Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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"Drowning the Past with A Thunderous Shout": Black Culture Workers and McCarthyism / Paul M. Heideman

 

Abstract: Drawing upon a critical deployment of a key Althusserian framework (Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses) this essay maps the presence and the repression of different strains of the African-American left between the world wars.  Representing jazz musicians – among others – as organic intellectuals is crucial to reconstructing the combination of economic pressures and institutional co-option that shaped their activities and allegiances.

 

<1> In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower enlisted Dizzy Gillespie and his jazz band to tour the world in an attempt to demonstrate the racial equality practiced in the United States. Leaving aside the fact that no one ever accused Ike of being hip to jazz, Gillespie was still an odd choice. A self-described "card-carrying communist" during the late 1930s, he had once described the appreciation of his music as an "un-American act." Gillespie summed up his radicalism perfectly when he declared, "we [black men] couldn't give a shit about America" (Gillespie 80, 287; Von Eschen 1). How is it that this anti-American radical would become Eisenhower's representative to the world? The story of Gillespie's transformation from a hard-bopping communist to a State Department ambassador reveals a larger transformation in American society; namely, McCarthyism's destruction of the Black radical culture of which Gillespie was a part.

<2> Over the last two decades, American cultural studies has seen a flowering of literature on the relationship between African-Americans and the "Old Left" of the 1930s and 1940s. The study of this relationship has forced a reexamination of the meaning of a whole generation of Black cultural production. Cary Nelson most succinctly summed up the attitude of this new scholarship when he asked "What happens when we put the Left at the center?" (Nelson 771). Using Nelson's framework, scholars have unearthed a number of readings and histories that contest traditional narratives of Black expressive culture. While this scholarship has contributed immensely to our understanding of American culture, all of it shares a somewhat peculiar limitation: very few works on the relationship between black culture and the Old Left extend beyond the early 1940s. Though it could be argued that the Cold War's atmosphere and the near disappearance of the Old Left by 1950 absolve scholars of any responsibility to pursue the relationship further than its apparent end, I believe this assertion seriously underestimates the viability of postwar Leftist culture. The view that the continual twists and turns of the Communist Party line alienated most Black Americans with the "Old Left" both understates the relationship of African-Americans to Leftist culture and overstates the centrality of the Communist Party to Leftist politics of the 1940s. Against this view, I argue that McCarthyism's wholesale assault on the Old Left was the prime force in tearing Black culture and the Old Left apart, primarily through a near total destruction of the latter. As Gillespie's story reveals, the anticommunist [1] movement played a central role in deforming the contours of black popular culture in the postwar era. To put it in Cary Nelson's terms, I will examine what happens when "the center cannot hold." In doing so, I employ a Fichtean framework of thesis-antithesis-synthesis to structure my paper. In the first section, I present the thesis: the close relationship between Black cultural production and the Old Left. In the second, the anticommunist movement is the antithesis. Finally, I explore the synthesis between these two forces in the final section by examining the careers of Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Ralph Ellison.

 

Part I. One Single Hand: Black Culture Workers and the Old Left

<3> "Made in Moscow." With these words, written in 1960, Theodore Draper laid out most concisely what would become the dominant paradigm in the study of American communism for the next 30 years. American communist policy was the result of the Soviet-based Communist International (Comintern) imposing its will "absolutely and externally" on the American Party. The membership in the US "simply did not exist as a factor in [its] decision making process" (Draper, Ch. 15). Draper's words would come to be the automatic description of how all Party decisions were made. Emphasizing the dominance of Moscow over the American Party provided an image of a rigidly top down organization, almost more of a cult than a political Party in the traditional sense. This authoritarian view of the Party had powerful appeal in an America just barely settling down from the paroxysms of McCarthyism. As we have moved further away from Draper's moment in time, however, his views have begun to come under scrutiny. The example just cited provides a perfect vector for exploring this scrutiny, for Draper was referring to the (in)famous "black belt" theory [2] that formed the cornerstone of CPUSA policy towards Black Americans in the interwar period.

<4> Indeed, recent scholarship has demonstrated that not only did Black Americans exercise decisive influence upon questions of theory and praxis in CP life, they were also often eager to hear the opinions of Comintern representatives on the questions of the day. The origins of the Black Belt theory are an excellent example of this relationship. Though Draper presents the policy as an imposition on American Blacks, in fact Harlem poet Claude McKay played a crucial role in laying the foundation for the theory. McKay traveled to Moscow in 1922 to witness what he then considered "the greatest event in the history of humanity" (the Russian Revolution) (cited in Maxwell 73). There he ended up giving an impromptu address to the assembled delegates of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, in which he condemned American Communism's "near-surrender" to racism. Comintern officials took McKay's criticisms so seriously they commissioned him to write a book on his thoughts on the subject. The resultant book, Negry v Amerike, argued for a policy remarkably similar to the official Black Belt thesis adopted at the 1928 Sixth Congress of the Comintern. McKay himself was acutely aware of this influence, remarking in his autobiography that his analysis "precipitated" the Black Belt Thesis (cited in Maxwell 92). While Draper may be correct to insist that the policy was (geographically, at least) "Made in Moscow," such a phrasing is misleading as to the policy's intellectual foundations.

<5> The engagement between African Americans and Communism was not limited, however, to the realm of theory. Black folks joined Communist-led struggles in remarkable numbers in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. Of these, the most important was the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys. The town of Scottsboro, Alabama was, for most of its history, as unremarkable as any of the hundreds of rural municipalities sprinkled throughout the Deep South. For most of its white residents, the brutal everyday racism of life in the Jim Crow South was as much a facet of existence as the morning dew collecting on the cotton fields. The events of March 25th, 1931, however, would place the name Scottsboro on the lips of African-Americans across the country for the next decade. Nine Black youths who were hitching a ride on a train got into a fight with group of whites, and when the train stopped they were arrested for assault. When the police discovered that two white women had also been riding in the train car, they added rape charges, and a lynch mob atmosphere quickly coalesced. Little did the officers know that as they dragged the Scottsboro boys (as the nine would come to be known) off the train, they were dragging the town of Scottsboro out of its sleepy past in into the national headlines.

<6> The Communist Party's legal defense organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD) jumped into action, sending representatives to Scottsboro to meet with the youths and their families. Prioritizing working closely with the boys' mothers, the ILD quickly established a rapport with the families. Convinced of the need for a mass protest based strategy, the families quickly signed papers giving the ILD control over the case. In an era when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the reigning legal defense organization for African-Americans, this amounted to a strategic coup for the CP.

<7> It was a coup the Party wasted no time exploiting. While formulating the legal strategy in Alabama, the Party immediately began agitating in Harlem. As soon as news that the boys had been sentenced to death reached New York, the Daily Worker responded with a front-page call for "mass meetings and militant mass demonstrations" (Naison 58). Though openly competing with the NAACP for leadership over the case, the Party built its reputation in Harlem through its members' total commitment to the case. The spectacle of white communists beaten bloody by police batons at Scottsboro marches gave real weight to Party pronouncements about black-white unity.

<8> The Party's growing credibility in the eyes of Harlemites revealed itself at both the top and bottom of society. In 1933, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a prominent Harlem minister, proclaimed "I don't mind being called a Communist … the day will come when being called a Communist will be the highest honor that can be paid an individual and that day is coming soon" (87). The Black newspaper The New York Age praised Communist efforts to free the boys, declaring "… the ILD is conducting a fight for the lives of these innocent lads in a most praise-worthy manner and it is up to every Negro and pro-Negro organization in the country to rally to their support" (83). Regular Harlemites also joined the defense efforts in mass numbers. In April 1933 alone, nine new ILD chapters were formed in Harlem; they were each named for one of the Scottsboro boys.

<9> The Scottsboro case, more than any other campaign or event, raised the Communist Party's profile among African-Americans. It was through the Scottsboro campaign that a number of important Black cultural figures came to be associated with the party. Their involvement would mark both American Communism and Black popular culture with the traces of their engagement.

<10> As noted above, the dominant model of portraying the interaction between African-Americans and Communism has been one of victims and villains. Anticommunist scholarship often represents Communist activists as cult-like fanatics who only cared about African-Americans insofar as they could advance the ultimate goal of revolution. Such a model obscures first and foremost the sheer breadth of the interaction. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, all of the following figures were associated with either the CP or its campaigns: Countee Cullen, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Louise Thompson, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. These figures represent, by any possible measure, a massive part of the Black twentieth century cultural canon. Though their level of involvement varied from Jean Toomer's publication of poems in the pro-Bolshevik magazine The Liberator to Countee Cullen speaking at benefits for the Scottsboro boys to Louise Thompson's use of social networks for Party recruiting, all of them chose to involve themselves with the CP during their careers.

<11> The most common framework for studying this choice, the notion of "fellow-travelers," conceals more than it reveals. This framework treats artistic commitment as a movement from the free artist to the committed apparatchik. Under this interpretation, non-member Party sympathizers are reduced to passive occupants of the radical train, merely along for the ride. As Michael Denning has noted, it reduces "the history of the cultural politics of the Popular Front to … a history of letterheads." Instead of a complex interaction structured by the social relations of the period, the narrative becomes "a bizarre inversion of the blacklister's Red Channels, that compilation of organizations joined, petitions signed, marches marched in, and benefits attended" (Denning 57-58).

<12> Against this model, Raymond Williams' twin notions of alignment and commitment provide a far clearer framework for analyzing the relationship between Black artists and communists. [3] Williams points out that artists are "born into a social situation with all its specific perspectives … the writer begins by being aligned" ("The Writer: Commitment and Alignment" 86). This simple proposition immediately distances Williams from the "fellow-traveler" framework. The framework of alignment recognizes 

the radical and inevitable connection between a writer's [3] real social relations (considered not only 'individually' but in terms of the general social relations of 'writing' in a specific society and period, and within these social relations embodied in particular forms of writing) and the 'style' or 'forms' or 'content' of his [sic] work, now considered not abstractly but as expressions of these relationships. (Marxism and Literature 203-204) 

Thus cultural workers are always already aligned. Black artists who were aligned with the communist movement were not then breaking the sacred bonds of creative freedom by using their art for political purposes, but merely employing their creativity to far different ends than most artists.

<13> The notion of commitment, however, by recognizing the processes by which people change, break, or become conscious of their alignments, goes even further. Williams defines it tersely as "conscious alignment, or conscious change of alignment" (204). Elsewhere he elaborates that even though "the most publicized cases of 'commitment' are when people shift in this way from one set of beliefs and assumptions to another" the conscious realization and affirmation of one's alignment is also "an extraordinary experience" ("The Writer: Commitment and Alignment" 87). Finally, and particularly germane to the study at hand, Williams describes how writing "is necessarily subject to existing or discoverable real relations." The conditions of a society can "amend, displace, or deform any merely intended practice" (Marxism and Literature 204). This is the framework I use to analyze the alignments and commitments of the artists mentioned above as they interact with the ascendancy of McCarthyism in American culture.

<14> This ascendancy has been inadequately recognized in the literature on African-American radicalism. Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, cited above, is an excellent example of this. While he acknowledges the "state of siege" (Denning 152) that McCarthyism placed left-wing culture in, he does not pursue the impact this state of siege had upon the massive historical bloc he details in the rest of the book. Readers are left with the impression that many Popular Front figures simply disappeared under the weight of repression. Though space considerations surely factor into decisions to leave such avenues unexplored, others have failed to pick up where Denning's scholarship leaves off. When Denning does make reference to the various actors of McCarthyism (HUAC, etc), the movement exists more as a specter of the future than as something present in his subject's lives. The Cultural Front's concluding chapter concerns itself with the legacy of Popular Front culture after it was no longer hegemonic, and here the limitations of Denning's perspective on McCarthyism become most evident. When speaking of the Popular Front's defeat, he offers sophisticated readings of Clancy Sigal's Going Away and Elia Kazan's film Face in the Crowd to illustrate the Old Left's discomfort with Southern culture. As migrations changed American demographics, Southern culture became American culture, and the Popular Front's failure to engage it became fatal.

<15> This explanation for the marginalization of cultural radicalism in the 1950s simply does not fit with the timeline of the Popular Front's dominance. By the time Elvis hit the national radar (one of Denning's reference points for the Southernization of America), Henry Wallace's campaign had been a miserable failure, the CIO had expelled its radical unions, and many of the most talented cultural workers of the Popular front were blacklisted or in exile. Denning's own model of seeing the radical institutions of the Popular Front as key to its cultural production shows the extent to which radical culture had been dismantled by the time the South asserted itself on the cultural radar. Furthermore, as Robin Kelley's work Hammer and Hoe has shown, there existed great potential in radical culture to appeal to a Southern consciousness. By assigning such primacy to the nation's internal migrations, Denning disproportionately lessens the weight assigned to repression in assessing the causes of the Popular Front's demise.

<16> On a more political level, Denning's discussion of the "conservative populist" theory of the end of the New Deal displays a lack of awareness about the role McCarthyism played in excising communist thought from the American consciousness. The basic "conservative populist" argument was that the 1960s saw the "class question" (whose expression is epitomized by the Popular Front) eclipsed by the "race question" (represented by the civil rights and Black Power movements), the latter being more divisive, and thus ultimately responsible for the movement's downfall. Denning rightly answers this charge by pointing out that class was not somehow privileged over race during the Popular Front. However, his answer lacks an awareness of the way the conservative populists were able to mobilize popular support precisely because the class question had been partially cut out of the civil rights movement [4] (Denning 463-473).

<17> While The Cultural Front is a compelling reexamination of Popular Front culture, it fails to appreciate the magnitude of change that McCarthyism effected on America. While acknowledging the "state of siege" foisted upon the Left by anticommunist trends, Denning's own close readings fail to take this siege into account. How exactly this siege functioned will be examined next.

 

Part II. The Mechanics of McCarthyism

<18> In order to investigate the effects of McCarthyism on Black cultural production, it is first necessary to provide an operational portrait of what Ellen Schrecker has called "the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history" (Schrecker x). This section of the essay provides such a portrait. But first, I will make use of Louis Althusser's notion of "ideological and repressive state apparatuses" in order to provide more clarity to how the anticommunist movement came about and operated. For Althusser, the capitalist state maintains its hegemony through two different types of apparatuses: repressive and ideological. Repressive apparatuses are distinguished from ideological ones insofar as the former "function massively and predominantly by repression," while the latter "function massively and predominantly by ideology." Repressive institutions such as the police allow the state to maintain political hegemony. Ideological institutions, such as national newspapers, function differently, allowing the state to retain hegemony by constantly securing the consent of the governed subjects [5]. However, this is not enough to ensure the survival of the state order. As Althusser notes, it is impossible for a class to maintain state power without "exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatus"(Althusser 145-146). These two different types of institutions must function together for a class to maintain power.

<19> Althusser's framework is instructive for a number of reasons. First, it places the repression of the period into a class context, which becomes highly important in terms of understanding the ways in which different targets were chosen during McCarthyism. Second, it allows various actors and institutions (e.g. the literary critics I examine in the second part of this essay) to be seen as part of a movement from which they have traditionally been thought of as quite separate. Third, the distinction between the two types of apparatuses also allows for the hybrid methods of retaining hegemony that each employ. Thus although an institution like the Federal Bureau of Investigation may function primarily by repression insofar as it relies on arresting suspects, J. Edgar Hoover's ceaseless attempts to push American opinion to the hysterical limits of anticommunism were undoubtedly an attempt to shape the public's ideology [6]. Althusser's description of the mechanisms for the maintenance of hegemony is thus necessary for a deep analysis of the history of McCarthyism.

<20> Despite the movement's anachronistic title, McCarthyism's reign in American politics was not confined to the brief tenure of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Though repression against radicals was certainly nothing new in American history, the particular movement that would come to hegemony during the second half of the 1940s represented a qualitative difference in both profile and intensity. Having laid the structural foundations for McCarthyism throughout the late 1930s, the Republican congressional sweep of 1946 allowed the anticommunist movement to finally achieve political dominance. The first term this new congress would serve saw a 500 percent increase in the number of investigations regarding communism over the previous term. The movement's growth throughout the late forties is also evident in different political reactions to it. In 1940, the FBI's raids on Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade met with stiff resistance from civil society. The attorney general eventually quashed the resultant indictments. By 1949, however, President Truman was going out of his way to avoid confronting the unscrupulous practices of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. While the movement's exact beginning is debatable, by late 1947 it was clear that the movement against communism was having a major effect on American politics (see Caute chapters 5 and 6).

<21> McCarthyism would create a political climate the effects of which can still be felt today, but by the mid-1950s it was clear that the heyday of domestic anticommunism had passed. The censure of Senator McCarthy near the end of 1954 certainly marked the ebb of a rabid anticommunism from public consciousness. By the time the Montgomery bus boycott began in 1955, the primary political issue of the day had passed from communism to African-American freedom. This brief sketch provides a timeline for McCarthyism's reign, but in order to understand the dynamics of the movement that would profoundly change the contours of twentieth century Black expressive culture, a summary of the principle actors of the movement is necessary.

 

Repressive Apparatuses

<22> Though this essay is primarily concerned with the cultural impact of McCarthyism on Black America, I want to make a special point of emphasizing its repressive machinery before its ideological. While both aspects of the movement were necessary for it to gain hegemony, the clearing away of the material base of Popular Front culture made the ascent of the various anticommunist ideologies immeasurably easier. Though the repressive apparatuses of McCarthyism were not explicitly concerned with changing Black cultural production (indeed, they were concerned with getting people fired or thrown in jail), they facilitated that change nonetheless.

<23> The most famous repressive apparatus of the era was undoubtedly the House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC). Initially known as the Dies Committee (after its chairman, Martin Dies), its stated purpose from its formation in 1938 was to investigate "un-American propaganda," which at the time referred to both fascist and communist publications. Weighted with conservatives from the beginning [7], HUAC wasted no time in laying the ground for a frontal assault against the Left. For example, in 1939 the head of the Communist Party-USA, Earl Browder, was hauled before the committee. Questioned about his passport, Browder revealed that he had held passports under different names. The committee immediately pressured the Roosevelt administration to prosecute. Eventually, Browder was given a 4-year prison sentence; a term far beyond that given to comparable crimes committed by non-communists. By 1953, the committee was so powerful that 185 of the 221 Republicans in the House applied for membership in it. That HUAC would last until 1975 (a length made all the more significant by the fact that most investigating committees don't even last a full congress) was a testament to its entrenchment in American politics.

<24> While HUAC's job was ostensibly to investigate domestic threats to America, its members soon found that they could accomplish their goals without any actual successful investigation. Historian David Caute notes that "frequently witnesses were fired as soon as they were subpoenaed." During the height of the committee's powers, it provided the names of over 60,000 people to prospective employers. As late as 1959, the Chairman of HUAC would complain that the Board of Education of California was "derelict in [its] duty" when it refused to fire over 100 teachers whose names the committee had sent (Caute 102-103). HUAC's repression was one of the prime material factors in the collapse of leftist culture in the late 1940s.

<25> Though HUAC is the institution most commonly associated with McCarthyism, Joe McCarthy never served in the house. The repressive machinery that undergirded his rise to power was located in the Senate, which actually contained two different anticommunist committees in the 1940s: McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and Pat McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee [8]. While HUAC targeted anyone who had links to communist organizations, the Senate committees tended to confine themselves to investigations of government employees. Diplomats to Eastern bloc countries, the Voice of America radio station, and the US Army were all targets of Senate investigations. Because of this, the Senate committees played a much less significant role than HUAC in the repressive domination of the Left. Since few, if any, Leftist groups were based in the networks that they sought to uproot, the Senate committees succeeded more in ruining the lives of individual radicals than the wholesale repression of groups (Caute 108; Schrecker 250-252). [9]

<26> What the Senate committees did accomplish, however, was to raise the level of public hysteria about communism, accomplishing an ideological shift that in some ways compensated for their repressive failure. Joel Kovel summarized this shift nicely, remarking that "the touchstone of loyalty is no longer whether one is a Communist; it becomes, rather, whether one is not an anticommunist" (Kovel 121). By staging massive televised spectacles in which the prime moment was that of accusation (not of conviction), the Senate committees succeeded in transferring the anticommunist attitudes of HUAC investigations onto a large section of the American public. The success of this endeavor is evident in the results of a 1954 poll in which 72 percent of the country thought "people should report to the FBI those neighbors or acquaintances they suspected of being Communists" (Caute 121).

<27> If anticommunists in the legislative arena were successful in persecuting Leftists, those in the executive arena excelled at it. While HUAC (and to a lesser extent, the Senate committees) caused a great many radicals to either lose their jobs or be thrown in jail, the model for such repression came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI was an old hand at meting out repression towards the Reds; it had an active antiradical division dating back to the 1920s whose files formed the beginning of the information network of McCarthyist anticommunism. Indeed, the FBI was vital to the success of the legislative repression. As HUAC Chairman J. Parnell Thomas gratefully noted, "The closest relationship exists between this Committee and the FBI" (Caute 113). Hoover's FBI had been keeping files on American radicals since 1939. Its growth into an anticommunist juggernaut, however, came in 1947, when President Truman enacted his program of loyalty oaths for federal employees. This program allowed the FBI to increase its scale of operation dramatically. Its personnel size grew from 3,559 to 7,029 in 1952. Over this time, the FBI conducted over two million investigations of federal employees. When agents wished to punish a suspected communist, proof wasn't even necessary. As with the legislative committees, the mere inquiry with an employer was often enough to have a radical employee dismissed. The sheer magnitude of the FBI's involvement with antiradical activity made it more dangerous than both the Senate and House investigative committees combined (Caute chapter 6; Schrecker chapter 6).

<28> Dedicated as it was to harassing radicals, the FBI also pushed an agenda to reshape American attitudes so that communism was something to be feared and hated. As evidenced by the poll results referenced earlier, it was a successful push. Hoover accomplished this shift in a number of ways. First, through his connection with various important journalists, he pushed for publication of sensationalist stories about the Communist menace. Relying upon his vast information network, Hoover could supply such journalists with real data to keep their stories credible. As Caute put it, "[w]hen [Hoover's journalists] wrote stories about card-carrying Communists, they knew the number of the card" (Caute 114). Second, the FBI's Crime Records Division was dedicated to producing television shows, speeches, and books all alerting the public to the communist menace.

<29> In the history of anticommunism, the FBI rarely receives the center stage treatment that Joseph McCarthy or HUAC do. This fact is itself a testament to the Bureau's success in red-hunting while keeping its own profile low. This lower profile, however, hides the role that the FBI actually played at the time. In Ellen Schrecker's history of McCarthyism, she describes the Bureau as "the single most important component of the anticommunist crusade and the institution most responsible for its success" (Schrecker 239).

<30> Though the FBI undoubtedly was the single most important agency, a myriad of smaller local agencies, taken together, equally contributed to creating the repressive atmosphere of the moment. First, in a directly repressive way, many states passed laws that criminalized Leftist activity. Michigan made writing or speaking subversive words punishable by a life sentence. The Attorney General ominously warned the nation that "Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States." Tennessee passed a law punishing the espousal of revolutionary Marxism with the death penalty. Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Washington simply banned the Communist Party (Marable 20).

<31> Beyond passing laws, many municipalities did their part in the fight against Communism by simply denying Leftists a venue. In 1946 the Shrine and Olympic auditoriums in Los Angeles refused to rent to William Z. Foster, CP Chairman. Three years later the mayor of Palo Alto, California refused the Community Center to a Communist professor. The mayor of New York declared that organizations listed by the Attorney General should be barred from "soliciting funds in the streets" (Caute 162). By denying the freedom to assemble, the anticommunists were able to both demoralize radicals and prevent them from gaining a public audience through legitimate means.

<32> The final piece of anticommunist repressive machinery was the legislative assault on organized labor. The postwar years in America had seen an unprecedented insurgency of organized labor. During the first half of 1946 the country was wracked by what the Bureau of Labor Statistics called "the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country's history" (cited in Brecher 228). As the anticommunist movement gained strength, it began a counteroffensive against this insurgency. The primary law that constituted this attack was the Labor-Management Relations Act, popularly known as Taft-Hartley. Passed over President Truman's veto in 1947, the law forced every union official to sign an affidavit that 

He is not a member of the Communist Party nor is affiliated with such party, and that he does not believe in, and is not a member of or supports any organization that believes in or teaches, the overthrow of United States Government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means. (Caute 355).

Taft-Hartley effectively drove a wedge through the core of the industrial union movement. Since any union in violation of the law could not receive certification from the National Labor Relations Board, they were faced with a choice of either attempting to force a company to recognize the union on its own strength, or remove Communists from leadership. Rather than hamstring the unions, many Communists stepped down of their own accord. The leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) sided resolutely with the state during this time; in 1949 the heavily Communist United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers was expelled. Ten other Leftist unions, representing over one million workers, were purged in the following months. Without the support of the national CIO, many of these unions either merged with other, less radical unions, or fell victim to their raids. By destroying the most progressive sections of the union movement, the anticommunists were able to immobilize the key institution behind much of Popular Front cultural production.

<33> The repression meted out during the formative period of McCarthyist hegemony (1946-48) effectively cut the foundation out from the cultural apparatus that had developed as a result of the Black-Red engagement. Unions that had sponsored Black theater acts found themselves fighting for survival. Black radical speakers couldn't find venues. The idea of socialism (in one form or another), which sixty percent of the country had been friendly to only 6 years earlier (Denning 4), was effectively purged from the public ideology. It left a vacuum that would soon be filled.

Ideological Apparatuses

<34> Though the assault on the Left had largely succeeded in disorganizing the movement's key institutions and stirring up a rabid anticommunism in the general public, the task of excising radicalism from American life was not yet complete. Anticommunist cultural production was simply not yet ready to take the place of the massive historical bloc that the Popular Front constituted. Radical books like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright's Native Son were bestsellers. Major cultural figures like Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra hobnobbed with the CP or its associated organizations. The anticommunists needed to produce a body of work that could wrest the aesthetic and cultural mores of the time away from radicalism.

<35> The groups that would produce this work were the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals. Both movements have traditionally been thought of as separate from the anticommunist movement. Ellen Schrecker, for example, treats the New Critics as a product of McCarthyism's "depoliticizing zeitgeist" (Schrecker 405). When Alan Wald speaks of the New York Intellectuals' "complicity" and "rationaliz[ation]" of Cold War repression, he treats them as observers more than participants (Wald, Writing from the Left 85). Against these views, what I propose is that both New Criticism and the New York Intellectuals formed the ideological counterpart (or, to follow an old metaphor, the "superstructure") to the repression detailed above in order to create a unified historical bloc of anticommunism.

<36> The New Critics were a group of writers associated with the South who sought in the 1940s to create a new way of looking at literature that was concerned above all else with form. Many of them were based in the political tradition of Southern agrarianism, summarized in the manifesto I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Seeking to expand their critical influence beyond the South, the group that was to become the New Critics dropped the emphasis on agrarian politics in the mid 1930s and quickly expanded their influence.

<37> Even with the emphasis on agrarian politics dropped, the New Critics still retained many of the values that had undergirded their politics. They believed in "the old values of the South:" the tradition of white supremacy, a social and cultural hierarchy, and an opposition to egalitarian reform. This elitist view of society carried over into an elitist view of how literature should be read (Schwartz 74-75).

<38> The New Critics sought to shift the aesthetic values of the 1940s explicitly away from the values of naturalism and social realism that characterized much of 1930s literature. According to their view, the "democratic" quality of Depression literature (i.e. its readability) that proletarian critics like Mike Gold so strongly defended reduced the complexities of life to an unacceptable level of simplicity. It was a sub-literary pulp genre of art that the New Critics sought to consign to the dustbin of history. One of the first ways they did this was by attempting to split history from the novel. For the New Critics, novels should concern themselves with "ahistorical universals" (Schaub 28). Art was "a means of freedom from society" (Schwartz 204). By removing a novel's sense of history, the New Critics removed one of the primary means by which ordinary readers could identify with it. The second way the New Critics sought to undermine the democratic values of literature was by emphasizing the need for formal complexity. The literary naturalism that had been the characteristic form of much 1930s fiction was attacked for relying "too much for its truths upon surface detail and fail[ing] to provide an adequate portrait of inner life" (Schaub 43). Reliance upon documentary modes of narrative would no longer do. Instead, the form of the literature itself had to capture the complexities and contradictions of modern life. Against this negative backdrop, the New Critics promoted the works of modernists like William Faulkner and James Joyce, artists whose formal complexity placed them well outside the reading range of average Americans.

<39> The New Critics sought to transform American literature in a way that was strikingly undemocratic. Though their aesthetic appeals were rarely couched in political terms, both their roots and their results were possessed of a clearly political nature. The New Critics alone, however, were not a strong enough force to effect the kind of change they sought. The eventual confluence of their views on literature with the views of the New York Intellectuals would eventually give the New Critics' aesthetic the support it needed to become a dominant literary paradigm.

<40> The New York Intellectuals were a group of writers who had been associated with the Old Left but drifted away from it in varying degrees throughout the late 1930s. Many were associated with either the Trotskyist movement or other smaller anti-Stalinist Old Left groups. As their anti-Stalinism gave way to a broader anticommunism, the New York critics turned their hostile gaze upon the kind of art they had previously boosted: naturalism.

<41> The route by which the New York Intellectuals came to advance a theory of art that lined them up closely with the formerly quasi-fascist New Critics was one which could not have been traveled without the influence of Stalinism. The New York group had originally thought of themselves as quite radical, socialists even. They sought to advance art which was revolutionary in both form and content. They were thus drawn to the European avant-garde even as they were repelled by its flirtation with fascism. As Stalinism began to have more and more of an impact upon American radicalism (through the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, etc), the New York critics found themselves repelled by what they saw as the American Left's tolerance for totalitarianism. They began to see capitalistic democracy as preferable to, and thus worth defending against, Soviet totalitarianism. To that end, the New York Intellectuals became apologists for American policy (Schwartz chapter 3; Wald, New York Intellectuals chapter 5).

<42> This reevaluation of the politics of the 1930s led to a reevaluation of the aesthetics of the 1930s as well. After all, if the political activity of that generation was hopelessly compromised by its engagement with Stalinism, might not its culture be similarly infected? The New York Intellectuals sought to prove that it was. One of the key ways in which they made this argument was through their distinction between ""ideology" and "ideas." Ideology was what too much of liberal culture in the 1930s had degenerated into. In fiction it took the form of "explicit exposition and debate" that clearly presented defined points of view to the reader. Bigger Thomas' lawyer's speech near the end of Native Son represented the paradigm of such a form. The New York Intellectuals argued that such a presentation wasn't faithful to reality because it skimmed over the contradicting emotions that characterized modern life. To represent these feelings, they called for formal complexity that would "put two emotions in juxtaposition." This kind of stylistic tension had two virtues: first, its complexity "was the mark of its adequacy to the form of 'reality' itself" and second, the kind of self-division that it encouraged would always be a guard against a one-sided degeneration into ideology. Moving away from the aesthetic of the 1930s that boldly called for change, the New York Intellectuals celebrated a cultural politics in which ambivalence was a key value (Schaub 32-35).

<43> Though the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals clearly shared similar aesthetic concerns, their divergent origins and locations placed them at odds throughout much of the 1930s. It took a series of literary episodes to draw the two together and solidify the new critical consensus of the 1940s. The most important of these episodes was what became known as "The Pound Affair."

<44> In 1948 it was announced that the prestigious Bollingen Prize would be awarded to the poet Ezra Pound for his collection Pisan Cantos. Several months later, the Saturday Review of Literature published a polemic by Robert Hillyer which denounced the prize committee for choosing a poet with clear sympathies towards fascism. Allen Tate, one of the leading figures of the New Critics, responded with a letter accusing Hillyer of campaigning "in a dangerous and unprincipled manner" (cited in Schwartz 155). The letter, which was published in the Nation, contained the signatures of eighty-four different writers, including representatives of both the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals. It was phrased in way that attacked Hillyer's support for democratic values in art as philistinism. Implicit in such an argument was the idea that the formal excellence of Pound's work was its defining concept, not its tact or politics.

<45> As publicity about the controversy began to spread, Tate ingeniously shifted the emphasis of his argument away from Ezra Pound and into more abstract areas concerning the relationship of art to political ideas. In order for art to be truly free, he argued, it needed to be judged on a purely aesthetic basis. Judging a poem by its politics was no different than "methods of literary criticism associated with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia" (168). By opposing formalist art criticism to totalitarian nations, Tate paired the former with democratic values, even as he disparaged those who argued for such values in art.

<46> The New York Intellectuals agreed with Tate's argument at several key points. Though many of them still felt that art needed to engage reality in some way, they agreed with Tate that "principles of 'autonomy' in aesthetic judgments" were the key issue at stake (166). Partisan Review, the New York group's key journal, published a long piece by John Berryman praising the Cantos. Even the few who attacked Pound did so without providing any support for the position of Hillyer. Overall, most of the New York Intellectuals where drawn to Tate's position because it seemed a middle ground, neither defending Pound nor attacking him, but instead "focused attention on aesthetic standards" (168). Those who sought to avoid the controversy in such a way ended up supporting the most essential propositions of New Critical theory.

<47> Though the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics' ideas about art had been on convergent paths for some time, it was not until the Pound Affair that the two came together on a common issue in the public eye. Not only did the controversy show the ways in which the two groups held common ground, it also united them against a common enemy: Hillyer and his Popular Front aesthetic principles. This literary united front came into existence at the exact moment it could fill the void left by the repressive machinery's attack on the Left. By attacking art that was inspired by a social conscience, the New Critical Consensus played a vital role for the anticommunist movement, demoralizing Leftist artists and marginalizing their ideas in the views of the larger public. The forgers of the new critical consensus therefore played a vital role for the anticommunist movement in bringing a certain intellectual respectability to the frankly pedestrian thought of folks like Hoover. How their ideological machinery matched up with the repressive machinery and was brought to bear on black Americans will be examined in the next chapter.

Part III: "Scoundrel Time" and the Black Popular Front

<48> The previous two sections presented two opposing forces in American society: Black radical culture workers and the apparatus of the anticommunist movement. This section synthesizes these two forces to demonstrate the ways in which a dynamic view of McCarthyism, informed by Raymond Williams' commitment/alignment framework, brings clarity to the readings of various black cultural figures. Though there are many historical figures or incidents that could be analyzed in such a way, the modest scope of this essay forces me to limit my inquiry to a select few. I hope those who wish to pick up where I leave off find the perspectives and insights I have established in this section to be useful.

 

Langston Hughes

<49> Of all the African-American artists who were affected by anticommunism, few have been as misread as Langston Hughes. His appearance in 1953 before Senator McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations caused Amiri Baraka to argue that "Hughes … copped out before the inquisitors of the HUAC" (Baraka 318). His omission of Paul Robeson from his anthology Famous Negro Music Makers in 1955 angered W.E.B. Dubois so much that he sent a letter to the publisher demanding an explanation. Arnold Rampersad, Hughes' most accomplished biographer, argued that the appearance before McCarthy proved that "for Langston, the long, rugged, public road away from radical socialism had come to an end" (Rampersad II 222). The two extremes of interpretation, that Hughes was either a coward or someone who had been moving away from radicalism for quite some time, both obscure the actual conditions of the time and provide a misleading portrait of Hughes' commitments in his later years.

<50> These commitments were, in some ways, born before Hughes was. His maternal grandmother's first husband was one of the men who died fighting alongside John Brown in the famous raid on Harper's Ferry. His great uncle, John Mercer Langston, was a conductor on the Ohio Underground Railroad and an anti-slavery society organizer. His mother, with whom he lived for much of his childhood, was a fighter for racial equality as well. When Langston was ready to begin school in 1908, Harrison Street School refused to admit him because of his color. Carrie Hughes argued her son's case to the Topeka Board of Education and won. This would be the same Board that would later become the defendant in Brown v. Board of Education. Hughes thus personified Williams' definition of alignment as how a writer is "born into a social situation with all its specific perspectives" (Williams, "The Writer" 86-87). In Hughes' case, this alignment was militant anti-racist struggle.

<51> This political formation continued into Hughes' high school years. Attending a rather cosmopolitan high school in Kansas, Hughes would later recount the tales his Jewish classmates told him of anti-Semitism in Russia. In one of his Chicago Defender columns, he recalled coming to the conclusion that "there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia" (Hughes Chicago Defender 169). This young internationalism was further developed by the jubilation with which Hughes' Jewish classmates greeted news of the Russian Revolution. Even at this early age, Hughes had begun to engage a Red and Black tradition. He later remembered reading the journal The Liberator, which at the time was edited by the dean of proletarian literature, Mike Gold, and the Harlem Bolshevik Claude McKay. Of The Liberator Hughes said, "I learned from it the revolutionary attitude towards Negroes" (Rampersad I 30).

<52> The 1922 poem, "Negro," is a good example of Hughes' early alignments. He writes in the first line of the poem, "I am a Negro:/Black as the night is Black/Black like the depths of Africa." In this poem the African American identity exists side by side with the proletarian identity of the worker, "under [whose] hand the pyramids arose./[Who] made mortar for the Woolworth building." Even in the lines affirming a specifically black identity, Hughes specifically labors the speaker, recounting how "Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean./I brushed the boots of Washington" (Hughes Collected Poems 24). The Black identity is shown to exist in a class context. The significance of Hughes embracing the class identity of his subjects in this period should not be missed. A mere three years after Hoover and the Palmer Raids destroyed the nascent socialist movement in America, a poor black poet was turning to class politics. This is precisely what Williams is referring to by alignment, in as much as Hughes may never have thought about whether he considered himself a Marxist at this point in his life, but because of his circumstances his politics leaned in that direction nonetheless.

<53> Hughes' alignment with radical politics would become even more pronounced as he came into increasingly frequent contact with the organized Left in the mid to late 1920s. More and more of his poems were being published in left-wing journals like Worker's Monthly (the successor to the Liberator) or New Masses. Though Hughes certainly was moving closer to the Communist Party during this period, it wasn't until the Scottsboro trial that his politics took a qualitative leap to the Left.

<54> Through the course of the trial, Hughes was forced to choose between the NAACP's legalistic strategy and the Communist-led International Labor Defense's strategy of direct action. Though his earlier radicalism may have made this choice seem natural, it was in fact a difficult choice. The NAACP's journal, The Crisis, had been the single major publisher of Hughes' work up to that point. Despite this, he aligned himself with the ILD, even assuming the presidency of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, a CP organized group. The impact of this increasingly personal contact with the Left is apparent in Hughes' poetry from the period. His poem "Scottsboro" is his first to use explicitly Bolshevik imagery. Calling on "Lenin with the flag blood red," the poem marked a definite shift from an alignment with the Left to a conscious commitment to communist politics. Besides this rather obvious imagery, the poem's content is also markedly different from Hughes' earlier work. "Scottsboro" opens with the booming declaration "8 BLACK BOYS IN A SOUTHERN JAIL/WORLD, TURN PALE!"(Hughes 142). For those familiar only with Hughes' blues and jazz poems, such a polemical outburst seems jarringly out of place. Reaching beyond poetry, Hughes' outrage over the Scottsboro trial spills over into prose as well. His essay, "Southern Gentlemen, White Prostitutes, Mill-Owners, and Negroes," begins with the challenge that if "9 Scottsboro boys die, the South ought to be ashamed of itself." The essay goes on to call Southern justice "blind and syphilitic" and suggests that "Alabama's Southern gentlemen amuse themselves burning 9 young black boys till they're dead in the State's electric chair" (Hughes Good Morning Revolution 57-59). Though Hughes was certainly aligned with the Left previous to Scottsboro, through the experience of struggle he forged a fierce commitment to the Left.

<55> Fast-forward 20 years, however, and this commitment seems to disappear. Responding to McCarthy's subpoena, Hughes wrote a telegraph to the committee stating "AS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN WHO BELIEVES IN DEMOCRACY AS A WAY OF LIFE FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE I DESIRE AT ALL TIMES TO COOPERATE WITH ANY AGENT OF OUR CONSTITUTED GOVERNMENT." Such faith in American democracy was nowhere to be found in Hughes' writings on the Scottsboro boys. During his testimony, when attorney Roy Cohn asked Hughes about his views on American justice he responded: "Well, I have certainly changed my views in regard to the fact that one may not get a fair trial in America. I believe one can and one does." Pressed by Cohn, Hughes elaborated, "Of course, we have our judicial defects, as does every system or country" (cited in Rampersad II 210-216). Such a forgiving attitude towards the "defects" of American justice with regard to African-Americans would shock those readers of Hughes' writings about Scottsboro. How is one to reconcile these two disparate narratives about American justice from the same man?

<56> As stated above, interpreters have generally either concluded that Hughes was a coward or done with the Left. The notion that Hughes was a coward is the easiest to dispel. First, it should be noted that the full machinery of McCarthyism was brought to bear against Hughes. Right wing groups had been targeting the poet for almost as long as he had been writing. In the atmosphere of anticommunist ascendance of the 1940s, these groups were emboldened enough to damage his career. In April, 1943, Hughes was scheduled to speak at Wayne University in Detroit. Prior to his speech, university officials reported over 100 phone calls denouncing Hughes' presence. On the day of the speech, the poet was greeted by pickets of almost a hundred members of the right wing America First Party (Rampersad II 69). These kinds of activities resulted in many speaking engagements being cancelled. This was an issue for Hughes. As with most black poets, he had never gained financial security though his art. The cancellation of paid lectures represented a direct threat to Hughes' livelihood. The attacks were not merely on a local level, either. In October 1944, one of J. Edgar Hoover's favorite columnists, George Sokolsky, published a column in the New York Sun and other papers denouncing Hughes' poem, "Goodbye Christ." This led to several high schools canceling their dates on Hughes' speaking tour (91). Personal attacks such as these combined with attacks on the general infrastructure of the Left created an atmosphere in which Hughes cannot fairly be blamed for toning down his politics in front of a congressional inquisition.

<57> Moreover, in spite of these circumstances of repression, Hughes actually did continue to speak out against the ravages of McCarthyism, albeit in a more oblique fashion. As James Smethurst notes, Hughes' poem, "Dream Boogie," can be read as a masked expression of discontent. The poem opens with the lines "You think/It's a happy beat," but the poems rhythm is repeatedly jarred by interruptions such as "What did I say?" that imply something is rotten in the state of poetry (Hughes Collected Works 388). As such, the poem represents "a perfect product of the cold war era." In addition to this, Hughes published poems against HUAC, and mocked red-baiting in his Chicago Defender columns. In such circumstances as he faced, speaking out against anticommunism was anything but "copping out."

<58> Rampersad's argument that Hughes became something of a liberal in this period thus seems more plausible. After all, the overt Soviet imagery of this Thirties work is certainly absent. But if the view of Hughes' work is expanded beyond the immediate period of repression, a different interpretation becomes much more plausible. In 1963 Hughes published "Northern Liberal," a bitter poem against those who wouldn't support the Southern struggle against Jim Crow. The poem is merciless in its condemnation against those who "above the struggle/[they] can afford to be" (Hughes 541). Where 10 years earlier, Hughes had been eager to try and identify himself with mainstream liberal politics, he was now consciously trying to separate himself from that milieu. In 1961 Hughes' vision again took on an internationalist scope, as he published "Lumumba's Grave," a declaration of solidarity with the African anti-colonialist movement (533). Then 1964, in the magazine American Dialogue (edited by former New Masses editor and Communist Joe North), Hughes published "Final Call." In it, the speaker cries "SEND FOR LENIN" and "SEND FOR TROTSKY" (545). These are hardly the words of someone who has left a commitment to socialism behind him. These poems show that Hughes clearly thought of himself as part of the left, even if circumstances wouldn't allow him to publicly declare it at every turn.

<59> By analyzing Hughes' work through the lens of McCarthyism, it becomes clear that he was neither a coward nor a liberal. Baraka's claim is severely undermined by the scale of repression that Hughes faced during the period. Rampersad similarly undervalues the impact of such repression, and fails to critically engage Hughes' later poetry. Only by maintaining both a focused view on the McCarthy period and a simultaneously broad view of the poet's later work (undoubtedly influenced by the civil rights insurgency of the Second Reconstruction) can his politics assume a coherent narrative. Though Hughes retained his commitment to socialism, the anticommunist movement affected other artists in far more profound ways.

 

Duke Ellington and Popular Front Jazz

<60> Of all the hidden histories of American radicalism, the engagement between jazz and the Popular Front is among the most unknown. While scholars have succeeded in bringing to light the associations between the Literary Left and the Popular Front, the story of the radical musical culture that arose in the 1930s remains largely hidden. As noted in the beginning of this essay, Dizzy Gillespie was a Communist Party member for a time and was deeply involved in the Leftist milieu of the Thirties. He was not the only jazz artist in the scene.

<61> The involvement of jazz artists in the Popular Front was not a simple coincidence of history; it stemmed from the tremendous efforts that radicals (especially those associated with the Communist Party) made on behalf of racial equality in America. From 1928, when the Comintern made the Black Belt Thesis official policy, up until the CP decided to "soft-peddle" racial issues during WWII, the Party and its associated organizations constituted the major institutional force fighting for Black rights in America. One internal Party directive during the depression read, "It is the duty of the white workers to jump at the throat of any person who strikes a Negro in the face, who persecutes a Negro" (Mahamdallie). Adam Clayton Powell observed that "there is no group in America including the Christian Church that practices racial brotherhood one-tenth as much as the Communist Party" (Horne Black & Red 67).

<62> In light of such a commitment to civil rights, it is no surprise that a great many Black Americans would be attracted to the Communist Party, and in particular to its associated organizations specifically devoted to issues of Black equality. A short survey of the various instances where jazz artists lent support to Popular Front causes shows the scope of their involvement. In 1932, Benny Carter's orchestra played a benefit for the International Labor Defense, which was a Party-supported organization devoted to fighting primarily for Black civil rights. During the Spanish Civil War, concerts for Loyalist cause featured artists such as Count Basie and Fats Waller. Benny Goodman [10] showed such strong support for the Spanish antifascists that right wing pickets greeted his concert at Carnegie Hall. Billie Holiday sang at May Day parades, Ella Fitzgerald at Daily Worker fundraisers (Denning 334-335). Mike Gold later remembered dancing with a black social worker at one such fundraiser: "She could dance like a dream, and she was a Communist!" (Maxwell 95). Even the critical apparatus of the jazz scene was inflected with Popular Front flavor. James Lincoln Collier once tried to find a serious jazz critic who wasn't on the Left and he came up with one name: R.D. Darrell. Darrell turned out to be a poor choice, as he was the music critic for the Communist Party cultural journal New Masses.

<63> The ubiquity of jazz artists at Popular Front events was not, however, a sign of their inherent radicalism. In Williams' phrasing, it was much more a signifier of politics of alignment than commitment. As Michael Denning notes, two of the primary political forms of Popular Front public culture were "a politics of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist solidarity" and "a civil liberties campaign against lynching and labor repression" (Denning 9). These politics had an obvious appeal for African-American artists. While Langston Hughes was aligned with the working class internationalism of the Communist Party, most jazz artists were aligned with the much broader politics of Popular Front activism. Dizzy Gillespie, always adept at stating the mood of the moment, remarked that "artists are always in the vanguard of social change, but we didn't go out and make speeches or say 'Let's play eight bars of protest.' We just played our music and let it go at that. The music proclaimed our identity; it made every statement we truly wanted to make" (335). This of course contrasted sharply with committed communists such as Langston Hughes or Richard Wright. The main exception was Duke Ellington.

<64> Born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., Ellington was an active youth who initially gave up on his piano lessons. His later political involvement was foreshadowed by his enrollment at Armstrong High School, whose principal was then the African-American labor historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson, who would later found The Journal of Negro Life and History, insisted on teaching black history to his students, even in the face of Woodrow Wilson's recent move to segregate the D.C. area schools. Ellington would later remember his school as a place of "the greatest race pride" (Lawrence 8).

<65> Three months before his graduation, however, Duke left school to pursue a career as a painter. His interest in the piano was reawakened in 1914 when he saw Harvey Brooks, a rising piano star. By 1919 Duke was working full-time in the music business. He spent the next decade building his orchestra into one of the most accomplished in the country. Eventually the group would land at Harlem's Cotton Club, a prestigious job which guaranteed them broader exposure (112).

<66> Around this time, Duke began his alignment with the radical left. In 1930 (before Scottsboro) he played a dance sponsored by the Harlem Communist Party and the Liberator. In 1932 and 1935 he played benefits for the Scottsboro boys (Horne, Black Liberation 62). Duke kept these appearances fairly low-key, causing jazz critic John Hammond to assert that Duke "[kept] himself from thinking about such problems as those of the southern sharecroppers, the Scottsboro boys, etc ….He has never shown any desire of aligning himself with forces that are seeking to remove the causes of these disgraceful conditions" (Lawrence 248). Besides these appearances, Duke also began to take a more vocal stand in the cultural politics of jazz. Criticizing George Gershwin's famed musical Porgy and Bess, he angrily noted that it "did not use the Negro musical idiom" (Denning 310). Rumors circulated the jazz scene that Duke was planning to write an all black revue.

<67> Those plans eventually manifested themselves in the musical Jump for Joy. Duke described the show as "a form of theatrical propaganda…that would take Uncle Tom out of the theatre" (Ellington, Music is My Mistress 175). The show opened in the summer of 1941, and was an immediate hit among black audiences. It was organized as two acts, each featuring a dozen or so scenes. Sketches were added or cut throughout its 101 performances, but all were concerned with presenting a non-degrading picture of African American theater, something that was no mean feat in 1930s America. Despite the problems this posed, Duke and his collaborators accomplished their goal of avoiding "black humor performed by blacks for white audiences from a white point of view. Our material was from the point of view of black people looking at whites" (Lawrence 305). Duke would later remember the audience and its reaction: "It included the most celebrated Hollywoodians, middle-class ofays, the sweet-and-low scuffling-type Negroes, and dicty Negroes as well (doctors, lawyers, etc). The Negroes always left proudly, with their chests sticking out" (cited in Denning 315). The show had an impact on its performers as well. Duke forbade the use of burnt cork in his show, to deliberately disavow any trace of minstrelsy. Avanelle Lewis Harris, a cast member who had been working in theater since she was six, remembered Jump for Joy as "the most exciting experience of [her] life in the theatre" (Ellington, Music is My Mistress 176).

<68> In addition to producing Jump for Joy, Ellington also became deeply involved in Communist Ben Davis' campaign for New York City Council. Ellington joined a large group of jazz notables including Lena Horne, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald in expressing public support for Davis. In 1945 Ellington played fundraisers for Davis' re-election campaign. He and Davis were even close enough that Davis could "lend" Duke to the American Labor Party for a fundraiser (Horne 102, 108, 121, 155).

<69> Duke's activism in this era eventually began to run up against the repression of the Cold War. In 1949 Ben Davis was convicted of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government. Jump for Joy's producer, Hollywood radical Henry Blankfort, was blacklisted. The jazz Popular Front came under direct attack as agents threatened to cancel the contracts of Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman unless they "cut their ties to the left." Though Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker resisted the repression, playing at a Free Ben Davis event in 1952, it was clear that the jazz artists' politics of alignment would not survive McCarthyism (Denning 335).

<70> Duke, in particular, was clearly frightened by the implications of anticommunism's ascendancy. In 1950 he wrote an article for the liberal anti-Communist magazine New Leader disavowing his involvement in the Stockholm peace petition, which pushed for nuclear disarmament. The Daily Worker had printed his name as a signer of the petition, but Duke insisted he had never signed it. In his article, he asserted that "movements of a political nature … have never been a part of my life" and "I've never been interested in politics in my whole life." He downplayed the oppression blacks faced in America, insisting that "there is somebody in every country whom somebody else doesn't like." Duke even went so far as to say "I, personally, fare far better as a member of my minority than any member of any other minority I've ever seen in any country." When asked about his opinions about communism, Duke replied that "the only 'communism' I know of it [sic] that of Jesus Christ." [11] Many of these assertions are clearly distortions, if not outright lies. Given the omnipresence of repression, Duke felt he had to hide his earlier political associations (Ellington, "No Red Songs" 2-4).

<71> This becomes clear when Duke's later career is examined. Though he never returned to the kind of propagandistic theater of Jump For Joy, he would go on to continue to use his position for political purposes. In 1957, before embarking on a State Department tour similar to Dizzy Gillespie's, he commented that the prospects for U.S. victory in the space race were inhibited by racism. "America's inability to go far ahead or at least keep abreast of Russia in the race for space" he wrote, "can be traced directly to this racial problem." He attributed the USSR's victory in launching Sputnik to the fact that the Soviets "[don't] permit race prejudice … to interfere with scientific progress." While it was commonplace for Black liberals to point to the way American racism held the country back, Duke's praise of the Soviet Union was beyond the pale of official opinion. The burgeoning Southern freedom movement gave Duke a chance, in a way, to speak against himself and his New Leader article. Ellington was the proposed Secretary of State for perpetual gadfly Dizzy Gillespie's "Dizzy for President" campaign, which was based around world peace, disarmament (which Duke had once explicitly disavowed), and civil rights. As the freedom movement pushed the limits of acceptable discourse outward, Duke used them to express the politics he had previously repressed (see Von Eschen, chapter 5).

<72> Though Duke never went as far as "calling for Lenin and Trotsky" as Langston Hughes did, he nevertheless showed himself to be still aligned with sections of Popular Front politics after the repression of the Cold War softened. While McCarthyism may have destroyed the institutional foundations for race-conscious revues like Jump for Joy, Ellington displayed a remarkable sympathy to Popular Front politics 10 years after their decline. Other artists, pushed further by anticommunism, would commit themselves to a different politics entirely.

 

Ralph Ellison

<73> Most accounts of the Left during McCarthyism focus on the heroics of the few radicals who dared to stand up to the anticommunist hysteria. This is due in part to the fact that most scholars who write about such topics have a self-proclaimed "ideological orientation" towards Marxism (Smethurst 3) and as such tend to valorize those who resisted the chill wind of the times. Much of the literature produced by the revisionist scholars that extends beyond 1946 concentrates on the ways that the Leftist project continued to affect American culture even after its demise. This orientation has, unfortunately, tended to undervalue the importance of the failure of various cultural workers to resist McCarthyism. Though the tendency of the mainstream canon to marginalize radical texts has created a historiographical void that the revisionist historians have done an excellent job filling, the discontinuities of the Left in the post-WWII period are at least as important as its continuities in explaining the shape and course of twentieth century American culture.

<74> No writer exemplifies these discontinuities like Ralph Ellison. A regular in the Harlem Popular Front scene of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ellison would go on to write the novel Invisible Man. One of the high-water marks of American modernism, Invisible Man won the National Book Award and turned Ellison into a literary celebrity. Despite Ellison's earlier radical fraternizing, the novel includes a relentless anticommunist logic, using sophisticated symbolism to lump white Communists, Black "Uncle Tom" figures, and white racists all together. Ellison's transition from Popular Front literary figure to national anticommunist would have been impossible without the interactions of both the repressive and ideological machinery of McCarthyism.

<75> Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1913. He enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute, the vocational college for African-Americans, in 1933 to study music. Financial difficulties forced Ellison to leave school without a degree, and he moved to New York City in 1936. His second day in Harlem, he was introduced to Langston Hughes, who became a guiding figure to the young artist. As detailed above, Hughes was intimately involved with the New York Popular Front milieu, and he took an active interest in acquainting Ellison with Leftist thought and activity. From the older poet Ellison received Marxist intellectual John Strachey's "Literature and Dialectical Materialism" and texts by French writer André Malraux. Ellison was entranced with the new critical perspectives with which he was being provided, and eagerly asked Hughes to send more. By the spring of 1937, he was a regular reader of New Masses, the Communist Party's cultural journal (Jackson 161-178).

<76> In the summer of that year, Ellison received a postcard from Richard Wright saying, "Langston Hughes tells me that you'd like to meet me." Having come across Wright's poem "Between the World and Me" in a 1935 Partisan Review, Ellison jumped at the chance to meet the most respected figure in Black radical writing. Wright was even closer to the CP than Hughes, and as Harlem Bureau editor for the Daily Worker he was a well-known and important figure in the Communist hierarchy. Wright even managed to secure Ellison a job at Federal Writers Project (FWP) in New York City. Through his associations with Hughes and Wright, he began to evince an ideological alignment with Communism. Ellison was glad that he secured employment "owing in part to his friend's Communist beliefs." He was "frustrated" with his friend Langston Hughes' playful references to the shortcomings of the Left, and looking for an opportunity to deploy his sharpening critical tools (Jackson, chapters 7-8).

<77> It was through his writing, however, that Ellison forged a true intellectual commitment to Communism. His writings from the Federal Writers Project, for example, show an extremely high level of agreement with the "Communist line" on various issues. A piece about an 18th century black uprising in New York made explicit comparisons to the mobilizations around the Scottsboro trial and emphasizes the interracial character of the insurrection. In an article on Carter G. Woodson's The Beginning of Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks, Ellison talked about the "community of interests" shared by black slaves and indentured servants in early America in ways nearly indistinguishable from contemporary journals of socialist theory (cited in Foley "Journalist" 542) [12]. As Ellison's superiors at the FWP were not communists, he was not pressured from above to provide Marxist analyses. Furthermore, he was not a Party member, and thus not subject to any kind of party discipline that may have compelled him to write from the communist viewpoint. The most logical explanation for Ellison's Marxist analyses is that they were what he really believed.

<78> Even when applying Marxism to culture (an endeavor declared impossible by many of those who would form the intellectual community that embraced Invisible Man) as a reviewer for New Masses, Ellison displayed a nuanced understanding of his critical framework. In a 1940 review, for example, he praised author Len Zinberg for demonstrating "how far a writer … is able to go with a Marxist understanding of the economic basis of Negro personality." In 1941 Ellison criticized the radical writer William Attaway's novelistic portrayal of Black migration. By only presenting the way the economy of the South limited the terms of Black opposition and not illustrating how the industrialized North allowed for a great level of working-class activity, Attaway presented an "incomplete" picture of Black America. In the area where Marxism was later thought to be the most inappropriate, Ellison using it to develop a theory of literature that profoundly challenged Black writers (cited in Foley 543-545).

<79> Lastly, Ellison's articles from the late 1930s and early 1940s also show a high level of agreement with the Communist perspective on domestic and international affairs. In 1939, at the height of the Popular Front, Ellison wrote an article praising leaders like Walter White and A. Phillip Randolph, black activists who were considered contemptible by Communists only four years earlier. He even went so far as to praise America as "the greatest of Democracies!" After Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact, Ellison radically shifted his views, condemning the New Deal Farm Security Agency for being a tool of "merchants and large landowners." His literary reviews of the time also display this about face, with Ellison (rather awkwardly) inserting references to imperialism and class exploitation. In 1942, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Ellison switched lines once again, writing an article acknowledging Blacks frustrations with Roosevelt, but maintaining that backing the President was the best way forward. This "soft-peddling" of racial issues was one of the Communist Party lines that Ellison often cited when explaining his novel's anticommunism (545-549). It's worth emphasizing again that during this period Ellison was not a party member. In interviews conducted after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison said that he had written "propaganda," but never indicated that he was in any way pressured or coerced into doing so. Had there been any censorship or revision of his articles, it would have been a prime opportunity for him to once again point out the totalitarianism of the Communists. The lack of any discernable evidence for publishing party-line pieces, other than his own belief in them, indicates a conscious commitment to the politics of the Communist Party.

<80> The mediating force that transformed this party-line journalist into an anticommunist intellectual was McCarthyism. Through the destruction of the institutions that provided Ellison with the institutional support to write radical criticism and the replacement of such institutions with resolutely anticommunist ones, the US state profoundly altered the politics and poetics of one of the twentieth century's finest writers.

<81> The change that took place in Ellison's thinking can be seen in the revisions he made to the drafts of Invisible Man. Begun in 1945, Invisible Man started out as a novel in which the protagonist's experience with "The Brotherhood" (Ellison's mimetic stand-in for the Communist Party) was quite positive. For example, instead of castigating the invisible man for his speech in the arena, Brother Jack takes him out for a beer. Ellison portrays the Harlem Brotherhood in a dialectical relationship with Black expressive culture. Brotherhood members rewrite Black church hymns with revolutionary lyrics, and Black youth take up Brotherhood chant rhythms to play the dozens. One Harlemite comments that "these here fays don't act like ofays, they act like people!" The early drafts of the novel indicate "considerable admiration for various facets of the Communist activity in Harlem" (Foley, "Drafts" 166-67, 169).

<82> Though Ellison began Invisible Man before he was fully disengaged from the Left, there nonetheless exists evidence that it took more than simple disillusionment with the Communist Party to cause Ellison's revision. Lawrence Jackson, Ellison's primary biographer, notes that the "crushing blow to the relationship between Ellison and the literary Left" came in December of 1946; his process of disillusionment had begun well before this (Jackson 347). However, Ellison did not begin to insert the anticommunist symbolism into the novel until well after this. Barbara Foley, one of the first scholars to obtain access to the recently opened Ellison Papers, has observed that "Ellison changed his mind, and his text, only gradually" ("Drafts" 179). The first section of the novel was published in 1947, indicating that it was that section – which does not involve the Brotherhood – that received the majority of the revisions made in that period. The view that Ellison's disillusionment with the Left was the sole motor force behind the novel's anticommunism fails to explain why he did not begin constructing such symbolism sooner.

<83> The actual force that prompted him to abandon any favorable portrayal of the US Left was the ascendancy of the New Critical Consensus detailed above. Daniel Bell, one of the more conservative New York Intellectuals, declared Ellison to be a cousin to his intellectual family. Thomas Schaub has noted this confluence of opinion as well, observing that "Ellison's experience was not unlike that of [New York Intellectuals] Rahv, Trilling, and Chase; like them, he understood political literature to be a form of propaganda, while "art" – being faithful to the ironic complexities of experience – was inherently anti-ideological" (Schaub 95) [13]. Looking at Invisible Man, it is easy to see the ways in which it conformed to the aesthetic requirements of the New Critical Consensus. It was formally complex, with multiple layers of meaning. The novel's hero ends by going underground, an apolitical action keeping with the New Critics' love of protagonist ambivalence. Most importantly of all, it was venomously anticommunist.

<84> The ascendancy of the New Critical Consensus provides the explanation for how and why Ellison modified his drafts to create such a novel so strongly antipathetic to the Left. As noted earlier, one of the primary sites where Ellison both wrote and read Communist criticism was New Masses. At its height, the journal was selling 25,000 copies a week, more than the New Republic and The Nation combined. In 1946, New Masses lost two of its central editors, who were accused of "ultra-leftism" by a party in crisis. Faced with a membership under attack and thus less likely to buy Communist periodicals, the CP clearly anticipated the journal's demise. As such, it launched a literary quarterly, Mainstream, designed to (hopefully) take the place of the struggling journal. Mainstream lasted only four issues, its editor resigning his university position in anticipation of an anticommunist purge. In 1948, due to declining revenues, the Party combined the two journals into the monthly Masses & Mainstream (Wald Writing 89-90; Exiles 108). The financial and legal troubles of the Party during this time rendered their opinions on cultural matters more vulnerable than anytime since the Hitler-Stalin pact, forcing Ellison to begin to look elsewhere for support.

<85> During the same time period (1946, to be exact), Partisan Review, the journal of the New York Intellectuals, reached a circulation of 6,000 an issue. Without a subsidy from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division, which had recently decided to promote the critics who would become dominant during McCarthyism, the journal would have gone under. In response to this subsidy, the editors of Partisan Review "carefully crafted" their writings "to conform to the Foundation's new interest in American literary culture." As the representative of one of America's robber baron dynasties, the Foundation represented a wing of American capital intent on retaking the cultural front (Schwartz 114, 117).

<86> Ellison's own anticommunist revision maps nearly directly onto the ascendance of the New Critical Consensus. [14] Viewed in the context of ideological and state apparatuses, his delay in revising the novel makes sense as it only took place once the language (formal symbolism) and the content (anticommunism) had gained a broad audience through the destruction of the Popular Front institutions. Without contextualizing Ellison so, his long revisions seem strange: one would think his disillusionment would cause him to make the novel all the more anticommunist as soon as possible. With the context of anticommunism, however, Ellison's novel fits in perfectly with the victory of the New Critical Consensus.

<87> Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Ralph Ellison all reacted quite differently to the anticommunist movement's victory. Their careers are tied together, however, by a shared indecipherability when McCarthyism is not considered. They are also all linked by their prominent positions in the history of twentieth century black expressive culture. As ancestors of contemporary cultural production, their engagement with anticommunism profoundly shaped the course of development in each of their respective fields.

Conclusion

<88> Dizzy Gillespie's transformation from "card-carrying" communist to State Department spokesman is in many ways representative of the larger Black Popular Front. Though many remained committed to some form of communism, all were profoundly changed by the onset of McCarthyism. Whether it affected their possible venues for resistance or utterly reshaped their value system, McCarthyism represented a qualitative change in American cultural politics.

<89> It is a change, unfortunately, the magnitude of which has been under appreciated in most scholarship around the Black Popular Front. Historians all too often theorize the movement as dead well before its participants so thought of it. Those with a broader eye have, in lionizing those who resisted, assumed a much higher level of theorizing on the discontinuities that McCarthyism caused than actually exists. Without a firm grasp of the ways anticommunism changed the Black Popular Front, it is much harder to see the ways it didn't.

<90> Furthermore, the careers of the various figures who constituted the Black Popular Front cannot be properly reconstructed without viewing McCarthyism as a shaping force. The implications, for example, of Ralph Ellison's departure from the Left are of interest to more than merely those who wish to study American radicalism. Given the stature of Invisible Man in American letters, they are of consequence to the history of twentieth century literature. This essay has examined only three of the multitude of cultural workers who made up the historic bloc of the Old Left. The scale of involvement of artists in this movement gives an indication of the amount of research that remains to be done on McCarthyism and culture workers. Only by putting the Left at the center of these investigations will we ever be able to uncover the actual extent of McCarthyism's damage to American culture.

Works Cited

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Notes

[1] I use the term “anticommunist” in the same sense that Joel Kovel has outlined. Communist with an uppercase “C” refers to those bodies officially associated with the Bolshevik Party, while communist with a lowercase “c” refers to “whatever inherently belongs to the ideal form of the doctrine” of a classless society. Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, xii. [^]

[2] The Black Belt theory held that Blacks in America constituted an oppressed separate nation and as such deserved the right to self-determination in establishing their own sovereign country. See Naison, pp. 17-18. [^]

[3] While Williams speaks only of writing, his analysis can be extended to the range of artists such as musicians covered within this study. [^]

[4] For an account of how Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr were to themselves deal with rediscovering the language of class, see James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, chapter 10. [^]

[5] One may note here that newspapers are not a state apparatus. Althusser’s terminology tends to submerge all ideological institutions (such as churches) under the broad rubric of the state. While such reckless inclusion is problematic, it is easily severable from the larger analyses of how a class retains hegemony. [^]

[6] Hoover’s book Masters of Deceit is his main effort in this arena. [^]

[7] Martin Dies’ book, The Trojan Horse, spent 303 pages discussing communism, while only 41 on fascism (Caute 88). [^]

[8] Government anticommunist committees sprung up so rapidly in this period that there developed a rivalry between them for both personnel and media coverage. [^]

[9] This failure is also evident in the apparent falsehood of many of the committee’s claims. Witnesses from Senate investigations openly recanted their former testimony, and cases were eventually dropped. Caute 108-108, Schrecker 250-252. [^]

[10] Goodman was such an ardent supporter of civil rights that he once threatened to beat a drunk with a clarinet for calling one of his band members a racial epithet. Smith, Martin John Coltrane, p.27. [^]

[11] This reference to Jesus Christ’s communism may well have been a form of what in African American traditions is called masking. Robin Kelley, in Hammer and Hoe, noted the central role religion played in the lives of Southern black communists, and it is possible that Ellington was referring to something similar. [^]

[12] See especially Lance Selfa, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism.” [^]

[13] I am not implying here that the US undertook its attack on the Left with the goal of influencing Ralph Ellison, but rather that his ideological shift is inexplicable without the context of state action. [^]

[14] The irony here being, of course (as Schaub notes) that neither Ellison’s art nor the writing praised by the New York Intellectuals was anti-ideological: it was rigidly anticommunist. [^]

 

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