Underground Communists in the McCarthy Period: A Family Memoir
by Daniel Rosenberg
New York: The Edward Mellon Press, 2008.
As someone who has done extensive research over decades into the history of anti-communism in the US, I see Daniel Rosenberg's new memoir, Underground Communists in the McCarthy Period, as towering above the “red diaper baby” literature that has emanated from some children of Communist Party activists over the last generation.
Much of this literature usually separates the personal from the political, either bonding with parents as brave victims of oppression or expressing anger at what they see as parents both neglecting them and making their lives stressful because of the parents unwavering political commitments. This book is an enormously important work, both as a scholarly interpretation and a valuable primary source addition to the history of the US communist movement. Rosenberg’s memoir is also in its own way a valuable addition to Jewish-American history, one that highlights the complexities and diversities within Jewish-American families on questions of politics religion and culture.
Most of all, Rosenberg presents personal and public evidence to counter the conventional wisdom of both the FBI-HUAC oriented anti-communist scholars like Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh and their largely liberal critics. These historians typically present images of communists as authoritarian automatons or potential Soviet spies and trivialize the Communist Party’s accomplishments.
Underground Communists in the McCarthy Period does what few other works of its kind have yet done: provide a serious, albeit not uncritical voice that makes sense of what the Communist Party did during the wave of political persecution following World War II.
Rosenberg's parents were working-class intellectuals and activists. To borrow a concept from John Dewey, they “learned by doing” and by reaching out in their own communities and to the larger society. Instead of simply hiding out during a wave of repression, they joined campaigns in Brooklyn against substandard and segregated schools. They were active in local school boards, trade unions and anti-machine reform clubs of the Democratic Party. As Rosenberg's book recounts, they taught him to respect the cultural heritage and achievements of American society, and to become his own person by making his own choices. They introduced him to art, jazz and many other things that I frankly wish my parents could have introduced me to.
Rosenberg analyzes what underground life meant in the United States clearly and concretely. Although J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI did not put communists in concentration camps as the Gestapo did to Germany's communists, provisions for such camps existed under the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, and Rosenberg’s parents were in the list to be put into such camps. The historical record also shows that during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the FBI seriously contemplated such an action. Still, FBI daily harassment of assumed Communist Party members made differences with the Gestapo difficult to discern.
While the story of FBI harassment has been told before, Rosenberg adds much by highlighting the FBI’s extensive infiltration of party clubs and organizations. In one instance, FBI agents set up a “party club” for the purpose of engaging in provocations that could be used in trials against party leaders. The bureau used surveillance and harassing visits to family members and neighbors to make their daily lives as difficult as possible.
Although the Communist Party saw these actions as incipient fascism, they were a kind of “selective fascism,” modeled after US segregation. Simply put, FBI activities were an attempt to deny employment opportunities, civil rights and civil liberties to people they associated with the Communist Party, in order to force the party into an underground existence and then use that existence as “evidence” that it was a conspiratorial group working to subvert the US government.
Rosenberg gently criticizes the party's intensification of its own isolation during the underground period. Party policy often limited the initiative and work of many members, while increasing the stresses upon them. Rosenberg concludes that the leadership “pulled many of its best activists out of circulation” at a crucial time. Repression encourages a circling of the wagons and a hardening of positions among those who don’t decide to leave. At the same time, Rosenberg withholds any rancor towards the activists who left the party.
Moving underground and increasing isolation was tragic, in the old definition of tragedy – you do things ethically for the right reasons but still fail. “The repression,” Rosenberg contends, 'which strengthened orthodox responses among party members, was not an illusion.” But the response in terms of the vitality of the party and its ability to adjust, develop and grow once the courts had begun to restrict persecution by law enforcement and other government entities can only be seen as a strategic error which negatively impacted later periods.
Still, Rosenberg’s fine work affirms the continued work of party activists like his parents as communists, their practical contributions to the advances of peoples struggles for education, housing, against racism and for the empowerment of the working class in the aftermath of the underground, or as I call it high domestic Cold War period. This memoir also demolishes the biggest official HUAC-FBI lie of all: that the CPUSA ceased to exist in any serious form after 1956.
For those interested in the history of the CPUSA and the American left in general, Underground Communists in the McCarthy Period is an invaluable work, both as analysis of larger events and as a vital memoir of personal experiences.
