Red Retreat
Goldbloom, Maurice J .
Red Retreat The Decline of American Communism, by David Shannon. Har-court, Brace. 425 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Maurice J. Goldbloom There is no shortage of books on the American Communist Party....
...For McCarthy-ism he has no use, but he remarks: "The Communists and their organizations obviously were the victims of a reaction that was sometimes disrespectful of the highest traditions of law and justice, but they were hardly innocent victims...
...But he appears to regard an even further erosion as more probable...
...Perhaps the best sections of the book are those dealing with the history of the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, and with the struggle for party control which followed Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...Primarily, this is a history of the postwar Communist movement in its strictly political aspects...
...Matters of importance to the labor historian are mentioned only briefly or not at all: e.g., Lee Pressman's key role in manipulating CIO machinery in the Communist interest in the war and immediate postwar periods, and the crucial part played by the expelled left Communists of the Dunne-Darcy-Keith group in enabling Joe Curran to break with the party in the National Maritime Union...
...Thus he describes the firing of Isadore Begun from his party offices for "white chauvinism" because of the cliches he did not include in his speech at a dinner honoring a Negro party memberl Shannon holds that "The decline of the American Communist Party can be told largely in terms of the conversion of the non-Communist Left into the anti-Communist Left...
...With the aid of previously unpublished material, Shannon has made many things clear which were previously obscure in both these periods...
...Another source of party weakness which Shannon describes in some detail is the constant search for heretics, and a readiness to manufacture them if there is a shortage of real ones...
...The author is extremely skeptical of the value of most of the repressive measures adopted against the Communists, and believes—citing cases to prove the point—that in many instances such measures have actually made the members more hesitant to break with the party...
...There are also some minor errors on the extent and nature of Communist influence in various unions...
...While the Communist adventures and misadventures in the labor movement receive somewhat more attention, treatment of them is still sketchy...
...Communist states don't seem to wither away, as Marx expected them to, but Communist parties sometimes do...
...At the same time, he has used the wealth of detail he presents to illuminate the broader issues involved in both cases...
...At the moment," Shannon believes, "the Communist Party seems destined to join a collection of other sects as an exhibit in the museum of American Left Wing politics...
...it is no fault of Shannon's that some is not, since he didn't write the Communist documents which are a necessary part of his story...
...A similar difference of points of view exists between them in regard to some of the security procedures undertaken against the Communists...
...Much of what he writes is fascinating...
...Professor Shannon is scholarly without being pedantic, and he writes with a sense of both the ridiculous and the pathetic—even tragic—elements of the story he tells...
...But there is a shortage of good ones, and this one is very good...
...He does not exclude the possibility that it might again, under other circumstances, show some recovery from its present estimated membership of three thousand...
...He attributes this in part to objective conditions and in part to the tactical errors of the Communists themselves, but points out that "The party's obeisance to Moscow was the source of its 'errors' and the root cause of its unhappy 'objective situation.'" He notes, however, that the strength of the American Communist movement—and, indeed, its existence —also resulted in large part from its connection with the Soviet Union...
...But whereas Hoover regards these procedures as aspects of the party's strength, Shannon shows how they both reflected and intensified the party's weakness...
...Nor does Shannon devote much space to Communist cultural efforts...
...Espionage is referred to only in passing—except as its discovery bore on the party's political activities—chiefly because of the absence of evidence, at least on the public record, of the party's direct involvement in espionage in the last several years...
...His description of the party's "internal security" procedures embodies little factual material that will be new to readers of J. Edgar Hoover...
...None of these, however, affects the validity of Shannon's general analysis...
...they don't deserve it...
...The cases which have come to light during this period have either involved an earlier time, or they have not been traceable back to the party as such...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 4
