Looking Into the Inner Life of the American Communist
The title of Vivian Gornick’s 2020 re-release of her 1977 book, The Romance of American Communism, isn’t quite right. It would be better titled as “The Romance of the American Communist Party.” To be sure, ideology and the Party overlap, significantly. But it is with the Party in particular that the romances described in the book are had—and with which they end. These romances mostly end bitterly, with the destruction of the Party’s living spirit in 1956. It died on February 25, 1956 to be exact, when Khrushchev delivered his “Secret Speech” to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing “The Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” under Stalin. The speech devastated the American Communist Party. It never recovered.
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