Haynes, John Earl 1944-

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HAYNES, John Earl 1944-

PERSONAL: Born November 22, 1944, in Plant City, FL; son of John Milner (an educator) and Sarah Elizabeth (Farmer) Haynes; married Janette Marie Murray (an educator), December, 1971; children: Joshua, Amanda, William. Ethnicity: "American." Education: Florida State University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1966; University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1978. Religion: Anglican Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—10041 Frederick Ave., Kensington, MD 20895. Office—Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540-4780; fax: 202-707-6336. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Aide to the governor of Minnesota, 1971-77; U.S. Congress, Washington, DC, legislative aide, 1977-83; aide to the governor of Minnesota, 1983-87; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, twentieth-century political historian in Manuscript Division, 1987—. University of California—Berkeley, Bush leadership fellow, 1974; Central European University, lecturer, 2001; also speaker at other institutions and at scholarly conferences. International Council on Archives, historical advisor to International Computerization of the Comintern Archives project, 1998—; member of advisory board for H-US1918-45 list of H-Net discussion lists, 2000—. Military service: U.S. Army Reserve, 1979-90; became major.

MEMBER: Historians of American Communism (president, 1992-95), Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Alpha Theta.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellow; Templeton Honor Roll, outstanding contemporary book, c. 1995, for The Secret World of American Communism.

WRITINGS:

Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1984.

Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Harvey Klehr) The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, Twayne Publishers (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Harvey Klehr and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov) The Secret World of American Communism (Bookof-the-Month Club and History Book Club selections), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1995.

Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1996.

(With Harvey Klehr and Kyrill Mikhailovich Anderson) The Soviet World of American Communism, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1998.

(Editor) Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1998.

(With Harvey Klehr) Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (History Book Club selection), Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.

(With Harvey Klehr) In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, Encounter Books (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Minnesota in a Century of Change: The State and Its People since 1900, edited by Clifford E. Clark, Minnesota Historical Society Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1989; contributor to encyclopedias. Contributor to periodicals, including Public Historian, American Spectator, Problems of Post-Communism, New Republic, Heterodoxy, Film History, American Experiment Quarterly, Journal of Cold War Studies, Labour History Review, and Continuity. Editor of Historians of American Communism (newsletter), 1982-2003; member of editorial board, State and Local Government Review, 1983-84, and International Newsletter of Communist Studies; member of editorial advisory board, American Communist History, 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: John Earl Haynes is a prominent scholar of the American communist movement. His books The Secret World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism were the first to draw on documentation from official Soviet archive sources not previously available to those in the West.

In The Secret World of American Communism, Haynes and coauthors Harvey Klehr and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov use documents found in the archives of the former Soviet Union to draw a more accurate picture of Soviet influence on the American communist movement than previously available. The authors found that, contrary to what American Communist Party members had maintained for decades, the party was an instrumental part of Soviet espionage operations, was heavily financed by the Soviet Union, and was implicated in the deaths or disappearances of many former members and political rivals. Furthermore, the evidence for these charges, noted Eric Breindel in the National Review, was found in "the Comintern archive and in the archive of the CPUSA [Communist Party of the United States of America]. Both collections are located in Moscow." "Documents now available in Russia," noted Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in the New Republic, "prove beyond any question that the American party functioned as an instrument of Soviet espionage." As Mark Falcoff put it in Commentary, "Now, surviving members of the party and, even more, their tenured apologists, will be forced to make their case in the face of documentary evidence of a kind they never expected to confront."

Particularly damaging to American communists was the new evidence for the party's involvement in the murder of exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Although, as Breindel noted, the book's "research serves largely to confirm much that had already been alleged," it does prove that Trotsky's murder was "a joint undertaking between the Soviet secret police and the U.S. Party's underground networks."

American communist involvement with the murder of Soviet dissidents is more fully documented in The Soviet World of American Communism, in which Haynes, Klehr and Kyrill M. Anderson present more documentation of Soviet influence on American communism, all of it drawn from official Soviet sources. A critic for Booklist pointed out the particular case of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black communist leader of the 1930s who disappeared when he went afoul of the party. He was, stated the critic, but "one of as many as a thousand accused Trotskyists that the American party turned over to Soviet police." A Publishers Weekly critic called The Soviet World of American Communism "another important volume for understanding the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and the 20th century."

Haynes once told CA: "I enjoy the study of history because it allows me to understand how and why human history happened the way it did. I enjoy writing about it because, once I have come to an understanding of how and why something came about, I want to tell others. I find writing about communism and anti-communism interesting because the conflict over communism was one of the defining events of the twentieth century."