The extraordinary nature of the CPUSA’s attempt to both place anti-racism at the center of its organizing and to root out racism from within its ranks owes to the equally extraordinary nature of the Party itself. While not the first “internationalist” socialist movement in the United States, it was the first to explicitly align itself and take direction from an international body—the Communist International (Comintern)—and to a lesser extent, a sovereign country, the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Party’s commitment to anti-racism owes directly to interventions at 1920s Comintern World Congresses, in which several African Americans involved with the African Blood Brotherhood (which later merged with the CPUSA), including Harry Haywood and Otto Hall, as well as other black and Asian radicals such as Claude McKay, Sen Katayama, and Otto Huiswood, persuaded the conference to grant the American black freedom struggle the “dignity,” as one historian put it, of an anti-colonial national liberation struggle.
The black petition to the Sixth World Congress was an attempt to stage a political intervention into the structures of American white supremacy. While clearly a Comintern resolution could not singlehandedly change the United States, that its largest and most influential radical political organization for the next two decades placed anti-racism and the black freedom struggle at the heart of its movement profoundly changed the American left, in ways that are still manifest today. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the realignment of the labor movement and the Democratic Party around civil rights owes in no small part to the Communist Party.
I bring this seemingly small if vital event in early twentieth century left-wing history up because it runs counter to both liberal common sense about American democracy and also the central thesis of historian Maurice Isserman’s new nearly four-hundred-page history of the Communist Party. Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism opens with a portrait of Eugene Debs and the early-twentieth-century Socialist Party (SPA) as the paradigmatic form of “indigenous” democratic socialism—independent-minded, iconoclastic, “morally charged” and led by a figure who “speaks his own piece.” Isserman contrasts this capacious Americanism to the foreignness of Communism. Reds narrates the rise and fall of the Communist Party in three acts: its “revolutionary” Third Period, from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s; the “Popular Front” era that lasts from 1935 to the onset of the Cold War; and finally the Red Scare and collapse in the 1950s, with a brief afterglow in the early 1970s during Angela Davis’s celebrity trial