Gray Flannel Cabalists
GEWEN, BARRY
GRAY FLANNEL CABALISTS BY BARRY GEWEN when Theodore Draper, the author of two outstanding volumes on the early years of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA), began his researches, he expected to...
...Modern Communism is a far more heterogeneous animal...
...No longer the revolutionary vanguard, the Communists moved to the right of the Socialist Party to support the New Deal, the AFL and the American way...
...Communist Party (CPUSA), began his researches, he expected to concentrate on the period 1930-45, the era of the party's greatest influence...
...A real leap of imagination is required to understand why anyone would consider these tinpot Lenins a serious threat...
...In our post-Mao and post-Castro era, anyone can call himself a Communist and get away with it...
...Socialists) were more dangerous still, and most dangerous of all were "Left social fascists," the radical fringe groups...
...After crying "fascist" at every opportunity, the USSR got a glimpse of the real thing in Germany, and in 1934 it began calling for a Popular Front uniting all those opposed to the immediate danger of Adolf Hitler...
...and most heterogeneous of all is that grotesque farrago of nationalism, romanticism, populism, caudillo-ism, idealism and violence known as Third World Marxist-Leninism...
...Inevitably, the result is a certain aridity (it is hard, while reading, to shake the feeling that one is picking through ashes from history's dustbin...
...The second part of Klehr's study describes this volte-face as the CPUSA swallowed hard and reversed its oppositionist line...
...They could push for their goals, yet not very hard...
...In no American institution was it more influential than the CIO, where members held key leadership positions...
...They were stolid, rigid, intense, humorless, suspicious, bureaucratic, non- or anti-sexual-Gray flannel cabalists who, if they could, would have outlawed ecstasy...
...Outside of the U.S., of course, Communism remains a live issue, and it is natural to ask what can be learned about current international questions from this book...
...The Kremlin lightened Klehr's labors by organizing his book for him...
...With the Popular Front, thousands of sympathizers flocked in, sending the rolls to unprecedented levels 2,000 in 1937, 82,000 in 1938, and nearly 100,000 by the summer of 1939...
...trade unions as "labor's Magna Carta...
...Honey is usually the best way to attract a following, and the brief period of the Popular Front was American Communism's true heyday...
...In the early '30s, despite the heated activity of the confrontational Third Period, membership stagnated, topping 18,000 after the 1932 elections, falling back to 15,000 six months later, then inching up slowly...
...The '30s CPUSA was still part of an orthodoxy, however unrealistic and mistaken...
...When it pursued farmers, it stumbled all over its ideological preconceptions, and after four years of effort in the early '30s counted 1,200 converts out of a rural population of 6 million...
...during strikes, it could not bring itself to fight for the immediate bread-and-butter demands of workers...
...Klehr's most useful contribution may be to show, from the inside, the tactical difficulties the party faced during the '30s, but his treatment signals that the CPUSA has become a subject to be studied rather than an object to be combatted...
...They gave up some long-cherished principles, not the least of them being a refusal to acquiesce in condemnations of their own ideology...
...Here is a body whose youth wing set out to appeal to the children of America with the charming slogan, "Smash the Boy Scouts...
...Here is a political organization that, in the Third Period, saved its most violent attacks for those who were closest to it: Fascists were dangerous, but "social fascists" (i.e...
...continuity was provided by a small core of stalwarts...
...The Nazi-Soviet Pact ended the most successful era in American Communist life," Klehr writes, "clearly demonstrating that loyalty to the Soviet Union took precedence over any and every other consideration for the entire party...
...It eagerly accepted Moscow as its ideological and moral center, the brain for its body...
...By cooperating with non-Communists of the Left, the Communists succeeded in increasing their numbers dramatically...
...Harvey Klehr's The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books, 450 pp., $26.50) is intended to remedy this situation...
...The party overtook the Socialists and became the dominant power on the Left...
...The Communists could not win elections, they could not organize workers, they could not build mass organizations...
...At a time when the CIO was claiming 3 million members, only 27,000 Communists belonged to either CIO or AFL unions...
...At most, 2,000 steelworkers were in the party...
...The Soviets then entered Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and, finally, Finland...
...Some of the more vociferous comrades complained that the party's machinery was being handed over to John L. Lewis on a silver platter...
...The history of the CPUSA is a story of dismal failure because Communism was always perceived by Americans as a foreign weed...
...To cope with the Angolas, Ethiopias, Vietnams, Grenadas, Nicaraguas, and assorted revolutionary movements around the world, we will have to look elsewhere than to notions of Communism derived from the American past...
...In 1936, a transitional year, it ran Earl Browder for President while schizophrenical-ly hoping for Roosevelt's re-election...
...And revolutionary rhetoric was out...
...In a brief two-chapter coda, Klehr recounts the last reversal of the decade...
...One cannot imagine a dedicated Communist dancing...
...Even during the growth years of the Popular Front, the Communists had their problems...
...The Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed in August 1939...
...On the positive side, The Heyday of American Communism is a mine of factual information about a phenomenon that by itself or through its McCarthyite reflection in the '40s and' 50s undeniably had a major impact on 20th-century American life...
...Otherwise, Klehr's study suggests just how irrelevant the Depression party is...
...Klehr demonstrates that the party could succeed only through compromise, but through compromise it lost its identity and sense of purpose...
...Klehr appears to support Draper's conclusion that the essential character of the party was molded in the '20s when, amid ideological splits and warring factions, the CPUSA solidified into a monolithic expression of Soviet policy...
...Visions of the Revolution kept getting in the way of reality...
...Throughout the decade's twists and turns, the party served as a revolving door for thousands of Americans who entered, grew disenchanted and left...
...The Popular Front was dead, and with it the party's possibility for expansion...
...They ignore what the Communists gave in return...
...But the more he learned, the more he realized that the formative decade of the 1920s was the most significant for an understanding of American Communism, and he never got around to writing about the 1930s...
...Tactics had replaced strategy, leaving Klehr to narrate the tale of a tail wagged by a Muscovite dog...
...They denuded their own organizations, surrendering many of their best cadres, some permanently...
...The faithful responded with street demonstrations, hunger marches, front organizations, dual unions established, in the words of one party spokesman, "to destroy the American Federation of Labor," and the occasional riot...
...Communism is 20th-century Americanism," announced party Chairman William Z. Foster...
...Leaders without a following, they were forced to act under severe constraints...
...The study has both the vices and the virtues of a book designed to fill a gap...
...The party deserved Richard Nixon as its archenemy, and it is no wonder that the '60s generation revolted explosively against both of these options...
...At the 1940 CIO convention they even supported a resolution condemning Nazism, Fascism and Communism...
...Forced to pirouette once more, the CPUSA returned to a policy of confrontation...
...Other scholars have since produced volumes on the party's activities during World War II and after, yet oddly the story of the important Depression years remained to be told...
...It was never to be so strong again...
...By the '30s, the internal disputes had faded...
...When it went after blacks the party disdained the crucial issues of discrimination and equal rights to advocate national self-determination, a concept utterly opposed by every major black spokesman...
...A mere 1,500 out of 400,000 United Auto Workers were Communists...
...The first part details the "Third Period" of the early '30s, when the comrades were ordered to take the offensive, to foment revolution against the capitalists, the Socialists and the biggest fascist agent of them all, Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...They relinquished the rigid control they had traditionally exercised over their trade union cadres...
...Klehr observes: "Those who look only at the benefits the Communists got from the CIO-And those benefits were plentiful-look at only one side of the story...
...It is more academic and distanced, less engage', than the Draper histories, though it self-consciously strives to emulate them...
...From clues scattered throughout the book, such as Klehr's descriptions of the tedious meetings (nothing of substance, after all, could be genuinely discussed) and the admonitions to the rank-and-file to be "regular fellows," it is possible to put together a composite sketch of these die-hards...
...Now it hemorrhaged members, losing more than 15 per cent in a single year...
...Within a few weeks the two dictators consumed Poland...
...Indeed, large portions of Klehr's book read like a comedy of futility, similar to the Laurel and Hardy short where Stan and Ollie try to move a piano across a narrow suspension bridge...
...Among the rank-and-file, however, not much had changed from the oppositionist years...
...Here is a workingman's party that opposed the National Recovery Act, which gave unions the right to organize, and the Wagner Act, hailed by U.S...
...The clearest lesson of The Heyday of American Communism is that a small band of dedicated revolutionaries will get nowhere unless it plants its seeds in fertile soil...
...The answer appears to be practically nothing...
Vol. 66 • December 1983 • No. 23
