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Abstract
Through the examination of three recently published volumes, in this review essay I argue that US Communists were "premature social movement unionists" in the quarter century circa 1930 to 1956. US Communists had adopted social movement unionism (smu), which did not officially emerge as an accepted type of trade unionism until the late 1980s/early 1990s, approximately a half century before becoming accepted throughout the world. This demonstrates that US Communists recognized the enormous potential of what trade unionism could achieve beyond the American Federation of Labor's craft-oriented business unionism and the Industrial Workers of the World's shopfloor based revolutionary syndicalism. Thus, the Communists' smu can be interpreted as a precursor to the twenty-first century Bargaining for the Common Good.

U.S. Communists have addressed why Eugene V. Debs remained a Socialist Party of America (SPA) member as opposed to joining the Communists when the SPA left‐wing split occurred in 1919. The literature on Debs, the SPA and U.S. Communism's history, however, fails to mention the Communist Party of America's Central Executive Committee writing a letter to Debs published in the April 25, 1920 issue of The Communist. This letter is significant because it is the first place where the Communists present their dualistic views on Debs after the SPA split. Becoming the standard interpretation in U.S. Communist historiography after his death, Debs is portrayed as a heroic militant, class‐conscious warrior who would have joined the Communists in 1919 had he received accurate information about the SPA. This claim, however, lacks support after examining the historical evidence. The article concludes with lessons that can be drawn from this discussion for the early twenty‐first century U.S. trade union movement.

Robert J. Alexander (1918–2010), a pioneering Latin American specialist, who focused much of his scholarship on the governmental systems, political parties, leaders and labor movements of Mexico, Central America and South America, is also known for his collection of an estimated 10,000–12,000 Latin American/Caribbean interviews amassed from the late 1940s to the turn of the twenty‐first century. During this same 50‐year period, Alexander, who also possessed a strong interest in U.S. radicalism, assembled a smaller interview collection of U.S. left‐wing activists that include those involved in Lovestoneite, Trotskyist, Shachtmanite, etc. organizations. In addition to his voluminous writings on Latin America, Alexander also devoted significant energy during the last three decades of his life to writing the history of dissident communist movements (i.e., the Communist Right Opposition, Trotskyism, and Maoism) throughout the world. The purpose of this article is to discuss and analyze Alexander's collection of interviews of U.S. political and labor radicals while critically examining his major works on dissident communism. In spite of the contributions he has made in these fields, I conclude that there are serious methodological flaws with Alexander's writings on dissident communism although his U.S. left‐wing interview collection of political and labor radicals is invaluable for the study of the twentieth‐century U.S. radicalism.