The following letters respond to Theodore Draper’s two articles, “American Communism Revisited” and “The Popular Front Revisited,” in the May 9 and May 30 issues.
To the Editors:
A younger Theodore Draper was fond of the notion that the revolution devours its children, even when the revolution takes place mostly within a relatively weak US Left. Sadly, this erstwhile revolutionary would now do the same with his own scholarly descendants, if he only could. The old lion remembers a quarteror half-century ago better than yesterday, ruminates on real and imagined wounds he has suffered, and swipes at the air whenever a grown cub passes by to recall its origins.
The Buhle File is worth reexamining here only to illustrate how opaque the cataracts on Draper’s scholarly vision have become. He cannot appreciate the value of work which extends his own investigations fifty-fold by reaching beyond the Left leadership (where Draper largely confined himself) to the rank-and-file base. He draws no conclusions from the extraordinary support various ethnic and racial communities—from Portuguese New Bedford to Spanish-Cuban Ybor City to Polish Detroit to dozens of others—gave to local Communists. He has little interest in the non-English language press, which at any time until 1950 considerably exceeded the circulation of the magazines and newspapers where Draper concentrated his study. He ignores comparative work among Socialists, Anarchists, Labor Zionists, Trotskyists, and others who shared a great deal more with Communists socially and culturally than they liked to acknowledge. In short, Draper disdains twenty years of individual and collective scholarly effort modestly intended to accumulate the social evidence for placing Communists within Left and American history. In my case, he has reduced all this to part of a sentence pulled out of a half-forgotten youthful polemic.
We could have lots of fun with Draper’s own youthful ink-slinging. But let us confine ourselves to the matter at hand. The offending phrase [by Paul Buhle] quoted in his footnote is taken from a sentence which actually reads, “Lacking a stable Party or trade-union bureaucracy, or (until recently) a place for Marxists of the Chair, American radicalism was spared” the prestige European intellectuals “who…set out to preserve [Marxism] as an undertaker preserves a corpse.” I wouldn’t put it that way now, but I remain stubbornly convinced that the Darwinian pseudo-scientism of the Second International and the Structuralist pseudo-scientism of the 1960s have contributed little to solving the fundamental difficulty facing US radicals. The problem is not so much the staying power of capitalism as the enigma of American social life and the propensity of our intellectuals (not merely Marxists) to substitute formulae for an appreciation of complex democratic possibilities.
Through their tortuous evolution, the Left Socialists-turned-Communists of the 1910s and early 1920s wrestled with this problem. Draper’s empathy for them made The Roots of American Communism a penetrating and moving book, despite its marked limitations. American Communism and Soviet Russia is, by contrast, a political history so thin that, as Comsymp Woody Guthrie might have said, you can read the Morgen Freiheit (if you can read Yiddish at all) right through it. Harvey Klehr’s Draperian Heyday of American Communism unwittingly reveals the result of the conceptual diminishment. Ironically, this brand of history could explain young Theodore Draper’s Communist involvement only as gullibility or personal opportunism. The survivors of the 1920-1940s radicalism know better. Let Draper consult just a few of the hundreds of interviews assembled. He should then realize how radicals of every description succeeded, despite their own dogma, in understanding and contributing to the changing scene around them.
Friendly advice: let it go, Ted. Return to the avuncular role. Take the blows and remember that the young sometimes need to clear away space before they can get a fresh look around.
Paul Buhle
New York University
New York City
To the Editors:
Since I am only one of the historians whose work has been attacked and distorted by Mr. Theodore Draper, I will try to be brief. Draper’s central complaint is that the new historians “admit the subservience of American Communism to the Soviet Union or the Comintern, while at the same time qualifying such ‘deference’ or subordination out of existence in specific or local circumstances.” In other words, most of us have discovered when we look at Communist work in specific areas that the Soviet influence was only one, and usually not the most important, factor influencing Communist strategy and tactics. Draper finds this conclusion politically unacceptable, as well he might. The old histories of the Communist Party, written during the cold war, were written to provide a rationale for repression, at least insofar as studies of Communists in the labor movement are concerned. It was politically important for cold war scholars to depict Communists as alien outsiders, not as legitimate trade unionists, in order to defend the CIO’s decision to expel Communists from the labor movement. The new historians, not burdened with such a heavy political agenda, have offered a more balanced approach.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difference in approach is to look at an event which Mr. Draper mentions in his first article: the formation of dual unions in 1928 and 1929. To Klehr and Draper this decision was made in Moscow. Both Klehr and Draper note that Soviet leaders urged American Communists to form dual unions, American Communists resisted this advice, but after several years, the American Communists gave in. They conclude that American Communists gave in because it was impossible to continue to resist Soviet pressure. This is a plausible assumption, particularly if one knows nothing about actual events in the industries in which these unions were formed.
It is, however, an assumption which must be discarded if one examines what Draper sneeringly calls “specific or local circumstances.” The garment industry is the one which I have studied and here it is clear that the decision to form dual unions was dictated by the conditions in the industry and not by Soviet advice or orders. In the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), the Communist-led opposition were the leaders of local unions which comprised most of the union’s membership. However, the ILGWU had an electoral system which allowed a number of small locals to wield more influence than the large, New York locals. The history of the ILGWU in the 1920s is largely the history of attempts by the Socialist-led ILGWU General Executive Board to maintain its control over the union in spite of having the support of less than a majority of the union’s members. The Socialists resorted to the tactic of expelling their opponents.
There were three waves of expulsions. In 1924, the left-wingers were removed from office in districts outside of New York. Communists protested these expulsions, but since they retained strength in the huge New York locals, they did not urge non-recognition of the removal. In May 1925, ostensibly because of a speech at a rally, the GEB removed the leaders of three large New York locals. The locals formed a Joint Action Committee, collected dues, and forced the GEB to sign a statement re-admitting them into the union, calling for an end to “all discrimination for political opinion,” and agreeing to allow the membership to vote on the issue of proportional representation. At the 1925 ILGWU convention, however, they refused to submit proportional representation to the membership. Following the 1926 cloakmakers’ strike the GEB launched the third round of expulsions. Workers in the large New York locals, representing more than half of the union’s total membership, were forced to repudiate their local leaders and re-register with the GEB. In other words, more than half of the union’s members were expelled and could only gain re-admission to the union by repudiating the leaders whom they had previously elected.
This decision brought civil war to the garment district. There is not the space to describe the carnage here, but one should see my article “New Perspectives on American Communism,” in Political Power Social Theory (1983) and my dissertation, which Draper has cited, for more information. The point here is simply that after a two-year struggle the Communists were unable to gain re-admission into the union. The 1928 convention of the ILGWU ratified the expulsion of the Communists and went on to expel two anti-Communist caucuses who had opposed the expulsions. Still, American Communists, imprisoned by their long-standing opposition to dual unionism, resisted the formation of a new union. But, following the 1928 convention, there was literally no alternative. If Communists were going to continue to be active in the garment industry, they would have to form a separate garment union and try to recruit the 60,000 garment workers who had dropped out or been expelled from the ILGWU. (The ILGWU membership had fallen from approximately 90,000 to approximately 30,000 during the attempt to purge the left from the union.)
Draper and Klehr make no attempt to assess the relative importance of the mass expulsions and the Soviet advice on the formation of the new union. Klehr does not mention the expulsions at all. Neither did Draper in his NYR article, but he has argued elsewhere that the expulsions could not have been a factor since “there were no new expulsions in 1928 or 1929.” This is, at best, an ingenious half-truth. There was no need for new expulsions since the 1928 ILGWU convention had ratified the expulsion of over half of the union’s membership.
This is not to say that the Comintern did not influence the American party, but rather that without an examination of “specific or local circumstances” one can not know exactly how the Comintern influenced the party. In this example, we can see that the Comintern had virtually no influence on the decision to form dual unions. American Communists rejected Comintern advice on this point until Communists had been driven out of the labor movement. However, the Comintern did influence the general line of the new unions. They defined themselves as “revolutionary unions” and openly proclaimed their identification with the Communist Party. In other words, the Comintern had almost nothing to do with the decision to form a dual union in the garment industry, but it did help (and even here it was not the only factor) to shape the sectarian politics of the new union.
There is a certain irony in the Draper-Klehr approach: by attributing everything to Soviet influence, it actually obscures precisely what the real Soviet influence, was. This defect is central to the political thrust of the Draper-Klehr approach: since they, and their predecessors, are anxious to justify the mass expulsions of Communist trade unionists, they must paint those trade unionists as totally dominated by the Soviet Union. A more accurate approach, showing how the Soviet influence interacted with other influences, might be better history, but it cannot achieve the political end (delegitimation of Communist workers) which Draper and Klehr seek.
