American Communism and Anticommunism:

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Return to Table of Contents - Chapter Titles with Sections and Subsections

History of the Communist Party of the USA

Howe, Irving, and Lewis A. Coser. The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919-1957. Assisted by Julius Jacobson. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957. A comprehensive and, despite its age, still reliable one-volume political history of the Communist Party up to 1957; emphasizes its obedience of Moscow and its hostility to democracy. Howe and Coser were leading Left anti-Communist intellectuals of the 1950s, veterans of the political fights between Communists and anti-Stalinist radicals, and sections of the book have a polemical tone.

Klehr, Harvey, and John Earl Haynes. The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself. New York: Twayne, 1992. History of the CPUSA from origins to 1991. “Every different era in the history of the American Communist movement has been inaugurated by developments in the Communist world abroad. The Russian Revolution led to the formation of the first American Communist party. Soviet pressure led to the abandonment of an underground Communist party. Comintern directives led American Communists to adopt an ultra-revolutionary posture during the late 1920s. Soviet foreign policy needs midwifed the birth of the Popular Front in the mid-1930s. The Nazi-Soviet Pact destroyed the Popular Front in 1939 and the German attack on the USSR reconstituted it in 1941. The onset of the Cold War cast American Communists into political purgatory after World War II and Khrushchev’s devastating expose of Stalin’s crimes in 1957 tore the American Communist party apart.” See: The American Communist Movement

Oneal, James, and Gustave Adolph Werner. American Communism: A Critical Analysis of Its Origins, Development and Programs. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1947. Highly critical history of the movement from its origins to the end of WWII from a democratic socialist perspective.

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General Histories of American Communism

and 20th Century American Radicalism

Alexander, Robert Jackson. “Splinter Groups in American Radical Politics.” Social Research 20 (October 1953).

Bittelman, Alexander. Milestones in the History of the Communist Party. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1937. Hagiographic celebration of episodes in Party history by a prominent Communist.

Browder, Earl. “Socialism in America.” St. Antony’s Papers [U.K.] 9 (1960). Browder’s attempt at a theoretical explanation for communism’s failure in the U.S.

Brown, Michael E., Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker, eds. New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993. Essays generally taking a benign, revisionist view of communism by Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, George Snedeker, Rosalyn Baxandall, John Gerassi, Marvin Gettleman, Gerald Horne, Roger Keeran, Mark Naison, Stephen Leberstein, Ellen Schrecker, Annette Rubinstein, Alan Wald, and Anders Stephanson.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left. London, U.K.: Verso, 1987. Overview of Marxism and Marxist movements in America from the 19th century to the 1970s by a New Left activist turned radical historian.

Buhle, Paul Merlyn. “Marxism in the United States, 1900-40.” Ph.D. diss. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975.

Carlisle, Rodney P. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Communism. Indianapolis, IN Hemel Hempstead: Alpha Prentice Hall, 2002.

Dawley, Alan. Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Diggins, John. “The Rise and Fall of the American Left.” Paper presented at Austrian Association for American Studies “America and the Left” conference. University of Graz, Austria, 1992.

Diggins, John P. The American Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Short but thorough analytic scholarly survey seeing the left as largely intellectual and cultural terms in three generations, the bohemian “Lyrical Left” of the pre-Bolshevik era, the “Old Left” of the 1930s and 1940s, and the student-led “New Left” of the 60s.

Diggins, John P. The Rise and Fall of the American Left. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Greatly expanded version of The American Left in the Twentieth Century.

Egbert, Donald Drew and Stow Persons, eds. Socialism and American Life (Vol. 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952. Essays on socialism in American history: Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, Terminology and Types of Socialism; E. Harris Harbison, Socialism in European History to 1848; Harry W. Laidler, European Socialism since 1848; Albert T. Mollegan, The Religious Basis of Western Socialism; Stow Persons, Christian Communitarianism in America; T. D. Seymour Bassett, The Secular Utopian Socialists; Daniel Bell, The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States; David F. Bowers, American Socialism and the Socialist Philosophy of History; Sidney Hook, The Philosophical Basis of Marxian Socialism in the United States; Paul M. Sweezy, The Influence of Marxian Economics on American Thought and Practice; Will Herberg, American Marxist Political Theory; Wilbert E. Moore, Sociological Aspects of American Socialist Theory and Practice; George W. Hartmann, The Psychology of American Socialism; Willard Thorp, American Writers on the Left; Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Art.

Foster, William Z. History of the Communist Party of the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1952. Written by one of the Party’s principal figures. A major theme of the book is the discrediting of Earl Browder and “Browderism.”

Hudelson, Richard. The Rise and Fall of Communism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. A history of communism worldwide. Includes a chapter on Communism and Anticommunism in the United States.

Hyfler, Robert. Prophets of the Left: American Socialist Thought in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Isaacs, William. “Marxian Political Movements in the United States, 1917-1939.” Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1939.

Isaacs, William. Contemporary Marxian Political Movements in the United States. New York: New York University, 1942. Monograph, 49 pages.

Johnpoll, Bernard K., and Lillian Johnpoll. The Impossible Dream: The Rise and Demise of the American Left. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Survey of American socialism, syndicalism and anarchism from the 19th century to 1920 and the birth of the American Communist movement.

Laidler, Harry Wellington. History of Socialism a Comparative Survey of Socialism, Communism, Trade Unionism, Cooperation, Utopianism, and Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968.

Lasch, Christopher. The Agony of the American Left. New York: Knopf, 1969. Insightful essays on a variety of radical history topics, including American socialists, 60s radicalism, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom.

Laslett, John H. M., and Seymour Martin Lipset. Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1974. Essays on the internal and external factors that discouraged the development of a powerful American socialist movement: Socialists View the Problem, Betty Yorburg; Social Scientists View the Problem, Laslett & Lipset; The Problem of Ideological Rigidity, Daniel Bell; Radicalism and the Agrarian Tradition, Theodore Saloutos; Catholic Anti-Socialism, Marc Karson; Socialism and American Trade Unionism, Laslett; Socialism and Syndicalism, Melvyn Dubofsky; The Problems of the Socialist Party Before World War One, James Weinstein; The Problems of the Socialist Party After World War One, Martin Diamond; The Liberal Tradition, Louis Hartz; Americanism as Surrogate Socialism, Leon Samson; The Relevance of Marxism, Clinton Rossiter; Socialism and Social Mobility, Stephan Thernstrom; The Labor Movement and American Values, Lipset; American Capitalism’s Economic Rewards, Werner Sombart; The Role of Intellectuals, Adolph Sturmthal, Pluralism and Political Parties, Norman Thomas; The Fortunes of the Old Left Compared to the Fortunes of the New, James Weinstein; The Prospects of the New Left, Staughton Lynd. Comments on various essays by Michael Rogin, Henry Browne, Philip S. Foner, Robert Tyler, Gerald Friedberg, Bernard Johnpoll, Kenneth McNaught, Warren Susman, Tom Bottomore, Irving L. Horowitz, Ann Lane, Iring Fetscher, Paul Buhle, Michael Harrington, and Leon D. Epstein. A 1984 revised edition (University of California Press) drops a number of essays and adds: Socialism and Race, Sally Miller; Socialism and Ethnicity, Charles Leinenweber; Socialism and Women, Sally Miller with comments by Theodore Kornweibel, Rudolph Vecoli, and Mary Jo Buhle.

Le Blanc, Paul. “The Tragedy of American Communism.” Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 1982. Commentary by a Trotskyist leader who has written on the history of American radicalism.

Lens, Sidney. Radicalism in America. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Pub. Co., 1982.

Lewy, Guenter. The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Critical history of the C.P. along with a history of liberal and left anti-Communism and McCarthyism in the post-WWII period, including sections on the ADA, CIO, and American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Lengthy sections on the relationship of Communism and the ACLU, SANE, other peace organizations, the Progressive party, the National Lawyers Guild, SDS, the New Left, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the Institute for Policy Studies. Sees a considerable blending together of the Old Left and New Left in the 1970s and 1980s. Highly critical of “anti-anticommunism.”

Lloyd, Brian. Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Argues that the attempt made by Debs-era radical intellectuals to blend pragmatism and Marxism made poor social and political analysts of them and, by so doing, contributed more than structural factors or practical ineptness to the failure of socialism in the United States.

Mairowitz, David Zane. The Radical Soap Opera: An Impression of the American Left from 1917 to the Present. London, U.K.: Wildwood House, 1974. “But American activism has been stymied at every turn by the sheer impossibility of its task; it has no real hope--nor has it every had any--of overturning the capitalist colossus.” “The Left proved that its strength lay in publicity rather than decisive action towards social change, and so the reaction against its only decade of real prominence in America was directed at its more ‘famous’ successes. The massive advertising campaign of the Popular Front provided a ready-made complex of targets. Where the Party had sought ‘names’ and stars to give it public recognition, Red-baiters and witch-hunters went after ‘names’ and stars to prove conspiracy.”

Martin, John Robert, Jr. “American Class and Race Relations: An Intellectual History of the American Left.” Ph.D. diss. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 1995.

McGovern, George. “America and the Left.” Paper presented at Austrian Association for American Studies “America and the Left” conference. University of Graz, Austria, 1992.

Schwartz, Stephen. Intellectuals and Assassins: Writings at the End of Soviet Communism. London, U.K.: Anthem Press, 2000. Includes essays on John Reed, Tina Modotti, Carlo Tresca, Paul Robeson, Conon Nancarrow, Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, Ella Wolfe, Lillian Hellman, the CPUSA underground, red diaper babies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Birobidzhan, and American Communist involvement in the NKVD’s unsuccessful attempt to break Trotsky’s assassin out of a Mexican prison.

Shapiro, Edward. “The Failure of American Socialism.” Continuity, no. 25 (Fall 2001): 31-41. Essay-review of the literature.

Solomon, Mark. “The United States Left in Historical Perspective: Successes, Failures, and Future Prospects.” Paper presented at Austrian Association for American Studies “America and the Left” conference. University of Graz, Austria, 1992.

Spolansky, Jacob. The Communist Trail in America. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Spolansky, a Russian immigrant and one-time radical, was one of the first Federal agents to investigate the Communist party.

Sylvers, Malcolm. Politica e Ideologia Nel Comunismo Statunitense [Politics and Ideology in American Communism]. Roma: Jouvence, 1989. Contains essays by a radical American historian on “The Historiographical Debate,” “The Analysis of Fascism,” and “The Presidential Elections of 1932.”

Walter, Edward. The Rise and Fall of Leftist Radicalism in America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992.

Whitehead, Fred. The History of Radical Politics in America. Chestertown, MD: The Literary House Press, Washington College, 1995.

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Documentary Histories of American Communism

Bart, Philip Abraham, ed. Highlights of a Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 1979. Documentary history sponsored by the Communist Party.

Fried, Albert. Communism in America: A History in Documents. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Johnpoll, Bernard K., ed. A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Reproduces documents in facsimile with explanatory footnotes and editorial comment setting the context. Vol. 1. Gestation and Birth, 1918-1928; “A Program for Revolutionary Socialism” January 1918, Socialist Propaganda League./ “A Letter to American Workingmen” August 1918 and “A New Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” January 1919, Vladimir Lenin./ “Call for a Third International at Moscow” January 1919 / Manifesto of the Communist International, Communist International March 1919 / “Manifesto and Program of the ‘Left Wing’ Section, Socialist party, Local Greater New York” February 1919 / “Call for a National Conference of the Left Wing” May 1919 / “Report to the National Executive Committee, Socialist Party of America” May 24, 1919 and “Minutes of Meeting, National Executive Committee, Socialist Party of America, May 24-29, 1919, Adolph Germer / “Socialist Task and Outlook” May 1919, Morris Hillquit / “The Left Wing Manifesto, Socialist Party, Adopted at National Conference” June 21-24 1919, National Council of the Left Wing. / “The Chicago Conventions” October 1919, Max Eastman / “Historical Review of the Split in the Socialist Party and the Organization of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party” October 1919, A. Pauly / “Manifesto, Program, and Constitution” September 1919 and “Report of Louis C. Fraina, International Secretary to the Executive Committee of the communist International” January 1920, Communist Party of America / “Communist Party and Communist Labor Party Unity Series of Documents” January-May 1920, Zinoviev, Communist Party of America, Communist Labor Party / “The Twenty-One Conditions of Admission into the Communist International” August 1920 / “Convention Call to Organize the Workers’ Party of America” December 1921, American Labor Alliance / “News Letter Service” August 4, National Office, Communist Party of America, Section of the Communist International, August 1922. / “Thesis on Relations of One and Two” August 1922 / The Workers Party on the United Front” August 1922 / “Concerning the Next Tasks of the C.P. of A.” August 1922, ECCI / “Adaption of the Communist Party of America to American Conditions” August 1922 / “The Farmer-Labor United Front” 1924 Charles Ruthenberg / “Parties and Issues in the Election Campaign” Alexander Bittelman, 1924 / “The American Trade Unions” William Z. Foster 1925 / “What the Left Wing as Accomplished” 1925 Earl Browder / “1928: The Presidential Elections and the Workers” Jay Lovestone, February 1928 / “Acceptance Speeches” William Z. Foster and Benjamin Gitlow” May 1928.

Vol. 2. Toil and Trouble, 1928-1933; “Program of the Communist International” 1928 / “Stalin’s Speeches on the American Communist Party” May 6 and 14, 1929 / “On the Road to Bolshevization” August 1929 Communist International / “Thesis and Resolutions for the Seventh National Convention of the Communist Party of U.S.A.” March 31-April 4, 1930 / “Why Every Workers Should Join the Communist Party” 1930 CPUSA / “Little Brothers of the Big Labor Fakers” May 1931, William Foster / “The Church and the Workers” Bennett Stevens 1931 / “Race Hatred on Trial” CPUSA 1931 / “Communist Election Platform” May 28-29, 1931 CPUSA / “Guide for Party Functionaries” 1932, C.P. New York / “Culture and the Crisis” 1931, League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford / “Negro Liberation” 1932, revised 1933, James S. Allen / “The Meaning of Social Fascism” Earl Browder, 1933 / “Why communism?” December 1933, revised March 1934, Moissaye J. Olgin / “Karl Marx, 1883-1933” March 1933, Max Bedacht, Sam Don, Earl Browder / “The Background of German Fascism” 1933, Joseph Freeman.

Vol. 3. Unite and Fight, 1934-1935; “H.R. 7598” Ernest Lundeen, February 2, 1934 Unemployment and social insurance bill / “Report Commission of Inquiry to the Board of Directors on Madison Square Garden Mass Meeting, February 16, 1934” ACLU March 1934 / “The Way Out: A Program for American Labor. Manifesto and Principal Resolutions adopted by the Eighth Convention of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., Held in Cleveland, Ohio, April 2-8, 1934. / “The Trade Unions Since the N.R.A.” April 1934, Nathaniel Honig / “Program of American Youth Congress” August 1934 / “Second United States Congress Against War and Fascism, Chicago” September 29-30, 1934, American League Against War and Fascism / “Fighting Fascism in the Factories: How the Young Communist League of Germany Fights in the Factories to Overthrow the Fascist Dictatorship” October 1934 Young Communist League of America Youth Publishers / “Building a Militant Student Movement” 1934 National Student League / “The Advance of the United Front: A Documentary Account, with an Introduction by Alex Bittelman” 1934 / “Working Class Unity of Fascism?” Israel Amter, 1935 / “In Flanders field ..” May 1935, Max Weiss / “Shovels and guns: The CCC in Action” 1935 James Lasswell / “The League of American Writers” June 1935 R. G. Crane “Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise” June 1935, M. J. Olgin / “The Communist Party: A Manual on Organization” July 1935, J. Peters / “Professionals in a Soviet America” November 1935, Edward Magnus / “Debate: Which Road for American Workers, Socialist or Communist?” November 27, 1935, Norman Thomas vs. Earl Browder.

Vol. 4. People’s Front, 1935-1938; “Resolutions of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International” November 1935 / “Build the United People’s Front: Report to the November Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.” January 1936, Earl Browder / “Zionism Today” January 1936 Paul Novick / “Lincoln and the Communists” February 1936, Earl Browder / “The Townsend Plan: What It is and What It isn’t” February 1936, Alexander Bittelman / “Industrial Unionism” April 1936 William Z. Foster / “Democracy or Fascism: Report to the Ninth Convention of the Communist Party” June 1936, Earl Browder / “The Communist Election Platform” June 1936 / “Resolutions of the Ninth Convention of the Communist Party” October 1936 / “The Struggle Against War, and the Peace Policy of the Soviet Union” October 1936, Robert Minor / “The Crisis in the Socialist Party” November 1936, William Z. Foster / “The Results of the Elections and the People’s Front” December 1936 Earl Browder / “What Means a Strike in Steel” February 1937 William Z. Foster / “An Eye-Witness at the Wreckers’ Trial” April 1937 Sam Darcy / “The Communists in the People’s Front” July 1937, Earl Browder / “Life and Labor in the Soviet Union” 1937 Robert W. Dunn and George Wallace.

Vol. 5. Twentieth-century Americanism, 1937-1939; “Party Building and Political Leadership” August 1937, William Z. Foster, Alexander Bittelman, James Ford, Charles Krumbein / “The Truth about Soviet Russia” March 1938 Gil Green / “Traitors in American History: Lessons of the Moscow Trials” April 1938, Earl Browder / “The Democratic front: for Jobs, Security, Democracy and Peace” Report to Tenth National Conventions of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. June 1938 Earl Browder / “Resolutions of the Tenth National Conventions of the Communist Party -- U.S.A.” July 1938 / “The Constitution and By-Laws of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.” August 1938 / “Women Voters: Save Your Home and Family: Vote Labor and progressive” October 1938, C.P. New York / “Social and National Security” December 1938, Earl Browder / “The Struggle against Anti-Semitism: a Program of Action for American Jewry” December 1938 J. Soltin / “Theory as a guide to action” January 1939 Earl Browder / “Religion and Communism” March 1939 Earl Browder / “The 1940 Elections: How the People Can win” May 1939 Earl Browder /

Vol. 6. The Yanks are Not Coming, 1939-1941; “It’s Up to You” August 1939, Joseph Starobin / “Unity for Peace and Democracy” September 1939, Earl Browder / “The War and the Working Class” October 1939, Georgi Dimitroff [Dimitrov] / “America and the International Situation” October 1939, Political Committee CPUSA / “Keep America Out of the Imperialist War!” October 1939, National Committee, CPUSA / “The USSR and Finland: Historical, Economic, Political Facts and Documents” December 1939 from Soviet Russia Today / “A Negro Looks at War” January 1940, John Henry Williams / “The Yanks are NOT Coming!” January 1940 Mike Quin / “A Soviet-German Military Pact?” February 1940 John Gates / “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier for Wall Street” February 1940, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn / “The People Against the War Makers” February 1940 Earl Browder / “Is This a War for Freedom?” Ernst Fischer March 1940 / Social Democracy and the War” March 1940 V.J. Jerome / “Our Plan for Plenty” March ? 1940 International Workers Order / “No Gold Stars for Us: Our Boys Stay at Home!” May 1940 Ann Rivington / “The People’s Road to Peace” June 1940 Earl Browder / “Capitalism Socialism, and the War” June 1940 William Z. Foster / “Jim-Crow in Uniform” July 1940 Claudia Jones / “Campaign Book: Presidential Elections 1940” July 1940, CPUSA / “An American Foreign Policy for Peace” October 1940 Earl Browder / Internationalism and Results of the 1940 Election” November 1940 Earl Browder / “War and the People” February 1941 K. Pollard / “Civil Liberties in the U.S.A.” March 1941 S. Small / “World Capitalism and World Socialism” March 1941 William Z. Foster / American Peace Mobilization: “Summary of the Working Conference for Peace” (Held in Washington, DC, January 25-27, 1941), “What is the APM?” March 1941 “Program of the APM as Adopted July 22, 1941, After Approval and Modification by the National Council and Local Clubs and Councils” July 1941 /

Vol 7. The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945; “In Reply to the President’s Fireside Chat” June 3, 1941, “Should America Go to War?” Vito Marcantonio / “Support the USSR in its Fight Against Nazi War” June 29 1941 William Z. Foster and Robert Minor / “Manifesto” June 29, 1941, National Committee CPUSA / “The Fight Against Hitlerism” July 1941 William Z. Foster and Robert Minor/ “The Year of Great Decision: 1941” May 1942, Robert Minor “Wage Policy in War Production” April 1943 Earl Browder “The Communist Party of the U.S.A.: Its history, Role and Organization” May 1943 Earl Browder / “This Is Treason” July 1943 Sol Vail and International Workers Order / “Communists and the Trade Unions” October 1943 Roy Hudson / “Teheran and America: Perspectives and Tasks” January 1944 Earl Browder / “The Negro People and the Communists” April 1944 Doxey A. Wilkerson / “Communists and National Unity: An Interview of PM with Earl Browder” April 1944 / “The Path to Peace, Progress and Prosperity” May 20-22, 1944, Communist Political Association / “Reconversion: Security or Crisis” August 1944 Allan Ross / “The Elections and the Outlook for National Unity” December 1944 Eugene Dennis / “The Role and Function of the C.P.A.” Communist Political association, December 1944 /

Vol. 8. The Party is Over, 1946-1992; “On the Struggle Against Revisionism” January 1946 National Veterans Committee of the Communist Party / “Our Country Needs a Strong Communist Party” February 1946, William Z. Foster / “What America Faces: The New War Danger and the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and Economic Security” march 1946, Eugene Dennis / “Theory and Practice of the Communist Party: First Course” November 1947, National Educations Department of the Communist Party / “Should America Back the Marshall Plan?” February 1948, Joseph Starobin / “The Third Party and the 1948 Elections” March 1948, Eugene Dennis / “What’s Behind the Berlin Crisis” August 1948, Joseph Clark / “1948 Election Platform of the Communist Party” September 1948, CPUSA / “The Twelve and You: What happens to Democracy Is Your Business Too!” September 1948, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn / “The North Atlantic Pact: For Peace or War?” Abraham Chapman, May 1949 / “Halt Wall Street Aggression in Asia!” June 27, 1950, Secretariat of the National Committee, Communist Party / “The Truth About the Prague Trial” January 1953, Louis Harap / “On the Loss of Stalin” May 1953, National Committee CPUSA / “Coexistence or No Existence: Which Way for America? Peace of H-Bomb Annihilation?” March 1955, Adam Lapin / “The Meaning of the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “ May 1956 Max Weiss / “Khrushchev’s Secret Speech” February 25, 1956 / “Appendix to Hearings Structure and Organization of the Communist Party of the United States” November 20-22 1961, HUAC / “Sense and Nonsense About Berlin” December 1962, Margrit and John Pittman / “Action of Socialist Countries in Czechoslovakia” October 1968 William Weinstone / “Women on the Job: The Communist View” November 1973, Judy Edelman / “The 25th Convention and the Fight for Party Unity” January 1992, Jarvis Tyner.

Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson. The Soviet World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Reproduces and comments on a hundred documents from the RTsKhIDNI [later RGASPI] archive. Topics dealt with include Comintern orders to the CPUSA and its response, Soviet funding, Comintern representative in the U.S. and American Communists who served with the Comintern, the CPUSA’s response to the Soviet ideological purges of the 1930s, Karelian fever and its aftermath, and the arrest and death of former American Communists in Stalin’s terror. See: The Soviet World

Lester, Robert, and Alice Chen, eds. and comps. Records of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Raymond E. Murphy Collection on Communism, 1917-1958. Bethesda, MD: LexisNexis, 2005.Microfilm reproducing documents (reports, memoranda, correspondence, news clippings, and analyses) from the records of the Central Intelligence Agency in the custody of the National Archives of the United States.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Communist Party of the United States of America, Petitioner, v. Subversive Activities Control Board, Respondent on Review of Order of the Subversive Activities Control Board: Brief for Petitioner, 1954.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner Vs. Communist Party of the United States of America, Respondent; Report. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1953.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. the Communist Party of the United States of America, Respondent. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1956.

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Origins of American Communism

American Institute for Marxist Studies. How Lenin’s Letter Was Delivered. Pamphlet. New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, n.d. Recounts how Lenin’s 1918 letter to American workers regarding the nature of Bolshevism was delivered to John Reed for American distribution.

Bagley, Carol L., and Jo Ann Ruckman. “Iroquois Contributions to Modern Democracy and Communism.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 7, no. 2 (1983). Argues that historians have ignored the contribution of the Iroquois to the philosophical basis of communism.

Bell, Daniel. “The Origins of American Communism.” New Leader 35 (26 May 1952).

Bittelman, Alexander. “History of the Communist Movement in America.” In Investigation of Communist Propaganda, United States. House of Representatives. Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1930. Bittelman was a leading party ideologist at the time.

Bremner, M.W. “Friends and Enemies: The Impact of the ‘Labor Problem’ on Political Attitudes in America, 1919-1924.” Ph.D. diss. Glasgow University [U.K.], 1983.

Browder, Earl. “Socialism in America.” In International Communism, edited by David Footman and R. N. Hunt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960.

Communist Labor Party of America. Communist Labor. [New York City]: The Party, 1919. Journal.

Communist Labor Party of America. The Class Struggle. N.Y. City: Communist Labor Party of America, 1919. Journal. Published by Socialist Left Wing factional prior to formation of the CLP.

Communist Labor Party of Ohio. The Toiler. Cleveland, Ohio: The Party, 1919. Official journal of the Communist Labor Party of Ohio.

Communist Party of America. Official Bulletin of the Communist Party of America (Section of the Communist International). [New York?]: The Committee, 1921. Journal.

Communist Party of America. The Communist World. New York City: Communist Party of America, Local Greater New York, 1919. Journal.

Communist Party of America. The Communist. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of a periodical published weekly in Chicago, by the National Organization Committee of the Communist Party of America. Includes The Communist, published by the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America, Sept. 27, 1919-Apr. 1921. Reprint of a periodical originally published weekly in Chicago by the National Organization Committee and Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of America.

Communist Party of America. The Communist. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. 3 v. in 1. Reprint, with an introduction added, of a periodical originally published weekly as the official organ of the Communist Party of America; issued with: Communist (Chicago, IL: July 1919), in 1 v. Formed by the union of: Communist (Chicago, IL: July 1919), and: Revolutionary Age (Boston, MA). Merged with: Communist (United Communist Party of America), to form: Communist (Chicago, IL: 1921).

Communist Party of America. The Communist: Official Paper of the Communist Party of America. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. 1 v. Reprint, with an introduction added, of a periodical originally published weekly in Chicago by the National Organization Committee, Communist Party of America; issued with: Communist (Chicago, IL : Sept. 1919), in 1 v. Merged with: Revolutionary Age (Boston, MA), to form: Communist (Chicago, IL: Sept. 1919).

Dobbs, Farrell. Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S. New York: Monad Press, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1980. v. 1 The early years, 1848-1917, v. 2 Birth of the Communist movement, 1918-1922. History of the founding of American Communism by a early Communist and later Trotskyist labor organizer.

Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Indispensable scholarly study of the origins of the American Communist party; emphasizes the power of Soviet Bolshevism in inspiring and shaping American Communism and the rapid subordination of American Communism to Soviet leadership. Draper, a young Communist in the late 1930s who later left the Party, amassed a rich collection of primary source material in preparing this and his subsequent volume on Communist history.

Falk, Julius [Julius Jacobson]. “The Origins of the Communist Movement in the United States.” The New International, Fall 1955.

Held, Abraham. “The Launching of the Communist Party of the United States.” Master’s thesis. University of Chicago, 1939.

Kaushik, R. P. “Birth of the Communist Party in the United States: A Historical Perspective.” Indian Journal of American Studies [India] 1, no. 4 (1971).

Kublin, Hyman. Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964. Katayama had a major role in the left-wing of the American Socialist Party during the 1910s as it developed into the American Communist movement.

Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party (Local Boston). Revolutionary Age. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of the journal edited by Louis Fraina in 1918 and 1919, in two volumes.

Left Wing Section, Socialist Party (Greater New York). New York Communist. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1970. Reprint of a periodical originally published weekly in New York in 1919 and edited by John Reed as the official organ of the Left Wing Section, Socialist Party.

Mason, Daniel. “Aspects of the Struggle to Create a Leninist Party.” Political Affairs 53 (September 1974). Celebrates episodes in the early history of the Communist Party.

Miller, Sally M. “The Socialist Party Schism of 1919: A Local Case Study.” Labor History 36, no. 4 (Fall 1995). Excerpts documents regarding the split in the St. Louis S.P. over Bolshevism.

Ovanesian, S.A. Podem Rabochego Dvizheniia v SShA [The Rise of the Workers’ Movement in the USA in 1919-1921], 323, 1961.

Phelps, Christopher. “Lenin and American Radicalism.” Science & Society 60, no. 1 (Spring 1996).

Travin, P. “S Pismom Lenina Cherez Okean [With Lenin’s Letter Across the Ocean].” Moskovski Komsomolets, 13 February 1960.

United Communist Party of America. The Voice of Labor. [New York, NY: Labor Committee of the National Left Wing, 1919. The journal of, variously, the United Communist Party of America; Socialist Party Left Wing; Joint Council of the Shop Committees; and Communist Labor Party of America. There were two different runs of Voice of Labor. The first was edited by John Reed and Ben Gitlow 1919-1921?, and was revived later in 1923 with Charles Ruthenberg of the UCP as the nominal editor.

Watkins, Gordon S. “Revolutionary Communism in the United States.” American Political Science Review 14, no. 1 (February 1920). One of the first, perhaps the first, article on the American Communist movement published in an academic journal. The essay surveys the split in the Socialist Party and the founding of the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America in 1919 based largely on the Socialist and Communist press and statements released by leading figures of the movement and various conventions, caucuses, and committees.

Workers’ Council of the United States. The Workers’ Council. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of 1921 journal, edited by Benjamin Glassberg and J. Louis Engdahl, of the Workers’ Council of the United States and the International Educational Association which merged into the Communist party.

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The Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, and the Early Communist Movement

Burwood, Stephen. “Debsian Socialism Through a Transnational Lens.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 3 (2003). Discusses the reaction of American Socialists to Bolshevism.

Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949.

Kraditor, Aileen S. The Radical Persuasion, 1890-1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History and the Historiography of Three American Radical Organizations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Looks at the intellectual attitudes of the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party, and the Industrial Workers of the World prior to the Bolshevik revolution. Stresses the inability of these radical movements to understand the multiple identities and interests of American workers and the resulting radical frustration.

Radosh, Ronald. Debs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Discusses Debs initial sympathy for Bolshevism and later more critical stance.

Schneirov, Richard. “The Odyssey of William English Walling: Revisionism, Social Democracy, and Evolutionary Pragmatism.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 4 (2003).

Shannon, David A. The Socialist Party of America: A History. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Discusses the split over Bolshevism.

Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967. Discusses the split over Bolshevism in the Socialist party.

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The IWW and the Early Communist Movement

Conlin, Joseph Robert. Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub. Corp., 1969.

Darlington, Ralph. “From Syndicalism to Communism.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

Dubofsky, Melvyn, ed. Department of Justice Investigative Files. Vol. pt. 1. The Industrial Workers of the World. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1989. Microfilm.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. Discusses the IWW’s initial attraction and eventual rejection of Communism.

Foner, Philip Sheldon. The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917. Vol. 4 of History of the Labor Movement in the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1965. The IWW as predecessor to the Communist movement.

Miles, Dione. Something in Common: An IWW Bibliography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986

Salerno, Salvatore. Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Finds significant anarchist elements in Wobbly thinking.

Thorpe, Wayne. “Ties That Failed to Bind: The IWW and Syndicalist Internationalism, 1905-1939.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

Tyler, Robert L. Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest. Eugene: University of Oregon Books, 1967. Discusses the reaction of Wobblies and Finnish-American Wobblies in particular to the Bolshevik revolution.

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William Haywood, the IWW, and the Early Communist Movement

Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Conlin, Joseph Robert. Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. “The Radicalism of the Dispossessed: William Haywood and the IWW.” In Dissent, edited by Alfred Fabian Young. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1968.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. “Big Bill” Haywood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Haywood, Big Bill. Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood. New York: International Publishers, 1929. Haywood, the leading figure in the IWW, was convicted of activities hostile to America’s participation in World War I. After his appeal failed, he fled to the new Soviet Russia and became a Communist. His autobiography may have been largely ghostwritten by the Communist Party.

Hein, Carl. “William Haywood and the Syndicalist Faith.” In American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities., edited by Harvey Goldberg. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957.

Palmer, Bryan D. “‘Big Bill’ Haywood’s Defection To Russia and the IWW: Two Letters.” Labor History 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976). Discusses the anger of the IWW with Haywood and the Communist party when Haywood’s defection left the IWW with the costs of paying Haywood forfeited bond.

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The Socialist Labor Party and the Early Communist Movement

Girard, Frank, and Ben. Perry. The Socialist Labor Party, 1876-1991: A Short History. Philadelphia: Livra Books, 1991.

Hass, Eric. The Socialist Labor Party and the Internationals. New York: New York Labor News Co., 1949. By a SLP (DeLeonist) leader.

McLemee, Scott. “The Sect That Time Forgot.” New Politics 5, no. 1 (Summer 1994). On the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party.

Socialist Labor Party. The Socialist Labor Party and the Third International: Socio-Political Science Vs. Revolutionary Romanticism. New York: The Party, 1926.

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Anarchists and the Early Communist Movement

Buhle, Paul. “Anarchism and American Labor.” International Labor and Working Class History 23 (1983). Discusses co-option of anarchism into Communism in the course of reviewing historical treatment of anarchist movements.

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Records and Documents of the Early American Communist Movement

Communist (Chicago, Ill., and Communist Party of America. The Communist: Official Paper of the Communist Party of America. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. 1 v. Reprint, with an introduction added, of a periodical originally published weekly in Chicago by the National Organization Committee, Communist Party of America; issued with: Communist (Chicago, IL : Sept. 1919), in 1 v. Merged with: Revolutionary Age (Boston, MA), to form: Communist (Chicago, IL: Sept. 1919).

Communist (Chicago, Ill., and Communist Party of America. The Communist. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. 3 v. in 1. Reprint, with an introduction added, of a periodical originally published weekly as the official organ of the Communist Party of America; issued with: Communist (Chicago, IL: July 1919), in 1 v. Formed by the union of: Communist (Chicago, IL: July 1919), and: Revolutionary Age (Boston, MA). Merged with: Communist (United Communist Party of America), to form: Communist (Chicago, IL: 1921).

Lusk, Clayton R. “Radicalism Under Inquiry: Conclusions Reached After a Year’s Study of Alien Anarchy in America.” Review of Reviews, February 1920. Chairman of the New York (State) Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities summarizes his conclusions, emphasizing his view that Imperial German agents had funded much of the subversive activities of anarchists and radicals.

The New York Communist. Edited by John Reed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1970. One volume reprint of the journal of the Left Wing section of the Socialist Party, Greater New York, edited by John Reed.

New York (State) Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities. Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It. Albany: J. B. Lyon company, printers, 1920. Prepared by an investigative committee (Lusk Committee) of the New York Legislature. Written as an exposé of subversion and tends to muddle the distinctions between Communists, Socialists, syndicalist, and anarchists but includes the texts of hundreds of key documents and letters no longer extant or rare. Published in four volumes. Part 1: Revolutionary and subversive movements abroad and at home -v.1-2; Part 2: Constructive movements and measures in America v.3-4.

Palmer, A. Mitchell. Red Radicalism as Described by Its Own Leaders. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1920. Compilation of evidence seized in the Palmer raids.

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee [Overman Committee]. Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1919. Chaired by Senator Lee Slater Overman, the committee linked Bolshevism to Imperial German espionage and to beer and liquor interests.

U.S. Senate, Judiciary Committee Subcommittee. Bolshevik Propaganda. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1919. Report.

U.S. Senate, Judiciary Committee Subcommittee. Bolshevik Propaganda. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1919. Hearings, February 11, 1919, to March 10, 1919. 1,265 pages.

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The Communist Party in the 1920s

Cannon, James Patrick. The First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant. New York: L. Stuart, 1962. Memoir by a Communist and later Trotskyist leader.

Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Well written and thorough scholarly study of the Communist Party in the 1920s; this key history of American Communism finds that Soviet-Comintern policy decisively shaped the American Communist Party. A new preface in the 1986 edition (Vintage) discusses his role in the CPUSA in the 1930s and his break after the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Eisman, Louis. “The First Decade of the Communist Party.” Master’s thesis. University of California, 1935.

Klehr, Harvey. “The Bridgman Delegates.” Survey [U.K.] 22, no. 2 (Spring 1976). Examines the background of delegates of the 1922 Communist convention at Bridgman Michigan.

Oneal, James. American Communism: A Critical Analysis of Its Origin, Development and Programs. New York: NY: The Rand Book Store, 1927. Thorough and polemical history from a democratic socialist perspective.

Palmer, Bryan D. “American Communism in the 1920s: Striving for a Panoramic View.” American Communist History 6, no. 2 (December 2007).

Raymond, Orin Ralph, 2d. “The American Communist Party and United States ‘Imperialism’ 1920-1928: Application of Doctrine.” Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1971.

Ryan, James. “A Final Stab at Insurrection: The American Communist Party, 1928-34.” In In Search of Revolution: International Communist Parties in the “Third Period,” edited by Matthew Worley. London, U.K.: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2004.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Speeches on the American Communist Party, Delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May 6, 1929, and in the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929... Pamphlet. [New York]: Central Committee, Communist Party, U. S. A., 1931. Stalin’s anathemas on the Lovestone-Gitlow leadership of the CPUSA. The leaders Moscow inserted to replace them circulated Stalin’s speeches among party members to justify Lovestone’s and Gitlow’s removal from office at Comintern direction.

United Toilers’ Publishing Association of America. Workers Challenge. New York City: United Toilers Publishing Association of America, 1922. Journal. Edited by Harry M. Wicks.

Weinstein, James. “Radicalism in the Midst of Normalcy.” Journal of American History 52, no. 4 (March 1966). Discusses the role of Communists in the early 1920s.

Whitney, Richard Merrill. Reds in America: The Present Status of the Revolutionary Movement in the U. S. Based on Documents Seized by the Authorities in the Raid Upon the Convention of the Communist Party at Bridgman, Mich., August. 22, 1922, Together with Descriptions of Numerous Connections and Associations of the Communists Among the Radicals, Progressives, and Pinks. New York: Beckwith Press, Inc., 1924.

Wolfe, Bertram D. “The Sixth Congress and the American Communist Party.” Survey [U.K.] 24, no. 1 (1979). Personal recollection by Wolfe, an American Communist party delegate, of the 1928 Comintern Congress where Stalin began to assert his supremacy over the Communist movement.

Workers (Communist) Party of America). The Party Organizer. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of a periodical originally published by the Workers (Communist) Party of America, in Chicago, Apr. 1927; in New York, Dec. 1927-1928. Issued with: Party Organizer, 1930.

Workers Party of America. Voice of Labor. Chicago, IL: American Labor Union Educational Society, 1921. Journal.

Workers Party of America. The Worker. New York, NY: Toiler Publishing Association, 1922-23. Journal.

Workers (Communist) Party of America. The Workers Monthly. [Chicago, IL: Daily Worker Society, 1924-27. Journal.

Workers Communist Party. The Communist. Chicago: Workers Communist Party, 1927. Journal

Zumoff, Jacob A. “The Communist Party of the United States and the Communist International, 1919-1929.” Ph.D. diss. University of London, U.K., 2003.

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The Communist Party in the 20s, Biographical Material

Charles Ruthenberg

Draper, Theodore. “Communists and Their History.” Political Affairs, May 1959. Draper letter on Oakley Johnson’s “Ruthenberg and the Party’s Founding.” Reply by Johnson.

Johnson, Oakley C. “Ruthenberg and the Party’s Founding.” Political Affairs, March 1959. Hysterical assault on Draper’s The Roots of American Communism.

Johnson, Oakley C. The Day is Coming: Life and Work of Charles E. Ruthenberg, 1882-1927. New York: International Publishers, 1958. Party hagiography.

Millett, Stephen M. “Charles E. Ruthenberg: The Development of an American Communist, 1909-1927.” Ohio History 81, no. 3 (1972). Recounts Ruthenberg’s evolution from supporter of progressive Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleveland in 1901, to the Socialist Party in 1909, to a leading left-wing Socialist Party activist who was jailed for anti-war activity, to a conciliator of the factions of the early Communist movement, and finally to the leadership of the united Communist Party as a faithful follower of Moscow.

Millett, Stephen M. “The Midwest Origins of the American Communist Party: The Leadership of Charles E. Ruthenberg, 1919-1927.” Old Northwest 1, no. 3 (1975). Biographical essay.

Ruthenberg, Charles E. Speeches and Writings of Charles E. Ruthenberg. New York: International Publishers, 1928.

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John Pepper

Kaas, Albert, and Fedor von Lazarovics. Bolshevism in Hungary: The Béla Kun Period. London, U.K.: G. Richards, 1931. Discusses the role of Joseph Pogany/John Pepper, later a Comintern representative to the American Party in the 1920s, in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Mályusz, Elemér. The Fugitive Bolsheviks. London, U.K.: G. Richards, 1931. Discusses the role of Joseph Pogany/John Pepper in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Sakmyster, Thomas. “A Hungarian in the Comintern: Jozsef Pogany/John Pepper.” Paper presented at “People of a Special Mould? Conference about Biographical and Pographical Research on Communism.” Manchester, U.K., 2001.

Sakmyster, Thomas. “A Hungarian in the Comintern: Jozsef Pogany/John Pepper.” In Agents of the Revolution: New Biographical Approaches to the History of International Communism in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, edited by Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen, and Andrew Flinn. Oxford New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

Sylvers, Malcolm. “Pogàny/Pepper: Un Représentatant Du Komintern Auprès Du Parti Commeniste Des Etats-Unis.” Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Institut de Recherches Marxistes [France], no. 28 (1987)

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Communist Party: 1930-1945

Browder, Earl. “The American Communist Party in the Thirties.” In As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social and Political Movements of a Decade, edited by Rita James Simon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967.

Burgchardt, Carl R. “Two Faces of American Communism: Pamphlet Rhetoric of the Third Period and the Popular Front.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 4 (1980). Compares Communist party pamphlets before July 1935 with those printed after that time. The former called for the destruction of capitalism in dogmatic and lurid language. The latter tried to convey a positive and less threatening image of Communism.

Casey, James. The Crisis in the Communist Party. Pamphlet. New York: Three Arrows Press, 1938. Casey, a former editor of the CPUSA’s Daily Worker, here writes for the Socialist Party.

Communist Party of the USA. The Record Weekly. Chicago, IL: Record Weekly Educational Association, 1939. CPUSA journal.

Draper, Hal. “Pie in the Sky.” New York Review of Books, 10 May 1984. Essay-review of Klehr’s Heyday of American Communism. Exchanges with Elmer Benson and Robert Claiborne, December 6, 1984.

Draper, Theodore. “The Romanticizing of American Communism.” New Leader 61 (13 March 1978). Review-essay critical of emerging literature romanticizing Communist history.

Draper, Theodore. “American Communism Revisited.” New York Review of Books 32, no. 8 (9 May 1985). Review-essay discussing Isserman’s Which Side Were Your On?, Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism, Nelson’s Steve Nelson, Charney’s A Long Journey, Richmond’s A Long View, Painter’s The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, and Haywood’s Black Bolshevik. Highly critical of those who romanticize Communist history and avoid a political approach to Communist history.

Draper, Theodore. “The Popular Front Revisited.” New York Review of Books 32, no. 9 (30 May 1985). Review-essay discussing Howe and Coser’s The American Communist Party, Naison’s Communists in Harlem, Keeran’s The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions, Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, and the film “Seeing Red.

Draper, Theodore. “Revisiting American Communism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books 32, no. 13 (15 August 1985). Comment on letters by Paul Buhle, James R. Prickett, James R. Barrett, Rob Ruck, Norman Markowitz, Al Richmond, Mark Naison, Roy Rosenzweig, Gary Gerstle, and Murray Bookchin; a further exchange with Maurice Isserman on September. 26, 1985.

Draper, Theodore. “The Life of the Party.” New York Review of Books 41 (13 January 1994). Essay-review of Robert Cohen’s When the Old Left Was Young and Michael E. Brown, et. al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. Discusses his own involvement in C.P. student organizations in the 1930s, discusses the chief schools of interpretation of Communist history, defends his views. Exchange with Paul Lyon and Maurice Isserman, 23 June.

Gordon, Max, Harvey Klehr, and Virginia Gardner. “The Communist Party: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books, 14 April 1983. An exchange over the nature of Communist policy in the 1930s and 1940s.

Harvey, A.D. “American Communism in 1937: A British View.” Contemporary Review 282, no. 1646 (March 2003). Introduces and provides the text of a memorandum prepared by the British embassy in the U.S. to London on the CPUSA in 1937.

Jacobson, Phyllis. “The ‘Americanization’ of the Communist Party.” New Politics 1, no. 1 (n.s.) (Summer 1986). Attacks revisionist historians of American Communism who use social and oral history selectively to portray American Communists as more attractive, more appealing, more indigenously American, and more inspirational than they actually were. Discusses Isserman’s Which Side Were You On?, Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, and Reichert and Kline’s documentary Seeing Red. “The American Communist Party: An Exchange,” response by Isserman and reply by Jacobson, 1,2 (Winter 1987).

Kengor, Paul. “Red Herring: The Depression and the Communist Party.” Frontpagemag.Com, 24 October 2008.

Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Most thorough and comprehensive history of the CPUSA in the 1930s. Discusses both the CPUSA as an institution and the involvement of Communists in the labor movement, liberal and New Deal politics, cultural and intellectual circles, and other arenas.

Kling, Joseph M. “Making the Revolution -- Maybe: Deradicalization and Stalinism in the American Communist Party, 1928-1938.” Ph.D. diss. City University of New York, 1983. Concludes that the Communist party became deradicalized after 193 because it supported the New Deal without placing that support in a class struggle context and withdrew from the ideological struggle against capitalism.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. “The American Communist Party in Its Heyday: A Case of Premature Eurocommunism?” International Labor and Working Class History, Spring 1984. Review-essay discussing Isserman’s Which Side Are You On? and Levenstein’s Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO.

Lynd, Staughton. “The United Front in America: A Note.” Radical America 8 (July-August 1974).

Ottanelli, Fraser M. “‘What the Hell is These Reds Anyway?’ the Americanization of the Communist Party of the United States, 1930-1945.” Ph.D. diss. Syracuse University, 1987.

Ottanelli, Fraser M. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Takes a benign view of the party in the 1930s. Holds that American Communists adoption of their Popular Front stance was a home grown rather than a Soviet initiative and judges, “the course of the CPUSA was shaped by a homespun search for policies which would make it an integral part of the country’s society as well as by directives from the Communist International.”

Phelps, Christopher. “The Poverty of Marxist Crisis Theory During the Great Depression.” Canadian Review of American Studies 26, no. 2 (Spring 1996). Argues that the poor quality and paradoxical weakness of Marxist crisis theory in the 1930s was due to the conservatism of the economics profession and the dogmatism and political vicissitudes of the Communist party. Includes extended critical analyses of Lewis Corey, the Labor Research Association and Science & Society.

Ryan, James. “The Triumph of Salesmanship Over Ideology: The American Communist Party During the Popular Front Era and Second World War.” Paper presented at Conference on Marxian Scholarship. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 1987.

Sylvers, Malcolm. “Party Organizer and American Communist Mentality in the 1930s.” Storia Nordamericana [Italy] 2, no. 2 (1985). Maintains that the internal journal, Party Organizer (1931-1937), supports the view that CPUSA was a legitimate indigenous political force rather than a self-isolated movement or one best understood through its links to the Soviet Union. Discusses Party Organizer advice on dealing with workers’ religious beliefs and racist attitudes, the problem of submerging the Party organization in the mass movements that appeared in the Popular Front period, and the scope of reported data on membership and local Party activity.

Wilentz, Sean. “Red Herrings Revisited: Theodore Draper Blows His Cool.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 36 (June 1985). Critical review-essay on Draper’s essays “American Communism Revisited” and “The Popular Front Revisited.”

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Illustrative Party Literature of the 1930s

Amter, I. Social Security in a Soviet America. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935. Part of the CPUSA’s “Soviet America” series.

Bittelman, Alex. The Advance of the United Front: A Documentary Account. Pamphlet. New York: Central Committee, Communist Party of the U.S.A., 1934.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Party Builder. [New York, N.Y.]: The Committee., 19uu. Journal, late 1930s, early 1940s.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Shipmates’ Voice, 193u. Journal, early 1930s, aimed at U.S. Navy sailors and U.S. Marines.

Daily Record. Daily Record. Chicago, Ill.: Midwest Daily Record Pub. Co., 1938-1939. CPUSA journal.

Ford, James W., and James S. Allen. The Negroes in a Soviet America. [New York: Workers library publishers, 1935. Part of the party’s “Soviet America” series.

Foster, William Z. Toward Soviet America. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1932. A book by Foster, then the CPUSA’s presidential candidate, detailing the party’s agenda for a Communist America. “By the term ‘abolition’ of capitalism we mean its overthrow in open struggle by the toiling masses, led by the proletariat.... To put an end to the capitalist system will require a consciously revolutionary act by the great toiling masses, led by the Communist party; that is, the conquest of the State power, the destruction of the State machine created by the ruling class, and the organization of the proletarian dictatorship.... Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties -- Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc. -- will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers’ associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc.... The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theatre, will be taken over by the government.”

League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford. Culture and the Crisis. New York: League of Professional Groups, 1932. Signed by 50+ prominent intellectuals and writers endorsing William Z. Foster for president and calling for intellectuals to chose vibrant and dynamic Soviet communism over the dying and decayed American capitalism.

Magnus, Edward. Professionals in a Soviet America. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935. Part of the CPUSA “In Soviet America” series.

Midwest Daily Record. The Midwest Daily Record. Chicago, IL: Midwest Daily Record Pub. Co., 1938. CPUSA journal.

Workers Communist Party and USA Communist Party, The Communist. (Chicago, IL: Workers Communist Party, 1927–44). Theoretical journal of the party.

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Communist Party and World War II:

The Nazi-Soviet Pact Period

Bush, Clive. “Left-Wing Isolationism, Literature and Ideology in America During the Run-up to World War II: Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford, John Strachey and the New Masses.” Comparative American Studies 1, no. 2 (June 2003).

Carley, Michael Jabara. 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1999. Justifies the Nazi-Soviet Pact, arguing that Stalin turned to an arrangement with Hitler only after sincere attempts to form an alliance with the West failed.

China Weekly Review. “Where Did Moscow Get the Nazi Flags Used to Greet Ribbentrop?: The Communist Party Press in America.” China Weekly Review 91 (2 December 1939).

Fischer, Louis. Stalin and Hitler’ the Reasons for the Results of the Nazi-Bolshevik Pact. Pamphlet. [New York]: The Nation, 1940.

Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. “The CPUSA Reports to the Comintern: 1941.” American Communist History 4, no. 1 (June 2005). Transcribes and comments on a lengthy Eugene Dennis report to the Comintern in the spring of 1941 regarding the policies and organizational status of the CPUSA with particular attention to the impact of the party’s support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact on its position in American society.

Ierace, Francis A. America and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. New York: Vantage Press, 1978.

Kolasky, John. Partners in Tyranny: The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, August 23, 1939. Toronto: Mackenzie Institute, 1990.

Leonhard, Wolfgang. Betrayal: The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Translated by Richard D. Bosley. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Former Cominternist discusses the reaction of Western Communists to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Ramsey, Russell W. Representative Sectional Press Opinion in the United States on the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 21, 1939. [Washington], 1947.

Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941. New York: Norton, 1988.

Ryan, James G. “Opportunity Lost: The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the American Communist Party.” Paper presented at Southwestern Historical Association. New Orleans, 1993.

Walker, Samuel. “Communists and Isolationism: The American Peace Mobilization, 1940-1941.” Maryland Historian 4, no. 1 (1973). On the CPUSA’s chief peace front that opposed any American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

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Communist Party Literature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact Period

Browder, Earl. America and the Second Imperialist War. Pamphlet. New York: New York State Committee, Communist Party, 1939. Opposes American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

Browder, Earl. Internationalism: Results of the 1940 Election; Two Reports. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, Inc., 1940. Opposes American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

Browder, Earl. The Most Peculiar Election: The Campaign Speeches of Earl Browder. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1940. Opposes American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

Browder, Earl. The Way Out. New York: International Publishers, 1941. Opposes American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

Foster, William Z. The War Crisis: Questions and Answers. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1940. States Communist opposition to American aid to the anti-Nazi powers.

McKenney, Ruth. Browder and Ford: For Peace, Jobs and Socialism. [New York]: Workers library publishers, Inc., 1940. Opposes American assistance to the anti-Nazi belligerents.

Molotov, Viacheslav Mikhailovich. The Meaning of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. Pamphlet. [New York: Workers Library Publishers, Inc., 1940. Defense of the Nazi-Soviet Pact published by the CPUSA.

Rivington, Ann. Women--Vote for Life! Pamphlet. [New York]: Workers Library Publishers, Inc., 1940. CPUSA pamphlet opposing American participation in World War II during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Ross, M. A History of Soviet Foreign Policy. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1940. Defense of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

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Communist Party and World War II

Bilderback, William Winch. “The American Communist Party and World War II.” Ph.D. diss. University of Washington, 1974. Surveys the Communist party’s stance toward the war and war related issues.

Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Boller, Paul F., Jr. “Hiroshima and the American Left: August 1945.” International Social Science Review 57, no. 1 (Winter 1982). Finds that in 1945 the Communists party and those associated with it were the strongest defenders of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. In contrast, the strongest critics of the attack were anti-Communist liberal and radicals such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, and most Trotskyists.

Browder, Earl. The Road Ahead to Victory and Lasting Peace. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1944. Calls for all-out prosecution of the war.

Communist Political Association. The Path to Peace, Progress and Prosperity: Proceedings of Constitutional Convention of the Communist Political Association. New York, 1944.

Fleming, Thomas J. The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Notes domestic political contention about the CPUSA and the alliance with the USSR.

Green, James. “Fighting on Two Fronts: Working Class Militancy in the 1940’s.” Radical America, no. 8 (1975).

Hamby, Alonzo. “Sixty Million Jobs and the People’s Revolution: The Liberals, the New Deal and World War II.” The Historian 30 (August 1968).

Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You on? the American Communist Party During the Second World War. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. Well researched and scholarly political history of the Communist party from the late 1930s to the end of World War II. Concentrates on the Communist party’s internal political life. Maintains that the generation of Communists who joined the Party in the 1930s were oriented toward a democratized and Americanized Communist movement but were frustrated by the structure of the Communist party.

Isserman, Maurice Herbert. “Peat Bog Soldiers: The American Communist Party During the Second World War, 1939-1945.” Ph.D. diss. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 1979.

Labour Monthly. “American Communists’ Policy.” Labour Monthly 26 (February 1944).

Minor, Robert. The Heritage of the Communist Political Association. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1944.

O’Neill, William L. A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. New York: Free Press, 1993.

U.S. House Committee on Military Affairs. Investigations of the National War Effort. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1945. Hearings on subversive and Communist influences in the army.

Warren, Frank A. Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.

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Communist Trade Union Policy during World War II

Freeman, Joshua B. “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism During World War II.” Labor History 19 (Fall 1978). Discusses the attitudes of Trotskyist and Communist union activists toward militant union tactics during the war.

Glaberman, Martin. Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the Nostrike Pledge in the UAW During World War II. Detroit, MI: Bewick/Ed, 1980. Part memoir, part history of wildcat strikes in World War II; notes the Communist role in opposing the wildcat movement.

Jennings, Ed. “Wildcat! The Wartime Strike Wave in Auto.” Radical America 9, no. July-August (1975).

Keeran, Roger. “‘Everything for Victory’: Communist Influence in the Auto Industry During World War II.” Science & Society 43, no. 1 (Spring 1979). Examines and judges Communist policy toward industrial production and war policy to be justifiable.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. “Industrial Unionism Under the No-Strike Pledge: A Study of the CIO During the Second World War.” Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1974. Discusses Communist opposition to disruptive labor militancy during the war.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. “Defending the No-Strike Pledge: CIO Politics During World War II.” Radical America 9, no. July-August (1975).

Lichtenstein, Nelson. “Ambiguous Legacy: The Union Security Problem During World War II.” Labor History 18 (1977).

Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Seidman, Joel. “Labor Policy of the Communist Party During World War II.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 4 (October 1950).

Seidman, Joel Isaac. American Labor from Defense to Reconversion. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Discusses the Communist party’s trade union policy during World War II.

Weir, Stan. “American Labor on the Defensive: A 1940’s Odyssey.” Radical America 9, no. July-August (1975). Critical of the Communist party’s wartime labor policies.

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Earl Browder and American Communism

Browder, Earl Russell. Communism in the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1935. Articles, speeches, and reports, 1932-1935.

Browder, Earl. The People’s Front. New York: International Publishers, 1938. Articles, speeches, and reports, 1936-1937.

Browder, Earl. Fighting for Peace. New York: International publishers, 1939. Articles, speeches, and reports, 1938-1939.

Browder, Earl. The Second Imperialist War. New York: International Publishers, 1940. Articles, speeches, and reports, 1939-1940.

Browder, Earl. The Reminiscences of Earl Browder. With Joseph R. Starobin. New York Times Oral History Program. [Glen Rock, NJ]: [Microfilming Corp. of America], 1975. Transcript of interviews conducted by J. R. Starobin in 1964, 6 microfiches.

Cleath, Robert Leroy. “Earl Russell Browder, American Spokesman for Communism, 1930-1945: An Analysis of His Adaptation of Communist Ideas and Goals to a Capitalist Society.” Ph.D. diss. University of Washington, 1963.

Jaffe, Philip J. “The Rise and Fall of Earl Browder.” Survey [U.K.] 18, no. 2 (Spring 1972). Topics include “social fascism,” “the two 1939 Comintern documents in code and the Soviet-German Pact,” “the Smith Act and the Trotskyites,” the “Browder-Foster rivalry,” “the Duclos article,” and “Browder’s misjudgment and excommunication.”

Jaffe, Philip J. The Rise and Fall of American Communism. New York: Horizon Press, 1975. Partly a biography of Earl Browder, partly a history of the Communist party from 1939 to 1945, and partly a compilation of Communist party documents by a long-time friend of Browder and other Communist leaders.

Levine, Isaac Don. “The Mystery of Mrs. Earl Browder.” Plain Talk, December 1948. Charges that Earl Browder’s wife, a Soviet citizen, entered the U.S. illegally using the passport of Edith Berkman, a Communist Party textile union organizer who had dropped out of sight.

Redfern, Neil. “A British Version of ‘Browderism’: British Communists And the Teheran Conference of 1943.” Science & Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2002). The CPGB, as had the CPUSA’s Earl Browder, saw Teheran as an indication that in the postwar world there need be no return to the class struggle of the prewar decades. It abandoned the Bolshevik insurrectionary model and set out to find a participatory role in the wider labor movement rather than as a vanguard radical party. Though some elements on the Party’s left criticized the leadership’s post-Teheran policies, their defeat at the Party’s 18th Congress showed that the vast majority of the membership had been seduced by the allied powers’ promises.

Rosenberg, Roger Elliot. “Guardian of the Fortress: A Biography of Earl Russell Browder, U.S. Communist Party General-Secretary from 1930-1944].” Ph.D. diss. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982.

Ryan, James. “The Making of a Native Marxist: The Early Career of Earl Browder.” Review of Politics 39, no. 3 (July 1977).

Ryan, James. “Earl Browder and American Communism at High Tide: 1934-1945.” Ph.D. diss. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1981.

Ryan, James, and Włodzimierz Batóg. “Nationalist Deviations Among Communist Leaders: Poland’s Wladysaw Gomulka and Earl Browder of the American Party.” Paper presented at “People of a Special Mould? Conference about Biographical and Pographical Research on Communism.” Manchester, U.K., 2001.

Ryan, James G. “The Soviet Archives and Earl Browder’s Rise to American Communist Party Leadership, 1930-1934.” Paper presented at Southwestern Historical Association. San Antonio, 1994.

Ryan, James G. Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Scholarly biography based in part on research in Moscow’s archives as well as on detailed research in the U.S. “Earl Browder, arguably the preeminent twentieth-century Communist leader in the United States, is one of the most tragic figures in American radicalism’s history. A Kansas native and veteran of numerous left-wing movements, he was peculiarly fitted by circumstance and temperament to head the party during its heyday. A complex and flawed personality, he did what was necessary to rise atop the hierarchy but possessed an independent streak that ultimately proved his undoing. Still, he could never quite bring the CPUSA legitimacy because he lacked the vision and courage to separate himself and the organization totally from a foreign monster.”

Ryan, James Gilbert. “Too Bold by One Half: The Underlying Causes of Earl Browder’s Fall from Communist Party Leadership.” Paper presented at Historians of American Communism session at the Missouri Valley History Conference. Omaha, Neb., 1991. Contends that Browder abandoned the concept of a vanguard party, believed the C.P. had become an important player in American politics, and felt that transforming the C.P. into the CPA would enhance Communist political success. Sees Browder’s appearance on a Time magazine cover, his [mistaken] belief he had a direct line to the FDR White House, and his interpretation of the Teheran agreements as contributing to Browder’s views. Judges that Browder missed his best opportunity to remake the American Communist movement when he failed to split the C.P. over the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Ryan, James. “Tinkering with Totalitarianism: The American Communist Party’s Attempts at Liberalization, 1934-1949.” Paper presented at the European Social Science History Conference. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2006

Spiro, George. Earl Browder. [New York]: Printed at the Van Rees Press, 1937. Hagiography.

Stein, Harry. “Before the Colors Fade: Marx’s Disenchanted Salesman.” American Heritage 23, no. 1 (1971). Biographical sketch of Earl Browder based on an interview with him at age 80.

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The Duclos Article and Purge of Browderism

Batóg, Włodzimierz. “Browder’s World. The Future of the Postwar World in the Eyes of the General Secretary of the CPUSA.” Paper presented at Congress of the Polish Historical Association. Wroclaw, Poland, 1999.

Browder, Earl. Teheran; Our Path in War and Peace. New York: International publishers, 1944. Browder explains his Teheran Doctrine, the central theory to justify his reforms of the CPUSA in 1943-1944.

Browder, Earl Russell. Teheran and America Perspectives and Tasks. Pamphlet. New York: Workers library publishers, 1944. Explanation of the basis for Browder’s reforms of the Communist movement.

Browder, Earl. In Defense of Communism Against W.Z. Foster’s “New Route to Socialism.” Pamphlet. Yonkers, NY: Privately published, 1949.

Browder, Earl. “How Stalin Ruined the American Communist Party.” Harper’s Magazine, March 1960. Browder looks back at the Duclos article.

Communist Party of the United States of America. On the Struggle Against Revisionism. New York: Communist Party, U.S.A., 1946. Frenzied attack on Browderism.

Dallin, Alexander, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. Dimitrov and Stalin 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Discusses the background for the Duclos article of 1945.

Duclos, Jacques. “A Propos de la Dissolution Du P.C.A.” Cahiers Du Communisme nouvelle série 6 (April 1945).

Duclos, Jacques. “On the Dissolution of the American Communist Party.” Political Affairs 24 (July 1945).

Foster, William Z., Jacques Duclos, Eugene Dennis, and John Williamson. Marxism-Leninism Vs. Revisionism. New York: New Century Publishers, 1946. Harsh denunciation of Browderism by American and French Communist party leaders.

Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. New York: Random House, 1968. Denies that the Duclos article indicated a more aggressive Soviet foreign policy.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. “Origins of the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs 46 (October 1967). Treats the Duclos article regarding the American Communist Party as evidence of a change in Soviet foreign policy.

Sylvers, Malcolm. “The 1944-45 Upheaval in American Communism: Earl Browder and William Z. Foster on the Post-War Perspectives for the United States.” Published conference paper in Internationale Tagung der Historiker der Arbeiterbewegung [International Conference of Historians of the Labour Movement] 21. Linqer Kongerenz 1985. Wein, 1986.

Unsigned. “O Kommunisticheskoy Politicheskoy Assotsiatsii SShA [On the Communist Political Association of the USA].” Byulleten’ Byuro Informatsi Tsk VKP(b): Voproy Vneshney Politiki [Bulletin of the Information Bureau of the CC RCP(b): Issues of Foreign Policy], no. 2 (January 1945). Russian original of what became the Duclos article.

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Communist Party: 1945-1959

Batóg, Włodzimierz. Wywrotowcy?: Komunistyczna Partia USA we Wczesnym Okresie Zimnej Wojny (1945-1954) [Subversives? Communist Party USA in the Early Cold War (1945-1954)]. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2003.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Political Affairs. New York: New Century Publishers, 1945-. Theoretical journal of the party.

Gates, John. On Guard Against Browderism, Titoism, Trotskyism. New York: New Century Publishers, 1951. Authoritative party pamphlet setting out ideological limits.

George, Harrison. The Crisis in the C.P.U.S.A. Pamphlet. Los Angeles, CA: Harrison George, 1947. George, a veteran senior party organizer, was expelled in 1947 in a dispute over party trade union policy.

Independent Communist League of America. Turning Point. New York, N.Y.: P.R. Club, Communist Party (Expelled), 1948. Journal, 1948.

Jaffe, Philip J. “The Varga Controversy and the American Communist Party.” Survey [U.K.] 18, no. 3 (1972). Examines the relationship of the Communist party’s decision to support a third party in 1948 with Soviet ideologist and Stalin aide Andrei Zhdanov’s speech and the attacks after 1945 by Stalin’s agents on Communist economic theorist Yevgenii Varga’s views on capitalism.

Lee, Mark Wilcox. “An Analysis of Selected Speeches of William Z. Foster During the Reconstitution Period of the Communist Party, 1945-1950.” Ph.D. diss. University of Washington, 1966. Finds that Foster’s rhetoric had a simple two valued system (capitalism is evil, the Soviet Union is good), that he frequently spoke in an “Aesopian” style understood by insiders and confusing to outsiders, and that he make frequent use of invectives and slogans.

Lester, Robert, ed. The Communist Party, USA, and Radical Organizations, 1953-1960 FBI: Reports from the Eisenhower Library. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1990. 7 microfilm reels. The documents reproduced in this publication are among the records of the White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs.” Accompanied by printed reel guide compiled by Robert E. Lester, entitled: A guide to the microfilm edition of The Communist Party, USA, and radical organizations, 1953-1960.

Mainstream Associates. Mainstream. New York: Mainstream Associates, Inc, 1947. Communist-aligned journal, 1947.

Masses & Mainstream. Mainstream. New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1956. Communist-aligned journal, 1956-1963

Masses & Mainstream. Masses & Mainstream. New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1948. Journal, 1948-1956. Merger of New Masses, and, Mainstream.

National Committee of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Party Affairs.. New York, NY: The Committee, 1957.

P.R. Club, Communist Party (Expelled). Spark. [New York, NY: P.R. Club, Communist Party (expelled)], 1947. Journal, 1947-1948.

Ryan, James. “The American Communist Party’s Leadership During the Cold War: Robert Thompson as a Case Study.” Paper presented at Southwestern Historical Association Conference. New Orleans, Louisiana, 1997.

Schrecker, Ellen. “The Communist Party and McCarthyism.” Paper presented at “70 Years of U.S. Communism, 1919-1989” Conference. City University of New York, 1989.

Schrecker, Ellen. “McCarthyism and the Decline of American Communism, 1945-1960.” In New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, edited by Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993. Decline of American communism blamed external causes. American opposition to communism, equated with McCarthyism, depicted as elite led and state imposed prejudice rather than a popular movement.

Schrecker, Ellen. “McCarthyism and the Decline of American Communism, 1945-1960.” In Anti-Communism and McCarthyism in the United States (1946-1954): Essays on the Politics and Culture of the Cold War, edited by André Kaenel. Paris: Editions Messene, 1995.

Shannon, David A. The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States Since 1945. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959. A critical history which treats the Communist Party as subservient to Moscow and an illegitimate participant in liberal politics. Based largely on non-archival sources.

Singer, Kurt D. Communist Agents in America: A Who’s Who of American Communists, 1947. Pamphlet. New York: News Background, 1947. Contemporary anti-Communist exposé.

Starobin, Joseph R. “American Communism and the Cold War: An Obscure Chapter in the Pre-History of the Sino-Soviet Schism.” Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1970.

Starobin, Joseph R. American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Well researched, poignant scholarly study by the former foreign editor of the Daily Worker. Argues that Browder was leading the Communist Party in the direction of a positive participation in American politics when he was expelled. Maintains that the American Communists were caught-up in a “mental Comintern” that caused them to slavishly follow what they thought, occasionally erroneously, were Moscow’s wishes. Suggests that Moscow made little effort to understand the condition of the American Communist Party and regarded the CPUSA with minimal interest.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Annual Report for the Year 1949. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1950. Discusses espionage, state and federal legislation, and Slavic front groups.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Annual Report for the Year 1951. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1952. Discusses Hollywood, farm groups, and veterans organizations.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Annual Report for the Year 1952. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1952. Discusses Army Security Agency and infiltration of federal agency.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Role of the Communist Press in the Communist Conspiracy. Hearings. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1952.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Testimony of Arnold Johnson Legislative Director of the Communist Party, U. S. A. Hearing. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959.

U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations. Communist Party Activities. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1953. Includes testimony of Louis Bortz and Joseph D. Mazzei.

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Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the 1956-57 Crisis in American Communism

Communist Party of the USA. “The Communist Party Convention.” Political Affairs 36 (April 1957). Lead editorial speaking of “the impact of the Khrushchev revelation,” “these revelations,” and “the shocking disclosures.”

Dennis, Eugene. “Questions and Answers on the XXth Congress, CPSU.” Political Affairs 35 (April 1956). Included the assertion that “the facts disclosed about the errors of Stalin ... are, of course, new to us.”

Dennis, Peggy. “A Half-View of History is not Good Enough.” Unpublished essay, 1992. A privately circulated essay critical of Isserman’s “Half-Swept House” as too heavily influenced by the perspective of those associated with John Gates.

Foster, William Z. “Draper’s ‘Roots of American Communism.’” Political Affairs 36 (May 1957). Referred to “the sweeping revelations of the Stalin cult of the individual.”

Harris, Jerry. “First Reaction: U.S. Communists and the Khrushchev Revelations.” Science & Society 61, no. 4 (Winter 1997-98). “A primary document based on detailed notes taken by a participant at the two meetings in the Spring of 1956 of the Party’s National Executive Committee and National Committee, with precise accounts of the debates relating to the N.S. Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the CCPSU Central Committee.” The notes, 28 pages, belong to Fred Fine who was on the Executive Committee.

Healey, Dorothy. “On the Status of the Party.” Political Affairs 37 (March 1958): 48. Writes of “Khrushchev’s revelations on Stalin.”

Isserman, Maurice. “The 1956 Generation: An Alternative Approach to the History of American Communism.” Radical America 14, no. 2 (March-April 1980). Argues that the near disintegration of the Communist Party in 1956 demonstrates that it contained a complex and diverse internal membership and that many members were oriented toward a democratized and independent socialist movement.

Isserman, Maurice. “Half-Swept House: American Communism in 1956.” Socialist Review, February 1982. Examines the shifting factional lines and attempts at internal reform of the Communist Party in 1956.

Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Translated by Boris I. Nicolaevsky. [New York]: New Leader, 1962.

Meyer, Hershel D. The Krushchev Report and the Crisis in the American Left. Brooklyn: Independence Publishers, 1956.

Pries, Anne. “Khrushchev‘s ‘Secret Speech’: Confusion of Tongues.” Journal of Communist Studies [United Kingdom] 6, no. 1 (March 1990). Compares previous versions available in the West with the authentic original Russian text of the speech which did not become public until 1989 in Izvestia. On the basis on language analysis, says the U.S. State Department version released in 1956 appears to be a good English translation of a Polish version prepared for Polish Communist leaders in 1956 and the Polish text is a good translation of the authentic Russian released in 1989. Says the first purported original Russian text to appear (1959, Documentation Office for East European Law, University of Leiden) was identified as a likely fake in 1981 and was actually a poor Russian translation of the U.S. State Department‘s English version.

Russian Institute, Columbia University. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956. Anthology of essays on the issue.

Starobin, Joseph R. “1956, A Memoir.” Problems of Communism 15 (November-December 1966). By a former influential CPUSA official on the 1956 crisis in the CPUSA.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The 16th Convention of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1957.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Analysis of 16th Annual Convention of Communist Party of United States. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1957. Statement by J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Wolfe, Bertram David. Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost: Text, Background, and Meaning of Khrushchev’s Secret Report to the Twentieth Congress on the Night of February 24-25, 1956. New York: Praeger, 1957.

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Communist Party: 1960 and After

Aynesworth, Hugh. “FBI Files Show U.S. Communists Were Puzzled by JFK Assassination.” Washington Times, 20 October 1995. The Assassination Records Review Board released an FBI informant report of Arnold Johnson at a CPUSA meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia, on December 8, 1963, expressing lack of knowledge about the assassination but noting that he had had correspondence with Oswald.

Communist Party of the USA. Daily World. New York, NY: Long View Pub. Co., Inc., 1968. CPUSA flagship newspaper, replaced the Daily Worker.

Communist Party of the USA. People’s Daily World. New York: Long View Pub. Co., 1986-. Party’s chief journal in its latter years.

Horne, Gerald. “The Media and the Left.” People’s Daily World, 18 August 1987. Prominent revisionist historian judges that the bourgeois press of the 1980s underestimates the growing power and popular influence of the American Marxist-Leninist left.

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1970. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1970. Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, second session. June 23, 24, and 25, 1970. (Including index).

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1971. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1971. Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, first session.

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. The Theory and Practice of Communism. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1973. Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session. Includes: pt. 2. The Communist Party, USA--defender of Soviet anti-Semitism; pt. 4. Parallel policies of CPUSA and CPSU, and the Communist meaning of coexistence--Détente; --pt. 6. Communist Party, USA, attempts to repenetrate the trade union movement.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communist and Workers’ Partys’ Manifesto Adopted November -- December 1960; Interpretation and Analysis. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1961. Testimony of Jay Lovestone.

Wiener, Jon. “The Communist Party Today and Yesterday: An Interview with Dorothy Healey.” Radical America 11, no. 3 (May-June 1977). Healey, a long time leader of the Communist Party in California, discusses Gus Hall, the Communist Party’s recruitment of minorities, and compares the West Coast branch of the party with the what she sees as a more rigid Eastern element.

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The Party Crisis of 1989-1991

Baer, Donald. “Leftists in the Wilderness.” U.S. News and World Report, 19 March 1990. Reactions to the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe: Gil Green: “This is the main turning point in Communism. ... It will bring about a socialist society that cannot be separated from democracy.” Paul Robeson, Jr.: “This is the death of Stalinism and the birth of Marxism.” Ring Lardner, Jr.: “Communism is like Christianity. It turned out to be a very beautiful theory that has never been put into practice. Given human nature, I‘m not sure it can be.” Dorothy Healey, on not speaking out on Soviet abuses: “Our voices would have prevented the vicious distortions of socialism that we‘ve seen.” Carl Marzani: “This is not Marxism’s failure. On the contrary. What is dead is Stalinism.” Eugene Genovese: “An awful lot of corpses have been piled up in what we hoped was a good cause. Socialism in the strict and serious sense has failed. And now we have to eat it.”

Committees of Correspondence. Corresponder. New York, NY: The Committees, 1992. Journal of those expelled from the CPUSA by Gus Hall in late 1991.

Elbaum, Max. “Upheaval in the CPUSA: Death and Rebirth?” CrossRoads, January 1992. Description of the split at the December. 6-8 1991 CPUSA convention, reproduces in part the “Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party” that affirms communism and the CPUSA’s past defense of the USSR but was critical of Gus Hall and spoke of Communists needing “a fresh look and making necessary adjustments” and allowed that “the crisis of the socialist societies in Europe over the last few years makes it evident that there were deep-going flaws in the model of socialism being constructed there.” Gus Hall dismissed Initiative signers as guilty of “right opportunism” and excluded most from the convention. The new National Board excluded all dissidents, including such figures as Angela Davis, Gil Green, Charlene Mitchell, and Carl Bloice. The dissidents have formed Committees of Correspondence and plan a newsletter and a conference.

Green, Gil. “Glasnost, Perestroika and The Communist Party.” Paper presented at “70 Years of U.S. Communism, 1919-1989” Conference. City University of New York, 1989.

Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. “The Communist Party of the USA and the Committees of Correspondence.” Problems of Post-Communism 43, no. 4 (July/August 1996). Discusses the split between the CPUSA and the Committees of Correspondence.

Klehr, Harvey, and John Earl Haynes. “The End: The CPUSA Expires.” New Republic, 23 March 1992. Discusses split at the CPUSA 25th convention. Quotes Herbert Aptheker as linking communism’s crisis to it having been “’authoritarian, domineering, brutal and guilty of colossal crimes -- not only suppression but also massive human extermination’” and Gus Hall as telling the convention “’There is no basic flaw in the theories of Marxism-Leninism or dialectical materialism.’” Concludes; “The split leaves the Party at the level of the small Trotskyist sects that do little more than issue turgid newspapers. But for Hall, hope spring eternal. ‘If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea,’ he recently advised”

Lapitski, Mark Isaakovich. “Epitafiia Amerikanskoi Kompartii [Epitaph to the American Communist Party].” SShA: Ekonomika, Politika, Ideologiia [Russia] 1 (1994): 88-96.

Marquit, Irwin. “Ideological Basis of the Organizational Crisis of Marxism-Leninism in the United States.” Rethinking Marxism, Spring 1994. Professor at the University of Minnesota and former leader of the CPUSA in Minnesota who went with the Committees of Correspondence discusses the split and advocates a purified strict Marxism-Leninism as the answer.

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Gus Hall

Brandt, Joseph, and Sylvia Opper, eds. Gus Hall Bibliography: The Communist Party, USA: Philosophy, History, Program, Activities. New York: New Outlook Publishers, 1981. Hagiography.

Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. “Hanging up on the Hammer and Sickle.” Heterodoxy 8, no. 3 & 4 (June/July 2000): 9. On Gus Hall’s career and retirement (shift from national chairman, replaced by Sam Webb, of the CPUSA to senior chair). “When a Karelian mass grave containing the bodies of hundreds of American and Canadian victims of communism was unearthed three years ago, the CPUSA never said a word. Neither did Gus Hall, although the list of these buried there included Minnesotans from the Finnish-American community from which he came.”

Kaplan, Steven. “Gus Hall: Minnesota’s Supreme Soviet.” Minnesota Law and Politics, August 1997. Biographical sketch. Hall, longtime head of the CPUSA, grew up in Minnesota.

Swearingen, Rodger. “Gus Hall: Moscow-Trained Boss of the CPUSA.” In Leaders of the Communist World., edited by Rodger Swearingen. New York: Free Press, 1971.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communist Leadership “Tough Guy” Takes Charge. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1960. On Gus Hall.

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Return to Table of Contents – Chapter Titles Only

Return to Table of Contents - Chapter Titles with Sections and Subsections

Chapter 2

Nature and Structure of the Communist Movement

Bell, Daniel. “The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States.” In Socialism and American Life (Vol 1), edited by Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952. Analytic and critical commentary on the intellectual and cultural outlook of the early Socialist party and Communist party. The American Communist “is the perpetual alien living in hostile enemy territory.... His is the ethnic of ‘ultimate ends’; only the goal counts, the means are inconsequential. Bolshevism thus is neither in the world nor of it, but stands outside. It takes no responsibility for the consequences of any act within the society nor does it suffer the tension of acquiescence or rejection.”

Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. First published in 1952 as chapter 6 of Socialism and American Life edited by Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons.

Bell, Daniel. “First Love and Early Sorrows.” Partisan Review 48, no. 4 (1981). Sees chiliastic and gnostic sources contributing to the willingness of Communists and other leftists to use violence and terror to redeem the world. “‘He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics.’ It was this quotation [from Weber] with which I ended my monograph in 1952 on Marxian Socialism in the United States. Since the death of socialism is the most tragic -- and unacknowledged -- political fact of the twentieth century, it is an injunction to be heeded now more than ever.”

Browder, Earl. What is Communism? New York: The Vanguard Press, 1936. Party literature.

Charney, George. “American Communism in Perspective: A Review.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 56 (1973). By a former senior party cadre.

Coser, Lewis. “Sects and Sectarians.” Dissent 1 (Autumn 1954).

Engerman, David. “‘Give a Party for the Party.’” American Communist History 1, no. 1 (June 2002). Late 1930s New York C.P. Entertainment Committee document.

Fry, William Welz. “Communist United Front Strategy and Tactics: Origins and Some Recent Applications.” Ph.D. diss. Georgetown University, 1962.

Furet, François, and Ernst Nolte. Fascism and Communism. Translated by Katherine Golsan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Haynes, John Earl. “New Times, 1910-1919.” Paper presented at Minnesota Historical Society “Voices of Dissent: The Minnesota Radical Press, 1910-1920, An Open Forum.” St. Paul, MN, 1989. Finds that New Times, the leading English-language socialist newspaper in Minnesota, grew frustrated at the failure of most workers to develop class consciousness and, over time, tended to blame this failure on the moral inadequacies of workers’ themselves. The chief figures in the paper became Communists.

Haynes, John Earl. “The New Times: A Frustrated Voice of Socialism, 1910-1919.” Minnesota History 52, no. 5 (Spring 1991). The New Times, Minnesota’s leading English-language Socialist paper, was edited by Alexis Georgian, a delegate to the founding convention of the Communist party of America. Finds that New Times became increasingly frustrated with the failure of workers to support socialism and tended to blame worker foolishness and stupidity. Suggests in a Kraditorian mode that New Times and the Socialists it represented cut themselves off from workers by indifference and hostility to ethnicity and American nationalism, scorn for religion, disregard for prohibition and women’s suffrage as issues of importance, support for violence, expressions of admiration for criminals as enemies of the system, and attacks upon marriage.

Hook, Sidney. “Spectral Marxism.” American Scholar 49 (Spring 1980).

Hook, Sidney. Marx and the Marxists: The Ambiguous Legacy. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1955.

Hoover, J. Edgar. A Study of Communism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. Introduction of Communist theory and practice, with particular reference to CPUSA, by the longtime head of the FBI. Emphasizes the conspiratorial aspects of the party.

Horowitz, David. “Letter to a Political Friend: On Being Totalitarian in America.” In Political Passages: Journeys of Change Through Two Decades, 1968-1988, edited by John Bunzel. New York: Free Press, 1988. Horowitz, a prominent New Left journalist who later became anti-Communist, states that his father was a Communist who left the C.P. in 1953 but remained loyal to Communism throughout his life, that his parents lived in colony of progressives in Sunnyside, Queens, and “they inhabited Sunnyside like a race of aliens -- in the community but never of it, culturally and psychologically distinct. They lived in a state of permanent hostility not only to the Sunnyside community, but to every other community that touched them, including America itself.”

Hunt, R. N. Carew. Marxism, Past and Present. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Jacobson, Julius. “Reflections on Fascism and Communism.” In Socialist Perspectives, edited by Phyllis Jacobson and Julius Jacobson, assisted by Petr Abovin-Egides. Princeton, NJ: Karz-Cohl Pub., 1983. Compares and contrasts.

Kraditor, Aileen S. “Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. A highly detailed and sophisticated blend of history, political theory, and personal reminiscences. Kraditor, a former Communist, is a leading conservative intellectual and social historian. Kraditor contends that longtime rank-and-file Communists mentally “lived in a world apart from the real one,” that her book “is about that separate reality,” and that “the promise of intellectual control of reality, here and now, constituted the basic appeal of Marxism-Leninism and its embodiment, the highly disciplined Communist Party.” Kraditor concludes that: “It is not too farfetched to surmise that the true believer’s quarrel with the world was, at bottom, not only that it was unjust but also that it was not of their own making.... The appeal of the Soviet Union lay not merely in its [misperceived] justice, prosperity, freedom, and democracy, but also in its being an artifact of the Marxist-Leninist mind blessed with total freedom to bring external reality into conformity with its wishes.” Kraditor comments that the C.P. “was an organizational expression of a world already existing in the minds of its true-believing members.... For if the reality had been as the true believers perceived it -- I mean fundamentally, not with respect to particular data about which anyone might err -- then the Party would have fitted into that reality rather successfully. Instead, they were a group of people who, in both favorable and unfavorable circumstances, always failed to convert the majority of workers (although their theory said this conversion was inevitable) and, finally, were obliged to use force and terror, when in power against the working class in order to make reality conform to their conception.”

Kraditor, Aileen S. “Unbecoming a Communist.” Continuity, no. 12 (Fall 1988). Kraditor, a former Communist and historian of radicalism, states, “The awful conditions that had supposedly caused the conversion to some radical ideology had not had the same effect on most people; was this radical more intelligent, better-informed, more compassionate than those others?... We should look inside the individual psyche ... of the radical for the roots of ideological commitment, the predisposition to perceive facts a certain way, the need to screen out some facts altogether, the preference for one theory over another.... Radical ideology is also like a mathematics, but in this case one that does not apply to the real world. Its practitioners, however, keep insisting it’s correct; they will not reexamine its axioms of its conflicts with empirical reality. Indeed, its implicit rejection of empirical reality constitutes part of its appeal to them. They believe, however, that they and conservatives perceive the world the same way and disagree only over how to evaluate the data. But the fact is that they perceive different realities; their disagreement is ontological as well as axiological. Conservatives make the same mistake when they equate radicalism with hypocrisy; they assume that radical ideologues ‘see’ the same facts as they themselves do but approve of atrocities and oppression by leftist regimes.”

Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism.” American Sociological Review 24 (August 1959).

Malia, Martin. “Judging Nazism and Communism.” National Interest 69 (Fall 2002). Analytic essay. “Western revisionism overall developed within what was basically a Soviet, or at least a Marxist, perspective. Putting matters this bluntly, however, was until recently impossible in academic discourse, especially in America. Down through the failure of Gorbachev’s perestroika, any allusion to these obvious facts was met with protestation from the revisionists that they were not Marxists but merely positivists whose “social science” . . . was a strictly non-political, “value-free” enterprise. Or they might revert to the countercharge of “McCarthyism... Bluntness is presently a therapeutic necessity.”

Milton, David. “Class Struggle American Style.” In Political Power and Social Theory [v. 4], edited by Howard Kimeldorf and Maurice Zeitlin. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984.

Muravchik, Joshua. Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. Historical analyses of the rise and fall of social democracy, socialism, communism, fascism, African and Chinese socialism, and other modern collectivisms. “Within 150 years after the term “socialism” was coined by the followers of Robert Owen in the late 1820s, roughly 60 percent of the earth’s population found itself living under socialist rule of one kind or another. Of course, not all who lived under socialism believed in it, but not all who were counted as Christians or Muslims were believers either. Yet once empowered, socialism refused to yield its promised rewards. The more dogged the effort, the more the outcome made a mockery of the humane ideals that it proclaimed. For a century and a half, no amount of failure dampened socialism’s appeal. Then, suddenly, like a rocket crashing back to earth, it all collapsed. In the span of a couple decades, socialism was officially repealed in half the places where it had triumphed. And in the other half, it continued in name only. Today, in but a few flyspecks on the map is there still an earnest effort to practice socialism, defended as if by those marooned Japanese soldiers who held out for decades after 1945, never having learned that their emperor had surrendered.”

Niemeyer, Gerhart. The Irrationality of Communism. Consultation with Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer. Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fifth Congress, Second Session. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1958.

Rachleff, Peter J. Marxism and Council Communism: The Foundation for Revolutionary Theory for Modern Society. New York: Revisionist Press, 1976.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. “The Life of the Party: What It Means to be a Communist.” Saturday Review of Literature, 16 July 1949. On the nature of party discipline, its corruption of intellectual and artistic standards, and its use on an underground arm for subversion and espionage.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Ideological Fallacies of Communism. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1957. The ideological fallacies of communism. Staff consultations with Dr. S. Andhil Fineberg, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Dr. Daniel A. Poling: September 4, 1957, September 25, 1957, October 18, 1957.

U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The Communist Party of the United States of America, What It is, How It Works a Handbook for Americans. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1956.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The Communist Party of the United States of America What It is, How It Works; a Handbook for Americans. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1955.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Contradictions of Communism. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Contradictions of Communism Report. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1964.

Wald, Kenneth D. “The Legacy of Communism in American Ideology and Ethos.” Paper presented at Hendricks Symposium, “The Legacies of Communism,.” University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1992.

Wheeler, Robert Hullings Lappe. “American Communists: Their Ideology and Their Interpretation of American Life, 1917-1939.” Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1953.

Wolfe, Bertram David. An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution. New York: Stein and Day, 1969. On the essential nature of communism.

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Communism and Americanism

Beichman, Arnold. Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences. New Brunswick (U.S.A.): Transaction, 1992. Discusses relationship of anti-Americanism and communism.

Beichman, Arnold. Nine Lies About America. New York: Library Press, 1972. Discusses relationship of anti-Americanism and communism.

Berman, Hyman. “Communism and the Frontier Tradition.” In The American West, as Seen by Europeans and Americans, edited by Rob Kroes and Michael P. Malone. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1989. Based on a 1988 symposium sponsored by the Netherlands American Studies Association in Amsterdam. Discusses the clash between the CPUSA’s centralized authority and quasi-military discipline with the American West’s individualistic, anarchistic doctrines.

Cantor, Milton. The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1975. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Discusses how American society and culture has driven the left to two unworkable positions: the impossibilism of revolutionary demands that workers reject and the immediatism of reformist demands that gets absorbed into trade unionism, liberalism, and mainstream politics.

Denning, Michael. “‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies.” American Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1986).

Flynn, Daniel J. Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation’s Greatness. Roseville, CA: Forum, 2002.

Gaido, Daniel. “‘The American Worker’ and the Theory of Permanent Revolution: Karl Kautsky on Werner Sombart’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003).

Goldner, Loren. “On the Non-Formation of a Working-Class Political Party in the United States, 1900-45.” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003).

Hollander, Paul, ed. Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.

Iton, John Richard. “Gateway Blues: Comparative Political Cultures and the Search for the Missing American Left.” Ph.D. diss. Johns Hopkins University, 1994. Argues that cultural and racial heterogeneity help explain the absence of a powerful left in the United States, a form of "American exceptionalism.”

Johnson, Alan. “The American Worker and the Absurd Truth About Marxism.” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003). Editorial introduction to a special issue on Marxism and American workers.

Kautsky, Karl. “The American Worker.” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003).

Klehr, Harvey. “Leninism and Lovestoneism.” Studies in Comparative Communism 7, no. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1974). Discusses the argument between Foster and Lovestone over the nature of American capitalism. Finds that both continued the Leninist misunderstanding of American history. Argues that Lovestoneism did no more than use Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism and his principle of uneven capitalist development to argue that capitalism in U.S. was strong because imperialism in America was still growing and strong whereas imperialism in Europe was stagnant. Foster, so much as he had a principled opposition, simply differed on the stage of American capitalism and on his emphasis on the voluntaristic element in Leninism that revolutionaries could make revolution.

Klehr, Harvey. “Leninism, Lewis Corey, and the Failure of American Socialism.” Labor History 18, no. 2 (Spring 1977). Lenin in 1907 remarked that one of the reasons for socialism’s weakness in America was that the democratic task was done and socialism did not have a link to democracy as it did in Europe. In 1916, Lenin changed his interpretation and developed his theory of imperialism that attributed socialism’s failure in America to the success of American imperialism and capitalists buying off part of the working class with the profits of imperialism. After that, Marxists stuck to Lenin’s 1916 view. In 1940 Corey revived the earlier Lenin view. Corey argued that American communism and socialism were imports to America that were inappropriate. In Europe socialism and fight for democracy were linked. In the more advanced and already democratic U.S. the working class regarded socialism based on the European mode to be inappropriate and, because the proletariat would never be a majority of the population, socialism with its devotion to being the voice of the working class could never win power democratically.

Klehr, Harvey. “Marxist Theory in Search of America.” Journal of Politics 35, no. 2 (1973). Discusses the difficulty of Marxist analysis of American history and the failure of the Communist party to develop an adequate theory of “American exceptionalism.”

Klehr, Harvey, and John Earl Haynes. “The Rejection of American Society by the Communist Left.” In Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, edited by Paul Hollander. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.

Le Blanc, Paul. “The Absence of Socialism in the United States: Contextualising Kautsky’s ‘American Worker.’” Historical Materialism 11, no. 4 (2003).

Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.

Link, Henry Charles, and A. D. Freiberg. “Psychological Barometer on Communism, Americanism and Socialism.” Journal of Applied Psychology 33 (February 1949).

Mann, Tom. “Preface.” In Americanism: A World Menace, W.T. Colyer. London, U.K.: Labour Pub. Co., 1922. Mann, a founder in both the British and Australian Communist parties, observes “If we refuse to travel towards Communism the only alternative is to become Americanised.”

Rolfe, Eugene E. M. “Rival Gods.” Hibbert Journal 52 (April 1954). On Americanism and communism as faiths.

Rossiter, Clinton Lawrence. Marxism: The View from America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960. Compares Marxism with the American tradition.

Ryan, James G. “Leadership in the Left Lane: Directions and Styles in the Communist Party of the United States, 1932–1957.” In Who’s the Boss? Leadership and Democratic Culture in America, edited by Hans Krabbendam and Wil Verhoeven. Amsterdam, NL: Vu University Press, 2007.

Sombart, Werner. Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Translated and edited by C. T. Husbands. Translated by Patricia M. Hocking. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976. Translation of the 1906 Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?, with a foreword by Michael Harrington.

Szporluk, Roman. Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Argues that the contest between Marxism and capitalism is more properly “triangular, not bipolar” with nationalism as a competitor.

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Organization and Structure of the Communist Party

Alperin, Robert Jay. “Organization in the Communist Party, USA 1931-1938.” Ph.D. diss. Northwestern University, 1959. Finds that Communist party organization was weak in the early 1930s but improved as schools and classes were organized to reduce membership turnover; argues that Marxism remained a driving organizational principle.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Party Organizer. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of The Party Organizer originally published (1st issue in Chicago, IL, 2nd issue on in New York City) with irregular frequency by the Workers (Communist) Party of America from April 1927 to vol. 2, nos. 7/8 (July/Aug. 1928); and by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, U.S.A. from vol. 3, no. 1 (February. 1930) to August 1938.

Kintner, William R. “Communist Organization and the Unlimited Quest for Power.” Ph.D. diss. Georgetown University, 1949.

Lincove, David. “Radical Publishing to ‘Reach the Million Masses’: Alexander L. Trachtenberg and International Publishers, 1906-1966.” Left History 10, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2004).

Peters, J. The Communist Party: A Manual on Organization. [New York]: Workers Library Publishers, 1935. With an introduction by Jack Stachel. Authoritative party statement of organizational principles.

Selznick, Philip. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952. Sees the organizational structure of the Communist party as that of a weapon aimed at the destruction of American society. (Selznick had been a young Trotskyist in the late 1930s and joined Max Shachtman's Workers Party when it split from the Socialist Workers party in 1940.)

Storch, Randi. “‘The Realities of the Situation’: Revolutionary Discipline and Everyday Political Life in Chicago’s Communist Party, 1928–1935.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, no. 3 (September 2004).

Taft, Philip. “The Party Organizer: An Introduction and Appraisal.” Labor History 11, no. 1 (Winter 1970).

U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Report on the Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1948. U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Structure and Organization of the Communist Party of the United States. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1962. two parts.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Organized Communism in the United States. Washington, 1958.

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Communist Party Youth Affiliates and Youth Organizing

American Youth for Democracy. AYD Spotlight. New York: New Age Publishers, 1943. Journal, 1943.

American Youth for Democracy. Spotlight. New York: New Age Publishers, 1944. Journal, 1944-1945.

Berwick, Arnold. “The Idealist in the Young Communist League.” The Freeman 41, no. 1 (January 1991). Memoir of YCL activities and militants at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Pioneer. New York, N.Y.: Pioneer Pub. Co., 1931. Journal.

Communist Party of the United States of America. Young Pioneer. New York, N.Y.: Pioneer Pub. Co., 1931. Journal.

Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, and Lewis Miller. Communist Propaganda Among American Youth: An Example of Material Used. Pamphlet. [Washington: Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, 1935.

Glaberman, Martin, and George Rawick. “The Champion of Youth: An Introduction and Appraisal.” Labor History 11, no. 3 (Summer 1970). Discusses a Young Communist League journal.

Gower, Calvin W. “Conservatism, Censorship, and Controversy in the CCC, 1930s.” Journalism Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1975). Notes that Army administrators excluded the Communist newspaper Champion of Youth from the camps.

Labor Youth League. Youth Review. New York, N.Y.: Labor Youth Pub. Co., 1953. Journal, 1953-?.

Lewis, Joel A. “Youth Against Fascism: The Construction of Communist Youth Identity in Britain and the United States.” Ph.D. diss. Central Michigan University, 2006.

Mishler, Paul C. “The Littlest Proletariat: American Communists and Their Children, 1922-1950.” Ph.D. diss. Boston University, 1988.

Potamkin, Harry Alan, Gertrude Rady, and D. Marya Morrow, eds. Pioneer Song Book. New York: New Pioneer, 1933.

Romerstein, Herbert. Communism and Your Child. New York: Bookmailer, 1962. Romerstein, young Communist activist, became an anti-Communist and joined the staff of the HCUA.

Romerstein, Herbert. The Communist International Youth and Student Apparatus. Pamphlet. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1963.

Trutor, Clayton J. “There Is a Great Country: The Soviet Union in American Communist’s Children’s Literature, 1925-35.” M.A. Thesis. University of Vermont, 2006.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Communist Training Operations. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959. Hearings, Part 2 and 3: “Communist Activities and Propaganda among Youth Groups.”

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Communist Target: Youth. Communist Infiltration and Agitation Tactics. A Report by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of Federal Bureau of Investigation, Illustrating Communist Strategy and Tactics in Rioting Which Occurred During House Committee on Un-American Activities Hearings, San Francisco, May 12-14, 1960. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1960.

U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Communist Tactics in Controlling Youth Organizations. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1952.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States Report on American Youth for Democracy. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1947.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communist Appeal to Youth Aided by New Organizations. Hearing, April 25, 1961. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1961.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communist Youth Program. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1965.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communist Youth Program Report. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1966.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. Labor Youth League, Respondent Decided February 15, 1955, F. Kirk Maddrix and Herbert H. Finzel for Petitioner, Gruber & Turkel (Samuel Gruber) for Respondent, Docket no. 102-23; Report. Washington, 1955.

Young Communist League. Y.C.L. Builder. [New York, NY]: The Committee, 1935. Journal, 1935-.

Young Communist League of the U.S. Y.C.L. Organizer. New York City: Published monthly by Youth Publisher for National Committee, Young Communist League, 1932. Journal

Young Communist League of the U.S. Young Communist Review. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of a periodical originally published monthly in New York by the Young Communist League, 1936-Feb. 1937; by the National Committee of the Young Communist League, Mar. 1937; by the National Board of the Young Communist League; as the official publication of the National Council of the Young Communist League, Aug. 1938-Dec. 1939. Issued with: Review (New York, 1940) and Weekly Review (New York, 1941).

Young Communist League of the U.S. Clarity. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1970. Reprint of a periodical originally published in New York by New Age Publishers for the Young Communist League (Apr.-May 1940-winter issue, 1942.

Young Communist League of the U.S.A. The Worker Guardsman. New York, 0193u. Journal claimed to be issued by members of the Young Communist League in the New York National Guard, early 1930s

Young Communist League, USA. Dynamic! [New York, NY]]: The League, 1983.

Young Pioneers of America. The Young Comrade. [Chicago, IL]: The Section, 1923. Journal

Young Pioneers of America. Young Pioneer. New York: Young Workers League of America, 1929. Journal.

Young Workers League of America. The Young Worker. [New York: National Organization Committee for the Young Workers League of America], 1922. Official journal published variously in the 1920s by the National Organization Committee for the Young Workers League of America, Young Workers League of America, Young Workers (Communist) League of America., and Communist Youth League of U.S.A

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Communist Party Associated Summer Camps

Levine, June. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca: Blacks, Whites and Reds at Camp. San Rafael, CA: Avon Springs Press, 2002. Wo-Chi-Ca [Workers Childrens Camp] was at times closely Communist-aligned and always leftist.

Meeropol, Ivy. “The Little Red Summer Camp: From the Village to the Woods.” New York Times, 19 August 2001. Affectionate memories of Camp Kinderland.

Mishler, Paul. “Communism and Youth in the Country: Summer Camps and Communist Education.” Paper presented at Organization of American Historians annual meeting. Washington, DC, 1995. Discusses origins, ethnic orientation, and program emphases of different C.P.-aligned youth camps.

Mishler, Paul C. Raising Reds the Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Radosh, Ronald. “Commie Camp: In Deep Winter a Memory of Red Summers.” Heterodoxy 5, no. 10 (January 1998). Memories of attendance over seven or eight summers at the Popular Frontish oriented Camp Woodland for Children in Phoenicia, New York.

Ruta, Suzanne. “Social Studies.” Wig Wag, August 1990. Report on a visit to Camp Kinderland, one of the few hard-left summer camps still operating in New York. Notes that children at the camp are predominately from radical families of several generations standing, that camp programs emphasized left themes of the 1930s, and that the camp’s director denied any camp association with the C.P.

Shargel, Baila Round. “Leftist Summer Colonies of Northern Westchester County, New York.” American Jewish History 83, no. 3 (1995)

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Communist Party Associated Schools and Party Education

Ginger, Ann Fagan, and David Christiano. “Justice Attacks Workers’ Schools and Clubs.” In The Cold War Against Labor, edited by Ann Fagan Ginger and David Christiano. Berkeley, CA: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987. Discusses administrative hearings before Subversive Activities Control Board in 1953 over the New York Jefferson School, witness Marlene Maclane Kowall, daughter of a movie actor tough guy, linked to magazine Counter-Attack. The California Labor School was listed as subversive in 1948, Treasury revoked tax exemption and levied for back taxes, $7000. Most Communist-aligned schools closed by 1956.

Gettleman, Marvin. “The Lost World of United Sates Labor Education: Curricula at East and West Coast Communist Schools, 1944-1957.” In American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, edited by Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Gettleman, Marvin. “Engaged Pedagogy: Curriculum and Politics at U.S. Communist Labor Schools, 1923-1957.” Paper presented at Wayne State University Conference on the University and the City, 1999. “The Engaged Pedagogy of these schools offered a novel vision of schooling as an active not passive process, a truly collective effort, and one that could do away altogether with the very possibility of competition and failure. When Stalinist scales are scraped away, this pedagogy and its apparatus could have great relevance for the educational crisis in the present day USA.”

Gettleman, Marvin. “The Lost World of Communist Labor Schools in the U.S., 1923-1957.” Paper presented at Southwestern Labor History Conference. San Francisco, 1999.

Gettleman, Marvin. “Science and Society: Educational Work of the U.S. Communist Party - (1944-1956).” Paper presented at “People of a Special Mould? Conference about Biographical and Pographical Research on Communism.” Manchester, U.K., 2001.

Gettleman, Marvin E. “Communist Labor Pedagogy Before McCarthyism.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Progressive Education: A Marxist Interpretation. Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press, 1982.

Stanley, William Oliver, III. “The Communist Party and Education, 1928-1939: The Union of Theory and Practice.” Ph.D. diss. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1974. Examines the Communist party’s internal educational philosophy and its critique of public schools.

U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations. Communist Ownership of GI Schools... Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1956. Looks at schools for veterans with C.P. links.

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California Labor School

Cherney, Isobel. “California Labor School.” In The Cold War Against Labor, edited by Ann Fagan Ginger and David Christiano. Berkeley, CA: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987. Reminiscences regarding the CLS by a leading teacher; discusses anti-Communist attacks on the CLS.

Gettleman, Marvin. “‘Education for Victory and Action’: The California Labor School in the Popular Front Era.” Paper presented at History of Education Society. Atlanta, GA., 1990. Argues that the CLS and other C.P. schools implicitly pursued a Gramscian strategy of breaking bourgeois cultural hegemony and promoting a class-conscious Marxist-Leninist workers’ culture.

Rigelhaupt, Jess. “The California Labor School and Radical Social Movements in the Post WWII San Francisco Bay Area.” Paper presented at Southwest Labor Studies Association annual meeting, 2003.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. California Labor School, Inc., Respondent. Washington, 1957.

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Elisabeth Irwin School

Radosh, Ronald. “Elisabeth Irwin Looks Back.” Heterodoxy 5, no. 5&6 (June 1997). On the 75th anniversary of the “Little Red School House” in Greenwich Village. Described his memories of the school, 1949-1955, and its creation of left educational environment: “EI, in fact, was a living example of PopFront culture in practice.”

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Hessian Hills School

Campbell, Katherine Moos. “An Experiment in Education: The Hessian Hills School, 1925-1952.” Ph.D. diss. Boston University, 1984. Finds that Communism shaped much of the philosophy of this private progressive school near New York in the 1930s; however, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact liberal parents controlling the school forced the resignation of its pro-Communist director.

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New York Marxist School/Brecht Forum

Boger, Mary. “Marxist Education in New York City: The Origin, Development, and Survival of the New York Marxist School/Brecht Forum, 1975–2000.” Paper presented at American Historical Association annual meeting. Boston, MA, 2001.

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New York Workers School

Gettleman, Marvin. “Politics and Education at the New York Workers School.” Paper presented at “70 Years of U.S. Communism, 1919-1989” Conference. City University of New York, 1989.

Gettleman, Marvin E. “The New York Workers School, 1923-1944: Communist Education in American Society.” In New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, edited by Michael E. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993. Says workers education was implicitly Gramscian in strategy, “without any sense that they had thereby abandoned long-term insurrectionary goals; the short-term reformist actions were precisely the kinds of contests for cultural hegemony deemed necessary as preludes to the decisive revolutionary struggles to come in the Gramscian, not the Leninist sense.” Denounces traditionalist historians such as Haynes and Klehr.

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New York Jefferson School of Social Science

Gettleman, Marvin E. “‘No Varsity Teams,’ New York’s Jefferson School of Social Science, 1943-1956.” Science & Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2002). The flagship institution of the CPUSA’s extensive network of schools, the Jefferson School flourished in New York City during the 1940s and early 1950s. Its pedagogy represented some of the left’s most creative cultural work in the period. The School attracted thousands of mainly adult student-workers for courses on Marxism, trade union issues and related topics as well as art, music, dance and literature.

Ring, Daniel F. “Two Cultures: Libraries, the Unions, and the ‘Case’ of the Jefferson School of Social Science.” Journal of Library History 20, no. 3 (1985). The Joint Committee on Library-Labor Relations, created by the American Library Association fostered public libraries’ work with labor unions. When a study by Henry Black, librarian at the Communist-affiliated Jefferson School of Social Science was accepted for publication in the committee’s newsletter, union representatives objected.

U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. Jefferson School of Social Science, Respondent. Report and Order of the Board, Decided June 30, 1955. Docket no. 107-53. Washington, 1955.

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The Communist Party and Conspiracy

Budenz, Louis F. Men Without Faces: The Communist Conspiracy in the U. S. A. New York: Harper, 1950. Budenz, once editor of the Daily Worker, became a fervid anti-Communist and frequently testified about the conspiratorial nature of Communism in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Budenz, Louis F. The Techniques of Communism. Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1954. Emphasizes the conspiratorial nature of the Communist party.

Cohen, Michael. “Plutocrats and the Octopus: Conspiratorial Visions of American Radicals in the Early 20th Century.” Paper presented at American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2001.

Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. New York: Holt, 1958. Polemical. Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, treats the Communist party as chiefly a conspiracy under foreign control.

Hoover, J. Edgar. J. Edgar Hoover on Communism. New York: Random House, 1969.

Hoover, J. Edgar. J. Edgar Hoover Speaks Concerning Communism. Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1970.

Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Transcribes, translates, and comments on documents from Russian archives dealing with the covert activities of the CPUSA. First book published on the CPUSA using extensive documentation from the Russian archives. See: The Secret World

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Communist Methods of Infiltration. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1953. Four parts.??

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Communist Conspiracy Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1956.

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Social Background of American Communism

Glazer, Nathan. The Social Basis of American Communism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961. Examines the socio-economic background of American Communists.

Glazer, Nathan. “The Social Basis of American Communism.” Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1962.

Klehr, Harvey. Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978. Analyzes biographical information on 212 Communist Party Central Committee members (1920-1961). Finds that native-born Communists rose faster than the foreign-born, blacks were more likely to remain loyal to the Communist party than whites, non-Jews rose quicker in the hierarchy that Jews, and that women rose in the cadre, but slowly.

Moore, Barrington. “The Communist Party of the USA; An Analysis of a Social Movement.” American Political Science Review 39, no. 1 (February 1945).

Slove, Karen E. “Social Factors Influencing Success or Failure of Radical Movements: A Study of the American Communist Party.” Undergraduate Honors Thesis. Emory University, 1984.

Taylor, Kerry. “Different Shades of Red? The Social Basis of New Zealand and United States Communism Compared.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, 2004.

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Psychological Approaches to American Communism

Almond, Gabriel Abraham. The Appeals of Communism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954. Critical commentary on the appeal of communism based on interviews with American and foreign Communists and on Communist literature.

Brunner, Marta L. “‘Faith’ in Social Change: Three Case Studies from American Social Movement History, 1890--1940.” Ph.D. diss. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2005. The Communist movement in the 1930s is one of the case studies.

Ernst, Morris Leopold, and David Loth. Report on the American Communist. New York: Holt, 1952. Examines the Communist party’s membership; sees Communists as compensating for personal deficiencies in extremist politics.

Krugman, Herbert. “The Interplay of Social and Psychological Factors in Political Deviance: An Inquiry Into Some Factors Underlying the Motivation of Intellectuals Who Became Communist.” Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1952.

Krugman, Herbert Ellis. “Appeal of Communism to American Middle Class Intellectuals and Trade Unionists.” Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1952).

Meyer, Frank S. The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961. Psychological analysis finding Communists to be largely neurotic.

Monnerot, Jules. Sociology and Psychology of Communism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

Novack, George Edward, John Dewey, and Leon Trotsky. Their Morals and Ours: Marxist Versus Liberal Views on Morality. New York: Merit Publishers, 1969. Introduction, by G. Novack.--Their morals and ours, by L. Trotsky.--The moralists and sycophants against Marxism, by L. Trotsky.--Means and ends, by J. Dewey.--Liberal morality, by G. Novack.

Wriggins, William H. “The Image of the Ideal Communist Militant as Depicted in Communist Party Publications.” Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1953.

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Communist Party Rhetoric

Cohn, Werner. “‘A Clear Provocation,’ Esoteric Elements in Communist Language.” Encounter [U.K.] 64, no. 5 (May 1985). Discusses the origins of Communist jargon which defines revelation of an embarrassing truth as provocation.

Dixler, Elsa Jane. “The American Communist Party and the Revolution.” American Behavioral Scientist 20, no. 4 (March-April 1977). Discusses the meaning of Communist revolution in the American context.

Draper, Theodore. “The Ghost of Social Fascism.” Commentary, February 1969. On Communist use of the concept of “social fascism” to denounce democratic leftists and liberal-left reformers in the early 1930s.

Evans, William Barrett. “‘Revolutionist Thought’ in the Daily Worker, 1919-1939.” Ph.D. diss. University of Washington, 1965. Finds no consistent theoretical perspective on revolution; instead, there was a consistent reflection of Soviet and Comintern pronouncements.

Hart, Roderick P. “The Rhetoric of the True Believer.” Speech Monographs 38, no. 4 (1971). Examines “doctrinal groups” defined as American Communists, John Birchers, Roman Catholics, and Mormons.

Hunt, R. N. Carew. A Guide to Communist Jargon. New York: Macmillan, 1957.

Ilkka, Richard J. “Rhetorical Dramatization in the Development of American Communism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63, no. 4 (1977). Notes that glorification of the Bolshevik Revolution was a major component of American Communist rhetoric.

Ilkka, Richard Jaco. “The Rhetorical Vision of the American Communist Movement: Origin and Debut 1918-1920.” Ph.D. diss. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1974. Finds that early Communist rhetorical fantasies cast the Socialist party moderates in the role of Russian counter-revolutionaries, the Socialist party Left in the role of the Bolsheviks and presented the new Soviet state as the prototype of a new society. In the simplified drama of Communist rhetoric self-righteousness was the most common theme occurring more often that hatred of capitalism and hatred of moderate socialists Much of the rhetoric symbolically acted out visions of self esteem and mastery: the Communist as vigilant guardian of the movement, preacher-militant educating the masses, and revolutionary martyr.

Kövecses, Zoltán. “Language, Linguistics, Power, and the American Left.” Paper presented at Austrian Association for American Studies “America and the Left” conference. University of Graz, Austria, 1992.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Report on the Communist Party of the United States as an Advocate of Overthrow of Government by Force and Violence. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1948.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Language as a Communist Weapon. Consultation with Dr. Stefan T. Possony. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1959.

Wander, Philip C. “At the Ideological Front.” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (Fall 1991).

Young, John W. “Totalitarian Language: Orwell’s Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Predecessors.” Ph.D. diss. University of Virginia, 1987. Finds that Orwell directly modelled Newspeak on actual Nazi and Communist practices. Observes that, unlike Orwell’s gloomy projection of Oceania, the actual experience of long-lasting totalitarian regimes (Communist) is that over time the large gap between official reality and rhetoric causes citizens to grow skeptical, cynical, and develop a private counter-language.

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Communists in the South

Allen, James S. Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist’s Memoir. Minneapolis, MN: MEP [Marxist Education Press] Publications, 2000. James Allen is the pseudonym for Solomon Auerbach.

Green, Chris. “Crabgrass as Grassroots: The Contending Influences of Don West and Lucy Mason in Post-War Georgia.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005

Harris, Abram Lincoln. “Black Communists in Dixie.” In Race, Radicalism, and Reform: Selected Papers, edited by William A. Darity. New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1989. Reprint of a 1925 essay by Harris (using pseudonyms) describing black radicals expelled from a Virginia Workers party branch for putting race above class.

Kamp, Joseph P. The Fifth Column in the South. Pamphlet. New Haven, CT: Constitutional Educational League, Inc., 1940. Right-wing polemic.

Kelley, Robin D.G. “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993).

Miller, Abe. “Robert Fowler Hall: The Communist Party and Civil Rights.” Paper presented at The Historical Society’s Midwestern Region conference. Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, 2000. Hall was a leading white Southern Communist.

Nelson, Claire Nee. “Louise Thompson Patterson and the Southern Roots of the Popular Front.” In Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change, edited by Angela Boswell and Judith N. McArthur. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Communist Infiltration and Activities in the South. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1958.

U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Communism in Mid-South. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1957.

Williams, John. “Struggle of the Thirties in the South.” In The Negro in Depression and War Prelude to Revolution, 1930-1945, edited by Bernard Sternsher. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. John Williams may be a pseudonym for Communist Hosea Hudson.

Zahavi, Gerald. “Regionalism and Revolution: Don West, Robert F. Hall, and the Communist Party in Appalachia, 1928-1948.” Paper presented at Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. Boston, MA, 2004.

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Communists in the South: The States

Communists in the South: Alabama

Fosl, Catherine. “Life and Times of a Rebel Girl: Jane Speed and the Alabama Communist Party.” Southern Historian 18 (1997). Speed, from an elite family, joined the CPUSA in the early 1930s.

Johnson, Clyde. “Red Dawn in Alabama?” Nation, 21 September 1991. Letter from C.P. veteran involved with the C.P. in Alabama in the 1930s praising Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe.

Kelley, Robin D.G. “Hammer n’ Hoe: Black Radicalism and the Communist Party in Alabama, 1929-1941.” Ph.D. diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1987.

Kelley, Robin D.G. “‘Comrades, Praise Gawd for Lenin and Them!’: Ideology and Culture Among Black Communists in Alabama, 1930-1935.” Science & Society 52, no. 1 (Spring 1988). Discusses religiosity of Alabama black Communists in the Third Period, suggests that some blacks regarded the C.P. and the Soviet Union as the fulfillment of a “folk belief that the ‘Yankees’ would return in order to complete the Reconstruction,” and maintains that a fruitful blending of Marxism-Leninism and black folk culture occurred.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. “For Communists eager to get on with the task of revolution, the South was a new, mysterious frontier.... [T]hey brought with them the cultural and ideological baggage of a Northern, urban-based movement, including assumptions about the backwardness of Southern workers. Yet, gnawing at the edges of their preconceptions was a policy that situated Southern blacks at the heart of the region’s revolutionary movement. Following nearly a decade of resolutions and reassessments on the ‘Negro Question,’ in 1928 the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International insisted that blacks concentrated in the black belt counties of the Deep South constituted an oppressed nation.... As an oppressed nation, the resolution maintained, African-Americans had the right to self-determination: political power, control over the economy, and the right to secede from the United States.”

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Communists in the South: Georgia

Lichtenstein, Alex. “Chain Gangs, Communism, and the ‘Negro Question’: John L. Spivak’s Georgia Nigger.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1995). Spivak’s combination of documentary reporting and proletarian fiction depicting African-American life on the chain gang and in peonage was published in 1932.

Moore, John Hammond. “Communists and Fascists in a Southern City: Atlanta, 1930.” South Atlantic Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Summer 1968): 437-54. Police moved quickly against Communist organizing among blacks. A “Blackshirt” movement of KKK supporters and unemployed whites grew large, but was driven underground by a hostile press and legal harassment by authorities.

Spivak, John Louis. Georgia Nigger. New York: Brewer, Warren and Putmam, 1932. Spivak was a secret Communist.

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Communists in the South: North Carolina

Scales, Junius Irving. Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers. Assisted by Richard Nickson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Scales, from a wealthy Southern family, became a CPUSA official and leader of the party in North Carolina. He was convicted and imprisoned under the membership clause of the Smith Act, the only person jailed under that clause. He became disillusioned and left the party while his case was on appeal. After the Supreme Court rejected his appeals he was imprisoned but later pardoned by President Kennedy after serving a portion of his term.

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Return to Table of Contents – Chapter Titles Only

Return to Table of Contents - Chapter Titles with Sections and Subsections

Chapter 3

Schismatic Communist Movements

Alexander, Robert J. “Schisms and Unifications in the American Old Left, 1953-1970.” Labor History 14, no. 4 (1973). Organizational survey.

Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London, New York: Verso, 2002.

Groups of Council Communists of America. Living Marxism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1970. Reprint of a periodical originally published in Chicago, Feb. 1938-fall 1941.

Klehr, Harvey. Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988. Survey of the status in the 1980s of the C.P., various Trotskyist and Maoist splinters, New Left radical groups, and such bodies as the CISPES, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Mobilization for Survival, National Lawyers Guild, Rainbow Coalition, and the Institute for Policy Studies.

New Committee for Publications. NCP Report. New York: New Committee for Publications, 1946. Journal of a group seeking “to bring about the establishment of a real Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist party in the U.S.”

None. Focus. 1949. Journal published by a group of Communists organized as a Marxist-Leninst study circle.

O’Brien, Jim. “American Leninism in the 1970s.” Radical America 11 &12, no. 1&6 (1977-78). Surveys the wide variety of Leninist organizations; concludes that the Communist party is likely to remain the dominant body.

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Trotskyism

Anderson, Kevin. “Theoretical Contrasts, Burnham, Novack, James, Dunayevskaya.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Bernabe, Rafael. “Latin American Perspective.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan M. Wald, eds. Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Includes, “The First Fifty Years of American Trotskyism” (Le Blanc); “The Liberating Influence of the Transitional Program” (Breitman); “George Novack, 1905-1992 -- Meaning a Life” (Wald); “Leninism in the United States and the Decline of American Trotskyism” (Le Blanc); “From the Old Left to the New Left and Beyond: The Legacy and Prospects for Socialism in the United States” (Wald); “The End of ‘American Trotskyism’?” (Wald); Appendix on George Breitman (Editorial Committee of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism and Ernest Mandel)

Broué, Pierre. “International & U.S. Trotskyism.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Cannon, James P. The Revolutionary Origins of the Socialist Workers Party: The Communist League in America, 1928-1938. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995.

Carlson, Oliver. “Recollections of American Trotskyist Leaders.” Studies in Comparative Communism 10, no. 1-2 (1977). Memoir by a Trotskyist mentioning conversations with William Foster, Karl Radek, James Cannon, Max Shachtman and others in the 1920s and 1930s.

Chase, William. “Троцкий в Мексике [Trotsky Mexico].” Otechestvennaia Istoriia (1995). On Trotsky’s contacts with the Dies Committee.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. Discusses Trotsky’s just over two-month stay in New York in 1917 and his role with the Russian-language socialist paper Novi Mir.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Notes that the American Socialist Workers party, as weak as it was, was one of the stronger elements in the Trotskyist “Fourth International,” that in exile his secretaries and bodyguards were chiefly American, and notes Trotsky’s advice to American Trotskyists on their disputes and strategy.

Dillard, Angela D. “A Farewell to White Radicals, Too?: The Reverend Albert Cleage, George Breitman and the Freedom Now Party?” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

Elias, Robert. “The Secret Life of Leon Trotsky: Baseball and the Revolution.” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 9, no. 1 (2000/2001).

Fenyo, Mario D. “Trotsky and His Heirs: The American Perspective.” Studies in Comparative Communism 10 (Spring 1977).

Goldberg, Judith. American Trotskyism, 1928-1970. New York, 1971.

Glotzer, Albert. Trotsky: Memoir & Critique. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989. Glotzer joined the American C.P. in 1923, was expelled for Trotskyism in 1928, and was a major figure in the American Troskyist movement in the 1930s. Glotzer was closely associated with Trotsky during Trotsky’s exile in Turkey. Glotzer broke with Trotsky over the “Russian Question” in 1940. Glotzer recounts his relationship with Trotsky, reproduces thirty rare photographs as well as correspondence between Trotsky and himself, and describes in detail the Dewey Commission hearings in Mexico City where Trotsky attacked the Moscow show trials (Glotzer was the official reporter for the Mexico City hearings.) Glotzer offers his own analysis of Trotsky’s role in the Communist movement and the latter’s mistakes in the struggle against Stalin.

Holmstrom, Nancy. “Theoretical Reflections.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Jayko, Margaret, ed. FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit Against Government Spying. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1988.

Le Blanc, Paul. Trotskyism in America, The First Fifty Years. New York: Fourth Internationalist Tendency, 1987. Short survey of Trotskyist history by a leader of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency faction. Contains membership figures for selected years from 1939 to 1976. Brief discussions of the Oehlerist, Shachtmanist, Goldman-Morrow, Johnson-Forrest, Cochranist, and Wohlforth/Robertson splits.

McDonald, Lawrence Patton. Trotskyism and Terror: The Strategy of Revolution. Washington, DC: ACU Educational and Research Institute, 1977.

Myers, Constance Ashton. “American Trotskyists, 1928-1941.” Ph.D. diss. University of South Carolina, 1974.

Myers, Constance A. “American Trotskyists: The First Years.” Studies in Comparative Communism 10 (Spring 1977).

Myers, Constance Ashton. The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Comprehensive history of the internal politics of Trotskyism in America from the time of the expulsion from the Communist party to the expulsion of the Shachtmanists from the Socialist Workers party.

Novack, George. “Fifty Years of American Trotskyism.” International Socialist Review, November 1978. Written by a leading Trotskyist.

Robbins, Jack Alan. The Birth of American Trotskyism, 1927-1929: The Origins of a Radical Marxist Movement. [Mount Vernon, NY]:, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1973.

St. John, Lucy, and Tim Wohlforth. Towards a History of the Fourth International. Pamphlet. Bulletin Pamphlet Series. New York, NY: Labor Publications, 1972.

Shachtman, Max. Ten Years: History and Principles of the Left Opposition. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1933.

Shriver, George. “Breitman and Trotsky’s Writings.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

Smith, Michael. “Opposition to Vietnam War.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Trotsky, Leon, James Patrick Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Vincent Raymond Dunne. Leon Trotsky on Labor Party: Stenographic Report of Discussion Held in 1938 with Leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. Pamphlet. [New York]: Bulletin Publications, 1968.

U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. American Aspects of Assassination of Leon Trotsky. Washington: U. S. Govt. Print. Off., 1951.

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. Communists in the Trotsky Mold; a Report on the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1971.

Volkogonov, Dmitrii Antonovich. Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary. Edited and translated by Harold Shukman. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Discusses American Trotskyism and KGB infiltration of the Trotskyist movement.

Wald, Alan. “The End of American Trotskyism?” Against the Current 53, 54, & 55 (1994-95). Surveys recent books on U.S. Trotskyism, comparing the experience of Trotskyism in the 30s with that of the 60s. Concluded that the core ideas of Trotskyist theory remain compelling but are most useful as part of a larger conception of a revolutionary socialist movement. He urges scholars and activists to emulate the “New historians of U.S. Communism“ in the sense of undertaking fresh local studies of U.S. Trotskyism with an emphasis on rank-and-file activities, regional experiences, and gender, ‘race‘ and ethnicity issues. Response by Frank Lovell, July-August 1995, by Steve Bloom, September-October 1995, reply by Wald, September-October 1995.

Wald, Alan. “Trotskyism and the Angel of History.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Woolley, Barry Lee. Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999. Written by a Trotskyist veteran. A history of the Fourth International from its founding until its Tenth World Congress in 1974. Discusses American Trotskyists and the Socialist Workers Party and includes a list of party names and pseudonyms.

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Smith Act Prosecution of the Trotskyists

Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial. New York, 1942. Contains the stenographic testimony of Cannon at the 1941 trial of Socialist Workers party and Minneapolis Teamster Local 544 leader under the Smith Act.

Cannon, James Patrick, ed. Why We Are in Prison: Farewell Speeches of the 18 SWP and 544-CIO Minneapolis Prisoners. Pamphlet. New York, NY: Pioneer Publishers, 1944.

Cannon, James Patrick. Socialism on Trial: The Official Court Record of James P. Cannon’s Testimony in the Famous Minneapolis “Sedition” Trial. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

Cannon, James Patrick, and Grandizo Munis. Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial. Pamphlet. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942.

Pahl, Thomas L. “The G-String Conspiracy, Political Reprisal or Armed Revolt?: The Minneapolis Trotskyite Trial.” Labor History 8, no. 1 (Winter 1967). Discusses government prosecution of the Socialist Workers party under the Smith Act in the early 1940s.

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Detroit Trotskyists

Breitman, Dorothea. “Detroit Branch, 1950s-1960s.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Georgakas, Dan. “The Detroiters and Others.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

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James Cannon and American Trotskyism

Cannon, James Patrick. The History of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944. Written by American Trotskyism’s founder and dominant figure.

Cannon, James Patrick. American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism. Pamphlet. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1947.

Cannon, James Patrick. Notebook of an Agitator. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1958.

Cannon, James Patrick. The First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant. New York: L. Stuart, 1962. Memoir by a Communist and later Trotskyist leader.

Cannon, James Patrick. Speeches for Socialism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.

Cannon, James Patrick. Speeches to the Party: The Revolutionary Perspective and the Revolutionary Party. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

Cannon, James Patrick. The Struggle for Socialism in the “American Century”: James P. Cannon Writings and Speeches, 1945-47. Edited by Leslie Evans. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977.

Cannon, James Patrick. The Left Opposition in the U.S., 1928-31: Writings and Speeches, 1928-31. Edited by Fred Stanton. New York, NY: Monad Press for the Anchor Foundation, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1981.

Cannon, James Patrick. The Communist League of America, 1932-34: James P. Cannon, Writings and Speeches, 1932-34. New York: Monad Press, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1985.

Cannon, James Patrick. James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928. New York City: Prometheus Research Library, 1992. Well edited collection of sixty Cannon articles, speeches, letters, and intraparty statements, a number previously unpublished, as well as five items by Cannon’s allies (Martin Abern, Arne Swabeck, Alfred Wagenknecht, and Antoinette Konikow) and one anti-Cannon document by Jack Stachel. Contains as well an index and glossary and a bibliography of Cannon’s writings and speeches, 1912-1928.

Cannon, James Patrick. The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-1938: Report of a Participant. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. 4th edition with additional material.

Cannon, James Patrick, and Rose Karsner. Letters from Prison. New York: Merit Publishers, 1968.

Cannon, James Patrick, Max Shachtman, and others. Dog Days: James P. Cannon Vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America 1931-1933. Edited by Prometheus Research Library. New York, NY: Spartacist Pub., 2002.

Evans, Les, and others. James P. Cannon as We Knew Him. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976. Reminiscences by thirty-three Trotskyists and colleagues.

Palmer, Bryan. “Love and Revolution: Jim Cannon, Rose Karsner and the Relation of the Personal and the Political in the Formation of the American Trotskyist Movement.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, 1999.

Palmer, Bryan. “Perspectives on Cannon.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Palmer, Bryan D. “Maurice Spector, James P. Cannon, and the Origins of Canadian Trotskyism.” Labour/Le Travail, no. 56 (Fall 2005): 91.

Palmer, Bryan D. James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. TOC: Introduction: The communist can(n)on -- Rosedale roots: facts and fictions -- Youth’s discoveries -- Hobo rebel/homeguard -- Red dawn -- Underground -- Geese in flight -- Pepper spray -- Stalinist suspensions -- Labor defender -- Living with Lovestone -- Expulsion -- Conclusion: James P. Cannon, the United States revolutionary movement, and the end of an age of innocence.

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Cochran Tendency and the Socialist Union of America

American Socialist. The American Socialist. New York: American Socialist Publications, 1954. Journal of the Cochranist faction.

Proyect, Louis. “Reflections on the Cochran Tendency.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Socialist Union of America. The Educator. New York City: Socialist Union of America, 1953. Internal journal, 1953, of the Cochranist faction.

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C.L.R. James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency

Buhle, Paul, ed. C.L.R. James, His Life and Work. London, New York: Allison & Busby, distr. by Schocken Books, 1986.

Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London, New York: Verso, 1988.

Buhle, Paul. “C. L. R. James; Revolutionary, 1901-89.” Radical America 22, no. 5 (1989).

Dworkin, Dennis. “C. L. R. James in Nevada.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2001). Regarding James’ 1948 visit.

Farred, Grant. “C.L.R. James and U.S. Trotskyism.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Glaberman, Martin. “C.L.R. James - A Recollection.” New Politics 2 (Winter 1990).

Glaberman, Martin. “C.L.R. James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Grimshaw, Anna. “C.L.R. James’s American Civilization.” Paper presented at “Cold War Culture” conference. University College, London, U.K., 1994.

Hogsbjerg, Christian. “Beyond the Boundary of Leninism? CLR James and 1956.” Revolutionary History 9, no. 3 (2006).

James, C. L. R., and Constance Webb. Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948. Edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995.

MacKenzie, Alan J. “Radical Pan-Africanism in the 1930s: A Discussion with C.L.R. James.” Radical History Review, no. 24 (Fall 1980). Discusses the role of Communists in Black politics in the 1930s.

McIntosh, Andrew. “C.L.R. James and the Black Jacobins Revisited.” Society 40, no. 4 (2003).

McLemee, Scott. “Anticipating the New Left: CLR James, the Johnson Forest Group, and Participatory Democracy.” Paper presented at Viet Nam Generation, Inc’s “Sixties Generations” conference. Western Connecticut State University, 1994.

McLemee, Scott, and Paul Le Blanc, eds. C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C.L.R. James 1939-1949. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994. Reprints James essays on Trotsky, Richard Wright, André Malraux, Edmund Wilson, African-American history, and labor history as well as essays on James: Scott McLemee, “American Civilization and World Revolution: C.L.R. James in the United States, 1938-1953 and Beyond,” Charles van Geldern, “C. L. R. James -- Thinker, Writer, Revolutionary,” Martin Glaberman, “C. L. R. James: A Recollection,” John Bracey, “Nello,” and Paul Buhle, “Marxism in the USA.”

Nordquist, Joan, comp. C. L. R. James: A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, CA: Reference and Research Services, 2001.

Robinson, Cedric J. “C.L.R. James and the Black Radical Tradition.” Review 6 (Winter 1983).

Thelwill, Michael. “C.L.R. James: More Dangerous As He Grew Older.” Radical America 22, no. 5 (1989).

Webb, Constance. Not Without Love: Memoirs. Hanover Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College & University Press of New England, 2003.

Worcester, Kent. “C.L.R. James and the Gospel of American Modernity.” Socialism and Democracy 8, no. 2-3 (1992). “In preaching the gospel of a reconstructed American modernity, James provocatively combined Marxist, populist, autonomist, ‘Johnsonite’ and Jeffersonian themes in a way that defied the conventional categories of both the New York intellectuals and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School.”

Worcester, Kent. “C.L.R. James, Multiculturalism, and the Canon.” National Political Science Review 4 (1994). Discusses the relevancy of James’ views to the debate over multiculturalism.

Worcester, Kent. “The American C.L.R. James.” Minnesota Review (1995). Essay-review of McLemee and Le Blanc’s C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism. Sees James while in the U.S. (1938-1953) breaking with the idea of a vanguard party, bringing out the centrality of the Negro question in America, and developing ideas that presaged the New Left, black power, and feminism. Discusses James’ analysis of American history and culture in his lengthy unpublished manuscript “American Civilization.”

Worcester, Kent. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. [Albany]: State University of New York Press, 1995. Biography of one of the most prolific radical intellectuals of this century, touching on James’ work in Marxist theory, revolutionary and Caribbean politics, literature, popular culture, and cricket.

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Leninist League

Leninist League USA. In Defense of Bolshevism. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1937.

Leninist League USA. The Bulletin of the Leninist League, U.S.A. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1939.

Leninist League USA. Report and Discussion on Break with S.W.P. Pamphlet. [New York: Leninist League USA, 1947.

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Revolutionary Workers League (Hugo Oehler and Thomas Stamm)

Revolutionary Workers League of the U.S. Constitution of the Revolutionary Workers League, U.S., and Its Position on Democratic Centralism. New York: Demos Press, 1938.

Revolutionary Workers League (U.S.). Draft Program of the Revolutionary Workers League of the United States. Chicago: Revolutionary Workers League, 1939.

Revolutionary Workers League. The Fourth International. New York City: Revolutionary Workers League, 1936. Journal, 1936-.

Revolutionary Workers League. The Marxist. [Chicago]: Revolutionary Workers League of the U.S., 1939. Journal, 1939-.

Revolutionary Workers League, U.S. Revolt. New York: Revolutionary Workers League, U.S., 1938. Published by the Convention Organization Committee of the Revolutionary Workers League, March-April, 1938.

Workers League for a Revolutionary Party. The Bulletin of the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of a late 1930s periodical originally published in New York by the Red Star Press. Journal of a faction, led by George Marlen, the split from the RWL. Volume includes reprints of: In Defense of Bolshevism, Bulletin of the Leninist League, U.S.A., Bulletin (Leninist League, U.S.A.), and: Political Correspondence of the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party, 1946-1950.

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Max Shachtman and the Workers Party

Browder, Earl, and Max Shachtman. Is Russia a Socialist Community? a Debate: Yes! Earl Browder No! Max Shachtman. Pamphlet. Bombay, India: C.P.D. Kurup, 1950.

Buhle, Paul, ed. The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940-1949 Recollections and Reflections: A Tamiment Library/Oral History of the American Left Conference, May 6-7, 1983. New York, N.Y.: New York University Libraries, Tamiment Institute/Ben Josephson Library, 1985. Edited transcript of oral recollections of former Workers party (Shachtmanists) activists.

Drucker, Peter. Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the “American Century.” Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994. Explores the activity and thought of Shachtman, who from the 1920s to the 1970s moved from the Communist party to a leading figure in the early American Trotskyist movement, to breaking with Trotskyism over its continued defense of the Soviet state to found the Workers Party, and then moving toward social democracy via the Socialist Party and eventually supporting the Humphrey/Jackson wing of the Democratic party. Defines three paradigms within which Shachtman operated--his Trotskyist paradigm, his independent socialist paradigm and his realignment paradigm--and explains each as determined by a relationship to a particular sector of the labor movement--the CIO rank and file, the leadership of the UAW under Walter Reuther, and the AFL-CIO leadership under George Meany.

Drucker, Peter. “Max Shachtman’s Three Marxisms: A Political Activist and Theorist’s Odyssey Through the ‘American Century.’” Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1994.

Drucker, Peter. “Perspectives on Shachtman.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Glotzer, Albert. “Max Shachtman -- A Political-Biographical Essay.” Bulletin of the Tamiment Institute, Ben Josephson Library 50 (April 1983). The issue also contains a guide to the extensive Shachtman collection of the Tamiment Institute.

Haskell, Gordon K. A Missionary Shachtmanite: A Political Autobiography, [privately printed], 1991.

Jacobson, Julius. “The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman.” New Politics 10 (Winter 1973).

Kollisch, Eva. Girl in Movement: A Memoir. Thetford, VT: Glad Day Books, 2000. Kollisch was active in Max Shachtman’s Workers Party in the 1940s. Such figures as Stanley Plastrik (to whom she was married) and Irving Howe appear under pseudonyms.

Shachtman, Max. “Radicalism in the Thirties: The Trotskyist View.” In As We Saw the Thirties: Essays on Social and Political Movements of a Decade, edited by Rita James Simon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967.

Shachtman, Max. The Fight for Socialism: The Principles and Program of the Workers Party. New York: New International Publishing Co., 1946.

Shachtman, Max. “25 Years of American Trotskyism.” New International 20 (February 1954).

Shachtman, Max. The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State. New York: Donald Press, 1962. Shachtman’s analysis of how the Bolshevik revolution had produced not simply a deformed workers state but a new form of tyranny.

Shachtman, Max. Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism? Internal Problems of the Workers Party. Pamphlet. New York: Prometheus Research Library, 2000.

Shachtman, Max. Race and Revolution. Edited by Christopher Phelps. London New York: Verso, 2003. Edited version of a unfinished Shachtman manuscript.

Slavin, Morris. “Reflections on the Workers Party.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Weir, Stan. “Requiem for Max Shachtman.” Radical America 7, no. 1 (1973). Written by a former Shachtmanist.

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Shermanites

Selznick, Philip. The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Includes some autobiographical reflections on his youthful Trotskyism. He became a young Trotskyist around 1937 and joined Max Shachtman's Workers Party when it split from the Socialist Workers party in 1940. Selznick, under his party name “Sherman,” organized a faction known as the "Shermanites" opposing Shachtman. The Shermanites group considered themselves revolutionary but "anti-Bolshevik."

Spartacist League

Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities. The Spartacist League and Certain Other Communist Activities in South Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Legislature, 1967.

NYC Spartacist League. Spartacist East. New York, N.Y.: NYC Spartacist League, 1968. Journal, 1968-.

Wohlforth, Tim. What is Spartacist? Pamphlet. New York, NY: Labor Publications, 1971. Regarding the Spartacist faction.

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Vern-Ryan Tendency

Vern, Dennis, and Sam Ryan. Documents of the Vern-Ryan Tendency, 1950-1953. [Los Angeles, CA?]: Communard Publishers, 1983.

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Weiss Current

Edwards, Theodore. “The Weiss Current.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

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League for a Revolutionary Workers Party (B.J. Field)

League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. Labor Front. New York, N.Y.: Labor Front Publishing Association, 1934. Journal, 1934-1936, of the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party aka Organization Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party (U.S.) led by B.J. Field

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Trotskyism and Maoism

Fields, A.B. “Trotskyism and Maoism: A Comparative Analysis of Theory and Practice in France and the United States.” Studies in Comparative Communism 16 (Spring-Summer 1983).

Fields, A. Belden. Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States. New York: Praeger, 1988.

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Trotskyists and the Labor Movement

Brown, Kathleen. “Women in Minneapolis Strike.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Burke, Arthur. “The Work of Cannon and Shachtman in the Trade Unions, Part IV: The Trotskyists in the UAW.” Bulletin of the Workers League for a Revolutionary Party 9 (June-July 1946).

Devinatz, Victor. “Trotskyists in Auto.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Devinatz, Victor G. “The Role of the Trotskyists in the United Auto Workers, 1939-1949.” Left History 10, no. 2 (2005).

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Bureaucracy. New York: Published by Monad Press for the Anchor Foundation:, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1977. Discusses the expulsion of Trotskyists from their positions within the Teamsters.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Power. New York: Monad Press, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1973. Discusses the growth of Teamster local 574 under Trotskyist leadership in the year 1934-1939.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad Press, 1972. Memoir of a Trotskyist trade union leader. Discusses his role in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strike which broke open-shop domination of the city.

James, Ralph C., and Estelle James. Hoffa and the Teamsters a Study of Union Power. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1965. Notes the influence of Trotskyists on Hoffa’s tactics.

James, Ralph C., and Estelle James. “The Purge of the Trotskyites from the Teamsters.” Western Political Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1966). Reviews the rise and fall of Trotskyist power (1934-1941) in Minneapolis Teamsters locals and the Central States Drivers Council.

Korth, Philip A. Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995.

Le Blanc, Paul, and Thomas Barrett, eds. Revolutionary Labor Socialist: The Life, Ideas, and Comrades of Frank Lovell. Union City, NJ: Smyrna Press, 2000. A Trotskyist organizer who worked in the SUP and UAW.

Moody, Kim. “C.P. & Trotskyist Trade Unionism.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Morris, George. The Trotskyite 5th Column in the Labor Movement. New York: New Century Publishers, Inc., 1945. Communist denunciation of Trotskyist labor organizing.

Quam, Lois, and Peter J. Rachleff. “Keeping Minneapolis an Open-Shop Town: The Citizens’ Alliance in the 1930s.” Minnesota History 50, no. 3 (Fall 1986). Notes the role of a Trotskyist-led Teamster local in breaking the power of the open shop movement in Minneapolis.

Sannes, Erling N. “‘There is Power in a Union’: Organizing Fargo’s Milk-Wagon Drivers in 1934.” North Dakota History 54, no. 2 (Spring 1987). Notes the role of Miles Dunne and other Minneapolis Trotskyist leaders of Teamster Local 574 in the organizing and strike action of Fargo Teamster Local 173. Notes the sympathy and assistance provided to the strike by the Farmers Holiday Association and by important politicians linked to the farmers Nonpartisan League.

Sannes, Erling N. “‘Union Makes Strength’: Organizing Teamsters in South Dakota in the 1930s.” South Dakota History 18, no. 1&2 (Spring/Summer 1988). Notes role of Minneapolis Teamster and Trotskyist leaders Carl Skoglund, Farrell Dobbs, and Vincent Dunne in spreading Teamster organizing into South Dakota. Notes that in 1938 Aaron Kruger lost his position as vice-president of the South Dakota State Federation of Labor in part for his links to the C.P.-influenced Workers Alliance.

Tank, Herb. Inside Job! The Story of Trotskyite Intrigue in the Labor Movement. Pamphlet. New York: New Century Publishers, 1947. Communist attack on Trotskyist labor organizing.

Tussey, Jean. “Trotskyist Labor Perspectives.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Walker, Charles Rumford. American City: A Rank and File History. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. Discusses the Trotskyist-led Teamster strike in Minneapolis.

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Trotskyism and Black Americans

Breitman, George. Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: The Writings of George Breitman. Edited by Anthony Marcus. Revolutionary Studies. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005.

Grauer, Gladys. “Experiences of an African-American Trotskyist.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Phelps, Christopher. “Black Trotskyists.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Somburu, Kwame. “Malcolm X and Trotskyism.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Trotsky, Leon. Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self-Determination. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978.

Wald, Alan. “Breitman and the Post-World War II Black Radicalization.” Paper presented at North American Labor History Conference. Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2005.

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Trotskyism and the Intelligentsia

Myers, Constance Ashton. “‘We Were a Little Hipped on the Subject of Trotsky,’ Literary Trotskyists in the 1930s.” In Cultural Politics: Radical Movements in Modern History, edited by Jerold M. Starr and Jerold M. Starr. New York: Praeger, 1985.

Wald, Alan M. “Trotsky and American Intellectuals.” Cahiers Leon Trotsky [France] 19 (September 1984)

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Illustrative CPUSA Attacks on American Trotskyism

Olgin, Moissaye J. Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1935. Rabid denunciation of Trotskyism one of the most evil forces in the world.

Wolfe, Bertram David. The Trotsky Opposition: Its Significance for American Workers. Pamphlet. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. CPUSA attack on Trotskyism.

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Leon Trotsky and the Dewey Commission

Belton, John. “The Commission of Inquiry Into Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Great Purge Trials in Moscow.” Master’s thesis. Emory University, 1977. History of the commission (Dewey Commission) of American intellectuals who investigated Soviet charges against Trotsky and found them largely baseless or unproven.

Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. The Case of Leon Trotsky: Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials. By the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry, John Dewey, Chairman [and Others]. Edited by Albert Manning Glotzer and John Dewey. New York: Merit Publishers, 1968.

Dewey, John, Benjamin Stolberg, Suzanne La Follette, and Commission of Inquiry into the Charges made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. The Case of Leon Trotsky. Edited by Albert Glotzer. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937.

Dewey, John, Benjamin Stolberg, Suzanne La Follette, and Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938.

Engerman, David C. “Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and the Soviets: A Soviet Document on an Episode in American Intellectual History.” Intellectual History Newsletter 20 (1998).

Martin, Jay F. “John Dewey and the Trial of Leon Trotsky.” Partisan Review 68, no. 4 (2001).

Poole, Thomas Ray, ed. Counter-Trial: Leon Trotsky on the Soviet Purge Trials. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1974. Microfilm.

Spitzer, Alan B. Historical Truth and Lies About the Past: Reflections on Dewey, Dreyfus, de Man, and Reagan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Discusses the Dewey Commission’s inquiry on the USSR’s charges against Trotsky and the vicious attacks on the commission by Communists and their allies.

Trotsky, Leon. The Stalin School of Falsification. Translated by John G. Wright, introduction and commentary Max Shachtman. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1962.

Wald, Alan M. “Memorials of the John Dewey Commission: Forty Years Later.” Antioch Review 38 (1977)

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Trotskyist Reference Works

“Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line,” 2002. <http://www.trotskyism.org>

Lubitz, Wolfgang, comp. and ed. Trotsky Bibliography: A Classified List of Published Items About Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism. New York: K.G. Saur, 1988.

Lubitz, Wolfgang, and Petra Lubitz, comps. and eds. Trotsky Bibliography: An International Classified List of Publications About Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism 1905-1998. München New York: K.G. Saur, 1999.

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Trotskyist Records and Documents

Alexander, Robert Jackson. International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Breitman, George, ed. The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolutions, 1938-39. New York: Monad Press, distr. by Pathfinder Press, 1982.

Cannon, James Patrick. The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1943. Documentary record of Communist factionalism.

Communist League of America. Internal Bulletin. New York: National Committee, 1932. Journal, 1932-1934.

Communist League of America, and International Communist League. International Bulletin of the League of Communist Internationalists. [New York, N.Y.]: Communist League of America, 1934.

Communist League of America (Opposition). War and the 4th International Draft Theses Adopted by the International Secretariat of the International Communist League. Edited by Sara Weber. [New York]: Communist League of America, 1934.

Communist League of America (Opposition) National Youth Committee. Young Spartacus. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1970. Reprint of the journal of the Communist League of America (Opposition) National Youth Committee, Spartacus Youth Clubs of America and Spartacus Youth League. Four volumes.

Left Wing Group, Workers Party U.S.A. International News. New York: Left Wing Group, Workers Party U.S.A., 1935. Journal, 1935, of a Trotskyist faction.

Opposition Group in the Workers (Communist) Party of America. Militant. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. reprint, with an introduction by Joseph Hansen added, of a periodical edited by James P. Cannon originally published in New York November. 15, 1928-March 1, 1929 by the Opposition Group in the Workers (Communist) Party of America; March 15-May 1/15, 1929 by the Opposition Group in the Communist Party of America; June 1, 1929-March 17, 1934 by the Communist League of America (Opposition); March 24-December. 8, 1934, by the Communist League of America. Seven volumes.

Turnbull, Emily. “Prometheus Library.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

Workers Party of the United States. Workers Party Internal Bulletin. The Committee, 1935. Journal, 1935.

Workers Party of the United States. New Militant. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of a periodical, 1934-1936, edited by James P. Cannon and published weekly in New York as the organ of the Workers Party of the U.S.

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Lovestone and the Right Opposition

Alexander, Robert Jackson. The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930’s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Surveys the fate of the Right Opposition led by Jay Lovestone in America and in other nations after its expulsion from the Communist party.

Communist Party of the U.S.A. (Majority Group). Revolutionary Age. New York, N.Y.: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint of the journal of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (Majority Group), 1929-1932, in three volumes.

Communist Party of the United States of America (majority group). The Crisis in the Communist Party of the United States of America. Pamphlet. New York, NY: Revolutionary Age, 1930. Statement of principles of the Lovestoneist splinter.

Communist Party U.S.A. (Opposition). Where We Stand. New York: Communist Party of United States (Opposition), 1934. v. 1. Platform and programmatic documents of the International Communist Opposition -- v. 2. Programmatic documents of the Communist Party, USA (Opposition).

Communist Youth Opposition (U.S.). Young Communist. [New York, N.Y.?]: Communist Youth Opposition, 1932. Journal, 1932-.

Independent Labor League of America. Discussion Bulletin of the Independent Labor League of America. [New York]: The League, 1939. Journal, 193

Independent Labor League of America. Workers Age. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint. Originally published as the official organ of the Independent Labor League of America. Organ of the National Council of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (Majority Group), 1932; of the National Council of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (Opposition), 1932-1934; of the National Committee, Communist Party U.S.A. (Opposition), 1935-1937; of the National Council, Independent Communist Labor League of America, 1937-1938; of the National Council, Independent Labor League of America, 1938-1941.

International Communist Opposition, and Communist Party (Opposition) (U.S.). The International Class Struggle. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1936.

Lovestone, Jay. The People’s Front Illusion: From “Social Fascism” to the “People’s Front.” New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1937.

Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Says that Jay Lovestone was a paid CIA contact until 1974 when Colby ordered review on Angleton activities and closed the case. Lovestone information was called JX by CIA, run directly by Angleton, with payment to Lovestone through Mario Brod, Angleton’s lawyer. Tom Braden handled Lovestone from 1950 to 1954, then when Braden left, replaced by Angleton.

Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999. Comprehensive journalistic biography covering Lovestone’s leadership of the CPUSA in the 1920s, his expulsion by Moscow in 1929, leadership of a C.P. opposition group in the 1930s, his shift toward a social democratic stance and his taking on a major role as a publicly little-known but highly influential anti-Communist figure in the labor movement both in the U.S. and abroad. Discusses his covert relationship with the CIA in the Cold War.

Tosstorff, Reiner. “The Secret World of American Communism -- Eine Marginalie Zur Martin-Lovestone-Connection.” The International Newsletter of Historical Studies on Comintern, Communism and Stalinism 4&5, no. 9-13 (1997-98).

U.S. House Special Committee on Un-American Activities (Dies Committee). Testimony of Jay Lovestone, Secretary, Independent Labor League of America. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1939-40.

Wolfe, Bertram David. What is the Communist Opposition? Pamphlet. New York: Workers Age Publishing Association, 1933.

Wolfe, Bertram David. Marx and America. Pamphlet. New York: John Day Company, 1934.

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Monthly Review

Phelps, Christopher. “[Anniversary Issue]” Monthly Review, May 1999. Anniversary issue edited by Phelps. Includes photos and assessment of Monthly Review’s and its editors’s critical relationship to Communist Party and opposition to McCarthyism. Includes “An Interview with Paul M. Sweezy,” “An Interview with Harry Magdoff,” and “An Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood.”

Simon, John J. “Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher.” Monthly Review 55, no. 5 (2003)

Sweezy, Paul, and Harry Magdoff. “Marxism in America: The Monthly Review Experience -- An Interview by Michael Hillard and Claude Misukiewicz.” Rethinking Marxism 1 (Spring 1988)

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Communist League of Struggle

Communist League of Struggle (U.S.), and Albert Weisbord. Class Struggle. New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968. Reprint. Originally issued: New York Communist League of Struggle, 1931-1937

Weisbord, Albert. The Conquest of Power. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937. Weisbord, a leading Communist labor organizer in the mid-1920, split from the party, was briefly associated with the Trotskyists, and then founded the Communist League of Struggle. The Conquest of Power expressed Weisbord’s philosophy and interpretation of the history of the Communist movement in America.

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Communist Workers Party and Greensboro

Bacigal, Ronald J., and Margaret Ivey Bacigal. “When Racists and Radicals Meet.” Emory Law Journal 38 (Fall 1989). Discusses the violent 1979 clash between the Communist Worker’s party and the KKK and American Nazis in Greensboro, NC.

Bermanzohn, Sally Avery. “Survivors of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre: A Study of the Long Term Impact of Protest Movements On the Political Socialization of Radical Activists.” Ph.D. diss. CUNY, 1994. Discusses activists of the Communist Workers Party.

Bryant, Pat. “Justice Vs. the Movement.” Radical America 14, no. 6 (1980). Outraged that in connection with the November 1979 Klan shooting of Communist Workers Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina, that the federal government’s Community Relations Service cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Eastland, Terry. “The Communists and the Klan.” Commentary 69, no. 5 (1980). Discusses the violent confrontation between the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Workers’ Party (Workers’ Viewpoint Organization) in November 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Institute for Southern Studies. “The Third of November.” Southern Exposure 9, no. 3 (1981). On the murders of five Communist Workers Party demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, on 3 November 1979 in a clash with members of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party and the acquittal one year later of the six men charged with the crime.

Klehr, Harvey. “Maoists Move in on Manhattan Dems.” Our Town, 2 August 1987. Documents the entrance of members of the Communist Workers Party (renamed the New Democratic Movement in 1985) into Democratic Party political clubs in New York City using the CWP-linked Asian-Americans for Equality.

Parenti, Michael, and Carolyn Kazdin. “The Untold Story of the Greensboro Massacre.” Monthly Review 33, no. 6 (1981). Accuses local, state, and federal law enforcement officials of complicity with the Klan and Nazis in the killings of Communist Workers’ Party militants.

Waller, Signe. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.

Wheaton, Elizabeth. Codename GREENKIL: The 1979 Greensboro Killings. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Discusses in detail the murderous gun battle between activists of the Communist Workers Party, the KKK, and American Nazis.

Wheaton, Liz. “The Third of November.” Southern Exposure, Summer 1981.

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Independent Socialist Party

Rubinstein, Annette. “The Independent Socialist Party.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

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Maoists

Alexander, Robert Jackson. Maoism in the Developed World. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Surveys Maoist organizations in the U.S.

Avakian, Bob. From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist: A Memoir. Chicago, IL: Insight Press, 2005.

Chang, Nien-chen. “Maoists’ Infiltration and Subversive Activities in the U.S.A.” Issues & Studies [Taiwan] 7, no. 7 (1971).

Clecak, Peter. Radical Paradoxes; Dilemmas of the American Left: 1945-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Offers a rehabilitation of Stalinism and an endorsement of Maoism.

Kampen, Thomas. Chinese Communists and the West: A Concise Biographical Handbook of Chinese Communists and Western Supporters. Copenhagen London: NIAS Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Miller, William J. The People’s Republic of China’s United Front Tactics in the United States, 1972-1988. Bakersfield, CA: C. Schlacks, Jr., 1988.

U.S. House Committee on Internal Security. America’s Maoists: The Revolutionary Union, the Venceremos Organization Report. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1972.

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Marxist-Leninist Party

Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. U.S. Marxist-Leninists, Unite in Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism! Proletarian Revolution in the U.S. is Our Sacred Internationalist Duty!: Two Articles on the Path Forward in Party Building. Chicago: Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, 1977.

McLemee, Scott. “Nothing To Be Done.” In These Times, 21 March 1994. On the dissolution of the Marxist-Leninist Party USA, descendent of the late-1960s era American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) and the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. The party upheld Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by Enver Hoxha of the Party of Labor of Albania.

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Progressive Labor

Benin, Leigh David. “A Red Thread In Garment: Progressive Labor And New York City’s Industrial Heartland In The 1960s And 1970s.” Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1997.

Progressive Labor Party. Marxist Leninist Quarterly MLQ. Brooklyn, NY: Progressive Labor Co., 1963. Journal.

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Proletarian Party

Cochran, David. “A Socialist Publishing House.” History Workshop Journal [U.K.], no. 24 (1987). Notes that control of Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company and International Socialist Review were passed to persons who had aligned with the Proletarian Party in the 1920s.

Johnson, Oakley C. “1919 Crucial Year on the Left: A Study of the Proletarian Party.” Political Affairs 53 (December 1974).

Ruff, Allen. “A Path Not Taken: The Proletarian Party and the Early History of Communism in the United States.” Paper presented at Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, 1991. A faction of the left-wing of the Socialist Party in Michigan took part in the founding of the Communist Party of America. But it split within a year, arguing that the C.P. had overestimated the readiness of American workers for Bolshevik-style revolution. This group formed the Proletarian Party.

Ruff, Allen. “A Path Not Taken: The Proletarian Party and the Early History of Communism in the United States.” In Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History, edited by Ronald Charles Kent. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. A faction of the left-wing of the Socialist Party in Michigan took part in the founding of the Communist Party of America. But it split within a year, arguing that the C.P. had overestimated the readiness of American workers for Bolshevik-style revolution. This group formed the Proletarian Party.

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Proletarian Unity League

Sarkis, Charles, ed. What Went Wrong? Articles and Letters on the U.S. Communist Left in the 1970’s. New York: United Labor Press, 1982. Proletarian Unity League.

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Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist)

Anton, Peter. Internationalist News Letter. New York: Revolutionary Communist League-(Internationalist), 1972. Journal.

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Revolutionary Communist Party

Goldstein, Robert Justin. “The Revolutionary Communist Party and Flag Burning During Its Forgotten Years, 1974-1989.” Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, no. 6 (1999). On the RCP’s adoption of burning the American flag as a tactic.

Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Revolution. [Chicago, IL]: The Party, 1975. Journal.

Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Revolution and Counter-Revolution the Revisionist Coup in China and the Struggle in the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Chicago: RCP Publications, 1978.

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Third Camp Socialism

Johnson, Alan. “‘Neither Moscow Nor Washington’: The Third Camp as History and a Living Legacy.” New Politics 7, no. 3 (n.s.) (Summer 1999).

Johnson, Alan. “Hal Draper & Third Camp Socialism.” Paper presented at “Explorations in the History of U.S. Trotskyism” conference. New York University, Tamiment Library, 2000.

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