On two strikingly
parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.
As I mentioned
in Monday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonism
toward communism there have been both moments and communities in which the
political philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s,
two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohort
of writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Depression’s
heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to
highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked
capitalism; and those economic woes, coupled with the continued destructive
forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal ills and threats, led many
African Americans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant American
systems.
Those responses
happened within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by
two individuals, writers whose most significant novels bookend the 1930s in
American literature and culture. John Dos Passos had been publishing fiction
since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy that came to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both his
stylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wright
launched his career with the short story collection Uncle
Tom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere two
years later with Native
Son (1940), a novel that features both one of American literature’s
most eloquent defenders of communism (in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist
Bigger Thomas) whose tragic and brutal arc makes numerous, ineloquent but
compelling arguments for the philosophy.
In the 1940s to
50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the Communist
Party: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be a
Communist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of public
statements and positions that culminated in his qualified support
for Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also argue
that their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and national
narratives: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the Cold
War, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives;
whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and he
came instead to see, as does for example Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeed
failed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such a
distinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a newgeneration of African American activists found anew a compelling alternative in
American socialism.
Next Communist
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think?
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