The Cold War Debate Continues a Traditionalist View of Historical

Survey Article The Cold War Debate Continues Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism

✣ John Earl Haynes

The domestic side of the Cold War has long been the subject of contentious scholarly debate. The most sensitive point of disagreement has been the history of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the inextricably linked question of domestic anti-Communism. The strong emotions that are still provoked by these issues were apparent in an October 1998 editorial in The New York Times, which warned that America should “beware the rehabilitation of Joseph McCarthy.” The editorial, entitled “Revisionist McCarthyism,” denounced “a number of American scholars”—without mentioning names—who, “armed with audacity and new archival information, . . . would like to rewrite the historical verdict on Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism.”1 In reality, the likely targets of the editorial had made no attempt to rewrite the verdict on McCarthy. In a joint response, Ronald Radosh, Harvey Klehr, and this author defended traditionalist scholars and emphasized that the new evidence on the CPUSA and espionage offered no vindication of McCarthy:

In The Secret World of American Communism, two of us stated that “[i]n McCarthy’s hands, anticommunism was a partisan weapon used to implicate the New Deal, liberals, and the Democratic Party in treason. Using evidence that was exaggerated, distorted, and in some cases utterly false, [McCarthy] accused hundreds of individuals of Communist activity, recklessly mixing the innocent with the assuredly guilty when it served his political purposes.” And, in The Amerasia Spy Case, two of us made the point that “precisely because Senator McCarthy was reckless and made false charges, actual Com-

1. “Revisionist McCarthyism,” The New York Times, 23 October 1998, p. A22.

76 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

munists who engaged in and contemplated espionage sought to claim the

status of victims.”2 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

A year after the editorial appeared, The New York Times published a lengthy essay by Jacob Weisberg, entitled “Cold War without End,” which argued that it was time for the debate about Communism in America to come to a halt. The essay appeared as a cover story in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine section, which rarely features articles of any length about scholarly debates. Weisberg’s tone was world-weary and ironic; he suggested that further discussion of the subject was pointless. The whole issue, he implied, is now chiefly of interest only to Jews concerned about “acceptance and assimi- lation” and certain persons with “unresolved feelings of personal betrayal” as well as “the Oedipal conflicts of red-diaper babies,” all of whom have failed to “process the news that the Cold War is over.”3 There is no doubt that the Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union is no more, and Communists and Communism, although not gone, are fast disap- pearing. But historical debates over Communism and the Cold War are in many ways more lively and interesting now than ever before. The twentieth century saw war, revolution, mass murder, human butchery, terror, and cruelty on an extraordinary scale. Making historical sense of these appalling phenomena will be a major preoccupation for scholars. Communism and anti-Communism played central roles in that ghastly century. Frantic calls to “move on,” voiced by those who fear to upset the existing academic consensus,4 and denuncia- tions of historians who are “too zealous in setting the record straight,”5 likely will be ignored. Debates over Communism will continue well into the twenty- first century and, as scholars of the French Revolution can attest, will remain a topic of intense controversy for many years to come. This essay will review the immense historiography on the subject of Com- munism and anti-Communism in the United States that developed during the Cold War and continues to this day. The 40 years that followed the founding of the CPUSA in 1919 produced much polemical and journalistic writing,

2. Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr, “Spy Stories: The Times vs. History,” The New Republic, 16 November 1998, pp. 15–16. The latter reference is to Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro- lina Press, 1996). A year later, a book appeared that actually came close to matching the claimed target of the Times’s ire, Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (New York: The Free Press, 1999), the first ever full-scale scholarly defense, albeit qualified, of McCarthy. 3. Jacob Weisberg, “Cold War without End,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 28 Novem- ber 1999, pp. 116–123, 155–158. 4. Anna Kasten Nelson, “Illuminating the Twilight Struggle: New Interpretations of the Cold War,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 June 1999, p. B6. 5. David Oshinsky, “McCarthy, Still Unredeemable,” New York Times, 7 November 1998, p. A20.

77 Haynes some of high quality and enduring value, but little scholarly history. Scholarly examinations began to appear in the late 1950s and increased slowly in num- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ber until the late 1970s, when interest in the subject blossomed. The 1987 compendium on Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings lists hundreds of books, articles, and dissertations—2,087 entries in all. If a new edition were prepared today, it would contain twice as many citations.6 In a literature this vast, generalizations are subject to numerous qualifications and exceptions. That caveat stated, one can discern four broad waves of scholarship: (1) the 1950s to the mid-1960s; (2) the late 1960s to the mid-1970s; (3) the late 1970s to the early 1990s; and (4) the period following the collapse of Soviet Communism.

The First Wave

The late 1950s and early 1960s produced the first substantial scholarly studies of the CPUSA. The ten books of the “Communism in American Life” series, commissioned by the Fund for the Republic, embodied both the strengths and the weaknesses of this initial group.7 The books broke new ground, but, like all pioneering efforts, they contained serious gaps and flaws. For example, the lack of detailed monographic studies of particular incidents and controversies greatly handicapped Robert W. Iversen’s The Communists and the Schools. Iversen tried to write a synthesis when there was no body of scholarship to synthesize. Similar problems arose from the unavailability of primary documents. David Shannon’s The Decline of Ameri- can Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States Since 1945, relied largely on published sources because of the absence of archival materials for post–World War II events.

6. John Earl Haynes, Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York: Garland, 1987). Citations since 1987 can be found in the author’s quarterly “Writings on the History of American Communism” in the Newsletter of the His- torians of American Communism, a publication that has appeared continuously since 1982. 7. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957); Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1959); Robert W. Iversen, The Communists and the Schools (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1959); David Shannon, The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Commu- nist Party of the United States Since 1945 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1959); Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (New York: Viking Press, 1960); Clinton Rossiter, Marxism: The View from America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1960); Ralph L. Roy, Communism and the Churches (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1960); Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961); Frank S. Meyer, The Molding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1961); and Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washing- ton: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

78 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

Although many books from this era have become dated, several continue to be of value. Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left remains a basic text Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 on the influence of Communism on literature, although there are now several competing accounts. Irving Howe’s and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History (published at this time, though not as part of the Communism in American Life series), was until recently the best and most comprehensive one-volume history of the CPUSA. It is still worth consulting. Two books from the first wave, however, remain without peer. Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism and his American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period tell the story of the party up to 1929. Archival resources were more readily available for these early years, and Draper personally collected a substantial number of primary documents. Also, because the era about which he wrote came before the party’s spread into mainstream institutions, the lack of complementary research handicapped him less than it did those who worked on later decades. The political attitudes of these pioneering scholars varied: most were liberals, radicals, or socialists, and a few were conservatives. Whatever their orientation, they regarded Communism as an anti-democratic political movement that sought to replace America’s system of democratic liberties with a tyranni- cal regime and also regarded the CPUSA as subordinate to Soviet Communism. In part these attitudes reflected the ideological civil war in the late 1940s between anti-Communist liberals and a Popular Front alliance of liberals who sought accommodation with the Soviet Union and cooperation with American Communists. Anti-Communist and Popular Front liberals both claimed to be the legitimate successors to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Their internecine struggle over the direction of liberalism was hard-fought and intensely emotional. The election of Harry Truman in 1948, Henry Wallace’s crushing defeat, and the expulsion of Communists from the labor movement marked the triumph of anti-Communist liberalism. Because the victorious anti-Communist liberals regarded Communists as illegitimate participants in liberal and labor institutions, they often saw such participation as “infiltration” and refused to recognize Popular Front liberals as fellow heirs of the New Deal. When they looked back at the 1930s and 1940s, most of them interpreted the New Deal in their own image and understated the extent to which some New Deal politicians and institutions quietly welcomed Communist participation. David Shannon’s The Decline of American Communism and Max Kampelman in The Commu- nist Party versus the CIO particularly reflected this view.8 In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and right-wing anti-Communists

8. Max Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO: A Study in Power Politics (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1957).

79 Haynes attacked liberals as front men for a Communist conspiracy. In response, some of the scholars of the first wave pursued a defensive agenda. Ralph Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Roy’s Communism and the Churches defended various religious bodies against right-wing attack and, in the process, seriously understated the extent to which some religious figures had found common ground with the Communists in the 1930s and 1940s. This defensive political stance also re- inforced the tendency of anti-Communist liberal scholars to attribute Com- munist involvement in liberal institutions to infiltration and manipulation. The conspiratorial image of Communism enabled anti-Communist liberals, facing partisan attacks from conservative anti-Communists, to deny an ideological link between Communism and Roosevelt’s New Deal, banish from memory the attraction of the Popular Front stance in the 1930s, and explain away Communist participation in New Deal institutions by presenting liberals as the victims of Communist subversion. The New Deal and its legacy were further protected from taint by the claim that successful Communist infiltration had been restricted to a few isolated areas of liberal and labor activities. The Communist Party’s role in the Congress of Industrial Organi- zations (CIO), a major grouping of labor unions, was acknowledged but minimized, and its role in mainstream liberal politics was said to be con- fined chiefly to New York (a situation acknowledged because the Commu- nist role in the American Labor Party was too public to ignore).

The Second Wave

The scholars of the second wave focused on American anti-Communism, not American Communism. They regarded McCarthyism and the popular anti- Communism of the late 1940s and 1950s as despicable phenomena that had inflicted grave damage on American culture, subverted democratic liberties, and ruined countless innocent lives. Almost unanimously, they placed the blame for McCarthyism on anti-Communist liberals. In most of the mainstream histories written in the 1950s and early 1960s, anti-Communist liberals had received positive and often glowing treatment. The “revisionist” historians of the late 1960s and early 1970s sought to overturn this assessment. Although these writers disagreed on some matters, their common views can be seen in The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism, a volume of writings by major revisionist scholars who launched a full-scale as- sault on anti-Communism in general and anti-Communist liberalism in particular. To these revisionists, anti-Communist liberals had legitimated an inherently evil impulse—anti-Communism—and had thereby set the stage for

80 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism its logical product: McCarthyism. Liberals were also held partially responsible for the Vietnam War, an issue that clearly tinged much of the scholarship at the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 time. The liberals’ alleged role in the war, according to the revisionists, provided further evidence of the immorality of opposition to Communism.9 The revisionists of this second wave had little to say about American Communism. In revisionist books and essays, the CPUSA was depicted as little more than a figment of the imagination of anti-Communists. At times, anti-Communists were portrayed as paranoid individuals embarked on a witch hunt for nonexistent witches. At other times, anti-Communists were treated as cynical opportunists who consciously created a mythical Commu- nist conspiracy to fool an ignorant public, to serve their political needs, and to justify their quasi-fascist actions. The American Communist party, to the extent it appeared at all in this second wave of scholarship, was treated as an organization of little importance. Communist activities were seen as far too insignificant to have justified the actions taken against the CPUSA. Whereas anti-Communist liberal scholars of the first wave tended to marginalize Communist participation in the New Deal, the revisionists of the second wave rendered it nearly invisible. In revisionist histories, those whom the anti-Communist liberals fought were often vaguely defined as progressives, social liberals, or activists in some undifferentiated reform coalition in which Communists may have played some vague and unspecified role. Those who had been accused of being Communists were skeptically referred to as “alleged” Communists. In The Politics of Fear, for example, Robert Griffith defined McCarthyism and other varieties of anti-Communism as hostility to radicalism unconnected to the anti-democratic characteristics of the CPUSA or Soviet Communism:

It was a natural expression of America’s political culture and a logical though extreme product of its political machinery. What came to be called “McCarthyism” was grounded in a set of attitudes, assumptions, and judg- ments with deep roots in American history. There has long been a popular fear of radicalism in this country. . . . The mobilization and political articulation of these is the anti-Communist “persuasion.”10

9. Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974). Authors in the volume include Leslie Adler, Richard Fried, Robert Griffith, Peter Irons, Ronald Lora, Donald Crosby, Michael O’Brien, Norman Markowitz, and David Oshinsky. 10. Robert Griffith: The Politics of Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970), pp. 30–31.

81 Haynes

As this definition implies, revisionists viewed radicalism as a positive thing and saw opposition to it as something to be condemned and scorned. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 This tendency to minimize the impact of Communism in American political life was accompanied by a benign view of the Soviet Union. In revisionist writing, the Soviet Union appeared as a country like any other; it was often absolved of any responsibility for the Cold War. Whereas the anti-Communist liberal historians of the first wave had often seen Nazism and Stalinism as “brown” and “red” varieties of a common totalitarian impulse, revisionists treated this comparison as nothing more than “emotion and simplism,” in the words of two leading revisionists, Leslie Adler and Thomas Paterson. In an article entitled “Red Fascism,” they condemned “the merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism.”11 They claimed that “the Marxian philosophy looked for social and economic improvement among disadvantaged people,” whereas Nazism was simply a destructive movement. In their view, Soviet Communism was a “system proclaiming a humanistic ideology and failing to live up to its ideal.” By glossing over the murderous reality of Stalinism, they and other revisionists were able to focus their attacks and indignation on Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism. The revisionists disparaged the hostility that anti-Communist liberals had displayed toward Stalin and Soviet Communism as without a rational basis.

The Third Wave

The third wave of historical writing began in the late 1970s with the appearance of a vast number of essays and doctoral theses on a broad array of Com- munist activities. In part because of the growing availability of archival materials, this third wave supplied what the pioneers of Communist history lacked: an extensive base of monographic studies. Three books from this era filled out the chronology of the CPUSA begun by Draper, whose two volumes had carried the story to 1929. Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, Maurice Isserman’s Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War, and Joseph Starobin’s American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 took the history of the CPUSA up to the party’s near-extinction in 1957.12 All three

11. Leslie K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and So- viet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–1950’s,” American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (April 1970), pp. 1049, 1061, 1063. 12. Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); and Jo-

82 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism books displayed a high level of scholarship and drew extensively on archival sources. They remain the basic texts on their eras. Klehr covered the most Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 important era of the party’s history, and provided a political and institutional analysis of the CPUSA, but he also cast a wider net by discussing Communist activity and influence in the labor movement, among students and blacks, and among intellectuals. Klehr also delved into the Popular Front relationship with elements in the New Deal coalition. Isserman’s book concentrated on the CPUSA during World War II, and ended with the ouster of Earl Browder as party chief in mid-1945. Starobin had been a mid-level CPUSA official in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he became an academic historian after he left the party. His firsthand knowledge of many of the events and personalities of the CPUSA significantly augmented the still-thin documentary record for the postwar period. In addition to these three basic texts, other broad syntheses appeared. Guenter Lewy’s The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life, which appeared in 1990, combined a summary of party history with an analysis of liberal anti-Communism and the relationships between Commu- nism and each of several groups: the civil rights movement, peace groups, and the New Left. In 1991, Fraser Ottanelli published The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II, a revisionist alternative to Klehr’s Heyday. Finally, in 1992 Klehr and this author published The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, a one-volume history of the party from its origins to 1990, the first comprehensive survey of the CPUSA since Howe and Coser’s book appeared in 1957.13 The interpretive approaches in the third wave were highly diverse, including works that criticized the CPUSA for insufficient revolutionary vigor,14 some that displayed strong partisanship for Communism,15 others that offered admiring as- seph Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1972). 13. Guenter Lewy, The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Political Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven It- self (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). 14. Staughton Lynd, “The Possibility of Radicalism in the Early 1930s: The Case of Steel.” Radical America, Vol. 6, No. 6 (November-December 1972) pp. 37–64; and John Gerassi, “The Comintern, the Fronts, and the CPUSA,” in Michael Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker, eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993) pp. 75–90. 15. Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1980); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986); Communist Front? The Civil Rights Con- gress, 1946–1956 (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987); and Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993).

83 Haynes sessments along with mildly negative comments, and a final group that provided much more critical accounts. The last two of these constituted the bulk Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of the literature. Those who took a critical view of American Communists were often referred to as “traditionalist,” “orthodox,” or “Draperian.” Certainly most of these scholars shared Draper’s judgment that the CPUSA was an anti-democratic political movement closely tied to Soviet Communism. This view was perhaps best summed up at the end of Draper’s Roots of American Commu- nism, which evaluated the CPUSA’s shifts of policy in its early years:

The first change of line was every other change of line in embryo. A rhythmic rotation from Communist sectarianism to Americanized oppor- tunism was set in motion at the outset and has been going on ever since. The periodic rediscovery of “Americanization” by the American Commu- nists has only superficially represented a more independent policy. It has been in reality merely another type of American response to a Rus- sian stimulus. A Russian initiative has always effectively begun and ended it. For this reason, “Americanized” American Communism has been sporadic, superficial, and short-lived. It has corresponded to the fluctuations of Russian policy; it has not obeyed a compelling need within the American Communists themselves.

He concluded that by the early 1920s, just four years after the CPUSA was founded, it had been “transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power.”16 Thirty-five years later, Klehr and this author offered a similar judgment in The American Communist Movement:

Every era in the history of the American Communist movement has been inaugurated by developments in the Communist world abroad. The Rus- sian Revolution led to the formation of the first American Communist party. Soviet pressure led to the abandonment of an underground Com- munist party. Comintern directives led American Communists to adopt an ultrarevolutionary posture during the late 1920s. Soviet foreign policy needs midwifed the birth of the Popular Front in the mid-1930s. The Nazi-Soviet Pact destroyed the Popular Front in 1939, and the German attack on the Soviet Union reconstituted it in 1941. The onset of the Cold War cast American Communists into political purgatory after World War II, and Khrushchev’s devastating exposé of Stalin’s crimes in 1957 tore

16. Draper, The Roots of American Communism, p. 395.

84 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

the American Communists apart. . . . Within the limits of their knowl-

edge, American Communists always strove to do what Moscow wanted, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 no more, no less.17

Although the third-wave historians who were critical of the CPUSA accepted Draper’s basic premise, they saw a more significant Communist role in domestic American affairs in the 1930s and 1940s than the pioneering generation had suggested. They did not claim that Communists were ever a predominant factor, but they wrote of a powerful Communist role in the CIO, in liberal politics in several states (New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, and California), and in a variety of cultural and intellectual arenas. They also regarded that role as less conspiratorial than the earlier generation had implied, and they described the circumstances that prompted non-Communists to find common ground with Communists in the 1930s and 1940s.18 Nevertheless, these traditionalist scholars constituted only a minority of those writing in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s about domestic Commu- nism. Most of the third-wave scholars were fervent critics of anti-Commu- nism. Their views were similar to those of the second-wave revisionists, but with a few notable differences of emphasis. Whereas earlier revisionists had often depicted “alleged” Communists and an insubstantial Communist Party, the third-wave revisionists depicted American Communists as very real and, on balance, very good. They saw Communists as the key element in the dy- namism of the CIO and the spark behind most of the significant radical and liberal reform movements of the 1930s. In a 1985 essay, Maurice Isserman called this latest group of revisionists, of whom he was a prominent spokes- man and among the ablest scholars, the “new historians of American communism.” He said they consisted mainly of veterans of the New Left of the 1960s who sought, through historical study, to address questions from their own radical political experience:

In place of the “formalism of traditional radical historiography,” with its top-down emphasis, the new history of Communism has examined particular communities, particular unions, particular working class and

17. Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, pp. 4, 179. 18. Major traditionalist books from this era include: Aileen S. Kraditor, “Jimmy Higgins:” The Men- tal World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930–1958 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); John Earl Haynes, Dubious Alliance: The Mak- ing of Minnesota’s DFL Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Harvey Klehr, Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978); and Lowell Dyson, Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

85 Haynes

ethnic cultures, particular generations, and other sub-groupings within

the party. Though critical of the CP’s authoritarian internal structure, and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 its overall subservience to the Soviet Union, the new historians have been alert to the ways in which the American CP was shaped by the en- vironment in which it operated and by the people who enlisted under its banners. . . . The new Communist history begins with the assumption that nobody was born a Communist, and that everyone brought to the movement expectations, traditions, patterns of behavior, and thought that had little to do with the decisions made in the Kremlin or on the 9th floor of Communist Party headquarters in New York. . . . [T]he new historians of Communism are willing to see American Communists . . . as a group of people involved in, shaping, and shaped by an historical process.19

The “new historians” have produced hundreds of essays and dozens of books on an astounding array of topics: Communist influence on folk music, drama, poetry, and various literary figures; Communist activity among Jews, Finns, Italians, blacks, Mexicans, and Slavs of various sorts; CPUSA support for sharecroppers in Alabama and Arkansas, grain farmers in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota, and dairy farmers in New York; Communist influence on social gospel Protestants, professional social workers, and socially conscious lawyers; Communist influence in sports; and Communist activities in the labor movement.20 This body of research demonstrated a significant Communist role in certain areas of American life, a role as yet rarely acknowledged in standard histories of the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Not surprisingly, in a body of writing as varied as this, the quality of research ranged from abysmal to splendid. In the latter category, for example, Mark Naison produced what will likely remain the definitive work on the subject, Communists in Harlem During the Depression.21 Taken as a whole, this literature was strong on periphery and weak at the core. Individual Communists working in particular settings were discussed in detail, while the Communist party itself remained in the back-

19. Maurice Isserman, “Three Generations: Historians View American Communism,” Labor His- tory, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 1985), pp. 539–540. 20. The CPUSA put major emphasis on union work. While most revisionist studies in this area are specialized, those with a broader focus include Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anticommu- nism, and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) with essays by Nancy Quam-Wickham, Bruce Nelson, Karl Korstad, Rosemary Feurer, Ellen W. Schrecker, Mark McColloch, Gerald Zahavi, and Tom Juravich. 21. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).

86 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism ground as only a vague presence. The revisionist literature depicted a Com- munist movement in which local autonomy, spontaneity, and initiative were Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the norm, and orders from the center, if issued at all, were ignored. This literature often conveyed the impression that there were two Communist parties. One consisted of the CPUSA headquarters in New York, to which the revisionists attributed the regrettable part of Communist history: subordination to Moscow, support for Stalin’s purges, the embrace of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, contempt for political democracy, and a fervent belief in Marxism- Leninism. The other Communist party, the “real” party in the eyes of the revisionists, consisted of idealistic rank-and-file Communists who rooted themselves in the wants and needs of the workers, who were inspired by the populist traditions of the American past, and who paid little attention to Earl Browder in New York and even less to Joseph Stalin in Moscow. This implicit two-party theory allowed scores of revisionist scholars to endorse Fraser Ottanelli’s admiring description of the CPUSA as the “foremost expression of left-wing radicalism during the depression and the war years” and Steve Rosswurm’s characterization of the largest Communist-led union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, as a “moral beacon of the labor movement.”22 The term “implicit” is appropriate here because few revisionist studies attempted to comprehend the American Com- munist movement’s history as a whole. Most of the articles and books dealt with a limited geographic area, a small time span, a single incident, a specific ethnic or racial group, a particular union, or some other limited aspect of Communist history. Although the revisionist writers claimed that local Com- munists habitually disregarded the CPUSA’s orders, their work did not provide sufficient evidence to back up this claim. One of the leading revisionists, Maurice Isserman, acknowledged the misleading impression that could be conveyed by the multitude of specialized studies: “It would be a mistake to regard the Communist Party at any point in its history as if it had been simply a collection of autonomous, overlapping subgroupings of Jews, Finns, blacks, women, longshoremen, East Bronx tenants and baseball fans, who were free to set their own political agenda without reference to Soviet priorities.”23 Indeed, the CPUSA was not organized on a congregational basis. In its heyday it was highly centralized, rigidly disciplined, and run by a full-time paid bureaucracy whose top echelons were all closely vetted, approved,

22. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States, p. 5; and Rosswurm, The CIO’s Left-Led Unions, p. x. Rosswurm is quoting and ratifying the evaluation of another revisionist historian, Frank Emspak, given in the revisionist Encyclopedia of the American Left, edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), p. 788. 23. Isserman, “Three Generations,” pp. 544–545.

87 Haynes and—in many cases—hand-picked by Moscow. Most revisionists failed to heed Isserman’s sensible note of caution. Throughout the 1980s and into the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 1990s, they continued to produce articles and dissertations in which American Communism was portrayed as an amorphous movement similar to the chaotic New Left of the late 1960s, rather than the rigid reality of the CPUSA in the 1930s. Only a few revisionist studies focused on the CPUSA itself, and even fewer looked at the party over a lengthy period.24 There is no revisionist equivalent to the traditionalist one-volume surveys (Howe and Coser, and Klehr and Haynes) that provide a comprehensive narrative of the party’s history. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a revisionist-style interpretation could really take account of the central themes and major episodes of the party’s rise and fall: The contradictions would render the narrative incoherent. Even the revisionist accounts that dealt with only a segment of party history ran into difficulties. In The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II, Fraser Ottanelli had to explain the CPUSA’s reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, something most revisionists with their specialized or localized studies could avoid discussing in detail. In the late 1930s, the party had organized its successful Popular Front policy around a few key points: antifascism, an international alliance against Nazi aggression, and support for President Franklin Roosevelt. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 required a drastic change of course, in keeping with the party’s subordination to Moscow. Without hesitating for even a day, the CPUSA enthusiastically endorsed the pact. However, the Comintern had not given the CPUSA any warn- ing or policy direction, and had not informed party leaders about the full implications of the document. Initially, the CPUSA depicted the pact as a blow against Nazi aggression. Following the German attack on Poland on 1 Sep- tember, American Communist leaders applauded Polish resistance to the Ger- mans. Two weeks later, the Comintern criticized the CPUSA’s “incorrect” position and provided guidance on the proper interpretation of the pact. Sup- port for the Polish resistance was strictly forbidden. Obediently, the CPUSA immediately denounced the Polish government as fascist and abandoned Po- land to its fate, a fate that became clear a few days later when Soviet troops invaded and annexed the eastern half of Polish territory. The Comintern’s directive, however, did not cover domestic policy. Browder tried to salvage what he could of the Popular Front alliance by not directly attacking Roosevelt except on questions of foreign policy. In mid-October, the

24. Isserman’s Which Side Were You On?, one of the few Party-centered studies, focuses on the period from late 1939 to 1946, with brief summaries on the 1930s and the late 1940s. Ottanelli’s The Communist Party of the United States from Depression to World War II has a somewhat greater span, covering the Party from the late 1920s to 1940 with a concluding chapter quickly taking the story to 1945.

88 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

Comintern once again informed Browder that his interpretation was incorrect and that he should make a complete break with Roosevelt. He promptly did Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 so, thus abandoning the policies that had allowed the CPUSA to thrive since 1935. This episode left no doubt about the primacy of Moscow’s wishes over domestic American considerations. Yet Ottanelli claimed that it showed the reverse: “The unwillingness of American Communists to accept the implications of the new course of Soviet policy is in itself an unequivocal refutation of any notion that the United States Communists automatically aligned themselves to the ‘twists and turns’ of Moscow’s policies.”25 By focusing only on the very brief period in which Browder misjudged what Moscow wanted, Ottanelli sought to convert the CPUSA’s slavish devotion to Moscow into a stance of maverick independence, a conclusion utterly at odds with reality. Isserman argued in his historiographic essay that the “new historians” were different from Draper and earlier scholars not only in their interpretive stance, but also in their methodology, which he described as a “new social history.”26 This theme was embraced by many of the revisionists, who often termed themselves “social historians” and disparaged traditionalist scholars for their “old style political history.”27 Draper, who had shifted to other topics after the publication of American Communism and Soviet Russia in 1960, returned briefly to the subject in 1985 to respond to the “social historians.” In two essays reviewing scholarship in the field, he lauded Klehr’s work and criticized the social historians’ depiction of Popular Front Communism.28 Their interpretations, he argued, were the romanticized nostalgia of “left- wing intellectual Yuppies” who were seeking an authentic populistic radicalism that the New Left had failed to achieve. Draper later included these essays in a new edition of American Communism and Soviet Russia along with some comments about his own membership in the Communist party in the 1930s.29 Draper’s essays and the heated exchanges that followed suggested that traditionalist scholars regarded the social history approach as an acceptable supplement to political history, but that they also viewed it as a device used by many revisionists to evade key issues in the history of American Commu-

25. Ottanelli, The Communist Party, p. 194. 26. Isserman, “Three Generations,” p. 538. 27. Gary Gerstle, “Mission From Moscow: American Communism in the 1930s,” Reviews in Ameri- can History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (December 1984), p. 561. 28. Theodore Draper, “American Communism Revisited,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 8 (9 May 1985), pp. 35–43; and Theodore Draper, “The Popular Front Revisited,” New York Re- view of Books, Vol. 32, No. 9 (30 May 1985), pp. 38–47. 29. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Vintage, 1986).

89 Haynes nism. The CPUSA was, after all, a supremely “political” party engaged in a permanent political struggle. American Communists viewed the world Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 through political lenses: Not only conventional political issues, but all of life, including music, art, literature, and personal social relationships, were interpreted from a political perspective. Draper and others were baffled by the revisionists’ efforts to cast aside the political history of so thoroughly a political phenomenon. Draper later referred to the revisionists as producing a “genre of books about Communists-without-communism.”30 Traditionalist scholars also found it hard to accept the deprecation of political history by scholars whose commitment to radical politics was obvi- ous. Just as no one reading the “Communism in American Life” series could miss the anti-Communist commitment of its authors, few reading the revisionists could miss their radical political orientation. A number of these historians were associated with or frequent contributors to journals that fused scholarship with a radical political perspective (Radical America, Radical History Review, Science and Society, Socialist Review, and Marxist Perspec- tives). Many revisionists explicitly defined their historical work as part of a radical agenda. Paul Lyons, an early revisionist whose book Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956 was often cited as a model of the new social history, stated that he regarded Communists as “people committed to a vision of social justice and a strategy of social change that make them my political forebears. And like my biological parents, they merit a love that includes— in fact, requires—recognition of their faults and errors. Needless to say, such a love also rests on an honoring.” He said he regarded his book as a “contribution” to the achievement of “socialist cultural hegemony.” Isserman, in his 1985 essay, acknowledged that the new historians had their origins in radical politics. He maintained, however, that their perspective later shifted away from a partisan “search for a usable past.”31 In his own case that was true, but other revisionists retained their commitment to blending history with political action. In 1994, Allan Wald, a revisionist who published numerous essays and books on cultural history, most notably The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, wrote that:

United States capitalism and imperialism remain absolute horrors for the poor and people of color of the world, and ultimately hazardous to the health of the rest of us. Therefore, the construction of an effective op-

30. Theodore Draper, “The Life of the Party,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 41, No. 1 (13 Janu- ary 1994), p. 47. 31. Paul Lyons, Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982), pp. 18, 238; and Isserman, “Three Generations,” p. 537.

90 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

positional movement in the United States remains the most rewarding,

and the most stimulating, task for radical cultural workers. That is why I Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 choose to assess the experience of Communist writers during the Cold War era from the perspective of learning lessons, finding ancestors, and resurrecting models of cultural practice that can contribute to the development of a seriously organized, pluralistic, democratic, and culturally rich left-wing movement.32

In addition to dominating the field by weight of numbers, the revisionists sought to marginalize and disparage the traditionalists. In 1993, twelve revisionists published essays in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. In the volume’s opening essay, Michael Brown claimed that books by Draper, Starobin, and Klehr were of no scholarly value and were nothing more than “an extraordinary, overtly tendentious type of sat- ire.” He linked the appearance of “orthodox” works in the 1980s to “the introduction of a durable fascist element at the center of the United States polity,” an apparent reference to the election of President Ronald Reagan. Brown praised the work of Isserman, Lyons, Roger Keeran, Mark Naison, and Ellen Schrecker, claiming that “what appears to be sympathy” for the CPUSA “is in fact simply a willingness to accept responsibility for the only perspective from which a critical historiography can proceed.”33 Although it is easy to distinguish revisionists from traditionalists, it is important to note that the revisionist camp includes a large number of scholars whose views on some issues diverge quite widely. Revisionists who claim that the CPUSA was never (or almost never) wrong have denounced fellow revisionists who, despite judging the party’s history positively, were critical of certain aspects of the CPUSA past. For example, Isserman’s Which Side Were You On?—a book that established him as one of the leading new historians—offered a positive account of the attempt by Earl Browder in 1943– 1945 to Americanize the party. After Moscow denounced Browder’s reforms,

32. Alan Wald, “Communist Writers Fight Back in Cold War Amerika,” in Philip Goldstein, ed., Styles of Cultural Activism: From Theory and Pedagogy to Women, Indians, and Communism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 218; and Alan Wald, The New York Intellectu- als: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1987). 33. Michael E. Brown, “Introduction: The History of the History of U.S. Communism” in Brown et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, pp. 21, 28. By “critical historiography,” Brown meant critical of American society, not critical of the CPUSA. Other authors in this volume include Rosalyn Baxandall, John Gerassi, Marvin Gettleman, Gerald Horne, Roger Keeran, Mark Naison, Stephen Leberstein, Ellen Schrecker, Annette Rubinstein, Alan Wald, and Anders Stephanson. Wald later disassociated himself from what he termed were Brown’s “oddball opin- ions,” and suggested that few revisionists shared Brown’s views. Alan Wald, “Search for a Method: Recent Histories of American Communism,” Radical History Review, No. 61 (Winter 1995), p. 173.

91 Haynes he was ousted in mid-1945, and “Browderism” became a Communist heresy.

Isserman’s views on Browderism earned him a rebuke from the Rutgers his- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 torian Norman Markowitz, who branded Isserman one of a “new group of anti-Communist caretakers.” Similarly, Mark Naison’s highly positive account of Communist activities in Harlem was criticized by some revisionists because Naison had acknowledged the party’s subordination to the Comintern. In the CPUSA’s theoretical journal, Gerald Horne denounced Naison for “rot” and “bad scholarship.”34 Despite these occasional disagreements, most of the revisionists shared a hostility to capitalism, anti-Communism, and the American constitutional order. These convictions were strongly felt and were the driving force behind their sympathetic treatment of Communism. They saw American Commu- nists, whatever their faults, as kindred spirits in the fight against capitalism and established American institutions. Many of these new historians acknowledged the shortcomings of Communism, but they regarded those shortcomings as trivial compared to Communism’s role in the long-term fight to destroy capitalism and reconstruct American society in accordance with radical values. Radicalism by itself, however, was not the determining factor. Many of the pioneering anti-Communist historians (and some of the recent ones as well) were hostile to capitalism and sympathetic to some form of left-wing ideology. Far more important was the extent to which radicalism was combined with a commitment to political democracy, liberty, and pluralism. The radicals who placed a high value on democracy and freedom regarded Com- munists as opponents rather than as colleagues. When discussing the view- point of the “new historians,” Isserman commented that:

To a certain extent, the new historians of American Communism, and the traditionalists like Klehr, are speaking at cross-purposes. The new historians have conceded what Klehr called the “essential clue” to the nature of the American CP: that its political line changed in accord with the prevailing winds from Moscow. They have then gone on to ask new questions.35

34. Norman Markowitz, “The New Cold War ‘Scholarship.’” Political Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 10 (Oc- tober 1983), pp. 27–38; and Gerald Horne, “Communists in Harlem during the Depression,” Po- litical Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 9–10 (September-October 1984), pp. 36–38. Isserman in “Three Generations” differentiated the “new historians” from revisionists such as Markowitz who were closest to the CPUSA’s self-perception of its history. Markowitz, a CPUSA member, is best known for The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941– 1948 (New York: Free Press, 1973). 35. Isserman, “Three Generations,” p. 544.

92 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

Isserman, however, only partly identified what traditionalists meant when they highlighted the link between American and Soviet Communism. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 He construed that relationship as the inappropriate projection onto the American scene of political themes current in the Soviet Union. Traditional- ists certainly agreed that this was one of the results of the CPUSA’s link to Soviet Communism, but they believed that the link was much broader. They regarded Soviet Communism as intrinsic to the nature of the American Com- munist Party, as a manifestation of the CPUSA’s essential antidemocratic character, and as an indication that if the CPUSA had been successful, it would have reconstructed the United States in the image of the Soviet Union. This point is not conceded or even discussed by most revisionists. Many revisionists also took a decidedly parochial approach to American Communism. Transnational historiography was not part of their agenda. Only a few bothered to compare American Communism with Soviet Commu- nism. Most of the revisionists seemed to regard Soviet Communism as largely irrelevant to the story of Communism in the United States. In light of the primacy of the Soviet Union in the minds of American Communists, the lavish attention devoted to Soviet affairs in the CPUSA’s press, and the constant rep- etition of “lessons” from the Soviet experience by party officials and organizers, one would think that discussion of Soviet Communism would be necessary in histories of the CPUSA.36 Similarly, unless one understands the history and character of Communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, it is impossible to comprehend the fervor and strength of anti- Communism in the United States. Anti-Communism cannot be explained as stemming simply from a philosophical opposition to Marxism or a fear of the CPUSA’s popularity. The large majority of those who opposed the growth of American Communism were deeply concerned about Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union and what they believed was the CPUSA’s desire to adopt Soviet- style Communism in the United States. It is astounding that most of the revisionist explanations of anti-Communism treat the experience of the Soviet bloc as irrelevant. By the measure of books and essays, revisionists easily won the historiographic contest. At the end of the 1980s it would have been difficult to name a dozen traditionalist scholars who were active. The revisionists, by contrast, seemed to be everywhere. Revisionism prevailed in the historical profession and in textbooks, and it set the tone for the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the papers presented at histori-

36. In 1934 the American Communist poet Tillie Olsen (much praised in revisionist literature) described Stalin’s USSR in one of her poems as “a heaven . . . brought to earth in 1917 in Russia.” T. Lerner [Tillie Olsen], “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” Partisan Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February-March 1934), p. 4.

93 Haynes cal conferences. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of

Soviet Communism. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

The Fourth Wave

With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, long- closed archives began to open. The revisionists were far less eager than the traditionalists to explore Moscow’s newly opened repositories. After all, the revisionists had embraced a favorable view of the Communist movement, and veteran Communists over the years had already said everything they could that was positive or exonerative about the movement. The CPUSA, like other political bodies, had never been inclined to hide what it saw as its positive accomplishments (or the self-exculpatory justifications for things that went wrong). No one really thought that the CPUSA had hidden away in Moscow a trove of documents about unknown incidents that made the party look good. No one expected to find in Comintern files a report that the American party’s Political Bureau had secretly sent a stern letter to Josef Stalin in 1937 expressing doubts about the Great Terror and demanding that Nikolai Bukharin and Grigorii Zinoviev be given an opportunity to defend themselves before an unbiased commission. Nor did anyone expect to find documents showing that the CPUSA’s leaders discussed the possibility of breaking with Moscow over the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The best that revisionists could hope for from the archives was nothing new. Traditionalists, of course, had different expectations and eagerly made their way to Moscow. In the summer of 1992, Harvey Klehr became the first American scholar to examine thousands of pages of Comintern records pertaining to the United States. In January 1993, this author became the first American historian to examine the records of the CPUSA itself, which were secretly shipped to Moscow decades earlier. Three books were published on the basis of these new materials: The Secret World of American Communism (1995), The Soviet World of American Communism (1998), and Venona: De- coding Soviet Espionage in America (1999).37 The first two books reprinted the actual texts of 187 documents primarily from the former Central Party Archive, now known as the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), which holds the records of the

37. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fredrik Firsov, The Secret World of American Commu- nism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

94 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

Comintern, the CPUSA, and the CPSU through 1952. With few exceptions, the information in the documents was largely what one might expect. Still, they were Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 important in providing documentary evidence, even decisive proof in a number of cases, about matters that had been ambiguous or contested in previous scholarship.38 The volumes reprinted documents showing that Moscow secretly provided the CPUSA with lavish subsidies (the existence of which had long been denied by revisionists, who ridiculed the notion as “Moscow gold” and the product of the overheated imaginations of anti-Communists) until the final years of the Soviet regime. Among the documents were a hand-signed receipt from Gus Hall, the general secretary of the CPUSA, along with a cover letter from the Com- mittee on State Security (KGB) to Anatolii Dobrynin, the former Soviet ambassa- dor to the United States and then a member of the CPSU Secretariat, reporting delivery by a KGB officer of three million dollars in cash to the CPUSA in 1988. Other documents confirmed the role of the international businessman Armand Hammer as a conduit of Soviet subsidies to the CPUSA in the 1920s. Also reprinted were numerous Comintern orders to the CPUSA. Some of the orders set policy, others dictated the membership of the CPUSA’s Political Bureau, and others micromanaged internal CPUSA personnel decisions. Among these were Comintern instructions on how to interpret the Nazi- Soviet Pact and what stance to adopt in the wake of the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. All of these instructions were obeyed. The debate over the existence of a CPUSA underground organization led by J. Peters also was resolved by the documents. Revisionists had doubted Whittaker Chambers’s evidence about this organization, but Comintern documents confirmed the existence of a “secret apparatus,” Peters’s role as its leader in the mid-1930s, and its infiltration of U.S. government agencies. Other documents revealed the fate of American Communists who fell victim to Stalin’s terror, including some who had been arrested with the support of American Com- munist leaders. Among these were Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a former senior CPUSA official and national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress, who died in the Gulag in January 1939, Thomas Sgovio, a former American Young Communist League officer, who was arrested in Moscow in 1938 and imprisoned in the Gulag for twelve years, and several hundred Finnish-Ameri- can Communists who emigrated to Soviet Karelia and were then arrested and executed during the purges of the late 1930s. Documents in The Secret World of American Communism revealed a link, hitherto largely unexplored, between American Communism and Soviet

38. Revisionists were derisive of evidence provided by former Communists who had become critical of the Party as well as that provided by a U.S. government counter-intelligence agency such as the FBI or by a congressional investigatory committee.

95 Haynes espionage. Revisionists rarely discussed the matter as part of CPUSA history.

The volumes by Ottanelli and Isserman, for example, did not examine the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 party’s espionage role in the 1930s and 1940s. This may not be surprising—a substantial CPUSA role in Soviet espionage did not fit well with revisionist themes—but what is more surprising is that traditionalists had not given the matter much attention either. Draper’s history of the party’s early years made little mention of spying. Klehr’s history of the party in the 1930s supported Allan Weinstein’s study of the Hiss-Chambers case by expanding on the background of the CPUSA underground and its links to Soviet intelligence, but espionage was a minor theme in his story. Joseph Starobin did not take up the issue in his history of the party in the postwar era. Howe and Coser gave the matter all of two sentences, suggesting only a minor role for Ameri- can Communists in Soviet espionage. The Klehr-Haynes one-volume history of the party, published in 1992, gave it considerably more attention and accepted the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg and the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz about the Communist role in espionage. Even so, the book concluded that “espionage was a sideshow to the party’s main activities,” adding that:

Ideologically, American Communists owed their first loyalty to the motherland of communism rather than to the United States, but in practice few American Communists were spies. The Soviet Union recruited spies from the Communist movement, but espionage was not a regular activity of the American C.P. The party promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services. To see the American party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of fifth column mis- judges its main purpose.39

Soviet espionage, rather than being treated as an element of the history of American Communism, was examined in isolation or as part of the story of American anti-Communism. The lack of attention to this issue is puzzling, for the source base was not as meager as sometimes thought. To be sure, the literature on Soviet espionage in the United States is of very mixed quality— in part because of the scarcity of archival resources, as well as the inherent difficulty of a field in which deception, misinformation, and secrecy are ram- pant—but some important evidence became available as far back as the 1940s and early 1950s. Two major espionage case—the Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers case and the Rosenberg espionage cases—went to trial, and the court proceedings and subsequent investigations brought forth a great deal

39. Klehr and Haynes, The American Communist Movement, p. 108.

96 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism of documentary material. The first, and for a long time the only, full-scale scholarly treatments of these causes céle÷bres were Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978) and Ronald Radosh’s and Joyce Milton’s The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (1983).40 Both books were thorough and detailed reviews of massive quantities of documentation, including evidence presented at the trials, voluminous government files made available through the Freedom of Information Act, and an impressive array of other archival material and oral histories. Weinstein concluded that Chambers had told the truth on the essential points, while Hiss had not. Radosh and Milton concluded that the Rosenbergs, particularly Julius, had been engaged in espionage—not only in nuclear espionage (for which he was convicted), but also as the central figure in a spy network consisting of engineers he had met as a young Communist. Both books met with a storm of criticism from revisionists, some of it vi- cious. Several polemical and journalistic accounts were published in defense of the Rosenbergs and Hiss, but these were not of scholarly quality. Even so, no revisionist academics attempted an alternative account.41 Although scores of revisionist essays and books are premised on the view that Alger Hiss was an idealistic New Dealer thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), and that the Rosenbergs were innocent progressives executed on trumped-up charges of espionage, revisionist accounts of the cases deal only with isolated aspects of them or with secondary matters.42 No revisionist attempted a comprehensive scholarly examination along the lines of Perjury or The Rosenberg File. The evidence presented by Weinstein and by Radosh and Milton was so powerful that many revisionists in the 1980s fell back to a stance of agnosticism on the two cases. For example, in 1987, Robert Griffith, a leading revisionist, wrote that “I remained unconvinced of Hiss’s guilt or innocence” and, in regard to the Rosenbergs: “Here, too, I remained something of an agnostic.”43 Because of revisionism’s preeminence in

40. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); and Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983). 41. The chief polemical work supporting the innocence of the Rosenbergs is Walter and Miriam Schneir’s Invitation to an Inquest: A New Look at the Rosenberg-Sobell Case (New York: Dell, 1968). John Chabot Smith argues that Hiss was innocent in his Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976). 42. An example of selective focus is the chapter on the Rosenberg case in J. Hoberman, Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 216–265. 43. Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. xxii–xxiii. Not all revisionists made use of such de- vices: Maurice Isserman, for example, stated his acceptance that Julius Rosenberg probably was guilty.

97 Haynes the academic establishment, it is not surprising that the National Standards for

United States History, which has received the backing of the leaders of the his- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 torical profession and is used as a guide for grade-school history teachers, described these two cases with language crafted not to imply either guilt or innocence.44 It is worth noting, however, that this cautious skepticism about Hiss and Rosenberg was atypical. In general, the National Standards displayed no ambiguity about McCarthyism and domestic anti-Communism, painting them in dark and ugly colors. This selective agnosticism allowed revisionists to maintain their basic interpretation of America in the late 1940s and 1950s as a “nightmare in red,” a nation traduced by paranoid anti-Communists engaged in political repression against innocent idealists. Aside from the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, scholars largely ignored the other instances of espionage that became public, notably the Soble spy ring. They treated cases as ambiguous even when guilt was clear (for example, the case of Judith Coplon) and disparaged the charges lodged by Elizabeth Bentley. Bentley’s story of several major CPUSA-linked Soviet espionage rings in Washington contributed greatly to the development of popular anti- Communism in the postwar period. Hostile revisionist historians overwhelm- ingly rejected her claims, typically ridiculing her as the “Blond Spy Queen.” Herbert Packer, for example, conceded that some of her story might be true, but he then dismissed everything she had said:

No witness’s story is better calculated to inspire mistrust or disbelief than Elizabeth Bentley’s. The extravagance of her claims about her espionage contacts, the vagueness of her testimony about the content of the secret material that she allegedly received, the absence of corroboration for most of her story, and above all, her evasiveness as a witness, all combine to raise serious doubts about her reliability.45

Similarly, David Caute, whose The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower was long a central text of the revisionist canon, depicted her as unbelievable. Earl Latham found Bentley’s story credible, but he was the last of the “Communism in American Life” authors; and in 1966, he noted the consensus view that Bentley’s charges were the “imaginings of a neurotic spinster.”46 The absence of any detailed scholarly

44. National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience, Grades 5– 12, expanded ed. (Los Angeles, CA: National Center for History in the Schools, 1994). 45. Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 222. 46. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 56, 108–109, 318, 343, 353; and Latham, The Commu- nist Controversy in Washington, p. 160.

98 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism investigation of the Bentley affair allowed this consensus to continue until the mid-1990s. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The situation changed dramatically with the opening of some of the Rus- sian archives in the early 1990s and the release of the Venona papers in the mid-1990s. Although the archives of the KGB and the Soviet military intelligence service (GRU) are closed, materials from these agencies can sometimes be found in the newly opened archives. Klehr and this author found GRU, KGB, and even Naval intelligence material in the records of the Comintern, as well as copies of stolen U.S. State Department documents in the records of the CPUSA. We found KGB-Comintern exchanges, some of which were reprinted in The Secret World of American Communism, that directly corroborated many of the claims about Soviet espionage voiced by Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and Louis Budenz. The documents also showed direct links between the CPUSA as an institution and Soviet spy networks in the United States. The history of the CPUSA and the history of Soviet espionage were no longer separate matters, and the revisionist consensus began to give way. A further blow to the revisionist interpretation came in 1995, when the U.S. National Security Agency began declassifying the Venona papers, trans- lations of some 3,000 messages sent between Moscow and Soviet intelligence stations in the 1940s. The intercepted messages had been decrypted by U.S. and British cryptanalysts over many years in a project known as Venona. Over half of the decrypted intelligence messages had been sent into or out of the United States. Although these messages were only a tiny fraction of the total Soviet intelligence traffic in the 1940s, they provided startling evidence of Soviet espionage in the United States and the key role that the CPUSA had played in Soviet spy networks. Drawing on these new sources, important books appeared in the latter half of the 1990s that posed a formidable challenge to the revisionists. Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, published in 1997, rein- forced the argument for Hiss’s guilt and the essential accuracy of Chambers’s story. That argument was strengthened by a new edition of Weinstein’s Per- jury (also published in 1997), which featured new documentation from Mos- cow that further confirmed Hiss’s role as a Soviet spy. That same year, Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel published Bombshell, which documented the espionage activities of Theodore Hall, a young Communist physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and Morris and Lona Cohen, two American Communists who became career Soviet agents and carried out spy missions in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. The out- pouring of new scholarship continued in 1998 (with The Soviet World of American Communism) and 1999, when four major books on Soviet espio-

99 Haynes nage appeared: The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The

Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, drawing on selected Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 documents from the KGB foreign intelligence archive; The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christo- pher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, based on transcribed documents brought out of Russia by a retired KGB archivist; Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by this author and Harvey Klehr, based on the Venona documents as well as Comintern and CPUSA documents from Moscow archives, FBI files, and other materials from American archives; and Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War, by Nigel West, drawing on the Venona papers and other declassified materials.47 These last four books partly overlap and tell the same story from the perspectives of independent sets of documentation. They show that the So- viet Union was engaged in a vigorous espionage offensive against the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, a campaign that reached its peak during the final years of World War II. Hundreds of Americans, mostly Communists, assisted Soviet espionage. The spies included dozens of mid-level government officials as well as some in higher-level posts: not only Alger Hiss but also Lawrence Duggan, the long-time head of the Latin American division in the State Department; Lauchlin Currie, a senior White House aide to President Roosevelt; Duncan Lee, a senior officer in the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA); and, most significantly, Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the Treasury. These revelations confirmed that Elizabeth Bentley, the much-disbelieved Blond Spy Queen, had been speaking the truth. The four books also made clear that the problem was not just one of a few individual American Communists. Dozens of CPUSA officials, from the party’s lowest levels to its very highest, and the party as an institution, actively assisted Soviet espionage against the United States. Klehr and this author concluded that:

Espionage was a regular activity of the American Communist party. To say that the CPUSA was nothing but a Soviet fifth column in the Cold War would be an exaggeration; it still remains true that the CPUSA’s

47. Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997); Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997); Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy (New York: Times Books, 1997); Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999); Christopher An- drew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret His- tory of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999). The U.S. National Security Agency declassified and released the Venona messages in batches from 1995 to 1998.

100 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

chief task was the promotion of communism and the interests of the So-

viet Union though political means. But it is equally true that the CPUSA Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 was indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War.48

These four books on Soviet espionage, combined with The Secret World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism, greatly bolstered the traditionalist case. It was further strengthened by the publication of several more specialized books, which also made use of the Moscow archives. James G. Ryan’s Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (1997) is the only published scholarly biography of this key CPUSA leader. Ryan began his research on Browder as a graduate student, and his 1981 dissertation unambiguously took a revisionist stance. By the time the book was ready, however, Ryan had had the opportunity to examine Comintern and CPUSA records in Moscow. He significantly modified his interpretive approach and incorporated traditionalist elements, concluding that Browder “could never quite bring the CPUSA legitimacy because he lacked the vision and courage to separate himself and the organization totally from a foreign monster.”49 Ted Morgan’s A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Com- munist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (1999), a biography of one of the CPUSA’s dominating figures in the 1920s and later a leading AFL-CIO anti- Communist, also embodied a traditionalist approach.50 These reevaluations of the CPUSA were accompanied by major reassess- ments of anti-Communism in the United States. Richard Gid Powers made use of the new Moscow-based research in his impressive Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (1996). Powers stated that “writing this book radically altered my view of American anticommunism. I began with the idea that anticommunism displayed America at its worst, but I came to see in anticommunism America at its best.”51 Like many before him, Powers condemned what he termed the “countersubversive” variety of anti- Communism embodied in McCarthyism. But he saw that as only one, and not the predominant, type of anti-Communism. He brought to the fore the ne-

48. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, p. 7. 49. James G. Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 274; and “Earl Browder and American Communism at High Tide: 1934–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1981). 50. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999). Morgan’s book, although based on extensive archival research, is aimed at an educated public rather than a scholarly audience, and has limited citations. 51. Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 503.

101 Haynes glected history of liberal anti-Communism as well as influential Jewish, Ro- man Catholic, labor-based, and socialist strains of anti-Communism. He also Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 discussed the role of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholic bigotry, and the antifascist “brown smear” in the politics of Communism and anti-Communism. My own Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, published the same year as Powers’s book, also emphasized that “rather than a single anticommunism, there have been a multitude, with different objections to communism.” The book stressed the key role of liberal and labor anti-Communism in defeating Popular Front liberalism in the late 1940s, and concluded that:

America’s political system could not achieve the consensus needed for the Cold War commitment while accommodating within that system a political movement that adhered to the ideology and promoted the interests of the Cold War enemy. For all its sporadic ugliness, excesses, and silliness, the anticommunism of the 1940s and 1950s was an understandable and rational response to a real danger to American democracy.52

While the opening of Moscow archives invigorated traditionalist scholars, the reaction among revisionists was decidedly mixed. The social and cultural historians, who eschewed politics and the party, claimed that the CPUSA archives in Moscow could be ignored. A prime example of this was Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997), which contains little recognizable Commu- nism in its benign account of the Popular Front.53 Stalin, the Gulag, and the Great Terror fade into the background. Conventional politics and even the CPUSA itself as an institution are largely absent. All that is left is an idealized Popular Front of softly politicized art, literature, music, cinema, and theater. The impact of Communism and Popular Front styles on the cultural arts cannot be gainsaid, and The Cultural Front offers an impressive analysis of Popular Front cultural modes. At the center of the Popular Front phenomenon, however, was the hard core of the CPUSA, its politics, and its drive for power. The omission of that core renders the history a hollow ball. Taking a different tack, Edward Johanningsmeier visited the archives in Moscow when completing Forging American Communism: The Life of Will- iam Z. Foster, the only published scholarly biography of the long-time

52. John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 3, 200. 53. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997).

102 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

CPUSA trade-union chief and chairman of the party from 1945 until 1961.

Johanningsmeier assured his revisionist colleagues that the majority of docu- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ments in the Comintern’s archive dealt with “prosaic matters” and possessed “built-in biases and shortcomings as evidence.”54 The point of this remark is unclear, except as an excuse to deprecate accounts based on the Moscow archives. The records of any sizable organization, be it a government agency, a labor union, a military unit, or a political party, are largely prosaic, possess biases, and have shortcomings. It is the task of researchers to sift through the mass of documentation to find what is interesting and reliable. In analyzing what the documents actually said, Johanningsmeier took a novel approach. When he found documents showing the CPUSA’s subordination to Moscow, he claimed these were merely “diplomatizing” by Ameri- can Communists who, he suggests, told the Comintern what it wanted to hear and then acted on the basis of American considerations.55 When Johanningsmeier came across documents on Soviet subsidies to the Ameri- can Party, he said they were “unsurprising.” When he found evidence link- ing CPUSA leaders to Soviet espionage, he insisted that “this also is unsurprising.” “Unsurprising” is an odd term here. Anyone whose knowledge of the CPUSA came solely from revisionist literature would find both the subsidies and the links to Soviet intelligence very surprising indeed. Both topics had been either ignored or denied by the revisionists. Johanningsmeier tried to get around the problem by claiming that the Soviet Union did not link subsidies to Moscow’s leadership. He argued that unless one can “link funds delivered to specific policy initiatives,” the payments would not provide any evidence of the CPUSA’s subordination to Moscow. On the question of espionage, Johanningsmeier tried to dilute the impact. Although the documents connected CPUSA leaders and party cadres to intelligence work, he argued that most rank-and-file members were not spies, and therefore the “significance of covert work” was marginal.56 The revisionist historian Ellen Schrecker dealt with the matter in a more creative way. She claimed that the documents pertaining to espionage might not be what they seem:

A careful reading of the Venona decrypts leaves the impression . . . that the KGB officers stationed in the United States may have been trying to make themselves look good to their Moscow superiors by portraying

54. Edward Johanningsmeier, “The Secret World of American Communism,” Labor History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Fall 1995), p. 635. 55. Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. xii. 56. Edward Johanningsmeier, “The Secret World of American Communism,” p. 635.

103 Haynes

some of their casual contacts as having been more deeply involved

with the Soviet cause than they actually were. These documents do not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 tell us, for example, whether some of the New Deal officials Bentley worked with were consciously spying for the Russians or just sharing confidences with political allies and friends. A case in point is a cryptic Venona message reporting that Harry Dexter White believed the Sovi- ets could get better terms on a loan than the American government had offered them. Was he betraying his country or merely making small talk?57

Schrecker’s argument, one advanced by other revisionists as well, depicts KGB operations in the United States as something akin to the 1959 comic film Our Man in Havana, which featured a British expatriate in Cuba who cons an incompetent British intelligence service into thinking he is a master spy by submitting fictitious reports from nonexistent sources.58 In the real world, any modern intelligence service with sufficient resources and a modicum of sophistication adopts elaborate safeguards against field-officer deceit and exaggeration, as well as the threat of double agents. A KGB field officer who identified a candidate for recruitment had to review the case with the head of the KGB station before receiving permission to proceed. The next step was the “processing” of the candidate, to use Soviet tradecraft jar- gon. The intelligence officer gathered background information from various sources to verify the individual’s biography and fitness for espionage work. The CPUSA’s liaisons with the KGB, Jacob Golos and Bernard Schuster on the East Coast and Isaac Folkoff on the West Coast, were often called upon to provide background material on prospective recruits. If the reports were not satisfactory, the candidate was dropped. If the reports were positive, the head of the KGB station would endorse the field officer’s recommendation and ask the KGB’s Moscow headquarters for “sanction” to proceed with “signing-on,” as the KGB called the formal recruitment of a source. Moscow’s approval of a recruitment was not automatic or routine. Often the KGB headquarters asked its American station for additional documentation of a candidate’s fitness. The KGB headquarters also did its own independent checking, sending queries to the Communist International to see

57. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 180. 58. The revisionist Anna Kasten Nelson advanced this among other reasons to reject Weinstein and Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood as well as this author and Klehr’s Venona in her “Illuminating the Twilight Struggle,” pp. B4–6. She doesn’t think much of documents in Soviet diplomatic archives either, and deprecated John Louis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Her sour dismissals are phrased as broad generalizations, and she avoids committing herself on specific cases, incidents, or persons.

104 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism whether its extensive records on the American Communist movement contained relevant information. One case involved Marion Davis, an official at Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the Office of Inter-American Affairs in Washington, whom the KGB’s New York station wanted to recruit. The field officer’s report noted that she had earlier worked at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and had been in contact with Soviet diplomats. General Pavel Fitin, the head of the KGB’s foreign intelligence service, requested Comintern records on Davis and refused to endorse her recruitment until he received a report from the head of the KGB station in Mexico City. Once Moscow approved a recruitment, the actual signing-on usually consisted of a meeting between the candidate and a professional KGB officer or, more rarely, a meeting with one of the KGB’s full- time American agents. The officer who conducted the signing-on then filed a report with Moscow confirming that the recruitment was complete. The Moscow KGB expected its field officers to provide regular reports on a source’s productivity. The heads of the KGB’s stations in the United States also periodically shifted responsibility for contact with sources among their field officers. Under these circumstances, a faked or exaggerated source would show up quickly and lead to severe consequences for the offending officer. In most cases, Moscow expected the delivery of actual or filmed documents or reports written personally by the source. These were delivered to Moscow by diplomatic pouch; and when a source failed to come up with material, Moscow demanded an explanation. Because any system is prey to human incompetence, these standard KGB practices did not guarantee per- fect results, but they did greatly reduce the possibility that the Venona messages are replete with field-officer braggadocio. Schrecker’s specific claim that Harry Dexter White was only “making small talk”—and that a deceitful KGB officer inflated these remarks into an intelligence report which gullible historians later found and mistakenly as- sumed was evidence of White’s spying—cannot withstand serious scrutiny. The import of this particular Venona message should be judged in conjunc- tion with other corroborating evidence, such as Whittaker Chambers’s statement in 1939 to Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle that Chambers personally knew of White’s assistance to a covert CPUSA network in the late 1930s. Chambers reaffirmed this statement in the late 1940s, and it was further supported by Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony to the FBI in 1945 regarding White’s role in the CPUSA-KGB network she supervised in 1943 and 1944. Furthermore, fourteen other Venona messages confirm that White was engaged in espionage. The message cited by Schrecker is hardly the most incriminating. Several of them report information supplied by White via Gre- gory Silvermaster, a U.S. government economist who ran a large Soviet spy apparatus. Was Silvermaster exaggerating White’s “small talk” into espionage

105 Haynes reports as Alec Guiness did in Our Man in Havana ? The KGB avoided relying on a single contact with a source, especially such an important one as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 White, precisely so that it could prevent any mishaps. Because White was very highly placed, the KGB in mid-1944 sought to verify White’s bone fides by sending a special officer to interview him, rather than relying on its resi- dent field officer. Kolstov, the cover name of the unidentified KGB inter- viewer, evidently was not a regular officer from the KGB stations in New York and Washington. Instead, he seems to have been a visitor from Mos- cow, probably posing as a diplomat in a high-level Soviet delegation who could meet with a man of White’s seniority without attracting security attention. In a report to Moscow, Kolstov stated that:

As regards the technique of further work with us Jurist [White’s cover name] said that his wife was ready for any self-sacrifice; he himself did not think about his personal security, but a compromise would lead to a political scandal and the discredit of all supporters of the new course, therefore he would have to be very cautious. He asked whether he should [unrecovered code groups] his work with us. I replied that he should refrain. Jurist [White] has no suitable apartment for a permanent meeting place; all his friends are family people. Meetings could be held at their houses in such a way that one meeting devolved on each every 4–5 months. He proposes infrequent conversations lasting up to half a hour while driving in his automobile.59

In 1945, while serving as a senior adviser to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations, White met with another KGB officer, Vladimir Pravdin, and answered a series of questions about U.S. negoti- ating strategy and possible ways for Moscow to defeat or water down American proposals. Anyone who claims that the documents on White were exaggerated reports of “small talk” must believe that Chambers and Bentley independently lied about White to American authorities and that Silvermaster, Kolstov, and Pravdin similarly misled Soviet authorities about White. Good historical practice does not analyze individual pieces of evidence out of context. It is worth noting that some revisionists have dealt with the new evidence in a far more realistic manner. When The Secret World of American Communism appeared in 1995 with its collection of Soviet documents, Maurice Isserman conceded that revisionists would have to come to grips with the new evidence. “No one,” he argued, “will be able to write about the C.P.U.S.A. in the future without reference to this volume.”60 Initially he ex-

59. Quoted in Haynes and Klehr, Venona, p. 142. 60. Maurice Isserman, “Notes from Underground,” The Nation, 12 June 1995, p. 846.

106 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism pected that the new evidence would require only a small modification of the revisionist stance to allow for the possibility that some American Communists Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 participated in Soviet espionage on a limited basis. But as more information appeared, Isserman adjusted his views. In 1999, he wrote that earlier there had been “sufficient ambiguities and blank spots in the available evidence to offer a last ditch in which the remaining defenders of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg could take their stand,” but “with the publication of . . . The Haunted Wood . . . that ditch just disappeared.”61 By this he did not mean that he was adopting a traditionalist stance, but he did make clear that he would have to take account of the new evidence:

The “new” history of American Communism and what might be called the new history of Communist espionage need not be mutually exclusive, let alone antagonistic, historical inquiries. If this reviewer were to rewrite “Which Side Were You On?” today, it would certainly be influenced by the revelations contained in books like “Venona” and “The Haunted Wood.” By the same token, some of the concerns and themes raised by the new history of American Communism are not irrelevant to those who seek to decipher the mixture of faith and breach of faith that created a romance of the clandestine among some American Communists during World War II.62

Other revisionists looked at the evidence and adjusted their views as well. Vernon Pedersen’s 1987 history of the Communist Party of Indiana, a master’s thesis, presented a revisionist narrative. But after he visited the Mos- cow archives, he incorporated many traditonalist themes into his 1993 dissertation on the Maryland Communist Party.63 Pedersen’s shift was similar to James Ryan’s change of perspective between his 1981 dissertation and the biography he published in 1997 of Earl Browder. The most ambitious defense of revisionism, Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), takes an entirely different approach. In writing this 573-page book, Schrecker, the author of several earlier books about American Communism, relied on extensive archival research along with voluminous reading of the secondary literature. It is easily the most impressive revisionist book of the fourth wave. Many Are the Crimes combines an examination of anti-Communism with an analysis of CPUSA history—a sensible, even necessary, approach. Schrecker argues, too sweepingly but with

61. Maurice Isserman, “Guess What—They Really Were Spies,” Forward, 29 January 1999, p. 11. 62. Maurice Isserman, “They Led Two Lives,” The New York Times Book Review, 9 May 1999, p. 35. 63. Vernon L. Pedersen, “Riding the Wave: The Indiana Communist Party, 1929–1934” (Master’s thesis, Indiana State University, 1987); and “Red, White, and Blue: The Communist Party of Mary- land, 1919–1949” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1993).

107 Haynes considerable accuracy as far as the academic world is concerned, that “there is a near-universal consensus that much of what happened during the late Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 1940s and 1950s [by way of anti-Communism] was misguided or worse.”64 This consensus, however, takes as a premise the revisionist view that the CPUSA was a normal, albeit radical, political movement, more rooted in American traditions than subordinate to Moscow, and that it had no significant involvement with Soviet espionage. This latter point was stressed in David Caute’s influential 1978 book, The Great Fear, which flatly asserted (with italics for emphasis) that “there is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period.”65 The new evidence contravened Caute’s assertion and threat- ened to sweep away what Schrecker claimed was a “near-universal consensus” on anti-Communism. Consequently, in bringing the revisionist interpretation up to date, Schrecker needed to offer an account of the CPUSA that took cognizance of the newly declassified documents. Although her book rarely goes into specifics, she offers harsher assessments of the CPUSA than most revisionists of the earlier era did. On the party’s internal life, she writes that “discipline was central to the CP’s identity” and:

In their political work (and for many activists in their daily lives as well) Communists were expected to comply with party directives. Even during its more reformist phases, where there was little difference between the aims and actions of the “big C” and “small c” Communists, the Ameri- can Communist party never abandoned its demand for conformity. It was—in theory and in ways that shaped the behavior of its members—a tightly organized, highly disciplined, international revolutionary socialist organization.66

In another place, she acknowledges the rigid discipline of the CPUSA:

The rapidity and unanimity of the party’s flips and flops indicates, as if such proof were necessary, how little self-government the American party had. Its quasi-military culture precluded real debate. Members of a vanguard party, lower-level cadres actually prided themselves on their discipline. As one labor organizer recalled, “edicts were handed down and we didn’t examine them.”

64. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, p. x. In addition to many essays, her other books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1994). 65. Caute, The Great Fear, p. 54 (emphasis in the original). 66. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, pp. 5–6. “Big C” and “small c” are Schrecker’s notation for the two Communist parties thesis.

108 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

At several points, Schrecker notes the party’s habit of secrecy and deception and the existence of an underground arm. She comments that “militance Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 or moderation of the CP’s current line seemed to make little difference. There was almost as much secrecy during the Popular Front and World War II as there had been when the party took a more openly revolutionary stance.” She also agrees that the CPUSA required its supporters in the labor movement to put party policy above union goals, despite the high price that required. She concedes that the CPUSA’s “demand that its labor cadres back the Progressive party destroyed whatever influence the party had within the mainstream of the labor movement.”67 As for the party’s relationship with the Soviet Union, Schrecker states that “even when the party grew during the 1930s and 1940s and took on the trappings of a much more Americanized reform movement, it never wavered in its internationalism and its support for the Soviet Union as the world’s main socialist regime.” She adds that “it was unthinkable for American Com- munists to defy what they interpreted as a directive from the Soviet Union.” Schrecker acknowledges that this deference to the Soviet Union included conscious support for Stalin’s terror, remarking that “Peggy Dennis, the wife of the party’s future general secretary, was actually in Moscow during the purges and saw several friends disappear. She knew what was happening, but accepted it ‘as part of the brutal realities of making a revolution, of building an oasis of socialism in a sea of enemies.’” On the matter of spying, she says, “it is clear that some kind of espionage took place during the 1930s and 1940s” and “as the evidence accumulates, it does seem as if many of the alleged spies had, indeed, helped the Russians.”68 A traditionalist scholar could have written those observations almost word for word. Although Schrecker concedes these points to the traditionalists, she takes a very different approach when discussing what the appropriate response was to a CPUSA that she describes as quasi-military, obsessively secretive, engaged in covert activities, intolerant of members who disobeyed its instructions out- side the conventional political arena, supportive of mass terror, funded by and subordinate to a foreign dictator, and complicit in espionage against the United States. She cannot bring herself to acknowledge that the anti-Commu- nists were right that the nature of the CPUSA justified a negative response to Soviet activity. In looking back at the 1930s and 1940s, Schrecker depicts in a negative light all varieties of criticism of or opposition to Communism. She states that the “term McCarthyism is invariably pejorative” and then applies that term to anyone who opposed Communism. She uses “McCarthyists” to de-

67. Ibid., pp. 22, 25, 36. 68. Ibid., pp. 10, 18, 21, 166.

109 Haynes scribe Joseph McCarthy and his allies and imitators, and goes on to argue that there were “many McCarthyisms” including “a liberal version . . . and there was Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 even a left-wing version composed of anti-Stalinist radicals.” She insists that “Socialists and other left-wing anti-Communists functioned as a kind of intelligence service for the rest of the [anti-Communist] network.”69 Weighted in the balance and found wanting by Schrecker are Harry Truman, the Americans for Democratic Action, the AFL, the CIO (its non-Communist majority under Philip Murray), Trotskyists, Lovestoneists, Socialists, Roman Catholics, the FBI, Par- tisan Review and the “New York intellectuals,” Sidney Hook, Hubert Humphrey, Morris Ernst, Norman Thomas, Walter Reuther, and so on. To justify her aversion to anti-Communism, Schrecker tries to play down the extent and consequences of Soviet espionage in the United States. Al- though she admits that “many of the alleged spies had, indeed, helped the Russians,” she refuses to acknowledge that the espionage was damaging and extensive. Schrecker concedes Julius Rosenberg’s guilt but defends Hiss, say- ing that his case remains “problematic.” In a throwback to the past, she continues to attack Whittaker Chambers’s credibility. Schrecker is equally scathing about Elizabeth Bentley, whom she derides as a “melodramatic, unstable, and alcoholic woman” who was “not a reliable informant” and who “fabricated parts of her original account.” Rather than specifying what was fabricated; Schrecker simply says that “something had been going on.”70 In contrast to her harsh assessments of Chambers, Bentley, and others who revealed the presence of spies, Schrecker goes out of her way to exonerate party members who betrayed their country:

Were these activities so awful? Was the espionage, which unquestion- ably occurred, such a serious threat to the nation’s security that it required the development of a politically repressive internal security system? It may be useful to take a more nuanced position and go beyond the question of guilt or innocence to ascertain not only how dangerous the transmission of unauthorized information was, but also why it occurred. Because espionage is an issue that carries such heavy emotional freight, it is usually treated in a monolithic way that overlooks distinc- tions between different types of spying and different types of spies.71

Schrecker also points to the motivations of Communist spies, whose actions, she claims, should not be seen as betrayal:

The men and women who gave information to Moscow in the 1930s and

69. Ibid., pp. x, xii, 75–76. 70. Ibid., pp. 172–173, 175. 71. Ibid., pp. 178–179.

110 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism

1940s did so for political, not pecuniary reasons. They were already

committed to Communism and they viewed what they were doing as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 their contribution to the cause . . . [and] . . . it is important to realize that as Communists these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism; they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national boundaries. They thought they were “building . . . a better world for the masses,” not betraying their country.72

One might regard these observations as justifying the suspicion with which security officials viewed Communists who worked in sensitive posi- tions. Those responsible for protecting American secrets could not possibly trust someone whose “political allegiances transcended national boundaries,” “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism,” and regarded the transfer of secrets to the Soviet Union as “not betraying their country.” Should we be relieved to find out that American Communists were spying in order to “build . . . a better world for the masses”? Schrecker certainly seems to believe so. In her view, the Communists spied for a good cause. While excul- pating the spies, she treats the imposition of security measures on Communists, even those engaged in espionage, as a moral outrage. Although she acknowledges that Julius Rosenberg was engaged in espionage, she con- demns the American authorities for their “inquisitorial” tactics in removing him from his post at a defense plant.73 Shrecker declares: “I do not think that I conceal my sympathy for many of the men and women who suffered during the McCarthy era nor my agree- ment with much (though not all) of their political agenda.”74 Indeed, she does not conceal her admiration for Communists, whom she views as “progressives” devoted to the same causes that she herself supports. Many Are the Crimes, to use a fashionable academic word, “privileges” Commu- nists. Their flaws, shortcomings, and imperfections receive understanding or palliation. In a typical case, Schrecker argues that “the party’s secrecy was the understandable—though deleterious—response to the official and unofficial harassment that it often faced. Its rigid discipline kept the organization united in the face of repression and the frequent changes in its line. Even its tie to the Soviet Union, the fatal flaw of American Communism, could be, in certain circumstances, genuinely advantageous from the CP’s perspective.” Similarly, she claims that “though many of these zigs and zags were charted in response to directions from Moscow, a more independent organization

72. Ibid., p. 181. 73. Ibid., p. 108. 74. Ibid., p. xviii.

111 Haynes would still have experienced similar shifts between revolution and reform.”

She dismisses violations of American passport laws and other statutes by Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 American and foreign Communist agents as only “technically illegal.” In her view, it was the enforcement of those laws against Communists that was truly reprehensible.75 At one point, Schrecker remarks that “Communists were not good allies. They were secretive, authoritarian, opportunistic, and insulting.” In light of that, one might think that a reluctance to work with Communists would be understandable, but because of the privileged status that Schrecker accords to the CPUSA, she insists that non-Communists should have accom- modated Communist habits. She blames the “sensitivity, perhaps even hyper- sensitivity to communist tactics” for the Socialist Party’s failure to “cooperate effectively with the CP.”76 Communists should be excused for making mistakes, according to Schrecker, but anti-Communists deserve no mercy. Schrecker demonized anti- Communists as the “other.” Fervid opposition to Communism, Schrecker ex- plains, “tap[ped] into something dark and nasty in the human soul.” She holds anti-Communism responsible for most of the ills of American society since 1945. Many Are the Crimes indicts anti-Communism for destroying the civil rights movement’s ties to the “anti-imperialist left” and thereby having “de- prived the African nationalists of their main American ally, thus indirectly strengthening that continent’s colonial regimes.” She laments that, because of anti-Communism, “most civil rights groups in the 1950s were conservative, re- spectable, and small—and posed little challenge to the entrenched Southern way of life.” Schrecker holds anti-Communism responsible for the Taft-Hartley act, adding that “debilitating as Taft-Hartley was, it was not solely responsible for labor’s disastrous failure to replenish its ranks. Here, again, the anticom- munist crusade bears much of the responsibility, for it diverted the mainstream unions from organizing the unorganized.” Anti-Communists, in her view, also bear responsibility for the failure of national health insurance, increased inef- ficiency in government (talented people were forced out of government service), and the inability of the government to generate unbiased foreign intelligence and foreign policy analysis because of security regulations that re- moved people with Communist ties from diplomatic and intelligence duties.77 Anti-Communism’s baleful influence on culture, according to Schrecker,

75. Ibid., pp. 4, 8, 125. 76. Ibid., p. 77. 77. Ibid., pp. 46, 375–376, 381, 390. Regarding the regrettable affects of anti-Communism on the U.S. State Department’s efficiency, Schrecker specifically cited the removal of Carl Marzani, a former OSS official, from his State Department job. What goes unmentioned is that Marzani had been a secret member of the CPUSA, was recruited as a Soviet agent by the KGB in 1939, and, after his firing, set up a publishing firm that the KGB secretly subsidized.

112 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism includes the slow development of feminism, the elimination of talented mu- sicians from orchestras, and the dullness of television programming (she de- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 votes a page and a half to this and concludes that “the patterns of institutional restraint and self-censorship established during the McCarthy era are still around”). In Hollywood, she asserts, anti-Communists contributed to “the good guy/bad guy polarization of the Westerns, the unthinking patriotism of the war movies, the global triumphalism of the Bible epics, and the con- stricted sexuality of the romantic comedies.” She even blames McCarthyism for corrupting “the fine arts [as] serious painters abandoned realism” and a “more subtle form of censorship destroyed the artistic vision of the Popular Front, marginalizing entire schools of representation and severing the connection between art and social responsibility.” Anti-Communism also comes under fire for allegedly retarding the progress of science, crippling higher education, and facilitating Richard Nixon’s abuse of presidential powers. Fi- nally, in an ominous, but to this author opaque, concluding observation, Schrecker states that “only now, under the impact of a globalized, yet atom- ized, capitalist system, political repression may have become so diffuse that we do not recognize it when it occurs.”78 In Schrecker’s view, if the CPUSA had been allowed to operate without criticism or restraint, America would have been a much better place: “We are looking at a lost moment of opportunity, when in the immediate aftermath of World War II the left-labor coalition that McCarthyism destroyed might have offered an alternative to the rigid pursuit of the Cold War and provided the basis for an expanded welfare state.” Because of the evils of anti-Com- munism, “we encounter a world of things that did not happen: reforms that were never implemented, unions that were never organized, movements that never started, books that were never published, films that were never produced. And questions that were never asked.” With pride, she observes that “at a time when most of their fellow citizens were ignorant and uninterested, Communists knew about the world and cared about it. They belonged to an international movement that alerted them to what was going on in places like South Africa and Vietnam and helped them do something about it.”79

78. Ibid., pp. 399–402, 415. Revisionist historian Norman Markowitz applauded and endorsed Schrecker’s demonized image of anti-Commuism, stating that “primal anti-Communism is gener- ally associated with Vichy collaborators and Nazi occupiers in World War II, and later with U.S. Cold Warriors. The purpose of ‘primal anti-Communism’ was to suppress all forms of critical thought and dissent.” Norman Markowitz, “Anti-Communism Old and ‘New,’” Political Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 8/9 (August/September 1999), p. 16. 79. Ibid., pp. 369, 374.

113 Haynes

Triumphalism and the Lost Cause Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

In the years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, revisionists have accused traditionalists of “triumphalism”—of exhibiting joy at the discrediting of the Communist experiment. In the eyes of the revisionists, traditionalists take pleasure in exposing Communist crimes and playing up the superiority of the West in the Cold War. What is one to make of these allegations? It is certainly true that most of the traditionalists, like the vast majority of Americans, were pleased by the outcome of the Cold War and the demise of Soviet Communism. But so what? Those who celebrate the West’s moral victory over the Soviet Union are hardly unmind- ful of the tragic and ultimately sobering nature of the destruction wrought by Communist ideology. Traditionalist historians pursue their research on Com- munism in the same way they would study other phenomena that led to social upheaval and violent conflict, such as the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. One suspects that revisionist complaints about triumphalism stem mainly from an unwillingness to confront the damning evidence that has emerged from the long-closed Soviet and East European archives. Having invested so much emotion and intellectual effort in portraying the CPUSA as a loyal opposition that sought only social justice and “a better world for the masses,” revisionists want nothing more than to avoid discussing the new documents that undermine their cherished vision. Many revisionist scholars, such as David Biskind, a historian of popular culture, continue to assert that the CPUSA was “little more than a ‘conspiracy’ of well-meaning liberals to raise the minimum wage and secure social justice for ‘Negroes.’”80 Similarly, American Commu- nists are lavishly praised in Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom (1999).81 Foner holds a prestigious post as DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and is a major figure in the historical establishment, having been elected president of both the Organization of American Histori- ans and the American Historical Association. His bizarrely romanticized por- trait of Stalinist loyalists as the carriers of the torch of freedom and democracy in the 1930s illustrates the tenacious hold of revisionism on the academy. Much of the revisionist literature in the post-Soviet period has taken on the quality of a “Lost Cause.” The myth of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause held sway among white Southerners in the first half of the twentieth century. Like much revisionist writing about American Communism, advocates of the Southern

80. Peter Biskind, “Dirty Realism,” Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1999, Book Review section, p. 4. 81. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1999).

114 Historical Writing on Communism and Anti-Communism myth presented the Confederacy as a tragic but noble cause, without clearly specifying exactly what that “cause” was. Slavery was deemphasized in the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/2/1/76/695185/15203970051032381.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 myth in favor of the more anodyne concept of “states’ rights.” This insistence that slavery was not at the heart of the Confederacy is very similar to the tendency of some revisionists to produce what Draper called “Communists-without-communism,” glossing over the CPUSA’s Marxist-Leninist goals. In the South’s Lost Cause narrative, the steadfast courage of Southern soldiers loomed large, as did the exploits of Confederate military commanders. But of the many Southern political leaders who promoted secession, only the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was given much attention in the Lost Cause narra- tion, and he had a lower profile than the military commanders who reported to him. Similarly, in the Lost Cause myth of revisionist American Communism, the CPUSA and its top leaders fade into the background, replaced by the picket- line bravery and occasional martyrdom of the party’s labor organizers. The Lost Cause version of Civil War history depicted Reconstruction, not slavery, as the great evil. In the mythical narrative, the South became the victim of a repressive and harsh military occupation, with honest Southerners abused by turn- coat scalawags and cruel carpetbaggers. Similarly, the revisionist literature on American Communism singles out McCarthyism, not Stalinism, as the great evil. In this peculiar version of history, ex-Communists are the scalawags, and congressional committees play the role of carpetbaggers. Unable to refute the new archival evidence, revisionist scholars have taken to attacking the anti-Communists and traditionalist historians instead. Hence their accusations that the traditionalists, in a frenzy of triumphalism, are seeking to rehabilitate McCarthy and McCarthyism. Rather than undertak- ing the difficult task of sifting through primary sources and writing their own comprehensive narratives of American Communism, too many revisionists want to end the discussion, evidently in the hope that some aspects of Com- munism will be spared scrutiny. It is safe to say, however, that the debate over the nature and role of Communism in the United States is far from over.

115