Draper was not Isserman’s only critic. Among those who stood in opposition to the New Left cohort was another young scholar of the American Communist Party, Harvey Klehr of Emory University. Isserman and his supporters went after Klehr, who came of age when they did, because he followed the older trends in historical scholarship about the CPUSA: Klehr took an “institutional approach” that stressed “the heavy hand of the Comintern,” as one reviewer of Klehr’s book wrote. Isserman noted that Klehr “used a traditional method of inquiry” and that he was unimpressed by more recent scholarship from those friendlier to American communism. One of Klehr’s points especially rankled Isserman: that the CPUSA’s “special relationship to the Soviet Union” set it apart from other radical movements and ultimately determined its political fate.
So how strange it is to find that today, Isserman’s new history of American Communism, Reds, is blurbed by none other than Harvey Klehr, who writes that Isserman’s is “the best one-volume book on the most important radical organization of twentieth-century America” and praises Isserman for showing how the CPUSA “voluntarily tied itself to a totalitarian regime hostile to democracy.”
What accounts for Isserman’s turnaround?
Our first clue comes at the very beginning of the book’s short prologue. It opens with an epigraph from none other than Draper that includes the line, “It is possible to be right about a part and yet wrong about the whole.” Another quotation nearby comes from Bertolt Brecht, the famed German Communist playwright, who in 1938 wrote, “What is written in the old books is no longer good enough.”
Isserman presumably includes his own older studies among the books no longer good enough, partly right but on the whole wrong.
What does Isserman think he got right? His scholarly cohort used to emphasize the great reforms Communists helped create in Western societies. In Reds, Isserman acknowledges that there is truth in this, but adds that the movement attracted “egalitarian idealists” only to turn them into “authoritarian zealots.” While the CPUSA supported “democratic reforms that benefited millions of ordinary American citizens,” it also “championed a brutal totalitarian state responsible for the imprisonment and deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.”