Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, has spent thirty-six years uncovering the hidden history of American radicalism.

As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Klehr wrote a dissertation on the relation between Marxism and American exceptionalism, the theory that the United States stands apart from other nations because it was founded on an idea rather than on a shared history or culture. One reason the United States has never seen a successful Marxist movement, Klehr argues, is because this nation’s founders accorded primacy to democratic principles as laid out in the Constitution. "In some ways this has been the leitmotif of my entire career," he says. "I’ve continued to ask what makes America different, and why the radical ideologies that did develop here, proved so unsuccessful." Despite the efforts of some radical groups, neither socialism nor communism has ever gained a strong foothold in the United States. It has, however, left its mark on American history. Klehr has examined the practices and propaganda of home-grown American communists during the first half of the twentieth century. Early in his career, with Emory’s support, he was able to acquire an archived collection covering the history of American communism in the 1930s. "I never would have been able to get started in this area without Emory’s support," he comments. One of the books resulting from his immersion in those materials, The Heyday of American Communism, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

With the end of the Cold War, scholars benefited from an explosion of communist materials coming out of newly declassified Russian archives. In the early 1990s, Klehr became the first Western researcher to obtain access to top-secret documents on Cold War espionage released by the former Soviet Union. "The archivist didn’t even know they were in the library," he says. "If he had, I probably would not have been able to see them." Together with American historian John Haynes, he wrote numerous articles and several books based on these materials, including The Secret World of American Communism (1996), also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The release of Soviet documents is ongoing, Klehr explains, and has changed scholarly conversations about the Cold War. Among other things, he argues, these documents have shown that the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy, for all his demagoguery, may have had a point. "McCarthy was wrong about most of the people he accused of being communist," says Klehr, "but he was right about the larger question of Soviet infiltration into American government. He didn’t know the half of it."

This year, with the support of a senior fellowship from the Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2007-2008), Klehr has completed Spies: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Espionage in the United States (forthcoming, Yale University Press). Working with co-author Haynes and a former KGB officer who obtained unprecedented access to KGB files, Klehr has written a book that he believes will answer "just about all the open questions on Soviet spying in the United States from the 1930s and 1940s." Not only does the new study explain in detail what the Soviet Union was doing to gain access to American secrets, but it also provides an unprecedented window into the private lives of spies. For instance, the book reveals that some spies were dull and conventional types, while others made terrible blunders such as having relationships with the people on whom they were spying. While the KGB certainly earned its reputation for stealing American secrets, Klehr observes, in the end it was remarkable that the organization didn’t steal more than it did. "Agents made amazing mistakes," he said. "And some of their stories, you wouldn’t believe even if they were written as fiction."

Looking ahead, Klehr is preparing to publish a collection of essays on the history of American radicalism written from 1971 through the present. The essays also reveal the trajectory of his own thought during his years at Emory. "Sometimes I still can’t believe I’ve spent nearly forty years here," he says. "It’s hard to separate myself from this place." A recipient of the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award (1983), Emory’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year (1995) and the Thomas Jefferson Award (1999), Klehr has taught thousands of undergraduate students – some of whom are the children of former students – and continues to relish his time in the classroom. One of his favorite courses is a freshman seminar on political loyalty, which explores the conditions under which some people decide to betray their governments.

The last few times he has finished writing a book, Klehr has promised himself that it will be his last. But the Soviet archives continue to capture his attention. "We’ll see," he says about his latest book. "I’d say this is the last one for certain, but new materials keep coming out of the archives."