[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]
On two
strikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.
As I mentioned
in yesterday’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 Great Depression’s
heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to
highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked
capitalism, leading a number
of American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative social
and communal ways of living; 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 (and thus differed) 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), the best-selling and hugely controversial 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, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless 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 new
generation of African American activists found anew a compelling
alternative in American socialism.
Next cultural
communism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?
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