John Earl Haynes (born 1944) is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti-Communist movements, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with Harvey Klehr).

Early years

He was born on 22 November 1944 in Plant City, Florida.^[1]

Haynes received his undergraduate degree from Florida State University in 1966, and his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1968 and 1978, respectively.

Career

During the late 1970s, Haynes served as a legislative assistant to Wendell Anderson, a Democratic Governor of Minnesota named to replace Walter Mondale in the US Senate when the latter was elected Vice President of the United States.^[2]

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the first years of the 1990s, sensitive archives in Russia began to tentatively be opened to scholars. In 1993, in his capacity with the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Haynes became the first American scholar to examine the records of the Communist Party USA, housed in the former archive of the Communist International in Moscow.^[3]

Haynes was later instrumental in helping to forge a December 1998 agreement between the institutional forerunner of today's Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), keeper of the Comintern documents, and the Library of Congress which led to the microfilming of the CPUSA collection and its sale to academic institutions.^[3]