The Romance of American Communism
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“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
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In this incredible collection of highly sympathetic interviews Vivian Gornick sheds light on what compelled Americans from different walks of life to become a part of CPUSA: be it loneliness of human condition, intense need to be a part of history or desire to understand their place in the world. At the centre of the book she places the contradiction between “the visionary discovery of the self”, the hunger for a new method of knowing life that made Americans into Communists in the first place, and deadening dogma that often accompanied them on the way out of CPUSA and that unmade them. She asks if CPUSA and its achievements were at all possible if not for the stifling straightjacket of organisation and discipline (qualities that the modern day left wing scene seems to lack) and if those qualities were only the logical continuation of the nineteen century radicalism – precisely, the spirit of time looking at itself in the mirror.
These longings haunted the Communists, arising as they did out of one of the great human hungers, a hunger that finally had a life of its own; so that while at first Communists fed the hunger, at last the hunger fed off them.
