dissertation, Klehr moved to the study of the demographic composition of the party leadership of the Communist Party, USA, agglomerating biographical information from archival study and person-to person interviews, Klehr examined the social composition of the party's leadership caste for the first time. The result of this research was a first book, Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite, published in 1978 by the Hoover Institution Press. Klehr's book drew the attention of Theodore Draper, a pioneering historian of American communism who had published seminal books on the topic in 1957 and 1960 on the story of the American communist movement from its origins to 1929 but had found himself unable to continue the saga into later years despite having accumulated a substantial research library on the topic. Draper pushed Klehr to continue his history to include its glory days in the years of the Great Depression. Klehr made possible the acquisition of Draper's archive by Emory University Library and began intensive study of the topic. The result was the publication of a second book in 1984, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. In the nearly quarter-century between the publication of Draper's second book on American communism and Klehr's 1984 effort at continuation, a new school of social historians had come to the fore in the field of American history, an unorganized group sharing a disaffection with the "traditionalist" orientation towards leaders and the machinations of high politics. These self-described "revisionists" made Klehr's 1984 work a focus of heated intellectual critique by asserting that it was an example of polemic Cold War anti-Communism. The highly politicized argument was returned in kind by the so-called "traditionalists," who frequently saw in the "revisionists'" predilection for local history and the party rank-and-file a thinly-disguised apologetic for the abuses of communism "glorifying the CPUSA, hiding its warts, and apologizing for its crimes." For more than two decades, the debate raged among historians of American radicalism, with Klehr emerging as one of the leading defenders of the "traditionalist" approach and its associated critique. The historical approaches were largely connected to the contemporary views of their adherents, Klehr later noted: The disagreements between the two camps were only partly generational, because some traditionalists, like myself and my long-time co-author John Haynes, were roughly the same age as our revisionist counterparts. To some degree, the combatants were divided by current political