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In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage

by John Earl Haynes

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873307,924 (3.7)None
Beginning in the late 1960s, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr say, the study of communism in America was taken over by "revisionists" who have attempted to portray the U.S. as the aggressor in the Cold War and saw suspicion about the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as baseless "paranoia." In this intriguing book, they show how, years after the death of communism, the leading historical journals and many prominent historians continue to teach that America's rejection of the Party was a tragic error, that American Communists were actually unsung heroes working for democratic ideals, and that those anti-Communist liberals and conservatives who drove the CPUSA to the margins of American politics in the 1950s were malicious figures deserving condemnation. The focus of "In Denial" is what the authors call "lying about spying." Haynes and Klehr examine the ways in which revisionist scholars have ignored or distorted new evidence from recently-opened Russian archives about espionage links between Moscow and the CPUSA. They analyze the mythology that continues to suggest, against all evidence, that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and others who betrayed the United States were more sinned against than sinning. They set the record straight about the spies among us. Haynes and Klehr were the first U.S. historians who used the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union to examine the history of American communism. "In Denial" is the record of what they discovered there. They show that while the international communist movement may be dead, conflict over the meaning of the communist experience in America is still very much with us.… (more)
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Churchill is supposed to have said “If you’re not a Communist when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re still a Communist when you’re 30, you have no brains.” This book demonstrates that a surprising number of American historians are brainless.


There’s a limited focus: contemporary historians (‘revisionists’) who deny or excuse or even praise American Communists who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. We don’t hear, except peripherally, about historians who deny that Stalin and Mao and Communism in general have been responsible for millions of deaths; the authors keep to their theme (with one interesting exception).


It’s a difficult book to follow unless you know the background. My own first memories of Communism involve having my parents usurp our brand new 6" black and white console TV to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings (when I wanted to watch cartoons or Westerns). I got the idea that Communists were bad people (which resulted in me taking the back door of our house off the hinges). Later, in my post-heart but pre-brains days I accepted that “McCarthyites” had engaged in a “witch hunt”, that the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were innocent, and that Communism may have made some mistakes but was clearly the inevitable future. I even joined an urban commune at the University of Chicago (I think this last experience did a lot more for my disillusionment with the worker’s paradise than The Gulag Archipelago; a house full of middle to upper class college students who talked about the plight of the workers and peasants but who could never bring themselves to do the dishes.) After the collapse of the XSSR and the end of the Cold War, Communism seemed almost quaint; I heard of the Venona decrypts but didn’t pay much attention, and the stories of some of the lesser lights of the McCarthy era like Elizabeth Bentley and Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White never entered my awareness.


Thus a good part of this book required a lot of further research. The tone of the authors, which originally struck me as shrill and overly confrontational, eventually seemed restrained. I was amazed to find the number of American historians who are still Marxists (did you know that there’s an “Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature” at Bard College in New York?) and the lengths that they will go to explain away Communist espionage. The “Racehorse Haynes” approach is common: Communists didn’t spy, they didn’t realize they were spying, they were just “sharing” information, the US spied too, all the evidence is forged, they’d already done all their spying by the time McCarthy came around, and Stalin was a nice guy anyway. There are some funny quotes where various professors jam their heads in so far that they have to unzip their pants to say “hello”; I was especially amused by the one who thought, in a strange case of preRathergate technoilliteracy, that word processors were in use in the late 1940s and thus the fact that the Venona decrypts were typed is evidence of forgery.


The exception to the espionage theme I mentioned above is a chapter that discusses a number of American citizens of Finnish ancestry that emigrated to the USSR in the 1930s to “build Socialism” in Soviet Karelia. They are mentioned with praise in a number of leftist publications. What’s not mentioned is that they were all executed in 1938 and 1939; an appendix provides a sad list of names. While this is a story that I hadn’t heard before, and its denial or whitewash is reprehensible, I don’t see that it fits with the rest of the book.



Recommend with the caveat that you might have to look some stuff up. The book would benefit from an introductory chapter giving the dramatis personae. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 11, 2017 |
There are two types of historians: traditional and revisionist. According to Haynes and Klehr, revisionist historians have dominated the area of Cold War history for too long. Among the crimes of the Cold War historians are denial, justification, and outright lies. After the opening of the Soviet Archives, it was released that the American Communist Party had more influence from Moscow than originally thought. Espionage was more rampant than people thought… perhaps, just maybe, McCarthy wasn’t on a wild witch hunt. Revisionist historians have since continued to deny horrors and influence, have mitigated events, and manipulate evidence to justify Stalin and espionage. However, I think that Harvey and Klehr would have had a more sound argument had they not come off sounding unprofessional in their direct usage of personal insults and adjectives. ( )
  morbidromantic | Dec 29, 2008 |
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Beginning in the late 1960s, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr say, the study of communism in America was taken over by "revisionists" who have attempted to portray the U.S. as the aggressor in the Cold War and saw suspicion about the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as baseless "paranoia." In this intriguing book, they show how, years after the death of communism, the leading historical journals and many prominent historians continue to teach that America's rejection of the Party was a tragic error, that American Communists were actually unsung heroes working for democratic ideals, and that those anti-Communist liberals and conservatives who drove the CPUSA to the margins of American politics in the 1950s were malicious figures deserving condemnation. The focus of "In Denial" is what the authors call "lying about spying." Haynes and Klehr examine the ways in which revisionist scholars have ignored or distorted new evidence from recently-opened Russian archives about espionage links between Moscow and the CPUSA. They analyze the mythology that continues to suggest, against all evidence, that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and others who betrayed the United States were more sinned against than sinning. They set the record straight about the spies among us. Haynes and Klehr were the first U.S. historians who used the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union to examine the history of American communism. "In Denial" is the record of what they discovered there. They show that while the international communist movement may be dead, conflict over the meaning of the communist experience in America is still very much with us.

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