How It All Got Started

The first thing I am moved to say about Theodore Draper’s book, The Roots of American Communism (The Viking Press, $6.75) is that it is reliable. It is written without prejudice and with conscientious and meticulous regard for the facts. The facts it deals with, the beginning of the Communist movement in the United States, are so unusual, and were woven together in so peculiar an ideational and emotional medium, that I think only one who had been inside the movement could ever get them straight.

On the other hand, those inside the movement were so well drilled in bias that you might think a scholarly historian would be the last thing to emerge from among them. Mr. Draper, according to a note on the jacket of this book, did not wholly emerge until the early years of World War II. He must have had a rough time with his conscience before that, but he seems to have “come clean.” He is a scholarly historian. I have read his book through carefully, a large part of it twice, and I find no traces of Marxian scar-tissue, or the chronic echolalia resulting from prolonged obeisance to Moscow. It is the work of a sound mind, zealous still, but zealous only to find out and set forth in good clear English what actually happened in revolutionary circles in America between 1917 and 1923.

ME

About the Author

Max Eastman

Featured Tags

The first thing I am moved to say about Theodore Draper’s book, The Roots of American Communism (The Viking Press, $6.75) is that it is reliable. It is written without prejudice and with conscientious and meticulous regard for the facts. The facts it deals with, the beginning of the Communist movement in the United States, are so unusual, and were woven together in so peculiar an ideational and emotional medium, that I think only one who had been inside the movement could ever get them straight.

On the other hand, those inside the movement were so well drilled in bias that you might think a scholarly historian would be the last thing to emerge from among them. Mr. Draper, according to a note on the jacket of this book, did not wholly emerge until the early years of World War II. He must have had a rough time with his conscience before that, but he seems to have “come clean.” He is a scholarly historian. I have read his book through carefully, a large part of it twice, and I find no traces of Marxian scar-tissue, or the chronic echolalia resulting from prolonged obeisance to Moscow. It is the work of a sound mind, zealous still, but zealous only to find out and set forth in good clear English what actually happened in revolutionary circles in America between 1917 and 1923.