No matter how stirring the demand for simple, working-class literature of the kind promoted by Manuel Gomez, editor of Poems for Workers in 1926, or by Mike Gold in his “Change the World” columns in the 1930s, there was no proletarian purity in the actual yield of radical poets in the Great Depression and after. From the dawn of the 1930s, their poetry was a mélange, a bubbling cauldron, reverberating with sundry aspirations and levels of talent. Their verse, of course, percolated through the predilections and vantage points of disparate editors, who in turn were swayed by their interpretations of Communist policy as well as by their personal acquaintances with the poets and the customary kinds of mitigating contingencies besetting an editor regardless of political persuasion. As Stanley Burnshaw mused in 1961 about his cohort of New Masses editors in the mid-1930s: “To think that the Marxist critics were an undifferentiated right-thinking Left phalanx is to create a monster that simply did not exist. Not only were the wars within the compound frequent and fierce. Even more important: any number of these writers were troubled or torn, each for his own private reasons.”1
Indeed, the Literary Left can only be fathomed as a social arena within which contests occurred among a diversity of qualifying factors. There were, naturally, the overarching constraints of the national economic situation that created a desperate insecurity about income for all but the elite. Then were felt the various pressures, real or imagined, placed by the dominant culture on writers to adhere to literary styles, themes, and even modes of acceptable personal behavior if they hoped to see publication of works and some degree of financial remuneration. (For example, in November 1939, Horace Gregory steered a young disciple toward publication of a review essay in the American Scholar, but alerted him to avoid any mention of Marx.)2 Finally there were the idiosyncrasies of diverse personalities in respect to their talents, opportunities, animosities, rivalries, and networks of personal friendships.
One of the salient characteristics of these associations for Leftists was an intellectual or culture symbiosis that can be understood as an “elective affinity”; that is, a convergence of individuals of diverse origins–for example, of different genders, ethnicities, and class backgrounds–into a common configuration that became the pro-Communist sphere. Such significant federations occurred through self-selected commitments and reciprocal attractions. These led first to mutual world outlooks, under the tangible state of affairs of the Depression, centered on the vanguard role of the working class under Party and Soviet leadership. In due time the writers so galvanized came to common projects and organizational affiliations.3 Moreover, the individual cultural products–poems, novels, plays, criticism–of such cultural workers with this shared world vision were potentially marked not only by Marxist themes (customarily the effort to decode commodity culture and dereify social phenomena), but also by common structural patterns. Ultimately, the overarching “force field” in which writers produced also embodied institutions founded and led by the Communist movement in ways that were sometimes paradoxical and discrepant.4
The politics of the movement expressed an indigenous revolutionary trend that freely subordinated its autonomy to the leadership of the Soviet Union. Yet the impact of the Soviet Union on cultural work in the United States, although vivid and multifarious, was far from all-encompassing. The pages of the New Masses, Daily Worker, International Literature, and other Communist Party organs reproduced articles by Soviet luminaries, very often commenting on U.S. writers and journals,5 and published overwhelmingly laudatory reviews of Soviet literature, film, and art. Indeed, another New Masses editor, Joseph Freeman, heartily endorsed a remark by the literary radical Floyd Dell in a 1952 speech at the Newberry Library that “what happened to American literature was the Russian Revolution.”6 But that was not all that happened. Many cultural workers in the United States assuredly identified with Soviet revolutionary literary exemplars such as Maxim Gorky (1838–1936), but it is more likely that pre-Russian Revolution books by socialist writers such as Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) and Jack London (1876– 1916) made a tangibly greater impress on their formative years.7 For those less centrally involved in Party institutions, the Russian Revolution was a crucial achievement, but received more in idealized form–as a democratic upheaval compelled into a cruel contest for survival–than through a command of complex, and sometimes convoluted, cultural policies and models.
A more cautious generalization about the sweeping authority of the Soviet Union upon Left literati in the United States might be that the Soviet “experiment” as a whole represented a hope or promise that inspired a near-militaryethos for the “committed” artist or intellectual in the era of the Depression and the rise of fascism. It was not so much that the assumption of art as a “weapon”–in the class struggle, or against fascism–distinguished the Communist cultural Left from non-Communist cultural workers. Walt Whitman was scarcely alone in declaring “literature as only a weapon, an instrument, in the service of something larger than itself.”8 Moreover, it would be arduous to name a single twentieth-century writer in the United States who did not have his or her own mix of implicit or explicit political concerns, including those who ostensibly held to an “apolitical” stance– the creation of an imaginary “world elsewhere”–as a means of coping with the social reality of the times.
The collective urgency, however, of the Communist cultural movement is more differentiating. The metaphor of class “warfare” is as much the source of the profuse crudities, superficialities, knee-jerk judgments, two-dimensional fictional characters, hastily selected and clichéd language, and the vulgarized use of Marxist categories that have troubled many readers and critics, as is the movement’s political Stalinism. As Joseph Freeman recalled,
There was a genuine faith in the Great Promise as represented by the Communist Party and Moscow; and there was a fear of fascism and war abroad and fear of reaction at home–and a determination to fight it. . . . We were men in war; we were soldiers in the “class war” of the socialist revolution...we hurled ourselves into life because life now meant the transformation of life into a higher, better, freer life–more just, more true, more beautiful–and for everybody, for the whole human race.9
In recent decades the conception of living “in a state of emergency” was popularized among Left intellectuals by the writing of Walter Benjamin, albeit without much heed to whatever potential ill-effects such an existence might have on artistic and intellectual production.10 As Burnshaw’s professor of English at Cornell, F. C. Prescott, counseled when his student gravitated toward Communism, “One doesn’t play the violin when the house is on fire.”11
An illustration of literary appraisal according to the Party’s “state of emergency” mentality is the 1935 New Masses review of Party sympathizer Horace Gregory’s work by Moshe Nadir (1885–1943), a Communist poet well known for his writing in Yiddish. Not only does Nadir take the standpoint of an alleged “proletarian reader” to expound that the content of Gregory’s Chorus for Survival is really “the chorus for the survival of the unfittest emotions, cryptic soul searching–rather than the survival of those laboring masses fit to take hold of the world and thus create a new life.” He also exhorts that Gregory return to the John Reed Clubs (of which Gregory was a founder) to become reeducated in Marxism, and take up activity in the Communist movement, so that his poetry will “cry ‘hold the fort’ to those who fight underground in Hitler’s Germany, in Schuschnigg’s Austria, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Leroux-Roble’s Spain or in our own growing plague spots.”12
Yet if Nadir’s admonitions seem to dodge many of the pertinent aspects of the creative process, there were also positive aspects of such an urgency for Freeman’s generation: the Communist literary movement’s passion, internationalism, anti-elitism, and especially the encouragement of collaborative enterprises that gave rise to a community of cultural workers. The tenacity of that community is what kept the Left literary tradition alive through so many difficult decades. Nonetheless, the community was linked to a specific party, and the party became crucial to the durability of the main organs of collective expression of the community. What sort of creative interaction took place amidst the “state of emergency” mentality fostered by world events in a force field that included Communist Party–led institutions?13
While no cultural dictator of the Left in the United States emerged to issue marching orders to an army of “artists in uniform,”14 there was among Leftists a greater willingness than is usually found among writers to engage in projects such as creating national organizations of writers (the Rebel Poets Society, John Reed Club, League of American Writers, Labor Poets of America, Contemporary Writers, the Committee for the Negro and the Arts, and the Harlem Writers Club) and supporting national publications. No activities of this sort remotely commensurate in size or cohesion–as well as in degree of sacrifice by writers of time, money, and personal risk–occurred among other literary circles such as the Southern Agrarians, New Critics, or the Beats.
It is conceivable that research in archives of the former Soviet Union may someday divulge that financial aid and/or practical political direction for some of these Left literary groups originated in the Soviet Union. On a national level, of course, these organizations were Communist led, and their foremost activists tended to follow the example of Moscow because they held that this was to the benefit of the advance of socialism.15 But there is such copious corroboration of grassroots Left literary activity and support for at least the John Reed Club and League of American Writers that it seems unlikely that the domestic authenticity of this literary rebellion could be fundamentally compromised. The Cold War–era liberal American Committee for Cultural Freedom, in contrast, founded as a legal organization in 1951, had a membership (mostly paper) that numbered in the hundreds. But the organization’s leaders junketed around the world, and it bankrolled its publications with massive subsidies from conservative foundations, with the funds in some cases originating with the Central Intelligence Agency.16
In the “hot-house” atmosphere of the Depression, individuals more seasoned in revolutionary activity, and especially those who appeared to have the trust of top Communist Party and international Communist bodies, were treated deferentially. Starting in the early 1930s, the determinations of various full-time Communist functionaries whose numbers increased dramatically, and the opinions they offered in book reviews and debates, came to carry increasing import. There is evidence that certain cultural statements were carefully reviewed by experienced Party intellectuals.17 A writer who received pointed disapproval in the Party press, or whose works were rejected or ignored, might well feel as if he or she were being discarded or persecuted. Even non-Marxist poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was adequately distressed by the comments on his poetry by New Masses critic Stanley Burnshaw to rejoin Burnshaw in verse.
Yet such rebukes, including those reviews that contained political polemics accusing writers of harboring anti-Marxist and reactionary tendencies, did not always have the status of being ex-communicatory.18 Most literary reviews were by individuals of different temperaments, tastes, and agendas. Literary editors and the managing editors would read over reviews before publication, blue-penciling them for style, and at intervals offer opinions about the contents of the review. Likewise, the Communist Party leadership followed the contents of the New Masses and intervened at times, but the surviving papers and reminiscences of the most prolific reviewers and columnists–Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Stanley Burnshaw–offer no evidence of their literary judgments being suppressed or altered against their will in the 1930s.19 These cultural helmsmen themselves, especially Mike Gold, were sporadically subject to blunt criticisms of their literary judgments in print.20 Often there would be interchanges betwixt various writers, and understandably some readers might be dazzled by the Party status of one or another participant. Still, when they had a chance, authors who had been subjected to criticism in the New Masses magazine rudely retorted, without necessarily communicating a sense that the opinions to which they objected carried any more institutional weight beyond that of the critic who wrote the review.21
There was, of course, at least one notoriously negative side to Party publications: it was rare for any living writer known to be opposed to Party policy (especially its view that Stalin’s leadership of the USSR was a force for democracy, peace, and progress) to receive approbatory mention, and often he or she would be liable to scurrilous personal attacks. There was also the proclivity for reviewers and editors closest to the Party apparatus to make judgments elevating short-term political expediency over larger, more complex questions. Statements published by Soviet writers’ organizations, especially if they referred to the United States, might be invoked as authoritative guidelines and cited to promote or change some literary practice.22
Publications supported and/or led by the Party, such as the New Masses after its first few years, sporadically held meetings between its editors and members of the Communist Party’s Political Bureau (a subgroup of the Party’s Central Committee in charge of day-to-day affairs), and in times of transition or crisis the Political Bureau might assign a particularly trusted Communist to serve on the New Masses editorial board.23 There were also several individuals dispatched by the Party to cultural work on a national level who became exceedingly influential in literary matters.
The most commanding of those who furnished direction for the “cultural front” was Alexander Trachtenberg (1884–1966), popularly known as “Trachty.”24 He had no particular literary credentials but did have a extraordinary background that included participation in the events leading up to the 1905 revolution in Russia, for which he was imprisoned. After a year of military service in the Russo-Japanese War, he emigrated to the United States. Trachtenberg received a scholarship to Trinity College in Hartford and then a fellowship to Yale University to do graduate work in economics and labor, where he became busy in the Socialist Party. His dissertation at Yale, “The History of Legislation for the Protection of Coal Miners in Pennsylvania,” was later published as a book. In 1915 he left Yale to become a teacher at the Socialist Party’s Rand School of Social Science in New York. He energetically opposed World War I and became an ardent supporter of the February 1917 revolution in Russia, although he was hesitant at first to identify himself forthrightly with the Bolsheviks.25
By 1921 he had become an adherent of the Communist movement and in 1924, with his friend Abraham Heller, founded International Publishers, where he served as president from 1924 until 1962. In this capacity, combined with his personal links to officials in the Soviet government,26 he became crucial in determining the contents of books and pamphlets issued by this highly professional Party-led operation, as well as in formulating policy for various Party-led cultural organizations, schools, and public events. By 1934, International Publishers had issued an imposing list of skillful translations of many classics by Marx and Engels, as well as works by Lenin and Stalin, and many books by U.S. radicals. That year a tenth-anniversary celebration was held at the New School for Social Research for Trachtenberg and the publishing house. The sponsors included B. W. Huebsch, vice-president of Viking Press; Bennett Cerf, president of Random House; Alfred Knopf, owner of Knopf Publishing Company; and W. W. Norton, owner of W. W. Norton and Sons; as well as leading book critics of the day such as John Chamberlain of the New York Times and Lewis Gannett of the Herald Tribune.
By the early 1930s, most matters connected with Communist Party cultural and publishing questions were Trachtenberg’s bailiwick; the major exception was the New Masses, to which Party leader Earl Browder paid especial attention. There was one incident, however, when Trachtenberg was invited to a conference at the New Masses office at the time novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) came there to protest Mike Gold’s attack on him for making anti-Semitic remarks in another publication. According to Joseph North, Trachtenberg convinced Dreiser that his anti-Semitism was faulty by showing Dreiser an article written by Lenin clarifying anti-Semitism as a legacy of Tsarism.27
Trachtenberg attended the fraction meetings of Party members active in the Party-led John Reed Clubs, and Party members who wanted to apprehend the Party leadership’s views dealt with him directly. To the extent that Trachtenberg served as a sort of “godfather” to the clubs, he warrants credit for battling rather successfully with a difficult task. The New York John Reed chapter alone included 125 artists and another 125 writers, who were engaged in considerable internal feuding. The members’ skills and degrees of reputation, and even their relationships to explicitly literary or artistic concerns, were at best uneven. In the regions outside the centers of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, various chapters attracted more teachers, lawyers, dentists, and other professionals than practicing artists or writers. Many of the regional chapters published their own magazines, sometimes crude and other times professional. A national committee was based in New York City, but it did not have an adequate financial basis to function properly. Scores of future writers and artists of note got their start in the clubs. The John Reed Clubs, despite direction from the Communist Party, had some semblance of a separate revolutionary political organization but were lacking in stable and coherent leadership.28
In 1934, Trachtenberg gave a momentous speech urging the John Reed Clubs to dissolve and support the holding of an American Writers Congress, a move that was obviously the result of a high-level decision of the Party.29 He soon afterward played a role in selecting the signers of the call to the congress, confining the names to trusted intellectuals. Next he directed the formation of the League of American Writers that was launched on the last day of the event, becoming the Party’s adviser during the crucial time that it evolved from a revolutionary to a Popular Front organization. Officially Trachtenberg served on the league’s Executive Committee for the first two years, until he was replaced by the up-and-coming Party cultural leader V. J. Jerome in 1937.
Trachtenberg was a short, swarthy, chubby man who stood a couple of inches over five feet, with a large head, jet-black eyes, and a great, stiff black mustache that he stroked thoughtfully. Mike Gold declared that his extraordinary energy and enthusiasm gave him “the zip of a child early on Christmas morning.”30 The Communist journalist and pulp writer Walter Snow (1905–1973) found him likable and “ebullient,” with a sense of humor (“I’ll only fight you politically” was one quip) and one who “always seemed ready to listen sympathetically.”31 Matthew Josephson recollected that Trachtenberg, “encircled by his apostles,” had “the air of an anxious mother hen guiding her chicks around.”32
Franklin Folsom, executive secretary of the League of American Writers, recalled Trachtenberg as being impressed with big names.33 Walter Snow thought Trachtenberg was also impressed with large women, especially writer Meridel Le Sueur, who with her dark hair looked powerful and muscular. Then again, it might have been simply large people who impressed him, for Snow also believed that six-foot-tall Philip Rahv, with “his football lineman’s build, his pose as a radical Don Juan...,and his passion for obscure pedantic words,” exercised “a Svengali sway over little Trachtenberg,” until Rahv came out for Trotsky.34 Daily Worker journalist Sender Garlin recalled Trachtenberg’s excitement when Party member Ruth McKenney’s play My Sister Eileen (1941) became a big success; he rushed over to the Daily Worker crying, “She’s getting more publicity than Marx and Engels got together!”35
Folsom reminisced that Trachtenberg would attend the Party’s Book and Magazine fraction, acting as if he were everyone’s father. He was prone to talk abstract theory, endlessly dispensing one cliché after another, but suddenly, after a half hour or so, would come up with a very sensible idea. New Masses editor Joseph Freeman conjectured that Trachtenberg had a superior regard for intellectuals if they were not members of the Party or if they were only fellow travelers. Trachtenberg also had “a dread of offending the leadership here and in Moscow.” In the 1950s, Freeman described Trachtenberg as “by turns a cunning and a tough official representing the official Line in literature.”36 Another Party writer, A. B. Magil, came to see Trachtenberg as “an interesting character,” but bureaucratic and with no feeling for literature, expressing “entirely utilitarian values in all literary activity.”37
Nevertheless, as director of International Publishers, Trachtenberg discharged outstanding services to literature in the United States by publishing books on aspects of working-class life rarely portrayed in fiction, such as Myra Page’s Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932), Mike Pell’s S.S. Utah (1933), James Steele’s (pseud. for Robert Cruden) Conveyer (1935), Ben Field’s (pseud. for Moe Bragin) The Cock’s Funeral (1937), Albert Maltz’s The Way Things Are and Other Stories (1938), Richard Wright’s Bright and Morning Star (1938), Meridel Le Sueur’s Salute to Spring (1940), Beth McHenry and Frederick Meyers’s Home Is the Sailor (1948), and Lars Lawrence’s (pseud. for Philip Stevenson) Old Father Antic (1961). Translations of Soviet novels issued by International Publishers included Dmitri Furmanov’s Chapayev (1934), Nicholay Ostrovsky’s The Making of a Hero (1937), and Petr Pavlinko’s Red Planes Fly East (1938). In the immediate postwar era, Trachtenberg oversaw publication of a poetry series, several books of Marxist literary and cultural criticism, and a surprising range of science, history, and adventure books for young readers.38
Since most of the magazines that sprang up in the Left cultural milieu in the 1930s were inaugurated by rank-and-file members, often with grievances about the limitations of the more established official publications, Trachtenberg intervened on several occasions to transmit the thinking of the Party leadership or to recommend “Party supervision,” which usually came in the form of adjoining individuals whom he saw as more reliable to editorial boards.39 Party activist Alan Calmer40 believed that Trachtenberg had the sole power to determine whether the New York John Reed Club’s Partisan Review would or would not become an organ of the League of American Writers, and that he also had the authority to assign Calmer to the publication’s staff.41 On the other hand, Walter Snow insisted that it was not Trachtenberg but Genevieve Taggard, a non-Party member but nonetheless a Party loyalist, who led the fight that prevailed in blocking the move in the governing body of the League to affiliate with Partisan Review.42 Whether she did this independent of a consultation with Trachtenberg is not known.
Trachtenberg remained an untouchable, behind-the-scenes power during the 1940s and 1950s. His primary area of work was International Publishers, where his efforts won the esteem of establishment publishers, especially Alfred J. Knopf. He had also been a founder of the Communist-led Labor Research Association (LRA) in 1927, and he endured as an important LRA collaborator. He ran for public office on the Communist Party ticket on several occasions and was active in organizing Party schools, serving for some years as the treasurer of its Jefferson School in New York. In 1952 Trachtenberg was indicted under the Smith Act and suffered through a nine-month trial, after which he was sentenced to three years in prison. He had served only three months, however, when the principal witness against him confessed to perjury.43 In 1956 he was retried, but the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York set aside his conviction upon appeal. In 1966, four years after retiring from International Publishers, Trachtenberg sustained a stroke at the age of eighty-two, dying three days later without regaining consciousness. He had no children and was survived only by his wife, Rosalind; arrangements were made to bury him near the Haymaket Martyrs Memorial in Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
One component of the Communist-led cultural movement had a claim to semi-independence derived from political theory as well as practical exigency. The African American Communist tradition, pioneered by activists and intellectuals around the Crusader magazine and African Blood Brotherhood in the post–World War I years, came into its own during the crisis of the Depression through theoretical writing and activities that sought to reconcile the dynamic tension between nationality and class. On the one hand, Communist Party publications and tactics featured a political and cultural orientation rooted in the Black proletarian/peasant national experience of southern folk culture in the United States and the Black church; on the other, the Party promoted a semi-autonomous alliance with workers in the North and in the colonies of European nations (as well as radical workers in Europe), organized around the basis of a common class position. Pioneering Black Communist theorists such as Cyril Briggs advanced contentions as to the momentousness of the singular culture and psychology of African Americans, who for centuries had been the target of a racist onslaught by Europeans.44
As a consequence, Black artists drawn to Communism could affirm Black pride and, indeed, develop a semi-autonomous Black aesthetic based on a national culture, while concurrently interacting with a multiracial and international cultural and political movement. Such was the underpinning of the “elective affinity” bringing a range of cultural workers into a relationship with institutions and organizations initiated and led by Party figures such as Trachtenberg, and by African American leaders such as James Ford (1893–1957). Such an orientation placed Black pro-Communist cultural workers center stage within the modern movement of cosmopolitan intelligentsia. That is, these “Afro-Marxists” viewed their particular identity within an internationalist framework, linking their struggle for liberation to the liberation of all humankind.45
Still, despite the dual components of the Party’s perspective, the situation of African Americans facing hostility from whites as a group tended to be overwhelming in comparison to the relatively few instances of genuine collaboration between Black and white workers. The former, racism from whites, was a certain knowledge, confirmed by abundant evidence that might be reworked into art; the latter, interracial unity on a class basis, was more of a utopian hope, far more difficult to adumbrate with convincing, well-rounded characters, symbols, and dramatizations. Such an imbalance is evident in fiction and poetry. Yet in contrast to the imaginative writing stands the legacy of cultural criticism produced by Afro-Marxists; this can be found in the pages of International Literature, the New Masses, Negro Quarterly, and, in the post–World War II years, Harlem Quarterly, Freedom, Masses & Mainstream, and Freedomways.46 These journals, even when reviewing books and plays, foreground in cultural terms the programmatic argument for the synthesis of class and nationality.
The first Black writer of national reputation to become associated with the Communist movement in the United States was the poet and novelist Claude McKay (born Festus Claudius McKay, 1890–1948). McKay emerged from a middle-class background in Jamaica, where he initiated a career as a poet, alternating between conventional British forms and island dialect verse. He published Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (reflecting his brief experience as a policeman) in 1912, before removing to the United States to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and at Kansas State. Within two years McKay moved to New York, where he held an assortment of working-class jobs and was drawn to the Left.
In Harlem he associated with Black socialists such as Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore and held membership briefly in the Industrial Workers of the World and later the revolutionary nationalist African Blood Brotherhood. He also developed personal friendships with Max Eastman and his sister Crystal, who brought him wide recognition by publishing in the July 1919 Liberator his poem “If We Must Die,” a militant response to the 1919 race riots. McKay then joined the editorial board of the Liberator and collaborated regularly with the Communist Party throughout the 1920s, probably joining it for a brief time. His proud and indignant sonnets of the early 1920s are a fundamental contribution to Black Marxist culture.
McKay, who was bisexual and had a penchant for bohemian living, was committed to the Communist movement but equally devoted to vagabondage. During 1919 and the early 1920s he traveled around Europe and lived in England, where he wrote for Workers’ Dreadnought, published by the English Socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, and issued a volume of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). Back in the United States, McKay became involved in personal and political quarrels with Mike Gold and Max Eastman about which kinds of poetry and articles were suitable for the Liberator. There was unease between McKay and the editorial group in general over the obligatory balance between articles focusing forthwith on race issues and those stressing class issues. A more destabilizing disharmony grew out of the temperamental disparity between the affectionate, patrician McKay, with his taste for sonnets, and the affectedly proletarian, tough-talking Gold, whom McKay considered “filthy” in his personal mien and who sought to publish poems of raw emotion. At one point, after hearing a story about Gold, an amateur boxer of some repute, swaggering in an aggressive manner into a gathering of pacifists, McKay insulted his manhood. The enraged Gold sought him out at an Italian restaurant, challenging McKay to box. Although the encounter ended with the two men laughing together over a bottle of dago red, McKay knew that their collaboration was over. When a vote of confidence was taken by the Liberator’s editorial board, Gold triumphed and McKay resigned.47
McKay then spent twelve years in Europe. He was present at the Third Congress of the Communist International in November 1922 and passed six months lecturing on art and politics throughout the Soviet Union. He wrote numerous essays for the Soviet press on Marxism and African Americans which appeared in a Russian collection, Negroes in America, published in 1923, the same year that his fourth poetry volume, Harlem Shadows, was published.48 During his European residence, he wrote prose works celebrating working-class and vagabond life and values, including Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1932), and Banana Bottom (1933).
By the time McKay resumed habitation in the United States in 1934, his radicalism had become markedly anti-Stalinist. He was also ill and broke. Yet, perhaps out of curiosity or to gather information, he joined the League of American Writers. In July 1937 he received an invitation to sit on the dais at the opening of its second American Writers’ Congress, but he stood up and departed from the stage when hearing the remarks of Party general secretary Earl Browder.49 That same year he issued his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, and he was criticized at length for his “disloyalty” by Alain Locke in the Black pro-Communist journal New Challenge.50 Thereafter he appeared on several occasions in the socialist publication New Leader. In 1940, however, he published Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which harshly attacked both the Communist Party and the socialists. Thereafter he became increasingly conservative, converting to Catholicism in 1944 and dying in Chicago in 1948. Although McKay did not play a personal role in nurturing the Black Literary Left, his literary and political trajectory anticipated aspects of the Black revolutionary Marxist tradition that cohered during the first part of the Depression; as McKay had done, Black writers personally and artistically blended literary trends from the Harlem Renaissance and the new proletarian literature orientation promoted by the Communist Party.
In some instances the fraternization of the two trends was cursory, resulting mainly in a few antiracist poems and some political endorsements. This seems to be the case with Countee Cullen (1903–1946), a leader of the Harlem Renaissance with degrees from New York University and Harvard. There are many uncertainties about Cullen’s personal background, and his career was marked by a sensational scandal in 1928 when his highly publicized marriage to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the most elaborate social affair in Harlem up to 1928, collapsed immediately because of his homosexuality. A Left political orientation was first evidenced in 1932, when Cullen endorsed the Communist Party’s presidential ticket, and in 1935 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the League of American Writers.
Cullen’s principal literary influence, however, was prior to the Depression; it came in the latter days of the Harlem Renaissance when he published Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), and The Black Christ (1929). His preferred verse forms were sonnets, quatrains, and ballads in the English tradition. Thus there is little to connect him to the cultural work of the 1930s and 1940s Black Left other than occasionally through his sympathies, starting with his early expression of a passion about Africa.51 In the 1930s Cullen taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York, published a satirical novel, One Way to Heaven (1934), and a collection of poetry, The Medea and Some Poems (1935). Before his death in 1946 of uremic poisoning combined with high blood pressure, he published several books of children’s verse and began to collaborate with Arna Bontemps on the musical St. Louis Woman (1946).
More pivotal for the advance of a Black cultural front was the work of two critics drawn very early to the John Reed Clubs, and who never publicly repudiated their pro-Communism; their writings were crucial in crafting the textual arguments supporting the Harlem Renaissance and proletarian synthesis. These were Eugene Gordon (1891–1974) and Eugene Clay Holmes (1905–1982), who used the Party name Eugene Clay. Although numerous other Black cultural figures drifted toward cultural institutions of the Party, these two intellectuals furnished a stability and continuity within the social arena that also expedited the melding of nationalist and class-based trends into a common tradition.
Gordon was born in Oveida, Georgia, graduated from Howard University, and became a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I.52 In the 1920s he became a feature editor for the Boston Post and in 1928 edited a literary publication called The Saturday Evening Quill that was sponsored by the Saturday Evening Quill Club of Boston. As an aspiring novelist and painter, he identified with the Harlem Renaissance. Next, at the outset of the 1930s Gordon professed that he was a Communist and was eminently visible in the Party’s literary affairs. His transformation was denounced by the ex-radical Black journalist George Schuyler.53 In 1933,Gordon wrote a short story about a Black Communist organizer in Georgia, “Agenda,” that was a prototype for the early fiction that would soon make Richard Wright famous; it won honorable mention in a fiction award from Opportunity.54 In the April 1934 issue of International Literature he published a substantial autobiographical essay, “Southern Boyhood Nightmares.” The following passage augurs many of the same themes that Wright would later popularize in his treatment of African American psychology in the chapter “Fear” in his novel Native Son and in the early sections of his autobiographical Black Boy:
My whole boyhood in the South was darkened by a lowly lying cloud of subconscious fear that at times burst through to open terror....It was... an accumulation of ideas suggested by countless agencies–my mother, my teachers, the pastor of our church, the children with whom I played in the gutters of New Orleans, the very atmosphere I breathed, my whole environment–the white man was my natural and eternal enemy, regardless of the guises he might assume or the methods of approach he might take.55
Gordon started out principally as a literary critic in John Reed Club publications, the New Masses, the Daily Worker, and International Literature. He co-authored a Party pamphlet, The Position of Negro Women, in 1935. He also addressed the First Congress of the League of American Writers, and served a brief time on the editorial board of the New Masses in the mid-1930s, after which he traveled to the Soviet Union and wrote for the Moscow Daily News. In the 1940s he kept on writing for the Daily Worker, often on Black cultural matters, and for a while he assisted on its staff. Married to a Euro-American woman, and with a son, he contributed to the National Guardian during the Cold War and then drifted into obscurity.
Holmes was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and received a B.A. from New York University in 1932, where his cardinal preoccupation as a student was literary criticism. His first published article, “Jean Toomer: Apostle of Beauty,” appeared in Opportunity in 1932.56 He began teaching at Howard University as an instructor in 1932, partly intrigued by the outlook of the chair of the philosophy department at that time, Alain Locke, who was also concerned with Black cultural criticism. Although Holmes was initially captivated by pragmatism and John Dewey’s instrumentalism, at Howard he encountered a core group of Black Marxists in the Division of Social Science, including William Alphaeus Hunton, Doxey Wilkerson, Abram Harris, and Ralph Bunche. Within a short time Holmes was won over to dialectical materialism and would become a virtuoso in teaching it to other Communists in the Washington, D.C., area.
A close relationship was cemented between Holmes and Locke because Holmes was a popular teacher, while Locke was not, and Holmes helped sustain the credibility of the department. Moreover, Holmes was willing to cover for Locke when Locke departed on long weekend trips. Holmes was also a facile writer who would help Locke in completing manuscripts. After a few years of teaching in the precarious situation of an instructor, Holmes wrote to the Communist critic Granville Hicks in 1935 that there was a good chance of his being retained at Howard if he could find funds to pursue graduate study. Although Holmes was now a Communist Party member, he felt that his membership must be kept secret from the Howard University administration; even Locke, who suspected where Holmes’s sympathies lay, did not yet know about his Party membership. Furthermore, the Washington, D.C., Party leadership had a high regard for Holmes’s work in building a chapter of the National Student Union and a faculty union at Howard, as well as for drawing Black faculty closer to the Party.57 Holmes subsequently earned an M.A. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1936, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1942, during which time “his philosophical outlook was forged in the context of the struggle between dialectical materialism and pragmatism.”58 In 1939 he married Margaret Cardozo.
Holmes was an assistant professor at Howard from 1937 to 1946, an associate professor from 1946 to 1961, and a full professor from 1961 until he left the university in 1970. In 1952 he succeeded Locke, who died two years later, as chair of the Philosophy Department, which he held till his retirement. Holmes’s Marxist critique of pragmatism is articulated in his doctoral dissertation, Social Philosophy and the Social Mind: A Study of the Genetic Methods of J. M. Baldwin, G. H. Mead and J. E. Boodin (1942). There Holmes argues that Darwinism and pragmatism have become wedded as a social philosophy under the banner of science, thus offering a philosophical apology for bourgeois democracy. Another book-length project, “The Life and Times of Alain Locke,” was never finished.
Holmes retained his militant commitment to the Black liberation movement long after the 1930s. During the Cold War, when grants for social science research were denied to Howard University faculty, and governmental committees charged that Howard was under Communist influence, he helped organize a conference on “Academic Freedom in the United States” in 1953. In 1958 he arranged for W. E. B. Du Bois to deliver a lecture against U.S. Cold War policy. Du Bois also condemned the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Many of Holmes’s writings after the death of Alain Locke were devoted to explaining Locke’s life and work. In addition to submitting essays to the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and American Journal of Physics, he was a contributor to the New Masses and a sponsor of the Communist-initiated academic journal Science and Society. Simultaneously he expounded on the philosophy of science, especially by applying higher mathematics and physics to the study of space and time.59 In the 1960s Holmes persevered in applying a dialectical materialist analysis to the Black experience in articles he wrote for Freedomways about the lives and works of Locke, Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.60 He died of cancer in Washington, D.C., at age seventy-five.
The John Reed Clubs, to which Gordon and Clay belonged, placed a distinct weight on leading Black writers to the revolutionary movement. The May–June 1934 JRC Bulletin carried an article called “Negro Intellectuals and the John Reed Clubs,” in which the national office of the John Reed Clubs reprinted excerpts of interviews it had conducted with Black John Reed Club members. Gordon, who was a member of the organization’s National Executive Board, observed that the small number of Blacks recruited to the John Reed Club in Boston was due to the “petty-bourgeois national-mindedness” of Black intellectuals from more privileged economic backgrounds, causing them to want to preserve their parasitic relation to the Black poor.
Langston Hughes, in a friendly contribution, implored that the same methods practiced in approaching other writers should be used to come closer to Black authors:
If the JRCs in the larger centers would send speakers and contact the Negro literary clubs and student groups, we might be able to catch the coming artistic generation while they are still on the wing. A lecturer going forth and pointing out to them the part which artists and writers have played in the liberation of the working class in Russia, and the part which they can play here, might do something toward winning the younger Negroes to our side.
Holmes, at the time a member of the Philadelphia John Reed Club, suggested that the writers’ group of the clubs had long ago explored this question and drawn certain inferences. In contrast to Hughes, who thought that Black journalists might be approached, Holmes considered most Black newspapermen and pulp fiction writers to be “hopeless”:
Where the wedge should begin...is with advanced university students.... Then...all those younger artists and writers, who have been declassed, who do not know what it is about, politically and socially....
Further, every effort should be made...to stage more and more lectures on Negro art, literature, etc., so as to penetrate the bourgeois intellectual Negro audience. These lectures should be competently given and from a Marxist-Leninist point of view. Notices of these lectures should always be sent to the Negro press.
In inspecting the present situation, the Bulletin editors noted that their superior accomplishments so far had been in St. Louis, where “a score of Negro artists from the Urban League joined the JRC,” and in Cleveland, where “the Club has attracted a number of Negro intellectuals.” In contrast, the New York Club had no active Black members among the club’s writers’ group.61
There were, nonetheless, little-known African American contributors of poetry to publications such as the Harlem Liberator, the organ of the Communist-led League of Struggle for Negro Rights,62 which also printed poetry and fiction by Don West, essays praising the USSR by Langston Hughes, announcements for the Marxist-Modernist “Vanguard” salon (hosted by sculptress Augusta Savage) and regular coverage of film and theater events. There were likewise Black journalists who were very close to the Party, such as Loren Miller of the California Eagle.63 Moreover, other African American members of the Party, such as the attorney William Patterson, occasionally wrote on cultural matters.64
The pro-Communist Left, however, received its biggest boost when, toward the end of the 1920s, sympathy for the Communist Party was indicated by Langston Hughes (1902–1967), a leading Black poet, playwright, novelist, translator, and autobiographer. Hughes was born in Missouri but raised in divers places in the Midwest. He was exposed to radical ideas through his grandmother’s devotion to the memory of her first husband, a follower of John Brown who was killed at Harper’s Ferry, and by Jewish high school students in Cleveland at the time of World War I. Hughes began to publish poetry even prior to entering Columbia University. He soon dropped out to travel in Africa and Europe. Although Hughes was well versed in the work of Claude McKay as well as the earlier African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), the writings of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg encouraged him toward verse forms that were more modern yet also non-elitist. His first two published collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), were conspicuous for fusing jazz and blues with scenes from Black working-class life.
During the interval that he wrote his first, semi-autobiographical novel, Not without Laughter (1930), Hughes had the sustenance of an affluent but conservative patron. When that relationship disintegrated in the early Depression, he voyaged to the Soviet Union, then lived in Carmel, California, where he completed his collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). Hughes’s short fiction in this volume and several others is marked by an easy-going style of simulated simplicity that is often whimsical and controlled, yet forceful. There is an ample sweep of locations around the United States and abroad, and Hughes progresses facilely among an invigorating compass of forms that engage stream-of-consciousness, an omniscient narrator, monologues, and letters. The revolutionary goal is rarely proclaimed in his fiction, unlike in his poems, although an occasional tale, such as “Little Old Spy” (1934), renders his sympathies explicit.65 Customarily, divers aspects of racial justice are investigated through narratives on the ground of the personal, entailing interracial love, the life of the Black artist, and the misapprehensions of Black life and culture by whites.
In the mid-1930s Hughes finished a number of plays, including Mulatto (1935), Little Ham (1936), Emperor of Haiti (1936), and Don’t You Want to Be Free? (1938). In 1940 Hughes issued the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, which would be concluded in 1956 with I Wonder as I Wander. Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) and Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943) promulgated his dual loyalties to the blues and to the antiracist struggle during the World War II years. In the meantime, his column in the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender, featuring the folk hero Jesse B. Semple, called “Simple,” won a major audience. Hughes originally designed the character Simple to promote a Left-wing view of why the antifascist war must be supported despite the existence of domestic racism, but Simple acquired a vitality of his own which resulted in the publication of five volumes of Hughes’s collected columns as well as his musical Simply Heaven (1957). Two postwar volumes of his poetry, Fields of Wonder (1947) and One-Way Ticket (1949), drew little notice, but Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) embodied new moods and cultural themes in Black urban life. More plays, children’s books, histories and biographies treating African-American topics, and anthologies, came forth before Hughes’s last two poetry collections, Ask Your Mama (1962) and The Panther and the Lash (1967).
From the advent of the Depression Hughes collaborated closely with the Communist Party, a partnership that was sustained more erratically in the 1940s.66 He joined the John Reed Clubs, published frequently in the New Masses, issued columns and a pamphlet praising the Soviet Union’s treatment of its darker-skinned nationalities, wrote a poem to honor the 1934 convention of the Communist Party, and was elected president of the Communist-led League of Struggle for Negro Rights. His new agenda of producing “rhymed poems dramatizing current racial interests in simple, understandable verse, pleasing to the ear, and suitable for reading aloud, or for recitation in schools, churches, lodges, etc.,” was fully in harmony with even the most extravagant wing of the proletarian literary movement.67 Hughes also served as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and his 1938 collection of poems, A New Song, was published by the Communist-led International Workers Order (IWO), originally created to provide insurance policies and other benefits for workers. The booklet featured an introduction by Mike Gold, who unhesitatingly declared “the best Negro literature” to be a folk literature, “close to the joys and sorrows of the people.” Gold designates Hughes’s current verse as the product of a two-stage evolution, moving from nationalist expression (as the articulation of the “hopes, the dreams, and the awakening of the Negro People”) to a deeper stage of “a voice crying for justice for all humanity.” In effect, the poems were an eloquent testimony to an Afro-Marxist cosmopolitanism. Moreover, by issuing 10,000 copies of the first edition, the IWO also resolved the enigma of locating an audience for writers “snubbed” by the upper classes, thus contributing “mightily to the rise of that democratic culture of which Walt Whitman prayed and dreamed.”68
The collection began with Hughes’s keen, double-voiced “Let America Be America Again.” Hughes first presents the words of a naive idealist calling for a restoration of the older America of pioneers seeking freedom; then a second speaker (in parentheses) mumbles that “America never was America to me,” and progresses to controvert further myths about the recent loss of “opportunity” and “equality.” As this oppositional speaking voice appropriates the standpoint not just of African Americans but of poor whites, Native Americans, immigrants, the young, and, finally, “the people,” it seizes complete control of the poem while clamoring that “we must take back our land again.” In his closing stanza Hughes enunciates a nearly immaculate declaration of a transformative praxis rooted in the recoupment of a revolutionary and messianic romanticism:
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers,
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!69
Thus Hughes premises his scrutiny of national mythology on the bedrock of a people’s struggle to make a detour to the future through the past.70
Although Hughes was less visible in Party affairs during and after World War II, he supported the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948, condemned the prosecution of Communist leaders under the Smith Act in 1949, and retained his admiration of the Soviet Union. According to Black former Communist Party member Lloyd Brown, Hughes began to use the telephone instead of personal visits as his primary means of keeping in touch with the Party because he felt obligated to look out for himself; throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Hughes was especially solicitous of Brown’s opinion as to how he should approach controversies with other Black writers, such as James Baldwin.71 Following receipt of a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1953, Hughes worked out a settlement in which he resolved to publicly praise HUAC so long as he was not compelled to name names.72
The Communist Party did not attack Hughes during this period, although W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Hughes was “beneath contempt” for omitting Paul Robeson from his 1955 juvenile book, Famous Negro Music Makers, and Hughes’s former literary agent was not assuaged when Hughes mailed him a copy of the testimony marked “No names mentioned.”73 Some Communist Party members were told that Hughes was placed in a compromised situation due to his homosexuality, threatened with public scandal if he didn’t make a deal.74 After Joseph McCarthy died, the Party literary journal contacted Hughes for a contribution of poetry, but Hughes replied that he had no poems on hand.75 Nevertheless, the Party continued to feature Hughes’s earlier work in its publications.
Somewhat under Hughes’s influence, Richard Wright (1908–60) began his literary career as a poet in Communist and John Reed Club publications in the early 1930s.76 He was born in Natchez, Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, and was raised by his mother, a country schoolteacher, and other relatives. In 1927 he moved to Chicago, where he held various jobs. While working in the post office he met Communists and future members of the John Reed Club, such as Abe Aaron (who published fiction as “Tom Butler”), as early as 1930.77 Soon after becoming busy in the club, he also joined the Communist Party at some point during 1932 or 1933. He was quickly established as a revolutionary poet, but by the mid-1930s, when he joined the Federal Writers Project, he had begun to write fiction, earning Hughes’s nickname of “The Negro Gorky.” His Black proletarian novel about postal workers, Lawd Today, was not published until 1962, but his first collection of four stories was issued in 1938 as Uncle Tom’s Children, whose theme as well as title recall Mike Gold’s preceding essay in Negro, “A Word as to Uncle Tom.”78 A fifth story was issued as a Communist Party pamphlet in 1939, Bright and Morning Star, and was annexed to the second edition along with “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” formerly appearing in the WPA book American Stuff (1938).
Following discord with local Black Communists during which he was charged with Trotskyism, Wright departed Chicago for New York in 1937, where he anticipated embarking on a more auspicious literary career. At that point there was some vacillation about his future in the Communist Party due to his negative experiences in Chicago, and he engaged in a friendly correspondence with pro-Trotskyist James T. Farrell (1904–1979).79 However, once in New York, Wright reconciled with the Party and rose to become director of the Daily Worker Harlem Bureau. After a brief marriage to a Jewish Communist dancer, he wedded a Jewish New York Party organizer and became a national Party speaker in defense of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. While presenting his views as a spokesman for African American opposition about U.S. intervention, Wright did not fail to advance the Black-Jewish unity that was one of the Communist Left’s primary accomplishments: “Who can deny that the Anglo-American hatred of the Negroes is of the same breed of hate which the Nazis mete out to Jews in Germany?”80
The unfriendly reaction of a number of Black Party activists to Wright’s portrayal of Bigger Thomas in his 1940 Native Son, of which he had heard oral reports, disaffected him, even though the novel was lionized by the leading critics in Party literary organs and received the personal endorsement of Earl Browder.81 Mike Gold declared Native Son the equal of The Grapes of Wrath as one of the two major novels of the 1930s.82 New Masses writer Samuel Sillen became a particular Wright enthusiast, also commending the 1941 theater version of Native Son in the strongest conceivable terms, and declaring Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, a historical narrative published that same year, a “magnificent literary and pictorial study.”83 In letters to Wright, Sillen astutely noted that a penchant of Left criticism was to be too concerned with the potential reaction of “other people” to Native Son, rather than honestly discussing one’s own reactions.84 He also accentuated that the New Masses was utterly behind the novel, welcoming the debate and the issues it raised, and that William Z. Foster and other Party leaders “downtown” exemplified “a powerful current of opinion . . . in favor of the book.”85
In the meantime, Wright applied himself to an unfinished novel about women in the United States, for which he enlisted Ralph Ellison as his research assistant. He also wrestled with the technical problem of creating fiction with a range of believable characters beyond the protagonist.86 Together the two men developed an intellectual rapport, based partly on the younger writer’s adulation of Wright’s fiction, but also on their conjoint devotion to studying Marx, Hegel, the classics of Western literature, as well as the psychology and folklife of African Americans. When Black poet Melvin Tolson (1898–1966) wrote to Wright from Texas that “the best laboratory of the Marxist is the race problem,” he could hardly have found a more amenable audience.87
By 1942, however, after the Soviet Union was hammered by the Nazis and the Communist Party was no longer opposed to the war, Wright resolved that the Party had accommodated far too much to its Western allies. He was especially incensed by the Party’s toning down of the battle against racism in the United States and temporarily dropping its opposition to the segregated armed forces. Consequently he began to withdraw from any association with the Party until 1944, when he held a public press conference in his publisher’s office to announce his resignation. At the same time he published in the Atlantic Monthly a compelling but inexact version of his experiences in the Communist Party that had been excised from his 1945 autobiography Black Boy.88 Among other inaccuracies, Wright depicts himself as leaving the Party at the time of the Moscow Trials, about seven years before his actual departure. In the Daily Worker, Black Party leader James Ford asserted with incredulity that “It seems strange that Wright in his Atlantic Monthly articles did not mention his experiences in New York where he was honored and respected by the Communist Party and he himself seemed proud of the Communist Party’s appreciation of him.”89 Notwithstanding, year by year his antagonism toward the Party grew more resolute until he postulated that “the concepts that lay at the bottom of my work now are in direct opposition to those espoused by the Communists.”90
With his wife and older daughter, Wright moved to Paris in 1947,where he became the dominant member of a circle of Left-wing African American expatriates. He also secured friendly relations with Existentialist radicals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and traveled to Africa, Indonesia, and Spain, each of which became topics of his nonfiction books. Wright continued to publish forceful novels with strong psychosexual and antiracist themes, especially The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958). Savage Holiday (1958), whose characters are all white, was designed to be released under a pseudonym, but Wright’s publisher reneged on the agreement for fear of losing sales. Wright remained committed to the need for a revolution against capitalism and colonialism, but he was subjected to pressure by the French government as well as by the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency.91 The stress took a toll on his personal life as well as his literary career, and he died in 1960 under somewhat mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-two.92
Wright’s evolution contrasted dramatically with that of a fellow African American pro-Communist, playwright, Theodore Ward (1902–1983). An autodidact from Louisiana, the eighth of eleven children, Ward left home at thirteen when his mother died.93 After roaming around the United States in the 1920s, he started taking poetry classes at the extension division of the University of Utah, and in 1931 was awarded a Zona Gale Scholarship in Creative Writing that brought him to the University of Wisconsin for several years where he gained some experiences in radio. Arriving in Chicago in 1935, he was quickly drawn to the Left and became a founder of the Chicago South Side Writers Group, sometimes referred to as the Chicago Negro Writers Group, as well as the local chapter of the League of American Writers. By this time Ward had turned his efforts to playwriting, and completed a radical drama in 1937 called “Sick and Tiahd.” In 1938, his most influential play, Big White Fog, a critique of the procapitalist Marcus Garvey and a defense of Communism, opened in Chicago with the endorsement of Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flanagan. In 1940 it was performed at the Lincoln Theater in Manhattan. Ward moved to New York City as well, establishing the Negro Playwrights Company with other Black radicals such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Owen Dodson, and Theodore Browne (1911–1979). The company, however, was not financially viable, and Ward fruitlessly sought support from the Writers’ War Board for a play about Frederick Douglass to be performed for Black troops. In the ensuing period he shined shoes and worked in a war plant while writing a play about longshore workers, Deliver the Goods (1942).
Subsequent to receiving an award from the Theatre Guild, Ward wrote Our Lan’ (1941), pertaining to the dispossession of freed slaves of their land in the post–Civil War era. Two productions, including one on Broadway, were engineered in 1947. That year Ward also wrote an unproduced drama about Black and white workers who contract silicosis, entitled “Shout Hallelujah!” With a Guggenheim fellowship for 1948, Ward began research for a major play based on the life of John Brown. A rudimentary version was acted in a converted garage on the Lower East Side, but he was never able to refine it into a successful version.
When his friend Wright acquitted himself of the Party during World War II, Ward was disgusted at what he regarded as a betrayal, reaffirming his own pro-Communist convictions by becoming a stalwart supporter of Party literature projects throughout the Cold War era. Although he denied holding actual membership, he had access to Party meetings and leaders, and was perceived as the equivalent of a member by Ralph Ellison and others. By 1964, however, when he returned to Chicago, such associations had atrophied, albeit he remained independently militant. In 1967, he established the South Side Center for the Performing Arts. Although the production of two new plays, “Candle in the Wind” and “Whole Hog or Nothing,” failed to materialize, he revived Our Lan’, which played for nearly a year in one of Chicago’s poorest communities, and then he toured the South in the late 1970s under the sponsorship of the Free Southern Theater.
The poet Robert Hayden (1913–1981), a member of the Communist-led John Reed Club of Detroit and later a historian and researcher for the Federal Writers Project, was popularly known as the “People’s Poet” of Detroit.94 Hayden was raised by a foster family in a depressed section of Detroit known as “Paradise Alley.” He read voraciously as a teenager. He first associated with Communists during his theater activities, and was acknowledged as the contact person who could recruit Black actors and actresses for productions of pro-Communist plays. One of these was the Detroit production of Paul Peters’s Stevedore in 1936, in which Hayden himself acted.95 That same year he performed in Langston Hughes’s Drums of Haiti, and met Hughes in person; Hayden handed over to Hughes an unpublished batch of his poems for an evaluation. Working in both the Detroit chapter of the John Reed Club and the Left-wing New Theater Union, Hayden was respected as a reliable Left-winger; although his bisexuality was known to some of his Communist associates, it was simply accepted. In 1936, Hayden, who had been attending Detroit City College (which later became known as Wayne State University), joined the Federal Writers Project to research Black history and folk culture. The following year, his folk drama about Harriet Tubman, Go Down Moses, was performed by the Paul Robeson Players at the Second Baptist Church in Detroit, under Hayden’s direction. In 1940, he published a volume of revolutionary poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, which was praised in the New Masses in an unsigned review for its “affirmative” character but reproved for its insufficient use of folk culture and “over-conventional use of diction and rhythm.”96 The publisher of the poetry volume was Louis Martin, Left-wing editor of the Michigan Chronicle, and the African American Communist Party member and United Auto Workers activist Christopher Alston raised the funds from fellow WPA workers. That same year Hayden married and soon enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he studied under W. H. Auden. Receiving an M.A. in 1942, Hayden taught at Fisk University from 1946 to 1969, then returned to the University of Michigan.
During World War II Hayden underwent a religious conversion to the Baha’i faith, and later dismissed his former writing. In the 1960s he objected to critics who discussed his early poems as meaningful to his career, and he refused to allow their republication, with the one exemption of a Broadside Press edition of his work “Gabriel,” about the slave rebel Gabriel Prosser.97 He relaunched his career as a poet during the Cold War with The Lion and the Archer (1948) and Figure of Time (1955), followed by A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent (1975), American Journal (1978), and Collected Poems (1985). These collections combined unique meditations on Black history and culture with poems on metaphysical and aesthetic themes. Hayden’s writing honored the Black oral tradition and seemed to motivate political views that were in accord with the new Black Left of the 1960s, but he antagonized members of the younger generation by refusing to call himself a Black Poet or support the notion of Black Art.
The Communist movement of mid-century prioritized class and race, and the Afro-Marxist cosmopolitanism of the Black writers and intellectuals drawn to the movement began to acquire recognition from the outset. In contrast, it has only been since the 1960s that four pro-Communist women novelists have accrued a substantial audience due to their perceived vocalization of protofeminist concerns–Tess Slesinger (1905–1945), Josephine Herbst (1992–1969), Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996), and Tillie Olsen (b. 1913). Yet even the work of these most “advanced” writers embodies qualifying factors connected with the historical moment of the mid-twentieth-century Left. One is not faced with a categorical “Communist Women’s Literary Tradition” but more customarily with constructions of female subjectivity by circumscribed women in particularized situations, perhaps disclosing an elective affinity for a relatively shared ideological world outlook. This state of affairs is equally applicable to Great Depression–era novels by Fielding Burke (pseud. for Olive Tilford Dargan, 1869–1968), Grace Lump-kin (1892–1980), Ruth McKenney (1911–1972), Myra Page (1897–1993), Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), Leane Zugsmith (1903–1969), Mary Heaton Vorse (1897–1966), and many others.98 What might be resolved is that this collection of writing is peerless in that it treats female sexuality, desire, and consciousness in the context of class and the exploitation of labor, often accompanied by insights into racial oppression. Moreover, the social actuality and arising panorama of the environment are premised on a roughly estimated assumption about the path to major change. In sum, this is gender-conscious writing but literature that does not necessarily privilege the creation of a unique female voice, especially in terms of textual play.
The fragmented consciousness evidenced in Olsen’s Yonnondio (written in the 1930s but published as a novel in 1974), for example, certainly yokes the novel to modernist and postmodernist language experiments that contemporary French feminist theorists valorize as crucial to liberation from phallocentric master narratives. Yet this trait is largely the outgrowth of the unfinished character of the text; if the circumstances of her life as a working-class woman had not interfered with Olsen’s completion of the novel in the mid-1930s, it might well have cohered in a unified narrative with the female protagonist fulfilling herself through more conventional masculinist political activities. Herbst’s accomplishment in the Texler Trilogy (Pity Is Not Enough [1933], The Executioner Waits [1934], Rope of Gold [1939]) is most compellingly defended as the achievement of a woman who strove, albeit with the deficiency of an unsystematic comprehension of the intersections of many-sided oppressions, to synthesize her gender consciousness with her discernment of racism and class exploitation.99 Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), while praiseworthy for its luminous presentation of the view that “the personal is political,” is troubled by a central ambiguity; conceivably, Slesinger consciously attributes essentialist features to men (logic) and women (emotion), or at least treats maleness and femaleness as equally destructive to psychological health.100
The ambivalences of this literary trend can be observed in the literary persona that has become the site for the most contested interpretations, retrospectively inscribed, of the relation of female Marxist cultural workers to the organized Left during the mid-twentieth century; this persona was produced by the writing of Meridel Le Sueur, who died in November 1996 with a copy of Walt Whitman’s writings at her bedside. The Communist Party’s People’s Weekly World published an obituary noting that Le Sueur remained a Party member to the end, testimony to an unbroken allegiance of more than seven decades. The avowal was based on a February 1995 interview where, in reply to “the question,” the bed-ridden Le Sueur quipped: “Prone, but still in!”101 In contrast, the New York Times obituary for Le Sueur made no mention of her having any Communist or Marxist inclinations, describing her as one “who reported on the plight of the poor during the Depression and celebrated the free spirits of early Americans in her fiction for children.”102 The Nation mentioned Le Sueur only as having a negative relationship with the Communist Party, based on the dubious allegation that the Party tried to “censor her output” because of “her writings about women and children and the close inspection of their lives.” The Nation journalist acknowledged that Le Sueur was hounded by the FBI and blacklisted, especially during the McCarthy era; but that this was not due to her Party membership–rather, it was “because of her radical connections with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Populists and Farmers Alliance.”103 The bulk of appreciations of Le Sueur that followed her death consisted of memoirs by other aspiring writers who were individually touched by her unflagging devotion to the working class, her continuing literary vitality, and her personal accessibility.104 Such a combination of presentism and political amnesia at the time of her death has worked to memorialize a hodgepodge of Le Sueurs, each with little connection to the others.
Nonetheless, Le Sueur’s career is commanding testimony to the particularities involved in the interrelationship of profeminist consciousness, cultural production, and the constraints as well as freedoms provided by Party commitment and ideology expressed through the institutions of the mid-twentieth-century cultural Left. Le Sueur began her life as a writer in the mid-1920s as a radical bohemian with deep roots in the Midwest, although she had already traveled to both coasts. Just after World War I, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and acted on the New York stage, rooming with the anarchist Emma Goldman in a commune. From 1922 to 1928, she unsuccessfully pursued a career in film (as an extra and stunt woman for Perils of Pauline and other movies), stage acting, and on radio (as the voice of Betty Crocker). She joined the Communist Party in 1924 or 1925 (no documentation exists, and her responses to interviewers varied), and in 1926 she married a labor organizer named Harry Rice. Under the influence of two midwestern fiction writers, Zona Gale (1874–1938) and Margery Latimer (1899–1932), and with the aid of Latimer, Le Sueur launched her literary career by publishing an allegorical story, “Persephone,” in the May 1927 issue of the Dial.105 That same year, while in jail for participating in a demonstration protesting the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, she decided to have a child. She soon moved to Minneapolis, where two daughters, Rachel and Deborah, were born in 1928 and 1930. More of her stories appeared in American Mercury, Pagany, Scribner’s, Fantasy, The Magazine, Windsor Quarterly, and similar magazines.
Her early work seems most firmly influenced by D. H. Lawrence with its emphasis on male “rational” and female “emotional” natures, alongside a view of heterosexual intercourse as a transformative experience for the female through the agency of a virile male.106 Le Sueur came from a Left-wing family. Her parents taught at the People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas, and they acquainted their daughter with a panoply of diverse rebels including Eugene Debs, John Reed, Helen Keller, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Margaret Sanger. This heterogeneous radical background molded her consciousness in the 1920s, although she also often referred back to troubling memories of her grandmother’s fanatical convictions against sex and alcohol.
Prior to the Depression, Le Sueur’s contributions to the Communist movement were mainly through articles published in the Daily Worker and the New Masses. In the early 1930s she reaffirmed her commitment to the Communist Party more resolutely. In her noted essay, “I Was Marching,” published in the 18 September 1934 issue of the New Masses, she chose to describe her conversion to Communism as if it were recent and that of a middle-class intellectual resolving her isolation through active support of the Minneapolis Teamster Strikes.107 A year later, in “The Fetish of Being Outside,” also published in the New Masses, she trounced the politically wavering poet Horace Gregory in the same publication for suggesting that, although he had been pro-Communist since the 1920s, he did not feel that Communist Party membership would advance his art.108 Her statement is often noted for its emphasis on the Communist Party’s providing a “communal sensibility” as an alternative to decadent, bourgeois individualism; this ambience was due more to the Party’s organic roots in the working-class struggle than to any specific ideological positions it held.109
By the mid-1930s, Le Sueur was making a distinct contribution to Marxist cultural theory as a passionate advocate of midwestern literary realism. Her speech to the 1935 American Writers Congress–she was the only woman to make a major presentation–argues that revolutionary regionalism is an authentic people’s culture. She characterizes the Middle West as the target of intense “laissez faire colonization,” yet also possessing a regional culture unburdened by an “old tradition” that obscures and muffles the organic connection between the “communal artist” and the new rising class of workers.110 In 1940, the Party’s International Publishers produced Salute to Spring, a collection of Le Sueur’s short fiction and reportage.
Le Sueur persevered in writing with modest attainment during the 1940s; her regional history North Star Country was published in 1945. During the peak of the Cold War, however, she justifiably assumed the mantle of a blacklisted cultural martyr, harassed by the FBI and betrayed by her comrades. She was tight-lipped about her personal life, but apparently suffered a difficult relationship with the Minneapolis painter Robert Brown. For years she held menial jobs, raising her two daughters virtually on her own. During this nadir of her national reputation, her work appeared mainly in the pages of the Party’s redoubtable magazine Masses & Mainstream. However, the Blue Heron Press, established by the Marxist historical novelist Howard Fast after he was released from prison only to find himself blacklisted, published her book about her parents, The Crusaders (1955). She also instigated a new phase in her career by writing half a dozen volumes of children’s literature, most of which are still in print.111
Le Sueur’s literary career was revitalized as a result of the radicalization of the 1960s. Small press editions of her stories and poems began to appear, including Corn Village (1970) and Rites of Ancient Ripening (1975). Then, through the extraordinary efforts of the independent West End Press, whose editor was friendly to the Communist cultural movement, The Girl, a curious novel of the 1930s, was assembled from various of Le Sueur’s manuscripts and published in 1978. Employing the forms, themes, and techniques of popular crime stories to advocate proletarian feminist solidarity, The Girl became one of the most recurrently discussed texts of radical women’s literature in the next decade and went through several editions. During the same period, the West End Press published Harvest (1977), Song for My Time (1977), and Women on the Breadlines (1977). After the Feminist Press published her Ripening (1982), which was ubiquitously reviewed, Le Sueur was hailed as an icon of feminism, celebrated for her devotion to working-class women and her ardent feelings for nature and Native American culture. For many veterans of the 1960s, Le Sueur’s career was living proof that a modern Left-wing women’s culture had existed much earlier and in more intricate ways than had been formerly acknowledged.
The specificity of Le Sueur’s legacy is given its most detailed treatment in an essay on the impact of the Communist Party and gender written by Linda Ray Pratt, “Woman Writer in the CP: The Case of Meridel Le Sueur.”112 Pratt illustrates that these two facets informing Le Sueur’s creative output are joined in more exact ways than generalizations about the oppositions of gender and class (or sometimes gender and Party) have allowed. Pratt’s thesis is that “CP involvement may have been a crucial support to Le Sueur’s survival as a woman writer even as it has had a dampening influence on her lyrical portrayals of women.”113 She commences her case by observing that, although contemporary feminists and others repeatedly point to Le Sueur’s brief association with people like Emma Goldman, her more formative political influences were Communists including William Z. Foster, Robert Minor, and Clarence Hathaway. Le Sueur also served at times in Communist Party leadership capacities; for example, as an alternate member of the National Executive Committee of the Communist Political Association (the organization launched when the Party temporarily dissolved during World War II) and as chair of the Minnesota-Dakotas District of the Communist Party.
Pratt then addresses Le Sueur’s oft-quoted recollection that some Party members criticized her work for being too lyrical. Here Pratt provides documentation that Le Sueur herself esteemed that particular criticism and thought it justified. Although Pratt prefers her more lyrical texts, Le Sueur in her last decades repudiated her early use of “beautiful language” and the “mysticism and vagueness” which she felt obscured her writing as late as 1939.114 Moreover, Pratt observes that claims about Le Sueur’s “feminism” need to be tempered by a recognition that her anti-male literary portraits were always of non-Party members; when Party males appear in her work, they “help female characters recognize their true identity as members of the communal group.”115 Such a literary strategy enabled a reconciliation, on a broad plane, of her feminist outlook with her Communist views, although it dodges a more exacting analysis. In sum, Pratt believes that the influence of the Communist Party encouraged Le Sueur’s non-lyrical and, for Pratt, stylistically weakest writing. Yet she concludes that it was also the Communist Party that fostered the most prophetic and enduring feature of Le Sueur’s artistic achievement, her sense of women’s collective power, and her vision of solidarity among women, which Le Sueur derived from the Communists’ view of solidarity among workers.
Pratt’s treatment of Le Sueur offers a refreshing respite from propensities to uncritically venerate Communist women cultural workers’ resistance to patriarchy, or to focus solely on the more retrograde masculinist features of the Communist cultural movement. For evidence of the latter, one has only to thumb through the pages of the New Masses to see that one of the most frequent motifs for ridiculing fascists, racists, labor fakers, bosses, liberals who were opposed to Party policy, and Trotskyists is to feminize them– especially by dressing them in women’s clothing, often in poses suggesting a female sexuality rendered grotesque by obesity and residual male features (mustaches, five o’clock shadows, hairy legs).116
In addition to using feminine features to ridicule conservatives and political rivals on the Left, some Left-wing literary polemics associate feminine qualities with the middle or upper classes, or else with effete intellectuals frequently depicted as not being “man enough” for class combat. This meshes with the trend in Left-wing literary criticism that portrayed “bad writing” as having feminine features–lacking punch, robustness, and machine-like precision.117 The tradition of identifying revolutionary efficacy with male political potency is clearly evident in a poem by H. H. Lewis, “The Man from Moscow” (1932), in which all political rivals are sexual failures compared to the Bolshevik:
The Knight of Labor was a nervous kid and passed off
before coming into his own.
The Anarchist never did learn how.
The Wobbly was game, he plunged in for direct action
but soon petered out and went haywire.
The A.F. of L.-ite has been fixed so that he cannot
create abomination against respectability.
The Proletarian,118 strumming the Marxian uke and crooning
one manifesto after another, gets no further.
And the queer Socialist,–tsk, tsk, shame forbid!119
Lewis was an eccentric voice, known for excessive effusions in which satirical and earnest beliefs were hard to disentangle. Yet his verse resonates with the broader sensibility of the Left-wing edifice of revolutionary proletarian identity, one that often counterpoised a masculine image of class war to a feminized middle-class culture. In yet another suggestive variant, Mike Gold theorized his class and ethnic identity in terms of gender: “Working class America is my father, working class Jewry is my mother.”120
Much Communist literature, by men as well as women, however, did stray from the dominant construction of gender ideology that featured a male obligation to “protect” women. More often, poetry by Leftist women depicted instances of females affirming their revolutionary credentials by attempting to “act like a man.” This effort is apparent even in a report on a public meeting that appeared in the Boston John Reed Club journal written by Rivka Ganz (dates unknown). Ganz offered the following description of the Young Communist League Organizer Sylvia Shreves: “There is something shy about her soft, fluffy hair, but her slim body thrusts itself bold and strong, forward to right and left, emphasizing every one of her short forceful phrases. She wears a worker’s white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow.”121 In this illustration, the proletarian prototype retains male features to which a Communist woman might conform. The results were somewhat different in more sustained efforts of pro-Communist women novelists to actively structure the meaning of sexual difference in capitalist society. In writings of Olsen, Herbst, Slesinger, and others, the female characters that are depicted may start out by trying to assume masculine roles–as rebels, organizers, professional writers, sexually autonomous beings–but their full-blown portraitures often defy and profoundly transgress the gender categories previously constructed through the prevailing literary tradition.
Much of the scholarship of the last decades leans toward the interpretation that the Communist movement empowered women by imparting confidence and offering forums for expression, while at the same time it constricted women in ways that reflected the gender hierarchy of the dominant culture. To be sure, Left women writers did not exist in a vacuum as mere creatures of the Communist movement; like other writers they were formed by the events of the time, ranging from the personal matrix of their home and families to the national and international events that escalated to a high pitch of horror in the 1930s and 1940s. But the Communist cultural movement did provide an institutional framework with some precision. The Soviet Union was upheld as a model, and the Communist Party projected itself as the vanguard of the American working class. This meant that a woman’s individualism was always qualified by certain loyalties to a political organization, social class, and even a foreign utopia, that were instrumental steps to self-liberation through group emancipation. One obvious manifestation of this Soviet dependency that fettered the expression of feminism was a growing parallel emphasis on the traditional family in the United States as the political orientation of the Soviet Union evolved toward a similar emphasis during the Popular Front.122
Still, one cannot look to a single determinant to explicate the creative efforts of the women writers, or African Americans, who comported themselves within the force field of the principal cultural institutions spawned by the Left in mid-century. Within this field, the New Masses was supreme. Yet this oft-cited but little understood publication was riven by multifarious pressures. On the one hand, there was a sweep of male personalities, each with irregular talents and disparate literary tastes. Then, pressing upon this hardworking and often shifting circle of editors was the increasing drive of the Communist movement for homogeneity and loyalty to an egregiously idealized Soviet leadership. The outcome was a magazine of many faces as it negotiated the traumas and blows of national economic collapse and the belligerency of international fascism.