[Harrington was an American educator and social commentator who was best known for The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (1983). In the review below, he praises The American Communist Party for its balanced approach, accessibility, and historical perspective.]

This new book on the American Communist Party fulfills a very real need: it provides an excellent introduction to a topic which has been central to many of the domestic political debates of the past decade. It is not as comprehensive and as scholarly as Theodore Draper's brilliant Roots of American Communism (that study, the first of two, ended in the twenties; The American Communist Party covers the entire period of 1919 to 1957), but rather complementary to it. The authors are more journalistic in their treatment, more political in their approach, than Draper, but this allows their analysis to be accessible to a wider audience.

But perhaps the major merit of this new book is that it puts the question of the Communist Party into some kind of a historical and political perspective. For one thing, the authors understand the essential political link between the American Communists and the Russians. The "Stalinization" of the Party, its transformation from an honest expression of American radicalism into the political agency of Moscow's foreign policy, can only be understood in terms of the development of the Russian Revolution itself. And yet there was another dimension to this change. For of all parties, the American Party was, in a very real sense, the most easily Stalinized. Even before the victory of Stalin in Russia, American Communists had surrendered their right to make decisions to the Communist International. Weak, often isolated by sectarianism, they became almost completely dependent upon the Russians—and when the Vohzd took over, it was a simple matter to turn this dependence into slavish submission.

And yet this political link should not be confused with the Russian espionage apparatus. The overwhelming majority of American Communists, as Howe and Coser well point out, were not part of a spy ring. They had been attracted to the Party for a variety of reasons—some through idealism, some through their own personal inadequacies, and so on—and for the most part they were the political instruments of Russian policy, but not spies. This conception, sharply at variance with the one put forward by Sidney Hook in his Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No!, puts American Communism into a historical perspective. It puts an end to the nonsense that the Party constituted a "clear and present danger" in an insurrectionary sense (as Vinson's tortured decision argued in the Dennis case); it confronts the conspiracy thesis with the complexities of reality.

Another value of this study is that it also relates the Party's development to actual happenings in American society. The early days are seen in terms of the strike wave of 1919; the thirties against the background of the Popular Front, the rise of fascism, and the New Deal. Here again, so many people in the last decade have refused this necessary investigation, and considered the Party (and Party membership) as if it were simply demonic. The American Communist Party is a welcome antidote to this kind of thinking. In the new climate of civil liberties, it may have a very good effect indeed.

Today, the Communist Party is a sect, without influence on the labor or liberal movements, shattered by the revelations of Mr. Khrushchev and the murderous reality of Russian imperialism in Hungary. Yet, we must still attempt to understand. For one thing, the Party played a role which cannot be estimated in terms of its numbers alone, and we must learn why. For another, there are good people who were tragically duped by their commitment who must be reintegrated into the democratic movement, whose sincerity and idealism should find a real way of expression. A reading of this new study will help, I think, in both of these tasks.

As history, then, this is a first-rate introduction to a stormy and important subject; as politics, it is a needed corrective to the oversimplifications of the past decade. Anyone concerned with the recent political past will find Howe and Coser's study an extremely valuable contribution, one certainly worth the reading.