“Run Quick and Find the Reds”1: Historians’ Search for American Communists

Abstract

I want to thank the executive committee, and especially Vernon Pederson, for asking me to speak to today and to everyone who came from far and wide to participate in this important conference. We are here today because we understand that when we research and write about American communism, we are entering an arena where the stakes are high: wars hot and cold have been fought, people gave their lives, others had them taken; and untold money was spent for the cause and to defeat the party altogether. In the end, the movement had an enormous impact on America’s political shift to the right as well as on movements that flourished on the left. And today, in Trump’s America, the history of American communism resonates. In the weeks leading up to the mid-term election, the Trump administration released a 72page report published by the Council of Economic Advisors attacking socialism. The report threatened that a democratic sweep in the midterms would likely result in the USA “becoming the next Venezuela.” The report honed in on the likelihood that democrats would force government run healthcare down the throats of American citizens, ultimately draining national coffers. A sub section of the report titled: “The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning” connects the messaging of Bernie Sanders and ElizabethWarren with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin andMao Zedong. The Socialism that appears un-American in the depictions offered by Trump and his followers, takes on a different cast among today’s socialists who are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America, now larger than the Socialist Party ever was, and approaching the numbers of the Communist Party, are looking to the history of socialism generally, and the American Communist party specifically, and they are asking questions about what worked in the past and what didn’t. They want to learn from the Old Left’s organizing strategies and world view and to understand why the USA and the anti-communist left turned so fiercely on communists. The significance of our work is clear. So is its timeliness. In the USA and across the globe, rural and urban communities are confronting challenges brought by globalization, ethnic and racial nationalism and