To the Yonkers Station

THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM (498 pp.)--Theodore Draper--Viking ($6.75).

The unquiet grave of the U.S. Communist Party has at last been visited by a historian who bears no penitential flowers, only the instruments for an autopsy. To produce his coroner's report. Author Theodore Draper, perhaps the most serious and scholarly historian to venture into this potter's field, has hefted a morgueful of decayed pamphlets and moldering manifestos, also remembered to interview many forgotten men of the left. The result is a book which, without exactly being the season's most fascinating reading, will remain for years a source for other historians, a warning and a matter for wonder to all.

As an accomplished military historian in World War II, Author Draper knows that for this kind of work a man needs access to enemy records. Draper himself--an old New Masses, Daily Worker and Tassman who broke with the Reds at the beginning of World War II--had this knowledge of the enemy built in. Yet he has preserved a stiff objectivity--rare among ex-leftists --which has kept him on the cold course plotted by the Fund for the Republic, which sponsored his study. The book is all the more welcome because, as Draper understates it, "Communists themselves cannot write their own history."

Native Springs. Before the native springs of American radicalism were drained into the stagnant pool of the Communist Party, there were generations of hedging and ditching. Engels sadly noted that Americans were "practical" but tremendously backward in "theory." At first the Socialist movement in the U.S. was largely staffed by immigrants who had a sharper taste for theory, and the Socialist Labor Party of North America would have remained a "small, moribund, foreign-language sect" had not practical, native forces been stirring.

The great 19th century ground swell of popular discontent swirled about real grievances in the U.S. rather than frothing up towards imaginary cures. Populism, which wanted cheaper money, Progressivism, which wanted cheaper everything, the Knights of Labor with their focus on the dinner pail and the dignity of those who ate from it, all expressed the aspirations of Americans who remained hard-headed even when hard up. Even "Big Bill" Haywood's I.W.W. was "practical" in its own simpleminded, bloody-minded way. Author Draper never loses sight of the fact that early capitalism cooked a brutal brew, but his is the story of the witches who danced around the pot. None of them could evoke the genie of modern Communism from the old mixture of immigrant theorizing and native radical cussedness. It took two world events and a crowd of lesser demiurges to do so.

Lenin's Words. World War I cut off from Marxism those who preferred patriotism to party. Then, when the whole movement seemed to have collapsed, the Bolshevik revolution came to rally the U.S. left in a kind of "ecstasy." At this stage many an older reader will recognize the names. An ex-anarchist named Michael Gold was converted; Eugene Debs declared himself a Bolshevik; Max Eastman was elated. Many a poor visionary in New York--remembering a fellow sometimes called Bronstein who had lived in The Bronx and would lecture for $10 a night--now felt the taste of vicarious power and destiny when he heard that this shabby comrade had become the great Trotsky, Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

Only a specialist reader will care to follow the C.P. through its early history of heresy, splinter groups and purges. From a host of names, Historian Draper has underlined one that serves to tell the story of all. Louis C. Fraina was the "one man who led the way to a pro-Communist Left Wing," and he was once so important, says Draper sarcastically, that William Z. Foster in a 600-page History of the Communist Party of the United States mentions him not once.

Born in 1894 near Naples, Fraina was selling newspapers on Manhattan's Bowery at the age of six; he was a professional Socialist organizer at 15, at 20 a veteran "theoretician." On Sept. 1, 1919 the first convention of the Communist Party of America, in a little building in Chicago called "Smolny" (after the first GHQ of the Russian Soviets), elected Fraina its first International Secretary. He echoed Lenin's words--the new party must be a party of action. Yet within three years Fraina was out of the C.P.. was later hounded by false charges of espionage and embezzlement. He spent ten years as respected Professor Lewis Corey at Antioch College (he died in 1953). Fraina was one of those children whom the revolution not only devours but forgets it ever ate, and this sort of thing, Draper wistfully notes, is tough on a historian.

Final Aphorism. Fraina's career sums up the failure of early U.S. Communism and its theorizers to win the practical-minded American worker. Draper's account ends in 1923, on the eve of an era when new theorizers carried U.S. Communism almost as high as the old Smolny gang had dreamed. That was the time (subject of later volumes) when U.S. intellectuals lovingly tended the shoots that had grown from the Communist roots, ready for the fatuous aphorism of Earl Browder that "Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century."

Browder now lives in Yonkers, a dim, muddled man, wondering just why U.S. Communism could never acquire a true American accent.

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