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The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life
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The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life Hardcover - 1990

by Guenter Lewy

From a height of almost 100,000 members during the Depression, the American Communist Party has accelerated into irrelevance and isolation. This book presents an intensively research historical analysis of Communism in America and provides a new understanding of Communism's machinations in U.S. politics.


From the publisher

From a height of almost 100,000 members during the Depression, when politicians, workers, and intellectuals were drawn into its orbit, the American Communist Party has descended into irrelevance and isolation, failing even to run a presidential candidate in 1988. Indeed, as Guenter Lewy
writes in this critical account of American Communism, despite decades of feverish activity and ferocious discipline, it was a cause doomed to fail from the very beginning.
In The Cause that Failed, Lewy offers an incisive narrative of the American Communist Party from the days of John Reed to the advent of glasnost. He traces its origins and development, underscoring how its devotion to Moscow and inflexible Marxist ideology isolated it from the American
scene--in fact, most of its first members were Eastern European immigrants. During the left wing tide of the Depression the Communist Party reached the peak of its influence, as it joined labor unions and progressive organizations in a "Popular Front." But Lewy reveals the deceptive,
antidemocratic, self-defeating tactics the Communists pursued even then, as they manipulated front organizations, seized control of political parties, peace groups, and labor unions, and enforced political conformity among members and sympathizers. He follows the Party through its inexorable
decline in the succeeding decades, up to its current position as one of the last Stalinist parties left in a world of glasnost and perestroika.
Lewy also provides a sharply critical discussion of the encounter between Communism and liberal and mainstream America. He examines such groups as the ACLU and SANE, arguing that the years when these organizations were tolerant toward Communists were also the times when they neglected their
original purpose in favor of partisan causes. He shows how Communists have manipulated well-meaning citizens in the peace movement and in Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign. One of the great ills Americans suffer, he writes, is an overreaction to McCarthyism--an atmosphere of
anti-anticommunism--which blinds them to the wrongs wrought by international Communism and makes them ignore the deceptive role played by the American Communist Party, which even today still keeps eighty percent of its membership secret.
The Cause that Failed presents an intensively researched and trenchantly argued historical analysis of Communism in America. Guenter Lewy's provocative account provides a new understanding of Communism's machinations in U.S. politics, and how Americans from across the political spectrum have
responded to its challenge.

Details

  • Title The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life
  • Author Guenter Lewy
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 384
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Oxford University Press, USA, New York
  • Date 1990
  • Features Bibliography, Index
  • ISBN 9780195057485 / 0195057481
  • Weight 1.59 lbs (0.72 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.28 in (24.13 x 16.51 x 3.25 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 20th Century
  • Library of Congress subjects United States - Politics and government -, Communism - United States - History - 20th
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 89026653
  • Dewey Decimal Code 324.273

Media reviews

Citations

  • Publishers Weekly, 08/24/1990, Page 0

About the author


About the Author:
Guenter Lewy is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author of Peace and Revolution, The Federal Loyalty-Security Program, America in Vietnam, and many other books.
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The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life
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