1. For several opinions about the distinction between affiliations and forms, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), pp. xix–xx; and Alan Trachtenberg, “Introduction,” in Paul Strand, ed. Maren Strange (New York: Aperture, 1990).
2. Because writers related to the Communist movement in various ways, and for longer or shorter amounts of time under differing circumstances, I have tried to be precise about each association. Still, there is no foolproof method of determining the depth or sincerity of one’s commitment. Much depends on the reader’s definitions and criteria; some assertions in my study will no doubt provoke legitimate disagreement. The term “Communist-led,” when referring to organizations initiated and politically supported by the Communist Party, has a range of different meanings in regard to the precise role played by organized and unorganized Party members. When treating such organizations—the John Reed Clubs, League of American Writers, the Party’s Cultural Commission, and so forth—I will try to provide more details about the institutional structure and culture.
3. Cited in Leo Ribuffo, “The Complexity of American Communism,” Right, Center, Left: Essays in American History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 136.
4. See the extensive discussion of Bourdieu’s concept as a bridge between the objective and subjective in Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (New York: Rout-ledge, 1992), pp. 74–84.
5. The most helpful guide to this general subject is Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996).
1. Guy Endore to the New Republic, 27 Feb. 1934. The 14 March 1934 issue carried a selection of letters about the event, but Endore’s was not included. A copy of his letter is available in the Endore Papers at UCLA.
2. The letter continues: “That was a very fine period of grace. Secondly, it made sure that whatever might come of it would not be a universal crusade against Russia.” Endore to Harry Braverman, 10 July 1941, Endore Papers. To another friend he wrote: “Only the Russians had a right to make a separate peace with the Nazis for they were able to protect themselves. So after offering collective action to all of those little countries who refused, they had a right to say ‘go to hell’ to all of them.” Endore to Carl Drehier, 26 July 1941, Endore Papers. According to Ring Lardner Jr., the sole surviving member of the “Hollywood Ten,” Endore and Samuel Ornitz were regarded as the “explainers” among Hollywood Communists, due to their role in justifying complicated or unexpected policy changes by the Party and Soviet Union. Wald interview with Lardner, Weston, Connecticut, October 1989. In the World War II period, Endore even corresponded with Comintern agent Otto Katz in Mexico about making a film about Stalin; see Endore to Katz, 22 Jan. 1943, Endore Papers.
3. Endore to Isidor Schneider, 9 July 1945, Endore Papers.
4. A favorable review by Charles Humboldt appeared in the issue of New Masses (11 Dec. 1945): 23–24; an enthusiastic letter appeared in the Readers’ Forum in the New Masses issue of 8 Jan. 1946, p. 20.
5. The inquiry into Endore’s Yoga is recalled in a letter from Sanora Babb to Guy Endore, 10 Nov. 1967, Endore Papers,
6. There are different recollections of the consistency of Endore’s vegetarianism, as well as his motivations for it. In a 13 September 1989 interview, his older daughter, Marcia Endore Goodman, expressed the view that Endore was primarily concerned about his health, although episodically he returned to eating meat when his wife became annoyed with preparing different meals for family members.
7. The career of Endore will be revisited in a later volume, with special attention to his screen credits and post-Communist activities.
8. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 307.
9. Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 4 Apr. 1960, p. 11, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute, Palo Alto, Calif.
10. Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 14 Sept. 1960, Freeman Papers.
11. Josephine Herbst to David Madden, quoted in the introduction to Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), pp. xxi–xxii.
12. Maltz interview with Victor Navasky, 20 Feb. 1974, Maltz Collection, Library of Social History, Los Angeles, California.
13. The 1946 post-Browder cultural controversy is misdated 1943 in Aaron’s discussion on pp. 386–90 in Aaron, Writers on the Left.
14. Walter Snow to Maurice Isserman, 24 Oct. 1972, University of Connecticut Library, Storrs, Conn. The collection of papers also includes Snow’s letters from the 1930s, which are full of fascinating details and compelling interpretations of disputes within the cultural Left from Snow’s perspective. In addition to his prolific career as journalist, editor, and author of mystery stories, Snow wrote poetry in the Daily Worker and elsewhere, much of which was collected in The Glory and the Shame: Poems by Walter Snow (Coventry, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1973). Despite his hard line against “renegades” in his correspondence with Isserman, Snow’s one novel, The Golden Nightmare (New York: Austen-Phelps, 1952), is an anti-Communist detective story; the book jacket boasts that Snow “was active in the long fight to oust Communists from control of the New York Newspaper Guild.”
15. I have contributed to this critique myself in “The Legacy of Daniel Aaron,” in Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 13–27.
16. See “Revising the Barricades: Scholarship about the U.S. Cultural Left in the Post–Cold War Era,” Working Papers Series in Cultural Studies, Ethnicity, and Race Relations, no. 11 (Pullman, Wash.: Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, 2000). This essay was originally intended to appear as a “literature review” in the Introduction to Exiles from a Future Time, but was cut due to its specialized academic character.
17. See my analysis of this novel and its context in “The Subaltern Speaks,” in Wald, Writing from the Left, pp. 178–86.
18. See Oral History of Guy Endore, Endore Papers.
19. Casanova: His Known and Unknown Life (New York: John D. Company, 1929); The Sword of God: The Life of Joan of Arc (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1932); King of Paris (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958); Voltaire! Voltaire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961); Satan’s Saint: A Novel about the Marquis de Sade (New York: Crown, 1965).
20. Herbert Biberman to Guy Endore, 16 July 1965, Endore Papers.
21. The ancedote is reported in an undated page in the Endore Papers.
22. Kenneth Burke, “Literature and Science,” in The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart (New York: Equinox, 1937), p. 167.
23. Norman MacLeod to Jack Conroy, 2 Mar. 1969, MacLeod Papers, Yale University.
24. Josephine Herbst to Alfred Kazin, 8 Sept. 1965, Herbst Papers, Yale University.
25. Joseph Freeman to Josephine Herbst, 25 Oct. 1958, Herbst Papers.
26. In a letter of 4 August 1958, Freeman expressed his dismay when reading a manuscript (not by Aaron) prepared for the Fund for the Republic about the League of American Writers, depicting the league as a “conspiracy” hatched by a Communist leader rather than a response to the Great Depression and rise of fascism. The author had gone to three embittered ex-radicals who “naturally rattled off the jokes, anecdotes and spiteful pieces of gossip they have been telling for years, all of it enriched by fantasy and time, all of it told out of context without any attempt to check other people and sources.”
27. “Part of Our Time, Too,” Nation, 5–12 Apr. 1999, p. 63.
28. Leo Ribuffo, Right, Center, Left: Essays in American History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 129.
1. Fearing and Gregory are among the best remembered of the Left poets. Two important volumes about Fearing appeared in the mid-1990s: Kenneth Fearing: Complete Poems (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1994), with superb editing, annotation, and an introduction by Robert M. Ryley; and the ingenious study The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West and Mass Culture in the 1930s, by Rita Barnard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). A number of dissertations are devoted exclusively to Fearing: Andrew Anderson, “ ‘Fear Ruled Them All’: Kenneth Fearing’s Literature of Corporate Conspiracy” (Purdue University, 1989); James Perkins, “An American Rhapsody: The Poetry of Kenneth Fearing” (University of Tennessee, 1972); and Patricia Santora, “The Poetry and Prose of Kenneth Fearing” (University of Maryland, 1982). Both Fearing and Gregory were featured in the influential dissertation by Macha Louis Rosenthal, “Chief Poets of the American Depression” (New York University, 1949), and more recently in Cameron Bardrick, “Social Protest and Poetic Decorum in the Great Depression: A Reading of Kenneth Fearing, Horace Gregory, and Muriel Rukeyser” (Columbia University, 1984). The entire issue of Modern Poetry Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1973) is devoted to essays on Horace Gregory.
2. See my discussion of Fearing in “From Old Left to New in U.S. Literary Radicalism,” in Wald, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 114–22.
3. Wald interview with Sanora Babb, Los Angeles, July 1989. In a 1989 interview in New York City, Annette T. Rubinstein stated her belief that this harassment had driven Taggard to suicide. To date, no evidence of her suicide has surfaced. Wald interview with Rubinstein, 10 Oct. 1989, New York City.
4. Horace Gregory to Charmion Von Wiegand, 13 Aug. 1965, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute, Palo Alto, Calif.
5. Letter from Joseph Freeman to Horace Gregory, 28 June 1961, pp. 6–7, Gregory Papers, Syracuse University.
6. Joseph Freeman, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1936), p. viii.
7. For an informative discussion of the use of Black dialect in canonical modernist poetry and fiction, see Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
8. Walter Snow, unpublished manuscript, “That Literary ‘Shotgun Marriage,’ ” p. 8, Snow Papers, University of Connecticut.
9. A superior collection of primary source materials edited by Jon Christian Suggs shows the ways in which this shifting policy was manifest: Suggs, ed., American Proletarian Culture: The Twenties and the Thirties (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1993).
10. Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, eds., Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 289.
11. On the other hand, the base for a specifically proletarian cultural movement was significantly eroded by the Popular Front, as Jack Conroy and Nelson Algren discovered when they tried to launch New Anvil in Chicago in March 1939; it lasted only until August 1940.
12. William Z. Foster to V. F. Calverton, 10 Aug. 1925, Calverton Papers, New York Public Library.
13. See “Historical Overview,” in Suggs, American Proletarian Culture, pp. 3–16.
14. The 1925 prospectus for the New Masses, at that time called “Dynamo,” states that the magazine intends to publish “Rhymed and free-verse poetry, favoring vigorous expression of positive ideas and ideals, and avoiding the ineffectual fatalism so prevalent in many aesthetic literary publications.” See American Fund for the Republic Collection. An example of the Soviet preoccupation with fatalism occurs in Anne Elistratova’s critique of the New Masses in International Literature no. 1 (1932): 107–14, where she takes Langston Hughes to task for his “distinctly decadent and passive mood” in his poem “Tired.”
15. Published in Granville Hicks et al., eds., Proletarian Literature in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p. 171.
16. This was Daniel Aaron’s apt phrase for Michael Gold’s vision of working-class literature at the time Gold edited the New Masses. Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 205.
17. See the minutes of the first national convention of the John Reed Clubs, May 1932, Chicago, where poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) starts an argument with the first question. Freeman Papers.
18. For evidence of continuities between poetry of the Old Left and New Left eras, see Dudley Randall, “The Black Aesthetic in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,” in Modern Black Poets, ed. Donald B. Gibson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 34–42; and Charlotte Nekola’s essay, “Worlds Moving: Poetry and Literary Politics of the 1930s,” in Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940, ed. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), pp. 127–34. Walter Kalaidjian’s American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), brilliantly suggests such cross-generational connections as well.
19. The general characteristics of this rebellion are cogently described in the chapters “The New Paganism” and “Three Bohemias” in James Burkhart Gilbert’s Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), pp. 1–87.
20. Among the poetry and short story publications whose most visible contributors and often whose editors variously showed attraction to Communist ideas between 1929 and 1935 are The Anvil, Blast, Blues, Challenge, Clay, Contempo, Contemporary Vision (originally Scepter), Direction, The Dubuque Dial, Dynamo, Folio, John Reed Review, The Hammer, Hinterland, Hub, The Left, Left Front, The Left Review, Leftward, Midland Left, The Morada, Nativity, The New Force, The New Quarterly, The New Tide, The Partisan, Partisan Review, Point, Pollen, Proletcult, The Rebel Poet, The Red, Red Pen, Revolt (New York), Revolt (Paterson, New Jersey), War, Western Poetry, and The Windsor Quarterly. In The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich observe that “The hold of revolutionary thinking and of the apparent necessity for social action upon the writers of the early thirties was so strong that it was difficult for any magazine to exclude it from its pages” (p. 316). This list conceivably could be expanded to include publications such as Pagany and even Hound and Horn. It’s also important to note that many of the more explicit pro-Communist literary magazines, especially those associated with the John Reed Clubs, are not listed in the bibliography by Hoffman et al., which is widely regarded as definitive.
21. The most fully documented and discussed instance of such a dispute over the politics of literary judgment was the 1937 break between some of the leading editors of Partisan Review, organ of the John Reed Club of New York, and the Communist Party. I have discussed this development extensively in The New York Intellectuals, and I review subsequent literature on the topic in “The New York Literary Left,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 130–42, and “Learning from Adversaries,” Boston Book Review 3, no. 6 (June 1996): 7–8. Many of the minor disputes between midwestern and New York–based writers are discussed in Douglas Wixson, Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
22. Freeman began as a local-color storyteller in New England but produced works in many genres, including novels and plays. Markham was a school-teacher on the West Coast who wrote several popular volumes of verse. Traubel was a journalist friend of Walt Whitman and a popularizer of socialism.
23. Chaplin was a journalist and artist as well as song-writer and poet. Giovannitti was born in Italy and also known as a lecturer and pamphleteer on behalf of the working class. Hill was a popular songwriter as well as cartoonist, executed after being framed on a murder charge in Utah.
24. Some of the background sources on the Left tradition in verse are summarized in the entry “Poetry, 1870–1930,” by Paul Buhle in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 608–11.
25. See Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
26. Manuel Gomez, ed., Poems for Workers (Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing, n.d.), p. 4. The selected poems were by the Chartist leader Ernest Jones; the United States journalist who witnessed the Paris Commune, Edward King; the Irish nationalist martyr James Connolly; the English antiwar poet Siegfried Sassoon; and a variety of contemporary Left poets including Joseph Freeman, Arturo Giovannitti, Louis Untermeyer, Michael Gold, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Oppenheim, Carl Sandburg, Donald Crocker, J. S.Wallace, Miriam Allen DeFord, Edward Connor, Francis W. L. Adams, Alice Corbin, John G. Neihardt, and Jim Waters.
27. For some of these observations, I am indebted to the excellent discussion of working-class literature by Martha Vicinus in The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), and the comments on politics and poetry by Barbara Harlow in Resistance Literature (New York: Metheun, 1987). For a rich study of the political poetry during World War I, see Mark Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
28. Papers of the Fourth American Writers’ Congress, University of California, Berkeley.
29. Nelson and Hendricks, eds., Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems, p. 212.
30. Allen Gutmann quotes a number of examples of this demand by New Masses writers in “The Brief, Embattled Course of Proletarian Poetry” in Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), pp. 252–69.
31. Gomez, Poems for Workers, p. 7.
32. According to Aaron Kramer, who knew both Untermeyers well, Ms. Untermeyer was the more committed of the two to the Communist view. Wald interview with Kramer, Long Island, New York, 5 June 1994. The Untermeyers were first married in 1907, then divorced in 1925. Louis Untermeyer passed through two more marriages and divorces, then remarried and divorced Jean Untermeyer before his next and final marriage. Jean Untermeyer, who also attempted a career as a singer, published six volumes of verse. She was a member of the Executive Committee and National Council of the League of American Writers, but she withdrew during the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
33. See William L. O’Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and American Intellectuals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 165.
34. Alden Whitman, “A Man of Many Talents,” New York Times, 19 Dec. 1977, p. 42.
35. Gomez, Poems for Workers, p. 7.
36. Ibid., p. 39.
37. Young Worker, May 1922, p. 14.
38. Ibid., by W. E. E., May 1922, p. 18; C. Revilo, June–July 1922, p. 1; S. Max Kitzes, June–July 1922, p. 15; and Rena Deane, October 1922, p. 14.
39. Field was first a missionary in Burma, then a socialist and activist in the suffrage movement. Neihardt is best known for his poetry and prose about the Plains Indians, especially Black Elk Speaks (New York: William Morrow, 1932).
40. Young Worker, Aug.–Sept. 1922, p. 8.
41. Ibid.
42. The transit of literary radicalism in the United States during its first three decades has been traced in general terms in the major studies by Aaron, Gilbert, and Rideout, although none of them discuss poetry in any detail. The most thoughtful consideration of the evolution of radical poetry in the 1920s and 1930s can be found in Cary Nelson’s remarkable Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). My assessment of the book appears in The Responsibility of Intellectuals (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. 126–30. General insight into the currents shaping twentieth-century radical literary form and themes in its formative period are presented in Michael B. Folsom’s “Literary Radicalism and the Genteel Tradition: A Study of the Principal Works of the American Socialist Movement before 1912,” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1972. A straight forward description of the Masses can be found in Thomas A. Maik, “A History of The Masses Magazine,” Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 1968. A more contemporary analysis of the cultural, personal, psychoanalytical, and sexual dimensions of this milieu is offered in Leslie Fishbein’s Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of “The Masses,” 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Two of the more recent studies of the Bohemian-Radical culture are Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986); and Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). The publication of Douglas Wixson’s study of Jack Conroy and the Midwest radical cultural tradition, Worker-Writer in America, closes a serious gap in scholarship about this regional literary tradition.
43. Genevieve Taggard, ed., May Days (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), p. 13. Taggard bolstered her argument with a citation from Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1922) to the effect that those who hail the achievements of weak and colorless poetry on the grounds of the class origin of the poets, and who deny access to “the technique of bourgeois art,” are themselves evidencing “contempt for the masses.”
44. One piece of evidence for the link is the celebratory review of Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), by Alan Calmer (a pseudonym for Abraham Klein, dates unknown), a young critic from Baltimore who was on the verge of becoming a leader of the John Reed Clubs and who subsequently became an employee of International Publishers. See Modern Quarterly 5, no. 4 (Winter 1930–31): 560–61.
45. See the thoughtful discussion of Gold’s role in the New Masses in Marcus Klein’s Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 68–86. For an overview of the history of the John Reed Clubs, see “Proletarian Literature and the John Reed Clubs” in Eric Homberger’s American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–39: Equivocal Commitments (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), pp. 119–40. In 1926 a group of pro-Communist intellectuals, in response to a communication from the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, tried to launch a Proletarian Artist and Writers League in New York to coordinate various cultural activities, but it never got off the ground. See letter from Harry Freeman, 5 Oct. 1926, in the Calverton Papers.
46. Rebel Poet 1, no. 1 (January 1931): 1.
47. Ibid., p. 2.
48. Ibid., 1, nos. 6–7 (June–July 1931): 3–4.
49. Jack Conroy to Sterling Brown, 3 July 1932, Brown Papers, Howard University.
50. Rebel Poet 1, no. 5 (May 1931): 2.
51. Ibid., 1, nos. 8–9 (August–September 1931): 9.
52. The complete list of names appears in Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 457 (n. 73).
53. This might explain why there were no follow-up volumes, which is surprising in light of the success of the first one. Likewise, the first and only competition for the best proletarian novel, a contest sponsored by the New Masses and John Day Company publishing house, also occurred in that fateful year.
54. Kalar’s fugitive pieces were collected by his son, Richard Kalar, and privately published in 1985 as Joseph A. Kalar: Poet of Protest (Blaine, Minn.: RGK Publication, 1985).
55. H.H. Lewis proclaimed himself a devout Communist in four “Rebel Poets Booklets” published in Holt, Minnesota, by B. C. Hagglund: Red Renaissance (1930), Thinking of Russia (1932), Salvation (1934), and Road to Russia: Poems Written by a Missouri Farmhand and Dedicated to Soviet Russia (1935). After the 1940s, he lapsed into isolation and became increasingly eccentric. The most complete information available about Lewis appears in Wixson, Worker-Writer in America.
56. From the early 1930s through the civil rights movement, the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, trained labor and civil rights activists. See John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932–1962 (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1988).
57. See the thoughtful discussion of Guthrie’s promotion of his own legend in Bryan K. Carman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). The definitive biography is Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1980).
58. Don West to Langston Hughes, 19 Oct. 1943, Hughes Papers, Yale University.
59. Don West, In a Land of Plenty: A Don West Reader (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1982), p. 3.
60. Wald interview with Junius Scales, New York City, April 1991. Several of West’s sisters were also active in the Communist movement. While West may have dropped his Party membership after 1956, he continued his ties to the movement and expressed sympathy for the Soviet Union. As late as the mid-1980s West contributed to a Party-led journal about his favorable impressions of the Soviet Union; see “Appalachian Young People Visit the USSR,” New World Review 52, no. 2 (March–April 1984): 27. Yet he also contributed to Jewish Currents in the years after its editors were castigated by the Party as renegades.
61. There is no reason to doubt the veracity of these claims. Two of the violent high points of his life as a Communist militant came in 1933, when West was beaten unconscious while serving as an organizer for the National Miners’ Union in Harlan, Kentucky, and 1948, when the Ku Klux Klan torched his home. See the West Papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. When West was active in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon defense efforts, the Gastonia Strike, and many other events in the history of southern radicalism, he was often forced to operate clandestinely and at great personal risk. In the 1950s he was hauled before Senate Internal Security investigating committees and vilified by the southern press.
62. West’s project might be usefully discussed in light of the “romantic nationalism” that Jerrold Hirsch sees as a crucial component of the Popular Front. See his essay, “From Play-Party to Popular Front: B. A. Botkin, Folklore, and Proletarian Regionalism,” Intellectual History Newsletter 19 (1997): 29–37. For a more critical view of West as one who romanticizes Appalachia, see Richard Marius, “Don West’s Sermon on the Mount,” Appalachian Journal 10, no. 4 (Summer 1983): 361–65.
63. West, In a Land of Plenty, p. 128.
64. Ibid., p. 94.
65. There was only one John Reed Club in the South, at Commonwealth College in Arkansas, and West never held membership in the League of American Writers nor signed any of its public statements. Only two of his poems, “Dark Winds” and “Southern Lullaby,” were included in Hicks et al., Proletarian Literature in the United States, pp. 198–99.
66. See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1963).
67. Edwin Berry Burgum, “Three Radical English Poets,” New Masses (3 July 1934): 33–36. For details about the “Auden School,” see Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).
68. The theses are reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).
69. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors (New York: H. H. Wilson, 1942), p. 1380.
70. Taggard’s essay and the editors’ comment appear in New Masses (25 Sept. 1934): 18–20. An additional essay was published on the topic, but this was mainly a polemic against Max Eastman which did not take clear sides on the original dispute. See Granville Hicks, “The Vigorous Abandon of Max Eastman’s Mind,” New Masses (6 Nov. 1934): 22–23.
71. For comparison, see Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), pp. 126–71.
72. The phrase is from Martin Buber in reference to the Russian populist Landauer.
73. Michael Löwy, “Marxism and Utopian Vision,” On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 22.
74. Max Blechman, “Preface,” in Blechman, ed., Revolutionary Romanticism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999), p. xvi.
75. Horace Gregory, Poems, 1930–1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1941), p. 90.
76. An excellent discussion of Whitman’s stature in Left poetry can be found in Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), especially pp. 94–100. A more recent discussion can be found in Carman, A Race of Singers, pp. 43–78.
77. Nelson Algren, “Strength and Beauty,” New Masses (20 Aug. 1935): 25.
78. Hughes expressed this view in his introduction to the 1946 International Publishers edition of I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman. The introduction was reprinted in American Dialogue 5, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 1969): 8.
79. Robert Hayden, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” in a 1942 unpublished manuscript, “The Black Spear,” courtesy of Robert Chrisman.
80. Patchen, in fact, wrote disparagingly of Whitman at times, but the influence was nevertheless abundant. See Raymond Nelson, Patchen and American Mysticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
81. This interpretation of Whitman can be found in Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 3–8.
1. About half the books written by Gold identify him as “Michael” and the other half “Mike,” and his Daily Worker column switches back and forth as well, so I follow suit and alternate between the two names.
2. “ ‘The Red Decade’—a valuable study of America’s literary Left of the 30s,” by A. P. Towle (pseud. for Philip Stevenson), Daily World, 28 April 1962, p. 4. Actually, in the cartoon strip to which Stevenson refers, it was not Krazy Kat himself but a sidekick who specialized in bouncing rocks.
3. “Out of the Fascist Unconscious,” New Republic, 26 July 1933, pp. 295–96.
4. Quoted in David Platt, “Mike Gold Is 60—Tributes Pour In,” Daily Worker, clipping in Gold Papers, University of Michigan.
5. Ed Falkowski to Kenneth Payne, 8 November 1971, Gold Papers.
6. Gold to Upton Sinclair, undated (probably mid-1920s), Sinclair Papers, Indiana University.
7. Dorothy Day, “Mike Gold,” Catholic Worker, June 1967, p. 8.
8. This is reprinted in Michael Folsom, ed., Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 203–8.
9. Michael Gold, “May Days and Revolutionary Art,” Modern Quarterly 3, no. 1 (February–April 1926): 161–64. Judging by the following passage from the review, Gold had at that time a critical distance from the organized Communist movement, whatever his membership status: “Why has the Workers’ Party not been able to tap some of this rich literary material that is disclosed in an anthology like this? Despite the fact that American Communists have the narrowness of adolescence, and have shown a decided anti-literary bias, could they not have enlisted some of the splendid satirists and humorists who are included here?”
10. For one of several discussions of Gold’s highly gendered treatment of revolutionary literature, see the section called “The Early 1930s: Proletarian Culture and Gender Ideology” in Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940 (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), pp. 3–9. A harsher version of the same argument appears in Janet Galligani Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 31–34.
11. The early manifesto is reprinted in Folsom, Mike Gold, pp. 62–70.
12. The history of the New Play wrights Theater will be discussed in a chapter about John Howard Lawson in a later volume, but it is worth noting here that one of the productions, Emjo Basshe’s The Centuries (1927), was a likely influence on Jews without Money.
13. Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 26.
14. Freeman to Mike Gold, 7 Jan. 1959, Gold Papers. The resumption of communication between the two men was jump-started by Daniel Aaron’s research for Writers on the Left.
15. Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 25.
16. Gold, “A Miscellany on Labor in the Sun and Modern Poetry,” People’s World, dated “1957,” copy in Gold Papers.
17. Joseph Freeman, An American Testament (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938), p. 368.
18. Gold interview with Michael Folsom, 13 Oct. 1966, Gold Papers.
19. Gold’s reminiscences of Mayakovsky appear in three issues of the Daily Worker in 1940: 22 Aug., p. 7; 24 Aug., p. 7; and 27 Aug., p. 7.
20. Michael Gold, David Burliuk: Artist-Scholar, Father of Russian Futurism; With a Brief Sketch of Mayakovsky Whom Burliuk Discovered (New York: A.C.A. Gallery, 1943).
21. In a letter from Elizabeth Granich to Folsom, 20 Apr. 1968, Gold’s widow states that Gold’s sister-in-law, who met Gold in 1921, believed that as early as his Boston pre–World War I years Gold was exhibiting the symptoms of diabetes attacks, including unconsciousness. After the illness was diagnosed in late 1939, Gold carried a note in his pocket that read: “I am a diabetic.... If I seem drunken, etc., it is a result of a diabetic attack. Please feed orange juice, milk, sugar water.” Letter and a copy of the note are in the Gold Papers.
22. Dorothea Parrot to Michael Folsom, 27 Mar. 1975, Gold Papers. Ginsberg’s nickname is given in Watson, Birth of the Beat Generation, p. 23.
23. Gold to Upton Sinclair, undated [1923], Sinclair Papers.
24. Al Richmond, “Some Recollections of Mike Gold,” People’s World, 7 May 1964, p. 6.
25. Gold has been the subject of a good deal of scholarship, although it is somewhat redundant and there remain periods of his life and texts that have not yet been fully explored. The best-known discussion of his life and work is in Aaron’s Writers on the Left, and a more recent consideration appears in Marcus Klein’s Foreigners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). The foremost authority on Gold was Michael Brewster Folsom (1938–1990), who became Gold’s personal friend and literary editor while attending graduate school in English at the University of California at Berkeley. Folsom spent long hours tape-recording conversations with Gold, and he believed that the original tapes were subsequently destroyed at Gold’s request for fear that some of the information might be used to persecute radicals for their political beliefs and activities. Folsom published a landmark essay in the 28 February 1966 issue of the Nation, pp. 242–45, denouncing the corruption of the text of Gold’s Jews without Money by the decision of Avon Books to delete the final, revolutionary paragraphs. Folsom’s protest resulted in the restoration of these paragraphs in later editions. Another Folsom essay that same year, “The Education of Michael Gold,” in Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), became the primary source on Gold’s early life for a generation of new scholars. Six years later, Folsom edited Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, with an irreverent but affectionate introduction called “The Pariah of American Letters.” This provoked an angry response in the Communist Party’s Political Affairs from Gold’s comrade, Art Shields, who felt that Folsom was too critical of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union (“Mike Gold, Our Joy and Pride,” vol. 51, no. 7 [July 1972]: 41–52). Folsom’s defense appeared in the December 1972 issue of that journal as “A Reply to Art Shields,” vol. 51, no. 12, pp. 49–52, followed by Shields’s “Differences with Folsom,” pp. 52–56.
Doctoral dissertations in the United States on Gold include: John Brogna, “Michael Gold: Critic and Playwright,” University of Georgia, 1982; Howard Hertz, “Writer and Revolutionary: The Life and Works of Michael Gold, Father of Proletarian Literature in the United States,” University of Texas at Austin, 1974; and Azar Naficy, “The Literary Wars of Mike Gold: A Study in the Background and Development of Mike Gold’s Literary Ideas, 1920–1941,” University of Oklahoma, 1979. John Pyros produced a privately published book called Mike Gold: Dean of American Proletarian Writers (New York: Dramatika Press, 1979); and James D. Bloom issued Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). A recent book with an excellent chapter on Gold is Rachel Lee Rubin, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Some of the important essays on Gold include Paul Berman, “East Side Story: Mike Gold, the Communists and the Jews,” Village Voice 15 (March 1983): 1, 9–11; Morris Dickstein, “Hallucinating the Past: Jews without Money Revisited,” Grand Street 9 (Winter 1990): 155–68; Helge Norman Nilsen, “The Evils of Poverty,” Anglo-American Studies 4 (April 1984): 45–60; Kenneth William Payne, “Naturalism and the Proletarians: The Case of Mike Gold,” Anglo-American Studies, April 1983, pp. 21–37; Annette Rubinstein, “Jews without Money—Not Jews without Love,” Jewish Currents, November 1960, pp. 7–10; and Richard Tuerk, “Jews without Money as a Work of Art,” Studies in American-Jewish Literature 7, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 67–79. A moving and informative tribute is John Howard Lawson’s “The Stature of Mike Gold,” Political Affairs 46, no. 6 (June 1967): 11–14.
In addition to engaging in discussions and correspondence with me about Gold between 1973 and 1990, Folsom gave me a draft of his unpublished literary biography of Gold up to the year 1918, upon which I have relied for some details. I also examined FBI materials on Gold, released under the Freedom of Information Act, at the FBI Reading Room in 1992. However, most of the new biographical information that I obtained comes from personal interviews with Gold’s widow, Elizabeth, and his son, Nick, in September 1995, as well as the collection of Gold Papers at the University of Michigan (which contains many items located by Folsom).
26. Gold, “Change the World,” Daily Worker, 12 July 1959, Gold Papers.
27. Gold interview with Folsom, 16 Dec. 1965, Gold Papers.
28. Elizabeth Granich to Folsom, 6 Aug. 1970, Gold Papers.
29. Irwin Granich, “To One Dying,” New York Call Magazine, 13 Aug. 1919, p. 10.
30. Gold, “A Great Deed Was Needed,” Workers Monthly, September 1925, p. 496.
31. Interview with Michael Folsom, transcribed in “Mike Gold: A Literary Life” (unpublished manuscript), p. 14, Gold Papers.
32. Ibid., p. 15.
33. In an undated letter (probably 1926 or 1927) to Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Papers, Gold lists the possible titles as “An East Side Youth,” “A Curse on Columbus,” “The Proletarian Trap,” “Poverty’s Trap,” “The Trap of Poverty,” and “Poverty Is a Trap,” indicating that the last is his favorite.
34. In a 3 June 1996 phone interview with Wald, Gold’s sister-in-law, Gertrude Granich, confirmed that Waters worked as a house painter and died of lead poisoning from the paint fumes. Waters contributed four poems to Manuel Gomez, ed., Poems for Workers (Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing, n.d.). Gold contributed only one poem, his moving “John Reed’s Body.”
35. Quoted in Folsom, “Mike Gold: A Literary Life,” p. 3.
36. Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Liveright, 1930), p. 309.
37. Ibid., p. 274.
38. Wald interview with Nicholas Granich, September 1995, San Francisco. In a 15 January 1968 letter to Folsom, Elisabeth Granich recalled hearing descriptions of the speaker as wearing a plumed hat and other clothing that suggested Goldman would be the speaker but speculated that Gold may have met Flynn at the demonstration as well. Gold Papers.
39. See his “Change the World” columns in the Daily Worker for 3 Sept. 1946, p. 7; 7 Sept. 1946, p. 6; and 10 Sept. 1946, p. 7.
40. This is reprinted in Folsom, Mike Gold, p. 23.
41. Ibid., p. 14–15.
42. Manny Granich contributed poetry to the publication.
43. At the beginning of his 1928 short story, “Love on a Garbage Dump,” Gold writes: “Certain enemies have spread the slander that I once attended Harvard College. That is a lie. I worked on the garbage dump in Boston. But that’s all.” The story is reprinted in Folsom, Mike Gold, pp. 177–85.
44. Folsom, unpublished manuscript, “Mike Gold: A Literary Life.”
45. The plays are apparently lost, but a letter in the Gold Papers from Kenneth Payne to Folsom, 2 June 1972, provides brief descriptions from a Yale University doctoral dissertation by Robert Sarlos, “The Provincetown Players: Experiments in Style.”
46. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (London: Allied Publishers, Private Ltd., 1964), pp. 117, 120.
47. The short story “Two Mexicos” is reprinted in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, pp. 49–61.
48. See Robert Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially pp. 30–49, 52–56.
49. Gold interview with Folsom, 13 Oct. 1966, Gold Papers.
50. Throughout his life, Gold wrote on art and even photography. See “The Jewish Artist in Search of a Subject,” Jewish Life 2, no. 1 (November 1945): 7–10; and “The Face and Figure of Man,” Jewish Life 10, no. 11 (September 1955): 9–10.
51. See the excellent discussion of the play in the context of a reconsideration of Gold’s relations with Claude McKay and African American culture in William Maxwell, “The Proletarian as New Negro: Mike Gold’s Harlem Renaissance,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 90–119.
52. Gold, “About Hoboken Blues,” 19 Oct. 1966, Gold Papers.
53. It appears in the issue of 21 February 1928 under the title “Fun on Commerce St.”
54. Michael Gold, Life of John Brown (New York: Roving Eye Press, n.d.), a reprint of the early biography by Bob Brown’s press. Two scenes from the Cacchione play were published as “Councilman Pete” in Looking Forward: Sections of Works in Progress by Authors of International Publishers on the Occasion of Its Thirtieth Anniversary (New York: International Publishers, 1954), pp. 143–53.
55. Gold to Sinclair, n.d., Sinclair Papers.
56. However, for a compelling interpretation disclosing how Gold employs Jewish, Irish, and Chinese stereotypes as a matter of course in Jews without Money, see Eric Homberger, “Some Uses for Jewish Ambivalence: Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold,” in Between ‘Race’ and Culture: Representations of the Jew in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 164–80. Also see Richard Tuerk, “Michael Gold’s Hoboken Blues: A Experiment That Failed,” MELUS 20, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 3–15.
57. See Gold, “Why U.S. Jews Should Study Story of His People,” Daily Worker, 8 Apr. 1947, Gold Papers.
58. Gold also saw himself as dark-skinned and an outcast among whites. See “The East Side I Knew,” Jewish Life 1, no. 1 (November 1954): 25–27.
59. “The Death of a Negro,” Liberator 6, no. 10 (Oct. 1923): 20.
60. William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, p. 106.
61. “Claude McKay,” manuscript by Michael Gold, Gold Papers.
62. “Change the World,” Daily Worker, 6 Aug. 1943, Gold Papers.
63. National Guardian, 9 Apr. 1956, p. 7.
64. Gold, David Burliuk: Artist-Scholar, p. 10.
65. Ibid., p. 8.
66. Ibid., p. 10.
67. Although Gold’s characters are poor, industrial work is not depicted, and the head of the protagonist’s household has a middle-class consciousness. One of the most sectarian reviews, reflecting the charges against Gold made in the New York John Reed Club, was that of Melvin P. Levy, a young Communist novelist and playwright, in New Republic (26 Mar. 1930): 160–61. Levy criticizes Gold for his failure to show the systemically caused inevitability of the characters’ poverty, to depict labor organizations and strikes, or to refer to the shirtwaist strike and triangle fire. The novel is compared unfavorably to Gold’s play Fiesta in its ideological failures.
68. “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ” appeared in the 22 October 1930 issue of the New Republic and is reprinted in Folsom, Mike Gold, pp. 197–202; the correspondence, mostly protesting Gold’s analysis but with a few supporting letters, extended to the issue of 17 December 1930. For Lewis, see James Bloom, Left Letters, p. 16.
69. See the excellent study by Richard Tuerk, “Jews without Money as a Work of Art.”
70. See the story “The Password to Thought—to Culture,” Liberator, 1922; this portrait is discussed, in light of the information that Gold rarely saw his mother in the 1920s, in a letter from Kenneth Payne to Michael Folsom, 12 May 1970, Gold Papers. In an interview with Folsom (transcription in the Gold Papers), Gold mentions that prior to leaving for Mexico he failed to tell his mother that he was leaving, and that he remained out of contact with her for a year, even though he knew that she was worried about him.
71. Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 39.
72. “Theater and Revolution,” Nation, 11 Nov. 1925, 536.
73. Gold to Sinclair, 7 Jan. 1924 [probably 1925], Sinclair Papers.
74. Ibid.
75. Michael Gold, “Why I Am a Communist,” New Masses (September 1932): 9.
76. This was the conclusion of the last of his February–March 1946 series of Daily Worker columns concerning Albert Maltz, which are reprinted in Folsom, Mike Gold, pp. 283–91.
77. “Horace Liveright and a Novel,” unpublished manuscript, Gold Papers.
78. Maltz to Kenneth Payne, 18 Apr. 1972, Gold Papers.
79. Gold to Sinclair, marked “Early fall 1936,” Sinclair Papers.
80. Wald interview with Garlin, Boulder, Colo., May 1990.
81. Gold to Walter Lowenfels, 12 July 1955, Lowenfels Papers, Yale University.
82. The poem first appeared in the Liberator in June 1924 and was reprinted many times (sometimes with “A Strange” changed to “The Strange”), and was set to music on several occasions, including one version composed by Aaron Copeland.
83. These three poems are reprinted in Social Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Jack Salzman and Leo Zanderer (New York: Burt Franklin Co., 1978), pp. 88–96.
84. Michael Gold, Charlie Chaplin’s Parade (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930), p. 26.
85. See the discussion in Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 237–43. Gold also referred to Jean Cocteau as a “feeble fairy” in “Six Open Letters,” New Masses (September 1931): 3. For a critical survey of Gold’s various statements on Whitman, see Richard Tuerk, “Mike Gold on Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 (Spring 1986): 16–23.
86. Gold, “Ode to Walt Whitman,” New Masses (5 Nov. 1935): 21.
87. Letter to the Daily Worker, 1953, Lowenfels Papers.
88. Stanley Burnshaw to Wald, 10 Dec. 1990, in possession of Wald.
89. Wald interview with Nathan Adler, Mill Valley, Calif., September 1989.
90. Lester Rodney to Wald, 6 Aug. 1991, in possession of Wald.
91. Ibid., 30 May 1991.
92. Notes from Freedom of Information Act Files on Mike Gold, FBI Reading Room, Washington, D.C., July 1990.
93. Wald interview with Nicholas Granich, 16 Dec. 1992, San Francisco.
94. Notes from Freedom of Information Act Files.
95. Bernard Smith, A World Remembered (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994), p. 21.
96. Aaron Kramer to Wald, 22 Feb. 1991, in possession of Wald.
97. Edward Dahlberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (New York: George Brazillier, 1971), p. 257.
98. Charles Yale Harrison, James T. Farrell, and S. J. Perelman also wrote fiction that employed Gold-like figures.
99. This identification was made by Hazel Rowley in her superbly researched Christina Stead (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), p. 193. Rowley also points out that Gold’s shipboard romance with his wife-to-be was reworked into the beginning of her novel, I’m Dying Laughing (1986).
100. Josephine Herbst to Genevieve Taggard, n.d., New York Public Library. In the late 1920s, Gold also had a significant relationship with Natalie Gomez, formerly the wife of Manny Gomez. See Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 6 June 1958, p. 8, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute.
101. According to Nora Sayre, Previous Convictions: A Journey through the 1950s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 349, “Black wouldn’t marry him [Gold] because marriage was a bourgeois institution which might hamper him as an artist.”
102. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Boston: Beacon, 1957), pp. 274–75.
103. Norman MacLeod to Jack Conroy, 2 Mar. 1969, MacLeod Papers, Yale University.
104. Dahlberg, Confessions, p. 286.
105. John Kobler, Otto the Magnificent: The Life of Otto Kahn (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), 176.
106. Daily Worker, 29 Oct. 1934, p. 5.
107. Letter from A. B. Magil to Gold, n.d., Gold Papers.
108. Gold interview with Folsom, 11 Aug. 1966, Gold Papers.
109. Michael Folsom made a strong case for Gold’s role in promoting the concept in “The Education of Michael Gold,” in Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), pp. 222–51.
110. Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 8 June 1958, p. 1, Freeman Papers.
111. Ibid., p. 7.
112. See Henry Stuart, New York Times Book Review, 29 Nov. 1925, pp. 5, 10; Sinclair Lewis, “Manhattan at Last!,” Saturday Review 2 (5 Dec. 1925): 361; Michael Gold, New Masses (August 1926): 25–26; D. H. Lawrence, Calendar of Modern Letters, April 1927, pp. 70–72; and Paul Elmore More, The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1928), p. 63.
113. Mike Gold, “The Education of John Dos Passos,” English Journal 22 (February 1933): 95–97.
114. Mike Gold, “The Keynote to Dos Passos’ Works,” Daily Worker, 26 Feb. 1938, p. 7.
115. See Howe and Coser, The American Communist Party, p. 308.
116. Daily Worker, January 14, 1944, p. 6.
117. Gold to E. S. Wood and S. B. Field, n.d., Huntington Library.
118. Freeman to Aaron, July 5, 1958, p. 3, Freeman Papers.
119. Original in John Howard Lawson Papers, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Ill.
120. See Oral History of Albert Maltz, Oral History Collection, UCLA, p. 455.
121. Maltz to Kenneth Payne, 18 Apr. 1972, Gold Papers.
122. Nelson Algren to Richard Wright, 20 Mar. (year unknown), Wright Papers, Yale University.
123. Mike Gold, “Change the World,” Daily Worker, 29 May 1944, p. 7.
124. “Eugene O’Neill’s Early Days,” Daily Worker, 26 Oct. 1946, p. 8.
125. Wright’s biographer, however, believes that Gold hesitated in his ultimate pronouncement in order to get a sense of the Party leadership’s final attitude. See Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 184–85.
126. Lowenfels to Joseph North, n.d., Lowenfels Papers.
127. A discussion of the relationship of Gold to Amado appears in Thomas Colchie, “Jorge Amado: The Life of a Latin American Literary Giant Parallels the Story of a Tumultuous Century,” Washington Post Book World, Sunday, 26 August 2001, p. 5. Freeman affirmed this judgment in a 3 July 1958 letter to Daniel Aaron, Freeman Papers, despite the fact that he and Gold had parted ways nearly two decades earlier.
1. Stanley Burnshaw, “Stevens’ ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,’ ” in A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 26. This originally appeared as “Wallace Stevens and the Statue,” Sewanee Review 69 (Summer 1961): 355–66.
2. Horace Gregory to T. C. Wilson, 14 Nov. 1939, Gregory Papers, Syracuse University.
3. This notion of “elective affinity” is most fully elaborated in Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 1988, p. 613.
4. The concept of the “force field” is refined in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), especially pp. 192–96. See also Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 84–91. George Hutchinson employs the concept of “force field” in relation to the Harlem Renaissance in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 4–7.
5. See, for example, the extremely detailed and highly critical “Review of the New Masses” by Anne Elistrova, International Literature, no. 1 (1932): 107–14.
6. Freeman to Floyd Dell, 13 Apr. 1952, p. 12, Dell Papers, Newberry Library.
7. Barbara Foley presents an overview of this topic in “Soviet Influences on American Literary Radicalism” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 63–85. In “The Wager of Benedict Bulmanis,” the introduction to Phillip Bonosky’s book Burning Valley (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. xiii–xiv, I discuss the influence of Soviet models on this U.S. Communist novelist.
8. The remark by Whitman was quoted in an article by Horace Traubel in Seven Arts 2 (September 1917): 35, and is cited in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 7.
9. Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 17 June 1958.
10. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 257, Benjamin writes: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”
11. Burnshaw, “Stevens’ ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,’ ” p. 24.
12. Moshe Nadir, “Poetry Out of Season,” New Masses (18 June 1935): 25–26. Gregory could be a harsh critic from a Marxist perspective as well, but his analyses were usually more historical in framework and his argumentation more learned and subtle. See his review of work by Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill, “Suicide in the Jungle,” New Masses (13 Feb. 1934): 18–19.
13. Much of this activity was monitored by the FBI, and I am grateful to Franklin Folsom for making available to me FBI files on the League of American Writers, which were first obtained by the historian Harvey Klehr. Files on numerous individuals associated with many of these Left literary organizations are discussed in studies such as Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers (New York: Ballantine, 1989); and Natalie Robbins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow, 1992).
14. Max Eastman used that phrase as the title of his powerful indictment of Soviet cultural policy and practice under Stalin, Artists in Uniform: A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Knopf, 1934). Subsequently the expression was sometimes used to attack the Communist cultural movement in the United States for an analogous enforced conformity.
15. The phrase “Communist-led” is meant as a generic term only to indicate that Party supporters were centrally involved in establishing and maintaining the institution or publication under discussion. The degree of domination by such individuals as well as the extent to which collaboration with Party officials occurred varied considerably, and will be examined in several particular cases. The term “front group” is avoided because it typically implies consistent cynical manipulation and top-down control.
16. Moreover, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) did not significantly support human rights and free expression in the United States; whatever the virtues of its publicity about the repression of intellectual freedom in Soviet-bloc countries, its domestic role was to mobilize liberal arguments for maintaining the antiradical repression of the McCarthy era. One motivation for ex-radicals to join the ACCF was to get a clean bill of health; some who did this were disillusioned by the deceptiveness of the organization’s leaders, at least one of whom was a CIA operative, and the hypocrisy of its domestic policy. See my review of some of the internal ACCF debates in The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 270–80. A more comprehensive study of the activities of the CIA in this arena is Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: Free Press, 1999). For a sympathetic account of the ACCF, which lauds its refusal to defend the Martinsville Seven and other McCarthy-era civil rights victims, see the chapter “The ‘Obnoxious’ Americans” in Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 159–70.
17. Stanley Burns haw reported to Granville Hicks on 5 July 1934 that an essay by E. A. Schachner in the spring 1934 Windsor Quarterly had even been examined by a representative of the Communist International. See Hicks Papers, Syracuse University. For Stevens, see Alan Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties and Literary Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Harvey Teres, “Notes toward the Supreme Soviet: Stevens and Doctrinaire Marxism,” Wallace Stevens Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 150–67.
18. In the early 1940s, for example, Langston Hughes was publicly denounced in an article in the Communist Party’s People’s World, even as he was strongly endorsed by Black Party leader William Patterson. See Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941–1967 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 5, 439.
19. See the informative discussion on this subject in Leah Levenson and Jerry Natterstad, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), particularly on Hicks’s refusal to alter his negative as sessment of a novel by Albert Halper at the urging of New Masses managing editor Herman Michelson (p. 95), or to change sections of his biography of John Reed, at the suggestion of Earl Browder (p. 74). 351
20. Anne Elistrova criticizes the work of several leading Communist writers, including a piece by Gold as “light-weight,” in her “Review of the New Masses.”
21. See the remarkable “Author’s Field Day: A Symposium on Marxist Criticism,” New Masses (3 July 1934): 27–32. In the 1940s, however, there were several instances where favorable reviews of novels were reversed in subsequent statements by the reviewers. Then, in the McCarthy era, writers who wished to illustrate anti-Communist credentials, or plead that they had been victimized by the Party, would cite hostile reviews of their literary work as evidence of official persecution. See, for example, the testimony of novelist Budd Schulberg in Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 434–57. Schulberg describes the shift in assessment of his work that appeared in People’s World.
22. An important example is the declaration of the 1931 conference of the Workers Cultural Federation, which embraced all 130 Party-led organizations in the cultural field (allegedly representing 20,000 members). The “Program,” published in New Masses (August 1931): 11–13, under the title “Art Is a Weapon!,” cited statements by Stalin on culture as well as the resolutions of the Kharkov conference.
23. The poet Orrick Johns (1887–1946) gave the following description of New Masses editorial procedure during his tenure on the board in 1934: “Editorial authority was democratic. There was no arbitrary head, though Herman Michelson, former Sunday editor of the New York World, was our copy pusher and deadline boss. Once a week four or five of us spent the night at the printer’s. It meant hard work every day including Sunday. I read more than 200 short stories a month, and double that amount of poems. The poems were all too much alike, factual material presented in realistic free verse, and few had much relation to poetry, but they showed an earnest search for vital themes. All these contributors required a personal reply, and some sort of criticism. Besides this work we wrote leaders, editorial paragraphs and special articles. The Central Committee of the Communist Party had its say in questions of policy, and even of specific pieces. The C.C. was usually represented by Joe North, whose style of reportage in reporting strikes became popular with our readers.” See Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937), p. 340.
24. The most substantial biographical account of Trachtenberg is Sender Garlin, “Publisher on Trial: The Lifework of Alexander Trachtenberg,” Masses & Mainstream 5, no. 10 (October 1952): 17–27. Much of this information is repeated in the entry on “International Publishers Company” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 46: American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900–1980 (Detroit: Gale, 1990), 196–98. See also the two obituaries, “A Tribune of the Printed Word,” Political Affairs 46, no. 1 (January 1967): 13–14; and Robert W. Dunn, “Waiting for Trachty,” New World Review 35, no. 2 (February 1967): 23–25. Some of this portrait is also based on the biographical sketch prepared by S. Luttrell for the descriptive inventory of the Trachtenberg Papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
25. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1957), pp. 98–99.
26. In The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 141, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson assert that Trachtenberg began receiving Soviet subsidies to assist publications in the early 1930s, although they provide no information as to the amount. In 1923, Trachtenberg had been elected a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
27. Joseph North, No Men Are Strangers (New York: International Publishers, 1958), p. 102. The incident is discussed in Aaron’s Writers on the Left. pp. 276–78, but neither Trachtenberg nor North is mentioned. Aaron reports that Dreiser at no time made a convincing retraction and was never called to account by the Party. North, however, writes that Dreiser made a satisfactory retraction of his statement. Communist writer Walter Snow claims that Dreiser was nevertheless punished for this indiscretion by not being proposed as chair of the League of American Writers in 1937. Instead, Donald Ogden Stewart was elected, and Dreiser refused to join the league. The record would seem to confirm this, since it indicates that Dreiser signed the calls issued by the American Writers’ Congress only in 1935 and in 1941, and that he was elected honorary president only in 1941, during the last weeks of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Snow to Maurice Isserman, 26 Oct. 1972, p. 2, Snow Papers, University of Connecticut.
28. Eric Homberger reviews some of the controversies wracking the clubs in American Writers and Radical Politics, 1930–39: Equivocal Commitments (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), pp. 119–40; as does Judy Kutulas in The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 52–58.
29. Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 281–82. In Radical Representations, p. 79, Barbara Foley argues that this development, culminating in the 1935 American Writers’ Congress, should not be interpreted as an early turn to the Popular Front prompted by Moscow. Rather, it remained within the framework of the Kharkov Conference orientation, which was designed to win Left-leaning writers to Communism, and reflected a “mellowing” of the cultural Left from its earlier prescriptive excesses.
30. Quoted in “A Tribune of the Printed Word,” Political Affairs 46, no. 1 (January 1967): 13.
31. Draft of memoir by Walter Snow, “That Literary ‘Shotgun Marriage,’ ” p. 5, Snow Papers.
32. Matthew Josephson, Infidel in the Temple (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 364.
33. Wald interview with Franklin Folsom, Boulder, Colo., May 1989.
34. Walter Snow to Jack Conroy, 12 Nov. 1971, Snow Papers.
35. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, Boulder, Colo., May 1989.
36. Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 1 July 1958, p. 10, Daniel Aaron Papers, Cambridge, Mass.
37. Wald interview with A. B. Magil, November 1990, New York City.
38. For the latter, see “Appendix: Bibliography of Radical Children’s Books in the United States Published in English,” in Paul Mishler, “The Littlest Proletariat,” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1988, pp. 213–22.
39. Draft of memoir by Walter Snow, “That Literary ‘Shotgun Marriage,’ ” Snow Papers, p. 5. Other examples of Trachtenberg’s authority are given in Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994), pp. 96–97. Folsom believed that, despite Trachtenberg’s organizational talents, he showed poor judgment in dismissing the proposal that the Book Find Club, an organization that aimed to make inexpensive copies of radical books available to subscribers, become a project of the League of American Writers; forced to strike out on its own, the club turned out to be a major success.
40. Calmer was an extremely active participant in the Communist Cultural Left throughout the 1930s—a prolific author of essays and an activist in the John Reed Clubs and International Publishers—but he suddenly departed the movement in 1939. Originally from Baltimore, where he wrote as a critic, journalist, and aspiring author of hard-boiled novels, Calmer was associated with V. F. Calverton, but repudiated Calverton to side with the Communist Party in the early 1930s. For a brief period in the mid-1930s, he seemed to share the developing critique of the predominant Communist literary practice held by Partisan Review editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv, but he pulled back from their trajectory toward Trotskyism. After returning to Baltimore, he supported himself by working in his father’s business and attempted to write a literary history of the early Republic. Wald telephone interview with Edward Newhouse, May 2000.
41. Partisan Review editor William Phillips does not refer to any proposal to affiliate with the league in his memoir A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983). He claims that the Communist Party tried to steal the magazine away from him and Philip Rahv by having Calmer put out an issue on his own, but that Calmer refused to do so.
42. Snow to Jack Conroy, 5 June 1973, Snow Papers. The same correspondence between Calmer and Freeman, treating a similar situation, shows Trachtenberg more as a strong-willed person around whom one had to maneuver. This dispute concerned the question of possibly fusing Partisan Review with the poetry magazine Dynamo, edited by Communists but lacking any official sponsorship. Calmer indicated that Dynamo editor Sol Funaroff’s personal assent was necessary for such a fusion, even though Trachtenberg and the Partisan editors were all for the unification. However, Calmer expressed the view that, if Funaroff opposed the merger, “the movement is not going to allow one person (Sol) to run the magazine as he has in the past.” Moreover, Calmer conjectured, “I also know that if the two magazines continue separately, that the movement (thru Trachty) will push PR and continue to neglect Dynamo completely....” Finally, Calmer noted that should the merger occur, Trachtenberg would oppose the addition of Nathan Adler, perceived as a troublemaker, to the editorial board. Calmer still thought the fusion could be finessed so that Adler would be involved. He felt that Adler was necessary to his (Calmer’s) vision of a magazine “edited collectively by the eight or nine young Communist writers who had grown up in the movement.” The failure of Dynamo and Partisan Review to fuse suggests that Trachtenberg had tremendous prestige and influence, but was not merely a dictator whose every command was obeyed by writers. Letter from Alan Calmer to Freeman, probably September 1935, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute.
43. See Albert Kahn, The Matusow Affair: Memoir of a National Scandal (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell Limited, 1987).
44. See the superb study by Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). Also see the assessment by Wald, “African Americans, Culture and Communism,” Against the Current 84 (January–February 2000): 23–29, and “The Black Cultural Front,” Against the Current 86 (May–June 2000): 27–34.
45. During and after the Cold War, the term “cosmopolitan intellectual,” along with associated notions such as “universalism,” became transformed into terms associated with Eurocentric elite perspectives, especially as expressed through the evolution of the group that became known as “The New York Intellectuals.” For a discussion of the “cosmopolitan ideal” as it operated among radicalizing young Jewish intellectuals, see my chapter “Jewish Internationalists” in The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 27–45. For a recent discussion of African American intellectuals in relation to cosmopolitanism, see Ross Posnick, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
46. One can also include the shorter reviews, poems, and sketches in pro-Communist newspapers in the South, such as the Southern Worker and Cavalcade, as well as publications of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the National Negro Congress, the Daily Worker, People’s World (originally Western Worker) and even some contributions to Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s People’s Voice and the Left-liberal New York daily newspaper PM.
47. See Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 58, 59; Geta LeSeur, “Claude McKay’s Marxism,” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, ed. Amritjit Singh et al. (New York: Garland, 1989), pp. 219–31; Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), pp. 40–42; Claude McKay to Max Eastman, 19 Dec. 1932, McKay Papers, Indiana University. For a fascinating interpretation of McKay’s writings about Marxism and African Americans, see William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 63–94.
48. It was finally translated by Robert Winter and published as Negroes in America (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972).
49. Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 329–30.
50. Alain Locke, “Spiritual Truancy,” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937): 81–85.
51. Houston Baker makes a case for a more substantial connection of Cullen to the Black Aesthetic in Afro-American Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 45–87.
52. See “In Memory of Eugene Gordon,” Political Affairs 53, no. 4 (April 1974): 2. There is a small collection of his papers at the Schomburg Library in Harlem.
53. George S. Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Mar. 1937, pp. 11, 15; Opportunity 11 (December 1933): 429.
54. Eugene Gordon, “Agenda,” Opportunity 11, no. 12 (December 1933): 372–74, and 12, no. 1 (January 1934): 18–22.
55. International Literature 1, no. 7 (April 1934): 4.
56. “JeanToomer: Apostle of Beauty,” Opportunity 10, no. 8 (October 1932): 252–54.
57. Letter from Holmes to Hicks, 18 Jan. 1935, Hicks Papers.
58. John H. McClendon, “Dr. Holmes, the Philosophical Rebel,” Freedomways 22, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 32–40.
59. See “The Main Philosphical Considerations of Space and Time,” American Journal of Physics 18, no. 9 (December 1950). See also the work by Holmes’s student Percy E. Johnston, Phenomenology of Space and Time: An Examination of Eugene Clay Holmes’ Studies in the Philosophy of Time and Space (New York: Dasein Literary Society, 1976).
60. See the following essays by Holmes in Freedomways: “The Legacy of Alain Locke,” 3, no. 3 (Summer 1963): 293–306; “W. E. B. Du Bois—Philosopher,” 5, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 41–46.
61. J.R.C. Bulletin 1, no. 2 (April–May 1934): 9–10.
62. See the excellent discussion in “Afric’s Sons with Banner Red” by Robin D. G. Kelley, in his collection of essays, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 103–21.
63. See Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 68.
64. William L. Patterson, “Awake Negro Poets,” New Masses (October 1928): 10.
65. Akiba Sullivan Harper, ed., Langston Hughes: Short Stories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), pp. 72–80.
66. For a meticulous chronicle of Hughes’s relations with the Communist Party in this decade, see Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2.
67. Langston Hughes to Sterling Brown, 13 Oct. 1931, Brown Papers, Howard University.
68. Michael Gold, “Introduction,” A New Song (New York: IWO, 1938), p. 8.
69. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” in ibid., pp. 9–11.
70. For a discussion of Hughes’s revisions of this poem during the Cold War, see Robert Shulman, The Power of Political Art: The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 302–3.
71. Brown recalls that Hughes regarded him as a Communist incapable of betrayal, but harbored a grudge against white Communists in Hollywood who had failed to introduce him into the business. Wald interview with Lloyd Brown, October 1990, New York City. See also Christopher C. De Santis, ed., Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
72. See the discussion of this episode in Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: A Biography (New York: Citadel, 1992), pp. 317–20.
73. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 3 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), p. 387; Maxim Lieber to Josephine Herbst, 8 May 1953, Herbst Papers, Yale University.
74. Wald interview with Brown, New York City, October 1990; interview with Tiba Willner, Ojai, Calif., August 1989.
75. Langston Hughes to Charles Humboldt, c. 1958, Humboldt Papers, Yale University.
76. The definitive biography of Richard Wright to date is Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2d ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
77. Abe Aaron to Jack Conroy, 13 Jan. 1934, Jack Conroy Papers, Newberry Library.
78. In a letter of 2 April 1938, Margaret Walker mentions Hughes’s new name for Wright, and a month later, on 9 May 1938, she notes the resemblance of characters in “Bright and Morning Star” to those in Gorky’s novel, The Mother. See Wright Papers. In his essay, Gold had argued: “In the last three years a great drift among thoughtful Negro workers and farmers has set in towards the Communist theory. These Negroes understand there is no hope in the bourgeois Uncle Toms who want everything to stand still, or to be done by lawyer-like diplomacy.” Nancy Cunard, Negro: An Anthology (New York: Ungar, 1970; orig. 1933), p. 136. The arc of action in Wright’s four, later five, novellas moves precisely in that direction.
79. See the 1937 correspondence between Farrell and Wright, Wright Papers. Among other things, Farrell prophetically warned Wright that a disadvantage to his affiliation with the Communist Party was that he would be obligated to defend sudden and unanticipated shifts in policy that might interfere with the integrity of his creative work.
80. Richard Wright, “Not My People’s War,” New Masses (17 June 1941): 9.
81. Horace Cayton, Long Old Road: An Autobiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), pp. 248–49. Ralph Ellison wrote Wright, who had left for Mexico, about attacks on the novel by Black Party leaders such as Abner Berry and Theodore Bassett, and its defense by the Jewish Communist Sender Garlin. Ellison’s view was that Wright’s Black Marxist critics were insufficiently “emancipated from bourgeois taboos.” Ralph Ellison to Richard Wright, 14 Apr. 1940, Wright Papers.
82. See Gold’s “Change the World” column in the Sunday Worker, 31 Mar. 1940, section 2, p. 7. See also the review of Native Son by Ben Burns (pseud. for Benjamin Bernstein), People’s World, 2 Apr. 1940, p. 5. See also the range of responses to Native Son by Samuel Sillen, Chester Himes, Ben Davis, James Ford, Earl Browder, and others in New Masses between 23 April and 21 May 1941.
83. See Samuel Sillen, “BiggerThomas on the Boards,” New Masses (8 Apr. 1941): 27–28; and “12 Million Black Voices,” New Masses (25 Nov. 1941): 22–24.
84. Samuel Sillen to Richard Wright, 7 May 1940, Wright Papers.
85. Sillen to Wright, 1 June 1940, Wright Papers.
86. Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison, 14 Apr. 1940, Wright Papers; Richard Wright to Lillian Gilkes, 30 Apr. 1940, Gilkes Papers, Syracuse University.
87. Melvin B. Tolson to Richard Wright, undated (probably 1938), Wright Papers.
88. Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174 (August 1944): 61–70; and ibid. 174 (September 1944): 48–56. This essay became a classic of anti-Communist literature, later anthologized in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Bantam, 1965; orig. 1956). However, in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Warner Books, 1988), Margaret Walker disputes a number of Wright’s claims, such as one at the climax of his memoir where he says that he was ejected from a May Day demonstration by Communist Party members.
89. James Ford, “A Disservice to the Negro People,” Daily Worker, 5 Sept. 1944, p. 6.
90. Undated manuscript, Wright Papers.
91. One of his biographers concludes that he probably gave information about Communists in the United States in order to retain his passport. See James Campbell, Exiled in Paris (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 189–97.
92. His body was instantly cremated, without the consent of his family, so the exact cause of death was never verified. See Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, pp. 521–31.
93. Biographical information on Ward can be found in the entry by Fahamisha Patricia Brown, “Theodore Ward,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 76:182–76. He is also discussed in Doris Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theater, 1925–1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) and Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater, 1935–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I am especially grateful to Keneth Kinnamon for sharing a ten-page answer by Ward to inquiries sent to him on 4 April 1965.
94. The most detailed survey of Hayden’s radical period can be found in Robert Chrisman, “Robert Hayden: Modernism and the Afro-American Epic Mission,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999. Additional information comes from Wald interview with Robert Hayden, December 1976, Ann Arbor, Mich.
95. Interview with Hy Fireman, Detroit, November 1990. See also Paul Sporn, Against Itself: The Federal Theater and Writers’ Projects in the Midwest (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1995), p. 153.
96. “Brief Reviews,” New Masses (21 Jan. 1941): 26.
97. See my “Belief and Ideology in the Work of Robert Hayden,” in Wald, Writing from the Left (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 192–98.
98. The crucial study of the genre is Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See also Laura Hapke, Women, Work and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
99. Mary Ann Rasmussen, “Introduction,” in Josephine Herbst, Pity Is Not Enough (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. ix.
100. Janet Sharistanian, “Afterword,” in Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1984), p. 381.
101. People’s Weekly World, 21 Dec. 1996, p. 20.
102. New York Times, 24 Nov. 1996, p. 21.
103. Nation, 17 Feb. 1997, p. 34.
104. See the valuable collection of appreciations in People’s Culture, n.s. 34 (1996).
105. This is reprinted in Le Sueur, Ripening (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), pp. 76–84.
106. The most helpful discussion of this phase of Le Sueur’s writing is still Elaine Hedge’s “Introduction” to Ripening, pp. 1–28.
107. “I Was Marching” was reprinted in Ripening, pp. 158–65.
108. “The Fetish of Being Outside,” New Masses (26 Feb. 1935): 22–23.
109. See Constance Coiner, Being Red (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 94.
110. This has been reprinted as “Proletarian Literature and the Middle West,” Harvest Song: Collected Essays and Stories (Albuquerque, N.Mex.: West End Press, 1990), pp. 204–7.
111. Alfred Knopf, the New York publisher with Left-wing sympathies, published more than half of these: Chanticleer of Wilderness Road: A Story of Davy Crockett (1951); Little Brother of the Wilderness: The Story of Johnny Appleseed (1947); Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road (1949); The River Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln (1954); and Sparrow Hawk (1950).
112. For a fuller discussion of scholarship about Le Sueur, see Wald, “The Many Lives of Meridel Le Sueur,” Monthly Review 49, no. 4 (September 1997): 41–44.
113. Linda Ray Pratt, “Woman Writer in the CP,” Women’s Studies 14, no. 3 (February 1988): 247.
114. Ibid., p. 257.
115. Ibid., p. 258.
116. For example, see the cartoons in New Masses (16 Oct. 1934): 7, and ibid. (13 Nov. 1934): 7.
117. The most forceful example of the equation of successful writing with the male work experience can be found in Mike Gold’s manifesto of “proletarian realism” in “Notes of the Month,” New Masses (September 1930): 3–5.
118. The Proletarian Party was founded in 1920 after its members, formerly the leaders of the Michigan Socialist Party, refused to accept the underground orientation of the early Communist movement. It lasted until 1971 and produced a number of important leaders of the United Auto Workers, such as Emil Mazey and Frank Marquart.
119. H. H. Lewis, “The Man from Moscow,” in Thinking of Russia (Holt, Minn.: B. B. Hanglund, 1932), p. 19.
120. Michael Gold, “The East Side I Knew,” Jewish Life 9, no. 1 (November 1954): 27.
121. “A Communist Speaks at Faneuil Hall,” Red Boston 1, no. 1 (September 1932): 8.
122. See Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party,” Socialist Review 45 (May/June 1979): 105. In artistic circles, non-monogamous and bohemian sexual relations were more widely accepted, as well as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” posture toward homosexuality. However, one inveterate Bohemian Communist, Viola Brothers Shore, told her daughter that she married her third husband only because of Communist Party pressure, while gay Communist Harry Hay, recruited to the movement by another gay Communist, actor Will Geer, married and started a family due to pressure to present himself as a model Communist Party member. Wald interview with Wilma Shore, New York City, November 1992; see Harry Hay, The Trouble with Harry Hay (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990), p. 97.
1. Carmon’s literary credentials for the job were minimal, although he had a reputation for being self-sacrificing and sociable. He was a longtime radical out of the Midwest, was once a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, and had spent time in Mexico with Mike Gold during World War I. Subsequent to leaving the New Masses, he went to the USSR from 1932 to 1936, where he was offered a job editing the English-language edition of the publication International Literature. After returning to the United States, he had some employment as a representative for Soviet publishing houses and then lived in obscurity with his wife, Rose, working as a bookkeeper in New Jersey at the time of his death. Information on Carmon is primarily based on notes from Rose Carmon’s 25 April 1969 interview with William Reuben, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. There are also passing references to Carmon in a number of books such as Douglas Wixson, Worker-Writer in America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
2. See Wixson, Worker-Writer in America, p. 271.
3. Information on MacLeod is based on my correspondence with him from 1976 to 1985; the MacLeod Papers at Yale University (including an auto biographical manuscript, “Generation of Anger”); and notes from his 28 July 1969 interview with William Reuben, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
4. See my discussion of MacLeod’s poetry in “Tethered to the Past,” in The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. 102–7.
5. For reactions to Chambers’s writing, and a detailed review of Chambers’s associations with the literary Left, see Sam Tannenhaus, Whittaker Chambers (New York: Random House, 1997).
6. This corresponds to A. B. Magil’s recollections in an interview with Wald in New York City in October 1989. Magil believes that, in the early 1930s, Mike Gold didn’t come to the New Masses office very often, thus it was Walt Carmon who really decided what went into the magazine.
7. Harrison was a leading figure in Left literary circles before that time. He had directed the Party’s publicity campaign on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, served as a contributing editor of New Masses, and was a founder of the John Reed Clubs. A letter from Walter Snow to Jack Conroy on 24 January 1933 (in the Snow Papers, University of Connecticut) remarks on the article in the 23 January issue of the Daily Worker about Harrison’s expulsion from the John Reed Clubs for protesting the Soviet Union’s treatment of Trotsky’s daughter. Snow observes that the article’s claim that Harrison had driven his own wife to suicide was kind of “raw,” but then goes on to make a number of personal charges against Harrison, claiming that he brought prostitutes to his home while his wife was alive and “was always more or less of a racketeer.” Harrison had his revenge when he pilloried Mike Gold and others in the Communist literary Left in his satirical novel Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Harrison’s relations with Trotskyism and his later evolution are described in Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 152.
8. MacLeod to William Ruben, 9 Apr. 1969, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
9. Norman MacLeod interview with William Ruben, 28 Mar. 1969, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
10. Rose Carmon interview with William Ruben, 25 Apr. 1969, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
11. This summary of the sectarian views in the New York John Reed Club was offered by Sender Garlin in a May 1989 interview with Wald in Boulder, Colorado, and by A. B. Magil in an interview in New York City in November 1990. Both men were at the time sympathetic to many of these criticisms of Gold.
12. At the conference Magil, on behalf of the trio, made a strenuous objection to the way the invitations had been handled. The complaint was referred to the Anglo-American Commission, which acted as if all those involved were loyal comrades, and everything was patched up. Magil stayed an additional seven weeks in Moscow, covering an early treason show trial of engineers for the Daily Worker. He shared a room with Gold, who was more upset about some criticisms that young Party activist Si Gerson had made of him in the Party youth paper than anything else. Magil later saw reports on the conference in International Literature and elsewhere that inaccurately covered the controversy and what he had said. Wald interview with A. B. Magil, New York City, November 1990.
13. Michael Gold, “Notes on Kharkov,” New Masses (March 1931): 4–6.
14. Walt Carmon to Walter Snow, 22 April 1930, Snow Papers. The reference is to a review in New Masses (March 1930): 16, by Carlo Tresca of Escape, a novel by Frencesco Fausto Nitti. Since Tresca was an anarchist, Snow’s letter of complaint, which has not survived, may have been as much about the reviewer as the content of the book. Carmon’s reference to himself and the staff as “anarchists” may be a double entendre as well.
15. New Masses (1 Oct. 1935): 41–42.
16. Burns haw, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 31–32.
17. Ibid., p. 22.
18. Ibid., p. 26.
19. Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 1 July 1958, p. 22, Daniel Aaron Papers, Cambridge, Mass. Sergei Mironovich Kirov was a trusted aide of Stalin and secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad. In 1934 he was assassinated, an event that became the pretext for a purge of dissident Party members and their trials; among those charged with and executed for the killing were Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov. It is now widely believed that Stalin ordered the assassination himself.
20. Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 350.
21. The history of disputes involving the New Masses that follows is limited to ones among personnel involved in literary matters, primarily poetry and fiction. The New Masses is worthy of a book-length study, one that would also give attention to its remarkable graphics and cartoons, its stunning reportage and eye-witness accounts, and its treatment of music, film, dance, drama, and the other arts.
22. Sam Tannenhaus, in his impressively researched Whittaker Chambers, p. 75, portrays Chambers’s rise on the New Masses and in the John Reed Club rather melodramatically. Tannenhaus has Mike Gold, “the New Masses’ ideological czar,” appoint Chambers to “an important job” of ensuring that the magazine’s “political message” remained undiluted while it continued to publish famous writers. The interpretation is faithful to Chambers’s self-image as a sort of “mole” under Soviet command, but it paints a one-dimensional picture of the cultural movement in which Gold, like many others, was more of a loose cannon than a manipulator of foot soldiers and dupes.
23. Pass, born in Russia, had lived in Seattle, Washington, before coming to New York City in the 1920s. As a youth he had worked as a fireman on a river boat on the Yukon River in Alaska. During World War I he served a prison sentence for refusing to participate in the war and was later active in the 1919 Seattle General Strike. His literary ambitions had been fueled by reading Jack London and Upton Sinclair, but in the 1930s he became a journalist and editor for the International Labor Defense and the League against War and Fascism. Among his many pseudonyms, the one he used most frequently for book reviews was Gilbert Day. In 1932 Pass played a notable role when he was in charge of publicity for the Communist presidential ticket and he drew writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Matthew Josephson, and Robert Sherwood into supporting the campaign. At the end of his life, Pass had completed a book manuscript on Paul Bunyan and was researching a new one on Theodore Dreiser. See “Joseph Pass Dies at 85” in the Daily World, 24 May 1978, p. 7; and Art Shields, “Joe Pass, Working-Class Editor,” Daily World, 5 Oct. 1978, p. 24.
24. North was an influential journalist who pioneered the Left-wing genre of “reportage.” See David Peck, “Joseph North and Proletarian Reportage of the 1930s,” Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1985 33 (3): 210–20.
25. Committee members included William Gropper, Joseph Freeman, Joseph Pass, Walt Carmon, V. J. Jerome, Joseph North and Eugene Shachner; the text of the agreement fills twelve pages. I am grateful to James Lerner for providing me with a copy from his collection of Joseph Pass materials.
26. This is from a 5 August 1937 memo by Freeman, reviewing the earlier dispute; Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute.
27. “Problems of New Masses,” unpublished manuscript, 1932, p. 4, Freeman Papers.
28. The organization Pen and Hammer was intended mainly for teachers, scientists, and researchers, but it attracted people who might otherwise have been drawn to the New Masses and duplicated the forums and publishing activities of the John Reed Clubs. Another organization that engaged in similar activities was the Revolutionary Writers Federation. This formation was supposed to coordinate the work of various writers groups who published in English as well as in foreign languages, but it, too, held debates and forums similar to those staged by the John Reed Clubs.
29. Rose Carmon interview with William Reuben, 25 Apr. 1969, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
30. Wald interview with A. B. Magil, New York City, November 1990.
31. Some of this information is based upon a 4 April 1941 letter from Freeman to Richardson Wood, Freeman Papers.
32. Burnshaw to Lee Baxandall, 6 April 1967, Burnshaw Papers, National Humanities Center, Austin, Texas.
33. Information on Burnshaw is based on Peter Revell, “Stanley Burnshaw,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 48, pp. 63–69; Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, “Interview with Stanley Burnshaw,” Wallace Stevens Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 109–26; Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York: George Brazillier, 1986), passim; Wald interview with Stanley Burnshaw, New York City, November 1992; the Burnshaw Papers; Stanley Burnshaw correspondence in the Granville Hicks Papers, Syracuse University; and Wald correspondence with Burnshaw between 1990 and 1998.
34. Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, “Interview with Stanley Burnshaw,” Wallace Stevens Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 114.
35. See the thoughtful review by Communist English professor Morris U. Schappes in Poetry 44 (August–September 1934): 347–50.
36. Burnshaw’s self-published prose poem, The Wheel Age (New York: Folio Press, 1929), was given a sympathetic review in the New Masses (July 1929): 18, by poet E. Merrill Root (1895–1973). Agreeing with Burnshaw that machines should not be uncritically embraced, Root urges that they be “tamed,” not destroyed. Root’s own political evolution diverged from that of Burnshaw. Although Root remained pro-Communist through the 1930s, he later turned sharply to the Right and became poetry editor of the John Birch Society’s American Opinion. Root’s poetry books include Lost Eden (1927), Bow of Burning Gold (1929), Dawn Is Forever (1938), and Before the Swallow Dares (1947).
37. Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself, p. 40.
38. Burnshaw, “A Poet Takes His Stand,” New Masses (August 1933): 27.
39. Christina Stead, “Some Deep Spell: A View of Stanley Burnshaw,” Agenda 22, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 1983/84): 125.
40. Burnshaw, “ ‘Middle-Ground’ Writers,” New Masses (30 Apr. 1935): 19–21.
41. See “Stanley Burnshaw Protests,” Poetry 44 (September 1934): 351–4.
42. Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself, p. 60. The review appeared in the issue of 11 August 1936. Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969) worked as Latin teacher while he was a leading activist in League of American Writers and pro-Communist in the late 1930s. Having published a volume of poems in 1928, Europa and Other Poems and Sonnets, Humphries coedited the pro-Republican collection ... And Spain Sings in 1937, translating about one-third of the poems in the volume from the Spanish. By 1940 he lost interest in Communism, although he translated Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York in 1940 and Aragon, Poet of the French Resistance in 1945. Later collections of his own verse include Out of the Jewel (1942), The Summer Landscape (1944), Forbid Thy Ravens (1947), The Wind of Time (1949), Poems, Collected and New (1954), and Green Armour on Green Ground (1956). Humphries’s Collected Poems appeared in 1965. In Poets, Poetics and Politics: America’s Literary Community Viewed from the Letters of Rolfe Humphries, 1910–1969 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), p. 132, evidence is cited that Frost held a grudge against Humphries for the rest of his life due to the review.
43. The poet and pioneer filmmaker Willard Maas (1911–1971) held membership in the Communist Party for a short time. He was author of Fire Testament (1935) and Concerning the Young (1938). See Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right, passim.
44. Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, “Interview with Stanley Burnshaw,” Wallace Stevens Journal, p. 111. Burnshaw also discusses his New Masses experiences in Robert Frost Himself, pp. 50–53.
45. Burnshaw recalls that, even among those who were already in ideological agreement with the Communist Party, “A communist poet wouldn’t have submitted [a manuscript] to us unless the poem’s content—its subject matter and its attitude—had been congenial. If its subject matter and attitude were not congenial to the New Masses at that time we never would have considered it.” See Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, “Interview with Stanley Burnshaw,” Wallace Stevens Journal, p. 117.
46. The poem was reprinted in Social Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Jack Salzman and Leo Zanderer (New York: Burt Franklin Co., 1978), pp. 1–4.
47. Burnshaw to Hicks, 7 Mar. 1940, Hicks Papers.
48. Burnshaw to Wald, 12 April 1992, in possession of Wald.
49. Burnshaw to Hicks, 27 February 1953, Hicks Papers.
50. Burnshaw, “The Bridge,” In the Terrified Radiance (New York: George Brazillier, 1972).
51. Burnshaw, “Stevens’ ‘Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,’ ” in A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 27.
52. Freeman, “Ivory Towers—Red and White,” New Masses (11 Sept. 1934): 23.
53. According to Sender Garlin, Alfred Hayes told him that the reason that Hayes’s poetry stopped appearing in the New Masses in the late 1930s was that it failed to meet the approval of the “Poetry Czarina,” Joy Davidman. Whether Hayes and Davidman had feuded over personal or literary matters was not clear. Wald interview with Garlin, May 1989, Boulder, Colo.
54. Freeman to Browder, 5 Aug. 1937, Freeman Papers.
55. Miller, who was born in Nebraska, passed the bar there in 1928, practicing law briefly and then moving to California. From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a reporter, and eventually he became publisher of the California Eagle from 1954 to 1964. He also rose to become a prominent California attorney. In 1964 Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown appointed Miller as a municipal court judge in Los Angeles.
56. Memo on New Masses, 5 Aug. 1937, Freeman Papers.
57. Freeman to Aaron, 2 Oct. 1960, p. 36 of letter, Aaron Papers, Cambridge, Mass.
58. Dupee’s personal and political history is reviewed in Wald, The New York Intellectuals, pp. 85–88.
59. Freeman to Hicks, 6 May 1937, Freeman Papers.
60. “Between Ourselves,” New Masses 24, no. 11 (7 Sept. 1937): 2.
61. Joseph Freeman, “Edmund Wilson’s Globe of Glass,” New Masses Literary Supplement (18 Apr. 1938): 74–79. A letter dated 6 December 1937 from New Masses editor Samuel Sillen to T. C. Wilson (T. C. Wilson Papers, Yale University) rejects a review of Edmund Wilson’s book on the grounds that it is limited to a discussion of Wilson’s attitude toward poetry. Sillen states that a more thoroughgoing criticism of Wilson was required by the editorial board. Freeman’s essay fulfills that requirement and may have been suggested to him. In his published letters and diaries, Wilson left no record of a response to Freeman, although they had had personal associations.
62. “Introduction,” in Horace Gregory, ed., New Letters in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), p. 10.
63. Horace Gregory to T. C. Wilson, 17 Oct. 1937, Wilson Papers.
64. Leah Levenson and Jerry Natterstad, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 88.
65. Granville Hicks, “The Writer Faces the Future,” in The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart (New York: Equinox Press, 1937), pp. 193–94.
66. Earl Browder, “The Writer and Politics,” ibid., p. 55.
67. Horace Gregory, ed., New Letters in America, p. 172.
68. Granville Hicks, “Those Who Quibble,” New Masses (28 Sept. 1937): 22–23.
69. Horace Gregory, “ ‘Good News’ in American Literature,” New Masses (12 Oct. 1937): 17–18.
70. Muriel Rukeyser, Letter to the Editor, ibid., p. 18.
71. Marshall Schacht, Letter to the Editor, ibid., pp. 18–19.
72. Granville Hicks, Letter to the Editor, ibid., p. 19.
73. T. C. Wilson, Letter to the Editor, New Masses (2 Nov. 1937): 20–21.
74. Samuel Sillen, “By Way of Answer,” ibid., p. 23. Selected from among a group of additional letters responding to the Hicks-Gregory debate was one by poet Rolfe Humphries defending lyric poetry (which had been disparaged in passing) as a manifestation of the human spirit, and also supporting Hicks’s concern about the lack of musical quality in much modern verse, attributing this to technical incompetence. See Rolfe Humphries, “Discipline in Verse,” ibid., p. 22.
75. See the review by Joseph Freeman in New Masses (June 1929): 14–15.
76. See Joshua Kunitz’s long letter as “J. Q. Neets,” in “Let Us Master Our Art!,” New Masses (July 1930): 23.
77. Wald interviews with Franklin Folsom and Sender Garlin, Boulder, Colorado, May 1989. None of this attitude is indicated in Jessica Smith’s highly laudatory tribute, “Joshua Kunitz: Legacy for Our Times,” New World Review, July–August 1980, pp. 28–30.
78. “Is Poetry Dead?,” New Masses (21 Dec. 1937): 9.
79. Lee Hays, “Wants Communist Poetry,” and R. W. Lalley, “Good and Effective Poetry,” New Masses (11 Jan. 1938).
80. Mike Gold, “Mike Replies,” New Masses (25 Oct. 1937): 21.
81. Dorothy Van Ghent, “When Poets Stood Alone,” New Masses (11 Jan. 1938): 41–47. For a biographical sketch of Van Ghent, including references to her Left associations at Berkeley, see L. R. Lind, “Dorothy Van Ghent: Teacher and Critic,” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 16, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 7–18.
82. Martha Millet, “Is Poetry Dead?,” New Masses (26 Jan. 1938): 20.
83. Robert Zachs, “A Slide Rule on Poetry,” New Masses (1 Feb. 1938): 19.
84. Ira Benson, “Writers’ and Readers’ Writers,” ibid., p. 20.
85. Robert Forsythe, “Wanted: Great Songs,” New Masses (25 Jan. 1938): 12.
86. Granville Hicks, “Revolution in Bohemia,” New Masses (12 Apr. 1938): 84–86.
87. Horace Gregory to T. C. Wilson, 14 Nov. 1937, Wilson Papers.
88. Ibid., 17 Oct. 1937.
89. Ibid., undated.
90. Ibid., undated.
91. Samuel Sillen to T. C. Wilson, undated, Wilson Papers.
92. Ibid., undated.
93. Sol Funaroff, “In Conclusion,” New Masses Literary Section (10 May 1938): 127.
94. “Walt Whitman’s Birthday,” New Masses Literary Section (31 May 1938): 13.
95. Philip Stevenson, “Walt Whitman’s Democracy,” New Masses Literary Section (14 June 1938): 132–33.
96. Joshua Kunitz, “In Defense of a Term,” New Masses Literary Section (12 July 1938): 145–47.
97. Clarence Weinstock, “Ivory Tower or Hole in the Ground,” New Masses Special Section (24 May 1938): 21.
98. However, neither Gregory, in The House on Jefferson Street (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1971), nor Crichton, in Total Recoil (New York: Double-day, 1960), is particularly candid about his experiences on the Left. Hicks, in Part of the Truth (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), makes a more serious effort, but seems to lack insight into his own motivations as well as a memory adequate to providing a “thick” description of events.
1. For an entirely negative view of Jerome, see John Weber’s Communist Influence in Hollywood (New York: Privately published, 1997), p. 2. The former Party educator of the Hollywood section describes Jerome as “a feckless pedant who simply parroted the Party line.”
2. Biographical information on Jerome is based on letters from Jerry Warwin, the son from his first marriage; phone interview with Fred Jerome, a son from his marriage to Alice Jerome, August 1992; Jerome Papers, Yale University; Winwar Papers, Boston University; Wald interviews with Sender Garlin, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Franklin Folsom.
3. Jerome to Maxim Lieber, 1 Apr. 1964, Jerome Papers.
4. The son later used the name Jerry Warwin, his surname a reversal of his mother’s maiden name. Frances Winwar seems to have gone to great lengths to obscure her first marriage and Jerome’s paternity in all biographical references. Her son is referred to by a number of different first and last names, and he eventually turned Winwar into Warwin. Her marriage certificate is among the Winwar Papers at Boston University.
5. Jerry Warwin to Wald, 29 Mar. 1993.
6. Frances Vinci Roman, “Nazimova—Artist and Woman,” New Pearson’s 49 (March 1923): 44–46.
7. “Susan B. Anthony,” Woman Today, July 1936, pp. 6–7.
8. Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (New York: William Morrow, 1989), p. 44.
9. Information on Grebanier’s testimony is provided in Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 78. In a letter of 22 August 1965, in the Hicks Papers (Syracuse University), Grebanier tells Granville Hicks that the negative reaction to his role in the hearings destroyed his marriage. However, Jerry Warwin, in his 29 March 1993 letter, states that reasons for the break-up were more complex. In his Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, Norse describes being propositioned by Grebanier in a homosexual bath house (pp. 137–38).
10. For further details on her life, see Fire and Grace: The Life of Rose Pastor Stokes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), by Arthur Zipser and Pearl Zipser. Anzia Yezierska’s 1923 novel, Salome of the Tenements, was partly inspired by the Stokes-Pastor marriage, as well as Yezierska’s own relationship with John Dewey. See the introduction by Gay Wilentz to the 1995 edition, published by the University of Illinois Press.
11. Zipser and Zipser, Fire and Grace, p. 270.
12. Ibid., p. 299.
13. Jerome to Dargan, 26 June 1933, Jerome Papers.
14. Zipser and Zipser, Fire and Grace, p., 302.
15. It was finally published as I Belong to the Working Class: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes, ed. Herbert Shapiro and David Sterling (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
16. Rose Pastor Stokes to Jerome, 27 Jan. 1932, Jerome Papers.
17. It was first published in the Masses, but the version Jerome read was in Genevieve Taggard, ed., May Days: An Anthology of Verse from Masses-Liberator (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925), p. 258.
18. Jerome to Stokes, 11 June 1928.
19. The indispensable source for information about Hook’s philosophical and political evolution is Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
20. Jerome to Stokes, undated, Jerome Papers.
21. Jerome to Dargan, 6 Jan. 1933, Jerome Papers.
22. Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) was the Party boss of Leningrad who reorganized the postwar international Communist movement as the Cominform in 1947, and who advocated strict political control of intellectuals in the arts (called “Zhdanovism”). In Jerome’s speech, delivered at the Stalin Memorial Meeting held at the Party’s Jefferson School, he declared his admiration for Stalin’s philosophical writings and stayed true to his mentor’s style by frequently striking out against “revisionists” and traitors such as former Communist Party leader Earl Browder and the Czechoslovakian dissident Rudolf Slansky. See V. J. Jerome, “He Built the Future,” in the special issue of Political Affairs devoted to Stalin’s death, 32, no. 3 (April 1953).
23. Jerome to Dargan, 6 Jan. 1933, Jerome Papers.
24. “Newsboy” was adapted by Gregory Novikov (dates unknown) for the Workers Laboratory Theater; the text is reprinted in Albert Fried, ed., Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 203–9.
25. Rebel Poet no. 15 (August 1931): 1. Appearing in the same issue, Jerome’s “Communis’ Blues” was just as artificial. However, a later poem, “To a Black Man,” at least imparts some dignity to the subject, largely due to his dropping the ersatz black dialect and speaking directly in his own voice (ibid., no. 17 [October 1932]: 6).
26. Jerome to Dargan, 6 Jan. 1933, Jerome Papers.
27. Jerome to Fast, 18 Dec. 1951. Rosalie McGee was the the wife of Black prisoner Willie McGee, who would be electrocuted on false rape charges; Amy Mallard was the widow of a lynch victim and active in support of the defense of Black Communist leader Benjamin Davis, who was imprisoned under the Smith Act; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was another historic Communist leader indicted under the Smith Act.
28. Jerome’s other publications include ... Stand Guard (New York: Workers Music League, 1931), for which he wrote the text to accompany music by Lan Adomian; Intellectuals and the War (New York: Workers Library, 1940); The Negro in Hollywood Films (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1950); and The Treatment of Defeated Germany (New York: New Century Publishers, 1945).
29. V. J. Jerome, “Toward a Proletarian Novel,” New Masses (August 1933): 14–15.
30. V. J. Jerome, “Edmund Wilson: To the Munich Station,” New Masses (9 Apr. 1939): 23–26.
31. Jerome’s “A Letter to Howard Fast” was published in Political Affairs 39, no. 1 (January 1959): 60–65, to refute Fast’s claim of mistreatment by the Communist Party. Daniel Aaron refers to the incident of Jerome criticizing an essay by Freeman for its treatment of Eastman in the 1920s in Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), p. 370.
32. Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994), p. 101. In his chapter “The Communist Party and the League,” Folsom tells a number of anecdotes about Jerome and discusses his tendency to employ the method of “fiat” in both organizational and literary matters.
33. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 302.
34. A posthumous sequel was published as The Paper Bridge (New York: Citadel, 1966). See Joseph North’s review essay of A Lantern for Jeremy, “And Then the Judges We Will Be,” Political Affairs 31, no. 6 (June 1952): 58–64; and Sholem Stern, “How Jerome Saw the Shtetl,” Jewish Life 9, no. 2 (December 1954): 18–19.
35. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, Boulder, Colo., May 1989.
36. Wald interview with Wilma Shore, New York City, November 1993.
37. Herbert Aptheker to Jerome, 2 July 1957, Jerome Papers. In a March 2000 interview with Wald, Aptheker reflected that he passed many hours working side by side with Jerome but learned little of Jerome’s inner life or personal artistic concerns.
38. Text of Aronson talk, Jerome Papers.
39. Rockwell Kent to Jerome, 23 Jan. 1941, Jerome Papers; Kreymborg to Jerome, 15 Dec. 1940, Jerome Papers.
40. MacLeish to Jerome, 28 Jan. 1937, Jerome Papers.
41. V. J. Jerome, “Archibald MacLeish’s Panic,” New Masses (2 Apr. 1935): 43–44.
42. MacLeish to A. B. Magil, 22 April 1939, Jerome Papers.
43. Putnam to Jerome, 14 Jan. 1944, Putnam Papers; Bertram D. Wolfe, Strange Communists I Have Known (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), p. 60.
44. Quoted in Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 288.
45. The Communist 16, no. 12 (December 1937): 1146–63.
46. Jerome to Dargan, 13 July 1944, Jerome Papers.
47. William Z. Foster to Jerome, 23 Dec. 1949, Jerome Papers.
48. Jerome to Administrative Committee, 6 Nov. 1953, 4 Jan. 1954, Jerome Papers.
49. See V. J. Jerome, “Remembering Dashiell Hammett,” Mainstream 16, no. 5 (May 1963): 60–61.
50. Winwar’s full intention in this analogy is not clear. The comparison seems especially apt in light of St. Augustine’s reputation for vitriolic polemics and indefatigable exegesis of holy texts; he was also the scourge of anyone who doubted the church. Moreover, one might speculate as to whether she was also referring to St. Augustine’s repentance of his dissolute youth. Reports from Winwar on meetings with the Department of Justice and FBI representatives, November 1952–February 1953, Jerome Papers.
51. There is a disputed account of an incident in prison in which Dashiell Hammet had to rescue Jerome from a knife-wielding inmate whom he had naively upbraided for cheating during a ping-pong game. Lillian Hellman claimed that the anecdote came from Hammet, and she recorded it in Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 90–91. Frederick Vanderbilt Field refutes this version, which makes Jerome look idiotic, in From Right to Left: An Autobiography (Westport, Ct.: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1983), pp. 244–45.
52. V. J. Jerome to Alice Jerome, 26 June 1951, Jerome Papers.
53. Ibid., 25 Jan. 1953.
54. Alice Jerome to Albert Maltz, 25 Apr. 1955, Jerome Papers.
55. Wald interview with Annette Rubinstein, New York City, 10 Oct. 1990.
56. Brown to Jerome, 3 July 1952, Jerome Papers.
57. Finkelstein to Jerome, undated, Jerome Papers.
58. Ibid., 3 June 1953.
59. Ibid.
60. V. J. Jerome, “Caliban Speaks,” Masses & Mainstream 6, no. 2 (February 1953): 21–25.
61. Jerome to Lowenfels, 6 Aug. 1963, Jerome Papers.
62. Lawson to Jerome, 10 Dec. 1957, Jerome Papers.
63. Wald interview with A. B. Magil, New York, October 1990.
64. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 302.
65. Jerome’s 1963 critique of Sidney Finkelstein, “Towards the Marxist Theory of Ideology,” Mainstream 16, no. 8 (August 1963): 43–50, seems to feature the same old orthodox heresy hunting, albeit with less vigor and vitriol.
66. Jerome to Lowenfels, 1 Mar. 1963, Jerome Papers.
67. Jerome to Lieber, 19 May 1963, Jerome Papers.
68. Report of Alfred Rivkin, M.D., 6 Mar. 1965, Jerome Papers.
69. Alice Jerome to John Howard Lawson, 25 Feb. 1966, Jerome Papers.
70. Although Potamkin never held membership in the Communist Party, he was a founder of the John Reed Clubs, a club delegate to the 1930 Kharkov Conference of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, and the secretary of the New York Club. He died of stomach ulcers in 1933. He contributed to a number of Communist publications, and International Publishers issued his pamphlet The Eyes of the Movie (New York: International Publishers, 1934). A collection of his film writings was edited by Lewis Jacobs, The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977).
71. The poem appears in Marcus Graham, ed., An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (New York: Active Press, 1929), pp. 224–25.
72. Mike Gold, “My Generation,” The Worker, 16 Oct. 1965, p. 6.
73. Bill Browder to Joseph Freeman, 14 Aug. 1933, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute.
74. Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), p. 196.
75. Conrad Komorowski to Freeman, 2 Nov. 1932, Freeman Papers.
76. Walter Snow to Isserman, 25 Oct. 1972, Snow Papers, University of Connecticut.
77. Freeman to Browder, 5 Aug. 1937, Freeman Papers.
78. Edward Dalhberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (New York: Brazillier, 1971), p. 236.
79. Albert Halper, Good-Bye Union Square (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), p. 269.
80. Wald interview with Tiba Willner, Ojai, Calif., July 1990.
81. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, Boulder, Colo., May 1989.
82. Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), p. 98.
83. Wald interview with Robert Gorham Davis, who was subsequently Winter’s lover, Cambridge, Mass., November 1991.
84. Wald interview with Tiba Willner, Ojai, Calif., July 1990.
85. Charmion to Freeman, 7 December 1941, Freeman Papers.
86. “What was particularly shocking was my realization that Max’s animus was not really political; that he was using the mask of politics to release a purely personal spleen engendered by a rivalry for women....” Freeman to Josephine Herbst, 16 June 1959, p. 37, Freeman Papers.
87. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, 2 May 1989.
88. Wald interview with Tiba Wilner, Ojai, Calif., July 1990.
89. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, 5 May 1989.
90. Halper, Good-Bye Union Square, p. 269.
91. See Freeman to Hindus, 19 May 1939; Hindus to Freeman, 21 May 1939; Freeman to Hindus, 24 May 1939, all in Freeman Papers.
92. Wald interview with Sender Garlin, 2 May 1989.
93. See Levenson and Natterstad, Granville Hicks, p. 76; and Hicks to Freeman, 26 Oct. 1936, Freeman Papers.
94. Freeman to Schneider, undated, Freeman Papers. For further details on the controversy regarding Farrell’s book, see Wald, James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978); and Wald, “The Athanasis of Union Square,” introduction to A Note on Literary Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
95. Amter to Freeman, 29 May 1936. The specific accusations were that in his 6 June 1936 report in the New Masses on the convention of the Socialist Party, Freeman made the Socialist Party seem less right-wing than it really was, and that he was insufficiently derogatory in his references to Max Shachtman and Jay Lovestone.
96. Burnshaw to Wald, 20 October 1992, in possession of Wald.
97. Burnshaw to Hicks, 22 July 1936, Hicks Papers.
98. Undated correspondence with Christina Stead, Burnshaw Papers, National Humanities Center, Austin, Texas.
99. Christina Stead to Burnshaw, 2 Oct. 1936, Burnshaw Papers.
100. Freeman to Aaron, 3 July 1958, p. 23. In an interview with Wald in New York, in October 1992, Burnshaw confirmed that Freeman was subject to sudden voice loss for psychological reasons, a telling symptom inasmuch as his voice was his most attractive feature.
101. Freeman to Aaron, 16 June 1958, p. 8, Freeman Papers.
102. Ibid., 17 June 1958, p. 2.
103. Ibid., p. 3.
104. Ibid., 22 June 1958, p. 2.
105. The most careful consideration of issues in the debate appears in Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, pp. 134–38. This includes a discussion of Joseph Freeman’s response to Eastman in his column in the Daily Worker issues of 22 November and 2 December 1933.
106. Freeman to Aaron, 2 Oct. 1960, p. 40, Freeman Papers.
107. Ibid., 1 Oct. 1960, p. 8.
108. Freeman to Cowley, 2 Mar. 1937, Freeman Papers.
109. Ibid.
110. Freeman to Aaron, 16 June 1958, Freeman Papers.
111. Freeman to Rolfe, 14 June 1937, p. 1, Freeman Papers. Between 1937 and 1939, Flores edited nine issues of the Marxist literary journal Dialectics, and he directed the production of a dozen pamphlets on literary subjects under the imprint of Critics Group Press.
112. Freeman to Rolfe, 14 June 1937, p. 2, Freeman Papers.
113. Freeman to Aaron, 9 Sept. 1960, Freeman Papers.
114. Freeman’s version, basically from his point of view, is reported in Aaron, Writers on the Left, 365–75.
115. Freeman believed that when his political heresies in An American Testament were discussed at the Kremlin conference in 1937, only Browder defended Freeman against the drive to “crucify” him; and that Browder in 1939, according to a report from Mike Gold, stopped the Daily Worker from reprinting the “ukase of excommunication” which had appeared in the Communist International. Free-man to Aaron, 5 Aug. 1958, p. 11, Freeman Papers.
116. Freeman to Browder, 5 Aug. 1937, Freeman Papers.
117. Ibid., p. 2.
118. P. Dengal, “Book Reviewing Is a Serious Matter,” Communist International 16, no. 8 (August 1939): 947–48.
119. See Freeman’s introduction to Granville Hicks et al., eds., Proletarian Literature in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1935).
120. Freeman to Jerome, 1 July 1939, Freeman Papers.
121. Wald interview with Tiba Wilner, Ojai, Calif., July 1990.
122. The first time was prior to the McCarthy era, during the Rapp-Coudert investigation of New York school teachers in 1940; this was because Freeman had mentioned the name of one of the accused teachers in An American Testament.
123. Wald interview with Tiba Willner, Ojai, Calif., July 1990.
124. Wald interview with Folsom, Boulder, Colo., May 1989. Harry Freeman was apparently an exceptionally able journalist. He had the capacity to collect a huge amount of information in his head and then produce a 10,000-word “round up” of events.
125. “The Poet Pure and Undefiled” was the title Freeman gave to a long sequence of autobiographical letters sent to Daniel Aaron in the 1950s.
126. Freeman to Dell, 1 Mar. 1951, p. 4, Dell Papers, Newberry Library.
127. Ibid., p. 5.
128. Ibid., p. 7.
1. Introduction by Gold to the poetry collection We Gather Strength (New York: The Liberal Press, 1933), p. 7.
2. The subject of Eliot and the Left warrants a book-length study. As examples of Eliot’s impact, see the numerous references to him cited in the poetry of Horace Gregory, Kenneth Fearing, and Muriel Rukeyser in Macha Louis Rosenthal’s landmark dissertation, “Chief Poets of the American Depression,” New York University, 1949. Also see Jules Chametzsky’s comments on Joy David-man’s relationship to Earl Browder and T. S. Eliot in the Nation, 8 Sept. 1979, p. 186.
3. Michael Gold, “Change the World!,” Daily Worker, 5 June 1934, p. 6.
4. Spier published two volumes of poetry, When the Siren Blows (New York: B. B. Hagglund, 1933) and You Own the Hills and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Alpress Publishers, 1935). The first has an introduction by Jack Conroy, and the second is dedicated to Conroy. Spier is described as a worker whose verse appears mainly in publications of the John Reed Clubs and Communist Parties. Both volumes contain a number of translations of Hungarian poetry by Antel Hidas.
5. The letter is quoted in Michael Gold, “Change the World!,” Daily Worker, 14 June 1934, p. 6.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. See the collection of documents in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977).
9. Jeffrey Segall presents an overview of divers responses to Joyce by the U.S. Left in Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
10. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 19.
11. Bud Johns and Judith Clancy, Bastard in the Ragged Suit: Writings of, with Drawings by Herman Spector (San Francisco: Synergistic Press, 1977), p. 21.
12. Ibid., p. 33.
13. Ibid., p. 34.
14. Ibid., p. 57.
15. New Masses (February 1931): 23.
16. Harry Roskolenko, When I Was Last on Cherry Street (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), p. 109.
17. Spector, Bastard in a Ragged Suit, pp. 202–3.
18. Remarks of Judith Spector Clancy Johns at the funeral of Clara Spector, 11 Apr. 1988, San Francisco. Courtesy of Bud Johns.
19. Spector, Bastard in the Ragged Suit, p. 179.
20. Spector, “Harlem River,” in Jack Salzman and Leo Zanderer, Social Poetry of the 1930s (New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1978), p. 287.
21. Spector to Walter Snow, 17 Jan. 1933, Snow Papers, University of Connecticut.
22. Bud Johns to Wald, 20 Mar. 1991, in possession of Wald.
23. Spector, Bastard in the Ragged Suit, p. 142.
24. Alfred Hayes to Kenneth Fearing, dated only 1937, Fearing Papers, University of Wisconsin.
25. Poetry 58 (October 1938): 50–53.
26. Sol Funaroff, Exile from a Future Time (New York: Dynamo, 1943), p. 62.
27. New York Times obituary, 31 Oct. 1942, p. 6. See also Samuel Sillen, “No Wreath, But a Sword,” New Masses (17 Oct. 1942): 22–23.
28. Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 133. Funaroff’s friend Nathan Adler first told me about the influence of Apollinaire on Funaroff.
29. Dahlberg, The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg, p. 283.
30. Wald interview with Leo Hurwitz, 11 Nov. 1989, New York City.
31. Wald interview with Gertrude Hayes, 8 Oct. 1989, New York City.
32. Adler did not pursue his writing beyond the early 1930s. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where he became an eminent clinical psychologist and taught at the University of California at Berkeley.
33. Wald interview with Nathan Adler, 12 Sept. 1989, Mill Valley, Calif.
34. Dynamo 1, no. 2 (March–April 1934): 21.
35. William Pillin (1910–1985), born in Russia, was a poet and ceramic craftsman who also developed a special interest in music. Influenced by Rilke, Lorca, and Neruda, he published Poems (1939), Theory of Silence (1949), Dance without Shoes (1956), Passage after Midnight (1958), Pavanne for a Fading Memory (1964), and Everything Falling (1971). Orginally active in the John Reed Club of Chicago, he moved to the Southwest and then to the West, increasingly attracted to anarchism.
36. Dynamo 1, no. 3 (Summer 1934): 20–25.
37. See Eric Homberger. “Communists and Objectivists,” American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939, pp. 163–86.
38. Williams was considered by Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, and others to be a participant in the proletarian literary movement although not an ideological Communist.
39. Dynamo 1, no. 3 (Summer 1934): 26–29.
40. Adler claimed that he and Funaroff wrote this together. Wald interview with Adler, Mill Valley, Calif., September 1989.
41. Dynamo 2, no. 1 (May–June 1935): 24–31.
42. We Gather Strength, p. 9.
43. Kenneth Fearing, “Historic Certainties,” Poetry 58 (October 1938): 50–53.
44. James E. Breslin, ed., Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets (New York: New Directions, 1985), pp. 94–96. Originally published as “Image and Purpose” in the 16 August 1938 issue of the New Masses.
45. Funaroff, “Unemployed: 2 A.M.,” Social Poetry of the 1930s, p. 49.
46. Funaroff, “Uprooted,” ibid., p. 50.
47. Ibid., p. 50.
48. Ibid., p. 51.
49. Ibid., p. 53.
50. Ibid., p. 59.
51. Anita Tilkin, “A Worker—An Extraordinary Poet,” Daily Worker, 1 Nov. 1938, p. 7.
52. Letter from Sol Funaroff to Nathan Adler, 10 Feb. 1940, in possession of Wald.
53. Varney graduated from Dartmouth and attended Yale Divinity School. From Harvard University he received a master of arts as well as a law degree. Following the Russian Revolution, Varney made several trips to the Soviet Union, spent a great deal of time in Europe in the 1920s, and was married for a brief time. He taught at New York University in the English Department from early 1930s to 1953, and thereafter wrote poetry and traveled. Varney published many books of his own verse: First Wounds, A Story in Five Chapters of Verse (1926), Sketches of Soviet Russia (1920), Sparrow Hawks (1950), Stalingrad, New Years (1943), Star Men, U.S.A. (1956), Spun Sequence (1960), and Poems for a Prose Age (1960).
54. Funaroff, Exile from a Future Time, p. 60.
55. Some of these details are from an undated letter from Hayes to Malcolm Cowley, Cowley Papers, Newberry Library; Wald interview with Nathan Adler, 12 Sept. 1989, Mill Valley, Calif.; and Wald telephone interview with Josephine Hayes Dean, 23 July 2001.
56. See the discussion in Archie Green, Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 87.
57. “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” ibid., pp. 85–91.
58. Orrick Johns, “The John Reed Clubs Meet,” New Masses (30 Oct. 1934): 25–26.
59. Wald interview with Gertrude Hayes, 8 Oct. 1989, New York City.
60. Sol Funaroff to Nathan Adler, 6 May 1937, in possession of Wald.
61. Wald interview with Nathan Adler, 12 Sept. 1989, Mill Valley, Calif.
62. Undated letter, probably written during the summer of 1937, from Hayes to Fearing, Fearing Papers.
63. Hayes to Granville Hicks, 28 Dec. 1934, Hicks Papers, Syracuse University.
64. Hicks et al., Proletarian Literature in the United States, p. 166.
65. Alfred Hayes, “Singleman,” in Salzman and Zanderer, Social Poetry of the 1930s, pp. 109–11.
66. Hicks et al., Proletarian Literature in the United States, p. 166.
67. Hayes, “In a Home Relief Bureau,” Salzman and Zanderer, Social Poetry of the 1930s, pp. 117–88.
68. Gold, “Change the World,” Daily Worker, 5 June 1934, p. 6.
69. Alfred Hayes, “As a Young Man,” Welcome to the Castle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), pp. 42–44.
70. Ibid., p. 48.
71. Alfred Hayes, Just before the Divorce (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 3–4.
72. Ibid., p. 17.
73. Hayes, “The Café G,” in ibid., p. 26.
74. The story appears in Hayes, The Temptation of Don Volpi (New York: Atheneum, 1960).
75. Wald interview with Nathan Adler, 12 Sept. 1989.
1. Statement on back flap of the book jacket of Genevieve Taggard: Collected Poems, 1918–1938 (New York: Harper, 1938).
2. These are reprinted in Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940, ed. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), pp. 149, 152.
3. Statement on the back flap of the book jacket of Genevieve Taggard.
4. Biographical information on Taggard is based on the Genevieve Taggard Papers at the New York Public Library; correspondence with her daughter, Marcia Durant Liles; interviews by Wald with Sanora Babb and Franklin Folsom; Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, “Genevieve Taggard,” American Women Writers, 4:199–201; “Genevieve Taggard,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), 45:376–81; Taggard, “Poet Out of Pioneer,” in These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Feminist Press, 1978), pp. 62–68. Two other studies that discuss Taggard’s life and work are Mary Lefkowitz, Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900–1945 (New York: Twayne, 1992); and Nina Miller, Making Love Modern (New York: Oxford, 1999).
5. Genevieve Taggard, “Hawaii, Washington, Vermont,” Calling Western Union (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), pp. xi–xxxii.
6. Letter from Leonard Bacon, 25 Mar. 1949, Taggard Papers.
7. “Married by Contract,” New York Times, 15 Apr. 1916, p. 13.
8. Genevieve Taggard to Herbst, 16 Oct. 1923, Taggard Papers.
9. Ibid.
10. See After Disillusion (New York: Thomas Seltz, 1935); Deux Contes (New York: Isthmus Press, 1928); and “Literature and Revolution” in New Masses (January 1929): 19.
11. Taggard to Sara Bard Field, undated, Taggard Papers.
12. Taggard, “USSR, 1917–1937,” Falcon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 8.
13. Taggard to Hicks, undated, Hicks Papers, Syracuse University.
14. Taggart, “Lark,” Collected Poems, p. 164.
15. Partisan Review 2 (April–May 1935): 50–51.
16. Ruth Lechlitner, “. . . anti-war and anti-fascism,” Carleton Miscellany 6, no. 1 (Winter 1965):77–81. In this memoir, Lechlitner claims that she was only associated with the League of American Writers from 1935 to 1937; however, the records of the LAW show her teaching at the league’s New York Writers School in 1939. See Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994), p. 301.
17. See Paul Corey, “Lurching toward Liberalism,” Books at Iowa 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 35–71.
18. Tomorrow’s Phoenix (New York: Alcestis Press, 1937), p. 62.
19. New Masses (13 June 1939): 24.
20. “This Body Politic,” Tomorrow’s Phoenix, pp. 13–22.
21. Ibid., p. 33.
22. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (London: Metheun and Company, 1920), pp. 47–59.
23. Ruth Lechlitner, “Garland for Spring, 1937,” Tomorrow’s Phoenix, p. 46.
24. Information on Joy Davidman was assembled from the following sources: the papers of Joy Davidman at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; Paul Leopold’s two-part study in The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, “The Writings of Joy Davidman,” 14, nos. 4, 5 (February and March 1983):1–10 and 1–9; Lyle W. Dorsett’s And God Came In (New York: Macmillan, 1983), and “The Search for Joy Davidman,” The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 14, no. 2 (December 1983): 1–7; interview with Dorsett in Wheaton, Illinois, September 1992; Wald interviews with Franklin Folsom, June 1990; Mary Elting, June 1990; Aaron Kramer, September 1994; and Sender Garlin, 1990; Davidman’s essay “The Longest Way Round” in We Found the Way, ed. David Wesley Soper (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951); the six-part New York Post series on “Girl Communist,” 31 Oct.–30 Nov. 1949; correspondence with V. J. Jerome, Jerome Papers, Yale University; and correspondence with Granville Hicks, Hicks Papers.
25. A score of 140 or above was then considered to be the genius level.
26. Joy Davidman, ed., War Poems of the United Nations (New York: Dial, 1943), pp. 299–300.
27. Dorsett, And God Came In, p. 16.
28. Joy Davidman, Letter to a Comrade (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938), pp. 86–87.
29. Joy Davidman, “The Apostate,” Hunter College Echo, November 1934, pp. 17–26.
30. Joy Davidman, Anya (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 123.
31. See Alfred Kazin, New York Herald Tribune Books, 14 July 1940, p. 2; John Cournos, New York Times Sunday Book Review, 14 July 1940, p. 7; and N.L. Rothman, Saturday Review of Literature, 13 July 1940, p. 10.
32. Those Who Found the Way (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951), p. 20.
33. Robert Frost was named co-recipient for that year.
34. Dorsett, And God Came In, p. 37.
35. Ibid., p. 43.
36. Biographical information on William Lindsay Gresham is assembled from the following sources: the papers of Joy Davidman and the papers of William Lindsay Gresham at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois; Leopold, “The Writings of Joy Davidman”; Dorsett’s And God Came In, “The Search for Joy Davidman,” and a personal interview with Dorsett in Wheaton, Illinois, September 1992; Wald interviews with Folsom, Elting, Kramer, and Garlin; and Gresham’s essay “From Communist to Christian,” in We Found the Way, ed. David Wesley Soper, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951).
37. Jean Karsavina contributed regularly to the pulps even as she published two Left-wing books for young people with International Publishers, Reunion in Poland (1945) and Tree by the Waters (1948). Later she translated Tolstoy and wrote opera librettos while she edited Soviet Review and Problems of Soviet Literature (from 1958 to 1965) and Reprints from the Soviet Press (from 1965 until her death). In 1974 she published a major novel of her childhood, White Eagle, Dark Skies, which received a prize from the Jewish Book Council.
38. William Lindsay Gresham to Davy [David Gresham], 20 Jan. 1960, Gresham Papers, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.
39. Dorsett interview with Douglas Gresham, 4 June 1984, Gresham Papers.
40. New Masses (31 July 1945): 4. The poem is called “Quisling at Twilight,” and the personal references are obscure.
41. Dorsett, And God Came In, p. 62.
42. The novel became the 1947 film Nightmare Alley, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power.
43. Bel Kaufman, “A Joy Observed,” Commonweal, 25 Mar. 1994, p. 7.
44. Dorsett, And God Came In, p. 85.
45. Gresham to Davidman, 3 Feb. 1955, Davidman Papers.
46. This claim occurs throughout the six-part New York Post series “Girl Communist,” 31 Oct.–30 Nov. 1949.
47. The marriage with Lewis was consummated, despite disclaimers by those acolytes of Lewis unable bear the thought of their cultured Christian idol in bed with the outspoken and occasionally vulgar New York Jew. See Leopold, “The Writings of Joy Davidman.”
48. Davidman, Letter to a Comrade, p. 31.
49. Ibid., p. 94.
50. Ibid., p. 57.
51. Ibid., p. 91.
52. Ibid., p. 61.
53. Ibid., p. 64.
54. The passage is discussed as a movement from abstraction to historical necessity in Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 4–5.
55. Taggard, statement on back flap of the book jacket of Collected Poems.
56. See the excellent discussion in Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party USA, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review 45 (May 1975): 73–118.
57. For the first three, see the selections in Nekola and Rabinowitz, Writing Red. See also Grace Hutchins, “Feminists and the Left Wing,” New Masses (20 Nov. 1934): 14–15; and Ella Winter, “Love in Two Worlds,” New Masses (16 July 1935): 17–19. For a series of exchanges on women’s domestic work involving McKenney and Flynn, see New Masses (11 Feb. 1941): 10–11; and New Masses (21 Mar. 1941): 10–11.
58. See Michael Folsom, ed., Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 211–14.
59. Meridel Le Sueur, “The Fetish of Being Outside,” New Masses (26 Feb. 1935): 23.
60. See Edwin Seaver, “Another Writer’s Position,” New Masses (19 Feb. 1935): 21–22.
61. Nekola and Rabinowitz, Writing Red, p. 131.
62. “Jimmie Higgins” is a popular term for the ordinary, everyday activist in the socialist movement, who keeps the organization going without the glory enjoyed by the top leaders. It gained widespread currency from Upton Sinclair’s novel, Jimmie Higgins (Racine, Wisc.: Western Printing and Lithographing Company, 1918).
63. Gellhorn, author of many works of fiction and reportage, was a longtime personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. Like Hemingway’s, her political views sometimes coincided with those of the Communist Party, especially at the time of the Spanish Civil War. See Carl Rollyson, Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
64. Hope Hale was a Communist Party member and pulp fiction writer who had married the British Communist journalist Claude Cockburn in the early 1930s; at the end of the decade she would marry the American Communist literary critic Robert Gorham Davis, although both became disaffected from Communism at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In the 1960s, a collection of her short fiction about the “darker regions of the civilized female psyche” appeared as The Dark Way to the Plaza (New York: Doubleday, 1968), and twenty-five years later she published her autobiographical Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1994). Dorothy Parker was a Jewish-American humorist sympathetic to the Communist Party during the 1930s and loyal to the Left afterward. She is the subject of two biographies, John Keats, You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970); and Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Villard Books, 1988). Sylvia Townsend Warner was a British Communist novelist. For a discussion of her work, see Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990). One novel of the Depression era, Summer Will Show (1936), is considered a classic of “lesbian fiction.” Terry Castle, “Sylvia Townsend Warner and Lesbian Fiction,” Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 128–47.
65. See, for example, the essay “Political Poetry,” by Elena Usiyevich in International Literature 9 (1937): 92–102. Her argument is surprisingly ungendered, insisting primarily that all poetry is political. However, a preoccupation with Soviet affairs led to the publication of articles that examined the status of women in changing societies; see, for example, the two-part series by Joshua Kunitz, “New Women in Old Asia,” in New Masses (2 Oct. 1934): 23–27, and (9 Oct. 1934): 15–19.
66. This program was adopted by the various John Reed Clubs, as explained in New Force 1, no. 5 (July–August 1932): 2.
67. New Force, ibid., p. 4.
68. “Resolution on the Work of New Masses for 1931,” New Masses (September 1932): 21–22.
69. Marguerite Young is identified as the Washington Bureau correspondent of the Daily Worker in 1934. Around 1936 she is reported to have moved to New York, where she served on the New Masses editorial board for a time. According to a June 1998 telephone interview by Wald with A. B. Magil, she was married to another bureau correspondent. Due to the widespread secrecy about Party affiliations caused by fear of political persecution, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that this Marguerite Young is the same well-known Marguerite Young (1908–1994) who authored Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) and who also wrote on utopian socialism and Eugene V. Debs. However, all available biographical material for the latter places her in Chicago from 1933 to 1936 and in Indianapolis from 1937 to 1941. See Miriam Fuchs, ed., Marguerite Young, Our Darling (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archives Press, 1994).
70. Rochester was a Communist Party member who worked for the Party-led Labor Research Association and for a time represented the Party on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote a number of pamphlets published by International Publishers on capitalism, including Capitalism and Progress (1945), The Nature of Capitalism (1946), and American Capitalism (1949).
71. Adams was a poet who had published several volumes of her own work as well as translations of François Villon. In the early Depression she taught at New York University, where she met and married the critic William Troy in 1933. The two then taught at Bennington College until 1944, after which she worked at Columbia University and was consultant for poetry at the Library of Congress. She participated in the 1935 American Writers’ Congress but in later years described herself as a Left-wing Democrat. De Ford, who lived in San Francisco after 1920, produced biographies and mystery stories and contributed journalism to the Left-wing Federated Press. There is no evidence of her support for the League of American Writers. Lumpkin was a pro-Communist novelist who later became an anti-Communist religious crusader.
72. In addition to women previously identified, Gale Wilhelm (1908–1991) is known as a pioneering lesbian novelist; although she receives a few insightful paragraphs in Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire, available biographical material does not refer to her having Left-wing commitments, and her New Masses contributions are not cited. Margaret Larkin (1900–1967) came from the western United States to New York City in the 1920s, where she began her writing career as a poet and was also a folksinger. In 1926 she published the one-act drama El Cristo, and in 1929 she published articles in both the Nation and New Masses about the songs of Ella May Wiggins, the martyred balladeer of the Gastonia Textile strikers. In 1931 she published Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs. When she began working for the Theater Union, she met the writer Albert Maltz, to whom she was married from 1937 to 1964. Anne Bromberger is listed as a member of the League of American Writers in 1937.
73. This is possibly a pseudonym for Janet Metzger, married to the Cleveland-based proletarian novelist Robert Cruden, who wrote under the pseudonym James Steele.
74. New Force 1, no. 4 (May 1932): 4.
75. Ibid., p. 13.
76. New Force 1, no. 1 (January 1932): p. 13.
77. Marion Holden, “The Dead Corporal,” New Writers 11, no. 3 (March 1936): 12–16.
78. The Partisan 1, no. 6 (September–October 1934): 9.
79. Partisan Review and Anvil 3, no. 3 (April 1936): 3–16.
80. New Masses (September 1932): 6–10.
81. Ibid. (April 1933): 10–13.
82. Brewster was a critic and short fiction writer, and Fischer a mystery writer.
83. Nora Benjamin was the pseudonym of Eleanor Gottheil Kubie, the award-winning author of nonfiction and fiction books for children. Aline Bernstein was a stage designer and the lover of novelist Thomas Wolfe. Martha Dodd was a novelist who would be accused of espionage during the McCarthy era. Dawn Powell, the novelist, was a close friend of Communist playwright and screen-writer John Howard Lawson. Brown and Wright will be discussed in chapter 8.
84. Backus was active in Hollywood, but no other information is available about her. Draper was known mainly as a feminist and supporter of liberal causes. Flexner was a Marxist drama critic and later a feminist historian.
85. Among the best resources on the history of the Communist Party and women are Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women in the CPUSA,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown et al. (New York: Monthly Review, 1993); Elsa Dixler, “The Woman Question: Women and the American Communist Party, 1929–1941,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974; Jayne Loader, “Women in the Left, 1906–1941: A Bibliography of Primary Sources,” University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies 2 (September 1975): 9–82; Robert Shaffer, “Women and the Communist Party USA, 1930–1940,” Socialist Review 45 (May 1975): 73–118; and Kathleen Wiegand, “Vanguards of Women’s Liberation: The Old Left and the Continuity of the Women’s Movement in the United States, 1945–1970s,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University 1995.
86. Clara Weatherwax, “The Shape of the Sun,” Partisan Review and Anvil 31, no. 1 (February 1936): 26.
1. In 1923, Claude McKay published a book in Russian that was translated five decades later as The Negroes in America (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979). This contains short chapters titled “Negroes in Art and Music” and “Negroes in Literature,” but it was not available in the United States to become part of the evolving Black Marxist tradition.
2. International Literature 6 (1935): 82.
3. Eugene Clay, “The Negro in Recent American Literature,” in American Writers’ Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 145–52.
4. Hart, American Writers’ Congress, p. 129.
5. Ibid., p. 178.
6. Henry Hart, ed., The Writer in a Changing World (New York: Equinox, 1937), p. 179.
7. Ibid., 226–27.
8. Robert Gessner (1907–1968) was a Jewish American author of two books about Native American Indians, a nonfiction work called Massacre (1931) and the novel Broken Arrow (1933), as well as a book about anti-Semitism, Some of My Best Friends Are Jews. He had published a thirty-page poetic paean to international revolution called Upsurge (1933) and episodically contributed poems to the New Masses throughout the 1930s. In the 1940s, Gessner turned increasingly to fiction and then launched a successful career as a teacher and scholar in film studies at New York University.
9. Ibid., 233–34.
10. Richard Wright, “Blue-Print for Negro Writing,” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937): 53–65.
11. Donald Ogden Stewart, ed., Fighting Words (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), p. 75.
12. The speech is reproduced in Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994), pp. 197–200.
13. The most judicious assessment to date appears in James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. This list is quoted from a Daily Worker article by Wright in Margaret Walker’s Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (New York: Warner Books, 1988), p. 110–12, and she offers no corrections in what is otherwise a highly critical book.
15. Edward Bland, “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry,” Poetry 63, no. 6 (March 1944): 328–33.
16. Gwendolyn Brooks memorialized him in her lead poem of the 1949 collection Annie Allen (New York: Harper, 1949).
17. Wald telephone interview with Mrs. Richard Durham, sister of Robert Davis, 10 June 1999.
18. See Sandra Carlton Alexander, “The Achievement of Arna Bontemps,” Ph.D. diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1976.
19. Horace Cayton, Long Old Road: An Autobiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 247.
20. See 1950s correspondence between Arna Bontemps and Maxim Lieber, Bontemps Papers, Syracuse University.
21. See “A Tale of Folk Courage,” Partisan Review and Anvil 3 (April 1936): 31.
22. Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope, p. 229.
23. John Edgar Tidwell is the authority on Davis. See his entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography and the introduction to his edition of Davis’s autobiography, Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
24. Frank Marshall Davis, 47th Street (Prairie City, Ill.: Dicker Press, 1948), iv–v.
25. Davis, Livin’ the Blues, p. 248.
26. Ibid., p. 284.
27. Herbert Aptheker (b. 1915) came from a wealthy Jewish family in Brooklyn. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1936 and wrote a master’s thesis, “Nat Turner’s Revolt: The Environment, the Event, the Effects.” In 1937 he published a two-part essay, “American Negro Slave Revolts” in Science and Society. In 1939, after a period spent in the South as an educational worker for the Food and Tobacco Workers Union, Aptheker joined the Communist Party, where he published under the pseudonym H. Biel. From then on, his work regularly appeared in the Journal of Negro History, Opportunity, and pamphlets published by International Publishers. In 1943, while training as an army officer, his Ph.D. dissertation was accepted and published by Columbia University Press as American Negro Slave Revolts, which marked a significant turning point in the historiography of the subject.
28. Wald telephone interview, March 1993, with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a former Communist Party leader in Harlem who lived in Hawaii and worked alongside Davis.
29. Margaret Walker to Wright, 1 June 1938, Wright Papers, Yale University.
30. Ibid., 30 June 1938.
31. Ibid., 7 June 1939.
32. Ibid., undated.
33. Constance Webb, Richard Wright (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1968), pp. 143–44.
34. Challenge 1, no. 1 (March 1934): 39.
35. Ibid., p. 40.
36. Ibid., no. 2 (September 1934): 29.
37. Ibid., no. 4 (January 1936): 38.
38. Ibid., no. 5 (June 1936): 49.
39. Marian Minus, “Present Trends of Negro Literature,” Challenge 2, no. 1 (April 1937): 10.
40. Walker to Wright, 19 Apr. 1938, p. 4, Wright Papers.
41. Wright to Langston Hughes, 29 May 1937, Hughes Papers, Yale University.
42. “Editorial,” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937): 3.
43. Walker to Wright, November 1938, Wright Papers. Andrew Yarrow, “Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance Writer, Dies at 91,” New York Times, 19 Aug. 1998, p. C23.
44. See A. Gilbert Belles, “The Politics of Alain Locke,” in Alain Locke: Reflections on a Renaissance Man, ed. Russell J. Linnerman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 50–62.
45. This appears in the reprint of Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro Anthology (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), pp. 111–15.
46. This appeared in Race 1 (Summer 1936): 70–76, 87.
47. Opportunity 11 (January 1933): 14–18.
48. Ibid. 14 (January and February 1936): 6–10; 42–43, 61.
49. Ibid. 15 (January and February 1937): 8–13; 40–44. James Allen (1906–1990, born Sol Auerbach) was the son of Left-wing Russian Jewish immigrants and a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania until he was expelled for his radical activities. He joined the Communist Party in 1928 and in 1930 traveled to the South to become the first editor of the underground Southern Worker. With a background of organizing Alabama sharecroppers and working on the Scottsboro case, Allen later published major books on African American history and politics, including Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (1937) and Negro Liberation (1938), both with International Publishers.
50. Opportunity 1 (January and February 1938): 7–11, 27, 39–42.
51. Ibid. 17 (January and February 1939): 4–10, 36–42.
52. Ibid., 19 (January and February 1941): 4–9, 48–52.
53. Ibid., p. 52.
54. Ibid., 20 (February and March 1942): 36–41, 83–87; Masses & Mainstream 2, no. 8 (August 1949): 4–5.
55. Phylon 10 (First and Second Quarters, 1949): 5–14, 167–72.
56. Ibid. 12 (First and Second Quarters, 1951): 5–12, 185–90.
57. Ibid. 13 (1952): 7–18.
58. Ibid. 14 (1953): 33–34.
59. International Literature 8 (June 1934): 122.
60. Sterling Brown to Benjamin Botkin, 22 May 1932, Brown Papers, Howard University.
61. Joann V. Gabin, Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 51. The interview cited was conducted with Brown by James Early and Ethelbert Miller on 19 May 1978 at Howard University. There is no evidence that Brown’s recollection was ever independently corroborated. On the contrary, the written record suggests that Brown grew completely silent during the McCarthy era.
62. See Samuel B. Garren, “William Attaway,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 76:3–6, and Richard Yarborough, “Afterword,” Blood on the Forge (New York: Monthly Review, 1987), pp. 295–310.
63. Milton Meltzer, “William Attaway, Negro Novelist,” Daily Worker, 26 June 1939, p. 7.
64. Ralph Warner, “Blood on the Forge Is Story of Negro Brothers,” Daily Worker, 8 Nov. 1941, p. 7.
65. Wald telephone interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 1993.
66. Negro Quarterly 1, no. 1 (Spring 1942): 3.
67. “Editorial Comment,” Negro Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Winter–Spring 1943): 295–302.
68. See Story 6, no. 31 (1935): 30–34. Biographical information based on an undated letter to the editors of Story, “My Twenty-Two Years,” Princeton University.
69. “Wounded,” Crisis 10 (1938): 321.
70. Jeffrey D. Parker, “Frank Yerby,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 76:222–31.
71. Harper’s 188 (May 1944): 448–53.
72. Ralph Ellison, “Recent Negro Fiction,” New Masses (5 Aug. 1941): 25.
73. In a letter from A. B. Magil to Wald, 7 Apr. 1976, Magil states: “My impression is that Ellison was not only close to the CP, but for a time a member.” In a phone interview by Wald with Howard Johnson, March 1995, Johnson said: “I think that Ralph was in the Party, just about the same time that Richard Wright was.” Lloyd Brown recalls Charles Humboldt telling him that Ellison was a member of the Communist Party’s Writers Unit in New York. Wald interview with Lloyd Brown, October 1990, New York City.
74. This view is also presented in Barbara Foley, “Ralph Ellison: Proletarian Journalist,” Science & Society 62, no. 4 (Winter 1998–1999): 537–56.
75. Ellison to Wright, 22 Apr. 1940, Wright Papers.
76. Ibid., 11 May 1940.
77. Wald interview with Sanora Babb, Hollywood, July 1989.
78. Ellison to Wright, Nov. 3, 1941, Wright Papers.
79. This essay, originally intended to be the conclusion of Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy, appeared in Atlantic Monthly 174 (August 1940): 61–70, and (September 1944): 48–56.
80. Ellison to Wright, 5 Sept. 1944, Wright Papers.
81. Ibid., 5 Aug. 1945.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., 23 Sept. 1946.
84. Ibid., 24 Aug. 1946.
85. Ibid., 1 Feb. 1948.
86. Walker, For My People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942), p. 14.
87. Ibid., p. 16.
88. “Negro Revolutionary Music,” New Masses (15 May 1934): 29–30.
89. Mike Gold, “Dark with Sunlight,” New Masses (July 1929): 17.
90. Ralph Ellison, “Transition,” Negro Quarterly 1 (Spring 1942): 87–92.
91. Wald interviews with Howard Johnson, July 1995, and Lloyd Brown, September 1996.
92. Nancy Cunard, ed. Negro: An Anthology (New York: Ungar, 1970; orig. 1933), p. 151.
93. Alan Calmer, ed. Get Organized! (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 12.
94. Robert Hayden, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Detroit: Falcon Press, 1940), p. 27.
95. Angelo Herndon, You Cannot Kill the Working Class (New York: International Labor Defense and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, n.d. [ca. 1934]), p. 25.
96. A 23 May 1940 letter from Theodore Ward to Wright, in the Wright Papers, reports on the turmoil, including a meeting of the Harlem branch of the Party where some members proposed the establishment of a bureau to which novelists such as Wright would have to submit manuscripts before publishing them.
97. “The Black Ball” in Ralph Ellison’s Flying Home and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 110–122.
1. There are several versions of Rukeyser’s Scottsboro adventures in circulation, but the above is based on a 28 December 1998 interview by Wald with her son, William Rukeyser, in Davis, California. Additional biographical material is based on the Rukeyser Papers at the Library of Congress, and a personal interview with Rukeyser in September 1980 in New York City.
2. “From Scottsboro to Decatur,” Student Review 1, no. 6 (April 1933): 12–15.
3. See ibid., pp. 12–15, and vol. 2, no. 3 (January 1934): 20.
4. Letter from Harry Magdoff to Wald, 29 Oct. 1991.
5. Rukeyer’s poetry is the subject of a substantial book-length study by Louise Kertesz, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). Among the most useful published studies of Rukeyser’s work are John Malcolm Brinnin, “Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication,” Poetry 61 (January 1943): 554–75; Laurence Goldstein, “Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight,’ ” in The Flying Machine and Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 117–23; and M. L. Rosenthal, “Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems,” in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, no. 14 (New York: New Directions, 1953), pp. 201–29. A doctoral dissertation that attempts to place Rukeyser’s entire career in perspective is Anne Frances Herzog, “ ‘Faith and Resistance’: Politics and the Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser,” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1993.
6. Jan Heller Levi, ed., A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1944), p. 104.
7. Letter from Robert Gorham Davis, 13 June 1986. An examination of Davis’s correspondence with Ella Winter, however, indicates that he did not actually see the incident but only heard about it. Davis felt that Stachel would not have taken such liberty with anyone not considered a member.
8. Wald interview with Muriel Rukeyser, New York City, September 1980.
9. Wald interview, 28 Dec.1998, with her son, William Rukeyser, in Davis, California.
10. Muriel Rukeyser to Louis Untermeyer, 25 June 1940, Untermeyer Papers, University of Delaware.
11. See “Grandeur and Mystery of a Poster Girl,” Partisan Review 10 (September–October 1943): 471–73.The purported satire not only accuses Rukeyser of literary and political opportunism, but pokes fun at her weight and sexual appetites. She was defended by Rebecca Pitts in “The Rukeyser Imbroglio,” Partisan Review 11 (Winter 1944): 125–29; and F. O. Mathiessen in “The Rukeyser Imbroglio Continued,” Partisan Review 11 (Spring 1944): 217–18.
12. Adrienne Rich, “Beginners,” Kenyon Review 15 (1993): 16. Wald interview with John Simon, Rukeyser’s publisher and first literary executor, 6 July 1996.
13. Herman Spector to Walter Snow, 17 Jan. 1933, Snow Papers, University of Connecticut.
14. Dynamo 2, no. 1 (May–June 1935): 23.
15. Ibid. 1, no. 2 (March–April 1934): 8–9.
16. See Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 70–80.
17. Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (New York: Covici Friede, 1938). p. 69.
18. Wald interview with Hy Fireman, November 1990, Detroit, Mich.
19. Norman Rosten to John Malcolm Brinnin, 9 June 1937, Brinnin Papers, University of Delaware.
20. Rosten to Brinnin, 15 Sept. (1938?), Brinnin Papers.
21. Alan Calmer, ed., Salud! Poems, Stories, and Sketches of Spain by American Writers (New York: International Publishers, 1938), p. 46.
22. Calmer to Brinnin, 25 Apr. 1939, Brinnin Papers, University of Delaware. “Cadillac Square,” together with his Spanish Civil War poem slightly retitled, lead off Brinnin’s 1942 collection dedicated to Kimon Friar, The Garden Is Political (New York: Macmillan, 1942).
23. John Brinnin, “Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication,” Poetry 61 (January 1943): 554–75.
24. An example of a major statement that explicitly urges aspiring proletarian writers to take a “stiff dose of modern fiction—Hemingway and Faulkner, Joyce and Proust,” is Alan Calmer’s “Reader’s Report,” a summary of the results of a contest for the best novel on a proletarian theme. See New Masses (10 Sept. 1935): 23–35.
25. “Revolutionary Verse,” Pen & Hammer Bulletin 2 (12 July 1934): 137–40.
26. New Force 1, no. 5 (July–August 1932): 4.
27. Granville Hicks, “Problems of American Fellow Travelers: Notes on American Novelists, Poets and Critics,” International Literature 3 (1933): 108–9.
28. Joseph Freeman, Daily Worker, 17 Nov. 1933, p. 4.
29. A. B. Magil to Freeman, 9 Nov. 1933, Freeman Papers, Hoover Institute.
30. Sterling Brown, “Scotty Has His Say,” Southern Road (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 23.
31. See Houston A. Baker Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 5.
32. Robert Hayden, “Gabriel,” Heart-Shape in the Dust (Detroit: Falcon Press, 1940), p. 23.
33. Sterling Brown, Southern Road (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 46.
34. Hayden, “We Are the Hunted,” in Heart-Shape in the Dust, p. 46.
35. See the discussion of this aspect of Hughes’s writing in Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories, by Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995).
36. Wright warns: “A vulgarized simplicity constitutes the greatest danger in tracing the reciprocal interplay between the writer and his environment.” New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937): 63–64.
37. Reprinted in Faith Berry, ed., Good Morning Revolution (New York: Citadel, 1993), pp. 1–2.
38. Ibid., pp. 2–4.
39. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
40. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
41. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
42. Ibid., p. 7.
43. Ibid., p. 13.
44. Ibid., p. 14.
45. Wald interview with Leo Hurwitz, 11 Nov. 1989, New York City.
46. See Sol Funaroff to James T. Farrell, 19 Mar. 1934, Farrell Papers. In a 1989 interview Gertrude Hayes recalled that the Dynamo poets “called Burnshaw ‘Birdshit’ and saw his going Left as being fashionable. He came from the world of the middle class and was ensconced as an editor.” Wald interview with Hayes, 8 Oct. 1989, New York City.
47. Michael Gold to Louis Untermeyer, undated, sent from Boston, Untermeyer Papers.
48. Wald interview with Leo Hurwitz, November 1989, New York City.
49. For characteristics of the genre, see Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).
50. For a recent discussion of Marxist perspectives on surrealism, see E. San Juan Jr., “Surrealism and Revolution: Perspectives from Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire,” in Working Papers Series in Cultural Studies, Ethnicity, and Race Relations (Pullman, Wash.: Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, 2000).
51. Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 7.
52. Ibid., p. 11.
53. Ibid., p. 14.
54. Ibid, p. 225.
55. Joseph Freeman to Daniel Aaron, 19 May 1959, p. 2, Aaron Papers, Cambridge, Mass.
56. Freeman to Aaron, 19 May 1959.