Maurice Isserman’s Red Scare

Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism by Maurice Isserman. Basic Books, 384 pages. 2024.

In March of 1931, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) conducted its first and only show trial: the trial of Party member August Yokinen on charges of “white chauvinism.” Yokinen, a janitor at a Finnish Workers’ Club near Harlem, denied entry to three young black men who wanted to join a dance. Yokinen went further to complain that if the black men were admitted, the Finnish baths would also have to be desegregated, and he would have to “bathe with Negroes.” The trial was held in the Harlem Casino, one of the largest public venues in Harlem at the time, and it was filled to capacity and beyond, with thousands of supporters, Party members, and the just plain curious waiting outside to get in. 

As trials go, there was not much suspense: the guilt of the defendant was not in question. The defense argued instead that permanent expulsion from the Communist Party would be a fate “worse than death” for a class-conscious worker, pleading that Yokinen be readmitted after six months of dedicating himself both to personal reeducation and to anti-racist work. Yokinen gladly accepted these terms and set about holding educational sessions at the Finnish Workers’ Club on the wrongs of racism and segregation. He was on track to rejoin the Party, until the U.S. government deported him a year later for failing to state that he was a Communist on his immigration papers: being found guilty of “white chauvinism” does not mean that one cannot also be swept up in an anti-immigrant, anticommunist dragnet.

The unusual trial of August Yokinen represented a notable first: as historian Mark Naison framed it, “Never before had a political movement” in the United States “tried to create an interracial community that extended into the personal sphere.” It was the “duty,” the prosecution argued, of every American Communist to “jump at the throat of any person who strikes a Negro.” The near-expulsion of Yokinen was not mere rhetoric: the trial came shortly after the Party’s doomed if heroic attempt to create interracial unions among mill workers in North Carolina, and it preceded their successful anti-lynching defense of the Scottsboro Boys by only a few months—a trial that was also the first of its kind: the rescue of nine young black men from the electric chair over the alleged assault of white women in the Deep South. 

The extraordinary nature of the CPUSA’s attempt to both place anti-racism at the center of its organizing and to root out racism from within its ranks owes to the equally extraordinary nature of the Party itself. While not the first “internationalist” socialist movement in the United States, it was the first to explicitly align itself and take direction from an international body—the Communist International (Comintern)—and to a lesser extent, a sovereign country, the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Party’s commitment to anti-racism owes directly to interventions at 1920s Comintern World Congresses, in which several African Americans involved with the African Blood Brotherhood (which later merged with the CPUSA), including Harry Haywood and Otto Hall, as well as other black and Asian radicals such as Claude McKay, Sen Katayama, and Otto Huiswood, persuaded the conference to grant the American black freedom struggle the “dignity,” as one historian put it, of an anti-colonial national liberation struggle. 

The black petition to the Sixth World Congress was an attempt to stage a political intervention into the structures of American white supremacy. While clearly a Comintern resolution could not singlehandedly change the United States, that its largest and most influential radical political organization for the next two decades placed anti-racism and the black freedom struggle at the heart of its movement profoundly changed the American left, in ways that are still manifest today. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the realignment of the labor movement and the Democratic Party around civil rights owes in no small part to the Communist Party. 

I bring this seemingly small if vital event in early twentieth century left-wing history up because it runs counter to both liberal common sense about American democracy and also the central thesis of historian Maurice Isserman’s new nearly four-hundred-page history of the Communist Party. Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism opens with a portrait of Eugene Debs and the early-twentieth-century Socialist Party (SPA) as the paradigmatic form of “indigenous” democratic socialism—independent-minded, iconoclastic, “morally charged” and led by a figure who “speaks his own piece.” Isserman contrasts this capacious Americanism to the foreignness of Communism. Reds narrates the rise and fall of the Communist Party in three acts: its “revolutionary” Third Period, from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s; the “Popular Front” era that lasts from 1935 to the onset of the Cold War; and finally the Red Scare and collapse in the 1950s, with a brief afterglow in the early 1970s during Angela Davis’s celebrity trial

Influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution, Communists, Isserman agues were “authoritarian,” “sectarian,” “hierarchical,” and had a whiff or what can only be described as Orientalist despotism about them. Issermnan’s thesis, simple and uncomplicated, is that the Bolshevik Revolution not only overthrew democracy in Russia (as much a dubious claim about the Bolsheviks as Russia in 1917), but that its form of left-wing organizing was a foreign import to American shores, derailing a healthy, democratic, intellectually curious, and homegrown American left for decades.

Isserman does offer that at the heyday of the 1930s left, namely the sit-down strikes in Flint and Detroit and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Communist Party briefly dropped its rigid sectarianism and went so far as to quietly work for the reelection of FDR. But the CPUSA’s attempt to swim with the tide of left-liberal Americanism was short-lived and, according to Isserman, more about Stalinist geopolitics than a genuine commitment to building a movement. Whatever their successes, he alleges, the CPUSA was “incapable of offering a meaningful vision of a good society,” and at best could summon the drab anti-utopia of Stalin’s dungeons and Khrushchev’s tanks. Despite a disciplined and dedicated cadre, the Party’s “lies” and mendacity eventually caught up with them.

As a prime example of the CPUSA’s undemocratic sectarianism, Isserman lambasts the Third Period as both exemplary of the nature of the Communist Party and their tactical misreadings of the American scene. Focusing on the strategy of “dual unionism,” Isserman characterizes the efforts to create separate, desegregated textile unions in North Carolina, or organize farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley, as the disastrous application of Marxist orthodoxy to exceptional American landscapes.

In California, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union was the first major attempt by a national union to organize low-wage migrant farmworkers, leading to massive strikes in the cotton and peach fields of the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys; in North Carolina, the National Textile Workers Union was one of the first to include black workers in the mill. Neither the AFL or even the CIO at its peak dared to attempt to organize migrant farmworkers or openly flout segregation in the Deep South during organizing drives. That the CPUSA’s efforts were not successful belies the way they trained generations of activists to challenge the color line in the West’s agricultural fields and the mills of the Deep South. Isserman writes as though such attempts were not prefigurative defeats of later victories but Soviet chicanery. His prime example of Communist orthodoxy run wild begs as many questions of the author as it does the Party.

While observing that the Red Scare was the primary cause of the Communist Party’s downfall, Isserman suggests that unlike the “witch trials” to which Arthur Miller likened the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Communist Party had “real witches”: spies and traitors who worked for the Soviet Union. By the time the book comes to a close, with the death of CPUSA general secretary Gus Hall and the final withering away of the Party, one can almost feel Isserman breathing a sigh of relief. Like an elder with dementia and a failing heart, there is something merciful about the end, if not of history, then of historical materialism and what the author alleges are its shallow grooves in the American grain. “The Party encouraged its members to think of the Soviet Union as their true homeland,” he concludes, uniting all the hanging threads of the book: the Communist Party was indeed a foreign conspiracy, and one wonders if its crime, in Isserman’s eyes, was a failed vision of socialism or a failed devotion to patriotism.

Beyond his dubious portrait of the Communist Party as founded and funded by “Moscow Gold” and shadowy, fifth-column agitators, the contrast Isserman draws between “good” and “bad” visions of the left is premised on shaky ground. While he’s correct to note that the Socialist Party in the Debs era was far less centralized and ideologically uniform—a broad diversity of left-wing thought flourished under the SPA—he takes as a given that ideological diversity is a party’s most important claim to justice or efficacy. SPA was not just primarily white; it allowed segregated chapters in the Deep South, and racist members could hold onto their leadership positions. Debs, while personally a staunch opponent to segregation, infamously said the SPA has “nothing special to offer the Negro” that it does not offer to other workers. While this form of colorblindness may have been seen a progressive policy relative to the two major parties, Du Bois—who flirted with joining the SPA briefly in the 1910s—commented thus in the pages of the NAACP’s Crisis:

“Why do not Negroes join the Socialists?” they ask. They do not ask such silly questions of white folks: They go and see why they do not join. They teach, agitate, and proselyte; while among ten million Negro Americans they have scarcely a single worker and are afraid to encourage such workers.

“Native born” workers who are unafraid to “speak their piece” may speak unadulterated truth to power; they may also speak unadulterated racism to their erstwhile comrades. Needless to say, outside of integrated Wobbly locals and a few northern cities, the SPA never held much appeal for African Americans, despite their economic and labor message being broadly popular among workers of color.

To put it another way, it is precisely because the Communist Party was aligned with an internationalist, anti-colonial movement that it managed to have such long and influential role on the American left. While the show trial was not particularly fair to Yokinen, as it alerted federal immigration authorities about his Party affiliation, it was a necessary demonstration to African Americans that the Communist Party was not like either the Democratic or Republican Parties, and not like the SPA, an organization that tolerated racists and segregationists, subsuming racial struggles for freedom under an overly universalistic class solidarity. Debs may have been more democratic than general secretary William Z. Foster, but the question of formal democracy means only so much when nearly half of the nation is living in a state of radical un-freedom, without basic citizenship, let alone civil and economic rights. While Isserman is correct that the CPUSA was not a democratic organization, one also has to understand, with dialectical irony, that it was precisely its lack of “native-born” American democracy that allowed it to affect such a dramatic change on U.S. political, racial, and classed culture.

Reds is a strange book to come out in 2024. Isserman has a long history of writing about the U.S. left, from his book on socialists during World War II, to his history of Trotskyist dissidents in the 1940s and 1950s, to his cowritten autobiography of the CPUSA leader Dorothy Healey. He is no stranger to the literature on the Party. And yet Reds seems to deliberately ignore the three decades of scholarly literature critically reevaluating the Party’s role in American history that has emerged since the waning of the Cold War. Prior to the 1990s, much of the literature on the CPUSA was in the vein of Reds: tracking Soviet cables from the D.C. embassy, asserting the CPUSA’s isolation from broader currents of American liberalism, accusing the party of espionage and treason against the United States. As such, Reds is a conscious throwback to the Cold War liberalism of Theodore Draper and Arthur Schlesinger, for whom American Communism was a totalitarian aberration in the United States’ confident, if now broken, stride toward an eventual liberal horizon. 

Beginning with Mark Naison’s 1983 Communists in Harlem during the Depression, followed by Robin Kelley’s 1990 Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Paula Rabinowitz’s 1991 Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America, Barbara Foley’s 1993 Radical Representations: Politics and Form in Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941, Alan Wald’s 1994 Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, Michael Denning’s 1998 The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Glenda Gilmore’s 2008 Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, and Enrique Buelna’s 2019 Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, among many others, a new generation of scholars and writers began to ask a different set of questions about America’s radical Marxist history. Rather than focus on communiqués from the Comintern, or the twist and turns of Stalin-era Soviet geopolitics, these writers have focused on the rank and file, on populist history from below. As Denning phrased it, if one looks at the Popular Front, “the periphery was in many cases the center”—not the relatively small core of Party leaders.

Undermining Isserman’s claim that the CPUSA could not offer “a meaningful vision of a good society,” authors such as Naison, Foley, Gilmore, Wald, and Kelley suggested quite the opposite: it was the Communist Party’s singular mission of smashing the American color line that spoke to the deepest impulses and contradictions of life in the United States. Kelley in particular notes how the Party in Alabama was almost entirely African American and was understood by its members as a militant platform to achieve racial equality, economic security, and a wide circle of allies, beyond their often-isolated conditions in the rural fields and small towns of the South. As historian David Roediger framed it, Kelley asks less whether the Party was good or bad, and more how “black workers could embrace and use the Communist party as a vehicle for organizing . . . measuring radicalism not by its ideological purity but by its ability to interact with a received culture to generate bold class organizations.” Such careful historical work even prompted NPR to frame a Black History Month interview of Kelley around the question of “How ‘Communism’ Brought Racial Equality To The South.”

Gilmore offers a longer trajectory, from the 1920s to the Cold War, to ask how the Communist Party launched a series of sit-ins, legal cases, and labor drives that set the stage for the later Civil Rights Movement and, as importantly, trained a generation of activists in racially militant, direct-action struggle. And as Wald points out in a two-part review essay on the African American cultural left, many leading black intellectuals from the late 1920s to the Cold War—Richard Wright, Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and many others—were either in the orbit of the Party or direct members themselves.

The Long Deep Grudge, Toni Gilpin’s intimate and moles-eye monograph of one of the lesser-known CPUSA-led unions, the Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE), tells a similar story from “the peripheries” rather than “the center.” What did it look like to be an organizer for, and a member of, one of one of the more militant CPUSA-aligned unions? Like all other causes and campaigns of the Communist Party, FE placed anti-racism at the core of unionism. While this was difficult enough in the Chicago home of McCormick Works, FE stuck to its principles even when McCormick moved south to Kentucky. Not only did FE promote black leadership within the union and on the shop floor, such radical anti-racism often translated into the daily life of FE members. Union picnics and picket lines were integrated, and squads of FE workers in Louisville held sit-ins and protests at segregated parks and swimming pools years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Montgomery bus boycott. According to Gilpin, it was the African American workers who stuck by FE when the United Auto Workers tried to raid it at the height of the Red Scare. As she narrates, the workers “loved that union,” and it was only the combined pressure of increased capital mobility and the Red Scare that forced FE leadership into an unhappy merger with larger and far less radical UAW.

It should also be remembered that the Communist Party was always much more than a tight core of its members or even a looser circle of “fellow travelers.” It functioned largely through “front” organizations—such as the Civil Rights Congress, the American League Against War and Fascism, John Reed Clubs, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, Friends of Nature, and far more—organizations that were often unruly coalitions of non-communists who participated with Party members to build a broader left politics and culture. The rise of the CPUSA marked a realignment of the ethnic and racialized working classes, a whole new way of life. As Denning stresses, the Party was both a kind counterculture to Fordism and in many ways resembled it: the same way Fordism was a culture of mass production and consumption, so, too, did the Party build a mass politics for a mass age, vertically integrated and simultaneously populist. The tension between centralization and populism marked the Party’s own internal contradiction, and this is a far more complicated and compelling story to tell than Soviet spies and Russian agents, or good socialists and bad ones. The CPUSA, much like the later Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), swum with the major radical and structural currents of their ages, cathecting mass desires for an alternative horizon, as well as falling prey to the very forces that brought them into being. 

This is what Isserman’s book simply has no accounting for. After spending his first two chapters aggressively compiling a case against the top-down, foreign-smelling, sectarian party of wreckers and malcontents, he simply notes that the Communist policy changed, and the CPUSA went on to suddenly scale to the heights of the labor movement, even achieving junior partner status in the New Deal coalition. Why was the Communist Party the most successful socialist organization in American history? How did the Communist Party become, for a time, so much a part of American left-wing, even liberal life? And why did Isserman’s better models, the SPA and, later, SDS last nowhere near as long, nor have as a great a cultural or political impact, despite their genuinely laudable achievements? Isserman offers no answers to these questions; indeed, he seems incapable of even posing them. 

Speaking of Communist efforts in the early days of the Depression to organize the unemployed, DeWitt Gilpin said that the Unemployed Councils “laid the basis for much of the New Deal legislation.” Like or dislike the Communist Party, disagree with its many mistakes, but the CPUSA caught and shaped the currents of the one of the profound eras of social change and political realignment in U.S. history. If one cannot account for these changes, let alone the demise of the SPA, then one is not writing history but anticommunist propaganda.

The historical claims of Reds are specious and contradictory enough that it becomes clear a fair hearing of the Communist Party is not Isserman’s primary objective. I rather suspect that he is attempting to find an historical lineage for his recent lurch rightward, having publicly resigned from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over their support for Palestinian solidarity protests following the October 7 Hamas attack. Isserman has been all over the papers in the last year, mourning that the organization he helped found in the 1980s has been taken over by keffiyeh-clad radicals.

Writing in The Nation, Isserman’s analysis of DSA’s sudden break to the radical left has nothing to do with the urgency of the moment: the word genocide is not mentioned once in the piece, even as a concern. That’s because, for Isserman, the sudden fury in response to the U.S.-sponsored slaughter in Palestine is not the result of changing conditions—from apartheid to genocide—but rather the work of “entryists,” dangerous fifth columnists attempting a takeover of DSA. Offering no proof, Isserman claims that, like the Progressive Labor Party’s takeover of SDS in 1969, DSA’s militancy regarding Palestinian solidarity has not been a response to the actual nature of an acute crisis but the result of sinister Communists infiltrating the organization. 

Despite his alarm that Communists are streaming over the Tofu Curtain from Park Slope to the American heartland, if one looks at DSA’s organizing since October 7, it has been well within left-wing democratic norms: I was personally phone-banked as a DSA member to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary, to call my Congress member to demand a ceasefire, and to show up at major demonstrations and sit-ins in Chicago in support of Palestinian lives. All these are not only well within the bounds of legal democratic practice, they are acts that place far more faith in the democratic process than I would argue either Democrats and Republicans do, to say nothing of corporate America or the police.

Perhaps then, it is not entryism or democracy bothering Isserman, but rather that Palestine has emerged at the center of an organization that for many years at best ignored it. Isserman laments in his public resignation letter that an organization founded on “realizable domestic reforms” such as “Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student debt relief, tenants’ rights, etc.” is now a part of a broad, unwieldly coalition that targets U.S. imperialism and Israeli fascism.

Isserman’s nostalgia for Debsian socialism seems thus less about the ability to “speak one’s piece,” something he has no trouble doing, than about the increasing internationalism of the American left. No one can argue that the pivot to Palestine solidarity was undemocratic or is unpopular in the organization. Indeed, the 2017 BDS resolution which charted DSA’s new course away from its older, liberal Zionist formation was voted on at DSA’s biannual convention, passing unanimously by a vote of over eight hundred delegates.

Isserman is correct in his assessment that the DSA has changed in the last decade: it has changed from an organization concerned primarily with domestic social welfare reform and labor organizing to an organization that understands these reforms as viscerally and intimately entwined with the lives of workers around the globe. In this sense, he is also correct to suggest DSA’s support for Palestinian liberation is in the tradition of the CPUSA. The CPUSA, unlike the SPA, not only fought internally for an end to white supremacy; it was constitutively an anti-imperialist organization from its heyday to the Cold War. In nearly all of the CPUSA’s work, from its Third Period sectarianism, to its Popular Front populism, to its opposition to the Cold War, CPUSA members understood that domestic issues, labor, the welfare state, and civil rights are deeply connected with, and produced through, American imperial entanglements. The CPUSA opposed the expansion of the U.S. empire in its calls for the end of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and its “hands off” China, Cuba, and Nicaragua campaigns, arguing that fascism was embedded in the antidemocratic forms of governance and investment imposed by U.S. corporations and U.S. gunboats. In scholar Hakim Adi’s words, the Communist International was the “era’s sole international white-led movement . . . formally dedicated to a revolutionary transformation of the global political and racial order.”

To have a new organization with the CPUSA’s anti-imperial politics, minus the adherence to Stalinism, would be welcome indeed. Yet Isserman’s denunciation of the new DSA as led by “authoritarian zealots” is not a good-faith call for a new generation of leftists to think through democratic proceduralism. In a follow-up to his Nation article published in The Atlantic, he again repeated the trope that American Communists “subordinated democratic ideals” to a “hierarchical party apparatus,” taking their inspiration from “Lenin” in the same way DSA now takes its inspiration from “Hamas.”

Reds comes out of a long history of trying to distinguish the good left from the bad along nationalist and patriotic lines. The good left are loyal members of the Democratic Party and defend America’s liberal democracy abroad; the bad left questions the two-party system entirely and raises thorny and difficult questions about the United States’ lack of democracy at home and support for bloodthirsty dictators abroad. Isserman went so far as to call for American radicals to not protest the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, even as the leaders of the Party supported a genocide. This separation of a good left from a bad left, a nationalist left from an anti-imperialist left, was exactly the logic deployed by everyone from socialists to liberals to justify the Red Scare. Isserman’s insights are not new; indeed, they stem from a very old playbook—as old as America itself.

To be clear, the tragedy of American communism is not that it failed; the tragedy is that it was crushed. As Ellen Schrecker describes in her classic Many Are the Crimes, the second Red Scare of the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s “was the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.” Aimed not only at the many thousands of the Party’s leaders who were jailed under the Smith Act and/or deported under the McCarran Act, the Red Scare shut down the left wing of the labor movement, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist civil rights organizations, organizations that defended undocumented immigrants, and Jewish and black leftist organizations, leaving what one author described as a “black hole” in the center of American history. By the time HUAC began to go after liberals in army uniform, it was far too late: radicals had been purged from unions, Hollywood, universities. The damage had been done. If the Communist Party was so far outside of the currents of American radicalism, as Isserman argues, one has to wonder why the state spent over a decade destroying it—and destroying in the process its own professed liberalism.

As fallout from the mushroom cloud of the 2024 presidential election settles, the dangers of ignoring the American empire should be quite clear: not only did Harris underperform with young voters, whose overall turnout decreased from 2020, many Democratic voters in crucial swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania appear to have stayed home, voted third party, or even voted for Trump, at least in part due to Biden and Harris’s unwillingness to, in Trump’s phrase, “settle the war in Ukraine and end the chaos in the Middle East.” Suggesting that we can have a socialist politics that ignores the wreckage America unleashes abroad and its refractions at home—from a fraying social safety net to a militarization of daily life—is not only immoral, but naive and misguided. We may not be able to defeat the American empire, but it will certainly undermine and defeat our social movements if we leave it to the far-right politics of “America First.” And while Democrats and leftists such as Isserman may point out that Trump is lying, they lose all credibility in the face of a genocide they express concern over and yet do nothing to stop. 

Isserman may finally get the purging of “Leninists” from the left he seems to long for. While Trump may have lied about his antiwar message, I fear he is entirely honest about his desire to “root out” the “communists, Marxists, racists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Some of this is surely just rhetoric, but a blueprint for sweeping purges has been clearly laid out in the pages of Project 2025 and another Heritage Foundation document, Project Esther, promising to escalate an already vicious crackdown on Palestine solidarity movements and left-wing academics. With a new Red Scare on the horizon, Isserman’s assertion that socialist support for Palestine is the work of fifth-column entryists only does the Trump administration’s work for them. 

This is not to say that leftists are above criticism. The CPUSA’s mistakes are well known, part of American common sense and official historiography. “Communism” for many Americans is still synonymous with Stalinism, despite decades of scholarship complicating this two-dimensional stereotype. At the risk of stating the obvious, Isserman is boxing with shadows: to suggest the DSA intends to create Soviet gulags or mass executions, to celebrate sclerotic post-Soviet states such as North Korea or armed attacks on civilians, is lunacy. Yet now there is a very large risk that a rebranded anticommunism will find adherents and willing ears, which would not only threaten the nascent American left but weaken the very left-liberalism Isserman seems to cherish. Social democracy, without a far left to push it and to force the state into compromises, has been emptied into a privatized husk: technocratic, neoliberal, and no more serious about economic redistribution and welfare than it is about democracy, global justice, human rights, climate change, or public health.

I believe that Isserman is sincere when he opines for a robust social democracy. One cannot however achieve it, let alone full socialism, by punching left. Perhaps he should take seriously the words of his own avatar, Eugene Debs: “Mistakes have been made on all sides . . . I can fight capitalists, but not comrades.”