On Jeffrey Burds’ comments in the American Historical Review By John Earl Haynes, July 2019 The June issue of the American Historical Review published a short letter to the editor I had written: “The April 2019 issue of the American Historical Review contains a featured review of The Cambridge Historyof Communism (595–599). The reviewer, Jeffrey Burds, writes: “Curiously, [redacted] made no mention of the August 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, when more than three-quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party.” On the basis of the CPUSA’s records at the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDNI) archive in Moscow, Harvey Klehr and I documented in The Soviet World of American Communism (1998) that CPUSA registered membership peaked at 66,000 in January 1939 before the pact, dropped to 55,000 by January 1940 after the pact, and then declined to 50,000 by January 1941. Further, the party’s records show that nearly half of the loss, 7,500, were immigrants who had not taken out citizenship papers and whom the party dropped so as to avoid coming under the Voorhis Act. This left 8,500 as the maximum loss that one could attribute to disillusion with the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. A loss of 13 percent over two years is a significant loss, but it is not even in the same league as a claim that more than 75 percent “abruptly resigned” due to the pact. The relevant documents are: Nat Ross, “Organisational Status and Organisational Problems of the CPUSA,” August 27, 1939, RTsKhIDNI 515-1-4083; “Report of J. W. [JohnWilliamson, CPUSA organizational secretary],” May 27, 1941, RTsKhIDNI 515-1- 4209; and T. Ryan [Eugene Dennis], “The Organizational Position of the CPUSA,” April 1, 1941, RTsKhIDNI 515-1-4091. Dennis in his 1941 report put the January 1939 registered membership at 65,000 rather than the 66,000 Ross reported in 1939.” The subject being a specific factual matter, I was brief: 297 words. Professor Burds responded and was not brief with 1,079 words 3.6 times longer than my comment: “I would like to thank Haynes for the data provided. Those data are problematic for several reasons. First, Haynes has viewed the history of American communism through a lens that anathematizes and condemns. His goal has clearly been to uphold an image of the American Left as a hotbed of Soviet spies, lackeys of Moscow, or as a threatening and ominous fifth column. I in fact lauded the editors and contributors to The Cambridge History of Communism for their break from ideological reductionism in favor of a far more balanced social and political history of communism in the twentieth century. I wrote: “Nowhere was this Communist decline clearer than in the United States. In his provocative essay ‘American Communism,’ Phillip Deery is the only scholar in nearly two thousand pages to note the recent emergence in reductionist mainstream conservative historiography (e.g., Allen Weinstein, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes) of a hasty generalization that dismisses U.S. progressivism and instead depicts the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as nothing more than a weapon for Soviet espionage.” I would suggest that this is the true source of Haynes’s objection, and not to quibble over data reflected in one sentence of my 6,700-word review of a threevolume collection of seventy-five essays in nearly two thousand printed pages. Second, the data themselves are in dispute. To name just one of several recent alternative estimates: In the Cambridge series, Phillip Deery referred to a decline of nearly 40 percent following the German-Soviet pact, from 90,000 registered members in early 1939 to 55,000 by mid1940. “Resignations flooded in. Critics were expelled. Others quietly melted away” (2:646–647). Note that this widely accepted estimate is three times higher than the one that Haynes has presented. Third, let’s look at Haynes’s data. Haynes and Klehr wrote: “At most, only about 13 percent of the party membership could be said to have left in reaction to the pact. This means that about 87 percent took the pact in stride” (Soviet World of American Communism, 72–73). Let’s be clear: It is an essential premise of Haynes’s argument that American Communists were unreactive to any changes in Soviet policy, uncritical accomplices with Moscow. Any evidence that shows a high turnover among Communist Party membership strikes at the heart of Haynes’s core presumptions about communism. Fourth, Haynes’s documents show at best snapshots of registered Communists as reported to Moscow between 1938 and 1941. In my review, I wrote specifically about “the August 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, when more than three-quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party.” My goal was not to measure total registered Communists, but rather to track the number and proportion of Communists who left the CPUSA following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and subsequent Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe from September 1939 to May 1941. Haynes’s aggregated membership data cannot answer this question. Most experts agree that nearly half of CPUSA members in 1939 were Jewish, the majority of these Eastern European Jewish immigrants, precisely the group most likely to object to Stalin’s new German policy. One must proceed cautiously under such circumstances. After thirty years of work in Soviet archives, I read CPUSA reports to Moscow not as the literal truth but rather as a concerted effort to conceal the reality that the CPUSA was in catastrophic decline. Objections to the pact and the Soviet war with Finland did, for example, lead in 1940 to a Moscow-instigated purge of the leadership of the PCM (Communist Party of Mexico) for their “very serious mistakes” (William Chase, “Restoring Democratic Centralism to Communist Parties: USSR, Spain and Mexico, 1935–1940,” paper presented at the SlavicEurasian Research Center Winter International Symposium: “The Russian Revolution in the Long Twentieth Century,” Hokkaido, December 2017). It is best to study the CPUSA in its global context. Franz Borkenau’s work on the life cycles of national Communist parties is especially enlightening here. Borkenau characterized Communist parties as organic and constantly changing: “There is a small stratum of devoted servants . . . Then there is an enormous mass of people who come and go, and of these shifting sands the communist parties are made up.” Borkenau estimated for the 1930s that over the course of five to seven years, “practically the whole of the party membership, with the exception of the stable 5 per cent, have disappeared and been replaced by new members” (Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist International [1939], 372). This was the underlying pattern of national Communist parties around the world. Studying the CPUSA in global context exposes such patterns and helps to avoid a narrowly selective cherry picking of data and documents. If we go beyond official numbers and integrate cadre turnover rates, the CPUSA between September 1939 and May 1941 clearly lost members far faster than it could recruit new ones. Kudos therefore to the CPUSA agents who managed to recruit at a respectable rate—adding between 14,700 and 31,500 new members during this critical twenty-one-month period. The result? What appeared on the surface to represent a 13–15 percent decline actually concealed a far greater drop created by members’ departures. A rate of 1,500 recruits—which is half the average monthly rate of CPUSA recruitment before August 1939 (Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II [1991],198)— would have added 31,500 new recruits by May 1941, so that the actual decline in party cadres following Molotov-Ribbentrop would be 46,500 members, or over 70 percent, nearly five times the decline indicated by `Haynes. The CPUSA leadership survived the crisis by building a new party with a new base. African American members of the CPUSA, for example, rose from 200 in 1930 to 7,000 by 1938. A CPUSA memorandum to Moscow reporting that substantial portions of Communist cadres had left the party in response to a change in Soviet policy toward Hitler would have generated serious consequences. Moscow would never have accepted responsibility for such a blowback against Moscow’s own policies. The decline would inevitably have been blamed on the CPUSA leadership, provoking a thoroughgoing purge and reorganization. Anticipating this, CPUSA leaders would have made every effort to cover up the profound crisis that Stalin himself had caused.” Professor Burds’ response reinforces the foolishness of his original claim that “more than three-quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party.” Let’s examine his response. Burds says: “To name just one of several recent alternative estimates: In the Cambridge series, Phillip Deery referred to a decline of nearly 40 percent following the German-Soviet pact, from 90,000 registered members in early 1939 to 55,000 by mid-1940.” That is not what Phillip Deery said. Deery on page 646 of his CPUSA chapter of the Cambridge encyclopedia writes “By 1939, its membership had soared to more than 90,000, its zenith . . . .” Note that Deery does not say that his “more than 90,000” were “registered” as Burds’ claims. “Registered” is a Burds insertion. Does that make a difference? Yes, and a big one. In the period under question the CPUSA used three measures of membership: enrolled, registered, and average dues paying. “Enrolled” is the largest and the least accurate. Someone was counted as “enrolled” as long as their name had not been removed from the membership rolls of their party unit by the unit secretary. Someone who formally resigned from the party was immediately removed from unit membership rolls. But overwhelmingly those leaving the party did not formally resign, they just dropped out. Party secretaries would usually keep dropouts on the rolls for a year or two, even morers until all hope was lost that the dropout would come back (some did, most didn’t). In the CPUSA archival document I cited earlier, Nat Ross, “Organisational Status and Organisational Problems of the CPUSA,” August 27, 1939”, enrolled membership in the CPUSA stood at 88,000 in January 1939. (Ross was the CPUSA’s representative to the Communist International at the time.) Note that 88,000 is not that far from Deery’s more than 90,000 estimate. The 88,000 figure is stated in my, Klehr, and Firsov’s The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1998). However, enrolled membership is not the most accurate measure of membership. “Registered” membership is the most accurate. Each CPUSA member was required to register (or reregister) with their party unit each year. Dropouts, obviously, did not reregister. Thus registered membership totals removed those who were inactive and failed to make the minimal act of reregistering (renewing) their membership with their party unit. In January 1939 the registered membership stood at 66,000, 22,000 less than the enrolled membership (again, from the 1939 Ross document). 66,000 is the figure I used in my comment on Burds’ review and my estimate of the number one can reasonably assign to reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact is based on CPUSA archival documents in the Moscow archives using the net change in registered membership for 1939, 1940, and 1941. The most restrictive measurement is ‘average dues paying.’ The Ross document reports that at 46,000 for the first seven months of 1939. One can argue that average dues paying was the most accurate measure of active members but I disagree. CPUSA membership still included many blue collar workers with limited income and unemployment was still high from the Depression. There were plenty of active rank-and-file CPUSA members with limited incomes who found regular dues payment a challenge and paid only sporadically. Nonetheless, they were active party members. To use average dues paying as the main measure of membership understates party membership in my view. Deery’s assertion that CPUSA membership “soared to more than 90,000” in 1939 is unsourced, but estimates in that range were common in the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, Klehr and I in The Secret World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1995, page 10) wrote “By 1939 nearly a hundred thousand Americans were members of the CPUSA.” But these figures were not based on internal party documents but by claims made by senior CPUSA officials. Then we came across in Moscow the CPUSA archival documents I cited above that gave a better understanding of how the CPUSA counted members (enrolled, registered, dues paying) and archival documents with these various numbers. Consequently, in The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale University Press, 1998) we corrected our earlier estimate: “. . . on 1 January 1939, party records show an “enrolled” membership of 88,000. However, of these, only 66,000 were “registered,” that is, had renewed their membership with a party club. Further, of these registered members, only 46,000 were carried as “dues-paying” members during the first seven months of 1939” (page 72). Burds’ claim, based on Deery, that there were more than 90,000 “registered” members in 1939 is false. Deery never said his 90,000 was a registered membership figure, and CPUSA archival documents put the registered total at 66,000 in 1939. Burds is claiming he is comparing identical measures, more than 90,000 registered in 1939 dropping to 55,000 registered in 1940. But in fact he is comparing apples and oranges, from at best enrolled membership, 90,000+ in 1939, to registered members, 55,000 in 1940. Burds goes on to say that Deery put the drop in membership after the NaziSoviet Pact at 40%. But Deery gives no source for this estimate. Further neither Deery nor Burds deals with the fact, documented in my original comment, that in 1940 the CPUSA dropped 7,500 non-citizens from its membership rolls (more than 11% of its registered membership) to avoid complications of the newly enacted Voorhis Act and Alien Registration Act. This had nothing to do with the NaziSoviet Pact, and to include these people in any estimate of people who left the party in disgust with the Pact cannot be justified. Consider further, Burds’ remark, “In the Cambridge series, Phillip Deery referred to a decline of nearly 40 percent following the German-Soviet pact, from 90,000 registered members in early 1939 to 55,000 by mid-1940.” Return to my original comment on Burds review. I wrote, “CPUSA registered membership peaked at 66,000 in January 1939 before the pact, dropped to 55,000 by January 1940 after the pact . . . .” and cited the CPUSA archival documents from which these numbers came. Burds is asserting CPUSA membership in mid-1940 at 55,000. Burds disparaged my numbers based on CPUSA archival documents because he asserted that CPUSA documents were concealing from the Comintern the more than 75% loss in membership losses he sees. But his number of “55,000 by mid-1940” is virtually identical to my “55,000 by January 1940.” So, contrary to Burds’ claims, the CPUSA documents were concealing nothing. (Minor point, all of the enrolled and registered membership numbers I’ve seen in the CPUSA archives were January numbers. Only the average dues paying membership was kept on a rolling average monthly basis, so his “mid-1940” makes little sense for enrolled or registered membership.) Burds has a long section on rapid turnover in Communist party membership. This is an old story long known to specialists in the field, and, indeed, Burds even cites Franz Borkenau’s 1939 remarks on the phenomena. As for the CPUSA, Theodore Draper wrote in 1986: “From the beginning of 1922 to the middle of 1925, about 20,000 new members were admitted. Of them, about 6000 stayed and 14,000 left.” “In 1923-24, about 10,000 of the 15,000 new member dropped out. In 1925-27, about 2000 of the 5000 new member dropped out. For the entire period, 1923,27, it appears that about 18,000 of the 23,000 new members were lost. . . . We may estimate, then, that about 100,000 people entered the party in the decade 1919-29, of whom only about 10,000 stayed in long enough to represent a basic membership.” (Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period, 188-189.) As for the 1930s, to use one year as an example from Klehr and my research, CPUSA report “Membership Figures of the C.P. U.S.A.” in RGASPI archive fond 495, opis 14 delo 58. This document reports January 1, 1936 registered membership of 31,000 (rounded off), new recruits for all of 1936 of 17,000, registered membership on January, 1, 1937 of 38,000. So the party gained 17,000 new members in 1936 but lost 10,000 of its current members, so the net gain was just 7,000. The 10,000 loss was 32% of its January 1936 membership. Keep in mind that 1936 was a good year for the party when it was growing rapidly. Figures like that prompted Klehr and me to write in 1998 "Turnover in membership was so rapid that Communists stayed in the party for an average of three or four years” (The Soviet World of American Communism, 348). People dropped out for every reason one can imagine: loss of interest, excessive demands the party put on members’ time (likely the major factor), personal feuds with other party members, disillusionment, etc. And, of course this constant turnover certainly continued in 1939, 1940, and 1941. Burds, however, wants to claim that the all of the loss of existing members was attributable to disgust to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This is truly creative accounting. Turnover of about 30% was normal, so at most only the net drop in membership can be attributed to the Pact. Burds also points to the slowdown in new recruits the party experienced as connected to the Pact. And, indeed, surely the Pact was a significant hindrance to recruitment. But in an act of truly magical math, Burds then adds in the slowdown in recruitment to get a yet new number, stating “the actual decline in party cadres following Molotov-Ribbentrop would be 46,500 members, or over 70 percent, nearly five times the decline indicated by Haynes.” Remember, Burds original statement was “more than three-quarters of American Communists (including most Jews) would abruptly resign from the Communist Party.” People not recruited did not “abruptly resign.” Nor can the normal annual dropout rate of around 30% of members for a myriad of reasons be attributed to a single cause. At best only the net change can be attributed to the Pact, and the net change (taking into account the 11% of non-citizens the Party dropped on its own initiative) was 13%, not the “more than three-quarters” of Burds’ imagination. Let us also deal with other problems with Burds’ remarks. In his AHR review, the original cause for my correction of his membership claims, he wrote “Curiously, Deery made no mention of the August 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact . . . .” In fact, Deery devoted two lengthy paragraphs to the Pact. Two lengthy paragraphs are not “no mention.” I quoted Burds’ claim that Deery had “made no mention” of the Pact in my letter to the AHR, and Burds had the opportunity to correct his misleading of AHR readers about Deery’s text, but he choose not to do so. (I redacted Deery’s name in my letter to the AHR in case he did not wish to be involved in the matter.) Burds also asserts in his response that after the Nazi-Soviet Pact the CPUSA was in “catastrophic decline” and in “profound crisis.” He is wrong on both counts. The drop from 66,000 registered members in 1939 to 55,000 in 1940, and then 50,000 in 1941 is a significant loss but not catastrophic, particularly since party’s records show that nearly half of the loss, 7,500, were non-citizen immigrants the CPUSA dropped to avoid new U.S. internal security laws. These immigrants remained members of and active in the CPUSA’s mass membership foreign-language federations. The party’s membership in 1940 and 1941 are about the same as 1938 (54,000) and well above 1937 (38,000), hardly catastrophic. As for the CPUSA being in crisis, that is just nonsense. Burds has to resort to pointing to the Mexican Communist Party as one thrown into crisis by the NaziSoviet Pact, writing, “Objections to the pact and the Soviet war with Finland did, for example, lead in 1940 to a Moscow-instigated purge of the leadership of the PCM (Communist Party of Mexico) for their ‘very serious mistakes.’” Yes the Mexican Communist Party did face a crisis over the Pact, but the American Communist Party did not. No member of the Politburo, no member of the Central Committee, not a single major national or regional CPUSA leader resigned in protest to the Pact. Not a single major national or regional CPUSA leader criticized the Pact or was expelled for objecting to the Pact. Even if you lower your standard to mid-level party figures, the fingers of one hand are sufficient to count them: Nat Honig, a mid-level trade union functionary, Manning Johnson, party district organizer in Buffalo, NY, and Melech Epstein, editor of the party’s Yiddish journal, the Morgen Freiheit. One could add Granville Hicks, but he was a purely intellectual figure, literary editor of New Masses, and not party cadre. Possibly someone could come up with a few more and we would need two hands. The only difficulty the CPUSA had with the Pact was the lack of warning from the Comintern. With no guidance from the Comintern and having only mainstream press stories about the Pact to go on, CPUSA leaders in the early weeks after the Pact (announced August 23) made confused and awkward public statements trying to reconcile the Pact with the CPUSA’s previous anti-Nazi stance. None of these statements criticized the Pact and, indeed, praised it as an anti-Nazi triumph. However, the Comintern soon provided detailed guidance and by mid-October 1939 the CPUSA was in full compliance. As with previous (and future) abrupt turns in party policy ordered by Moscow that shifted the CPUSA from a softer, reaching out for allies on the liberal-left approach to a harder more revolutionary stance, the hard-core of the CPUSA reveled in go-it-alone purity and sloughing-off the ‘summer-soldiers’ of revolution. The damage the Pact did was not principally to the CPUSA itself, but to the impressively large network of liberal and left allies and covertly Communistled front groups created during the now discarded Popular Front stance of the midto late-1930. Many of those front groups entirely collapsed or had to be reorganized on a much more narrow and sectarian basis. Anti-Stalinist liberal and left groups gained new adherents and new vigor. This was a tactical problem for the CPUSA, but neither catastrophic nor a profound crisis. In fact, the new stance allowed the Communist faction in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one of the CPUSA’s chief centers of strength, to draw closer to John L. Lewis, chief of the CIO and head of the powerful United Mine Workers union. Lewis was an isolationist, hostile to President Roosevelt’s policy of aiding those nations fighting Nazi Germany, and opposed FDR’s reelection in 1940, positions the CPUSA now also supported. Finally, Burds engages in an ideological attack on myself and like-minded traditionalist historians and mocks an entirely false straw-man of his imagination that has no connection to our actual positions as well as pretending he is a mindreader of my motivations. This is irrelevant to the factual matters under question and is no more than a fig-leaf for his weak understanding of American Communist history.