MAURICE ISSERMAN IS ONE OF THE PRE-EMINENT HISTORIANS of the American left, having previously authored a history of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) during World War II, a biography of DSA founder Michael Harrington, and Dorothy Healey’s memoirs, for which he provided commentary. His new history, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, provides a lucid, succinct, yet comprehensive history of the party, at once sympathetic and scathingly critical, as befits such a bewilderingly contradictory institution and mindset. Isserman shines light on not just official party pronouncements, but leaflets and internal communications, dizzying shifts of party lines, the diaries and memoirs of zealous and doubting members, and the documents in Moscow’s vaults that became available after the USSR’s 1991 collapse, that showed which (relatively few) U.S. party members were also Soviet spies.
He does not stint in his praise when praise is due, particularly for the party’s role in building the great unions that arose during the New Deal and in advancing the interests of African Americans at a time when such advocacy was scarce. But he does not stint in his criticism of how the party not only subverted itself but damaged the prospects of the entire American left through its undying obeisance to the Soviet Union, which required the kind of screening out of reality we now associate with Fox News.
“In what is the central contradiction that both defined the character of American communism and doomed its political prospects,” Isserman writes, “it was a movement that claimed to be founded on a rigorously self-aware and self-critical rationalism, the ‘science’ of Marxism-Leninism, but sustained itself over many decades through what proved to be the blindest of faiths.”
Isserman begins his story with a survey of the pre-Communist American left before 1918 and its major institution, the Debs-era Socialist Party, home to a cacophony of perspectives, and to future CPUSA leaders like unionist William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Before they willingly subordinated themselves to Moscow’s every whim, these activists formulated their own perspectives and pronounced them for all to hear. “I speak my own piece,” Flynn famously said.
The second congress of the Communist International, held in Petrograd and Moscow in 1920, put an end to that. Rule Number 16 of its requirements for member parties stated, “All decisions of the Congresses of the Communist International and decisions of its Executive Committee are binding on all parties belonging to the Communist International.”