Maurice Isserman

Open Archives and Open Minds: “Traditionalists” versus “Revisionists” after Venona

Twenty years ago this spring, Harvey Klehr and I offered opposing interpretations of the history of American Communism on a panel at the annual convention of the OAH, meeting that year in Minneapolis. In retrospect, for all our differences, there was one topic on which we stood upon common ground—or, more precisely, took no stance at all, for neither one of us felt it necessary to mention the word ‘‘espionage’’ in our papers. While in Minneapolis, the very morning of our panel, I obtained a copy of the latest issue of the New York Review of Books hot off the presses and containing the first of two lengthy articles by Theodore Draper attacking the misguided works of the ‘‘new historians of American Communism,’’ myself included. Neither of Draper’s two articles contained the world ‘‘espionage,’’ nor did a subsequent article he wrote on the same subject in the New York Review of Books in 1994. It thus may seem to future historiographers a singularly striking fact, as they revisit and deconstruct the ‘‘Great Historical Debate Over American Communism’’ in the late twentieth century, that irrespective of political perspective, the most influential books shaping our generation of historians’ understanding of this subject—from Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History, published in 1957, to John Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s The American Communist Movement published 35 years later—either completely neglected or otherwise downplayed the significance of American Communist involvement in Soviet espionage. Howe and Coser in 1957 devoted exactly two sentences to the topic in their 600-page book, and concluded that while reports of spying American Communists were not without some basis, they were on the whole ‘‘exaggerated,’’ while Klehr

50 Years Later: Poverty and The Other America

Michael Harrington’s most famous appeal to the American conscience, The Other America, was a short work (one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most Americans assumed. The extent of poverty could be calculated by counting the number of American households that survived on an annual income of less than

The New History of American Communism Revisited@@@The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II.@@@Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left.

3,000. These figures were readily available in the census data, but until Harrington published The Other America they were rarely considered. Harrington revealed to his readers that an “invisible land” of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. ”That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them,” Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. “They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.” That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us—and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington’s work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue.

America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

No topic in American historiography has been more hotly debated than the role played by Marxism in the social and political life of the United States. Until now, most accounts have been partisan--either attacking Marxism as an alien ideology, or defending it as the authentic expression of the political will of the American working class. Paul Buhle has produced the first overview of American Marxism to go beyond this opposition. His account ranges from the immigrant socialism of the nineteenth century to the formation of the CPUSA in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of American communism in the 1920s and 1930s, the crisis and split in 1957, and the revival of Marxism outside the Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s. Brimming over with historical detail and grounded in substantial original research, Marxism in the United States provides a balanced account of the strengths and weaknesses that have characterized the history of American Marxism. This revised edition assesses the new challenges facing the American left in the 1990s.