Black Anti-Communists Have Been Memory–Holed

Reds: The Tragedy of Communism

By Maurice Isserman

(Basic Books, 384 pages, $27.99)

Reds: The Tragedy of Communism opens with a warning aimed at the reader: the “history of American Communism requires the ability to weigh complex and often ambiguous evidence and judgments.” Author Maurice Isserman, a noted historian at Hamilton College, continues: “Be prepared to keep two opposed ideas in mind.” He advises those “unwilling to do so” to “put this book down right now.”

The italics increase:

The Communist movement helped win democratic reforms that benefited millions of ordinary American citizens, at the same time that the movement championed a brutal totalitarian state responsible for the imprisonment and deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.

And, 

The Communist Party USA was an advocacy group entitled to normal constitutional guarantees of free speech, and at certain times and places it was also a criminal conspiracy.

Furthermore, “studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits.” Well, of course. (READ MORE: Boston Red Sox and MLB Impose Communist Struggle Session on Player)

To his credit, Isserman relates the acknowledgment of Fred Beal, a union organizer found guilty of second-degree murder for deaths in a 1929 mill strike who had fled to the Soviet Union, there witnessing such horrors as “famine deliberately induced by the Soviet government” only to return because he would “‘rather be an American prisoner than a free man in Russia.’” Isserman even takes Communists, who turned a blind eye, to the proverbial woodshed.

Others — including others on the non-Communist Left — saw clearly what American Communists indignantly denied, that life under Soviet Communism in the Stalin era was defined by pervasive fear of an all-powerful repressive regime that routinely and on a massive scale employed spying, denunciation, imprisonment, torture, and murder against innocent victims.

Isserman describes the lure of luxurious travel for the apparatchiks and the schizophrenic reversals in Party directives, such as in the case of the Soviet-Nazi pact. He discusses John Dewey and Sidney Hook’s Committee for Cultural Freedom’s manifesto published in the May 27, 1939 issue of the Nation, which rejected the “totalitarianism” of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He also discusses the “counterblast,” endorsed by 400 signatories, denouncing the “‘fantastic falsehood’ that the Soviet Union was in any sense comparable to the fascist powers” — hitting the newsstands three days after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. He admits forthrightly that some Communists conducted espionage.

Yet, also, as the opening directive states, “The Communist movement helped win democratic reforms.” The 1930s, the period of the Party’s “greatest influence,” “fought for such causes like unemployment insurance, social security, and racial equality.”

Isserman is to be commended for refraining from insulting detractors, as Harold Meyerson did in reviewing Reds in the American Prospect and comparing the necessity of “screening out of reality we now associate with Fox News” to that of Communists.

A Short Shrift to the Real Anti-Communists

Still, Reds often does not model the even-handedness that its author lectures the reader to maintain.

This is because the sources — polemical statements and memoirs, written by Communist activists (or their Communist ghostwriters), and scholarly books written by activist, Communist-sympathizing historians, provide most of the evidence. At the same time, the contributions of former Communists or sympathizers on the right, who wrote volumes on the subject, are given short shrift. Whittaker Chambers barely gets a mention, but uninfluential Party diarists are discussed at length.

The focus is on strawman Joseph McCarthy and the “hysteria” of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The McCarran Act’s requirement that “fifteen national and district Party leaders” register with the Subversive Activities Control Board is cast as an unjust demand for self-incrimination “as criminal conspirators and foreign agents.” An inordinate amount of ink is spilled on the sufferings of writers like Arthur Miller during the “postwar Red Scare” and on the aptness of the witch hunt analogy in his play The Crucible.

When it comes to the fall of Communism, Mikhail Gorbachev is presented as the hero who hears the voice of the people and magically vanquishes communism. The naïve reader would think that President Reagan had nothing to do with it. The one mention of Reagan comes as criticism of his action as California Governor when he threatened to “cut the UCLA budget if [Communist Party member Angela] Davis continued to teach on its campus.” (READ MORE: A Witness Emerges From Another Communist Gulag)

There is a mention of one ex-Communist who became a conservative, Frank S. Meyer, but the discussion is truncated. Meyer’s differences with the authoritarian structure of the party as revealed in his letter in 1943 to party chief Earl Browder is discussed. Isserman explains that “The Bolshevik model of a disciplined cadre organization excluded most ordinary Americans.” Meyer proposed a new kind of structure based on “‘traditional American concepts of democracy,’” which Isserman interprets as being “a lot like the British Labour Party, which he had joined all those years earlier in Oxford before becoming a Communist.” And this is where he leaves the discussion of one of the most important thinkers of the mid-20th century conservative movement.

The reader needs to go to the endnote to even learn that “Meyer remained in the CP for another two years, encouraged by Browder’s decision to dissolve the Party in 1944. In the fall of 1945, he quit, becoming a leading conservative activist and intellectual, and a cofounder of National Review magazine” and the author of The Moulding of Communists: The Training of Communist Cadre (1961).

Meyer became a pivotal figure in the movement, promoting “fusionism” — i.e., the fusion of the two conservative wings, traditionalism and libertarianism. He is one of many Communists-turned-conservatives who rethought the entire project of progressivism — big government, collectivism, and redistribution — and, in the process, advocated for a return to American founding principles. It would seem that a book about the American Communist movement would have at least a paragraph devoted to such apostates, no?

In Highlighting Black Communists, Isserman Ignores Black Anti-Communists

Isserman goes to the Earl Browder Collection at Syracuse University to get his quotations from Meyer’s letters. But in that same collection is a dossier on George S. Schuyler, the most widely read black columnist in America from the mid-1920s through the 1940s. Schuyler recognized the motives of the Communists from the time they first established their headquarters in New York City in 1919, which is what Richard Wright pointed out in The God That Failed: Blacks were recruited to be “street agitators” and suffer the blows from police.

While Isserman recounts the work of black socialist labor organizer and activist A. Philip Randolph, he ignores the star writer who got his start at the Messenger, the socialist monthly that Randolph edited. While Randolph organized the Sleeping Car Porters union, the writer he had hired, George Schuyler, became the star columnist in the black newspaper he made number one in circulation, the Pittsburgh-Courier.

To make the case for the Communists’ civil rights advocacy, Isserman lauds the fact that Lovett Fort-Whiteman, as a delegate to the Fifth World Congress in 1924, “delivered a report to the Comintern audience including Joseph Stalin” that argued for the unorthodox position that black people “‘are not discriminated against as a class but as a race’” and “urged the American Communist Party to begin organizing among Black southern sharecroppers.”

Instead of referencing Schuyler’s warnings to the black community at the time, as Fort-Whiteman, a former contributor to the Messenger, made his Soviet-funded recruiting tour, Isserman turns to Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, a mendacious work by Yale historian Glenda Gilmore attempting to expiate her segregationist Southern roots by rehabilitating Communist agitators as the first civil rights leaders.

Isserman does not mention Fort-Whiteman’s death in the Gulag.

Gilmore does. The Communist-championing historian casts a death by starvation and beating (Fort-Whiteman had all his teeth knocked out) in a place where the temperature went down to 60-below in romantic terms and partly as his own fault (for being recklessly enthusiastic about Communism). She calls his death on Jan. 13, 1939, “an ordinary death for the place. Fort-Whiteman had not been able to meet the work quota; for this, he ‘was severely beaten many times’” and his food rations were greatly decreased.

She imaginatively recreates his dying moments:

Deep disappointments, crushing blows, starvation: It took them all to break Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Did he dream, there in a frozen hole [where he was forced to sleep] in the tundra, of hot nights on Sweet Ellum Street back home in Dallas? Of midday classes at Tuskegee, where sweating students performed the heavy work of uplift? … Or did he dream his own “dream deferred,” of bringing revolution to Chicago streets, equality to the South, and black liberation to the Kremlin? There in Kolyma no one mourned him, no one knew that he was the first African American Communist. No one knew of his eagerness, his recklessness.… In the final, perfect equality of the gulag, it mattered not a whit that he was a black man.

The “perfect equality of the gulag”? Ironically, Gilmore writes that Fort-Whiteman “never allowed [himself] to be silenced.” Her book is among the most frequently cited in Reds.

In the case of nine black boys and young men accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro in 1931, Isserman pushes the Communist propaganda line (of William Z. Foster, Howard Zinn, the Daily Worker, and other similar communist mouthpieces) that the defendants “would surely have gone to their deaths in the electric chair, except for one new factor, the presence, nearby, of Communist organizers.” His source again is Gilmore.

Actually, the defendants would have gotten out of prison much sooner than they did had the Communists not forced the case away from the competent hands of the NAACP to exploit it for publicity and fundraising, as I describe in Debunking Howard Zinn. As Schuyler pointed out repeatedly in his columns and articles, the Communists sent agitators to disrupt NAACP meetings and stole money raised by church-going black workers for the defendants. They deliberately prolonged the case, for example, by not filing a bill of exceptions in time for a new trial and by making threats against the judge. The last two Scottsboro boys were not paroled until after 1944 — and that was only after the NAACP was allowed to rejoin the case.

Walter White and W.E.B. Du Bois, two of the black members of the NAACP leadership, also denounced the Communists for trying to make the Scottsboro Boys into “martyrs” for their cause.

And then there is Angelo Herndon, described by Isserman as a “valuable recruit” at the age of 18, “who joined the Party after reading a pamphlet about the Gastonia strike, and was drawn to its vision of interracial unionism. Herndon became an organizer and was arrested in Atlanta the following year, charged with promoting ‘insurrection,’ and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. Herndon’s case, handled by the Communist-controlled International Labor Defense (ILD), drew considerable publicity, and appeals would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which invalidated the Georgia insurrection law in 1937.”

Who benefited from Herndon’s involvement that led to time in jail? Did he find “interracial unionism” there?

Isserman’s Sources Are Unreliable. That Hasn’t Stopped Widespread Praise.

In my book, I refuted a similar presentation by Howard Zinn, who quotes from a 1937 publication put out by the International Labor Defense and League for Struggle for Negro Rights about how Herndon complained about how passages from the Communist literature that he possessed were read to the jury and about how he was asked, “’Did I believe in the demand for the self-determination of the Black Belt?’” The Black Belt was to be carved out of 11 Southern states, and as Schuyler pointed out in the NAACP’s Crisis, was intended to spark a civil war — the strategy by which communists came to power worldwide. (Isserman mentions the Black Belt on page 114, but only to quote Mark Solomon who claims that the issue “‘elevated the Black movement to an elevated position in the Leninist pantheon.’”) (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 132: Venezuelan Fraud Is A Cautionary Tale For Americans)

Herndon was actually recruited in Cincinnati and brought to Atlanta to lead marches that were intended to provoke violence and police “suppression.” Schuyler recounted in his 1966 autobiography, Black and Conservative, that “A Greenwich Village Communist woman” had attempted to recruit him for the same purpose. But he had “laughed aloud. So they got Herndon; he carried out his Red assignment, and he was promptly nabbed, jugged, tried and sentenced to the Georgia chain gang; then released on bail. Soon the Communists were parading him around the country at mass meetings that proved very lucrative.” Earl Ofari Hutchinson, too, wrote that Herndon was seen as just “another martyr,” to give “the Party greater visibility and stature among blacks.”

Indeed, Herndon seemed to be naïve and compliant — just the kind of black man Communists were looking for. Browder, when being interviewed by Theodore Draper, called Herndon a “good boy” — although not a good Communist.

Herndon did see the truth about Communism. By the end of the 1940s, he had returned to the Midwest to lead a bourgeois life as a salesman.

Again, Isserman’s sources are unreliable: Herndon’s 1937 autobiography (written while he was still in prison); Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party by Gerald Horne, an admitted communist-sympathizing activist-scholar; and, again, Gilmore.

Far from being friends of blacks, Communists were their exploiters; as Schuyler learned from interviewing a black former Communist Party member, when it came to crunch times, blacks were the first to be fired by the Communists.

The other group that Communists allegedly advocated for were workers. But while Communists and progressives may not have liked the Taft-Hartley Act, Schuyler did, for it opened up unions to black membership.

As indicated in an article he wrote for the Guardian, Isserman seemed to have a certain group in mind:

American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes.

Similarly, Steven Mintz at Inside Higher Ed wrote that Reds “should be required reading for today’s leftwing activists.”

Students and casual readers of Reds will be left in the dark about those like Meyer and Schuyler who saw the fundamental flaws of Communism (and progressivism) and went back to American founding principles. Unfortunately, no balance in academia or publishing would allow readers such a perspective. George Schuyler and the other black anti-Communists have been memory-holed, thanks to generations of Communist-sympathizing academics and publishers.

Mary Grabar, a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, began her research on George Schuyler there in 2011 and continues to search for a publisher for her biography of him. She is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America, and the forthcoming Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths.

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