Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism

"The wisest, most eloquent history of the Communist Party USA that has ever been written" (Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win), revealing how party members contributed to struggles for justice and equality in America even as they championed a brutal, totalitarian state, the USSR  
 
After generations in the shadows, socialism is making headlines in the United States, following the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the election of several democratic socialists to Congress. Today’s leftists hail from a long lineage of anti-capitalist activists in the United States, yet the true legacy and lessons of their most radical and controversial forebears, the American Communists, remain little understood.  
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In Reds, historian Maurice Isserman focuses on the deeply contradictory nature of the history of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a movement that attracted egalitarian idealists...