A Misleading Guide to U. S. Communism
SESSIONS, JOHN A.
A Misleading Guide to U.S. Communism By John A. Sessions It would be difficult to imagine a work of scholarship at once more important and more badly done than the Bibliography on the Communist...
...But, as is the fashion in scholarship these days, he turned the actual work over to a corps of assistants...
...The job has been so badly done that nothing remains but to do it over again...
...Liston Oak is represented by a single article arguing against new laws to control Communists...
...If the Fund for the Republic seriously wishes to defend itself against such attacks as have been leveled against it by Fulton Lewis and the American Legion, it must do something to make amends for this bibliography...
...As part of that study, John A. Sessions is writing a history of the League of American Writers...
...The bibliography lists nothing written by Dwight Macdonald, whose attacks on the Communists have become an integral part of our intellectual history...
...Here, for example, is a bibliography of the Communist problem which includes no mention of anything by Angelica Balabanoff, first Secretary of the Communist International, whose autobiography is one of the most illuminating accounts we have of the internal operation of the Comintern...
...The bibliography is no more adequate in its treatment of Communist party sources...
...Koestler has written books...
...One of the most astonishing items is the single entry for James T. Farrell--an article he wrote against Trotskyism in 1950...
...There is room to cite such inconsequential items as an article by Pat Toohey listing Communist-sponsored radio programs in Philadelphia during June and July 1936...
...an article by E. Richards in The Communist on the Unicameral Legislature in Nebraska, and an advertisement for a novel by Upton Sinclair...
...This is a bibliography on the Communist problem which has no room for the works which have hurt the Communists most...
...If so, it is slight excuse: This is too important a matter to be left to rank amateurs...
...And yet, the compilers of this volume have consistently omitted the most important works of many of the very writers who have done most to illuminate the Communist problem...
...Sessions, assistant director of the ILGWU Training Institute, taught at Michigan and Cornell and has written for the Atlantic and other journals...
...The bibliography has room for Father Raymond Kelley's silly attack on surrealism as Communistic art, but no room for International Literature's well known savage tirade against the New Masses for, among other things, failing to reprint enough of Stalin's speeches...
...the editors of the bibliography seem unaware that Mr...
...Farrell's Note on Literary Criticism, a telling attack on the Communist literary critics, accelerated the crumbling of the Communist literary front, but it does not warrant a place in this autobiography, nor do other pieces written by Farrell on the Communists...
...There are two possible explanations...
...But none of these are included in this bibliography...
...Max Eastman, whose writing on Communism is nothing if not persistent, is represented by three entries, all minor articles...
...For several years, the Free Trade Union Committee of the American Federation of Labor has published a series of significant documents on the problems of Communists and the labor movement...
...One could go on indefinitely calling the roll of writers either inadequately represented or altogether ignored--Norman Thomas, William Henry Chamberlin, Philip Taft, James Rorty, Joseph Wood Krutch, Philip Rahv, David Dallin, and so on...
...Professor Arthur-Sutherland of the Harvard University Law School, who was in charge of this project, is a legal scholar of unquestioned repute...
...One is that this book results from incompetence, that the compilers honestly did not know where to look for the materials they were supposedly seeking...
...But there is no room for Albert Maltz's famous groveling public recantation in the Daily Worker of the deviationist views he had recently expressed in the New Masses...
...Arthur Koestler is represented by a single article which he wrote for the New York Times...
...This bibliography, should it become a standard library reference item, could only have the opposite effect--that is, to direct future research workers away from some of the most telling indictments of Communist methods...
...The second possibility is a more disturbing one--that somehow the "anti-anti-Communist" attitude has touched this work...
...Bibliographies have one important purpose--to direct future research workers to the most significant available materials...
...Communism By John A. Sessions It would be difficult to imagine a work of scholarship at once more important and more badly done than the Bibliography on the Communist Problem in the United States financed and published by the Fund for the Republic...
...One can only wonder what has happened...
...Last spring, we noted that several NL writers (including Daniel Bell, John P. Roche, Ralph L. Roy, Moshe Decter) were engaged, under the direction of Clinton Rossiter and sponsored by the Fund, in a major study of Communist influence on U.S...
...Judging from this bibliography, Bertram Wolfe must have died in the mid-1930s since there are several articles written by Wolfe when he was a Communist but none by this prolific writer since 1934...
...But the point is clear...
...It would be interesting to know more about these assistants, and to know what Professor Sutherland did to check on their political background before he turned the work over to them...
...Instead, the AFL is represented by a collection of trivia...
...In the October 3 New Leader, James Rorty praised two security studies assisted by the Fund for the Republic...
...It is unquestionably the most ambitious and best-financed attempt to provide a definitive work in this field...
...institutions...
...This 475-page volume lists more than 5,000 hooks and articles on the subject of the Communist party...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 43
