2025/05/01 by James R. Barrett · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements #European history and politics #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609805
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
In his ambitious study of the Communist Party USA between its foundation in 1919 and its decline in the postwar era, Joshua Morris casts a wide net, chronologically, topically, and conceptually. He argues that the party consisted of distinct “worlds” and focuses particularly on three of these—the Political, Labor, and Community. These worlds were firmly based in the American context. Thus, Morris writes, the party was “less rooted in international affairs than it was built upon what certain American Leftists believed was just and fair for their society” (viii). In this sense the party was “not exceptional by American political standards,” and by the late 1920s members were “genuinely American first and Communist second” (xv, xvi). Most readers familiar with the history and particularly those influenced by the “revisionist” school will find an attraction here. If the revisionists have established anything, it is that thousands of local party rank-and-file activists in labor and community organizing, antiracist work, and other fields were motivated less by Marxist-Leninist doctrine than by the promise that the movement seemed to hold for changing American society. Often they were distant from the political center and focused primarily on the practical work before them. While offering a new synthesis, Morris is clearly more sympathetic with these revisionists than with the Cold War historians or more recent anticommunist chroniclers who have tended to see the party as an arm of Soviet policy.Morris sees the party as very similar to American social movements of the nineteenth century. The problem, of course, is that the party was quite exceptional in many respects, and its work even at the grassroots level was constantly shaped by the international movement. Indeed, it was the intrusion of the Comintern or bureaucrats in the New York Communist Party headquarters, Morris’s “political world,” that often stymied the work of these local activists. Frustration with this fact is at least part of the explanation for the remarkable level of membership turnover. Likewise, from the mid-1920s on, this was a “Stalinist” party in the sense that it was highly centralized, hierarchical, and subject to Soviet factionalism. Union activists like William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone were indeed dedicated to labor organizing, but they operated in a supremely political context. Many of them served on the organization’s Central Committee and shaped policy. “Labor communists” often had to tailor their organizing to the Soviet line and the decisions of the party leadership or face expulsion. This is not to diminish the impressive organizational work done by communists over the decades. The trick is to write a history that acknowledges this local work and practical focus while accounting for the unique character of the organization and the impact of the international dimension. Morris tries this at various points but is often unsuccessful. In his version of the story, the worlds remain quite distinct and separate.Morris is most successful in his narrative of the party’s early years before the Depression, especially his long discussion of the Trade Union Educational League in the needle trades, coal mining, and textiles, where league activists built extensive organizations and led important strikes. Indeed, the heart of the book is in the 1920s. Conversely, Morris’s characterization of the entire period from 1928 to 1944 (his periodization) as a “re-centering of the political sphere around centrist, yet cooperative and progressive, politics” is confusing (401). Something like this might be argued for most of the Popular Front and war years (1936–44) (though the party’s structure and internal practice remained Stalinist in these years), but Morris’s periodization also includes the ultrasectarian Third Period (1928–35), hardly one of centrism and cooperation.Morris argues that the party’s catastrophic postwar decline was less a matter of fragmentation and destruction and more one of what he terms political “diffusion.” He describes the effects of both extreme sectarianism and factionalism in the wake of Earl Browder’s demise and the damage wrought by extensive government repression, but his tendency is to see the continuation of communist activism through an array of community and civil rights organizations. There is no mention at all of either the Soviet invasion of Hungary or the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress (both in 1956), which revealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes. Likewise, Morris ignores the pivotal 1957 CPUSA convention, where a key group of veteran members tried to save the organization through a series of reforms but were rebuffed by the hardliners. Judging by party members’ recollections, these were all cataclysmic events. Coming during massive government repression, they robbed the party of the great bulk of its membership. There is no doubt, as Morris argues, that many former members remained active in a range of movements through the 1960s and beyond, but as an organization the party had minimal impact in those turbulent years. It had not simply “diffused.” It had largely died.A very brief conclusion is inadequate to bring the story through the 1960s or to draw out the implications of Morris’s interpretation for the historiography of the party. Extensive notes, many with multiple references, testify to exhaustive research, but for personal testimony Morris relies largely on several of his own interviews and only a few of the dozens of autobiographies that have appeared, mostly since the 1970s. The book is characterized by several factual and typographical errors. Saul Wellman, for example, was not the party’s Detroit lawyer (423). Some of these problems may be attributable to the lamentable decline in copyediting. These are less significant than the author’s efforts to provide an integrated view of the CPUSA’s whole history in its various dimensions. Given the shortcomings of the “many worlds” approach, however, we do not have that yet.