A Not-So-Secret Agenda

Abstract

A Not-So-Secret Agenda Robert Shaffer (bio) Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xxxii + 348 pp. Documents, notes, bibliographic references, and index. $25.00. The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, has a not-so-secret goal: to resurrect, based on “proof” from newly available archival material inside Russia itself, the notion of the Communist Party, USA as a “conspiracy” directed from Moscow. The authors aim to discredit recent histories of the CPUSA that portray it sympathetically, as a vibrant and valuable asset in American reform movements. This goal is not new for Klehr, who is the author of The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (1984) and, with Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (1992). Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov (referred to as “Klehr et al.” here) claim in The Secret World that the documents they present prove that the CP engaged in widespread espionage against the U.S. government in conjunction with and on behalf of the Soviet Union, and that its organization was based on secrecy and subterfuges that placed it outside the bounds of “normal” American political life. Klehr et al. maintain that their findings substantiate assertions that Agnes Smedley, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and others were spies or agents for Moscow. These findings, they say, tend to rehabilitate the reputations of prominent anticommunists of the McCarthy era, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. While at times distancing themselves from Joseph McCarthy’s attacks and methods, the authors characterize the CP in his terms, as “a conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power” (p. 326). Fortunately, the format of this book, in which a selection of documents from the Communist International (Comintern) archives in the former Soviet Union is translated and published for the first time, allows a reviewer to judge the conclusions of the authors very easily. Comparing the documents with the [End Page 500] authors’ claims demonstrates that the evidence simply does not bear out their arguments. That the authors are well-versed in the primary sources on American communism is beyond question. They tease out the significance of seemingly insignificant names and phrases in the Comintern documents through extensive references to court records, FBI files, obscure obituaries, and interviews. This wide background knowledge pays off, in one instance, in their deconstruction of CP leader Earl Browder’s claim to the Comintern that he was in verbal communication with President Roosevelt; it turns out that an artist who had once painted a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt convinced Browder that she was transmitting messages for him to the White House. But with the exception of this one instance, Klehr et al. marshal their evidence more as prosecutors than as historians, and the prosecution’s case ultimately fails. Among their weakest claims—but one that exemplifies the tone and misuse of evidence in the book—is that Agnes Smedley, the flamboyant American writer who participated in Chinese revolutionary activities in the 1920s and 1930s, was a “Comintern agent.” Several documents from the mid-1930s do show that the Comintern provided some money through Smedley for the Chinese Communists and related organizations. But three of these four Comintern documents focus on the need to sever connections with Smedley, precisely because she did not follow Comintern instructions; the correspondence describes her as “reckless,” “harmful,” and “irresponsible.” Thus, these documents sustain the judgment of Smedley’s biographers Janice and Stephen MacKinnon that she was a “freelance revolutionary,” a characterization Klehr et al. had explicitly set out to counter. Regarding espionage by Alger Hiss of the State Department, Klehr et al. have a problem—the documents never mention Hiss. Since the authors believe that Hiss’s guilt has already been established, 1 all they feel they need to do is to demonstrate that Hiss’s detractors had some credible knowledge about the CP’s “underground” work. Thus, the documents do show that a high CP official, Joseph Peters, who...