1

LLOYD L. BROWN: BLACK FIRE IN THE COLD WAR

The trouble with Negro literature, far from being the alleged “preoccupation” with Negro material, is that it has not been Negro enough.

—LLOYD BROWN, “WHICH WAY FOR THE NEGRO WRITER?”

ON FEBRUARY 20, 1962, in the vicinity of Forty-Third Street and Broadway in Manhattan, two FBI special agents approached the activist and writer Lloyd Brown, seeking his cooperation in their investigation of communist writers and artists. According to one of the entries in Brown’s extensive Freedom of Information file, the agents identified themselves and asked if they could discuss “certain matters of apparent mutual interest” about the “communist conspiracy.” By this time the openly communist Brown had become outraged by the attempts of the FBI to interview him and stated that he was not going to discuss anything with the FBI until he, along with the rest of the Negro race, got his freedom. He told the agents that they should be down South investigating “the deplorable conditions under which negroes [sic] must live.” In their report of Brown’s response, the agents described what must have seemed to them like a strangely incongruous reaction:

BROWN ignored this conversation and stated, “I’m just a Mau-Mau without a spear. Go ahead, call me a ‘nigger’ everybody else does.” BROWN continued by advising the Agents to go back and tell whoever they tell that he is the meanest, rottenest s-o-b they ever met and that is the way he is going to be until he gets his freedom. [The report concluded:] In view of BROWN’s hostile attitude coupled with his expressed obsession with negro inequality, no recontact is contemplated at this time.

(U.S. FBI, Lloyd Brown, 100-24616, 2-21-62; emphasis added)

FIGURE 1.1. Page from Lloyd L. Brown’s FOIA file (1962).

Source: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This encounter with the FBI agents, who continued to trail him for years even after he was no longer associated with the Communist Party, was typical. In all FBI attempts to interview him, he was “hostile and uncooperative,” and, though they continued to hound him at work, in the streets, and at his New York co-op, they eventually concluded that further contact would not be contemplated because “he was firm in his refusal to cooperate in any way” (U.S. FBI, Lloyd Brown, 2-23-67). Besides Brown’s fearlessness before government spies, the incident is a remarkable for another reason. It dramatizes the emphasis in Brown’s work and life on the relationship between racial injustice and political radicalism. Ten years earlier in 1951, when he published his first novel Iron City with the Marxist press Masses & Mainstream, it was so blatantly procommunist that Dalton Trumbo, one of the famously blacklisted Hollywood Ten, said that publishing that book during the Cold War was like setting a match to kerosene. For Brown, however, the novel’s radicalism was not only in its normalization of communists but in its challenge to 1950s neoconservatism, which urged black writers to abandon race matters, racial themes, and social protest. In the same year as Iron City, Brown published his manifesto on black literature, also in Masses & Mainstream. The two-part essay “Which Way for the Negro Writer?” also argues vehemently for black writers to resist conservative attempts to mainstream black writing and eliminate racial protest. Brown published at least twenty-four essays and reviews in Masses & Mainstream, covering every aspect of black culture from jazz to civil rights to racism in psychoanalysis.¹ Between 1948 and 1952, as the journal’s editor, he reviewed nearly every major book written by a black writer, including Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947), Saunders Redding’s Stranger and Alone (1950), William Demby’s Beetlecreek (1950), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953). Strangely for such a prolific and observant reviewer, Brown never wrote about Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1950s publications, even though her writing is easily as politically radical as his. In his reviews Brown continually castigated black writers for what he considered their “contempt for the working class,” their “Red-baiting,” and their focus on pathology in black culture. During his tenure in the 1950s as an editor at Masses & Mainstream, that journal published more articles by and about black writers than any other journal except for black ones, bragging in their 1952 Black History Month issue about the number of black writers in their pages.² Brown even shows up in the correspondence of two of his public antagonists, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, though, quite unexpectedly, they found themselves on his side.³ Brown might very well have claimed the taunt he threw at his FBI investigators as the signature of his life and work: he was indeed a Mau Mau rebel, not with a spear but with his pen.

Brown was such a ubiquitous presence in literary, cultural, and political circles in the 1950s that it is hard to account for his absence from contemporary black literary history on grounds other than his left-wing politics. In my correspondence with Brown, dating from 1996 until his death in 2003, his letters describe close friendships with Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Freedomways editor Esther Jackson—leftists all, but also, like Brown, often excised from the main currents in the African American and American literature and culture they actually helped create. Brown’s literary friendships and collaborations, which are important records of African American literary history, have almost never been documented.⁴

Throughout the 1950s, Brown worked closely with Paul Robeson on the newspaper Freedom, reputedly ghostwriting many of the columns attributed to Robeson. He was also something of a ghost in Langston Hughes’s life. He made a special effort to support Hughes when Hughes was under attack by Senator McCarthy’s investigative committee, writing a rebuttal to a negative review of Hughes’s work by James Baldwin in the New York Times (Brown 1959), but he always kept their “underground friendship” off the record so as not to conflict with Hughes’s precarious peace with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Iron City was published, Hughes telephoned to say how much he liked it and that he was sure that ten years earlier it would have been a Book-of-the-Month selection. Hughes never wrote anything about the novel publicly, though he felt that Iron City’s character Henry Faulcon and Brown’s own Jesse B. Simple were close kin. In 1959, when Hughes’s Selected Poetry was published, Hughes phoned Brown to say that he wished he could dedicate the book to him. Instead he sent a copy with this private dedication on the flyleaf: “Especially for Lloyd Brown—these 30 years (+) of poetry—Sincerely, Langston Hughes.”⁵ Brown’s procommunist politics have made it easy for critics to dismiss him. He is almost totally absent from contemporary versions of African American literary history, never cited as an influential ancestor, his writings nearly always dismissed as communist propaganda.⁶ But I make special mention of these ghostlike appearances of Lloyd Brown in African American literary circles to establish that in the 1950s, even as a spectral presence, he managed to play a major role in black cultural production.

This chapter seeks to reestablish Brown’s significance as both novelist and cultural critic and to show that CP aesthetics were, for him as for many radical leftists, ultimately more liberating than limiting. Writing from the Left, outside of the confines of the Jim Crow literary and cultural establishments, and with the institutional and creative support of the Party, Brown had the freedom to reject mainstream literary mandates that tried to restrict representations of black subjectivity. In direct opposition to the assimilationist rhetoric of the integration period, left-wing activists and artists like Brown challenged the very structures that defined the limits of integration, exposing the terms of analysis that made black writers into the “Other” and black writing into “The Problem.” In his powerful and almost totally unknown 1951 essay-manifesto “Which Way for the Negro Writer?” he insisted that the crusade of the black neocons in the 1950s to unblack the Negro in literature and to aim for acceptance in the mainstream was not simply an aesthetic agenda but a response to Cold War manipulations that exerted as much ideological pressure on these writers as some claimed the Communist Party had on its members.

While the canonical black texts of the 1940s and 1950s—Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. Saunders Redding’s Stranger and Alone, Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade, and Willard Motley’s We Fished All Night—portray the Party as a deceptive and manipulative organization using the Negro for its own opportunistic ends, Brown portrayed his communist characters as positive forces in their communities. Brown also had Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas in mind when he wrote Iron City. The three politically informed working-class intellectuals—Faulcon, Zachary, and Harper, and the working-class Lonnie James—the collective protagonists of Iron City—were deliberately fashioned in opposition to the murderous, illiterate Bigger Thomas and meant to stand as the more representative black proletariat of the 1940s.⁷ By putting Lloyd Brown’s Iron City in dialogue with Richard Wright’s Native Son, I show how the focus on Wright as the major figure on the Left distorts and minimizes the political and aesthetic value of communist influence on black literary production. In contrast to Wright, Brown embraced formal experimentation, fashioning Iron City out of the materials of leftist culture—documentary texts, 1930s proletarian drama, black folk culture, and even surrealism. Precisely because Brown remained faithful to the Communist Party and objected so publicly and articulately to any retreat from politically engaged art, he compels us to question those erasures that enabled this highly political decade in U.S. history to become depoliticized in contemporary African American literary and cultural histories.

LLOYD BROWN IN BLACK AND LEFTIST CULTURAL CIRCLES: “WHICH WAY FOR THE NEGRO WRITER?”

While Brown may have been ignored and marginalized by post-1950s literary critics, as editor and writer for New Masses between 1947 and 1953, he was a known quantity in the 1950s black and left-wing literary world. Between 1947 and 1954, Brown published more than twenty-five articles and reviews covering black literature, civil rights, race, and international issues.⁸ But it was his critique of the Atlanta University–published black cultural journal Phylon that put him in the crosshairs of the 1950s black literary establishment. In the winter of 1950, Brown read the literary symposium that appeared in the December issue of Phylon, which contained one respondent after another suggesting that fiction featuring racial issues, black characters, or black settings could not be “universal.” For Brown the symposium was a rejection of blackness in exchange for the promises of integration: “It was a challenge to everything I believed in. It was as though they were trying to wipe us out. I’m all for integration, but only if it’s on the basis of equality.”⁹ The Phylon editors had sent out a questionnaire to twenty-three prominent black writers and academics, asking them to respond to several—clearly leading—questions:

(1) Are there any aspects of the life of the Negro in America which seem deserving of franker, or deeper, or more objective treatment? (2) Does current literature by and about Negroes seem more or less propagandistic than before? (3) Would you agree with those who feel that the Negro writer, the Negro as subject, and the Negro critic and scholar are moving toward an “unlabeled” future in which they will be measured without regard to racial origin and conditioning?

(Atlanta University and Clark Atlanta University 1950)

Questions one and two were throwaways; what the Phylon editors most wanted to hear about was that “unlabeled future,” which they believed would usher in the racial millennium.

In what the editors called “a mid-century assessment of black literature,” Phylon devoted a special issue to the responses of twenty-three writers and educators to the questionnaire. The most well known were Gwendolyn Brooks, Hugh Gloster, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Alain Locke, Margaret Walker, George Schuyler, Sterling Brown, William Gardner Smith, and J. Saunders Redding. The most prominent absent voices included four well-known leftists: Ernest Kaiser, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Paul Robeson; the one excommunist Richard Wright; and the communists Lloyd Brown and Abner Berry. Twelve of the twenty-three that were included were college professors, eleven of them on the faculty of major black universities. Ira De A. Reid, the chair of the Department of Social Science at Haverford College, was the only black professor at a predominantly white school. The symposium responses range from the archconservatism of Gloster, a professor at Hampton Institute, to Walker’s subtle left-wing radicalism, to a postmodernist poem by Hayden that critiqued the racial essentializing of the symposium.¹⁰ The conservative voices in this issue are worth special attention because they were in the ascendancy in the early 1950s and because they became the grounds for Brown’s attack.

Picking up on the direction of the third question, Gloster said unequivocally that the focus on “racial subject matter” had handicapped the Negro writer, retarded his “cosmic grasp of varied experiences,” diminished his philosophical perspective, and lured him into “cultural segregation.” He praised writers like Richard Wright for transcending the color line by identifying Bigger Thomas with “underprivileged youth of other lands and races,” and he heralded Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry for producing novels with no black characters. Like many of the respondents, Gloster singled out Willard Motley for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door, about an Italian youth, which, he said, “[lifts] his work to the universal plane by representing humanity through an Italian boy.” As if gender somehow transcended race, Gloster praised Gwendolyn Brooks and Petry for dealing with women’s issues, which he said are not racial matters, since they deal with such womanly concerns as “passion, marriage, motherhood, and disillusionment in the lives of contemporary Negro women.”

Other respondents followed in Gloster’s footsteps, cautioning black writers to free themselves from their “racial chains” by not writing about black characters. The novelist and critic J. Saunders Redding urged the Negro writer to register “human” rather than “racial” values by “testing them in creatures of his own imagination who were not Negro.” Charles Nichols of Hampton Institute saw a “heartening maturity” in writers who were “not primarily concerned with Negro life” and predicted that the Negro writer was in the process of coming of age “though, happily, not as a Negro.” Even Langston Hughes, whose entire literary output could be described as culturally black, found it a “most heartening thing to see Negroes writing in the general American field, rather than dwelling on Negro themes solely,” and he too praised Willard Motley, Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, and Dorothy West for presenting “non-Negro subjects” and thereby lifting their work to a “universal plane.”

In his symposium essay, Alain Locke, the “dean” of African American letters, deployed the term “universal” eleven times, admonishing writers to achieve a “universalized particularity,” to find a way to write about race “from the universal point of view,” to write of racial life but to consider it from “the third dimension of universalized common-denominator humanity.” Full of obfuscating terms and what seems like sheer terror over being left off the “universal” bandwagon, Locke’s essay ends with the declaration that “outer tyrannies” like segregation, prejudice, racism, and the exclusion of black writers from the mainstream of American literature and publishing are so much a part of the past that they no longer pose a serious problem for the black writer. Abandoning his left-leaning politics of the 1930s, Locke insisted that the only things restricting black writers were “inner tyrannies”—“conventionality, repressions, and fears of race disloyalty.”¹¹

A telling sign of Cold War pressures and anxieties is that the symposium respondents reproduce, almost verbatim, the official State Department line that racism was “a fast-disappearing aberration, capable of being overcome by talented and motivated individuals.” The journalist Era Bell Thompson wrote that integration and full equality for blacks were so close at hand that writing about Jim Crow racism should be discarded as a relic of the past. White editors, she claimed, are only interested “in the quality of a writer’s work, not in the color of the skin, and black writers need only be ready to take advantage of these opportunities.” “White journalism,” she continued, apparently unaware of the irony of the term, “has always been open to the Negro, but never to the extent that it is today.” N. P. Tillman of Morehouse College agreed with Thompson that there was no bias in the book business: “The American reading public accepts a book by a Negro now on much the same basis as it receives a book by a white author.” The Fisk University professor Blyden Jackson wrote with blithe optimism, “All around the air resounds with calls to integrate the Negro into our national life.” Later, the poet Sterling Brown (1951, 46) would write that the Phylon group had turned integration into a “literary passing for white.”

Bear in mind that these calls from the symposium contributors to erase blackness and discover the “universal” subject are not signs of a postmodernist move toward hybridity and multiple subject identities. By minimizing racial identity and racial strife and promoting the image of a democratic and racially progressive United States, the Phylon group was offering race invisibility as a bargaining chip for American citizenship status. As Ernest Kaiser, one of the left-wing writers absent from the symposium, notes in a letter to me, the Phylon group was “moving quickly to establish its non-left credentials [in order to] maintain its financial support from the mainstream”:

You understand that the magazine doesn’t want to embarrass the College and lose its subsidy. By 1948, the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, was attacking Du Bois and Robeson. Almost all middle class black persons were becoming anti-Communist in order to save their careers. The writers who contributed to the Phylon symposium are all college professors who are also writers. They could see what was happening to very famous blacks like Du Bois and Robeson. They were not going left at that time.

In the March-April 1951 issue of Masses & Mainstream, Brown leapt into action, publishing “Which Way for the Negro Writer?” as a reply to and critique of the Phylon symposium. The essay served several purposes. It became a statement of Brown’s theory of black literature and an opportunity for him to expose the ways Cold War ideologies were producing and manipulating the work of black intellectuals. By 1950, the policing of un-American activities and ideas by HUAC was in full sway, with the Left being Red-baited and any ideas associated with the Left, including civil rights and racial equality, discredited as communistic. As early as 1947, the attorney general had begun labeling organizations primarily involved in antiracist work “subversive,” and, in hearings conducted by Truman’s Loyalty Board, “advocacy of racial equality was an official justification for heightened scrutiny” of federal employees (Biondi 2003, 140). That blackness was itself considered subversive is borne out by the rhetoric of the “un-American” investigatory committees. Anyone active in an organization concerned with social or racial reform was automatically suspect. Advocating racial equality or civil rights or even listening to a Paul Robeson recording could be grounds for having one’s loyalty questioned. Witnesses in loyalty hearings were asked such questions as “Do you think that an outspoken philosophy favoring race equality is an index of Communism?” (Caute 1978, 282). Any mixing with blacks, including interracial friendships and interracial dating, could be a sign of a communist activity. When the House Investigating Committee began in 1939 to dismantle the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project for alleged communistic tendencies, it was cited for having “mixed casts” and for having Negroes and whites dancing together (Mathews 1967, 265). To prove communist influence in the project, one witness said she had been pressured by her supervisor to date a Negro (Matthews 1967, 289). Any expression of discontent by Negroes could and would be interpreted as “the first step toward communism.” The chairman of another anticommunist investigative committee, Senator Albert Canwell of Washington, announced conclusively, “If someone insists there is discrimination against Negroes in this country … there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist” (Caute 1978, 168).

Cold War rhetoric around issues of race was constructed through a vocabulary of coded terms. “Gradualism,” “moderation,” and a focus on racial “progress” defined the “vital center’s” position on race.¹² Successful blacks like Marian Anderson and Jackie Robinson were held up as indicators of racial progress, while civil rights activity was disparaged. Walter White, the right-leaning top man at the NAACP, which was targeted by McCarthy as too cozy with communists, suggested an even more potent way to minimize the threat of blackness. In an article published in Look magazine in 1949 and reprinted in Negro Digest the same year, White advocated immediate investigation into a new scientific discovery, “monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone,” which promised to make blacks white. “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” claimed that once science perfected monobenzyl, the skin of every Negro could be changed to white. White queried hopefully, “Would not Negroes then be judged individually on their ability, energy, honesty, cleanliness as are whites?” Without even a hint of irony, White predicted that this chemical could hit society with “the impact of an atomic bomb” and conquer the color line.

None of this black-and-Red baiting surfaces explicitly in the Phylon issue, but Brown was politically wired to detect the ways that a seemingly innocuous phrase like “Negroes moving toward an ‘unlabeled future’” signaled neither “unlabeling” nor real integration but capitulation to the right-wing assault on black resistance. As an editor at a Marxist journal where these issues were being debated openly, he and his colleagues were in the direct line of fire, but they were also freer and more willing to call things by their real names.¹³ In fact, one of the reasons Brown’s Masses & Mainstream essay should be recognized as one of the central texts in African American literary history is that it so thoroughly unmasks the coded Cold War rhetoric on race.

Although Brown could often be narrow and doctrinaire in his rigid adherence to the CP line, his reply to the Phylon symposium reflects those liberatory aspects of being openly communist. “Which Way for the Negro Writer?” became the ideological counterweight to the mainstream influences that inspired such docility in the Phylon respondents. Brown began his critique by connecting the cries for a universal perspective to American imperialism and to the domination of the white ruling class who, he said, believe that “so-called inferior cultures must be re-molded to conform to the Anglo-Saxon ideal.” He insisted that “there is no contradiction between Negro subject material and Negro forms on the one hand and universality on the other” and that any notion of universality that excludes black people, black life, and black forms is simply “an acceptance of the abysmal standards of white supremacy.” In opposition to the voices clamoring to eliminate blackness, Brown wrote defiantly in his essay: “Negro literature has not been Negro enough.”

As part of his larger critical strategy, Brown’s essay presented a trenchant analysis of the racial politics of the 1950s publishing industry. As a member of the Masses & Mainstream editorial staff, he was able to draw from politically and factually informed sources about “the conditions of commodity publication.” To counter Thompson’s claims that black writers were on an equal footing with white writers, Brown argued that the production and consumption of black literature was controlled by white capitalists and therefore that black writing was subject to their categories and values. He pointed to the publishing record of the New York Times, noting that “in thirty-two pages of reviews, articles, and advertisements in the Sunday, February 4, 1950 issue of the New York Times Book Review, no work by a black writer is mentioned.” He continued: “None of the best-sellers in the Times is by a Negro, nor is there any mention of Negro writers in any of the books recommended in the Times.” In his critique of the massive 1949 three-volume Literary History of the United States,¹⁴ Masses & Mainstream’s editor, Samuel Sillen (1949), noted that “neither Negro writing nor the Negro people merit a [single] chapter in this work of eighty-one chapters.” Leveling his final attack against Phylon’s fantasy of mainstream acceptance, Brown reminded his readers that Atlanta University’s journal Phylon, in which these conservatives were announcing the new day of integration, was a segregated quarterly published at a segregated university located in a state that was represented in Congress by white segregationists.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Brown’s essay is that in it he imagined African American literature in global terms and race as an international issue. The black American writer, he said, is united in the world of imaginative literature with those “writers of socialism, national liberation, and peace” including the “immortal” Gorky, Lu Hsun of China, Neruda of Chile, O’Casey of Ireland, Hikmet of Turkey, Guillen of Cuba, Nexo of Denmark, Aragon and Eluard of France—leftist writers he considered giants of the earth. In “What I Saw in Mexico,” a report for Masses & Mainstream on his trip to the American Continental Congress for Peace in Mexico in 1949, Brown was one of the first to cite the “the two Americas,” noting that, despite the number of Negroes in Latin America, the people of the Spanish-speaking Americas have been strangers to blacks in the United States. Struck by how a conservative cultural mainstream had managed to deny the internationalism of black writing, he contended that at the moment when the attention of the whole world was focused upon “Negro oppression and struggle in our country,” black writers were being accused of writing about “‘narrow racial issues’ or minority questions,” when in reality, he reminded the Phylon readers and respondents, these are the subjects that are “bound up with world issues.”¹⁵

“HELL IN PITTSBURGH”: THE MAKING OF IRON CITY

As ideologically grounded as Brown was, he did not simply craft a communist version of black culture out of political pressure or from the CP’s black nation thesis. Both he and Wright were black nation advocates, adhering for a time to that central tenet of the CPUSA, which from 1928 until 1935 declared blacks a national minority whose culture should be represented positively by communist and leftist writers. The Party’s black nation thesis was eventually rejected by black writers as unrealistic, but its respect and support for black culture was a needed antidote to the pressures black writers faced in the 1950s to abandon black characters and racial themes.

Unlike Wright’s experiences with a brutal Jim Crow, Brown absorbed an affirming sense of black culture from his early years in a black old folks’ home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Born in St. Paul in 1913, the son of an African American father and a German American mother, Brown and his brother and sisters were sent to an orphanage by their father after their mother’s death, when Brown was four. Because of the meager social services for blacks in St. Paul, the segregated Crispus Attucks Old Folks Home in St. Paul doubled as an orphanage. Listening to the ex-enslaved people sing spirituals and tell stories, these orphaned and quasi-orphaned Northern children heard the songs, tales, and sayings of black rural Southern folk for the first time, and Brown’s early knowledge of black folk culture came largely from these elderly people, whose warmth and caring was a source of tender nurturing he never forgot. The residents of the home recognized early on that he was an extremely intelligent child and encouraged and doted on him. Though poverty and segregation existed at the home, there was none of the terror of lynching and the life-threatening forms of Southern discrimination that Wright, in contrast, experienced growing up in Mississippi. Brown encountered black folk culture in a distilled form, dissociated from the material conditions of the Jim Crow South. His earliest encounter with black folk culture, filtered through the imaginative recounting of the elders at the orphanage, was subsequently honed in the crucible of Marxist-communist ideology and reconstructed in his fiction as a source of collective strength, humor, and defiance (Nelson 2001).

Though Iron City retains the sensibility of these early childhood experiences in a black community, the idea for Brown’s first novel came directly from his years as an organizer in Pittsburgh and with his seven-month incarceration in the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh in 1941 for trying to get communists on the ballot. The Party sent Brown to Pittsburgh because it was one of the centers of the steel industry and, as home to immigrants from Slavic countries who were sympathetic to the Left, fertile ground for union organizing. Pittsburgh also attracted the attention of HUAC. Unlike Comrade Wright, who entered the Party in 1932 via the John Reed Club, which he joined in order to become a writer (Fabre 1993, 103), Comrade Brown joined the Party in 1929, via the worker-oriented Young Communist League, to become an organizer, and, by the time he became a published writer, he was a seasoned Party operative. A devoted CP member until he left the Party in the mid-1950s, Brown did union organizing in Connecticut and Ohio in the 1930s and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1933 on behalf of the Scottsboro Nine. He was particularly dedicated to organizing garment industry workers in New Jersey and Connecticut, mainly young women who were being paid very low wages because they worked outside of the unionized areas of New York. One of his first activities in New Haven was organizing a strike of young, mostly Italian women at the Lesnow Shirt Factory where, Brown reported with a certain pride in their gallantry, the fathers and brothers of these women would not allow the women to picket and instead walked the picket line for their wives and sisters.

Brown’s organizing work in Pittsburgh in the 1940s established his reputation as a writer and a radical. He set Iron City in Pittsburgh, which, in the 1940s, was the manufacturing home of Iron City beer and the center of the steel industry, with a reputation for union organizing. By 1947 the HUAC witch-hunt had begun in earnest in Pittsburgh, and as the Cold War historian David Caute (1978, 216) writes, Pittsburgh became “the violent epicenter of the anti-Communist eruption in postwar America” and a “hell” for radicals. In 1948 one common scare tactic used against organizers was printing the names of people who had signed a petition to nominate the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace for president in the major Pittsburgh newspapers, insinuating that both candidate and supporters were communists. The conservative and anticommunist Catholic Trade Unionists defeated the more radical United Electrical Workers Union, and by 1950, HUAC began the trials at which the notorious FBI informant Matt Cvetic (who was the model for the informant in the novel and eponymous film I Was a Communist for the FBI) implicated hundreds of people who were then expelled from their unions and fired from their jobs (Caute 1978, 216). While Iron City is set in the 1940s, a decade before Pittsburgh’s major anticommunist purge, the literary historian James Smethurst (2004) reminds us that its depiction of communists as the defenders of minorities, as union activists, and as men and women of integrity is also a response to the attacks on progressives and leftists who were gaining traction in Pittsburgh in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Brown clearly wanted Iron City to represent both the Party’s power as well as the anticommunist attack, a reminder that Pittsburgh as “hell” for radical leftists cut two ways: as the historian Philip Jenkins (1999, 17–43) argues, the Communist Party in Pittsburgh attracted “hell” because it was especially creative, productive, well organized, and poised to become a serious political force.¹⁶

Brown went to trial on August 30, 1940, for distributing leaflets on behalf of progressive and communist candidates, sentenced to four months and a fine of $200, and was sent along with his comrades to the Allegheny County Jail where, according to both him and his FOIA file, he began tutoring “his seventeen fellow Communist party members” in American history and English (U.S. FBI, Lloyd Brown, 100-672, 10-9-42). While in jail Brown also met, befriended, and formed a defense committee for William Jones, a young black man on death row accused of murder. With their networks on the outside, including their wives, the jailed communists fought for a new trial for Jones and won three stays of execution, though they finally lost. Jones was sent to the electric chair on November 24, 1941 (Brown 1952).

Brown’s experiences defending Jones in the Pittsburgh jail became the basis of Iron City. Set in the Allegheny County Jail, Iron City focuses on three black communists—Paul Harper, Isaac Zachary, and Henry Faulcon—convicted under the Smith Act, just as Brown and his friends were, for violating election laws when they tried to get communist candidates on the ballot.¹⁷ The three begin a friendship with a fourth man, Lonnie James, framed by the police and sentenced to death for murder. The three black communists—each an ordinary, working-class black man brought to the Party by a desire for social, political, and racial justice—form the collective protagonist of the novel. Harper is from Cleveland, a high-school dropout working at a factory during the Depression and caring for an invalid father while educating himself by devouring library books, just as Lloyd Brown did. Zachary is a former railroad worker who migrates north when Southern white unionists start a race war to force black men off railroad jobs. Faulcon, another Southern migrant modeled on Langston Hughes’s Simple character, works as a dining-room waiter and is radicalized as he tries to court the churchgoing Lucy Jackson, a political organizer working on the Scottsboro case. Convinced of Lonnie’s innocence, the three communists, with the help of their wives, organize a Scottsboro-like defense committee to save Lonnie’s life. Published privately by Masses & Mainstream Press, Iron City was sold through subscriptions, not in stores or by book clubs, which allowed Brown even more room to assert his radical ideas. But even within the relative safety of the Left, Iron City generated controversy. Some Masses & Mainstream subscribers sent the novel back and cancelled their subscriptions in fear of having a left-wing book in their possession (Bonosky 2007).

THE LIVING NEWSPAPER AS MODERNIST SOURCE

As unlikely as it might seem for a doctrinaire communist like Brown, who objected to the “surrealist horror” of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 modernist novel Invisible Man, Brown’s political radicalism actually led him to explore a range of formal experimentations in Iron City. Notwithstanding the claims of the literary critic Arnold Rampersad that Marxism and modernism don’t mix, Brown found radical politics and formal experimentation—as long as the latter could advance his radicalism—entirely compatible. In true modernist fashion, Brown (1949b), for example, took issue with the left-wing jazz historian Sidney Finkelstein, who claimed that jazz would have to progress from a “largely unwritten form” to “the more ambitious forms made possible by musical composition.” Brown argued for the importance of modernist improvisation, insisting that “jazz is full of surprises” and he feared what would happen to jazz if “notes and bars” replaced Lester Young’s “winged saxophone.” In his literary productions, Brown was less consciously modernist, but he was inspired by the left-wing literary and theatrical experiments of the 1930s Left, including the Living Newspapers of the 1930s, Popular Front documentary techniques, as well as the CP’s black belt thesis, which encouraged the use of black vernacular forms. Inventing his own idiosyncratic form of literary modernism in his first novel Iron City, Brown crafted a novel that the cultural critic Stacy Morgan (2004, 248) calls “a hybrid product of documentary impulses and modernist literary influences,” showing that the protest novel could be a flexible, innovative form, one not inexorably tied to the prescriptions of social realism.¹⁸

Brown readily acknowledged borrowing Living Newspaper techniques for the construction of Iron City: “No doubt I was influenced by the documentary character of WPA artistic expressions in the Thirties, such as the popular Living Theater productions which based drama on current events.”¹⁹ More than any of his other borrowings, the 1930s left-wing cultural production called the Living Newspapers was Brown’s primary influence. An offshoot of the Living Theatre developed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to put large numbers of unemployed actors to work during the Depression, the Living Newspaper was a kind of a traveling political theater, a multimedia spectacle that dramatized current events or problems as a means of provoking audiences to understand the need for action and reform of political problems (Jarvis 2000, 333). Distinctively innovative in form and intentionally theatrical, the Newspapers utilized spectacular staging techniques, including film and projection, elaborate sets, short vaudeville sketches, music, song and dance, personified characters, and actual documentary material from current newspaper stories and political debates. Because of the huge casts—there were often more than two hundred actors in a production—stage directions were elaborate and at times confusing. During some performances, a character representing the “common man” would come out of the audience and demand answers to a complex situation, like decreasing military spending in order to finance public housing, and he would then be given information about causes and possible solutions. Like those that originated during the Russian Revolution of 1919, first produced by the Red Army with troupes of actors performing stories from newspapers, the WPA’s Living Newspapers tried to reproduce the spirit of revolt that was carried out in the innovative forms and the revolutionary content of these Red Army productions (McDermott 1965).

One of the most successful Living Newspapers, entitled One-Third of a Nation, produced in both New York and Philadelphia by the Federal Theatre, dramatized the problems of slum housing, its title referring to the “one-third of the nation” affected by poor housing. The set for One-Third of a Nation featured a gigantic cross-section of a tenement building, which was made to collapse on the tenants at each performance and was so large that the stage had to be reinforced each night (Jarvis 2000, 333). Another Living Newspaper production that Brown remembers seeing in the 1930s, which I have not been able to locate, presented the debate over social security and challenged the claims of the Hearst newspaper chain that social security would deprive Americans of their identities by requiring them to wear dog tags, thereby instituting a totalitarian state.

Another defining quality of the Living Newspaper was its use of ridicule, macabre humor, and other vaudevillian techniques to spotlight social problems. One Living Newspaper, Stars and Bars, which depicted the problem of black slum housing, featured a personified Death leading Syphilis, Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, and Infant Mortality in a macabre waltz until the four diseases snatch the black children from their parents’ arms and toss them offstage into the audience. Liberty Deferred, written by Abram Hill and John Silvera, one of only three Living Newspapers by African American playwrights, was never produced, probably because its racial focus was considered too controversial. It featured two couples from Manhattan, one white and one black, touring the United States to learn about black history.

FIGURE 1.2. One-Third of a Nation poster (1938).

Source: Living Newspapers of the WPA.

While touring Manhattan island, they learn and argue about the history and current status of African Americans, while observing almost forty scenes covering the early slave trade, the economics of tobacco and cotton production, constitutional and congressional debates on slavery, Denmark Vesey’s revolt, abolitionism, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, the Dred Scott case, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and African Americans in the armed forces in World War I.

(Nadler 1995, 619)

Most of Liberty Deferred is representational but the ending is entirely surrealistic: a huge map of the United States appears, “covered with little doors—one for each state—out of which actors’ heads pop, in blackface for the segregated states, and in white for the others” (Nadler 1995, 619). Then, a character named Jim Crow steps out of the scenes and into the frame with the two couples in order to demonstrate to them that his power to segregate extends even to New York City. In a scene called “Lynchotopia,” lynching victims are “graded by the egregiousness of the violations of their constitutional rights,” and the winner is the one who is dragged to death across state lines.²⁰

It is critical to note this relationship between Iron City and these 1930s leftist cultural forms because those forms supplied both a form and a sensibility for Brown’s novel not ordinarily associated with the social realism of 1940s black writers. As Stacy Morgan (2004, 41) writes, Brown’s contemporaries—Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, William Attaway, and Margaret Walker—were deeply skeptical about the possibilities for black Americans in the U.S. capitalistic structure and represented the national landscape as “littered with irreparably fractured American dreams.” But Iron City took on the spirit of those improvisatory leftist cultural forms. Sprinkled throughout Iron City, often unmediated by the narrative voice, are “documentary” pieces of evidence that require interpretation by the reader: newspaper clippings, passages from a chamber of commerce brochure, radio broadcasts, political pamphlets, taped voices from a prison wiretap, prison regulations, a script of prisoners’ voices, and even an extended postmodernist parody of Native Son that debunks the “scientific” claims for the authenticity of its portrayals of the black underclass. There are direct historical references to the Cold War, including the Smith Act and Red-baiting. The “conversion” stories of the three communists dramatically reenact African American labor and radical history. At one point in the novel, the narrator, like the “Everyman” of the Living Newspaper, directly addresses one of the ex-prisoners and retells the story of a mass lynching that actually took place in Georgia in 1946. Finally, Iron City’s utopian ending, a nonrepresentational surreal dream of Judgment Day that combines a socialist labor rally with an African American Pentecostal picnic, represents the twin urges of Brown’s novel—one toward experimentation and one toward Communist Party aesthetics, both marshaled in support of black cultural agency.

IRON CITY’S MODERNIST REVISIONS

Two “documentary” scenes in Iron City—the railroad story and the story of a mass lynching in Georgia in 1946—illustrate the political and aesthetic effects of Brown’s modernist adaptations. Like the multiple levels of the Newspaper, the railroad story told by Isaac Zachary (called Zach), a railroad worker and union man, merges autobiographical narrative, blues songs, black biblical stories, a historically based labor history, and a communist conversion narrative, all enabling Brown to transform Zach’s personal tale into a collective history of black workers. In the first scene, Zach is confined to solitary for refusing to allow a racist guard to touch him. As he sits in the dark hole of solitary, the imagined sound of a switch-engine takes him back to his life in the South and to his dreams of becoming a railroad man. As Zach’s vernacular voice merges with the third-person narration, the narrative recounts his climb up the railroad hierarchy from “call boy” to engine wiper, brakeman, and finally fireman, a position of partnership with the always white engineer. Like a Greek chorus, the men in the roundhouse interject warnings to Zach about the dangers of his ambitions: “No son, not so long as your skin is black. And just remember this as long as you’re black and live in Mississippi: there’s three main things Cap’n Charlie won’t ’low you to do, and that’s mess with his women, vote in the elections, or drive a railroad train” (Brown 1951, 153). Ignoring these warnings, Zach climbs up the ladder to become a fireman, still with a “crazy ambition to be an engineer,” until white workers set off a “strange and secret war” in Mississippi and other parts of the South (a war that lasted from 1931 to 1934 and was never covered in the newspapers), literally assassinating black men who refuse to leave their railroad jobs. Zach continues to fight until he is shot, and with the death of his dream of black equality in railroad work, he and his wife Annie Mae go north to the coal and steel town of Kanesport, up the river from Iron City. During the 1932 presidential elections, when the choice is between “one fat-faced and grim in his high choking collar, the other lean and smiling at his coming victory,” someone slips Zach the poster of a white man and black man running for president and vice president of the United States. The two candidates, William Z. Foster and James W. Ford, who in fact ran on the Communist Party ticket in 1932, represent the interracial dream of brotherhood Zach could not find on the railroad. Zach’s Marxist labor history conversion story ends with an image of the Glory Train, now the Communist Party Express, with equal accommodations for all people, headed for the Promised Land.

This fictionalized account of the history of black railroad workers is also a historical document, which is corroborated by Eric Arnesen in Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. By 1900, Arnesen writes, “blacks constituted the majority of firemen, brakemen, and yard switchmen on the Gulf Coast lines; they made up some 90 percent on the Seaboard Air line and the majority of such positions on some divisions of the Illinois Central, the Southern, and the L&N railroads in the South,” and from the 1890s to roughly 1930, they outnumbered whites as locomotive firemen on Georgia’s railroads, “holding 60 percent or more of these positions” (2002, 24–25). Confirming Zach’s story, Arnesen says that blacks were barred from white unions and from most skilled positions as white workers campaigned for restrictions against black workers. But blacks, ironically, achieved seniority and competence in positions that whites had disdained—as brakemen and firemen. When jobs became scarce, white workers were outraged that blacks were working while whites were being laid off, and they declared a race war, attacking trains staffed by black workers and setting off a wave of assassinations of black firemen and brakemen in the South that resulted in at least the deaths of ten blacks. This racist war against black railroad men meant that until the early 1970s, blacks were eliminated from all but the most menial railroad jobs despite years of demonstrated competence in railroad work. Arnesen makes a specific note about Brown’s attentiveness to historical detail in Iron City, writing that the “novelist Lloyd Brown wrote accurately of Mississippi black firemen” (2002, 120).

If the integrationist discourse of the 1950s defined identity in personal terms, giving priority to the individual and to a hopeful view of U.S. democracy, Brown’s railroad story is rooted in the militant civil rights discourse of the 1940s, which gave priority to a collective vision that emphasized class consciousness and a struggle against economic racism. In contrast to the familiar trope of the racist railroad journey in African American literature that generally takes place in the interior of the train, the train story in Iron City occurs outside the train car and reveals a history of black agency and black achievement rather than black humiliation and limitation. The original context for the interior train journey, provided by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, was the aborted journey of the almost-white Homer Plessy, who argued his right to a first-class seat on a Louisiana streetcar. Similar railroad scenes occur in Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, W. E. B Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, Ralph Ellison’s 1940s short story “Boy on a Train,” Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, and more recently James Alan McPherson’s 1998 autobiography Crabcakes. Though ultimately there is a collective meaning to these interior train stories, they initially focus on a relatively privileged individual deprived of respectability, agency, and individual rights. These fictional accounts of a Jim Crow train ride focus on attaining freedom of movement within the train as a “visible marker of social power and legitimacy” (Myers 2011, 16), as though autonomy and independence could be achieved by egalitarian seating arrangements ordered and supervised by white authority. Though we must remember the example of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Ballad of Freedom Train,” which opens with “Who’s the engineer on the Freedom Train / Can a coal black man drive the Freedom Train” (Rampersad 2002, 136), Iron City may be the only fictional text in black literary history that turns our attention to this historically absent site of black working-class labor history, where a collective and costly battle for economic mobility, equality, and dignity was waged on behalf of an entire class of black workers.

DOCUMENTING GENOCIDE, A MODERNIST TROPE

The second “documentary” scene in Iron City done in the style of the Living Newspaper begins with a direct address by a voice from the prison, probably the elderly Henry Faulcon, to Harvey “Army” Owens, who was incarcerated with the three communists for larceny and failure to pay alimony, a sentence that is eventually commuted so that Army can be drafted into World War II. Assuming the voice of the Everyman character of the Living Newspaper, Faulcon directly addresses Army in a three-page eulogy that predicts the events of Army’s life after he leaves prison: Army will leave the war decorated with ribbons and medals and will go south to marry his sweetheart, whose sister will marry his best friend. After a double wedding ceremony, the two couples will make their way back home to live in a little town in Georgia where, some years later, on a warm spring night, a mob of white men will confront them on the road, drag them out of their car, line them up, and shoot all four at point-blank range, leaving their bodies so mutilated that they have to be buried in closed coffins at a quadruple funeral. All of this is reported in a stream of consciousness, the narrator literally spilling out the words without stopping as if overwhelmed by the savagery of the murders, the helplessness of the victims, and the chilling inevitability of Southern race terror:

It is nothing but a little old town and before you know it you can walk into the country and the road is springy and the stars are big and heavy and the night is warm and young like the way you feel and your buddy and his wife a few steps behind just a-giggling about some secret they got but you and your wife got your own secrets too and you don’t have to study none about them. Then it will be four cars stopping when the headlights find you and the white men getting out and you saying you ain’t done nothing wrong but they got shotguns and they’ll line you up in the ditch and kill you. Four shotguns with both barrels. You and your wife and her sister and your buddy, and the red clay will be redder where your bodies are found…. Your funeral, Harvey, is going to be “bigger even than the double-wedding was.”

(1951, 218)

By the end of the eulogy, the narrative voice has become a collective narrator whose relationship to Army is now familial: “Goodby, Harvey Owens. We were proud to know you, son.”²¹

These two vignettes—Zach’s railroad history and Army’s lynching—serve different yet complementary functions in Iron City. Zach’s story becomes a lesson in both the possibility of interracial worker solidarity and the recurrence of class antagonisms. Army’s elegiac story serves two purposes: first to expose Southern white racism and second to point to the left-wing intertext, We Charge Genocide, which is Brown’s source for Army’s story. The lynching of four sharecroppers, Mr. and Mrs. Roger Malcolm [sic] and Mr. and Mrs. George Dorsey, which took place in Monroe, Alabama, on the evening of July 25, 1946, was reported in We Charge Genocide, a 225-page petition signed by nearly one hundred people and submitted to the United Nations in 1951 by two prominent left-leaning black intellectuals: Paul Robeson and William Patterson. Robeson led a delegation to submit the petition to the United Nations in New York, and the Civil Rights Congress head Patterson, a ranking member of the CPUSA, presented it to the United Nations in Paris. Declaring that racial violence against Negroes fit the UN definition of genocide, We Charge Genocide was part of the Left’s effort to use international pressure to expose U.S. racism. The text immediately became an embarrassing narrative for the U.S. government, which tried vigorously to get well-known black leaders to denounce it. There are two contemporary documentaries about the 1946 quadruple lynching: Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America by Laura Wexler and Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement, by John Egerton, both testifying, as Wexler puts it, that lynching was not obsolescent in the 1940s. Though Egerton’s book includes the testimony from a man who claims that as a young boy he had witnessed the lynching back in 1946 and was terrorized into keeping silent until he was fifty-six years old, that claim is disputed by Wexler. What is even more stunning about the quadruple lynching is that it seems to have disappeared from history, even though it was widely condemned in 1946 and 1947, with protests across the country, including a rally of five thousand people in Madison Square Garden. Army’s story does not end in greater consciousness but with the potency of Southern racial terror reaffirmed by the extreme isolation and vulnerability of four young lynched black bodies, thus becoming Iron City’s cautionary tale for those blacks that exist outside of the parameters of an organized workers’ movement. Brown’s deliberate juxtaposition of these two vignettes, both rooted in actual events, leads to and confirms his ultimate purpose, which is to imagine black workers harnessing their skills—along with the strength, vitality, and dignity of black culture—to the powerful organizational engine of the Communist Party.

IRON CITY’S BATTLE ROYALE WITH NATIVE SON

Brown’s parody of Native Son was motivated by both a modernist playfulness and an antimodernist skepticism of psychology and psychoanalysis, and probably also because Wright’s portrait of the brutal and illiterate Bigger Thomas supplied the perfect target for Brown.²² Brown’s attack on Wright in Iron City begins with a satirical rewriting of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s preface to the first edition of Native Son. Canfield Fisher, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee member and a Quaker liberal, was assigned to write the preface, apparently without Wright’s approval. In an attempt to psychologically diagnose the black underclass, she compares Bigger Thomas and his family to sheep and rats in a psychological experiment, concluding that “Negro minority youth,” frustrated and angered by American racism, exhibit similar behavior patterns—becoming either a neurotic rat like Bigger or, like his mother and sister, acquiescent and downtrodden sheep. According to Canfield, these psychological experiments show that “personality deficiencies in Negro youth” are the result of living in one’s own “intimate” culture, where acceptable standards of behavior are not developed, a view of black culture that Wright replicated in the novel. The resulting pathology can then be considered a self-inflicted wound, a “personality deficiency,” not the effects of a racist society.²³

In Iron City, Harper, Zachary, and Faulcon, the same kind of black proletarians who were the subjects of Canfield’s investigations, began an extended riff ridiculing the Canfield preface. Harper tells the other two men about an article in the Sunday American covering a lecture by the “noted lecturer and sociologist” Richard Canfield that illustrates the causes of black delinquency. As in the original Canfield preface, Richard Can-field claims that laboratory experiments with sheep and rats show how the animals become frantic, confused, and pathological Bigger Thomases when their basic needs are thwarted. The three men then begin referring to themselves ironically as rats and sheep. Faulcon says that Brotherhood Week will have to be changed to Be Kind to Animals Week. The narrator joins in the signifying by calling Lonnie a wild rat meeting with a visitor. Brown says very explicitly in “Which Way for the Negro Writer?” that this kind of black humor is “ironic” and “ambiguous,” with “a subtle and sly quality that depends for its effect upon a common understanding that comes from common experience and outlook,” and, signifying on Richard Wright, he says it is always absent from the “lifeless, abject Negro-Victim caricature” (1951b, 56).

Brown’s undermining of Native Son is most clearly seen in his construction of the character of Lonnie James. As a highly intelligent working-class man framed by racist police, Lonnie possesses the qualities Brown felt Wright had denied Bigger, including a sophisticated understanding of the criminal justice system and a resistant spirit. In contrast to Bigger, who sits in the courtroom with his head bowed, deeply grateful to his communist lawyer “Mr. Max,” Lonnie stubbornly refuses his white lawyer’s attempts to make him plead guilty. “After what I’ve been through I’m not thankful about anything. Not a damn thing, you hear me? And I aint going to plead guilty—not for you and not for anybody else.” To further emphasize Lonnie as the anti–Bigger Thomas, Brown revises the trope of the newspaper clippings. When Bigger picks up a newspaper during his attempted escape and reads the accounts of the police dragnet surrounding him, he is in effect fatalistically holding in his hands the image of his own entrapment, the map that shows the police closing in on him. On the other hand, Lonnie, who possesses, interprets, and distributes the newspaper clippings he has systematically organized to prove that the police have framed him, uses the newspaper accounts of his arrest and trial to become an agent of his own defense. He hands over his clippings to Harper in order to prove his innocence and to enlist the communists to work on his behalf, and thus, in contrast to Bigger, he draws around himself an ever-widening circle of support. From the beginning of his novel, Brown sets up an immediate sense of kinship between Lonnie and the three black political prisoners. Faulcon is surprised that Lonnie looks so much like Harper: “you and him could be kin.” Harper is particularly drawn to Lonnie and begins to see him as a son. Despite Party criticism that Iron City was too “nationalistic,” Brown insisted on representing this black working-class solidarity, creating an identification with and sympathy that makes Lonnie a far more sympathetic figure than Bigger, although it also invites the critique that Brown was intent on producing an idealized version of the relationship between the Party and the black working class. In his construction of the working-class Lonnie, framed by the white-dominated and racist criminal justice system, and of the three politically informed working-class intellectuals Faulcon, Zachary, and Harper, Brown is very deliberately positioning these four—rather than the murderous, illiterate Bigger Thomas—as the representative black proletariat of the 1940s.²⁴

COMMUNIST AESTHETICS: LIBERATING OR LIMITING?

Given Iron City’s formal innovations—its use of mass-media discourse and documentary, its mixing of social realism with postmodern parody, its collective protagonist, and even its mild and provisional feminism—the novel challenges the prevailing view that modernism could emerge only out of estrangement from political commitment or that Ralph Ellison was the only black modernist of the 1950s (Lecklider 2012). In fact, the cultural critic Michael Denning argues in The Cultural Front that the documentary aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s that Brown adapted for Iron City was itself a “central modernist innovation” and that, given the many kinds of innovations of Popular Front artists, the term “social realism” cannot adequately represent their aesthetics. These artists used many terms to describe their work, including “revolutionary modernism,” “new realism,” “proletarian surrealism,” “dynamic realism,” and “social surrealism.” Even in the 1950s at least one reviewer of Iron City, J. Saunders Redding, writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, recognized that Brown was doing something truly innovative. The conservative Redding, who was certainly no friend of the Left, noted that Brown was pioneering in his use of what Redding called “race idiom.” Referring to the way the third-person narrator in Iron City shares the same vernacular speech and idiom as the characters, Redding praised Brown for giving black vernacular speech an “elasticity,” making it “a vehicle not only of speech (dialogue) but of narration and analysis.” Virtually all of the commentators on Brown’s novel since the 1990s recognize Iron City as an experimental novel. As I have already indicated, Stacy Morgan makes the point that Brown’s “effectively crafted social realist text” constituted “not merely a mimetic reproduction of ‘the real,’ but rather a hybrid product of documentary impulses and modernist literary influences” (2004, 254). James Smethurst says that Brown consciously adapted left-wing literary and theatrical experiments in order to represent “a fragmented mass or multiple working class subjectivity” (2004, 5). The literary historian Alan Wald, in his introduction to the new Northeastern University reprint of Iron City (1994), contends that although the plot of Iron City retains its commitment to realism, he sees the novel’s surreal dream sequence and its references to popular culture as modernist techniques. Wald, along with many other scholars of the literary and cultural Left, also makes the important observation that black writers were often freer to explore formal experimentation because the Party, at least for a time, allowed a level of autonomy, and as he shows in Exiles from a Future Time, communist artists often departed from Party platforms and followed their own directions.²⁵ Brown confirms Wald’s point about Party flexibility and says that even though he was often criticized for his politically incorrect Marxism, he was never censored nor directly pressured to write a certain way.²⁶

If Saunders Redding grudgingly bestows the mantle of modernism on Brown, the black leftist Ernest Kaiser in a 1949 Phylon article explicitly questions Brown’s commitment to a modernist sensibility. In “Racial Dialectics: The Aptheker-Myrdal School Controversy,” Kaiser takes on both the liberals in the Gunnar Myrdal camp and the Marxists who followed the leading communist Herbert Aptheker for their failure to incorporate the findings of the new sciences of anthropology, sociology, and psychology into their studies of race. If the Myrdal School refused to acknowledge the significance of racism, the Marxists, with their unwavering belief that the socialist revolution would end racism, were, according to Kaiser, equally simplistic. Mainly, however, Kaiser critiques Marxists for refusing to allow black people a complicated psychology. Lumping together three well-known Marxists—Lloyd Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Herbert Aptheker—Kaiser accused them all of failing to take into account “the great strides that had been made in the field of social psychology by sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists,” and he took them to task for their naïve assumption that blacks have survived American racism as “little angels even under terrific oppression.” As did the two famous psychoanalysts he refers to in this essay, Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, Kaiser believed that the competitiveness of American capitalist society led to isolation and insecurity for all Americans, black and white. In particular, Kaiser claimed that blacks “as exploited workers and farmers under capitalism and as Negroes jim-crowed and segregated” were indeed subject to certain forms of neuroses. In this article, Kaiser refers specifically to a lecture Brown gave called “Negro Character in American Literature to Contemporary Writers,” which is no longer available and apparently chanted the Party line about the inviolable black psyche, and Kaiser argues that Brown, like Du Bois and Aptheker, was deliberately turning his back on the findings of modern psychology.

A closer look at the final dream sequence at the end of Iron City allows for a final assessment of Brown’s willingness or unwillingness to depart from Marxist orthodoxy or to admit the ambiguities and uncertainties that mark life in a racist society and in a modernist text. As the novel comes to an end, Lonnie James’s defense committee receives word that the Supreme Court has new evidence and will reconsider Lonnie’s appeal. In this state of suspension between uncertainty and hope, the novel abandons its social realist mode and shifts to a surreal dream world. Once again, we see how Iron City is indebted to the stylistic techniques of the Living Newspaper. The conclusion of the Living Newspaper Liberty Deferred, where Jim Crow jumps out of the frame, is strikingly similar to the last scene in Iron City, which begins with Faulcon dreaming that he sees the Hollow, the black section of Iron City, crumbling in a “silent slow-motion disaster.” One scene after another dissolves dreamlike into the next, until the Hollow is transformed into a plush green valley surrounded by a forest and a winding river unrolling through the mountains. Faulcon hears what he thinks is Gabriel’s trumpet, which turns into a sound like Louis Armstrong playing “Sunny Side of the Street.” Faulcon imagines a million people seated before him, and, in the tradition of the socialist speaker, he plans to proclaim the beginning of a new millennium of racial and gender equality. But before he speaks, he orders the rich white people to the rear, the black working class to the front, and women to be seated on an equal basis with men. Folk figures like John Henry and Stackalee appear in the throng along with people from Faulcon’s life, who become radiantly transfigured. His reluctant lover Sister Lucy Jackson appears, “tall and black and beautiful”—and now more willing than resistant. Lonnie stands before the assembled crowd, “proud and free,” as Faulcon announces that Lonnie is going to be “a thirty-game winner for the Iron City Stars,” who will never be last again. With Zachary as the engineer, the Glory Train takes off with everyone on board but Faulcon, who stays behind with Lucy Jackson. Although the surreal dream and the reference to the Louis Armstrong song suggest a comparison with the Invisible Man’s drug-induced rant in a hole, Iron City’s dreamscape, like the endings of the socially conscious Living Newspapers, is meant as a triumphant vision of change enabled not by an individual consciousness but by the energies of black communal and socialist traditions (Smethurst 1999).

But what haunts Iron City’s “authentic” Marxist ending and in fact betrays Brown’s underlying anxieties is the very real execution of Jones ten years earlier. Since Iron City is based on Jones’s case, which ended with Brown and his fellow communists unable to save his life, it is impossible to read the ending of the novel without remembering the original story, especially since Iron City trains the reader to act as an interpreter of texts and to connect the events of the literary text to extraliterary documents. In fact, Brown provided those documents in a 1952 Masses & Mainstream article, “The Legacy of Willie Jones,” which nostalgically reviews the letters Jones wrote to him and to the outside defense committee before his death, a set of letters pointedly given to Brown in Pittsburgh the day after a reception honoring the publication of Iron City. Moreover, the images of this last scene in the novel are taken from biblical and religious conceptions of Judgment Day. Brown may even be betraying the remnants of his Catholic education at Cretin High School in St. Paul, where he was probably introduced to Catholic teachings on the Last Judgment, which are very precise and detailed about the end of the world and closely match Faulcon’s dream. The world will not be annihilated, according to Christian theology, but will change in form and appearance; loved ones will be reunited though transfigured into a spiritual form; trumpets will announce the event. If Faulcon’s dream is about life after death, it is, ipso facto, also about death. It is, in fact, a three-page passage saturated with images of death, particularly with the image of the newly transfigured Lonnie James, “who will never be last again” and whose ghostly doppelganger Willie Jones has preceded him on the Glory Train. Iron City’s victorious ending is both formally and politically unsatisfying, the one place in the novel where Brown’s allegiance to Party politics seems to violate his artistic vision.

In my attempts to make a final determination about Iron City’s aesthetic posture, I turn to a two-part article entitled “Communists in Novels” by Brown’s close colleague, Masses & Mainstream’s editor Charles Humboldt, the man Brown said was his “principal guide as a writer.”²⁷ As communists were being prosecuted under the Smith Act, the Party moved away from its relatively liberal Popular Front policies toward a more rigid orthodoxy, demanding a greater allegiance to Marxist principles of art—a position that seems to have been spearheaded by the cultural critiques of the arch-conservative Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanovism demanded that writers conform to Soviet socialist realism as a model for their creative works, and its demands “ushered in a new conservative phase” of the communist movement (Hemingway 2002, 221). In effect, that phase meant producing an art that was antithetical to anything considered bourgeois culture or not in the service of the proletarian movement. Zhdanovism was also antithetical to any signs of modernism, and it mandated an art dominated by a set of political rules about the correct portrayal of communists, the dangers of formalism, and the necessity of representing “the inspiring Socialist culture of the Soviet Union” (Hemingway 2002, 208). In light of these debates over the direction of Marxist and communist art, Humboldt in “Communists in Novels” attempted to put forth careful criteria for the acceptable communist hero in fiction; his criteria walk a careful tightrope between accepting the Zhdanov hard line and encouraging full creative expression for writers. Brown was certainly at the center of these debates over whether communists were or should be “aesthetic socialists” or “revolutionary socialists” subordinating art to politics, and it is likely that on some level he was struggling with these issues as he was crafting Iron City.

Clearly, Humboldt was no Zhdanov. He argued for the inclusion of Freudian insights about characters and for constructing a character with “fullness,” by which he meant complexity. But despite his expansive and progressive understanding of the purpose of art, he too proposed “our requirements for the Communist character.” In constructing the communist hero, Humboldt declares, the writer should minimize “everything in his make-up that might alienate him from his allegiance, lessen his love, weaken his comprehension, drive him to error, desertion or renegacy [sic]” and maximize “whatever sustains him, gives him intellectual clarity, expands his capacity for love and loyalty, increases his resourcefulness and energy” (62). Humboldt inserted enough qualifications into his argument to allow the writer some artistic flexibility, but in the end he admonished writers to portray communist characters who “speak the language of the working class,” are able “to master the forces that overcome others,” and can “resist oppression instead of being crushed by it”; in other words, he called for “artists in uniform” (Guilbaut 1984, 130).²⁸

Read together, the Redding, Kaiser, and Humboldt articles underscore my contention that a leftist influence was both limiting and liberating for Brown. As Redding observes, Iron City is modern in its experiments with the vernacular voice and narrative style. But, as Kaiser asserts, it is antimodern in its refusal to imagine for its characters the complexities of a modern psychology. Humboldt suggests that Brown was somewhere in between, attempting to balance the rigid Zhdanovian hard line with the more flexible Humboldtian one. Brown did not abandon his attempts to create a progressive social protest novel, but his heroes in Iron City were correct enough to have been rated A-list communist characters.

Brown’s own problematic relationships within the Party do not surface in any of his writings. He had difficulties with Party leaders, particularly Earl Browder, whose efforts to liberalize and Americanize the Party disturbed the Marxist-Leninist camp that Brown favored and resulted in Browder’s ouster from Party leadership in 1945. According to Brown’s friend, the well-known communist writer Phillip Bonosky, Brown “survived” Browderism and went on to support Browder’s successor, William Z. Foster. Bonosky says that Brown was suspicious of the Party’s efforts to push him into leadership positions he felt unqualified for and eventually came to believe that he was being used by Party leaders and refused a nomination to the Central Committee. In 1998, Brown wrote to the historian Eric Foner and included, almost gratuitously, that he knew “the CP leadership would readily distort the record for narrow partisan reasons.” But he was never naïve, reports Bonosky, and so was not disillusioned by the actions of the Party leaders—including the Khrushchev revelations—though he did quietly leave the Party in the early 1960s, continuing thereafter to refer to himself as “a communist with a small c.”²⁹ None of this ambivalence is represented in Brown’s novel or in his essays, and none of his communist characters reflect the complexities suggested by his own experiences with the Party.³⁰

What I have tried to do in this chapter is, first, to reinsert Brown and the literary Left at the center of 1950s African American culture to revise the notion that this was a decade of accommodation and retreat from the militantly left-wing 1930s and 1940s and, second, to challenge the way this period is reconstructed in merely aesthetic terms—for example, as the period of “Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism,” as the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Gates and McKay 2004, 1355) puts it. Black literature of the 1950s is more accurately described, as Brown makes clear, as a debate with multiple voices and perspectives, arguing over black representation, over the nature and future of protest literature and the politics of form, over gender and sexuality, over communism and anticommunism, over integration versus black civil rights militancy—debates in which an embattled Left was actively involved in the production and defense of African American culture. However long Lloyd Brown has been confined to what Smethurst (2004) calls the “isolated cultural circles of the left,” his novel, essays, and radical activism played a central role in the literary and cultural debates of postwar black cultural production.³¹ For its unmasking of Cold War manipulations, Brown’s work ought to be considered an essential counterintelligence tool for contemporary historians of black life, literature, and culture.³²