The American Communist Party in Its Heyday: A Case of Premature Eurocommunism?

Abstract

Each generation rewrites the history of its era as a guide to a remolded future. In no field has this been more self-consciously the case than in that worked over by historians of the American left. Little more than a decade ago, for example, young scholars found the Industrial Workers of the World nearly irresistible. Perhaps there was something about Wobbly spontaneity and social iconoclasm, their very political marginality, that distantly mirrored the passions and hopes generated in the 1960s. In these days of industrial decline and conservative drift, the romantic Wob blies are not much in vogue. The possibilities open to the left seem more prosaic: halt the decline of the unions, temper the arms race, begin a reconstruction of the old liberal-labor alliance. Utopian and revolutionary visions, whether of 1917, 1932 or 1968 now seem anachronistic, even embarrassing, while foreign models of social ist reconstruction hold little interest. Neither Moscow nor Havana brings much inspiration, and only the long neglected social democratic movements of Western Europe ? whether in their Eurosocialist or Eurocommunist forms ? attract much excitement. It is out of this decade's rather sober political landscape that a remarkably positive r??valuation of the Communist experience in American life has emerged. For here was a movement which at its height in the 1930s and 1940s enrolled upwards of 80,000 to 100,000 members, won the respect of a wide strata of liberals and progressives, and perhaps most importantly made its weight felt in the new industrial unions and on the broad terrain of national politics. Two new books by Harvey Levenstein and Maurice Isserman are particularly symptomatic of this retro spectively appreciative 1980s mood. Making use of extensive archival resources, including the heretofore unopened Earl Browder papers, both volumes are scho larly but not detached, and each uses the Communist past to search for answers to contemporary dilemmas. Isserman r??valu?tes the Party's experience during World