Formation, Zigzags, and Fall

The basic outlines of the Communist Party’s historical trajectory are well-known and Isserman hews to its accepted periodization. It had its origin in a pair of competing parties splitting from the Socialist Party in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Owing to guidance from the Comintern, these factions united to form a single organization before embarking on the confrontational “Third Period” in 1928.

Subsequently embracing a more pluralistic approach during the 1930s “Popular Front” won the CPUSA its heyday of influence, before squandering its popularity by championing the Hitler-Stalin pact. Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union prompted the party to reverse its position yet again and back the anti-Nazi war effort. However, the party’s patriotism was rewarded by all manner of government harassment and ostracism by its erstwhile political allies, intensifying after the party’s unwise support of the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. A mass exodus of members following official Soviet acknowledgement of Stalin’s misdeeds in 1956 marked the end of the party’s significant influence in American political life.

In recounting this history, Isserman retells the triumphs of the CPUSA which are the bread and butter of revisionist historiography. Brushing aside accusations of Communist “infiltration” of labor unions, Isserman points out that Communists had a key role in building the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions in the first place. On issues of combating US racism, through the Scottsboro legal campaign and other efforts, “Communists were indeed acting as a vanguard.”

The party’s greatest material contribution to anti-fascism, the celebrated Lincoln Brigade, fought valiantly, although ultimately unsuccessfully, to repel Francisco Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. In eras of heightened popularity, the party managed to attract rings of “fellow travelers” — “not necessarily a synonym for being a naive puppet, or useful idiot, or the other pejoratives often attached to the term” — to multiply its influence. Mercifully, Isserman relegates the party’s espionage activities, a tedious fixation of traditionalist historians, to an appropriately limited page count.

These touchstones of CPUSA history are familiar, but Isserman also highlights less widely known episodes in the party’s development. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was an anti-racist legal defense effort similar to the Scottsboro one, except on behalf of accused Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. The replacement of soldiers shipped off to fight in World War II with female members enabled the party membership to achieve gender parity toward the war’s conclusion. And among the many included anecdotes enlivening the text, Isserman recounts an amusing episode of Ernest Hemingway falling out with the CPUSA, stopping by party headquarters to leave a note to “Tell [party columnist] Mike Gold that Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.”