On The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation
By Brian Dolinar (University of Mississippi Press, 2012)
Brian Dolinar opens The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) by quoting not from a major artist or critic, but from a virtually forgotten participant in a long-dismembered radical organization, an audience member at a panel about “Culture” held by the National Negro Congress of 1940. During the lively discussion that followed the official presentations, a woman identified in the proceedings only as “Mrs. Lynch” spoke up, reminding the room that the cultural front mattered because “it is the cultural things that keep us from going stark crazy” (3).[1]
It’s a poignant opening, and one that indicates Dolinar’s anti-elitist approach. To be sure, The Black Cultural Front is a study concerned with interpreting the work of three important writers and artists, figures who were swept up and shaped by the mid-20th century movement for social justice—Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Oliver Harrington. But it is also a book committed to presenting mid-20th century Black Left culture more broadly as a “down to earth” matter, a matter of sustaining organizations and struggles, a pragmatic practice of engaging everyday people, of helping them to survive in dangerous and shifting circumstances. Dolinar is well aware that without the “Mrs. Lynches” of the world—the “no name” participants, so often lost to official history—there are no social movements to speak of (let alone writers or artists or critics to represent them).
Discussing each figure in turn,[2] Dolinar draws our attention to these artists’ social movement roots and to some of their lesser-known efforts to engage every-day people. This down-to-earth focus on black artists as producing work that might actually matter to masses helps Dolinar’s study shed new light on a familiar figure like Langston Hughes (whose extraordinarily popular “Simple Stories” from his Chicago Defender newspaper column receive extended treatment), while bringing into view many lesser known—largely forgotten—people and groups that informed these figures’ work. The result is a rich overview of Black left cultural production in the 1930s and 40s that should be of great interest to students of African-American and the Left, not to mention those who would seek to regenerate radical culture today.
Rooting Left Cultural Production in Political Organizing
Dolinar roots his discussion of the Black Cultural Front in a rigorously detailed seventy-page discussion of a broad constellation of organizations and campaigns that helped inspire, enable, and sustain Black left cultural production of the period. (This opening section alone will be a valuable resource for students of the period for years to come.) These groups—the National Negro Congress (NNC) receives extended treatment but there are perhaps a dozen others discussed—saw their mission not in narrowly cultural terms, but as aiming at political, social, and economic emancipation, and not only within the US, but worldwide. Within this broader Left mission, the “Cultural” was an important front—and a crucial one, as Mrs. Lynch reminds us—but never a stand-alone, autonomous enterprise. Dolinar does not present this political mission as something that “suppressed” or “restrained” radical black artists, however, but as something that inspired, enabled, and supported them. For instance, the courageous Communist-led “mass action” campaigns to expose and challenge Jim Crow and political repression, (beginning with struggles to free the “Scottsboro Boys” and the Communist activist Angelo Herndon) stimulated a great deal of radical writing and art, while simultaneously helping to create audiences and vehicles for that writing, both within the United States and, crucially, abroad. These campaigns, as well as efforts like the worker-writer John Reed Clubs, helped to create connections between diverse artists, workers, organizers, and allies, laying the basis for future collaborations—like the famous South Side Writers group in Chicago—that emerged beyond the purview of official pro-party organization.
From his first page, Dolinar positions The Black Cultural Front as a counter to the still-hegemonic narrative that presents radical left-wing political commitment (in general)—and involvement with the Communist Party (in particular)—as a hindrance (or an irrelevance) to black cultural production.[3] As Dolinar relates, such accounts tend to be based on a one-sided extrapolation from cold-war inflected retrospectives of canonized black writers, namely Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Narratives of the party “stifling” creative expression, whether or not they are even true for the likes of Ellison and Wright personally,[4] certainly cannot be said to hold for a wider layer of variously radicalized black writers and artists of the Depression era, few of whom swore off the Communist Party publicly, nor claimed to have been “hindered” by it. Indeed, Dolinar goes so far as to suggest that the anti-communist positioning of Wright and Ellison is to be explained more so by these authors’ careerism than by genuine political disagreements. Wright, having achieved celebrity with Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and especially with Native Son (1940), no longer needed the party that had helped establish him.[5] Ellison, writing later, knew that, as a formerly communist (and pro-Communist) black writer, the American celebrity he desired could not be had without swearing off the party and Marxism from the outset. [6] While a superficial view of the political trajectory of writers such as Langston Hughes and Chester Himes has been enlisted to confirm the anti-Communist arc that Ellison anchors (Hughes publicly distanced himself from the CP-left during the McCarthy period, while Himes attacked the Party outright in and after his 1947 novel Lonely Crusade), Dolinar’s historical examination of these two figures actual relationship to the Left complicates and challenges the widely-held anti-red narrative, showing how the cold war revisions these authors’ made to their own autobiographies in later years cannot be taken at face value. His treatment of Oliver Harrington more directly breaks from the Ellisonian-Wright arc of black anticommunism altogether, presenting us with a popular black writer, artist, and activist who became closer to communism and the Communist Party after World War 2, ultimately fleeing the US to Eastern Germany to preserve his artistic and political freedom in the face of McCarthy-ite repression.[7]
Similarly challenging cold war ideology, Dolinar argues convincingly that political groups such as the National Negro Congress cannot be accurately viewed as “communist dominated.” As Dolinar writes: “That the Communists played a major role in the National Negro Congress (NNC) is unquestionable. Yet there remains no indication that the NNC’s activities were dictated by Moscow. The evidence indicates that much of the initiative within the NNC came from black Communists doing the on-the-ground work of organizing those who were working for racial equality” (44). Supporting this important argument, Dolinar demonstrates that the NNC continued to give expression to the “Double V” position—advocating “Victory” against fascism not only abroad but at home as well—even after the CPUSA turned to a more patriotic “win the war” position after 1941.
In some ways Dolinar’s study echoes Barbara Foley’s recent work on the “making of” Ellison’s Invisible Man. He too seeks to “read forward,” focusing not just on the most famous or critically acclaimed literary works of now-canonized authors, but on the letters, transcripts, notes, newspaper columns, and biographical information that form the pre-history of those works—defamiliarizing rather than reproducing inherited notions about the direction that political and cultural history took. Similar to Foley’s Wrestling with the Left, The Black Cultural Front makes extensive use of previously archival materials to contradict the idea that the failure of the Communist-led alliance of the interwar period was ‘inevitable’ and/or that what came after this 30s-40s Left—be it the Fifties’ breakthrough of Invisible Man, or of the later Civil Rights Movement—was simply ‘superior’ to what had come before. Like Foley, Dolinar attends to the ways that the early works of the 20th century black cultural movement, rather than representing a dead end, or merely prefiguring the “mature works” and “later developments,” often point beyond them. He too sees the destruction of this Communist-led Left alliance—against imperialism, racism, fascism, and for working-class power—as primarily a product of external anticommunist assault, not of internal—let alone “inherent”—contradictions in the Communist party-movement (vulnerable as such contradictions undoubtedly made the movement to the coming attacks).[8] As Dolinar puts it, “What ultimately undermined the black cultural front was not political infighting or white domination [within the Left], but the destructive power of the anticommunist crusade” (67).[9]
Reframing “The Cultural Front”
Dolinar’s title, of course, recalls Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (1996), a sweeping study which offered a forceful synthesis of 1930s radical US cultural production, and that has helped to shape a great deal of scholarship on the period since. Denning anchored his study in and around the period of the Popular Front, when, in the face of a worsening Depression and a growing fascist threat, communists tended toward a more flexible and forgiving approach to other left, liberal, and reformist groups. Like Denning, Dolinar is interested in the notion of culture as a “front” in a broader social struggle, and in left culture of the Depression-era as something that was embedded organically within the everyday life and experience of people, especially the working, poor, and oppressed people.[10]
This book departs from Denning’s approach in important ways, however, besides the obvious one of giving more extended attention to specifically black cultural production—itself an important corrective. A first difference stems from Dolinar’s deeply biographical approach, which allows him to trace the complex and evolving relationships between activism and art as they emerged over decades of experience and experimentation, rooted in particular places and organizations. A second, related, difference, regards the relationship of the “cultural front” to the political organizations that anchored it: Dolinar sees the Communists and Communist Party-led organizations as central to the Black Cultural Front, in contrast to Denning’s tendency to minimize the importance of actual Communist Party leadership, organization, and influence. Denning has argued, with considerable influence, that, at least during the Popular Front period, the “periphery” (of “small c” communists, non-communist socialists, etc) was really the center of things, reversing the traditional “center-periphery” model of “hardcore reds” and soft pink “fellow travelers” that has long been a staple of anti-communist accounts. To be sure, this reverse-frame has been as appealing and as generative as it has been controversial. It offers an enticing end-around the rhetoric of anti-Communism—recuperating the movement, without “defending” the Party. Yet such an approach risks reproducing anti-communism’s marginalization of core activists and organizations that were, in many respects, integral—even central—to building and sustaining the broader radical movement. [11]
Whether Dolinar would take issue with Denning’s de-centering of (capital-C) Communism from the Cultural Front in general, or only as regards the Black Cultural Front, is not made clear (nor does it need to be for his present purposes). Certainly he discusses reasons why the CP proper might have become more central for black radical cultural workers than it was for white radicals. For one thing, being intimately and acutely acquainted with exploitation and social oppression, many African Americans were inclined towards radicalism and the idea that meaningful change would have to come from outside the existing (white) establishment. Second, many of the established cultural avenues, such as Hollywood, radio, or academia that were open to white writers—even left-wing ones—during the 1930s and early 40s (at least until the descent of HUAC and the blacklist) were all but closed to Blacks. This fact of “having less to lose” likely made some black writers and artists less afraid than whites to ally themselves, privately or publicly, with the Communist Party. Communist-led publications, clubs, and schools offered otherwise marginalized black writers rare opportunities for artistic and political support, for publication, and for reaching significant, often international, audiences.
Underlying all of the above was the crucial fact that the CP, since its founding, put a high priority on exposing and challenging “Negro” oppression, as well as what it often called “white chauvinism.” While this anti-racist stance was a centerpiece of many theoretical party works—from Joseph Stalin’s writings on the National Question, to Lenin’s theory of Imperialism, to the CPUSA’s own “Black Belt Thesis,” which framed the black-majority regions of the American South as a “nation within a nation” with the right to self-determination—Dolinar emphasizes how it was the way the Party demonstrated anti-racism in practice (not just theory) that mattered most. It was the Party’s courageous, bold, and even death-defying campaigns (especially in defense of the “Scottsboro Boys” and other victims of Jim Crow terrorism) that won the attention, the involvement, and the lifelong commitment of many black activists, writers, and artists. As Dolinar argues, “It was not from any abstract theory that cultural workers were won over to the Left. Journeying into the heart of the South, they came face to face with the most brutal forms of racism. It was such immediate contact that transformed their political views” (32). Those who were personally transformed in the process included both African Americans from the North, such as Louise Thomson, as well as whites, such as Hollywood writer John Howard Lawson.[12] These well-orchestrated “mass action” campaigns recruited writers, artists, actors, and musicians as part of a broader effort to mobilize and educate masses of people: throwing fundraising events for legal defense, pressuring elected officials through letter-writing campaigns, and conducting journalistic investigation into oppressive Southern conditions. Dolinar makes clearer than Denning did how integral the CP was to the initiation and coordination of these courageous and creative campaigns.
Like Denning, Dolinar grasps his period broadly, arguing that the Black Cultural Front cannot be thought as reducible to the period of the official “Popular Front,”[13] particularly insofar as many Black writers and artists maintained their left-wing orientations and affiliations into and after World War II. In periodizing inclusively, Dolinar aligns his work somewhat with those who argue for a “Long Civil Rights Movement,” underscoring the continuities between Depression-era (CIO-union organizing, anti-lynching), war-time (“Double V”) organizing, and later (better-known) Civil Rights campaigns to challenge racial segregation and discrimination. The Black Cultural Front provides a crucial backstory, refuting the idea that mass antiracist struggle began with the NAACP efforts around Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. However, Dolinar takes issue with the “Long Movement” tendency to minimize the damage done to the Black Freedom Struggle by what citing what Lieberman and Lang, in their Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement (2011), call the “Faustian bargain” with cold war anti-communism. The net result of this bargain was to suppress the more radical wings of the movement, particularly those concerned with international solidarity and economic class. Indeed, a recurring theme in Dolinar’s book is the terrible damage that was done to the Black Cultural Front by such red-baiting, whether it stemmed from HUAC or from a prominent and devoted black socialist like A. Phillip Randolph.
Langston Hughes
Hughes, Himes, Harrington….and Beyond
The Black Cultural Front (TBCF henceforth) also stands as a counter to extant “authoritative” biographies of Langston Hughes, Chester Himes, and Oliver Harrington, each of which downplay or altogether neglect their subject’s radical politics. Against the likes of Arnold Rampersad, Michael Fabre, and others, Dolinar argues that “[u]nderstanding the political program of these artists is crucial to comprehending their art” (5), not some extraneous content that can be bracketed off as separate from their more serious efforts. For each of these artists, their radical political perspectives and associations were not merely a “phase” or a “distraction” from their more “mature” work, but an essential component of that work itself. While noting shifts in accent and activism over time, including the ways that each writer responded to World War 2, and the growth of Fifties repression, TBCF emphasizes the consistency of radical engagement that runs through each artist’s life.[14]
Dolinar presents us with a portrait of Langston Hughes as a committed activist who remained a radical “social poet” for well over two decades, a consistent experimenter, constantly adapting forms, genres, and styles, to the politics, the needs, and the (potential) audience of the moment, taking “poetry to the people” (71). Noting that the “The term ‘fellow-traveller’ does not adequately describe Hughes’ deep interest in the Left” (77) during the 1930s and beyond, and reading Hughes’ Thirties writings against later-life autobiographical accounts that tend to downplay his red passions, Dolinar recounts Hughes leading role in various mass campaigns, from Scottsboro, to the struggle against fascism in Spain, as well his important role in various Black political and cultural organizations across the United States. He draws out both Hughes’ exemplary internationalism and his commitment to making apparently distant events relevant and comprehensible to working-class readers back home. Pointing out how “Few scholars have fully addressed the many literary modes in which Hughes operated,” (72), Dolinar discusses his wide-ranging engagement with Black community theater, and devotes special attention to Hughes’ critically neglected popular serial writings: his Chicago Defender newspaper columns and the “Simple” stories that would become Hughes’ “most successful literary creation.”[15]
In these “Simple” stories, which first appeared in 1943, a working-class Harlem man named “Jesse B. Simple” converses with others (and often with a narrator posing as Hughes himself) about the pressing issues of the day. Writing this regular opinion column for the Chicago Defender allowed Hughes to sustain himself financially—but more than a source of income, it allowed him to render radical ideas accessible to a mass audience well into the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing out some of the radical, anti-cold war, pro-Soviet, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist highlights from these popular series, Dolinar refutes the “accepted account of this period in Hughes life…[namely] that as he pursued his writing career, he moved away from class politics and distanced himself from his radical friends of the 1930s” (98). In a profound insight that is worth considering in relationship to the work of other Thirties radicals as well, Dolinar argues that many commentators have misread Hughes attempts to reach broader masses of people—and thus his increased engagement with popular cultural forms, such as children’s stories and humor—as an abandonment of radical politics. There is no doubt that, after 1946 Hughes grew (understandably) more cautious, in the face of anticommunist pressures, yet Dolinar argues that in his Defender columns (more than in book publishing) Hughes maintained considerable creative freedom and thus continued to speak sympathetically about radical ideas, causes, and people, (including figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson, from whom he felt compelled to distance himself in other spheres).
Chester Himes, still a lesser-known figure than Hughes, receives an even more comprehensive bio-critical treatment. As with Hughes, Dolinar emphasizes Himes proximity to the pro-Communist left during his politically formative period, as well as the way that anti-capitalist radicalism persists in his work even following his movement away from (and then back to) explicitly revolutionary themes, and despite even a bitter turn against Communism in the mid to late 1940s. Offering summaries of Himes early radical fiction, much of which was authored in prison, Dolinar discusses Himes involvement in Left and CP-led activism, particularly around International Labor Defense and the “Sleepy Lagoon” case in Los Angeles, where dozens of local Chicano men and youth were rounded up by police and falsely accused of murder. He then offers detailed summaries of Himes two important pulp-proletarian novels of the 1940s—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947)--as well as discussions of these novels receptions. As he argues convincingly, “Perhaps more than any other author of the black cultural front, Himes articulated both the possibilities and the limitations for black workers in the mid-century drive toward a unionized workforce” (151). We should be grateful to Dolinar for re-introducing and re-contextualizing these important, but largely neglected novels.
The way in which Dolinar “reads forward” complicates Himes later bitter appraisal of the CP by showing how, though indeed Lonely Crusade was harshly criticized, Himes’ earlier work (though it too tended to be critical of the CP) had been largely praised in pro-communist journals. Himes endorsement of a “Double V” position, for instance, was welcomed and accepted as legitimate. Further, while giving voice to Himes’ concerns about a Marxism that would use calls for class or mass “unity” as a means to postpone dealing with racial oppression and inequality, Dolinar shows how Himes departs from anticommunist stereotypes of the post-communist intellectual; he still remained pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist, even as he became sharply antagonistic towards the CPUSA. In some ways, Himes bold antiracist stance certainly exceeded the CP’s own in the 1940s—with respect to Japanese internment during World War 2 in particular—yet Dolinar situates his stance as continuing constructive engagement with, rather than a negation of, the CP-oriented Left. He unearths in Himes an increasingly harsh view of individual CP members and of the Party’s overall role in the labor movement, but also a continuing respect and engagement with Marxism and with the communist horizon of interracial, anti-racist, working-class struggle.
Chester Himes
Following Himes through five years of writers block and his rejuvenation in Paris, Dolinar reviews his turn to absurdist and then to pulp fiction, reading this turn to noir and crime novels not only as a matter of financial necessity, but as a turn to engage mass consciousness. Recounting the emergence of Himes’ groundbreaking black Harlem detective duo, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, Dolinar gives special attention to the final noir novels Himes wrote, calling attention to how Himes used this mass cultural form to directly engage the 1960s political scene from a radical, revolutionary perspective. Providing a clear summary of Himes’ strikingly dystopian, apocalyptically violent late Sixties novels, Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) and Plan B (published posthumously), Dolinar shows that “Himes had not abandoned the radical themes of his earlier fiction. He survived many years of hurt to make a valuable contribution to the next generation” (169). In tracing this return to revolutionary themes in the context of 1960s Black Power movements, Dolinar provides us with an entry point into reconsidering neglected intersections between “Old” Left and “New.” Moreover, that Himes re-emerges as an overtly radical novelist after years surviving as a less explicitly political crime fiction writer, lends force to Mrs. Lynch’s opening words, and to Dolinar’s ongoing emphasis, that the importance of radical culture is not just in its immediate political or ideological intervention, but in its helping people to survive—and to keep their sanity—in dangerous and potentially maddening times. (The treatment of Himes is supplemented nicely by Dolinar’s discussion of black detective fiction writer and social critic Walter Mosley in the Conclusion to the book, appropriately entitled “Keeping the Memory of Survival Alive.”)
The last full chapter of The Black Cultural Front focuses on a markedly different figure, Oliver Harrington. Even more than the chapter on Chester Himes, the section on Oliver Harrington is likely to be startlingly new material to many readers from literary and cultural studies. (It was certainly news to me!) Primarily a visual artist—a cartoonist—Harrington, unlike Himes and Hughes, was radicalized not before but after World War 2. An important and widely syndicated political cartoonist (as well as a columnist), Harrington was best friends with Richard Wright, though he has been largely written out of the major Wright biographies. As Dolinar writes, Harrington “went from being one of the most well known artists of his generation to becoming an obscure figure…a consequence of his taking up with the Left” (171), a commitment which actually drove Harrington to relocate to East Germany in 1961.
Dolinar traces Harrington early involvement in solidarity work around strike efforts at the black Harlem-based newspaper, the Amsterdam News, a campaign which “successfully forged a black cultural front in Harlem” (176). Though Harrington was not yet a red, participating in this campaign put Harrington in touch with active Left figures such as Communist city councilman Ben Davis, Jr. Following the strike, his artwork took an important turn, as he developed the character of Bootsie, a “black everyman of Harlem” (177) who would become a popular staple of the black press for years to come, using accessible humor and local dialect to explore pressing social themes of the day. As he does with Hughes, Dolinar examines Harrington’s presence in several influential black newspapers—the Pittsburgh Courier and the People’s World, as well as the Amsterdam News—not merely as a means of financial sustenance, but as a productive and popular progressive engagement in mass culture. The selections from Harrington’s “Dark Laughter” comic series that Dolinar excerpts support his argument that this artist was able to express radical social commentary in ways both accessible and hilarious. My only regret is that Dolinar (or his publishers) were unable to reprint the full cartoons in this bound volume; seeing the text embedded in the artwork would no doubt be even more informative and stimulating.
As Dolinar writes, “Different from the experiences of other black writers and artists who broke with the Communist Party, Harrington moved closer to the Left in the post war years. It was his time overseas covering the movements of black soldiers during the war which set of a chain of events that left to his later radicalization.” (212). His radicalism was further spurred by reportage and activism around the violent racist backlash directed at black veterans upon their return to the United States. Interestingly, in opposing post-war lynching and several atrocities committed against black vets, Harrington was simultaneously involved with both NAACP and CP led efforts, at least until in the context of escalating anticommunism he found himself pushed out of the former. Through Harrington’s complex and impure commitment, which mixed civil rights and anti-capitalist organizing, with skill sharing going in both directions, Dolinar in a way reminds us of the unrealized possibilities: of a Left-liberal alliance against racism that was not to be, a post-war coalition that was ruptured and shattered by liberalisms conscription in the anti-communist crusade.
Like Himes, Harrington would be pushed into exile by the cold war, spending much of his life as an expatriate, joining Himes and Richard Wright for a time in France. But unlike the two novelists Harrington would ultimately settle not in Western Europe but in East Germany, becoming more closely identified with the Soviet-led Communist movements from which Wright and Himes took their distance.
Oliver Harrington
In the course of his discussion of Hughes, Himes, and Harrington (“The Three Hs” we might call them) Dolinar offers us a wide-ranging, biographically and historically informed discussion of many lesser known figures as well. The names of dozens—if not over a hundred—left and/or black cultural workers cross his pages. Some are familiar—though their appearance in such radical contexts may suprise. Many others perk the reader’s interest, and ask for more extended treatment elsewhere. As I have already suggested, one of Dolinar’s particular emphases in The Black Cultural Front regards the importance of what Hughes once called “those with no names,” the anonymous toiling masses, whom radical black writers sought both to reach and to amplify.
In a similar spirit, Dolinar’s artistic discussions are anchored not so much in the best-known writings of these “three Hs”, but in readings—and more than close readings, in prehistories and recontextualizations—of their more neglected works. In particular, Dolinar draws our attention to the 3 H’s engagement with mass/popular cultural forms and genres: from pulp detective fiction, to popular theater, to weekly newspaper columns and cartoons. As Dolinar quotes black poet and critic, Sterling Brown, black radical writers and artists were concerned throughout the period with finding ways to overcome the obstacle of “an audience that isn’t going to read books” (46). This audience awareness led them to experiment with genre form and style, in ways that have not been fully appreciated. Often black writers migration into these mass-popular genres has been mistaken by critics and biographers as representing a moving away from politics, a “retreat from radicalism,” as Rampersad puts it regarding Hughes. Dolinar however makes a compelling case that a pronounced, often profound leftwing perspective continues to infuse and enrich the “popular” and “commercial” writings of Langston Hughes especially. This is particularly true of his Chicago Defender columns, which—remarkably—Hughes produced weekly all the way through 1940s, 50s, and well into the 1960s (until 1966).[16]
While Dolinar, (in keeping with his own professed emphasis on “experience and practice” over “theory”) does not draw the point out explicitly, his focus on “minor” writings-- popular and commercially oriented plays, radio addresses, local speeches, newspaper columns, “Simple Stories,” and cartoons—as a primary locus of left cultural production implicitly calls us to question the marginalzing of these cultural forms—and the over-privileging of others?—within the realm of 20th century literary and cultural studies, at least when we are talking about the left. Why is it that I have been taught (and have myself taught!) Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again,” but not his “Simple Stories”?
“Because they took the masses seriously,” Dolinar writes, the Three H’s “tried to meet them where they were—watching movies, listening to radio, or reading newspapers and paperback novels” (19). “For this reason,” Dolinar adds, “these Depression-era figures have inspired a contemporary generation of artists who search for a way to be relevant in a society saturated by popular culture” (39).
This last, exciting assertion—perhaps for reasons of space—is not as fully developed within the pages of The Black Cultural Front as I was hoping it would be. Dolinar’s brief “Conclusion” offers a suggestive discussion of the work of contemporary black novelist Walter Mosley, and references to a few other radical black artists, yet is a bit light in terms of tracing the persistence of a black left pop cultural tradition more broadly. Where else can we trace the impact and inspiration of these radical black cultural workers who worked so hard to keep left-wing ideas and spirits alive during the tough times of McCarthyism? Of course, the lingering of such questions is but a compliment to what Dolinar has accomplished, setting before us vital neglected material and a provocation, on both a political and a methodological plane. It is for future scholars to trace forward the roots that Dolinar has helped restore to view.
**
At the outset of his hefty volume, The Cultural Front, Michael Denning argued against the bad “common sense” that stigmatizes radical artists for spending too much time preaching to the converted and/or the “choir,” emphasizing how vital it is for left-wing cultural workers to do precisely that. (Indeed, he has suggested that we have not attended to the “choir” effectively enough![17]) What, after all, is going to keep folks coming back to “church” if not the power of the music, or the poetry of the sermon? Who will be the ones spreading the Word and bringing new people into the pews, if not the “choir” filled with the cultural “holy spirit”? Implied in Denning’s brilliant jujitsu against this widespread anti-radical cliché is a view of left cultural production—both in the period of the Great Depression, and beyond it—as not principally about engaging the opposition, or “convincing” new people, so much as sustaining those already inclined or committed to the cause, where the cultural front is not so much about going on the “offensive” but about “holding the line,” keeping up morale and sustaining affiliation and commitment for the long battles ahead.[18] Left culture’s role here would be not so much about producing transformative leaps of consciousness as helping people to hold on to those gains that have already been achieved through their practical encounters with every day people and every day experience. And “to keep us from going stark crazy,” as Mrs. Lunch put it.
Denning’s argument certainly resonated for me: as a participant in radical currents and social movements, what did in so many of these collective efforts was not a resurgence of bad ideology or the sharpening of political differences but the less partisan but pervasive problem of burn-out, and the devolution of the “just cause” into a soulless ordeal, like doing chores for a family that was never home when you needed them. Sustaining living, breathing, caring collectivities of the radically inclined that will actually endure is not an easy thing to do—it never was an easy thing to do—certainly not in today’s precarious hyper-capitalism. Culture has an important role to play here, insofar as it can bring us together and provides us a chance to experience our movement brothers and sisters in pleasurable and mutually fulfilling ways, ways that are not reducible to the work to be done, pressing as that work often is. Lacking such a sustaining, shared “cultural front” today, confirming Mrs. Lynch’s fears, radical activists are all too likely to go “stark crazy.” How could they not?
Indeed, insofar as the maintenance of a level of psycho-social sanity among the masses of people must be considered a prerequisite for building or sustaining a grassroots movement for radical social change; insofar as the daily experience of oppression, alienation, propaganda, and exploitation in today’s world threatens to destabilize not only our climate and our economy but our very psyches; insofar as cultural production can “keep us from going stark crazy,” Mrs. Lynch’s wisdom (and Dolinar’s) sets before us an important—and too often neglected—imperative for radical culture work today: Part of the work of left culture must be to help people survive as people, to serve and to care for others, to keep the social trauma of the day-to-day from infecting the very fibers of their being and ours—and thus to keep open the possibility of a new life, a new practice, a new world. To help people survive in such a way as to keep open the possibility of something more than mere survival, and something more than cultural, too: worldwide social liberation.
[1] Dolinar brings out the broader resonance of Mrs. Lynch’s words later on in the book, revealing that her statement was made following A. Phillip Randolph’s controversial (red-baiting) speech and resignation at the opening of the Congress, a speech which had prompted a majority of NNC delegates to walk out in protest.
[2] At times, for brevity, I’ll refer to the trio as the “Three Hs” below.
[3] One of the intolerable aspects of this reigning anti-radical ideology is the way that the condemnation of the particular serves as a way of discouraging radical mass-oriented political commitments today, in this day that calls out for them with such urgency.
[4] I consider the relationship of Ellison and Wright to US Communism, in two essays. “Invisible Tragedies, Invisible Possibilities” in Cultural Logic (2010), and “The Making of a Heroic Mistake” (forthcoming). Also see Barbara Foley’s Wrestly with the Left and Gregory Meyerson’s “Aunt Sue’s Mistake” Reconstruction 8.4.
[5] In his chapter on Oliver Harrington, who became a very close friend of Richard Wright in Paris, Dolinar relates Harrington’s account of Wright’s later regret for having abused the Party in his writings.
[6]The recent study by Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: Ralph Ellison and the Making of Invisible Man (Duke, 2010), has radically altered our understanding of this canonical writer’s engagement with Communism, extending the period of his radical commitment and engagement with Marxism, as well as significantly altering our understanding of why this famous anti-communist actually left the Communist party-movement. Similarly, those who find Wright’s best writing to be from the 1930s (as I do) may have a difficult time accepting the idea that the party stifled his writing. Indeed, even a close reading of Wright’s own CPUSA-break-text, American Hunger, reveals how much he felt enabled and inspired by the party, and how much he saw its problems as stemming from its American-ness, not its communism.
[7] We will attend to each writer, and to his evolving relationship to the pro-Communist Left, below.
[8] Dolinar does not attend as closely or as critically as Foley does to the internal contradictions within the Communist party-movement of the period. His emphasis is on the political continuities in the movement and in his particular figures’ careers as well.
[9] Dolinar’s treatment of the issue of the Communist Party’s culture of secrecy here speaks to his balanced appraoch: Reviewing the history of anti-radical repression in the US, from the Haymarket Affair of 1886 to the Espionage Act used to destroy the Socialist Party, he writes, “If the Communist Party in the United States practiced a high degree of secrecy it was to protect itself from such political persecution, a fear that would eventually prove to be justified during the McCarthy era” (23). This contrasts with those who would frame the secrecy of the organization as the cause rather than an effect of state repression.
[10] We’ll return to Denning in the conclusion.
[11] Some have criticized Denning’s as a “donut theory” of Thirties radicalism, where all the substance is in the periphery, with no “center” required. For a thorough, balanced but critical assessment of Denning’s The Cultural Front, see Charles D. Cunningham’s essay, “Dialectics of Hope: Marxism and Method in The Cultural Front” published in Reconstruction 8.1. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/081/cunningham.shtml
[12] For the most comprehensive study of John Howard Lawson, see Gerald Horne’s book The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2006.
[13] Denning also extends the timeframe of the “cultural front,” inaugurating it unofficially in 1934 by way of a Kenneth Burke speech that argued for making “the people” rather than “the workers” the key term of popular appeal (not in 1935 when the CP officially announced the “Popular Front”).
[14] For a recent and influential example of a critic rushing to generalize the “embarrassing” effects of radical political commitment on Thirties writers, including Langston Hughes, see Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton, 2009) for instance pages 155-6, in his chapter entitled” Hard Time for Poets.”
[15] It’s worth pausing over the irony Hughes’ most popular writings are among his most critically neglected and ignored.
[16] Dolinar’s study might be enriched by more discussion of the struggles, contradictions, compromises, or ‘tough choices’ that the Hs had to make in order to maintain their popularity and/or viability as entertainer/producers within the world of post-American pop/mass cult. To “survive” of course is not survive without scars, not without losses.
[17] The discussion here relates to a widespread weakness to be witnessed on the American “Left” scene today. Often times the radical minded and communist-inclined bite down upon—if not swallow—their radical tongues, citing the impossibility of such advanced concepts and projects in a society of such cultural, political, and social backwardness at the US of A. Citing the “backward” elements of Amerika—as if they should or could be the primary target audience of radical thought or practice in the first place—these “advanced” forces fail to come together as advanced, self-consciously, and avowedly radical, revolutionary forces, instead often falling into a kind of cynical support for more “realistic” centrist “progressive” initiative in the hopes that these can be somehow “pulled left” or at least used as a buffer against the “backward.” Thus does a genuine radical left fail to constitute itself as such—and the “lesser evil” blackmail and cynicism continues. Against such a pessimistic, self-defeating left centrism that perpetually puts off the unavoidable task of founding a radical pole to shift the political situation altogether, contemporary radical cynics might consider Mao’s simple maxim on Leninism: “Unite the Advanced. Win over the Intermediate. Isolate the Backward.”