Workers of America, Unite?
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Workers of America, Unite? Russian Commissars, American Communists By Arnold Beichman The CPUSA—the Communist party as it existed in the United States—is the only radical party in American history...
...Throughout the very early years of the CPUSA, the Soviet Union hoped to foment the overthrow of American capitalism...
...In 1933, this international "social fascism" line, which barred united efforts with social democrats, helped bring Hitler to power in Germany...
...But when, during the 1920s, even the apparatchiks in Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...The tactic was a total failure and made mortal enemies of the leaders of the AFL...
...Among the trade unions and their members, the mishmash offered under Soviet orders by the CPUSA had little success, and The Soviet World of American Communism shows—with Comintern documentation to prove it—that were it not for John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman, the two labor leaders who founded the CIO, there probably wouldn't have been any CPUSA success among the trade unionists...
...Its first victim was Browder, the CPUSA secretary who had abjectly complied with every Comintern zig and zag for twenty years...
...It was a form of colonialism, run from the mother country of the Soviet Union, that Stalin called "proletarian internationalism," and it meant that Moscow's orders to its colonials were to be obeyed upon pain of expulsion...
...The Soviet World of American Communism takes its place as yet another fine entry in Yale University Press's extraordinary series of recent books on the history of the Communist plague in the twentieth century...
...Thanks to archives opened in Russia after the fall of the Communists, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kir-il M. Anderson have been able to document beyond all doubt the extent and the vicious-ness of the role played even in America by the "Comintern," the Soviet agency that ruled Communist parties the world over...
...One of the Comintern's stupidest decisions was the creation of dual unions—coal miners, garment workers— to challenge the jurisdiction of the equivalent unions already in the American Federation of Labor...
...Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson have gathered the key correspondence between the Comintern and the CPUSA, and readers will find much to be depressed about as they plow through the endless record of duplicity, naivete, and treason...
...And dutiful CPUSA organizers were immediately shipped south to organize the unlikely rebellion...
...The comrades, led by CPUSA Secretary Earl Browder, obeyed without a murmur...
...Russian Commissars, American Communists By Arnold Beichman The CPUSA—the Communist party as it existed in the United States—is the only radical party in American history to be governed by a foreign country...
...To implement Stalin's doctrine of "social fascism," social democrats like the one-time leader of the American Socialist party, Norman Thomas, were henceforth to be denounced as "social fascist" enemies...
...Perhaps the most surprising feature of the history of American communism is how well the Soviets did in the United States, given the often idiotic orders issued to the CPUSA by Russians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and any other Eastern European whose expertise on America derived entirely from Stalin's paranoid perceptions, the misreporting of the Soviet press, and occasional comments in the works of Marx and Lenin...
...Our line has changed again...
...No one would think of doing this favor for fascism, but communism with even more millions of victims and a much longer life span is the beneficiary of this sustained effort of historical rehabilitation in—of all places— American colleges and universities...
...The CPUSA even cheered the fall of France in June 1940 as a victory against "imperialism...
...But perhaps the most depressing thing found in The Soviet World of American Communism is the final confirmation of what has long been known: that, upon joining the CPUSA, the ostensibly independent Americans—intellectuals and workers alike—became as submissive to Moscow as members of the Nazi German-American Bund were to Berlin (and the Bund, at least, made no pretense of being a political party or anything other than a pressure group for a foreign power...
...Our line has changed again," went a contemporary socialist parody of the Negro spiritual with the choral reply: "Ah knows it, Browder...
...Browder was expelled in disgrace by his own comrades because an article in a French Communist party magazine accused him of betraying the proletarian cause with his "Popular Front" slogan, "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism...
...But when Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, the war overnight became a war against fascism...
...Everything, including political strikes against arms manufacturing plants, was done to sabotage the Allied war effort...
...Ah knows it, Browder...
...In 1946, Stalin opened the cold war against "imperialism...
...Moscow realized that "Soviet America" was no longer an immediately realizable ambition, the Comintern directed the CPUSA to perform instead two much more clandestine roles: enlisting popular support for Soviet foreign policy and recruiting key Americans for Moscow's espionage apparatus...
...When the same Comintern proclaimed a "Popular Front" to fight fascism in 1936, Norman Thomas went from "social fascist" to hallowed social democrat...
...In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, the historian Theodore Draper rightly denounced such popular exculpation of communism, together with its surviving academic defenders...
...A new "party line" came down from the Comintern in 1931...
...For every other reader, however, The Soviet World of American Communism will prove that there isn't a single good word to be said for the Communist Party USA...
...Stalin, for example, once produced a slogan intended to win African-American support for communism ("Self-determination for the Black Belt"), insisting that American blacks south of the Mason-Dixon line were ready to revolt against whites, take over all the Southern states, and proclaim a Soviet-style republic...
...There is, he wrote, "clearly an attempt to rehabilitate communism by making it part of the larger family of socialism and democracy...
...The ability of American Communists to swallow the Soviet line seems to have been endless...
...When Stalin and Hitler proclaimed their non-aggression pact in 1939, World War II became for the Communists an "imperialist" war...
...Not one...
...But the Comintern documents found by Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson show the CPUSA leaders gladly doing whatever was asked of them...
...Nonetheless, looking back, one is forced to agree that the CPUSA did remarkably well in securing unconditional approval for Soviet foreign policy aims from such non-Communist Americans as Henry Wallace, Joseph E. Davies, Vera Micheles Dean, Claude Pepper—the list is endless...
...Under the Leninist doctrine of "democratic centralism," Moscow's always infallible commands had to be obeyed no matter how irreconcilable these policies and slogans were with actual American conditions...
...The French, it should be noted, had the one Western Communist party that beat even the Americans in obeying slavishly Stalin's orders...
...A few months ago there appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times a full-page apologia by a self-proclaimed "red diaper baby": Her parents may not have exercised good judgment by becoming party members—but at least they "believed in something...
...Even more remarkable is the extent to which the highest-ranking American Communists were not just willing but eager to submit to a Comintern leadership whose strategies were stupid, ill-informed, and in some cases disastrous (from a Kremlin standpoint...
...When Stalin's spokesmen issued orders, party members obeyed without a murmur...
...So too the party did quite well in espionage recruitment, finding Alger Hiss, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Whit-taker Chambers, Lee Pressman, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and many more...
...One wants to say that Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson have provided, with their superb annotation, enough to make impossible any such rehabilitation...
...The Moscow "show trials" of the 1930s were defended as Stalin heroically cleaning out Nazi spies like Trotsky, while the executions, assassinations, and the Gulag were declared more than justified...
...But the history of communism in America demonstrates the heartbreaking capacity of some intellectuals to believe almost anything—and, worse yet, to act on it...
...You had to be a special kind of American to submit to it all, and it seemed to work best among the intellectuals...
...In recent years, a number of writ-ers—both popular and academic— have undertaken to whitewash both Stalin and the CPUSA members who so willingly submitted to his demands...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 25
