“For many Americans, disillusioned by the apparent
failure of capitalism, communism offered an alternative. It also seemed effective. While other political groups talked, Communists
acted. In the early 1930s, they were
a visible presence in the most important social movements of the day. Communists organized demonstrations of the unemployed
in
Harvey Klehr et al.
“American Communists looked to the
Comintern for guidance at every stage of their
history. Soviet Communists settled
American leadership disputes; they funded American movements and programs; they
directed American ideology. And they
always placed the interests of the Soviet Union above those of other
countries…This in large part accounts for the continued controversy: many leftists, including many former Commusts, are unwilling to acknowledge that an organization
that seemed to speak to the most disenfranchised of American outcasts, that
argued for American values of equality, acceptance of outcasts, and respect for
labor, was so tied to a foreign power that it could neither choose its own
leaders nor set its own agenda” (Harvey Klehr et al.,
The Soviet World of American Communism, 11-12).