Maurice Isserman is the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College. He is the author, most recently, of Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. Over at The Guardian, Isserman writes: “I was struck by the mystery of why so many intelligent and admirable people remained so loyal for so long to a fundamentally flawed movement.”
Here is more from that piece:
Somewhere along the line, I showed a draft of an early chapter of Reds to a friend and fellow historian familiar with my earlier works. Getting back to me a few days later, he said he liked it well enough, and saw how it grew out of my first books on the topic. But, he added: “You seem less patient with the communists than you used to be.”
That was a shrewd observation. Now that I’m in my 70s, roughly the age of those I interviewed back when I first began studying the history of American communism, now that I’ve had ample time to reflect on some of my own youthful political follies in the 1960s, I probably am (in retrospect) less inclined to be patient with my interviewees in their younger days. Understanding, yes. Patient, not so much. As the great British historian EP Thompson, himself a former communist, wrote in his 1963 masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class, understanding the “obsolete”, “utopian” and “deluded” English working-class radicals of the early 19th century required rescuing them from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.
Condescension, historically, can take the form of a patronizing dismissal of those who came long before us for failing to live up to the high standards of moral intelligence and practical knowledge we like to imagine we possess. But it can also take the form of cutting our ancestors perhaps too much slack.
In the case of American communism, the appeal of the Soviet “experiment” in the 1930s and 1940s in a world racked by the Great Depression and menaced by domestic and foreign fascism is perfectly comprehensible. At the same time, it shouldn’t have taken a speech by Khrushchev to reveal Stalin’s all-too-evident crimes against humanity in his three decades of misrule over the Soviet Union; lots of people, including many on the American and international left, had figured that one out for themselves long before.
In the end, studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits. I hope that in Reds I have avoided both (readers, please advise), and thus have been fair to my old and now departed friends, those veterans of the communist movement, whose memories and insights I taped so many years back.
American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes.
Read the entire piece here.