ABSTRACT
The new historians of American Communism and the new breed of academic Marxists constitute a little-noted subdivision of the “Yuppie” social stratum. The periodic rediscovery of “Americanization” by the American Communists has only superficially represented a more independent policy; it has been in reality merely another type of American response to a Russian stimulus. The issue of Soviet influence, through the Communist International or Comintern, on American Communism inevitably turns up in other writings by the new historians. Maurice Isserman wondered how it was that the American Communists gained so much influence and membership in the late 1930s, a problem also raised by others. If the needs of Russian policy dictated a revolutionary or sectarian Comintern policy, the American Communists swung over to the left. The first serious, large-scale history of American Communism, by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, made a cogent analysis of its “totalitarian” character.
