The Unrevised Truth
DRAPER, ROGER
THE UNREVISED TRUTH BY ROGER DRAPER THE earliest serious historians of the American Communist Party—Irving Howe and Louis Coser, and Theodore Draper—regarded it chiefly as the instrument of its...
...Whittaker Chambers—the most famous defector and the accuser of Alger Hiss—claimed that a man named J. Peters led the underground espionage network Chambers joined in the 1930s...
...It proceeded to expel her...
...party annually received large sums from the Comintern...
...In fact, the book confirms suspicions of organized Communist penetration into a number of Federal agencies, including the State and Agriculture departments, during the late '30s and early '40s...
...Communist Party archives of the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History...
...Though it has always been clear that there was a J. Peters, revisionists have questioned his involvement in the underground—to say nothing of its reality...
...THE BOOK'S RELIANCE on Soviet sources exposes it to controversy...
...Its operations have been directed for that entire period by Com...
...Ann Cadwallader Coles, an artist who died in her native South Carolina in 1969, was described in an admiring local obituary as a painter of portraits of prominent Carolinians...
...Questions about the independence of the U.S...
...government employees...
...But a 1939 report written by Peters' successor, Rudy Baker, says: "The CPUSA secret apparatus has been in existence about four years...
...The editors have found that at this very time (September 1944), the chief of the foreign section of the Soviet spy agency did indeed write to Georgi Dimitrov...
...Afterward she sent the First Lady many letters...
...The minutes of the December 1938 meeting of the executive committee of the party's New York branch suggest how this affected ordinary members...
...Mostly people who came of age politically in the 1960s, they do not really deny the burden of the anti-Communist argument: that high policy was determined in the U.S...
...Comrade Herron, had recruited and later married a woman named Mary Kelley...
...Moreover, Baker himself was named as a Soviet agent by defector Louis Budenz...
...The facts speak for themselves...
...It would be absurd, however, to pretend that this difficulty makes the archives of the former Communist bloc unusable...
...party's public political line and organizational efforts make up only one side of the controversy...
...Peters " Without providing anything specific against Hiss, the book thus upholds Chambers' credibility...
...party's national control commission wrote a memorandum complaining that it had "not received any reports from Minnesota on any expulsions of Trotskyites or Lovestonites...
...The documentary materials in the book were drawn from the Comintern (Communist International) and U.S...
...KGB archives would supply more and better information, yet are still accessible solely to favored researchers...
...Among numerous remarkable statements, he claimed the President had told him that "at the present time, the CPUSA is conducting its political line skillfully...
...She died in a sanitarium...
...Roosevelt substantiating her claim...
...But she "was under the influence of Trotskyites and made vicious statements against the party...
...Roosevelt and invented responses that Browder reported back to Moscow...
...Soon thereafter, as several telegrams reveal, the businessman-doctor Julius Hammer and his famous son Armand became what the editors call "an official part of the Comintern's covert financial network...
...He found that Adams, a fellow-traveling artist, had received a commission to paint a picture for Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she met once...
...Actually, she was a mental case: When she turned against Communism, the FBI decided that she was delusional and refused to credit her tale...
...Indeed, the first attempt to fish in these waters—The Secret World of American Communism (Yale, 348 pp., $25.00), edited and with an ongoing commentary by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and a Russian collaborator, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov—has not only transformed the debate but begun the process of ending it...
...Harvey Klehr had investigated "The Strange Case of Roosevelt's 'Secret Agent'" in an article he wrote years before Browder's report surfaced...
...Only the opening of all relevant archives would let us know...
...Some will no doubt hold that membership in the Communist underground represented a political commitment of the highest order...
...Herron "took a very firm Bolshevik position and said he would have nothing further to do with her until she changed her position...
...Now, thanks to the opening of some of the Soviet archives, they can...
...Isaac Don Levine, a ghostwriter hired to produce her autobiography, forced Adams to admit that she had forged the letters from Mrs...
...Gitlow insisted that Lovestone—later the force behind U. S. labor's efforts to weaken Communist influence in West European trade unions?had been involved with Soviet intelligence as late as 1936...
...For a time, it was noted, she kept a studio in New York...
...party's clandestine section...
...After her defection in 1945, she testified that in the fall of the previous year her Soviet contact had told her that the lax practices of her spy ring would force Soviet intelligence to investigate it...
...Jay Lovestone, for "Bukharinism...
...But there, according to an autobiographical essay she wrote in 1936 as part of an application to participate in secret work run by the Far Eastern department of the Comintern's labor federation...
...This is not a totally new issue: In the mid-1950s, a woman named Josephine Truslow Adams claimed that she had been Browder's wartime link to the White House...
...A Comintern accounting record shows that the subsidies began no later than 1919...
...underground, she made herself available for international covert work...
...Coles enjoyed a career unknown to the newspaper: Shejomed the Socialists and then the Communists, eventually entering the U.S...
...For in the 1930s and '40s, a number of defectors contended that behind the party's known structure lay a secret apparatus, also manipulated by the USSR...
...Another defector, Elizabeth Bentley, confessed to the FBI that she had belonged to a spy ring consisting of U.S...
...On this issue, too, there is a strong (albeit less strong) revisionist bias in the literature...
...For at first sight the book appears to contain a sensational discovery: In a report to Soviet intelligence...
...Central Committee and, ultimately, in the Kremlin...
...Yet in 1942 Browder took her at face value and started regularly feeding her his policy insights...
...The editors believe "There is no evidence...
...Gitlow also claimed that in the '20s, the U.S...
...In December 1938, for example, at the height of the Soviet Great Purge, the leader of the U.S...
...false documents were planted in the collection...
...and John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, is listed as receiving more than a million rubles worth of jewels in January 1920...
...Nevertheless, they concede that whoever gave life to a particular piece of paper might have been mistaken or incompetent, and there is a striking instance of the problem here...
...In 1942 Adams saw Browder and pretended that she socialized frequently with the Roosevelts...
...party's general secretary between 1934 and 1945, purported to have a direct link to Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...But these evils compromised the leaders alone, the revisionists maintain...
...THE UNREVISED TRUTH BY ROGER DRAPER THE earliest serious historians of the American Communist Party—Irving Howe and Louis Coser, and Theodore Draper—regarded it chiefly as the instrument of its Soviet master...
...To them, local Communist activity was a legitimate form of American radicalism—largely, it seems, because Stalin and the party's bosses in New York could not be present at each rally and picket line, so low-level organizers had some tactical discretion...
...But since the 1970s, "revisionists" such as Maurice Is-serman and Mark Naison have dominated the field...
...The editors found a 1944 inquiry in which a Soviet military intelligence official asked Dimitrov to confirm information that Adams was "meeting systematically with the President of the U.S.," as Browder had evidently told someone...
...Perhaps so: In 193 8 Pat Toohey, the CPUSA's Moscow representative, informed Dimitrov that Lovestone still had Soviet intelligence connections, as well as "four different homes" and "as many separate identities...
...Another danger lurking in Soviet archives is a possible distortion of their total content because of the selective way in which they have been opened...
...Only two states, New York and Ohio, were commended for "taking special steps toward systematic seeking out of enemy agents...
...He then "broke the decision without the knowledge of the party," but the executive committee rejected demands for his removal and merely placed a censure in his file...
...Earl Browder, the U.S...
...The truth is that none of this could be resolved, because neither side's arguments could be confirmed independently...
...One more defector whose testimony is at least partly vindicated here is Benjamin Gitlow, thrown out of the party in 1929, like its leader...
...Documents in the Comintern repository, though, suggest that her story ought to be taken quite seriously...
...Although the editors write that the documents presented were "chosen not for their support of any single interpretation but for their particular importance or their general value," they obviously kept a lookout for the names of persons figuring in the defectors' testimony...
...By and large, she has been dismissed as "a neurotic spinster...
...The Secret World of American Communism shows that the leaders of the American party were in touch with Soviet intelligence, and reported to it regularly, but the book may exaggerate the importance of espionage in Browder's daily horizons...
...Some of the most interesting items in The Secret World of American Communism touch upon the party's sectarian and intolerant internal milieu...
...Among the revisionists, there will now have to be a parting of ways...
...the head of the Comintern, asking for information on seven "members of the Comparty of America...
...A party organizer...
...The importance of this query lies in the fact that Bentley soon identified six of them as members of her group...
...Neither the precise kind of work she wanted to do nor the result of her petition is known...
...What is clear, as the editors write, is that "Once acclimatized to the American...
...Certain rank and filers lived double lives that if not admirable were at least astonishing...
...Adams regurgitated them in the letters she continued to send Mrs...
...But revisionism will be a cultist viewpoint...
...A Russian authority suggests that they were worth about $ 1.5 million...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
