A Personal Look at America's Foremost Communist

Science &amp Society

International Labor and Working-Class History, 1981

American Communist History, 2019

I want to thank the executive committee, and especially Vernon Pederson, for asking me to speak to today and to everyone who came from far and wide to participate in this important conference. We are here today because we understand that when we research and write about American communism, we are entering an arena where the stakes are high: wars hot and cold have been fought, people gave their lives, others had them taken; and untold money was spent for the cause and to defeat the party altogether. In the end, the movement had an enormous impact on America's political shift to the right as well as on movements that flourished on the left. And today, in Trump's America, the history of American communism resonates. In the weeks leading up to the mid-term election, the Trump administration released a 72page report published by the Council of Economic Advisors attacking socialism. The report threatened that a democratic sweep in the midterms would likely result in the USA "becoming the next Venezuela." The report honed in on the likelihood that democrats would force government run healthcare down the throats of American citizens, ultimately draining national coffers. A sub section of the report titled: "The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning" connects the messaging of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. The Socialism that appears un-American in the depictions offered by Trump and his followers, takes on a different cast among today's socialists who are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, now larger than the Socialist Party ever was, and approaching the numbers of the Communist Party, are looking to the history of socialism generally, and the American Communist party specifically, and they are asking questions about what worked in the past and what didn't. They want to learn from the Old Left's organizing strategies and world view and to understand why the USA and the anti-communist left turned so fiercely on communists. The significance of our work is clear. So is its timeliness. In the USA and across the globe, rural and urban communities are confronting challenges brought by globalization, ethnic and racial nationalism and

2006

This article focuses on the vital contribution made by a network of inter-war activists in the US government, the military, the security services, eugenics institutes and big business lobbies to the creation of American anti-communism. Long before the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, this network helped entrench an ideology of anti-communism in the center of American political life. Its members developed political propaganda and mythology, and spread their message across the political, economic and social spectrum. In particular, the article debunks the myth of the 1920s as a period of political “normalcy”; describes the linkages between nascent anti-communism and America’s immigration policy revolution of the mid-1920s; explains the prevalence of racial theory, anti-labor views and cultural prejudice in the US’s growing national security apparatus; ties the emergence of 20th century anti-communism to long-standing anti-labor views and activity; describes the rise of “100% Americanism” in response to communism; and explains how doctrines of innate inequality were used to justify what was described as “anti-communist” repression.

Labour/Le Travail, 1997

This is a long review of Gary Murrell's biography of Herbert Aptheker, pioneering Marxist historian of American Slavery and CPUSA scholar activist for more than half a century. I draw upon my own knowledge of and relationship with both Aptheker, some of his comrades, and scholars who have responded to his work over time

Foreign Affairs, 1984

Journal of Southern History, 2017

American Communist History, 2019

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The Review of Politics, 1996