Throughout his life, Wolfe was a man of enormous and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. But his autobiography, while it shows us the breadth of his interests and activities—the book is a treasure-house of personal adventures, discussions of art and literature, mini-biographies, brief histories, and assorted travelogues—does not deal in depth with political ideas. Of political intrigues, there is much; of political philosophy, disappointingly little. Thus we learn at great length of the books Wolfe wrote with and about the great radical painter, Diego Rivera, and of the adventures they shared in Mexico and America throughout the 20’s and 30’s, but we never get sufficient analysis of the Marxist faith that drew them both to it. This is the story of a life, not of a life’s ideas.
It is entirely possible, of course, that Wolfe intended to deal more fully with these matters in his coverage of the postwar years. At any rate, we have what we have, and, wishing there were more, we can still be grateful that Wolfe lived long enough to conclude at least part of an intriguing and usable chapter in the history of modern American radicalism.
