Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
The Popular Front Revisited
By Theodore H. Draper
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade
by Harvey Klehr
Basic Books, 511 pp., $26.50
Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War
by Maurice Isserman
Wesleyan University Press, 306 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The American Communist Party: A Critical History
by Irving Howe, by Lewis Coser
Da Capo, 612 pp., $59.50
Communists in Harlem During the Depression
by Mark Naison
Grove Press, 355 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions
by Roger Keeran
Indiana University Press, 352 pp., $25.00
The Romance of American Communism
by Vivian Gornick
Basic Books
Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists
a film by Julia Reichert, by James Klein
The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis
by Jane Jenson, by George Ross
University of California Press, 346 pp., $28.50
An unprecedented outburst of academic interest in the history of American Communism has occurred in recent years. It has produced more doctoral dissertations, books, and articles on the subject during the past five years than in all the previous sixty years of American Communist history. This curious phenomenon has been concentrated in colleges and universities by younger faculty members, many of whom teach labor and social history. Their work appears mainly in academic and radical journals or in university press publications. Most of them have graduated from the student New Left of the 1960s to the professoriat of the 1980s, still imbued with a need to find an outlet for their radical sympathies or, as one spokesman has put it, 'a source of political reference and inspiration.'[1] Unlikely as it would have seemed to the New Leftists of yesterday, with their superior contempt for anything contaminated by the old left, this source has been found in the history of American communism, and especially in its short-lived experiment with the Popular Front in the late 1930s.
Review, 7184 words
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