American Communism and Soviet Russia

"That is a fairly old book now. I read it many, many years ago at graduate school. Theodore Draper was the leading light among historians of American Communism. This book had a major impact, because it was so thoroughly researched and had lots of great detail. It was one of the first books that really allowed you to study the story of how American Communism was shaped by its reaction to the Russian Revolution. There are other numerous examples of where disputes within the American Communist Party were resolved by all the participants hurrying off to Moscow and presenting their respective positions to the Communist International. Moscow was the ultimate arbiter of what the American Communist Party did. It set the parameters of the way that I and a lot of other people came to understand how the Communist Party had operated in America and it helped us to understand why it had failed so miserably. And I think that’s because American radical groups have never done terribly well in the United States for many complex reasons that people have been arguing about for many years. In the case of the Communist Party, along with those reasons, another is because it was so beholden to the Soviet Union."