Maurice Isserman at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes Maurice Isserman—award-winning author and Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College—for a discussion of his new book Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. He will be joined in conversation by Gary Gerstle— Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. 

About Reds

After generations in the shadows, socialism is making headlines in the United States, following the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the election of several democratic socialists to Congress. Today’s leftists hail from a long lineage of anti-capitalist activists in the United States, yet the true legacy and lessons of their most radical and controversial forebears, the American Communists, remain little understood.

In Reds, historian Maurice Isserman focuses on the deeply contradictory nature of the history of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a movement that attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Founded in 1919, the CPUSA fought for a just society in America: members organized powerful industrial unions, protested racism, and moved the nation left. At the same time, Communists maintained unwavering faith in the USSR’s claims to be a democratic workers’ state and came to be regarded as agents of a hostile foreign power. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes, however, doubt in Soviet leadership erupted within the CPUSA, leading to the organization’s decline into political irrelevance. 

This is the balanced and definitive account of an essential chapter in the history of radical politics in the United States. 

Praise for Reds

"History is splendidly covered in Reds."—Wall Street Journal

"A trenchant, decades-overdue book on the history of the U.S. Communist Party."—Foreign Policy

"Maurice Isserman is of the pre-eminent historians of the American left, having previously authored a history of the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) during World War II, a biography of DSA founder Michael Harrington, and Dorothy Healey’s memoirs, for which he provided commentary. His new history, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, provides a lucid, succinct, yet comprehensive history of the party, at once sympathetic and scathingly critical, as befits such a bewilderingly contradictory institution and mindset."—American Prospect

"What Maurice Isserman has accomplished in this well-written and superb history of the American Communist Party is a fresh assessment that will force many who have previously studied the party to revise some views."—The Bulkwark

"How could blind disciples of Joseph Stalin also have been among the most dedicated fighters for unions and against racism in their nation? Maurice Isserman has not just produced the wisest, most eloquent history of the Communist Party that has ever been written. Reds is also vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the promise and agony of the American left in the twentieth century.—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win

“In Reds, Isserman recognizes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American Communism: a movement that recruited idealists and professed a commitment to democratic ideals, but also provided several hundred recruits for Soviet espionage and voluntarily tied itself to a totalitarian regime hostile to democracy. Isserman’s brisk account of the Party’s history from 1919 to the early 1990s is the best one-volume book on the most important radical organization of twentieth-century America.”—Harvey Klehr, Emory University

“Isserman’s all-too-aptly subtitled Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism is indeed a classic in the Greek mode. Nuanced, judicious, and elegantly written, this wide-ranging story of a doomed movement places it within the broader context of a turbulent twentieth century. Highlighting the inherent contradiction between the Communist Party’s once dynamic contributions to American life and its obeisance to the Soviet Union, Isserman offers a sobering reminder of how blind partisanship can blight the best efforts of those who seek a better world.”—Ellen Schrecker, Yeshiva University

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.