The Roots of American Communism

In this definitive history of the evolution of the Communist Party in America - from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence as a legal entity in the 1920s - Theodore Draper traces the native and foreign strains that comprised the party. He emphasizes its shifting policies and secrets as well as its open activities. He makes clear how the party in its infancy "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power," a fact that Draper develops in his succeeding volume, American Communism and Soviet Russia.