Up from Bohemia
Journey with Ronald Radosh.

By Stephen Schwartz, author of Intellectuals and Assassins
May 19-20, 2001

Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh (Encounter, 216 pp., $24.95)

onald Radosh's memoir is a valuable addition to the literature of leftist intellectual disillusionment. Its chief distinction may be its author's sense of humor, which contrasts strongly with the torment and anguish experienced by nearly all his predecessors who made the trek from revolutionism to the discovery that Soviet Communism and its works were a brutal deception.

Which is not to say Radosh has not suffered. He was once considered an outstanding radical scholar among the young American historians to emerge in the Cold War era. But since his plunge into "extreme truth-telling" — by confirming, in his 1983 book The Rosenberg File, the guilt of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — he has undergone a professional ostracism that, once upon a time, would have been condemned as "un-American."

Radosh is no whiner, and he does not elaborate on the fate that has been his. Since he left the City University of New York in 1992, he has — aside from a brief period at Adelphi University — been academically blacklisted. Yet he seems to grasp that no career is constitutionally guaranteed. Rather than plead for solidarity and mercy from those "progressives" who would loudly protest such a sanction against one of their own, he has preferred to recall, without rancor, his radical origins and middle years. Radosh exhibits no personal bitterness toward a leftist movement that, in fact, swindled and betrayed him. Rather he evinces some thing close to nostalgia for the enthused innocence with which he once embraced the Leninist cause.

Radosh was born in 1937, a child of the New York garment workers' milieu. His father worked in the once-bustling hatmaking industry, and supported a Communist labor faction; his mother was a union activist. The parents had made a pilgrimage to Soviet Russia in 1924, the year Lenin died, and returned red-starry-eyed.

Young Ron's most important formative influence was his mother's cousin Jacob Abrams, an anarchist and a legendary figure in American radical history. The subject of a landmark Supreme Court civil-liberties case, Abrams had been deported from the United States for distributing subversive literature. He ended up in Mexico, where he be came a fixture in the émigré intellectual community and attempted to help Trotsky defend himself against the conspiracy that would ultimately kill him. After Abrams gave the family a set of plates that had belonged to Trotsky, Radosh used them to serve snacks to his pals in the Stalinist youth movement, who came to include the arch-provocateur David Horowitz — and whose faces paled in horror when they realized which "renegade" hands had once touched them.

From Abrams, Radosh learned very early, even as his parents remained faithful to the cause, that Stalinists were murderers, and that the revolutionary ideal had an extremely ambiguous character. This early skepticism may have been fortified by a certain distance his parents seem to have taken from Muscovite orthodoxy, at least by the 1950s. Despite having enrolled Ron at the unabashedly leftist Elisabeth Irwin High School (students called it "the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds"), they had become wary of his joining the Labor Youth League, the junior section of the CPUSA. Ron himself showed a reluctance to sign up, having been pitched as a prospective recruit by two Greek Communist partisans who showed up at his summer camp in upstate New York. "There was something about their austere nature and fanatical commitment that scared me," he writes.

Nevertheless, he soon swallowed his doubts and enlisted. It wasn't a matter of ideological seduction; rather it was a logical step, given his family background and his attendance at Com munist summer camps, where he learned to play the banjo and perform ersatz folk music under the mentorship of none other than Pete Seeger. There was, however, an element of social promotion in his decision. He admits, "The reasons had little to do with politics, and a great deal to do with the need to find an identity. Strangely, belonging to the LYL served that purpose. It provided the camaraderie of a tight-knit group of ready-made friends, along with a sense of moral superiority, of being on the right side of a good fight most people didn't even know about. And it offered the possibility of what every teenage boy seeks: a girlfriend. God bless the Communist movement for giving me my very first sexual experiences from among a group of 'liberated' girls."

Radosh's induction into the banjo brigade and his friendship with Seeger marked the beginning of a trudge through the netherworld of leftist stardom. That affords the most amusing aspect of this chronicle: His progress through the Cold War Left is mainly a series of encounters with celebrities. Thus, when Radosh went to study at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a young folkie calling himself Bob Dylan showed up at his door, looking for a place to stay. Although he had Communist friends and modeled himself on Woody Guthrie, master of the Stalinist musical lampoon, Dylan was short on politics, and at that time, even shorter on charisma. After a few sessions of guitar-picking at radical parties, Dylan was asked to knock it off. But he already knew what he wanted: "to be as big a star as Elvis Presley." Before long, Radosh, Dylan, and a few other budding musicians were holding regular hootenannies at a local café. ("That was great!" raved Dylan after hearing Radosh sing an anti-HUAC ditty called "Talkin' Un-American Blues." "That song really says something.")

Readers are carried through a series of such walk-ons — giving Commies less the flavor of a people's republic than of People magazine. Whittaker Chambers memorably described, in Witness, seeing his wife Esther fighting the police on a strike picket line in the 1920s. By contrast, Radosh's radical biography in cludes watching the reggae musician Bob Marley score dope on a hotel terrace in socialist Jamaica and Bianca Jagger unbuttoning her blouse while she and Radosh discuss the dialectics of revolution in Nicaragua.

Commies thereby suggests the essential difference between the ex-radicals of the late-Cold War period and such forebears as Chambers and Arthur Koestler. The same falsehoods were purveyed, corrupting the same idealism, leading many to similar disgusted exits from the ranks. But conditions had changed dramatically: Violent labor conflicts, street fighting in Europe, and the hard school of Bolshevism were a far cry from the American civil-rights movement, yuppies frolicking in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and graduate-school seminars on sexual politics.

The 1983 publication of The Rosenberg File, which Radosh cowrote with Joyce Milton, was the beginning of the end of Radosh's sojourn on the left. The Left hated Radosh because he was the first of its major intellectuals to defect publicly, because his work could be challenged only through a campaign of insult and slander, and because his break was based on his conclusion that the Rosenbergs were guilty — an expression of heterodoxy so extreme as to challenge the entire leftist cosmology. ("The facts are irrelevant," friends told him. "We need the Rosenbergs as heroes.") Radosh writes that "the reaction to The Rosenberg File made me finally move on to consider the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else. Perhaps, I thought — but quickly buried the heresy — the entire socialist project was wrong." A trip to Nicaragua, during which he witnessed the defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box, would complete these political second thoughts and end what he calls "my own long exile from America."

Despite the depth of his former commitment to socialism, and the vitriol he received as he gradually rejected it, Radosh seems not to have gone through the "dark night of the soul" experienced by others like him. That is probably because, in the end, he never took himself that seriously. He seems to have had a secure enough ego to have noticed the contradictions in the leftist dispensation from the beginning, to have considered them carefully over time, and to have made a principled break over questions of truth and in tegrity. He has shown extraordinary courage, which goes with psychological strength rather than dependency. For an individual like him, a break with leftist conformism was doubtless inevitable.

Historians continue to debate whether Communism in the U.S. possessed some essentially American quality that redeemed its wholesale involvement with treason, espionage, and terrorism. Radosh, who has done more than any other individual to expose the activities of Communists like the Rosenbergs, would be the first to argue that Communism was an alien force without authentic American roots. Yet there remains something quintessentially American in the curiously benevolent frivolity of much of what he recalls here. However great the harm the '60s Left did to our culture, it could have been much worse, difficult as that may be for some to imagine.

For more Radosh click here.