The first decade of the American Communist Party is difficult to sentimentalize. Unlike the campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys — or even the patriotic hokum of the Popular Front days (“Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism!”) when the members and sympathizers numbered around a million — the party’s early years saw more state repression and internal conflict than decisive action or steady growth. No sepia-toned image of it is burned into the American left’s historical memory.

But the CP was also the first socialist group in the United States to make the fight against racial oppression central to its program. Most members were working-class immigrants; the party had deep roots in ethnic communities while also taking pride in its internationalism and anti-imperialism.

Jacob Zumoff’s The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929, now out in paperback, is among the few studies of the CP in its formative period — and the organization it describes has strengths we would do well to remember, since they were hard-won and priceless.