Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
Pie in the Sky
By Hal Draper
The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade
by Harvey Klehr
Basic Books, 511 pp., $26.50
The history of the American Communist party (and not only the American) is largely a history of paroxysms—about two to a decade—dividing the Party's experience into periods. During the 1920s, after the initial revolutionary outburst that spread the influence of the Russian Revolution through the world socialist movement and split the socialist parties, the American Communist party was shaken by the shift from the underground to the legal party. (There was an analogous shift throughout the Comintern.) The Thirties was marked by the two periods that are Harvey Klehr's subject: the so-called Third Period of 1929–1934, in which the Party's line became freakishly ultraleft (or so it seemed), and the People's Front period of 1935–1939, in which the Party swung dizzily to the opposite extreme, the right of the radical spectrum.
Review, 4782 words
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