Harvey Klehr

Klehr later recalled that his interest in the American radical left had been shaped by the domestic political upheaval of the era of the Vietnam War during which he had attended college. In 2010, Klehr wrote:

Klehr has received a number of awards, including Emory's Thomas Jefferson Award (in 1999). He was a member of the National Council on the Humanities, served a term that expired in 2010.

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.

Following graduation, Klehr was hired to teach political theory at Emory University in Atlanta. After generating several journal articles from his 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.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Bachelor's degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967. He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, after defending a dissertation entitled The Theory of American Exceptionalism.

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.

Harvey Elliott Klehr (born December 25, 1945) is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with John Earl Haynes).