Revising Revisionism: A New Look at American Communism

Abstract

Although the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) never became a major player in American political life, it was a significant participant in mainstream politics and the trade union movement in the 1930s and 1940s whose activities evoked tremendous passions among both supporters and opponents. It has also been the focus of sustained attention by historians. An online bibliography of scholarly writing about domestic American communism has more than 9,000 entries, listing hundreds of dissertations and books as well as thousands of published articles, many added in the last decade. This enormous corpus of works on a political movement that never enlisted more than 88,000 members is filled with fierce debates between “revisionists” convinced that their subjects have been marginalized or unfairly denigrated and opponents less enamored with the role the CPUSA played in American life. The first substantial group of scholarly works on the CPUSA, the ten-book “Communism in American Life” series sponsored by the Fund for the Republic, appeared during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, Theodore Draper’s The Roots of American Communism (Viking Press, 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period (1960) unearthed the political history of the CPUSA to 1929 with a detail and understanding still Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:452–462 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9131-9