Rewriting History: The Evolution of American Communist Historiography
Joshua Morris
In studying and reciprocating historical narratives, historians rely on
sources to provide evidence and clues about events and people as
accurately as they can. In doing so, they necessarily must rely on the
intermediaries that provide access to source materials. These
intermediaries are typically archival facilities, either public or
private, as well as libraries and the institutions that facilitate
them. But access to source material on a specific subject doesn’t
necessarily mean that the whole history of a subject is contained within
the collection of a specific archive; nor does it mean that a
collection can convey any strict concept of truth. The
availability of archival resources on a subject, the evolution of the
role of the archival practice, and the role of government with regard to
access of resources together have a profound effect on how the
historical record is constructed. Historians who have access to
different material on the same subject might inevitably create two
contrasting narratives of a subject’s history. Thus access and
availability of archival collections and resources at any given moment
dictate the boundaries within which a historical narrative can be
constructed. Likewise, the socio-political climate of a society can
dictate which kinds of sources are considered historical and valuable.
This essay explores the connection between and boundaries generated by
knowledge of and access to collections, as well as the role played by
governments both foreign and domestic as a means for better
understanding the importance of archival institutions in the production
of historical narratives.
There is no better
subject in the field of U.S. history with respect to the boundaries
generated, both public and private, by access and availability of
archival resources than the history of the Communist Party, USA
(CPUSA). Organized in 1919 and officially active by the mid-1920s, the
CPUSA existed at various times as a legal entity, and at other times as
an illegal entity; the temper of political climate at any given moment
acting as the barometer of which identity they held. The first
histories constructed about the CPUSA were done in the 1950s by
historians Theodore Draper and David Shannon. Their books, The Roots of American Communism (1957) and The Decline of American Communism (1959),
respectively, utilized the sources available to them at the time of the
late 1950s; newspaper records, published Party documents, and
publicized FBI files. Their books were noted by their approach of
relying exclusively on both published material and government files.
The narrative of CPUSA history, thus, at the onset of 1960, was defined
almost exclusively by non-archival material. There is however, a
notable reason for this.
Party documents, particularly in the
1950s were hard to come by. A decade of repression from 1948-1954
pushed the Party underground and most of its members into hiding.[1]
Neither Draper nor Shannon cited, likely do to restrictive access, any
archival collections held in the Soviet Union. Neither author cited any
internal Party document or personal Party member’s collection, leading
one to believe that they had little if any direct connection to the
Party itself. Both authors thus faced a handicap: the limited
resources of archival collections on the CPUSA and the limited amount of
internal Party sources.[2] Some of the limitations are explained by
later historians such as Nelson Lichtenstein, who in 2003 identified how
Party documents written as early as 1936 did not appear in archives
until the spring of 1982.[3] Though it is conjecture, based upon oral
testimonies of CP organizers, it is certainly plausible that many
elements of CP history were left undocumented for years due to fear of
repression during the 1950s and 60s.[4]
Nevertheless, Draper and Shannon both set a standard for the historical
narrative of the CPUSA. Together, they argued that “it is impossible to
examine the Communist movement in America without looking at the
international Communist movement and the implications of the
internationalist organization that was the Comintern.”[5] Backing up
Shannon’s rhetoric, Draper emphasized the thesis that the CPUSA existed
solely as a “creation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and
that every significant policy or action undertaken by the CPUSA was an
instruction of, or at least with the approval of, that foreign body.”[6]
For nearly 15 years, the so-called ‘Draper Thesis’ remained
unchallenged. Likewise, the availability of sources on the CPUSA
remained unchanged. The 1950s repression put the Party into hiding, and
subsequent historians such as Irving Bernstein (1966) and Walter
Galenson (1974) confined their histories of Communism in the United
States to a contextual element of the 1930s Depression era. As late as
1984, the Draper Thesis prevailed with Harvey Klehr’s work The Heyday of American Communism,
where “the ultimate source of Party policy was [the public policy] of
the Soviet Union.” Klehr was particularly annoyed by how the study of
the Party involved researching “poorly reported and all-but-forgotten
episodes” of history.[7] The first challenge to Draper’s thesis came
from a different angle and a different set of resources, almost out of
necessity, in the late 1970s.
Writing with the
benefit of oral testimonies and trade-union collections submitted to
University archives in the 1960s, historian Bert Cochran stated in his
1977 text Labor and Communism that, in addition to
being an instrument of Soviet policy, the CPUSA “was also a political
organization that incorporated many of the earlier streams of American
radicalism and which represented for most of its membership a vehicle to
achieve thoroughly familiar and legitimate political goals.”[8] It
should be noted that part of this shift toward archival collections can
be explained structurally, as identified by Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E.
Myers and Rebecca Sharpless in The History of Oral History.
According to their explanation of the development of archival programs,
Universities such as UC Berkley did not begin archival programs for
oral and autobiographical histories on U.S. Labor until the mid-to-late
1950s. The National Archives didn’t begin collecting oral testimonies
and autobiographies in general until 1961, with the work of Presidential
libraries such as the Truman Library and the Kennedy Library.[9]
During 1972-73 as well, UCLA collected labor stories, including the oral
history of the CPUSA’s Southern California organizer, Dorothy Ray
Healey, as part of a foundation project in their history program.[10]
This culminated in the creation of the UCLA Oral History Foundation,
which to this day provides free access (including online) to over 20
different well-document and historically significant oral histories,
many of them civil activists and labor organizers. CPUSA activist
Dorothy Healey’s works specifically became available in 1982. This all
coincides with the shift in resources used by Cochran versus his
predecessors. Cochran, in addition to using Draper’s source approach of
published governmental and Party documents, utilized unpublished
material from the National Archives pertaining to the CPUSA during its
formative years.
Keeping up with the relaxation of tensions and
the popularity of the New Left in the late 60s and early 70s, CPUSA
members began to speak out. Party affiliates George Charney, Al
Richmond, and Steve Nelson “renewed their disillusionment with the
CPUSA” by publishing their own memoirs and donating their personal
collections to the National Archives and New York University, as stated
by Party historian Edward Pintzuk.[11] Pintzuk believed that the
addition of these testimonies and private collections, “added a
dimension to the history of the CPUSA that had been lacking.”[12] One
by one, more resources regarding CPUSA history found themselves
deposited in archives across the country. Party affiliates Saul Wellman
and Nat Ganley donated their personal collections to the Walter P.
Reuther Archive at Wayne State University in 1969, made available in the
early 90s.
Peggy Dennis donated boxes of her personal collection and
her unpublished autobiography, The Autobiography of an American Communist,
in 1977 (made available the same year). Draper submitted his life’s
work in 63 boxes to the Hoover Institution Archives and eventually
settled at Emory University, which contained many of his unused and
unpublished collections on the CPUSA over the years. Shannon’s
lifetime collection was donated as well to NYU in 1975. These are just
among a fraction of sources that became available from the so-called
“revisionist” era of CPUSA history.[13] Frank Boles asked in his article
for the Society of American Archivists if “in the grand scheme of
things, what one does makes any difference?”[14] By the mid-1980s, the
expansion of analysis on the CPUSA, the processing of collections, and
their opening of public access, all proved that the work done in the
1960s and 70s did indeed make a difference.
Benefitting from these
newly available resources, a visible shift in the historical narrative
took place, starting with New Left historians such as Mark Naison
(1983), Kenneth Waltzer (1983), and Gary Gerstle (1985). Edward Pintzuk
describes these new historians as “trained in social history” and
“critical of the older school reliance on institutional and political
analysis,” particular with regard to the sources used.[15] And the
bibliographic information provided by the authors gives evidence to the
claim: Naison’s debut book on Communists in Harlem during the Depression
relied extensively on aforementioned collections made available during
the 1970s. This includes unused material within Draper’s collection,
Party documents donated by former members such as Peggy Dennis, and
interviews conducted by Naison himself.[16] Going further than Naison
and his colleagues, Roger Keeran, in his 1986 text The Communist Party and the Auto Workers’ Unions,
used the available collections submitted to the Walter P. Reuther
Archives from the United Auto Workers to challenge those who portrayed
the Party as an illegitimate organization and handicap to trade
unionism. The particular collection used at the Archive, UAW Local 600
Papers 1935-1966, were opened for research in April of 1983.[17] As one
can clearly see, the expansion of collections and resources on CPUSA
history by the end of the Cold War had a significant impact on the
depiction of the Party in historical narratives.
Newer Party
historians of the 1990s, like Fraser Ottanelli, Michael Honey, and Vicki
Ruiz, wove the CPUSA’s efforts and documentation into their own
specific studies of the U.S. labor movement. Ottanelli, writing to
counter Draper and Shannon’s work, expressed that former depictions of
the Party in U.S. history “turned American intellectuals away with its
emphasis on an undying support for the Soviet Union.”[18] This began a
trend among labor historians to shift their emphasis away from “capital
‘C’ Communists, the Party leaders and policy makers who had little if
any direct involvement with union organizing,” and toward “little ‘c’
communists, the rank-and-file.”[19] This new focus “tended to look more
directly at the activities of the Party, as opposed to its outlining
ideological and international relationships.”[20] An iconic example of
this new focus came from Vicki Ruiz’s examination of women in the
canning and packing industries of Southern California in her book Cannery Women: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry.
Ruiz described CPUSA activism as a “genuine commitment to
worker-oriented, worker-controlled farm and food-processing
unions.”[21] These women dominated the workforces targeted specifically
by the CPUSA’s agricultural policy from 1932-1938. These
reinterpretations of the value of CPUSA history were only the coming of a
larger storm of change, however. There was still one more major factor
in the generation of the CPUSA’s historical narrative, one that some
might consider the most important, involving the role of government with
regard to access of records.
Domestically, Harvey Klehr addressed the issues of government-related archival problems in his 1984 book The Heyday of American Communism:
“The
most substantial cache of Party material in a single collection is in
the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Acting under the
Freedom of Information Act, I obtained more than 30,000 pages of
material on various groups and individuals. Much of it was useless, but
here and there were nuggets of information. There is no doubt that
informers and wiretaps enabled the FBI to obtain mountains of
information that would illuminate Party history. Unfortunately, the Bureau’s filing system makes recovery of all this information virtually impossible and prohibitively expensive.”[22] [Emphasis Added]
The
difficulty faced with the FBI’s archival system created an overt
limitation for one of the Party’s foremost historians by the 1980s. In
response, Klehr turned to the Draper Collection at Emory University.
Stuck with a limitation of government resources, including collections
suspected to contain valuable information, Klehr had to rely on
pre-existing and known sources. Part of this extends simply from the
difference in practice between institutional and governmental archives.
Whereas governmental records typically are cataloged by systematic
categorization of subjects for the sake of litigation, a university
special collections typically prefer to organize collections by content
with respect to provenance and original order. A serious look into the
CPUSA through the eyes of the government would thus have to come from
another source, and it did, about seven years after Klehr’s book.
One
of the most significant events to rock the foundations of civilization
in the late 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe in 1989, followed swiftly by the dissolution of the Soviet Union
itself in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet government and the shift of
power to the Russian state created problems far beyond just politics.
The newly-created Russian Federation inherited one of the most
sophisticated archival systems in the history of mankind; the Soviet
Communist Party’s Archives held deep in the Kremlin. To the stark
contradiction of Soviet-era historians like Harvey Klehr who argued the
inability to rely on the Soviet Government’s archives, the Soviet Union
did not destroy its history. The truth, it turned out, was that they
didn’t have to; they simply locked it up.
Processed in the late 1950s after Joseph Stalin had died, the RTSkhIDNI
Archives of Soviet International Policy contains “documentation
relating to the history of socialism, the records of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its predecessors, mainly before 1953, as
well as the records of the Komsomol (Comintern).”[23] This collection
was made publicly available by presidential decree in 1991 and unveiled
to the world the depth of meticulous documentation undertaken by the
Soviet government with respect to its history. The collection was
originally held under the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, an
upper-division body of the CPSU. As such, the collection was kept under
tight control until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The opening
of the archives led to an explosion of research in the 1990s. This
shows another powerful example of how a government can play a profound
role in the ability to construct historical narratives; principally by
their ability to limit or prevent access to collections maintained.
With the shifting of availability of resources came a subsequent shift
in the CPUSA’s historical narrative.
Since the opening of the
Soviet archives, both old and new historians took up the challenge of
reinterpreting CPUSA history. ‘Old school’ Party historians Harvey
Klehr, John Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson teamed up to publish two volumes
on Party history reflected by the release of the RTSkhIDNI collection; The Secret World of American Communism (1996) and The Soviet World of American Communism
(1998). These works reciprocated a version of the Draper Thesis,
albeit with a new insight into the flexibility between the American and
Russian Parties. This time, American CP leaders “sought Comintern
advice and counsel on strategy and tactics, the resolution of intraparty
ideological disputes, and how best to advance a rigid Marxist-Leninist
doctrine.”[24] Here we see the Soviet’s international body depicted as
an adviser and teacher, as opposed to, as Klehr put it 24 years prior,
“the ultimate source”[25] of Party policy within the United States.
To date, Randi Storch’s Red Chicago and Jacob Zumoff’s The Communist International and U.S. Communism are the most comprehensive surveys of CPUSA history that utilize the RTSkhIDNI collection. Storch, using Chicago as a case study to examine the Party’s grassroots in the 1920s and 1930s, describes the RTSkhIDNI collection and its use in her introduction:
“The
Russian State Archive includes more than four thousand files on the
Communist Party of the United States for 1919 through the early 1940s,
with its richest materials relating to the period between 1928 and
1935.”[26]
Benefitting from the new material, both Storch and
Zumoff create historical depictions of the CPUSA previously
unthinkable. The result is a ‘grassroots-upward’ narrative that is
becoming the dominant theme of social history today. The most recent
archival addition of CPUSA records occurred in 2007, when the CPUSA’s
Central Committee voted to donate their entire records collections,
dating back to the mid 1920s, to the Tamiment Library at New York
University. With this latest addition to archival collections on the
Party, new ways of interpreting the CPUSA become available. Likewise,
ongoing efforts to introduce extensive oral histories of the Party
present even more routes for understanding the Communist experience in
U.S. history.[27]
Throughout the history of the CPUSA there exists
a separate and almost more dramatic history; that being the history of
the Party’s sources. Years of social and political repression in the
late 1940s and early 1950s led to the destruction of an entire
generation of documentation within the United States, forcing historians
like Draper and Shannon to rely on published and non-compromising
material. Civil activism and the New Left in the 1960s led to an
expansion of resources as Party members wrote autobiographies and
donated personal collections to Universities across the nation.
However, throughout this period both the U.S. and Soviet governments
played a crippling role in limiting access to critical information about
the CPUSA. This remained an issue until the collapse of the USSR in
1991 and the opening of its pre-1950s collections. The Soviet
collections changed nearly every way that Party historians approached
their subject; it challenged former narratives with evidence to the
contrary, and it provided answers to questions that weren’t even asked.
And it all extends from one simple practice, that of the administration
of archival collections. Archives have further contributed to the
historical record over the years, but, as this essay has shown, they
also create boundaries within which those narratives can depict and
explain history.
Bibliography
Archival/Institutional Sources
Healey, Dorothy Ray. “Dorothy Healey Remembers” Oral History interview by UCLA Center for Oral History Research, UCLA, 1972.
http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0008zbb6&titleDorothy%20Healey&source=flash
Morris, Joshua. The Shortest Straw: The CPUSA and Southern California Organizing. (Master’s Thesis presented to California State University, 2010)
Pintzuk,
Edward. “Racial Justice, Civil Liberties, and the Communist Party of
the United States,” (PhD Dissertation, Wayne State University, 1993)
“Rossiiskii
Gosudartsvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politcheskoi Istorii (RGASPI),”
Finding Aid at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History,
Federal Archival Agency of the Russian Federation.
http://www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B-12.tab1.php
“UAW
Local 600 Papers, 1935-1966,” Finding aid at the Walter P. Reuther
Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
http://reuther.wayne.edu/files/LR000176.pdf
Secondary Sources
Boles, Frank. “But a Thin Veil of Paper” in The American Archivist, Vol. 73 (Spring 2010)
Charlton, Thomas & Lois E. Myers & Rebecca Sharpless. The History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology (Lanham: Alta Mira, 2007)
Cochran, Bert. Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Klehr, Harvey, John Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984)
Lichtenstein, Nelson & Eileen Boris. Major Problems in the History of American Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003)
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983)
Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From Depression to WWII (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991)
Pintzuk, Edward. Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1997)
Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry from 1930-1950 (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999)
Shannon, David. The Decline of American Communism (Madison: Chatham Bookseller, 1974)
Storch, Randi. Red Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
[1] Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984) 412-413
[2] For more information on the limitations presented by Shannon’s and Draper’s work, see:
Morris, Joshua. The Shortest Straw: The CPUSA and Southern California Organizing. Master’s Thesis presented to California State University, Pomona. (2010): 5-6
[3] Lichtenstein, Nelson & Eileen Boris. Major Problems in the History of American Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 284-286
[4]
In her unpublished Oral History testimony as part of the CPUSA Oral
History Project, interviewee Michele Artt talks about growing up in an
era while her parents were meticulously hunted by the FBI, and were
unable to actively write about, publish, or document activities they
participated in. (Can ask for Oral History interview if you’d like)
[5] Shannon, David. The Decline of American Communism
(Madison: Chatham Bookseller, 1974) 4; “Comintern” is a common
abbreviation of the term “Communist International,” the international
organization run by Moscow to coordinate CP activities around the world.
[6] Pintzuk, Edward. Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1997) 1
[7] Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984) xi
[8] Cochran, Bert. Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 119
[9] Charlton, Thomas & Lois E. Myers & Rebecca Sharpless. The History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology (Lanham: Alta Mira, 2007) 13-14
[10]
Healey, Dorothy Ray. “Dorothy Healey Remembers” Oral History interview
by UCLA Center for Oral History Research, UCLA, 1972.
http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0008zbb6&titleDorothy%20Healey&source=flash
[11] Pintzuk, 3
[12] Ibid
[13]
For more information on the “revisionist” era and a complete list of
sources that became available at the time, see Pintzuk, Edward. “Racial
Justice, Civil Liberties, and the Communist Party of the United
States,” (PhD Dissertation, Wayne State University, 1993) as well as
Naison’s Communists in Harlem During the Depression Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983)
[14] Boles, Frank. “But a Thin Veil of Paper” in The American Archivist, Vol. 73 (Spring 2010): 20
[15] Pintzuk, Edward. Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1997) 4
[16] Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) 354-371
[17]
“UAW Local 600 Papers, 1935-1966,” Finding aid at the Walter P. Reuther
Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
http://reuther.wayne.edu/files/LR000176.pdf (accessed 11/25/14, 2:01pm)
[18] Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From Depression to WWII (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991) 2
[19] Morris, Joshua. The Shortest Straw: The CPUSA and Southern California Organizing. Master’s Thesis presented to California State University, Pomona. (2010): 5
[20] Ibid, 7
[21] Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry from 1930-1950 (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999) 41
[22] Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984) xii-xiii
[23]
“Rossiiskii Gosudartsvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politcheskoi Istorii
(RGASPI),” Finding Aid at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political
History, Federal Archival Agency of the Russian Federation.
http://www.iisg.nl/abb/rep/B-12.tab1.php (accessed 11/28/14, 5:03pm)
[24] Klehr, Harvey, John Haynes, and Kyrill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 356
[25] Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984) xi
[26] Storch, Randi. Red Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 4-5
[27]
For more info, see my work in the CPUSA Oral History Project (to be
submitted to Walter Reuther Library before dissertation)
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