The roots of American communism

"This definitive history is the detailed and factual story of the Communist party in America, from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence from the underground in the nineteen-twenties. In dealing with these significant formative years, the author discloses the pattern that has carried through to the present. He traces the native and foreign strains that went into the party; the people who actually made up its membership and leadership; its structure and operation; the shifting policies that guided it; the factional differences within it; its secret as well as its open activities. He makes unmistakably 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." He has ferreted out a staggering array of facts and information that are available nowhere else. Skilled in journalism as well as in historical scholarship, Mr.^ Draper brings to life the individual leaders --^ including among many others Foster, Browder, Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Reed. His stories of the underground days and of the spies and counterspies are thrillers of the first order. And in tracin