First published 2010 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009044442
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klehr, Harvey.
The communist experience in America : a political and social history / Harvey Klehr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1056-2 (alk. paper)
1. Communism--United States--History--20th century. 2. Communist Party of the United States of America--History--20th century. 3. United States--Politics and government--1919-1933. 4. United States--Politics and government--1933-1945. 5. United States--Economic conditions--1918-1945. I. Title.
HX83.K5495 2010
320.5322097--dc22
2009044442
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1056-2 (hbk)
For nearly four decades, my scholarly career has been focused on American radicalism. From one perspective, it appears like an odd choice to be so obsessed with groups and ideas that have failed so consistently and spectacularly. The United States is the only major industrial nation where no socialist or communist movement or party has either come to power or seriously contested for power. Despite the alarums offered by some conservative pundits, the Democratic Party has never embraced even the moderate forms of democratic socialism so common in Europe. The Socialist Partys high point came in 1912 when Eugene Debs, its perennial presidential candidate, received 6 percent of the national vote. The Communist Party achieved some cultural and intellectual panache in the 1930s, but even at the height of its influence, it remained a marginal political movement and was unable to capture the American labor movement.
Why devote ones intellectual life to studying failures? The easy answer which contains some measure of truthis that an academic career requires a niche, and I was able to carve out my own among the debris of American radicalism. But that would not account for why so much of what I have written has either appeared in mainstream intellectual publications or engendered debate and controversy that has spread far beyond narrow and obscure academic journals. The fate of the American left touches on much wider themes that go to the heart of still-heated debates about the nature of American society.
Arguments about whether distinctive features of American society, culture, political structure, economic system, or population account for the relative weakness of American radicalism have engaged historians, sociologists, and political scientists for many decades. Such influential concepts as Frederick Jackson Turners frontier theory were linked with the absence of class conflict in America. German sociologist Werner Sombart famously explained that American radicalism foundered on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie. More critical analysts attributed the failure of the American left to fierce repression, with various red scares and the McCarthy era as prime exhibits. Other commentators have examined American immigration, winner-take-all plurality elections and such cultural values as Lockean individualism or the Protestant ethic as contributors to the failures of the American left.
Although my research began with an effort to contribute to the debate about American exceptionalism, it quickly moved to the study of radical groups, reflecting my evolving interests, but also the realization that radical organizations often created their own opportunities and dilemmas through their own choices. While the environment for radical success has never been especially favorable in the United States, neither has it been hopeless. And the failures of one of the largest and longest-lasting radical groups, the Communist Party, offers many lessons about how political groups can take advantage of or squander these chances.
The opportunity to collect a number of the essays and articles I have written over the years provides a glimpse of how an academic career can be shaped both by an overarching research question and the serendipity of new archival resources. When I began my research in the late 1960s, I could not have dreamed of the material that would become available to scholars by the turn of the century. Nor could I have anticipated that even though my graduate training was in political theory, I would have to learn research techniques more common to sociology or history. And, I would have been astounded to be told of the monetary resources that would be required to answer the research questions that would interest me. Selecting these twenty-seven essays and articles from the nearly sixty I have written is a reminder that much of what I have been able to accomplish is due to the generosity and vision of private foundations committed to excavating inconvenient material from Americas past.
These essays also illustrate how fortunate I have been to find scholarly collaborators with similar interests. Ron Radosh and I teamed up to write several articles and one book. For nearly twenty years, John Haynes, twentieth-century manuscript historian at the Library of Congress, has been a friend and co-author. We have been able to research and write far more together than either one of us could have done individually and saved each other from numerous mistakes and misinterpretations.
Revisiting these essays also brings reminders that long familiarity with a topic does not insulate one from being wrong. In the euphoria induced by the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was too easy to predict the end of the Communist Party of the United States after a seemingly fatal internal split. And John Haynes and I were far too sanguine when we blithely assumed that evidence from Russian archives would convince some of our scholarly opponents that they had been wrong about the relationship between the CPUSA and the USSR or the involvement of certain individuals in espionage. Nostalgia and investments in fixed positions are powerful factors that can trump evidence and we ignore that at our peril.
My interest in the American radical left began in graduate school in the late 1960s. A doctoral student in the Political Science Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I originally intended to study traditional American politics, but became distracted by the upheavals of the era. I considered myself on the political left, but hardly a revolutionary. Some of my friends and classmates, however, were associated with the Southern Students Organizing Committee (SSOC), a spin-off of Students for a Democratic Society. And the political atmosphere on American campuses was charged with anger and rage and much talk of revolutionary upheaval.
