Early years Theodore Draper was born
Theodore Dubinsky in
Brooklyn, New York on September 11, 1912, one of four children. His younger brother was
Hal Draper, who became a noted Marxist historian. Theodore's parents were ethnic Jews who emigrated to New York City from
Ukraine, then part of the
Russian Empire. His father, Samuel Dubinsky, was the manager of a shirt factory who died in 1924. There he joined the
National Student League (NSL), a
mass organization of the
Communist Party USA targeted at organizing and mobilizing college students. Membership did come at a cost, however, as a decision was made by the Communist Party to distribute NSL members from City College, where the organization was strong, to other campuses where the fledgling organization had no presence. While attending a social function in 1935, Draper was approached by
Harry Gannes, the foreign editor of the Communist Party's newspaper,
The Daily Worker. In the summer of 1936 Draper was tapped to go to Moscow as the ''Daily Worker's'' correspondent there. He was ready to travel to Russia when he was suddenly told he couldn't leave because the party had learned that his brother,
Hal Draper, was a
Trotskyist, causing Soviet authorities to regard Ted as a security risk. The position of Moscow correspondent was subsequently offered to another
Daily Worker journalist. In 1937, Draper moved to the Communist Party's literary-artistic weekly,
The New Masses, where he took a position as foreign editor and wrote for publication under his real name. Draper returned to the United States in November 1939, but the changing political situation — and the changing political line of the Communist Party in response to this — ultimately scrapped Draper's book project despite multiple re-writes. Throughout 1939 and 1940 Draper continued to periodically write for the
New Masses on various topics at the request of the editors. Draper remembered: The article was delivered just before the deadline and must have gone in without much editorial deliberation. With everyone stunned by the French debacle, and no party line on it immediately established, my article had squeaked through. I was asked to write another article on the same subject for the following issue and attempted to say the same thing in even stronger form. But this time the party line caught up with me as a result of word from Moscow. The Soviet press let it be known that nothing had changed, there were no new problems or new conditions, no "new moment in Europe."... My second article was never published. It was the first time that any article of mine had been rejected. I was suddenly faced with the kind of personal political crisis that so many had confronted before and were to confront afterwards. Draper refused to write any more articles for the
New Masses after that date, limiting himself to a few book reviews so as to avoid a total severing of connections with the Communist movement. He also spent a six-month stint as correspondent for the Soviet news agency
TASS, before joining the staff of a short-lived French-language weekly newspaper based in New York City. He was put to work in the Historical Section of the
84th Infantry Division, rising to the rank of
technician fifth grade and ultimately writing the Division's official history of its activities during the
Battle of the Ardennes in
World War II. During his time with the 84th Infantry Division he met with
Henry Kissinger and
Fritz Kraemer, and stayed in friendly contact with the latter. In 1945, he was one of 16 Army officers and enlisted men singled out as alleged
Communists by the
House Committee on Military Affairs. General
"Wild Bill" Donovan came to their defense, citing their loyalty and effectiveness. Draper's transition from a political journalist to a historian had begun.
Historian Following World War II, Draper worked as a
freelance journalist, writing extensively for
Commentary magazine, a new publication of the
American Jewish Committee, among other publications. He was set free to work on the task full-time in 1952 by a grant from the newly established
Fund for the Republic, set up as an autonomous organization by the
Ford Foundation. Under the direction of political scientist
Clinton Rossiter of
Cornell University, the Fund for the Republic determined to publish a full-scale history of American communism.
David A. Shannon of the
University of Wisconsin was tapped to write the history of the CPUSA during the post-war period, while Draper was chosen to produce a monograph on the party's early years.
Robert W. Iverson wrote
The Communists and the Schools (1959) in that series. These letters of Jim Cannon to Ted Draper were ultimately published in book form as
The First Ten Years of American Communism in 1962. In the meantime, Draper finished his book for Rossiter and the Fund for the Republic: Two years later, I finished a book, but not
the book.... I woke up one day to realize that I had written a book which ended in 1923, a turning-point in the story.... I was faced with a problem; 1923 was too far from 1945 to make up a plausible alibi. I could not expect anyone else to know what the significance of 1923 was and why it had become my stopping-point. Yet, somehow, without intending it, I had produced a book on the formative period of the formative period; it had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it was a book I knew, if the wrong one. Draper turned in the manuscript to Clinton Rossiter, who was irate about the truncation of the narrative but was in great need of a publication to show that the Fund for the Republic project was alive and functioning. To his own dismay, Draper repeated the stunt, terminating the second volume with the 1929 expulsion of party leader
Jay Lovestone and his co-thinkers. After several tries and failures to complete the task, Draper turned his research material over to a young scholar whose work he appreciated,
Harvey Klehr of
Emory University. With his scholarly funding dried up and his interests shifting, Draper next moved to the hot-button topic of the
Cuban Revolution as a focus for his scholarship. A series of articles, books, and pamphlets ensued, marked by the 1962 tome ''Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities,'' published by
Frederick A. Praeger publishers. Draper's work as a historian of the Cuban Revolution brought him to the attention of the
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, an anti-communist
think tank located at
Stanford University. Some of Draper's later works include
A Very Thin Line, a history of the
Iran–Contra affair, and
A Struggle for Power, a monograph on the economic and political circumstances behind the
American Revolution of 1776.
Death and legacy Theodore Draper died on February 21, 2006, at his home in
Princeton, New Jersey. An additional 63 boxes of material collected for his unpublished third book on American Communism, plus over 120 reels of
microfilm and other research materials, are to be found at the
Emory University Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library,
Atlanta, Georgia. == Works ==