Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
The Party's Over
By Harvey Klehr
Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War
by Maurice Isserman
Wesleyan University Press, 305 pp., $19.95
Steve Nelson, American Radical
by Steve Nelson, by James R. Barrett, by Rob Ruck
University of Pittsburgh Press, 454 pp., $19.95
For so small a movement the Communist Party of the United States has been the subject of an extraordinarily large number of historical studies. Accounts of the Party's activities and reminiscences of its members and former members have been appearing at a steadily increasing rate. This interest can hardly be attributed to the revitalization of the Party; it remains today, as it has been for the last quarter-century, a tiny sect with a steadfast and overriding loyalty to the Soviet Union. Oddly, the collapse of the New Left and the impotence of recent American radicalism have helped to renew fascination with the CPUSA. Historians and activists rummaging in the radical past for lessons about the failures of the American left have found abundant material in the Communist Party. In little more than sixty years it has gone through enough phases to test almost every conceivable hypothesis.
Review, 3502 words
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