Despite my reticence to identify with any political label I have sometimes, in casual political conversation, referred to my self as a communist. I’ve done this to provoke, as amongst most people I know the word still evokes something dangerous and foreign. I’ve also done it as a kind of shorthand, a simple label to express my skepticism of capitalism and the culture of spiraling consumption I grew up in. After reading this book, I’ve learned that not only do I not want to be a communist, I don’t deserve to be one.

Growing up in the 90s and 00s, the word communism had been so thoroughly drained of any real meaning that I don’t think the average American of my parents generation could even tell you what it meant. After all, the folks Gornick interviews in this book were reminiscing about a by-gone era in the mid-70s - these people could have been my great or even great-great grandparents. The time of an organized communist party was distant history when I was becoming politically aware, and the contemporary communist party seemed a kind of cosplay joke. My thoughts on politics were being shaped by the writers and philosophers I was reading, many of whom sat comfortably on the far left of the spectrum, but the people I listened to for my opinions on current politics (mainly the daily show, maybe a Michael Moore movie I rented from the library) were never explicitly talking about capitalism, much less communism. The word itself conjured vague impressions of villainous looking Eastern Europeans, gulags, repression.

Of course, Obama was a disappointment for people my age, and the election of Trump the death blow to my perception that history is a long arc towards justice or however the saying goes. I think these twin factors, along with the clear correlation between capitalist industry with gratuitous environmental destruction, as well as the feeling that even a modest existence in America was more and more a pipe dream, led to many people of my generation to commit more deeply to learning about politics. For me, the motivation was a desire to understand. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening around me, why the feeling I had at 16 and 17 that the world was going to get better, that we would solve our problems through technocratic benevolence and enlightened discourse was melting away as quickly as an Antarctic glacier. Dipping my toes into radical thought has given me some sense of direction again, led me to see that the economic system built in the wake of the Industrial Revolution is tumbling towards entropy, and that if we don’t do something to stem the tide, the future looks bleak. It’s in this context that I felt I could truly own my claim of being a communist, or at the very least, an anti-capitalist. Gornick quotes one Claud Cockburn who says he never became a communist to help people, instead communism was the only was he could imagine human society surviving for any meaningful span of time, so dire were the conditions both contemporary and predicted. In fact, he says, communism for him was a conservative ideology, in that it was conserving meaningful life and livable society. Out of everything I read in this book, this viewpoint struck me as closest to my own.

After reading Marx and then hopping ahead to modern works of radical thought, it can be easy to forget the intervening 150 years of leftist history , a good chunk of which was dominated by the Soviet Union and the Central Communist Committee. Reading Gornick’s book shines a light on just how different it was to be a leftist in the middle of the last century. The simple fact that communist party bureaus the world over we’re paying membership dues to the central committee in Soviet Russia, which worked glove in hand with a regime with the blood of millions on its hands was shocking to me. I think the modern left takes it as given, having learned the lessons the folks in this book took so hard, that such a system is ludicrous and bound to end in abuse. But the whole thing back then was so new. Most of the folks interviewed for this book joined the party before WWII; this was the era when totalitarianism was just being invented, with regimes on both sides of the political spectrum perfecting how to control, coerce, and manipulate vast numbers of people. The deep seated fear of such a society didn’t exist for many of these people at the time, because they couldn’t even conceive of it yet. To the modern reader this ignorance is almost prelapsarian in its distance from our current conception of what government and ideology is capable of. The way that many people interviewed in this book describe the feeling at the height of the American communist party sounds terribly earnest and naive to modern ears, but our ironical remove comes with the intervening historical insight and digestion.

While the modern leftist may lament that political thought has most certainly taking a cynical, ironic turn in the many years that separate us from the stories in this book, I for one think that the Communist party of that early era sounds like a nightmare, and that’s certainly the way Gornick portrays it. It’s also clear that these people were asked and were forced to give up so much for their beliefs, and while it’s unquestionably good that you can freely check out Das Kapital from the library now without fear of being blacklisted, I do think the radical imperative is lost when being a socialist is as easy as putting a rose emoji in your bio. We are free to say what we want because the people in power are no longer scared of us; whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up for debate I guess.

The best parts of this book are when Gornick speaks for herself. Maybe it’s because her viewpoint is closer to that of a reader in 2022 by mere proximity in time (although it has been 50 years), or maybe it’s because she is able to reflect on the legacy of American Communism with a healthy remove that so many of her interview subjects don’t have, blocked as they are by pride and dogma. Most of these folks, despite Gornick’s extremely flattering depiction, are just not that interesting to me; they come across as the out of touch middle aged people overly concerned with their legacy that I guess most of us are destined to become. I was struck by the fact that many of of them live in areas of the country that have in the intervening decades become hot beds of gentrification and rent hikes, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence. But it’s also because most of them are just too normal and good, I couldn’t connect with their struggle to leave the party which clearly took on outsized importance in their lives, and besides that they mostly seemed well-adjusted, well-off, and if we are to believe Gornick, mostly still really hot. The exception that proves the rule is the chapter about the Bittermans, which reads with all the complexity of character and uncanny description of a short story, and for my money, it’s the best part of the book. ( )

this book resonated with me from the first, as gornick describes being a "red diaper baby" - an unattractive phrase meaning she was raised by communists. girl, same. though my family's communism looks so different to gornick's, both generationally and geographically, i felt that thread of need in her writing, of wanting to understand the political forces that came before her, that shaped her own political engagement. in that sense, i found this immensely satisfying; also in the sense that it covered a period of communist and american history where i had holes in my knowledge, and now no longer. in the new introduction, written in 2019, gornick laments that her prose was so overblown and dramatic. but it feels so right for a book about "romance" - that is, the deep stirring of the soul that's drawn to a political life. to me, her prose was just right. it certainly stirred something in me. through reading this, i feel more connected to my politics *in myself* than ever; beyond simply an understanding of my world. compelling stuff. the oral histories are gripping, the people we meet are such fascinating figures. there were stories that shocked me, or made me deeply emotional. a masterwork. ( )

This book is a really valuable archive of the lived experiences of American communists, many of whom made extraordinary sacrifices in their dedication to building a better world. It suffers a bit from overwriting, which the author acknowledges herself in the foreword. It's at its best when the authorial voice takes a backseat and the voices of the interviewees are allowed to chime through strong and clear, painting a vivid human picture of 20th century American socialism. ( )

This is second book by this author that I read, and she is one of those authors that can write about any subject and make it interesting because of her intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. I would definitely purchase a copy of this book and any of the authors other books. ( )

I first read the Romance of American Communism in 1980 when I was 20 years old and just out of college. In the late 1970’s I found feminism and my world changed forever. How I saw, how I felt, and how I loved was impacted. New ways of being, seeing and loving reshaped my belief system but more importantly it reshaped my inner life and in some ways, my personality. I am now 60 and my relationship to feminism has shifted. There have been political battles and broken connections but I am still remember the falling in love and there is nothing like it. And I am still in awe.
When I read the Romance of American Communism it was the only book that best described my own political and emotional journey. I felt like I knew these people, understood their commitments, their dedication and how life was meaningful and deep. I gobbled it up and read it again. Although I did not know much about Communism or American Communism it was the affective experience of reading about people like me that made me cherish it so.

Of course, the lie was exposed and the dreams and hopes of American Communists died. Grief, fury, guilt, depression and a host of other reactions ricocheted throughout the movement. Ms. Gornick and especially her mother grieved it too.

It seems a perfect time to read The Romance of American Communism given the passion, dedication and determination of Blacks Lives Matter. Political change will sweep you in and change you forever. ( )