The roots of American communism

the long version

"This definitive history is the detailed and factual story of the Communist party in America, from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence from the underground in the nineteen-twenties. In dealing with these significant formative years, the author discloses the pattern that has carried through to the present. He traces the native and foreign strains that went into the party; the people who actually made up its membership and leadership; its structure and operation; the shifting policies that guided it; the factional differences within it; its secret as well as its open activities. He makes unmistakably clear how the party in its infancy "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power." He has ferreted out a staggering array of facts and information that are available nowhere else. Skilled in journalism as well as in historical scholarship, Mr.^ Draper brings to life the individual leaders --^ including among many others Foster, Browder, Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Reed. His stories of the underground days and of the spies and counterspies are thrillers of the first order. And in tracing the network of connections in Russia, the overwhelming impact of the Russian Revolution, and the step-by-step control exercised by the Comintern thereafter, he not only creates a dramatic narrative but helps us to understand what is happening to world communism today. His work is of unparalleled value to historians and students, as well as of lively interest to the general reader. A picture section of contemporaneous photographs and cartoons makes its own graphic contribution to the study. Mr. Draper had already been at work on this book for some time on a part-time basis when the Fund for the Republic announced in 1955 its large scale project for an over-all survey of the influence of communism in American life. Mr.^ Draper joined the project on a full-time basis, and his work has become the first and key volume in a series of independent books, under the general editorship of Clinton Rossiter, that will result from this survey. In a later volume, due in 1958, Mr. Draper himself will carry the subsequent history of the party up to 1945." -- Publisher's description