the last 25 years or so done. it's in my book on the supreme court, a whole lot of things that make it much, much harder for unions to exist, much less, you know, recruit people so, you know, widespread, high rate on obscene wealth and a reasonable tax rate on all the rest of the wealth, you know, social net programs, strengthening social security and medicare, you know, bottom line, you know, we want to live we don't want to live in a poor country. and and sadly, we've more and more of us have become have been poor as a result of these policies that that once again, i think it's real important to point this out. we're born in large part out of good intentions, and it has just blown up in our faces and, you know, fortunately over last three and a half years, joe biden has been the first president to repudiate these and say, no, we're going to go back to what fdr.

so thank you very much for having me here. maurice isserman is the publius war. julius rogers, professor of american at hamilton college, a former fulbright excuse me, visiting professor in moscow. he's the author, award winning books on the history of the left. other topics his writing has appeared in the new york times, washington post, los angeles times, gary gerstle is the paul mellon professor of american history emeritus at the university of cambridge. he's the author of several books, most recently the rise and fall of neoliberal order, which we also have available for purchase. tonight, he been a guardian columnist and has written for the atlantic monthly, the york review of books and more. tonight, morris is presenting his new book, reds, the tragedy of american communism, which

michael cohen reviewed, saying maurice isserman has not just produced the wisest, most eloquent history the communist party that has ever been written. reds is also a vital for anyone who wants to understand the promise and agony of the american left in the 20th century. we're so please post this event here at harvard bookstore tonight. please join me in welcoming morris and gary dr. huyck and everybody hear me in the back. good. leave a couple notes on summers. very generous introduction. michael kazin has a very close personal friend, also carries and publishes for julius rogers was a 19th century graduate of hamilton college george and daughter millennial daughter managed to deflate that that grand title by referring to me as the poo -- ridiculous professor of american history.

so i'm very happy to be here place i a lot of time as a starving graduate student back in the 1970s along with gary we were both members an oddly named the boston chapter of an oddly named group, ma hoa, which for the mid atlantic radical historians organization. and i had never realized before that that massachusetts office was in the mid-atlantic region, but it didn't seem to matter my last book, which i didn't get to introduce here, but did some touring, particularly in places where you can go skiing like colorado was a history of. the u.s. army's 10th mountain division in world war two, the ski troops or the alpine troops and everybody came to those talks, particularly in colorado, where they trained and based. and you can get vanity plates

commemorating the 10th mountain division. everybody loved the 10th mountain division because they went to italy and they killed nazis. and then it came back to the u.s. and they founded the ski industry. so not to like. now to this evening's i think sometimes stirs different reactions we'll see how that goes. i could talk about the 10th if you'd rather have a show of. so. one of the one of my sins is that when i publish a book i go to amazon rankings to see whether i'm in a 7000 or number 250,000. in terms of the books that amazon sold that day and the algorithm is set such that if you sell 20 books in a half and you might not have sold any for

the previous week or the week that followed, the algorithm decides that you're a bestselling author. and so i hopes and fears up and down on a daily basis. but more interesting are, the comments that a number of people you have to buy the book to leave a comment and this is one of my more critical comments you can you read that. yeah sort of well among other harsh things that this reviewer said he said that i was an aging -- chick and i like think of myself more as a mature menshevik. but i'll let you decide. but he also says that, and i think he's right, that this book is kind of an exercise lies in ambiguity or as i would prefer to think of it, an exercise in

following. if scott fitzgerald's dictum thatou should be able to bear contradictory thoughts at the same time. and in that way it brings you a little closer to the truth. and i that's what i'm trying to do in this book. so n i'm going to turn this over to my interlocutor and see what questions he has pose. mr. interlocutor, as this turned on, you can hear me. i have a strong voice. i tried to get away with not using the mic, but i meant to shout to draw an unwary customer from other parts of the store. so will do my best to do that. it is a great to be here. you heard that i teach at the university of cambridge. you may be wondering if i took a wrong turn somewhere since the university of cambridge is on the other side of the atlantic, i have spent the last ten years there and have just i'm ninth

day into my retirement and am a fellow this year at the harvard radcliffe institute. and i'm delighted to be in this cambridge. i'm delighted to have an opportunity to talk with maurice about this wonderful book he has written. we go back decades, although we have not seen each other, we're trying to figure this out in maybe 20 years. that's what happens when you get old. you have good friends who you don't see for 20 years, but we were immortalized together in 1985 when i after i wrote a very critical review of a disciple, theodore draper, who was then one of the most prominent historians of american and a very critical historian of american communism. and i was very critical of his disciples book. and that prompted him to attack us as new historians of american communism in pages of the new york review of books i think i got attacked after publishing what was in effect my first article and it was a moment

where we were bonded in a way because we were trying to understand a topic. we felt we hadn't understood or that other people had not done justice to. and being the young turks that we were, we were trying to offer an alternative interpretation of the left in american history. so i'm going to ask maurice in a moment to go back to that moment, and i'm going to ask him what drew him to the subject initially. but before i do, i just want to make clear to you who he is you are looking at, arguably the most distinguished historian of american radicalism today, his first book was on the communist party in world war two. his the united states. his second book was on the collapse of the old left in the fifties and the birth of the new left. then he wrote a biography, a big biography of michael harrington, who was the leader.

first d soc. i won't spell out what that was. and then democratic of america. he wrote book on with dorothy ray healy called california red, which is really a joint enterprise. her autobiography morris well you can tell us later helping her to it but also her interlocutor and her interlocutor and actually i think she's one of the heroes, one of the secret heroes of of of this book here and now. he has completed what is probably the most comprehensive and perhaps definitive history of american communism. that's an extraordinary record over career. that's just to assure that he hasn't spent his year writing about mountaineering and that has become an indispensable recover the history of the american. so we have an extraordinary resource an individual with us here. well, thank you very. and that was a two part series.

and called us yuppies, which, if you remember, era was a kind of grave insult. and this i was in my second year of teaching at smith college then and having been pilloried in the new york review of books, i decided my not being wise in the ways of academia that my career was over and i'd forgotten. p.t. barnum was very wise that make sure they spell the name right. did he get it wrong? i know he got a good fact checking everything followed from that. so take us back to your original in the history of the american left and history of the american communist party. yeah, i think this is sort of generational in terms of generation of historians looking around. i see more from our of historians. but we were coming out of the 1960s, which was a period of

very intense political engagement, which to my mind didn't end up very well and i mean, i thought about in the early 1970s writing a history of the new left, but i was too close to it. but i thought another way to to get at that history was to a little further back and to find an earlier period of political engagement in this case, the 1930s and 1940s. and look the history of american communism, which did not turn out all that well. and i was always to in all those books that you mentioned, two moments in the history of the party when people were looking for alternatives or trying within the kind of iron boundaries set up on being good and loyal communist, trying to think way out of this box, to

find a way to to build an america and radical movement. so in world war two, for example, the leader of the communist party, earl browder, actually dissolved the party and formed what he called the communist political association, thinking that this would somehow bring down those barriers and which did not last longer, did not end well. in my second book, if i had a hammer there's a chapter on the communist party looking at the de-stalinization crisis of 1956 when the soviet then soviet leader nikita khrushchev denounced his predecessor, josef stalin, who had ruled over the soviet union from 1924 until his death. and. 1953 denounced him as a bloody, paranoid murderer. everything that his opponents and his critics abroad had had always he was a moment of great disillusion, but briefly, a moment of it seemed to open up a road to create the communist

movement along new lines as an independent movement, as a movement that wasn't tied to soviet foreign objectives. and that too badly. and thirdly, the book about dorothy healy. dorothy was the leader of the los angeles communist party district, which after new york was second strongest in, the party from the 1930s on in well into the fifties. and she was a maverick so much so that other people, other more orthodox people in the communist party began to refer to los angeles as the the yugoslavia of american communism, as this sort of deviant direction. and she to from within the movement to to reinvent it and ultimately had leave it decided that was in the cards so i was drawn this history not as a usable past not as a blueprint

or a model for later generation on the left to pursue, but rather as a an exercise historical perspective. what does it tell about you know so many talented and dedicated people drawn to the party and enjoyed successes, particularly in building a view industrial union movement in the 1930s 1940s, a pioneering in for an interracial organizing in the struggle against racism and yet it could never an independent path could never build a genuinely american radical movement. the question of communism in america remains interesting today because of the influence

of its adherents in the 1930s and 1940s. what we might call a popular front one and popular front to i some people, my age in this audience, an older who may have ties in one way or another to that moment. but i also see some younger people delighted you're here who may not have that knowledge at hand. if you know about the communist party, you have learned about it through the cold war, through the soviet union, through mccarthyism in the 1950s. but there would have been no need for mccarthyism in the 1950s. and the repression associated with it had it not been for the quite considerable success of the american communist party in 1930s and forties. so maurice, i want you to recreate for us the dimensions of that.

where was the party successful? who did it draw into? it's orbit? who did it scare and why did it such a compelling north star? i hope none of your planning on leaving for the next 3 hours because i want to do justice to that question. that's a that's short for a communist party meeting, by the way. yeah. okay. well, briefly, the communist party was extremely sectarian organization for most of its existence, but a significant exception and starting in the mid-19th when on soviet it shifted gears up to that point its emphasis was on revolution proletarian going it alone. the communists alone knew how to overthrow capitalism and every

competitor on the left, socialist, anarchist or whatever was to be despised and liberals were certainly to be despised and the roosevelt administration was, you know, simply a front group for big business and a cheat. and in with but with hitler's rise to power and the growing military power of nazi germany and threat to the soviet union stalin and the international communist movement shifted gears from again, emphasis on revolutionary war to an emphasis on building an anti-fascist. both domestically and internationally to counter the growing threat from both domestically and internally. finally. and so for the for the first time in the party's history in the united states, it wasn't

attempting to set up barricades separating itself off from from americans who believed otherwise weren't communists, but trying to build bridges to them and in that for a relatively small at its height of the late end of the 1960s, that's the gypsy disguised autobiography slips back in there at its height at the of the 1930s, there were probably. 65 to 75000 members of the communist party, maybe another 20,000 in the young communist. its youth affiliate. and this is a country then of 130 million. that's not a lot of people but it for a moment achieved remarkable success in creating those kind of anti-fascist coalitions and, in particular in organizing taking part in the great organization of the

industrial working class through the congress of, industrial organizations, these cio, which grew from very small to millions of of union members in, such unions as united auto workers and united electrical workers, the longshoremen's union on the coast, and other unions and communists were integral to that process of building for the first time a successful, enduring mass industrial union movement that progress was interrupted abruptly in 1939, when stalin signed, the non-aggression pact so called actually more like a quasi alliance with nazi germany and the communists immediately switched from being the most dedicated to being the most dedicated it opponents of the

second world war, which broke out just days later and then reversed direction once again on june 22nd, 1941, when hitler invaded his or her supplier ally stalin, stalin's soviet union and, the grand alliance of so-called of the soviet union, the united states and britain formed alliance to to defeat hitler and mussolini and then in the pacific also been imperial japanese empire, and the communists became the most dedicated proponents again. wartime unity and resumed growth. i mean, there were many people who said you know, this is one twist and turn to many. but for a moment in the 1940s, again, it seemed as if communism was reinventing itself with

reinventing itself as a movement that could step down deep and enduring roots in american politics. alas, alas, from the communist perspective, that was not to be. because, again, in 1945, suddenly this coalition of convenience of the friend, the enemy of my enemy is my friend broke down in the cold, resumed, and the communists became the nearest target for those who couldn't do much about. the expansion of soviet power in europe or about the expansion of communism into china and elsewhere around the world. but could a lot to destroy the domestic communist movement which is what happened so those 60 or 70,000 communists were reduced. by 1956 to a of about 20,000 survive today. and then in the aftermath of the

de-stalinization crisis so i already alluded to reduced again to three or four or 5000 and never really growing beyond that thereafter. that's five minute version of the three hour discussion. and i would to that just the influence in the apparatus of the united states our. absolutely writers you want to speak to that for a moment. the writers and artists screenwriters. yeah. well, actually, i gave this talk at the wellesley public library a few weeks ago, and there there was nobody younger than me. and so i didn't have to a lot. and at one point somebody said, oh, yes, my father was blacklisted hollywood. and then somebody else, you five rows away said, oh, yeah, my father was blacklisted and all. but that was wellfleet. yeah. so i mean, they a force american

culture. paul robeson extremely popular and dedicated civil rights activist and singer actor had massive hit with a song called ballad for americans in 1939. and right at the end, the popular front period, which gave voice to this vision of a multiracial, multiracial, multiethnic, democratic, small d, democrat society, that was kind of the essence of the popular front. oh, casablanca. the movie released in 1942, set in the first week in december 1941, which i'm assuming most of you have seen at some point or another, was a political parable today. it's a romance. it's a thriller it's an anti-nazi movie. but in the context of the political context, the late

thirties and early 1940s, many people, the audience would recognize that someone, like rick blaine, the cynical, seemingly cynical, saloon keeper of rick's cafe america in casablanca, who fought in spain for the loyalists was probably a communist. and in fact, howard koch was one of the screenwriters, for it was himself very close to hollywood left and was blacklisted in. the 1950s. so yeah they were a major force for a moment in american culture and of that continued in the person of pete seeger who had joined the young communist league at harvard in the 1930s and through a number of groups, the almanac singers, the early forties, the weavers, the start of the fifties, and then as a cultural force on his own for many decades thereafter carried on some of that.

he had long since left party, but he carried on some of that popular front cultural tradition. you you don't mince words your critique of the communist party in this book and i want to read just one paragraph to give a flavor. morris is a wonderful writer, by the way. here this is a chapter of speaking their own since communists morris writes, taken as individuals, be altogether admirable. people, intelligent, compassionate to a fault. and yet, whatever their personal qualities, the movement to which they devoted their lives or base based on lies, not about everything, but certainly in regard to one central issue, the nature of the soviet union. daily worker editor john gates. in a memoir published in 1958 that he and his fellow communists had never mastered the art of persuading very large numbers of americans,

deceptively or otherwise. instead, gates suggested the one deception they excelled at was self that was effective basic cause of our demise john gates said. i have two questions about that passage. morris the is seems to have a darker tone than your first book which side are you on that you wrote year was my doctoral dissertation so i started writing it in 1977, published in the and published in 1982 published in 1982. i think there was a more hopeful tone about the communists in that book than i saw in this one. and yet even in this book, there are moments in the book of excitement of possibly of

uncover ing a genuine radicalism that could transform country not just in a multicultural direction, but in an anti-capitalist direction. there are moments when the party seems to be on the the verge of accomplishing that. the popular front is one such moment. the 1940s, when earl browder does dissolve the communist party and said, we're going to be an association free. moscow didn't last very, but that was the yugoslav tendency, i suppose or we could see it as a precursor of communism of the sixties or euro communism of communist parties in europe, achieving a real measure of from moscow so for so first am i correct in seeing you having harder tone toward these people then and you're more younger yourself and secondly, even if

we grant that or accept that were there never nevertheless in the long history this party that could have turned out differently. yeah, those are the central questions that i was confronted with, especially the latter. i don't i think there is a darker tone or maybe more of an impact and tone in part because instead of looking at a small, discrete moment like the world war two party or the de-stalinization or looking at a single individual whom i found very admirable, dorothy healey i was looking at 70 years of communist party history that the communist party still exists. i bring my account a close in 1991, with the fall of soviet union, after which the communist party's existence.

it sort of lost its central and continuing inspiration overall all those decades. and so in part it's seeing the same blind errors being repeated generation, generation after generation of party and party members. in part, it's because we just know much more about the communist party than i did the late seventies and early eighties because of the fall of the soviet union, because of the opening of the moscow archive was because of the opening of of certain intelligence archives in washington, d.c., for example, we know a lot soviet espionage in the early 1980s. harvey whose book you gave a that you turned theodore furies upon you harvey clara said that the communist party didn't spy and wasn't, you know, maybe there was one or two spies, but it wasn't a central part of the party history. and we know that it was that the

communist party, i mean, we're talking about maybe 300 or so members, but with the knowledge, the full knowledge of its leaders deeply enmeshed in soviet espionage during the second world war, after afterwards that that those spy rings were broken. we also know that the communist party from the beginning drew a substantial financial muscle stipend from the soviet union, so called moscow gold, which they always denied and in the sixties, seventies alone, the soviet union funneled something like. $30 million, which was a lot more money in days than it is today, but still not to the american communist party with its 5000 members, which was more than it funneled to the italian communist party with its 1.5 million members.

i don't know what they thought they were for their money, but when you factor in those things, the the the espionage was the financial link, it was harder for me to to maintain that patience that informed my my earlier writings and as whether it could have turned out differently. there is a narrative logic. my first book, which side were you on that? if only browder's mild reforms to the parties outlook had been allowed to contain you and it had gone beyond simply declaring itself an association rather than a partizan kind of loosened party discipline, but had somehow affected a genuine reinvention itself. as a american political movement, drawing its inspiration from american sources and predecessors like debs garrison, douglas stanton

and, many others who and had gone its way independent of the soviet union again, sort of prefiguring the euro communism of 1970s, which that was a powerful force when i was writing this. and then to disappear that that narrative. i now disagree with that somehow could have turned out differently. and i now have come to reject that. that logic. i've never said that quite because much more powerful communist and socialist and social democratic movements in western europe dissolved in the and eighties and how could that tiny american communist party thrive in this country, which is much more conservative when

those movements once they tried to to to cut their ties with the soviet union? well, the communist component of that could not. so i think no. that the the original sin what makes this a tragedy in a shakespearean sentence is not, you know, these people are the victims of the caprices of the gods, as in the greek tragedy, but as a shakespearean sense that the the the fault within them there was an original sin. and that was the commitment to, the leninist vision of and the revolution and revolutionary reorganization as well. the continuing loyalty to the soviet union and could never dispense with that. they tried they bumped up against it in the visuals did have much more sort of original and compelling thoughts about where the movement should go, but they could never lead their their comrades in that

direction. thank you for that. i know you say in the early part of the book, you're not you're not writing this book to recover a usable past. however. this is for the younger people in the audience, and their numbers have grown over the last ten or 15 minutes. it's your voice, your voice. this is an organizing cell here. the left is the the the left was reborn in the 1960s and seventies, what was then called the new left. we were both part of that in some form. it survived as a cultural force in american politics, in terms of identity politics of one sort or another. but the anti-capitalist component of that left disappeared, and it was nowhere to be found in the 1980s and

1990s, with a couple in the 1990s, nor in the first few years of the 21st century, and then the crash of 228 2009 changed everything. and an american was reborn. occupy street and 2011, the candidate of 2016 was not only trump, but sanders, who, when i talk about him, when i'm discussing current politics, i call him the second most successful socialist in american. after eugene victor debs, no one is really tried to argue m out that, and i don't think they can. so my question is, for a new generation, the american left, i will say also that having an american left is important for politics in america.

for a new generation of the american left. what that you have studied in your career, studying radicalism is relevant to them and to their experience. and here i ask you to consider, of course, communism, but you also know a lot about democratic socialism and you know a lot about all the byways and highways of the american left in the 20th century. so we're going to go to q&a after this question. but i don't want to let go until i give a chance to impart some of knowledge and wisdom to future generations. yeah, well, yeah, absolutely mean that the failure of american is not identical with the failure of the american left. i mean, is a difficult country to organize a left. nothing changes. nothing changes, changes.

and then all of a sudden as in the early 1960s, suddenly everything and everything is up for grabs. there are just those moments in our history when new political opportunities present themselves. and i think yeah. with with bernie's with alexandria election two years later to the congress with the formation of the squad suddenly. we we were in such a moment or at least the very beginnings of it for while there were four members of democratic socialists of america in sitting in congress, which is more socialist than ever sat at one time in congress before that. but looking back when new generations look back at that history. i think there is a great american radical tradition that that begins in boston in, 1635

with and hutchinson who tells the official establishment ministry that she's going to make up her own mind about what god has in plan for the commonwealth of massachusetts and continues on through the abolition movement and william lloyd garrison and frederick douglass and the women's suffrage movement and elizabeth cady stanton and then continues on a new form through eugene victor debs, who you mentioned debs. you read his marx and engels and and believed in national working class solidarity and class struggle. but as his very biographer, nick salvatore, suggested in, an earlier book, eugene debs citizen socialist, that debs was really formed. his experiences as a young man beginning a political career, beginning a union activism in terre haute, indiana in the late

19th century. and that his quest for democratic citizen worship for a kind of responsible control over own life of every individ vision of what a good society would look like that his socialism and i think when we go looking for for fathers and mothers, that is the tradition we should go and and revisit and see it plays out in the 1960s and especially in the civil movement the women's movement and continues on to the present. so i see these as alternate traditions, as choices that that we can make. and these movements overlap at points. communists, again, were very to the civil rights beginning of the civil rights movement. the long rights movement,

starting in the 1930s and 1940s. but they the i think as important and as useful for as those who came into the civil rights movement in the early sixties through the church and through the youth movement. and those are those are are real guides to if there is such a thing as a usable past that when of american radicalism provides, it thank you i could easily go on with my questions but but yeah. let's open up the audience here and i want to give people here an opportunity i will call on you and when i see your hands and i think will share the mic what were the boom or the boom. yes. in the there. okay. hi. one message from, your book that i found be potentially a very

grim. one is the part where you talk about how some organizations when they get a lot bigger like sds you got that section where you talk about it expands from a small circle of friends to becoming 100,000 members. and then you argue a lot of the times sectarian ism and very militant tendencies take over and friendly debate becomes a lot harder. and i wonder a little bit because even you know many people were thrilled to see dsa grow to an incredible burst of membership to like thousand members from, i don't know, five or 6000. and you were very unhappy with it because you felt they took a very wrong headed line on palestine israel issues. and so i want to raise this

question a lot of people would say robert putnam taught about where bowling alone all these organizations are going into decline. we know the ended in 2021 the isil of 2019. a lot of others have gone out of business. communist party is still there, but dsa looked like a real exception to this incredible decline. but you ended up very unhappy with that. it seemed like it fit your model for what you didn't like, what happened to sd yes. so i like to ask you a little bit about how do we grow a large movement and stay democratic or? what do you think dsa could be doing differently during this time? well, let me answer that more generally of all, i don't know how to build a broad, stable american left. historians are really good at predicting the past, and they stink at. predicting the future.

but as a former person, radical movements are built primarily by young people who join them. for a variety of reasons picked out of political commitment, out of idealism, all of form of political identity, a personal identity through their participation. that was true in the civil rights movement and the the problem of movements that are primarily made up of young people. i'm thinking of myself. you in 1968, as a freshman in college joining sds, which was the greatest moment of my life, is that they lack institutional memory. so for me, joining sd in 1968, the port huron statement, you know, was like old testament. i mean, it was it was the ancient past, the people who had it were, you know, not part of what sds in by the time i got around to it at the end of the

decade and so in my jumble of thoughts could read the port huron statement and say, you know, that's great. and i could read. well, actually tom hayden, writing in ramparts magazine celebrating the columbia strike in two or three. many columbia's essentially that, you know, colleges and universities are part of the war machine and they should be destroyed and somehow. the you know, the early sds commitment to you know building a movement with real intellectual and gifts gave to a that you know, look towards street as the future of the movement and i thought both of those were great at the same time but there was the street confrontational aspects of sds that that came to the fore and helped similarly with dsa lots and lots of people who had never thought about or heard of democratic socialism when bernie sanders said, i'm democratic socialist and they agreed with

what he was saying about contemporary american society and political proposals, google democratic socialism. and they they found dsa, his web site. and so they poured in and tens of thousands but institutional memory of dsa had been founded to be which was the left wing of the possible and michael harrington's phrase that got lost and so i don't know how you both remain open growth and and you know this is not your sds dsa which it shouldn't be our but also keep some core values a kind core commitment in the case of both sd and dsa, their origins to to democracy, i mean, the word democracy in in the titles, organizations and that's that's gotten obscured. i, i could solve that dilemma,

but very good question. can you solve it in the back there. yes. yes, you have kind of amorphous question. i don't know if it'll come out right, but i have this stereotype of, i think marxist. i think of academics arguing each other and theory, theory, theory. and here's the 17 books about marx. and that's not what real marxism is. and, you know, and i kind of have a sense that in we've kind of grown allergic to that and gone in the other direction. it's almost an anti-intellectual trend among the left. and so i guess my my question comes down to like, have we thrown the baby out the bathwater, you know, in america it's like, no, let's just grab a sign and protest and do stuff and you don't need to have some intricate blueprint of how the economy works and it's just get the job done and let the society academics about that stuff and what what do you how to what extent you need you know a real

theoretical grounding or some kind of intellectual rigor behind a movement. why that actually kind of start to hold you back? we're kind of missing that. and maybe we should have some unifying actual blueprint. yeah, it's a very good question. well since all this is disguised autobiography, let me do some undisclosed autobiography. in the summer of 1969. so i've been in sds for a year. i came to boston and i was with a friend of an waltham, and i got a job in a jigsaw puzzle factory, which was my most picturesque job ever. and on my lunch, like factory workers across the country, while i ate my lunch. i read lenin and read is to be done and read, you know, imperialist in the highest stage of capitalism. and i wanted to convert myself

into a. and fortunately for me, i think, i was also at the same time too much immersed in the counterculture that era to really do that see what i mean in the eyes of real leninist. i was just a poseur. so my my lenin days were restricted. but i think we can. i'm speaking as a historian not as a particularly as a theorist. we can certainly learn from the past. i mean, if i was speaking to a young person about being a radical in america, i'd say study the history of the abolitionist movement. i mean, who were a minority often to, you know, rioting and their halls burned down and their meetings were disrupted and yet they persevered and they built a very movement based on largely on american religious traditions that i got back then.

hutchinson how did they do that? and did they spark a rights? whereas these ideas originally were about slavery, central contradiction, sin of the american experience, but spread to other dimensions so that people like elizabeth cady stanton and susan anthony, who began as abolitionists, then began to say, well, what about women, about their rights? and we saw a similar thing in the 1960s with the civil rights movement inspired women's movement, the gay rights, all prisoners rights movement, rights of soldiers. how there's something about that of rights. i i'm not putting it in a theoretical framework, but it is kind of central to building a a durable and, genuine american radical. how how do we apply lessons to future building future movements. that's an amorphous answer to

your they're very non amorphous question yes so great question you when i look at today's more of the radical left i see some one unifying thing unites everything. it's not really as much the economics as i would say or even necessarily foreign policy or dislike of the leaders. it's of a despising of kind of the as it personally is its past its present in many eyes. i guess the probable futures like a combination the us was that something that was a factor as much in the thirties and forties as yeah economics that a lot of people talked about and like thinking of actual like communism. that's a very good question too i you know subsequent generations on the left have discovered and rediscovered which is you know again, the

original sin and the abolitionists and william lloyd garrison called for secession. he wanted new england to secede from the united states because. it was it was sinful to be tied to these slave owners and similarly, in the 1960s and the late 1960s, for many of us, we look to the third world and we saw the united states as the one bad actor in, the world and, you know, third world revolutions as necessary eerily righteous and countering that. and i think we're going through a third iteration of that now. i'm sorry, i forgot the last part. if was as much the case in thirties and forties. well, oddly enough, because of who the young communists know, the people coming through the young communist league who were in their teens or their early twenties, they were overwhelmingly the first native born generation immigrant parents and. when earl browder, the communist

party leader, said communism is 20th century americanism sounds to us. oh yeah, really, you know, or hokey to them. you know, it had a real power it said we can we can be radicals, but can be good americans, too. but paul and so on. ballad for americans. it's all about how you know there yes there's been hysteria and yes there's been racism division but but at its heart the american identity is a good one. and so oddly enough, that is a way a contemporary generation of american radicals could look back to the popular front and say, you know, a lot of this was these are people who were justifying the moscow trials. at the same time, they're singing ballad for americans. but there was something to that, to be able to be a sharp critic of inequality and injustice and still love your country and feel

like part of your country. to put a point on this most successful period of radicalism in america, which is the thirties and forties, is a moment of intense american patriotism on the left. right, right gary's book, very, yes. um, thank you much for coming to speak. i think maybe i can out ourselves as dsa so don't hate me. but i think it was. yeah, it was interesting to hear your perspective professor. i think the question i had was i feel like you've outlined really clearly that there was this inherent contradiction existed, right, in which you had communist party members criticizing you, like who wanted to have this egalitarian society at the time were in favor of this like campus know, soviet kind of foreign policy. and i'm curious, you could talk a little bit more about the why of that so like why it that there was this draw towards the soviet foreign policy or why was

it possible for this contradiction to happen. i'm particularly curious because. you know, dsa is a very organization. there are a lot of different guess positions within it, some of which are more campus than others. and so i as we're grappling these questions as the younger generation, i'm curious if you're able to just speak more towards, you know, what is the why behind this? yeah, i mean the socialist movement of the late 19th century in the early 20th century was very optimistic and it was growing. and american communists looked to their comrades in europe and in germany, where by 1912 or so the social democratic party had a third of the seats in the reichstag, and the german parliament and. there were these international conferences every couple of years and. so so the leaders of the british labor party and the french socialist party and the social democratic party with in

brussels or someplace and pledge that the workers of the world would never go off to war against one another. and then 14 happens. and what happens is that the workers of the world march off obediently to war, and most of those socialist parties and social democratic parties vote war credits and become i mean, there were dissenters, but and so it was a moment of disillusionment that sense of automatic progress will just keep, you know, gathering and that that dissolves. and there are two exceptions in the socialist movement to that endorsement of the war. one is the american socialist party. united states is not yet in the war. and in fact, it's in a leaders are running on platforms going to keep america out of the war. so they're there. they're an exception. and the other is in russia, where the bolsheviks and and the mensheviks both opposed the war

in different ways. but they were underground, you know, in the tsarist empire, you know, there's no legal protest available to them. and then in 1917, this this extraordinary thing happens, which is this tiny the bolshevik party at the start in 1917 has maybe 24,000 members in the in the tsarist empire of 100 million or so souls. and that's, you know, at the start of 1917, by the end of 1917, they've seized control of precarious control but managed to defeat the white armies and and create what looks like the first successful socialist society. and so around the world and including in the united states, radicals look at this and say they must have the secret. this must be the formula. if only we do what lenin and lenin was unknown to outside

russian exiles. through the socialist movement and. then suddenly, you know, he's the leading inspirational figure. lenin, trotsky ironically enough, given what happens to trotsky. and so if only we can be as disciplined as they, we can bend history to our will. and that something i refer to as linda voss temptation and that generations on the left, certainly the american communist party, but also in the various splinters from communist party, trotsky is later maoist and so forth. succumb to that same temptation and that's that's part of the tragedy i'm describing because over and over and over again it's proved sterile a dead end self isolating and a very

different tradition than that and hutchinson to william lloyd garrison to eugene debs tradition which to me is the real inspiration. but i think let me just say a few words and by way of closing leninism was about power. but there was a dream of communism that was lot bigger than leninism. that was a world beyond capitalism, without inequality, without exploitation. and to the question earlier about blueprints, i don't know about a blueprint, but certainly there was a vision that the communists had of a world without injustice and without exploitation and believing that the development of capitalism had put within humanity's hands the capability of this enormous productive potential in the world for positive use. it was arguably the most

spectacular ambition to re-engineer humanity that i know of. and one can understand the power of that absolute dream and why attracted intelligent, smart, dedicated people. again, again and again and. its collapse was spectacular and. and the on the left to pick up the pieces from that has been and you young dsa ers are living in the wake of that still. and one of the challenges for a left to rebuild dream of that power without bringing leninist tyranny along with it and no one has figured out yet how to do that. if anyone does going to be the younger generations. absolutely not the older ones.

so onward i want to thank maurice writing this spectacular book. and thank you for and and you should all actively buy a copy and read it and think about it. and if you don't agree with it, write him a enter into conversation with him. continue the conversation there. books available for anyone who wants to pick any copy up tonight. and i think maurice would be happy to absolutely put his john hancock in there that's probably an appropriate name to talk about reds but the book about the book is about tension and contradiction. so i can talk about your john hancock book as a revolutionary. yeah there we go. thank you all very much. news for