What role did American Communists play during the New Deal?

These are heady times for socialists in the United States. In the past two years, socialism has again become an important political current for the first time since the mid-1970s. On the one hand, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign—despite its containment within the capitalist Democratic Party—demonstrated that there is a mass audience for “democratic socialism” in the United States. Over thirteen million Americans voted for a self-proclaimed socialist—and Sanders won more voters under thirty years of age in the primaries than both Clinton and Trump combined.1 On the other hand, the organized socialist left in the United States has grown exponentially. The membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has increased from less than 2,000 in 2015 to nearly 30,000 in late 2017.