Moses Finley’s Communist Party Membership

Abstract

Moses Finley’s Communist Party Membership F. S. Naiden Despite the flurry of recent publications occasioned by the centennial of Moses Finley’s birth in 1912, the question of his membership in the Communist Party USA remains unsettled. In articles in the 2014 special issue devoted to Finley by the American Journal of Philology, this writer and Daniel Tompkins both surmised that Finley joined the Party in the late 1930s and remained a member until the mid-1940s. In his response, Brent Shaw doubted whether Finley belonged to the party.1 Other publications, such as the edited volumes Moses Finley and Politics and M. I. Finley, An Ancient Historian and his Impact, skirted this question.2 On one occasion, Finley himself denied being a member. On another, he declined to answer the question. Both times he was under oath.3 Incontrovertible evidence now shows that Moses Finkelstein, as he was then named, joined the Party in 1937–8. The Party official who enrolled him, Emily Randolph Grace, reported this information in a biographical note she wrote about Finley in order to prepare for an international conference in 1960. In this very short piece, published only last year, she wrote that “In 1937–1938 Finley joined the CPUSA, suspended his academic work, and engaged in political activities … as executive secretary of the so-called Boas Committee,” a nation-wide organization of students and teachers advocating academic freedom, but which she termed “anti-Nazi.”4 In 1960, Emily Grace was living in the Soviet Union, where such notes were a common way for scholars to prepare for conferences by learning about their Western counterparts. As the Russian historian Sergei [End Page 739] Karpyuk explains in his 2016 article about Emily Grace, these concise reports circulated before an impending conference without being published.5 Karpyuk himself brought about the publication of Grace’s note, which appeared on the 30th anniversary of her death in 1986. He knew her through her work at the Institute of World History in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In the late 1930s, Emily Grace served as the membership secretary of a Communist Party cell on the West Side of Manhattan. Her note does not say who else belonged, but her own career as a scholar and editor suggests that this group, probably of a dozen or so, consisted of scholars, teachers, and writers. Born in 1911, Emily Grace graduated from Bryn Mawr (BA 1933, MA 1934), and joined the Party in 1936. Unlike Finley, she was publicly known as a Communist. After enrolling him, she remained within his circle of acquaintances. She taught in party-run schools, just as he did, and wrote for the party-line American Review of the Soviet Union, published by the American Russian Institute where Finley served as director after World War II. In 1946, she married another Communist, the economist Vladimir Kazakévich, and three years later the couple moved to the Soviet Union, never to return. The US government suspected Vladimir of spying.6 Two years before, Finley left the American Party in a different fashion, returning to academic work at Columbia, where he finished his dissertation in 1951. Since Finley’s wife Mary had joined the Party in 1935, his own decision to join three years later is unsurprising. From 1938 to 1946 he did indeed devote himself to political activism, mostly in New York. Emily Grace may have influenced his decision to join. She happened to be a classicist, with two degrees in Ancient Greek. In 1949, she would receive a Classics Ph.D. from Yale. Her dissertation, “The Sparta of Agis and Cleomenes: A Study of the Ancient Literary Sources,” had the same oblique relation to Marxist themes in economic history as Finley’s dissertation on the Athenian horoi.7 For each of these two scholars, the other was that rarissima avis, a Communist Hellenist of nearly the same age. Kazakévich’s contact with Finley foreshadowed his later work-place [End Page 740] contact with the Bryn-Mawr trained classicist Harriet Monroe, who served on his office staff during his years at the American Russian Institute.8 In other ways, Finley and his Party...