Theodore Draper

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Theodore H. Draper (September 11, 1912 – February 21, 2006) was an American historian and political writer. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Herbert Feis Award for Nonacademically Affiliated Historians in 1990 from the American Historical Association.

Draper was a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books.

His works include A Very Thin Line, a history of the Iran-Contra Affair, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, and The Roots of American Communism.

Draper was a supporter of the American Communist Party in the 1930s but broke with it as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He rejected Marxism in the 1940s and became a liberal anti-Communist during the Cold War.

He wrote several scholarly studies of the history of the Communist movement in the United States, most notably The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960).

His brother, Hal Draper, was a notable American Marxist theorist. While Theodore Draper had been sympathetic with Stalinism in the 1930s, Hal Draper was active at that time in the Trotskyist movement.