THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM (498 pp.)—Theodore Draper—Viking ($6.75).
The unquiet grave of the U.S. Communist Party has at last been visited by a historian who bears no penitential flowers, only the instruments for an autopsy. To produce his coroner's report. Author Theodore Draper, perhaps the most serious and scholarly historian to venture into this potter's field, has hefted a morgueful of decayed pamphlets and moldering manifestos, also remembered to interview many forgotten men of the left. The result is a book which, without exactly being the season's most fascinating reading, will remain for years a source for other historians, a warning and a matter for wonder to all.
As an accomplished military historian in World War II, Author Draper knows that for this kind of work a man needs access to enemy records. Draper himself—an old New Masses, Daily Worker and Tassman who broke with the Reds at the beginning of World War II—had this knowledge of the enemy built in. Yet he has preserved a stiff objectivity—rare among ex-leftists —which has kept him on the cold course plotted by the Fund for the Republic, which sponsored his study. The book is all the more welcome because, as Draper understates it, "Communists themselves cannot write their own history."
Native Springs. Before the native springs of American radicalism were drained into the stagnant pool of the Communist Party, there were generations of hedging and ditching. Engels sadly noted that Americans were "practical" but tremendously backward in "theory." At first the Socialist movement in the U.S. was largely staffed by immigrants who had a sharper taste for theory, and the Socialist Labor Party of North America would have remained a "small, moribund, foreign-language sect" had not practical, native forces been stirring.
The great 19th century ground swell of popular discontent swirled about real grievances in the U.S. rather than frothing up towards imaginary cures. Populism, which wanted cheaper money, Progressivism, which wanted cheaper everything, the Knights of Labor with their focus on the dinner pail and the dignity of those who ate from it, all expressed the aspirations of Americans who remained hard-headed even when hard up. Even "Big Bill" Haywood's I.W.W. was "practical" in its own simpleminded, bloody-minded way. Author Draper never loses sight of the fact that early capitalism cooked a brutal brew, but his is the story of the witches who danced around the pot. None of them could evoke the genie of modern Communism from the old mixture of immigrant theorizing and native radical cussedness. It took two world events and a crowd of lesser demiurges to do so.