If you want to understand the Democrat Party you have to study Communism. Here is a CRB review of three fairly recent books. I have read the first, the Radosh effort. A page-turner! I also recommend Sidney Hook's Out of Step.
A review ofCommies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left
, by Ronald Radosh andA Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left
, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner andRed Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture
, by Michael Barson and Steven Heller
ommies should have appeared long ago but proves well worth the wait. Like Sidney Hook's Out of Step, it is the personal odyssey of an honest mind coping with left-wing illusions and it provides, to boot, a useful directory of key players on the Left.
A one-time member of the Communist Party USA, Ron Radosh was familiar with many of the Old Left stalwarts, and went to school with a veritable who's-who of the Left: Victor Navasky of The Nation; CPUSA vice-presidential candidate Angela Davis, punctiliously referred to in the media as a "social activist"; Weatherman Kathy Boudin; and the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Radosh is a veteran of Camp Woodland for Children, which he dubs "commie camp." Singer Paul Robeson, a leading apologist for Stalin, performed there. So did Pete Seeger, the banjo Bolshevik himself, later honored by President Bill Clinton. In few other books will one find a recollection of the left-wing anti-comic campaign of the 1950s, or of Birobidzhan, Stalin's bogus homeland for the Jews. Radosh helpfully includes Seeger's lyrics in praise of Birobidzhan.
Seeger, in fact, was one of the Communist Party's "artists in uniform," who believed that "songs are weapons." Seeger was a hero to Radosh, but that does not stop him from recalling Seeger's slavish defense of Stalin. Radosh reminds us that Seeger's Songs for John Doe, an album he made with the Almanac Singers during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was swiftly recalled when the Party line changed from "peace" to outright jingoism.
Radosh learned his boyhood lessons well. He became part of the left-wing vanguard at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a movement whose veterans are still making trouble. They include Tom Hayden, who proclaimed that anti-Communism was "the moral equivalent of rape," and Los Angeles Times columnist Bob Scheer, who breathlessly told Radosh in a radio interview that utopia had been realized in North Korea. Bob Cohen, another of Radosh's comrades, candidly confessed that "we don't want peace in Korea, we want the North Koreans to win." In similar style, television producer Danny Schechter wore a tee-shirt proclaiming, "We won in Vietnam and Cambodia."
Radosh's withdrawal from these ranks began with one of the defining events of his life, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. It was an article of faith on the Left that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of a reactionary, xenophobic, anti-Semitic America. Nearly two decades later, Radosh set out to make the definitive case in the Rosenberg's favor, but wound up convinced of their guilt. The Rosenberg File, written with Joyce Milton, proves beyond doubt that Julius Rosenberg was a Stalinist spy and that Ethel was his accomplice.
The Left quickly denounced Radosh as a heretic. Leading the charge was Marxist historian Eric Foner of Columbia University. But the response of Michael Harrington, America's leading socialist, also proved revealing. "I always knew they were guilty," he said, "but we're trying to get former Communists who have left the party but are still pro-Soviet into our organization, and I can't do anything to alienate them." The same kind of doublethink prompted Communist Party executive Dorothy Healey to tell Radosh how the Soviet Union generously funded the CPUSA — "How do you think the CP bought its building on West 23rd Street?" — and then threaten to sue when he repeated the exchange in a review of her book.
Exposing the Rosenberg's guilt was not politically correct, and the Left never forgave Radosh, who was willing to follow the truth wherever it led. "The reaction to The Rosenberg File, made me finally move on to consider the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else." The present book, which contains some funny vignettes about Bob Dylan and Bianca Jagger, confirms that the Left has always been a kind of hate group. "Today's Left has no Soviet Union as a beacon," Radosh notes, "but its reflexive hatred of the American system is intact."
Related: Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness
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