The issue of communism in the United States, with a particular focus on the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America), remains a contentious one, both as a historical subject and as a source of possible lessons for contemporary activists, especially for those of us in the United States. Maurice Isserman has written a strong, wide-ranging and generally fair account of the CPUSA that I believe is meant to “wrap up” the issue historically, and while he gives it one hell of a try, I don’t think he has quite succeeded.
Isserman brings a lot to his subject; this is at least his fourth book on the “old” left: this follows If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left; California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party; and Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War, and he’s written several other books as well. This immersion into the “old left”/CPUSA serves him well as he’s deeply engaged with the expansive literature on the subject over the years. He certainly appears quite capable of wrapping up this issue. And he also is aware of the strengths and weaknesses not only of the CPUSA (“the Party” hereafter), but of the larger left in general and the historical canvas on which he paints.
Most importantly, he emphasizes the necessity of being able to hold contradictory facts in one’s head at the same time and still be able to think and to understand: the CPUSA was not all evil or all good but included aspects of both that have to be included in one’s analysis if one wants to understand the Party’s and its members’ efforts and experiences. He argues, “The Communist movement helped win democratic reforms that benefitted millions of American citizens, at the same time that the movement championed a brutal, totalitarian state responsible for the imprisonment and deaths of millions of Soviet citizens” (emphasis in original).
Isserman covers a wide range of years: from 1900 until 1991. Although two “communist” parties emerged from the Socialist Party in 1919 and the unified party wasn’t founded until 1923, this means he grounds his study in the American radical tradition, and particularly that of the Socialist Party, from which many of the early communists emerged. He examines the emergence of the two “workers’” parties and their effort to obtain the “franchise” (i.e., recognition) of support from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); a crucial, utterly crucial move that acknowledges the global status of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which in Russia led the first “workers’ revolution” to succeed in seizing state power anywhere, thereby subordinating themselves to the CPSU and its major spin-off, the Communist International or Comintern.
So, he deftly leads readers through the complex interactions inside the Soviet Party—including discussions of the myriads of conflicts/splits/withdrawals/expulsions/and, ultimately, assassinations—and their various and sundry effects on the US party; by 1931, Stalin has achieved power unequivocally. Isserman gets readers through the “third period” (1928-1935), now definitely considered an “ultra-leftist” period, where Stalin argued the conditions were closer for revolution than they actually were. Nonetheless, I think Isserman tries and generally produces a fair accounting of this period, while not getting stuck within such machinations.
Importantly, it was during this period where the Party took on forthrightly the oppression of African Americans; interestingly, a position pushed by Stalin. However, especially by fighting valiantly for the lives of the “Scottsboro Boys”—11 Black teenagers/young men unjustly charged with rape by two young white women—the Party gained increasing support from and membership by African Americans. One of the greatest contributions by the Communist Party to US society, although not without problems or contradictions, was it became the largest and most active, white-populated organization in the country that challenged Black oppression in general.
The “Popular Front” period (1935-39) is next. This is the period where the party made its greatest gains and won its greatest acceptance. As Isserman notes, it was “an attempt on their part for the first time to build bridges between themselves and other Americans, whereas always before their inclination had been to build barricades.” Isserman doesn’t spend much time discussing why the Party switched from an ultra-left program to a much more centrist one; it was its debacle within Germany, where Hitler gained power, destroying both the Social Democratic and the Communist left and the labor movement in the process and showing the Soviets they had to take a different tact. In fact, the Communist International made a major political shift when it renounced revolution in the so-called “developed” countries; in reality, these were all imperialist countries, although it did not change its line in the colonized or formerly colonized countries. Isserman downplayed that point. This shift to the Popular Front, however, allowed American members to more enthusiastically embrace the Party and its’ political line.
It was the “Spanish situation” (1936-39) in which Isserman really recognized the Communist role and focused most attention upon. Fascist army troops led by Francisco Franco rebelled against the Republic and sought to overthrow the government. Literally thousands of Communists and other leftists (especially anarchists, although Isserman does not discuss their involvement) from around the world flocked to Spain to support the “Loyalist” government, making real the ideal of “proletarian internationalism” and among them were over 3,000 Americans. Isserman honors them and their efforts, while recognizing the futility of many of them; without “Western” arms, which President Roosevelt refused to supply, and in face of Nazi, Italian and Spanish fascist forces, especially air support, they were all-but-doomed.
At the same time, Communists were playing important roles in the US in helping build the CIO, the Congress for Industrial Organization (later, after expulsion from the hidebound American Federation of Labor in 1938, Congress of Industrial Organizations, an independent labor center, still with the initials CIO). Much to my surprise—and I say more below—Isserman does not say much about this.
He performs a good sociological overview if the Party’s efforts during this period, and especially notes their electoral successes, particularly in New York City, which was their stronghold.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—more commonly known as the Soviet-Nazi Pact—was a disaster for the Party that I don’t think Isserman really fully explains; it was an incredible debacle for the Party. Having won incredible respect for fighting fascism in Spain and in the workplaces of the US industry, the Party pissed away a lot of respect, especially among intellectuals and those who paid a lot of attention on foreign events, for blindly following the Soviets into supporting this pact with the Nazis; this would be used unmercifully by its enemies against it to great effect after World War II. However, not only did the Soviet government under Stalin ally with the Nazis, but part of the deal included invading Eastern Poland (in congruence with the Nazi invasion in the west), invading Finland, and absorbing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Empire, each of which the CPUSA supported.
Once Hitler turned on his Soviet allies on June 22, 1941, and invaded the Soviet Union, the Party’s political line shifted 180 degrees; instead of arguing that the US should stay out of the war, as previously, they now wanted maximum production to aid the defense of the Soviet Union. They supported the “no strike pledge” of CIO leaders without reservations, and on industry’s shop floors, they turned from activists to “restrainers,” seeking to maintain production even if face of workers’ demands limiting production.
Over time and interestingly aided by US government propaganda, the American public came to develop great respect for the Soviet peoples and their fight against the Nazis; after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943, they cheered on the Soviet and Eastern European war on the Wehrmacht. The Party gained increasing respect during this period and into the post-war period; in fact, as Victor Silverman argues, it took more than a couple of years for most Americans to accept the Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union. (Somehow, this initial public respect for the USSR has not been included in most post-World War II analyses.)
After the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945, the US government’s position shifted from being generally willing to work with Stalin and the Soviets to the anti-Soviet position of now-US President Harry S. Truman. This scared Communist leaders, and the Smith Act arrests in July 1948 made the threat personally real; many of the top-level Communists went underground to keep from going to prison. This was projected by the government as even more evidence of “evil” Soviet intentions, adding to Cold War fear. Of course, this was compounded by Soviet actions in 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin airlift, and the tightening Soviet grip on Eastern Europe. Isserman examines this period carefully and examines internal Party developments critically.
As the Party realized that fascism was not immediately relevant, it relaxed somewhat and made changes in its leadership: it looked for a little while like it might overcome its Soviet anchor. Stalin died in 1953. However, in 1956, when his successor, Nikita Khruschev, revealed the true extent of Stalin’s crimes, Party members were shaken. Interestingly though, people mostly stayed in the Party after that, seeing that the Party and the Soviet Union could “rectify errors.” However, it was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in later 1956, in response to loosening reforms by the Communist-led government, that really doomed the Party: Party members could not see advancing “socialism” at the point of bayonets; after all, for many, advancing to socialism was felt to be a moral process. By 1959, not only had the Party’s prestige collapsed, but its membership numbers had as well.
Subsequent political “advances” by the Communists really were due to the work of individual (usually former) Party members, and not by the organization itself. This was especially true in the late 1960s-early ‘70s anti-Vietnam War era.
Despite my comments here and there above, I think Isserman did a strong job in weaving the above periods together in a way that makes sense, is plausible, is understandable to non-experts, and is generally critical and fair. He uses a lot of cultural examples, such as the movie “Casablanca,” which aids in understanding. However, while not unfamiliar with this history, I do not claim to be an expert on the Communist Party—and I haven’t read a lot of the literature, although I think I have read some of the more important analyses—and it will be interesting to see how the “experts” respond to this review.
Two things that activists can learn from Isserman’s work: (1) do not subordinate your organization to a foreign one, no matter how good or pure it may look or how heroic the leadership; take responsibility for your own decisions and actions. And (2), following, do your own critical thinking and be willing to challenge others’ analysis and positions. In other words, “democratic centralism,” no matter how “logical” it may look for the situation, leads ultimately to passive acquiescence, which is contrary to empowerment of self and others. So, even if it might be necessary for tactical situations, it should never be the “guiding light” for organizations.
However, I think there are two areas in which Isserman really comes up short, keeping this book from “wrapping up” the Communist Party as a historical subject. First, is the CIO. He simply does not give it much attention in and of itself: against strong efforts by industrial leaders of some of the most economically powerful corporations in the world to prevent unionization across the country, including armed violence by the police, such as in Chicago and a few other places, industrial workers had unionized some of the largest concentrations of economic wealth and power the world has ever seen between 1936-1942. Then, in the first year after the war—from September 1945 to roughly that time in 1946—the US had the greatest strike wave in American history; Art Preis claims that over 116,000,000 production days were lost due to striking. And by 1948, the CIO—and the AFL in response—had unionized about 80 percent of US industry.
That is such a phenomenal achievement that it deserves much more attention than Isserman gives in and of itself. It was these strikes and this power that forced the US elites to “allow” many industrial workers to ultimately join the “working middle class”; this was not due to corporate or governmental beneficence, but due to the labor movement’s organized power. It led to a 27 year period (1948-73) where family incomes across the sociological board doubled their real incomes, after inflation. (It has fallen greatly since then.) It was where the concept of “the American dream” emerged and had a material base to it. He certainly does not appear to understand this.
However, his failure here is even greater in that this is a study of the Communist Party in the United States but ultimately includes commentary on the Communist movement globally in general. And the base for the Communist movement, as is well known, is Marxism. And Marx argued that it was the “class struggle” between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—more contemporaneously but less accurately, bosses and workers—in the workplace that was the basis for all economic and social development. Now, you can argue that it was the peasantry in China and Vietnam and elsewhere that served as the base of revolutionary forces in those “undeveloped” countries (actually, they had been victimized by imperialism), but any study of grassroots-imposed social change in the imperial countries during this period requires the primary emphasis be on labor movements. Isserman does not understand this. The CIO was the most important social force in any study of US Communism covering the years between 1935 and 1949, and not merely a sociological development that he should refer to completely cover his subject, and he failed to appropriately understand this.
This leads to one more point. And here Isserman is not being picked on; these comments refer to almost all studies of Communist/radical movements that are being studied internationally, much less globally, and especially during the existence of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to 1991: they cannot use developments in the United States as the foundation on which their analysis depends. What I mean by this is that it’s not acceptable, it is essentially biased from the start, to accept—consciously or unconsciously—the US as the source from which all studies begin.
In other words, over the last 30 years, there has been the growing recognition that some US Communists—actually the total numbers, while real, seem quite small, and definitely are small in percentage of party membership—shared information with Soviet intelligence services and a few even committed espionage against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. I am not contesting that. What I am contesting, however, is that there never seems any question of how many people, say in the Soviet Union or elsewhere, shared information with US intelligence services such as the CIA or committed espionage on behalf of the United States? If one focuses only on Soviet activities, it suggests the US is “pure,” and we know it was not.
For example, toward the end of World War II, we know that the US smuggled out hundreds if not thousands of Nazi intelligence operatives in Eastern Europe to the “Western” countries, and especially engineers and technicians involved with the Nazi rocketry operations, in advance of Soviet military operations in the USSR and Eastern European nations. Does the name Werner von Braun mean anything??? There have been considerable others who have been named specifically and in general; these are not rare, individual cases.
We also know that the American Federation of Labor (AFL), under George Meany, set up operations in Europe in 1944 to challenge the Soviets, not the Nazis, working with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the organizational predecessor to the CIA), as well as working in France and Italy in 1947-48 to destroy leftist-led labor movements and undermine democratic elections. These facts are unequivocal. And these and related operations continued until recently, when Trump cut off funding to the National Endowment for Democracy and the US Agency for International Developments—providers of over 90 percent of all funding to the AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center”—in early 2025. [See my AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010) or Jeff Schuhrke’s 2024 book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso) for details.]
The point here is not that the Soviets were “good” and the Americans “bad,” or vice-versa, but to argue that we each need to be aware of our nationalist bias that effects our work, and consciously work to not replicate that, however unintentionally, in our work.
What this will do is add nuance to our work, making it better in most cases. In this case, recognizing US perfidy along with that of the Soviets, allows us to consider why people might join the Communist movement. In other words, few were duped or made a “mistake,” but consciously chose to join the Party because they thought the “socialism” being offered a better way forward than “capitalism,” and this seems extremely pertinent to the early- and mid-1930s. (And many left the Party when it didn’t deliver on its promises and aspirations.) And many stayed despite hearing stories of Stalin’s brutality because it was easy to believe that years of anti-communist rhetoric and reporting, the US media might be lying about what they were reporting! Again, not excusing “deviant” behavior, but providing the groundwork for better analysis and understanding, enhancing the quality of researchers’ efforts.
In short, Maurice Isserman’s Reds is an impressive effort. Clear and well-written, it deserves the attention of all interested in this subject over these time periods. We still need to better understand the CIO—and my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Unions, Race and Popular Democracy: Learning from the CIO to Build a Progressive Labor Movement in the Mid Twenty-first Century, will help in that—and we need to need to problematize US government operations in the US and around the world for a better understanding of the 20th Century.