Books, Arts & Manners: Mom, Apple Pie, and the CPUSA

The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (Yale, 348 pp., $25)

OVER the last two decades, most historians of Communism in America—perhaps not surprisingly—have tended to sympathize with the American Communist enterprise. Many are “red-diaper babies”—i.e., the children of Party members and/or sympathizers. Others, to be sure, came to their radical-Left sensibilities without familial encouragement. In either case, however, their purpose has been to depict the CP as an indigenous populist movement—linked to the Soviet Union by bonds of admiration, but otherwise authentically American.

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Eric Breindel

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The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (Yale, 348 pp., $25)

OVER the last two decades, most historians of Communism in America—perhaps not surprisingly—have tended to sympathize with the American Communist enterprise. Many are “red-diaper babies”—i.e., the children of Party members and/or sympathizers. Others, to be sure, came to their radical-Left sensibilities without familial encouragement. In either case, however, their purpose has been to depict the CP as an indigenous populist movement—linked to the Soviet Union by bonds of admiration, but otherwise authentically American.