1 See the discussion of Josephine Herbst’s statement that the 1930s was “a humanscape —the setting of my loves and discoveries” in Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 6–7.
2 See Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005), 112.
3 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner’s, 1940), 381.
4 See Albert Fried, ed., Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 226–47; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 282–87; Ernst Fischer, “The People’s Front of Yesterday—The National Freedom Front of Today and Tomorrow,” Communist, October 1942, 841–48.
5 See the fascinating analysis in Frank A. Warren, Noble Abstractions: American Liberal Intellectuals and World War II (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1999).
6 This view is expressed, for example, in the essay entry “Stalinism” by Ralph Miliband in the Harvard University Press Dictionary of Marxist Thought, which is also a source for definitions of further political terms used in this book, such as fascism and colonialism. See Ralph Miliband, “Stalinism,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 461–64.
7 Michael Harrington, “Liberalism and the Left,” in Taking Sides: The Education of a Militant Mind (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 8.
1 Ed Lacy, In Black and Whitey (New York: Lancer Books, 1967), 9.
2 Ibid., 142.
3 Ibid., 29.
4 Ibid., 99.
5 Ibid., 97.
6 Ibid., 28.
7 Ibid., 100.
8 Ibid., 127.
9 See the biography by Doris Willens, Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hayes (New York: Norton, 1988).
10 Lacy, In Black and Whitey, 238.
11 Ibid., 224.
12 Zinberg’s story “The Right Thing” was included in Nick Aaron Ford and H. L. Faggett, Best Short Stories by Afro-American Writers, 1925–1950 (Boston: Meador, 1950), 184–88.
13 Lacy, In Black and Whitey, 239.
14 Ibid., 249, 253.
15 “Leonard Zinberg, Wrote as Ed Lacy,” New York Times, 8 January 1968, 85.
16 Biographical information about Zinberg is based on Papers of Leonard S. Zinberg, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, Mass.; Alan M. Wald interview with Annette T. Rubinstein, September 1990, New York, N.Y.; Alan M. Wald interview with Harold Cruse, November 1991, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Alan M. Wald, “The 1930s Left in US Literature Reconsidered,” in Writing from the Left (London: Verso, 1994), 100–113; Alan M. Wald, “Popular Fiction,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 620–27; Alan M. Wald, “The Urban Landscape of Marxist Noir: An Interview with Alan Wald,” Crime Time: The Journal of Crime Fiction, no. 27 (2002): 81–89; Robert Niemi, “Ed Lacy, 1911–1968” (draft manuscript, 2005); Ed Lynskey, “Ed Lacy: New York City Crime Author,” from <http://www.mysteryfile.com/Lacy/Profile.html> (March 2006).
17 Ralph Ellison, “Negro Prize Fighter,” New Masses, 17 December 1940, 26–27.
18 George Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, 28 December 1940, 11, and 18 January 1941, 6.
19 For a summary of the debate, see Gavin Cologne-Brookes, The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
20 “Hargrove’s Post Spurned by Legion,” New York Times, 13 September 1946, 4.
21 Ed Lacy, Sin in Their Blood (New York: Mcfadden-Barell Books, 1966), 18. The original edition was by Eton Books, 1952.
22 Ibid., 7.
23 Ed Lacy, Moment of Untruth (New York: Lodestone Books, 1964), 14.
24 See n. 19 in Chapter 1.
25 See my review essay about Lipsitz, “Learning from Labor,” Monthly Review, February 1996, 53–62.
26 I first discussed these debates in book form in James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978), esp. chap. 2.
1 Wolff was officially the last commander. After the return of the volunteers, the term “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” was used to refer to the preponderance of U.S. participants, although some had participated in the George Washington Battalion, the Canadian MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion, the John Brown Artillery Battalion, or other units.
2 Milton Wolff, Another Hill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 353.
3 Ibid.
4 See the lengthy discussion in the chapter “Art Is a Class Weapon” in Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society, 1900–1954 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 165–224.
5 In Crusade on the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969), Robert Rosenstone estimates that 30 percent of the Lincolns were Jewish, although the number could be as high as 40 percent, and believes that only 5.73 percent of the volunteers held positions as teachers of any kind. Communist Party members may have comprised as much as 80 percent of the volunteers. See pp. 97–121, 367–72.
6 The episode seems roughly based on the climax of Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (New York: Liveright, 1932).
7 Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 205.
8 Hemingway facilitated publication of Bessie’s manuscript as well as lauding it in print and in private correspondence; see Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 236. Sheean’s lengthy endorsement appears on the back jacket of the first edition of Men in Battle.
9 According to Bernard Dick, Sheean had been attracted to Marxism and fell in love with a Spanish Communist in Spain. Dick also links Lang to the playwrights Emmet Lavery and Maxwell Anderson. See Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 115–16. The character may additionally have some reference to scenarist and novelist Michael Blankfort, who had written a novel and play about Spain and was regarded by his onetime Communist friends to have behaved poorly during the HUAC hearings.
10 Alvah Bessie, The Un-Americans (New York: Cameron and Associates, 1957), 257.
11 Bessie was the principal author of the open letter, but Wolff assisted; see Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 237,238.
12 Bessie, Un-Americans, 258–59.
13 For the assault on Thompson, see Sylvia Thompson, “The Arlington Case,” in Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, by Griffin Fariello (New York: Norton, 1995), 544–48; for the murder of Bodenheim, see Jack B. Moore, Maxwell Bodenheim (New York: Twayne, 1970), 172–73.
14 Bessie, Un-Americans, 370, 371.
15 Ibid., 371.
16 See the insightful discussion in Dick, Radical Innocence, 106.
17 Bessie, Un-Americans, 383.
18 See, for example, the statements by Paul Berman and Martin Peretz on the back jacket of Herrick’s autobiography, Jumping the Line: The Adventures and Misadventures of an American Radical (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), and by Thomas Berger on the back jacket of Herrick’s novel Hermanos! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).
19 There is a vast body of high-quality scholarship on U.S. literature about the Spanish Civil War, often combining genres and political perspectives and sometimes providing an international context. The only study to include a substantial discussion of both Bessie and Herrick is the unpublished dissertation by José Morales-Serrano, “Spanish Civil War Fiction” (University of New Mexico, 1979). Other volumes on this topic include Frederick R. Benson, Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1967); Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1962); Peter Monteath, Writing the Good Fight: Political Commitment in International Literature of the Spanish Civil War (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); John M. Muste, Say That We Saw Spain Die: Literary Consequence of the Spanish Civil War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); and Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause: The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Weybright and Taley, 1968).
20 Biographical information on Wolff is based on Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; “Milton Wolff’s Homepage” on the Internet, which includes a summary and excerpt of “A Member of the Working Class”; and the private papers of Milton Wolff in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, N.Y.
21 Letter from Milton Wolff to Anne, 3 April 1943, Wolff Papers, Lincoln Brigade Archives.
22 Dan Bessie, Rare Birds: An American Family (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001), 235.
23 Ibid., 87.
24 Sources for this biographical sketch include Bessie, Rare Birds; Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; correspondence between Alvah Bessie and Guy Endore, Guy Endore Papers, University of California, Los Angeles; the Alvah Bessie Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison (including the text of a 1978 M.A. thesis at California State University, Northridge, “Alvah Bessie: A Study of One of the Hollywood Ten,” by Jerrold Zinnamon, and correspondence with Zinnamon); the Bessie Papers, Lincoln Brigade Archives; Dick, Radical Innocence; Gabriel Miller, “Alvah Bessie,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 26:30–33; and personal correspondence with Dan Bessie, 19 October 1988 and 1 September 1995.
25 Alvah Bessie to Guy Endore, 22 January 1934, Endore Papers.
26 Ibid., 4 February 1934.
27 Ibid., 18 March 1934.
28 This biographical portrait of Herrick is based on personal correspondence between Alan M. Wald and William Herrick between 1995 and 1998; Herrick, Jumping the Line; Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; Cecil Eby, Between the Bullet and the Lie: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969); and materials from the Herrick Papers, Boston University, Boston, Mass.
29 Herrick, Jumping the Line, 3.
30 The organization was internationally associated with the Bolshevik Bukharin, and in the United States it was led by Jay Lovestone.
31 See letter from Bernard Wolfe to William Herrick, 16 December 1952, Herrick Papers. In this letter Wolfe indicates his intention of using some of Herrick’s anecdotes in his own fiction.
32 Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, eds., Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 13–15, 294. The poem “For Arnold Reid” was published in New Masses, 25 July 1939, 11.
33 Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (New York: Delta, 1972), 202.
34 Letter from Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 7 July 1958, Daniel Aaron Papers, Cambridge, Mass.
35 Information on Reid is based on material found in the microfilm of the Comintern Archives section on the International Brigades, Fond 545, Opis 3, Delo 453, in the Lincoln Brigade Archives at Tamiment Library. The information on Reid is found variously under the names Reid, Reed, and Reisky. Some of this material is summarized as well in Herbert Romerstein, Heroic Victims: Stalin’s Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Council for the Defense of Freedom, 1994). Romerstein provides the identification of Bittleman, who is referred to in the archives as “B.” However, Romerstein seems unaware of the crucial correspondence of Earl Browder and Robert Minor in regard to Reid’s fate, suggesting that not all files were available to him when he carried out his research in Moscow in 1993.
36 Herrick, Hermanos !, 50.
37 Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 204.
38 Of course, this assessment of the Popular Front was defended in recent years by a number of anticommunist and conservative historians. See Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, eds., Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). At the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Radosh was particularly prominent in assailing the notion of any positive contributions from the Lincolns. See Ronald Radosh, “My Uncle Died in Vain Fighting the Good Fight,” Washington Post, 6 April 1986, and the reply by Christopher Hitchens, “Re-bunking,” Grand Street, Summer 1986, 228–31. See also the following exchange in the Nation: Brian Morton, “Pathetic Fallacies,” 29 November 1986, 614–17, and letters from Ronald Radosh and Brian Morton, 27 December 1986–January 1987, 722, 748. One of the more ambitious attempts of recent scholarship to treat the International Brigades veterans and their cause with respect, while simultaneously holding no illusions about the aims of the Stalin regime, is James K. Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). The quantity and quality of Hopkins’s research, as well as its polished prose, sets a high standard for future scholarship.
39 Law is discussed throughout the indispensable volume edited by Danny Duncan Collum, African Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “This Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’ll Do” (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992).
40 To my knowledge, there is only one other published novel focusing directly on the war in Spain by a U.S. citizen who was a combat veteran. James Norman Schmidt (1912–83) served in a French antiaircraft battery during 1937–38. Subsequently he broadcast English-language news programs from Madrid. He then returned to Chicago, the city of his birth, and passed briefly through the Communist Party. His 1960 The Fell of Dark: A Novel of War in Spain, published under the name James Norman, is about the evacuation of antifascist leaders from Madrid and Valencia as Franco’s forces move toward final victory, and it might be read as an allegorical meditation on several of the different factions in the war.
Other radical novels about Spain were produced by authors who visited Spain briefly or sympathized from afar. John Dos Passos, who was in Spain in 1937 to help Ernest Hemingway with the film The Spanish Earth (1937; directed by Joris Ivens), was already disaffected from the Communist Party; his experiences there prodded him to write a two-dimensional polemic against Stalinism, The Adventures of a Young Man (1939). Charles Yale Harrison, also a former pro-Communist, wrote an attack on Communist policy in a more satirical vein in Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Two other novels about Spain in the 1930s, William Rollins’s The Wall of Men (1938) and Upton Sinclair’s No Passaran (1938), are romances intentionally written in the style of pulp fiction, with no pretense of verisimilitude, although they generally share the Communist outlook on the war. Michael Blankfort, a fellow traveler, published a pro-Republican novel about the siege of Alcázar, The Brave and the Blind (1940), preceded by a play in 1937 of the same title, and two years later Dorothy B. Hughes published a mystery novel featuring a Spanish Civil War veteran, The Fallen Sparrow (1942). The Spanish Civil War continued to be a literary theme of interest into the late twentieth century, spawning novels appearing around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the war, such as Pael Leaf’s Comrades (1985) and Clive Irving’s Comrades (1986), as well as short fiction such as David Evanier’s “How Sammy Klarfield Became a Vacillating Element in Spain,” Journal of Contemporary Studies, Summer/Fall 1985, 89–106.
Short fiction about the Spanish Civil War includes three stories by veteran Alvah Bessie: “In the Line of Fire,” New Masses, 25 July 1939, 11–12; “Soldier! Soldier!,” New Masses, 2 October 1939, 15–16; and “My Brother, My Son,” Story, January–February 1940, 48–55. Prudencio de Pereda, who was born in the United States of Spanish parents, traveled to Spain with Hemingway to assist with The Spanish Earth and published a number of short pieces related to Spain: “The Runners,” Partisan Review and Anvil 3, no. 2 (March 1936): 21–24; “In Asturias,” Partisan Review and Anvil 3, no. 4 (May 1936): 12–14; “The Bullfighter,” New Masses, 16 March 1937, 15–16; “The Spaniard,” Story, May 1938, 9–18; “My Brother Goes Back,” New Masses, 16 July 1938, 20; and “Fascist Lament,” New Masses, 28 February 1939, 11. Other fiction by Leftists about Spain includes Howard Fast, “Departure,” Mainstream, Summer 1947, 338–34; Marjorie Fischer, “Angela,” Direction, January–February 1939, 16–17; Martha Gellhorn, “Visit to the Wounded,” Story, October 1937, 58–61; Lillian Hellman, “A Bleached Lady,” New Masses, 11 October 1938, 20–21; Dorothy Parker, “Soldiers of the Republic,” New Yorker, 3 February 1938, 13–14; Hyde Partnow, “Madrid to Manhattan,” New Masses, 7 December 1937, 17–23; and Tennessee Williams, “In Spain There Was a Revolution” (previously unpublished), Hudson Review, Spring 2003, 50–56.
In cooperation with International Publishers, associated with the Communist Party, Alan Calmer edited Salud: Poems, Stories, and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (1938). The volume was intended to be a contribution from the perspective of proletarian literature and features short work by veterans as well as visitors to the front and other sympathizers of the Popular Front cause, the majority of whom were close to the Communist movement: James Neugass, Edwin Rolfe, David Wolff (a pseudonym for Ben Maddow), Sol Funaroff, Prudencio de Pereda, Kenneth Rexroth, Norman Rosten, Edward Newhouse, Kenneth Fearing, Erskine Caldwell, John Malcolm Brinnin, Vincent Sheean, and Joseph North. Another collective effort was . . . and Spain Sings (1937), edited by M. J. Bernadette and Rolfe Humphries, featuring fifty pro-Republican poems by Spanish authors translated into English by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Stanley Kunitz, Millen Brand, Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Maas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Ruth Lechlitner. A recent poetry collection that expands the literary terrain of Spanish Civil War verse is Cary Nelson, ed., The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). A decade after the war ended, Alvah Bessie edited The Heart of Spain: Anthology of Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry (New York: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1952), and at the time of his death he was collaborating with Albert Prago on Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: Monthly Review, 1987). The participation of veterans in the writing of science fiction, detection fiction, and other popular genres will be discussed in volume 3 of this series.
41 This was particularly the case in 1986, the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war. In his Village Voice article, “Spanish Betrayals,” 22 July 1986, 22–23, 25, Paul Berman mistakenly equates the reasoned and documented Homage to Catalonia with the exaggerated and highly speculative Hermanos! In an essay for the New Criterion, Ronald Radosh declares that “Herrick has given us what is perhaps the first honest portrayal of the war from within the Brigades in Spain”; see “‘But Today the Struggle’: Spain and the Intellectuals,” New Criterion, October 1986, 13. However, the use of Herrick’s fiction and memoirs to attack the brigade has provoked sometimes erroneous countercharges. The following letters of exchange in the Village Voice debate the issue: “To Lie in Madrid,” with contributions by Harry Fisher, Bob Gladnick, and Paul Berman, 19 August 1986, 4, 6; “The Spanish Civil War, Cont.,” with contributions by Rose Smorodin and Paul Berman, 2 September 1986, 4; and “The Guns of August,” by William Herrick, 16 September 1986, 6.
42 Bailey’s version, along with copies of newspaper articles as documentation, appears in Bill Bailey, The Kid from Hoboken (San Francisco: Citrus Lithograph Prepress, 1993), 257–67.
43 Herrick, Hermanos!, 26–27.
44 Herrick to Wald, 24 February 1997.
45 See Berman, “Spanish Betrayals.”
46 See the references in n. 38 above and letter from Herrick to Wald, May 1996.
47 I tried to address a number of issues involving understandable human failings of brigade members in relation to some of the political contradictions in Spain in my review of Harry Fisher’s Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War (1997), in “Humanizing the Lincolns,” The Volunteer 21 (Winter 1998–99): 5–7.
48 Rosenstone, Crusade on the Left, 114.
49 See Berman, “Spanish Betrayals.” Carroll, in Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, investigates the death of Oliver Law and finds Herrick’s version untenable; see pp. 135–39. See also the materials on Law sent by Herrick to Victor Berch in the Lincoln Brigade Archives.
50 Herrick to Wald, 24 February 1997.
51 Ibid.
52 These letters are available on microfilm in the Comintern Archives material on the International Brigades, Lincoln Brigade Archives. I am also grateful to Lincoln veterans Abe Smorodin and Bill Susman, as well as Cary Nelson, for sharing with me their own information regarding Reid in Spain. However, they are not responsible for my conclusions about Reid’s fate.
53 Herrick also diminished his credibility by giving anti-Communist testimony under pressure during the McCarthyite witch-hunt era, although he says it was to preserve his union and that he later regretted doing so. See Herrick, Jumping the Line, 260–61.
54 William Herrick, “Contemporary American Fiction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 26, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 745.
55 A subsequent essay by Nelson raises further questions about who pulled the trigger during the execution of Lincoln volunteer Bernard Abramofsky, and whether the issue is important. See “Milton Wolff, Ernest Hemingway, and Historical Memory: The Spanish Civil War Sixty Years Later,” North Dakota Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 81–89.
56 The assertion that an individual might be faking injuries out of cowardice was apparently not unusual in Spain. In Harry Haywood’s Black Bolshevik: An Autobiography of an Afrio-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), the author describes on p. 471 an incident when he was accused of faking an asthma attack and might have been shot had a doctor not been present to confirm his condition.
57 Carroll, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 186–87. This description contradicts the version related by Romerstein in Heroic Victims, 37–38, where he expresses the belief that Abramofsky was shot in a café by a Lincoln Battalion officer named Tony DeMaio. His evidence is that a witness had identified DeMaio’s victim as “Aronofski.”
58 Wolff, Another Hill,195.
59 Ibid., 117.
60 Ibid., 378.
61 Characteristic of such views is Isidor Schneider’s “P.S. on Hemingway,” New Masses, 14 January 1941, 12–14.
62 Alvah Bessie, review of For Whom the Bell Tolls, New Masses, 15 November 1940, 27–28.
63 Salmagundi, no. 76–77 (Fall 1987–Winter 1988): 128. Nelson’s memory is confirmed by the series of articles covering the dispute over Hemingway’s novel in the People’s World between 30 October 1940 and 12 February 1941.
64 Dwight Macdonald, “Reading from Left to Right,” Partisan Review 8, no. 1 (January– February 1941): 407.
65 Lionel Trilling, “An American in Spain,” review of For Whom the Bell Tolls, ibid., 63.
66 A fuller statement of this political perspective on the nature of the war appears in Franklin Rosemont, “Spanish Revolution of 1936,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 792–93. The fullest documentation appears in Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Paul Buhle provides a useful perspective on the contradictions of the Spanish Civil War in “Still a Good Fight,” In These Times, 14 November 1994, 30–31. “The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left,” a special issue of Revolutionary History (4, no. 1–2 [Winter 1991–92]) presents material expressing the orthodox Trotskyist view.
67 Paul Preston, Revolution and War in Spain, 1931–1939 (London: Methuen, 1984). See the informative discussion of this volume by Helen Graham, “The Recuperation of Historical Complexity: The Spanish Experience of Republic and Civil War,” European Historical Quarterly 16 (1986): 491–96.
68 Salmagundi, no. 76–77 (Fall 1987–Winter 1988): 126–27; Sam Tanenhaus, “Innocents Abroad,” Vanity Fair, September 2001, 302.
69 Alan M. Wald interview with Saul Wellman, October 1995, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Tanenhaus, “Innocents Abroad.”
70 See the excellent discussion in Warren Rosenberg, Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 1–2.
71 Perhaps the most familiar version of the symbiosis is the mild Clark Kent transforming himself into the iron-fisted Superman, in the cartoon originally created by two Jewish artists, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. See Rosenberg, Legacy of Rage, 4, and Paul Breines, Tough Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1990), x.
1 John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (New York: Knopf, 1963), 6. The 1963 Knopf volume states that it is the first edition, although the copyright is 1962. About half the scholarly sources give the date of publication as 1962 and half as 1963.
2 Ibid., 438.
3 Ibid., 79.
4 Sometimes the slogan was expressed as “double victory for democracy at home and abroad.” See Albert Parker [George Breitman], “Why Communist Party Attacks ‘Double V,”’ in Fighting Racism in World War II, ed. Fred Stanton (New York: Monad, 1980), 157–58. A history of the evolution of the slogan in the Pittsburgh Courier can be found in Lee Finkle, Forum for Protest: The Black Press during World War II (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1975), 112–13.
5 Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, 79.
6 Ibid., 79–80.
7 According to Alan M. Wald interview with Grace Killens, 20 February 2002, Brooklyn, N.Y., the location of the events was Brisbane. Information on race conflicts in the U.S. military remains sketchy to this day. A useful and well-footnoted survey appears in the chapter “Good War, Race War, 1941–1945,” in Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 186–237. Rumors of a 1943 massacre of rebelling Black soldiers at a military base in Mississippi are reported in “Missing in Action,” In These Times, 11 July 2001, 16, 21.
8 Killens includes the full quotation as the novel’s frontispiece: “And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns. And then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns. And then we heard the rain falling and that was the drops of blood falling. And when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.” The novel’s four section titles are also drawn from the quotation: The Planting, Cultivation, Lightning-Thunder-Rainfall, and The Crop.
9 For a useful review of the segregationist practices in the U.S. military during the war, see W. Y. Bell Jr., “The Negro Warrior’s Home Front,” Phylon 5, no. 3 (third quarter, 1944): 271–78.
10 Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, 450. In particular, Killens’s character Scotty exhibits many characteristics of demoralized Black soldiers in World War II, deserting and rebelling as a form of refusing to accept racist treatment. See Bell, “Negro Warrior’s Home Front,” 276–77.
11 Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, 436.
12 Ibid., 465.
13 Ibid., 476. According to Grace Killens, Robert Samuels and many of the soldiers in the novel are based on individuals Killens knew and encountered during his wartime experiences; see Wald interview with Grace Killens.
14 See the following studies and collections of writings: Stanton, Fighting Racism in World War II; Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Boston: Beacon, 1957); Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986); and Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951). Maurice Isserman’s “Which Side Were You On?” The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982) offers a fresh and far more sympathetic interpretation of the Communists’ policy. Although the book is convincing in arguing that the Party did not entirely “abandon the struggle for black rights during the war” (141), its treatment of the Party leadership’s hostility to the Double V campaign is far too cursory.
15 Earl Browder, “Partisanship—A Luxury America Cannot Afford,” Communist, March 1944, 200. Earlier, Browder had been explicit in stating that the Party was making itself available to defeat all those who might raise “socialistic proposals” that might “disturb” national unity:
The Communist Party of the United States has completely subordinated its own ideas as to the best possible social and economic system for our country, which are the ideas of scientific socialism, to the necessity of uniting the entire nation, including the biggest capitalists, for a complete and all-out drive for victory. We give the formal assurance, which is backed up by our deeds, that we will not raise any socialistic proposals for the United States, in any form that can disturb this national unity. To all those still haunted by “the specter of communism,” we offer the services of the Communist Party itself to lay this ghost. [Earl Browder, “The Communist Party and National Unity,” Communist, September 1942, 691]
16 Quoted in James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), 54.
17 Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, 438, 439.
18 According to Killens’s widow, he returned from World War II with several volumes of notebooks but only began to work on the novel in the mid–1950s; see Wald interview with Grace Killens.
19 According to Grace Killens, her husband remained a Marxist and socialist all his life; see ibid.
20 Biographical information on Killens is based on the following: Alan M. Wald interview with Grace Killens and Barbara Killens, 20 February 2002, Brooklyn, N.Y.; FBI file of John Oliver Killens, courtesy of Keith Gilyard; William H. Wiggins Jr., “John Oliver Killens,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 33:144–52; John Oliver Killens, “Rappin’ with Myself,” in Amistad 2, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Vintage, 1971), 97–136; John Oliver Killens, “The Half Ain’t Never Been Told,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (Detroit: Gale Group, 1985), 2:279–306; Papers of John Oliver Killens, Boston University, Boston, Mass.; Alan M. Wald interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 1995, by telephone from the Virgin Islands; Alan M. Wald interview with Lloyd Brown, October 1990, New York, N.Y.; and Alan M. Wald correspondence with Phillip Bonosky, 21 May 1997.
21 Killens, “Half Ain’t Never Been Told,” 284.
22 I am grateful for a 16 August 2004 letter from Keith Gilyard, which corrects many biographical details about Killens’s youth, some of which Killens seems to have embellished in memoirs and interviews.
23 Letter from Keith Gilyard to Alan M. Wald, 17 August 2004.
24 Wald interview with Grace Killens.
25 Ibid.
26 Useful information about the radical culture at Howard University in the 1930s can be found in Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abraham Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunch, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
27 See Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23–37. Cohen gives evidence that most of the organization’s leaders had been quietly recruited to the YCL.
28 See Paul Buhle, “National Negro Congress,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 535–36.
29 Killens, “Half Ain’t Never been Told,” 286.
30 There was little public acknowledgment of the race conflict. See Kay Saunders, “In a Cloud of Dust: Black GI’s and Sex in World War II,” in Gender and War: Australia at War in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joy Damousu and Marilyn Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 178–90. I am grateful to Keith Gilyard, Killens’s biographer, for calling my attention to this essay. Grace Killens is certain that at some point Killens visited Australia, probably for “rest and recreation” from his duty in combat areas.
31 Wald interview with Grace Killens.
32 Killens, “Rappin’ with Myself,” 98.
33 In 1950 the union was expelled from the CIO for its alleged Communist influence, and it was put out of business in 1952. See Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 650.
34 See Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
35 The YCL had dissolved itself into American Youth for Democracy in 1943, when the Communist Party dissolved into the Communist Political Association to reaffirm the sincerity of its Popular Front pledge to raise no socialist agitation. See Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 922. The statement of purpose of New Foundations appears on the inside of the issue of vol. 2, no. 4 (Summer 1949). A useful commentary on the history of New Foundations by Alan Trachtenberg appears as the introduction to the 1968 Greenwood Reprint Corporation edition.
36 See Harvey Klehr, “Harry Haywood,” in Biographical Dictionary of the American Left, ed. Bernard K. Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 19), 189– 91, and William Eric Perkins, “Harry Haywood,” in Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 297–98.
37 Joseph Walker, “An American Author’s Views on Freedom,” Muhammad Speaks, 4 March 1963, 19.
38 John O. Killens, “For National Freedom,” New Foundations 2, no. 4 (Summer 1949): 245.
39 Ibid., 245, 248.
40 Ibid., 254: “Indeed, as a result of the special character of oppression under which they have lived, the Negro people in the South have developed all the attributes of nationhood; they constitute an historically evolved, stable community of economic life, language, territory, and psychological makeup, manifested in a community of culture. Within the borders of the United States, under the jurisdiction of a single central government, there are today two nations: a dominant white nation, with its Anglo-Saxon hierarchy, and a subject black one.”
41 Ibid., 258.
42 Ibid., 249.
43 Wald interview with Johnson, March 1995.
44 There is some uncertainty about Ralph Ellison’s date of birth, as it was not recorded. In Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley, 2002), Lawrence Jackson points out that although the date is traditionally recorded as 1914, he believes it was 1913; see n.3 on p.447.
45 Wright came in contact with the Communist Party in 1932 and apparently joined in 1933; his disaffection was pronounced after 1942, and he resigned in 1944. See the discussion of Wright in Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 90–93.
46 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 558.
47 Ibid., 563.
48 See the extraordinary history of the editorial changes made in the original version of Invisible Man in Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 420–31. Barbara Foley discusses the earlier evolution of the manuscript in “From Communism to Brotherhood: The Drafts of Invisible Man,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 163–82.
49 See my discussion in “The New York Intellectuals in Fiction,” in The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 226–63.
50 See Freedom, June 1952, 7.
51 For a discussion of that schema, see Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 294–97.
52 See ibid., 281–94.
53 In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Paul Gilroy insists (pp. 134–35) that Du Bois’s writings are selectively rooted in Hegel, which suggests that Killens might have indirectly imbibed the approach. Yet Adolph Reed Jr. disputes this interpretation of Du Bois in W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabian and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 229–30.
54 “Cracker” is a derogatory term for a poor southern white, usually in Georgia; the other expression frequently used in the same manner is “peckerwood,” which is believed to be an inversion of “woodpecker.”
55 John Oliver Killens, Youngblood (New York: Knopf, 1963), 232.
56 See Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and the Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 48–49.
57 Inasmuch as the Harlem Writers Guild played an important role in gestating African American writers during the Cold War, it will be discussed in volume 3, along with predecessors such as the Harlem Writers Club and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts.
58 See my study of the significance of this volume, “Narrating Nationalism: Black Marxism and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse,” in Mullen and Smethurst, Left of the Color Line, 141–61.
59 According to Keith Gilyard, Killens made a central contribution to a founding document of the organization. See Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 59–62.
60 Killens, “Half Ain’t Never Been Told,” 296.
61 See John Oliver Killens, Great Gittin’ Up Morning: A Biography of Denmark Vesey (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972) and A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man: The Adventures of John Henry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975). Unpublished plays include “Lower Than Angels” (1965), “Cotillion” (1975), and “Ballad of the Winter Soldier” (1964), with Loften Mitchell.
62 According to Grace Killens, John Killens’s contribution was small but significant; see Wald interview with Grace Killens. A lesser-known film partly written by Killens is Slaves (1969), which also appeared as a mass-market paperback called Slaves (New York: Pyramid, 1969).
63 Wald interview with Grace Killens.
64 Quoted in New York Times obituary, 30 October 1987, D22.
65 According to a 21 May 1997 letter from novelist Phillip Bonosky to Alan Wald, there was a discrepancy between Killens in his polemical writing, where he put things “extravagantly,” and in his private self. Grace Killens also described her husband in person as soft-spoken and quiet; Wald interview with Grace Killens.
66 According to Finkle, Forum for Protest, 211, the term “People’s War” was widely used by left-wing African Americans.
67 Bernard C. Natty and Morrio J. MacGregor give the figure of 700,000 for African Americans in the U.S. Army alone, at the time Japan surrendered, in Blacks in the Army: Essential Documents (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1981), 103. Chap. 20, pp. 592–638, “Service Units around the World,” gives information about the various roles played by such troops.
68 Indeed, the letters supporting Attaway’s application for a Rosenwald Fellowship to finish up the manuscript are all dated during the spring of 1940. See letters in File for William Attaway, Julius Rosenwald Foundation Papers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.
69 See William Attaway, “Plan of Work,” 1, File for William Attaway.
70 See Ralph Ellison, “Transition,” Negro Quarterly, Spring 1942, 87–92, and Ralph Warner, “Blood on the Forge Is Story of Negro Brothers,” Daily Worker, 8 November 1941, 7.
71 See the discussion of Attaway and the story in Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 282–83.
72 See John Oliver Killens, foreword to Blood on the Forge (New York: Monthly Review, 1987), 7. Killens dates the meeting around 1946–48 and describes it as “a left wing session to hammer out a liberation ideology for black writers.” Attaway was perceived as one of the “big time theorists.”
73 All of these writers will be discussed in volume 3.
74 Some of the policies had been put in place while Browder was in prison on old charges of a passport violation, 25 March 1941 to 16 May 1942, and many other leaders had enthusiastically championed them. Despite new books about the Communist Party, the most substantial sources for the issue of the Party’s approach to antiracism during the war remain earlier studies such as Howe and Coser, American Communist Party, 441–49, and Record, Negro and the Communist Party, 227–35.
75 The most informative discussion of Negro Story to date appears in Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 106–47.
76 Such incidents were common and the subject of protest in the African American press. See Sgt. Aubrey E. Robinson, “Correspondence,” Opportunity, Winter 1945, 48.
77 Margaret T. Goss, “Private Jeff Johnson,” Negro Story, July–August 1944, 28–31. This statement is similar to the quotation attributed to the African American Communist journalist Eugene Gordon in a 4 April 1942 article in the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, “Why Communist Party Attacks ‘Double V,”’ by Albert Parker [George Breitman]: “Hitler is the main enemy. . . . The foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered secondary.” The article is printed in Stanton, Fighting Racism in World War II, 157–58. Other World War II writings in Negro Story that are not informed by a Double V perspective include Lieutenant Robert A. Davis, “Sketches from the Army,” July–August 1944, 55–56; Corporal Theodore Black, “Fighter’s Fury,” December 1944–January 1945, 31–34; Herman A. Mitchell, “At Taps,” December 1944– January 1945, 53; and John Woodford, “Prisoner of War,” December 1944–January 1945, 40.
78 Chester Himes, “Looking Down the Street: A Story of Import and Bitterness,” Crossroad, Spring 1940, five unnumbered pages.
79 See the discussion of Ellison and Negro Quarterly in Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 283– 85.
80 “Now Is the Time! Here Is the Place!,” Opportunity, September 1942, 271–73, 284.
81 “Zoot Suit Riots Are Race Riots!,” Crisis, July 1943, 200–201, 222.
82 Chester Himes, “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” Crisis, May 1944, 159, 174.
83 Earl Conrad, “Blues School of Literature,” Chicago Defender, 22 December 1945, 11.
84 This is the theme of Earl Browder’s collection of writings, What Is Communism (New York: International Publishers, 1936), echoes of which can be found in Himes’s World War II statements.
85 Chester Himes, “Lunching at the Ritzmore,” Crisis, October 1942, 314–15, 333.
86 Chester Himes, “Two Soldiers,” Crisis, January 1943, 13, 29.
87 Chester Himes, “So Softly Smiling,” Crisis, October 1943, 314–16, 318.
88 Chester Himes, “Heaven Has Changed,” Crisis, March 1943, 78, 83.
89 Chester Himes, “All He Needs Is Feet,” Crisis, November 1943, 332.
90 Chester Himes, “Let Me at the Enemy—an’ George Brown,” Negro Story, December 1944– January 1945, 9–18.
91 Chester Himes, “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” Negro Story, March–April 1945, 14–17.
92 Chester Himes, “He Seen It in the Stars,” Negro Story, July–August 1944, 5–9.
93 Chester Himes, “All God’s Chillun Got Pride,” Crisis, June 1944, 188–89, 204. When the story was reprinted in The Collected Stories of Chester Himes (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), the prologue indicating that the main character is already in the guardhouse was omitted.
94 Chester Himes, “Make with the Shape,” Negro Story, August–September 1945, 36.
95 Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), 4.
96 Ibid., 60–61.
97 Ibid., 89.
98 Ibid., 78.
99 Ibid., 112–15.
100 Ibid., 117, 158.
101 See the biographical sketch of Gordon in Wald, Exiles from a Future Time, 83–85.
102 Eugene Gordon, “Powerful Novel of Negro Life,” Daily Worker, 30 December 1945, 9. See the quotations from letters to the Daily Worker in Record, Negro and the Communist Party, 228–34. For example, there is this passage from a letter by Thelma Dale: “In the win-the-war camp, a false illusion existed that Negroes would automatically win their rights through all-out support of the war effort. Even the Communists, as part of the revisionist policies, to an extent were affected by this illusion which resulted at times in soft-pedaling of the fight against the inferior status of Negroes in the armed forces.”
103 Herbert Aptheker, “Together for Freedom,” New Masses, 25 December 1945, 24.
1 New York Times, 22 September 1944, 17.
2 See the discussion of Vansittartism and quotations from Maltz’s correspondence on the subject in Jack Salzman, Albert Maltz (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 74–75. Maltz also refers to his preoccupation with the issue in his oral history, “The Citizen Writer in Retrospect” (1983), tape 14, side 1, University of California, Los Angeles.
3 Lola Paine, “The Degeneration of the German Woman,” Daily Worker, 26 November 1944, 11.
4 See Mike Gold, “Not Until the Germans Repent,” Daily Worker, 4 October 1944, 7.
5 This appeared in Krasnaya Zvezda, 24 July 1942, and is cited in Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 192.
6 For a comprehensive collection of essays on Goldhagen’s book, which includes references to earlier studies, see Robert R. Shandley, Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
7 Michael Gold, “Germany Today: Suddenly All Good Little Anti-Nazis,” Worker, 20 May 1945, sec. 1, p. 9.
8 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 171.
9 Maltz, “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 523.
10 Biographical information on Albert Maltz and Margaret Larkin Maltz is based on the following: Bernard Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 104–20; Salzman, Albert Maltz; Maltz, “Citizen Writer in Retrospect”; Alan M. Wald interview with Tiba Wilner, July 1990, Ojai, Calif.; Papers of Albert Maltz, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, Mass.; Papers of Margaret Maltz, Mugar Memorial Library; Papers of Albert Maltz, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; three reels of taped interviews with Albert Maltz by Victor Navasky, Library of Social History, Los Angeles.
11 Maltz, “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 98.
12 Ibid., 14.
13 Ibid., 11–16.
14 Errol Segal, “George Sklar: Playwright for a Socially Committed Theater” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1986), 90–95.
15 See the biographical sketch of Walker in Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 55–56, 151–52.
16 Carl Reeve, “Despicable Role of Scab Portrayed in Black Pit,” Daily Worker, 23 March 1935, 7.
17 Joseph North, “The Theatre: Theatre Union’s Black Pit,” New Masses, 2 April 1945, 42– 43.
18 Jack Stachel, “On the Theater Union’s Play Black Pit,” Daily Worker, 29 April 1935, 5.
19 See Margaret Larkin, Nation, 9 October 1929, 382–83; “The Story of Ella May,” New Masses, November 1929, 3–4.
20 Albert Maltz, The Underground Stream (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), 341.
21 Michael Gold, introduction to Albert Maltz, The Way Things Are (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 14, and Michael Gold, “Review,” Daily Worker, 16 July 1940, 7.
22 For Kazin, see Alfred Kazin, “Youth at the End of the Parade?,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 24 July 1938, 2, and “Here Is a Left-Wing Writer Who Can Write,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 30 June 1940, 5.
23 Samuel Sillen, “Profile of a German Worker,” New Masses, 3 October 1944, 23–24.
24 Howard Fast, “Howard Fast Reviews Albert Maltz’s New Book,” Worker Magazine, Sunday Worker, 8 October 1944, 10.
25 Harry Martel, “The Problem of German Evil in The Cross and the Arrow,” Worker, 18 March 1945, sec. 2, p. 8.
26 Robert Raven, “Book Strengthens People’s Hatreds,” Worker Magazine, Sunday Worker, 1 April 1945, sec. 2, p. 3.
27 Howard Silverberg, “Gives Exact Nature of German Guilt,” ibid.
28 Undated manuscript by Howard Selsam, “On Martel’s Criticism of The Cross and the Arrow,” Papers of Albert Maltz, Wisconsin Historical Society.
29 Further complicating the situation, the Trotskyist movement tended to present an idealized picture of the German working class and to place much of the blame for the triumph of fascism on policies of the Communists in the 1920s and 1930s. Trotskyists also held that the demand for “unconditional surrender” would only strengthen the resolve of the German population to fight longer and harder, for fear of being subjected to a new version of the hated Versailles Treaty. See Felix Morrow, “Stalin Blames the German Proletariat,” Fourth International, June 1942, 186–91.
30 Biographical information on Irwin Shaw is based on the Irwin Shaw Papers, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, Mass.; Michael Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1989); and James Giles, Irwin Shaw (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).
31 Irwin Shaw, “Residents of Other Cities,” in Sailor off the Bremen and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1939), 267, 262.
32 Irwin Shaw, “Sailor off the Bremen,” in Sailor off the Bremen, 8.
33 Shaw’s play Sons and Soldiers (New York: Random House, 1944), originally called “Labor for the Wind” in 1940, is dedicated “To David Shaw, artist, brother, soldier.”
34 Shaw, “Sailor off the Bremen,” 10, 9.
35 Ibid., 19.
36 Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw, 33.
37 Ibid., 27.
38 Ibid., 55.
39 Ibid., 45.
40 Shaw wrote all or part of the following film scripts, in the United States and abroad: The Big Game (1936), The Hard Way (1942), The Talk of the Town (1942), Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), Take One False Step (1949), Easy Living (1949), I Want You (1951), Act of Love (1954), Ulysses (1955), Fire Down Below (1957), This Angry Age (1958), Desire under the Elms (1958), The Big Gamble (1961), In the French Style (1963), and Survival (1963).
41 See the analysis in Morgan Y. Himelstein, Drama Was a Weapon: The Left-Wing Theater in New York, 1929–1941 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 45–46; see also Si Gerson, “Great Anti-War Play,” Daily Worker, 21 April 1936, 7.
42 See John Cambridge, “Gentle People,” Daily Worker, 7 January 1939, 7, and H. M., “Gentle People in Trouble,” New Masses, 17 January 1939, 29–30.
43 Giles, Irwin Shaw, 172.
44 Most of the names appearing in the 28 April 1938 issue of the Daily Worker, including Shaw’s, are reproduced in Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 248.
45 See Wald, New York Intellectuals, 128–39.
46 See Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Knopf, 1982), 63.
47 Maltz, “Citizen Writer in Retrospect,” 486.
48 Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw, 105.
49 Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942), 271.
50 Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw, 71.
51 Lionel Trilling, “Some Are Gentle, Some Are Not,” Saturday Review, 9 June 1951, 8.
52 Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw, 161.
53 Ibid., 182.
54 Shaw, Sons and Soldiers, 99.
55 Leslie Fiedler, “Irwin Shaw: Adultery, the Last Politics,” Commentary, July 1956, 73.
56 Collins was called to Washington, D.C., along with the Hollywood Ten in 1947 but was not asked to testify at that time.
57 In her 1956 testimony, Jigee Viertel minimized her Communist activities, stating that she joined mainly for educational reasons and that after 1940 her association was very loose. See Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles, Calif., Area, pt. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 5789–5804. Budd Schulberg’s version is that he only joined a Marxist study group in 1936, which changed itself into a chapter of the YCL and Communist Party without notifying him. See Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles, Calif., Area, pt. 3 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 581–624.
58 Salka and Berthold Viertel had come from Germany in the 1920s. She was an actress turned screenwriter (intimately associated with Greta Garbo), and he was a director and poet. Their legendary Hollywood salon was home to many famous writers from Europe. Salka Viertel published a successful memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
59 See Shnayerson, Irwin Shaw, 70–71, 111–12, and Schwartz, Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 297– 99. Another source for details about Jigee Viertel and others in her circle is Peter Viertel, Dangerous Friends: At Large with Huston and Hemingway in the Fifties (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
60 Irwin Shaw, The Troubled Air (New York: Random House, 1951), 116–17.
61 Ibid., 367.
62 Ibid., 293.
63 See the discussion of the novel in Wald, New York Intellectuals, 243–46.
64 See Howard Blue, Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 128–31, 351. Blue’s book provides original information on the background to the blacklisting in radio, although Troubled Air is not cited.
65 In Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 45, Harold Norse recalls White, for whom he uses the pseudonym David Blake, as follows: “At thirty-four he was stony bald with sunken cheeks.”
66 Actually, Shaw’s memory was wrong about this. The Rapp-Coudert hearings began in 1940, and White had resigned from Brooklyn College to serve in the Spanish Civil War, which was over by 1939. However, White’s name may well have been mentioned during the hearings, since the chief informant was a former Communist Party member, Bernard Grebanier, from White’s own English department. See Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 75–83.
67 Shaw, Troubled Air, 330–31.
68 Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, 48.
69 Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (New York: Random House, 1948), 70.
70 Irwin Shaw, Welcome to the City and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1946), 106.
71 Ibid., 107.
72 See Giles, Irwin Shaw (1991), 62–65, and Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 110.
73 Shaw, Troubled Air, 339.
74 Ibid., 380–81.
75 Ibid., 403–4.
76 Shaw, Young Lions, 19.
77 Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 92.
78 Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties, 109.
79 Shaw, Young Lions, 689.
80 Irwin Shaw, Act of Faith and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1946), 109.
81 In his crudely polemical review of Young Lions in the Daily Worker, 15 October 1948, 12, Robert Friedman mistakenly points to the episodes involving Ackerman and Green as evidence that Shaw believes that anti-Semitism can only be fought as “the individual acts of men of good will.”
1 See Will Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 88–91.
2 “Editorial Policy of the Voice,” People’s Voice, 14 February 1934, 34.
3 Ibid., 20, 34.
4 Although Robeson was certainly a supporter of the Communist Party at this point, his main biographer believes that he kept his distance on the tendency to subordinate antiracist militancy to wartime exigencies. See Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 255.
5 Benjamin A. Davis Jr., contribution to “Round Table: Have Communists Quit Fighting for Negro Rights?,” Negro Digest, December 1944, 64–65. Taking a position critical of the Party, sociologist Horace R. Cayton argued, “It is my feeling that the Communists misjudged the situation; that more aggressive action for Negro rights would indeed have aided the war effort”; see 66–68.
6 Haygood, King of the Cats, 88–90. See also Rob Teel, “The Color of Music in American History,” Oklahoma Daily, 2 February 2001, 2.
7 See Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal for Journalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
8 Haygood, King of the Cats, 44–45.
9 Kenneth O’Reilly and David Gallen, Black Americans: The FBI Files (New York: Carroll and Graff, 1994), 268–69.
10 For the most detailed study of Davis’s career, see Gerald Horne, Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark, Del.: Associated University Press, 1994). Davis’s autobiography is available as Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary (New York: International, 1969).
11 See Maceo Crenshaw Dailey Jr. and Ernest D. Washington, “The Evolution of Doxey A. Wilkerson,” Freedomways, Summer 1985, 101–15. Also see Brace Lamert, “Doxey Wilkerson Is Dead at 88,” New York Times, 18 June 1993, D16.
12 See David H. Anthony, “Yergan, Max,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 912.
13 See Rodger Streitmatter, Raising Her Voice: African-American Women Journalists Who Changed History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 84–94.
14 Ibid., 93–94. Alan M. Wald telephone interview with Marvel Cooke, February 1998.
15 Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 97–98.
16 “Ann Petry,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (Detroit: Gale Research Corporation, 1988), 6:254, 259.
17 Ann Petry, “Marie of the Cabin Club,” Afro-American (Baltimore), 19 August 1939, 14.
18 Ann Petry, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon,” Crisis, December 1943, 368–69.
19 James W. Ivy, “Ann Petry Talks about First Novel,” Crisis, February 1946, 48–49.
20 Examples of her articles about protests are “An Open Letter to Mayor LaGuardia,” People’s Voice, 22 May 1943, 4, and “Doomed Boys May Live Due to Layman’s Plea,” People’s Voice, 26 June 1943, 13.
21 Ann Petry, “Harlem Urged to Attend First Meeting of ‘Women, Inc.,”’ People’s Voice, 2 May 1942, 17.
22 Robert A. Hill, ed., The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 180.
23 Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), 99.
24 Ibid., xiv.
25 Earl Conrad, “A Woman’s Place in Harlem,” Chicago Defender, 2 February 1946, 13.
26 “First Novel,” Ebony, April 1946, 35–39.
27 Norman Markowitz, “Progressive Party, 1948,” in Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 636–37.
28 “Winners of Houghton Mifflin’s Literary Fellowship Awards,” Daily Worker, 3 March 1945, 11.
29 John Meldon, “The Street —A Powerful Novel of Harlem Tragedy,” Daily Worker, 20 March 1946, 11.
30 Milton Puretz, “Disagrees with Meldon’s Review of The Street,” Daily Worker, 30 March 1946, 8.
31 Albert Maltz, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?,” New Masses, 12 February 1946, 19–22.
32 Samuel Sillen, “Better Politics and Better Art,” Daily Worker, 14 April 1946, Worker Magazine section, 8.
33 Beth McHenry, “Says The Street Is First of Series on Negro Life,” Daily Worker, 29 March 1946, 13.
34 Alfred Goldsmith [Saul Levitt], “Struggle for Survival,” New Masses, 21 May 1946, 25– 26.
35 Theodore Ward, “Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat,” Mainstream, Winter 1947, 110.
36 Ibid., 107–8.
37 Ann Petry, “Harlem,” Holiday, April 1949, 110–16.
38 Albert Maltz, “Moving Forward,” New Masses, 9 April 1946, 21–22.
39 Certainly the novels written by African American Leftists prior to The Street did not offer trade union salvation or feature the CIO riding to the rescue. Richard Wright wrote only one short story, “Fire and Cloud,” in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), that showcases mass interracial action at its climax. But the story was preceded by three disaster tales, and in its 1940 edition it was followed by “Bright and Morning Star,” in which the proletarian interracial alliance is betrayed by a white comrade and the African American heroine goes down in a hail of bullets.
40 Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” in The Writer’s Book, ed. Helen Hull (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 32–39.
41 Ann Petry, “Doby’s Gone,” Phylon 5, no. 4 (fourth quarter 1944): 361–66.
42 “Ann Petry,” 256.
43 Petry’s consciousness of triple oppression is strongly evidenced in nonfiction in her essay “What’s Wrong with Negro Men?,” Negro Digest, March 1947, 4–7.
44 Ann Petry, The Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 258–60.
45 Ibid., 200.
46 Ibid., 323–24.
47 Ibid., 8.
48 Ibid., 15.
49 Ervin, Ann Petry, xiv.
50 See Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 161.
51 Harvard-educated Edwin Seaver (1900–1987) was a close fellow traveler of the Communist movement in the 1930s and author of two left-wing novels, The Company (1930) and Between the Hammer and the Anvil (1937). In 1938 he began to work for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and during the 1940s he edited four volumes of new fiction that included work by a large number of Communist and pro-Communist writers.
52 See Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Dominic J. Capeci Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); Hill, FBI’s RACON; Brandt, Harlem at War.
53 Max Weiss, “Fifth Column Diversion in Detroit,” Communist, August 1943, 698–710.
54 Earl Browder, “Hitler’s Uprisings in America,” New Masses, 14 September 1943, 3–5.
55 See Brandt, Harlem at War, 185–206. The precipitating event occurred on a Sunday at 7:30 P.M. in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel at 126th Street and Eighth Avenue. An altercation began between a rookie patrolman and a woman who had apparently left a drinking party in one of the rooms. Pvt. Robert Bandy then hit the patrolman with his own nightstick and was shot while fleeing. The wound was slight, but word soon spread among a growing crowd that Bandy was dead.
56 Ann Petry, “In Darkness and Confusion,” in Miss Muriel and Other Stories (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 281.
57 Ibid., 284.
58 Ibid., 286.
59 Ibid., 290.
60 Ibid., 291.
61 Ibid., 294.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 295.
64 According to Brandt, Harlem at War, 194, among those exhorting Harlemites from sound trucks to return to their homes peacefully were Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Max Yergan, Ferdinand Smith, Hope Stevens, and the Reverend John H. Johnson.
65 Ebony, April 1946, 39.
66 Paula Rabinowitz of the University of Minnesota has also observed that there are strong links between Country Place and the early section of The Street in which Lutie is employed as a domestic for a decadent family in upstate New York; see private conversation, February 2004. One might also speculate that “In Darkness and Confusion,” which among Petry’s short stories is unusually long, may have been part of a larger literary project about other aspects of Harlem life that she did not develop.
67 Ervin, Ann Petry, 75, 99.
68 Hill, FBI’s RACON, 180.
69 Muriel Wright Brailey, “Necessary Knocking: The Short Fiction of Ann Petry” (Ph.D. diss., Miami University, 1996), 3–4.
70 Characteristic is the following excerpt from a 1971 interview with John O’Brien: “INTERVIEWER: Do you like talking about your writing? PETRY: No. I find it painful.”
Other classic Petry responses include “Once I’ve written something I don’t have anything more to say about it. That’s it. . . . If a critic wants to analyze it, let him. Fine. But I don’t want to” and “I think it is an imposition to ask me to ‘explain’ a story or novel.” One interviewer, Mark Wilson, in 1987 maintained that the tape recorder could not communicate the warmth of the responses he got, often punctuated with laughter. But Wilson never asked her about her politics or the People’s Voice. What Petry does talk extensively about are her ancestors and her family’s drugstores and her Columbia University writing teacher. She also lists names of actors and writers she had occasion to meet. See Ervin, Ann Petry, 69–103.
71 Wald telephone interview with Marvel Cooke, December 1996. Queries about Petry’s politics in published interviews are sometimes confusing because some interviewers fail to distinguish between what she thought during the late 1930s and 1940s and what she felt after the Cold War began and later.
72 It is customary for stories in an author’s single-volume collection spanning several decades to appear in the order of publication or, if not, for there to be some means for the reader to ascertain the date and place of original publication. In this volume, the publisher gives only seven copyright dates without connecting them to particular stories. The book has no preface, introduction, or acknowledgments. The stories appear absent of bibliographical matter.
73 The main source of biographical information about Offord is Thelma Barnaby Thompson, “Carl Ruthven Offord,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 76:130–33.
74 Nell Dodson, “Carl Offord’s First Novel, White Face, Is Startling,” People’s Voice, 15 May 1943, 10.
75 Claudia Jones, “Maiden Book of New Author Deals with Negro Problems,” Daily Worker, 13 June 1943, 4. On 29 June 1943, p. 7, letters pro and con the Jones review were published in the Daily Worker.
76 Samuel Putnam, “Calls Offord Novel ‘Thrilling Experience,”’ Daily Worker, 16 July 1943, 7.
77 Barbara Giles, “The White Face,” New Masses, 3 August 1943, 24–26.
78 Carl Ruthven Offord, “America’s Ghettos,” New Masses, 21 September 1943, 11–12.
79 See Offord, “Low Sky,” in Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin Seaver (New York: Fischer, 1944), 304–13, and “So Peaceful in the Country,” Story, May–June 1945, 81–86.
80 Ward, “Five Negro Novelists,” 100–110.
81 See Carl Offord, “Gentle Native,” Masses & Mainstream, September 1948, 8–16, and “The Green, Green Grass and a Gun,” Masses & Mainstream, February 1949, 39–43.
82 Alan M. Wald interview with Franklin Folsom, May 1989, Boulder, Colo.; see Christina Baker, In a Generous Spirit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 100, 145.
83 Alan M. Wald interview with Willa Appel, December 1992, New York, N.Y.
84 Ben Appel, “The Message Novel,” The Writer, February 1944, 36.
85 Alan Benoit, “Home Front Enemies,” New Masses, 21 December 1943, 24–26.
86 Benjamin Appel, “The ‘Message’ Novel,” The Writer, February 1934, 35–38.
87 One of the few scholars attentive to Spivak’s methods and impact is William Stott, in Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
88 See the valuable essay by Alex Lichtenstein, “Georgia History in Fiction,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 633–58.
89 Spivak’s papers are at Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. The most extensive study of Spivak is a senior honors thesis done at the University of Michigan by Martin Wayne Friedman, “Towards an Effective Committed Reportage: A Study of John L. Spivak” (Program in American Culture, 1982).
90 See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 375–76. These authors also believe that Kahn assisted with pro-Soviet espionage.
91 See Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
92 Kahn’s Matusow Affair (Mount Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell, 1987) was posthumously published.
1 The tendency to blame the Communist Party for literary failures was most powerfully expressed by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 306: “In the long run, the damage wrought by the party in its passion to conquer or destroy what it could not conquer was the same in literature as in the trade unions, the same in cultural matters as in politics. In the long run, that is, our story is the story of human waste.” The theme that the Communist Left destroyed writers is also prevalent throughout Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties (New York: Dell, 1955).
2 Alan M. Wald interview with Henry Roth, 21 December 1988, Albuquerque, N.M. Biographical information on Roth is primarily based on this interview, along with correspondence from Roth on 30 November 1988 and 5 May 1989. Scholarship on Roth is quite substantial, including numerous essays, interviews, and lengthy book reviews. Most important are Bonnie Lyons, Henry Roth: The Man and His Work (New York: Cooper Square, 1976); Mario Materassi, ed., Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925–1987 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987); and Hanna Wirth-Nesher, ed., New Essays on Call It Sleep (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Additional sources include a letter from Roth to Horace Gregory, 25 July 1933, in the Horace Gregory Papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. Steven G. Kellman’s Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (New York: Norton, 2005) contains new details about Roth’s family and confirms the incidents of incest; his decades-long Communist activity, however, remains opaque.
3 This is how Stanley Burnshaw recalled Bransten, as reported in Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 277: “‘spectacularly thin’ and ‘unathletic-looking, with a tension in his expression that could be gloriously dissolved when he laughed.’ He suffered deeply from lack of self-esteem.”
4 See Materassi, Shifting Landscape, 3–10.
5 See the following in New Masses: “Brief Review,” 12 February 1935, 27; David Green-hood, “Another View,” 19 February 1935, 21; Kenneth Burke, “More about Roth’s Call It Sleep,” 26 February 1935, 21; Alvah C. Brothers, “Bourgeois-Critical Exploitation,” 26 February 1935, 21; Edwin Seaver, “Caesar or Nothing,” 5 March 1935, 20.
6 Roth believed that Green died when his ship was torpedoed during World War II.
7 See Mark Shechner, “The Unquiet Past of Henry Roth,” Chicago Tribune, 2 February 1995, book section, 1, 14: “Like many Depression-era writers, Roth fell under the spell of the Communist Party, which employed him as a literary foot soldier to write a ‘proletarian novel’ about a worker who had been injured in an industrial accident. Roth abandoned the project early on. . . . A stubborn man, Roth wouldn’t be harnessed to literary number painting.”
8 Genya Schearl is close in appearance to Eda Lou Walton, to whom Call It Sleep is dedicated; his own mother more likely resembled the repulsive Aunt Bertha of the novel. This point is made in Werner Sollers’s essay “A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else,” which also provides an explanation of the source for Roth’s use of the Oedipal complex. See Wirth-Nesher, New Essays on Call It Sleep, 127–88. The evidence is lacking that Roth had ever read Freud as a young man; like Marxism, talk of Freud was in the air at Walton’s salon, which is where Roth might have absorbed the fundamental ideas of both.
9 Wald interview with Roth.
10 The statement is reprinted in Materassi, Shifting Landscape, 48–51.
11 Wald interview with Roth.
12 Biographical information about Gilfillan is based on the collection of Lauren Gilfillan papers (hereafter LGP) assembled over a ten-year period by the author, with the assistance of Henry Gilfillan. These papers consist of photocopies of more than fifty letters exchanged between relatives of Gilfillan (especially her mother and aunts) and letters from Gilfillan to various friends and relatives; photocopies of diaries, journals, and unpublished writings by Gilfillan from World War I through the early 1930s; letters and e-mails from Henry Gilfillan to Alan M. Wald from 1988 through 1999; photocopies of a large collection of book reviews, interviews, and other newspaper and journal articles about Gilfillan in connection with I Went to Pit College; copies of memoirs, genealogies, and family histories by Henry Gilfillan and other relatives; copies of letters from the Johns Hopkins University Hospital regarding Gilfillan’s father; and Alan M. Wald’s correspondence with the Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital about Gilfillan. Since many of the letters, newspaper articles, and other items are not dated very well, a general chronology of events has been reconstructed by cross-checking and cross-referencing. For background information on psychiatric treatments and analyses in the 1920s–40s, I consulted Charles Gibbs, “Sex Development and Behavior in Female Patients with Dementia Praecox,” Archives of Neurology and Psychology II (1924): 179–94, and L. Kerschbaumer, “Endocrine Maldevelopment in Schizophrenia,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 98 (November 1943): 521–25. I acknowledge and appreciate additional guidance from Dr. Gina Morantz-Sanchez and Dr. Isabel Bradburn. I also appreciate background information on the 1931 coal strike provided by Dr. James Barrett. Most citations will be from LGP, although I have attempted to provide more specific information about Gilfillan’s writings in the Communist press and other places where her own writings appeared.
13 LGP.
14 LGP.
15 LGP.
16 Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 150. It was Rabinowitz’s work that first drew my attention to the importance of Gilfillan’s book. Her interpretation of I Went to Pit College remains unsurpassed.
17 LGP.
18 Edwin Rolfe, “A College Girl Writes about Western Pennsylvania Miners,” Daily Worker, 3 March 1934, 7. Of course, most of the book is not just about the miners, who were all men, but equally about the women and children of the community.
19 LGP. Of course, as a Bohemian rebel of the 1930s, Gilfillan preferred not to wear makeup before, during, or after her Pit College sojourn.
20 LGP.
21 LGP.
22 LGP.
23 See the three-part series by Linda Morton in section C of the Washington, Pa., Observer-Reporter, 19, 20, 23 October 1981.
24 LGP.
25 LGP.
26 Adler’s report was incorporated into the “Change the World!” column of the Daily Worker, 17 April 1934, 7.
27 Lauren Gilfillan, I Went to Pit College (New York: Literary Guild, 1934), 289.
28 “Change the World!,” Daily Worker, 17 April 1934, 7.
29 Ben Field, “From Smith College to Pit College,” Partisan Review 1, no. 1 (February– March 1934): 54–56.
30 “Change the World!,” Daily Worker, 17 April 1934, 7.
31 Ibid.
32 LGP.
33 LGP.
34 LGP.
35 LGP.
36 Lauren Gilfillan, “Weary Feet,” Forum, October 1933, 201–8.
37 “Authors’ Field Day: A Symposium on Marxist Criticism,” New Masses, 3 July 1934, 29–30.
38 Lauren Gilfillan, “Why Women Really Might as Well Be Communists as Not, or Machines in the Age of Love,” Modern Monthly, February 1935, 747, 753.
39 LGP.
40 LGP.
41 The biographical sketch of Vogel is based on personal correspondence with the author.
42 B. F. Skinner, Particulars of My Life (New York: Knopf, 1976), 241.
43 Vogel to Gregory, 13 October 1935, Gregory Papers.
44 “Man’s Courage,” New York Times Book Review, 23 March 1938, 2.
45 The agency was established in 1935 by executive order of President Roosevelt as the Works Progress Administration, but the name was changed in 1939. Its aim was to assist individuals on relief by employing them in useful projects.
46 Alan M. Wald interview with B. J. Widick, 27 June 1990, Ann Arbor, Mich.
47 “Ruth McKenney,” in Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (New York: H. H. Wilson, 1942), 883.
48 Malcolm Cowley, “Collective Novel,” New Republic, 22 February 1939, 77; Ruth Mc-Kenney, Love Story (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 122.
49 Jake, in contrast, is portrayed as celibate during the long separation preceding this encounter and is unstigmatized for his participation in the sexual encounter.
50 Ruth McKenney, Jake Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), 390, 371.
51 His last name, Home, probably refers to the critical roots of his experiences in his Pennsylvania community.
52 See McKenney, Love Story, 120–21.
53 See articles discussing Jake Home in Daily Worker: 16 March 1943, 7; 3 May 1943, 7; 1 June 1943, 7; 2 June 1943, 7; 2 July 1943, 7; 25 June 1943, 7.
54 McKenney, Love Story, 231.
1 New Left Review, November–December 1985, 11–12.
2 See summary of Kramer’s career by Alan M. Wald in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 677–78. See also Aaron Kramer, Wicked Times: Selected Poems, edited and with a biographical essay by Cary Nelson and Donald Gilzinger Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
3 Alan M. Wald interview with Aaron Kramer, 15 September 1990, New York, N.Y.
4 Ibid.
5 Quoted from memory in ibid.
6 Aaron Kramer, “To Angelo Herndon,” New Pioneer, September 1934, 6.
7 Wald interview with Kramer.
8 See Aaron Kramer’s entry on Proletpen in Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 643–44.
9 This appeared as a special issue of Nature, Society, and Thought 13, no. 1 (2000).
10 Ben Burns, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1966), 113; Alan M. Wald interview with Ben Burns, October 1995, Chicago, Ill.
11 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 136.
12 Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 91.
13 Ibid., 60–61.
14 Ibid., 95.
15 Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review, March–April 2002, 15.
16 Biographical information is based on Alan M. Wald interview with John Sanford, March 1989, Montecito, Calif.; the John Sanford Papers at Boston University, Boston, Mass.; and Alan M. Wald correspondence with Sanford, 1988–99.
17 Wald interview with Sanford and correspondence with Sanford.
18 Biographical information about Vera Caspary is based on the Vera Caspary Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, and Alan M. Wald interview with Ben and Norma Barzman, October 1992, Los Angeles, Calif.
19 Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 36.
20 Two other Jewish American pro-Communist women who wrote of their personal experiences with anti-Black racism in the 1930s were Tess Slesinger in “White on Black” and Dorothy Parker in “Arrangement in Black and White.” Both stories were anthologized in an influential collection on racism published in 1945, Primer for White Folks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1945). Moreover, all three of these radical women writers were associated in 1939–40 with the journal Equality, which was launched under Communist Party direction “to defend democratic rights and combat anti-Semitism and racism.” Caspary served on the editorial council of Equality, along with another Jewish American pro-Communist woman, Lillian Hellman, and both Slesinger and Parker were contributors. The managing editor of Equality was Abraham Chapman, a Jewish Communist who fled to Eastern Europe during the Cold War but eventually returned to the United States. Chapman resurfaced as an English professor in the 1960s, publishing excellent and influential collections of African American, Native American Indian, and Jewish American literature.
21 See Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 75–77.
22 A film version did not appear until NBC produced a poorly done miniseries in the late 1970s starring the boxer Muhammad Ali as Gideon Jackson and costarring the singer Kris Kristofferson.
23 In this sense, Maltz prefigures Enzo Traverso’s The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003). Traverso argues that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, rather than constituting a “break in civilization,” confirm extermination “to be one of the faces of civilization itself” (2).
24 Abzug published one other novel, Seventh Avenue Story (1947), dealing with the garment industry. See also Abzug’s correspondence with Charles Humboldt of Masses & Mainstream at Yale University. My interviews with Helen Yglesias and Barbara Zeluck in February 2004 in New York City indicated that both Abzugs may have been Communist Party members in the postwar years, but such affiliations were never publicly acknowledged and have not been documented. The Daily Worker, 11 January 1947, 11, singled out Abzug’s novel for praise in “First Novel Illuminates G.I. Side of War,” reviewed by John Hudson Jones.
25 Martin Abzug, Spearhead (New York: Dial, 1946), 74–75.
26 Ibid., 211.
27 Stefan Heym, The Crusaders: A Novel of Only Yesterday (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 9.
28 Sources for Stefan Heym include Peter Hutchinson, Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Inge Dube, “Stefan Heym,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 69:135–42; Reinhard Konrad Zachau, “Stefan Heym in Amerika” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1978); David Binder, “Stefan Heym, Marxist-Leninist Novelist, Dies at 88 on Lecture Tour in Israel,” New York Times, 18 December 2001, A21. The Daily Worker ran a laudatory review by Robert Friedman, “Stefan Heym’s Crusaders Outstanding War Novel,” 5 September 1948, sec. 2, p. 11.
29 Heym’s novel has been the subject of a thoroughgoing commentary in Joseph J. Waldmeir, American Novels of the Second World War (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 56–76.
30 Biographical information about Saul Levitt is based on the Saul Levitt Papers at Boston University, Boston, Mass., and Alan M. Wald interview with his widow, Deena Levitt, September 1991, New York, N.Y.
31 Sources for biographical information on Louis Falstein: Alan M. Wald interview with Falstein, September 1991, New York, N.Y.; Falstein Papers, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich.
32 Biographical information on Schappes is based on Alan M. Wald interviews with Morris Schappes, 14 November 1989 and 4 June 1990, New York, N.Y.
33 Wald interview with Schappes, 14 November 1989.
34 See Morris U. Schappes, “Errors in Mrs. Bianchi’s Edition of Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” American Literature 4, no. 2 (January 1933): 369–84. See also his review of Emily Dickinson: “Unpublished Letters with Notes and Reminiscences,” American Literature 5, no. 1 (March 1933): 82–85.
35 See the discussion in Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66–67.
36 See the discussion in ibid., 75–83.
37 See Morris U. Schappes, “The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 1868–1885,” New York Public Library Bulletin, no. 53 (1949): 315–34.
38 Wald interview with Schappes, 14 November 1989.
1 Matt Wayne, “Sincerity in the Theater,” New Masses, 3 July 1945, 29–30.
2 Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (New York: David McKay, 1970), 45.
3 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 105.
4 Ibid., 103.
5 In his April 1956 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Family in Modern Drama,” he affirmed that “there lies within the dramatic form the ultimate possibility of raising the truth-consciousness of mankind to such a level of intensity as to transform those who observe it.” See Robert A. Martin and Steven A. Centola, eds., The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 84.
6 Arthur Miller, “The American Writer: The American Theater,” in Martin and Centola, Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 376 (originally in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 1982).
7 Matthew C. Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 274.
8 Miller, Timebends, 230.
9 Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” in Martin and Centola, Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 7.
10 “The Testimony of Arthur Miller, Accompanied by Counsel Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.,” in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use of United States Passports, 84th Cong., Congressional Record, pt. 4, 21 June 1956 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 1956), 4687.
11 Miller, Timebends, 237.
12 Alan M. Wald interview with A. B. Magil, August 1990, New York, N.Y.; Alan M. Wald interview with Lloyd Brown, 2 September 1991, and telephone conversation, 13 December 1995. I do not regard Brown’s recollection as definitive proof of Miller’s Communist Party membership, but it sounds plausible in the context of the other circumstances.
13 The primary repository of Miller’s papers is the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The materials are still not fully processed. Just before Miller’s death an additional collection of Miller’s papers and correspondence arrived, “but for legal reasons, those are not presently available either for processing or research. . . . It will be quite a while before they [any letters contained in the material] are available to scholars” (letter from Richard Workman to Wald, 24 May 2005).
14 Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller: His Life and Work (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), x.
15 Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 130.
16 Martin and Centola, Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, xiii.
17 Bernadine, I Love You (unpublished, 1945); Grandpa and the Statue, in Radio Drama in Action, ed. Erik Barnouw (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945); The Philippines Never Surrendered (unpublished, 1945); The Guardsman (adaptation, 1945), in Theater Guild on the Air, ed. H. William Fitelson (New York: Rinehart, 1947); Pride and Prejudice (unpublished adaptation, 1945); and Three Men on a Horse (adaptation, 1946), in Fitelson, Theater Guild on the Air. There are a number of references to Miller in Howard Blue, Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002). The most detailed study of Miller’s radio plays is by Gerald Weales, “Arthur Miller Takes the Air,” American Drama 5 (Fall 1995): 1–15.
18 Martin and Centola, Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 591–92.
19 Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
20 Marilyn Berger, “Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89,” New York Times, 12 February 2005, A1, A14–15. Other obituaries in the major papers were shorter but similar. See Bart Barnes and Patricia Sullivan, “Playwright of Broken American Dreams,” Washington Post, 12 February 2005, A1, and Ed Siehel, “Playwright Arthur Miller Dies,” Boston Globe, 12 February 2005, 1.
21 The contempt citation was due to Miller’s honorable refusal to answer questions about the identity of other individuals at a meeting of Communist writers—in particular, whether the playwright Arnaud D’Usseau chaired one such meeting. Of himself, Miller stated that he signed a form in 1939 that might have been used as an application for Communist Party membership but could not remember its exact nature, and that he did not know if a woman named Sue Warren had proposed him for membership in 1943 or 1947 (the question was unclear in regard to the date). His answer was less a forthright denial than an assertion of not having “memory” or “knowledge.” He was unequivocal that he was never under Communist “discipline,” which was a view that might be conceivable for a maverick writer in a Party Cultural Unit who saw his or her work as artistic and choices of activity as voluntary. See “Testimony of Arthur Miller,” 4685, 4688–89. Moreover, in Timebends, 407, Miller seems to leave open the possibility that HUAC interrogator Richard Arens might have come up with some evidence of Communist Party membership, and that Miller would have had to concede the point: “How to explain that even if he had produced a Party card with my signature on it, I could only have said yes, I had probably felt that way then.”
22 Tony Kushner, “Kushner on Miller,” Nation, 13 June 2005, 6.
23 Steven R. Centola, ed., Arthur Miller: Echoes down the Corridor, 1944–2000 (New York: Viking, 2000), 1–13. The full citation for the original appearance is “A Boy Grew in Brooklyn,” Holiday, March 1955, 54–55, 117–24.
24 The original story was in New Currents, June 1943, 9–10. Miller is identified as “a young short story and radio script writer.”
25 New Currents was inaugurated in March 1943, as a result of the reorganization of Jewish Survey. Miller had appeared in the first issue of Jewish Survey, May 1941, with an essay called “Hitler’s Quarry,” about the U.S. State Department’s failure to help European Jews trying to escape the Nazis. The piece was published beneath one by the Communist writer Albert Maltz, “War Boom in Jew-Baiting,” and Miller was identified as “a promising New York writer.” Jewish Survey was marketed as a non-Party publication that focused on anti-Semitism in all countries but did not advocate U.S. military intervention against Germany. Following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the publication dramatically changed its policy and published an editorial headlined “Aid the Soviet Union against Hitler” (July 1941, p. 3). The managing editor of Jewish Survey was Louis Harap, a member of the Communist Party, and the editorial board included such well-known pro-Communists as Marc Blitztein, Rockwell Kent, Dashiell Hammett, Albert Maltz, and the painter Max Weber. The change of the magazine name from Jewish Survey to New Currents after several issues of the former failed to appear was an attempt to broaden the publication by giving overwhelming focus to the Nazi threat. The new “Statement of Policy” placed exclusive emphasis on “the total defeat of Hitlerism” as the precondition of Jewish survival. See New Currents, March 1943, 3. New Currents retained a strong component of pro-Communists on its editorial board, with some changes occurring as members entered military service. Miller’s appearance in Jewish Survey as well as New Currents confirms how strongly he identified his opposition to anti-Semitism with his support for Soviet foreign policy in its various incarnations.
26 Miller, Timebends, 105, 114.
27 Ibid., 116.
28 Ibid., 71.
29 Ibid., 85, 86.
30 Editorial, “From Month to Month,” Jewish Voice, March–April 1941, 2.
31 Miller, Timebends, 85, 86.
32 Ibid., 86.
33 Mary McCarthy, “The American Realist Playwrights,” in On the Contrary (New York: Noonday, 1962), 309.
34 Some of these claims are summarized in Louis Harap, Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth Century Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black Jewish Literary Relationship (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 122–28.
35 “CP Raps Press Hubbub on Browder,” Daily Worker 30 April 1942, 2.
36 Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains (New York: Viking, 1980), 298.
37 The political views of the New Masses editors can be seen in the issues of late 1944 and early 1945; see esp. the issue of 19 December 1944, 22.
38 Stage for Action was a resuscitated version of the celebrated Theater of Action of the 1930s. Circumstantial evidence suggests that “Harry Taylor” might have been a pseudonym for Harry Lessin, a longtime member of the inner circle of both groups. The original Theater of Action was founded in 1929 as the Workers Laboratory Theater. The troupe was in the orbit of the Communist Party, concentrating on works of agitation and propaganda aimed at bringing political education to workers. After a period of friendly association with Group Theater, Theater of Action folded into the Federal Theater Project as the One Act Experimental Theater. When the Federal Theater Project closed in 1940, groups such as Current Theater and New Theater emerged to carry on the tradition. See “Workers Laboratory Theater/Theater of Action,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., ed. Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 899–900. For a more substantial study, see Dorothy Jeanne Friedman, “From the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre to the Theatre of Action: The History of an Agitprop Theatre,” M.A. thesis, Theater Arts, University of California, Los Angeles (1968).
When Stage for Action was organized toward the end of 1943, a young Gene Frankel, later recognized as a pioneer of off-Broadway theater, took over the directorship. What differentiated Stage for Action from its predecessors was its highly professional staff and a greater degree of focus on theater entertainment values. Like Miller at the time, its writers, actors, composers, lyricists, and directors earned their living by working in the commercial theater of stage, screen, and radio. Stage for Action was supported by yearly subsidies from left-wing unions, such as the National Maritime Union and United Electrical Workers Union. See Harry Taylor, “Stage for Action,” New Masses, 2 January 1945, 29–30.
39 The performance date was December 1943. That They May Win appears in Margaret Mayorga, ed. The Best One-Act Plays of 1944 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 45–59. In a subsequent New Masses account of Stage for Action, Taylor judged Miller’s work to be “sturdiest production so far” and announced a schedule of future performances, mostly reflecting Communist Party concerns about fifth columnists, support for the no-strike pledge, and the significance of the Teheran conference. See Taylor, “Stage for Action.”
40 For example, see Taylor’s review in the issue of New Masses, 26 December 1944, 27–28, where Taylor correlated the stage version of John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano to the current moment in World War II.
41 “Between Ourselves,” New Masses, 9 January 1945, 2.
42 Ibid., 23 January 1945, 2.
43 Ibid., 6 March 1945, 2.
44 The most detailed study of Miller’s radio plays is Weales, “Arthur Miller Takes the Air.”
45 Matt Wayne, “Deep Are the Roots,” New Masses, 23 October 1945, 27.
46 Matt Wayne, “On and Off Broadway,” New Masses, 27 March 1945, 27.
47 Miller, Timebends, 39.
48 “On Broadway,” New Masses, 12 March 1946, 30.
49 Ibid., 10 July 1945, 27–28.
50 This prefigures his comments on Brecht in his essay “About Theater Language.” See Martin and Centola, Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 542; see also the remarks on Brecht on pp. 159–60.
51 Wald interview with Magil. On 13 February 1945, p. 2, there was a notice in the New Masses that editor Joseph North was departing for England; A. B. Magil took charge in North’s absence.
52 Sillen made the astute point that there is an imbalance between the play’s philosophical content and dramatic action, a flaw that Miller was able to address in his later plays. See Samuel Sillen, “Three New Broadway Plays Add Little to Season’s Total,” Daily Worker, 2 December 1944, 11.
53 Alan M. Wald interview with Norman Rosten, September 1992, New York, N.Y.
54 J. B. M., “The Truth Is Political,” New Masses, 11 September 1945, 21.
55 Isidor Schneider, “Probing Writers’ Problems,” New Masses, 23 October 1945, 22.
56 Ibid., 22–25.
57 Albert Maltz, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?,” New Masses, 12 February 1946, 19–22.
58 Isidor Schneider, “Background to Error,” New Masses, 12 February 1946, 23–25.
59 The events are summarized most sympathetically in Jack Salzman, Albert Maltz (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 85–95. A listing of most of the contributions to the debate can be found in Lee Baxandall, ed., Marxism and Aesthetics: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 174–76.
60 “Between Ourselves,” New Masses, 26 March 1946, 2; ibid., 2 April 1946, 2.
61 Ibid., 9 April 1946, 2; ibid., 16 April 1946, 2.
62 Ibid., 23 April 1946, 2.
63 These included James Allen, Herbert Aptheker, Richard O. Boyer, Lloyd Brown, Howard Fast, Charles Humboldt, V. J. Jerome, Albert Kahn, and Charles Keller. See “Just a Minute,” New Masses, 26 March 1946, 2.
64 “Between Ourselves,” New Masses, 30 April 1946, 2.
65 Arnaud D’Usseau, “The Theater as a Weapon,” New Masses, 25 June 1946, 15–18.
66 “Theater” and “The Forrest: Another Comment,” New Masses, 7 January 1947, 26–27.
67 Isidor Schneider, “All My Sons,” New Masses, 18 February 1947, 28–29.
68 Charles Humboldt, “Taking Stock,” New Masses, 13 January 1948, 18.
69 In the early 1950s Miller defended the Reverend William Howard Melish, rector of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Church, who was ousted from his position because he was an official of the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship. Melish was a neighbor of Miller’s in Brooklyn and had started a New Masses column at the same time that Matt Wayne’s was launched. See Gottfried, Arthur Miller, 160–61.
70 Two of the most important exchanges were Isidor Schneider, “Death of a Salesman,” and Samuel Sillen, “Another Viewpoint,” Masses & Mainstream, April 1949, 88–96, and Edwin Berry Burgum, “Playwriting and Arthur Miller,” Contemporary Reader, August 1953, 24–32, and Ira Wallach, “Playwright and Audience,” Contemporary Reader, February 1954, 61–64. In addition to the 1944 review by Sillen of The Man Who Had All the Luck, other Daily Worker reviews include Mike Phillips, “Letter on Arthur Miller,” Daily Worker, 1 March 1949, 12; Lee Newton, “Arthur Miller’s Hit Play,” Daily Worker, 14 February 1949, 11; Harry Miller, “The Crucible: Arthur Miller’s Best Play,” Daily Worker, 8 January 1953, 7; David Platt, “Letters to Times Assail Unfair Criticism of Miller’s Crucible,” Daily Worker, 18 February 1953, 7. In his testimony before huac, Miller referred on a number of occasions to commentary on his work in the Communist press.
71 New Masses, 6 March 1945, 27.
72 New Masses, 23 September 1947, 26.
73 Allan Crawford, “On the ‘Christian Front,”’ New Masses, 20 November 1945, 23.
74 Arthur Miller, “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?,” New Masses, 25 December 1945, 4.
75 The same point was made by contributors Albert Maltz and Norman Rosten. In contrast, Eda Lou Walton raised the matter of Pound’s sanity.
76 Miller, “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?,” 4–6.
77 Beth McHenry, “Focus Author Hopes to Make Anti-Semitism Understood,” Daily Worker, 17 April 1946, 13.
78 A successor to China Today, Amerasia was a monthly magazine that treated U.S. involvement in the Far East.
79 Frederick Vanderbilt Field, “Amerasia,” in Buhle et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left, 22. See also Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
80 On p. 183 of Timebends, Miller states that he purchased a country house in Connecticut from Jaffe in the spring of 1947, having received early news of the sale because Mary was then Jaffe’s employee. He states, “In a year or two he would be on trial for publishing without authorization.” That would place the trial in 1948 or 1949, instead of 1946. Gottfried’s Arthur Miller states on p. 113 that Mary’s employment started after Jaffe’s arrest (June 1945) and that she departed with the birth of her second child (31 May 1947).
81 See “Testimony of Arthur Miller,” 4687–88. Of All My Sons, Miller explained that “I started that play when the war was on. The Communist line during the war was that capitalists were the salt of the earth just like workers, that there would never be a strike again, that we were going to go hand in hand down the road in the future.” However, by the time the play was finally produced, “the Communist line changed back to an attack on capitalists.” Miller speculates that, had the play been produced earlier, it would “have been attacked as an anti-Communist play” by the Communist Party. Also see Miller, Timebends, 238:
The play could not have been written at all had I chosen to abide by the party line at the time, for during the war the Communists pounced on anything that would disturb national unity; strikes were out of the question, and the whole social process was to be set in amber for the duration. . . . I knew this was nonsense and that profiteering on a vast scale, for one thing, was rampant and that the high moral aims of the anti-fascist alliance, if they were to be given any reality at all, had to be contrasted to what was actually going on in society.
Miller speculates that had All My Sons appeared when the war was still going on, it would have exploded in the face of both the business community and Communists.
82 Miller also went out of his way to challenge the perception that The Man Who Had All the Luck, “seemingly a genre piece mid-America,” was unconnected to the political questions of the 1940s: “The fear of drift, more exactly a drift into some kind of fascism, lay hidden somewhere in the origins of The Man Who Had All the Luck” (Miller, Timebends, 86).
83 The name “Wayne” had primarily mass culture associations, decidedly masculine. The actor Marion Morrison had taken the pseudonym John Wayne in the 1930s because a director thought his birth name was too sissified for the future star of westerns and World War II movies. Bruce Wayne was also the alter ego of the comic book hero Batman, introduced in 1939. Possibly Miller was thinking of the Wayne County CIO Council in Michigan, which had spearheaded the militant organizing of autoworkers that had so entranced him during his University of Michigan days. Moreover, Miller customarily borrowed names of relatives, sometimes employing them ironically. Matthew was the name of his Catholic father-in-law, a man not especially sympathetic to Jews or the Left.
84 Arthur Miller, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” Jewish Life, March 1948, 9. Harold U. Ribalow refers to Miller’s remarks as a “speech,” without giving any publication sources in his introduction to an anthology of Jewish American writing, This Land, These People (New York: Beechurst Press, 1950), 4.
85 Miller, “Concerning Jews Who Write,” 9.
86 Ibid., 10.
87 Stanley J. Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 1st supplement (New York: H. H. Wilson, 1955), 609.
88 Arthur Miller, The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck (London: Methuen, 1989).
89 Edwin Seaver, ed., Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing (New York: Fischer, 1944), 556.
90 Miller, Timebends, 298.
1 Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 345.
2 “To All Intellectuals, Artists and Writers!,” The Red Spark: Bulletin of the John Reed Club of Cleveland, October 1932, 2.
3 Chester Himes, “Looking Down the Street,” Crossroad, April 1939, pages unnumbered.
4 Jo Sinclair, “Dead Man,” Crossroad, April 1939, pages unnumbered.
5 Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), and Spinoza: The Young Thinker Who Destroyed the Past (New York: Weybright and Tally, 1970).
6 Dan Levin, “The Burial,” Crossroad, April 1939, pages unnumbered.
7 Alan M. Wald interview with Lloyd Brown, October 1995, New York, N.Y. Brown remembered that African American Communist leader Pettis Perry had told him that Himes was a member of the Los Angeles branch of the Party but had been expelled by Perry on the charge of sexual harassment. Brown speculated that Himes had his revenge on Perry through the creation of the Black Communist leader Bart in the novel.
8 I have discussed The Lonely Crusade and other works of Himes in two essays: “Chester Himes (1909–1984),” in African American Writers, 2nd ed., ed. Valerie Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), 1:333–47, and “Narrating Nationalisms: Black Marxists and Jewish Communists through the Eyes of Harold Cruse,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 141–61.
9 Richard Wright, “Wasteland Uses Psychoanalysis Deftly,” PM Magazine, 17 February 1948, 8.
10 Himes wrote the following of Levin in The Quality of Hurt (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 141:
I had known Dan back in Cleveland during my WPA days, when he had been editing one of those little literary magazines to be found all over the country; and I had seen him again in New York after the war when he had been working as an instantaneous translator for the United Nations. Dan had served in the Pacific and had written one of the first war novels, which in a way was a forerunner of the Jewish writers’ treatment of the war theme which had its culmination in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Jewish writers never glorified war like the Hemingway school. Thinking of it, I remember that Dan fought in the Spanish Civil War before that and had written a short story from that experience which I will never forget. It was about a young poet in the line of prisoners to be shot by the soldiers of Franco. He wanted to write a poem to tell his story to the world.
This passage gives an indication of Himes’s faulty memory as an autobiographer: Levin was never in Spain, and Mailer’s novel preceded Mask of Glory.
11 This organization was founded in 1933 as the American League against War and Fascism.
12 Levin’s fictional re-creation of the Crossroad experience is consistent with his memory sixty years later. Certain characters bear a close resemblance to real prototypes. Milt and Agnes Bruster, for example, are based on Philip and Helen Sharnoff, relatives of Helen Buchman, who would soon become Jo Sinclair’s mentor and companion. Philip was an instructor at the Party’s Workers School, specializing in dialectical materialism, while Helen was a promising poet. During the crisis surrounding Crossroad, Philip supported Party control of the magazine and pressured Helen to do likewise. Joe Rieber was based on a Communist artist, severely crippled and deformed, who lived in the poorest African American community. The Midwesterner mirrors Crossroad . It was not intended to be a Party organ but antifascist and liberal, yet not a front. However, in Levin’s recollection, certain Communists around the magazine exhorted that it be subordinated to Party guidance. Zaddick’s insistence that the focus of the magazine be “anti-Nazis” is shattered by news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which places even greater pressure on the Communists to shape the magazine to reflect the new Party orientation. Zaddick desperately performs intellectual somersaults to please the Party, in order to avoid becoming a “renegade,” while at the same time maintaining the publication’s autonomy and not violating the trust of its non-Party supporters.
13 Dan Levin, “The Education of a True Believer” (unpublished manuscript, 1940), 22.
14 Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 3.
15 Primarily Levin had worked with Karamu House, the African American cultural center in Cleveland, and had acted in plays performed there that had antiracist themes. One such play was Stevedore; another involved a stupid white detective and a brilliant black detective of which Levin later thought he heard echoes when he read Chester Himes’s Harlem detective thrillers. See Alan M. Wald interview with Dan Levin, February 2005, New York, N.Y.
16 Earl Conrad, “Blues School of Literature,” Chicago Defender, 22 December 1945, 11.
17 People’s World, 14 August 1942, 4.
18 The review was made available to me by one of Himes’s biographers, Michel Fabre. It is noteworthy that Himes complains about Petry’s treatment of African American men.
19 Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, eds., Conversations with Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 126.
20 See the biographical summary in Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 285.
21 Letter from Chester Himes to Ruth Seid, 21 December 1945, Jo Sinclair Papers, Boston University, Boston, Mass.
22 In the first version of Wasteland, she used the name Ruth instead of Judy; the novel was written in 1943 and was published almost unrevised.
23 She apparently softened her view of her father over time; the portrait of the father underwent five rewritings in Changelings and became increasingly sympathetic.
24 Jo Sinclair, “Noon Lynching,” New Masses, 22 September 1936, 16–18.
25 Albert Stevens, “A Wasteland of Distorted Humans,” Daily Worker, 28 April 1946, 9.
26 Alfred Goldsmith, “Troubled Journey,” New Masses, 2 April 1946, 25–26.
27 Jo Sinclair, The Changelings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 34.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 33.
30 Ibid., 34.
31 Ibid., 135.
32 Ibid., 197.
33 Ibid., 280.
34 Ibid.
35 George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), 308.
36 Ibid., 317.
37 Ibid., 316.,
38 Sinclair, The Changelings, 199.