How Theodore Draper Aged: A Dissident View of Communist Scholarship's Founding Figure

Theodore Draper has long been recognized as a founding figure of American Communist scholarship. His The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960) have long been the bedrock on which studies of Communism in the U.S. have developed. In studies of Communism in specific national settings Draper's research is internationally regarded as among the best work in the field, which not surprisingly is highly partisan.  Draper's books -- situated at the interface of deep empirical research and clearly stated convictions and interpretations -- have generated support and endorsement as well as opposition and criticism.

Too often, however, assessment of Draper is one-sided. In commenting on how his scholarship has aged over five decades, I hold to the necessity of appreciating the two-sided nature of his contribution. Draper's commitment to empirical research, making use of all sources then available to him, and his insistence that Communism was never simply about decision-making and activism among American Communists, but also involved appreciation of the Comintern's important role establishes his books as significant statements on the origins of the U.S. revolutionary Left.  However, in his ideological straghtjacketing of the Communist tradition which is forced into the containments of Russian domination, Draper fails to offer insight into the significance of Stalinism and its contribution to the degeneration of the U.S. Communist movement over the course of the 1920s.

Moveover, new subject areas, which Draper could not have countenanced given his political views, or perhaps even imagined in light of the interpretive constraints of the 1950s, have emerged in recent years.