Harvey Klehr

Marxist Theory in Search of America

Marxist theory has, to this day, not been able to inspire a large social movement in America. On the contrary, left-wing groups, during the infrequent occasions when they have thrived, have done so precisely when they were least committed to Marxism. The heyday of socialism came at a time when it most nearly resembled the major American political parties in its hospitality to all shades of left-wing opinion. The Communist Party gained influence in direct proportion as it abandoned Marx for Jefferson and Lincoln and proclaimed Marxism to be twentieth-century Americanism.

Reflections of a Traditionalist Historian

My friend and co-author, John Haynes, recently updated the bibliography he first published in 1987 on American Communism. Then, it included more than 2000 items. The most recent iteration is up to 9000 items and every day brings new entries. The last few years have seen a new publication, American Communist History brought into existence through the ministrations of Dan Leab, former editor of Labor History. This new journal, Dan informs me, does not lack for high-quality submissions. An H-Net list devoted to the topic began in March 2003, has more than 300 subscribers and generates regular posts and considerable controversy. Only five years ago, the New York Times Sunday magazine had a cover story on the raging wars about Senator Joseph McCarthy and the issue of Communist espionage among scholars and a lead editorial in the NYT around the same time inaccurately denounced some unnamed historians who were accused of attempting to rehabilitate the late Senator. The NYT does not often deign to notice academic disputes, much less weigh in on their merits, unless they involve plagiarism, fraud, or Alan Sokol fooling the editors of Social Text, so the newspaper’s intervention was a clear sign that the issue of American Communism continues to strike a nerve even as it recedes further and further into the past. One of the reasons the issue of American Communism remains so raw is that so many of those who have studied it bring political passions and commitments to their work. Much of the first burst of scholarly attention to the CPUSA came in the late 1940s and 1950s in response to the transformation of the Party from a significant factor in some areas of American life into a pariah and subject of governmental and societal attack. The first generation of scholars of the CPUSA were bitter political opponents of Communism—either one-time Party members like Theodore Draper, former Trotskyists like Irving Howe, or Social Democrats like Daniel Bell. They had lived through many of the events they wrote about, participated in struggles against Communists and bore the scars earned in those battles. Forced to rely on a limited amount of primary data, they were able to produce often-valuable and still useful scholarship in significant part because of the fund of personal knowledge they brought to the topic.

The CPUSA reports to the comintern: 1941

From the early 1920s until 1939, communications between the American Communist party and Communist International (Comintern) leaders in Moscow had been frequent and ample. Tens of thousands of pages of texts (letters, memoranda, cables, magazines, and newspapers) passed to and from Moscow and the CPUSA. The Comintern also dispatched plenipotentiary representatives who supervised the leadership of the American party as well as specialized agents who dealt with specific ethnic groups or specific organizational tasks or technical requirements. For its part, the American party sent a stream of American Communists to Moscow: official party ‘‘representatives’’ to the Comintern, ‘‘referents’’ who served apprenticeships with sections of the Comintern and as in-house sources of information on America, cadre attending long-term educational and shortterm training sessions at the elite International Lenin School and the lessprestigious Communist University of Toilers of the East, and delegations of party activists attending Comintern-related conferences. In the 1930s numerous high-level CPUSA officials also personally traveled to Moscow to deliver lengthy written reports, testify, and be subjected to detailed examination by the Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat.

Harry Hopkins and Soviet Espionage

One of the intriguing unidentified cover names in the Venona decryptions released in the mid-1990s was ‘19’, a Soviet source senior enough to report taking part in a conversation with President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Vice-President Wallace at the 1943 Trident conference. While some historians thought the evidence too ambiguous to identify the real name behind ‘19’, others built a case that it was presidential adviser Harry Hopkins. Alexander Vassilievs notebooks, made public in 2009, resolved the issue by firmly identifying ‘19’ as State Department official Laurence Duggan. There remain, however, writers who refuse to accept the evidence that ‘19’ was Duggan and insist that Hopkins was a Soviet agent on the basis of insubstantial evidence.

Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage

Abstract A careful review of the depiction of Soviet atomic espionage provided in Pavel Sudoplatovs Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets by Jerrold and Leona Schecter demonstrates how faulty memories, Soviet intelligence agency disinformation, sloppy citations, misplaced trust in documents provided by unidentified sources under unexplained circumstances, and egregious lapses in logic and judgment can lead to conclusions unsupported by evidence. The accounts of Soviet atomic espionage in both books are neither reliable nor credible. In particular, the assertions that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard consciously cooperated with and assisted Soviet atomic intelligence are without credibility.

REFLECTIONS ON ESPIONAGE

In 1995 the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made public the story of a forty-year American intelligence operation code-named Venona. Shortly after the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, American military intelligence had ordered companies that were sending and receiving coded cables overseas, such as Western Union, to turn over copies to the U.S. government. Hundreds of thousands of cables were sent or received by Soviet government bodies. Beginning in 1943, spurred by rumors and concerns that Stalin might conclude a separate peace with Hitler, the U.S. Armys cryptographic section began work trying to read these Russian cables. It had very limited success until 1946, by which time the Cold War was already underway. Some twenty-nine hundred cables dealing with Russian intelligence activities from 1942 to 1946 eventually were decrypted successfully in whole or in part as a result of Soviet technical errors in constructing and using “one-time pads” that American code-breakers were able to exploit. These cables implicated more than three hundred Americans as having been involved with Soviet intelligence services during World War II, a time when the United States and the USSR were allies.

Female leadership in the communist party of the United States of America

The recent resurgence of interest in the role of women in American society has prompted numerous efforts to rediscover womens history and to assess the role played by women in various political movements. Emphasis has been placed on the alleged lack of representation of women in the higher ranks of political parties and other key groups within the political system. The role of women within the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) has also been a subject of controversy. The Party itself boasts of its prominent women--including Mother Bloor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and, more recently Angela Davis. On the other hand, a recent article in a journal of womens studies has insisted that very few women ever served in high positions within the CPUSA. 1 Both arguments must be examined with skepticism. For its own self-