Dead Political

 “The Romance of American Communism,” by Vivian Gornick, 1979

This famous book was written by a red-diaper baby who looks back fondly at the human side of the members of the U.S. Communist Party (CP), nearly all joining during its heroic period in the 1930s.  Communists are usually stereotyped as robots, thugs or pointy-heads by capital – the psycho-ingredients of a bag of nonsense for years. This book refutes those ideas in spades. Gornick interviewed ex-members of the Party in the 1970s (1974) about their lives as big ‘C’ Communists.  Little ‘c’ communists are not present in her narrative, as this is a sociological study blind to the rest.  She interviews poverty-stricken eastern European Jews from the Bronx; former Poles who immigrated to the Philly slums; hoboes who became sailors out of San Francisco; dirt poor populists; lawyers that became CP functionaries; miners; fruit pickers, labor organizers, former artists and the rest. 

Gornick herself grew up in the hotbed of New York kitchen-table Jewish socialism, surrounded by poor working-class men and women who had found meaning in their lives by being active Communists.  Whole New York neighborhoods like the lower East Side and the Bronx Coop building complex were this way, part of city culture. For Gornick, her life in New York surrounded by Communists told her they were “honest dissenters” who wanted “a change in the law” towards socialism – not a revolution. 

Only one of her older interviewees was in the CP or politics anymore in the 1970s, though a few still worked in unions.  Being expelled is a semi-regular event in these tales, as the CP allowed no factions, disagreements or dissent. They couldn’t handle disagreements even in the 1960s. Nor was there any voting to decide policy or leadership. One women divorced her husband when he was expelled.  Nearly all of them finally left or were expelled from the CP for one reason or another. 

In the conversations, Gornick uncovers the great events and also disagreements within the Party – the Depression; the struggle of California farm laborers; the fight against fascism in Spain; the Popular Front; the Hitler/Stalin Pact; WWII; 1946 no-strike pledges; the Marshall Plan; Smith Act jailings; the McCarthyite witch hunts; the blacklist; Party members going underground; the Wallace Candidacy, the Hungarian invasion and Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, which decimated the CP back into a small sect.  And then Czechoslovakia. She’s aware that the U.S. CP never had any ideological independence from the Kremlin, as do some of her interviewees, but her political grasp does not go much beyond that.  An understanding of Marxism as different from Stalinism is entirely absent, even by Gornick.

Literary references abound in the book.  Gornick interviews men and women across the U.S. from working class, middle-class and even a few rich backgrounds, ill-educated and not. Many were “dirt poor and dirt political.” One of her themes is that ‘they came from everywhere’ and ‘they returned to everywhere’ - there was not one CP type.  Nearly every part of the country is represented. In the CP they learned many skills, ideas and history, learning how the world actually functioned.  The mysteries of why society included poverty, war, bosses, racism and exploitation were revealed.  They became tied to an international movement, no longer isolated wage slaves in one town.  The real thing that drew most was Marx’s writings, not just ‘the struggle’ or comradeship.  Marx sparked ‘a bright light’ to go off in their heads.  They became what she calls “fully human.”

Gornick notes their inability to make personal, psychological or emotional insights into themselves as Communists.  Or even to think in any other way but politically. Yet as one woman remarks about her 4 years in the furious and bloody battles engaged in by California fruit pickers: “they were the best 4 years of my life,” a period “of total comradeship.” This radical crucible, like fighting in the Spanish Civil War or significant strikes, is common to many leftists, including younger ones that went through movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and later events, like the George Floyd protests. She calls it “being and becoming.” Gornick also discusses how CP life was a totality, involving a connected “wholeness of the world.” 

Being a CPer was intimately linked with being a trade unionist for some.  Many were sent into certain industries as part of ‘colonization.’  The CP was a constant and powerful force in the ‘30s and ‘40s union movement and upsurge. Nevertheless several activists say the CP “never understood the American working class” and the multiple contradictions within U.S. workers.  Others always had conflicted feelings over Party directives they disagreed with.  Some covered it up by being more dogmatic and rigid.  There were contradictions between art and the narrow crudities of many CP functionaries – which Gornick is unable to explain. They made every single branch expel Earl Browder in 1948, a seeming unnecessary act. One member was told to stop seeing his sister because she was taking a school class from a Trotskyist.  Self-criticism, charges and trials were normal.  Ex-Party members were shunned. The idiocies are multiple. 

"Disarm the Rich Farmers or Arm the Workers for Self Defense" 

Of especial misery was the deluded decision by the CP leadership to have their 2^nd tier leadership of 2,000 ‘go underground’ for 4-5 years in the 1950s, to preserve the Party in the face of ‘imminent fascism.’  This policy led to many of these comrades leaving the Party, as fascism did not occur, only isolation and poverty.   

Gornick asks people about their present lives and one thing is clear – no matter what they did afterwards, they were all productive people whose experiences in the CP shaped them.  Nearly all do not regret their involvement. Yet all of these interviewees rejected the revival of the Left in the 1960s.  Gornick does not interview the small handful of CP dissidents who went on to form Progressive Labor, the Revolutionary Union and the Communist Labor Party in the 1960s.    

The animating force overriding the drudgery of daily Communist activity - raising funds, selling the paper, calling contacts, organizing and attending meetings and pickets, going door to door, running off leaflets, postering, mutual aid, educationals, electoral work, travel, etc. – was “the revolution around the corner.”  This was also a motivation during the 1960s and early 1970s.  It did not come to pass.  But it will animate U.S. history again … and one day it will be true.   

Note:  The author was a member of the Communist Party for a year and a half, then quit.  The Party in Minnesota was mostly led by old Finnish ladies at the time.  None appear in the book, although nearly half of the Party ‘toveri’ in the early days were foreign language section Finnlanders, mostly from northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Tyomies was their Finnish publication, coming out of Superior, WI.  Tyomies means ‘worker’ or ‘working-man’ in the Finnish language.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms:  “Revolution in the Air” (Elbaum); “Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary” (Peery); “A Threat of the First Magnitude” (Leonard/Gallagher); “I Married a Communist” (Roth); “The French Communist Party versus the Students,” “You Say You Want a Revolution? (Levin/Silbar); “The Way the Wind Blew” (Jacobs), "In Dubious Battle" (Steinbeck) or the words “Communist Party.”

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent used / cutout book section for cheap!

Red Frog

April 9, 2022