The CPUSA

Some exerpts from Eric Breindel's review of "The Secret World of American Communism," by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov.

Just as the CP itself opposed American entry into the "imperialist war" until the Soviet Union was attacked, so did its underground cadres.

Communists preferred to depict themselves as "liberals in a hurry," ...

The CPUSA is described as "a conspiracy financed by a hostile power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that [hostile] power."

It's well to recall that Earl Browder (the CP's secretary general from 1930 to to 1944), himself, shortly before his death in 1973, acknowledged that the CPUSA had been involved in espionage. To be sure, Browder presented the matter in a decidedly benign fashion: "We [the Party] had people who would inform us from the enemy camp because they sympathized with our position," he explained to a UPI correspondent, going on to note that "we didn't consider it espionage."

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. h/t BrosJudd

This book was written in 1996, so I wonder that the authors didn't tell the rest of the story, i.e., how Moscow funded and directed our "60's cultural revolution," the next step in bringing the noble experiment home. A couple of paragraphs on why McCarthy was right would have been welcome too.