Theodore Draper

Theodore H. "Ted" 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. 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.

Theodore Draper was born Theodore Dubinsky on September 11, 1912, one of four children. (Another was Hal Draper, who became a noted Marxist historian.) Theodore's parents were ethnic Jews who emigrated to America 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 attended Boys High School in Brooklyn. His mother insisted they change the family name to the "American-sounding" surname "Draper" when Ted was 20 so that the children could avoid anti-semitism 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.

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