AP PHOTO
A protest during a sit-down strike in Detroit. Communists were indispensable organizers for the unions of the 1930s.
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism
By Maurice Isserman
Basic Books
From the late 1970s through the 1990s, a good chunk of my ongoing political education came from Ben Dobbs. As an active member of what would become the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I got to know a number of comrades who’d been active in the Old Left in the 1930s and ’40s. They included participants in the great sit-down strikes of the ’30s, activists who’d built public-employee unions years before they had legal bargaining rights, and the brave souls who’d boarded buses in pre-’60s Freedom Rides through the South.
Most had been members of the Socialist Party or some Trotskyist sect. But not Ben Dobbs, who was an old Commie. And not just any old Commie, but the deputy leader of the party’s Los Angeles local from shortly after World War II straight through the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, which prompted Ben and the rest of the L.A. leadership to resign their posts and eventually leave the party over its support for the invasion and all things Soviet.
That they’d lasted so long in an organization with which they were so clearly at odds was a function of L.A. exceptionalism. Most of their party contemporaries had joined the Young Communist League in the 1930s, where they helped organize unions and built an unprecedented corps of Black activists. Three events triggered these cadres’ exodus in the mid-1950s: Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech revealing the mass murders and imprisonments ordered by Joseph Stalin, which the U.S. party had ignored, downplayed, or just plain denied; the Soviets’ 1956 invasion of Hungary, which had been flirting with a less repressive version of communism; and the shutting down of the party’s newspapers and journals to longtime members who, also in 1956, had begun writing in to reject the Soviet Union as a model and condemn the U.S. party’s adherence to top-down “democratic centralism,” under which all members had to espouse the party’s current policies (themselves dictated by the Kremlin), internally as well as externally, or face censure or expulsion.
In Los Angeles, however, leaders and members stayed beyond that exodus, continuing to voice such heresies and engaging in activities (like nurturing the early New Left) that the national party opposed. The national office tried repeatedly to oust L.A. leader Dorothy Healey and deputy leader Ben Dobbs, but the members rejected all such attempts. When Dorothy and Ben (I knew them well enough that it’s hard for me to refer to them by their last names) finally left, they and their comrades formed a group they called “Forty Socialists in Search of a Party.” Many—Ben first—eventually joined DSA.
In the late 1970s, Ben began asking me over to his house to talk politics and much else. “How do you find the workers?” was his customary greeting, at once both serious and comical. He had his own method of finding them, volunteering on any number of campaigns he thought sufficiently strategic, where he performed so many tasks with good-humored dedication and smarts that campaigns vied for his involvement. During one city council election, two races—one in Hollywood, the other in Venice—featured progressive candidates with serious prospects of winning. The campaigns had to work out a modus vivendi: One would get Ben on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with Sundays up for grabs. Both candidates won.
As the years went on, Ben began asking me to join occasional meetings of his old comrades, usually seven or eight onetime party members arrayed around his living room. At one such meeting, the talk turned to a new left-of-center group that was making waves in the state Democratic Party. The question was how that group determined its policies, a process I outlined as best I could. After a moment of silence, one of the comrades said, “democratic centralism.” Another mumbled, “top-down democratic centralism.” That had been a rule that had defined party life and much of their own lives, finally compelling them to conclude it was something they could no longer abide.
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 provides a lucid, succinct history of American communism, at once sympathetic and scathingly critical.
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.”
The twists and turns that Joseph Stalin took to establish his rule over Russia following Lenin’s death turned those parties into singularly inept quick-change artists. Inside Russia, failure to adjust was often fatal. In the U.S., Stalin’s turn against Trotsky and the Bolshevik “left” required the expulsion of such Trotsky-symps as James Cannon and Max Shachtman. But after embracing the mixed-economy policies first championed by Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin then repudiated these “rightists,” too, at the end of ’20s. Jay Lovestone, the CPUSA head who had faithfully followed what had been the Stalin-Bukharin line, was slow to pick up on the change and found himself unceremoniously expelled. Party members drew the lesson: If even their topmost leaders could be dumped, they had better not contemplate any deviations themselves.
For the first half of the 1930s, the party line was stunningly sectarian and downright dangerous to democracy. To Stalin, what prevented the potential for revolution in the West during the Great Depression were other left parties and unions (deemed “social fascists”) that favored nonviolent means to reformist, if sometimes systemic, change. Therefore, in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, the German Communists focused more on fighting the Social Democrats than the Nazis.
For its part, the CPUSA opposed the New Deal, including its 1933 legalization of collective bargaining, as a fraud perpetrated on otherwise revolutionary American workers. When longtime socialist author Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1934, the party condemned him as a social fascist, too (though one recent study of Bay Area communists, showing that the party’s own gubernatorial nominee drew far fewer voters than the party’s candidates for down-ticket statewide offices, suggests that party members ignored Sinclair’s “social fascist” mislabeling and gave him their votes in the privacy of the voting booth).
In 1935, Stalin himself recognized that this social fascist nonsense wasn’t working very well. In Germany, the Communists had been wiped out once Hitler took power. In France, faced with the prospect of a rising fascist right, Communists and Socialists banded together in what they called the Popular Front to elect the nation’s first socialist government. (This history, you likely have noticed, has recently repeated itself.) So the line shifted. Suddenly, Franklin Roosevelt and New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia were not social fascists after all, but progressives worthy of support.
Fortunately for the communists, the new embrace of popular fronts coincided with serious efforts to unionize the nation’s manufacturing workers. The newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations hired hundreds of communists (and not a few socialists) to do the organizing. Party members’ organizing tasks were made easier by the party’s less sectarian approach: No longer were they compelled to urge the workers to “build a Soviet America,” as they had been (to no avail) before 1935. Communists Wyndham Mortimer and Bob Travis, along with Socialist Roy Reuther (Walter’s brother), organized the historic sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, which jump-started the rise of the United Auto Workers and American industrial unionism generally. The relatively small number of workers who barricaded themselves inside GM’s factories until the company recognized the union were disproportionately Communist and Socialist party members.
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Joseph Stalin’s USSR initially condemned reformist left parties as “social fascists” that prevented the potential for revolution.
Isserman notes that the Communists’ immersion into the real world of American workers brought an unaccustomed pragmatism into their ranks. In two states, California and Washington, party members became active within the states’ Democratic Parties; in New York, they worked alongside New Deal champions to form the American Labor Party, enabling them, under New York’s system of fusion voting, to support FDR without having to join the Tammany-dominated Democrats.
Ben Dobbs and Dorothy Healey honed their political skills during the Popular Front, making effective alliances with nonparty progressives, and working in campaigns that created a modicum of worker power in this most capitalist of countries. Under the broad left banner of opposing fascism, party members participated in a host of coalitional organizations like the National Negro Congress and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
But the Front came to a shuddering halt in August of 1939, when the Kremlin abruptly signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany and proceeded to divvy up Poland with them. The party’s anti-Nazi focus was redirected to a critique of the “imperialist” war; Roosevelt and La Guardia, who supported aiding Britain, soon to be under attack by the German air force, were once again social fascists and agents of British imperialism. The communists who dominated the National Negro Congress passed a resolution opposing such aid and the prospect of U.S. involvement in the war, prompting NNC’s leader, socialist A. Philip Randolph (president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s first successful Black union), to leave the organization. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League closed its doors.
This grotesque episode in the party’s history was mercifully cut short by Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June of 1941, which enabled the CPUSA to re-enter the mainstream of American liberal sentiment. Isserman characterizes party members’ reactions as an “overwhelming sense of relief.”
After Pearl Harbor, the party’s allegiance to the USSR made any policy that might conceivably hinder full U.S. prosecution of the war somewhat suspect. The party still defended Black rights, but it opposed desegregating the armed forces while the war persisted, even as ex-Communist and active Socialist Bayard Rustin spent the war in a federal prison camp for his refusal to fight in a segregated Army. Scandalously, rather than question the war’s exigencies, the party even stayed silent when Japanese Americans were interned in prison camps.
The line changed yet again after the war, once Stalin no longer regarded the U.S. as an ally (and vice versa). CPUSA leader Earl Browder, like Lovestone before him, was wrong-footed by this change, and removed both from leadership and membership. The advent of the Cold War and the waning of the New Deal majority led to a sharp governmental turn against the party, very much abetted by revelations of Soviet spying (particularly on the Manhattan Project) that had involved a small number of CPUSA members.
A series of inquisitorial hearings and trials followed, leading to convictions of party leaders chiefly for belonging to the party rather than anything even remotely resembling insurrection advocacy. While the Supreme Court upheld those convictions in the early 1950s, it reversed itself when another set of convictions—chiefly of California leaders including Dorothy and Ben—came before it in 1957. By then, Stalin was dead, Joe McCarthy was dying, the Korean War had ended, and the specter of an internal Communist threat looked increasingly absurd.
It was around the same time that Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin, invaded Hungary, and directed the U.S. party to shut down internal criticism. And so, the cadres quit. Except in Los Angeles.
A FEW DAYS AFTER NEW YEAR’S IN 1992, I got a call from Ben. One week before, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
“I’m having some people over,” Ben said. “You should come. I think you’ll be interested.”
I went. It was all old comrades, including the lawyers who’d represented blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, and the New Deal economist who’d written speeches for Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. The subject of discussion, of course, was what to make of the former Soviet Union, and the CPUSA, which had defined itself by defending everything the Soviet Union had done. Without making light of the party’s positive achievements, they asked: Where had it gone so terribly wrong?
The men in the room—it was all men—spoke in quiet voices, their tone measured, but their meaning clear. (I didn’t say a word.) They went around the room, and when they were done, Ben spoke.
“We had a joke,” Ben said. “A guy is standing on a soapbox on the corner, making a speech. He says, ‘Come the revolution, we’ll all have peaches and cream.’ A guy in the crowd shouts, ‘I don’t like peaches and cream!’ The guy on the soapbox says, ‘Come the revolution, you’ll like peaches and cream!’
“Why did we find that funny?” Ben said. Slowly, the men in the room nodded.
