Theodore Draper

Theodore H. Draper (September 11, 1912 – February 21, 2006) was an American historian and political writer.

Draper is best known for the 14 books he completed during his life, including work regarded as seminal on the formative period of the American Communist Party, the Cuban Revolution, and the Iran–Contra Affair.

Theodore Draper was born Theodore Dubinsky 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.

His mother, Annie Kornblatt Dubinsky, ran a candy store to make ends meet following her husband's death.

He was raised in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from the borough's Boys High School.

His mother insisted they change the family name to the "American-sounding" surname "Draper" when Draper was 20 so that the children could avoid antisemitism during pursuit of their careers.

In 1930, Draper enrolled at the College of the City of New York, better known as "City College".

It was there that he joined the National Student League (NSL), a mass organization of the Communist Party USA targeted at organizing and mobilizing college students.

This marked the start of a decade during which Draper chose to remain reliably within the Communist Party's orbit.

Draper later recalled:

My initiation came in the National Student League, which I joined in 1930... Most of its leaders were members of the Young Communist League, but I was not.

I preferred being a "fellow-traveler," which was how I came to be around it.

I was enough of a true believer to be convinced that whatever its faults or shortcomings, only the Communist movement was capable of making the "Revolution"; a revolutionary, therefore, had to be close to it.

Nevertheless, I was unwilling to give up a measure of freedom or absence of discipline, such as I could enjoy as a fellow-traveler.

Draper noted that his non-party status "may even have helped me, because it could show that one did not have to be a card-carrying Communist to hold a leading position in the NSL."

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.

Draper was instructed to enroll at the Brooklyn branch of City College, forerunner of Brooklyn College, a decision which he later remembered as "one of the saddest days of my life."

Draper graduated from Brooklyn College with a B.S. in philosophy in 1933; by this time, the College's National Student League organization "was so large and influential that it could virtually close down the school on May Day."

Upon graduation he enrolled in the graduate program in history at Columbia University, which he attended for two years without taking a degree.

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. The editor asked Ted whether he would be willing to put his prospective academic career aside and to instead come to work at the paper as his assistant.

After giving the matter careful consideration, Draper decided to accept the offer and went to work at the Daily Worker, where he remained for two years as assistant foreign editor, writing for publication under the name Theodore Repard.

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.

The magazine sent Draper to Europe in 1938 to cover the tense geopolitical situation there.

Draper spent time in Paris, in Czechoslovakia covering the crisis which led to the "Munich Agreement" between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, and in Spain covering the last days of the Spanish Civil War.

Upon returning from Europe in 1939, Draper was approached by a new fellow-traveling publishing house called Modern Age Publishers with an offer for Ted to write a book on the European political situation.

Draper used the book advance as an excuse to quit The New Masses and he headed for Paris to conduct further research.

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.

With France falling to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940, Draper was urgently requested to contribute an article for publication on the significance of the event.

An article entitled "New Moment in France" was produced and published in the July 9, 1940 issue, in which Draper argued that the French collapse had altered the balance of power in Europe and hinted that the Soviet Union would be a likely next target of the Nazis in their pursuit of "an ever widening circle of expansion for easy booty."

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.

Draper was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Herbert Feis Award for Nonacademically Affiliated Historians from the American Historical Association.