1. Maurice Isserman’s history of the CPUSA has met with both praise and criticism which is not surprising. The subject matter still remains a matter of great contention and disparate views. Thus any attempt to presume to be the final word is a fool’s errand. I’m sure Isserman appreciates that fact more than most.
2. That said, I highly recommend reading his recounting and appraisal of the party’s history. I haven’t read the whole body of literature evaluating the party, but I believe that Isserman’s book is a good place to start. It is very readable and well researched, offering a generally sober and balanced assessment of the party, free, for the most part of cant and ideological predispositions. It certainly isn’t a rehash in slightly different form of earlier books that severely and one sidedly critiqued the party.
3. The broad scope of the book, ranging from the party’s founding in 1919 to its bitter factional fight in 1991 inevitably means that choices had to be made as to what episodes of the party’s history to include in the book and what to exclude. The question therefore is: did Isserman get it right? Did he make the right choices? By and large, I believe he did, with some qualifications that I will mention below. Some readers, of course, will differ with me on this, but that goes with the territory. Historical interpretation never finds unanimity.Chinese leader Chou En Lai is reported to have said to Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s when asked about the influence of the French Revolution, “It is too early to say.” While it turns out that the story is apocryphal, it retains, nevertheless, an element of truth. Every generation returns to what is considered “settled historical truths” of earlier generations and rethinks them in a new light. I have little doubt that the history of the Communist Party won’t escape generational recasting as well.
4. If I had written a history of the party (and I’m not presumptuous enough to think I could) I would have shined a brighter light on the activity of the party in the decades following the tragic, traumatic, and consequential events of the 1950s. There is a rich history here, but it doesn’t reside on the surface, calling attention to itself. It has to be dug up, patiently so, for the reader to see what party activists were doing out of view of cameras and public scrutiny. For while the worst of McCarthyism and its witch hunts were over by the end of the fifties, the deployment of anti-Communist tropes to discredit and isolate communists as well as weaken the movements in which they participated persisted long after that. Thus communists were reluctant to publicly declare their party affiliation. Or, to borrow the language of the gay rights movement, “come out.” In the Jim Crow South, party membership, if it became public knowledge, could get you and others killed.
Unless this is appreciated, anyone, including historians, can get the impression that the party was standing on the sidelines as a new era of activism and struggle took hold in the 1960s and beyond. But this wasn’t the case. Communists were active during these years, not reduced to merely recording history, issuing statements, or hiding from the FBI. They eagerly joined with others for the purpose of defending and expanding democracy, effecting progressive change, and securing peace.To be sure, the party didn’t set the agenda for the broader movements nor was it “indispensable”as it liked to claim. But it was a political actor in those years. Though the party was greatly reduced in size and influence compared to the 1930s and 1940s, it could claim a layer of activists who were connected to mass organizations and movements and punched above their weight in many instances. Communists led movements too during this period.
But again this wasn’t always obvious to outside observers, historians included, because the vast majority of party activists in the aftermath of McCarthyism and in the midst of the Cold War didn’t self-identify as communists for reasons that I believe are understandable. Isserman makes this mistake in my opinion.
He writes:“Instead of experiencing growth through meaningful political engagement, the Communist Party in the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s settled into an elaborate multi-year liturgical cycle. There were annual celebrations of May Day and the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Every four years, from 1972 through 1984 Gus Hall (National Chair-SW) would run for president of the United States. Every five years delegates gathered for the CPUSA’s national convention, where a laundry list of resolutions were proposed, debated, approved, and, soon thereafter, forgotten.”
While there is some truth here, it is one sided and badly incomplete. It obscures the activist dimension of communists at the state, city, and local levels during these years. Communist erred in various ways for sure, but they didn’t sit on their hands. This is the period when I and a host of other young people joined the party and were deeply involved in the anti-war, labor, civil rights and other movements of that time. Other than weekend nights, my free evenings were rare.
5. On the other hand, Isserman is right that the party, diminished in size and reach by the end of the ‘50s, never fully recovered from the combination of McCarthyism, Khrushchev’s report on the crimes of Stalin, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the long Cold War. Isserman estimates that in the late 1940s the party still could claim a membership of nearly 60,000, but a decade later, he writes, it could only count 10,000 members. The hemorrhaging of members, however, didn’t stop here. By the end of the ‘60s its membership numbered only 5,000.*In the two decades that followed, the Party grew, as I mentioned above, but incrementally, sometimes with a burst here or there — not least during the trial and subsequent acquittal of Angela Davis — but not enough to compensate for the inevitable losses of the generation that joined the party in the 1930s and the normal attrition of members who at some point concluded that the Party wasn’t their cup of tea. By the end of the ‘80s and before the split in 1991, I estimate the membership numbered approximately 3,000.**
6. The party’s terrain of struggle, as Isserman makes clear, was the terrain of reform even at the height of the Great Depression. Some of those struggles, as Isserman argues, were sharp, contentious, and altered the balance of class and social forces, but never did the conditions mature enough for a systematic break with capitalism, notwithstanding the claims of a few analysts on the left. In other words, the struggle for reforms — piecemeal or of a more radical character — was the road that the party traversed and rightly so. This in the party’s view was the only terrain that would open up the road to socialism. Moreover, the party believed that any attempt to bypass such forms of struggle, to leap into the future, would inevitably lead the proponents of a “revolutionary way” to disappointment and isolation.
7. While Isserman doesn’t see the party as a salvageable project or offering a “usable past,” he doesn’t suggest, and rightly so, that there is nothing to learn from the party’s experience. Having spent most of my adult life until recently in the party, I would argue that the lessons are many and retain a political relevance for today’s movements. Moreover, Isserman’s book is a good place to begin that conversation.
8. Isserman’s history of the party also offers new insights into some of its crucial mistakes, most of which went unmentioned and unexamined within the party back then and now. Aside from the rise and fall of Browderism, that is, the belief that the struggle between antagonistic classes on a national and global scale was waning and a new era of societal progress lay ahead in the post-World-War-II world, the party, including in its schools, rarely delved into any consideration of other miscalculations and missteps, minor or egregious, that it made. Such discussions weren’t officially verboten, but were never encouraged by National Chair Gus Hall.
A few of the most egregious errors would include the party’s attitude toward the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, its acquiescence with Roosevelt’s internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in 1944, its full support of the Henry Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, the party’s legal strategy to contest the Smith Act, the decision of party leaders to go underground in the early ‘50s, its unqualified support of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, its skepticism of the new social movements in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, its hesitation to jump into the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, and its view of the collapse of the Soviet Union and defense of the coup attempt in August 1991.A critical look at any of these would have yielded new insights and overdue corrections to mistaken analyses. But that never happened, notwithstanding the unsuccessful efforts and courage of a few brave souls who dared to critique the party’s analysis.
For Gus Hall, who led the Party for roughly 40 years, the main danger wasn’t mistakes of the past, but right opportunism in the present and future, which he understood as a readiness in theory and practice to bend to the pressures of the ruling class as well as underestimate the revolutionary disposition of the working class and the prospects of building the Party. While this may sound good and righteous on its face, it can easily and did underestimate the complexities of building a powerful working class and people’s movement and a mass party of socialism in the most powerful capitalist country in the world.
9. Isserman is right that Gus Hall saw himself as a first class theoretician. And his high self regard was regularly reinforced in day-to-day party life by coworkers around him. Thus the accolades he received when visiting the Soviet Union that Isserman mentions were more like “frosting on the cake.” To be fair though, Gus wasn’t devoid of analytical and political skills and insights. Of note, he called attention to the rise of the extreme right in the early 1980s — long before much of the left — and insisted on strategic and tactical adjustments to this new reality. The rise of Trump and the MAGA movement later and the necessity of a cross class coalition to defeat this exceedingly dangerous fascistic phenomenon would be no surprise to him. It follows in a more or less straight line from his political analysis 30 years earlier.
10. Isserman is also right to say that decision making in the party was collective in form, but personalized in substance. While collective bodies regularly met, it was the General Secretary (the title was later “Americanized” to National Chair), first Earl Browder and then Gus Hall, who largely set the agenda, determined the boundaries of discussion, and with the help of his supporters enforced those boundaries. I was part of that dynamic, although, to be honest, mostly on the enforcer side, which I regret.
11. Isserman is on point to say that the Soviet Union figured prominently — too prominently — in our party’s political, ideological, and cultural firmament. But when it came to joining and remaining in the party, it was nearly always existing US capitalism and its depredations, not existing Soviet socialism, that brought nearly all of us into the party’s orbit and kept us there.
Of course, the exception to this is the crisis in the socialist world in the late 1980s and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of that time, as you would imagine, shook party members, eroding to a degree our confidence in the socialist project. Nevertheless, most party members were not so shaken by the sudden and completely unexpected evaporation of Eastern European and Soviet socialism that they were ready to give up the fight for a society free of exploitation and oppression. As for remaining in the party, well, that’s another matter. Many left, but only after they had concluded that Gus Hall and his supporters were unwilling to undertake a critical look at the party’s present and past positions as well as consider changes at the highest level of its leadership structure.
12. Figuring prominently in the raucous discussion at the time were a number of issues: (1) the undemocratic top-down nature of the party’s decision making process, (2) the relationship between class and race, (3) leadership succession, (4) the interrelationship between class and democratic struggles, (5) the influence of racism and male supremacy within the party, (6) past positions on international events, and (7) finally, the causes and consequences of socialism going belly up in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. To this I would add more than a dollop of personal grievances on both sides. In the end, nearly half the membership quit, while the party’s political and organizational capacity, not surprisingly, was greatly diminished.
13. Was the split inevitable? I still ask myself that question without any conclusive answer. I do know that it only could have been avoided if Gus Hall at his own initiative or at the insistence of his closest supporters had agreed to a willingness to co-chair the party with Charlene Mitchell or had stepped down in favor of a collective leadership, representing both sides of this factional fight. Would that alone have been enough? I don’t presume to know. And anybody who does is probably “talking out of their ass.” But it would have been a good start.Only later did I realize that there were no winners in this clash. Both sides, in effect, set the table for their own irrelevance and undoing.
14. No other political grouping on the left, I believe, faced anywhere near the type of scrutiny and repression that the party did. In saying this, I didn’t expect Isserman to rescue us, as E. P. Thompson rescued “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity,” but I would say that any history of the party that is stripped from this reality won’t sufficiently capture the successes and failures of the Communist Party.
15. It wasn’t until after the convention in 1991 that I began to look critically at the party and my own role in the party’s leadership. In much of the party at that time, we acted as if we had a nearly unblemished record over the long arc of the party’s life. But I found such a view very unconvincing. Any honest rendering, I figured, had to acknowledge that we made plenty of mistakes and took more than a few wrong turns, some egregious. Nevertheless, people of like mind in the Party at that time were few in number. Most Party leaders resisted any serious examination of our history, theory, and practice, which is never a good idea if you want to stay relevant. Invented history, to say the obvious, is a political dead end for those who are captured by it. Isserman’s “Tragedy” provides a compelling corrective to such thinking.
* From a conversation with Danny Rubin who was the Party’s organizational secretary in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
** From my own experience and knowledge of party organization prior to the split in the Party in 1991.
