The John Reed Clubs (JRC) and its successor, the League of American Writers (LAW), played crucial roles in the development and direction of the Chicago Renaissance. Both organizations were major institutions of the cultural world of the Communist Left during the 1930s and early 1940s. Though the national images of the two groups reflected quite different political and cultural moments, in practice both played much the same role with respect to black artists in Chicago. Each actively sought the participation of African American artists and intellectuals, breaching the walls of Jim Crow in a notoriously segregated city and providing black artists a connection to their literary counterparts beyond the South Side. At the same time, both groups provided models and networks of support for the organizations and activities of Left African American arts groups and institutions, such as the South Side Writers Group and Negro Story, which formed much of the base of the Chicago Renaissance.
The JRC grew out of attempts in the late 1920s to merge the legacy of the so-called “lyrical Left” associated with Greenwich Village and the Masses and Liberator magazines during the teens and the early twenties with a newer “Proletarian literature” impulse greatly influenced by European (especially Soviet and German) Communist artistic movements. Much of the impetus for this merger emerged from the movement to save the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, a movement that brought together older radicals and liberals with younger (and not so young) activists associated with the new Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The New Masses magazine was founded in 1926 in part as an attempt to keep this Left-liberal alliance together. It included as contributors and/or editorial board members a considerable number of black artists and intellectuals associated with the New Negro Renaissance, among them Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond. Countee Cullen, an activist in the effort to free Sacco and Vanzetti, also fell within this circle. As the name suggests, the journal was posed as successor to the Masses. A stalwart of the old “lyrical Left” (and a close friend of Jean Toomer), Waldo Frank, was initially elected editor-in-chief. However, Frank quickly departed as editor, leaving the younger writers, Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman (who, too, despite their relative youth, had come of age in the “lyrical Left” of Greenwich Village and the Masses) to take the editorial lead. As the 1920s wore on, Gold (a native of the Lower East Side most famous as a writer for his 1930 novel Jews without Money) became increasingly dominant, taking the journal more and more into the “proletarian literature” movement.
Essentially, the proletarian arts movement, including activists in literature, theater, the visual arts, dance, music, photography, and the relatively new medium of film, sought to break with established artistic forms and institutions and to allow workers and farmers to create new art forms, journals, organizations, and so on, that both expressed current identities and concerns of the working class as well as prefigured or heralded what a new proletarian culture might look like when the international working class has (as “The Internationale” predicts) become all and the state has withered away. It also looked to the CPUSA, the Communist International (Comintern), and the Soviet Union for political and ideological leadership.
This movement took root in the United States during the “Third Period” ideological era of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term Third Period referred to a formulation of Stalin in which he saw the revolutionary moment during and immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution (the “First Period”) as being followed by a phase of relative capitalist stability (the “Second Period”). However, Stalin predicted in the late 1920s that the Second Period would soon end and be followed by another (and deeper) era of capitalist crisis (the “Third Period”) in which the working class around the world would be receptive to the leadership of the revolutionary parties associated with the Comintern. However, Stalin and the Comintern also concluded that the workers might be misled by various sorts of liberal and non-Communist Left groups, especially the various Social Democratic groups. As a result, what became known as Third Period ideology (which in fact was a product of the so-called Second Period) emphasized the establishment of countercultural “workers’” institutions, such as workers’ theaters, bookstores, visual arts groups, writers’ groups, journals, and so on, that were formally, thematically, and institutionally distinct from “bourgeois” culture, whether conservative or liberal. This ideology also discouraged the sorts of political and cultural alliances that in fact led to the founding of New Masses, attacking such organizations as the Socialist Party and the NAACP and causing the departure of a considerable number of editors and contributors.
By 1928, New Masses focused its attention on the development of “worker-writers,” many the children of so-called “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe. Because many were from the Midwest and other regions outside the usual literary precincts of New York and Boston, these correspondents from the class war were encouraged to tell their stories in their own regional and class voices and in their own styles. Of course, the journal and the new literary Left did not totally sever its sentimental and practical ties with its predecessors. In 1929, a group of artists associated with New Masses, the CPUSA, and proletarian literature founded the John Reed Club in New York City. The club was named after the stalwart of the Masses and pre-Bolshevik Greenwich Village Left bohemia who famously chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution and was one of the leaders of the 1919 split in the Socialist Party that resulted in the beginnings of the CPUSA (originally in two different parties). The new club attempted to further Gold’s and New Masses’ efforts to encourage the development of worker-artists and new types of working class or proletarian art through classes, formal and information discussions, debate, networking, art shows, poetry reading, and so on.
The New York club became a prototype for other John Reed Clubs across the country, with an initial convention in 1932. Within a couple of years, the JRC had a membership of over 1,200 artists and writers in at least 30 chapters, many with their own journals—though only the Partisan Review of the New York chapter and Left Front of the Chicago chapter survived more than a couple of years. As a member of the International Union of Writers and Artists, basically a Comintern cultural umbrella organization, the JRC had links to like-minded organizations internationally. Again, it should be emphasized that the JRC (and New Masses, the CPUSA, and the Comintern) did not lay down definitive strictures about what proletarian literature might be (or even whether a sympathetic middle-class author could write it or not). Rather, it was a place where developing artists in many media and genres could showcase their work, study, and discuss politics and aesthetics (and the relation of politics to aesthetics). It also provided a place where they could network with their more- and less-established counterparts while participating in the larger political struggles of the day, particularly the unemployed movement and the efforts to organize unions in mass production industries that would culminate in the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The general artistic tenor of the JRC is summed up in its slogan, “Art Is a Class Weapon.”
The chapter in Chicago was probably the most influential and most stable local JRC organization outside of New York City, with separate subgroups for visual artists, writers, and musicians, as well as a study group. It also shared a South Michigan Avenue headquarters with a JRC spin-off, the Film and Photo League, and the Chicago Workers Theatre. The Chicago JRC and its journal Left Front anchored the organization throughout the Midwest region, which included chapters in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Davenport, and the left-wing Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, many of which published their own local journals (such as Detroit’s New Force and Grand Rapids’s The Cauldron). In addition to Left Front and the more short-lived official JRC journals, The Anvil, one of the most influential and long-lived of the Left journals of the 1930s, was edited by another midwestern JRC member in Moberly, Missouri, Jack Conroy. Conroy later moved to Chicago as a member of the Federal Writers’ Project, where he (and The Anvil) became a strong supporter of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
Another ideological development on the Left spurred by the Comintern in the late 1920s came to have a great impact on the shape of the JRC and the Left in the United States generally. Quite a few African American artists, intellectuals, and activists, such as W. E. B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Claude McKay, W. A. Domingo, Cyril Briggs, Richard Moore, Eric Walrond, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, William Patterson, and Harry Haywood, had some relationship to Left organizations like the Socialist Party, the CPUSA, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the 1910s and the 1920s. However, by and large the Left before the late 1920s considered the category of race to be a sort of false consciousness that would basically wither away when the class question was solved through Socialist (or anarchist) revolution. It is true that some black leftists, particularly the pro-Bolshevik African Blood Brotherhood that included in its leadership or membership Briggs, Moore, and Haywood, mixed Marxism with black nationalist ideology, and that the international Communist movement increasingly began to use Lenin and Stalin’s theorization of the “national question” of the former “prison house of nations” that had been the Russian Empire to come to understand the relationship of African Americans to working-class struggles in the United States. However, it is not until the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 that the “Negro Question” in the United States is finally adjudicated to be a “national question,” with African Americans in the southern “Black Belt” deemed to be a nation with the right to self-determination up to and including the right to form a separate republic, and in the urban North to be a “national minority” that needed to be integrated into “mainstream” society on the basis of full equality. Equally important as far as the work of the CPUSA and the organizations it influenced were concerned, the Comintern concluded that this national question was not peripheral to the struggle for working-class power, but absolutely central. Instead of being something that could wait, or that would take care of itself after the revolution, the question of “Negro liberation” was posited as something that must be addressed if the working class was going to make any fundamental advances. This position was not universally hailed by CPUSA leadership and rank and file, black and white—though at least one black Communist, Harry Haywood, was instrumental in its formulation. However, by the time the JRC took shape as a national organization in 1932, the centrality of Negro liberation to all aspects of Party work was entrenched in the CPUSA.
This had a number of important practical consequences. One was the concerted effort that the CPUSA made to recruit African Americans and promote them to positions of leadership in both the Party and the groups over which it exerted leadership or significant influence. Another was that the Left attempted to push what it saw as the issues confronting African Americans to the fore, from the fight to save the defendants in the infamous Scottsboro, Alabama, rape case from legal or extralegal execution to the battle against Jim Crow in public accommodations, housing, employment, and education. In the trade union movement, particularly with the formation of the CIO, the Communist Left pushed strongly for the inclusion of black workers under the slogan, “Black and White Unite and Fight,” helping to create a cadre of Left African American trade union activists, particularly in the electrical and packinghouse industries, which would organize considerable institutional support for the Chicago Renaissance. Perhaps even more importantly so far as the Chicago Renaissance is concerned, black and white leftists, including former JRC members like Jack Conroy and Richard Wright, led the struggle for the inclusion of black artists in the Federal Arts Project (FAP), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), and for the public support of cultural initiatives in the African American community, such as the South Side Community Art Center.
The JRC followed the general CPUSA and Comintern admonition to recruit African Americans and to put the issues of African Americans in the forefront. The initial membership of the JRC in the Midwest was overwhelmingly white—more so than the local organizations of the CPUSA itself. However, JRC worked hard to attract the attention of the black community in the Midwest. In St. Louis, the white painter Joe Jones conducted JRC community art classes in which half his students were African Americans. Chapters put on productions of Langston Hughes’s one-act “mass chant” Scottsboro Limited—Hughes, a native midwesterner, had close ties to the JRC in New York, the Midwest, and California. The JRC journals devoted a large proportion of their pages to work about and aimed at African Americans. For example, in 1933 and 1934 Left Front printed reportage detailing Jim Crow practices at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, a strike by black nut-pickers in St. Louis, and the unemployed movement on the South Side, as well as sketches of the daily life of black workers, a one-act play about John Henry as a working-class hero, graphics about lynching and racist (and anti–working class) police violence, and poetry by a young black writer, Richard Wright.
While the membership of the JRC remained largely white, a core of black writers, including Wright in Chicago; Robert Hayden in Detroit; Langston Hughes in New York City and Carmel, California; Eugene Gordon in Boston; Eugene Clay Holmes in Washington, D.C.; and Frank Ankenbrand in Philadelphia were drawn into its orbit. Wright was introduced to the JRC in 1933 through fellow workers at the Chicago Post Office, a longtime hotbed of black and white political activism. Within a few months, Wright was elected executive secretary of the Chicago JRC chapter, in part because of the CPUSA imperative to promote black leadership and in part because of an internal leadership struggle within the chapter. Not long after, Wright became a member of the editorial board of Left Front. Wright’s membership in the JRC and later the CPUSA led to his first publications in Left Front, The Anvil, and New Masses. Within the Chicago JRC, not only did his discussions about politics and art generally, and his own work in particular, allow Wright to develop his craft as a writer, but his leadership role in the chapter and ultimately the national organization allowed him to build a national network of contacts. These translated into an international reputation as his poetry and essays appeared in International Literature, the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, the cultural wing of the Comintern, with which the JRC was affiliated.
The JRC was disbanded in 1934, largely at the behest of the CPUSA leadership. In part, the dissolution of the group came as part of a new international policy of the Comintern that led to the Popular Front. The triumph of the Nazis in Germany in 1933 and the rapid and near-total destruction of what had been the largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union shocked the international Communist movement, especially as other fascist organizations quickly gained in strength internationally, with fascist governments in Portugal and Austria joining those of Germany and Italy. Part of the Comintern’s assessment of these fascist successes, especially in Germany, was that Third Period sectarianism inhibited the development of a potential antifascist coalition among Communists, Socialists, and liberals of various stripes. Also, there was a sense that the Nazis and the Italian fascists had been extremely adept in their use of nationalism and popular culture to consolidate and mobilize a mass political base that allowed them to seize and maintain power. So the Comintern directed its member parties to abandon the sort of countercultural approach that characterized Third Period ideology and activities and seek to build alliances with liberals and others on the Left in a “popular front” against fascism. This involved the abandonment or transformation of many Left institutions that had been set up as alternatives to their less radical counterparts. The CPUSA, for example, disbanded the “revolutionary unions” of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), a Left-led labor federation set up in opposition to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and instructed TUUL members to join the AFL.
The CPUSA leadership considered the JRC as another Third Period sectarian organization and many of its members “ultraleftists” who saw even Mike Gold as a sort of “right opportunist” promoting “middle-class” writers. Despite the JRC’s rapid growth, its membership and the publication of its journals other than Partisan Review and Left Front were extremely unstable—and Left Front lacked the resources to survive past 1934. Even New Masses had to recast itself drastically in 1934, moving away from the “proletarian literature” model toward something more like The Nation or The New Republic in format, as much or more for reasons of financial survival as any directive from the CPUSA leadership or the Comintern. JRC meetings and lectures were characterized by endless argument about politics and aesthetics—arguments that were stimulating to some, but alienating and arcane to others. Such arguments reflected the persistent struggles between “left” and “right” within the local leadership of the clubs, such as the fight that was in part responsible for Wright’s advancement in Chicago. Despite the fears of the “ultraleftists” about liberal cooptation of the JRC and the urgings of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers to reach out to the broader literary community, the JRC made little headway among established writers not already committed to the Left, even though the CPUSA believed that the notion of an antifascist alliance would find a receptive audience among many authors in the United States. As a result, the CPUSA and its cultural apparatus attempted to create a new sort of writers’ group that would replace the JRC.
However, one initial problem with the incipient Popular Front approach in the United States was the lack of developed liberal-Left institutions that could form the basis of such progressive antifascist alliances. While the CPUSA dissolved the TUUL, for example, and directed its militants to join the AFL, the fact was that in many of the mass production industries in which the TUUL had been active, there were either no AFL unions or just union jurisdictions that existed only on paper. Even trades that had a long tradition of labor organizing, such as longshoring and coal mining, were dominated in many areas by company unions in the early 1930s. As a result, labor activists in such industries as auto, steel, rubber, and electrical—many, if not most of them leftists—had to organize more or less independent organizations under “federal charters” from the AFL, with the result that the workers in those industries received little attention and less respect from the conservative leaders of the building trades and craft unions that dominated the AFL. Ultimately, dissatisfaction with this neglect and the unwillingness of AFL leaders to devote energy and resources to organizing workers who might threaten their control of the federation led to the formation of the CIO by a handful of established industrial unions and the “federal locals,” breaking from the AFL in 1935 to form the rival organization. While some of the CIO’s initial leaders, such as the United Mine Workers Union’s John L. Lewis and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union’s David Dubinsky, had long histories as anti-Communists, many of the leaders of new CIO affiliates had connections to the CPUSA—even Lewis showed a new willingness to work closely with Communists. In short, Left labor militants abandoned their radical unions to join the AFL, only to leave the AFL a few years later. The point is not that these activists, and the CPUSA, were ideologically fickle, but that in the end the AFL was not a suitable Popular Front “mass organization” vehicle.
Similarly, there was no obvious organizational replacement for the JRC. The few “mainstream” writers’ groups that existed, such as the Authors Guild and its parent organization, the Authors League of America, were generally conservative and focused narrowly on issues of copyright, royalties, tax codes, and so on, allowing little room for advancing the sort of antifascist, prounion progressive politics that characterized the Popular Front. A more radical counterpart to the Author’s Guild, the Writers Union, was organized in New York in 1935, but did not really get very far until it became the official labor representative of Federal Writers’ Project workers—and even then it did not achieve the institutional strength of its counterpart in the Federal Arts Project, the Artists Union.
So the CPUSA proposed that a new group be created that would focus its organizing efforts on professional writers and attempt to situate itself within the tradition (albeit a broadly progressive tradition) of American culture rather than outside or against it. During the second and final convention of the JRC in Chicago in 1934, the chief CPUSA cultural official Alexander Trachtenberg (head of the CPUSA press International Publishers) met with a caucus of CPUSA activists in the JRC, informing them of the Party’s decision to dissolve the group and replace it with what would become the LAW. There were immediate objections to the proposal from JRC members. Some rightly felt that to disband a group without consulting its membership (or even its leadership, really) was authoritarian and bureaucratic—centralist without the democracy. There was also considerable feeling that the CPUSA was abandoning the development and support of new working-class writers in favor of a more elitist, middle-class (or petty bourgeois, to use the CPUSA idiom) approach—an issue that Wright raised at the meeting with Trachtenberg. Where, he asked, would incipient writers, such as he was when he came into the JRC, find a place in the movement? Nonetheless, Trachtenberg and the CPUSA carried the day. Even though some of the clubs attempted to carry on for some months, the JRC fell apart and its journals vanished except for the Partisan Review, which continued for a few more years as a journal of the Communist Left, merging with Jack Conroy’s The Anvil in 1936, before its transformation into an independent journal of the anti-Stalinist Left by its editors Phillip Rahv and William Phillips in the late 1930s.
One result of the dissolution of the JRC was Wright’s desire to replicate it in the South Side of Chicago in a more strictly African American vein. This desire led to Wright’s instigation of the South Side Writers Group as a combination of workshop, discussion circle, and study group, much like the JRC. Interestingly, though, in some ways the South Side Writers Group had the sort of range of writers within its orbit that the CPUSA intended for the LAW, including older writers with long careers, such as Fenton Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes (when he was in Chicago); younger writers who had begun to establish a wider reputation, such as Wright himself and Frank Marshall Davis; and emerging authors, such as Margaret Walker, Marian Minus, and Edward Bland. Even though the South Side Writers Group was to some degree set up in opposition to dissolution of the JRC and the creation of the LAW, it helped draw a cadre of black artists and intellectuals into the cultural and political life of the Communist Left in Chicago, giving the LAW an advantage in recruiting African Americans that the JRC had lacked.
The LAW was established at the first American Writers Congress in 1935. To a large extent, the LAW never completely realized the dreams of Trachtenberg and the CPUSA or the fears of Wright. Relatively few well-established non-Communist writers became very active in the organization—though Van Wyck Brooks and Ernest Hemingway were for a time League officers. Some higher profile writers who lent their support to the LAW at one time or another, such as Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, and Upton Sinclair, had been among the comparative handful of well-known authors who had similarly backed the JRC. Some others, such as Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, and such successful Hollywood screenwriters as John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Budd Schulberg, and Dalton Trumbo were members or strong supporters of the CPUSA. It is true that the LAW had more success in convincing such authors and intellectuals as William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Edgar Lee Masters, Marianne Moore, and Katherine Porter to sign its antifascist statements, particularly in favor of the Spanish Republic. However, despite the appearance of such relative stars as Gwendolyn Brooks and Ernest Hemingway as officers at different times (especially immediately after the third LAW convention in 1939), the national LAW leadership generally looked a good deal like that of the JRC, including many who had been active, or the sort of writers who would have been active had they been around, in the JRC and the “worker-writer” movement. Despite his objections to the disbanding of the JRC, Richard Wright was one of the original signers to call for the Congress and was elected to the LAW’s National Council.
There were some major differences between the two organizations. The central principle of the LAW was developing a prounion antifascist front of writers, while the JRC had been devoted to creating a counterculture of working-class artists in many media and genres promoting international proletarian revolution. Another major difference was that LAW never developed the strong grass-roots local organizations and journals as did the JRC. LAW was far more diffuse, held together largely through national and regional congresses and the efforts of the national office. Unlike the JRC, which made a major priority the development of branches in such industrial centers as Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark, and Indianapolis, local LAW organizations tended to take shape only in the traditional literary centers of New York, Boston, Connecticut (to which many New York writers had decamped), and Chicago, and in the newer center of Los Angeles (really Hollywood), where many authors from the older centers were drawn to work in the film industry. And only New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago developed any real stability—in part because particular CPUSA units (or “clubs”) and “sections” comprised of writers and other artists in those cities concentrated much of their energy on the local LAW chapters.
However, the LAW chapter in Chicago closely resembled its JRC counterpart in many respects. Though Chicago had a considerable history as a literary center, playing a particularly important part in the development of literary modernism in the United States during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, it was also famously a city of basic industry, of steel mills, metal fabricating plants, stock yards, slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, and railroads—and a center for the new industrial unions of the CIO. Despite a wealth of talented and productive writers, there was virtually no “mainstream” publishing industry and relatively few “star” writers in Chicago as compared with New York and Hollywood. Many of the white LAW members (and Wright) were veterans of the JRC and the worker-writer movement—though some, such as Wright and Nelson Algren, would achieve stardom or near stardom in the 1940s. Probably the most financially successful was Meyer Levin, but that success was much more based on his position as an editor and writer at Esquire magazine than for the novels of working-class Jewish life in Chicago that he wrote during the 1930s. So if one had to present some credentials as a writer to join the LAW, in Chicago the bar for young writers was considerably lower than it was in, say, Hollywood. There also seems to have been less ideological conflict within the Chicago chapter (at least before the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939), though at times, members of the chapter were at odds with the national LAW office—a sort of regional conflict between New York and the Midwest that also typified the JRC.
One difference between the JRC and the LAW in Chicago, however, was that black writers had an even higher profile in the latter than they had in the former. In part, this was because with the rise of the CIO and Left-led campaigns for unemployment insurance, tenants’ rights, civil rights, and so on, the CPUSA’s base in the South Side African American community was far larger than it had been in the early 1930s. Another factor was the creation of the WPA arts projects, especially the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Federal Arts Project that after considerable struggle, often through the Left-led unions of WPA arts project workers, hired many African American writers and artists in Chicago. Among the writers were Wright, Bontemps, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Willard Motley, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, and Frank Yerby. In the Federal Writers’ Project, these authors worked with many of the white radicals who would join them in the local LAW chapter, including Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy (whose New Anvil now replaced his older Anvil that had disappeared through its merger with Partisan Review).
The Left literary community anchored by the LAW and such institutions as the South Side Community Art Center, the National Negro Congress, The New Anvil, the WPA arts projects, and the writers club of the CPUSA, provided emerging African American writers with the opportunity to network with other writers outside of the black community of the South Side. Nearly all the members of the South Side Writers Group and the black workers at the FWP and FTP joined the LAW or participated in its local activities, bringing in other black writers. For example, Wright introduced the journalist and poet Frank Marshall Davis to the LAW circle; soon Davis was the treasurer of the Chicago chapter. Davis later credited the League as the means by which he began to escape the social and artistic walls of the ghetto. Such networking had happened before in Chicago. Fenton Johnson had been active in the earlier Chicago Renaissance, especially Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry, and in the related bohemia around Washington Square Park (also known as “Bughouse Square”) on the Near North Side during the early twentieth century. And, of course, Wright had made like connections in the JRC. Still, such crossing of racial boundaries by black and white writers took place on a whole new scale in the Left milieu of LAW, the CPUSA, and the Popular Front in the late 1930s.
Like the JRC, LAW was characterized by considerable debate over policy and mission, though perhaps on a less open basis than in the jawboning sessions of the JRC in many cities. The source of the debates came in part from outside the group with the rise of such “anti-Stalinist Left” organizations and journals as the Committee for Cultural Freedom and the new incarnation of the Partisan Review, led largely by Trotskyists (many of whom were former members of the JRC whose original alienation from the CPUSA grew of out the preemptory disbanding of the writers’ group) who, rather than making antifascist alliances with the Communist Left, grouped the Communists together with fascists as fellow totalitarians. While this view generally received a tepid response from non-Communist artists and intellectuals in LAW, issues of Stalinist repression raised by the anti-Stalinists, particularly the “Moscow show trials,” did have a considerable impact.
Perhaps the closest that the LAW came to realizing fully its dream of organizing a broad antifascist coalition of writers that would prominently feature well-known non-Communist writers, at least on paper, was at its Third Congress in June 1939, when Van Wyck Brooks, Louis Bromfield, Malcolm Cowley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, George Seldes, Vincent Sheean, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck were elected as vice presidents of the organization. However, the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union a couple of months later, followed by the Soviet occupation of what was then eastern Poland and the Soviet invasion of Finland, threw the organization in crisis. No doubt from Stalin’s perspective it was possible to explain these events as realpolitik maneuvers designed to ensure the survival of the U.S.S.R. and to reverse territorial concessions forced on a weakened nation in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. However, the Soviets gave the CPUSA and the Left of the United States no inkling that such a drastic change of policy was in the works. When the antifascist coalition was so quickly abandoned by the CPUSA and the groups it led, it rankled many inside and outside the LAW, strengthening the disquiet that many within the cultural world of the Communist Left already felt over Stalin’s trials and purges of leading revolutionaries, intellectuals, and artists. Quite a few LAW activists resigned; others became more or less inactive. The Chicago chapter ceased to function as a local organization—though the national organization survived until 1942.
This crisis was not the end of the Left cultural circles in the Midwest. Despite the consternation that the pact caused among many Left artist and intellectuals, especially among Jewish participants in the Popular Front, it had less of an impact on black artists. Though they, too, felt some discomfort with the pact, the continuing commitment of the Communist Left to African American empowerment and the fight against Jim Crow tended to carry more weight with them. In fact, the early to mid-1940s was in many respects the period of greatest public Left influence within the black community in the Midwest and elsewhere, despite the decline of some major Popular Front organizations, such as the National Negro Congress and the LAW. It was the period in which the Ford Motor Company’s huge River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, (with the largest concentration of black industrial workers of any workplace in the world) was successfully organized by the United Automobile Workers, forming the Left-led Local 600. It was also the era when the African American Communist leader, Benjamin Davis, was elected as a city councilperson in New York City.
It was also between 1939 and 1945 that the Chicago Renaissance really took off, gaining a national profile through Left political and cultural network forged through the JRC, the LAW, the South Side Writers Group, the Abraham Lincoln School, the WPA arts projects, the CIO, and the CPUSA. This period saw the publication of Wright’s Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices, William Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder and Blood on the Forge, Margaret Walker’s For My People (which won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1942), Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville, and Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s sociological collaboration on the Great Migration, They Seek A City. It also included the production of Theodore Ward’s play Big White Fog (first staged by the Chicago “Negro unit” of the Federal Theatre Project in 1938) in New York City to nationwide acclaim. Furthermore, it was the era of perhaps the most stable Left African American cultural journal of the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago-based Negro Story (which, despite its name, published much poetry).
The early career of Gwendolyn Brooks is a good example of how this network promoted the work of young black writers. Like her friends and contemporaries Margaret Burroughs and Margaret Danner, Brooks came of artistic age in the milieu of such interlocking political and cultural institutions of the LAW, the National Negro Congress, the NAACP Youth Council, the South Side Community Art Center, the Abraham Lincoln School (a Popular Front educational institution largely initiated by the black Communist William Patterson and bankrolled by the department store scion Marshall Fields), the Chicago Defender (whose staff had a distinct Left influence then), Negro Story, and the CIO in Chicago. Some of Brooks’s earliest publications came in Negro Story. A prominent black Communist activist, Ishmael Flory, convinced the Left-leaning United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers Union to fund a Negro Story poetry prize to support Brooks’s work. Brooks’s career also demonstrates how even those alienated from the CPUSA often continued to maintain the network of associations and contacts, as well as the literary interests in race, class, and ethnicity, forged in the JRC and LAW. Richard Wright, by then out (or on his way out) of the CPUSA largely over the Communist backpedaling on Negro Liberation during World War II, was (along with Langston Hughes) an enthusiastic reader of Brooks’s manuscript for A Street in Bronzeville, ensuring the book’s publication. Edwin Seaver, a stalwart of the Communist literary Left estranged by the German-Soviet pact, published Brooks’s poetry in his influential Cross Section anthologies in the 1940s.
When the LAW finally collapsed in 1942, no national Left writers or artists group rose to take its place. However, again, the networks created by the JRC, the LAW, and other cultural institutions of the Popular Front remained in place to a large extent, facilitating the continued advancement of Chicago Renaissance participants as novelists, playwrights, visual artists, poets, critics, and editors. In some cases, these participants remained quite overtly Left in orientation, such as those who joined the circles around Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom in the 1950s and the journal Freedomways from the 1960s to the 1980s. Others moved considerably from their old ideological moorings, but still maintained many of the old ties, albeit in different political and cultural contexts. However, it is clear that without the JRC and the LAW and the cultural worlds of the Third Period and Popular Front Left, the development and career paths of nearly all the Chicago Renaissance authors, particularly those who came of artistic age in the 1930s and 1940s, would have happened far differently, if at all.
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