JIMMY HIGGINS
The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File
Communist 1930-1958
Aileen S. Kraditor
Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1988
283 pp.
Aileen Kraditor is a well-known American historian, the author of a number of books on nineteenth-century social change--some of them dealing with women's issues. Whether as a member of the Communist Party, as she was in the 1960s, or today as a self-described conservative, she is never reductionist in her scholarly work; nor does she divide the world into simple categories (for example, "oppressor" and "oppressed"). Rather, she has a strong sense of the complexity and irony of the historical process.
Her book Jimmy Higgins begins with a quotation from philosopher Stephen Toulmin: "There is only one way of seeing one's own spectacles clearly: that is to take them off." And that is what the book is all about. It is clear that for Kraditor, the project represents an effort to understand part of herself, to come to terms with a period in her life so that she may move forward more easily by understanding her own past motives. Despite the title, then, the book is clearly an effort at self-analysis. Why and how, the author asks herself, was she able to so distort reality as to remain a Communist Party member in the face of the self-contradictions of the theory and its lack of correspondence with reality?
Her answer essentially is that, with the aid of other members of the party, one creates a new "reality" that insulates one from the real world, enabling one to continue to ignore that world. Party members are unaware of what they are doing. They are, at least in the United States, more victims than victimizers. This accounts for Kraditor's fascination with "Jimmy Higgins," an imaginary composite figure, considered the ideal type for party members to emulate. As devout true believers, they were the members who kept the party machinery going through numerous changes in line, leadership, strategies, tactics, and circumstances.
Kraditor shows that these members differed in important ways from the party leaders, as also from the vast majority of members who associated with the party for a few years only.
The true believers of the American Communist Party differed from each other, too, for each was a unique individual. They and their European counterparts, however, shared the conviction that the entire historical condition of human beings in capitalist society was to be condemned. Their critique of contemporary society was thus total.
As a result they lacked a common universe of discourse with those who did not share their views. "Facts" were perceived and interpreted differently. Real communication and debate with those with whom they disagreed became impossible. Nor, as Kraditor points out, are communists the only ones who create such realities. Many of the student radicals of the late 1960s created their own realities, centering around the heroism of Castro and later Mao. Such ideological totalism is an all too common experience among human
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