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The Secret World of American Communism. - book reviews
National Review, June 12, 1995 by Eric Breindel
It's worth mentioning that, to Browder, "enemy camp" meant the U.S. Government; "inform" meant deliver secret information; and "[people who] sympathized with our position" meant fellow Communists. It's also safe to assume that, unlike Browder, U.S. authorities would have considered "it" espionage.
In the end, The Secret World vindicates philosopher Sidney Hook's insistence on the relevance of the distinction between "heresy" and "conspiracy" in discussions of the U.S. Communist Party. In Heresy, Yes -- Conspiracy, No! (published in 1953), he maintained that while Communist "ideas" represented ordinary heresies -- which liberals had no reason to fear -- the same could not be said for actual Party activities. The CPUSA constituted an active conspiracy: it was secretive, loyal to a foreign power, and dedicated to the clandestine infiltration of American cultural and political institutions.
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Insofar as Party members used the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, argued Hook, in order to advance the purposes of a foreign government -- a regime that was hostile to the very civil liberties that facilitated its agents' efforts here -- the CPUSA could not be depicted as a legitimate political undertaking.
In vindicating Hook's conclusion, Klehr, a professor of history at Emory University, and Haynes, a Library of Congress archivist, employ a highly judicious tone. Indeed, the care and the caution that inform The Secret World bespeak an allergy to sensation of any kind.
But for all their circumspection, the authors demonstrate conclusively that John Reed was on Moscow's payroll; that Armand Hammer -- notwithstanding lifelong denials -- was a money-laundering agent of the USSR; and that Moscow-based Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Stevens -- a Christian Science Monitor correspondent -- was long a secret Party member.
Of special interest is the Klehr - Haynes finding that U.S. Communists -- working under Moscow's direction -- played an important part in the murder of Trotsky. Here, too, their research serves largely to confirm much that had already been alleged. But it's increasingly clear that the "Trotsky project" was, for all practical purposes, a joint undertaking between the Soviet secret police and the U.S. Party's underground networks.
Also noteworthy are the revelations about the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered -- under Communist Party auspices -- to fight Franco in Spain between 1936 and 1939. The authors have discovered that a considerable number who had been deemed military casualties were killed after "disciplinary" proceedings. Some had been accused of ideological deviation; others had been labeled spies; still others had wanted merely to exercise their "contractual" right to return home after serving their hitch and, as a consequence, were shot as "deserters."
"Lincolns" who were identified by KGB talent-spotters as potential agents, and were trained for underground careers at spy schools in Spain, represent another subject on which Klehr and Haynes shed new light. One such veteran, a New Yorker named Morris Cohen, became an important Soviet espionage operative. He and his wife participated in the theft of atomic secrets at Los Alamos, fled this country when the Rosenbergs were arrested, and turned up in Britain some years later as Peter and Helen Kroger; at the time, they were posing as dealers in rare books.
