684
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing over them was not a witch-hunt, as so often alleged, since while
there were no witches, there were Communists, and they were "agents
of the Kremlin who for years have carefully infiltrated into many strate–
gic places."
Hook's ideas created a furor, even among stalwarts of the demo–
cratic left. Irving Howe, himself an ardent early anti-Stalinist, wrote a
polemic against Hook in the pages of the Shachtmanite newspaper he
was then editing. Later, in his autobiography
A Margin of Hope,
Howe
commented that it was "all a matter of perspective." Hook and his asso–
ciates, Howe reasoned, should have saved their arrows for the fight
against McCarthy, and not the battle against the anti-anti-Communists.
Hence Howe disagreed with Hook and believed that membership in the
Communist Party was not sufficient ground for a professor to be dis–
qualified from university teaching. Howe, argued, as he remembers, that
"the membership of the Party was heterogeneous in character, sentiment,
and loyalty; that judgments about the conduct of professors should be
made individually," and to act against them
en masse
would require
"constant academic purges." Consequently, Howe believed that Hook's
anti-Communism revealed a lack of sensitivity "to the danger McCarthy–
ism represented for civil liberties."
That stance was actually a strange one for Howe to have taken. As
co-author of an early book chronicling the history of the CPUSA,
Howe was well aware, as he and Lewis Coser had written, that the Party
was a "foreign national party" dedicated to and controlled by the Rus–
sian ruling class. The Party's cadre, they wrote, were "malleable objects";
true Stalinists were individuals reduced to "little more than a series of
predictable and rigidly stereotyped responses." Since the time Howe and
Coser produced that evaluation, a new generation of scholars have
turned to the study of American Communism and have generated a
plethora of revisionist work - dedicated to challenging the view of
Howe and in particular that of Theodore Draper, whose pioneering
works on American Communism established long ago that the Soviet
connection was for American Communists the defining essence of their
movement. The new revisionist view, exemplified most often by historian
Maurice Isserman, a view that has become the dominant one in academic
circles, is that the American Communist movement was a normal politi–
cal party. While some of the historians in this group acknowledge the
link to Moscow, they argue vociferously that American Communists
were able to both bypass and transcend this umbilical cord. As Isserman
saw it, the attempt to produce an Americanization of the Party stemmed
not from response to a Russian stimulus, but from a compelling need
