New books explore the rise and impact of the Cold War

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Here we are, more than two decades since the implosion of the once-feared Soviet Union. Most of to-day’s college undergraduates have no memory of a time when Russian Communism represented a grave threat to the United States.

There still are a few nations that fly under the banner of communism —notably the People’s Republic of China—but even they have long ago abandoned the specter of class warfare and the inevitable rise of the proletariat that defined communism.

For historians of some future age, the communist ideology may be no more than an asterisk in the story of the Industrial Revolution. For others, it will be one of the 19th century by-products of the Enlightenment that defined an overall chaotic 20th century.

Three new books, each very different, deal with some aspect of the web of world communism. Taken individually, each presents a fresh look at one scene in the larger world drama. Taken together, they offer a first-cut 21st century look at one of the defining movements of the century just past.

In “Marx’s General,” we are taken back to the 19th century roots of communism in the mills of the Rhineland, the University of Berlin and the drawing rooms of Victorian England.

In “Anti-Communist Manifestos,” we are offered four mid-20th century literary works that, according to author John Fleming, shaped the Cold War.

And in “Alger Hiss and the Battle for History,” we read a noted author’s take on what was behind our nation’s obsession with rooting out Communists at any cost to democracy.

Tristram Hunt’s biography of Friedrich Engels, who with Karl Marx is considered the co-founder of communist theory, probably is the most significant of the three titles.

In the young British historian’s view, Engels, while choosing to remain in the shadow of Marx, was the dynamo that powered the pair of high-living social scientists who for four decades attached their writings to the social upheaval occurring around them.

Engels, the well-born scion of a Prussian cotton merchant and a cotton baron himself, lived during most of the tumultuous 19th century and personally financed a good deal of the early Communist movement.

Engels was a more disciplined thinker and writer than the more famous Marx, whose writing was abstract and work habits cavalier. For much of their 41-year relationship, communism was as much an exercise in social science to be debated in Europe’s elite journals as it was an effort to put theory into practice on the streets.

Of course, neither man lived to see what odious turns communism would take in the hands of Lenin and Stalin. Hunt argues that one hardly can blame Marx and Engels for the atrocities of Joseph Stalin, but he guesses they would have been leading the chorus for the Bolsheviks had either lived to 1917.

Hunt is at his finest in the comfort zone of his specialty, urban life in Victorian Europe. His images of the Manchester slums, its factories, its child labor and its larger-than-life machines that crushed a man’s mind and spirit are sharp and vivid.

His analysis of the web of philosophies and ideologies of the age, many, like Hegelian Dialectics, sounding like so much social gobbledygook to the 21st century ear, slows his story of the life of this complex man.

In stark contrast, Princeton professor emeritus Fleming is a wordsmith, a fluid writer who takes pride in the perfect turn of a phrase. “Anti-Communist Manifestos” is what one might expect from a gifted professor of literature.

Fleming makes the case that three autobiographies and a novel shaped the American mindset that led to the Cold War and helped turn American progressive thinkers away from communism. The four books span the formative and defining years of the Cold War, roughly 1940 to 1952.

It is important to recall that before World War II, a substantial number of influential Americans looked to the world communist movement to save the West from its excesses. And, of course, at a critical juncture in World War II, Stalin’s Soviet Union was this country’s most powerful ally against fascism.

In 1941, when Jan Valtin’s autobiography, “Out of the Night,” was being read, the mystique of intellectual communism was beginning to crack. Arthur Koestler’s novel “Darkness at Noon” showed Soviet Communism as ruthless, vicious and dictatorial. Even the most fervent coffee house communist was reconsidering what he had chosen to right the wrongs of capitalism.

Fleming analyzes these and his other two choices, Victor Kravchenko’s “I Chose Freedom” and Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness,” through the eyes of a classical literature professor, apparently free of the usual political baggage that travels with Cold War authors.

You can almost picture this preeminent Chaucer scholar bisecting these titles as he would bisect the characters of “The Canterbury Tales.” Like all good lit profs—he’s been one of the best for 45 years—he can make you want to read or re-read the books he is describing.

The most inviting of the three recent books is Susan Jacoby’s “Alger Hiss.”

You will recall that Hiss was the rising star in the State Department who was identified as a Communist spy by former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers. The case made headlines for months in the late ’40s, kicked off the Joseph McCarthy era and catapulted a young Sen. Richard Nixon into the national spotlight.

Hiss, who proclaimed his innocence to his grave, never was convicted of spying for the Soviets, but served time for perjuring himself before Congress.

There have been a dozen scholarly books and twice that many advocacy titles, each proving that Hiss was or was not a spy for the USSR. Jacoby claims newly unclassified material makes it pretty clear that Hiss was involved in passing information of dubious value to the Soviets. But that is not the point of her book.

For Jacoby, an avowed liberal who insists she “loathes” both Soviet Communism and McCarthy’s attacks on civil liberties, this book is a study of the negative effects of the Cold War on American democracy.

In her view, the Hiss case itself, and the continuing interest in it long after the deaths of most of the participants, can be attributed to the struggle between right and left, neither of which, she says, has gotten over the New Deal. Coming on the heels of Jacoby’s best-seller, “The Age of American Unreason,” this book is bound to make enemies on both sides of the political aisle.

It seems every generation digs into a set of facts and comes up with an entirely new set of conclusions. It’s part of the unfolding of history— and the publishing business. In the case of these three books, it would be an overstatement to say they reach entirely new conclusions, but each takes a fresh view of a significant part of our recent past.

Edward Cuddihy is a retired Buffalo News managing editor.

NONFICTION

Marx’sGeneral: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

By Tristram Hunt

Metropolitan

430 pages,

$32

NONFICTION

The Anti-Communist Manifestos

By John V. Fleming

Norton

352 pages,

$32

NONFICTION

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

By Susan Jacoby

Yale University Press

272 pages,

$24

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