Ellen Schrecker

“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 Chicago, protected young blacks against lynching in Alabama, and led strikes of California farmworkers. For many idealistic and energetic young men and women who were eager to address the start social and economic problems of the Depression era, joining the Communist party seemed to make a lot of sense” (Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism, 7).

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).