Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 years of the Communist Party, USA
by Tony Pecinovsky
International Publishers, £10.15

THE vast majority of texts dealing with the history of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) have, to put it mildly, some quite severe shortcomings .

Most are bedevilled by a complete antagonism towards their subject right from the start, with an obsessive and enduring anti-communist narrative viewing the party as a conspiratorial Soviet- directed implant that only ever briefly seduced a handful of naive and fundamentally un-American militants.

Many accounts fail to understand the extent of state repression that the party had to face for decades of its existence, the focus instead being given to liberals and fellow travellers drawn from Hollywood during the McCarthy era.

Even where commentators are willing to grant the party some hard-won success, they are keen to emphasise that this was very much a short-lived phenomenon of the 1930s centred on  industrial militancy and work in popular-front anti-fascist movements.

And little, if anything, is said about the journey of the party in later years, the focus of attention being largely given over to organisations such as the Black Panther Party.

But in exploring the lives of six communist militants — Arnold Johnson, Charlene Mitchell, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, Judith le Blanc and W Alphaeus Hunton — Tony Pecinovsky adopts an entirely different approach in his recently published work Let Them Tremble.

Pecinovsky is openly partisan in his support for the party, past, present and future. Repression in the postwar period drove the CPUSA underground, severe prison sentences were handed out and hundreds, if not thousands, spent the best part of a decade on the run. The fact that the organisation survived at all is nothing short of a miracle.

Unable to continue its earlier and incredibly influential work in the labour and trade-union movement, Pecinovsky notes that the party continued to successfully organise in defence of free speech and in the struggle for peace and black civil rights.

During the late 1960s, the party was key to all the initiatives calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Three nationally famous anti-war GIs — the first to refuse to fight and who were subsequently prosecuted — were all members of its youth organisation at the time.

Many will be familiar with the arrest and trial of the monumental Angela Davis, but far fewer will know that the  National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression that she later helped to found was able to draw tens of thousands into its work.

When many of the ultra-left organisations that had got so much media attention had disappeared altogether or become irrelevant sects, the party continued to  mobilise en masse on demonstrations. It was still able to publish two newspapers and was central to the struggles against apartheid and US intervention in Central America.

Some of the individuals Pecinovsky writes about are better known than others. Party stalwart Gus Hall has been written about previously but others, such as native American Judith Le Blanc and African-American presidential candidate Charlene Mitchell, far less so.

With the historical analysis of the party’s trajectory being very much undertaken in the spirit of informing the struggles of today, it’s refreshing that the book is keen to not consign the party to the past.

Although, where possible, Pecinovsky has conducted face-to-face discussions with party activists, the only gripe I have is that the text is a little repetitive, and the lengthy quotes from articles and speeches sometimes add little of substance.

But if you want to find out how communists have struggled against almost insurmountable odds in the belly of the beast, I can’t think of a better book.