http://nationalism.org/patranoia/hofstadter-paranoid-style.htm "The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter." (Who, btw, according to Richard Gilliam in a work on Hofstadter and his friend, C. Wright Mills, said he was briefly attracted to the CPUSA in the 30's.)
Did the FBI and CIA do everything they could to help their assets and agents like Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, former leading cadre in the so- called Bukharinite Right Opposition, Communist Party (Opposition) (I have a theater ticket in my boxes of sectariana for a showing of movies on the Russian Revolution in NYC in '37 by Lovestoneite Communists), fight and purge the CPUSA Left-Led Unions from the AFL-CIO, like the UE and Mine, Mill and Smelters Union, SURE! But, a read of such works, by left historians, as, "Communism, Anti-Communism and the CIO, " by Levenstein, if memory serves, or Lichtenstein on Walter Reuther or works on the Assoc. of Catholic Trade Unionists, led by a Catholic Socialist anti-Stalinist or any knowledge of the brutal warfare in unions like the ILGWU in the 20's and 30's between Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists and Lovestoneites, belies any simple claim that the opposition to the CPUSA led unions was purely directly from Langley, VA. or J. Edgar Hoover's desk. Another cite, for y'all, w/ a positive appraisal of the role and legacy of the CPUSA in trhe unions, co-authored by Maurice Zeitlin @ UCLA. http://titles.cambridge.org/catalogue.asp?isbn=052179840X , "Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions."
And, another just out by Ted Morgan, "Reds, " on McCarthyism. Huge book. Last chapter/ epilogue had a Bob Feldman moment. Bobby Seale meets CPUSA figure, Dorothy Healey, a mentor of mine, in the late 70's. Dorothy asks how is the BPP different than a soup kitchen. He says, "You would know if you knew dialectical materialism." !!! She had joined the CPUSA in the early 30's. By then she had studied and practiced diamat for three decades. Her first Party assignment was trying to organize farm workers in the Central Valley. -- Michael Pugliese