| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919–57. By Vernon L. Pedersen. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xii, 253 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02321-8.)

In the last ten years, traditionalist historians of American communism have emerged from research in Soviet archives with generally interesting and provocative books documenting the extent of Soviet influence on certain aspects of the American movement. However, if the traditionalist narrative of Soviet domination of the party is to move beyond its current nearly exclusive focus on espionage activities, it must illustrate a deeper, more pervasive "Soviet world" of American communism at the level of rank-and-file, community, and labor organizing. Vernon L. Pedersen's study of the Maryland Communist party (CP) moves in this direction. 1

Only a few members of the Maryland CP were engaged in espionage, and the rank and file were wholly unaware of these activities. According to Pedersen, however, it was the general "atmosphere" of the support of the Soviet Union in the party that enabled the spies to do their work at all. In fact, all Maryland party members might be considered co-conspirators, since they belonged in essentially the same category as the spies themselves, who were merely on one end "of a continuum of covert practices that included virtually all members." Predictably, Pedersen concludes that, since all party members were secret agents of one kind or another, the Communists themselves were primarily responsible for the McCarthyite repressions of the 1950s. . . .

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