The 'American Exceptionalism' of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 1

The first 'American Exceptionalists' belonged to a left-wing current led by Jay Lovestone. Briefly in control of, then dramatically expelled from, the US Communist Party, they maintained an independent existence on the US Left from 1929 to 1940. Some became prominent in the labour and civil rights movements, while Will Herberg became a prominent Jewish theologian and an editor of the conservative National Review, and Bertram Wolfe worked as an anti-Communist ideologist with the US State Department. Lovestone himself collaborated with the CIA to help shape the Cold War foreign policy of the AFL-CIO. Yet earlier documents and articles from the Lovestone group provide rich information and remarkable insights on twentieth-century realities and radicalism.

Biographical note
Paul Le Blanc (Ph.D., 1989) University of Pittsburgh, is Professor of History at La Roche College. He is author or editor of twenty-five books related to the labour movement, including A Freedom Budget for All Americans with Michael Yates.

Tim Davenport has been centrally involved in a number of important on-line efforts, including Wikipedia, the Marxist Internet Archive, and oversees a website on early American Marxism (www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html). He is a member of Historians of American Communism.

Readership
All interested in the history of the United States, the labor movement, social movements, civil rights, socialism, the twentieth-century world, Communism, anti-Communism, Stalinism, Marxism, political and social theory.