Volume 32, Number 8 · May 9, 1985
American Communism Revisited
By Theodore H. Draper
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
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 Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade
by Harvey Klehr
Basic Books, 511 pp., $26.50
Steve Nelson: American Radical
by Steve Nelson, by James R. Barrett, by Rob Ruck
University of Pittsburgh Press, 482 pp., $19.95
A Long Journey
by George Charney
Quadrangle (1972, out of print)
A Long View from the Left
by Al Richmond
Houghton Mifflin (1972, out of print)
The Narrative of Hosea Hudson
by Nell Irvin Painter
Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
by Harry Haywood
Lake View Press (Chicago, 1978), 700 pp., $9.95 (paper)
American communism has become a minor academic industry. It was not always so. When I worked on the subject a quarter of a century ago, it was mainly of interest to those who had been in or around the communist and other 'left' movements. Now that it has been taken over by a new academic generation, too young to have known what it was like to be for or against the communist movement in the 1930s or even 1950s, it is inevitably being reconsidered from different political perspectives and personal backgrounds.
Review, 6796 words
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