Oral History and the Old Left

Abstract

On April 12, 1898, Laura Camella Hudson, daughter of a slave and wife of a sharecropper in Wilkes County, Georgia gave birth to a son, Hosea. Two years later and several thousand miles to the East, Joe Rapoport was born in the small Ukranian Jewish shtetl of Stanislavchik. And still another three years later, Stjepan Mesaros (later Steve Nelson) was born in Subocka, a village of fewer than one hundred families in the fertile farming region of Croatia. Few people would be surprised to learn that these three boys from such geographically dispersed preindus trial and rural settings would spend their adult years in American factories. After all, such sagas of the uprooted fill high school history textbooks and (with a little sex thrown in) popular paperback novels. What is remarkable here?and perhaps unsettling to those who still adhere to the dominant myths of our past?is that Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson did not join the American middle class and struggle for social and economic success, but rather joined the American Communist party and struggled for social and economic justice. And what is even more remarkable is that these three fascinating life stories are now available to us in oral autobiogra phies collected and edited by professional historians and published by eminently respectable university presses. Both the lives of Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson and the form of their presentation?as oral histories?command our attention. For to examine these life stories is to re-examine some of our most common assumptions about the Ameri can Communist party, to recognize that the party's history has been much richer and more complex than we have been led to believe by either the polemics of many anti-Communists or the apologetics of many Communists. Yet, while appre