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Twenty-five years ago I published a book called The Romance of American Communism. In its opening chapter I wrote:
At the wooden table in our kitchenin the 1940s and 50sthere were always gathered men named Max and Hymie, and women named Masha and Goldie. Their hands were work-blackened, their eyes intelligent and anxious, their voices loud and insistent. They drank tea, ate black bread and herring, and talked issues. Endlessly, they talked issues. I understood nothing of what they were saying, but I was excited beyond words by the richness of their rhetoric, the intensity of their arguments, the urgency and longing behind that hot river of words that came pouring ceaselessly out of them all.
It was characteristic of that world that during those hours at the kitchen table I didnt know we were poor. I didnt know that in those places beyond the streets of my Bronx neighborhood we were without power, position, material or social existence. I only knew that I felt the same electric thrill as when Rouben, my Yiddish teacher, pressed my upper arm between two bony fingers and, his eyes shining behind thick glasses, said to me: Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.
They were voyagers on that river of wordsthese plumbers, pressers and sewing machine operatorsand they took with them on this journey not only their own narrow, impoverished experience but a set of abstractions with the power to transform. They were not the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians. They were not a people without a history, they had the Russian Revolution. They were not without a civilizing world view, they had Marxism. Paradoxically, the more each one identified himself or herself with the working-class movement, the more brilliantly each one seemed to come individually alive.
For the people among whom I grew this intensity of feeling was transmitted through Marxism as interpreted by the CPUSA. At the indisputable center of their world stood the Communist Party. It was the Party whose awesome structure harnessed that inchoate emotion which, with the force of a tidal wave, drove millions of people around the globe toward Marxism. It was the Party whose moral authority gave shape and substance to the abstractions. It was the Party that brought to life a remarkably far-reaching sense of comradeship. For, of this party it could rightly be said, as Richard Wright in his bitterest moment did day, There was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.
The affective life of the CPUSA lasted less than forty years, beginning in 1919 and ending in 1956, when Khrushchev ad-dressed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union and revealed to the world the incalculable despair of Stalins rule: the gulags, the lists, the purges, the trials; thirty years of terror and 18 million dead; the draconian madness of it all right up to the bitter end. The famous Doctors Plot, to which Jules Feiffer alludes in his play A Bad Friend, was hatched in 1953, when Stalin accused nine doctors, six of them Jewish, of plotting to poison the Soviet leadership. The doctors were tortured until they confessed, but Stalin died a few days before their trial was to begin, and a month later Pravda announced their innocence and release.
The Khrushchev Report brought political devastation to the organized left wing. Coming as it did in the midst of one of the most repressive periods in American historya period when Communists were hunted like criminals, suffered trial and imprisonment, endured social isolation and loss of work, had their professional lives destroyed, and, in the case of the Rosen-bergs, were put to deaththe report was the final blow for the left. Within weeks of its publication, thirty thousand people left the Party. Within a year, the CPUSA was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect, off the American political map.
More than a million Americans were Communists at one time or another. They were Americans whose lives were formed by political history as were the lives of few others in the United States. History was in them, they were in history. Yet by the 1970s they, and their experience, had been so successfully demonized by a popular culture spawned by the Cold War that the people among whom I had grown disappeared into social oblivion in a way that seemed, to me, entirely out of order.
I wrote The Romance of American Communism as a corrective. I wanted to make real that which had become abstract. I wanted ordinary Americans to see how much like themselves people who were Communists could be. But, of course, a corrective runs the risk of bending over backward in the opposite direction and ending up telling only one side of the story all over againsomething I struggled to avoid but was nonetheless often charged with having done. I had, it seem-ed, extended my understanding so far that, in my book, the horrors of the true believer were not sufficiently delineated; did not, in fact, weigh in the balance, as they do in A Bad Friend.
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