Fools for Communism: still apologists after all these years

Reason, April, 2004 by Glenn Garvin

If a similar treasure trove of documentary evidence about the Civil War had been uncovered--say, establishing that Lincoln's government had been riddled with Confederate spies and that several of his cabinet members were secret slaveholders--half the university presses in America would have burned out from over-use. But the revelations of CPUSA peonage to Moscow have produced only a handful of books from U.S. historians.Among the most notable have been three by Klehr and Haynes: The Secret World of American Communism, The Soviet World of American Communism (both co-authored with Russian documentarians), and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.

Klehr, who teaches at Emory University, and Haynes, a historian with the Library of Congress, were among the first American scholars to examine the Communist Party archives thrown open in Moscow. Though traditionalist historians with a leery view of American Communists, they were hardly McCarthyite mad dogs. As recently as 1992, in The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, they scoffed at the idea that the CPUSA was a colony of would-be Borises and Natashas. "Espionage was not a regular activity of the American C.P.," they wrote. "The party promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union's intelligence services. To see the American Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of Fifth Column misjudges its main purpose."

What they found in the Moscow archives convinced them otherwise. However many fluffhead folk singers and guilt-tripping Hollywood glitterati it may have contained, the CPUSA, they wrote three years later in The Secret World of American Communism, was also "a conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power."

For conceding their mistake, Klehr and Haynes have undergone the intellectual equivalent of a Stalinist show trial by their fellow historians. A constant stream of articles in academic journals and lefty magazines--even an entire conference sponsored by New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies--has pilloried them for everything from "triumphalism" (that is, they're glad Stalin didn't win the Cold War; can you imagine a historian of World War II being drummed out of the profession for expressing gratitude that Hitler didn't win?) to accepting funding from conservative foundations (which, unlike the tens of millions of dollars the CPUSA took from the Kremlin, might come with secret strings attached) to starting the Vietnam War, destroying affirmative action, and dismantling the welfare state.

That bit about Vietnam came from a piece co-authored by Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University, who in a movement rich with unintentional self-parody nonetheless towers above the rest. We might even call her the Lucille Ball of anti-anti-communism, though, to be sure, she would never be so gauche as to associate with a pre-revolutionary Cuban like Ricky Ricardo. A prodigious apologist, Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded: "Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase "non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death to the Soviet Union.