Books, Arts & Manners: Twentieth-Century Americanism

The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, by Harvey Klehr (Basic, 511 pp., $26.50)

In 1978 Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University published a first-rate study, Communist Cadre, which for one reason or another did not receive the kudos it merited. However, his work on that volume brought him into contact with Theodore Draper, the foremost historian of the American Communist Party and author of The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia. Draper chronicled the development of the CPUSA through the Comintern’s expulsion of Jay Lovestone and his “American Exceptionalists” in 1929 and its replacement of these duly elected leaders of the vanguard with a collection of flunkies. Then, perhaps suffering from battle fatigue, Draper put this work aside. Now he has turned his files over to Klehr, and the latter, with a good deal of additional research, has produced a study of the Party’s progress in the 1930s.

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John P. Roche

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The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, by Harvey Klehr (Basic, 511 pp., $26.50)

In 1978 Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University published a first-rate study, Communist Cadre, which for one reason or another did not receive the kudos it merited. However, his work on that volume brought him into contact with Theodore Draper, the foremost historian of the American Communist Party and author of The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia. Draper chronicled the development of the CPUSA through the Comintern’s expulsion of Jay Lovestone and his “American Exceptionalists” in 1929 and its replacement of these duly elected leaders of the vanguard with a collection of flunkies. Then, perhaps suffering from battle fatigue, Draper put this work aside. Now he has turned his files over to Klehr, and the latter, with a good deal of additional research, has produced a study of the Party’s progress in the 1930s.