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Lenin's Words. World War I cut off from Marxism those who preferred patriotism to party. Then, when the whole movement seemed to have collapsed, the Bolshevik revolution came to rally the U.S. left in a kind of "ecstasy." At this stage many an older reader will recognize the names. An ex-anarchist named Michael Gold was converted; Eugene Debs declared himself a Bolshevik; Max Eastman was elated. Many a poor visionary in New York—remembering a fellow sometimes called Bronstein who had lived in The Bronx and would lecture for $10 a night—now felt the taste of vicarious power and destiny when he heard that this shabby comrade had become the great Trotsky, Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
Only a specialist reader will care to follow the C.P. through its early history of heresy, splinter groups and purges. From a host of names, Historian Draper has underlined one that serves to tell the story of all. Louis C. Fraina was the "one man who led the way to a pro-Communist Left Wing," and he was once so important, says Draper sarcastically, that William Z. Foster in a 600-page History of the Communist Party of the United States mentions him not once.
Born in 1894 near Naples, Fraina was selling newspapers on Manhattan's Bowery at the age of six; he was a professional Socialist organizer at 15, at 20 a veteran "theoretician." On Sept. 1, 1919 the first convention of the Communist Party of America, in a little building in Chicago called "Smolny" (after the first GHQ of the Russian Soviets), elected Fraina its first International Secretary. He echoed Lenin's words—the new party must be a party of action. Yet within three years Fraina was out of the C.P.. was later hounded by false charges of espionage and embezzlement. He spent ten years as respected Professor Lewis Corey at Antioch College (he died in 1953). Fraina was one of those children whom the revolution not only devours but forgets it ever ate, and this sort of thing, Draper wistfully notes, is tough on a historian.
Final Aphorism. Fraina's career sums up the failure of early U.S. Communism and its theorizers to win the practical-minded American worker. Draper's account ends in 1923, on the eve of an era when new theorizers carried U.S. Communism almost as high as the old Smolny gang had dreamed. That was the time (subject of later volumes) when U.S. intellectuals lovingly tended the shoots that had grown from the Communist roots, ready for the fatuous aphorism of Earl Browder that "Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century."
Browder now lives in Yonkers, a dim, muddled man, wondering just why U.S. Communism could never acquire a true American accent.