The American Exceptionalism of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940

Few figures in the history of the American Left can claim a more significant and yet contradictory legacy as Jay Lovestone.

Lovestone and his comrades briefly controlled, and then were dramatically expelled from, the Communist Party of America. The so-called “Lovestoneites” struck out on their own, forming a new Communist political organization with a unique analysis of American conditions and the international political situation—different in content, but similar in its development, to the Trotskyist “Left Opposition.” This book, the first in a six volume series examining the ideology of dissident Marxist movements in America, provides fundamental documents illuminating the political and foreign policy ideas of Lovestone’s “Communist Party Opposition,” which included within its ranks at various times such prominent activists as Benjamin Gitlow, Bertram D. Wolfe, Will Herberg, Charles S. Zimmerman, Louis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey), and Ellen Dawson.  

By assembling this collection and providing commentary on these little known documents and articles from the Lovestone group, Le Blanc and Davenport have rendered an invaluable service to historians and activists looking to better understand the political landscape of twentieth-century radicalism.

Tim Davenport (b. 1961) is an independent scholar from Corvallis, Oregon. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He has been a very active content-writer for Wikipedia since 2008, concentrating on early 20th century political biography and the history of political organizations. He is the creator of the Early American Marxism website (marxisthistory.org) and a long-time volunteer with Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) and regularly contributes scans of rare material to the Internet Archive (archive.org).

He has co-edited The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940 with Paul LeBlanc [Haymarket, 2018] and The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs with David Walters [in six volumes, Haymarket, 2019–].

Davenport is a member of the Organization of American Historians, Historians of American Communism, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. He is also an active collector of political books and pamphlets.

Publication date: February 20, 2018