He also tracks the public's changing perception of the Communists, from amused unconcern to alarm, and details how the Ober antisubversive law and the HUAC hearings of the 1950s dismantled the Party from without while planting seeds of paranoia that destroyed it from within.".

In A New Deal for All? Andor Skotnes examines the interrelationships between the Black freedom movement and the workers' movement in Baltimore and Maryland during the Great Depression and the early years of the Second World War. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that such "border state" movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 1930s, deepening commitments to antiracism led Communists and Socialists in Baltimore to launch racially integrated initiatives for workers' rights, the unemployed, and social justice. An organization of radicalized African American youth, the City-Wide Young People's Forum, emerged in the Black community and became involved in mass educational, anti-lynching, and Buy Where You Can Work campaigns, often in multiracial alliances with other progressives. During the later 1930s, the movements of Baltimore merged into new and renewed national organizations, especially the CIO and the NAACP, and built mass regional struggles. While this collaboration declined after the war, Skotnes shows that the earlier cooperative efforts greatly shaped national freedom campaigns to come—including the civil rights movement.

This book explores the multifaceted dimensions that make up the American communist movement from its early years in the 1920s to its peak in the years leading up to World War II. The author argues that in order to effectively understand a social movement, it is necessary to take an approach that differentiates between the political-, social-, and labor-oriented motivations taken by the movement's participants. By exploring the political, community, and labor dimensions of American communism, the author helps convey the complex nature of social movements and the various ways they attempted to create agency in their society.

In this brilliant and impassioned work, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr document how, beginning in the late 1960s, the study of American communism was taken over by "revisionist" historians who attempted to portray the United States as the aggressor in the Cold War and saw the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as an admirable force for promoting democratic values. Today, more than a decade after the death of communism, revisionists remain dismissive of Stalin's crimes and seriously understate the degree to which the CPUSA apologized for Stalinism and gave assistance to Soviet espionage. Under their influence, the leading historical journals persist in teaching that America's rejection of the Communist Party was a tragic error, that American Communists were actually unsung heroes working for democratic ideals, and that those anticommunist liberals and conservatives who fought against the CPUSA in the 1950s were contemptible.

A group of Central European communists, most of them Hungarians, in the interwar period served the world communist movement as international cadres of the Comintern, the Moscow-based Communist International. As an important member of this cohort, J¢zsef Pog ny played a major role in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the ?March Action? in Germany in 1921, and, under the name of John Pepper, in the development of the American Communist Party of the 1920s. During the 1920s he was an important official in the Comintern apparatus and undertook missions on three continents. A prolific writer and effective organizer, he was one of the most flamboyant and controversial communists of his era. Some of his comrades praised him as ?the Hungarian Christopher Columbus.? Others, like Trotsky, called him a ?political parasite.? This study is based on newly available primary sources from Hungary, Russia, and the United States; it is the first ever written about this colorful and well-travelled Hungarian communist. Examines Pog ny?s development as a socialist and communist, the influence of his Jewish origins on his career, the reasons for his remarkable success in the United States, and the circumstances that led to his arrest and execution in the Stalinist terror. ÿ

Arguments about whether distinctive features of American society, culture, political structure, economic system, or population account for the relative weakness of American radicalism have engaged historians, sociologists, and political scientists for decades. Influential concepts such as frontier theory have been linked with the absence of class conflict in America. Other analysts have attributed the failure of the American Left to fierce repression, giving red scares and the McCarthy era as illustrations. Some have linked the American Left's failure to American immigration, winner-take-all elections, and the cultural values of individualism. The Communist Party, one of America's largest and longest lasting radical groups, offers many lessons about how radical political groups can take advantage of-or squander-their opportunities.Klehr focuses on the theme of American exceptionalism and problems that America's capitalist society raised for Marxism and other radical groups. The Communist Experience in America deals with dissident communist formulations. Such groups included a number of talented men who went on to a variety of political and literary careers. Klehr also deals with fellow travelers, some of whom wrote fascinating essays on American exceptionalism and the decline of political extremism.In part, Klehr hopes to inspire the same moral outrage about Communism that fuels those dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are never forgotten or obfuscated. Communism, in practice everywhere in the world, also came at enormous human cost. Regardless of their other virtues or qualities, those who supported or defended Communism from the safety of the United States must be called to account. This work does just that; in detail and depth.

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.