The organising principle of this book is stated in its preface, in a single sentence: "A study of the basic stages of the class struggle of the proletariat is inseparable from the study of the history of its vanguard, the Communist Party." Everything else follows from that. This is a scholarly history of the American working class between 1918 and 1939 — the first of two volumes, the second carrying the story to 1965 and reviewed separately — written on the premise that the Communist Party of the United States was the vanguard of that class, and that the history of the one is the history of the other. The book is nineteen chapters and about a hundred and eighty thousand words long. It has a bibliography that runs to hundreds of American titles, and its authors, named in the front matter, worked from the American union press and the American secondary literature at first hand. It is a serious book. It is also, at its centre, an untrue one, and the untruth is of a particular and instructive kind.
Take the date first, because the spine misleads. The English edition carries "© Progress Publishers 1977," but the text is older. It was produced under the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences by a team of Soviet Americanists — G. N. Sevostyanov wrote the preface; I. M. Krasnov, Y. F. Yazkov, V. L. Malkov, N. V. Sivachyov, N. V. Kurkov, B. Y. Mikhailov and S. M. Askoldova the chapters — and the American secondary literature it cites effectively closes at the end of the 1960s. The great mass of the bibliography dates from 1968 and 1969; a stray title or two reaches 1972 and 1975, in the ordinary way of a translation desk swapping in whatever English edition was on the shelf. The living presences in the preface belong to the same moment: it opens on "troublous times for the United States," on students "organizing demonstrations," on a labour movement led by George Meany, "the present A.F.L.-C.I.O. President." Read it as a book of about 1969–70 — an early-Brezhnev, détente-era work — dressed for export in an English jacket seven or eight years later. Its companion volume was dated the same way and reads the same way.
What was it for? The preface is candid enough about the polemical target: American historians who hold "that the Marxist-Leninist teaching on classes and class struggle is altogether inapplicable to the United States," the "theory of consensus," the doctrine of American "exceptionalism." Against them the book means to prove two things — that the United States was riven by class conflict its own academy would not describe, and that the Communist Party was the continuous revolutionary thread running through the conflict. The first proposition is largely true and the book documents it well. The second required the removal of certain people from the record, and it is in the removals, not in the arguments, that the book tells you most about the institution that commissioned it.
Begin with what is good, because a reader told that everything here is worthless will learn nothing, and because the falsifications matter only against a background of real work.
Soviet labour history of the United States had one structural advantage over much of what American departments were producing at the same date: it assumed that class conflict was the organising fact of American life and went looking for it. Applied mechanically that assumption distorts; applied to the strike waves of 1919 and 1933–37 it produced narrative history of subjects the American academy was then neglecting. The chapters on the postwar upheaval — the Seattle general strike of 1919, the great steel strike, the repression that broke the open-shop drives — are dated, sourced and readable. The book's statistical spine is honest: it gives A.F.L. membership falling year by year through the early 1920s, the strike totals mounting through 1933 and 1934, the union figures for the mine workers and the garment workers doubling in eighteen months. When the authors describe the San Francisco maritime strike of 1934 — Bloody Thursday, the National Guard on the Embarcadero, the general strike that shut the city — they quote Hugh Johnson of the N.R.A. against himself at length, and the account holds up against any American narrative of the event.
The treatment of Black workers is better than the period's reputation, and better than a good deal of the American labour history then in print. The book sets the constitutional colour bars of the A.F.L. internationals against the wage data; it records the Communists who "marched into the cotton fields of Alabama, the very citadel of the Black Belt, and organized a sharecroppers union there in 1931," and follows that union from thirty members to twelve thousand, "90 percent of them Blacks," through the plantation terror of the mid-1930s — night raids, the burning of churches, strikers held "without a trial or investigation of any kind." This is real history, much of it drawn from sources an American scholar would not seriously work through for another generation. On the IWW the book is generous rather than sectarian: the Wobblies are "the most militant labor organization," their members conducted themselves "courageously" under the 1917–18 raids, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is quoted mourning the organisation that "swept like a comet across the skies." The pre-1919 socialists — Debs, John Reed, Ruthenberg — are heroes here, their antiwar speeches quoted at length. None of this is erased. The erasures are elsewhere and later, and they are specific.
They are concentrated on the year 1934, and they are the heart of the matter.
Nineteen thirty-four was the hinge of the American labour decade. Three strikes that spring and summer broke the deadlock of the early Depression and made the industrial-union upsurge of the later thirties possible: the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Minneapolis truck drivers' strikes, and the San Francisco longshore and general strike. What made them decisive was not merely their militancy but their leadership: each was directed by radicals to the left of, and outside, the Communist Party. Toledo was led by A. J. Muste's American Workers Party and the Lucas County Unemployed League; Minneapolis by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America — the Dunne brothers and Carl Skoglund, with James P. Cannon in support; San Francisco was the one of the three in which the Communist Party had genuine weight, and even there its influence was contested. This is not obscure knowledge. It is the settled account of the period in every serious history written since.
The book narrates all three strikes. It attributes the leadership of two of them to the Communist Party and anonymises the third.
Toledo it gives to the Communists outright: "most of the labor unions in the city responded to the Communists' call for a general strike." The Auto-Lite plant is never named — it is "an auto electrical equipment plant" — and A. J. Muste, whose American Workers Party actually ran the strike through the Unemployed League, is nowhere near it. Muste is in the book, but quarantined: he appears earlier as head of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, "headed by social-reformists A. J. Muste, Sidney Hook, James Burnham," and later as the organiser of unemployed leagues in Ohio — never as the man who led the strike the book has just credited to his rivals.
Minneapolis is handled more carefully, because there the leadership could not be reassigned to the Party without inventing a Party presence that was not there, and so it is simply deleted. The book gives the strike in full and with evident sympathy — the "citizens' army" organised against it, the workers' own hospital, the two men killed on 22 May, the sixty-seven wounded and two dead on 16 July, Governor Olson's martial law, the surrender of the employers at the end of August. What it does not give is a single name. The union "was preparing for a strike"; "the central labor council sanctioned a strike"; the drivers won. Who organised the preparation the book so admires, who built the strike apparatus, who directed the fighting — this is left blank. Vincent, Miles and Grant Dunne, Carl Skoglund, Local 574: none appears here or in the book anywhere. The strike is orphaned so that it need not be fathered on the Trotskyists.
The contemporaneous answer to this was in print before the strike dust had settled, in the first issue of The New International, July 1934, in an article by the man who had helped direct the fight. James P. Cannon's "Minneapolis and Its Meaning" makes exactly the point the Soviet book spends its energy suppressing — that the outcome turned on who was in charge. "In other places, as a rule, the strike militancy surged from below and was checked and restrained by the leaders," Cannon wrote. "In Minneapolis it was organized and directed by the leaders." And: "Policy, method, leadership—these were the determining factors at Minneapolis which the aspiring workers everywhere ought to study and follow." The Progress volume, which believes above all in the determining role of leadership, cannot afford to say whose leadership it was. (The companion volume performs the sequel to this erasure: it writes the 1941 Smith Act prosecution of these same Minneapolis leaders out of the record entirely. This volume erases the strike; the next erases the trial.)
San Francisco, alone of the three, the book claims for the Party — "the San Francisco strike, to whose organization the Communists contributed greatly, was an exceptionally important action" — and here the claim has some purchase, since the Communists did have real influence on the coast. But set beside the treatment of the other two, the pattern is unmistakable. Where the Party led, it is named; where its rivals led, the leadership is either transferred to the Party or dissolved into passive verbs. The same Cannon article, incidentally, disposes of the Party's own record that year in one line: "Not a single of the 'red' unions affiliated to the Trade Union Unity League has succeeded in gaining recognition." The book presents the Trade Union Unity League as constructive labour organising. Its own contemporaries on the left thought it a wreck.
That brings us to the doctrine, and to the second kind of falsification, which is done not by an assertion but by a silence. The Communist Party of 1928–1934 was operating the Comintern's "Third Period" line: capitalism in terminal crisis, revolution on the order of the day, the socialists denounced as "social-fascists" and treated as the main enemy, and the trade-union field abandoned to a network of separate "revolutionary" unions — the Trade Union Unity League — in place of work inside the A.F.L. In 1935 the Seventh Congress of the Comintern reversed the entire line at a stroke, junked the dual unions, and proclaimed the Popular Front. This is one of the most consequential zigzags in the history of the American left, and it is the sort of thing a history of the American labour movement in these exact years is obliged to reckon with.
The book does not name it. "Third Period" appears once, and it refers to a phase of the C.I.O., not to the Comintern. "Social-fascism" does not appear at all. The Trade Union Unity League is described — its founding in 1929, Foster's stewardship, its programme — but as a straightforward drive to "organize the unorganized," with none of the sectarian doctrine that produced it and none of the damage it did. The 1935 turn to the united front then arrives as pure discovery: "The Seventh Congress of the Comintern worked out such a new political line in the summer of 1935," a line "calling for the establishment of a united front of the working class." A reader of this book would never guess that the "new political line" was the repudiation of the old one, or that the old one had branded as "social-fascists" the very socialists with whom the Party now sought unity.
Here again the contemporaneous record supplies what the book removes, and it does so in the same July 1934 issue of The New International. Arne Swabeck, quoting the American party's own convention theses, records that the Party had proclaimed "the open Fascism of the AF of L" and had drawn from it the conclusion that its "most fundamental task in mass work is the building of the revolutionary unions of the Trade Union Unity League." He records that the 1930 thesis had classed together, as varieties of Fascism, "the AF of L, the Socialist party and the Muste group." This is the doctrine under which the Party greeted the Toledo and Minneapolis strikers — led by "the Muste group" and by expelled Trotskyists — as enemies. The Progress book credits the Party with Toledo and mourns the sectarianism nowhere. It cannot, because to name the Third Period as sectarian error would be to concede that the Party's line was not the ripening of an objective process but an instruction from Moscow, reversible overnight when Moscow reversed it.
The one place the book does confront a Comintern reversal is the "Negro question," and the way it manages the confrontation is the tell. In 1928 the Sixth Congress of the Comintern imposed on the American party the doctrine of "self-determination in the Black Belt" — the position that Black Americans constituted an oppressed nation entitled, in the Southern counties where they formed a majority, to a separate state. The book quotes the theses: "In those regions of the South in which compact Negro masses are living, it is essential to put forward the slogan of the right to self-determination for Negroes." And then, writing forty years on and after the Soviet position had itself changed, it repudiates the line: "The self-determination slogan stemmed from an incorrect definition of the Negro population as a nation having the right to create an independent state." It blames the adoption on individuals — "the Pepper group," "some American Communists" — and it credits the Party with correcting itself, noting that when "the Communist Party withdrew the slogan of national self-determination" this helped it establish closer unity with Black organisations.
Every clause of that is arranged to protect one proposition: that the Party is the subject of its own history, adopting errors through wayward individuals and shedding them through its own maturing wisdom. What the arrangement cannot say is that the 1928 slogan was Comintern doctrine, defended by the Party for years against its own better organisers, and that it was dropped not because the Party grew wiser but because the line changed — the same mechanism, exactly, as the Third Period and the Popular Front. When the Party is wrong, in this book, the error is a named man's deviation. When the line reverses, the reversal is the Party's insight. The one thing that never happens is that the Party receives an instruction and obeys it.
This is what makes the book a document of its doctrine rather than a history of its subject, and it is worth naming the test precisely, because the point is not that the book uses hard words about Cannon or Muste. It does — Cannon and his supporters are "expelled from the Party as splitters and disrupters," Muste is a "social-reformist," Norman Thomas's socialists show their "opportunist essence" — but so did the anti-Stalinist left use hard words about its opponents; harsh language is not the finding. The finding is that the book's central category, the Party-as-vanguard, is one that can never be turned on the Party itself. The Party's opponents deviate, split, betray, adapt; the Party errs only through infiltrators and is always, in the end, the continuous revolutionary thread — "the consistent fight of the Communist Party of the United States all through its history," as the book puts it. No act the Party performed — not the sectarianism that isolated it from the 1934 strikes, not the overnight reversals dictated from abroad — is ever allowed to count against the thread. A history whose organising category cannot be applied to its own protagonist is not a history. It is a theology with footnotes, and the footnotes, to repeat, are often real.
The construction shows even at the point of origin. "The Communist Party of the United States was founded on September 1, 1919," the book states — one date, one vanguard. Its own narrative a few pages earlier says otherwise: the left wing of the Socialist Party, expelled and splitting, held two rival founding conventions on consecutive days in Chicago, one founding "a new party to be called the Communist Labor Party of America" on 31 August, the other proclaiming the Communist Party of America on 1 September, both built overwhelmingly out of the foreign-language federations, and "Attempts to bring the two communist conventions together" failed. The party the book traces as a single continuous thread began as two threads, underground, speaking mostly languages other than English, and did not securely unify for years. The book records the facts and then, in its framing, quietly resolves them into the one clean birth the vanguard thesis requires.
So the honest way to read this book is to take the research and discard the vanguard. The chapters on the 1919 upsurge, on the wage and membership statistics, on the sharecroppers and the plantation terror, on the discrimination fought inside the A.F.L., on the sit-down strikes of 1936–37 and the founding of the C.I.O., are the work of historians who did the reading and cited their sources. The chapters and passages that touch the Party's rivals and the Party's own zigzags — the 1934 strikes, the Trade Union Unity League, the Black Belt line, the silent passage from Third Period to Popular Front — are the work of the same historians writing under a constraint they could not name, and must be read against the record.
The record is available and, for once in this series, it is contemporaneous. The New International began publication in July 1934 — its early volumes, before the 1940 split that took the magazine away from the Fourth International's own tradition, carry the American Trotskyists writing in the moment — and its very first issue contains both Cannon's account of the Minneapolis strike he helped lead and Swabeck's dissection of the Party's Third Period line, quoted above by volume, number and date. For the strikes at book length, the American reader should go to James P. Cannon's The History of American Trotskyism and to Farrell Dobbs's Teamster Rebellion, the account of Minneapolis by one of its organisers; neither is in the present editor's hands to quote, but both are named here so the reader can find them. What this volume removed, those books restore: a strike, a leadership, a party, and the small awkward fact that the decisive year of the American labour decade was opened not by the vanguard this book was written to celebrate, but by the people it was written to forget.