With the publication of The Secret World of American Communism—the
initial volume in a new series of studies called “Annals of
Communism,” published by the Yale University Press under the
editorship of Jonathan Brent—the history of the Communist movement
in America has been definitively altered.
This book is the first to give us an account of clandestine Communist
activities in this country that is based on documents from the
recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union. It is the work
of two distinguished American scholars—Harvey Klehr of Emory
University and John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress—and a
Russian archivist, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, who was formerly with
the
Russian Center for the Preservation and
Study of Documents of Recent History in Moscow.

What this book establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the
Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was, from
the outset of its creation in the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure
of power in Russia in 1917, an organization whose sole purpose was to
serve the interests of the Soviet state by any means and for whatever
ends—legal or illegal, public or secret—determined by the Party’s
masters in Moscow. It also establishes that the operations of the
CPUSA were financed by sizable infusions of money secretly and
often illegally channeled to the Party from the Soviet Union. It thus
marks finis to whatever claims may have been advanced in the
past—and there have been many, of course, and recently, too—that
the CPUSA was somehow to be understood as a normal and independent
American political party, notwithstanding its radical views.

The authors of The Secret World of American Communism write with
admirable clarity about the issues their work has been obliged to
engage:

Many questions remain about the CPUSA’s role in American political
and social life. One of the most contentious and important
issues concerns the party’s clandestine activities. Did the
Communist party conceal key aspects of its organization in a secret
apparatus? Did secret members of the party infiltrate government
agencies in the 1930s and 1940s? Did the Communist party and its
members commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union? Strictly
speaking, only the last was a crime. The maintenance of a concealed
underground organization, however, marked the CPUSA as an abnormal
participant in democratic politics. And the manipulation of
government agencies to promote Communist policies was a form of
political subversion.

They write with clarity and candor, too, about the historiographic
debate their study is designed to address:

Two views of the history of the CPUSA are in contention. The
older view, first developed in the 1950s, holds that the CPUSA was
never an independent American political party but a creature given
life and meaning by its umbilical ties to the Soviet Union. Seeing
the Soviet connections as the defining aspect of American communism,
these scholars … focus on the party’s willingness to alter its
policies to suit Soviet needs and on the key roles played by the
party leadership in defining the Stalinist nature of American
communism.

The revisionist view, the dominant perspective among academic
historians for the past twenty years, holds that the American
Communist movement was a normal, albeit radical, political
participant in American democracy. This assessment sees American
communism
as a domestic American movement with its roots in America’s
democratic, populist, and revolutionary past.

About the conclusions which the authors of The Secret World of
American Communism have reached on the basis of their research in
the Comintern archives, they are appropriately unambiguous:

It is no longer possible to maintain that the Soviet Union did not
fund the American party, that the CPUSA did not maintain a covert
apparatus, and that the key leaders and cadres were innocent of
connection with Soviet espionage operations… . Both the Soviet
Union and the American Communist leadership regarded these activities
as normal and proper. Their only concern was that they not become
public.

In other words, what the authors correctly characterize as “the
dominant perspective among academic historians for the past twenty
years” on the Communist movement in America has proved to be an
ideological fantasy. The bulk of the research that is documented in
The Secret World of American Communism fully supports this claim
with an extraordinary range of dramatic revelations.

Document 1, for example, is a Comintern accounting sheet listing
payments to Americans in 1919 and 1920 amounting to the equivalent of
almost three million dollars, an immense fortune at the time, with
more than a million of it going to John Reed, the author of Ten Days
That Shook the World.

Documents 2, 3, and 4, from the years 1923–25, are concerned with the
activities of Armand Hammer and his father, Julius, both American
physicians and businessmen resident in Moscow at the time. (Armand
Hammer was later well known in the United States as the head of
Occidental Petroleum and an art collector on a big scale.) The
authors write that “Comintern records establish for the first time
that in the early years of the Soviet regime, Armand and his father
were actually an official part of the Comintern’s covert financial
network,” and, further, that “Documents 3 and 4 disclose for the
first time that both Julius and Armand Hammer were laundering Soviet
money”—that is, providing a channel for Comintern funds to be paid
to Communist operatives abroad.

The documentation detailing the Moscow-directed activities of the
CPUSA in the 1930s and 1940s is even more plentiful. There is much
in The Secret World, for example, about J. Peters, who was
identified by Whittaker Chambers as heading the CPUSA’s underground
organization in the 1930s. The documents assembled in this book
confirm, as the authors write, that “Chambers’s allegations
concerning J. Peters and the Communist underground in Washington,
D.C., in the 1930s were true.”

Then, too, there is a good deal about the curious links that formed
what was, in effect, a Communist underground, more or less supervised
by the NKVD in Moscow and the CPUSA in New York, that spread from
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War to the Office of
Strategic Services and the Office of War Information in Washington
during the
Second World War. This chilling story, all of it meticulously
documented in The Secret World, is another of the extraordinary
revelations to be found in this important study.

Whether, in today’s intellectual climate, these and the other disclosures
contained in The Secret World of American Communism
will prove to be sufficient to reverse “the dominant perspective
among academic historians for the past twenty years” on the subject
of the Communist movement in America remains to be seen. For this
“dominant perspective” has been based more on ideology than on an
interest in knowing the truth. But for anyone interested in the
truth, this first volume in Yale’s “Annals of Communism” series marks
the beginning of a triumphant revision of the revisionists.