American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 9781107143319, 9781316534434

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A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E I N T R A N S I T I O N , 1940–1950

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, and in U.S. popular memory, World War II is remembered more vividly than the American Revolution. American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 provides crucial contexts for interpreting the literature of this period. Contributions from scholars in literature, history, art history, ethnic studies, and American studies show how writers intervened in the global struggles of the decade: World War II; the Cold War; and emerging movements over racial justice, gender and sexuality, labor, and decolonization. One recurrent motif is the centrality of the political impulse in art and culture. Artists and writers participated widely in left and liberal social movements that fundamentally transformed the terms of social life in the twentieth century, not by advocating specific legislation but by changing underlying cultural values. This book addresses all the political impulses fueling art and literature at the time, as well as the development of new forms and media, from modernism and noir to radio and the paperback. christopher vials is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he also serves as director of American Studies. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014), for which he was recently interviewed on NPR and CBC Radio. He is also the author of Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture 1935–1947 (2009), and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Criticism, Science and Society, and other venues.

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a m e r i c a n l i t e r at u re i n t r a n s i t i o n American Literature in Transition captures the dynamic energies transmitted across the 20th- and 21st-century American literary landscapes. Revisionary and authoritative, the series offers a comprehensive new overview of the established literary landmarks that constitute American literary life. Ambitious in scope and depth, and accommodating new critical perspectives and approaches, this series captures the dynamic energies and ongoing change in 20th- and 21st-century American literature. These are decades of transition, but also periods of epochal upheaval. These decades – the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the sixties, 9/11 – are turning points of real significance. But in a tumultuous century, these terms can mask deeper structural changes. Each one of these books challenges in different ways the dominant approaches to a period of literature by shifting the focus from what happened to understanding how and why it happened. They elucidate the multifaceted interaction between the social and literary fields and capture that era’s place in the incremental evolution of American literature up to the present moment. Taken together, this series of books constitutes a new kind of literary history in a century of intense cultural and literary creation, a century of liberation and also of immense destruction too. As a revisionary project grounded in pre-existing debates, American Literature in Transition offers an unprecedented analysis of the American literary experience. Books in the series American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 edited by m ark w. van wienen American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 edited by ichiro tak ayoshi American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 edited by ichiro tak ayoshi American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 edited by christopher vials American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 edited by st even b ellet to American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970 edited by david wyat t American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 edited by k i rk c u r n u t t American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 edited by d. qu entin m iller American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 edited by st ephen j . bu rn American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 edited by rachel greenwald smith

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AM E RI CA N L I TE R AT U R E IN TRA NS I T ION, 1 9 40–1 9 50 edited by CHRISTOPHER VIALS University of Connecticut

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107143319 doi: 10.1017/9781316534434  C Cambridge University Press 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-1-107-14331-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Chronology

page viii ix xiv xv

Introduction: A Decade in Transition

1

pa rt i t h e u n i t e d s tat e s i n t h e wo r l d 1 Why We Fight: Contending Narratives of World War II

13

Christopher Vials

2 Human Rights in American Political Discourse

29

Glenn Mitoma

3 Fictions of Anti-Semitism and the Beginning of Holocaust Literature

44

Josh Lambert

4 The Fatal Machine: The Postwar Imperial State and the Radical Novel

59

Benjamin Balthaser

5 Antifascism as a Political Grammar and Cultural Force

73

Christopher Vials

6 From Confession to Exposure: Transitions in 1940s Anticommunist Literature

89

Alex Goodall

7 The Contested Origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War Christian G. Appy v

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107

Contents

vi part ii em ergent publics

8 Crosscurrents: World War II and the Increasing Visibility of Race

129

Bill V. Mullen

9 Good Asian/Bad Asian: Asian American Racial Formation

144

Floyd Cheung

10 Social Realism, the Ghetto, and African American Literature

161

James Smethurst

11 From Factory to Home? The Crisis in the Gendered Division of Labor

178

Julia L. Mickenberg

12 Public Excursions in Fierce Truth-Telling: Literary Cultures and Homosexuality

193

Aaron Lecklider

13 Resurgence: Conservatives Organize against the New Deal

212

Kathryn S. Olmsted

part iii m edia and genre 14 Late Modernisms, Latent Realisms: The Politics of Literary Interpretation

229

Sarah Ehlers

15 Naked Cities: The Literature of Urban Renewal

246

Sean McCann

16 Noir and the Ebb of Radical Hope

262

Alan Wald

17 Narrating the War

278

Philip Beidler

18 Paperbacks and the Literary Marketplace

291

Erin A. Smith

19 Literary Radicals in Radio’s Public Sphere Judith E. Smith

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309

Contents 20 The State Cultural Apparatus: Federal Funding of Arts and Letters

vii 334

A. Joan Saab

Index

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349

Illustrations

1 Miné Okubo, eating lunch while awaiting departure inside the Civil Control Station, Berkeley, California, 1942 page 150 2 Still from the film, Naked City (1948) 248 3 Esther Bubley, Sailors Boarding the Bus (1943) 343

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Contributors

christian appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he recently received the Chancellor’s Medal and the Distinguished Teaching Award. He is the author of American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015), Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (2003), and WorkingClass War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (1993). He is currently working on a book about the impact of nuclear weapons on American political culture since World War II. benjamin balthaser is Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic US Literature, Post 1900, at Indiana University-South Bend. His recent book, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (2015), explores connections between cross-border, anti-imperialist movements and the making of modernist culture at mid-century. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals or collections such as American Quarterly, Boston Review, Jacobin, Criticism, and The Oxford History of the Novel in English. He is currently working on a manuscript project titled Dialectics of Race: Modernism and the Search for a Racial Subject. philip beidler is the Margaret and William Going Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he has taught American literature since receiving his PhD from the University of Virginia in 1974. An armored cavalry veteran of the Vietnam War, his books include The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering, Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation, and Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam. His most recent books are The Victory Album: Reflections on the Good Life after the Good War; The Island Called Paradise: Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts; and Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination. ix

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List of Contributors

floyd cheung is Professor of English language and literature and of American studies at Smith College. He helped found the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program in 2001. His scholarly work focuses on the recovery of lesser-known early Asian American literature, including a new edition of H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands (2016) and Sadakichi Hartmann: Collected Poems, 1886–1944 (2016). With Keith Lawrence, he coedited and contributed to Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (2005). sarah ehlers is an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston. Her first book, Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics, excavates radical Depression-era poetry and criticism in order to rethink scholarly discourses about poetics. Her articles on modern and contemporary poetry have appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Modern Language Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Mosaic, and Lineages of the Literary Left. alex goodall is a senior lecturer in history at University College London. He works on the history of radicalism and antiradicalism in the United States and beyond, particularly in the years prior to the McCarthy era. He is the author of Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War One to the McCarthy Era (2013) and of a series of articles on American anticommunism published in the Historical Journal, Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of American Studies, and several edited collections. josh lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), which won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and American Jewish Fiction (2009). His reviews and essays have appeared in several publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Haaretz, and the Forward. aaron lecklider is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture (2013) and the forthcoming Love’s Next Meeting: Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture. sean mccann is Professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential

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List of Contributors

xi

Government (2008) and Gumshoe America: Hard-boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000). julia l. mickenberg is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (2017) and Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006), as well as co-editor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature and The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. She has also published articles in American Literary History, American Quarterly, and the Journal of American History. glenn mitoma is an assistant professor of human rights and education at the University of Connecticut, jointly appointed with the Human Rights Institute and the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and is director of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. His work appears in Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and History. His first book, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power, examines the mid-twentieth century ascendancies of the United States as the preeminent global power and human rights as the most compelling global ethic. bill v. mullen is a professor of American studies at Purdue University. He is the author of Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (2015); Afro-Orientalism (2004), and Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (1999). He is a member of the organizing collective of the United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He is also co-editor, with Ashley Dawson, of Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (2015) and is currently at work on a biography of James Baldwin. kathryn s. olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of four books: Right out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (2015), Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (2009), Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (2002), and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (1996). a. joan saab is Susan B. Anthony Professor and Chair of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester. Her first book, For the Millions:

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List of Contributors

xii

American Art and Culture between the Wars (2004, 2nd ed. 2009) was the inaugural volume in the “Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America” series. She has just completed a born-digital “book” titled Searching for Siqueiros on the digital publishing platform Scalar and is currently writing the volume on visual culture for a series on sensory history titled, Making Sense of What We See; she is also editing the Companion to Visual Culture. Her next project is tentatively titled, Tales From the Crypt: Vincent Price and American Art. james smethurst is a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), and The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (1999). He also co-edited Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States (2003), Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (2006), and SOS – Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014). erin a. smith is Professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American literatures and cultures and gender studies. She is the author of What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America (2015), Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (2000), and numerous articles on American popular books and reading. Her research has been supported by fellowships and stipends from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Louisville Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. judith e. smith is Professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her writing on postwar film, stage, radio and television have appeared in various published essays and in Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940– 1960 (2004). Her recent book Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (2014), explores Belafonte’s leading man performance on multiple stages – in nightclubs and concert halls, on Broadway, in television and film production, and at civil rights and peace demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s. An essay on the 1964 film, Nothing but a Man, in The Poetics and Politics of Black Film: Nothing but a Man (2015) is part of the research for her new project, provisionally titled “Alternative

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List of Contributors

xiii

Freedom Dreams: Black Arts Radicals Represent Multi-Racial Citizenship, 1945–1970.” christopher vials is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he also serves as director of American studies. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2015) and Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935–1947 (2009). With co-editor Bill Mullen, he is now at work on The US Antifascism Reader and on a third monograph on the fraying appeal of neoliberal temporality in US culture. alan wald is H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus in English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the author of a trilogy about the US literary left, and the thirtiethanniversary edition of his The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left is to be published in late 2017.

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Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank Ray Ryan and Edgar Mendez at Cambridge University Press for all their support and guidance through this whole process. I also owe a singular debt of gratitude to my colleague Clare Eby at the University of Connecticut for her trust and generosity. I would also like to thank the contributors to this collection for agreeing to share such fine work: Christian Appy, Benjamin Balthaser, Philip Beidler, Floyd Cheung, Sarah Ehlers, Alex Goodall, Josh Lambert, Aaron Lecklider, Sean McCann, Julia L. Mickenberg, Glenn Mitoma, Bill Mullen, Kathy Olmstead, Joan Saab, James Smethurst, Erin Smith, Judith Smith, and Alan Wald. I would also like to thank Benjamin Balthaser and the American studies Writing Group at the University of Connecticut for reading a draft of Chapter 1. For laying the foundations for so much of the analysis found in these pages, I thank Michael Denning, Barbara Foley, Paula Rabinowitz, and Alan Wald. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Cathy SchlundVials – my best editor, finest colleague, and most patient supporter.

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Chronology

1939 September 1

Germany invades Poland, triggering World War II in Europe

1940 May 10 June 22

July 10 September 22 October 16

November 5 Publications of 1940

Germany launches Blitzkrieg against Western Europe Fall of France; France signs armistice in which the northern part of the country is under direct Nazi occupation, while a collaborationist regime is established in southern France with its capital in Vichy German air assault on Britain begins Japan invades French Indochina Roosevelt signs the Selective Service and Training Act, requiring all male citizens aged twenty-six to thirty-five to register for the military draft Roosevelt elected to third term, defeating Wendell Willkie Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon; Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Richard Wright, Native Son

1941 January 6

Roosevelt outlines the “Four Freedoms” in his State of the Union address xv

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xvi March 11 June 25

July 22 July 26 August 14

August 28

December 6 December 7–8

December 11 December 24

Publications of 1941

Chronology Lend-Lease Act signed into law, marking a major step in US intervention on the side of the Allies In response to March on Washington Movement, Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to prevent racial discrimination in defense industry; first federal step toward civil rights since Reconstruction Germany and Axis partners invade the Soviet Union in “Operation Barbarossa”; Germany now fighting a two-front war United States finally embargoes gas, oil, and metal shipments to Japan, four years after its great push into mainland China Roosevelt and Churchill release the Atlantic Charter, a policy statement outlining goals for a postwar order; becomes the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations Office of Price Administration (OPA) created by Executive Order 8875; imposes price controls to control inflation, marking a significant expansion of New Deal economics Soviet counteroffensive finally halts German advance, outside Moscow Japan bombs Pearl Harbor; the following day, the United States declares war on Japan, and Japan begins its invasion of the Philippines United States declares war on Germany and Italy Roosevelt announces a “no strike pledge” brokered with the AFL and the CIO for the duration of the war; periodic “wildcat strikes” continue, however, and union membership increases during the conflict Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine; William Shirer, Berlin Diary; Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices

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Chronology

xvii

1942 January 1–2 January 20 February 19

May 8 June July 13 August 4 November 3

November 8 Publications of 1942

Declaration of the United Nations: treaty of twenty-two nations allied against the Axis powers Nazis convene Wannsee Conference to plan a European-wide “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066, authorizing the deportation and forced incarceration of Japanese Americans; War Relocation Authority is created the following month to administer the camps Final surrender of US forces in the Philippines to Japan First large-scale gas chamber in operation at Auschwitz-Birkenau Roosevelt creates the Office of War Information Federal government creates the “Bracero program,” a coordinated system for Mexican “guest workers” in the United States Midterm elections give conservative coalition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans control over both houses of Congress; concerns about the war and FDR fatigue are the conventional explanations for their victory. US and British troops begin Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning; Pearl Buck, Dragon Seed; Vera Caspary, Laura; William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down; José Garcia Villa, Have Come, Am Here; Margaret Walker, For My People

1943 February 2

German troops surrender at Stalingrad; generally regarded as the turning point of the war in Europe

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xviii April June 3

June 20 July 10 September

September 13 December 17 Publications of 1943

Chronology Warsaw Ghetto Uprising So-called Zoot Suit riots begin in Los Angeles; white mobs assault Mexican and Mexican American youth in the streets, injuring more than 150 people “Race riots” begin in Detroit; 34 people killed and 433 wounded, overwhelmingly black US and British troops land in Sicily, beginning the Italian campaign First Armed Services Edition (ASE) book series printed; by the end of the war, more than 122 million ASE books were distributed to servicemen and women Tule Lake internment camp begins to be realigned as a camp for “dissenters” Chinese Exclusion Act repealed T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; Elizabeth Hawes, Why Women Cry: Or, Wenches with Wrenches; Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Anna Louise Strong, Wild River; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary; Wendell Willkie, One World

1944 June 6 June 22

June 22

October 20 November 7

Operation Overlord: US, British, and Canadian troops land in Normandy and begin to retake Western Europe Soviets launch Operation Bagration, a major offensive in the East to retake Belarus; operation is comparable in scale to the Normandy invasion G.I. Bill signed by Roosevelt provides low-interest loans for housing and free tuition for veterans; massively expands higher education system in the United States US troops land in the Philippines Roosevelt elected for fourth term, defeating Thomas E. Dewey; liberal Democrats expand

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Chronology

December 18 Publications of 1944

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gains in House of Representatives, reflecting happiness over the course of the war Supreme Court decides Korematsu v. United States, ruling that the Japanese American interment did not violate the Constitution John Hersey, A Bell for Adano; Margaret Landon, Anna and the King of Siam; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma; Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit; Carlos Bulosan, Laugher of My Father

1945 January 12 January 27 February 4 February 23 March 7 April 12 April 29 May 7–9 June 26 August 6 and 8 August 15 September 2 October 15–21

Soviet Union launches new offensive, capturing Poland in January and Budapest the following month Red Army liberates Auschwitz-Birkenau Yalta Conference: Allied leaders meet to outline the postwar occupation of Germany and prosecution of war criminals US forces retake Manila US troops cross Rhine and enter Germany Franklin Roosevelt suddenly dies at Warm Spring, Georgia; Harry S. Truman sworn in as president US troops liberate Dachau Germany surrenders; victory in Europe Representatives of fifty nations meet in San Francisco to draw up the United Nations Charter United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively Japan announces its surrender, ending World War II; US occupation begins in earnest the following month Ho Chi Minh declares the independence of Vietnam from France Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England; largely viewed as the most important of these congresses, because it

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xx

October 24

November 19 Publications of 1945

Chronology brought together black leaders from across the globe to chart the course of anticolonial struggle in the years to come United Nations officially comes into existence as Charter is ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States; the same day, Syria wins independence from France Trials of the International Military Tribunal begin in Nuremberg to prosecute the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville; Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go; Arthur Miller, Focus; Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos; Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie; Weegee, Naked City; Richard Wright, Black Boy

1946 January 17 February 22

April 29 July 2

July 4 October 1 November 5

First meeting of the United Nations Security Council, in London George Kennan sends his famous “Long Telegram” to the US State Department, helping consolidate the emergent US policy toward the Soviet Union Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convenes Luce-Celler Act allows Filipinos and Asian Indians to become naturalized US citizens; also sets an immigration quota of 100 Filipinos and 100 Indians per year Treaty of Manila: United States recognizes independence of the Philippines Trials of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg are completed; twelve defendants sentenced to death by hanging Midterm elections: Republicans become a majority in the US House of Representatives for the first time since 1930

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Chronology Novels of 1946

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Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart; Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock; John Hersey, Hiroshima; Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding; Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660; Ann Petry, The Street; Jo Sinclair, Wasteland; Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

1947 March 12 March 21 April 3

May 29 June 23

July 18 October 20 November 24 Publications of 1947

Truman issues his “Truman Doctrine” speech to Congress, firmly signaling a foreign policy course against communism globally Truman issues Executive Order 9835, known as the “Loyalty Order,” to root out communist influence in the federal government US Attorney General’s Office publishes its “List of Subversive Organizations,” which includes many antifascist and civil rights organizations of the 1930s OPA formally abolished, despite significant protests to maintain it Taft-Hartley Act enacted over Truman’s veto, which allowed states to opt out of the National Labor Relations Act of 1936 and become “right to work” states; significant rollback of the New Deal, passed after a two-year postwar strike wave Britain recognizes independence of British India and partitions it into the states of India and Pakistan House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) begins hearings on communist influence in the motion picture industry US House of Representatives cites “the Hollywood Ten” with contempt of Congress; they are each sentenced to a year in prison Saul Bellow, The Victim; John Horne Burns, The Gallery; Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade; Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano; James

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Chronology Michener, Tales of the South Pacific; Arthur Miller, All My Sons; Willard Motley, Knock on Any Door; Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

1948 Final issue of The New Masses, the cultural magazine of the Communist Party USA May 14 State of Israel established July 26 Truman issues Executive Order 9981, ending formal segregation in the military August 17 / September 9 South Korea and North Korea established as per a UN agreement dividing the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel November 2 Truman defeats Thomas Dewey in upset victory; Democrats take control of both houses of Congress after much of the public finds the Republican rollbacks of the New Deal detrimental; except for a brief interlude in 1952–1954, Democrats continue to control Congress until 1980 November 12 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal adjourns; six high-ranking figures in the Japanese military and government sentenced to death December 10 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly Publications of 1948 William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; Alfred Kinsey, Sexuality and the Human Male; Norman Mailer, Naked and the Dead; Irwin Shaw, Young Lions January 13

1949 January 20 May 23

Truman inaugurated president for second term Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) created, ending the period of military occupation by Western allies

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Chronology August 29 October 1 October 7 December 27 Publications of 1949

xxiii

First successful Soviet atomic test Mao Zedong declares the creation of the People’s Republic of China German Democratic Republic (East Germany) created Holland finally recognizes Indonesian independence after four-year national liberation struggle Nelson Algren, Man with the Golden Arm; Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen; Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed: A Confession; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; Toshio Mori, Yokohama, California; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; William Carlos Williams, Patterson

1950 February 9

April 14 June 27 September 15 November 11 Publications of 1950

Joseph McCarthy gives his speech on communist infiltration in Wheeling, West Virginia, catapulting him to the national stage as leading red-hunter in the United States National Security Council policy paper NSC-68 presented to Truman; outlines blueprint for military-industrial complex UN Security Council passes resolution calling on all members to help repel invasion of South Korea by North Korea Amphibious landing at Inchon, the first major engagement of US troops in the Korean War First meeting of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1950)

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Introduction A Decade in Transition

On May 8, 1945, at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time, CBS radio aired a radio poem by Norman Corwin to mark the surrender of Nazi Germany earlier that day. Titled “On a Note of Triumph,” it was a full hour in length, read by a narrator (Martin Gable) whose voice threaded lines of verse between musical numbers, studio sound effects, a score by Bernard Herrmann, and an ensemble of other voices representing the common people. Labeled “the most important broadcast of 1945” by a national poll of radio editors,1 it began this way: So they’ve given up. They’re finally done in and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse. Take a bow, GI. Take a bow, little guy. The superman of tomorrow lies dead at the feet of you common men of this afternoon . . . All the way from Newburyport to Vladivostok, you had what it took and you gave it, and each of you has a hunk of rainbow round your helmet. It seems like free men have done it again!

The formal qualities of “On a Note of Triumph” bear witness to a host of forgotten turns in US culture at the very center of this critical decade. Its status as a “radio poem,” a genre popularized by Corwin, Orson Welles, and others through shows like The Columbia Workshop and Mercury Theatre on the Air, speaks to the cultural possibilities for a democratic art that had been opened, in part, by new mass media of the era. Equally significant was Corwin’s self-conscious inspiration from Walt Whitman. The poem’s exaltation of “the common men of this afternoon,” in unadorned lines of verse accessible to a mass audience, indexes a populist aesthetic that formed the “other” of the New Criticism, the bedrock of twentieth-century English departments in the United States, which was emergent in this same decade. Fueled by the New Criticism, several generations of scholars would disavow the aesthetic of “On a Note of Triumph” in favor of the high modernist project embodied, in the United States, by figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. 1

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Introduction

The form and content of “On a Note of Triumph” also signal a political phenomenon far more visible in the public sphere of the 1940s than high modernist poetics. I refer here to the politics of the “Popular Front,” Michael Denning’s shorthand for the left-oriented political mass movements of the era.2 In line with these politics, Corwin’s work carried an internationalism that was quite popular at the time: his prototypical GI hails “from Newburyport to Vladivostok” and later in the broadcast identifies himself as “a private first class in the army of one of the United Nations.” Moreover, the final part of the piece was didactically structured around “the lessons” that the listeners were to have learned from the war. As was typical of Popular Front sensibilities, these lessons required a leveling of the social hierarchies that the fascists had sought to etch in stone. For example, various voices shout, “We’ve learned that women can work and fight as well as look pretty and cook!,” “We’ve learned that the Cassandra and the Jew were right, and that the Cliveden set [pro-German aristocrats] was wrong,” and “We’ve learned that those more concerned with saving the world from communism usually turn out making it safer for fascism!”3 However, to contemporary listeners cognizant of the imminent Cold War, some of the “lessons” ring with a more imperious tone too. One American voice shouts, “We’ve learned that our East Coast is the West Bank of the Rhine, and the defenses of Portland begin in Shanghai.” Corwin clearly intended this line to be read within the context of his broader internationalism, but the ambiguities over the US role in global affairs raised by his words are also a telling marker of this critical juncture. As a cultural artifact, “On a Note of Triumph” foregrounds many of the recurrent themes of this volume. Its populist sensibilities illustrate the political turn behind so much of the art and literature of the decade, one in which the political left enjoyed an unprecedented degree of influence on public affairs. As such, its gestures toward inclusivity – its uneven attempt to expand the notion of who comprises “the people” – suggest a shifting social terrain on which new publics were struggling for a place in the sun. Corwin’s radio poem also signals the impact of new media and new institutions that vastly expanded the potential audiences for middlebrow and high culture and, in so doing, redefined the contours of the literary. Finally, “On a Note of Triumph” indexes the ways in which US cultural production in the 1940s intervened, in highly visible ways, to sketch a new global sensibility within a rapidly changing world order, and with outcomes far more uncertain than many scholars have assumed. Be that as it may, Corwin’s career embodied the tragic foreclosure of radical possibility as the

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official logic of the US state entered the Cold War. At the beginning of the decade, he was celebrated as the de facto poet laureate of American internationalism; at its end, this very same internationalism triggered scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and landed him on the blacklist of the anticommunist publication Red Channels.4 Moreover, the Victory in Europe Day he celebrated in “On a Note of Triumph” was followed three months later by a second ceasefire with more ominous implications. Truman enabled Victory in Japan Day through two atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed more than 100,000 people. As Christian Appy argues in this collection, these bombings signaled the continuity of US-led racial violence and world-ordering ambitions, and on a far grander scale, into the postwar period. A single cultural artifact, however, cannot be expected to fully register the enormity of changes afoot in its historical moment. Indeed, these changes were legion in 1945. The decade of the 1940s was not merely one of transition, but a period of epochal upheaval. Indeed, the year 1945 denotes not only the middle of a decade but also, without hyperbole, the beginning of a whole new era in world history. The war that formally concluded on September 2, 1945, with approximately 60 million dead would be the last time (to date) that the major world powers settled their grievances with one another through military means, though organized violence would continue in new arenas. In the aftermath of the twentieth century’s greatest bloodletting, the United States would emerge as the preponderant imperial power, yet would do so within the context of a decolonizing planet in which a “third world” was rapidly changing the rules of world hegemony. Along with its primary rivals, the Soviet Union and China, it would attempt to court the allegiances of newly enfranchised peoples across Africa and Asia, and the contours of this rivalry, dubbed a “Cold War” by Bernard Baruch in 1947, were already beginning to take shape before Corwin’s GIs had even shipped home. In its broadest outlines, all of this is well known. In US popular memory the details of World War II are far more familiar than the specifics of the American Revolution. As a result of countless twenty-first-century documentaries and narrative films restaging the conflict, the year 1941 has in many ways become the new 1776 to many Americans. Stock images of the Cold War – of Khrushchev and Kennedy, of Sputnik and the Apollo Missions, of McCarthyite witch hunts and family fallout shelters – are also readily accessible to most Americans. Yet this culture-industry–fueled memory boom has generally obscured the precise nature of the shifts that

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transpired in the 1940s: their causes, their actors, their signature events, their political implications, and, perhaps most importantly, the roads not taken. For most Americans, the true significance of the mid-twentieth century is something that remains hidden in the light. Over the past few decades, American studies scholarship has engaged this popular interest in the period by unearthing sites banished from cultural memory while attempting to shift the narratives in which familiar historical landmarks are ensconced. As this scholarship has labored to show, the 1940s were a time when anticolonial movements abroad and the dislocations of war helped gave rise to the modern civil rights movement; when the institutionalization of the New Deal through Keynesian economic planning dramatically increased the standard of living, equalized incomes, and created a truly mass consumer culture; when the demographic reshufflings of wartime created an unprecedented emergence of gay and lesbian publics; when transformations in radio and film, the introduction of the paperback book, and unprecedented state funding of culture were reshaping the United States as an “imagined community”5 ; and when the political left was arguably at its highest point in institutional influence, a political fact that created uncertainties for the postwar direction of the United States in world affairs. Such shifts are precisely what the chapters in this volume aim to show. American Literature in Transition: 1940–1950 brings together scholars in literature, history, art history, film studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and human rights. It aims to provide academics, cultural critics, and any student of the American past with a sense of the global and ever-shifting historical dynamics that produced the cultural work of the 1940s. As the chapters in this collection illustrate, a crucial context to consider here is the political impulse fueling the creation of art and culture in this decade. The 1930s and 1940s were a time when US artists and writers participated widely in international left and liberal social movements that fundamentally transformed the terms of American social life in the twentieth century, chiefly by challenging the color line, supporting the labor movement and radical parties, and facilitating the demographic shift to a sizable middle class. Following Michael Denning’s lead, scholars have retroactively termed these movements “the Popular Front.” The term originated with the Soviet-dominated Communist International, which in 1935 called for a nonsectarian left-liberal coalition to combat the rising influence of fascism. This movement assumed a life of its own in each national arena. American studies scholars extended the term from its Soviet origins, using it as a moniker for a set of left and liberal social movements of the 1930s and 1940s

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organized around antifascism, antiracism, and economic leveling. This left upsurge was the force from below that enabled Franklin Roosevelt and the US Congress to pass the signature legislation of the expansive and longlasting “Second New Deal.” It so relentlessly diffused its message throughout the country that a Fortune magazine poll in 1942 found that 25 percent of Americans “favored socialism” while another 35 percent “had an open mind about it.”6 Ironically, this political impulse was illegible to literary academics through most of the twentieth century, largely until the work of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, and Alan Wald prompted a vast project of recovery among a host of scholars.7 Some of these scholars are represented in this volume, including Benjamin Balthaser, Floyd Cheung, Sarah Ehlers, Aaron Lecklider, Julia Mickenberg, Bill Mullen, James Smethurst, Judith Smith, Alan Wald, and me. However, literary critics in the second half of the twentieth century overcame the baggage of New Criticism far too infrequently, reducing US literary output from the 1920s to the 1940s to scattered works of high modernism. Yet, as the chapters in this collection show, cultural producers in these years participated in social movements not simply by using their work to “soap box” for specific legislation or topical events, but to change underlying values in the terrain of culture – the terrain where, following Raymond Williams, ideology is lived and experienced. The degree to which they succeeded and failed, over short-term and long-term arcs, will be a thread uniting many of the chapters across all three parts of the volume. But the insurgent political impulse in arts and letters is not the whole story of US literary history in the period. To frame this history as broadly as possible, this collection is divided into three parts: “The United States in the World,” “Emergent Publics,” and “Media and Genre.” Part I, “The United States in the World,” comprises chapters detailing how American writers – and the broader public sphere in which they operated – shaped new global imaginaries within the United States. Writers used their work to fashion and at other times to resist official imperatives that shifted rapidly from the exigencies of World War II to the Cold War. In highlighting this process, these essays challenge the twenty-first- century American national narrative of “the Greatest Generation,” as well as the earlier New Left historiography that first contested “the Good War” by reconsidering it as just another US imperial venture. They also add new perspectives to the historiography that question the inevitability of American rivalry with the Soviet Union. In emphasizing how global currents and so-called foreign policy matters affected US culture “at home,” they participate in a transnational

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turn in American studies and American literary studies that has collapsed the distance between the foreign and the domestic. Such moves, however, are not limited to the chapters in this part. Part II, “Emergent Publics,” focuses on emergent voices and newly visible bodies in the US public sphere in the 1940s. A convergence of social forces created spaces in the civic area for working women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Asian Americans to articulate emergent selfhoods to a degree unknown in prior decades. Chief among these social forces was the political organizing and cultural work from the margins. The historiography of the “long civil rights movement,” for instance, dates the real beginnings of the modern US black freedom struggle to the 1930s and 1940s; historian Martha Biondi in particular has argued that the civil rights movement first came together during World War II in New York City.8 As the chapters by Bill Mullen, Floyd Cheung, and James Smethurst show, high-profile agitation by people of color and their allies capitalized on the war against Hitler to deepen the campaign for racial justice. In the process, they created a critical discourse on “racism,” a term that surfaced in the United States in the late 1930s and spread thereafter through antifascist and antiracist political and cultural work.9 At the same time, a number of scholars in LGBT studies, most notably Allan Bérubé, have shown the 1940s to be a watershed moment in the history of sexuality in the United States. In the same-sex spaces of military life and domestic production, the war produced a new sexual situation that allowed those with homosexual inclinations to explore and express them with diminished fears. Over the course of the decade, the number of gay social spaces increased dramatically, and large homosexual populations began to coalesce in major, wartime port cities and production centers like New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area.10 As Aaron Lecklider’s chapter reveals, this ferment gave rise not only to the formation of the Mattachine Society in 1950 – the first modern gay/lesbian advocacy organization in the United States – but also to an innovative and often overlooked corpus of literature. However, the emergent voices of the decade did not all arise from the margins. The political center had certainly shifted to the left in the 1930s and 1940s, yet some actors on the political stage remained deeply unhappy with history’s apparent tilt. As Kathryn Olmstead’s chapter argues, the end of the decade saw the resurgence of political conservativism, and in a form that anticipated the phenomenon now known as neoliberalism. But whether writers of the 1940s called for racial justice or for a stop to the communist menace, their work formed the building blocks of the public

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sphere, joining the efforts of others to articulate new group identities and transforming the discursive terrain in the process. Part III, titled “Media and Genre,” distills some of these same historical dynamics through the lenses of literary genre and the material sites of cultural production. Scholars who evoke Raymond Williams’s concept, “the structure of feeling,” often forget that he initially applied it to the literary form. Williams emphasized how literary forms were in themselves “structures of feeling.” That is to say, to see cultural forms as a structure of feeling is to acknowledge that individuals do not simply absorb and passively reproduce formal ideologies; rather, they incorporate formal ideologies into the sum total of their experiences – always social and generational in nature – thereby transforming these ideologies and becoming conscious of them only through their lived relationships.11 Thus, literary genres – such as realism, noir, the five-act play – are collective ways that artists imaginatively distill the contradictory social forces and discourses of their historical moment into concrete works of the imagination, creating something new of these contradictions in the process. In a similar vein, the chapters in this part – on intersecting aesthetics of noir, modernism, realism, the World War II narrative, and the imagination of the city – treat signature genres of the period as structures of feeling. As they show, such genres mark how artists creatively and collectively registered the epic transformations of their era, how they combined contradictory discourses and their own lived experiences into new aesthetic forms, and, in so doing, worked to transform the world into something different from what they found. Part III also attends to the material institutions out of which literature emerged. Wartime conditions and the turn to Keynesian economics enabled an expansive interpenetration of mass culture – inclusive of Hollywood film, network radio, and the publishing industry – into the everyday lives of Americans in the 1940s. The decade witnessed the introduction of the paperback book, a now familiar innovation of the publishing industry that revolutionized literary readership. In this context, the essays of Erin Smith and Joan Saab both highlight the role of the Council of Books on Wartime, a government-funded program through which the major publishing houses distributed millions of free novels to servicemen during the war, expanding readership in the process. During the war, with rising incomes at home and bored servicemen overseas, the audience for Hollywood pictures swelled, and more importantly, its productions gained a newfound place in the national mission. As media scholars have noted, radio was in many ways the television of the 1930s and 1940s. The medium was also widely accessible to Americans:

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83 percent of all US residents, rural and urban, owned a radio by 1940, with a majority of its audience female. Indeed, radio arguably brought the public sphere into private homes more than any other medium of the era, and at a time when a number of artists used its unique qualities to recreate literary classics and fashion avant-garde cultural works on the air. As the chapter by Judith Smith demonstrates, radio writers and directors used the medium’s “intimacy effects” to expand the audience for Popular Front and early civil rights messages. But as Joan Saab’s chapter underscores, not all cultural production was financed by the culture industries. The turn to more statecentered, Keynesian economic policies from the 1930s through the 1960s had its corollary in the arts. These decades saw an unprecedented effort by the state to influence public tastes by directly employing or indirectly subsidizing a legion of painters, writers, filmmakers, and photographers. In mapping the position of literature within this global tableau, the chapters in this collection aim to make its readers aware of the historical possibilities of the 1940s as a window of time, a window through which a whole other social reality might have passed. To imagine a historical moment as such an open-ended possibility is to engage in what Lisa Lowe has called “a past conditional temporality.” That is to say, to reconstruct the space of literature, along with the social movements that breathed life into its words, is to resurrect a space of possibility, a set of “what ifs” where the course of struggle is not yet determined. It is to enter a space where US racial hierarchies might have assumed a very different form, where the social democratic reforms of the New Deal might have perished in their infancy, where the United States may not have placed anticommunism at the center of its world-ordering ambitions, and where we might have consequently remembered the literary history of the period very differently from the outset. To see cultural history through the lens of a past conditional temporality, in other words, is to refuse to impose a stable course of events on what was a highly contingent political struggle.12 I sincerely hope the readers of this volume can use these essays to bridge the distance between the decade of the 1940s and their own, recognizing the possibilities of the present in the pages of the past. Christopher Vials NOTES 1 R. Leroy Bannerman, Norman Corwin and Radio: The Golden Years (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 158–62.

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2 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), xix. 3 Recording accessed through The Norman Corwin Collection, CD produced by OTRCAT, Leneka, KS. 4 Bannerman, Norman Corwin and Radio, 204–5. 5 “Imagined community” refers here to the concept guiding Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 6 Denning, The Cultural Front, 4. On the left-wing push from below, see Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 224–49. 7 I refer here to Denning’s Cultural Front and to Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). With Wald, I refer to his corpus of work, beginning with James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York: New York University Press, 1978). 8 Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). For a review of this historiography, see Robert Self, “The Black Panther Party and the Long Civil Rights Era,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, ed. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 22. 9 On the origins of the term racism in the United States, see Chris Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 70–1. 10 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Allan Bérubé, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990). 11 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 130–1. 12 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 40–1.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534434.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

part i

The United States in the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

c h a p ter 1

Why We Fight Contending Narratives of World War II Christopher Vials

Henry Luce’s signature essay “The American Century,” published in LIFE magazine in February 1941, is sometimes assumed to be the definitive statement of a turn for the United States and its place in the world for the twentieth century. No doubt, its words carry a sweeping prescience: Americans . . . have failed to play their part as a world power – a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and . . . to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.1

Indeed, Luce’s essay generated almost five thousand letters of response from readers, overwhelmingly positive. He intervened in a foreign policy debate in which a conservative isolationism frequently dueled a left-liberal internationalism; within this fray, he carved out a novel position that stressed the need for the United States to seize opportunities arising from a world in flames and become the global leader of its own brand of market-driven internationalism. This internationalism would differ from the global aspirations of both Hitler and the left in that it was based on a liberal capitalist “freedom and democracy,” rather than “socialism” or “one-man rule.” As the founder of Time, LIFE, Fortune, and the March of Time newsreels, Luce had an ample arena in which to make his case. Luce’s “American Century” did prefigure official practice in key regards, a point to which I return at the end of this chapter. Yet it would be all too easy to view it as an indicative statement of the “real mission” of the United States during World War II, as a moment of honesty amidst the patriotic goads to national sacrifice and the calls to liberate oppressed peoples from the yoke of fascism. Something in these calls for liberation was indicative of a real and pervasive political force in the United States, one arising from a vastly different sensibility than that underlying the market liberalism of 13

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Luce. Take, as one prominent example, the words and deeds of Henry Wallace, vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1940 to 1944. Wallace’s rhetoric was particularly significant given that Roosevelt made fewer and fewer public appearances during the war, leaving to his associates – chiefly Wallace – the task of defining its aims to the public.2 Wallace explicitly positioned his idea of the war against Henry Luce’s imperial manifesto: “Some have spoken of the ‘American Century,’” the vice president asserted in 1942. “I say that the century on which we are entering – the century which will come out of this war – can and must be the century of the common man.” In his speech and pamphlet, “The Price of Free World Victory” (1942), he described the American, French, Bolivarian, and Russian revolutions as unfinished struggles; they would only be complete, he asserted, with an Allied victory bringing farmers’ cooperatives, collective bargaining rights for workers, an anti-imperial ethos, civil rights, and universal education worldwide. The fascist, in Wallace’s view, was the global antithesis of this vision. In a piece he wrote for the New York Times in 1944, he argued that fascism was a pressing danger not only in Europe but also within the United States and suggested that its most identifiable features were racial intolerance, misguided nationalism, and “the lust for money and power.” American fascists, he argued, “claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”3 Wallace was the highest-ranking product of a vast movement culture in the United States that shared and propelled such views. Following Michael Denning, I call this movement the Popular Front, a left-liberal coalition of labor unions, antiracist organizations, and antifascists that continued to exert real political muscle during the war years. Like this movement, Wallace labored to make his words flesh in national policy. In his role as chair of the Board of Economic Warfare, he fought with the more conservative State Department to require all procurement contracts for materials from Latin America to mandate fair labor standards and wage scales for workers. Such efforts were not generally successful, but they did earn Wallace a ranking as one of the most admired men in the United States in public opinion surveys as late as 1946.4 In postwar memory, the calls to sacrifice in the period from 1941–5 have been reduced to patriotic narratives of “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation,” which see World War II as the one righteous touchstone among a train of dubious US military engagements ever since. Beginning with the revisionist historiography of the 1960s, American scholars have overwhelmingly aligned themselves against the narrative of the Good War, arguing instead that the period from 1941–5 was anything but a time of

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national unity or social harmony, and that Roosevelt’s practice overseas was scarcely more emancipatory than that of the colonialist Churchill.5 American studies scholarship since the transnational turn has followed in this direction and tends to insert World War II into a continuum of imperial endeavors by the United States, and not without reason. Counters to the Good War have even found a place in American public memory as knowledge of the Japanese American incarceration, the racialization of the Japanese enemy, atrocities by US troops, and the turning away of Jewish refugees by federal authorities has become increasingly widespread. But to counter the myth of the Good War by reducing it to “just another Bad War” also misses the mark, flattening out distinct features of the historical moment and effacing alternate possibilities from the archive. Within the US public sphere, the “American Century” was one of several visions of the conflict that contended with others, even within the highest levels of government, in the period from 1941 to 1945. It must be remembered that the war aligned the country against fascism: a set of right-wing nationstates based around militarism, anticommunism, racism, and the violent hardening of existing social hierarchies. As such, it brought the United States into alignment not only with Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek but also with the Soviet Union and left-wing guerillas across Europe and Asia, including Josip Broz Tito, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Luis Taruc, and Kim Il-sung. The unprecedented influence of the political left in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the political nature of the enemy in its German, Italian, or Japanese guises, inspired other American visions of “Why We Fight” that had little to do with the American Century. These visions also altered, in their own fashions, the political history of the war. Cultural producers intervened in the public sphere to make the war their own, to shape its course in line with their respective visions. This chapter examines the multiplicity of ways in which American cultural producers articulated the mission and purpose of World War II, identifying the points of convergence and friction between the various discursive positions. The three major, sometimes overlapping, narrative strands identified by this chapter are (1) the American Century; (2) the Popular Front-informed internationalism of the “People’s War;” and (3) what I call the “Free World/Slave World” narrative, a dualistic republican vision pitting a “free world” against “a slave world.” The “People’s War” was particularly pervasive and is also the discourse least acknowledged by scholars of American culture in the 1940s, so I devote special attention to it in this chapter. It argues that in the cultural terrain, no single narrative

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of “Why We Fight” became hegemonic during the war years, nor was any of one of them predestined to guide US policy after the war. While the American Century came to guide US foreign policy more clearly than the other narratives after the war, each left its mark on official and military practice, and all left their imprints on public memory in the postwar years. To engage the open-endedness of the historical moment in this manner is to engage what Lisa Lowe calls a “past conditional temporality.” That is to say, to reject the notion that the United States had already settled into its Cold War course before 1945 is to imagine “what could have been” and to acknowledge the contingent nature of history by refusing to retroactively impose a stable course of events on a highly unstable political struggle.6 First, we must examine the institutions engaged in mobilizing public opinion. Cultivating the “message” of the war was an official matter of the state, but only in part. State-generated propaganda was orchestrated through the Office of War Information (OWI), founded in July 1942, which replaced the short-lived Office of Facts and Figures. It printed literature, directed public relations campaigns (scrap metal, fuel conservation, and “Buy War Bonds” drives), and produced its own radio programs and documentaries, sometimes with the help of the culture industry’s top talents. However, the agency was deeply unpopular with congressional conservatives, who perceived it, not incorrectly, as promoting a New Deal vision of the country. In June 1943, one year after its creation, they decimated the agency’s budget, prohibiting it from creating materials for domestic consumption. Like much of the American public, moreover, Franklin Roosevelt was deeply averse to war propaganda because of his memory of (and participation in) the hysteria of World War I. He consequently gave the OWI limited power, and its officials were instructed not to focus on enemy atrocities, which ironically led to a downplaying of the emergent Holocaust. After the decimation of the OWI by Congress, the Treasury Department took center stage in managing the government’s wartime public relations effort.7 With the state seriously curtailed in its efforts to educate the public on the goals of the war, the culture industries and the culture at large was left to take up the task. Hollywood produced an endless stream of movies designed to boost morale, and network radio offered a barrage of warrelated programming; meanwhile, commercial periodicals, organizational newspapers, and the publishing industry continued to inform and influence vast readerships. The culture industries offered a patriotic bill of fare that overwhelmingly promoted the war, yet its message often strayed from the OWI guidelines they had promised to uphold. OWI director Elmer

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Davis and officials with the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures complained that Hollywood was offering only cheap thrills, gore, and stereotypical portrayals of the enemy, rather than serious, sophisticated presentations of war aims. Radio was more amenable, as stations offered airtime to short “commercials” and full programs produced by the Domestic Radio Bureau of the OWI and later by the Treasury Department.8 Overall, the variety of institutional sites involved in crafting the message of the war, along with a profound lack of consensus within the state over long-term war aims, worked against a unified narrative of the conflict, and the lack of coherence was widely felt. In December 1942, public opinion polls revealed that as many as 35 percent of those surveyed stated they had no clear idea why the United States was fighting.9 Generating some of this dissonance was a factor that has been downplayed or unacknowledged by many scholars of the period: namely, that the United States entered World War II in an era when the political left was arguably at its highest point of mobilization in US history. A highly energized labor movement, replete with organizers affiliated with socialist and communist organizations, had pushed the federal government to dramatically alter the nation’s class structure through the reforms of the “Second New Deal” in the latter half of the 1930s. Class radicals formed a prominent position in a “force from below,” particularly through the CIO unions, which pressured Roosevelt and enabled his liberal allies in Congress to adopt some of the more dramatic legislation of the New Deal, including the Wagner Act (1935), the Social Security Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938).10 During the war, despite the “no strike pledge” of December 1941 decried by many New Left historians, labor expanded its position through a largely pro-union War Labor Board that facilitated a vast expansion of union membership, through wartime price controls from the Office of Price Administration (OPA), and through a rank-and-file militancy that took advantage of wartime labor shortages to push for shop-floor gains. All in all, the working class benefited disproportionately from the wartime boom: real wages in manufacturing rose by 27 percent from 1941–4, with the poorest paid enjoying the greatest wage increases.11 Labor’s most active constituents, who viewed fascism as a reactionary enemy of the common people, understandably saw the Allied war effort as extending and solidifying the democratic gains of the New Deal.12 At the same time, black migration during World War I had created a sizable black population in northern cities, which enabled the creation of a vibrant black press and increased black political organization. Historian Martha Biondi maintains that the expansion of the black public sphere

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during World War II marked the real beginnings of the modern civil rights movement. In the struggles of black union activists in the CIO, fights against discrimination in housing and employment, and protests over segregation in the armed forces – all quite intense during World War II – a movement took shape.13 The African American press launched the “Double V” campaign, which stood for victory over fascism at home and abroad, and which had an uncompromisingly anticolonial dimension. Building on their antifascist work of the 1930s, both black and white leftists pushed to make the fight against the fascist enemy into a global war against reactionary politics, one that would expand the gains of the New Deal at home and set their country on a new internationalist course abroad. Such views cohered in the narrative I call the “People’s War,” ubiquitous within wartime popular culture. It was generated most prominently by Vice President Henry A. Wallace, whom Roosevelt entrusted to define his administration’s war aims to the public. This narrative defined “victory” over fascism not simply as the restoration of the status quo, but as the destruction of the most reactionary forces at work in the world, a destruction that would bring in its wake a more tolerant, pluralistic, and economically level democracy. The People’s War tended to direct attention toward the German enemy as the greatest threat to world order and to the singular contribution of the Soviet allies in countering it; in this sense, the narrative was in line with Roosevelt’s own vision, which combated the sometimes openly expansionist “Asia First” focus of congressional conservatives. This antifascist message first cohered in the United States in the 1930s, but encouraged by state sponsorship, left and liberal narratives of fascism gained access to much wider audiences during World War II. While they reached broad publics through print media during the Depression, leftliberal antifascisms were now able to break into the heavily vetted arenas of network radio and Hollywood film with greater consistency. The war also catapulted elaborate expositions of left-liberal antifascism to the top slots of the nonfiction bestseller list.14 In the literary realm, it should be noted that nonfictional accounts of the then-topical conflict were far more popular than fictional treatments. As one reviewer noted in The New Masses in 1943, “Current war novels . . . compete at an obvious disadvantage with eye-witness narratives now arriving from the front in such a rich crop. In battles for our existence, the photographic truth is for the moment worth more than the most plausible fiction.”15 Driving this general attraction to “the photographic truth” was the penchant for realism among the mid-century left, which ensured that travel literature, reportage, and other nonfiction forms dominated the

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list of titles carrying the narrative of the People’s War. Such titles, some adapted to radio, included William Shirer’s Berlin Diary (1941), Joseph E. Davies’s Mission to Moscow (1942), John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover (1943), Selden Menefee’s Assignment U.S.A. (1943), Elizabeth Hawes’s Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (1943), Erskine Caldwell’s All Out on the Road to Smolensk (1942), Edgar Snow’s People on Our Side (1944), and Carlos Bulosan’s Laughter of My Father (1944). Fictional and poetic treatments of the People’s War included Upton Sinclair’s Wide Is the Gate (1943); Norman Corwin’s radio program Columbia Workshop, particularly the episodes “On a Note of Triumph” (1945) and “Unity Fair” (1945); Robert Terrall’s mystery novel They Deal in Death (1943); Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole (1945) the prose fiction of the journal Negro Story; and, on the critical edge of the People’s War, Chester Himes’s novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). The genuine internationalism of One World (1943), the best-selling travelogue and postwar blueprint by former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, also furthered the narrative in key regards. But this discourse of the enemy – which described fascism as a global form of political reaction – had to contend with incompatible wartime visions of “Why We Fight.” Sometimes produced, paradoxically, by leftists and liberals, these other visions did not entirely contradict the image of European fascists projected by the 1930s left. However, they tended to represent fascism as fully alien to the values of Allied nations while creating images of the Japanese people that were dramatically different from those of the left’s “Boycott Japan” and “Aid to China” campaigns of the previous decade. One such prominent narrative divided the planet into a “free world” and a “slave world,” receiving its most popular expressions in Frank Capra’s famous documentary series Why We Fight (1942–4), in Pearl Buck’s novel Dragon Seed (1942), and in John Steinbeck’s novella The Moon Is Down (1942) (Dragon Seed and The Moon Is Down occupied top slots on the bestseller list in their years of publication, and Hollywood adapted both novels to film). To a more limited extent, this narrative can also be found in William Faulkner’s “Two Soldiers” and “Shall Not Perish.”16 Grounded in republican notions of “fitness for self-government,” the Free World/Slave World narrative shifted the focus from Popular Front economic and racial justice to an abstract vision of democracy narrowed to the traditional liberal freedoms: freedom of speech, press, and assembly. In contrast to the radical antifascisms of the 1930s, it hardened the divisions between the peoples of the Allied and Axis nations, affirming the tolerant, democratic essence of the former and the immutable militarism, regimentation, and foreignness of the latter. It offered a People’s War of a different sort: a war not between

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ideas and governments, but between peoples possessing unreconcilable cultural, even racial, differences. Predictably, it took on its most ugly forms in its depictions of the Japanese. The Free World/Slave World narrative also captured the racial crosscurrents of World War II, encompassing both a call for tolerance and a new construction of otherness to demarcate the limits of the new pluralism. Pearl Buck’s novel Dragon Seed offers a compelling, high-profile example. It was one of only two novels on the top-ten bestseller list in 1942 that directly dealt with the war (the other one was John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, an allegorical story of resistance in an unnamed land, albeit thinly veiled as Norway, which was in the #2 slot). Redubbed by one critic “The Good Earth’s Warriors,” Dragon Seed contained a cast similar to the rugged, yeoman farmers popularized by Buck’s earlier work, but now engaged in a collective struggle to repel the Japanese from China.17 It was published at a particularly dark time in the Allied war effort. The Japanese were advancing virtually unchecked through Southeast Asia and beyond, while the Germans had taken virtually all of continental Europe and were within range of Moscow. In many ways, Buck offered up the Chinese as models of the democratic spirit, exemplars of the values that Americans would need to marshal to turn the tide. Dragon Seed centers on the family of patriarch Ling Tan, his wife Ling Sao, and their five children. Ling Tan and his family are described as hard working, frugal, and suspicious of the new-fangled ways of the big city. Like the romanticized American yeoman, they are “neither rich nor poor” and desire only the pleasures afforded by farming their modest plot of land. Indeed, when war comes to their village, Ling Tan understands its root causes like any good Jeffersonian democrat would. Buck writes, “When he heard that the enemy envied his nation the land, he understood at once the whole war and its cause. ‘Land . . . land is at the bottom of what men want. If one has too much land and the other too little, there will be wars.’”18 As with Steinbeck’s Norwegians, Buck makes the Chinese a “free people” by inscribing them into the narrative of Jeffersonian agrarianism, a popular American self-image commonly resurrected in the 1930s and reformatted for the New Deal. Like other instances of the Free World/Slave World narrative, the universalism of the novel is one that ultimately homogenizes vast sections of the globe, representing the majority of the world’s people as fundamentally compatible with the terms of American national virtue. Like so many Allied peoples in this narrative, Buck’s Chinese become de facto Americans. One critic of Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down picked up on this tendency when he observed of the novella’s allegory

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of occupied Norway, “The Norwegians were only Joads with different names.”19 Yet this universalism required its other: in Buck’s case, the Japanese. The Japanese invasion upsets the idyllic rhythms of village life in Dragon Seed. The peasants curiously look on as foreign planes bomb the nearby town, but when war comes to their village, the results are brutal. The taxes the Japanese impose destroy the viability of the farms, but Buck presents rape as the most serious crime of the Japanese occupation, which visits the Ling Tan family when his daughter-in-law Orchid is raped and murdered by Japanese troops. Unable to find any women after they have all gone into hiding, the invaders sexually assault Lao San, the youngest son of the family. Completely dehumanized throughout the book, a menace to both productive labor and white womanhood (albeit white womanhood in yellowface), the Japanese’s presentation fully reproduces Yellow Peril discourse. One contemporary reviewer from the Saturday Review of Literature found this to be the main limitation of the book, writing, “One difficulty is that it is an either or book. The Chinese are virtuously white and the Japanese are viciously black.”20 Like Steinbeck in The Moon Is Down and Capra in Why We Fight, Buck effaced all cultural differences among US allies, creating an internally homogeneous “free world” filled with peoples essentially American at heart, peoples that required a racialized adversary for their legibility. Yet Buck, like most purveyors of the Free World/Slave World narrative were New Deal liberals, and not devotees of Luce and his American Century. Buck critiqued recent US policy in Asia by reminding readers, in fleeting moments of dialogue, that the Japanese invasion of China could not have happened without the support of British and American companies (during the invasion, the United States kept the Japanese war machine fully oiled, quite literally – supplying it with 80 percent of its oil and 90 percent of its gasoline – a fact duly noted by leftists and liberals after the invasion of 1937).21 And Ling Tan’s comments on land inequality as the root of war carried populist echoes of the New Deal. Yet Buck’s Edenic portrait of the prewar Chinese countryside could maintain its coherence only by eliminating the longer history of Western imperialism in the region. Apart from bringing some foreign-made goods into the towns, the West has seemingly left no footprint at all in Ling Tan’s village; like Wang Lung in The Good Earth, he and his and family plow the earth in a rural idyll essentially unchanged for centuries. In representing her setting as uncontaminated by negative influences from the West, Buck must necessarily extract it from the global flows of capital that constituted a very real connection between many Chinese villages and the outside world since the mid-nineteenth

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century. Though Buck became a critic of the Cold War, her highly influential work Dragon Seed, as with other iterations of the Free World/Slave World narrative, helped lay the groundwork for American Cold War liberal universalism. While serving world-ordering ends, this universalism disavowed imperialism, past and present, and attempted to create sentimental bonds between Americans and decolonizing peoples, homogenizing the latter through a proto-multiculturalism that recognized superficial cultural difference in a world full of “Americans under the skin.”22 Yet this impulse to cultural tolerance was belied by the Cold War’s imperial nature, which created resistance movements in the global south, necessitating a “Good Asian”/”Bad Asian” dynamic outlined by Floyd Cheung in Chapter 9. Yet, significantly, the protagonists of The Moon Is Down and Dragon Seed are not Americans: their authors imagine them to possess an innate fitness for self-government and capacity for liberation independent of any American intervention or presence. This was not the case in the cultural productions of the American Century, the last major discourse of World War II considered here. These narratives directly figured Americans and Britons tutoring other peoples in the practice of democratic governance or schooling them in the strategy for their own liberation. The American Century could also be found on the bestseller list, most prominently with John Hersey’s novel A Bell for Adano (1944) and, though it did not directly figure the ongoing war, Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam (1944), the inspiration for Oscar Hammerstein’s The King and I. It also found expression in lesser known works in the reportage and nonfiction category, including George Weller’s Singapore Is Silent (1943), Ira Wolfert’s American Guerilla in the Philippines (1945), Thomas Clare’s Lookin’ Eastward: A G.I. Salaam to India, and the many book-length works of reporter Dorothy Thompson. Some of these authors openly supported the British colonial project, while others mirrored Luce exactly. Weller’s narrative of the fall of Singapore, for instance, introduces American readers to a Southeast Asian world with which they have deep economic ties that they have yet to acknowledge or act on. “Being forcibly deprived of automobiles,” he writes, “has taught America that it too has economic rights which must be fought for, taken, and held in the Southwest Pacific.” To secure these rights, he recommends maintaining a string of US bases in the Pacific after the Japanese are defeated.23 The most prominent fictional proponent of the American Century is John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano, published serially in 1943 and as a critically acclaimed novel in 1944. The plot revolves around an American military officer, Major Victor Joppolo, who has been tasked with administering

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the US occupation of the southern Italian town of Adano, which the Allies recently liberated from the Germans. There is no combat depicted in the novel; instead, it focuses entirely on the proper management of an occupation, a theme that affords Hersey the opportunity to reflect on the stakes and political mission of the war. A Bell for Adano brings together elements of both the People’s War and the Free World/Slave World narratives, but ultimately puts them to work in service of Henry Luce’s call to spread American institutions and values across the globe. Hersey’s Joppolo pursues a very different political economy from that advocated by the Republican, anti-New Deal Henry Luce. In defiance of classical economics, he creates a system of public assistance payments for the poor, strategically restricts the circulation of goods in and out of the town, and, like a good OPA administrator, even imposes stringent price controls. A Bell for Adano also overlaps with the narrative of the People’s War in positing fascism not as an innate expression of German, Italian, or Japanese cultures, but as a tendency among Americans as well. The central villain of the story is not a German or an Italian, but the American General Marvin, the original ugly American whom Hersey describes as “something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out.”24 Yet Joppolo finds no substantive class divisions on arrival in Adano. There are rich and poor, but such inequalities are naturalized as one among many of the age-old rhythms of village life. The major mediates the minor class tensions that do exist: one of his first tasks is to smooth over a disagreement between the wealthy Cacopardo and the working-class Craxi (18). Making his task easier is the simple virtue of the people. Hersey’s portrait of the Italians is reminiscent of the townsfolk of a Capra film. Adano’s people are essentially good and decent, falling into a range of stock village types: these include the peasant Giuseppe, who naps atop his moving donkey cart; the fisherman Tomasino, a stubborn, hard worker who keeps his nose to the grindstone; and “the lazy Fatta,” the brunt of all village jokes. They are simple and not infrequently comic working people whose common denominator is the lack of any political awareness: there is no left or right in Adano, no communists, or republicans. The only fascist character is the ex-mayor Nasta, whose laughable attempts to regain control of the town are easily thwarted by the occupation authorities. Nasta reveals Hersey’s limited and ultimately melodramatic understanding of fascism. This “fascist” character has no ideology – no nationalism, no theories of racial supremacy or anticommunism, no militarist ethos. His fascism seems to reside entirely in his faulty character: he is a corrupt, inaccessible, and cowardly official who lords over his people. As Joppolo

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tells him, “There is goodness in your people, but not in you, not a bit. The world has had enough of your kind of selfishness.” Thus Joppolo’s role is to fill an ideological void, to bring the townsfolk into consciousness of the democratic essence that is nascent in their virtue as a “good” people. Here, Hersey’s limited understanding of fascism is matched by his highly abstract notion of democracy. Early in the novel, Joppolo tells a corrupt, local policeman, Adano has been a Fascist town . . . But now that the Americans have come, we are going to run the town as a democracy. Perhaps you do not know what a democracy is. I will tell you. Democracy is this: democracy is that the men of the government are no longer the masters of the people. They are the servants of the people. What makes a man master of another man? It is that he pays him for his work. Who pays the men in the government? The people do, for they pay the taxes out of which you are paid. Therefore you are now the servants of the people of Adano.25

Here and elsewhere in the novel, Joppolo schools the Italian people in an emergent, passive, and consumer model of representative democracy, one in which paying the salaries of public employees is what turns subject into citizen. After an initial reticence, the townsfolk warmly embrace Joppolo’s governance and throw him a hearty celebration to mark the end of his tenure. His last lesson to the people of Adano is directed at a group of children – a fitting proxy for the Italian people – whom he urges not to be “selfish,” the ultimate fascist character defect. Hersey’s drama of Italians in need of American tutelage was staged on the very same historical ground in which Italian antifascists pursued radical experiments in direct democracy. In advance of the arrival of Allied troops in 1943 and 1944, Italian partisans often drove fascist forces out of their cities and towns; the Italian antifascist Committee of National Liberation put into motion all-volunteer committees to administer public services, with renowned efficiency. Echoing other contemporary American media reports, a journalist for The Nation wrote, “When the Allied troops entered these great cities [Milan, Turin, Genoa, Venice], they found an amazing degree of order and the partisans’ administration running smoothly.”26 In the same year in which Hersey wrote his novel, Roosevelt and Churchill allowed monarchists, collaborators, and former fascists to continue ruling Italy in exchange for an immediate ceasefire. Those in the United States who saw the global struggle as the People’s War felt betrayed and made their discontent known. The same Nation journalist quoted earlier protested, “The aim of the Allies in the south has been to prop up the monarchy

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and to discourage the committees of liberation from taking any political initiative.”27 In its broad outlines, Hersey’s novel was in line with Luce’s project of spreading American liberal institutions across the world, and on US terms. It occluded radical economic and political transformation in favor of a Keynesian, anticommunist, and representative democracy under American auspices; in this sense, its American Century was that of the Marshall Plan. While the discourse of the American Century necessarily presented Allied peoples sympathetically, it constructed a much greater degree of cultural and racial difference within “the Free World” camp than was the case in the narratives of Buck, Steinbeck, and Capra. In positing a global democratic agency (albeit imagined from an American perspective), these latter writers did not rely on notions of the economic and cultural development of “backward” peoples. At their best, they held open the possibility of nonhierarchical relationships between the United States and (some) other peoples, and had the Henry Wallace vision become hegemonic in the postwar world, the Free World/Slave World narrative may very well have served it in its own limited way. Considering the worlds both inside and outside its borders, US policy practice during World War II not only followed elements of the American Century but also those of the People’s War as well. The way in which the American Century prefigures the aims and rhetoric of the Cold War is selfevident; indeed, even in the midst of World War II, the United States took several steps to position itself as leader of a deeply hierarchical world order. During the war, the United States helped to reformat the world order for its brand of “free trade imperialism,” a mode of domination based less on the direct administration of overseas territories and more on the control of markets and trade routes secured through military bases and naval might.28 To this end, Franklin Roosevelt persistently argued against “colonialism” – most prominently, against Winston Churchill’s insistence on maintaining British colonies after hostilities ceased – and took tentative steps toward supplanting it with an American brand of empire. To the chagrin of its West European allies, the United States put forth the Declaration on National Liberation of March 9, 1942, which proposed a timetable for the end of colonial rule. In the late 1930s, the country seized outright a number of British-claimed islands in the Pacific, and during the war it secured effective control of military bases and staging posts across the Pacific at the expense of the British and the French. Roosevelt was particularly insistent that the French no longer maintain their colonies after the Axis defeat: in reference to West Africa and French Indochina, he told Churchill, “If Great

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Britain and America are to police the world, they must have the right to select the police stations.”29 Be that as it may, US authorities were “pragmatic” on the colonial question while the conflict raged. In an effort to minimize Allied casualties during the invasion of North Africa, Roosevelt authorized the US military to broker a deal in which French fascist collaborators would be allowed to maintain colonial rule of French North Africa if they agreed to a ceasefire. The deal was successful, though it was deeply controversial with the American public.30 While the impact of the American Century on geopolitical practice is perhaps most salient among American studies scholarship, it is also important to acknowledge that the vision of the People’s War shaped the military and political course of the war as well, albeit in more short-term ways. Twenty-first-century historian Steven Casey has shown that Roosevelt was quite sensitive to public opinion. American outcries against the propping up of ex-fascists in North Africa and Italy caused the president to reject a similar move he was considering with Germany. In exchange for a ceasefire, his plan would have stopped Allied armies from crossing the German border and occupying the country, effectively allowing Germany to retain most of its Nazi leadership structure (to a far greater extent than actually transpired) and preventing the Red Army from setting foot on German soil.31 In opposition to such considerations, the demand for “unconditional surrender” in Europe, pushed adamantly by the remnants of the US Popular Front, was the policy that held sway in the conflict’s final years. The first phase of the Japanese occupation, moreover, was set in motion on a distinctly left-liberal basis designed to erode the spirit of militarism in the country, one in which US occupation authorities, through the Labor Union Law of December 1945, helped create the massive growth of labor unions and even worked with the Japanese Communist Party.32 To be sure, it was in the domestic realm that the People’s War had its most profound impact, evidenced by labor union political strength and the often overlooked expansion of New Deal economics through highly popular OPA price controls during the conflict. In sum, to look at World War II from the lens of a past conditional temporality is to see the “what could have been” not merely as a set of dreams that resided entirely in the cultural imaginary, but as an alternative historical course that tempered social structures and geopolitical realities, even as it was incompletely realized and lost to historical memory. In the years after 1945, Popular Front-oriented cultural producers produced a body of literature, some of it epic in scope, which mourned and memorialized the lost opportunities of the People’s War.33 This work formed an antifascist

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residual culture that struggled within a new and hostile, postwar cultural terrain. NOTES 1 Henry Luce, “The American Century,” LIFE, February 17, 1941, 63. 2 Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 42. 3 Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory” (192, 194) and “The Danger of American Fascism” (260–1), in Democracy Reborn, ed., Russell Lord (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944). 4 John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 281–2; Mark Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 9. 5 Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, Introduction to the War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. For an early example of the Churchill/Roosevelt parallel, see Blum, V Was for Victory, 258, 286. 6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 40–1. 7 Allan Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942– 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 53–63, 84–95; Casey, Cautious Crusade, 64–5, 157. 8 Thomas Dougherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 46; Winkler, Politics of Propaganda, 58–9, 61. 9 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 71; Winkler, Politics of Propaganda, 54. 10 Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 224–5, 262; Fraser Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 47–8. 11 Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in The War in American Culture, 115; Charles Chamberlain, Victory at Home: Manpower and Race in the American South during World War II (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 5–9; Nelson Lichtenstein, “Class Politics and the State during World War II,” International Labor and Working-Class History (Fall 2000), 264, 268–9. 12 I describe this process in detail in chapters 2 and 3 of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). 13 Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1.

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14 I refer here to Berlin Diary (1941), Mission to Moscow (1942), and Under Cover (1943). Alice Payne Hackett, 70 Years of Best Sellers: 1895–1965 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1967), 163–77. 15 Fred Wylie, “Two War Novels,” New Masses, March 23, 1943, 24–5. 16 “Two Soldiers” and “Shall Not Perish” form a series. They do not try to illustrate “the Slave world” of fascism, but they do put forward a yeoman farm family – and yeoman families all over the country – as icons of democratic virtue and vehicles of national reconciliation. 17 Hackett, 70 Years of Best Sellers, 165; Samuel Sillen, “The Good Earth’s Warriors,” New Masses, February 10, 1942, 27–8. 18 Pearl Buck, Dragon Seed (New York: John Day, 1942), 9, 89. 19 Benjamin Appel, “Soviets and War,” New Masses, January 26, 1943, 28. 20 Howard Mumford Jones, “Japanese Gentility,” Saturday Review of Literature, January 17, 1942, 5. 21 Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (New York: Back Bay Books, 2000), 16. 22 For this notion of Cold War universalism, I am indebted to Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia and the Middlebrow Imagination: 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 23 George Weller, Singapore Is Silent (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 3, 10. 24 John Hersey, A Bell for Adano (New York: Bantam, 1980), 42. 25 Ibid., 41. 26 Mario Rossi, “Fascism without Mussolini – II,” The Nation, May 19, 1945, 569. 27 Ibid., 570. 28 The concept of “free trade imperialism” is taken from John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xi, 8–9. 29 Paul Orders, “‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History’: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism,” in The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom, ed. David Ryan and Victor Pungong (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 67–8, 72. 30 Casey, Cautious Crusade, 112–15. 31 Ibid., 125–9. 32 Yoshio Sugimoto, “Labor Reform and Industrial Turbulence: The Case of the American Occupation of Japan” Pacific Sociological Review, 20.4 (1977), 492– 514. 33 I refer here to Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1946), Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (1948), Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948), John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), Louis Falstein, Face of a Hero (1950), Arthur Laurents, Home of the Brave (1946), and Robert McLaughlin, The Side of the Angels (1947), among others.

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c h a p ter 2

Human Rights in American Political Discourse Glenn Mitoma

Whatever prominence “human rights” enjoyed in the United States during the 1940s was marked by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress, delivered on January 6, 1941. Working to build support for “lending” materiel to the United Kingdom for their fight against Germany in exchange for “leasing” military bases, Roosevelt concluded his speech by proclaiming a vision of universal justice: In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world. This is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception – the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change – in a perpetual peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions – without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society. This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom 29

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g l e n n m i to m a under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere [emphasis added]. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.1

James Kimble suggests that this passage attracted little attention following the speech, with most commentators focused on the implications of what amounted to a complete abandonment of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Neutrality Acts.2 Listeners would also have found nothing remarkable in the president’s characterization of human rights, because the words encapsulated a familiar – if beautifully articulated – set of assumptions that had taken shape over much of the previous decade about the nature of freedom and the place of rights in the American political tradition. And yet, Roosevelt’s remarks delineated a new horizon of possibility for the discourse and practice of human rights that would be explored in the 1940s, possibilities that had the potential to extend rights beyond their previous ideological, national, and racial boundaries. Instead, by the end of the decade, this horizon proved yet more distant. The founding of the United Nations in 1945, the negotiation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s prominent role notwithstanding, human rights were reinscribed almost exclusively at the level of a discursive international politics and would diminish as a prominent political idiom in the United States. Roosevelt was not always a rights-talker. The New Deal’s “Three Rs” – relief, recovery, and reform – did not include rights. During the “fireside chat” in which he introduced the Three R heuristic, the president did, in fact, invoke the Bill of Rights, but only to maintain that it was untouched by his policies, rhetorically asking his audience, “Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?” Only those seeking “special financial privilege” would disagree, he argued, implicitly associating the claims of individual rights with the interests of capitalist accumulation.3 Since the late nineteenth century, social reformers had often been thwarted in their efforts to seek state intervention for the redistribution of wealth and opportunity on a more egalitarian basis by the political and legal defense of individual property rights. Even more fundamentally, the political principle embodied by fundamental individual rights – that individuals have claims or immunities that are inviolable by governments, even governments directed by sound political majorities – cut against the Progressive faith in “social intelligence” as the foundation of just and

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rational public policy. Rights, at least as they were most often understood in American politics, seemed to offer little in the struggle for economic recovery. As the Great Depression began, “human rights” emerged as a minor, but potentially significant, counter-discourse to “property rights.” Spurred by the Senate debate over the nomination of anti-union judge John Parker to the Supreme Court by Herbert Hoover in 1930, John Dewey, Henry Steele Commager, and Max Lerner,4 among others, cited the opposition of property rights and human rights, reflecting frustration on the left with judicial rulings that blocked progressive economic and social measures in the name of protecting private property. The phrase “human rights over property rights” began to take on a life of its own within this critical discourse, yet there was little positive content to “human rights” beyond a general support for more a more activist state. Thus, Representative Hamilton Fish III could conclude his call for a coordinated system of state and federal pension regulation with these words: “Let us strive to establish human rights on a parity with property rights in the United States of America.”5 Or the president of the American Forestry Association, George Pratt, could intone, “If capitalistic society is to endure, then human rights . . . must be regarded as superior to property rights,” in his call for better natural resource management.6 In this discourse at least, human rights operated not so much as a set of elaborated rights, but rather as a moral critique of a particular legal right – private property – when set against progressive policies. The absence of a well-formed rhetoric of human rights notwithstanding, the legal codification of economic rights was in fact changing in the 1930s. The passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 represented a dramatic expansion of the rights framework into the economic sphere, enhancing protections for workers’ rights to free speech, free association, and collective bargaining. The act’s supporters led a campaign to place collective bargaining rights into the existing rubric of liberty. By the following year, Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. was conducting hearings into “violations of the rights of free speech and assembly and undue interference with the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively.”7 According to historian Jerold Auerbach, the La Follette committee modus operandi was to link “resistance to collective bargaining to an invasion of constitutional liberties.”8 While it achieved little in the way of additional legislative reforms, the committee’s hearings demonstrated both the successful efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in fostering political and legal appreciation for individual constitutional rights in the interwar period and the potential for extending the logic of rights into the economic field.

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The Wagner Act was among the raft of laws introduced under Roosevelt, including the Social Security Act (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), and the Revenue Act (1942), that together constituted a new infrastructure of state protections for workers, children, and the aged. For the most part, however, these economic reforms were not pursued under the banner of human rights. Supporters, such as American Federation of Labor president William Green,9 would occasionally invoke the term, but more often “human rights” was heard from opponents of the New Deal. Shortly after its founding by the disgruntled industrialists of Du Pont and General Motors, the American Liberty League proclaimed “human rights and property rights are inseparable.”10 Similarly, former president Herbert Hoover’s 1934 book The Challenge of Liberty, excerpted in the Saturday Evening Post, attacked “National Regimentation” (by which he meant economic regulation) as “a vast shift from the American concept of human rights.”11 These efforts were ineffectual in derailing reform or unseating Roosevelt (the singular goal of the Liberty League) and suggest how strained the association between fundamental human rights and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism had become. If the Great Depression helped drive a wedge between human rights and property rights, the rise of Nazi Germany and the outbreak of war in Europe kindled a broader American identification with its rights “tradition,” particularly as embodied by the Bill of Rights. In Whose Revolution? A Study of the Future Course of Liberalism in the United States, Irving DeWitt Talmadge held that “the tragic experiences under authoritarian rule have enforced the importance of individual rights. These rights have ceased to be abstractions to people deprived of them.”12 Similarly, Arthur Garfield Hays, co-founder of the ACLU, insisted that it was the American commitment to political freedoms that made democracy vital and kept the specter of fascism and communism from American shores, going on to clarify that “when I refer to political freedom I am concerned with those liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”13 This attention to the Bill of Rights was new. Michael Kammen notes that selections from Hays’s book and another article on the history of the Bill of Rights appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1939, even though the publication had never before printed a word about the Bill of Rights. Going into 1940, several state governments followed the lead of New York in establishing a “Bill of Rights Week,” which encouraged schools and communities to promote understanding of “the purpose, meaning and importance” of the Bill of Rights as a counter to “un-American philosophies.”14 In Our Bill of Rights: What It Means to Me, published by the Bill of Rights Sesquicentennial

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Committee, fifty-eight prominent Americans, including Francis Biddle, Pearl S. Buck, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, wrote of the significance of the document. New York senator James M. Mead’s contribution was typical when he diagnosed Europe’s troubles: “they haven’t a Bill of Rights.”15 The American tradition of guarding the freedoms preserved by the Bill of Rights had been largely invented twenty years earlier by Harvard Law professor Zechariah Chafee. In his 1920 volume Freedom of Speech, which helped establish modern First Amendment jurisprudence, Chafee not only asserted new interpretations of the existing constitutional protections found in the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment but also cast those interpretations as fundamentally rooted in American identity. He recast the American Revolution as a struggle to break from the English doctrine of “seditious libel” and to ensure that the United States, as independent from the British Empire, would not be bound by the common law tradition of punishing unpopular speech. “The First Amendment was written by men . . . who intended to wipe out the common law of sedition, and make further prosecutions for criticism of the government, without any incitement to law-breaking, forever impossible in the United States of America.”16 At the time such arguments from history were less important to progressives and socialists who were ill disposed to a political/legal technology that seemed mired in a hazy preindustrial past, but this narrative was essential to the renaissance of rights in the 1940s. By 1941, Chafee’s anti-British rhetoric was politically inconvenient, however, and some commentators took care to discern a broader, transatlantic liberal tradition. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s contribution to Our Bill of Rights began with a paean to the Magna Carta as the “first step in that 500-year struggle for Anglo-Saxon liberty.” Recalling that it was in “the field of Runnymede” that modern freedom was born, few of Hull’s readers would have forgotten that those fields were then under attack by German bombers.17 At the outbreak of the war, H. G. Wells rallied the British public in a Times of London column titled “War Aims: The Rights of Man” and, at the height of the Battle of Britain, circulated a proposed international declaration of rights.18 A cosmopolitan proponent of world government, Wells’s intervention was intended as a call to defend and expand individual liberty as a universal human right, rather than as a particular “AngloSaxon” privilege. Even so, his publications contributed to a growing sense of a common Anglo-American culture of individual rights. As it so happened, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred just days before the observances of the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, a coincidence that helped ensure a prominent place for the rhetoric of rights throughout

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the war. The December 15, 1941, commemorative events took on, in the words of the New York Times, a “solemn fervor, intensified by the fact that the document embodies those principles that America has been forced to defend in world-wide conflict.” In Chicago, ten students from Providence Parochial High School read the Bill of Rights, with Senator Scott Lucas declaring, “These are the sacred rights of constitutional liberty for which we battle the totalitarian powers of the earth.” In New York, it was actress Helen Hays who read the first ten amendments, but Firello LaGuardia sounded a similar note. The Bill of Rights, he said, embodied “the contrast between a democracy and a dictatorship” and had to be defended: “My friends, that means fight.”19 The Four Freedoms proclaimed by Roosevelt earlier that year elegantly elided the nationally bound rights discourse with a newer discourse of freedoms triumphant “everywhere in the world,” an elision captured by the term “human rights.” Freedom of speech and freedom of religion directly referenced the First Amendment and provided a counterpoint to Nazi anti-Semitic persecutions and totalitarian control of the public sphere. Freedom from want described the interventionist New Deal agenda and acknowledged the extent to which the Depression created an enabling context for the rise of fascism. Freedom from fear, which the president tied to postwar arms control initiatives, suggested the possibility of new international governance structures. In his radio address during the Bill of Rights sesquicentennial celebration, Roosevelt characterized the Bill of Rights as “a declaration of human rights which has influenced the thinking of all mankind from one end of the world to the other.” At once a vehicle for and a symbol of the universal human values that lay at the core of American identity, the Bill of Rights was presented by Roosevelt as a “mother charter” of global human rights that the “political and moral tigers” in Germany were seeking to destroy by threatening the United States as a nation and human rights as a principle.20 Roosevelt returned to the well of human rights a few weeks later when he and Winston Churchill drafted a joint statement of war aims. Issued on New Year’s Day, 1942, the “Declaration by United Nations” was signed by the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China, as well as twenty-two other nations, and proclaimed the Allies’ intent to “defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.” It reaffirmed the precedent of the Atlantic Charter, released the previous August, which asserted the aspiration for “all the men in all the lands” to live in “freedom from fear and want.” Drafted primarily by Churchill, the Atlantic Charter

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had eschewed the phrase “human rights,” which Roosevelt reintroduced into the Declaration.21 Roosevelt also coined the term “United Nations,” and while at this point it was a plural rather than singular noun, an enduring connection was established between what would become the United Nations Organization and the principle of human rights. Despite the sanctimonious speeches on December 15, the Bill of Rights in practice had a mixed record during the war. Civil liberties suffered, although not to the extent they had under World War I. Most critics of the war remained free to publish and speak, and many conscientious objectors to military service saw their objections honored. The great exceptions to this were the mass expulsion and incarceration of individuals of Japanese ancestry. Indeed, equivocation might have been sensed in the Los Angeles celebration of the Bill of Rights anniversary, at which Mayor Fletcher Bowron declared, “Now is the time to see how little, not how much we can say,” and warned against too much criticism of government policies.22 A month later, Bowron dismissed all Japanese American employees from City Hall and furiously lobbied for removal of the entire West Coast population.23 Shortly thereafter, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which would be ratified by the Supreme Court in the 1944 Korematsu decision, effectively denying basic rights to thousands of individuals living in the western United States. While this vexed record of upholding constitutional liberties was unfolding, the effort to extend the New Deal’s rights framework into the economic sphere continued. In the spring of 1941, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) presented a postwar vision for economic planning guided by “a new bill of human and economic rights.” Designed to complement and extend the political rights “firmly and finally established” 150 years before, the report stressed that these new rights were made possible and necessary by the “new aspects of economic life, technology, and congestion which our forefathers did not face.” The NRPB’s report claimed that the United States had moved from the problem of “freedom and the production of wealth” to the problem of “freedom and the distribution of abundance” (emphasis in original). A new bill of rights – which included the right to work, to a living wage, to rest and leisure, to education, to social security, and to an adequate standard of living – would serve to guide government policy and planning at all levels, and to ensure that the economic and social coordination achieved for the purposes of national defense could be translated into shared general prosperity when the guns fell silent.24 As a set of specific proposals, the NRPB’s new bill of rights went nowhere, and after several more reports, congressional opponents defunded

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the board. Although he declined to champion the NRPB’s policy proposals, Roosevelt did take up the rhetoric of a new bill of rights in his 1944 State of the Union Address: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed” (emphasis added). These included the right to “a useful and remunerative job,” decent housing, medical care, education, a decent wage, and also, in language attuned for the campaign stump, the “right of every farmer” to sell for a good price, and the “right of every businessman” to be free from “unfair competition and domination by monopolies.”25 More metaphor (“so to speak”) than legislative initiative, the president’s “Economic Bill of Rights” was as much a rephrasing of extant policies as the framing of a future agenda. Early reaction to the metaphor was mixed. Local stewards of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America fully endorsed the president’s call for a “Second Bill of Rights” when they met in Hartford, Connecticut; their stance was consistent with much of organized labor. That phrase fell flat with Raymond Moley, an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times, however, who declared the Economic Bill of Rights “almost wholly political confetti” and mocked the possibility that there could be a guaranteed right to a job. “Santa Claus must be just around the corner,” he wrote caustically. Six weeks out from the speech, even the sympathetic New York Amsterdam News saw little evidence that it was more than a momentary rhetorical flourish: “This is the greatest and most realistic of the Bills of Rights. Hence the loud silence that has greeted it.”26 Even if Santa Claus was not just around the corner, the end of the war was, and no question loomed larger than that of the economic transition. The war put an end to the Great Depression, and although both parties had campaigned in 1944 on continuing “full employment,” Roosevelt’s victory presented an opportunity to pursue that goal through the establishment of a “right to work.” Roosevelt returned to the “second Bill of Rights” in early 1945, but this time emphasized the right to work as “the most fundamental.”27 Within weeks, Senator James Murray introduced legislation to establish “the right to useful, remunerative, regular, and full-time employment.” In the months that followed, however, support for a guaranteed “right” to a job dwindled, as critics from Walter Lippmann to Henry Hazlitt declared it unworkable. “It is one thing to commit the federal government to a policy which it must try to carry out,” Lippmann scoffed, “It is quite a different thing to make it a matter of right, which all Americans ‘have.’”28 By the time the Employment Act of 1946 was passed, the law called only for the

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promotion of “maximum employment” and even that was hedged against “other essential considerations of national policy” and “free competitive enterprise.”29 By 1946, the war was over, Roosevelt was dead, and the administration’s biggest champion of economic rights, Henry Wallace, had been fired as Secretary of Commerce by President Harry Truman. As robust as the conversation about economic rights had been since the mid-1930s, this outcome reflected both a strong conservative counternarrative (bolstered by the emerging Cold War) and the failure of advocates to sufficiently articulate what it meant to have a “right” to work. The debate over the right to work and the economic bill of rights also reflected a contraction of the discourse from a human rights framing, as it appeared in the original NRPB report, to one that was more clearly circumscribed within the American nation-state. While the policies that might have been suggested by the Four Freedoms faltered during the war, those freedoms achieved iconic status in the public imagination largely through four paintings created by Norman Rockwell in early 1942. In fact, it was Rockwell’s imagery that popularized the Four Freedoms heuristic for understanding human rights, reviving the president’s phrase eighteen months after it was delivered.30 The vernacular aesthetic and content of Rockwell’s work lent a compelling familiarity to the concept of human rights understood as the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech imagined as participation in a New England town meeting, freedom of worship seen in the pious faces of Christian prayers, freedom from want realized in the bounty of a Thanksgiving table, and the freedom from fear enjoyed by children being tucked into bed by their watchful parents. Rockwell’s white, lower middle-class iconography provided an opportunity to viewers to imagine the Four Freedoms within an exclusively domestic context. Rather than emphasizing the fact that these freedoms were at stake “everywhere in the world,” Rockwell presented readers with quintessentially American scenes of home and hearth. As with much of Rockwell’s work, the paintings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and were accompanied by essays that cast each of the freedoms in a broader global context. The prodigious Booth Tarkington imagined a chance meeting between a young Hitler and Mussolini for “Freedom of Speech.” “In America or England, so long as governments actually exist by means of freedom of speech,” Hitler is made to say, “you and I could not even get started; and when we shall have become masters of our own countries, we shall not be able to last a day unless we destroy freedom of speech.” In “Freedom of Worship,” popular historian Will Durant

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praised the sacrifice of war as “the privilege of winning for all peoples” the sacred freedom “of body and soul.” Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Freedom from Fear” likewise connected Rockwell’s domestic scene with the global struggle: “freedom for ourselves involves freedom for others – that is a universal right, neither lightly given by providence nor to be maintained by words alone, but by acts and deeds and living.” Rockwell’s paintings inscribed the Four Freedoms within the intimate domesticity of American life, but these authors situated them within the public political space of global conflict and the imperative of popular military mobilization.31 If the paintings and other essays imagined human rights as an extant American reality to be defended, the essay accompanying “Freedom from Want” equivocated as to that reality. Written by the then-unknown Filipino author Carlos Bulosan, the essay was more ambiguous and elliptical than the others in the series, with only a few references to the war. Bulosan instead meditates on the displacement and alienation experienced by those on the margin of American society. “Sometimes we walk across this land looking for something to hold onto . . . we cannot believe that America has no more place for us.” The “want” described is both material and spiritual – food and clothing, to be sure, but in order that “we are not merely living but also becoming a creative part of life.” The shiny faces around Rockwell’s holiday table grate against the images of struggle that Bulosan projects: “We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon the armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.” Here, scenes perhaps first assumed to be drawn from the European battlefield – bayonets and bullets – slide into the mise en scène of America’s own tyrannies – the lynch tree and the police interrogation room.32 Bulosan’s essay signaled the way that hoisting the banner of human rights in World War II could serve both to inspire a global crusade and to throw America’s own failures and exclusions into stark relief. In the end, the dignity of Rockwell’s subjects, rather than the precariousness of Bulosan’s, helped sell war bonds and establish the Four Freedoms and an indelible image of human rights in the public consciousness. But this image yielded little in the way of additional legal, policy, or legislative achievements in the 1940s, despite advocates’ recourse to the rhetoric of rights. The Four Freedoms resonated because of their consonance with New Deal liberalism, yet their original ambit was global rather than

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national, and it was in the realm of international organization that some measure of institutionalization was accomplished. Roosevelt’s speech presented the Four Freedoms as the foundation of a postwar global order, and a sustained wartime effort by a number of civil society organizations achieved significant results in this regard. The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP), the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, the American Law Institute, and others conducted research, published reports, and lobbied officials in support of a new international organization that would require member states, as a 1940 report by the CSOP put it, to “accept certain human and cultural rights in their constitutions and in international covenants.” International human rights protections were essential to ensure peace, these groups argued, but so too was broad American public support for multilateral engagement – a fact evidenced by the League of Nations experience. Thus, advocates foregrounded human rights in their articles, radio addresses, and even comic books in an effort to cultivate grassroots support for the United Nations Organization.33 These efforts succeeded in ensuring both that the United Nations had a strong human rights mandate and that there was broad American support – both public and official – for US leadership in the new organization. The public significance of human rights was suggested by the appointment of Eleanor Roosevelt as US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), on which she served until 1952. The “most admired woman in world” according to Gallup’s polling of the American public, Mrs. Roosevelt was ubiquitous in the public sphere through her daily “My Day” column and other writings, public lectures, and radio appearances. Well known for her progressive stances, particularly with regard to African American equality, Eleanor Roosevelt came to personify human rights despite having rarely used the term before her UN appointment. She remains a patron saint for many contemporary human rights advocates.34 Conscious of public scrutiny, she told the UNCHR at its first meeting that “human rights mean something to the people of the world, which is hope for a better opportunity for people in general to enjoy justice and freedom and opportunity.”35 What they did not mean, however, was a specific mechanism for addressing violations. As Roosevelt wrote in her “My Day” column shortly after the commission began meeting, “I’m afraid that many, many people think that the Human Rights Commission is a tribunal where all people who have complaints can hope that their complaints will be heard . . . These people will be disappointed, because . . . [t]he Human Rights Commission is not a court which can deal with individual wrongs.”

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For “the First Lady of the World,” human rights meant hope, not law – confirming their discursive rather than practical value.36 The response to a series of petitions proved Roosevelt’s predictions of disappointment to be correct. Between 1946 and 1951, the National Negro Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Civil Rights Congress petitioned the UN, alleging widespread violation of African American human rights in contravention of the US commitment under the United Nations Charter to promote “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” In each case the petitions were solemnly received and discretely ignored. The most significant was the 1947 NAACP petition, an effort directed by W. E. B. DuBois, which generated significant media attention. When the Soviet representatives pushed to include it on the UN agenda, the Americans countered with a proposal that would have subjected the allegations of human rights abuse against all member states to discussion, and the matter was dropped. Using a strategy of deterrence through mutually assured embarrassment, the US government avoided confronting American racial apartheid and demonstrated the impotence of the UN to serve as an enforcer of human rights.37 Instead, the accomplishments were exclusively discursive. While burying the NAACP petition, Roosevelt and the other members of the UNCHR were drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a nonbinding statement of principle adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Despite the emergence of the Cold War, the document reflected broad international consensus around a social democratic vision of rights. Social, economic, and cultural rights were included alongside classic civil and political rights in keeping with the Four Freedoms and Second Bill of Rights – as well as, it should be noted, the Soviet Constitution of 1935. By the end of the decade, this expansive articulation of rights provoked a backlash, led by the American Bar Association, against what ABA president Frank Holman labeled “human rights on pink paper.” Although Holman worried that the UN human rights program was undermining “our kind of government and its institutions,” in point of fact the Declaration of Human Rights threatened no kind of government since there were no meaningful mechanisms of enforcement.38 Unmoored from effective political or legal mechanisms, the discourse of human rights largely receded from the American public sphere beginning in the 1950s. And yet, this discourse left a trace that marked the postwar trajectories of American liberalism and social movements and was recovered as an organizing principle for a new generation of transnational

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movements on behalf of human dignity beginning in the 1970s. The emergent outlines of the welfare state, which underlay the broadly egalitarian economic expansion enjoyed through the 1970s, was in part rooted in the association of economic security with freedom implied by the “freedom from want.” Additionally, while leaders of the Black Freedom struggle made the strategic decision in the late 1940s to pursue a domestic civil rights strategy, it was informed by a broader recognition of the existence of fundamentally universal moral rights that needed legal expression and institutionalization. Thus, although it is true that human rights produced more light than heat during the 1940s, they sparked a slow burn whose embers might yet flame anew.

NOTES 1 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union” (1941), accessed December 30, 2015, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/pdfs/ fftext.pdf . 2 James Kimble, “The Illustrated Four Freedoms: FDR, Rockwell, and the Margins of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 45 (2015): 46– 69. 3 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Review of the Achievements of the Seventy-Third Congress,” Radio address, June 28, 1934, accessed December 30, 2015, http:// docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/062834.html. 4 “Columbia Professor Asks Senator Norris to Form Third Party,” Washington Post, December 26, 1930; Henry Steele Commager, “Constitutional History and the Higher Law,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 62 (1938), 20–40; Max Lerner, “The Supreme Court and American Capitalism,” Yale Law Journal 42 (1933), 668–701. 5 Hamilton Fish, “The Challenge of the Aged,” North American Review 229 (1930), 96. 6 “Science News,” Science 75 (1932), 9. 7 Quoted in Jerold Auerbach, “The La Follette Committee and the C.I.O.,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48 (1964), 3–20. 8 Ibid., 443. 9 “Wagner Labor Bill Defended by Green,” New York Times, March 23, 1934. 10 “Liberty League for Economic Freedom, Shouse Tells Borah,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1934; Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” American Historical Review 56 (1950), 19–33. 11 Herbert Hoover, “The Challenge of Liberty,” Saturday Evening Post, September 8, 1934. 12 Irving DeWitt Talmadge, Whose Revolution? A Study of the Future Course of Liberalism in the United States (1941; repr. New York: Hyperion Press, 1975), vi.

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13 Michael Kammen, A Machine that Would Go by Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 339. 14 Ibid. 15 J. W. Wise, ed., Our Bill of Rights: What It Means to Me (New York: Bill of Rights Sesqui-Centennial Committee, 1941), 99. 16 Zecheriah Chafee, Freedom of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 23–4. 17 Wise, Our Bill of Rights, 73. 18 H. G. Wells, “War Aims: The Rights of Man,” The Times, October 25, 1939. 19 “150th Year Marked of Bill of Rights,” New York Times, December 16, 1941; “Chicagoans Join Nation in Tribute to Bill of Rights,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 16, 1941. 20 “President’s Bill of Rights Speech,” New York Times, December 16, 1941. 21 Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 327 n.16. 22 “Southland Vows Bill of Rights Will Survive,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1941. 23 Abraham Hoffman, “The Conscience of a Public Official: Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron and Japanese Removal,” Southern California Quarterly 92 (2010), 243–74. 24 National Resources Planning Board, “Planning for Action: An Approach to Post-Defense Planning,” in box 143, folder “National Resources Planning Board, 1941,” Franklin D. Roosevelt, Papers as President: The President’s Secretary’s File (PSF), 1933–45, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, accessed December 30, 2015, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/ images/psf/psf000713.pdf . 25 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress” (1944), accessed December 30, 2015, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text .html. 26 “UE Stewards Ask End to ‘Little Steel,’” Hartford Courant, January 17, 1944; Raymond Moley, “The President Tries a Punt,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1944; “A Realistic Bill of Rights,” New York Amsterdam News, February 26, 1944. 27 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address” (1945), accessed December 30, 2015, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16595. 28 Walter Lippman, “Loose Words about Full Employment,” Washington Post, September 18, 1945; Henry Hazlett, “Implications of State Guarantee of Employment,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 21 (1944), 114–19. 29 P. Bachrach, “The Right to Work: Emergence of the Idea in the United States,” Social Science Review 26 (1952), 153–64. 30 Kimble, “The Illustrated Four Freedoms.” 31 Booth Tarkington, “Freedom of Speech,” Saturday Evening Post, February 20, 1943; Will Durant, “Freedom of Worship,” Saturday Evening Post, February 27, 1943; Stephen Vincent Benét, “Freedom of Speech,” Saturday Evening Post, March 13, 1943.

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32 Carlos Bulosan, “Freedom from Want,” Saturday Evening Post, March 6, 1943. 33 Glenn Mitoma, “Civil Society and International Human Rights: The Commission to Study the Organization of Peace and the Origins of the UN Human Rights Regime,” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008), 607–30. 34 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). 35 “Verbatim Report of the First Meeting of the Commission on Human Rights [Excerpt],” in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948, ed. Allida Black, vol. 1 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2007), 489–92. 36 Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (February 8, 1947), accessed December 30, 2015, www.gwu.edu/∼erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1947&_f=md000569. 37 Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Eleanor Roosevelt was a longtime board member of the NAACP and lobbied strongly against the petition strategy. 38 Glenn Mitoma, Human Rights and the Negotiation of American Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

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Fictions of Anti-Semitism and the Beginning of Holocaust Literature Josh Lambert

There is a myth, widely circulated by respectable scholars, that goes as follows. During World War II, and in the decade or so immediately following, American popular culture portrayed Nazis as monstrous enemies who committed unprecedented, terrible crimes, but this portrayal did not focus particularly on Jews as the Third Reich’s primary or paradigmatic victims. Only later, this story goes – after 1961, when Adolph Eichmann’s trial was broadcast on American television, or maybe after 1967, when the Six-Day War radically changed the situation in Israel and Palestine – did Americans come to see Jews as exemplary victims of Hitler’s regime and to see the Holocaust, as the genocide of European Jews came to be called, as a signal event in the history of the United States. Scholars have conclusively refuted that myth, most notably in a crucial book by the social historian Hasia Diner that surveys the vast and varied commemorations of the Holocaust in America before the 1960s.1 But the myth largely persists in literary and cultural history: even the most sophisticated and wide-ranging recent studies of Holocaust literature tend to imply, by omission if not by direct statement, that there were few significant literary responses to the genocide of European Jews in American literature until Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker in 1961, or even later.2 Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the 1940s, American writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, responded to the Nazi genocide with a range of literary works that achieved both popular success and critical acclaim. Such responses typically took the form of an examination of anti-Semitism, whether in Europe or the United States. Many novels treated the phenomenon centrally, including Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945), Jo Sinclair’s Wasteland (1946), Abraham Bernstein’s Home Is the Hunted (1947), Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), and Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947). So did many notable plays and films of the period, including Ernst Lubitsch’s To 44

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Be or Not to Be (1942), Arthur Laurents’s Home of the Brave (1945), Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), Darryl Zanuck’s film adaptation of Gentleman’s Agreement (1948), and Mark Robson’s 1949 film adaptation of Laurents’s play. Much of the other bestselling fiction of this period attended to antiSemitism even when its focus was primarily elsewhere. As Leah Garrett recently notes, one of the “main themes” of early postwar novels about World War II is “the pervasive anti-Semitism encountered in the American military and the attempts to come to terms with it.”3 Such novels sold very well in the late 1940s and included titles such as John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, Ira Wolfert’s An Act of Love, Merle Miller’s That Winter, Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders, and Martha Gellhorn’s The Wife of Astonishment. Similar examples can be found in other works of Anglo-American literature of the period ostensibly concerned with settings and issues far removed from the Europe and the war; for example, Malcolm Lowry’s celebrated late modernist novel, Under the Volcano (1947). As Donald Weber phrases it, “the meaning of Jewish identity in relation to various forms of antiSemitism . . . became perhaps the overarching subject of post-war cultural expression.”4 No thoughtful reader of this literature could doubt that it reflected Americans’ fascination with recent events in Europe and the increasing centrality of the Nazis’ genocidal aims to Americans’ understanding of World War II. The vast majority of these literary works, along with plenty of short fiction and poetry treating American anti-Semitism published in the same period, explicitly mentions the Nazi persecution of Jews, at least in passing. But even when it does not, by addressing anti-Semitism such literature aims to raise readers’ awareness of the genocide of European Jews and convince them of its relevance to contemporary American life. These works pose this question: the murder of millions of foreign Jews was a tragedy, but how should it matter, here and now, to American readers? The answers in these works helped establish both the relevance and the conceptual outlines of what would come to be called “Holocaust literature” and “Holocaust memory” in the decades that followed. Surveying a number of the most successful, influential, and resonant literary titles of the period, this chapter details American writers’ responses to the genocide, during and immediately after the end of the war. Some novelists described the death camps or focused on American anti-Semitism as a social problem made more pressing by knowledge of what had happened in Europe. Others argued for the relevance of the genocide to postwar

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Americans by emphasizing how it raised troubling questions about knowledge, identity, and affiliation that should matter to all postwar Americans, whether or not they felt themselves to be living in a place and time in which anti-Semitism was a significant problem. As one might expect, many of the earliest, most complex, and most sustained literary treatments of the genocide in the United States were produced by those writers working in the field of American Yiddish literature. Yiddish was at once the language spoken by the majority of the Nazis’ Jewish victims and a tongue that had developed a vigorous cultural presence in America, with daily Yiddish newspaper circulation peaking in the hundreds of thousands in the interwar years and a vibrant Yiddish theater that could seat thousands on any given night.5 As Anita Norich argues, despite the language barriers, American Yiddish and English literary activity during the war often intertwined and overlapped.6 The novelist Sholem Asch, for one key example, published a fascinating and complex series of fictions, including The Nazarene (1939/1943), “Christ in the Ghetto” (1943), and “The Birth of Hitler” (1944), which deployed Christian imagery and theology as a frame for thinking through the contemporary persecution of Jews. Asch was popular enough that his works were published in both languages and sometimes first, or only, in English,7 so one cannot plausibly deny that such Yiddish literature influenced American readers of English. The ability of writers like Asch to raise awareness of the genocide by publishing, in English, information that had been reported extensively in Yiddish is exemplified by an essay he contributed to the New York Times Magazine, on February 7, 1943, lamenting the destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe, mentioning explicitly “gas chambers,” cattle cars, and the murder of two million Polish Jews.8 There, Asch quotes from a Yiddish letter, translated in the Times a month earlier, which purported to have been written on behalf of ninety-three religious Jewish girls in Warsaw preparing to martyr themselves rather than be used as sexual slaves by the Nazis.9 Though scholars have since determined that no such group martyrdom took place, a handful of literary works about the ninety-three girls, written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English by Americans, were published in the months that followed.10 Compelling in and of themselves, such texts, along with innumerable other works of American Yiddish literature and journalism published throughout the 1940s, establish clearly both that many Americans had access to a stream of information (if not always an entirely reliable one) about the genocide in Europe as it was happening and, more importantly, that they felt no compunction about responding to these events using literary techniques and approaches.11

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Of course, treating the genocide of European Jews in Yiddish or Hebrew posed different opportunities and challenges than doing so for the audiences that consumed American literature in English. As David Roskies has shown, Jewish writers, writing in Jewish languages for Jewish audiences during and after the Holocaust, could draw on, and parody, thousands of years’ worth of established tropes, images, and phrases.12 But how did literature composed in English, aimed at a wide, variegated American reading audience, respond to the genocide and assert its relevance to Americans? Most directly, several works from the period explicitly described the mechanics of the genocide. A group of popular American novels in 1948, for example, offered quasi-journalistic descriptions of “the epochal moment when forward units of General Patton’s Seventh Army liberated Dachau during the German retreat,” as Leah Garrett notes.13 Of Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, Merle Miller’s That Winter, Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders, and Martha Gellhorn’s The Wine of Astonishment (later republished as Point of No Return), Garrett observes that these authors’ descriptions of concentration camps and the machinery of extermination “read like firsthand reportage rather than mediated novelistic discourse.”14 Indeed, according to a scholar of Gellhorn’s work, her fiction adapted passages she had previously published in journalistic accounts while working as a correspondent for Collier’s.15 And while some reportage on the concentration camps had downplayed the role of Jews as the Nazis’ primary victims, Garrett argues persuasively that because these novels all featured American Jewish soldiers as their protagonists, they made the case to millions of postwar readers that the genocide of European Jews was inseparable from the larger story of America’s role in the war. Though these early direct representations of the death camps were significant, treatment of the subject was not limited to fictions set in the European theater of the war. A striking example of an allusion to the European genocide in a work set in the Pacific theater appears early in James Michener’s bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947). In Michener’s story, “Mutiny,” an American lieutenant sides with the local population of a Pacific island who are refusing to cooperate with US forces. In explaining why he supports the islanders, he compares them to “some sawed-off runt of a Jew in Dachau prison . . . working against the Nazis.”16 The analogy, somewhat shockingly, casts the US military in the role of the Nazis and Pacific Islanders as their victims, demonstrating how widely available such symbols had already become for deployment in relatively unrelated contexts.

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Authors also made the case that far outside of Nazi-occupied territory, and without the bureaucratic and military power of the Third Reich fomenting it, anti-Semitism could still carry violent, sometimes mortal consequences.17 Anti-Semitism in the United States had very rarely been murderous in its direct effects: as pervasive and pernicious a phenomenon as it has unquestionably been, Leonard Dinnerstein remarks in his history of American anti-Semitism that “there have never been pogroms in America” (with the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 standing as an exception).18 When novelists turned their attention to American anti-Semitism, they were attempting to express anxieties raised by the Nazi genocide of European Jews in a way that would resonate with Americans, but it would have been factually misleading to present stories of Jews violently persecuted in America. Instead, novelists employed poignant metonymies to heighten the stakes of American anti-Semitism. For example, several war novels of the period climax with the death of an individual American Jew, including Shaw’s Young Lions, Wolfert’s An Act of Love, and Heym’s The Crusaders. Whatever analysis one wishes to make of this trend – at the time, Alfred Kazin linked it to “that glorification of death, that passion for sacrifice” that was then on view among the Jewish paramilitary and terrorist groups opposing the British in Palestine19 – it seems clear that these deaths also simply stand metonymically, within their respective fictions, for the millions of murdered Jews of Europe. Norman Mailer’s massively successful first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), furnishes a particularly striking example. The book follows a multiethnic group of American soldiers through their deployment in the South Pacific. At a crucial moment, a “wretched” and “helpless” Jewish soldier named Roth understands that if he refuses to jump a gap on a mountain ledge, his “platoon wouldn’t understand. They would jeer him, take relief from their own weakness in abusing him.”20 Knowing this, he jumps, and falls to his death. The isolation of this Jew from his platoon (who “wouldn’t understand” him), with its fatal consequences, serves as a metaphor for the likelihood that a Jew could be alienated from his fellow Americans in general. Later in the novel, a second Jewish soldier from the same unit muses on the history of Jews’ suffering and laments how little bearing that knowledge has had on the American military men who surround him: “All the ghettoes, all the soul cripplings, all the massacres and pogroms, the gas chambers, the lime kilns – all of it touched no one, all of it was lost. It was carried and carried and carried, and when it finally grew too heavy it was dropped.”21 Though the soldiers did not deliberately kill their Jewish compatriot, here their anti-Semitic insensitivity is

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rhetorically linked, through the image of a weight that has been “dropped,” both with Roth, who died by falling, and with another, non-Jewish dead soldier, whose corpse has been carried and let slip. In Mailer’s vision of the American military, anti-Semitism is not just stubborn and pervasive but also tangibly responsible for the death of an American Jew, reflecting its continuity with the murderous hatred of the Nazis. Though wildly different in setting and style, Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), a celebrated classic of Anglo-American late modernist prose fiction, likewise climaxes with a death: in this case, not the death of a Jew, but of a man who is killed because he is erroneously perceived to be Jewish. Late in the novel, its protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin, former British consul in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, is mistaken for a Jew – he is called “antichrista prik” and “Jew chingao” [i.e., chingado, fucker] – and then murdered.22 This makes a case for taking anti-Semitism seriously, as the novel depicts such beliefs as threatening the lives not only of Jews but also of anyone who, like Firmin, could be mistaken for a Jew. The threat of serious physical violence against a non-Jew mistaken for a Jew similarly constitutes the focal point of the playwright Arthur Miller’s only novel, Focus (1945). In that book, a New Yorker named Newman begins to be perceived as Jewish after he buys a new pair of glasses; the book climaxes with a bloody fight involving baseball bats, fists, and an organized gang of thugs attacking what they call “Hebrew bastards.”23 Miller gestures toward the relationship between such acts of anti-Semitism in the United States and those perpetrated by the Nazis, when, in the novel, Newman watches a film, set in Poland, where a group of Jews are to be hung by “German soldiers” “merely because they are Jews” (199–201). Nazi antiSemitism, rather than its American counterpart, was the impetus for the novel: Miller makes this explicit in his 1984 preface, in which he notes that, although the book was inspired by what he saw at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he worked during the war, “whatever the actual level of hostility to Jews that I was witnessing, it was vastly exacerbated in my mind by the threatening existence of Nazism” (v). Events in Europe inspired novelists like Miller and Mailer to think more deeply about anti-Semitism in the American military and in America itself, but the link Miller made between American and European anti-Semitism suggested, like Lowry’s invocation of anti-Semitism in Under the Volcano, a broader way of thinking about the relevance of Nazism to life in the postwar United States.24 Indeed, in Focus the artificial central conceit draws the reader’s attention away from the social problems of the era and toward the arbitrariness and irrationality of anti-Semitism. Similarly, much of the literature

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produced in this period concerned itself less with the concrete consequences of anti-Semitism in America and more with the internal incoherencies and necessarily confounding dynamics through which antiSemitic beliefs were acted on. In Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, a child is bullied and called “dirty Jew” and “stinking kike,” and the results of housing, employment, and personal discrimination are made tangible for any reader who has not been aware of them. These facets of American anti-Semitism, moreover, are explicitly contextualized in relation to the European genocide.25 Yet, as in Focus, the most revealing, crucial aspect of that novel is its central premise, in which a non-Jewish magazine reporter pretends to be Jewish so as to experience anti-Semitism directly. These premises, like the circumstances of Firmin’s murder in Under the Volcano, suggest that it is impossible to identify a Jew accurately from direct observation. As the protagonist of Gentleman’s Agreement tells himself, contemplating the idea that for the purposes of writing a magazine article about anti-Semitism he can just “be Jewish,” it doesn’t matter that “he didn’t look Jewish, sound Jewish.” Because, according to this understanding, there are no intrinsic qualities that all Jews share: “he had no accent or mannerisms that were Jewish – neither did lots of Jews” (63–64). Motivated by a desire to refute Nazi and anti-Semitic claims about Jews’ essential natures and ineluctable behaviors, these texts declare, on the contrary, that to be a Jew is simply, and only, to be a person whom others regard as a Jew. Of course, such an idea did not circulate only in literary fiction. Indeed, this way of understanding Jewishness was stated explicitly in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, published in 1946 in France and in 1948 in English translation: “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew,” as Sartre puts it.26 Sartre is likewise explicit in claiming that Jews have no shared traditions, practices, or beliefs that distinguish them from nonJews, remarking that Jews “cannot take pride in any collective work that is specifically Jewish, or in a civilization properly Jewish or in a common mysticism.”27 It has long been recognized, even by sympathetic readers of Sartre, that such statements reflected ignorance and errors in judgment, and, whatever Sartre’s intentions, that they were offensive to some Jews.28 It is important, if not quite exculpatory, to note that Anglo-American fiction of the period, written by liberal Jews and non-Jews alike, played out strikingly similar ideas about Jewishness as their own responses to Nazism. Acts of passing, and confusions of Jewish and non-Jewish identities, recur throughout the literature of the period, including in many of the bestselling World War II novels that are the focus of Garrett’s study.29 Other examples proliferate. In Irwin Shaw’s short story, “Select Clientele,”

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which appeared in the New Yorker in 1940, a non-Jewish European musician named Max gets called a “Jew bastard” by hoodlums while riding a bicycle on a country road along with his Jewish friends. “Poor Max,” his friend says, “Not even a Jew. You hang around with the wrong people.”30 John Berryman’s story “The Imaginary Jew” (1945) is narrated by a young man mistaken for a Jew by a group of people in Union Square, arguing about whether the United States should enter the war. The story concludes with its narrator realizing that “the imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew.”31 Jo Sinclair’s prize-winning novel Wasteland (1946) begins with its protagonist, whose original name was Jake Braunowitz, presenting himself as John Brown and telling his therapist, “Nobody in the office even knows I’m a Jew.” Sinclair is explicit that Jake’s crisis, which is the focus of the book, is precisely a crisis of “identity.”32 In Leslie Fiedler’s short story “Dirty Ralphy” (1947), the narrator remembers a particular kid from his childhood who called him “Dirty Jew” and accused him of killing Christ. The twist comes when the narrator’s mother tells him that the kid, Ralphy, whom he remembers, was actually himself Jewish and that the anti-Semitic taunts came from a different, non-Jewish child.33 Each of these narratives relies on the premise that it is difficult or impossible to tell who is Jewish and who isn’t. Such tales of confused identities, which almost always explicitly invoked the European genocide, responded to a Nazi racism that relied on the legibility of an individual’s Jewishness. And if such works insist that you can never really tell whether someone is Jewish or not, they suggest how unstable any claim about identity must be. Such thinking clearly contributed to the sense of postwar American Jews as “specialists in alienation” and to the pervasive experience of “self-alienation” that Morris Dickstein sees “everywhere in postwar culture.”34 One novel of the period bears emphasizing because of the complexity and perspicacity of its response to the events in Europe and especially to the literary representations and discourses, discussed earlier, that were proliferating in the United States. In The Victim (1947), his second novel, the future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow takes what is, in retrospect at least, a shocking approach to the topics of the moment. As critics have noted, the novel refers to the genocide of European Jews only once explicitly, but its fascination with the sources and dynamics of anti-Semitism clearly constitutes Bellow’s own attempt to think through the relevance of the European genocide to American life.35 Unlike Focus, Gentleman’s Agreement, and many other works of the period, however, Bellow’s novel concentrates its energy neither on the social problem of anti-Semitism in America (as an

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early reviewer noted, “the problem of prejudice is only incidental”36 ) nor on the epistemological problem of how to decide who is and is not a Jew, but, instead, on the impossibility of ever being certain who is guilty and who innocent. It is a novel, as one reviewer nicely phrased it, in which the reader sees “the victim victimizing the victimizer.”37 This is especially striking given that the book was published during precisely the years when Americans were coming to appreciate the enormity of the Holocaust. It must be understood as Bellow’s response to the books mentioned earlier (including Focus, which Bellow reviewed dismissively on its release) and to the ideas that made such plots compelling and commercially viable.38 The Victim centers on the interactions of a Jew, Asa Leventhal, and a non-Jew, Kirby Allbee, during a hot summer in New York. Many of their meetings feature anti-Semitic actions on Allbee’s part. Yet Allbee’s racist claims about Jews aren’t always the most obvious or disturbing ones in the playbook of modern anti-Semitism. Allbee generalizes that Jews shy away from “physical violence”; that Jews eschew alcohol and are critical of nonJews who imbibe; that Jews have special feelings for biblical and modern Yiddish songs, but not for American spirituals; and that some Jews look, or just are, “Asiatic.”39 These are erroneous, perniciously essentialist ideas about Jews, and all of them can be traced back through the history of Western anti-Semitism (in which Jews’ weakness and cowardice, relationships to alcohol and music, and association with the East are familiar tropes) and into Nazi discourse. But it is also striking how ambiguously or even positively presented they are in Bellow’s novel. If he had wanted to accentuate the distastefulness of anti-Semitic prejudice, it would have been easy enough for Bellow to have Allbee insultingly call Jews cowards and weaklings, rather than to have a character note that Jews abstain from “physical violence,” for example, or to have Allbee refer to a Jewish woman as Asiatic without his intending it as a compliment and also calling her “charming” (63). In every example, Bellow presents Allbee’s anti-Semitism as less brutally hateful than it could be, which, especially in comparison to other works of the period, could be understood to vitiate the novel’s effectiveness as a primer in the realities and evils of postwar American anti-Semitism. Also, by the time he appears in the novel, Allbee is so disempowered – he’s an unemployed, lonely drunk – that it is unclear how his insipid anti-Semitic remarks really threaten anyone. Furthermore, Bellow’s anti-Semite can be understood as having a genuine, justifiable claim against the novel’s Jew. Allbee claims that Leventhal, having been offended by an anti-Semitic remark Allbee made at a party, deliberately acted so as to make Allbee look bad at work. Leventhal did

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this, Allbee believes, by requesting that Allbee introduce him to Allbee’s boss and then disrespecting that boss, making Allbee look bad for having made the introduction—finally resulting in Allbee losing his job. What’s most noteworthy about this somewhat dizzying accusation is that Leventhal gradually comes to realize that he might have been at least partly at fault in Allbee’s being fired, as the latter claims. In other words, the novel raises the possibility that Leventhal may indeed be guilty of having caused Allbee’s difficulties and perhaps, therefore, deserving of his abuse. One confronts, in Weber’s words, “a gradual but steady recognition of the legitimacy of Allbee’s claims.”40 Bellow signals his intention to undermine a reader’s assumptions about who may or may not be at fault from the outset, both in the novel’s title (which raises the question, with its singular definite article, of who exactly should be read as the victim in this story) and in its epigraph from the Thousand and One Nights. This is where Bellow’s novel differs markedly from other fictions of anti-Semitism of the late 1940s, which aim to evoke readers’ sympathies for both European and American Jews and outrage against anti-Semitism in any form. Why, at that historical moment, would Bellow present a representative Jew who may indeed be deserving of the anti-Semite’s scorn? In retrospect, as an immediate response to the Holocaust, this aspect of The Victim does not make much sense. But read as an intellectual’s response to the reductive discourses circulating in America at the time of its publication, its purpose becomes clearer. While popular novels of the time, from Focus to Gentleman’s Agreement and beyond, portrayed the Jew merely as a person, in Sartre’s phrase, “whom other men consider a Jew,” and, even more than that, as a figure whose identity comes into being only as the victim of hatred, Bellow’s novel aimed to undermine those definitions of Jewishness. In The Victim, no one is completely a victim, because everyone is also an aggressor; and the American Jews represented in the novel are, if anything, ascending to positions of greater and greater strength in American culture.41 Judging by the decade that would follow, in which Jews, and Bellow himself, would take on larger and larger roles in American popular and literary culture, Allbee is not wrong to see himself as a Protestant relic of a previous age. In contrast to contemporary understandings of Jewishness like Sartre’s – where because Jewishness has no essential features it is asserted that the Jew exists only as the result of anti-Semitic hatred – Bellow explores ways of thinking about Jewishness that derive from his background in the fields of sociology and anthropology, in terms of kinship and relationships. For one thing, the Jews in The Victim behave in

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recognizably Jewish ways: they gather in a cafeteria, intersperse their English with Yiddish words, and talk about Jewish historical figures. For another, the novel obsesses over questions of duty to family members and to acquaintances from the very first page, where Leventhal leaves his office suddenly so as to tend to a sick nephew whom he barely knows; the proper uses of “connections” or “influence” are discussed again and again, by Leventhal and his friends and family members, who help one another get jobs and medical attention, and by Allbee, too, who demands that Leventhal use his influence with other Jews to advance his career. The novel is simultaneously aware that the idea that Jews influence one another is a major anti-Semitic trope – articulated perniciously in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and upheld by the Nazis – and also, rightly, it refuses to accede to anti-Semitic logic by denying that Jews should sometimes act in support of their fellow Jews.42 The Victim suggests that Bellow was acutely perceptive in understanding that such denials, along with claims of the nonexistence of “collective work that is specifically Jewish,” as in Sartre, and unwillingness to admit that anything distinguishes Jews from nonJews, as in Hobson and Miller, posed a more pressing threat in postwar America than anti-Semitism per se. Bellow’s remarks about the novel and the other American literature of anti-Semitism of the time underline the sense that he deliberately hoped to set himself apart with The Victim. He wrote to Edmund Wilson on April 22, 1946, that The Victim, “in spite of its theme . . . doesn’t – I think – have the tone of souffre-douleur [i.e., scapegoat].”43 Astoundingly, this statement comes two years before a wave of popular novels in which, in Garrett’s description, “the Jewish soldier had to die . . . to teach Christians how to become better men.”44 In his review of Focus, earlier that year, Bellow suggested that the issue of who is a Jew and who is not really isn’t quite as difficult to sort out as others suggested; surely an anti-Semite like Miller’s Newman, mistaken for a Jew, would “be far more apt to carry his baptismal certificate around to the neighbors as proof that he was not a Jew than to become suddenly resolute before the mad face of injustice.”45 Contrary to Sartre, Miller, and Hobson, then, Bellow reminds his readers, both in his evaluation of Miller’s novel and in his own fictional approach to the subject, that there are documents, practices, and bodies of knowledge that can effectively, if not conclusively, distinguish Jews from non-Jews. One can locate precedents for this aspect of The Victim in the work of Bellow’s former teachers in anthropology, Melville Herskovits and Alexander Goldenweiser, students of Franz Boas who in the 1920s and 1930s articulated related ideas about Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and Jewish

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power.46 In the late 1940s, though, on the heels of the most brutal and widely documented persecution of Jews in human history, it took much more “imagination . . . and sheer nerve,” as Leslie Fiedler has noted, “to portray the Jew, the Little Jew, as a victimizer as well as victim.”47 One sees a similar logic, however, in a furious 1949 polemic, Love & Death: A Study in Censorship, by Gershon Legman, which ingeniously reads the murder mystery as providing a victimizer – the murderer – who is transformed by the novel into a subhuman victim who can then be tracked and killed like an animal.48 And even if Bellow did not himself review such novels as Wasteland, Gentleman’s Agreement, and The Young Lions, one can imagine him nodding along to the dismissive treatments of those books contributed by Isaac Rosenfeld, Diana Trilling, and Kazin to Commentary, a publication ferociously supportive of Bellow’s work.49 What Bellow achieved, and what he was celebrated for by his peers, was to anticipate such critiques in fiction. It should surprise no one that American literary production was fascinated by anti-Semitism during and immediately after World War II – or at least it should surprise no one who is not irrationally committed to perpetuating a myth that Americans somehow, en masse, refused to grapple with the genocide of European Jews until decades later. In reams of commercial and literary fiction, Hollywood films, and many other genres and venues, Americans immediately began the work of thinking through the relevance of this major historical cataclysm to their own lives and their surroundings. The literature they produced was varied in its approaches and ideas, but unlike too much of the American Holocaust literature that has followed more recently, as a whole it tended to avoid representing the gruesome details of a foreign tragedy simply for the sake of sentimental exoticism, the faint moral pleasures of what has more recently been described as “misery lit.” On the contrary, American writers of the late 1940s labored to understand how Nazi racist beliefs mattered in the America in which they lived, which led them to a series of resonant and lasting thought experiments about identity and responsibility, and set the highest possible stakes for the discussion of individuals, collectivity, and alienation that would suffuse all of American culture in the decade that followed. NOTES 1 In We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), Hasia Diner cites a representative sampling of the scholarship

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

josh l ambert that has promulgated the myth (see pp. 4–9), before going on to soundly refute it. For example, while David Roskies’ and Anita Diamant’s excellent, sophisticated, and wide-ranging Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012) rightly rejects the idea of a “conspiracy of silence” (26) during the war, like earlier studies of Holocaust literature, it does not cite any English-language American literature of the mid- or late 1940s. Leah Garrett, “Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948,” Jewish Social Studies 18:2 (Winter 2012): 70–99. 75. See also Louis Harap, “The Jew at War: The 1940s,” in Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in TwentiethCentury American Literature, 1900–1940s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 133–50. Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to the Goldbergs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 99. For an overview of American Yiddish culture, see Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Easy European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 417–551. Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 17–41. Ibid., 74–95. Sholem Asch, “In the Valley of Death,” New York Times Magazine (February 7, 1943), 16. “93 Choose Suicide before Nazi Shame,” New York Times (January 8, 1943), 8. See Judith Tydor Baumel and Jacob J. Schacter, “The Ninety-Three Bais Yaakov Girls of Cracow: History or Typology?” in Reverence, Righteousness, and Rahamanut: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, ed. Jacob J. Schacter (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), 93–127. Another interesting set of examples is treated in Jeffrey Shandler, “The Holocaust for Beginners: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil un Karl and Other Wartime Works for Young American Yiddish Readers,” MELUS 37:2 (2012): 109–30. See David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 79. Ibid., 114. Giovanna Dell’Orto, “‘Memory and Imagination Are the Great Deterrents’: Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary Author,” Journal of American Culture 27:3 (September 2004): 303–14. 310. James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 48. On anti-Semitic activity in the United States during the war, see Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 128–49. Ibid., 245. Alfred Kazin, “The Mindless Young Militants,” Commentary (December 1948), 499.

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20 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Owl Books, 1981), 659, 570, 665. 21 Ibid., 682. 22 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: New American Library, 1971), 370–3. 23 Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 209. Further citations from the novel are noted in parentheses. 24 Alan Wald offers a thorough, thoughtful reading of the complex ways in which Miller’s Jewish and leftist political affiliations played out in his literary output in the 1940s in Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 210–35. 25 Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 188. Further citations from the novel are noted in parentheses. 26 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1948), 69. 27 Ibid., 85. 28 For a discussion of Sartre’s book and its reception, see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 68–92. 29 See Garrett, Young Lions, 119–20. 30 Irwin Shaw, “Select Clientele,” New Yorker (August 17, 1940): 13–16. 31 John Berryman, “The Imaginary Jew,” Kenyon Review 7:4 (1945): 529–39. 539. On this story and Karl Shapiro’s World War II poetry, see Hilene Flanzbaum, “The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet,” ELH 65:1 (1998): 259–75. 32 Jo Sinclair, Wasteland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 11, 21. 33 Leslie Fiedler, “Dirty Ralphy,” Commentary 4 (1947): 432–4. 34 Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4, 5. 35 S. Lillian Kremer, Witness through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 36–44. 36 Alan S. Downer, review of The Victim, New York Times (November 30, 1947), BR28. 37 John Farrelly, “Among the Fallen,” New Republic (December 8, 1947), 27–8. 38 See Saul Bellow, “Brother’s Keepers,” New Republic (January 7, 1946), 29–30. 39 Saul Bellow, The Victim (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 25, 29, 67, 35–6, 63. Further citations from the novel are noted in parentheses. 40 Weber, Haunted in the New World, 119. 41 This is one way to explain why Bellow set the novel within the New York magazine industry, in which Jews had in earlier decades been less accepted and successful than in book publishing, film, and other media, but in which, by the late 1940s, Jews were beginning to attain positions of greater authority. 42 For discussions of “influence” in the novel, including an explicit invocation of the Protocols, see Bellow, 200, 235–6. 43 Benjamin Taylor, ed., Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 41. 44 Garret, Young Lions, 127. 45 Bellow, “Brother’s Keepers,” 30.

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46 See Melville J. Herskovits, “When Is a Jew a Jew?” Modern Quarterly 4 (1927): 109–17, and Alexander Goldenweiser, History, Psychology, and Culture (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1933), 397–404. On Bellow’s studies with Herskovits and Goldenweiser, see James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 49–50, 57. 47 Leslie Fiedler, “Saul Bellow,” in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fielder, vol. 2 (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 56–64. 61. 48 See Gershon Legman, Love & Death: A Study in Censorship (New York: Breaking Point, 1949). 49 See Isaac Rosenfeld, “Wasteland’s New Priests,” Commentary (March 1946): 89–90; Diana Trilling, “Americans without Distinction,” Commentary (March 1947): 290–2; Kazin, “The Mindless Young Militants.” See also Harold Rosenberg’s review of Sartre, “Does the Jew Exist?” Commentary (January 1949): 8–18.

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c h a p ter 4

The Fatal Machine The Postwar Imperial State and the Radical Novel Benjamin Balthaser

Chester Himes’s 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go introduces us to Robert “Bob” Jones, an African American shipyard worker attacked by a lynch mob after a white co-worker falsely accuses him of rape inside the labyrinth of a half-completed US navy warship.1 Himes’s novel charts many of the epochal changes the new Keynesian military state wrought in the United States, as his character is both offered a high-paying job as a skilled worker in a unionized shipyard and his new mobility is marked by a showroom Buick he’s able to purchase with his wages. Yet by setting a lynch mob inside the very structure of the “arsenal of democracy,” Himes offers a trenchant commentary on the meaning of this new global order. As historian Eric Foner describes it, New Deal liberalism and its culmination in the defeat of global fascism are often remembered as the “story of American freedom,” in which a coalition of civil rights, labor, and left-wing activists remade American into a more inclusive democracy, one that laid the seeds of the civil rights movement a decade later.2 Even as African Americans were increasingly included within dominant social institutions, both private and public, these new social institutions were often constituted by preceding racial, gendered, and classed formations, structuring the content as well as the possibilities for advancement for African Americans. As Himes articulates in both of his novels set within wartime industrial factories, the racism of the postwar era is not just a return of the past – it presents new challenges that fatally ensnare his protagonists, especially as “liberal antiracism” becomes the official language of corporate America and the state.3 Himes’s novels are important precisely because they are about the “historical rupture,” to use George Lipsitz’s formulation, brought by the new postwar era, a conjuncture marked by increased opportunity and workingclass expectation, and at the same time, the heightened repressive apparatus of a new centralized corporate and federal power.4 Himes’s depiction of a lynch mob within this “democratic arsenal” thus becomes even more compelling as a critique, given the emphasis Franklin Roosevelt and others 59

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placed on economics as a means to achieve full citizenship for all Americans. It should be remembered that FDR’s 1940 “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, often credited with signaling the US entry into World War II on the side of the Allies, is by contemporary standards, a strange speech about war: the final half says little about the Nazis as a racial or military threat, but instead focuses on the US industrial economy and its link to American democracy. The Nazis, according to Roosevelt, “turn capital against labor,” whereas a new US armaments industry would “defend every one in the nation against want and privation” and allow for “management and workers” to “reconcile their differences by voluntary and legal means.”5 The Axis system of “modern slavery’ is contrasted to the industrial might of the United States, which is not a tool of private profit, but the source of democratic value. In FDR’s metaphor, coined by General Motors CEO Bill Knudsen, democracy at home is linked to the ability of the United States to circulate goods around the world and mediate disputes through the rule of law – unlike the Nazis, who circle the world in bombers and submarines to enforce economic repression. This emphasis on both the law as an arbiter of disputes between capital and labor, and a global economic order based on free trade was spelled out more clearly – and with a great deal less populist fervor – in a 1942 statement jointly published by the editors of Fortune, Time, and Life magazines.6 In much the same way as Roosevelt envisioned the United States manufacturing its way to a new global order, so the editors of these influential magazines envision an “American Proposal” of global “free enterprise” replacing the violent, territorial empires of Great Britain and the bloody conquests of the Nazis. In such a world system, territorial conquest is replaced by a market-based legal and regulatory regime in which “subsidies, monopolies, restrictive labor rules, plantation feudalism, poll taxes, technological backwardness, obsolete tax laws, and all other barriers to further expansion are removed.” This “new American imperialism” as the editors refer to it, is not about conquest, but rather about spreading the free market throughout the globe, even if it means the United States will “help build up industrial rivals.” While we might recognize these aims as central to post-1970s globalized neoliberalism, as Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch point out, the architecture of the “new American imperialism” was founded long before the United States entered World War II: it was an essential part of New Deal federal legislation.7 Gindin and Panitch’s reading of the New Deal era runs counter to many liberal, even radical interpretations of the New Deal era, as one in which a “realignment” of social forces produced something close to a

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US version of social democracy.8 The new powers granted to the federal government by the New Deal, including a central bank, merit-based civil service, a well-staffed treasury, and economic and financial regulatory agencies, “made the New Deal . . . a crucially important moment in the development of American state capacities . . . for the expanded reproduction of capital.’”9 For Gindin and Panitch, the rise of a new imperial state does not preclude the incorporation of workers into new forms of representation, because it was increased working-class consumption that in part allowed for the global expansion of capital after the war. In their reading of the New Deal, while workers were included as an essential part of new strategies of accumulation, the massive reorientation of the state functioned less as a progressive reform of capitalism than as the conditions for its global growth. The basis for the new American imperialism – the internationalization of the dollar in global currency exchange and labor peace domestically and abroad – relied on a “liberal conception of the ‘rule of law,’” in which both labor and capital adhered to formal contract agreements and global institutions.10 As the Himes novel indicates, this “new American imperialism” had a distinctive racial caste, or rather, race remained central to the way in which this new order imagined itself. As Mary Dudziak suggests in Cold War Civil Rights, the federal government was eager to present itself to a rapidly decolonizing world as the legal guarantor of formal equality, going so far as to write, through the State Department, amicus briefs in support of desegregation.11 This support for formal, legal equality was not an impediment to a growing US empire, but rather suggested an emergent constitutive form. As Melamed and others remind us, formal equality in the United States and abroad (the latter in terms of monetary policy and clientelist arrangements) did not mean that race was no longer a driving force in the new postwar economic order: rather the “new governmentality” of liberal antiracism was predicated on axially divided labor markets and global forms of unequal exchange.12 Writers emerging from the Popular Front era met the incorporation of the many social movement demands for full employment, racial justice, and higher standards of living into an increasingly corporate and reactionary landscape at home and a growing imperial presence abroad with varying attitudes of confusion, despair, and contradiction. This sense of foreclosed possibility and increasing entanglement with a new imperial state marked a wide swath of former Popular Front writers in the 1940s. Among the African American literary left, which included writers such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, the new horizons of personal consumerism, higher wages, and interracial solidarity were riven

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with an increasing entanglement with a carceral state, often in which a character’s very rise either personally or institutionally is predicated on their eventual ensnarement in legalized racial violence. This tension between incorporation into a new economic order, but one based on racial violence and subjection, also features in the often contradictory narrative structures of Carlos Bulosan’s and Americo Paredes’s respective wartime novels, America Is in the Heart and George Washington Gomez. It should also be remembered that “race” was understood at the time as a transnational term, linking slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and capitalism into a single frame of analysis.13 Petry’s novel The Street, while not ostensibly about World War II in the way Bulosan’s and Himes’s texts are, nonetheless suggests through the character of Boots Smith that race, by its imperial construction, is a global construction. In that sense, many of these texts are not about “imperialism” as usually imagined – pith-helmeted Englishmen with large-bore rifles. Rather they are about the increasing power of finance and monopoly capital in the daily lives of people living in the United States, often working within manufacturing and media firms that exercise a global reach. Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky both mark opposite but complementary portraits of middle-class white men whose masculine selfhood collapses in the face of a new corporate order. They are men adrift within imperial forces beyond their control, and their individualistic responses to this new global order meet with spiritual death in the case of Fearing’s protagonist and to actual death in the case of Bowles’s. In this sense, even the most domestic of these narratives are a reminder of Amy Kaplan’s dictum that our national identity is not built despite, but rather through, our nation’s expansion around the globe.14 As a one-time union organizer, WPA worker, and prison inmate, Chester Himes may have been best suited among all 1940s writers to comment on the contradictory nature of the expanding postwar, liberal state. If He Hollers, set in California during the war, focuses on four days in the life of Bob Jones, a leaderman for a newly hired gang of black workers in a recently integrated Long Beach shipyard. In many ways, Jones is exemplary of the expanded sense of opportunity for African Americans during the war. Jones, who attended college, is engaged to the light-skinned daughter of a prominent African American doctor, who encourages Bob to return to school and become a lawyer. Perhaps most importantly, Bob is the highestranking African American in the shipyard, a “key man” as he tells himself, “as important as anybody now.”15 As much as his role as a sub-foreman or the social significance of his girlfriend, it is Jones’s car that embodies

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his newfound sense of status. Driving to work in the morning, he “looked down the over the broad, flat, mile-long hood and thought about how the rich white folks out in Beverly couldn’t even buy a new car.”16 The drive to work itself is cast a kind of race war on the highway: Bob has to “burn rubber,” makes his “brakes scream,” shouts insults at white drivers, and is in return given looks of “cold hatred” by cars filled of white passengers.17 In one sense, the low-intensity race war on the Los Angeles freeways is a foretaste of the violent confrontations that occur later in the day at Bob’s worksite; yet in another, the freeway is the one site in the novel where Bob experiences a kind of formal equality with white drivers and pedestrians. Unlike at his worksite or in other public venues, Bob can (and does) talk back, make aggressive gestures, and threaten whites without fear of retribution. The car is also the means by which Bob experiences a very literal sense of spatial and, thus, racial mobility, crossing the color line of Los Angeles to eat downtown, visit a white woman’s apartment, and, finally, attempt to escape from the police. In one sense, the car fulfills the utopian promise of what Lizabeth Cohen refers to as the “consumer’s republic,” a citizenship based on formal equality within, and having enough money to have equal access to, a consumer marketplace.18 The experience of democratic inclusion extends to Bob’s visual apprehension of the shipyards themselves. While inside the plant, Bob experiences the most violent forms of racial victimization and exploitation. Yet viewing the shipyards from the freeway, Bob expresses his awe of the shipyards as a kind of sublime: they had “an impressive look, threedimensional but infinite.19 The “infinity” of the yards is contrasted to the often claustrophobic spaces Bob experiences while actually inside the plant, the rooms in which he has to duck, the overcrowded spaces of tackers and welders, the dice alley in which Bob is beaten by gamblers, culminating in his final very literal entrapment with Madge inside an empty storage room. Outside, on the freeway, the expansiveness Bob feels looking at the plant structurally mirrors the expansiveness he experiences while driving, his dominance established, free to navigate the city. Bob continues the rumination: I felt the size of it, the immensity of the production. I felt the importance of it, the importance of the whole war. I’d never given a damn one way or the other about the war excepting wanting to keep out of it; and at first when I wanted the Japanese to win. And now I did; I was stirred as I had been when I was a little boy watching a parade, seeing the flag go by. That filledup feeling of my country. I felt included in it all; I had never felt included before. It was a wonderful feeling.20

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Reminiscent of FDR’s speech, Bob’s utopian vision of equality and inclusion rises from the site of the factory itself, the grand impersonality of it. Contrasted to the oppositional racial nationalism of “wanting the Japanese to win,” Bob perceives the factory as an infinity, one that stretches out over the water and into the “gray-blue distance of sky,” not bound by spatial or geographical coordinates. As Frederic Jameson reminds us, capitalist imperialism is the language of infinite space, one transcending all barriers and boundaries. Much like the Fortune’s op-ed, Bob perceives his Americanness as a formal equality, one that expands through markets to encompass the entire globe. Rather than understand Bob’s vision of inclusion as simply an appearance undergirding an essence of racist violence, the formal equality offered to Bob in the law, on the worksite, on the LA freeways, and in the consumer marketplace does not contrast so much as constitute the forms of racism he experiences as a sub-foreman at the Atlas Shipyards. When Bob is called into his supervisor’s office for cursing back at Madge, the Southern migrant who calls Bob the n-word and refuses to work with Bob’s all-black crew, the supervisor does not deploy overly racist language to demote Bob, but rather refers to the language of productivity and order. Placing the onus on Bob, the supervisor informs him that his “job was to help me keep down trouble between the white and colored workers.”21 Recontextualizing the company’s permissive attitude toward a racist worker as Bob’s “job” to “keep down trouble” frames the relationship between Bob and Madge as one mediated by the alienated money-form of waged work: one’s professionalism requires experiencing situations as impersonal and technical, rather than situated in a political and economic structure that privileges Madge’s body at the expense of Bob’s. The supervisor also distances himself from Madge, saying with a kind of sophisticated disdain, “You know Southern people talk,” suggesting that Bob does not talk this way, as well as that he and Bob share a common enlightened view of racism as something of the backward past. The supervisor’s description of Madge again frames Bob as someone who bears the rational values of production and implies that, by responding to a racist epithet, he, like Madge, is not capable of acting rationally. The supervisor’s articulation of Bob’s “job” also implies of course that Bob and Madge are formal equals and that there is no larger context in which her rhetorical deployment of racist violence exists: thus Bob is merely responding to a hysterical provocation, and not something endemic to the corporate structure. In the language of the new, legalistic imperial state, race becomes just another factor of rational capital accumulation.

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When Bob is finally assaulted by a lynch mob after Madge falsely accuses him of rape (to cover for the fact she attempted to seduce Bob in an empty room), it is significant that while Bob is beaten, he is not actually lynched. The guard says as much to Bob as he wakes up in jail, “You’re lucky you’re in California. In my home state we’d have hung you.”22 And yet the “phony formality of an American trial,” which Bob assumes will find him guilty, actually absolves Bob of any crime. On further questioning of Madge, the police investigator concludes that she is lying to cover her own assignation with Bob, and she is persuaded to drop her case. Yet rather than acknowledge the interracial assignation on the ship, the judge explains the case was dropped in order not to “handicap our production schedule.23 Again, the notion of production and order becomes the modality through which social fissures are articulated and then sutured. Rather than acknowledging the racial divide, the judge allows for a reified, impersonal force of the market to dictate his decision making. And yet Bob is not reinstated to Atlas Shipyards, but rather inducted into the military as his ”punishment.” In the new liberal order, it is not lynch mobs but rather compulsory military service that defines Bob’s final relationship to the state. Or rather, Madge’s racism functions within a regime of formal equality, much like the racial coordinates of the global empire are facilitated through the language of formal equal exchange, yet hide within them the DNA of previous racial orders. Bob’s figurative reenslavement, unlike earlier African American realist texts such as Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition or Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, does not require the literal death of the black subject to ensure compliance – rather his life is incorporated into an impersonal system that values his labor as an unequal yet integral part of a larger system of capital accumulation and empire. Himes’s If He Hollers and his later novel The Lonely Crusade (1948) are unique in making explicit the language of liberal antiracism that structures the new US-centered global imperialism. Yet nearly all writers of color who identified with the Popular Front experienced the 1940s with a profound sense of contradiction. Unlike the wartime texts of Himes and Bulosan, Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street does not directly represent political movements, yet it follows the same basic trajectory as these narratives, as Lutie Johnson’s quest for independence ultimately ensnares her within the twin fatal entanglements of poverty and the law. In many ways, Lutie Johnson would seem to be an emblem of an emergent class of independent, working women. Living on her own in an apartment with her preadolescent son, Lutie works an office job downtown, attends bars on her nights off, and has aspirations to sing jazz with a band. As Lipsitz writes, women found

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“new rewards and respect from labor” during the war years, when increasing numbers entered skilled trades that had previously been barred to them.24 Yet many of her achievements are framed as functions of necessity, not choice. As with other writers of color of the era, advancements in formal equality that appear as universal often appear partial or even oppressive from the political and social margins. As many commentators have noted, the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act excluded many workers of color, particular African American women working as domestic servants. When Lutie discovers that her son Bub has been arrested, she muses on the meaning of black women in the workforce: The women work because white folks give them jobs – washing dishes and clothes and floors and windows. The women work because for years now the white folks haven’t liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their families. And it finally gets to be too late for some of them. Even wars don’t change it.25

World War II’s lack of political and social significance is echoed by Boots Smith, the musician who courts and finally plots to sell Lutie to his boss sexually: “them white guys in the army are fighting for something. I aint got nothing to fight for . . . none of it means nothing.”26 For both Lutie and Boots, the war does not change social relationships for African Americans; indeed, in many ways it makes conditions even worse, as it removes black men from the home and conscripts them into a deadly war to fight their oppressor’s enemy. It is far from incidental that when Lutie is finally sold to Junto, the white real estate and liquor mogul, he is perhaps the only antiracist in the book. As his lifelong friend, Mrs. Hedges says to him, “You don’t ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you don’t really care.”27 And yet it is precisely through Junto’s liberal antiracism – he will exploit whites and blacks equally according to the rules of capitalism – that he comes to dominate Harlem’s real estate and commercial entertainment and finally dooms Lutie to exile, as she kills Junto’s henchman, Boots, in self-defense. It should be noted that Lutie’s downfall, however, is precipitated by her own attempts to exercise personal freedom and rational choice on the market. Her solution to her anxieties about her son taking after her alcoholic father is to find her own apartment, and yet it is precisely through her isolation that she falls victim to the predations of first her building’s superintendent and later Boots Smith and Junto. On one level we can read Lutie’s decisions as a reflection of her limited options, as critic Bill Mullen suggests; yet her downfall is also the result of her own social aspirations, articulated

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through her own interpellation in a liberal marketplace.28 Lutie identifies with the values of her white employers, marveling at the way their wealth shields them from the full weight of human tragedy to which Lutie herself must adjust, frequently comparing herself to Benjamin Franklin and applauding herself for her own thrift, diligence, and drive to succeed. Seeing an advertisement for a kitchen sink on the subway, she “entered a small private world which shut out the people tightly packed around her.”29 This “small private world” Lutie enters is neither the social collective of public space on the subway nor the collective struggle depicted in Chester Himes’s The Lonely Crusade. She regards the advertisement as a private consumer, the universal consumer-subject separated from others by her own longing for the scene depicted in the image: a “miracle of a kitchen,” she reflects, “the faucets looked like silver. The linoleum of the floor . . . pointed up the sparkle of the room. Casement windows. Red geraniums in yellow pots.” The specificity with which Petry reveals these details to the reader suggests Lutie’s absorption in the image and her own desire for the consumer objects displayed. And yet Lutie also reflects that the kitchen in the ad was “exactly like the one she had worked at in Connecticut” and nothing like her own. Remembering her own labor as a domestic worker to keep her employer’s kitchen clean, she reveals not only her inequality in a consumer marketplace but also the work that is required to produce the social relations behind commodity production in the first place. Lutie’s apprehension of the advertisement reveals both her inclusion into a consumer marketplace and her exclusion as a racialized worker, suggesting, much as does Himes, the promise and limits of a liberal multicultural economic regime. The trope of being “trapped” runs through nearly all the Popular Front novels of the mid- to late 1940s, from Bob Jones literally being locked inside a room with a white woman who tries to have him lynched, to Lutie Johnson’s claustrophobia in her small kitchenette, to the noir-ish novels of Kenneth Fearing. While one can read this trope in many ways, I would suggest its coordinates are as much political as they are psychological. It should be remembered that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the imperial state after World War II. Indeed, if anything, the end of World War II appeared to many as the fulfillment of many of the ideals for which progressive social movements strived: full employment, the embrace of antiracism as national discourse, the defeat of fascism, and the acceptance of unions as partners in industrial production. Yet before the war, there had been a vibrant anti-imperialist movement that, more often than not, pointed out the continuities between Western

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imperialism and European fascism, both in terms of domestic racial practices such as Jim Crow and the violence of Western imperial practice abroad. W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James both wrote extensively about the connections between fascism and imperialism, prefiguring Aimé Césaire’s analysis that fascism was merely colonialism coming home to roost.30 As Penny von Eschen observes, much like Petry’s Boots Smith, many African American radicals in the late 1930s saw little difference between the “democracies” of the Atlantic world and Nazism.31 Beyond the African American left, there were broad-based antifascist organizations, such as the American League against War and Fascism, which demanded an end to US imperialism in Latin America as part of its 1934 founding charter; as late as 1940, an insert distributed in UCAPAWA unions asserted that joining the war in Europe would be understood as fighting for the side of “imperialist powers” and, like all imperialist wars, against the interests of working people.32 While declaring war on the Axis powers was welcome news in many quarters, for large segments of the left, supporting Western imperialist powers such as Britain and France against other imperialist powers such as Germany and Italy seemed a betrayal of the movement, rather than its fulfillment. The left-wing poet and noir-novelist Kenneth Fearing expresses the sentiment of postwar defeat ironically, through the jaded and often cynical gaze of a young, suburban executive working in one of the mass-culture industries, which is often taken as a satirical representation of Henry Luce’s magazine empire. The Big Clock (1946) tells the story of George Stroud, a “smug, self-satisfied, smart-alecky bastard” in the words of a washed-up New Deal artist of whom George is a collector, “just like 10-million other rubber-stamp sub-executives.”33 The governing metaphor in the novel is, of course, the giant “clock” of capitalism, “the hands of which “sometimes actually raced, and at other times they hardly moved at all” – but most importantly, they are the hands “to which all other watches have to be set,” even when they defy reason and physics and “move backward.”34 This imperial vision of a central clock and its satellites that must set their hands by it is reminiscent of Bob’s vision of the shipyards that stretch into infinity. Indeed, the global dimension of this new, centralized form of order is expressed by Stroud as a “super-clock” that “would go on forever . . . too massive to be stopped.”35 George imagines his life as governed by this clock, and he is neither capable of changing its speed nor finding a way to live wholly outside of its dictates. It seems telling that George’s one vision of an organized political revolt comes in the shape of a dream of an anticolonial uprising. Half-asleep,

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George recounts his friend’s letter about a trip down to Haiti: “it was a Black Republic” his friend reports, and “I was grinning in my sleep as I saw Bob and myself plotting a revolt of the whites determined not to be sold down the river into Crimeways.”36 In the dream, Bob and George fight the magazine industry just as Toussaint liberated Haiti from French colonial slavery. As trivial as it may seem to compare culture industry executives with chattel slaves, it recounts the ways in which the Popular Front era witnessed the realignment of cultural workers, especially those in the new culture industries, around the politics of antifascism, labor, and anticolonialism. That such a vision comes to Stroud as a dream – and one from which he wakes up – says a great deal about how he understands his relationship to the new imperial order: as part of a subconscious structure of desire that Stroud sublimated in art collecting, assignations, and more frequently, booze. Alan Wald describes The Big Clock as a lamenting, ironic expression of “the reversal of the internationalism, social unionism, antiracism, and collective social responsibility that emerged during the Great Depression” and goes on to quote Fearing describing the novel as “the drama . . . in which a long phase of our society died.”37 Politically speaking, the last gasp of Popular Front social movements was the 1948 independent presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who ran both on a New Deal and an antiimperial program, expressed as a desire to live in peace with the Soviet Union. The resounding defeat of Wallace and the intensification of the Red Scare led many to believe that the social movements produced in the “red decade” of the 1930s were not only defeated but also that fascism was around the corner in the United States.38 It seems thus telling that the two award-winning novels published in 1949 by writers associated with the Popular Front are both stories of escapism and suicide. Nelson Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm tells the story of the appropriately named Frankie Machine, who returns from the war with an opium addiction from his stay in a military hospital. Machine ultimately commits suicide, but his isolated death in the working-class Polish neighborhood of Chicago is not redeemed by a working-class political movement. And the war, rather than ensuring Machine’s freedom, merely entraps him inside a spiral of heroin addiction. Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky replaces the internationalist commitments of the previous decade with a privatized, exotic desire for the Third World, one that is as deadly for its practitioners as is Frankie’s escape into heroin. A progressive America, these authors seem to suggest, died both inside and out, perishing from deaths that only make sense within the context of the social and political defeats of the previous decade.

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In the present political and social context of austerity, it may seem strange to consider the 1940s as a moment of political defeat and radical pessimism, especially when many of the things we associate with the victories of the left in the United States were enshrined then as part of the permanent structure of the state: Social Security, unemployment insurance, the legalization of labor unions, the first beginnings of federal action against segregation. And yet that is the intervention these novels make: rather than read the New Deal era as one that culminates in the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” that promised high wages and worker-management collaboration, only to fall apart with the rise of the New Right of the 1980s, these authors remind us that the defeat of the utopian impulses of the New Deal era was inscribed in their very implementation during World War II. Bob Jones, Lutie Johnson, Frankie Machine, even George Stroud: what all these characters have in common is the desire to experience equality and prosperity without having to sacrifice their dignity and especially their freedom. As the abstractuniversal of human rights promoted by the anticolonial struggle is replaced by the abstract-universal of the marketplace, these characters find ways to circumvent and resist their incorporation into a consumer republic, even when such resistance culminates in their death. Read as a cycle of novels, and not simply the view of individual authors, we may think of these texts as a noirish response to the official discourses of prosperity and postwar national unity, legal equality, and capitalist rationality. It is cynicism, rather than solidarity, that emerges after the war as the expression of class consciousness, suggesting that the kind of wholesale challenge to the existing order that seemed possible a decade earlier has now been foreclosed, often by the very organizations that once seemed to promise it: labor unions and civil rights leaders, many (though not all) of whom supported Truman and the Democratic Party at the dawn of the Cold War. Like film noir, the fatalism of these texts indicts not only the protagonists in a literal sense but also the entire system that finds them guilty of wanting more than they are supposed to have. NOTES 1 Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002). 2 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). 3 Jodie Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xii–xv. 4 George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 19, 39.

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5 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Arsenal of Democracy,” www.americanrhetoric .com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html 6 “An American Proposal,” Fortune May 1942. See Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso: London, 2012), 67–9 for a discussion of the editorial series. 7 Ibid., 45–87. 8 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (Verso: London, 1999), 6, 10. 9 Gindin and Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism, 63. 10 Ibid., 26, 38–9. 11 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11. 12 Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 10, 27, 35; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ideological Tensions of Capitalism: Universalism versus Racism and Sexism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Wallerstein and Étienne Balibar (London, Verso, 1991), 29–36. 13 Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 14 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 12. 15 Himes, If He Hollers, 10. 16 Ibid., 10. 17 Ibid., 12–15. 18 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 112–93. 19 Himes, If He Hollers, 38. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 29. 22 Ibid., 186. 23 Ibid., 201. 24 Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 54. 25 Ann Petry, The Street (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974), 388–9. 26 Ibid., 258. 27 Ibid., 251. 28 Bill Mullen, “Object Lessons: Fetishization and Class Consciousness in Ann Petry’s The Street,” in Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left, ed. Alex Lubin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 42–3. 29 Petry, The Street, 28. 30 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36–7. 31 Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 22–43. 32 “The President’s Page: Our Union, the War, and National Defense” and “CIO Policy on National Defense,” UCAPAWA News, 1(8) May–June 1940, 2–3; “Manifesto and Program of the American League against War and Fascism: Second US Congress against War and Fascism, Chicago, Illinois, September

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33 34 35 36 37 38

benjamin balthaser 28, 29 and 30, 1934” (Chicago: The League), University of California, Davis, special collections, The Walter Goldwater Radical Pamphlet Collection, American Old left (AOL), box 107 folder 25. Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 122. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 8. Alan Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 27. Ibid., 15–16.

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Antifascism as a Political Grammar and Cultural Force Christopher Vials

“Spain was in Detroit. We knew what that was about. Spain was a battle of very rich people against very poor people.” – Arthur Miller, reflecting on strikes at General Motors in 1937

Initially launched by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in 1933, the American League against War and Fascism brought together radicals and nonradicals of various stripes to combat not only fascist regimes overseas but also “developments leading to fascism” at home. By the end of the decade, it had become the coordinating body for the antifascist activities of 1,023 affiliate organizations representing more than seven million people; its rallies, congresses, and roundtables enjoyed the sponsorship of US congressmen, state governors, and city mayors.1 Its periodical, Fight against War and Fascism (hereafter, Fight), provides a clue as to why so many organizations came together under its banner. The magazine covered far-away developments such as the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in Germany, the invasion of Ethiopia, the shifting frontlines of Spain, and Japanese advances in China. But arranged under the heading of “the fight against fascism” was also news from a wide array of characteristic leftist and liberal campaigns, including union building, the push for social democratic legislation, antiracism, anti-imperialism, the struggle for women’s equality, and the drive to eliminate militarism in American culture. The magazine’s short fiction revealed this political breadth as well, as exemplified by Langston Hughes’s short story “Conversation” about an exchange between two white Southerners. One of them brags that he shot four black men “for settin’ their minds against us white folks,” and added, “I’m a hundred per cent American!” The story mentions nothing about fascism explicitly, but its placement in Fight leaves no doubt about its frame of reference.2 On first glance, the sheer range of issues covered by Fight suggests an incredibly broad definition of fascism, so broad that the term loses its 73

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meaning. Yet it is more accurate to draw a different conclusion from the panoply of “fights” in Fight: that is, for many liberals and leftists in the 1930s and 1940s, “fascism” was less a concrete regime in Germany or Italy and more a vehicle to conceive the connectedness of seemingly divergent struggles. To be antifascist, then, was not only to collapse distances across continents but also to move toward thinking and acting in what we now call intersectional ways. This chapter identifies antifascism as a ubiquitous grammar among US cultural producers in the 1940s and stresses how this ubiquity was not limited to the war years. The status of antifascism as a state-sanctioned discourse in World War II provided US antifascists with a dramatically expanded forum, but the discourse did not originate in the war. Its meaning is not reducible temporally to the years 1941–1945 nor geographically to the politics of Germany, Italy, or Japan. I call antifascism a “grammar” because it structured the very terms of the political for liberals and the left in the 1930s and 1940s. By calling it a grammar, I do not mean to suggest that it was hegemonic – in other words, it did not exercise a leadership role by structuring the US global imaginary across the political field. But, as I conclude, its mainstream status during the war allowed some of its elements to become “common sense” in US culture, with both shortand long-term consequences. To be antifascist, in my use of the term, is not simply to have a reflex aversion to something called fascism, nor is it to use “fascist” as a casual slur. For antifascist writers, “fascism” is not one problem among many, but a force so menacing and so present that it requires concentrated effort to check. It is an urgency that inspires the creation of serious, in-depth cultural work aimed at revealing its social bases and possibilities of emergence. This antifascism did not simply identify its nemesis as part of the human condition nor abstract it as a generalized threat to Enlightenment liberalism (freedom of speech and association); rather, it identified fascism in politically specific terms as a phenomenon of the extreme right, which, in turn, was enabled by long-standing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Fascism was seemingly atavistic – a hateful warrior spirit conjured from an ancient time – yet it paradoxically expressed a distinctly modern social order. As Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas wrote, “How such a movement as Fascism, with its medieval intolerance and more than medieval insistence on conformity, could establish itself in the modern world is of profound concern to us all.”3 Antifascists like Thomas saw in fascism a form of primitive violence that confounded the very notion of progress and teleology. Yet it served a modern function by preserving the rule of economic elites, even though it was ultimately beyond their control. As such, it threatened the

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political existence of the labor movement, workers’ parties, and feminist and civil rights organizations, as well as the very lives of Jews and people of color. To see World War II in antifascist terms, then, was to see it as a struggle to vanquish extreme political reaction around the world and to open up opportunities for a multifaceted, democratic leveling in the process. Thus while antifascists in the United States and other parts of the world certainly engaged in nationalism and in struggles for national liberation, antifascism worked against a strictly nationalist reading of global politics. In the 1930s, the adoption of an antifascist grammar by many Americans was part of a broader cultural turn to the left that marked the Depression decade. But what gave this grammar its urgency was the fact that fascism was not yet universally recognized as a dirty word in the United States. Enlightenment liberalism – the belief in free speech, freedom of association, individual property rights – is no doubt deeply embedded in US national culture. For this reason, it is often assumed that Americans of all political stripes had an immediate, gut-level aversion to the authoritarian and antiliberal regimes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, influential sections of the public were able to reconcile their faith in liberalism and the US Constitution with an admiration for Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, in part because of contradictions inherent in liberalism itself.4 In the 1930s, European fascism inspired a host of far-right emulators in the United States, particularly the Midwestern and Northeastern-based “shirt-movements” like the Italian American Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, and the Khaki Shirts. More alarming, however, were the far more numerous and influential groups that lent a socially meaningful degree of legitimacy to Franco, Mussolini, and even Hitler. These groups fell into three main constellations: the business press, most notably The Wall Street Journal; socially conservative Catholics, led by Father Charles Coughlin; and what I call the law-and-order right, composed most notably of the veterans’ organization, the American Legion, and the print media barons William Randolph Hearst and Bernarr Macfadden. These three constellations, all on the political right, were united ideologically by their anti-Marxism and their sympathy for fascist national renewal, yet they were otherwise too divergent in their mobilizing passions to come together in a common front.5 The US entrance into World War II greatly helped move Americans toward their aversion to the word “fascism,” but the mere fact of military mobilization was not the sole reason. Often overlooked is the political and cultural work of antifascists and their organizations, which began in the 1930s and continued into the next decade as they helped shape the

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“message” of World War II. Antifascist writers and organizations realized that making fascism a “dirty word” was a political project requiring hard work. As a publication for the American League against War and Fascism stressed in 1936, “Whether or not America goes fascist depends on who gets organized first.”6 As a political project involving the transformation of ideas and fundamental values, antifascism necessarily took place in the terrain of culture, a terrain where art and literature play a distinct role. Before and after December 7, 1941, politically oriented artists, writers, and literary critics were well aware of their function in shaping an antifascist common sense. Samuel Sillen, the chief literary critic for the communist New Masses during the war, wrote, “To stress the political in this era is not to impose a point of view; it is to call attention to reality. For this is not merely a contest of military strength, but of basic values as well; and in the definition of these values literature has a profound function.”7 Before, during, and after the war, antifascist writers worked to shift “basic values” through their positions in government agencies, culture industries, radical organizations, unions, and political campaigns – and with no small degree of impact. It took a while for liberals and the left to move toward an antifascist cosmology, however. With a few exceptions, they were uninterested in fascism when it remained a local Italian phenomenon. Mussolini rose to power through his infamous “March on Rome” in 1922, but it was only after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany eleven years later that liberals and the left began to regard fascism as a global menace and an object of frantic concern. When the Nazis imposed their regime on a major industrial power in 1933, it became obvious that fascism was an exportable phenomenon. Left-of-center Americans almost immediately feared its establishment in the United States by native reactionaries, and for the first time, antifascism became a political rubric through which a broad range of campaigns were conceived and maintained. An early example was Upton Sinclair’s nearly successful drive for the governor’s mansion in California, launched in 1933, which was based on a wholly domestic agenda of wealth redistribution. In his campaign materials, he wrote, “I have seen the horror that has come to Germany, and I realize that the American Socialist Party wouldn’t make one good-sized bite for American Big Business, when it gets to the biting stage. We have only a year or so in which to save ourselves, and save our country.”8 In the 1930s, antifascism was not merely a domestic agenda, to be sure. Antifascists lobbied Roosevelt and Congress to annul the various Neutrality Acts (which banned the sale of war materials to all belligerent parties in

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Europe and Asia) in favor of economic aid to the Chinese and the Spanish Loyalists. They also organized consumer boycotts of German and Japanese goods, called attention to US financing of the Japanese war machine in China, materially assisted Jewish and antifascist refugees in Europe, and, most dramatically, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigades. During the Depression, some of the most prominent and successful antifascist organizations were the American Jewish Congress and the Friends of Democracy (liberal), the Jewish Labor Committee (socialist), and the American League against War and Fascism (initiated by the CPUSA). Nazi atrocities against Jews and political opponents often appeared in the American press because these organizations staged mass demonstrations against each new outrage. By the second half of the 1930s, their work enjoyed wider platforms due to an increasing cooperation between the antifascist left and the New Deal state. The CPUSA had become far less sectarian after attaching itself to the Communist International’s “Popular Front” policy in 1935, which advocated collaboration between communists, socialists, and liberals for the purposes of halting fascist advances. At the same time, Roosevelt had also moved to the left. He adopted harder antibusiness rhetoric and pushed for more dramatic social reform during his “Second New Deal;” he also sought new allies as he took steps toward an increasingly assertive foreign policy against Germany and Japan.9 Antifascist political work, as part of the left turn in American politics during the 1930s, prepared the soil for Roosevelt’s declaration of war in 1941. Up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to be sure, most Americans despaired of sending US troops to fight overseas. But the campaigns of the 1930s and early years of the 1940s reformatted US public opinion in more foundational ways than the narrowly conceived debate over “isolationism” and “intervention” that has preoccupied scholars. This debate, moreover, was not about sending American troops into combat overseas, an action neither side proposed. It was largely between those who favored picking sides in the emergent global conflict, primarily through trade policy (mainly liberals and the left), and those who saw even economic favoritism as a step that could draw their country into war (the latter tended to be a position held by political conservatives). “Picking sides,” in turn, revolved around a person’s conceptions of who comprised the nation’s friends and enemies abroad, something keyed into one’s fundamental political beliefs. Despite calls by business organizations and the political right to see communism as a greater menace in world affairs than fascism, Gallup Polls in the second half of the decade consistently showed overwhelming moral

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support for the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, for China in its struggle with Japan, and for the left-wing Spanish Loyalists over the fascist forces aligned against them.10 Norman Corwin’s enormously popular radio poem, “On a Note of Triumph” (1945), illustrates the aesthetics, politics, and influence of antifascist internationalism during the war. To mark the long-anticipated surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies on the previous day, CBS aired this poem on May 8, 1945, at 7 pm Pacific time. With active encouragement from the network, Corwin had been working on a VE Day poem since the summer of 1944, and CBS ensured that the script, musical score, cast, and crew were available and ready to air when news of the surrender eventually came.11 Written, directed, and produced by Corwin, the work was a full hour in length. Its lines of verse were read by a main narrator (Martin Gable), who was backed by an elaborate mise en scène orchestrated in the studio: a musical score by Bernard Hermann (later known for his work on Alfred Hitchcock films); periodic smaller musical numbers, including one by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger; sound effects that were created live; and individual voices of “the people,” read by actors and rendered in everyday speech. The soon-to-be celebrated status of “On a Note of Triumph” as a poem, not to mention the airing of verse on prime-time, nationally syndicated media, speaks to the literary possibilities of radio before the advent of television; even more importantly, it illustrates the unique cultural and political moment of the 1940s. Like many writers on the left at mid-century, Corwin took his inspiration from Walt Whitman, aiming to create an accessible “people’s poetry” for a mass audience. Form mirrored content with some of the work’s first lines: “Take a bow, GI / Take a bow, little guy / The superman of tomorrow lies dead at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.” Like poets Karl Shapiro and Corwin’s friend Carl Sandburg, he positioned his unadorned, accessible verse against the high modernist project embodied by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. This project was momentarily discredited for its ties to fascism: indeed, a week before the airing of Corwin’s Triumph, Pound had been apprehended by Italian partisans for his pro-Axis broadcasts on Rome Radio. High modernism employed innovations in form to create a “poetic speech” wholly distinct from everyday language, and it figured personal alienation – even exile – from the public as prerequisite for the literary imagination. In contrast, the Whitman-esque mode served Corwin as a Jewish American writer in several important respects. Gable’s gravel-throated narration claimed a masculinity not afforded to Jewish men through the effete world of the salon poet. And as Hilene Flanzbaum

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observed with Karl Shapiro, the submersion of the Jewish poetic voice into the common stream of “the people” rejected the outsider position offered by high modernism to claim a place in the national culture.12 And Corwin’s work certainly claimed a place. “On a Note of Triumph” received rave reviews, with a national poll of radio editors calling it “the most important broadcast of 1945” and one newspaper critic calling it “a literary gem . . . as stately and magnificent as an ode.” The live performance was repeated the next week, but this time it was recorded and printed as an album by the Columbia Recording Company and, later, as a book by Simon & Schuster, both enjoying excellent sales.13 But Corwin claimed much more with “On a Note of Triumph.” The production bore witness not only to the ascendancy of a populist aesthetic and the heightened presence of Jewish Americans in the national culture but also to the mainstreaming of the antifascist politics to which they were inextricably tied. In line with these politics, the radio poem celebrated the victory in Europe but also carried a surprisingly cautious and somber tone. The narration was structured around these questions: “What did we win?”, “Who did we beat?”, and “What did we learn?” The “we,” it was clear, constituted not only American citizens but also people around the world: Corwin’s “GI” hailed “from Newburyport to Vladivostok,” and the humble voice posing the questions identified itself as belonging to “a private first class in the army of one of the United Nations.” Musicians in the studio performed victory songs in Greek, Serbian, Danish, and English, the last sung by Woody Guthrie. As was typical of antifascist cultural production, Corwin tried to give political specificity to the fascist enemy: the fascist was a figure who not only violated the liberal tenets of freedom of speech and freedom of association but was also a vicious reactionary driven by an anti-Semitic, racist, anticommunist, and anti-trade union mission (in the broadcast, a villainous Nazi orders the victim of his interrogation, “Now spit out your teeth, pretty one, and tell us: who else is in your trade union?”). As announced by various voices in the broadcast, all the lessons “we” learned involved a leveling of the social hierarchies that the fascist sought to extend. For example, “We’ve learned that women can work and fight as well as look pretty and cook!.” “We’ve learned that the Cassandra and the Jew were right, and that the Cliveden set [pro-German aristocrats] was wrong,” and “We’ve learned that those more concerned with saving the world from communism usually turn out making it safer for fascism!”14 As such, “On a Note of Triumph” was typical of antifascist cultural production in trying not simply to exalt the sacrifices of American boys in uniform, celebrate battlefield heroics, or extol American national virtue but

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also to define the political meaning of the war, a meaning animated by the Popular Front social movements of the 1930s and 1940s. It aimed for a poetics capable of reaching the disenfranchised, singing their praises, and bringing them to political power. As such, it necessarily held a didactic function: its plebeian voices, which spoke an antifascist folk wisdom as if it was already universal (which it was not), modeled a social order not yet achieved. As the reception of Corwin illustrates, World War II dramatically expanded political opportunities for antifascist political and artistic work, as antifascism, for the first and last time, became part of official state rhetoric and at the center of civil society. Left and liberal antifascists of the 1930s held key positions in government propaganda agencies during the war. Most prominent were Archibald MacLeish, creator of the Spanish Civil War-themed radio play “Air Raid” (1938), who was appointed to direct the short-lived Office of Facts and Figures (OFF); Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information (OWI), who had also been a member of the American Labor Party; and Robert Sherwood, a key figure in the OFF and OWI, who later wrote the distinctly antifascist screenplay for the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). More prominent still was Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States from 1940 to 1944, whom Roosevelt allowed wide latitude in shaping the message of the war. Wallace called for a “Century of the Common Man” based around global multilateralism, farmers cooperatives, trade union power, civil rights, and universal education; amazingly, he argued that American businessmen and right-wingers carried the fascist spirit at home.15 This was also the period when the government recruited members of the Frankfurt School to serve as experts on Nazism. Working through the OWI, the Board of Economic Warfare, and the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), Frankfurt School scholars such as Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer contributed to the war effort on a number of fronts: they suggested ways of presenting Nazis to US audiences in the press and in film, devised means of combating German propaganda abroad, crafted de-Nazification policy, and recommended paths to postwar reconstruction in Europe. The views of Neumann in particular carried much weight in official circles, which was particularly striking because his major work, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942), stridently argued that fascism was a continuation of capitalism and that private property was incompatible with liberal democracy.16 As I have argued elsewhere in this volume, the antifascist vision cohered in the narrative of “the People’s War,” which promoted World War II as a

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struggle to defeat political reaction across the globe and leave a confederation of pluralistic, economically level democracies in its wake. The People’s War also found expression in a popular internationalism, clearly exhibited in “On a Note of Triumph,” but embodied most famously by Wendell Willkie’s bestseller One World (1943), which rejected a postwar global order ruled by preponderant powers (including the United States) in favor of a truly multilateral United Nations. But in attempting to shape the meaning of the unfolding conflict, the People’s War contended with other narratives that had nothing to do with properly antifascist aims. These included both the imperialist “American Century” of Henry Luce, which sought to win consent for US military and capitalist leadership across the globe, and what I have termed elsewhere in this volume the “Free World/Slave World” narrative. At its best, this latter narrative envisioned US allies as Jeffersonian democrats under the skin, and at its worst, it brutally racialized the Japanese. Despite the presence of committed antifascists in state agencies, government publications were politically compromised, rarely offering the unvarnished antifascist analysis encountered in the left and liberal presses; yet they contained enough Popular Frontisms to make the OFF and the OWI quite controversial. The OWI was deeply unpopular with congressional conservatives, who perceived it, not incorrectly, as subtly promoting a proto-civil rights and New Deal vision of the country. In June 1943, one year after the OWI was created, conservatives in both parties teamed up to decimate its budget, prohibiting it from creating materials for domestic consumption. Its overseas branch, however, continued to provide political opportunities for those with Popular Front sympathies. Publicly and privately, some OWI personnel stationed abroad worked to undermine what they saw as their government’s backsliding on the antifascist goals of the People’s War, including its reimposition of French colonial rule in North Africa, its silence on British colonialism in India, and its seating of the collaborationist King Victor Emmanuel III on the throne of Italy.17 Wartime discourse, of course, was not strictly an official affair. Hollywood produced an endless stream of pictures designed to boost morale, network radio offered a barrage of war-related programming, and commercial periodicals, organizational newspapers, and the publishing industry continued to inform and influence vast readerships. The culture industries offered a bill of fare that was overwhelmingly supportive of the war, yet its message often strayed from the OWI guidelines they had promised to uphold. Elmer Davis, Archibald MacLeish, and officials with the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, for example, complained that Hollywood was

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offering only cheap thrills, gore, and stereotypical portrayals of the enemy, rather than serious, sophisticated presentations of war aims. Radio was more cooperative: stations offered airtime to short “commercials” and full programs produced by the Domestic Radio Bureau of the OWI and later by the Treasury Department.18 The war years triggered a boom of reading, at home and on overseas bases and staging areas. The boredom of military life for soldiers, as well as restrictions on gasoline and travel for civilians, led to an increased market for books, which were now more accessible through the introduction of paperback printing technology in 1939 and through the Council of Books in Wartime.19 But throughout the war, Samuel Sillen of The New Masses lamented the fact that American writers, unlike their European and Asian counterparts, had not responded to this boom with a great, properly antifascist novel or play. Not without reason, he noted how many fiction and nonfiction titles offered action, reportage, and topical detail rather than engaging in the properly antifascist mission of shaping the meaning of the ongoing struggle. In late 1942, he levied a critique that he would repeat until hostilities ceased: “Even so fine a work as They Were Expendable gives only the most limited sense of the why of our fighting as an integral part of the how. A positive war play like Maxwell Anderson’s The Eve of St. Mark similarly suffers, as Alvah Bessie has pointed out, from the very limited involvement of ideas in the action.”20 It is true that while the battles raged on land, sea, and air, American antifascist writers, unlike their European and Asian counterparts, developed a relative paucity of fiction. Nonfictional accounts of the then-topical conflict were far more popular. As one reviewer noted in The New Masses in 1943, “Current war novels . . . compete at an obvious disadvantage with eyewitness narratives now arriving from the front in such a rich crop. In battles for our existence, the photographic truth is for the moment worth more than the most plausible fiction.”21 Added to this factor was the penchant for realism among the mid-century left, which ensured that travel literature, reportage, and other nonfiction forms dominated the list of titles carrying the narrative of the People’s War. Such titles, some adapted to radio, included William Shirer’s Berlin Diary (1941), Joseph E. Davies’s Mission to Moscow (1942), John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover (1943), Selden Menefee’s Assignment USA (1943), Elizabeth Hawes’s Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (1943), Erskine Caldwell’s All out on the Road to Smolensk (1942), Edgar Snow’s People on Our Side (1944), and Carlos Bulosan’s Laughter of My Father (1944). But it is not true that fictional and poetic treatments of the People’s War were simply unavailable; they included Upton Sinclair’s

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Wide Is the Gate (1943), the radio work of Norman Corwin (discussed earlier), Robert Terrall’s mystery novel They Deal in Death (1943), Kay Boyle’s Avalanche (1944), Lillian Hellman’s play The Searching Wind (1944), the prose fiction of the journal Negro Story, and, on the most critical edge of the People’s War, Chester Himes’s novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; see Chapter 4 in this volume). On a more hopeful note, however, Sillen observed that Americans had access to more reflective and aesthetically innovative works produced abroad. Indeed, major publishing houses like Simon & Schuster and Knopf often translated and sold the kind of work that met with praise on the left, including titles by antifascist authors Stefan Heym, T’ien Chun, Franz Weiskopf, Constancia de la Mora, Haru Matsui (Ayako Ishigaki), Taro Yashima, Wanda Wasileivska, Ignazio Silone, and Egon Irwin Kisch. Many of these titles were distributed to soldiers and civilians through the Council of Books in Wartime’s “Armed Services Editions.” As a nonprofit venture of the major publishing houses launched in cooperation with the OWI and subsidized by the US government, the Council of Books in Wartime was explicitly tasked with defining the meaning and import of the ongoing fight for American readers. Whether government sanctioned or not, and whether it appeared in print, radio, or film, much of the US-generated programming designed to bolster wartime morale had a clear patriotic tone: praise of the virtues of the American people and the democratic traditions of a “free nation” were standard fare. Some of this programming was clearly exceptionalist in nature. Yet such views were more than matched by other brands of patriotism. In the late 1930s, the Popular Front had also taken a nationalist tone, replete with praises of the Constitution, the American people, and national traditions. But Popular Front nationalism was of an aspirational sort: rather than hearkening back to national purity best achieved in its founding moments or lauding the extant United States as offering the best system in the world, it praised the nation mainly for the promise it held for the future, implicit in its best traditions. Literary author Carlos Bulosan best expressed this spirit in his Saturday Evening Post piece titled “Freedom From Want,” when he referred to dispossessed workers of America as “the living dream of dead men.”22 Moreover, nothing would have been more toxic to the Roosevelt administration’s political survival at home than to advance the notion, so common in twenty-first-century memory, that the United States fought the war by itself. To dampen continued isolationist grumbling that foreigners were not doing their share, OWI publications and films helped foment popular internationalism by taking pains to

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highlight the contributions of all Allied nations (both Roosevelt and Wallace stressed the reality that the Soviets, in particular, were doing far more of the fighting and dying than were Americans). Thus the nationalism of so much wartime discourse did not rest on the claim that the United States was the best nation on earth, but rather that it was a great and free nation, moving forward in tandem with other great, free nations. An epic, antifascist literature eventually arrived on the American scene, but it was not until after hostilities ceased. Prompting the creation of such work was the cultural environment of the immediate postwar years. The many writers and organizers whose worldviews were stamped by the left saw even more reason to stay politically engaged under the banner of antifascism after the Axis was militarily defeated. With the blacklist fully underway as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) resumed its work in 1946, what reminded leftists and some liberals of fascism when they surveyed the US scene was a rhetoric of xenophobia, conspiracy, and racism, along with a very real erosion of civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. By the dawn of the new decade, they read such repression in the context of a larger, postwar social transformation that bore uncanny similarities to the very regimes they had fought against so recently: the permanent militarization of society necessitated by the Cold War; a growing anti-intellectualism, cultural homogenization, and conformity; the reactionary thrust behind economic “reconversion”; the violent racial reaction to the civil rights movement; and, perhaps most alarmingly, the rehabilitation of Germany, Spain, and Japan as “bulwarks against communism” coupled with silence toward the millions who perished during the Holocaust.23 Yet despite the onset of the Red Scare, writers and directors were nonetheless able to raise serious questions about US social structures, even in Hollywood films, in part because of a public appetite for social and psychological depth following the trauma of the world war. The void of epic, antifascist novels and plays about World War II, lamented by Sillen, was arguably filled after 1945 with titles such as Arthur Laurents’s Home of the Brave (1946), Martin Abzug’s Spearhead (1946), Robert McLaughlin’s The Side of the Angels (1947), Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions (1948), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders (1948), Louis Falstein’s Face of a Hero (1950), and later, John Oliver Killen’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962). Many of these novels were written by Jewish American veterans whose politics aligned closely with the Popular Front. While it disavowed socialism as a solution, Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie (1945) also channeled the voices of GIs and US servicewomen

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abroad to express deep-structural critiques of American consumerism and “industrialism” as alienating underpinnings of postwar reconversion. Reflecting on World War II, one of Philip Roth’s narrators in I Married a Communist spoke of the need for honesty regarding “the GIs that Corwin didn’t talk about, GIs not so nice or, for that matter, so antifascist as the heroes of On a Night of Triumph [sic], the GIs who went overseas thinking about niggers and kikes and who came home thinking about niggers and kikes.”24 Indeed, the antifascist World War II novel of the early postwar years provided the stories of the GIs that Corwin didn’t talk about; it stressed how US military life embodied the very militarism, racism, antiSemitism, and class hierarchy that the People’s War was supposed to be vanquishing from the earth (see the discussion of Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole in Chapter 12 of this volume). The main villains in the bestselling World War II novels of the early postwar decades tended not to be Germans or Japanese, but American military officers. As Philip Beidler has astutely noted, American officers appeared “as the enemy within, martinets at least, brutish, arrogant, decadent; gender and class oppressors, anti-Semites, racists.”25 Veteran writers often depicted the bureaucratic irrationality, racism, and quintessentially bourgeois careerism of American officers as something almost as dangerous to the lives of their men as German tanks or Japanese ships. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, for example, is set on a fictionalized island in the South Pacific where US troops are still actively battling the Japanese. The novel pits its main character, the Popular Front-oriented Lieutenant Hearn, against his commander, General Cummings, who openly extols the virtues of fascism. The danger of Cummings’s dream coming alive in postwar America becomes clearer when Hearn is tasked with leading his platoon on a mission in a remote, mountainous jungle region, a plot turn that enables an antifascist allegory. The completely isolated platoon becomes a fascist state in miniature when Sergeant Croft – a brutal, racist, anti-Semitic psychopath from Texas – causes Hearn’s death and takes command. Croft’s coup d’etat against liberal authority allows his brutality to reign: he successfully displaces the platoon’s aggression onto its one Jewish soldier, Roth, who is ultimately killed. Before his anticlimactic death, Hearn had opined, “The victors always tend to assume the . . . the, eh, trappings of the loser. We might easily go Fascist after we win.”26 The discursive terrain of antifascism, however, was never limited to the battlefields of World War II. As I argued in the beginning of this chapter, antifascism was an intersectional rubric that used political reaction (and its origins) as a site to connect seemingly distinct struggles. American

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literature from the 1930s provides no shortage of authors who used antifascism to think through social contradictions within the United States, and this current continued into the next decade. Some authors reflected on the dangers of home-grown fascism explicitly, beginning in the 1940s with Richard Wright and his Native Son (1940) and Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1942), then followed immediately after the war with literature such as Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945) and the now widely taught memoir, America Is in the Heart (1946) by Carlos Bulosan. Another strand of postwar literature echoed the spirit of their contemporary World War II novels by using stories of injustice on the home front to reveal the broken promises of the antifascist People’s War abroad. These included the civil rights plays On Whitman Avenue (1946) by Maxine Wood and Deep Are the Roots (1945) by Arnaud D’Usseau and James Gow, both about the racism faced by African American veterans returning home. Another drama in this vein was Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ (1947), which used the betrayed hopes of African Americans following the Civil War as a vantage point to view more recent conflicts. It also included the now famous black radical novels The Street (1946) by Ann Petry and If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) by Chester Himes. The antifascist nature of the Allied cause in World War II was also called into question by an emergent genre of literature on the Japanese American incarceration. This was comprised of Miné Okubo’s graphic novel Citizen 13660 (1946), published in the same month as Karon Kehoe’s now forgotten novel, City in the Sun (1946), and also, more obliquely, by Toshio Mori’s short-story collection Yokohama California (1949). I call antifascism a “grammar” because it structured the very terms of the political for many involved in left and liberal social movements of the 1930s and 1940s. This grammar continued to resonate in US politics into the Cold War decades and beyond. The antifascism of these decades left strong imprints in the campaigns against McCarthyism, in the movements of the late 1960s (particularly in the Black Panther Party), and in AIDS activism of the late 1980s.27 In all of these cases, activists and cultural producers directly accessed narratives of fascism forged in the Popular Front years as they confronted new faces of political reaction in their own time. From the standpoint of the 1940s, what can be said about antifascism – as a way of articulating the political – is not that it created the precise kind of democratic leveling its activists wanted. Rather, it lent material support to crushing fascist regimes abroad, worked to create a mainstream “common sense” that fascism was a form of political reaction antithetical to national values, and provided a public space and global vision for those working to

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push back against attempts to restore the country to its prewar racial and economic status quo. In these ways, it helped keep the darkest currents of American political life from fully taking hold. NOTES 1 Chris Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 48–9. 2 Langston Hughes, “Conversation,” Fight against War and Fascism, October 1936, 21. 3 Norman Thomas, Fascism or Socialism? The Choice before Us (London: George Allen & Unwin: 1934), 52. 4 Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 45–6, 172–4. 5 Ibid., 35–46. 6 American League against War and Fascism, A Program against War and Fascism (New York: American League against War and Fascism, 1936), 25. 7 Samuel Sillen, “Trends in War Writing,” New Masses, December 8, 1942, 24. 8 Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future (Los Angeles: End Poverty in California, 1933), 20. 9 Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 46–57. 10 Ibid., 32, 55–6. The Gallup Poll was not established until 1935. 11 R. Leroy Bannerman, Norman Corwin and Radio: The Golden Years (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 145–50. 12 Hilene Flanzbaum, “The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, edited by Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 18–32. 13 Bannerman, Norman Corwin and Radio, 158–62. 14 Recording accessed through The Norman Corwin Collection, CD produced by OTRCAT, Leneka, KS. 15 See Henry Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” “Russia,” and “The Danger of American Fascism,” in Democracy Reborn, ed. Russell Lord (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 190–200, 259–63. 16 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 295, 299, 301, 305; Kellner, “Introduction,” in Technology, War, and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 1, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998), 20–23; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 14, 261–3. 17 Allan Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942– 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 53–63, 84–95; Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156–7. 18 Thomas Dougherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 46; Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 58–9, 61.

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19 Frank Schick, The Paperbound Book in America (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1958), 79–81. 20 Sillen, “Trends in War Writing,” 24 [emphasis in original]. 21 Fred Wylie, “Two War Novels,” New Masses, March 23, 1943, 24–5. 22 Carlos Bulosan, “Freedom from Want,” Saturday Evening Post, March 6, 1943, 12–13. 23 Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 90–125. 24 Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (New York: Vintage, 1998), 49. 25 Philip Beidler, The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 92. 26 Norman Mailer, The Naked and Dead (New York: Picador, 1998), 320. 27 Vials, Haunted by Hitler, chapters 5–7.

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ch a p ter 6

From Confession to Exposure Transitions in 1940s Anticommunist Literature Alex Goodall

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet regime signed the pact with Nazi Germany that ripped apart the Popular Front alliance of communists and left-wing progressives that had dominated radical politics in the second half of the 1930s. The betrayal was especially painful for the radical American artists who had believed themselves to be working on the “cultural front,” and their tools of trade ensured that they were well placed to give cogent expression to their feelings.1 The result was a literature of alienation in the early 1940s that formed a precursor to the larger shift toward anticommunism in American culture in the Cold War. Since ex-communists and disappointed fellow travelers moved across the political spectrum over the coming decade, their influence was felt in leftwing, liberal, and conservative circles alike. Politicians and public figures of all stripes in the Cold War deployed arguments that had been initially articulated by these disappointed radicals. Nevertheless, the initial literary products of what Alfred Kazin called the “Great Disillusionment” were written at a time when anticommunism had not yet become an all-consuming cultural force in American life.2 The United States and Soviet Union fought as allies between 1941 and 1945, and while there was little love for communism in the American mainstream, Nazism and Japanese militarism were seen as greater dangers to world peace. New Deal liberals highlighted the work that the Red Army was doing to hold back the Nazis. Former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies’s memoir, Mission to Moscow (1941), which valorized Stalin and whitewashed the Moscow Trials, sold more than 700,000 copies and was made into a Hollywood movie that, running alongside films such as The North Star (1943) and Song of Russia (1944), offered a far more positive view of the Soviet world than could be found after the war.3 Anticommunist writers from the left in the early 1940s plowed their own furrows, often unaware of their vanguard status. Shaken by controversies invisible to the mainstream, the 1940s literature of disillusionment was 89

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incestuous and internecine. It was shaped by styles and philosophies honed in the 1930s debates over art as a political weapon, and there were noticeable continuities between the radical literature of the 1930s and the anticommunist writing that emerged to challenge it. Many placed the representation of disillusionment at the center of their writing, and the individuality of the associated anger, grief, loss of faith, and struggle for meaning gave even the weaker works an emotional range typically lacking in later anticommunist literature. As Philip Rahv wrote, “The old anti-Stalinism of the independent left had the true pathos and conviction of a minority fighting under its own banner for its own ends.” By the end of the 1940s, however, anticommunism had become instead “almost a professional stance . . . in apparent obliviousness of the fact that in the past few years anti-Stalinism has virtually become the official creed of our entire society.”4 In short, a literature of disillusionment briefly emerged from the ashes of the Popular Front before being swept away by a culture of fear. Hidden behind the lurid glow of Cold War neon, the distinctive features of this material, not least as a bridge between two eras, have often been overlooked. It repays study, both for its own sake and to add nuance to the larger history of early anticommunism. In Joel Kovel’s influential formulation, scholars of the subject have been encouraged to distinguish between “anti-Communism as a more or less objective dislike of Communism” and anticommunism as “the reigning ideology of the West.” To Kovel, anti-Communism was “that part of the picture which is primarily about Communism,” whereas “anticommunism is that part which is primarily about us,” especially our projected anxieties and neuroses.5 However, this dichotomy can slip into the a priori belief that conservative forms of anticommunism were essentially less rational than more progressive variants, a problem also common to Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style in American history.”6 Framing the history of anticommunism in these terms can shut down more forensic analysis of conservative politics and thinking, as Alan Brinkley has pointed out, in favor of reductive diagnoses of social neurosis as the primary, or even sole, determinant of conservative anticommunism.7 Studying the anticommunist literature of the 1940s suggests an approach in which Kovel’s formula can be modified in order to downplay the emphasis on objectivity and irrationality in favor of a focus on conflicting modes of literary representation. As Alan M. Wald notes, many of the most important figures in the literary world of the 1940s rejected “Communism” (with an uppercase “C”), opposing the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its connections to the Stalinist world apparatus, but remained committed

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to the ideology and values of “communism” (lowercase “c”) or radical culture more generally.8 Their efforts to denounce Stalin were part and parcel of a desire to rescue communism from his influence, and much labor went into wrestling apart these two elements. As such, anti-Stalinist writers and literary critics responded directly to the broadly realist literary styles that had been promoted by fellow-traveling radicals in the 1930s, seeking to move them in new directions rather than abandoning them altogether. By drawing on confessional and autobiographical themes that echoed the American jeremiad tradition, these figures sought to show how the international communist movement was failing on its own terms. Such confessional anti-Communism was not “objective,” nor was it impersonal in the way Kovel’s framework implies. Nevertheless, it did retain an underlying concern with literary realism that connected it to the communist culture it was now opposing. This contrasts with the anticommunist literature of exposure that emerged in the later 1940s, which took its cues primarily from mass consumer fiction rather than the cultural front. Less concerned with mimesis, this literature represented communism in abstract and stylized ways, using tropes common to the contemporary romance, adventure, crime, and detective fiction genres of which they formed a part. Its power and appeal lay not in any fidelity to the lived experience of American communism, but in depicting a coherent, deterministic world in which the crimes of communism were given existential moral significance by connecting them to long-standing literary conventions. Rather than condemning Stalin’s crimes, one is asked to hate the communist for his deformities and deviance. Unlike the confessional tradition, in which the dominant themes of the writing were doubt, conflict, and internal transformation, the literature of exposure focused on betrayal, discovery, and vengeance. This changed focus was not merely of literary significance. Over time, these images fed into the political debate over communism’s nature and place in American life. By the McCarthy years, they had reshaped the public image of communism so much that it had little relationship to the organizations and people who participated in the communist movement during the previous generation, but instead came to represent a vast, amorphous, and in many ways timeless moral struggle.

The Literature of Disillusionment It is surprising how few substantive literary challenges to communism could be found in the United States before the late 1930s. After her brief

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sojourn in Bolshevik Russia, Emma Goldman had written a manuscript, “My Two Years in Russia,” a somewhat botched version of which was published in the United States in 1923, followed by an additional, corrective volume a year later.9 Max Eastman had been another early enthusiast for Bolshevism who quickly lost faith. He published several books on the Soviet Union and revolutionary Marxism in the interwar years, concluding in The End of Socialism in Russia (1937) that “the Soviet Union bids fair to be as reactionary as any country which has emerged from feudalism.”10 Russian émigré Ayn Rand’s novel of life and love in post-revolution Russia, We the Living, was released in 1936 – over the objections of Granville Hicks, who was at that time an associate editor at Macmillan and a CPUSA member – but it sold only in the low thousands due to a combination of unenthusiastic marketing, an uninterested public, and its indifferent quality.11 Among a growing crop of work produced by disaffected European radicals, Andre Gide’s Return from the USSR was translated into English and released by Knopf in 1937, and Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine was published in New York by Harper the same year – but George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, released in Britain in 1938, was not distributed by an American publisher until 1952. The first significant bloom of literary anti-Stalinism emerged in the second half of the 1930s, when the New York intellectuals affiliated with Philip Rahv and William Phillips’s Partisan Review broke with the CPUSA over the Moscow Trials, during which a series of “Old Bolsheviks” had been arrested, prosecuted on trumped-up charges, and, in many cases, executed in order to consolidate Stalin’s absolute control over the Soviet machinery of state. Initially a party organ, Partisan Review was relaunched in 1937 and quickly became the principal intellectual home for critics of Stalin on the left. The journal was notable in connecting political indictments of Stalinism with questions of culture and aesthetics.12 Arguing that party leaders had persistently subordinated artistic decisions to the political line, Rahv claimed that the communist movement was less interested in books than in mobilizing radical authors as political celebrities: “defining art as a weapon becomes in practice the many-sided opportunism of converting the artist into one.”13 Rahv suggested that literary criticism, if done right, could instead be used to interrogate politics. Because legal hearings were “performances, plays, dramatic fictions,” the Moscow Trials could be analyzed like literary works – as both political crimes and “trials of the mind and of the human spirit.” According to Rahv, an assessment of their “reality or unreality as literature ought to affect our judgment” of their ethical significance. Their

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falsehood was revealed in the absence of the dramatic tension normally generated during a trial from the contingent behavior of free agents responding to accusation. Instead of dramatically rich occasions, the Moscow Trials were flat and empty. Characters became caricatures: “banal, mechanized, automatic . . . Manifestly no imaginative artist could have composed such plays; only a policeman could write so badly.” Rahv suggested that the Soviets had moved back to the world of “predramas, magical rites . . . In the Soviet Union the tragic is still in its embryonic phase; the state is barren, and to cure itself it practices exorcisms and conjures up spirits.”14 Although rooted in the political crises of the late 1930s, the literary implications of disillusionment were worked out in the 1940s when a much larger body of anticommunist writing emerged. It was as if meltwater moving invisibly within a glacier gave way to the calving of an ice sheet. Many of the first texts to make an impression were either produced in Europe, such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940, published in the United States in 1941); focused on European politics, as with Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), which offered, in André Marty, a critical representation of the role of the communist apparatchik during the Spanish Civil War; or were by Europeans who had taken refuge in America, as with Walter Krivitsky’s In Stalin’s Secret Service (1939), Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night (1940), and Freda Utley’s The Dream We Lost (1940).15 Krivitsky (real name Samuel Ginbsurg) and Valtin (real name Richard Krebs) had both been communist covert agents, and their personal accounts offered the sense of adventure that Cold War spy novels would emulate. Utley, an English radical, moved to the United States in 1939 after fleeing the Soviet Union when her Russian husband was sent to the gulag, and her memoirs offered similar dramatic attractions. Koestler’s work, in contrast, drew on his experience of confinement during the Spanish Civil War to conjure a vivid and claustrophobic impression of solitary confinement and interrogation, and was more introspective. As Rahv had pointed out, the drama of the Moscow Trials was not to be found in the courtroom. Koestler focused on what came before, asking how his protagonist, Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik caught up the Moscow Trials, could come to terms with his impending sacrifice on the altar of Stalinism. In so doing, Koestler was able to highlight the absurd ends to which an ideological framework of thought could drift, a theme that connected his work to the contemporaneous critiques of Stalinist ideology offered by the American philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook.16 Although he compared communism to religion, notably absent, Koestler

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suggested, was the Christian notion of mercy that Rubashov repeatedly invoked through his vivid memory of the Pieta. Other European imports, including Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (1946), Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), would follow later in the decade. However, the United States generated a substantial indigenous corpus of anticommunist literature. The vast majority came from either disillusioned members of the CPUSA or proximate fellow travelers and had been distinctively shaped by the experience of communism in American life. Even the most shattering event of the period, the Hitler-Stalin pact, featured as much as evidence of the opportunism of the Communist Party leadership in America, which quickly pivoted behind the Moscow line, as for its larger geopolitical significance. Although Eugene Lyons’s synoptic work, The Red Decade (1941), was influential, most works echoed Koestler by focusing on individual experience as the site of dramatic tension. Many were personal narratives, such as William Henry Chamberlin’s The Confessions of an Individualist (1940), Benjamin Gitlow’s I Confess: The Truth about American Communism (1940), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), originally titled Black Confession, and contributions from both Wright and Louis Fischer in Richard Crossman’s Euro-American collection, The God that Failed: A Confession (1949). Lightly fictionalized representations of personal alienation were also presented in John Dos Passos, The Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Granville Hicks, Only One Storm (1942), Joseph Freeman, Never Call Retreat (1943), James T. Farrell, The Road Between (1949), and Edward Newhouse, The Hollow of the Wave (1949). Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947) focused on the mistreatment of African Americans by Communist Party activists. Their experiences and writing would influence Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), begun in 1945 when Ellison was still angry over the quietist line on race the party had adopted during the war.17 As the repetitious “confessions” of the autobiographical titles make clear, these texts also followed Koestler in linking the abandonment of communism to the loss of religious faith. Although quickly reduced to cliché, this theme proved resilient, not least because it gave the written account a sacred status. As part of the process of conversion, the testimonial was not only a record of disenchantment but also an act of penitence before redemption. This tied the literature of disillusionment to the “conversion narrative” tradition stretching back to the Puritan literature of the First Great Awakening and the accounts of antebellum ex-slaves. Whittaker Chambers’s

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Witness (1952) offered the most accomplished example. Framed by ideas taken from Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (whose The Concept of Dread was, not coincidentally, first published in English in 1944), Chambers’s account of conversion and redemption through testimony becomes a self-pitying jeremiad that connects the decision to stand as witness against communism to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross before an indifferent and brutalized population.18 As well as justifying these books’ publication, the focus on individual experience reinforced the argument that communism in its Stalinist form was an essentially anti-humanistic movement. The early 1940s literature of disillusionment turned this into a central theme. In Freeman’s Never Call Retreat, for instance, the communist poet, Kurt, is forced by the party leadership to withdraw a poem that does not suit the political line; this paralleled Freeman’s experience when the CPUSA asked him to sabotage the release of An American Testament (1936).19 Richard Wright offered a typically double-edged interpretation: he presented his early enthusiasm for communism as stemming from a naïve narcissism, believing he could educate the communist world about the working people whose virtues they extolled. His disillusionment came as a humbling realization that his fellow party activists didn’t even have an interest in him. “My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty,” Wright wrote. “But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my bones.”20 Similarly, Newhouse satirized his experience working for the communist-affiliated New Age publishing house in The Hollow of the Wave, in which pro-communist staff drive the Holland Press into the ground by publishing agit-prop and passing over books of merit.21 In one scene, an executive director, Jack Kincaid, argues passionately for publishing Gide, unaware that he had split from the party. Later, having discovered the truth, he returns to denounce the French author as a “dangerous character, a homosexual, a Fascist and every other kind of jerk,” unruffled by his rapid shift in attitude.22 Narratives of conversion and alienation tended to imply that escaping communism’s influence allowed for the expression or rediscovery of identity. The successes and failures of these texts as literature thus depended on the author’s ability to represent persuasively the subjective experience of conversion. This had implications not only for the political content of 1940s anticommunist literature but also for technique, as writers sought to move away from the models of 1930s literature either through innovation or by returning to older American forms. At times, the desire to break

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with the 1930s could end up as mannerist rather than iconoclastic, as with Newhouse’s clunky efforts to reprise Fitzgerald in The Hollow of the Wave. In other cases, as with Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944), authors were able to engage with the problem of alienation and sketch out a new kind of commitment to American life and culture.23 Trilling’s anticommunist “novel of ideas,” The Middle of the Journey, sought to reassert the bourgeois novel itself as a tool to resist totalitarianism by promoting the sensibility of freedom. To Trilling, the essential naiveté of the liberal fellow traveler, and of Enlightenment ideology more generally, stemmed from the refusal to admit to the inevitability of death, the subject toward which his novel is directed. To the progressive mind, Trilling asks, “Was there not a sense in which death might be called reactionary?”24 By meditating on his mortality, the novel’s protagonist, John Laskell, comes to recognize that mature adulthood is “at once responsible and conditioned,” the middle of a journey between birth and death represented in Laskell’s convalescence and rural recuperation after a near-fatal fever.25 By contrast, the liberal Nancy Croom is pathologically resistant to thinking about mortality. This, Trilling suggests, is deeply connected to her politics. In agreeing to act as a letter drop for the communist agent, Gifford Maxim, Nancy believes herself to be better attuned to reality than is her airy husband, but events show her to be a fantasist, unwilling to face up to what is really being done in the name of progress. A central irony is that her primary assessment of value is made according to her judgment of realism. She considers the unschooled but essentially moral Emily Caldwell to be “unreal” in her inarticulate aspirations toward beauty, whereas Emily’s violent husband Duck is judged to be interesting and therefore “real,” his sins excused on sociological grounds. The arrival of Maxim, a fictionalized version of Whittaker Chambers, who has recently broken from the communist underground, exposes Nancy’s supposed worldliness as delusion in a manner that, befitting his surname, is both economical in phrasing and as ruthless as a machine gun.26 He immediately spots Duck’s “criminal personality.” He tells the gathered company that a shared radical acquaintance died in Spain not as a hero, but by stepping on a rusty nail. He makes it clear that his former comrades would prefer him dead. In each case he deflates the romance of radicalism. “So far as The Middle of the Journey had a polemical end in view, it was that of bringing to light the clandestine negation of the political life which Stalinist Communism had fostered among the intellectuals of the West,” Trilling wrote in 1975. “In such confrontation of this tendency as my novel proposed to make, Chambers [Maxim] came

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to its aid with what he knew, from his experience, of the reality which lay behind the luminous words of the great promise.”27

From Confession to Exposure Communist and fellow traveling writers of the 1930s never followed the party line in the slavish manner that their critics argued.28 Nevertheless, to those who believed, as Rahv, that the work of the cultural front had become indistinguishable from propaganda, the antidote was a form of postcommunist writing that restored the primacy of aesthetic considerations. Few writers offered as elegant a response to this call as Trilling, however. Indeed, the occasionally ham-fisted political messages to be found in 1930s literature recurred in the literature of disillusionment: Hicks, Newhouse, and Farrell were all guilty of overdetermined plotting and political didacticism. Anticommunist writers of the 1940s thus shared more with the cultural front than their overt attacks on literary communism might suggest. Later in the decade, during the emerging Cold War the literature of anticommunism transformed beyond recognition. As fear reshaped American popular culture, an image emerged of a worldwide communist conspiracy whose diabolical features were born of racial, gendered, and class anxieties rather than the actualities of communism. Anticommunist tropes proliferated, yet lost their nuance and dramatic complexity, moving away from any kind of realism. As Stephen Whitfield notes, the Cold War witnessed the politicization of American culture in ways that led to the political exclusion of many on the left. The new era saw the “philistine inspection of artistic works” not only for their overt content but also “for the politique des auteurs. Censors endorsed the boycott of films that they had not seen; vigilantes favored the removal from library shelves of books that they had not read.”29 Writing that offered an uncomplicated characterization of the enemy was, by contrast, received with enthusiasm. As a result, the communist enemy was increasingly slotted into mass-market genre fiction, replacing older enemies such as gangsters and foreigners. The wartime assault on Nazism also contributed to new visions of communism as “totalitarianism.”30 While the study of anticommunist texts in the 1940s began as intellectual history, by the Cold War years it increasingly became a subject for historians of culture.31 Although her peculiar vision stands alone, Ayn Rand was undoubtedly a crucial progenitor of this shift in register. Compared to her earlier effort, We the Living, which was at least in some ways reflective of life in Soviet

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Russia, the hugely successful The Fountainhead (1943) presented a model of anticommunist literature that was set in America but uninterested in the cultural front, or indeed in the real life of American communists at all. Rand’s ideas were shaped by Hollywood screenplays, pulp romance novels, and libertarian theory, not the history of the Communist Party. As mass genre literature came to the fore, other texts, such as Willa Gibbs’s The Tender Men (1948), Neil Boardman’s The Long Home (1948), Pat Frank’s An Affair of State (1948), Lavinia Davis’s Come Be My Love (1949), Catherine Ridgway McCarthy’s Definition of Love (1949), and Virginia Peckham’s Proud Angela (1949), presented images of communism that were both sweeping and conventional. In Definition of Love, for instance, a novel for young women, the heroine, Connie Trumbull, has to choose between two men: the likable poet and university instructor Ted Sackett or the exciting but dangerous Dick Morey. This classic dilemma is barely altered by the fact that Ted is a former party member, whereas Dick – jealous, rage-filled, and dissolute – is an unrepentant communist. Communism thus becomes a marker of character rather than a subject for interrogation. Even many writers who had close knowledge of interwar communism and sympathy for individual communists began to offer less overtly representative and biographical images of communism, molding their writing to the genre expectations of the burgeoning culture industry. Waldo Frank, who had been the fellow-traveling chairman of the CPdominated League of American Writers, wrote The Invaders (1948), an early example of post-apocalyptic literature in which an atomic explosion in New York brings together a schematically constructed cast of survivors, including a physically and emotionally damaged communist veteran.32 Rex Stout, an anticommunist liberal, ACLU member, and former contributor to The New Masses, inserted communist villains into his pulp detective novel, The Second Confession (1949). In Limbo Tower (1949), William Lindsay Gresham, who had been a loyalist medic during the Spanish Civil War, placed naïve but principled revolutionary radicals alongside other residents of a tuberculosis ward that served both as a somewhat plodding metaphor for humanity and as a backdrop for a doctor-nurse romance plot. Even supposedly autobiographical works revealed a lowered interest in mimetic reproduction of the communist experience. The contrast between Ben Gitlow’s measured autobiography of 1940 and his melodramatic and unreliable retreatment of 1948, The Whole of Their Lives, reveals how far the expectations of anticommunist writing had shifted. Books such as anticommunist witness Louis Budenz’s This Is My Story (1947) were increasingly imitative of the crime genre, rather than the post-communist confessional.

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Indeed, in Herbert Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives (1952) there is no faith to lose: the hero simply assumes a disguise in order to infiltrate the communist underworld, and what little tension there is stems from his desire to avoid being caught. The reorientations such texts depict are only ever skin deep. The experience of communism in the 1930s encouraged disillusioned writers to fictionalize their experiences, but not entirely to abandon the realist models of the 1930s. By the end of the 1940s, however, genre expectations had taken over. Indeed, they were conditioning understandings of American communism in politics as well as literature. This blurring of lines could be seen most clearly in the case of Matt Cvetic, an army reject hired by the FBI during the war to infiltrate the CPUSA in Pittsburgh. Cvetic used his comparatively uneventful experiences as a low-level FBI informant to secure an invitation as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). With this badge of honor secured, Cvetic offered up his dubious personal narrative as the basis for a radio series, I Was A Communist for the FBI, that ran between 1952 and 1954 and led to a film of the same name. Despite claiming fidelity to truth, the series bore only a faintest relationship to Cvetic’s actual experience. Instead, the hero sought week by week to avoid being caught by suspicious communist conspirators in various contrived scenarios, while feeding crucial evidence of Bolshevik criminality to his FBI employers. Those who were able to most effectively align message and medium in the postwar years opted for genres that better suited stark and simple themes, as with Orwell’s turn to fable. More often, though, as mass genre conventions took over, predictable literary techniques became common. In novels such as The Invaders (1948) or Cornelia Jessey’s Teach the Angry Spirit (1948), the psychological damage associated with political radicalism is represented by branding embittered radicals with physical injuries, reprising centuries-old tired associations between disfigurement, disability, and corruption. Even Trilling played with this hackneyed trope in The Middle of the Journey (1947), though he, at least, turned it into a sophisticated device of anthropomorphic fallacy. In the scene when Maxim comes to seek Laskell’s help, having recently split from the party, the “great dreadful scar” on Gifford Maxim’s face, “said to have been made by a glancing blow from the steel shoe of a policeman’s horse,” seems to take on a will of its own. With Laskell’s perception uprooted by his slow recovery from fever, he imagines Maxim’s scar offering “its sardonic comment on everything that was false.” Later, when Laskell is on the road to recovery and Maxim has been literally stripped after his departure from the party, Laskell observes his old friend

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sitting in ill-fitting, borrowed clothes and notes that the scar, though still visible, “no longer had its old meaning.”33 The introspective focus on conversion and confession thus gave way to a concern with identification and exposure. Detectives assumed a forensic role in identifying the hidden communist, psychiatrists diagnosed their maladies, and the subjective experience of radicalism became irrelevant. The concern with exposure contrasts dramatically with the treatment of covert communists in earlier texts, such as Hicks’s Only One Storm, in which the decision to hide party membership is less a sign of deceit than an affectation. When Christina Kittredge asks an attendee at a cocktail party if she and her husband are party members, her question is condemned for being tactless rather than predatory, and she feels naïve for having been unable to read the signs. “‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ the cynical know-it-all, Ralph Baxter, declares, “if anyone here doesn’t know you two are in the party, he ought to be told the facts of life.”34 This could hardly be further from the idea of the “deep cover” Soviet agent that, in the wake of the Alger Hiss case, became a central element of the allegations made by proto-McCarthyites at the end of the 1940s. Indeed, Wallace Burgin, the most dedicated communist in Hicks’s novel, is presented sympathetically, and it is he, rather than the limp fellow travelers, who breaks from the party in the wake of the invasion of Finland. While self-dramatizing and messianic, the communist Gifford Maxim in The Middle of the Journey also emerges as a more honorable character than the fellow-traveling progressives, the Crooms. In the literature of disillusionment it was the cynic and the careerist who were presented most negatively; by the Cold War it was the fanatic, the fantasist. Whatever one’s view of its ethics, exposure was the very opposite of conversion. It was external and coercive rather than driven by voluntary, internal motivations. The shift from confession to exposure, from subjective characterization to external identification, marks out the personal, often angst-ridden testimonials of the earlier 1940s from the genre literature more common to the Cold War years. The rise of highly stylized genre representations of the communist “enemy within” is often linked to the radical right in the early Cold War years and the challenge to more liberal strains of anticommunism. This was not always true. If the sensibility of anticommunist writing in the late 1940s was increasingly kitsch, it did not inevitably include McCarthyite political messages. The theme of exposure could also be used to emphasize the importance of expertise and calm judgment when it came to combating the Red Menace, for instance.

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Rex Stout, whose Nero Wolfe series ran to dozens of novels and short stories between the 1930s and 1970s and was repurposed in radio plays, films, and television series, offered a neat argument on the dangers of amateur sleuthing when his detective hero was asked to uncover a hidden communist in his 1950 book, The Second Confession. Wolfe is hired by the wealthy chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corporation, James U. Sperling, to expose a radical lawyer, Louis Rony, as a secret communist. Sperling hopes to smear Rony, who is having a relationship with his rebellious daughter, Gwenn. Wolfe agrees to take the case, but insists that he will only go where the evidence leads and will not participate in a stitch-up. When Rony is murdered, it becomes clear that another character in Sperling’s circle is the real hidden communist. Wolfe compels two Communist Party leaders to identify the villain, who turns out to be Sperling’s trusted right-hand man, Webster Kane. Thus exposing communists is shown to be a complex, technical task that should be reserved for experts like Wolfe, while Sperling is “disqualified by mental astigmatism.”35 Ironically, Kane had already offered a confession to Rony’s murder earlier in the book, but it was a false one extracted by Sperling in the hope of covering for his son’s suspected involvement in the crime, and had been disregarded by Wolfe as an obvious fabrication. The ultimate revelation of Kane as a murderer and communist was the “second confession” of the title, demonstrating the importance of getting not just the right man but also getting him for the right reasons. Standard detective-novel red herrings planted throughout the book thus become implicit warnings against leaping to conclusions. Meanwhile, as payment for his services, Wolfe insists that Sperling use his influence as a corporate sponsor to bring about the dismissal of a rabble-rousing McCarthyite television commentator, Paul Emerson, a sour, antisocial, pillpopper who uses his media bully pulpit to attack radical professors, world federalists, and, latterly, Nero Wolfe. At first Sperling resists, pointing out that Emerson has high ratings. “So had Goebbels,” Wolfe retorts. “And Mussolini.”36 While the novel confirms what had become the conventional view of communist malevolence, it insists that the only proper response is expert investigation based on rigorous evaluation of evidence, leading to principled exposure, not witch hunts. Nevertheless, this methodical vision was, like the anticommunist confessional, a muted undertone in comparison to the vibrant iconography of the most successful anticommunist fictions of the early Cold War. Wolfe’s stance could hardly be further from the one taken by Mickey Spillane’s antihero detective, Mike Hammer, who more than any other fictional

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character represented the surging anticommunist id of the McCarthy years. Hammer’s brutal adventures propelled the sale of more than seventeen million books between 1947 and 1953.37 Although the first book of the series was published in 1947, Hammer did not run into his first communists until One Lonely Night, published in 1951, which sold an extraordinary three million copies. In this book, Hammer’s distinctive form of justice was served through cartoonish violence, sadistic punishment of a radical temptress, infiltration of a communist network and murder of its head, and the wholesale fabrication of evidence. Hammer’s joyously reactionary excesses represented a contemptuous rejection of Nero Wolfe’s delicate liberal sensibilities, and the extraordinary success of Spillane’s novels testified to the Cold War enthusiasm for a rawer form of vigilante anticommunist justice than Stout’s principled hero could offer: a fantasy of punishment that would bear fruit in books and films of the frontier West, in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, and so on.38 John Kerrigan reminds us that the detective genre is essentially a form of revenge tragedy, in which the hero hunts for clues within a landscape charged with moral significance in order to expose a crime, just as Hamlet seeks to prove his father’s murder. As with the Prince of Denmark’s “antic disposition,” the detective assumes the disguise of folly or eccentricity to evade the quarry’s suspicions. By patiently gathering clues and manipulating those around him through dramatic performances (whether the Mousetrap or bringing the suspects into the drawing room), the hero exploits the tragic weaknesses of the villain (the sense of guilt, clues left at the scene of the crime) to force the criminal into self-exposure.39 Reading early Cold War anticommunist literature as revenge tragedy offers an additional explanation for what Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of the radical right-wing vision in the early Cold War years. The detective novel’s orientation toward clues, performance, and exposure meshed neatly with early Cold War investigatory culture. Meanwhile, the tragic model of a coherent universe in which traces of criminal conduct deterministically point the way to a misdeed of existential moral significance was the very essence of early Cold War conspiracy theories. When John Birch Society co-founder Robert Welch suggested that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist, there was no room for historical explanations based on accident, incompetence, or unintended consequence – only for a vast, orchestrated and covert plot, an unprecedented act of treason that could be uncovered only through the careful efforts of the righteous.

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Hofstadter pointed out that the image of the enemy evoked through the paranoid style was “on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”40 As such, the punishment of the communist in early Cold War fictions often revealed displaced fantasies of self-repression. Mike Hammer’s violent retribution in One Lonely Night is presented as a fitting response to the particular crimes of the enemies he fights, just as the vaccine mirrors the disease it immunizes against, yet it reflected at a deeper level the anxieties and neuroses of the Cold War mainstream. The Bolshevik femme fatale represents not communism but the threat of uncontrolled female power and is stripped and whipped, disciplined through sexualized violence. The communist ringleader is condemned for his idealism, his refusal to conform to the existing social order; his name, Oscar Dreamer, points out that his sin is of being a fantasist. As punishment he finds himself at the receiving end of Hammer’s brutal pseudo-realism. “You were a Commie, Oscar, because you were batty,” Hammer tells his enemy, as he chokes him to death.41 One can go too far in attributing change neatly to a particular decade. Traces of many of the major anticommunist themes in literature and public rhetoric could be found before the 1940s. Nor did the decade bring to a permanent end the radical literary tradition of the Depression years that had such influence on the anticommunist writing of the 1940s. Alan Wald reminds us that two prominent CP-affiliated publishers, International Publishers and New Century, were still selling two million books and pamphlets annually after the war, while a range of radical authors, many subsequently forgotten, were producing trenchant and sometimes prophetic critiques of the homogenized mass culture of the American landscape well into the 1950s.42 Nevertheless, the language and literature of anticommunism had been substantially transformed in the 1940s. The extension of genre representations of communist criminality into the legislative and executive branch investigations was in many ways an inversion of the way the disaffection of communist writers was represented earlier in the decade. To Rahv, the Moscow Trials were a step back from both drama and the law, a ritual that was deterministic and devoid of humanity, and the response had to be a search for truth through literature. By contrast, the investigations conducted in the McCarthy era sought to make reality conform to a model of communism driven by genre fiction and fantasies of revenge. The communist became a criminal charged with existential moral significance. Guilt was revealed through staged performances of exposure.

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Punishment through social exclusion symbolically inverted supposed efforts to gain secret access to the corridors of power. Where reality and fiction began and ended had become impossible to tell.

NOTES 1 Richard Pells, Radical Dreams and American Visions: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996); Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Overseas Editions, 1942), 310. 3 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (London: Tauris, 2000), 190; Andrew J. Falk. Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 31. 4 Philip Rahv, “American Intellectuals in the Postwar Situation,” Partisan Review (May–June 1952). 5 Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), xi. 6 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American History,” Harpers (November 1964), 77–85. 7 Alan Brinkley. “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99.2 (April 1994), 409–29. 8 Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the AntiStalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), xv. 9 Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City: Doubleday, 1923); Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia (Garden City: Doubleday, 1924). 10 Max Eastman, The End of Socialism in Russia (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1937), 9. 11 Richard E. Ralston, “Publishing We the Living,” in Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living, ed. Robert Mayhew (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), 165. 12 Wald, The New York Intellectuals; Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 13 Philip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” Southern Review 4.3 (Winter 1939): 625 [emphasis in original]. 14 Philip Rahv, “Trials of the Mind,” Partisan Review 4 (April 1938).

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15 John Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009). 16 Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist & Pragmatist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 191. 17 Amy E. Carreiro, “The ‘Art’ and ‘Protest’ in Ralph Ellison’s ‘Anticommunist Rhetoric,’” Western Journal of Black Studies 30(1)(2006), 46. See also Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 18 Louis Menand, “Freud, Anxiety and the Cold War,” in After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in the America, ed. John Burnham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 193. 19 Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 365–8. 20 Richard Wright, in The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism, ed. Richard Crossman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), 154. 21 Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 311. 22 Edward Newhouse. The Hollow of the Wave: A Novel (London: Reinhardt and Evans, 1950), 156. 23 Simon During. Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 130. 24 Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), xxi. 25 Ibid., 353. 26 On Trilling’s connection to Chambers, see Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27 Trilling, The Middle of the Journey, xxxi. 28 Aaron, Writers on the Left, 263–4. 29 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 10. 30 Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi German and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s1950s,’ American Historical Review 74 4) (1970), 1046–64; Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). 31 Cyndy Hendershot, Anti-Communism and Popular Culture in Mid-Century America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003); Arthur Redding, Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008). 32 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 250. 33 Trilling, Middle of the Journey, 137, 140, 245. 34 Granville Hicks, Only One Storm (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 66.

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Rex Stout, The Second Confession (London: Collins, 1950), 184. Ibid., 190. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 35. Ibid., 35. John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 59–73. 40 Hofstadter, “Paranoid Style in American History,” 85. 41 Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 36. 42 Wald, American Night, 86. 35 36 37 38 39

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ch a p ter 7

The Contested Origins of the Atomic Age and the Cold War Christian G. Appy

Just three months after the deadliest war in history had ended, with a body count of some 60 million people, Life magazine was already envisioning World War III. It would be “the ghastliest of all wars,” exceptional for both its lethality and its brevity. In Life’s November 19, 1945, issue, a story called “The 36-Hour War” asks readers to imagine what it would be like if the same weapons that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned against the country that first invented and used them. Only this time, there are not just two bombs, but scores, and they are delivered not by lumbering airplanes, but by intercontinental rockets capable of flying 8,000 miles in a half-hour. In the first minutes of this cataclysmic atomic strike “more than 10,000,000 people have been instantly killed.” Within hours, enemy paratroopers drop into America’s urban wastelands to seize control. A black-and-white illustration shows one of the gas-masked invaders standing above a buxom blond lying in the rubble beneath him as if (minus the lurid colors) she was copied from the cover of a trashy paperback. Her bizarre come-hither pose is that of a corpse. The text is matter of fact: “By the time enemy troops have landed, the United States has suffered terrifying damage. Some 40,000,000 people have been killed and all cities of more than 50,000 population have been leveled.”1 Terrifying indeed. Nearly a third of the US population is dead, and Life does not even speculate about the possible long-term tally from wounds, burns, and radiation. However ghastly, “The 36-Hour War” invites a prurient interest in the spectacle of mass death and the wonders of unimaginably murderous technology. Yet we are not allowed to wallow for long in our atomic reverie because the story rushes to an unexpected, and completely unconvincing, conclusion – an American victory! The United States, we are assured, counterattacks immediately and decisively: “US rockets lay waste

Many thanks to Christopher Vials for his astute editorial advice on this chapter.

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the enemy’s cities. US airborne troops successfully occupy his country. The US wins the atomic war.” No need to worry about the details: America simply “wins.” However, even the dullest reader might wonder how such wholesale slaughter on all sides could constitute victory. A mildly curious reader might raise another good question: just who is the unnamed “enemy” that initiated this atomic war? All we’re told is that the missiles traveled “some 8000 miles around the earth from equatorial Africa. There an enemy of the United States has built its rocket-launching sites quickly and secretly in the jungle to escape detection.” Of course, even by the fall of 1945 many Americans could easily guess the identity of their most likely future enemy. Although it would be another two years before Bernard Baruch coined the term “Cold War,” and another two years after that before the Soviet Union ended the US nuclear monopoly by successfully testing an atomic bomb of its own, many powerful Americans were already raising dire warnings about the global menace of communism spearheaded from Moscow, the capital of America’s recent wartime ally.2 This chapter explores the twin origins of the atomic age and the Cold War, and US public resistance to both. The policies that shaped these two profoundly significant historical epochs were mutually reinforcing and together gave rise to a massive nuclear arms race that made global annihilation a constant peril and provided the rationale for non-nuclear wars that killed millions of people in dozens of nations. President Harry Truman’s claim that the use of atomic weapons against Japan was militarily necessary and morally justified to ensure American victory became a template for his insistence that a policy of global containment against communism, embedded in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, was essential to the survival of the United States and its highest principles. Similarly, public opposition to atomic weapons and the Cold War was also linked. Fears generated by both led a surprising number of Americans in the mid-1940s to embrace world government as the only plausible path to peace and the only means to prevent a future nuclear war or a permanent militarized stand-off with the Soviet Union. Because the nuclear arms race and Cold War anticommunism became so entrenched by the 1950s, and so broadly accepted as uncontestable facts of life, it is easy to forget the broad resistance to those new realities in their dawn. I argue, however, that neither was an easy sell and that both were opposed by a wide variety of interconnected progressive movements of the mid-1940s. These movements called not only for world government but also for military demobilization and the withdrawal of US troops from postwar China. This early opposition

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to the emergence of a permanent nuclear security state has largely disappeared from public memory. This lost legacy of dissent is epitomized by the career of a once famous, but now long forgotten, World War II hero – the maverick Marine Corps general Evans F. Carlson. A discussion of Carlson’s centrality to the left-liberal politics of the 1940s comes near the conclusion of this chapter. Perhaps the most obvious, but underappreciated, basis for postwar public dissent is the simple fact that the prospect of new enemies and new arms races arose immediately after V-J Day. Indeed, before the war had ended, American officials were already recasting the strange-bedfellow alliance with the Soviet Union into a doctrinaire and hostile showdown. The Communist Menace, as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described it in his 1947 book, was headquartered in the Soviet Union, but Hoover and countless other Cold Warriors routinely invoked the enemy as an abstract, unnamed “subversive,” “insurgent,” or “aggressor.” Vagueness about the enemy’s identity – as already rehearsed in Life’s “36-Hour War” – proved useful in the concerted effort to rally public support for the “American Century,” a commitment to US global supremacy that would require a vast variety of far-flung investments, military bases, and interventions. A focus on specific nations or opponents might have constrained the heady ambitions of Pax Americana. So instead, the US power elite in the government, military, and business (major media included) routinely instructed Cold War Americans that communism was a hydra-headed monster that could spread its power in countless ways and in limitless places – through the proxy rule of “captive nations” in Eastern Europe; through revolutionary subversion in countries as far apart as Greece, Indochina, or Guatemala; through fifth-column agents in American labor unions and Hollywood; through electoral politics in Western Europe; and even, “a very few years from now,” through a preemptive nuclear attack launched from Equatorial Africa. Whether at home or abroad, every space – even outer space – was a potential site of ideological and military contention. As Tom Engelhardt puts it in The End of Victory Culture, “Although the enemy was often identified with one super-nation, the Soviet Union, it seemed to mock all national boundaries . . . Being everywhere and nowhere, inside and out, the postwar enemy seemed omnipresent yet impossible to target. A nightmarish search for enemy-ness became the defining, even obsessive domestic act of the Cold War years.”3 By the late 1940s the defense of national boundaries against a clearly identifiable foreign foe no longer seemed a sufficient or feasible objective. Since communists might be plotting against the

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United States and its allies from anywhere – from a living room next door to a tiny country you couldn’t find on a map – citizens must prepare to consider anyone a potential enemy and every boundary permeable. In 1947, J. Edgar Hoover testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to rally public vigilance in opposition to domestic communism. Ordinary citizens should do their part in “quarantining” American Reds “so they can do no harm.” But he was unable to say exactly how the public could identify and isolate these home-front enemies. After all, Hoover claimed that “hundreds of [American] groups and organizations” had been “saturated with the virus of communism” – a “disease that spreads like an epidemic.” Even “ministers of the gospel” and teachers, he added, were “joining hands with the communists” to “promote their evil work.” Indeed, he worried that “all of our people” might “take the poisonous pills of communist propaganda.” How could any “quarantine” effectively contain such a pervasive, contagious, and invisible disease?4 And how much more difficult would that objective become in far off, unfamiliar countries where left-wing insurgents and their supporters spoke a foreign language and blended in seamlessly with their neighbors? That challenge would haunt American troops throughout the Cold War, most obviously in Vietnam, but even decades later when the United States fought twenty-first-century counterinsurgencies against another round of invisible, unconquerable enemies who defied US power and control. The advent of the nuclear age presented an even more obvious challenge to conventional boundaries between friends and foes and to the faith that any future American war would lead to inevitable triumph. For if a nuclear war were actually fought, especially as those weapons of mass destruction became ever more powerful, civilians on all sides would be horrific losers, and even nonbelligerent nations might become victims. The prospect of nuclear war thereby threatened to erase any meaningful distinction between winner and loser, ally and enemy, survivor and victim, and the righteous and the evil. Indeed, by 1950, the US government implicitly acknowledged that there could be no clear or decisive victory in a nuclear war. The best one could hope for was a better rate of survival. Nowhere is this more vividly documented than in the civil defense literature that began to pour forth within months of the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb in 1949. For example, in early 1950 the National Security Resources Board distributed 20 million copies of a pamphlet called Survival under Atomic Attack. The central message was intended to be encouraging: “If you follow the pointers in this little booklet you stand far better than an even chance of surviving the bomb’s blast, heat, and radioactivity.” Not

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exactly an inspiring pep talk. Victory culture had been supplanted by survival culture. Instead of mobilizing the public to stand up for their country, civil defense propaganda mobilized Americans to hunker down. There was no opponent to fight, only a weapon to avoid. A foreign enemy was neither named, nor described, nor denounced. As historian Robert A. Jacobs observes, in civil defense literature and films “bombs fells as if out of the blue, and the job of the citizen was to survive the explosion.”5 During World War II, by contrast, home-front culture was saturated with calls for total victory against clearly identified enemies. There were, to be sure, striking differences between wartime representations of the Germans and the Japanese. As many have noted, wartime animus toward Germans focused on Hitler and Nazism, not on the German people as a whole. For example, although wartime Hollywood created a number of uber-evil Germans, it was not uncommon to see ordinary Germans cast in a surprisingly sympathetic light. By contrast, as John Dower makes brilliantly clear in War without Mercy, Americans routinely depicted Japanese as subhuman animals – as monkeys, apes, vermin, and insects. Wartime race hate drew on a long tradition of Yellow Peril racism and was exacerbated by wartime propaganda that painted Japanese as a uniform mass of fanatical savages eager to die to the last man, woman, and child in defense of their emperor. Dower identifies a widespread American conviction that the Japanese enemy required, and even deserved, extermination.6 The pervasiveness of anti-Japanese racism – at least among white Americans – helps explain why, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, 85 percent of Americans supported the atomic bombing of Japan and the firebombing of sixty-seven Japanese cities that preceded it. Indeed, almost a quarter of Americans told pollsters they wished “many more” atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan.7 But most Americans were simply relieved that the war was over and viewed the bomb as the extraordinary invention that delivered the “inevitable triumph” President Franklin Roosevelt had promised the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked. For a brief time, at least, the bomb was widely regarded as a victory weapon, not as a doomsday discovery that could usher in the apocalypse. On October 27, 1945, for example, 100,000 Americans filled the Los Angeles Coliseum to witness “Tribute to Victory,” a reenactment of the Pacific war. With Hollywood’s Edward G. Robinson providing the dramatic narration, the penultimate moment arrived. “At a signal,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “a low-flying B-29 skimmed over the bowl, the multicolored search light beams tinting its gleaming silver with pastels. As the big bomber roared over the peristyle, a terrific detonation shook the ground,

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a burst of flame flashed on the field, and great billows of smoke mushroomed upward in an almost too-real depiction of devastation.” The finale came next, as the searchlights fell on an American flag standing on a stage model of the USS Missouri where Douglas MacArthur (played by Walter Pidgeon) accepted the Japanese surrender.8 This flag-waving celebration of the bomb as victory weapon was quickly supplanted by deep concerns about the atomic future. And even the most enduring justification of the bomb’s use was not yet fully in place. The dominant legitimizing narrative about Hiroshima and Nagasaki depended not only on a broad faith that the bomb brought victory but also that in doing so it actually “saved lives” by preventing the necessity of an even deadlier invasion of the Japanese home islands. That argument, however, was mostly constructed after World War II, and its power deepened over time as it became entrenched in popular culture, high school textbooks, and public memory. In fact, during the war Truman was advised that a land invasion of the Japanese islands, if required, would cost an estimated 40,000 US deaths. It was not until 1947, starting with a landmark article by former War Secretary Henry Stimson, that officials routinely claimed that the invasion of Japan would (in Stimson’s words) “cost over a million casualties [killed and wounded], to American forces alone.” In his 1955 memoir, former president Truman insisted that 500,000 American lives would have been lost (five times the number of US troops killed in the entire Pacific war). Over the years, the expected death tallies – asserted as matters of fact – continued to grow. By 1991, President George H.W. Bush praised Truman’s “tough, calculated decision” to use atomic weapons because it “spared millions of American lives.” And, of course, the Japanese, it was routinely noted, would have fared even worse, undoubtedly losing far more people than were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, many Americans eventually concluded that the atomic bombing of Japan had been a kind of mercy killing. In 1995, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning a proposed exhibit by the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum that would have raised questions about the necessity of using atomic weapons to end the war. The resolution praised the atomic bombing of Japan for “helping to bring World War II to a merciful end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and Japanese.”9 The dominant post–World War II American public memory not only ratified Truman’s decision but also erased most of the dissent that had surrounded wartime decision making. Had President Harry Truman bothered to consult seriously with his top military commanders he would have found that six of his seven five-star admirals and generals believed the

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Japanese were already defeated before the atomic bombing in August 1945 and were likely to surrender before an American invasion of the home islands, scheduled for November 1, especially once the Soviets fulfilled their pledge to enter the war against Japan (as they did on August 8, 1945). Several of the top brass, including Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, also had moral objections to using atomic weapons. Moreover, as historian John Chappell has demonstrated, in the months before the atomic bombing of Japan, many Americans favored a diplomatic conclusion to the war, rather than an inflexible insistence on unconditional surrender. Chappell concludes, The evidence indicates that there was substantial support for terms that provided the Japanese with incentive to “surrender,” especially a provision allowing the emperor to retain a ceremonial throne. Moreover, the Truman administration understood that Japan was putting out diplomatic feelers indicating an openness to surrender on those terms, but the president was resistant. Only after the atomic bombs were dropped did the United States allow the emperor to remain in place and unpunished.10

One of Truman’s motivations for using atomic weapons was to intimidate the Soviet Union and to end the war before the USSR could claim a greater stake in East Asia. Although historians continue to debate the relative weight of this motive, there is general agreement that Truman, his Secretary of State James Byrnes, and other key officials, believed the bomb’s use might help contain the Soviet Union. The first bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, producing massive Japanese casualties two days before the Soviet Red Army began storming across northern China. The Japanese surrender on August 14 did indeed check possible Soviet ambitions in the region. Truman and his advisors also believed the bomb’s massive power would serve to make the Soviet Union more “manageable” in Europe. That assumption proved illusory, but it clearly informed Truman’s thinking. The atomic bombing of Japan was both the last act of World War II and the first act of the Cold War.11 In 1945, there was little public awareness that animosity toward the Soviet Union was a factor in Truman’s atomic decision making. Even so, after the short-lived victory celebrations there was a rapidly growing public sense of dread about future nuclear wars. There was also, even more surprisingly, a striking level of empathy with the Japanese victims of the atomic bombs, despite government censorship of photographs and films depicting the wounded and dead. The most obvious evidence of American concern was the astonishing success of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Often

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described as the twentieth-century’s most significant work of journalism, Hiroshima was first published on August 31, 1946, when the New Yorker devoted the entire issue to Hersey’s profile of six survivors of the atomic bomb. The decision to focus on a small group of people was inspired by Hersey’s reading of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), a novel about five victims of a bridge collapse. Hersey consciously employed novelistic techniques to make his authorial presence as invisible as possible so that readers might make a more direct identification with the survivors. “My hope,” Hersey recalled, “was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain, some of the disaster, and therefore realize it.”12 And so Hiroshima begins with these gripping lines: At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

When published as a book, Hiroshima eventually sold three million copies. The ABC Radio Network thought Hersey’s work so important it hired four actors to read it in full on the air, reaching millions more. Hersey avoids commentary, but he does quote a German Jesuit priest, Father Siemes, who says, “The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?” Today, in the wake of decades of celebratory accounts of the “greatest generation” that won the “good war,” it is somewhat shocking to recall that a bestselling book was published directly out of the ashes of that war and fundamentally challenged America’s habit of self-congratulation. The popular reception of Hiroshima goes a long way toward explaining why, from 1945 to 1948, at least a third of Americans supported a quite radical solution to the specter of future nuclear wars – world government. In August 1946, for example, a public opinion poll found that 54 percent of the US public supported the transformation of the United Nations into “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.” Other polls, couched less idealistically, indicated substantial reservations to any global constraints on US actions. Nonetheless, even more judicious estimates found that at least a third of Americans had a favorable view of global governance.13 The mid-1940s support for progressive internationalism stood in stark opposition to the vision of US imperialism articulated by publishing

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magnate Henry Luce in his 1941 call for an “American Century” of global supremacy. One World enthusiasm represents, in part, the idealism typified by Vice President Henry Wallace in 1942 when he criticized Luce’s American Century and called instead for a postwar “century of the common man.” And, in 1943, millions of Americans became familiar with the phrase “one world” because of a book by the same title – the enormously popular blockbuster by the former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie about his global travels.14 By late 1945 and 1946, a surprising variety of people across the ideological spectrum were persuaded that nuclear weapons must be outlawed and that world government was the only effective solution to that end. Advocates included well-known broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing; journalists Anne O’Hare McCormick, Freda Kirchway, and Norman Cousins; scientists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard; college presidents Robert Hutchins and Hamilton Holt; Generals Henry “Hap” Arnold and Carl A. Spaatz; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.15 At the forefront of the movement were scientists. They quickly formed a group called the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later the Federation of American Scientists) to spread word about the perils of atomic weapons and the need to control them. Thus, many of the very men who had produced the greatest weapon of mass destruction in history – including Hans Bethe, Philip Morrison, Robert Oppenheimer, and Harold Urey – were now insisting that it should never be used again and must be banned. Ironically, the public anointed them heroes on both sides of the equation – for pulling off one of the greatest scientific inventions in history and then for denouncing it. As their stature soared, the media and Congress asked them to opine on all kinds of topics, as if their expertise extended beyond ground zero in every direction. Many atomic scientists enjoyed the limelight, but one of the most distinguished of them, Leo Szilard, offered this biting comment: “It is remarkable that all these scientists . . . should be listened to. But mass murderers have always commanded the attention of the public.” However vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, the scientists galvanized public interest in world government, perhaps most of all with the publication of a bestselling small paperback collection of essays called One World or None (1946), the title itself powerfully conveying the main argument.16 The heyday of One World-ism in the mid-1940s is all the more remarkable given the fact that it was bracketed by historical eras in which enthusiasm for world government was widely ridiculed as hopelessly naive or condemned as dangerously subversive. By the end of the 1940s, it

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was soon effectively supplanted and suppressed by Cold War orthodoxy. Consider this one bizarre, yet representative, example. In 1954, the Girl Scouts became the target of effective red-baiting when the 1947 edition of the Girl Scout Handbook included a tribute to Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low that read, “The concept of ‘One World’ had taken shape in her lively mind many years before the phrase became common. She was one of the first true internationalists.” A Florida broadcaster named Robert T. LeFevre scoured the Handbook and identified many other passages he deemed dangerously subversive. With allies in Congress and the American Legion, LeFevre managed to gain an almost complete capitulation from the Girl Scouts. In the 1954 edition of the Handbook, the tribute to founder Low was pared down to this: “The concept of ‘international friendship’ had taken shape in her lively mind long before the phrase became familiar to everyone.” Many other passages were politically sanitized or simply cut. In the rush to bring out a cleansed edition, one whole page under the title “One World” was left blank (now under the title “My World”), a page that had mostly included an anodyne list of products produced by foreign countries.17 The One World movement, albeit short-lived, is striking evidence that Americans were not immediately or easily sold on the Cold War division of the world into polarized armed camps necessitating the creation of a permanent national security state. When Harry Truman wanted to give aid to the right-wing governments of Greece and Turkey to help them suppress leftist movements, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Arthur Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican, famously advised the president that the only way he was likely to get the support he needed would be to make a personal appearance before Congress and “scare the hell out the American people.” And so he did. On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and insisted that the threat of international communism was so great the United States must be willing to intervene anywhere around the globe to prevent its expansion, thus articulating what became known as the Truman Doctrine.18 American officials also sought to stir up Cold War fervor by equating the struggle against communism to the World War II battle against fascism. “Red Fascism” was the clever rhetorical device invoked to make the linkage explicit. Truman himself said he did not see much difference between the two systems because both were “totalitarian” and both had to be met with unyielding force.19 Throughout the Cold War, US leaders insisted that the effort to “appease” Hitler had been a grave error that should not be repeated against an equally aggressive communist enemy. The analogy was intended

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to generate the same level of public support and moral certitude for the Cold War as had existed during World War II. However, the much discussed “Cold War consensus” was never as broad or deep as the unifying glue of World War II, in part because American postwar policy was not actually dedicated to resisting all forms of totalitarian rule. The overwhelming priority of Cold War policy was not promoting democracy, but containing communist nations, suppressing leftist-led revolutionary movements, and building a global capitalist system. Indeed, Cold War Washington notoriously supported scores of right-wing dictatorships so long as they were open to US business and were reliably anticommunist. And even before the Nuremberg Trials were underway, the United States was recruiting former Nazi scientists (Operation Paperclip) to support the Cold War arms race.20 The American public was more reluctant than their leaders to ally with right-wing extremists, whether at home or abroad. As Christopher Vials and Andrew Falk have shown, antifascism and other forms of progressive dissent continued to persist in American literature, film, and political culture in the years after World War II.21 They were also manifested in a variety of political actions other than in One World-ism. For example, within the military there was a broad grassroots movement to accelerate and deepen postwar demobilization and to protest American support for colonialism and right-wing regimes like China’s Kuomintang. One of the first manifestations of this movement came in the fall of 1945 when twelve US troopships were used to ferry 13,000 French soldiers and Foreign Legionnaires from France to Indochina where they would soon initiate the reconquest of their briefly independent colony. The enlisted crews of the ships, all of them US Merchant Marines, organized major protests against this policy. The entire noncommissioned crew of the Pachaug Victory signed a letter of protest to Washington. Another crew sent a cable to President Truman: “We, the unlicensed personnel [non-officers] of the S.S. Winchester Victory, vigorously protest the use of this and other American vessels for carrying foreign combat troops to foreign soil for the purpose of engaging in hostilities to further the imperialist policies of foreign governments when there are American troops waiting to come home.”22 Soon thereafter hundreds of thousands of soldiers began to demand an end to their overseas deployment. In Manila, Seoul, Guam, Yokohama, Hawaii, Paris, Frankfurt, Le Havre, Vienna, Calcutta and elsewhere, US troops took to the streets. The protests were especially widespread in January 1946 when the government announced that it would slow the pace of demobilization from 800,000 per month to 300,000. In Manila, the New

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York Times reported, some 20,000 soldiers “jammed one of the city’s main plazas tonight in a two-hour rally protesting the reported War Department slow-down in demobilization.” At another demonstration, when protesters were addressed by their commander, General Wilhelm D. Styer, he “was interrupted frequently by boos and profane jeers.”23 According to Time magazine, “the ‘Going Home’ agitation struck out against ‘imperialism,’ ‘militarism,’ the big brass, War Secretary Patterson, Congress – even businessmen.”24 In Yokohama, the arrival of Secretary of War Patterson sparked a “near mutiny.”25 American GIs were not merely homesick. Many worried that their extended foreign duty would require them to engage in unjustified or unwinnable military interventions. While there was broad rank-and-file support for World War II, few GIs wanted to serve as foreign occupiers in countries where they were not welcome. Postwar duty in China, where more than 100,000 soldiers and marines were deployed, was particularly unpopular. Their official mission was to disarm and repatriate Japanese soldiers. In reality, however, they were used to prop up the corrupt and repressive Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by ensuring that Communist Chinese troops did not fill the vacuum left by the defeated Japanese. US Marines in the North China provinces of Hebei and Shantung were indeed drawn into small-scale fighting against communist forces. Though far less bloody than the island battles with the Japanese, these skirmishes were undeniably confusing and disillusioning. As historian Craig M. Cameron put it, in the rapid transition from World War II to the occupation of China, “the nature of battle had changed from straightforward annihilation of identifiable enemies to the strain of guerrilla warfare, having to endure raids, hit-and-run attacks, and ambushes at the hands of men not clearly marked as being Chinese Communists.”26 Even Time magazine, a steadfast promoter of Chiang Kai-shek and US efforts to bolster him, reported in early 1946 that American troop morale was low. The “average marine’s reaction” to the mission of “support[ing] the Chinese Central Government” was “the hell with it – let’s get outta here.” After all, “many marines say: ‘When we leave, the Communists will take it anyway – so why not let them have it now?’”27 Marine disillusionment deepened with the rise of anti-Americanism in China. By early 1947 thousands of students in Shanghai were marching in protest, carrying signs reading “China Is Not an American Colony,” “Get Out, or We’ll Throw You Out!” and “Bloody GI, Go Home to Your Wife.”28 A wide variety of public figures also voiced dissent with the US presence in China. Writer Zora Neale Hurston was not an outspoken

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political activist, but her searing private opposition to US foreign policy helps recover a sense of the range and depth of American dissent in the 1940s. A supporter of anti-interventionist Republican Party stalwarts like Senator Robert Taft, Hurston described President Harry Truman as a “monster” in a 1946 letter to a friend. “I can think of him as nothing else but the BUTCHER OF ASIA. Of his grin of triumph on giving the order to drop the Atom bombs on Japan. Of his maintaining troops in China who are shooting the starving Chinese for stealing a handful of food . . . Is it that we are so devoted to a ‘good Massa’ that we feel that we ought not to even protest such crimes?”29 One of the best-known public critics of the postwar US military presence in China was General Evans F. Carlson, the celebrated founder of the Second Marine Raider Battalion, an unconventional unit of commandos that became widely known as “Carlson’s Raiders.” His dissent is a useful case study in the open-endedness of US foreign policy in the mid-1940s and the deeply contested nature of the emergent Cold War policy, even within military ranks. Though long forgotten, Carlson and his unit gained national fame during World War II by successfully attacking Makin Island in 1942, bringing about the first land victory of the Pacific War for the United States. This success was followed by important contributions to the victory at Guadalcanal, for which Carlson received his third Navy Cross. Hollywood quickly churned out a movie based on the unit’s heroics called Gung Ho (1943). In modern American vernacular “gung ho” means exceedingly enthusiastic. Although it does not have a precise political connotation, it is perhaps most often ascribed to people who do their jobs fervently, often in military service, without questioning the objective of the mission. Carlson learned the phrase from Chinese Communists to whom it meant “working together in harmony.” He preached the term to his men so much they began calling themselves the “Gung Ho battalion.” Carlson, however, did not seek men who were uncritical zealots. He explicitly sought men who had thought seriously about the objectives of the war and were committed to democracy, social justice, and the Four Freedoms. He was particularly impressed by veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who had volunteered to fight on behalf of Republican Spain against the pro-fascist General Francisco Franco. For that, many other marine officers considered Carlson at least a political fanatic, if not a dangerous leftist. Yet his undeniable military bravery led some colleagues to forgive his politics. For example, in a color-coded mix of condemnation and praise, future Marine Corps Commandant Colonel David Shoup said of Carlson, “He may be red, but he isn’t yellow.”30

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Before World War II, in the 1930s, Carlson served three military tours in China. On the third one in 1937–38, he traveled 2,000 miles from Shanghai to get behind Japanese lines and rendezvous with the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army. Before setting out he initiated close and enduring friendships with Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star over China (1937), and another American writer sympathetic to the Chinese Communists, Agnes Smedley. En route, he spent a night with Mao Tse-tung for whom he developed an immediately romanticized view, describing him as “a humble, kindly, lonely genius, striving here in the darkness of the night to find a peaceful and an equitable way of life for his people.”31 Carlson was no less enthusiastic about the Communist military forces he accompanied for almost two months, being deeply impressed by their discipline, selflessness, and skill. Carlson’s extraordinary life also included a friendship with Franklin Roosevelt that began in 1936 when the marine officer was part of the security detail on some of FDR’s trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, where the president found some relief from his polio. When Roosevelt learned that Carlson would return to China in 1937, he asked him to write private letters about his impressions. Carlson kept that extensive correspondence private, but he very publicly told journalists and anyone else who would listen about his positive views of the Communists and his negative opinion of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government and the Japanese. The military told Carlson to refrain from expressing his political views so he resigned from the Marine Corps in 1939 after seventeen years of service (he had served in the Army for nine years prior to that). Two years later, in 1941, he rejoined the Marines and began recruiting his commandos.32 During his two-year interlude as a civilian, Carlson published two books about his experiences with the Chinese Red Army, and one of them, Twin Stars of China (1940), found a considerable readership. Though clearly a left-leaning progressive, he was never a communist. According to historian Kenneth Shewmaker, Carlson’s positive accounts of the Red Army stemmed, in part, from a naive assumption that his Chinese Communist friends shared his deep love of democracy and were not really much different from devout New Dealers. In any case, Carlson openly endorsed their cause. Nor was he timid about joining many left-wing American organizations that included Communist Party members. For example, Carlson was one of the best known members of the American Veterans Committee (AVC), a left-liberal alternative to the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars that eventually had more than 100,000 members (including Medgar Evers, Studs Terkel, and Ronald Reagan). The AVC extended

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full membership to women and veterans of color and advocated a wide range of progressive causes, including civil rights and one world government.33 In December 1945, Carlson was featured at a Madison Square Garden rally sponsored by the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, another of the many long-forgotten post–World War II peace organizations that took progressive positions on everything from labor to foreign policy. Speakers included Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, Helen Keller, United Auto Workers Richard Frankensteen, and actors Orson Welles and Fredric March. When General Evans Carlson walked to the podium in full-dress uniform bedecked with row upon row of campaign ribbons and decorations, the audience of 20,000 rose to their feet and chanted “Gung Ho!” “Gung Ho!” “Gung Ho!” Carlson described the US presence in China as “inimical to the interest of the Chinese people” and called for an immediate American withdrawal.34 Less than a year later at a San Francisco conference, Carlson called for better relations with the Soviet Union and criticized those “who regard the American Century as the century for unrestrained American access to world markets . . . and whose over-all attitude is that the world is America’s oyster to do with as we please.”35 Carlson was also co-chair, along with Paul Robeson, of the National Committee to Win the Peace, an antiimperialist group that advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons and the withdrawal of US and British troops from Palestine, China, the Philippines, and Greece. In support of that organization in 1946 he told the press, “I see no solution to China’s problem and ours other than immediate withdrawal of our troops and ending of all assistance to Chiang Kai-shek until he stops this war against the Chinese people and sets up a democratic coalition government.” In response, Time magazine lashed out at the man it had once praised. “Everyone knew that retired Brigadier General Evans F. Carlson was a Marine, and a good one . . . his Gung Ho Raiders wrote heroic headlines . . . Not so many US citizens knew that General Carlson had also long been an apostle of Communistic causes and Communistfringe groups.”36 The red-baiting of Carlson would continue even after his death at age fifty-one, in 1947. A few days before he died, Carlson was visited by his friend Henry Wallace, who became a far greater target of red-baiting during his 1948 bid for the presidency as a Progressive Party candidate. Carlson’s death in many ways marks the moment when the progressive dream of postwar peace and international cooperation began to fade or at least go underground, increasingly besieged by the rise of McCarthyism, the intensification of the Cold War, and events that gave ballast to the excessive

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fear-mongering of the era – the Berlin Airlift (1948), the Soviet acquisition of the bomb (1949), the Chinese Communist revolutionary victory (1949), the Alger Hiss perjury conviction, the Rosenberg arrests (1950), and the onset of the Korean War (1950). Yet the creation of a permanent national security state – with its massive military spending, its countless secret operations in foreign countries, its giant intelligence- gathering apparatus, its hundreds of foreign military bases, its repeated military interventions, and its ever-expanding nuclear arsenal – was not the inevitable or uncontested outcome of World War II, however much that war created the conditions for its birth. Nor was it inevitable that the United States would embrace a policy of nuclear deterrence that made global human extinction a dire peril we still face; or that the United States would fight an endless string of limited wars and counterrevolutions against faraway, largely invisible enemies, with no prospect of decisive victory. The possibility of those outcomes was presciently forecast and resisted by a range of mid-1940s progressives like Evans Carlson. Their critiques have largely faded from historical memory, but they would repeatedly resurface and deepen in the decades that followed. A nuclear-free world still eludes us, along with any foreseeable end to the seemingly permanent American warfare in the Greater Middle East and the yearly military interventions in more than one hundred countries by US Special Operations Forces. But the roots of our current and ongoing plight, along with challenges to it, lie in the 1940s and are well worth revisiting. NOTES 1 “The 36-Hour War,” Life, November 19, 1945. This article is briefly discussed by Paul Boyer, By The Dawn’s Early Light (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 67; Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 110–11, 123, 181; and Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 49–50. 2 Baruch used the term “Cold War” on April 16, 1947, in a speech to the South Carolina House of Representatives, though it did not gain wide currency until journalist Walter Lippmann began using the term in his New York Herald Tribune column in September 1947. On the rise of the Cold War see Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993); Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977);

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and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007 revised edition), 6. See voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/hoover-speech-before-the-house-committeespeech-text. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Survival under Atomic Attack (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950), 31; Robert A. Jacobs. The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 63. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 52–7. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 183. Ibid., 181. Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 23; Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947; Peter J. Kuznick, “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative, Asia-Pacific Journal, July 3, 2007; Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 73. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 177. The atomic bomb was deemed unnecessary by Generals Douglas MacArthur, Henry Arnold, and Dwight Eisenhower, and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, and Ernest King. Only General George Marshall recommended its use. John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 153. For a synopsis of Truman administration views that using atomic bombs on Japan would help rein in the Soviet Union see Takaki, Hiroshima, 53–68. The argument was first and famously made by Gar Alperovitz in Atomic Diplomacy, 1965. For his more recent analysis see The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996). “John Hersey, The Art of Fiction No. 92,” Interviewed by Jonathan Dee, Paris Review, Summer–Fall 1986; Russell Shorto, “John Hersey, the Writer Who Let ‘Hiroshima’ Speak for Itself,” New Yorker, August 31, 2016. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 37–8. Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941; Henry Wallace, “The Four Duties Pursuant to the Four Freedoms,” May 8, 1942, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/henrywallacefreeworldassoc.htm; Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943). Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb: One World or None: A History of the World Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the

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Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 73–83; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 27–106; Gilbert Jonas, One Shining Moment: A Short History of the American Student World Federalist Movement, 1942–1953 (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2000). Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 61; Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Federation of American Scientists, 1946). Ben H. Bagdikian, “What Happened to the Girl Scouts?” The Atlantic, May 1955. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1955/05/what-happenedto-the-girl-scouts/306925/ Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II (New York: New Press, 2009), 68. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s– 1950’s,” American Historical Review (April 1970): 1046–64; Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)104. David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and RightWing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2015). Vials, Haunted by Hitler; Andrew J. Falk, Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 50. Robert Trumbull, “20,000 Manila GI’s Boo General; Urge Congress to Speed Sailings,” New York Times, January 8, 1946, 1. “Army & Navy: Demobilization,” Time, January 14, 1946. “GIs Protest: On Slow Demobilization,” New York Times, January 13, 1946, E1. Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 211. “Army & Navy: Jacfu on the Railroad,” Time, Jan. 21, 1946. “Jacfu” was marine slang for “joint American-Chinese foul-up.” Henry B. Lieberman, “5,000 Parade in Shanghai,” New York Times, January 2, 1947, 11; Tillman Durdin, “China Protesters Meet US Envoy,” New York Times, January 4, 1947, 8. Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 15 Duane Schultz, Evans Carlson, Marine Raider: The Man Who Commanded America’s First Special Forces (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2014), 229 for the Shoup quotation; on Carlson’s affinity for veterans of the Abraham Lincoln brigade, see Shelby Scates, Warren G. Magnuson and the Shaping of TwentiethCentury America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 110.

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31 Schultz, Evans Carlson, 25; see also John Wukovits, American Commando (New York: NAL Caliber, 2009). 32 Schultz, Evans Carlson, 19–22, 26–9. 33 Kenneth E. Shewmaker, “The American Liberal Dream: Evans F. Carlson and the Chinese Communists, 1937–1947,” Pacific Historical Review, May 1969, 207–16; on Carlson and the American Veterans Committee see Charles G. Bolte, “The New Veteran,” Life magazine, December 10, 1945, 57–66. When Carlson joined the AVC he attached a letter that read: “If we are to produce a harmonious society . . . the welfare of all members of society in the postwar era must receive unprejudiced consideration.” 34 Schultz, Evans Carlson, 227. 35 “Carlson Asks End to Hostile Policy,” New York Times, October 19, 1946, 6. 36 “National Affairs: Win the Peace for Whom?” Time, September 16, 1946.

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part ii

Emergent Publics

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ch a p ter 8

Crosscurrents World War II and the Increasing Visibility of Race Bill V. Mullen

The political and cultural significance of race at the levels of the state, literary and mass culture, and civil society changed dialectically in scope and form during the period of World War II. We may think of these changes as crosscurrents running along four related axes of “visibility.” The first is spatial, denoting the relationship between the geographical movements of populations and shifting cultural alignments. The second is temporal, indexing how the political and cultural tendencies of earlier periods, especially the era of the Great Depression, culminated in the World War II era while seeding the cultural politics of postwar culture. The third axis runs between “high” and “mass” culture, categories put into flux and crisis by events of the war and the varied responses of US writers to that event. The fourth is global: World War II helped launch new international and transnational cultural and political linkages manifested in a reorientation of US writers especially to issues of race and empire. This chapter delineates each of these four axes while indicating how they provided contours to postwar US culture, politics, and civil society.

Shifting Maps of Racial Empire During and immediately after the war, the United States underwent the largest labor migration in its history. Twenty-five million people – more than 20 percent of the population – migrated to another country or state for military service or employment.1 The racial maps of the western and northern United States in particular were remade as African Americans and Mexican Americans took up new employment in shipyard building, public transportation, agriculture, and auto work. Unions, workplaces, public spaces, housing, and the military were newly integrated, causing increased demands for social equality and access while also triggering a racial backlash spawned by economic competition. US literature, in turn, canonized 129

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the migration narrative, elevating stories of movement, displacement, and transience suffused with the racial dynamics of these real-world currents. Long histories of US imperial conquest in Mexico and Asia and the legacy of US slavery and racial exclusion also came home to roost in domestic and international crises of race and US capitalism during World War II. African American, Mexican and Mexican American, and Asian laborers were readily available as a “reserve army” both to replace a workforce conscripted to fight in the war and to fight the war itself. African Americans, for example, comprised 3 percent of war workers in 1942 but 8 percent by 1944.2 By 1945, more than 1.2 million African Americans were also enlisted in the military. These represented narrow but vital points of entry to the labor market after the near 50 percent Black unemployment during the Depression. The Dodge Motor Company in Detroit, Los Angeles shipyards producing war materiel, and steel mills in Chicago and Gary all saw increases in the number of Black workers during the war. The federal government’s Bracero Program meanwhile was signed into law on August 4, 1942, to fill a war-induced labor shortage in the US agricultural industry. It offered Mexican “guest workers” short-term contracts to pick sugar beets, cotton, tomatoes, and other crops, instantly changing the demographics of California’s Central Valley and of places like Ciudad Juarez near El Paso. Some among the 110,000 Japanese internees who had been removed from civil society in 1941 and 1942 were forced into agricultural work at places like the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Newell, California. A bar excluding Filipinos from military service was lifted during the war, providing a path to citizenship for veterans. Filipino agricultural immigrant workers, long relied on in California, began settling in cities like Stockton, California, during the war. The reversal of the 1882 Chinese exclusion Act by the Magnuson Act of 1943, prompted by the wartime alliance with China, similarly enabled Chinese American military service and a path to citizenship. Like the Bracero Program, it was part of an intricate balancing act by the state and capital to maintain labor supplies for industry profit and military victory. The consolidation of this new, more integrated working class generated one of the greatest periods of worker and civil rights militancy in US history. The tension arose from the contradiction between wartime nationalism and the experience of historical exclusion. In Detroit, Black foundry workers at the Dodge Motor Company staged two separate wildcat strikes in August 1941 to protest the company’s racist job transfer policies.3 The St. Louis “March on Washington Committee,” named for A. Philip Randolph’s aborted call for a 1941 national march against

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employment discrimination, mobilized 500 demonstrators outside the United States Cartridge Company in June 1942 to protest discriminatory hiring. Elsewhere, Black workers organized in response to “hate strikes” called by white workers resisting shop floor integration. In 1947, the National Farm Labor Union helped organize a strike in the DiGiorgio (California) grape fields that included protests against the Bracero contractlabor program.9 More famously, in Long Beach, California, in 1943, Mexican American working-class youth in zoot suits fought back when hundreds of sailors, egged on by police and city council ordinances criminalizing their dress, chased them through the streets. The “Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee” that was formed to defend the “pachucos” helped launch the modern Chicano Movement.4 Literary representations of the new racial formations during the war constitute a singular motif, if not genre, of 1940s “cultural work,” originally a Popular Front term denoting art produced by socially conscious, radical, or communist artists. For example, leftist William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941) narrates the journey from Kentucky to Pennsylvania of two African American sharecroppers recruited as strikebreakers. Set in 1919, the book recasts the African American Great Migration as proletarian novel. Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) locates newly arrived African American migrants and Southern “okies” in a crucible of race, sexual, and gender tensions forged in wartime California shipyards by what Himes perceives as a domestic “front” of US racist imperialism (see Chapter 4 in this volume). In this novel, labor conscripted to build the guns of war is sinking, not rising, together. Richard Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy (1945) and migration study 12 Million Black Voices (1941) are perhaps the most ambitious cultural texts of the period to make the African American diaspora and migration synecdochal of the experience of capitalist modernity. As Wright narrates, Imagine European history from the days of Christ to the present telescoped into three hundred years and you can comprehend the drama which our consciousness has experienced! Brutal, bloody, crowded with suffering and abrupt transitions, the lives of us black folk represent the most magical and meaningful picture of human experience in the Western world. Hurled from our native African homes into the very center of the most complex and highly industrialized civilization the world has ever know, we stand today with a consciousness and memory the world such as few people possess. We black folk, our history and our being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is.5

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Carey McWilliam’s collaboration with Farm Security Administration photographers on Factories in the Field (1939), the first study of Chinese, Armenian, Mexican, and Filipino migrant labor in California agriculture, identified the West Coast as a highly exploitive but suddenly visible “Pacific Rim.” Carlos Bulosan’s novel America Is in the Heart (1946) is an autoethnography of this turn in US capitalist history. The protagonist, modeled closely on Bulosan, migrates from the Philippines and becomes an itinerant cannery worker and field hand navigating subaltern pathways shared by Black, Mexican, and white workers; equally important, he details the efforts of communist, socialist, and CIO organizers – with whom Bulosan was in close contact – to organize them. The book foretells the conditions of modern-day California “day laborers” and the United Farm Workers’ revolts of the 1960s. Photographs, artwork, and narratives of the Japanese American incarceration during the war, such as Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946) and Toshio Mori’s Yokohama California (1949), are other early exemplars of the emergence of Asian American literature in the postwar period and of a nascent protest literature against histories of Asian exclusion. Indeed, appeals by African American newspapers and race leaders like Du Bois to protest Japanese internment is yet another moment of newly visible interethnic “solidarity” that would later blossom in the 1960s career of internment camp survivor and Malcolm X confidante, Yuri Kochiyama.6

The 1940s, the Cold War, and the “Long” Civil Rights Era Scholar Martha Biondi’s observation that the 1940s constitute the beginnings of the modern civil rights era conforms to recent scholarly consensus on the “long civil rights” movement.7 This work sees the 1940s as advancing formal and informal race agitation for equality begun in the 1920s and 1930s – as evidenced by the rise of Black nationalist organizations, new civil rights programs, judicial campaigns to win equality (in areas such as housing, citizenship, and employment), and antiracist movements often tied to political groups like the Communist Party that were anti-imperialist or antifascist in orientation. It is possible to speak of the 1940s, for example, as the culmination of a “Black Popular Front” or “Black Cultural Front” in which political and cultural work reflected the legacy of “Black and White Unite and Fight” struggles for equality promoted by the Communist Party during the 1930s.8 At the same time, the new “visibility” of racism during the 1940s was critical to the politics of Cold War backlash and the making of the postwar world. By 1946, however, Black, Jewish, and white radicals

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tagged by the state as antiracist were in the frontlines of persecution in the workplace and in the emergent federal surveillance apparatus. As Manning Marable has noted, the purging of communists and radicals from organized labor in the years 1947–1950 was the primary reason for the decline in the AFL-CIO’s commitment to fighting racial segregation. Were it not for anticommunist repression of radical currents, writes Marable, “The democratic upsurge of black people which characterized the late 1950s could have happened ten years earlier.”9 US writers, in turn, narrated these contradictions by both retaining legacies of earlier radicalisms and trying to forge new independent viewpoints and organizations.10 Indeed, Alan Wald characterizes as “late anti-fascist” the political and cultural zeitgeist of the 1940s. This anachronistic term refers to the continuity of Popular Front sentiment against fascism through and beyond the war years, as well as the temporal and political disjunctures it produced with the onset of the Cold War in 1946. For example, Wald notes that the term “progressive culture” that emerged on the US left during the Popular Front to include nineteenth-century figures like Walt Whitman was by the 1940s also used to mask or misrepresent communist sympathies once the specter of McCarthyism emerged. We can see these temporal dialectics in two distinctive cultural moments of racial “visibility” (and “invisibility”) during the 1940s. In 1944, Richard Wright published in The Atlantic Monthly the essay, “I Tried to Be a Communist.” It located Wright’s break with communism in his self-described 1938 expulsion from a May Day Parade in Chicago for “Trotyskist” sympathies. Yet when he moved from Chicago to New York in 1938, Wright became an active contributor to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA’s) Daily Worker and helped recruit to its writing ranks a young Ralph Ellison. Ellison in turn would later “expel” from his own published record his contributions to the Daily Worker and the CPUSA’s New Masses while revising the text of his breakthrough novel Invisible Man (1952), so that its demonized portrait of the Communist Party, “The Brotherhood,” conformed to McCarthyite orthodoxy.11 Wright and Ellison thus made critical conjunctures of the 1930s fight against racism and fascism “invisible” in order to manufacture a temporal and political break with a new racial future. This effort owed both to shortcomings in the left’s own fight against racism (for example, the Communist Party’s lack of support for the “Double V” campaign and its support of Japanese American internment) and to a new Cold War hegemony they felt compelled to navigate. The decade was thus a period of both “late” radicalism and early-onset conversion to a new racial politics coerced in

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part by the US nation-state’s imperial ascent and anticommunist hysteria. A through-line in this conjuncture was persistent reflection on the nature of “self-determination” struggles inherited from the Old Left’s Black Belt Thesis and revised by figures like Trotsky and C. L. R. James in the 1940s. The “long” civil rights movement was thus marked by a history and memory of left-influenced interracial struggle, as well as new conceptions of racial and ethnic political identity beholden to but independent of their roots. A good example is the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE was established in 1942 by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation directed by A. J. Muste; its strategy of nonviolent protest and focus on segregation became a template for later civil rights actions like the 1960s Freedom Rides. In 1947, an interracial group of sixteen CORE activists, including Bayard Rustin, challenged interstate segregation on buses during a “Journey of Reconciliation” to the South. Rustin had joined the Communist Party while in college, leaving it to join the Socialist Party after the CPUSA subordinated its fight against racism to defending the Soviet Union during the war. But by 1949, under state pressure and accusations of communist influence, CORE itself produced a “Statement on Communism” and denounced ties with “Communist–controlled” groups.12 Its legacy was then twofold: as spur and model for a wide range of African American civil rights organizations to come (SNCC and the Black Panthers, for example) and as martyr to Cold War efforts to break antiracist struggles from above. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1940s trajectory similarly illustrates the temporal dialectics of the 1940s. Skeptical of CPUSA’s policy toward African Americans in its heyday of popular appeal during the 1930s, Du Bois moved much closer to his eventual Communist Party membership during the period of World War II. New Deal liberalism’s failure to distribute relief equally to African Americans, the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to pass antilynching laws, the United Nations’ failure at its 1945 inception to denounce colonialism, and his perception of the US military victory during the war as an extension of American empire all pushed Du Bois into new political orbits. In the decade following the war, he publicly supported the Soviet Union, renewed his break with the NAACP, and was prosecuted under the Smith Act in 1951. Du Bois also found himself abandoned and isolated by other race leaders like A. Philip Randolph and the NAACP’s Walter White, who served as what Manning Marable calls the “left wing of McCarthyism” during and after the war.13 Du Bois’s legacy for the long civil rights

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movement, like that of CORE, was thus twofold: he was both a cautionary tale of communist affiliation for liberal antiracists like Martin Luther King Jr. and a spur to Black anti-imperialists drawn to his political leftism and early embrace of putatively communist nations like China. Yet these are not the most important temporal considerations of the 1940s. More significantly, the decade was an incubator and gateway for a postwar generation of activists and cultural workers dedicated to both racial reform and revolution, which they aimed to achieve by building new and highly visible cultural and political movements. Among the activists born or beginning their early radicalization in the decade were Yuri Kochiyama (whose family was interned during the war); UFW leader Caesar Chavez and scholar-activist Americo Paredes (both veterans of World War II); American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier and “Red Power” scholar Vine Deloria Jr. (the latter educated at reservation schools); playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who drew her plot for Raisin in the Sun from her family’s 1940s legal case against Chicago restrictive covenants; author James Baldwin, who described himself in the early 1940s as a “Trotskyist”14 ; 1972 communist presidential candidate Angela Davis; Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale; Martin Luther King Jr.; and Malcolm X, famously a rebellious zoot-suiter during the war. The 1940s “cultural front,” to use Michael Denning’s term, also produced landmark books that would eventually become popular touchstones of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Margaret Walker’s For My People (1942), and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Street in Bronzeville (1945). Other authors who foreshadowed the rise of multicultural literature were John Okada (his family was interned during the war), author of No-No Boy, an historical novel first published in 1957 but set in 1946, about young Japanese Americans challenging internment and conscription into the military; and Americo Paredes, whose novel George Washington Gomez, was about a Mexican American “invisible man” who assimilates to US geopolitical power through World War II enlistment. The latter book was begun in the late 1930s, but only published in 1990 by Arte Publico Press as part of a Chicano studies movement that Paredes himself helped launch after starting the nation’s first Center for MexicanAmerican Studies program at the University of Texas in 1970. The long and winding path to publication of Paredes’s book and his “belated” career as a recognized writer and social activist of Chicano history of the United States are an apt allegory of the 1940s as part of the long civil rights moment.

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The Racial Politics of Mass and High Culture during the 1940s Literature and popular culture of the World War II era provided competing and at times conflicting racial “structures of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s term. World War II is the era of both Life magazine – famous for advocacy of the “American Century” – and Ebony Magazine, its African American derivative. It is the era of Richard Wright’s Native Son– the first African American literary blockbuster and Book of the Month Club selection – and Cabin in the Sky, a breakthrough Hollywood musical that made Lena Horne a household name and represented the confluence of Black cabaret, jazz, and dance with mass media. Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan would earn both literary accolades and popular success by publishing pastoral stories of Filipino life in Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country.15 It is also the decade in which William Faulkner’s prominence as a writer of race in the US South reaches Collier’s Magazine. Faulkner’s short story “Go Down Moses” about a Black prisoner condemned to Death Row was published there in 1941, a year before becoming the title story of a book by the same name and seven years before his great novel of race of the 1940s, Intruder in the Dust. By the end of the 1940s, “race” and racial representation would be a source of debate about the very meaning of mass culture (Theodor Adorno’s writings on jazz, for example). High culture, including the literary, also became a key site of what sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1940s book called the “American dilemma,” which argued against formal and informal exclusion in favor of an aspirant or proto multiculturalism. Indeed, literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s in the United States integrated popular and mass culture in what Raymond Williams has called residual and emergent forms. Influenced by the proliferation of print media, film, and radio and broad conceptions of a “people’s culture” fomented by a wide variety of groups – from trade unions to the CPUSA – writers devised a variety of new tactics and strategies both to engage mass readership and to use literature to comment on the influence of “popular” and mass culture itself. We should not be surprised that writers attuned to racial conditions were among those engaging with race and mass culture. By the 1940s, US writers of color had become keenly aware of egregious tendencies toward exclusion, racism and racial misrepresentation in literary publishing and the culture industries writ large. For example, the Chicago Defender, one of the largest circulation Black newspapers in the United States during the war, regularly published poetry and prose by aspiring and established African American writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes in order to widen

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opportunities for Black writers and readers. Hughes’s popular “Simple” stories, vernacular tales about a working-class African American named Jessie B. Simple, for example, were first published in the Defender. In form and content, Hughes hoped to achieve a popular base and popular language to criticize a war perceived by African Americans as racist while assaulting fascism and speaking to Black economic dispossession. Richard Wright also merged mass media influence and densely allusive literary writing into something akin to tabloid modernism. His 1940 novel Native Son, about a double murder by a young Chicago African American named Bigger Thomas, draws its story line from Chicago newspaper reports of the sensational murder by a man named Robert Nixon. It presents a scathing representation of racism in the Chicago press and is influenced in its storytelling method by both daily newspaper journalism and “True Detective”-style magazines. In the novel, popular culture’s reactionary lures motivate Bigger toward misplaced rebellion and false consciousness: he masturbates in a movie theater to a racist film featuring an attractive white woman, and he draws anticommunist ideas from bourgeois magazines and books. As Benjamin Balthaser argues in an essay on Wright’s novel and his nonfiction 12 Million Black Voices, Wright was constantly attuned to popular representations of race as ideology while developing a Black epistemology, or reading, of mass culture itself through his fictional portraits of characters such as Bigger Thomas.16 Wright’s plot in Native Son – which revolved around an alleged black rape of a white woman – signaled how themes of miscegenation, interraciality, and interracial antiracism crashed the terrains of literature and mass culture in the 1940s. As Alex Lubin argues, World War II “fundamentally changed racial formations in the United States and in so doing made interracial intimacy especially charged.”17 This change came about through a variety of crosscurrents – the Yellow Peril, fascist eugenics discourse, the notorious Scottsboro case of 1931, newly integrated workspaces, women’s emergence in new public spheres, and mass media coverage of all of these – which played out in high and low cultural representation. Billie Holliday’s blockbuster 1939 hit song “Strange Fruit,” about Southern lynching, inaugurated a decade of racial representation on that theme, a kind of spectacularization of the real and photographic “spectacle” of lynching astutely diagnosed by Jacqueline Goldsby.18 During the 1940s, Ann Petry’s The Street, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go would all represent interracial sexuality or lynching and its specter. In dance, the progressive anthropologist and dancer Pearl

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Primus debuted her choreographed interpretation of “Strange Fruit” on the New York stage, indicative as Farah Griffin notes of Black women’s activist upturn during the war.19 The culmination of this theme and its widest popularization were found in Lillian Smith’s 1944 novel Strange Fruit. The bestselling novel by the Southern white liberal was banned in Boston and other cities for its representation of interracial romance (a ban overturned in Detroit through the efforts of the United Autoworkers). By the end of the 1940s, the spectacularization of race had also helped give birth to new media. Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony Magazine (1945) and Jet magazine (1951) created niches for Black middle-class culture, fashion, and lifestyle while retaining a market and forum for self-representation of interracial sexuality and marriage. Finally, as Chris Vials notes, the US alliance with China and the Philippines during the war shifted the racial discourse and the literary marketplace: “The war did not represent a generalized wave of tolerance toward people of Asian descent, but rather a lessening of the Yellow Peril discourse historically directed at the Chinese and Filipinos and an intensification of this discourse in regard to the Japanese and Japanese Americans.”20 The war years saw the publication of a range of books that emphasized the affective bonds between Asian and US peoples and included such titles as Pearl Buck’s Dragon Seed (1942), Edgar Snow’s People on Our Side (1944), and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and The Laughter of My Father (1944). Significantly, many of these books enjoyed wide popular appeal or bestseller status, indicative of their fit for a kind of marketplace Popular Front. Similarly, changes in postwar alliances in Asia and the onset of the Cold War deeply affected the literary marketplace. Both Agnes Smedley and Anna Louise Strong, for example, who wrote popular nonfiction books on China during the war, chose permanent exile from the United States when its end brought a swift, rising tide of anticommunism. Popularizations of wartime alliances would quickly devolve into cultural show trials meant to de-miscegenate the national culture and create a new template for anticommunist ideology.

Race, Globalism, and the Third World World War II revealed contradictions and conflicts between an ascendant racist and US-centric imperial order and an emergent anticolonial, antiimperialist insurgency intended to overthrow that order. African American writers in particular formed new transnational linkages with struggles across Asia and Africa. Efforts of the Civil Rights Congress to compel the

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newly formed United Nations in 1945 to recognize domestic US oppression and violence against African Americans as tantamount to “genocide” against Jews and the bombing victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki refigured racism and antiracist struggle on a global scale. The US state’s endeavor to “contain” the spread of antiracist and anti-imperialist organizing (much like its efforts to contain communism globally) through draconian legislation like the Smith Act could not hold back the lineaments of a new internationalism indebted to a half-century of racial radicalism and to institutions and alliances, such as the Pan-African Congress, that literally exceeded US borders. By the end of the decade, the tracks to the “Third World” had been laid and included American conjunctures and switch points. Writers committed to representing racism expanded their geographical horizons by writing about the world outside the United States, by internationalizing the themes in their work, and, more dramatically, by choosing exile from the United States. Indeed, by the end of World War II a well-established discourse in place among Black and other nonwhite progressives was that the United States constituted something like a fascist state for people of color. Throughout the war, African American newspapers and cartoonists regularly caricatured racist southern politicians such as Mississippi segregationist Theodore Bilbo as an American Hitler, while others compared Japanese internment camps to concentration camps for Jews. This “inside-outing” of US politics – asserting that what happened “over there” could “happen here” – reflected a new global conception of racism induced by the war itself. Radicals doubled down on this conception by envisioning the United States as a new master in a global colonial order. The US occupations of Japan and Germany, the American military’s enlarged footprint across the planet, continuing US support for South African apartheid, and its imminent role as an investor in colonial regimes across Asia and Africa all provoked new analyses of race. The CPUSA, for example, would revive its long-dormant “Black Belt Thesis” and argue for “internal colonization” by African-Americans, while individual figures like W. E. B. Du Bois perceived the newly created United Nations – birthed in San Francisco, housed in New York – as an in-house tool for US efforts to carve up and hold down the nonwhite postwar world. In February and October 1945, the founding World Trade Union Conference (WTUC) and Fifth Pan-African Congress were held in England. At both conferences, the central themes were the present and future contours of imperialism and racism, as well as the role of the United States in the world order. The WTUC included delegates from trade unions in

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Africa, Asia and Palestine, as well as members of the AFL-CIO. Attendees applauded the Crimea Conference and the Yalta meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin; these events signaled the near end of the war and generated a “Charter of Labour for the Colonies” that insisted on the elimination of a “color bar” in employment and the building up of trade unions. Delegates also asserted the right of colonies to “self-determination,” a theme meant to replace ineffectual Wilsonian (and by implication American) precepts from the era of the League of Nations. The Manchester PanAfrican conference, meanwhile, was attended by Du Bois, as well as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and George Padmore, organizer and colonial correspondent for the Chicago Defender during the war. Out of Manchester came the contours and impetus for African decolonization and a no-holds-barred rejection of US and western imperialism, all wrapped in a language of what Nkrumah called a new “colonial international.”21 These events foretold the uncoordinated but notable stream of exile and expatriatism undertaken by US writers seeking to build new bridges with currents of pan-Africanism and its cultural arm, negritude. Richard Wright left the United States for Paris in 1946 where he would support Afro-Asian decolonization through his contributions to the pan-African journal Presence Africaine and his books on Ghana and the 1955 Bandung Conference. These moves represented Wright’s definitive rejection of triumphalist US imperialism and Cold War anticommunism. Chester Himes also moved to Paris, as did James Baldwin and the left-wing cartoonist Ollie Harrington. Within ten years of the war’s end, African American writers had come to use Europe and Africa as a measuring stick of progress on race at home – or lack thereof – as well as a platform for criticizing US imperialism. Other writers channeled their wartime experiences into new global analyses of racism and colonialism. John Oliver Killens, who served with US amphibious forces in the South Pacific from 1942 to 1945, would later publish And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963). The protagonist of this World War II novel is shipped out to the Pacific after a commanding officer discovers a letter he has written protesting racism faced by Black soldiers, and he winds up being hospitalized in Bainbridge, Australia. Killens writes of “two” wars in the novel: “Both involve the maiming and killing of men and both are fought against fascism. Thus the Battle of Bainbridge is as important as the Battle of Iwo Jima or the Battle of North Africa.”22 Killens’s novel conforms to the argument of John Dower’s influential study War without Mercy, namely that the war induced a heightened xenophobia and racism globally and a shift in racial discourse domestically.23

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Herein lies the partial explanation for the racialization of the international peace movement that emerged during and after the war. This movement was represented by figures such as the conscientious objector Bayard Rustin, who served a prison term during World War II, helped form the War Resisters League in its aftermath, and in 1948 traveled to India in homage to Gandhi’s role in nonviolent resistance to British rule. Similarly, Claudia Jones and Shirley Graham Du Bois would both dedicate themselves to peace and antinuclear campaigns after 1946; they would link events such as International Women’s Day and protests against domestic violence against Black women to a worldwide campaign for demilitarization. More famously, W. E. B. Du Bois would be arrested in 1951 and charged with violating the Smith Act for his work with the Peace Information Center in the United States and his efforts to gather signatures for the Stockholm Appeal to ban nuclear weapons. In Du Bois’s 1952 book, In Battle for Peace, his public fight to prevent a second nuclear holocaust in Asia or Africa converged with his private efforts to resist a legal lynching at the hands of the state. The book is a remarkable testimony to the racial reconfigurations and political resistance taken up the Black Power and Vietnam antiwar movements a short generation later.

Conclusion As George Lipsitz writes, “By the end of the war, race had become a visible and clearly contested element in all areas of US life.”24 This visibility took multiple, contradictory forms. In 1948, California voters rejected efforts to extend the state’s anti-Japanese Alien Land Law, the same year in which Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the military. Both actions were results of civil rights grassroots pressures. At the same time, as James Baldwin wrote, treatment of African Americans during the war was “for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded.”25 Indeed, as Lipsitz and Margot Canaday document, the war and its aftermath served to consolidate new forms of white national hegemony; the state, for example, would redistribute resources toward the majority and away from minorities in the form of Veteran Administration and GI Bill benefits that disproportionately went to white (and straight) veterans.26 Malcolm X’s stated desire to join the Japanese Army during the war foreshadowed new gestures of domestic and international alliance and hinted at permanent eruptions of the coming Third World.27 As even a relative conservative like Walter White noted in the immediate aftermath of

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the Japanese surrender, the war had provided the “Negro a sense of kinship with other colored – and also oppressed – peoples of the world. Where he has not thought or informed himself on the racial angles of colonial policy and master-race theories, he senses that the struggle of the Negro in the United States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism and exploitation in China, Malaya, the West Indies, and South America.”28 In short, World War II was its own race war, generating new iterations of old hegemonies while sparking affective, institutional, and political affiliations among racially oppressed groups. Both developments shaped the lasting contours of the postwar period. NOTES 1 Erin Royston Battat, Ain’t Got No Home: American’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 128. 2 George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 73. 3 Ibid, 74. 4 An essential representation of the Sleepy Lagoon episode is Luiz Valdez’s play, Zoot Suit. See Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992). 5 Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988), 146. 6 On Kochiyama’s life and her relationship to Malcolm X see Diane Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 7 See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle of Postwar Civil Rights in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 8 Mary Helen Washington uses the phrase in her book, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 9 Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Black Reconstruction in America, 1945–1982 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 17. 10 Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 1–21. 11 For more on Richard Wright’s twisting break with the Communist Party, see Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 19–43. 12 Marable, Race, 25, 28. 13 Ibid, 33. 14 Herb Boyd. Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (New York: Atria Books, 2008), 109. 15 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1996), 273.

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16 Benjamin Balthaser, “Killing the Documentarian: Richard Wright and Documentary Modernity.” Criticism. 55.3 (Summer 2013), 357–90. 17 Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 13. 18 See Jacquelyn Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 19 See Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013). 20 Christopher Vials, Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935–1947 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 111. 21 See Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood (eds.), The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited: With Colonial and Coloured Unity (The Report of the 5th PanAfrican Congress) (London: New Beacon Books, 1995). 22 John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1984), 457. 23 See John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). 24 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 202. 25 Ibid, 203. 26 See George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and Margot Canady, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 27 See George Lipsitz, “‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’: The Asia Pacific War in the Lives of African American Soldiers and Civilians,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 324–53. 28 Qtd. in Dower, War without Mercy, 177–8.

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c h a p ter 9

Good Asian/Bad Asian Asian American Racial Formation Floyd Cheung

Since Chinese immigrants arrived in California in the 1850s looking for gold, work, and a new life, most other Americans have perceived Asian Americans – both immigrant and US-born – in binary terms. During peacetime whether they are considered “good” or “bad” has depended largely on whether they seemed good or bad for one’s own economic situation. From the perspective of railroad barons who needed a workforce able to blast through the Sierra Nevada mountains, Chinese seemed good, but from the perspective of other railroad workers who felt threatened by competition, they seemed bad.1 Those arguing that Chinese were bad for America helped pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The relatively few Japanese living in the United States during the late nineteenth century were more often perceived as good by association with a country that charmed most Americans as both exotically quaint and relatively modern. More to the point, their small numbers did not seem to pose an economic threat until their skills and industry, especially in the agricultural and fishing sectors, gathered momentum in the early twentieth century. Immigrants from other Asian countries like Korea and India came in even smaller numbers. Since the United States had colonized the Philippines in 1898, Filipinos entered America as US nationals. President William McKinley considered them good, and he made the case for “benevolent assimilation” of our “little brown brothers.” During the Great Depression, however, many native-born Americans saw Filipino American workers as bad for their economic well-being. This binary construction of Asian Americans as either good or bad pivoting on their perceived economic impact is of course problematic. It serves the interests of a capitalist system that sometimes requires a surplus workforce and often practices a divide-and-conquer strategy to manage racially Thanks to Chris Vials, Iyko Day, Miliann Kang, Robert Hayashi, Yi-Ting Huang, Juliana Hu Pegues, Franklin Odo, and Sheri Cheung for providing feedback and suggestions that helped me improve this chapter. The remaining infelicities are mine alone.

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diverse laborers who otherwise have much in common in terms of class.2 No matter whether they were considered good or bad for the economy, immigrants from Asia were often perceived as “unassimilable aliens” and therefore barred from access to naturalized US citizenship from 1882 until 1965. Hence ambivalence and exclusion have deeply affected the lives of Asian Americans, even when they have been able to make a home in the United States. The precarious status of different Asian American groups often has shifted with heightened consequences during times of war. For instance, two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Time magazine published an illustrated chart titled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.”3 Once respected the most among Asian nationalities, Japanese became the United States’ most hated enemies. Conversely, once considered worthy of exclusion from immigration, Chinese were suddenly “friends.” Historian Ronald Takaki has called World War II the “watershed” moment for previously despised or ignored Americans of Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian descent.4 As their ancestral nations became allies of the United States, they were given unprecedented opportunities to join dominant America via the war effort. At the same time, Japanese Americans – both “alien and non-alien” (i.e., immigrant and US citizen alike) – were subjected to mass incarceration.5 Hence the stakes for being labeled good or bad dramatically increased during this period. Yet most Americans had difficulty distinguishing between Asian Americans of different national origins. As the authors of the Time chart admit, “Even an anthropologist, with calipers and plenty of time to measure heads, noses, shoulders, hips, is sometimes stumped.” Given these conditions, some Asian Americans like reporter Joseph Chiang pinned “on his lapel a large badge reading ‘Chinese Reporter – NOT Japanese – Please.” The size of Chiang’s badge and its capitalization of “not” reveal the intensity of his insistence at the same time that the plaintive addition of “please” attests to his vulnerability. Some writers during the lead-up to World War II attempted to use literature to identify China as “good” in comparison to Japan as “bad.” Perhaps no writer of the prewar era had a more beneficial impact on dominant American perceptions of the Chinese than Pearl S. Buck. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth (1931), tells the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who works, marries, raises a family, philanders, moves to the city, endures, and finally returns to the land. Compared to exotic and despicable villains like Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless, Buck’s characterization of Wang brought humanity to a Chinese character and made him relatable to mass audiences.6 Buck also encouraged the Chinese

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American scholar Lin Yutang to write My Country and My People (1935), which helped popularize the idea of Chinese as wise and unassuming. Her work also opened the door for the publication of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China (1937), which increased American sympathy for Chinese communists and even characterized Mao Tse-Tung as a “Lincoln-esque” leader.7 Books like these prepared the American public to identify with a humble and agrarian Chinese nation oppressed by its militaristic neighbor, Japan, which had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and captured Nanking in 1937. Buck, Lin, Snow, and others helped Americans think of Chinese as “good Asians” in the “good war” that the United States would join after Pearl Harbor. At first glance, H. T. Tsiang’s novel And China Has Hands (1937), which was rushed into production at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, appears to follow suit. After all, it is dedicated to “the Death of the Japanese Empire” and seems to cast “good” Chinese victims versus “bad” Japanese invaders. In fact, however, his work actually makes a case against imperialism – not against the citizens of an imperial nation. And China Has Hands surprises its readers by focusing not on the Chinese in China but on a Chinese American laundryman in New York named Wong Wan-Lee and a half-black, half-Chinese aspiring actress named Pearl Chang. Tsiang clearly wanted his readers to think about his novel in the context of Buck’s bestseller: “Poor Wong Wan-Lee, who had made no ten thousand fortunes, was a failure; but his cousin Wong Lung had made a million and had become the hero of The Good Earth – Horatio Alger! Poor Pearl C, who had become no star, was a failure; but her cousin Pearl B, had married her boss, a publisher.”8 But the bulk of Tsiang’s story makes the point that Wan-Lee and Pearl cannot achieve Alger-esque success in America because economic and social forms of discrimination prevent them from doing so. Along the way, And China Has Hands connects its critique of American capitalism and racism with its critique of Japanese imperialism.9 In the end, WanLee protests against both a cafeteria owner’s exploitation of his employees and the Japanese invasion of China. Nevertheless, we should note that Tsiang calls for the death of the Japanese empire – not Japanese people. In his novel’s dedication, he imagines that the Japanese “masses” might revolt and “mournfully” considers the possible extinction of the “Japanese population” should war expand. Like all Asian Americans during this period, reporter Joseph Chiang and author H. T. Tsiang found themselves in an awkward position. Some chose to identify as “good” and distance themselves from the “bad.” But others chose to critique the very terms of this constructed binary. As George

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Lipsitz explains, individuals need to decide whether they are “like crabs in a barrel,” desperately pulling others down in order to climb toward the top, only to be pulled down themselves, or whether they are willing to form interethnic alliances and think outside the barrel.10 Indeed, a group’s position is inherently insecure as the earlier examples show; hence, the need to think outside the barrel even for those even on the relatively privileged side of the binary. A focus on the literature of the World War II era reveals that many Asian American writers thought outside the barrel, forming interethnic alliances or questioning the terms of representation altogether during a particularly fraught time in US and world history. The binary racial formation “good Asian/bad Asian” during the 1940s operated as part of a divide-andconquer strategy that made it difficult for members of different Asian ethnic groups to perceive their common racialization in America, but those who challenged this binary imaginatively laid the groundwork for an emergent pan-ethnic movement. As historians have explained, the term “Asian American” itself was not born until the late 1960s. The Asian American movement aimed to create a pan-ethnic coalition among many distinct Asian ethnic groups by deemphasizing differences based on heritage and accenting shared experiences of racism. Mass media also played a role. “With the help of the television evening news,” historian Sucheng Chan observed, “an increasing number of Asian American college and high school students realized with a shock that the ‘enemy’ whom American soldiers were maiming and killing [in Vietnam] had faces like their own.”11 Decades earlier, before the age of television, writers of novels, short stories, and poems had helped shape views of Asians, imagining and reimagining possible terms of difference and grounds for alliance. Suspicions about their loyalty put Japanese Americans in the worst position in the 1940s. Some Japanese American writers worked hard to produce more sympathetic views of themselves and their compatriots, but others thought outside the barrel by critiquing the contradictions inherent in a dominant American ideology encapsulated by FDR’s executive actions that at once considered all Japanese Americans suspicious at the same time that he proclaimed that “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”12 Many authors had to perform such a critique, however, in coded language during the war because of censors in the incarceration camps, or they had to wait until after the war to publish their work at all.13 In fact, a diverse Japanese American literary culture in both English and Japanese had thrived before the war, but Executive Order 9066 smothered most of it.14 Still, writers like Sadakichi Hartmann, Toyo Suyemoto,

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Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, Miné Okubo, and John Okada found ways to continue their work. Known as the art critic who made the case for photography as a fine art and as the first Asian American poet, Sadakichi Hartmann wrote up until his death in 1944.15 During his last years, he revised many old poems and drafted some new ones that he intended to publish in a collected works edition.16 This volume would have contained early Symbolist works like “Cyanogen Seas Are Surging,” as well as his haiku and tanka – some of the earliest in English. In addition, it would have included the latest version of My Rubaiyat, which not only celebrated Omar Khayyám’s hedonistic embrace of “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou” but also maintained that such enjoyment could take place only “If young and old refused to bear / Arms ’gainst brethren they do not know.” Although some of his neighbors in Banning, California, accused him of signaling Japanese planes at night during his star-gazing expeditions and although the FBI interviewed him, Hartmann avoided incarceration.17 Toyo Suyemoto, Miné Okubo, Toshio Mori, and Hisaye Yamamoto were not so fortunate. Their works written before, during, and after the incarceration testify to the emotional trials and material conditions endured by more than 110,000 Japanese Americans. Imprisoned at the Topaz camp in Utah at the age of twenty-six, Toyo Suyemoto distilled her experience in poetry. Writing for a camp literary magazine called Trek gave her a way to communicate with her fellow incarcerees, but she had to employ agricultural and natural metaphors as a kind of code to evade government censors. For instance, one of her poetic speakers describes the desert setting of Topaz with the following couplet: “The dust is blown by strong wild winds / And seeds choke in unwatered sand.”18 Every word here can be taken literally and figuratively. This strategy works seamlessly in her poems based on Japanese forms such as the haiku, which in their seventeen-syllable brevity suggest more than they seemingly say. Consider, for example, the following: Where do the geese go? Can they escape from autumn And return to spring?19

The speaker envies the freedom of these flying birds (in another haiku, she exclaims, “Let me follow them”), but we realize from this rhetorical question that even geese cannot outfly the seasons. The speaker longs for fall and winter to give way to spring, even though she can do nothing to hurry those seasons along, much less escape to warmer climes. This kind

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of poem must have spoken volumes to fellow incarcerees even as censors apparently viewed them as innocuous. Visual artist and documentarian Miné Okubo, who also was imprisoned at Topaz, drew sketches of camp life accompanied by commentary. Citizen 13660 (1946), which we would call a graphic novel today, is one of the first accounts of the incarceration experience published by an incarceree for a broad audience. The subject of much scholarly discussion, Okubo’s work has been admired for its ability to signify on many levels. It provides data about the process of notifying, assembling, processing, housing, feeding, cleaning, and otherwise manipulating the lives and bodies of a diverse Japanese American population. At the same time, it offers subtle, ironic, and even wry critiques of the government, fellow incarcerees, and herself. Okubo accomplishes much of this through juxtaposition of word and image. Xiaojing Zhou astutely observes that “Okubo’s apparently neutral descriptive prose paradoxically enhances the subjugation of Japanese Americans, [while] the visual details of her drawing assert the incarcerees’ protest of their condition.”20 For example, her textual description of her brother’s and her arrival at a Civil Control Station reads as straightforward description: “A guide directed us to Group No. 4 to which we were assigned. Sandwiches and fruit were served by the church people . . . At 11:30 a.m. Group 4 was called. We picked up our hand luggage and fell into line.”21 Tagged with her family’s assigned number, 13660, Okubo pictures herself biting into a sandwich in the top center of this image from Citizen 13660 (see Figure 1). Her eyes seem to engage the viewer, asking American readers to look carefully at what they allowed their country to do to ordinary people. The United States tagged young and old with numbers, effacing their identities. Yet in Okubo’s image, expressions of worry mix with gestures of compassion. These are not the “inscrutable” enemies described by popular media of the day, but individuals whose facial expressions and body language indicate human interiority.22 And as communicative as their faces are, Okubo chooses to use a flat-looking, perspectivally disorienting style rather than realism. She was certainly capable of realism, having earned an MFA in art at the University of California, Berkeley, but she chose to use different techniques to highlight the fact that the incarceration created a topsy-turvy world full of injustice and suffering. At the same time that Okubo depicts each figure’s facial expression, hairstyle, and other signs of individuality, she overlaps them in a way that suggests that the logic of incarceration has flattened their otherwise round characters. Citizen 13660 helped Americans perceive that troubling reality. As one 1947 review put it, Okubo’s book serves as “a strange diary in a land of freedom . . . a

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Figure 1 Miné Okubo, eating lunch while awaiting departure inside the Civil Control Station, Berkeley, California, 1942. Used with permission from the Japanese American National Museum (Gift of the Miné Okubo Estate).

valuable permanent record of what we did to the American citizens whom we placed behind iron curtains in our own country.”23 In his short stories and novels, Toshio Mori provided both an account of prewar Japanese American life and testimony of the incarceration. His first collection of stories, Yokohama, California (1949), characterizes Japanese Americans not as “bad Asians” but as ordinary Americans. In an interview Mori reported that as an avid reader and budding writer, he admired Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which features a community of nonracialized ordinary Americans. He explained, “One day I started to feel akin to his characters” and later decided to portray “the combination of characters I knew in the Japanese community.”24 For instance, Mori’s stories familiarize readers with “the woman who makes swell doughnuts,” a man whom the community calls “the Seventh Street philosopher,” as well as the “young and old” who come out on a hot day to “the Alameda ball grounds to see the big game.”25 Although the collection was accepted for

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publication in 1941, it was not released until after the war. For that edition he added two stories that referred to the incarceration: “Tomorrow Is Coming, Children” and “Slant-Eyed Americans.” With the addition of these stories and the delayed publication date, the entire volume takes on added layers of meaning. A haunting sense of loss now accompanies the passage in “Lil’ Yokohama,” written before the war, about what is at stake in a baseball game. On the one hand the community cares deeply about who will win and how the players will perform: “Will Slugger Hironaka hit that southpaw from San Jose? Will the same southpaw make the Alameda sluggers stand on their heads? It’s the great question.” On the other hand the narrator insists on the timeless ordinariness of Lil’ Yokohama, no matter who wins: The popcorn man is doing big business. The day is hot. Everything is all set for a perfect day at the ballpark. Everything is here, no matter what the outcome may be . . . Like the outcome of all things, the game and the day in Lil’ Yokohama have little to do with this business of outcome. That is left for moralists to work on years later.26

Little did anyone know when this story was written what forces could disrupt a perfect day at the park and what outcomes from war and incarceration would require reckoning for years to come. In “Lil’ Yokohama” Mori depicts prewar Japanese Americans assimilating culturally as well as they could by embracing wholeheartedly that most American of sports, baseball. Even the narrator’s command of idiom – “southpaw,” “slugger,” “stand on their heads” – testifies to his cultural fluency. At the time it was written, before Pearl Harbor, the passage about “outcome” has a less ominous air: it’s fine day, no matter who wins the game. But by the time the story was published in 1949, one reflects on more calamitous outcomes: the confidence these baseball players and spectators may have had in American fair play was broken. In 1941, “everything” is intact – confidence, jobs, homes, farms. All this is lost during the incarceration. “Moralists” have much to ponder “years later” indeed. Written by Mori while imprisoned at Topaz in 1944, the novel The Brothers Murata focuses on how Japanese Americans spent their time in camp. While the exploits of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team composed entirely of Japanese American soldiers are well known, this novel tells the lesser known story of dissention over whether young male incarcerees should volunteer to fight in the war. The Brothers Murata recounts how a fictionalized camp community reacts to Hiro Murata’s decision to volunteer for military service while his brother Frank Murata leads a draft

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resistance movement. Both men and their mother receive verbal, physical, and social abuse from various factions: those who believe that US military service will provide a chance for Japanese Americans to demonstrate their allegiance, those who believe that doing so capitulates to a government that treated them unfairly, and a few who believe that Japan will win the war. The novel characterizes Hiro and his friends as “a typical bunch of young fellows in America . . . representative Americans but for their Oriental facial features.”27 The novel represents his brother too as an ordinary person who feels called to advocate for what he believes: “‘By fighting for our civil rights I show love for the American way of life, am I not?’ asked Frank blandly.”28 Neither brother convinces the other, and the book comes to a tragic end, as if to suggest that dominant America put them and their community in an impossible position. Neither brother is “bad” or “good,” but the novel critiques the government though the voice of one character, who angrily observes, “Just because we’re of the yellow race they evacuated us. See how they allowed German and Italian aliens to remain in their homes! We are not equals here.”29 John Okada’s works similarly question how the interment and war disrupted the Japanese American community. Okada is best remembered for his novel No-No Boy (1957), which focuses on a fictional postwar Japanese American community in which some veterans wear their combat fatigues as sign of their “good Asian” status while “no-no boys,” who refused service, endure being marked as “bad Asians” by themselves, as well as their peers. Okada also published a poem right after Pearl Harbor and, in 1946 and 1947, a one-act play and five short stories in the Northwest Times, a newspaper based in Seattle. The poem, titled “I Must Be Strong,” considers the predicament of loyal Americans who possess the “dark features . . . of the enemy” during wartime.30 The play satirizes the postwar US occupation of Japan, making fun in particular of a hypocritical and sexist officer who is in charge of producing educational films meant to democratize their Japanese viewers. Four of the short stories feature white characters who grapple with various crises regarding the meaning of life. The fifth short story, “What Can I Do?” features the only Japanese American character among these works, Jiro Nakumura, a wounded hobo who seeks food and work in a town that he does not know. A sympathetic café owner feeds and hires him, but Jiro, gripped by hunger and desperation, briefly considers and then dismisses the idea of stealing from the cash register when the owner steps out. Of course, the owner returns in time to catch Jiro in this compromising situation and chases him from the café. Before this unhappy conclusion, the owner declares Jiro’s transient lifestyle “one helluva way to live.” Jiro

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responds, “Maybe there’s no other way for a guy like me,” to which the owner follows up with “Whattaya mean, a guy like you?” Jiro provides no answer. In his silence, readers are invited to consider the possible roles of his wound and his race in leading to his current predicament. Contemporary critic Viet Thanh Nguyen, however, explains that to “be a minority is to be defined, to some extent, by the wounding or damage done to one on the basis of being a minority.”31 Hence Jiro’s predicament may not be his own fault, but rather the result of being Japanese American at the wrong time in American history. The evocative vagueness of Okada’s storytelling simultaneously preserves Jiro’s individual humanity and acknowledges social forces beyond his control. Featuring women’s perspectives, Hisaye Yamamoto’s stories also characterize Japanese Americans not as inherently “bad” or “good,” but as ordinary people who have culturally specific experiences yet also grapple with human aspirations and challenges. For example, “Seventeen Syllables” (1949), set before the war, juxtaposes the awakening of daughter Rosie’s sexuality with the short-lived flourishing of mother Tomé’s literary career. At the opening of the story Rosie provides only hollow appreciation for her mother’s poetry: “Yes, yes, I understand. How utterly lovely.”32 For her part, Tomé has not had positive relationships with men and hence warns Rosie against pursuing a burgeoning relationship with Jesús, the son of a Mexican family hired to help with the harvest. At the end of the story, when Rosie’s father destroys her mother’s writing prize in a fit of frustration, Tomé reveals hard truths about her past that, like her poetry, Rosie cannot appreciate. Tomé urges Rosie never to marry, and as in the beginning, Rosie answers, “Yes, yes, I promise,” with similar insincerity.33 With stories like this, Yamamoto not only sheds light on the lives of Japanese Americans in a multiethnic setting before the war but also implies that they were as complex as anyone’s regardless of race. One of Yamamoto’s short stories set after the war, “Wilshire Bus” (1950), challenges the idea that World War II enabled some groups to become “good Asians.” This story makes it clear that a simple transformation from “bad” to “good” via US military service, or from a sudden geopolitical shift in which one’s ancestral country becomes an American ally, is a fool’s fantasy in light of long-standing racism and narrow-minded thinking. The Japanese American protagonist, Esther Kuroiwa, rides a bus down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to visit her husband, an injured veteran. As the bus proceeds, other passengers embark, including an elderly Chinese American couple and a drunken white man. Esther shares a quick acknowledgment with the Chinese American woman; she smiles “a greeting (well, here

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we are, Orientals together on a bus).” The drunk disrupts the peace, however, by making a scene; the only person to challenge him is the Chinese American woman. In return, the drunk says, “if you don’t like it . . . why don’t you get off this bus, why don’t you go back where you came from? Why don’t you go back to China?”34 He goes on to mimic stereotypical Chinese speech (“Alla same, mama, no tickee no shirtee”) and uses the racist term “Chink.”35 We might call this a microaggression today, but the event haunts Esther. In fact, Esther deems her own response to this event a “grave sin of omission.”36 With characteristic economy of expression, Yamamoto takes us through Esther’s thoughts. At first she tries to ignore the drunk by looking out the window and succeeds, feeling “quite detached . . . because she was Japanese, not Chinese, and therefore in the present case immune.” Her mind then wanders to the wartime memory of seeing “a fellow Oriental” wearing a button that read, “I AM KOREAN.”37 She remembers that when Japanese were considered “bad Asians,” some Chinese and Koreans wore such buttons to distinguish themselves as “good Asians.” Esther was angry then and realizes that she is guilty of similar individualistic thinking now. Considering herself “in the present case immune,” Esther had remained silent in the presence of racism. She now feels the weight of her own “moral shabbiness.”38 Esther had allowed herself to believe that she was near the top of the barrel, but this event reminds her of all the times that different Asian ethnic groups have pulled one another down in their attempts to be “good Asians” in a racist system. Almost two decades before the formation of an interethnic alliance via the Asian American movement, Hisaye Yamamoto wrote this story that powerfully makes the case that we are all riding on the same bus. While most Japanese American writers of this period tended to write about the incarceration, its prehistory, and aftermath, and while Chinese American writers generally tried to persuade dominant Americans to think about China in a better light, the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan capitalized on readers’ increased receptivity toward writing by Asians to explain conditions in his land of heritage, the Philippines, as well as circumstances faced by himself and his fellow working-class Americans. Born in 1911, Bulosan came of age during the US colonization of the Philippines, which lasted from 1898 until 1946. Having arrived in the United States in 1930, he was in the position to report on his experiences as an immigrant laborer during the Depression. In a charged and poetic piece that he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post called “Freedom from Want” (1943) to accompany Norman Rockwell’s painting of that name about one of FDR’s “four freedoms,” Bulosan represented workers across the nation: “We are

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millions from Puget Sound to Florida. In violent factories, crowded tenements, teeming cities. Our numbers increase as the war revolves into years and increases hunger, disease, death and fear.”39 In this essay Bulosan argues that the United States cannot achieve true democracy until it includes all people in the enjoyment of its fruits. He claims that the country cannot stand if the sweat of many benefit only a few. Furthermore, workers need not only food but also “the time and ability to read and think and discuss things.” This is his vision of what freedom from want truly means. Bulosan thus uses official rhetoric as an opportunity to articulate a radical challenge to the logic of the crab barrel. While the 1930s were hard for almost everyone, it was a period of rampant racism, physical violence, and inhuman cruelty for poor nonwhites, especially recent immigrants from the Philippines. As Bulosan explained through a fictionalized version of himself in America Is in the Heart (1946), “I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.”40 In this semiautobiographical novel, which he subtitled “A Personal History,” Bulosan gives readers a glimpse of life in the colonized Philippines, a sense of the immigrant experience, and a story about one Filipino American’s tribulations, hopes, and discovery of himself as a writer. “Then it came to me, like a revelation, that I could actually write understandable English,” declares his protagonist, “I jumped to my feet and shouted through my tears: ‘They can’t silence me any more! I’ll tell the world what they have done to me!’”41 Indeed through America Is in the Heart, Bulosan informed his readers about the plight of immigrant laborers exploited by management, abused by police, and persecuted by nativists. If some Filipinos had come to be identified by commentators as “bad” Asians, this novel suggests that economic and social forces drove them to live lives of desperation. In The Laughter of My Father (1944) and the posthumously published The Cry and the Dedication (1995), he shifted focus to life in the Philippines and Filipino resistance against US colonization. As Bulosan’s publishing career demonstrates, most Asian American authors of this period wrote about their own ethnic experiences. That is, they met audience expectations by producing autoethnography or “selfculture-writing.”42 Thus did many Asian American writers gain entry into the mainstream literary market and hope for a chance to tell their own story and affect the way readers perceived their countries of heritage. Of course, this opportunity to intervene also functioned as a burden to represent. Rey Chow calls this phenomenon “coercive mimeticism,” which Paul Lai defines as “the incessant and necessary performing of an ethnic self for

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a mainstream audience as well as one’s ethnic group.”43 Few writers of the 1930s and 1940s found ways to publish without resorting to autoethnography. H. T. Tsiang attempted to create an Everyman character in Mr. Nut, the protagonist of his 1935 novel, The Hanging on Union Square, but quickly found himself returning to recognizably Chinese American characters by 1937 in And China Has Hands. And while Sadakichi Hartmann wrote about a diverse range of subjects and characters, he made sure to include references to Japanese art and poetry in much of his work. The Filipino American poet José Garcia Villa, however, found another way. Born and educated in the Philippines, Villa traveled to the United States in 1929. After publishing an autoethnographic short-story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933), Villa turned to creating a new poetry as would a god go about creating a new world. His first collection of poems, titled Have Come, Am Here (1942), is less about an immigrant’s arrival than a creator’s prerogative. His speaker declares, “I am more than God’s equal” and “In the chamber of my philosophy God is instructed.”44 Villa believed that “poetry is – first of all – expertness in language and form, not in meaning; and the true meaning of a poem is its Expressive Force rather than its content – the language of poetry being a mode of action, a transmitter of energy rather than of information.”45 Hence Villa experimented with words, sounds, pace, punctuation, and other formal elements in his creations. For example, he sometimes used commas instead of spaces to change the way readers moved through a line, and he invented “reversed consonance,” whereby rhymes would be produced by matching words that swapped initial and final consonants (e.g., “near” would rhyme with “rain”). Villa garnered much success with his experimental creations, winning the Poetry Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1942 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1943, among other prizes. Although Villa’s prose concentrated on Filipino life, his poetry ignored “themes that would more naturally be associated with a Filipino writer living in the United States: exile, belonging, home,” according to Rocío Davis.46 Ultimately, Villa forged his own place in modern American literature partly by altogether avoiding references to his racialized identity. Especially during the 1940s, some individuals and groups felt pressure to identify as “good Asians” lest they face persecution. To some extent this pressure continued during the Cold War. For example, Jade Snow Wong testifies in her introduction to Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) that she had written “with the purpose of creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans,” and in No Chinese Stranger (1975), she

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encourages her US readers to consider that even a Chinese Communist “might in reality prove to be a flesh-and-blood young man trying to make his social contribution.”47 The development of José Garcia Villa’s career, however, anticipates those of some recent Asian American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Cathy Song, and Truong Tran whose early, more autoethnographic work won them marketability and acceptance, which they later parlayed into a measure of literary freedom. Alternatively, writers like Hisaye Yamamoto, who began to imagine Asian Americans as a panethnic group, anticipate writers like Sesshu Foster, Diana Son, and Bao Phi. Phi, for instance, dedicates his book of poems, Sông I Sing (2011), to “my Asian American people,” a pan-ethnic, global community “From the streets of Seoul to the sidewalks of Tehrangeles / From California shores to New York corner stores.”48 Hence while some writers continue to feel called to influence public perceptions in their group’s favor, others attempt to use all the powers of literature to disrupt such binaries and perhaps create new worlds of signification altogether. Wars, however, motivate fearful Americans to retrench. In the post-9/11 era, while the United States is conducting a supposed “War on Terror,” an alarming number of people have perceived Muslim Americans and those Asian Americans mistaken for being Muslim American as “bad” Asians once again. The morning after 9/11 some Asian Americans wore T-shirts emblazoned with the US flag to make their allegiance clear. Recalling injustices following Pearl Harbor, Japanese American activists gathered in Washington, DC, to remind everyone that racialized identity too often serves as a proxy for wartime loyalty. After the November 2015 attacks on Paris, US presidential candidate Donald Trump called for the exclusion of all Muslims, reinforcing conditions for the persecution of Muslim Americans. Author Hiroshi Kashiwagi, who was incarcerated during World War II, joined with Asian American and Muslim American organizations to denounce such calls.49 Like a generation of writers in the 1940s, Kashiwagi is committed to thinking outside the barrel. NOTES 1 Floyd Cheung, “Anxious and Ambivalent Representations: NineteenthCentury Images of Chinese American Men,” Journal of American Culture 30.3 (2007): 293–309. 2 Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 215. 3 See K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), especially chapter 3, for

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4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

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f loyd c h e u n g an excellent analysis of this chart in its historical context. It should go without saying that “Jap” is a pejorative term. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1990), chapter 10. The language of “alien and non-alien” comes from the notices posted in Japanese American neighborhoods instructing all those of “Japanese ancestry” to assemble for relocation. For more on Buck’s realistic portrayals of Chinese, see Chris Vials, Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935–1947 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 116–21. Qtd. in ibid., 119. H. T. Tsiang, And China Has Hands (New York: Ironweed Press, 1937/2003), 121. Julia H. Lee, “The Capitalist and Imperialist Critique in H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands,” in Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature, ed., Keith Lawrence and Floyd Cheung (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 81. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 117. Qtd. in Sylvia Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 20. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “President’s Statement,” Nisei in Uniform (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1944), epigraph. Following the lead of the Japanese American Citizens League, I refer here to what are more commonly known as “internment camps” and “internees” as “incarceration camps” and “incarcerees” to avoid reproducing the euphemistic language that the US government used to justify the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. For more on this vocabulary, see www.densho .org/terminology. Greg Robinson, introduction, in I Must Be Strong: The Life and Work of the Author of No-No Boy, eds., Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung. Submitted for publication. See Jane Calhoun Weaver, Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) on Hartmann’s status as an art critic; on his status as an Asian American poet, see Juliana Chang, ed., Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892–1970 (New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1996). He died before completing this project, but now it is possible to consult Sadakichi Hartmann: Collected Poems, ed. Floyd Cheung (Stroud, UK: Little Island Press, 2016). His FBI file held in the Sadakichi Hartmann Papers at the University of California- Riverside reveals that authorities considered him an “invalid” who presented no risk. Toyo Suyemoto, “Internment Camp,” in I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment, ed. Susan B. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ:

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Rutgers University Press, 2007), 86. For a fuller discussion of her use of natural imagery, see John Streamas, “Toyo Suyemoto, Ansel Adams, and the Landscape of Justice,” in Lawrence and Cheung (eds.), Recovered Legacies, 141–57. Suyemoto, “Hokku,” in Richardson, I Call to Remembrance, 175. Xiaojing Zhou, “Spatial Construction of the ‘Enemy Race’: Miné Okubo’s Visual Strategies in Citizen 13660,” MELUS 32.3 (2007): 57. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660, 1943 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983), 25. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 95. Rev. of Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660, Social Service Review 21.2 (1947): 278. Toshio Mori, “An Interview with Toshio Mori,” in Unfinished Message: Selected Works of Toshio Mori (Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University Press, 2000), 224. Mori, “The Woman Who Makes Swell Doughnuts,” 57; “The Seventh Street Philosopher,” 49; and “Lil’ Yokohama,” 37, in Unfinished Message. Ibid., 37. Mori, The Brothers Murata, in Unfinished Message, 139. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 193 John Okada, “I Must Be Strong,” University of Washington Daily (December 11, 1941): 1. For reprints and fuller analyses of these rediscovered works, see Abe, Robinson, and Cheung, eds. I Must Be Strong: The Life and Work of the Author of No-No Boy. Submitted for publication. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse,” New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 11. Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables,” in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, ed. King-Kok Cheung (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, 1988), 8. Ibid., 19. Yamamoto, “Wilshire Bus,” in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 37. Carlos Bulosan, “Freedom from Want,” Saturday Evening Post 215 (1943): 12. Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History, 1946 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), vii. Ibid., 180. Hertha Wong, Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6. Paul Lai, “Autoethnography Otherwise,” in Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography, ed. Eleanor Ty and Christi Verduy (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 60. José Garcia Villa, Have Come, Am Here (New York: Viking, 1942).

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45 Villa, Poems by Doveglion (Manila: Philippine Writers’ League, 1941), flap. 46 Rocío Davis, “José Garcia Villa,” in Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Guiyou Huang (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 308. 47 Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1950 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), vii; Wong, No Chinese Stranger (New York: Harper, 1975), 92. 48 Bao Phi, Sông I Sing (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2011), 1. 49 Kimberly Veklerov, “Formerly Interned Japanese Americans Stand Up against Muslim Hate,” SFGate (December 22, 2015): www.sfgate.com/bayarea/ article/Formerly-interned-Japanese-Americans-stand-up-6716136.php?cmpid= twitter-mobile.

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Social Realism, the Ghetto, and African American Literature James Smethurst

While there has been a lively discussion of the nature and varieties of left literature and art associated with “social realism” in the 1930s and 1940s since the appearance of ground-breaking work on the literary and artistic left in the 1990s, one still frequently encounters the sense of social realism as a literary genre with fairly clear generic features.1 Similarly, the notion of the 1940s as a distinct period in African American literature and art that saw a movement away from social realism remains a powerful critical narrative. However, in this chapter I argue that social realism was not so much a genre or body of literature with reasonably clear formal and thematic features in the way of realism, naturalism, gothic literature, surrealism, or, indeed, Soviet socialist realism, but rather a stance or set of related stances connected to the left, especially the Communist left. Social realism was not a coherent style or aesthetic approach. That is to say, social realism was literature and art that uncovered the social forces and deep structures that shape reality and that sought to give a sense of the felt experience of that reality rather than simply presenting “realistic” surface details. Certainly, some prominent left critics, such as V. J. Jerome, would attempt to argue more for such a unitary style or aesthetic and generally for some more traditional notion of “realism” in the Communist press and cultural journals, such as New Masses and Masses and Mainstream. However, tempting it might be to see such pronouncements as truly defining social realism or the official Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) “line” on literature, it is necessary to look at the actual texts to judge what social realism might be, especially with respect to African American writers. The means by which African American social realists sought to achieve these goals varied considerably, as they drew on a huge range of literary traditions and styles and cultural resources beyond those we associate with realism or naturalism – though, again, black artists certainly drew on realism and naturalism. In that respect, one might see African American literature of the 1940s in much the same light as that of the Black Arts 161

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era – as an artistic and intellectual conversation about common issues and subjects through widely varying, and often complexly hybrid, formal methods and methodologies. The movement of black literature in the 1940s, then, was less of a movement away from a social realism inherited from the “Red Decade” of the 1930s than a variously negotiated sense of social engagement that had the landscape of the urban black neighborhood, the ghetto, at its center and used a wide variety of formal approaches and methodologies, often in combination. In part, no doubt, it was a result of the resurgence of the Great Migration and increasing urbanization of the African American community, North and South, which made black people, for the first time in US history, a primarily urban population during the 1940s. In that way, the new centrality of the urban landscape in black social realism dovetailed with a new black reality, even if the formal techniques that writers employed did not always conform to reductive notions of the stylistic and thematic strictures associated with left literature in the 1940s. It is common to think of the 1940s as the path from a hot war against fascism to a Cold War against Communism at home and abroad. Another way to consider the 1940s is as the beginning of the end of the old empires. It was the time of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, the success of the Chinese Revolution, the beginning of the war in Indochina against French colonialism, and the rise of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party in Ghana. In short, the seeds of what black radicals in the United States would call the “Bandung World” (after the Afro-Asian Conference of the 1955 that took place in Bandung, Indonesia) began to sprout during this era. For black radicals it was already a time of international optimism and possibility, as well as growing Cold War conflict and containment. The 1940s were filled with political and cultural contradictions. In some respects, much of the political left, particularly the Communist left, which had led many of the civil rights efforts against Jim Crow, was seen as putting black liberation and the fight against Jim Crow on the back burner in order to focus on the defeat of Nazism and fascism, particularly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In particular, certain African American artists, activists, and intellectuals, notably Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, saw this move of the CPUSA as an abandonment, even betrayal, of its historic commitment to African Americans, resulting in their estrangement from the party in the early 1940s. The CPUSA did not officially support the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) headed by the black Socialist labor leader A. Phillip Randolph after his public call for a mass march of African Americans against Jim Crow in employment in

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early 1941. Neither did the CPUSA publicly endorse the call for a “Double V” (victory abroad over Nazism and Fascism and victory at home over Jim Crow) initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier. However, this opposition of the Communists to MOWM and the “Double V” campaign was more rhetorical than practical. In addition to their reluctance to back the efforts of long-time CPUSA antagonist Randolph, the Communists resisted on a theoretical level attempts to equate in importance any struggle with the fight against Nazism after the German attack on the Soviet Union. However, rank-and-file Communists, especially black Communists in the unions and other organizations they influenced, often got involved with MOWM on the local level – so much so that Randolph sent out warnings to keep the “Reds” out.2 Similarly, the CPUSA declared that the formulation of the “Double V” campaign mistakenly equated the fight against Jim Crow with the paramount struggle against Nazism on which all other social progress depended. Yet at the same time the Communist press and the organs of its cultural and political network continued to highlight the contradiction inherent in using a Jim Crow military and defense industry in a war against a virulently racist and anti-Semitic enemy. The left-led Negro Victory rallies in New York’s Madison Square Garden and elsewhere, involving left and progressive black writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and so on, were much in this vein. In short, the left, particularly the Communist left, remained a powerful presence in black literary, cultural, intellectual, and political life in the 1940s, albeit one that became more isolated by the end of the decade and the rise of the high Cold War. The cultural world of the late Popular Front facilitated the entrance of African Americans into so-called mainstream US culture to a greater degree than ever before. Integrated swing and jazz groups, though still relatively rare, gained prominence as such progressive bandleaders as Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman hired black musicians in the late 1930s and early 1940s – though the life of black musicians in integrated groups was very difficult, especially touring in the South. Swing also became prominently associated with famously integrated, if still primarily African American venues, such as Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. And if swing was the soundtrack of a multiracial US democracy (an idea that admittedly coexisted alongside the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow), then bebop (which arose in the 1930s, but was not for the most part recorded until the 1940s) became the soundtrack of US bohemia and the US artistic avant-garde; it was, in fact, the leading international exemplar of a new US artistic dynamism, anticipating and inspiring the increasing US profile in the visual arts after World War II.

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Meanwhile, Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son was a bestseller and a Book of the Month Club selection. Paul Robeson played the lead in Othello on Broadway from 1943 to 1945 (still one of the longest, if not the longest, runs of any Shakespeare play on Broadway), a potentially explosive role in the United States at that time. Ann Petry’s 1946 The Street became the first novel by a black woman to sell more than a million copies. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. And in 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar. To a considerable degree this greater African American access to the cultural “mainstream” mirrored increased participation in the industrial economy of the North and the West with the ramping up of production associated with the war effort. This increased participation in the workforce was a result not only of the growing demand for labor but also of the previously mentioned civil rights activity by the MOWM and other progressive and left black organizations and their allies. A direct consequence of this agitation was the creation of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) by Executive Order 8802, signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. Though the entry of African Americans into industries from which they had been partially or entirely excluded was uneven, still a whole range of comparatively well-paying jobs opened up, spurring a new upsurge of the Great Migration that had diminished during the Depression. This time, the migration was not only to the urban centers of the Midwest and the Northeast where black migrants had previously settled in large numbers but also to the Far West, particularly Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where many of the war industries were located. However, despite these important practical and symbolic challenges to Jim Crow, segregation and racism remained a powerful presence in the United States. While new jobs became available to African Americans, urban space remained rigidly segregated, with boundaries enforced by the police, local political and legal structures, realtors and lenders, and mob violence. Although the black population of these urban centers grew exponentially, the boundaries of the ghetto expanded far more slowly, if at all. Consequently, already crowded and overpriced black neighborhoods became far more so, producing in many a sense of claustrophobia and confinement reinforced by aggressive and often violent policing that struck many as more of enforcing an occupation than preserving the peace. In the realm of culture, despite some significant advances, serious film and even stage roles were almost nonexistent. Black actors remained largely limited to comic or plantation roles: mammies (the role for which Hattie

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McDaniel won her Oscar), butlers, chauffeurs, comic sidekicks, and jungle extras. Robeson stopped doing film because of these limitations. Classical music was almost completely segregated except for singers – and it would not be until 1955 that Marian Anderson, the most successful black classical singer of the day, would debut as the first black regular cast member of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Black actors and musicians thus sought legitimacy within the boundaries of a segregated culture industry. Race records (renamed as rhythm and blues) remained an operative and viable marketing strategy for recorded music, reflecting the continued segregation of the music industry in most respects. While white vaudeville died out, black vaudeville continued to flourish, in no small part due to the lack of opportunities for black performers in film and the new medium of television and the paucity of programming for black audiences in those media. Similarly, the continued segregation of the music industry, coupled with the increasing purchasing power of the black consumer, resulted in the creation of a new kind of black radio by the end of the decade. WDIA in Memphis became the first entirely black-oriented station in 1949. Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son was in many respects a novel of the late Depression rather than of the period that began with the increasing engagement of the United States with World War II. It nonetheless did much to shape the trajectory, both positively and negatively, of African American literature in the 1940s and beyond. It played a major role in establishing the Northern (and Western) ghetto as the ur-landscape of black literature. Northern urban black neighborhoods certainly had figured in the work of African American writers during the 1930s, but the landscape of the South was more common in their work at that time. Examples of this Southern-themed literature include Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children; Langston Hughes’s plays, Scottsboro Limited and Mulatto; Arna Bontemps’s novel Black Thunder; Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God; Sterling Brown’s collections of poetry, Southern Road and No Hidin’ Place; William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge; and Margaret Walker’s For My People. There is no equivalent body of work by major black authors set in the South during the 1940s. Even Hurston’s 1948 Seraph of the Sewanee, probably her least read novel, deals primarily with white rather than black Southerners. This does not mean that the South is absent in the literature of the 1940s. It remains as a sort of ghost of the past weighing on the minds of the living participants in the Great Migration and their children. Many of the greatest works by black writers in the 1940s, including Native Son, meditate on the consequences of the cultural, ideological, spiritual, and intellectual rupture

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between the generation of migrants raised in the rural or small-town South and their children and grandchildren who have grown up in the ghetto. Certainly, black literary representations of the encounter of Southern folk with urban black communities date at least as far back as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1901 The Sport of the Gods, but it is in the 1940s when the African American community became more urban than rural and when the ghettos of the North had existed long enough for large numbers of young black people to have grown to adulthood in them without having any detailed, direct knowledge of the South. Native Son is designed to give the reader a sense of the horror of the ghetto and how it weighs on its inhabitants through the protagonist Bigger Thomas, a product of both the Great Migration and the ghetto. To do this Wright draws on the resources of naturalism, modernism, sociology, Marxism, gothic literature, and popular culture, especially the 1930s horror movie. One might say that Bigger is the alienated modernist protagonist (the opening scene can be read as Bigger as a Kafkaesque transformation into a giant rat) caught in a gothic nightmare (in the same scene, Bigger must in true gothic fashion kill his rat double). At the same time, he lives in the ghetto after the manner of Robert Parks’s and the Chicago School of Sociology’s “marginal man” who is isolated from the “mainstream” of urban Northern society and the rural Southern world of his mother. Bigger is oppressed on account of his class and race (or nation in terms of CPUSA Marxism), as he careens, naturalist style, to his destruction despite his best efforts. He is driven to monstrous behavior from hunger, fear, and rage generated by forces that he cannot see except in the figures of white people. Contrary to some commonly made assessments, Native Son, is not simply a ham-fisted, if powerful, naturalistic novel, but is stylistically and intellectually very complex. It is complex for a purpose too, because its final section also suggests a possible solution to the class and racial oppression it sketches. Part of the solution can be seen in the relationship of Bigger Thomas to the Communist lawyer Boris Max. From Max, Thomas gains the sense of himself as a thinking subject and agent who could understand the forces and deeper structures of his world. This is not to say that he in fact realizes that understanding (he will be executed before that could happen): rather, he recognizes that such an understanding is possible. His ability to forge a true partnership with Max is limited; there are places that Max is unwilling to go, and things about Thomas’s reality and psychology as a black man in the ghetto that Max simply does not get. The relationship between Thomas and the younger Communist Jan Erlone is ultimately more important. Thomas killed Erlone’s girlfriend Mary Dalton

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and tried to frame Erlone for her death. Yet by the end, Erlone has come to a deep understanding of Thomas’s existential experience, and Thomas comes to see that it might be possible for a white man to reach that understanding and for black and white to cooperate across the color line. One might say that Erlone recognizes not so much white privilege as it is now understood, but different degrees of oppression according to race and class (gender is not really such a category in Native Son) and that Thomas sees the possibility for such recognition and for the objective understanding of his oppression, which had been much mystified before. In that sense, though there is no real hope for Thomas as an individual, there is hope for the destruction of the ghetto through collective understanding and action. Native Son promotes a model of black literature that grapples with the artistic and ideological inheritances of modernism, Marxism, popular culture, gothic literature, and naturalism. It projects the ghetto as the black literary landscape and the black working-class subject as the black literary protagonist to a degree that had not been done before. This model would exert tremendous influence even on those many writers who would critique, revise, and even significantly reject it. Native Son focuses so exclusively on the subjectivity of its protagonist that the reader has no real insight into the thoughts, motivations, and emotions of the other black (or really any) characters in the novel. Other African American authors revise Wright’s novel by attempting to paint collective portraits of the ghetto. For example, Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street has been frequently described – and really dismissed – as a “naturalist” novel of “the Wright School.” Certainly, naturalism marks this novel that, in some ways, fits more squarely in the naturalist tradition than does Native Son. Its protagonist, Lutie Johnson, believes in the possibility of individual black self-fashioning and self-advancement to a much larger degree than does Bigger Thomas. Such beliefs about individual agency and choice that get crushed by the forces of society and nature are typical of many “classic” naturalist protagonists. However, as in Native Son, both the gothic tradition and popular culture greatly inflect Petry’s novel. As with naturalism, the gothic is even more clearly displayed in The Street than in Native Son, with the stuff of gothic novels and horror movies transposed into New York City and Harlem. The Harlem sections of the novel have the strange air of a bad dream or a nightmare. First of all there is the almost maniacal doubling of characters so that they mirror each other in nightmarish ways. There are subterranean passageways, dark stairs that seem to go up and up, conjuring, prophecies, evil “gentlemen” who wish to take advantage of the heroine,

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premonitions, ghosts, premature burials, demons, uncanny events, mirrors, strange noises, terror, surveillance, and hauntings. The world of 116th Street is a landscape where a devil (the white gangster Junto) manipulates a witch (the madam Mrs. Hedges), a demonic monster (Jones the super), a ghost (Jones’s girlfriend Min), and a sort of vampire (the bandleader Boots) in a scheme to entrap and possess the soul of Lutie. Also, like Native Son there is deep engagement with popular culture in The Street. However, instead of film and pulp literature, the primary form of popular culture on which The Street draws is journalism, which is not surprising given Petry’s work as a columnist and sometime reporter at the left-leaning People’s Voice newspaper in Harlem. This engagement works on two levels. If it is possible to read many of the black characters in the novel as archetypal figures in a horror or gothic tale, they are also practically a roll call of stereotypes of black people that one would find in the popular “mainstream” press of the era. From that perspective, Lutie’s husband Jim is a womanizing drunk who abandons his family. Jones is a violent, sexually rapacious, and would-be rapist beast. Boots is a more suave and sexually voracious would-be rapist. Min is a loose woman who drifts pathetically from man to man. Mrs. Hedges is a large, asexual, unattractive (at least in her eyes) unwomanly woman. Lutie’s son Bub is a juvenile delinquent. Lutie is a loose woman lacking in maternal instinct or responsibility as she hangs around in a bar, goes off to the apartment of a man to whom she is not married, kills him, and abandons her son. However, what Petry also does, which Wright does not do, is give the backstories of all the important black characters of the novel. Again, they are like small vignettes or special-interest pieces in the black press, letting us see how the various characters, including the most heinous, come to be the way they are. This does not absolve them of their responsibility for their actions, but humanizes them, as well as indicts the system of racism and exploitation that twisted and deformed them, that created the ghetto. This humanization of the characters, even the most monstrous, might be seen as a direct response to Wright’s failure to do likewise in his portrait of the ghetto. Similarly, there are sections of the novel that read like feature articles in a newspaper or magazine that report on the conditions of the black working class in Harlem (and elsewhere) to white people and perhaps to more well-to-do African Americans. For example, there is a treatment of how African American households foster children to make the rent and the ways in which those arrangements frequently go wrong. Stylistically, it is a straightforward, if somewhat dramatized journalistic passage that explains how hard it is for decent but poor African Americans to make ends meet

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and how apparently shiftless behavior can be explained.3 What one sees here is an early version of the black left feminism of “triple oppression” (race, class, and gender) posed by many black left women artists, activists, and intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps most clearly in a theoretical sense by the black Communist leader, Claudia Jones.4 Perhaps the most pointed way in which The Street speaks back to and critiques Wright’s novel is its concern with female working-class African American anger, in contrast to Native Son’s focus on male rage: Lutie’s murder of Boots is a sort of mirror image of Bigger’s murder of his girlfriend Bessie Mears. In a sense, one might see in Lutie what might have been going on in Bessie’s head if Wright had let us see it or if he could have even known about it. Another way in which Petry’s novel differs from Native Son is that it contains no Communists, Socialists, organized nationalists, or any other political activists, even though Petry was very much involved in the left network of Harlem that included, among other groups, CIO unions, the American Negro Theatre, the People’s Voice, tenant organizations, the National Negro Congress, and, of course, the CPUSA. Harlem’s city councilperson, Benjamin Davis, was a leader of the CPUSA. Its congressperson, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., was at the time closely allied with the Communists. Yet in the novel, there are no efforts at slum clearance, no building of public housing, and no programs to ameliorate the suffering of the people of 116th Street. Instead, the portrait drawn is of a prison, a hell, a nightmare from which it seems impossible to escape. While it might seem strange for a socially engaged artist like Petry to write a novel seemingly without hope, perhaps it is less strange if one thinks that in the end The Street is among the most radical novels of the 1940s by a US author. That is to say, much like Native Son, it posits individual resistance as futile and the ghetto as an intentionally designed prison that cannot be reformed or improved. By extension, it must be smashed, and that can only come about through collective action. In addition to the portrait of the ghetto as hypercrowded prison, there was also the notion of the ghetto as home or homeland, a landscape that in some sense belonged to black people even if they actually owned very little of it. Undoubtedly, the great writer of this vision of the ghetto as simultaneously home and prison in the 1940s was Langston Hughes. Of course, he had been writing composite, polyvocal portraits of Harlem from at least as early as the Popular Front era of the 1930s, if not the New Negro era of the 1920s, and would continue to do so until his death in the 1960s. However, in the 1940s the landscape of Harlem took a central place in Hughes’s writing in a more intense way. In November 1942, Hughes began

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writing a wide-ranging newspaper column, “Here to Yonder,” for the Chicago Defender, probably the leading African American newspaper of that time. The column covered topics of race, music, literature, film, domestic and international politics, and theater. Three of Hughes’s columns in February 1943 featured a fictional conversation between him and his “Simple-Minded Friend” – a poor and extremely streetwise “everyman” of Harlem. The reception to these columns was so positive that Hughes began to develop the “Simple Minded Friend” into the more rounded character, Jesse B. Semple. Gradually, these “Simple” stories became a more and more regular part of Hughes’s column, and he would continue to write these stories until the mid-1960s. The main audience for the stories, at least until they were first collected and published by “mainstream” publishers in the 1950s, was almost entirely African American. This audience was nonetheless a wide cross-section of the black community, given the broad readership of the black press at that time. Audience, imagined and real, is crucial to understanding what Hughes is doing in the Simple stories. The readers of the Chicago Defender, the original home of these stories (which eventually were widely syndicated through the black press), were not necessarily in sympathy with the street culture embodied by Jesse Semple (Simple), who is definitely one of what Amiri Baraka called “all these blues people” in his play Dutchman.5 Hughes uses Simple to make an intraracial (as opposed to interracial) argument against a Eurocentric model of cultural value that enshrines dead or near-dead white people at the expense of the culture of the majority of African Americans, certainly the majority who live in Harlem and other ghettos. This model of cultural value ignores living African American “high” artists unless they are certified by white tastemakers – as seen in the story, “Banquet in Honor,” in which an elderly African American painter takes an “elite” black gathering to task for not supporting him until he was called a genius by the New York Times.6 Hughes also criticizes this Eurocentric model because it excludes the vast majority of African American cultural expression and, by extension, the producers and consumers of this expression such as Simple. He sees such an approach as elitist, pessimistic, and self-hating. Simple often humorously critiques attempts to “improve” him culturally, which were generally made by Joyce, his girlfriend and later his wife. For example, “Banquet in Honor” ends with him declaring, “They wouldn’t buy none of his art when he could still enjoy the benefits. But me, I would buy that old man a beer any time.”7 Simple does not completely reject high culture, but instead explicitly proposes a model in which African American popular expression, particularly

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music, is integrated, so to speak, with it. This approach is seen as far more optimistic, self-affirming, and democratically inclusive of the entire African American community of Harlem than simply rejecting popular culture as low-brow trash or high culture as necessarily removed from the sphere of the black working class. While the old artist of “Banquet in Honor” works in the “high” medium of painting, Simple admires the artist’s demand that the black middle class (or would-be middle class) support young artists who are representing the reality of the African American community, even if the style is not always “realist” in the old sense. As Hughes writes, “If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race – give that child some help. Buy what they’re making! Support what they’re doing!”8 It is also worth noting that Simple’s construct of the African American popular tradition is one that stretches from the “classic” and “folk” blues of the 1920s, to gospel music, to the big band jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, and to the bebop of the late 1930s and 1940s. Here, as he did so often in his career, Hughes is making an argument for the fundamental continuity of African American expressive culture. While this may seem unremarkable to us today, the notion that Louis Armstrong or the early blues musicians were the direct ancestors of Charlie Parker and bebop was far from accepted by black artists and intellectuals in the 1940s (and 1950s and early 1960s, for that matter), as Ralph Ellison’s largely negative essay on Charlie Parker and bebop jazz, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz” (which first appeared in a 1962 issue of Saturday Review) attests. Hughes represents the ghetto not only as the contemporary locus where this culture comes together but also as a place where black experience generates both the form and meaning of the newer expressions of that culture – as he does in the story “Bop” where Simple explains that the sounds of bebop come from a policeman beating a black man.9 Hughes’s Simple stories are a valuable lens through which to look at the development of black literature in the 1940s because they span the transition from the World War II moment into the immediate postwar period; that postwar period witnessed the onset and deepening of the Cold War internationally and domestically and the threat of nuclear war, as well as a dramatic intensification of anticolonial struggles and the emergence of what would come to be called the “Third World” of newly independent former colonies. The stories display a contradictory combination of pride, anxiety, fear, revelation, concealment, reverence for tradition, desire for the new, and a deep sense of the past coupled with a determination to never

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go back, be it to Virginia or the prewar style of Jim Crow. They also reveal an immediate postwar world in which the increasingly urbanized African American community remains hemmed in ever more crowded and highly (and frequently violently) policed neighborhoods. That community is uncertain of whether the unprecedented challenges to Jim Crow, Northern- and Southern-style, can be maintained and extended or whether there will be a backlash effort to return to the prewar Jim Crow “normal” through massive violence as well as law, as there was after World War I. In fact, racist organizations, notably the Ku Klux Klan, did become in many respects more spectacularly violent in the late 1940s and early 1950s than they had been in the previous decade. By many metrics – membership, positions of political and artistic leadership, and so on – the cultural and political influence of the black left in African American communities was never greater, but at the same time, the repression of the left that would destroy virtually all its public manifestations by the mid1950s was clearly on the horizon. By the end of the war and in the immediate postwar years, the New Criticism and the championing of a largely depoliticized neo-modernism in literature, the visual arts, art music, dance, and so on, gained greater and greater ascendancy, in large part because of the cultural Cold War – pushing many black artists who remained influenced by naturalism, social realism, and the more left forms of modernism (e.g., expressionism and Mexican muralism) to the margins. While some artists, notably Hughes, promoted what might be seen as a popular black modernism or avant-gardism that challenged the neomodernism of the New Critics and Partisan Review, others engaged that neo-modernism in ways that revised it more than directly challenging it. Such black neo-modernists as Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin Tolson, and Robert Hayden certainly rejected notions of social detachment and the avoidance of historical contextualization in their work. Brooks in her poetry collections, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949), creates a collective portrait of Chicago’s South Side Bronzeville neighborhood, much as did Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson with Harlem, Frank Marshall Davis with the South Side, and Robert Hayden with Detroit’s Paradise Valley. Recalling W. E. B. Du Bois’s formulation of African American dualism as, among other things, the peculiar or alienating sensation of looking at one’s self through the eyes of another, the narrative perspective or stance of Brooks’s poems is often that of a Bronzeville insider who is least partly alienated from herself and her fellow residents of the black South Side. Driving this alienation is a social vision of high and popular culture that objectifies and commodifies them, one that hems them in

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culturally much like other forces constrain them spatially. Consequently, A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen are concerned with the ability of popular culture to both repress and facilitate resistance among African Americans, particularly black women. The “high” modernist T. S. Eliot is a particular touchstone for Brooks. Her translation of the urban landscape of London into that of black Chicago, of the bedsit into the kitchenette, as it were, and the ambivalent presence of the rhetoric and resources of popular culture, particularly African American-inflected popular culture, are more true to the spirit of the early Eliot of “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” than to the New Critic’s version of Eliot. Sometimes these translations or transpositions are intentionally quite obvious: A Street in Bronzeville’s poem “kitchenette building” explicitly invokes “The Hollow Men” and “Gerontion” with their images of stifled dreams and the dryness that inhibits natural growth now transferred to a more ostensibly prosaic Bronzeville. Many vivid details of the poem attest to the imprisoning nature of the ghetto, a sense of confinement and crowding in which sharp colors, vivid dreams, and clear sounds are impossible within a segregated space where people are forced so close together. There is a strange sense of doubleness and contradiction in which the speaker is both inside and outside. She declares both the impossibility of art, dreams, the free range of the imagination in the ghetto, even as she articulates the very thing said not to be possible: “But could a dream send up through onion fumes/Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes/And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall.”10 This apparently impossible achievement of creating art out of what is declared to be an inhospitable environment resembles Ralph Ellison’s notion of the blues as an art form that “keeps the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain.”11 As was the case in The Street, Brooks employs a version of the black left feminist notion of triple oppression with a particular emphasis on the impact of mass culture, both as an instrument of this intersecting oppression and as means for resistance. However, because of the complexity of this intersection, what can be liberating, or at least a rebellion against racist restrictions, for some African Americans can have quite problematic results for others. In “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” Smith is a zoot-suited rebel who refuses any pretense to what we might now call “respectability politics.” The speaker of the poem clearly feels a distance of gender and class (certainly formal education) from Smith. This gives her a perspective that allows her to see critical white (and perhaps some black) views

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of Smith’s nonconformist refusal to work at a regular job, adhere to standards of “good taste” in fashion and music, or even pretend to have any real goal beyond the moment. Yet the author clearly admires this refusal and reminds any who would condemn her subject that his rebellion was shaped by his life in poverty, first in the Jim Crow South and then in the rigidly segregated urban North. The pursuit of pleasure, the satisfaction of immediate hungers, and the adoption of a style of dress, of language, of music, and so on, insistently declare Smith’s presence. While these elements do not free him, they do give him a power of rejection, much like Orc’s spirit of rebellion in William Blake’s prophetic poems, but with hip drapes and music. Again, this simultaneous reappropriation and critique of mass culture were important, even defining features of African American left literature and art in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Yet, as much as the speaker might admire the masculine rebellion of Smith and his gang on a certain level, it also deeply disturbs her and the reader. The poem ends with Smith imagining that he will consume his date like brown bread at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, a horrifying objectification of a black woman by a black man using the imaginative lexicon of mass culture. Though like Bigger Thomas, Smith is driven by the American hungers created by mass culture, notably the movies that have been a major source of his education as well as a means for rebellion, as in Native Son, it is on the black woman that this culture has the most dire impact, in part because of how these hungers distort the ways black men see black women. In short, Brooks drew on the “high” modernist literary strain canonized by the New Criticism as the benchmark by which poetry and literature generally should be measured. Yet her work does not read like that of her white neo-modernist counterparts. In her composite portrait of the ghetto; her meditation on the political, economic, and cultural forces undergirding the system of racial, class, and gender oppression; and her investigation of what Frederic Jameson called the utopian and reifying aspects of popular culture for African Americans (particularly black women), Brooks’s work in A Street in Bronzeville and the 1949 Annie Allen (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950) constitutes not so much a swerve from social realism as a revisioning of it – a revisioning that, as Mary Helen Washington has shown, would continue in the 1950s.12 Though they adapted “high” modernism in somewhat different ways, much the same could be said of the work of Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden, both of whom not only devoted much energy to the representation of the ghetto in their work of the 1940s (and beyond) but were also deeply invested in poetry that was both historical and historiographical – interrogating both white scholarly

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and popular culture accounts of African American history and the place and meaning of African Americans in US history. Perhaps the greatest transformation in African American literature was not so much its movement away from social realism as such, but its increased distance from the institutions of the organized left by the end of the 1940s. This was due not only to an ideological disillusionment with the left, particularly the CPUSA, on the part of some black writers and artists but also to Cold War repression that led to the destruction of almost all major black left organizations and institutions. Black leftists, primarily but not solely Communists, were active and productive in the deeply anticommunist years of the late 1940s and first half of the 1950s, as Mary Helen Washington, Dayo Gore, and Martha Biondi have convincingly argued.13 However, the Cold War and Red Scare made the CPUSA and its cultural circles increasingly less viable as vehicles for African American struggles for freedom, civil rights, self-expression, and self-determination. Yet the networks of black artists and activists forged in the long Popular Front from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s did not disappear, even if many of the institutions and spaces where these networks were created did vanish or diminish under the pressures of the Cold War. In many cases, these networks and individuals found a new yet significantly refigured and recontextualized life with the rise of new sorts of black radicalism in the 1960s. But much of the anxiety and anger expressed by black writers in the late 1940s and early 1950s before the emergence of the civil rights movement, as such, might be seen as a result of trying to envision what black struggle might be in the postwar Cold War era. They wrote at a time when the radicals who had been most visible at the center of that struggle, such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Benjamin Davis, Claudia Jones, and the black labor leader Ferdinand Smith, found themselves increasingly marginalized, persecuted, and even imprisoned or deported; the organizations to which they belonged smashed or isolated and greatly diminished; and the political positions that they espoused placed beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. One might say that their anxiety was also tinged with regret about what social realism might mean without the political milieu that gave birth to it. Perhaps it is that anxiety about the uncertainty of where things were going and regret for what might have been that introduced what might be seen as a sort of elegy for the Communist left as a significant note in African American literature from the late 1940s until the early 1960s. Even in works that express open disillusion with the CPUSA, such as Chester Himes’s 1947 Lonely Crusade and even Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man

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and Wright’s 1953 The Outsider, the protagonists register a great sense of loss over what the Communist Party meant or might have meant; this sense is even more pronounced in work by writers who remained more sympathetic with the politics and institutions of the left in the 1930s and 1940s, such as in Julian Mayfield’s 1961 The Grand Parade. Oddly enough, it is perhaps this sense of loss of the possibilities of the radical moment of the Popular Front and social realism and the desire to rebuild or recuperate radical black institutions and expressive culture by a later generation of militant black artists and activist in the 1960s and 1970s, that are among the most important legacies African American art and literature of the 1940s. This sense of loss led black artists and writers active in that decade to serve as critical supporters of the Black Arts movement, facilitating the building of the later movement even as they provided Black Arts with what they saw as a much-needed historical perspective on black art and political struggle. NOTES 1 Some key texts of this upsurge in left literary studies in the 1990s include Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Alan Wald, Writing from the Left (New York: Verso, 1994). 2 David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014): 42. 3 Ann Petry, The Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946): 170–2. 4 For Jones’s most influential writing on the subject, first published in a 1949 issue of the CPUSA’s theoretical journal Political Affairs, see “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,” in Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment, ed. Carole Boyce Davies (London: Ayebia, 2011): 74–85. 5 Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 98. 6 Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961): 42– 48. The Simple version of “Banquet in Honor” was an adaptation of a story Hughes first published in the left-wing journal, Negro Quarterly, in its summer 1942 issue. 7 Ibid., 48 8 Ibid., 46–7. 9 Ibid., 119. 10 Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987): 2. 11 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964): 78.

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12 Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014): 165–204; Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” Social Text 1 (Winter, 1979): 130–48. 13 Washington, The Other Blacklist; Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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From Factory to Home? The Crisis in the Gendered Division of Labor Julia L. Mickenberg

World War II both reified and challenged traditional gender roles in the United States in ways that indelibly marked the literature of the 1940s. War is traditionally, of course, a masculine realm: in our most basic understandings, “war compels men to go forth and fight in order to protect their women, who remain passive and secure at home with the children.”1 The extent to which American women were mobilized during those years – dealing with rationing and food shortages, working in the war industries, and joining the WACS, WAVES, and other women’s branches of the military – belied this myth. Even so, the home in the homeland, and the women and children in that home, served as the rationale for men to put their lives on the line overseas. In a discussion of British women writers and World War II, literary critic Gill Plain argues that the contradictory discourses around women during the war reveal popular anxieties around changing gender roles: “Women were the symbolic representatives of the home front, but they were needed in the public sphere, and magazines, posters, and advertisements struggled to reconcile women’s agency with their traditional roles, usually by offering the reassuring message that ‘love and marriage would follow wartime service and sacrifice.’” According to Plain, both the image of the woman (temporarily) working in war industries and the wife/mother keeping the home fires burning evoke an anxious trace of their “feared alternatives: the career woman and the undomesticated female.” In the 1940s, American women writers, like their British counterparts, “raised these specters, depicting in their non-compliant, doubtful, and questioning women the breakdown of patriarchal authority within the home and the displacement of heterosexual norms.”2 Nonfiction and journalism, novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, and plays written by a range of American women in the 1940s show working women – in industrial and in professional jobs – as an accepted and ongoing feature of American life, rather than as a temporary aberration brought 178

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on by the war emergency. As such, this writing exposed the fallacy within the predominant gender discourses expressed in both official propaganda and in much of the mass media. Opposition to fascism, which galvanized many Americans to support the war effort, on one level implied challenging the traditional gender roles that fascist ideology supported. The extremely patriarchal character of Nazi Germany, manifested by its pronatalist policies, its emphasis on women’s natural commitment to “kinder” (children) and “kuche” (kitchen), and its characterization of the women’s movement as a Jewish plot, caused progressive women in the United States to characterize “the fascist regime [as] a menace to the liberties of women.” As Susan Gubar notes, “it was singularly appropriate, then, that the first issue of Wonder Woman, which appeared in 1943, presented the skimpily clad superheroine battling Hitler and his war machines.” But the notion that fascism was a menace to women was itself ambivalent, for the mass media often represented fascism not menacing women’s freedom, but rather their role as keepers of the home. Images of Japanese men attacking white women played into familiar Yellow Peril tropes; an ad for War Bonds, for instance, shows a Japanese soldier with his hand covering a terrorized white woman’s mouth. The text reads, “Keep This Horror from Your Home: Back Up Our Battleskies!”3 The sheer number of American women at work in the United States was itself a challenge to the fascist celebration of kinder and kuche as women’s natural domain. By the time World War II ended in 1945, employment among women had climbed by 60 percent from the prewar years. A majority of these women were married, and about a third of them had young children.4 This demand for women’s labor during World War II, coming on the heels of the Great Depression’s disruption to the male breadwinner ethic, introduced the possibility of radically refiguring gender roles. However, traditional gender roles were in many ways strengthened after the war, thanks to propaganda that emphasized the temporary nature of women’s role in war-related industries, the female-dominated home on the domestic front as a rationale for the war, and women’s domestic roles.5 Even as women were recruited to work in industry in support of the war, films and magazines highlighted women’s domesticity while portraying single women and female sexuality as dangerous (hence the pin-up girls painted on the noses of fighter planes). Official propaganda reminded women that their wartime jobs were temporary, thus preparing them “for the massive layoffs of female employees after the war.”6 These narratives underscored a demographic reality. The baby boom, usually perceived as a postwar phenomenon, actually began shortly after the United States

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entered the war, and marriage rates also increased between 1940 and 1943. All of this represents the flip side of the “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon, which may be the more familiar narrative of women in the war years, whereby “in response to the needs of an expanding wartime economy, public policy shifted from barring women from jobs to recruiting them.”7 Still, if the war in many ways served to reinforce traditional gender roles, paving the way for “sexual containment” during the Cold War that began shortly after it, a deeper look at women’s commentary and published writings suggests that something did change for women in the 1940s – and quite profoundly. Even after the war the housewife/mother was an ambivalent figure in the popular imagination, as fiction like Shirley Jackson’s enduring short story “The Lottery” suggests. Published in the New Yorker in 1948, in what at first seems like it will be an innocuous tale of small-town life in middle America, “the residents of an unidentified American village participate in an annual rite of stoning to death a person chosen among them by drawing lots.” The lottery “winner” – Tessie Hutchinson – is a housewife who arrived just before the town’s drawing is underway: she was so busy with the “dishes in her sink” that she had nearly forgotten what day it was. At first Tessie seems like every other woman in the crowd, enjoying the ritual, until her husband draws a dark mark for the family and then, in the second round, Tessie herself draws the mark; only then, as the stones fly toward her head, does she complain bitterly that the process was “unfair.” The story generated more letters from readers than any piece published in the magazine until that time.8 Although most of the letters expressed readers’ confusion over what the story was supposed to mean, the ability of “The Lottery” to affect readers and its endless anthologizing in the years since its publication might indicate a subconscious antagonism toward America’s Tessie Hutchinsons, self-satisfied housewives who publicly support a cruel system until they become direct victims of that system. Certainly, the war made many women feel differently about their roles. Sherna Gluck, who interviewed dozens of former female war workers in the 1970s, notes, Scores of women told us that their wartime work experiences changed the way they felt about themselves. Being able to “hold their own with men” . . . gave a new sense of self, of competency, not only to women new to the world of work outside the home but also to those who had worked at traditional women’s jobs . . . During the war, for the first time in their lives, many women performed jobs that were viewed by the public as necessary and valuable . . . Finally valued by others, they came to value themselves more.9

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Popular Front feminism, a variety of the left feminism that grew out of labor and progressive reform movements, embodied some of the contradictions of the era: leftist rhetoric in the late 1930s celebrated women as “militant mothers” and workers as virile, muscular men. At the same time, however, women within the Popular Front social movement began to formulate and articulate sophisticated critiques of their social position, especially in the workplace, in ways that informed the broader sensibility of women’s writing in the 1940s.10 In Why Women Cry: Or Wenches with Wrenches (1943), fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, who worked for the United Auto Workers as a labor organizer during the war, describes actual female factory workers – far more humanized than the Rosies of war propaganda – who struggle to balance work and family, and who recognize, with frustration, that they will more than likely be out of work once the war ends. Hawes and many women of her generation believed that work and economic independence were a necessary route to autonomy, self-fulfillment, and egalitarian relations with men: “It was always our belief that only economicallyindependent women could meet men, love them, and marry them, with any degree of honesty in the arrangement,” she maintains. Writing two decades before Betty Friedan, she insists, “We believe that women have the right and duty to be productive in the world. We know we can produce children and still produce other things. We know that the children of working mothers can be as well and perhaps better brought up than those of non-working mothers.”11 Hawes recognized that her access to domestic help and child care – not to mention her ability to have a career she found fulfilling – were luxuries that most women would never attain. Indeed, although the government funded nursery schools during the war so that more women could enter the workforce, the number of facilities failed to meet the demand. And those that did exist were extremely controversial, seeming, in the eyes of conservatives, to threaten the very foundations of the family and to replicate the reputed nationalization of children under communism.12 While working as a labor organizer, Hawes was surprised whenever people asked her if she thought women would want to work after the war ended. She responded to that question as follows: I said 85 percent of them would work after the war if they could get jobs, so there was no use discussing the problem from any other angle . . . It is somewhat shocking to have a well-informed and intelligent woman talk as if a working woman were an object of pity. It makes you think people get stuck in ruts and don’t notice that in the passage of time, women are quietly

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julia l. mickenberg emerging from their homes of their own desire and not just to keep the wolf from the door or because they’re thrown out.”13

The sense that women wanted to return to home and hearth as soon as hostilities ended was reinforced by the motion picture industries of the Allied countries. Elaine Tyler May argues, “Hollywood’s professed advocacy of gender equality [during the 1930s] evaporated during the forties.” Even in the few films about female factory workers during the war, such as the British production Millions Like Us (1943), the heroine who discovers female camaraderie and common cause in the workplace nonetheless finds true fulfillment at the end of the film through marriage to a male coworker.14 The 1940s was the era of both Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942), which raised the specter of “Momism” (or the phenomenon of sons made into sissies by overbearing mothers) and Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg’s Modern Woman, the Lost Sex (1947), which highlighted the psychological and social risks of women having careers. Wylie’s misogynist portrait of “Momism” suggested that mothers endangered their children (read: sons) not just through neglect (by working) but also by focusing too much energy on their children. However, the 1940s was also the era of the “democratic family,” an outgrowth of the “progressive parenting” that arose in reaction to fascism amidst the growing pervasiveness of Freudian thought. Dr. Spock’s more democratic “permissivism” began to replace more regimented and authoritarian models of parenting.15 Although the impulse to make families more democratic may have empowered children, it diminished women’s authority in the home, continuing to cast them as the primary caregivers and adding to the burden of expectation on women, especially those who worked both outside the home and in it. If the ways in which war positioned women as outsiders was a significant theme in 1940s literature by women, it is also true that in women’s literature the woman worker – the woman as worker – was more taken for granted than in other realms of popular culture. This was most obviously due to the fact that the woman writer was a worker herself, and consciously so. What Michael Denning describes as the “laboring of American culture,” characteristic of the Popular Front, emerged from a combination of unionization on a massive scale and an infusion of plebeian, class-conscious workers into the means of cultural production (at all levels of the culture industry). These factors generated consciousness among white-collar workers of their affinities with their blue- and pink-collar counterparts.16 So it was that a writer in the 1940s would come to see herself as a “worker,” would be more

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likely to identify with the “working class,” and would be more likely to make “working” women protagonists of their literary creations. This permeability in class consciousness, as laborers in factories, telephone operators, and those working within the culture industries all came to identify as workers, is perhaps best illustrated in the cheap or “pulp” paperbacks that flooded the market in the 1940s, making high culture – in the form of literary fiction – accessible to the masses while simultaneously blurring the lines between highbrow and lowbrow. In her study of pulp novels of the mid-twentieth century, Paula Rabinowitz describes Vera Caspary’s Laura (1942) as “a case study in pulp as interface” between highbrow and lowbrow, and between trashy genre fiction and literature with a capital “L.” Caspary’s noir novel focuses on the career woman, Laura Hunt, whom readers are first led to believe has been murdered. When Laura is discovered to be alive, she becomes a suspect in the murder of another woman who had been having an affair with Laura’s fiancé and staying in Laura’s apartment while she was away (and was thus originally misidentified as Laura herself ). As Rabinowitz notes, “By the time Laura’s voice is heard, it becomes clear that another form of passing is also going on – Laura herself is passing as the femme fatale, a natural role for the modern, urban, single, beautiful woman.”17 Laura is a successful and beautiful advertising copywriter, at the center of a kind of love triangle between three men, two of whom are obsessed with her and one of whom was supposed to marry her. Waldo Lydecker, the effete detective-fiction writer who views Laura as a kind of protégé and seems (at first) to only fleetingly resent her refusal to be his lover, explains to the detective going through Laura’s things, “Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty of money, and there were always men to squire her and admire her. Marriage could give her only one sort of completion, and she was keeping herself for that.” When the detective, McPherson, “dryly” observes that Laura had been “keeping herself busy” with plenty of men who satisfied her sexual needs, Lydecker responds, “Would you have prescribed a nunnery for a woman of her temperament? She had a man’s job and a man’s worries. Knitting wasn’t one of her talents. Who are you to judge her?”18 Although Laura is strikingly successful in her career, in other works of literature we see a tension between women’s career aspirations – too often thwarted – and the reality of so many women who worked primarily “to keep the wolf from their door.” Mick Kelley, the adolescent protagonist of Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), imagines one day becoming “a great world-famous composer. She would have a whole

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symphony orchestra and conduct all of her music herself. She would stand up on the platform in front of the big crowds of people,” wearing “a real man’s evening suit or else a red dress spangled with rhinestones . . . It would be in New York City or else in a foreign country. Famous people would point at her.” But by the time she is fourteen, Mick is working in the local Woolworth’s and finding it more and more difficult to even mentally access her own dreams: But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time. Woolworth’s wasn’t the same as school. When she used to come home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always tired. At home she just ate supper and slept and then ate breakfast and went off to the store again. A song she had started in her private notebook two months before was still not finished. And she wanted to stay in the inside room but she didn’t know how. It was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her.19

The tension between career aspiration and the reality of work is also on display in Mary McCarthy’s short story, “The Genial Host.” It centers on an aspiring female writer who recognizes that personal sacrifices to her dignity are necessary to further her career. As such she pretends to appreciate the gestures of a well-connected acquaintance to help her: “If you did not yet know him well, you did not realize that he loved you for that patched fur, it signified that you were the real thing, the poet in a garret, and it also opened up for him charming vistas of What He Could Do For You.” The eponymous “Genial Host” sends letters of introduction that might set the story’s protagonist up with a variety of jobs she doesn’t actually want. But this educated white woman has the privilege of assuming she can always get an unfulfilling but decently paying office job if she can’t find work that employs her literary talents.20 Most African American women had no such luxury to choose the work they most desired or to which they felt best fitted, as is suggested in Margaret Walker’s classic evocation of the African American condition in her poem, “For My People” (1942). It delineates the work typically performed by African Americans and other people of color in the United States: washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding21

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As Frances Beal would articulate decades later, to be Black and female was to experience “double jeopardy,” limited in opportunity thanks to both sexism and racism.22 Florence (1949), one of the earliest plays by the African American writer Alice Childress, speaks to the challenges not just of reduced opportunities but also of popular expectations faced by a Black woman who wants both a decent job and a creative career. The short play takes place entirely in a train station in the South, where an African American woman, here simply called “Mama,” is waiting for a train to visit her grown daughter, Florence, in New York City. Mama had been planning to tell Florence, who is trying to make it as a professional actress, to give up and come home: despite the few successes she’d had on stage and on screen, the obstacles for a Black female actress were simply too great. Mrs. Carter, a supposedly liberal white woman in the station, makes Mama change her mind. Unbidden, Mrs. Carter begins telling Mama about her brother, a novelist, whose story about a tragic mulatto has been misunderstood by the critics. Mama can’t understand what’s so tragic about a woman who looks white but is partly black, but gets sucked into conversation with Mrs. Carter. When Mama reveals that she is going to visit her daughter, an actress in New York, Mrs. Carter immediately says Mama must “make her stop before she’s completely unhappy” because there is no way she can succeed. As a “pretty well-known” actress herself, Mrs. Carter then offers to help Florence out; Mama is delighted until she realizes that Mrs. Carter’s way of “helping” is to find work for Florence as a domestic. This offer so shocks Mama that she returns her train ticket and instead sends the money she would have spent on it to Florence, with a note saying, “Keep trying.”23 If Mrs. Carter’s patronizing offer to help Florence get a more appropriate job leads Mama to defiantly conclude that her daughter Florence “can be anything in the world she wants to be!”24 , Ann Petry’s chilling novel, The Street, expresses no such optimism. Indeed, protagonist Lutie Johnson’s defeated hopes that a career as a nightclub singer may save her and her son from the street ultimately drives her to a rage that destroys all possibility of turning her life around. The novel opens with Lutie renting an apartment in Harlem for her and her son Bub, flashing back to the circumstances that had left Lutie a single mother (her husband had been unable to find work, and Lutie’s two years of living with a family in Connecticut as a domestic servant, while leaving behind her own son, had driven her husband into the arms of another woman). Taking the boy, Lutie moved back in with her father, studying at night for the civil service exam. She ended up as a file clerk, hardly a job worthy of her intelligence, earning not much more than what she earned as a domestic. The apartment she finds

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on 116th Street in Harlem for her and Bub feels more like a trap than a home, so dark and unwelcoming it practically drives Bub onto the street, with its all-consuming milieu of danger, crime, and poverty. Lutie is continually having to avoid the lascivious gaze of both white and black men and narrowly escapes being raped by the building’s creepy superintendent. Petry sums up her predicament: What else was there? She couldn’t hope to get a raise in pay without taking another civil service examination, for more pay depended on a higher rating, and it might be two years, ten years, even twenty years before it came through. The only other way of getting out was to find a man who had a good job and who wanted to marry her. The chances of that were pretty slim, for once they had found out she didn’t have a divorce they lost interest in marriage.25

She is continually reminded of the other option she has: sleeping with white men for extra money. By the end of the novel Lutie’s hopelessness drives her to violence, and she is forced to flee New York, imagining the dark fates that await both her and a young son who has already, and inadvertently, been driven to crime as he tried to help his mother get money.26 Options were limited for many women in the United States in the 1940s, and the wartime ethos reinforced women’s traditional roles as much as it expanded their options for paid work.27 However, the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, as it entered fiction, film, and journalism, offered a radically different view of women’s role in society. Soviet women were historically unique in their level of participation on the actual battlefield: Roger Markwick notes that one million women served in the Red Army on the Eastern Front, and another 28,000 women fought with the partisans. Certainly, they were living under a totalitarian government and in a climate still scarred by the purges of the late 1930s; moreover, they had seen many of the freedoms originally granted to women under the Bolsheviks, such as abortion and divorce on demand, rolled back. Yet most of these women were eager to fight for their motherland because the Stalinist system, while deeply repressive, had benefited young women like themselves, offering them real opportunities for education and professional advancement.28 The commitment and bravery of Soviet women during the war attracted the attention of American women. If the new Soviet woman had for years been a figure of interest for American feminists, her role in the traditionally masculine bastion of war offered a fundamental challenge to what Joshua Goldstein terms the “war system” and, by extension, the underlying gender system.29

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In the United States, brave Soviet women found expression in Collier’s report on the “Fearless Women of Russia” in November 1942 (and in many other magazine articles); in Lillian Hellman’s screenplay for the film The North Star (1943), which portrayed Soviet women burning their homes to avoid leaving them for the Nazis and teenage girls fighting in the woods; and in I Saw the Russian People by Ella Winter. Winter writes, “Every woman in Russia was mobilized. They flew, shot, commanded ships, drove tanks, grew potatoes, laid bricks, spun wool, welded, taught, made precision instruments.”30 Anna Louise Strong’s Wild River (1943) offers a poignant example of the way in which some American women writers perceived Soviet women as role models. The novel is set in the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to World War II and chronicles the development of a collective farm and the Dnieper Dam, built in this account by young people who had been orphaned during the 1921 famine (they and others later destroy the dam to keep it out of German hands). Although the book’s protagonist Stepan is male, young women play an equally prominent role in the story, especially Anya, whom Stepan finally marries. Anya studies nursery management and public health and then learns new methods of sugar beet cultivation that she can take back to her community. She is elected to the village Soviet and even sent to the Sixth All-Union Congress in Moscow with a Ukrainian delegation. In the delegates’ dining hall Stalin himself carries in a plate of sandwiches for the delegates. Several women leap up to help him, a dynamic that inspires Stalin to launch into a discussion of how women’s lot had changed since ancient times, with “the division of labor” bringing “woman’s long enslavement.” Now, “our socialist country is producing a new kind of woman. After generations of slavery, of feudalism and capitalism, our new Soviet women arrive, builders of socialism equally with men, to avenge the heavy centuries.”31 If Wild River’s admiring portrait of Stalin and the fact that it conveniently glosses over the Great Terror assured the book’s place as an embarrassing artifact of a moment, rather than as a literary classic, it is also true that characters like Anya – determined to “smash the shackles that bound women,” unwilling to be like American women who “spend hours without work waiting around to inspire a man,” and eager for a relationship based on “equal companionship” – were inspiring models for American women.32 If the female war worker is largely absent from fiction, depictions of American women in actual combat are rarer still. This should not be surprising. In contrast to Soviet women, American women were limited to supporting roles in combat, “looking” but often doing little else, as in the

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Gwendolyn Brooks poem by that title. From her “Gay Chaps at the Bar” sonnet series, looking is the only action available to a mother sending a son off to war, especially because she lacks words adequate to the occasion: “You have no word for soldiers to enjoy/ . . . ‘Come back!’ or ‘careful!’ Look, and let him go.”33 But depictions of the war itself that do exist in writings by women suggest how active looking itself can be. These sparse glimpses remind readers not so much of the fact that American women were largely excluded from the battlefield but of the extraordinary women documenting it. Margaret Bourke-White was the only foreign photojournalist in Moscow when German bombing began in the summer of 1941. Building on that scoop, she became one of the most prolific chroniclers of the war. In Shooting the Russian War (1942), Bourke-White’s excitement at capturing a great “scoop” overshadows any moral quandaries about the war itself; it also reveals her single-minded commitment to her work. She tells of hiding under the bed in her hotel room during bombings so that she could elude patrolmen checking to see that all guests had evacuated to shelters, leaving her free to photograph the bombs as they dropped. She visited the Yelnya battlefield just after a major battle and was driven to tears not by the devastation of the war but by the challenge of documenting it: “When we drove into its ruined streets I knew that here at last I had the pictures I wanted, pictures that would look like war.”34 News that they would need to leave only moments after arriving nearly drove Bourke-White to hysterics. By the end of the war Bourke-White had apparently seen enough to be affected on a deeper level. In 1946 she wrote, in words that ominously remind readers of the new world order ushered in by the atomic bomb, We turned our backs on our greatest opportunity to do something constructive with the youth of Germany. We had no plan, no desire, no willingness, it seemed, to teach a democratic way of life. We poured out lives and boundless treasure to win a mechanical victory and now we had no patience for the things of the spirit which alone can save us from another far greater catastrophe.35

Women and girls in the United States interacted with real fighting soldiers, but usually not on battlefields. Women’s fiction of the 1940s reflects this reality, and the soldiers they encounter on the home front are not always the valiant fighters for democracy who made theirs the “greatest generation.”36 Soldiers are reminders of the war – and markers of the gratitude women owed to men for fighting in it – but also reminders of women’s subordinate role in society. The adolescent Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding “wanted to be a boy and go to the war as a Marine.

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She thought about flying aeroplanes and winning gold medals for bravery. But she could not join the war, and this made her sometimes feel restless and blue.” When she tries to donate blood, She could hear the army doctors saying that the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and the strongest blood that they had ever known. And she could picture ahead, in the years after the war, meeting the soldiers who had her blood, and they would say that they owed their life to her; and they would not call her Frankie – they would call her Addams.

But Frankie is told she is too young to donate. She becomes afraid when she thinks of the war, but “she was not afraid of Germans or bombs or Japanese. She was afraid because in the war they would not include her, and because the world seemed somehow separate from herself.” Frankie’s desire to belong to something, her “need to be known for her true self and recognized,” manifests in plans to join her brother and his fiancée in the new life they will make after they marry. “They are the we of me,” she decides in an epiphany that brings a sudden feeling of connection with every person she passes during a single, otherworldly day spent wandering around her Southern small town, now not as “Frankie” but as the more feminine and suddenly mature F. Jasmine Addams. Meeting a soldier that day, she no longer feels jealous. Instead she imagines they somehow have a special understanding as they drink beer together at a bar, on Frankie/F. Jasmine’s first real “date.” But when the soldier brings Frankie up to his room and attempts to rape her we are reminded, as Susan Gubar finds in stories by Kay Boyle and several other female writers of the 1940s, “that what women face in wartime is not only the unleashed violence of sex-starved men but also the elaborate images such men construct as a compensation for and a retaliation against the sex they are presumably fighting to preserve – that they are really preserving themselves to fight.”37 American women – and men – also faced state repression if they happened to be Japanese in origin. Miné Okubo’s understated but striking portraits of life in a Japanese internment camp in her Citizen 13660 (1946) – the first insider account to be published – with ink and paper drawings and extended captions, are a reminder of the direct ways in which the war came home for Japanese Americans. Okubo records her experience of daily life behind barbed wire, “close to freedom but far from it.” The book is a testament to camp occupants’ daily struggle to maintain both decent living conditions and to cope amidst uncomfortable living quarters, dust, frequent relocations, public mistrust, and constant surveillance. For Okubo, teaching children art classes at the Tanforan Assembly Center (south of

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San Francisco) was not exactly satisfying. Her drawings of unruly children painting each others’ faces contrast humorously with text that notes, “Busy parents were assured that their children would have good care and training. These schools were an effective counterinfluence to the bad atmosphere of the camp.” work kept her busy, as did writing and drawing for a camp literary magazine, Trek, which she and other internees at the Topaz Camp in Utah created during her time there.38 That so many of the women authors discussed here – among the most significant contributors to the 1940s literary milieu – were on the left speaks to the imposed nature of the traditional gender norms characteristic of what came to be called the “Cold War consensus” that took hold by the end of that decade. Indeed, the challenge to traditional roles imposed by the “new Soviet woman” may have reinforced those roles during the Cold War simply by contrast. In other words, the “silences” – to use Tillie Olsen’s powerful descriptor – among women writers, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s – were tied both to the particular domestic burdens that inevitably fall on women, making sustained writing difficult, and to a political climate that made independent women seem politically suspect. As a range of writings by women in the 1940s would suggest, these years represent a complicated moment of possibility, transition, and complex negotiation, especially around the question of female labor. NOTES 1 Margaret Higonnet et al., “Introduction,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 1. 2 Gill Plain, “Women Writers and the War,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, ed. Marina Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 166. 3 Susan Gubar, “‘This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun’: World War II and the Blitz on Women,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, 229, 37, 39, 34. 4 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 50. 5 Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982); May, Homeward Bound, 74. 6 May, Homeward Bound, 72 7 Ibid., 50 8 Ruth Franklin, “The Lottery Letters,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2013, www .newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-lottery-letters, accessed November 1, 2016.

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9 Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women and the World War II Work Experience, 45 vols. (Long Beach: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Oral History Resource Center, California State University, 1983), xiv. 10 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 136–8. 11 Elizabeth Hawes, Why Women Cry: or Wenches with Wrenches (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), 35–6. 12 William M. Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71–90; Sonya Michel, “American Women and the Discourse of the Democratic Family in World War II,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. 13 Elizabeth Hawes, Hurry up, Please, It’s Time (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), 61–2. 14 May, Homeward Bound, 57. 15 Julia Mickenberg, “The Pedagogy of the Popular Front: Progressive Parenting for a New Generation, 1918–1945,” in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Caroline Levander and Carol Singley (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); William Graebner, “The Unstable World of Benjamin Spock: Social Engineering in a Democratic Culture, 1917–1950,” Journal of American History 67 (1980): 612–29; Nancy Pottisham Weiss, “Mother, the Invention of Necessity: Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care,” American Quarterly 29:5 (1977). 16 Denning, The Cultural Front. 17 Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 45, 47, 48. 18 Vera Caspary, Laura, 1st Feminist Press ed., Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005), 34, 23. 19 Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 205, 301. 20 Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 144. 21 Margaret Walker, “For My People,” Yale Series of Younger Poets 41 (New Haven, Yale UP), 1942. 22 France Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Tony Cade Bambara (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 109–22. 23 Alice Childress, “Florence,” in Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Elizabeth BrownGuillory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 121. 24 Ibid., 120. 25 Ann Petry, The Street (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 82. 26 Ibid., 84. 27 May, Homeward Bound, 65. 28 Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontlines during the Second World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–28.

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29 Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 30 Irina Skariatina, “Fearless Women of Russia,” Colliers 110 (1942); Ella Winter, I Saw the Russian People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 75; Lillian Hellman, The North Star, a Motion Picture about Some Russian People (New York: Viking Press, 1943). 31 Anna Louise Strong, Wild River, 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 263–4. 32 Ibid., 301, 174, 271 33 Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” in Blacks (Chicago: David Co., 1987), 67. 34 Margaret Bourke-White, Shooting the Russian War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), 267. 35 Qtd. in Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 298–9. 36 The terms was popularized by Tom Brokaw in his book, The Greatest Generation (1998), depicting men who came of age during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. 37 McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 27– 8, 50; Gubar, “‘This is My Rifle, This is My Gun,’” 257. 38 Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983), 81, 92.

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ch a p ter 1 2

Public Excursions in Fierce Truth-Telling Literary Cultures and Homosexuality Aaron Lecklider

On April 5, 1946, Leo Bergman, a rabbi in Rockford, Illinois, wrote a letter to Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid), the bestselling author of the novel Wasteland, describing the scandal he triggered by advocating for homosexuals in public. Wasteland, which won the Harper prize for a novel by an “unnoticed” writer, had generated a fair amount of attention (including a blurb from Richard Wright), owing in no small measure to the novel’s important lesbian character, Debby. Sinclair’s Debby is a soft butch who works on projects for the Works Progress Administration and writes a story “about colored people” for the New Masses.1 She is a well-adjusted and confident woman in men’s clothing who provides the moral center of the novel. In addition to generating book sales and controversy (“don’t read Wasteland,” a “very elegant” woman advised fellow attendees at a dinner party; “it looks sordid”2 ), Wasteland also precipitated an avalanche of correspondence to Sinclair from women and men who saw in her character signs of a fellow same-sex lover. Sinclair might have been largely unnoticed before writing this novel, but she was hardly unknown: her work had been published in many literary and political magazines, including, like her fictional doppelganger, in the New Masses, the foremost literary venue for the American left. Sinclair’s debut novel represented a culmination of stories, poems, and essays of social concern that had guided her radical perspective on American culture for years. Though Bergman was an admirer of Wasteland, his letter wasted little time on literary analysis, instead positioning the rabbi as an outspoken champion of sexual diversity. Bergman wrote, At a recent service, “I blew the roof off the Temple. I went off on a discussion of Lesbians, Homosexuals, and all people who are assigned to ghettos by the smug, complacent, dominating bourgeois Babbitts of the middle class, who cover their vicious subtle vices by condemning others who differ from them, as a means of warding off judgment and guilt from themselves. Spontaneous reaction should be “So What” – to realization of emotional 193

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Bergman’s letter, rising to veritable piques of disgust at middle-class apathy, suggests how Sinclair’s radical embrace of homosexuality through her novel’s sensitive characterization resonated with readers through a public disavowal of homophobia that persisted through the 1940s and beyond. It also documents an instance of vernacular resistance to cultural prohibitions on homosexuality that points to an emerging politics of homosexuality outside large urban centers in cities like New York and San Francisco: that Bergman blew the roof off a temple in a smaller Midwestern city suggests how print culture facilitated shifting discourse about homosexuality far outside coastal metropolises where queer subcultural communities were commonly believed to reside. Though much scholarly attention has emphasized the role of homophile organizations that formed in the 1950s for developing the sexual politics that extended into the later twentieth century, I want to suggest that Bergman’s letter also demonstrates how literary texts of the 1940s did important cultural work by disrupting repressive attitudes toward homosexuality and catalyzing new public stances opposing prejudice against homosexuals. I am particularly interested in Bergman’s insistence on repeating the phrase “blew the roof off” – a refrain that suggests both the explosive potential of speaking out for “Lesbian or Homosexual” and the literal demolition of private spaces through open recognition of sexual lives previously hidden. Emerging publics both literal and literary in the 1940s brought homosexuality out of the shadows and into the streets.4 Whether through fiction depicting homosexual relationships, pulp novels unveiling sensationalistic sexual practices, or the Kinsey Report’s scientifically sanctioned insights into secret queer desire, the cultural landscape of the 1940s was rife with representations of homosexuality. These cultural texts moved the dominant discourse in progressive directions, and gay women and men represented a major presence in American culture that was anything but silent. By emphasizing visibility and politicizing sexuality, the decidedly public spaces for representing homosexuality that emerged both during and immediately after World War II shaped literary and political cultures for much of the twentieth century. Equally significant to Bergman’s articulation of public sexual politics, however, was the “so what” of his sermon. This vernacular construction points to the particular ethics of coexistence with racial, sexual, and religious “others” in the wake of the recent global struggle against fascism,

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a perspective that was particularly associated with the antifascist Popular Front that emerged in the 1930s.5 The emphasis on race, and the placing of racial justice at the center of the political by both leftist and black freedom struggles, especially shaped the terms of emergence of gay and lesbian publics. The Depression-era Popular Front was not overly concerned with sexual identities, favoring a pluralistic definition of Americans that foregrounded ethnicity, nationality, race, and religion over sexual identity. Yet the broadening visibility of homosexuals during World War II allowed an expansion of the Popular Front vision of democracy to admit gay women and men into the canon of those seeking access to American pluralism. “So what?” signified an acceptance of difference that might have stopped short of the rhetoric of rights that took hold in the 1950s or the narrative of liberation favored in the 1960s, but it suggests the 1940s as a liminal period when simplistic definitions of American identity were challenged and claims to citizenship broadened. During this period an ascendant grammar of race that emphasized a language of persecuted minorities and national autonomy facilitated the terms of emergence for gay and lesbian publics. World War II fundamentally transformed ordinary Americans’ relationship to their own and others’ sexual identities and brought same-sex intimacy into the public light. Before the war, the United States was experiencing an especially pernicious moment of public condemnation toward gay women and men.6 Stepped-up surveillance by the police was accompanied by a cultural fascination with the pansy and lavender gentleman as stock stereotypes, producing a series of images that wavered in their embrace of homosexuality even as they introduced significant sites for national visibility.7 The burgeoning gay culture that became visible in urban centers during the 1920s and entered into popular culture throughout that decade thus gave way to more vigorous policing of gay women and men in the 1930s, an effort fortified by the generalized cultural anxieties precipitated by the Great Depression and fear of rising fascism in Europe. Though the left challenged some of those negative attitudes and questioned the logic of police discipline that targeted gay women and men during the Depression era, an organized movement foregrounding homosexuality failed to fully materialize even during the Popular Front era. Yet by the 1940s, a new climate more amenable to same-sex intimacy developed out of several factors precipitated by historical developments beginning in 1941. These included the homosocial environment cultivated in the military, the shifting gender dynamics playing out on the US home front with the shipping of men overseas and the presence of more women in the workplace, and an increasingly vigorous scrutiny by the government

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of homosexuality in each of these spaces. Within the military, the creating of the “blue” discharge and psychological screening for male homosexuals, now termed “undesirables,” beginning in 1941 increased visibility at the same time as sexual identities were subjected to fierce government control.8 Far from being an incidental biographical detail in the lives of GIs fighting fascism, homosexuality was transformed through both the experience of war and the government’s classification of homosexuality into a burgeoning subjectivity that brought with it a series of political, cultural, and personal shifts. This state interest came at an awkward moment of sexual permissiveness, as writer Gore Vidal recalls, because the availability of penicillin had lessened the impact (and stigma) of venereal disease, making promiscuity safer.9 Lesbians, who also pursued same-sex relationships that were fiercely disciplined during the war years, were targeted more than gay men within the military after the war’s end. Yet they nonetheless sought sexual contact with other women in the Auxiliary Corps, where they frequently found opportunities to pursue same-sex intimacy.10 On the home front, women socializing in bars and nightclubs produced visible lesbian subcultures that adopted increasingly codified roles and rituals to facilitate same-sex intimacy and sexual contact between women.11 American literature carefully tracked these changes, and representations of homosexuality carefully charted the emergence of sexual identity as a psychological and social category. The new visibility of homosexuality during World War II put publishers in a liminal position as arbiters of gay respectability: where they had once avoided explicitly homoerotic content, requiring notable writers such as Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler to seek out a French publisher for The Young and the Evil in 1933, mainstream publishers in the 1940s issued a range of racy novels that included scenes depicting homosexuality and queer characters. Perhaps the most significant literary text pointing to the centrality of sexuality as an emergent identity during World War II was gay writer John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947). Burns completed this insistently modernist and desultory novel in 1946 while serving as a translator during the war and at the tender age of twenty-nine; it was published by Harper, the publisher of Sinclair’s Wasteland.12 Though Burns’s sometimes difficult novel was marketed as a literary work, its prurient content led to its distribution in a 1950 pulp edition by Bantam Books promising “a Naples street of soldiers and strolling girls,” a description that, by 1960, had been amended to acknowledge, at the very least, “prostitutes of both sexes.” The growing pulp industry allowed publishers to reach multiple audiences, issuing books initially targeting literary audiences to attract mass consumers

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through broader distribution networks. Prurient content aside, The Gallery was set in wartime Italy and consisted of nine “portraits” in a Neapolitan galleria, interspersed with alternating “promenades.” The imbricated structure of this modernist novel shares some aesthetic cues with then-leftist writer John Dos Passos’s influential USA trilogy, in which Dos Passos had included several gay characters, including the queen Gloria Swanson.13 Dos Passos blurbed the first edition of The Gallery, effusing that “if Americans can still write in this sort of exultation of pity and disgust of the foul spots in our last few years of history then perhaps there is still hope that we can recover our manhood as a nation and our sense of purpose in the world.” That Burns’s novel, teeming as it was with gender transgression and sexual deviance, might aspire to something other than redeeming the nation’s “manhood” is in little doubt, yet the endorsement by Dos Passos, an established and popular writer known for his radical politics and ability to incorporate modernism into social realism, points to the significance of a novel expressing sexual dissent during a period increasingly dominated by coercive patriotism. Among the character portraits that comprise Burns’s cast are a number of gay men (or “dreadfuls,” to use Burns’s favored slang), many of whom congregate at Momma’s bar, the setting for the novel’s fifth portrait. Burns articulates a uniquely self-conscious gay identity when he describes the patrons’ “awareness of having been born alone and sequestered by some deep difference from other men.” Yet he also carefully connects that identity to a particular form of democratic praxis by invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt’s influential 1941 State of the Union Address: “Momma knew something about those four freedoms the allies were forever preaching,” Burns writes, and “she believed that a minority should be left alone” (133). Momma might have been animated by a right to privacy, but her belief that her gay patrons deserved a modicum of dignity suggests a politicization of gay identity that anticipates precisely the kind of rhetoric that would be invoked by 1950s homophile activists in ONE Magazine and The Ladder. Mediating sexual identity through antiracist language, Burns positioned gays as members of a democratic community – with the right to full enjoyment of America’s promised freedoms – and as an embattled minority, and he did so years before the founding of Mattachine. Neither is the depiction of bar culture as a site of politicization and community in The Gallery incidental. As scholars such as Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis have demonstrated, bars represented key spaces for socializing among lesbians and gay men that also calcified cultural practices to produce sexual identities. Developing lesbian spaces and practices was even

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more important among working-class patrons for whom access to rarified environments harboring homosexual communities such as art museums and opera houses was restrictive.14 Burns details the denizens of Momma’s as a catalog of gay archetypes (and he does use the word “gay” to describe the patrons). His diverse characters embody the democratic promise and intersectional identities incubated within queer spaces: a chatty black queen blithely asks, “Why doesn’t everybody just live for love?” (134); a butch lesbian in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps “worried about the state of the world” while reading books dissecting “theories of leisure classes and patterns behind governments” (135); a pair of British sergeants who campily address one another as “Magda” and “Esther” meditate on the impact of World War II on the moral structure of the postwar world. And then there is the cruising: Momma’s clientele were “all looking at their wrist watches and telling themselves: I have another hour to go – what will it bring me?” (142) Burns thus envisions the gay bar as a uniquely utopian space for interracial mingling, crossclass solidarity, political work, and cruisy leisure. The queer sociality he describes was aligned with the free-ranging democratic vision that represented a loosely conceived repackaging of the Popular Front during the war years. Within The Gallery, the Italian landscape represents a staging ground for placing on equal footing a broad cross-section of ordinary women and men. Burns explicitly acknowledges the backdrop of fascism as foundational to developing a politics of homosexuality, connecting Popular Front democracy to antifascist struggle. “How can we speak of sin,” one of his characters complains in Momma’s gay bar, “when thousands are cremated in the German furnaces?” (149–50). In a distinctly Popular Front vein, Burns engages in a repurposing of antifascism to address prejudice against homosexuals, an enterprise shared by earlier narratives by writers such as Richard Brooks and Edward Dahlberg. Dahlberg’s 1934 novel, Those Who Perish, was the first to explicitly take on Hitler and the rise of Nazism (the novel was published just one year after Hitler’s rise to power). In his blurb for the book, John Chamberlain described Dahlberg as “a Proust of the lower and middle depths of society.”15 Those Who Perish includes a number of homosexual characters, aligned in every instance with the antifascist cause. Moses Kotch, one of the most significant anti-Nazi crusaders in the novel, is mapped as homosexual through his carrying of “a paper edition of the private life of Oscar Wilde” in “the side pocket of his purple suit”; he suggestively asks over lunch if another male character “ever read Havelock Ellis?”16

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In 1945, Brooks, later known as a director of high-profile films including Blackboard Jungle (1955) and In Cold Blood (1967), published The Brick Foxhole, a brutally violent potboiler that, in scholar Judith E. Smith’s perceptive analysis, “argued for boundary-crossing cosmopolitanism through the moral condemnation of its opposite.”17 Like The Gallery, The Brick Foxhole is set during World War II, a setting that tests the limits of democracy by placing its characters in close quarters.18 The book raised the ire of the Marine Corps, which was not permitted to review the book’s content before publication and objected to its unglamorous portrayal of American troops.19 Rather than exploring soldiers on the battleground, however, Brooks’ novel is set in the barracks (the “brick foxhole” of the title), an uncompromising domestic setting that introduces everyday homosociality as a political concern. The Brick Foxhole, later released in a pulp edition that promised an “outspoken” and “shocking” narrative, details the baiting and murder of a homosexual civilian at the hands of military men fueled by masculine sport and anti-gay foment (“I ain’t beaten up a queer in I don’t know how long,” one character complains; 89). This plot point might have heralded the trope of tragic queers that persisted well into the Cold War, and indeed the murdered Mr. Edwards does conform to many of the standard representational strategies that presented gay men as disempowered vehicles of American affliction. “I have such a bitchy life,” the gay character melancholically complains, further lamenting, in a clunky bit of foreshadowing, “I’m so lonely I could simply die” (93). But the ferocious attack on this gentle character also positions him as a sympathetic victim within a narrative of American prejudice: his attackers, depicted as nasty brutes, are also virulently racist and anti-Semitic, and his murder propels a narrative that exposes the wicked core of American hatred that was brought to the forefront alongside the ascendance of antifascism. Though the extent of Nazi persecution of homosexuals was not fully appreciated in the United States until Richard Plant published his exposé on the “pink triangle” in 1986, Brooks’s novel did include homosexuals in a moral cosmology that was, at its core, deeply antifascist.20 Brooks’s inclusion of a homosexual victim in The Brick Foxhole allowed critics such as Sinclair Lewis to admit a social critique that included Jews, African Americans, and “especially homosexuals” as victims of prejudice, finally concluding that the true problem for Americans was “hatred finally, for everyone and themselves.”21 Richard Wright similarly praised Brooks’ “first public excursion into fierce truth-telling,” noting how the novel’s foray into “the apartments of men who like to pick up lonely soldiers”

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allowed him to explore “the noble citizens who inhabit this great arsenal of democracy.”22 In Crossfire, Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 film adaptation of Brooks’s novel, the persecuted homosexual character is replaced by a Jew. Progressive representations of homosexuality in the wake of World War II tended to highlight points of commonality between racially and ethnically targeted Americans. In short, Dahlberg and Brooks adopted a “so what?” posture toward homosexuals. They aligned struggles of gay women and men with those of African Americans and Jews, invoking the black freedom struggle and Popular Front rhetoric to promote a shared narrative uniting oppressed people in the United States. This perspective is also found in Sinclair’s Wasteland. For Sinclair, the character of Debby, both a lesbian and a Jew, represents a source of moral authority who challenges lingering anti-Semitic attitudes in American culture and, at the same time, suggests homosexuals as legitimate victims of hatred who bear a particular responsibility to help others similarly stigmatized. Debby’s experiences of marginalization as a Jewish lesbian awaken in her deep feelings of solidarity with African Americans and people with disabilities. “I’m part of a person they call nigger, or dirty Jew, or cripple,” Debby says; “Maybe it takes hurt to understand hurt, I don’t know. But it’s like I can understand all kinds of hurt now. Every kind there is” (156). Having herself experienced a number of incidents in which she was targeted for her butch presentation, as when she passes four women who were “pointing at her, and all of them had turned from their babies and were laughing,” Debby seeks to eliminate all forms of prejudice. Her knowledge of individual pain, an appeal that resonated with postwar audiences recently exposed to the traumatic wounds of both war and fascism, generates a moral imperative to align with other movements for social justice. The connective tissue for Debby is humanitarian: Debby literalizes her sense of solidarity through the act of giving blood for the war. She “gives as a way of warding off, and fighting, evil: the sins of society against minorities, the evil of society’s segregation of Jew, Negro, homosexual. Her blood is offered up against ghettos of any kind, physical and spiritual.” In this respect, Sinclair shares a vision with Carson McCullers, a fellow queer writer whose A Member of the Wedding, also published in 1946, includes a similar fantasy of commonality through blood donation (see Chapter 11 in this volume). In McCullers’s novel, Frankie Adams “decided to donate blood to the Red Cross; she wanted to donate a quart a week and her blood would be in the veins of Australians and Fighting French and Chinese, all over the whole world, and it would be as though she were close kin to all

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of these people.”23 For both Sinclair and McCullers, wartime blood donation was envisioned as a metaphor for highlighting points of commonality across difference. When one was bleeding or needing blood, most differences were reduced to “so what?” Yet this was also a utopian vision: in reality, American blood was segregated by race until 1950.24 Jo Sinclair’s sensitive portrayal of Jewish and gay characters might be seen as a legacy of earlier working-class Jewish fiction: gay writer Myron Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann, for example, includes two homosexual characters, brothers Harry and Michael Singermann.25 Addressing subjects such as prejudice, assimilation, and identity, Brinig repurposes familiar tropes to draw his portrait of Jewish homosexuals discovering both their subjectivity and the intolerance of the society surrounding them. Sinclair’s characters are similarly invested in questions of subjectivity. Initial descriptions of Debby highlight the peculiarities that set her apart from others in her family: her brother Jake recognizes she is “different, entirely different” and puzzles over how “she was so damn odd” (27). Yet Sinclair also connects Debby’s difference to her radical politics, suggesting how marginalized ethnic and sexual identities were imagined to impel leftist identification. Her deviance from mainstream American norms as a Jewish lesbian radical confirms Debby as a model revolutionary, a framing that positions minoritized subjects on the frontlines of a progressive vanguard. “Maybe she was the one destined to lift up this horrible, hard-luck family of theirs,” her brother muses on discovering Debby’s work in the New Masses. “Maybe this queer, not-to-be-understood girl was finally the one to do it.” Though her fashion and friends mark her as queer, the most significant feature Jake puzzles through is Debby’s “secret.” That word appears obsessively in his description of Debby: even as he acknowledges her gender transgressions – “the way she looked like a boy, her hair cut short that way” and how “she’d always worn pants around the house” (28) – Jake ultimately concludes she “was a secret, half like a man and half like a woman” (33). Yet it is significant that Jake is the one to make her secret a metonym. Jake notices that Debby, far from following the tragic homosexual trope, is surrounded by a community of women with similar “secrets,” many of whom gather at her and Jake’s house on weekends, including “a girl they called Toby” who “looked kind of like a happy, smiling boy,” and Barbara, Debby’s boss on the WPA (34). In spite of all signs pointing to Debby’s relative peace with herself and her community, thinking about Debby invokes in Jake “a feeling of shame” (28). Though Sinclair’s representation of Debby’s gender trouble suggests a fascinating engagement with female masculinity in the 1940s, the idea of a “secret” that precipitates

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“shame” points to a liminal moment for public sexuality in the postwar period. Sinclair displaces precisely those struggles often instrumentalized against homosexuals – secrecy and shame – onto their families. “In dealing with an open-secret structure,” Eve Sedgwick famously writes in Epistemology of the Closet, “it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.”26 In Wasteland it is Jake whose analysis is incomplete, and it is his burden that Sinclair documents in order to replace stigmatized queer pathologies with a new politics of representation. Readers closed the gap between literary representations of homosexuality and real-world struggle in the letters they wrote to Sinclair.27 They referred to themselves as “Debbies,” sought to determine if the author was, as they suspected, herself a “Debby,” and expressed particular interest in the character of Debby, even when they stopped short of explicitly connecting those dots. One letter writer, for example, began her correspondence with Sinclair by sending a benign fan letter praising her representation of Jake, only tentatively mentioning Debby in a short postscript. A second letter, however, arrived two weeks later in which the writer admitted her fascination with Debby and segued into a defense of Sinclair’s sensitive portrayal: “Your ‘Debby’ is a very interesting character . . . when one says lesbian people get a horrified expression and look so shocked, but your dealing with the subject is so understanding.”28 Wasteland brought homosexuality into the public sphere and created a counterpublic united through their reading of the novel and shared investment in Jo/Debby. Sinclair’s bold lesbian character also attracted notice from fellow leftist writers. Chester Himes, for example, wrote a letter to Sinclair in 1945. “I always knew you’d do it when you got around to being honest with yourself,” Himes wrote. “Perhaps I might do it myself someday when I can afford to be honest with myself – or perhaps Dick [Richard Wright] will do it when he gets honest again.”29 The slipperiness of Himes’s “honesty” leaves open multiple interpretations: was he praising Sinclair’s inclusion of a lesbian character that resembled herself? Was he attracted to her fearlessness in exposing various forms of social prejudice, including American racism? Himes’s use of “honesty” is particularly evocative given the emerging psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality that saw repression as a form of victimization. Himes was not likely homosexual, and neither was Richard Wright, though Theodore Ward, the author of Big White Fog, called Wright a “third sex man,” and Margaret Walker insinuated his possible queerness in her biography.30 But Himes did routinely represent samesex eroticism, especially in his 1952 novel, Cast the First Stone, based on

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his experience in prison.31 Perhaps that novel indicated Himes’s eventual “honesty with himself ” as he explored, through a semi-autobiographical fiction, the complicated erotics of race and homosociality through the lens of Depression-era incarceration. Regardless, his praise for Sinclair’s honesty certainly indicates an acknowledgment of the slippery relationship between her biography and her work. Sinclair’s characters are not themselves wrapped up in particularly dramatic struggles for liberation, but they do advance sympathetic models of diverse people and suggest a version of public visibility that could be translated into a public recognition of homosexuality that demanded both visibility and acceptance. Sinclair’s representation of lesbian as a political category overlaps with what critic Jaime Harker identifies as the “gay protest novels” that appeared at the advent of the Cold War. Novels such as Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944) and The Fall of Valor (1946), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1950), and Hal Phillips’s The Bitterweed Path (1949) emerged as part of “the larger interest in ‘the dispossessed’ that marked the late 1940s and early 1950s.”32 Among the best-selling postwar gay protest novels was Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, published in 1947 and adapted in 1949 into a film, its sexual content muted.33 Motley was a singular figure: a radical black gay novelist who portrayed white ethnic characters.34 Before publishing Knock on Any Door, Motley had written for a wide range of left-leaning publications such as the Chicago Defender and Hull-House Magazine. Some of Motley’s early fiction explored homosexuality explicitly, but he had trouble finding venues willing to publish that work. Accent magazine, for example, rejected Motley’s explicitly queer story, “Boy Meets Boy,” in 1940. Accent’s editor protested that he did “not object to homosexuality as a subject, but it isn’t enough in itself to carry a story.”35 Esquire passed on it as well, explaining that the character’s “‘simply adoring’ nature doesn’t come within our scope.”36 Motley published Knock on Any Door despite having to change publishers midstream, and though he was forced to excise some of the novel’s more explicitly gay content, much of it survived in the published version. Most of the homosexuality in Knock on Any Door takes the form of paid sex work. Characters including the protagonist Nick Romano willingly perform homosexual acts to make money. Yet they also exploit the stigmatization of homosexuality to extract this money from unwitting victims: homosexuality is thus made visible as a familiar feature in an urban landscape, but homosexuals are still depicted as unfortunate victims either suffering from a pathological weakness or motivated by greedy self-interest. Other gay novels from the later 1940s, including Gore Vidal’s The City

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and the Pillar and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (both published in 1948), similarly depict homosexuals as sympathetic victims. Gore Vidal’s representation of homosexuality situates the war as the obstacle to his characters’ erotic bliss: it is only when the war separates them that their queer relationship becomes tragic. Capote, himself a dynamic face of public queerness, depicts a less urbane world where sexual minorities and gender nonconformists find one another even as they struggle against various forms of social oppression. He dedicated the novel to his boyfriend, Newton Arvin, a radical literary scholar who lived in western Massachusetts.37 The wide range of homosexual representations in the postwar period suggests an invigorated visibility for diverse sexual identities that paradoxically challenged cultural ideas about homosexuality as a fixed category. The characters in Motley’s Knock on Any Door engage in homosexual practices, but most are chiefly conceived as financial transactions. Yet the cultural signifiers of a homosexual identity and set of subcultural practices persist even within an ostensibly class-themed novel of the slums that places samesex affairs within a lumpenproletariat morass. There is a campy tone to much of Knock on Any Door that suggests Motley’s intimate knowledge of queer spaces and that frustrates readings claiming homosexuality as merely a social problem or behavior born out of desperation. In one scene that was cut from the novel, for example, a character announces, “have respect for the opposite sex. Have respect for all the gay bitches!” Rather than condemning this passage to the dustbin of history, Motley resuscitated it a decade later in a gay bar scene he included his third novel, Let No Man Write My Epitaph.38 Evidently, Motley considered this articulation of “respect” significant enough to be recycled. In fact, Motley’s radical commitments had been articulated earlier in a World War II era speech. At an antifascist rally in Chicago’s Bughouse Square, Motley publicly invoked a list of marginalized categories that included “black nigger” and “damn dirty Jew” alongside “whore” and “homosexual.” “How we love to call names,” Motley concluded; “how we love to hate!”39 Here Motley recapitulated the language that was designed to keep racial, sexual, and ethnic communities on the outskirts of society while signifying against their victimization, boldly confronting the pejorative categories used to target them. Motley envisioned new alliances among those whose marginalization became a shared ground on which to challenge hatred. Like Leo Bergman, Motley blew the roof off with his antipathy to hatred, and through his writing and speaking he built alliances with many fellow writers and readers who found new expressions of discontent with America’s history of intolerance.

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Like Motley, many of the writers who wrote about homosexuality had their works reprinted in mass-market editions. Themes that were considered too far on the fringes of respectability by publishers attempting to attract a more literary (or even middlebrow) audience in the 1940s found broader audiences in the form of pulp. The pulp fiction of the postwar era represented one of the most important new venues for exploring homosexuality in public.40 The range of representational strategies found within pulp diverged wildly from pseudoscientific exposés to racy depictions of scandalous love triangles, with even more salacious content coming onto the market in the 1950s. The pulp of the 1940s tended toward repackaged literary work with steamy cover art that promised lurid content, as well as graphic dissections of American bedroom practices given a scientific imprimatur even as they indulged frankly sexual themes. The texts possibly disappointed secretive consumers seeking erotic thrills – Knock on Any Door, for example, was surely too dry to deliver fully on the New American Library’s promise of “cheap, sordid sex” – yet the advertising on the covers, especially their titillating artwork, attracted audiences uniquely receptive to the seductions of a boundary-pushing book. Literary scholar Paula Rabinowitz has scrupulously documented how audiences responded to queer cues in pulp reissues through both their consumption and their imagining of community. Taking fashion tips from lesbian pulp became, for example, a feedback loop that both gave rise to and recognized the existence of lesbian subcultural communities.41 Yet the emergence of “queer pulp” also inaugurated new representational conventions that crossed over into the middlebrow marketplace in the form of what Jaime Harker has termed “fagtrash,” that work that blurred the line between the salacious and the respectable.42 In spite of World War II’s significant role in shaping American culture, it was not only representations of war and postwar fantasies of inclusive democracy that brought homosexuality into the public sphere. The imprimatur of science brought with it an air of respectability that created space for the most significant publishing event of the 1940s: the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.43 Kinsey was a professor of zoology at the University of Illinois who made a name for himself as a foremost scholar of gall wasps. When Kinsey turned his attention to human sexuality, eyebrows were raised, but nothing prepared the American public for the seismic impact of his signature Report. Published on January 6, 1948, the highly technical 735-page volume sold out all 25,000 copies within two weeks. Though the Report was touted as a scientific volume, it also included some tentative claims about

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sexuality in history: the sexual behavior of human males, it seems, had a longer and richer history than many had suspected. Among the most significant findings published in the Kinsey Report was confirmation that most American men masturbated, sex practices outside marriage and monogamy were common (according to the Indianapolis Star’s splashy headline: “50% OF MARRIED MEN UNFAITHFUL!”), and homosexuality was startlingly prevalent.44 This last point was especially surprising to Americans who preferred to relegate same-sex intimacy to the cultural margins, yet it also disrupted ideas about homosexuals as a minority that could be isolated and excluded from civil discourse. As it turned out, Kinsey reported that “a considerable portion of the population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age.”45 Never before had these facts been so starkly stated: homosexual “outlets” were so common as to be nearly routine, and one’s friends and neighbors were probable perverts. The statistics introduced in the Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became oft-cited lore that shaped ideas about sexuality in the United States for decades to come: 37 percent of American males had some homosexual experience resulting in orgasm; 10 percent were primarily homosexual; 4 percent remained exclusively homosexual. Even without falling back on these statistics, Americans were forced to rethink the dominant cultural belief that homosexual behavior was, as many had maintained, “rare and therefore abnormal or unnatural.”46 Kinsey also challenged the idea of a fixed, knowable sexual orientation, which, even as Americans were digesting the surprising claims Kinsey made about homosexuality, fundamentally undermined the notion that Americans could be neatly categorized according to homo- or heterosexual identity, most instead falling somewhere on a spectrum. Kinsey’s report was significant for its specific findings, but it was also a watershed moment for bringing direct and often unsettling ideas about sexuality into the public sphere. The ensuing conversation about sexuality in America both energized those who sought to bring homosexuality out of the shadows and produced apoplexy among those for whom Kinsey’s findings seemed to threaten the very core of American identity: Kinsey’s Report was, according to one psychiatrist writing in no less august a publication than Psychological Quarterly, “stigmatizing the nation as a whole in a whisper campaign.”47 Yet the opposite was also true – the whispers about homosexuality were transformed through the Report into a roar. The impact of the document was likened by some journalists to the atomic bomb that had been unleashed just a few years earlier. More insidiously, myths about leftist

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deviance were dusted off to discredit Kinsey as a communist – what better way to undermine American democracy than to chip away at the presumed heterosexuality on which civilization rested?48 Yet many of the anxious reactions to the Report were muted due to Kinsey’s scientific imprimatur: while obscenity law might have been invoked to suppress erotic materials with reckless abandon, science was still conceived as part of the public good. Individuals who might have furtively read pulp and scandal sheets outside the watchful eyes of friends and neighbors could read the Kinsey Report proudly, their interest a marker of cosmopolitanism, intellect, and the scientific mind. More than 5,000 men had been interviewed by Kinsey and his associates. By making their sexual histories part of the public record, Kinsey further shifted the meanings of sex in public. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male allowed for a public conversation to develop about homosexuality that pushed against the moralistic shrouding of sexual behaviors under a cloak of secrecy; suddenly Americans not only had their private sexual desires brought into the public sphere; they were also discussing them openly with their friends and neighbors. The leap from this public conversation to a more organized movement to advocate for rights for homosexuals did not take long. Harry Hay, a founding member of Mattachine in 1950, recalled that he carried his Report “as though it were a Bible.”49 He proposed his unsuccessful “Bachelors for Wallace,” an early effort to capitalize on progressive politics in the interest of homosexual rights, in the year of the Report’s publication. The publication of the Kinsey report precipitated a crisis for those who found homosexuality disturbing, but it also paved the way for greater visibility among those seeking solidarity with fellow friends of Debby. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, the growing threat of McCarthyism began to push back into the closet some of the visibility that had emerged in the postwar United States. The revelations of John Puerifoy in 1950 that ninety-one homosexuals were working in the State Department and were posing an urgent national security risk launched a concentrated purging of homosexuals from federal employment. The idea that homosexuals were un-American put a damper on some of the public discourse that had emerged over the previous decade.50 Yet the counterweight to that repression was the growing strength of homophile organizations such as Mattachine (founded in 1951), the Daughters of Bilitis (founded in 1955), and ONE, Inc (founded in 1952).51 Meanwhile, the publishing vogue for all things queer accelerated as pulp became more explicitly erotic and targeted at gay women and men, and the newly lucrative market for beefcake

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magazines such as Physique Pictorial, which began publication in 1951, provided erotic thrills and challenged censorship. It is impossible to imagine these changes having occurred without the developments in American culture around homosexuality in the 1940s, when the language of the Popular Front opened an engagement with pluralism that intersected with the radical politics of deviance commonly articulated by writers associated with the left. Though it took some time for organizers to channel this spirit into the homophile and gay liberation movements, it is likewise impossible to imagine the seismic shifts in American attitudes toward homosexuality that shaped the latter twentieth century without excavating their foundation within literary and print cultures that took root in the 1940s. NOTES 1 Jo Sinclair, Wasteland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987; originally 1946), 33. All page citations are to this edition. 2 Letter from Mary D. Tufts to Miss Herdman, Box 36, Folder 13, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid) Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. 3 April 5, 1946 Letter from Rabbi Leo A. Bergman to Jo Sinclair, Box 36, Folder 14, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid) Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. 4 On publics, counterpublics, and the literary public, see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 5 On the cultural effects of the Popular Front, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1998). 6 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Jennifer Terry, American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 268–96. 7 Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Matthew Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals: Regulation and Irregular Sexuality in Golden Age of Radio Comedy,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 135–56. 8 Allan Bérubé, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990). 9 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 52. 10 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in TwentiethCentury America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 175–6.

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11 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 118–38. 12 John Horne Burns, The Gallery (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947). Citations are to this edition. On Burns’s drafting of the novel, see David Margolick, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (New York: Other Press, 2013). 13 John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 414. 14 Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern America: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 15 Dahlberg was probably more conflicted about homosexuality than Those Who Perish suggests: Andrew Delblanco has noted that he “accused Melville in 1960 of ‘sodomy of the heart’ and dismissed Moby Dick as a book for ‘hermaphrodites and spados.’” Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 363. 16 Edward Dahlberg, Those Who Perish (New York: John Day, 1934), 105. 17 Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 145. 18 Richard Brooks, The Brick Foxhole (New York: Harper, 1945). 19 Daniel K. Douglass, Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 32. 20 Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 210–14. 21 Quoted in Smith, Visions of Belonging, 149. 22 Richard Wright, “A Noncombat Soldier Strips Words for Action,” PM, June 24, 1945. 23 Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 23. 24 Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107. 25 Myron Brinig, Singermann (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1929). 26 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 22. 27 Monica Bachmann, “‘Someone like Debby’: (De)Constructing a Lesbian Community of Readers,” GLQ 6:3 (Fall 2000): 377–88. 28 Letter from Betty E. Breaux to Jo Sinclair, May 29, 1946, Box 36, Folder 13, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid) Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. 29 Letter from Chester Himes to Jo Sinclair, December 21, 1945, Box 36, Folder 14, Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid) Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. 30 Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 168–9. 31 Chester Himes, Cast the First Stone (New York: Howard-McCann, 1952). 32 Jaime Harker, Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 12. I would extend Harker’s

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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postwar periodization to include the 1930s as a period when, as I have written elsewhere, writers as diverse as H. T. Tsiang and James T. Farrell connected race, sexuality, and gender in their leftist writing. Aaron Lecklider, “H. T. Tsiang’s Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in ‘The Hanging on Union Square,’” MELUS 36. 4 (December 1, 2011): 87–113. It also bears noting that even established writers depicting same-sex intimacy confronted challenges to publishing: Baldwin had to take his manuscript for Giovanni’s room outside the United States to be published, and Jackson’s doubling down on homosexuality in his sophomore novel, The Fall of Valor (1946), nearly derailed his writing career. Willard Motley, Knock on Any Door (New York: Appleton-Century, 1947). John C. Charles, Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the PostWar African American White-Life Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 86–129. Letter from Keith Huntress to Willard Motley, 1940, Willard Motley Collection, Northern Illinois University Special Collections, Box 7, Folder 11. Letter from WS (Esquire Magazine) to Willard Motley, 1940, Willard Motley Collection, Northern Illinois University Special Collections, Box 7, Folder 11. Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1948); Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Random House, 1948). Willard Motley, Let No Man Write My Epitaph (New York: Random House, 1958), 425. Willard Motley Collection, Northern Illinois University Special Collections, Box 23, Folder 16. Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (New York: Chronicle Books, 2001); Michael Bronski, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 184–208. Harker, Middlebrow Queer, 45–70. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (New York: W. B. Saunders, 1948). Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 270. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 610 Ibid., 659. Edmund Bergler, “The Myth of a New National Disease,” Psychiatric Quarterly 22 (1948): 86. Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey, 271. Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 61. Johnson, Lavender Scare; K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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51 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006); Craig M. Loftin, Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).

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Resurgence Conservatives Organize against the New Deal Kathryn S. Olmsted

William F. Buckley once described conservatism as a movement that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”1 The 1940s provided plenty of reasons for American conservatives to try to stop the forward thrust of history. President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration had provided relief, recovery, and reform during the Great Depression and led the nation into the war against fascism. Roosevelt’s brand of social democracy, or liberalism, as he called it, had helped him win four terms as president, and his New Deal coalition of southern whites, urban ethnics, union members, and African Americans seemed invincible. Conservatives looked glumly into the future and worried that it would bring more of the changes that they hated: increased power for organized labor, federal protections for civil rights, and other elements of what they called “creeping socialism.” And yet by the end of the decade, the conservative movement – seemingly obsolete after the triumph of New Deal liberalism during depression and war – was resurgent. During the 1940s, Roosevelt’s opponents prepared their crusade to undermine his policies and defeat the New Deal coalition. They also began to articulate their opposition to a strong state and develop a coherent philosophy in ways they had not done before. In 1950, just five years after Roosevelt’s death and the end of the war, conservative leaders stood poised to take back control of the nation’s politics.

Civil Rights and the Party of Lincoln During the 1940s, American conservatism continued to transform itself into a movement for limited government. Before Roosevelt’s New Deal, American conservatives had embraced an expansive role for the federal government. The federal state they supported built the roads, dams, and railroads that extended their markets; it also helped them prohibit alcohol and control labor. To be sure, the government – especially state 212

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governments – occasionally intervened in the economy in ways that business leaders opposed, such as through minimum wage and maximum hour legislation for women workers. But in the main, as political scientist John Gerring has shown, conservative politicians believed that a strong state was necessary to maintain order and protect property rights. Conservatives feared anarchy, not tyranny.2 Then, in the 1930s, Roosevelt’s government had begun serving not only business but also workers. The New Deal forced employers to recognize unions, pay minimum wages, and – eventually – stop discriminating against workers of color. As a result, conservatives of all types – those from the center right and the far right, southern Democrats as well as Republicans – began to call for limiting government power. The conservatives’ newfound anti-statism was somewhat selective; most still wanted a strong military, for example, and they supported government policies that benefited business.3 Nevertheless, conservatives in the 1940s began to articulate “small government” as a conscious philosophy in ways that they had not done before. Conservatives in the 1940s were split between the two major parties. The Republican Party was home to Wall Street bankers, corporate leaders, and small businessmen from the West and Midwest who pushed for anti-union legislation and lower taxes. Conservative Democrats, by contrast, tended to support progressive taxation and public ownership of railroads and utilities, yet remained conservative on social and cultural issues, especially civil rights. White southerners had been a key part of the Democratic Party’s coalition for decades, and almost all of the political leaders from the South remained within the Democratic Party. After Reconstruction, as southern state legislatures took the right to vote away from most African Americans, white southerners embraced the Democratic Party as a bulwark of racial hierarchy and segregation. But even as southern states under Democratic control passed disfranchisement laws, canny Republicans tried to persuade white southerners to join their cause. Although the GOP in theory stood for African American rights, in practice it failed to endorse any substantive civil rights reforms, such as an anti-lynching law. When he campaigned for the presidency in 1896, Republican nominee William McKinley courted socalled lily white Republicans in a failed bid to win segregationists away from the Democrats.4 Later, Herbert Hoover also tried to convince southern white supremacists that Republicans could protect their interests. These early GOP attempts to woo the southern white vote proved unsuccessful: southern leaders were not yet willing to abandon the Democrats for the party of Lincoln.

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But by the 1940s, increasing numbers of white southerners grew alarmed as the national Democratic Party began to stake out bold positions on civil rights. A historic demographic shift prompted major political changes. As the Great Migration of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s accelerated during World War II, almost a million African Americans moved out of the South into northern and western cities where they could vote. As they exercised their new right to the franchise, these migrants often voted along class, rather than racial, lines. Thrilled by Roosevelt’s policies, African Americans enthusiastically supported the Democratic candidate for president. The Democratic vote in some black urban districts jumped 250 percent in 1936.5 These new Democrats began to pressure their party leaders to protect African American civil rights throughout the nation. The national party officials did not respond immediately. Franklin Roosevelt needed white southern votes, especially in the Senate, to pass most New Deal laws. He agreed to white southern demands to exclude farm workers and domestic workers – who were disproportionately African American – from New Deal labor protections, as well as from the Social Security Act.6 The president also dragged his feet on anti-lynching legislation. In 1941, he did establish a wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which investigated charges of racial discrimination among federal contractors, but only after African Americans threatened to embarrass his administration with a march on Washington if he did not do so. Roosevelt died in 1945 having done little for civil rights. After the war, the Democrats under President Harry Truman’s leadership made important strides toward enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Truman supported the passage of a federal anti-lynching law, the end of the poll tax, and the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. He also desegregated the military by executive order. While these courageous moves pleased African American voters, they angered southern Democrats. When the Democratic Party strongly endorsed civil rights in its 1948 platform, southern white supremacists walked out of the convention and formed the segregationist States’ Rights Party. Many southerners agreed with Mississippi senator James Eastland, who proclaimed that their region would be “destroyed and mongrelized” by the integrationist policies of the national party.7 Conservative Republican leaders saw opportunity in the southern rebellion. To win votes in the South, Ohio senator Robert Taft, the leader of the Republican right, touted his party’s opposition to most federal civil rights protections. He cited the FEPC as an example of a federal program that ignored and destroyed local traditions. “The President would center in

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Washington the entire field of control over questions involving civil rights,” he said in Nashville in 1948, “without even considering the proper functions of the Federal Government, the states and local communities in dealing with different features of the problem.”8 By the late 1940s and early 1950s, GOP leaders were again eagerly studying the possibilities of expansion in the South. In 1951, a Republican Party committee proclaimed that the region represented “the great frontier of the Republican Party from this point out.”9 Some GOP leaders believed that an exodus of white southerners from the Democratic Party could help them remake the partisan landscape and create a new, uniformly conservative organization. However, moderate conservatives in the GOP were initially reluctant to abandon their party’s support for African American civil rights. In the early 1940s, some northern Republicans continued to insist that the government ensure equal treatment under the laws for all citizens, regardless of race. Thomas Dewey, the party’s presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, had created a state version of the FEPC in New York as governor, and the party’s 1944 platform called for the creation of a permanent commission.10 But during the presidential campaign of 1948, Dewey did not publicize his solid record on civil rights, possibly because he thought he would lose more southern white votes than he would win northern African American ones.11 Certainly, many Republican leaders were beginning to wonder whether it was worth the trouble to continue to seek the black vote. In 1947, Republican Speaker of the House Joseph Martin told African American Republican activists that the party saw few reasons to support a constituency that now leaned Democratic: “The FEPC plank in the 1944 Republican platform was a bid for the Negro vote, and they did not accept the bid. They went out and voted for Roosevelt,” he said. As a result, Republicans did not want to spend political capital fighting for civil rights bills.12 The Republican Party had not yet fully embraced what its leaders would in the 1960s call the “southern strategy” of luring white segregationists into the GOP. But savvy GOP leaders realized that a party that stood for states’ rights – even when the rights in question involved depriving American citizens of their right to vote – could unite conservatives on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

The Right and Labor Though Roosevelt hesitated to use federal power to protect African Americans, his administration never faltered in its enthusiasm for guaranteeing the rights of workers. New Deal laws transformed the relationship between

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laborers and their employers. Beginning in 1933, after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the federal government guaranteed workers’ right to join a union. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act, called the Wagner Act after its author, Senator Robert Wagner (DNY), expanded these rights further. The Wagner Act gave unprecedented legal recognition to labor unions by protecting union contracts and union elections. The proportion of nonagricultural workers in unions jumped from 11.9 percent in 1934 to 28.6 percent in 1939.13 Many business owners had supported Roosevelt in the election of 1932, but these new legal protections for organized labor caused them to change their minds. In the fall of 1934, some of the nation’s top industrialists created the American Liberty League to fight Roosevelt and his new union allies.14 In California, corporate growers and shippers formed the Associated Farmers to oppose union activism and New Deal labor laws in their state, even though the NIRA and the Wagner Act did not apply to agricultural workers.15 Employer groups were especially incensed by union leaders’ efforts to exercise their newfound political power. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed a Political Action Committee in 1943 to work for the election of more labor-friendly legislators. The CIO-PAC’s voter registration, mobilization, propaganda, and turnout efforts helped Roosevelt win his fourth term in 1944.16 But two years later, in the first postwar elections, the popular and savvy four-term president was dead, while the hapless Truman struggled to keep Roosevelt’s coalition together. Popular anger at the wave of strikes after the end of World War II helped Republicans win control of both houses of Congress in 1946. For the first time in fourteen years, conservatives had the power to restrain organized labor. They used their majority to pass a historic labor management bill, the Taft-Hartley Act. Named after the Republican chairs of the Labor Committees of both houses, Taft in the Senate and Representative Fred Hartley (R-New Jersey) in the House, the new law drastically undercut the pro-labor provisions of the Wagner Act. Taft-Hartley made it illegal to require employers to hire only union members and allowed states to outlaw so-called union shops, which forced workers to pay dues to the union that represented them. The law also restricted picketing, hampered workers’ ability to strike, prohibited secondary boycotts, limited the power of the National Labor Relations Board, banned union contributions to political campaigns, and forced union leaders to swear that they were not communists. Perhaps most significantly, it forbade the unionization of foremen and supervisors, thus enabling employers to divide workers on the shop floor. Labor leaders denounced it as a “slave labor bill,” while United Auto Workers president

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Walter Reuther called it “a vicious piece of Fascist legislation.”17 President Truman vetoed the bill, but conservative southern Democrats joined with Republicans to override him.18 As with civil rights, labor issues sometimes divided moderate conservatives from hard-right conservatives. Dewey and his allies privately worried that the Taft-Hartley Act would alienate from the GOP the more cautious labor leaders of the American Federation of Labor. But again, as with the fight over the FEPC, the moderate conservatives kept their doubts to themselves as Republicans unified behind a policy of uncompromising resistance to New Deal reforms.19 Though organized labor would remain politically potent for two more decades, Taft-Hartley marked an important turning point in the political history of twentieth-century America. With the passage of the law, conservatives began to wrest back power from organized labor, restore control to employers, and eviscerate the New Deal coalition. Yet the conservatives’ domination of Congress in the Truman era affected far more than labor policies. Truman wanted to expand the New Deal with his own “Fair Deal,” adding new protections for civil rights, expanding federal aid to education, and – perhaps most important – establishing universal health care. By attacking organized labor and destroying the New Deal coalition, the resurgent Republicans ensured that these Fair Deal programs were dead on arrival. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein writes, “The Taft-Hartley law stands like a fulcrum upon which the entire New Deal order teetered. Before 1947 it was possible to imagine a continuing expansion and vitalization of the New Deal impulse. After that date, however, labor and the left were forced into an increasingly defensive posture.”20 Conservatives had not yet killed the New Deal, but they had stopped its advance. The conservatives’ fight against unions was both principled and pragmatic: they truly believed that organized labor needed to be tamed – and, in taming it, they strategically weakened a powerful Democratic constituency. By the end of the decade, the labor battle had ended in a policy victory and a political win for Republicans, but this was not their only success. This synergy between politics and policy also characterized another key issue facing conservatives in the late 1940s: the struggle against domestic communism.

Red Menace Conservatives resisted civil rights and labor rights because they opposed the growth of federal power – or, more specifically, the growth of federal power for the benefit of previously marginalized groups. As the 1940s continued,

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these conservatives increasingly used one word to describe this expansion of the state under Roosevelt and Truman: communism. Conservatives’ conflation of New Deal liberalism and Soviet-style communism predated the Cold War. Some of Franklin Roosevelt’s opponents had accused him of coddling communists from the moment he recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. These accusations mounted after 1935, when Roosevelt began his “Second New Deal” with the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act. In 1934, the archconservative Los Angeles Times accused Roosevelt of being a worse communist coddler than Joseph Stalin, because “in fact Communists in Russia are under the iron heel of Stalin and disturbers are sent before a firing squad.”21 William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful newspaper publisher in the country, similarly blamed Roosevelt for following a road that led to Moscow. In 1935, he wrote in hyperbolic capital letters, “SINCE WE HAVE MOVED LEFT WE CAN SEE THE MONSTROUS RUSSIAN DOCTRINE BEING ACTUALLY APPLIED OF GRADING DOWN THE WHOLE POPULATION TO THE LEVEL OF THE LEAST PROSPEROUS.” He added, “Is this the New Deal or the NEW DEATH?”22 The conservatives’ rhetorical equation of communism with liberalism continued into the next decade. In 1940, the national Republican Party platform suggested that the New Deal was the opening wedge for the Soviet takeover of America and promised a thorough purge of un-American elements if voters returned the GOP to power. “We vigorously condemn the New Deal encouragement of various groups that seek to change the American form of government by means outside the Constitution,” the platform stated. It continued: We condemn the appointment of members of such un-American groups to high positions of trust in the national Government. The development of the treacherous so-called Fifth Column, as it has operated in war-stricken countries, should be a solemn warning to America. We pledge the Republican Party to get rid of such borers from within.23

Even during the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, conservatives continued to imply that liberals were secret Reds and claimed that the New Deal was a precursor to dictatorship. As Representative Martin Dies (D-TX) told Congress in 1943, “When the people are regimented economically, then the next step is to regiment them politically and religiously. When any group of supermen or social planners get control of government and impose their fanatical beliefs, they become avaricious for power and they subjugate the whole body politic.”24

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The conservatives who equated liberalism with communism belonged to both major parties in the 1930s and early 1940s. But after the war against fascism ended and the Cold War on communism began, the charge of “communism in government” became more partisan as extreme anticommunists within the Republican Party decided to flog the issue of alleged treason within the Truman administration. In 1946, the new Republican National Committee chair, Representative B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee, exhorted his party to move further to the right. “Today’s major domestic issue,” he wrote in a newsletter to party activists, “is between Radicalism, regimentation, all-powerful bureaucracy, class-exploitation, deficit spending and machine politics, as against our belief in American freedom.” According to the GOP, the 1946 election was a contest of “Communism vs. Republicanism.”25 A young southern California Republican running for Congress proved especially enthusiastic about labeling his opponents as communist sympathizers. Richard Nixon unseated the incumbent US Representative Jerry Voorhis in 1946 by accusing the former socialist and longtime anticommunist of harboring pro-Soviet views. Nixon’s campaign relied on the standard conservative dichotomy of freedom versus slavery: according to one of his campaign memos, the voters faced a choice between “state socialism versus free enterprise” and “Pro-Russian policy versus American policy.”26 Once elected, Nixon became a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he played a key role in exposing a former New Dealer, Alger Hiss, as a communist spy. Hiss, who had been out of government for two years when he was first accused of espionage in 1948, denied knowing the confessed spy Whittaker Chambers back in the mid-1930s. But then Chambers produced some incriminating documents in Hiss’s handwriting. To many conservatives, Hiss’s perjury conviction in early 1950 validated all of their earlier charges. “At last the stream of treason that existed in our Government has been exposed in a fashion that all may believe,” former president Herbert Hoover wrote to Nixon.27 The Hiss case made Nixon a hero to anticommunists throughout the country and helped propel his rise to US senator, vice president, and ultimately president. The Californian touted himself as “AMERICA’S GREATEST ENEMY OF COMMUNISM.”28 Again, as in their attacks on organized labor, the conservatives’ political use of anticommunism had policy consequences that moved American politics and culture to the right. To inoculate himself against charges of communist sympathy, Truman established a loyalty program in 1947 that resulted in the termination of thousands of left-leaning Americans from

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government service. Because homosexuality was equated at the time with political subversion, thousands of gays and lesbians lost their jobs as well.29 This liberal anticommunist loyalty program, combined with the conservative anticommunist investigations, comprised the Red Scare in American politics. As a result, the most progressive Americans – those most likely to demand a larger role for government in American life – found themselves blacklisted and marginalized. The anticommunists had succeeded in discrediting the left and narrowing the spectrum of debate.

From Isolation to Intervention Conservatives’ fear of communism helps explain the dramatic change in their foreign policy stances in the 1940s. Before the United States entered World War II, conservatives were divided into two foreign policy camps: eastern internationalists, such as Dewey and Henry Stimson, who served in the cabinets of both Hoover and Roosevelt, and Midwestern and western isolationists, led by Taft. But with the advent of the Cold War, many former isolationists began to advocate for a policy of vigorous American intervention throughout the world. The Cold War killed conservative isolationism, at least for a generation. During the prelude to World War II, isolationist leaders had condemned President Roosevelt for what they saw as his disproportionate concern with Adolf Hitler’s expansion in Europe. These anti-interventionists blamed Roosevelt for allowing American Jews to shape US opinion against Hitler through “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government,” according to an infamous speech by aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh in September 1941.30 Moreover, given Hitler’s intense opposition to Soviet communism, some American conservatives maintained that Roosevelt had targeted the wrong enemy. A communist victory in the fight between the Soviets and the Nazis, wrote Robert Taft in 1941, would be “far more dangerous to the United States . . . than the victory of fascism.”31 He added that America should stay out of the war even if Hitler conquered all of Europe.32 Conservative isolationists like Taft believed that America should only join the war if attacked. And then the attack came. After the Japanese bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, the US government declared war on Japan, and then the Germans and Italians declared war on the United States. The overwhelming majority of Americans rallied to support the war effort. But there were some conservatives who still viewed the war against Hitler (if not against

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the Japanese) as a disaster from the start. Roosevelt’s opponents believed that the president’s prewar foreign policy had been at best “stupid and inept,” as one GOP staffer wrote to party strategists, or diabolically conspiratorial at worst. They charged that Roosevelt had goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, yet had done nothing to warn the commanders in Hawaii. After the war, Republican leaders launched a congressional investigation of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. Though the committee majority exonerated the president, many conservative leaders continued to argue that the president had deceived and manipulated the country into entering the fight.33 By 1947, former isolationists were calling on President Truman to oppose the Soviets all over the globe. The non-interventionist coalition in the 1930s had included not only many unconditional pacifists but also hardline conservatives who believed that the United States should be fighting the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany. Now that the communists were the nation’s primary enemy, many of these formerly non-interventionist conservatives saw the value of an aggressive US foreign policy. Some, such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Michigan), became ardent advocates of military intervention. Vandenberg lectured President Truman on the need to “scare the hell out of the American people” to persuade Congress to provide military aid to anticommunist countries.34 Others, like Taft, evolved into reluctant and conditional interventionists. Taft opposed the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund after the war, worrying that these international institutions threatened American sovereignty. He also opposed the Marshall Plan to aid struggling western European economies. Yet, like other former isolationists, he supported the Truman Doctrine and its vow to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”35 In 1949, many conservatives worried that communism was winning the global struggle with capitalism. In August, the Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb, thus ending the American nuclear monopoly. In October, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, formally ending years of civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Long-time internationalists and former conservative isolationists alike believed that Truman’s containment policies had failed. The next year, the North Korean invasion of South Korea would provide the opportunity for these new conservative internationalists to call for replacing Truman’s doctrine with a different foreign policy – that of rolling back, rather than containing, communism throughout the world.

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Faith and Freedom As conservatives worked to unify and build a new movement in the 1940s, there remained one substantial impediment to their success: they shared no single, coherent philosophy. Some libertarian thinkers had begun to draw connections between free markets and free individuals. Yet most ordinary voters knew little of these intellectuals and their theories; most Americans identified as conservatives because they opposed cultural change, not because they disliked New Deal economic policies. To succeed, conservative leaders needed to create a movement that melded the traditional religious conservatives who resisted social change with neoliberal materialists who embraced the chaotic and inventive possibilities of an unfettered market. It was not an easy task. The 1940s saw the publication of the foundational texts of modern conservatism (or, to use their term of choice, neoliberalism).36 In 1944, two Austrian economists published books that helped reshape the intellectual landscape of the modern right. In 1944, Ludwig von Mises, who had left Vienna for New York in 1940, published two books, Bureaucracy and Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. That same year, the University of Chicago Press released Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Von Mises had been Hayek’s mentor in Vienna, and both men were scarred by their experience with the dictators and fascist governments of interwar Europe. They argued that centralized planning led to totalitarianism and slavery; indeed, only an unregulated market could provide the conditions for liberty to flourish. Without a free market, there could be no freedom of speech, no toleration of diversity, and no peace among nations. Money, wrote Hayek, was “one of the greatest instruments of freedom.”37 Hayek’s book in particular thrilled conservatives in the United States and Europe. In the New York Times Book Review, journalist Henry Hazlitt called The Road to Serfdom “one of the most important books of our generation . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart, to stop, look, and listen.”38 In 1947, Hayek joined with other conservatives who considered themselves “sincere democrats and liberals at heart” to form the Mont Pelerin Society, a transatlantic group of business leaders and conservative intellectuals dedicated to fighting socialism and social democracy around the world.39 By the end of the decade, hundreds of thousands of copies of The Road to Serfdom were sold every year.40

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While these free market treatises inspired neoliberal intellectuals, another European immigrant to America won additional converts to the conservative cause with her bestselling novels. Alisa Rosenbaum had fled the Russian Revolution in the 1920s, changed her name to Ayn Rand, and settled in Hollywood. By the late 1930s, Rand had discovered her true calling in fiction writing. In 1943, her novel The Fountainhead, the story of a fiercely independent architect, spoke to Americans who felt oppressed by mass society. This “hymn in praise of the individual,” as its New York Times review stated, had sold millions of copies by 1949 when it was made into a major movie with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. Rand hoped that the novel would rally Americans against collectivism in general and the New Deal’s brand of social democracy in particular. America, Rand says in the novel through one of her characters, “was based on a man’s [sic] right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive.”41 Rand structured the plot and the characters to make this political point. Despite her impressive sales, there were clear limits to Rand’s appeal to American conservatives in the 1940s. For one thing, she was a proud, even defiant, atheist in a country in which faith in God was mandatory for politicians, especially those on the right. In addition, her praise of selfishness and ridicule of self-sacrifice offended those conservatives who valued order and tradition. Later, in the 1950s, conservative intellectuals like Whittaker Chambers would excoriate her fourth novel, Atlas Shrugged, as shrill, dogmatic, and arrogant.42 Yet many conservative leaders in the 1940s hoped that traditionalists and proto-libertarians could find common ground. California minister James Fifield, for example, spearheaded a movement to reconcile Christian teachings with Randian neoliberal principles – or, as the title of his organization’s magazine proclaimed, to promote “faith and freedom.” In the 1930s, in reaction to the successes of the New Deal, Fifield had created a group called Spiritual Mobilization to organize Christian pastors in support of libertarian policies. Fifield argued that the New Deal built up the state as a kind of false idol, encouraging Americans to put their faith in government rather than God. The welfare state threatened not only capitalism but also Christianity. “Every Christian,” Fifield wrote, “should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal.”43 By the early 1940s, his organization used the generous contributions it received from corporate leaders to mobilize the Christian faithful against New Deal liberalism. The resulting coalition of corporate and cultural conservatives foreshadowed the alliance that would transform the nation’s politics.

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Conclusion At first glance, the conservative movement of the 1940s might appear largely irrelevant to the later successes of the New Right. There were no conservative presidents during the decade, and only a brief two-year span (1947–8) when conservatives controlled Congress. Yet appearances can deceive. During their short period of congressional dominance, conservatives succeeded in passing a labor-management act that eviscerated the liberal political coalition. Outside of Congress, scholars – and one novelist – published major works that would endure, providing an intellectual foundation for the conservative resurgence of the second half of the twentieth century. American conservatives continued to develop an explicitly anti-statist philosophy as they came to believe that the federal government too often took the side of unionized workers and racial minorities. Meanwhile, conservatives in both major parties began to seek common cause in supporting more military intervention abroad and less federal enforcement of civil rights at home. By the end of the 1940s, the stage was set for conservatives to reclaim the power they had lost with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932. NOTES 1 “The Mission Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955. 2 John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93–101, 125–58. 3 On the selective nature of neoliberals’ anti-statism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Macmillan, 1994). 4 Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 67–72. 5 Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 206. 6 See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005); and Austin P. Morris, “Agricultural Labor and National Labor Legislation,” California Law Review 54:5 (December 1966), 1939–89. On the New Deal and race in the South, see Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 7 Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 73. 8 Robert Mason, The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 139.

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9 Ibid., 140. 10 Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 445–8. 11 Mason, Republican Party, 138. 12 Quoted in William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), 59. 13 Richard B. Freeman, “Spurts in Union Growth: Defining Moments and Social Processes,” in The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 273. 14 On the American Liberty League and early business opposition to the New Deal, see George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934–1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 15 See Nelson A. Pichardo, “The Power Elite and Elite-Driven Countermovements: The Associated Farmers of California during the 1930s,” Sociological Forum 10:1 (March 1995), 21–49. 16 Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 503–17. 17 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic, 1995), 266. 18 James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 352–66; Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 65. 19 Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 51. 20 Nelson Lichtenstein, “Taft-Hartley: A Slave-Labor Law?” Catholic University Law Review 47:3 (Spring 1998), 763–90. 21 “The Red Menace,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1934. 22 “Rugged Individualism or Predatory Collectivism?” San Francisco Examiner, March 7, 1935. 23 Quoted in Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 53. 24 Congressional Record, 78th Congress, 1st session, February 1, 1943, 478. 25 Bowen, Roots of Modern Conservatism, 40. 26 David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003), 23. 27 Hoover to Nixon, January 22, 1950, “Nixon, Richard M., Correspondence 1950–1956,” PPI, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA. 28 Nixon advertisement cited in Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow, 29. 29 For a recent, perceptive analysis of the Second Red Scare, see Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 30 Quoted in Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 117. 31 Quoted in Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 149.

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32 Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, 304. 33 Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 2, quote at 63. 34 Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security – From World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 68. 35 Harry Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine,” March 12, 1947, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=12846. 36 Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 6. 37 Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition (London: Routledge, 2014), 125. 38 Henry Hazlitt, “An Economist’s View of ‘Planning’: Regimentation on the Fascist Model, Says Dr. Hayek, Can Evolve from It,” New York Times, September 24, 1944. 39 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009), 43–51. See also the classic work of George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic, 1976). 40 For a discussion of the impact of Hayek’s book, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995), 157–61. 41 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; repr. New York: Signet, 1993), 683. For more on Rand, see Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 42 Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 88. 43 Quoted in Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic, 2015), 12.

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part iii

Media and Genre

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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c h a p ter 1 4

Late Modernisms, Latent Realisms The Politics of Literary Interpretation Sarah Ehlers

Entering the Forties In one of the final scenes of Tim Robbins’s pseudo-historical film The Cradle Will Rock (1999), a part homage/part dirge to the era of federally funded political art, Nelson Rockefeller (played by Edward Norton) and his cronies delight in the idea that they will “control the future of art” by funding a new celebration of “color” and “form.” As they raise their glasses, the film cuts to portrayals of landmark artistic events of the late 1930s: the raucous opening night of Marc Blitzstein’s pro-union opera The Cradle Will Rock (1937); the destruction of Diego Rivera’s social realist mural Man at the Crossroads in the ground floor of Rockefeller Center (1933); the testimony of Federal Theatre Project (FTP) director Hallie Flanagan before the Dies Committee (an early instantiation of the House Un-American Activities Committee); and the eventual dissolution of the FTP at the hands of the US Congress (1939).1 Robbins’s film takes obvious liberties with history – but the portrayal of key scenes from the 1930s and 1940s in quick succession is instructive as a way of thinking about the formation of modernism at mid-century. If a reinvigorated version of modernism, one that emphasized formal innovation and artistic autonomy – or color and form – took hold at the dawn of the so-called American Century, then it was the product as much of the specific global problems of the 1940s as the ongoing political-cum-aesthetic antagonisms of the “Red decade” of the 1930s. The implication of Rockefeller’s toast is relatively straightforward: modes of art and criticism concerned with the exploration of formal relationships at the expense of content are (happily, for capitalists like him) detached from the stark realities that left-leaning cultural workers depicted in more directly representational works such as the FTP’s “Living Newspapers” or social realist murals that strove to reach mass audiences. Not all attempts to define and promote modernism during the 1940s were underwritten by corporate and nationalist interests in the way the 1999 229

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version of The Cradle Will Rock suggests.2 Nonetheless, the establishment of modernism during and after World War II was due to the formation of movements diverse in their politics. These ranged from the conservative southern agrarians associated with the New Criticism to the anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals in the Partisan Review circle, movements somewhat united in a “defense of aesthetics as an autonomous practice separate from political and personal demands.”3 If, as scholars such as Alan Filreis and Robert Genter have argued, the future of modernism was “up for grabs” in the 1940s, then so too was the collective knowledge of its recent past.4 Put another way: at stake in narratives in the 1940s about avant-gardism and mass culture, innovation and tradition, and aesthetics and politics were the rights to the literary history of modernism. Scholarship in the field of modernist studies has crafted important prehistories of modernism that undo the conservative narratives that took hold during the World War II and Cold War eras. Such studies work outside the monolithic concept of “modernism” to establish, in Andreas Huyssen’s words, “alternative and different modernities” that account for geographic differences as well as sociopolitical issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.5 An important subset of such scholarship has focused on the Cold War critics and institutions that shaped later twentieth-century understandings of modernism and, more specifically, the modernist commitment to artistic autonomy. Literary historian Greg Barnhisel, for instance, demonstrates how, during the 1940s and 1950s, the stylistic techniques and attitudes that had defined modernism earlier in the century (he identifies several aspects of modernism, including allusiveness, abstraction, fragmentation, and the impersonality of the artist) were emptied of their revolutionary and reactionary content and replaced with “a celebration of the virtues of freedom and the assertion that the individual is sovereign.”6 Attempts to define modernist formal and representational techniques as devoid of political content have made it seem as if there is only one way to consider the relationship between modernism and discourses about artistic autonomy. In fact, during the 1940s, critics who theorized and even promoted autonomous aesthetics diverged in their thinking about the relationship of art to political life. At the same time, the conflation of modernism with aesthetic autonomy has affected how critics understand modernism’s supposed opposite – literary realism. Indeed, the perceived divide between modernism and realism is a Cold War cultural fiction. During the 1940s, the realist commitment to providing faithful representations of the social world was conflated with the politics and aesthetics of 1930s social realism. “Cold War modernism’s other, of course, was socialist realism,”

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Barnhisel explains. “Socialist realism was everything modernism was not, opposing experimentation and formalism and downplaying the individual artist, stressing instead art’s role in helping the state and party achieve political and social goals.”7 This chapter considers how ideas about modernism codified during the 1940s obscured the variegated terrain on which the politics of form was debated and determined. The ascendancy of New Criticism in the immediate postwar period obscured the diverse ways in which critics theorized artistic autonomy in relation to social and political life. As a result, subsequent literary critics and historians have (often unwittingly) conflated a variety of interpretive practices with New Critical formalism. At the same time, the renewed concern with literary works’ formal conditions in the forties contributed to the dismissal of realism as an aesthetic category worthy of study in its own right. As this chapter’s title suggests, and as I explore in subsequent sections, battles over the history and meaning of modernism have also obscured the evolution of literary realism in the 1940s. As a result, cutting-edge cultural work of the decade has either been read in terms of reductive narratives of modernism or dismissed as naïve realism. An approach that takes seriously the simultaneous development of modernist and realist aesthetics during this transitional decade provides a richer and more complex portrait of the art and literature of the period, highlighting a range of authors, movements, and texts that have been overshadowed by dominant narratives about modernism. The effort to empty modernist aesthetics of its political content has effectively buried the dynamic relation between modernism and realism. While it is useful to preserve modernism and realism as heuristic devices, a historical inquiry into their permeation opens up alternate theoretical means for considering how cultural producers engaged with both realist epistemologies and modernist aesthetics in their efforts to respond to the specific political realities of the postwar period.

Late Modernisms Literary critics and historians have used the term “late modernism” to describe the historical and aesthetic contours of modernist writing from the 1930s to the 1950s. Such scholarship has set out to prove that the 1940s and 1950s were, in many ways, the pinnacle of the modernist movement that began in the 1910s and 1920s, rather than its nadir. In his transatlantic study Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (1999), for instance, Tyrus Miller uses “late modernism” to describe the

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“transitional period” following the growth of the New Deal cultural apparatus and the beginnings of postmodernism.8 Robert Genter’s more recent historical study, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (2010), eschews the narrative that modernism was in a state of transition, exhaustion, or decline in the postwar era. Challenging the “declension narrative” of modernism exemplified in essays such as Irving Howe’s 1967 “The Contours of Modernism,” which lamented that the spirit of the earlier avant-gardes had been utterly exhausted, Genter highlights important frictions in the 1940s and 1950s literary scene. According to him, there existed productive tensions between “defenders of a slightly more academic and formalist version of high modernism and those practitioners of a supposedly irrational, perverse, and therefore immature form” associated with the Beat generation that he dubs “romantic modernism.” In this version of late modernism, not all artists, writers, and intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s upheld elitist attitudes about form and about the separation of art and mass culture; instead, many, like Kenneth Burke, “began critiquing modernism from the inside” via an emphasis on the artist’s new responsibility to translate the innovations of the 1920s into powerful communiqués that responded to the aftermath of economic collapse and the new threat of total war.9 Genter’s sense of the complex political terrain of late modernism is preceded by earlier studies focused on New York intellectual circles, notably Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left (1987) and Harvey Teres’s Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (1996), which demonstrate the political subtleties of writers’ and critics’ engagements with modernist (high) culture – especially before the New Critics’ conservative version of modernism was established at the height of the Cold War.10 Narratives about the supposed rise and fall of modernism over the course of the twentieth century tend to obscure the complex institutional processes whereby the signifier and concept of “modernism” was (often retroactively) produced and shaped. Contemporary assumptions about modernism are themselves products of the political and cultural landscape of the 1940s. What we now call “high modernism” was promoted, even invented, during the forties within intellectual circles that, in various ways, used cultural high modernism to argue for the autonomy of art. These ways included the interpretive practices of New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren; the literary criticism of intellectuals associated with the anticommunist left magazine Partisan Review, including, but not limited to, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Philip Rahv, and Lionel Trilling; the critical

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theory of Frankfurt School philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer living in exile in the United States; and the avant-garde art criticism of Clement Greenberg, among others. Although varied in their politics and approach, these groups’ promotion of modernism shared an important feature during the 1940s: the codification of formalist reading practices, especially as a reaction to (and at the expense of ) the social realist aesthetics of the 1930s. More specifically, despite their disparate political predilections, both the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals shared an interest in promoting cultural high modernism and in pursuing formalist modes of reading that dovetailed with ideals of aesthetic autonomy.11 In the early 1940s especially, such practices were formulated as a reaction to proletarian and social realist styles predominant on the literary scene during the thirties. The New Critics had long disparaged vehemently what they called “propaganda art” in their promotion of formalist reading practices and traditional poetries, a position encapsulated in essays like Cleanth Brooks’s “Metaphysical Poets and Propaganda Art” from his Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939). For Brooks, communist critics valued poetry only as a vehicle for propaganda, and politically committed poetry is itself, “incapable of enduring ironical contemplation.”12 If for most of the 1930s there was little regard for the New Critical pronouncement that poetry and politics do not mix, by the end of the decade the spoils had fallen to those on “the side of the eternal verity of purportedly apolitical art.”13 Following the disillusionments of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, certain strains of leftist writing and criticism began to echo the New Critics’ dismissals of “propaganda,” as well as their emphases on form and freedom of expression. Two essays that usher in the 1940s helpfully illustrate this shift: Philip Rahv’s “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy” (1939) and Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939). Rahv’s and Greenberg’s essays demonstrate attempts to craft Marxist reading practices outside of what they perceive to be the stringent ideologies of the Communist Party; in so doing, both emphasize the relative autonomy of aesthetics and politics. Rahv published “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy” in Southern Review, a literary magazine established by Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. The forum for Rahv’s essay alone gives some indication of the similarities between the New Critics’ and New York Intellectuals’ interpretive methods at the start of the 1940s. As Wald notes, by the time Rahv published the essay, his own left-leaning magazine, Partisan Review, had been reinvented as “an organ of modernist high culture” to the detriment of literary modes associated with the proletarian literatures of the

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Depression decade, namely realism and naturalism.14 In “Proletarian Literature,” Rahv writes against the imposition of political doctrine on literary works. He suggests that the writing formulas promoted by the Communist Party during the thirties were “empty of aesthetic principle” and served as a “complex political mechanism” whereby writers were made to believe that they were allying themselves with the working class when, in effect, they were surrendering their “independence to the Communist Party.” Thirties proletarian literature thus, according to Rahv, mistakes the “literature of a party,” which only reproduces party ideology, for the “literature of a class,” which allows for “conflict” and “free exchange” and which “constantly strives and partially succeeds in overcoming its social limitations.”15 Rahv’s closing emphasis on the superiority of the “media of art” over the “media of politics” not only replicates the art–propaganda distinction outlined by Brooks but it also instructively sets up the principles of formalist analysis put forward in Greenberg’s influential essays on abstract art.16 Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Rahv’s and William Phillips’s Partisan Review, is the first of a series of essays Greenberg penned during the 1940s and 1950s that, in outlining the principles of abstract art, promoted cultural high modernism.17 Like Rahv, Greenberg argued for the distinctiveness of artistic and political realms, but he also emphasized the separation of high art from mass culture. The avant-garde, as both an aesthetic descriptor and value, favors the abstract, or nonrepresentational, over the direct representation of everyday experience. Such art emphasizes compositional processes over subject matter – or, as Greenberg puts it, cause over effect. As his title suggests, the opposite of avant-garde art is kitsch: “Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard,” he writes, labeling this rearguard the “popular and commercial art and literature” associated with kitsch.18 In Greenberg’s theory of avant-garde art, realism qua propaganda is related to the category of kitsch, and he uses the constellation of realism, propaganda, and kitsch to advance his arguments for the irreconcilability of political art and avant-garde practice. By focusing on form/medium over content, Brooks, Rahv, and Greenberg all indicated (whether explicitly or implicitly) that art in which the work’s formal conditions were its primary concern – whether that be Pollock’s drip technique or Faulkner’s fragmented, stream-of-consciousness narration – was also art that was intrinsically valuable. Their shared interest in formalist critique and in a version of modernism that would later be described as “high,” suggests similarities among the New Criticism, the Partisan Review circle, and avant-garde art critics and visual artists.19 Indeed, all three groups contributed to the institutionalization of high

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modernism during the 1940s, helping canonize writers such as T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and William Faulkner by making them objects of critical reflection and attention.20 The canonization of this version of modernism by academics and professional critics also extended to larger institutional scenes during the decade, as evidenced by the 1949 awarding of the Nobel Prize to Faulkner, the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and the museum’s subsequent acquisition of his free-form painting The She-Wolf. But perhaps the loudest signal that high modernism, and the reading practices it was said to engender, had been widely accepted and institutionalized in the 1940s was the 1949 decision to award the inaugural Yale Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, a poem sequence he composed in 1945 while detained at a US Army Disciplinary Training Center in Italy. The varied responses to the award demonstrate that, despite their purported similarities, the political differences between New Critics and New York Intellectuals translated into major differences in opinion about the limits of formalist critique. New Critic Allen Tate, in his role as Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress, spearheaded the committee that selected Pound’s volume for the award. The prize committee’s official statement acknowledged that some would object to bestowing a major prize on poems that were unabashedly anti-Semitic, racist, and pro-fascist. But, in its statement, the committee held fast to the notion that “to permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement . . . would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which any civilized society must rest.”21 As controversy over the award inevitably ensued, Tate and other members of the Bollingen committee continued to insist on the primacy of formal achievement over political content. But the New Critical paradigm that claimed poems were self-contained objects cordoned from historical circumstance did not hold water for Partisan Review critics in the case of The Pisan Cantos. Despite their own promotion of high modernism, awarding the prize to Pound was simply too much for Partisan Review, especially because so many Intellectuals associated with the magazine were Jewish and identified with the left. While the magazine wanted to uphold its commitment to modernism, it would not abandon leftist politics completely, nor would it support a poet with Pound’s political record.22 The difference in opinion over the award for Pound raises significant questions both about how politics shapes formalist critique and about the limits of formalist reading methods in the face of political extremes. William Barrett perhaps posed it best in his 1949 Partisan Review essay on the Bollingen

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committee decision, asking, “How far is it possible, in a lyric poem, for technical embellishments to transform vicious and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?”23 Indeed, while the New Critics were certainly not alone in creating canons of value and promoting fictions of aesthetic autonomy, conflating all variants of autonomous art during the 1940s ignores important culture politics. New Critics might have touted the separation of interpretation from content and authorial intention, but they also actively policed the boundaries of culture. For example, contrary to the statement that outside considerations should not obscure poetic achievement, in 1944 John Crowe Ransom withdrew his acceptance of Robert Duncan’s poem “African Elegy” for Kenyon Review after reading the young poet’s essay “The Homosexual in Society” in Dwight MacDonald’s journal Politics.24 Thus while on the surface the New Critics and New York Intellectuals would seem to be somewhat methodologically of a kind, the specific political crises of the 1940s complicated the categories of autonomy that they promoted in their criticism in vastly different ways. Similar tensions were in play in the broader literary and artistic field, as can be seen in the critical theory of Frankfurt School writers such as Adorno and Horkheimer. Living in exile in Los Angeles during the 1940s, the two penned The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), a text based on the overwhelming sense that “public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity.” Looking back over the horrors of World War II and the rise of the mass culture industry, Horkheimer and Adorno groped for language to describe significant changes in social life and intellectual production: “No terms are available which do not tend toward complicity with the prevailing intellectual trends,” they wrote, “and what threadbare language cannot achieve on its own is precisely made good by the social machinery.”25 Following the unprecedented horrors of World War II, Adorno argued for the political possibilities of modernist autonomous art. For Adorno, political autonomous art does not describe or represent a social reality in the way that a realist work might (that is, it is not art about “what happened”); rather, it derives its significance both from a given reality and its non-identity with that very reality. In his later essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), Adorno delineates the relationship between an artwork’s aesthetic qualities and the social truths it reveals. In that essay, he presumes to make his audience “uncomfortable” by offering a sociological explanation of lyric poetry. He suggests that art performs the work of ideological demystification by “giv[ing] voice to what ideology hides . . . . Whether intentionally or not,” while also describing it as sui generis, created as a

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“reaction to the reification of the world” and therefore defined by its resistance to the world.26 During the 1940s, modernist poets negotiated a similar historical terrain, and they took up a comparable project of attempting to represent reality by performing what it occludes. In texts such as Trilogy (1946) and Wars I Have Seen (1947) the modernist poets H. D. and Gertrude Stein attempted to address the traumatic experiences of the war. For H. D., Stein, and others, the sense that new global realities were afoot demanded new ways to represent and theorize those realities.27 In other words, at stake for politically and socially engaged writers in the 1940s was the very meaning of “reality” itself. In his 1941 essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Wallace Stevens insisted that reality is an abstraction – not an order of experience that can be easily represented or understood. Echoing critiques of realist epistemology, such as those forwarded in Lionel Trilling’s “Reality in America,” Stevens insists on “a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live.”28 As with the Frankfurt School critique, the transcendental realm invoked by Stevens can also be seen as a potential negation of material reality that is ultimately utopian in its impulses.29 In line with critics such as Filreis who have discerned the dynamic relationship between Stevens’s modernist aesthetics and left literary culture, reading Stevens on Adorno’s terms illuminates the political possibilities of Stevens’s thinking about poetics.30 Rather than viewing his use of modernist formal techniques as apolitical, we might instead consider how they engage, even if in negative ways, with social life.

From Late Modernism to Late Realism The codification of the concept “modernism” during the 1940s rested, in part, on productive fictions about the development of so-called modernist artistic practices during the 1910s and 1920s, particularly the notion that modernists ushered in a revolutionary break with a coherent and utterly conventional past. At the turn of the twentieth century, the ideal of modernism’s rebellious spirit, encapsulated by Pound’s famous dictum to “Make It New,” oversimplified the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century; it assumed that modernist iconoclasts bucked the directly representational strategies and conventional forms favored by nineteenth-century novelists, poets, and documentarians, instead concentrating their energies on the development of aesthetic experimentation. In so doing, modernist artists, even when they focused on the “ordinary” or “everyday,” rejected the notion that art should (or could) be mimetic.31 As Fredric Jameson puts

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it, “We all know what precedes modernism, or at least we say we know (and we think we know): it can be none other than realism, about which it is surely obvious that it constitutes the raw material that modernism cancels and surcharges.” According to Jameson, a “naïve realism is posited in such a way that a ‘modernist’ transformation can be identified as its cancellation, if not its complete negation.”32 In other words, predominant narratives about modernism rest, at least in part, on the assumption that modernism broke from an outmoded realism. The purported bifurcation between “realism” and “modernism” posed at the beginning of the twentieth century was repeated with gusto during the 1940s; yet the grounds of that antagonism changed as a result of the political and aesthetic upheavals of the Great Depression. During the Depression, realist aesthetics were revalued and promoted by leftist literary movements that stressed wide accessibility and the direct representation of struggles for social justice. Starting in the early 1940s, however, mass cultural productions and forms of socialist realism came to be associated with dangerous totalitarianisms, and realist art was dismissed – even condemned – on multiple fronts. The institutionalization of modernism that took place in the 1940s obscured a diverse array of authors, literary texts, and popular cultural artifacts written in realist modes, as well as significant innovations within the genre of realism itself. The persistence of realist aesthetics can be discerned in novels such as Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949); Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946); Erskine Caldwell’s Trouble in July (1940), Georgia Boy (1943), and Tragic Ground (1944); Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948); Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Country Place (1947); and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Poets also continued to engage realist modes, such as in the documentary propensities of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1949) and the emphasis on folk idioms and the representation of place in volumes such as Gwendolyn Brook’s A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose (1946). In addition to these new books, realist works of earlier decades were reintroduced and popularized in the forties through mass media formats such as radio programming and mass-market paperbacks.33 These examples do more than prove that realism continued to flourish during the 1940s – they also allow us to see realism as a complex and shifting sensibility rather than a simple negation of modernism. As Chris Vials observes, “The revival of realism in the mid-twentieth century, despite its inheritance, was not simply a repetition of earlier conventions established by the likes of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Edward Sheldon, or

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Jacob Riis, or even of socialistically minded naturalists Jack London, Upton Sinclair, or Lewis Hine.”34 Scholars of radical and African American literature, especially, have challenged the pat narrative that modernist techniques won the day over social realist ones, expanding our sense of how realism developed simultaneously to, and in conjunction with, modes of late modernism.35 During the forties, realist aesthetics offered appealing possibilities for artists immersed in struggles for racial and economic equality. As Stacy I. Morgan elucidates, the centrality of realism to the 1940s literary scene is especially salient in African American art and literature. According to Morgan, “the careers of African American cultural workers tell a different story” about the social realist movement – one that “extends for at a least a full decade beyond conventional periodizations” that mark the late 1930s/early 1940s as its end.36 Morgan points out that writers such as Petry and Robert Hayden and visual artists such as John Wilson were three among many African American cultural workers who produced social realist works during the decade. As well, poets such as Frank Marshall Davis, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker continued the tradition of realist people’s poetry, exemplified by Davis’s 1944 poem sequence “For All My Common People” and Walker’s 1942 volume For My People.

Modernist Realism From a historical standpoint, then, both realism and modernism constitute two dominant aesthetics of the 1940s. But what if “realism” and “modernism” were viewed in dialectical relation to one another, rather than as parallel phenomena or as a contradiction in terms? Indeed, many cultural productions of the 1940s trouble easy definitions of both, and works of visual and literary art from the decade exhibit an evolution of realist aesthetics that is informed by the modernist movement. In the realm of the visual arts, for example, Andrew Hemingway provides the example of Joseph Solman, whose work combined modernist and realist techniques. Hemingway cites a 1948 exchange in New Masses in which Solman called for “an expanded conception of realism that could encompass modernist innovations.” The artist based his arguments on the idea that the concept of realism itself would have to shift according to new social demands, and his statement brings up important questions about the relevance of socially conscious art in the social contexts of the postwar years.37 The imbrication of modernism and realism in 1940s visual and literary art suggests the tension between a deeply felt need to represent

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difficult social realities and a just as deeply felt anxiety that such representation was not possible. In American Modernism and Depression Documentary, Jeff Allred argues that late modernism is something like “a radicalization of literary realism, in which the relationship between the real and representation becomes a primary object of contemplation.”38 In 1940s documentary photographs – produced by image makers such as Walker Evans, Aaron Siskind, and Roy DeCarava, to give just a few examples – foregrounded the mediating role of the camera, emphasizing process and medium in ways similar to abstract expressionist painters. At the same time, however, these documentary images, because of their indexical nature, could never escape their links to specific historical circumstances. According to Sara Blair, the postwar cultural “commitment to abstraction as the benchmark of avant-garde sensibility” obscured the “productive strateg[ies]” photographers used to reconceive the “signifying logics inherited from EuroAmerican modernism.”39 While Blair’s primary object of study is African American cultural production, her arguments are applicable to the 1940s art scene writ large. One of the landmark texts for considering the complex relationship between modernism and realism during the 1940s is Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an attempt to represent, in photographic images and prose, the lives of Alabama tenant farmers. In the first pages of the book, Agee imagines an alternate form for it that would include no writing: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” he writes. “It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odor, plates of food and excrement . . . A piece of the body torn out at the root would be more to the point.”40 Agee’s opening fantasy is telling because it imagines that the book itself could be one of the “real things” that are captured by Evans’s camera and that he so scrupulously tries to describe. But the pages of meandering prose that follow Evans’s photographs only evidence his inability to make the medium of language perform the work of the camera – that is, to represent things as they really are. For Agee, however, the photograph does not necessarily expose the limits of linguistic representation. Rather, it illuminates his desire to move beyond such limits – to push the capabilities of language into another realm. While Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, in many ways, a “paean to the power of vision,”41 it is also, in just as many ways, a book that speculates how photography might produce a new modality of language. And Agee invokes such problems in relation to the genre of realism:

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Trying, let us say, to represent, to reproduce, a certain city street under the conviction that nothing is as important, as sublime, as truly poetic about that street in its flotation upon time and space as the street itself. Your medium, unfortunately, is not a still or moving camera, but is words. You abjure all metaphor, symbol, selection and above all, of course, all temptation to invent, as obstructive, false, artistic. As nearly as possibly in words (which, even by grace of genius, would not be very near) you try to give the street in its own terms: that is to say, either in the terms in which you (or an imagined character) see it, or in a reduction and depersonalization into terms which will as nearly as possible be the “private” singular terms of that asphalt, those neon letters.42

In the remainder of the passage, Agee painstakingly describes the street in ways that exemplify what Jacques Rancière calls his tendency for “Balzacian description.” The sheer exhaustiveness of the list suggests the impossibility of representing the street – or anything else for that matter – in realistic terms. But does Agee’s comment on representation suggest how modernist aesthetics reveals the limits of realist epistemologies? Or is he proposing a radical shift in realist writing itself? Either way, using Agee as a potential starting point, it becomes possible to posit a literary history of the 1940s that views modernism in terms of realism – rather than the other way around. This would involve, as Jameson suggests, turning away from narratives that treat “modernism” and “innovation” as synonymous and, instead, revealing the innovative spirit of realism itself.43 As contemporary humanities scholars continue to engage in debates over how to read, it is imperative that we learn from the conflicts of the recent past. The emphasis on the autonomy of the literary text, and the protocols for reading such an emphasis demands, forged during the immediate postwar period have continued to reverberate in our contemporary milieu. Mary Helen Washington offers a personal take on such influences in the opening to her recent work, The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left in the 1950s44 , acknowledging how New Critical biases shaped a generation of scholars and, in turn, the construction of cultural histories and literature anthologies. Considering the relationship between poetic form and capitalist crisis across the twentieth century, Ruth Jennison observes, “The New Criticism (whose primary authors were the Agrarians) produced a modernism that excluded from the historical record whole trajectories of communist, anarchist, socialist, Black nationalist, and internationalist and utopian poetic interventions.”45 One might ask, however, if New Critical formalism has loomed too large in the contemporary scholarly imagination – whether as protagonist or

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antagonist – thereby continuing to obscure the possibilities for political art and interpretation available in the 1940s in texts as different as “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In many ways, it has remained unclear how to theorize political art outside of ideas about modernism, poetic expression, and formal mastery that are themselves products of what Gillian White describes as “a diffuse New Critical discourse by now so thoroughly absorbed so as to seem natural.”46 As a result, it is equally imperative that we understand the complicated historical terrain on which such ideas were forged. In this sense, we are perhaps as haunted by the art of the 1940s as it was by the need to grapple with the turbulent realities of the decade. Whether viewed through the lens of realism or modernism – or the complex interplay of the two – the innovations of the 1940s provide significant insight into the interactions between politics and aesthetics across the twentieth century. NOTES 1 The Cradle Will Rock. DVD. Directed by Tim Robbins. Los Angeles: Buena Vista Pictures, 1999. 2 To be sure, however, corporate and government institutions did play a role in defining modernism. See Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 3 Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 7. 4 Ibid.; Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 5 Andreas Huyssen, “Introduction,” in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 14. 6 Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, 3. 7 Ibid., 48. 8 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 10–11. 9 Genter, Late Modernism, 5–7 [emphasis in original]. 10 Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Harvey Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 11 I capitalize the spelling of New York Intellectuals here and later to reference a specific group of left-wing, anti-Stalinist writers and critics based in New York during the mid-twentieth century rather than intellectuals in New York more generally.

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12 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 44. 13 Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), 67. 14 Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 221. 15 Philip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” Southern Review 4.3 (1939), 619–21. Barbara Foley discusses the contradictions in Rahv’s essay in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–43. 16 Rahv, “Proletarian Literature,” 627. 17 Although the suppositions of ““Avant-Garde and Kitsch” are generally associated with developments in the visual arts, the aesthetic values and modes of critique they establish are integral to understanding the 1940s literary scene. For instance, Daniel Tiffany demonstrates the importance of Greenberg’s theory of kitsch for understanding the history of poetry in My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 18 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6.5 (Fall 1939), 39. 19 The descriptor “high modernism” was coined retroactively to describe the version of modernism circulating during the Cold War, which emphasized aesthetic achievement and innovation. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 55–66. 20 Harvey Teres discusses Partisan Review critics’ interest in Henry James’s novels in Renewing the Left, 108–9. 21 Case against the Saturday Review of Literature (Chicago: Modern Poetry Association, 1949), 29–30. This pamphlet was a reissue of the statement by the Fellows of the Library of Congress (the committee that decided the Bollingen Award) outlining the terms of the award and justifying the decision to bestow it on Pound. 22 See Lem Coley, “‘A Conspiracy of Friendliness’: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and the Bollingen Controversy,” Southern Review 38.4 (2002), 809–28. 23 William Barrett, “Comment: A Prize for Ezra Pound,” Partisan Review 16.4 (1949), 347. 24 This anecdote is recounted in Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983), 151. See also Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 90. 25 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Cultural Memory in the Present, trans. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xv. 26 Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37; 39–40.

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27 For a consideration of modernist responses to World War II, see especially Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); and John Whittier Ferguson, Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 28 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 31. 29 Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950), 3–22. Gillian White, “Reality in America: Realism and Rhetoric in Stevens’ ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’” Wallace Stevens Journal 35.2 (2011), 240–65. 30 Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 31 For a discussion of modernist aesthetics in relation to the mimetic, see Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19–20. 32 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 119–20. 33 For an account of the popularization of realist literature during the 1940s, see Chris Vials, Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935–1947 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009). 34 Ibid., xv. 35 Of course, the reduction of the political art of the 1930s to “proletarian” or “socialist” realism is, itself, a product of ideologies of the 1940s and 1950s that suppressed the radical art of the interwar period. As Michael Denning argues in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, “social realism” has been significantly misunderstood as “a rearguard opposition to modernism” that seeks “a relatively straightforward representationalism in the arts.” See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1996), 118. Denning’s assessment, however, might also participate in the contemporary valuation of modernism in that it reads diverse cultural front aesthetic tendencies largely in terms of modernist innovation. 36 Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 20–1. For a discussion of African American social realist art in the 1940s, see also Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 37 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 216. 38 Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13 [emphasis in original]. 39 Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 49. 40 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 10.

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41 Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York: Verso, 1996), 46. 42 Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 207–8 [emphasis in original]. 43 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 123–4. Jameson writes that he “always thought it would be interesting to return to the favour, and to show how, through the prism of realist innovation theory, all later modernisms can be revealed to be in reality so many unwitting realisms.” 44 Mary Helen Washington, The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left in the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 10. 45 Ruth Jennison, “29/73/08: Poetry, Crisis, and a Hermeneutic of Limits,” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 28.2 (2015), www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/hermeneutic-of-limits. 46 Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2.

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Naked Cities: The Literature of Urban Renewal Sean McCann

Whenever in some poorer neighborhood of the city I see through a window some small crowded kitchen naked under the harsh light glittering in the ceiling, I still smell that fiery breath, that warning of imminent fire . . . I see now . . . that we ourselves were like kindling . . . like so many slivers of wood that might go up in flames if we came too near the white-blazing filaments in that naked bulb. Our tension itself was fire. – Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City1

The climactic scenes of the semi-documentary crime film The Naked City (1948) follow New York’s hard-working homicide detectives as they track a thief and murderer named Louis Garza to New York’s teeming Lower East Side. As the police patiently draw their net tighter around him, the once arrogant Garza panics and flees onto the Williamsburg Bridge. In the film’s much admired critical moment, the cornered man climbs desperately to the bridge’s highest point. Already wounded by a gunshot, Garza looks down on the force pursuing him. In a striking sequence, he is shown framed by the background scenery of the smokestacks of industrial Brooklyn. Then, in two remarkable point-of-view shots, he looks toward Manhattan. Garza looks down first to a set of empty tennis courts beneath him and then across the Lower East Side toward the Empire State Building, before he is shot and falls to the bridge below.2 Those brief moments convey much of what made The Naked City a major critical and popular success when the film was released in 1948. The chase scenes through the crowded streets of the Lower East Side highlight the feature of the production most widely appreciated at the time: its novel use of on-location shooting to convey a vividly authentic impression of the city. Garza’s final moments on the bridge, meanwhile, nicely illustrate the populist moral fable – a neat synthesis of tabloid journalism and left politics – at the heart of the movie’s narrative.3 New York as seen by The Naked City is a rich, social fabric composed of the interactions of millions 246

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of ordinary people. Their lives and labors usually pass unnoticed, the film implies, but the events of a sensational crime drama reveal the otherwise unseen metropolis. In the patient labor of the police force, we see the moral economy of the working city – the stoicism, resilience, and cooperation at its core – brought to heroic refinement. In the destructive actions of criminals, we see, by contrast, the greed and amorality of those who exploit the freedom of the city to prey on others. Those two fundamental elements of the metropolis come together most dramatically in the climactic moment when Garza finds himself trapped on the Williamsburg Bridge. A one-time professional wrestler who became the muscle for a gang of jewel thieves, Garza is being sought by the police for the murder of his co-conspirator Jean Dexter. Dexter, in turn, we discover, was a model-turned-thief who made use of her beauty to escape her roots among the immigrant poor. Each, The Naked City implies, is a product of the working class who has sought to escape the world of ordinary toil and mundane cooperation apparent in the crowded streets of the metropolis. In their mutually self-destructive entanglement, Garza and Dexter thus become exceptions to the working city. By extension, they stand as polar opposites of the disciplined cooperation displayed by the police, which is exemplified in the apprenticeship of young detective Jimmy Halloran to the seasoned leadership of Lieutenant Dan Muldoon. When we see Garza stranded on the bridge, confronted by Halloran and Muldoon and their colleagues, we see the desperate isolation that criminal desires inevitably bring. When we are shown the Empire State Building through Garza’s eyes, we see a brief image of the power and elevation that he and Dexter illicitly sought. When we watch Garza’s climactic fall, we witness the tragic end to which his criminal actions have fatefully led (see Figure 2). In this respect, The Naked City may have marked the acme of the strain of working-class populism that the scholar Michael Denning identifies as the politics of “the cultural front.” As a cinematic production, the film aligned the talents of left intellectuals such as writer Albert Maltz and director Jules Dassin with those of tabloid journalists like producer Mark Hellinger. Together they fashioned a celebration of the stoicism and vitality of a multiethnic, working-class city. Yet, even as The Naked City was praised by critics and embraced by audiences, the world the film apotheosized was already beginning to disappear. Producer Mark Hellinger, who had honed his reputation as a tabloid chronicler of the grit and glamor of the city, had long since departed New York for Hollywood when the film was made. (He would die of a heart attack during production.) So, too, had the tabloid photographer Weegee, whose acclaimed first book Naked City

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Figure 2 Still from the film, Naked City (1948)

(1945) gave the film its title. Maltz and Dassin would soon see their careers crippled by anticommunist hysteria, as would hundreds if not thousands of their contemporaries among left-wing academics, schoolteachers, social workers, lawyers, activists, and industrial laborers. More fundamentally still, when The Naked City was released, the white working-class city depicted in the film stood on the brink of major demographic and political transformation. Throughout the 1940s, African American migrants had arrived in New York in larger numbers from the South, and Puerto Rican arrivals had poured into the city from the island territory in ever-growing waves. During these same years the initial signs of mass suburbanization began to change the geography of the metropolis. (Levittown, the paradigmatic postwar suburban development, saw its first 300 families arrive in 1947.) If The Naked City imagined the white working-class metropolis at a moment of vitality and moral authority, the city it envisioned was quickly fading from view. Perhaps appropriately, then, alongside the populist moral fable foregrounded by the movie, The Naked City hints at another mid-century narrative of the American metropolis – a story about the decline of the populist city and the rise of a new middle-class metropolis freed of the constraints

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associated with industrial production and working-class labor. Even as the film celebrates the industrial metropolis at the height of its power and cultural influence, in its depiction of crowded streets, shabby tenements, and suppressed desires, it also alludes to this different, yet increasingly prominent account of mid-twentieth-century urban life. Indeed, nothing was more common in the civic discourse of the era than the view that New York was bursting at its seams and that the potent energies unleashed by a booming wartime economy had stretched its fabric to the limit and left it on the verge of momentous transformation. “The city has never been so uncomfortable, so crowded, so tense,” E. B. White wrote in Here Is New York (1949), his own celebrated paean to the metropolis. “Every facility is inadequate – the hospitals, schools, and playgrounds are overcrowded, the . . . highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light.”4 White reflected in these words a powerful consensus that had been forming among the civic elites of the United States throughout the 1940s. In their view, the nation’s urban centers only appeared to be thriving amid the decade’s war-fueled economic boom; in truth, they stood on the edge of crisis. Although American cities had grown steadily from the Gilded Age through the 1920s, in the later 1930s and the 1940s a number of observers began to note signs of a major transition in the nation’s social geography. Well into the interwar era, urbanization in the United States had been driven by the demands of industrial production and the predominance of rail transportation. Together, these forces had encouraged patterns of dense concentration: cities built around downtown business districts that were joined to nearby, often overlapping, and heavily crowded factory and residential neighborhoods. With the Depression, however, long-term trends in urban growth appeared to stall. In the 1940s, even amid a booming economy, anxious observers began to point to the gathering pressure of suburban development and to the emerging tendency of business and industry to move to the metropolitan periphery. The nation’s cities, they warned, were now threatened with a looming “specter of decentralization.”5 For the business leaders, real estate interests, and local politicians who dominated urban affairs at the time, the answer to this threat came to seem straightforward: American cities would have to be reconstructed to compete with the attractions drawing consumers and commercial interests to the suburbs. Describing their ideological vision as a plan for “urban renewal,” those civic elites called for a program of aligned measures that they believed would bring new clarity to the disorder of the industrial city and thereby retain the allegiance of desirable white, middle-class residents and the merchants who served them. The advocates of urban renewal

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pressed for zoning that would encourage factory owners to relocate beyond city limits, and they demanded the replacement of industrial districts by parks and playgrounds. They called for highways, bridges, and tunnels and for new “superblock” construction – high-rise towers on wide green spaces – that would open up the urban fabric and allow residents a liberating experience of space and mobility. They urged the expansion of educational, cultural, and medical institutions to attract the interest of middleclass residents. Above all, the advocates of urban renewal demanded that the so-called blight of the tenement districts, which housed industrial workers and the poor, be replaced by modernist residential developments designed for the middle class. “Everyone knows that order is better than chaos,” New York planning commissioner Cleveland Rodgers explained. “We need good schools, hospitals, highways, parks, dwellings, at reasonable cost, with sunlight, air, and playgrounds for children – and plenty of parking space.”6 Rodgers championed in these words the work of Robert Moses, New York City’s planning czar, whose dozens of massive construction projects – highways, bridges, tunnels, civic centers, parks, and housing developments – dramatically transformed the metropolitan landscape and made him a national personification of urban renewal. For Rodgers, Moses was the heroic founder of a new metropolis, the creator of an automobilebased city that catered to the needs and desires of a white-collar middle class. The vision Rodgers shared with Moses was all the more striking in that it conflicted sharply with the actually existing urbanism then built into the city’s infrastructure. His goal as the city’s de facto planning czar, Moses explained, was to replace a “crowded, overbuilt” city with “the rus in urbe, the parklike town.”7 (As he later clarified, in perhaps the most notorious of many immoderate statements, “when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”8 ) But, like most urban centers across the United States at the time, New York in the 1940s was still very much a densely populated industrial city. In the words of John Gunther’s bestselling chronicle Inside U.S.A (1947), it remained “the greatest manufacturing town on earth.”9 As The Naked City implied, moreover, the city’s population was predominantly constituted by manual workers who were largely crowded into tenement housing.10 Nevertheless, Moses, Rodgers, and their allies looked forward to a postindustrial city, and they implied that the manual workers who still made up the largest slice of the mid-twentieth-century urban population would soon be replaced by a rising professional middle class. As one neighborhood planning association explained, its hopes for the future were premised on the expectation that a reconstruction of the metropolis would produce a new urban

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community built around “skilled wage earners, white collar employees, and junior executives.”11 Nowhere was that vision clearer than in the frequent references made by the advocates of urban renewal to the problem of “blight.” What they meant by that term was not, as one might think in light of later urban history, abandoned buildings or economically moribund neighborhoods. They referred rather precisely to the kind of crowded and apparently vibrant working-class neighborhoods through which Garza passes on his way to the Williamsburg Bridge and that he looks across as he gazes at the Empire State Building. In the view of business and real estate interests, the tenement housing that characterized such regions of the city remained too valuable to replace, yet too decrepit to attract middle-class residents who would pay higher rents. As the president of the Urban Land Institute claimed in a 1943 article in Skyscraper Management, absent state action, such “dismal areas” thus seemed an immovable “dirty collar around central business [districts].” An official with the Federal Works Agency added in 1944 that, “next to the war,” such blighted areas were the “greatest threat which confronts the American people.”12 Although it seemed to counter the working-class populism that informed stories like The Naked City, that complaint against the evils of blight was widely shared in New York at the time. Indeed, E. B. White’s much-loved celebration of the city turns out to be a subtle apologia for the distinctive vision of urban life that Moses and Rogers presented, and it hinges on the notion that both urban decay and war were versions of a common problem that could be defeated through a coherent program of rational state action. Celebrating New York as an island of cosmopolitan tolerance that deserved to become a model for a postwar world, White also cast the city as a pattern of delicate social harmony – a “poem compress[ing] much in a small space” – that managed just barely to survive the anxiety and rancor created by its confining infrastructure. “By rights, New York should have destroyed itself long ago,” White wrote, “yet New Yorkers always seem to escape . . . [destruction] by some tiny margin.” In the postwar years, this perennial tension had risen to a new pitch: “The city had never been so uncomfortable, so crowded, so tense.” But drawing attention in particular to the goals of urban renewal, White suggested that its project of reconstruction would ease the burden and allow the city to reach its cosmopolitan potential. “The slums are giving way to the lofty housing projects – high in stature, high in purpose, low in rent,” White noted. He was referring in particular to the new Parkchester Apartments in the Bronx – a cousin to the recently completed Stuyvesant Town-Peter

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Cooper Village. A massive redevelopment project made possible by Moses’s ability to force through hundreds of acres of slum clearance, Parkchester was also a privately operated development, owned and operated by the Metropolitan Life Company and limited at the time to middle-class and white residents. In short, for White, as for Moses, the city moved toward its greatest potential as it embraced a program of reconstruction aimed at ensuring its middle-class character. In his peroration, White extended that logic, holding out the promise of urban renewal as a vision of a new global order. He described the construction of the United Nations building – another Moses-led project that required the clearing of a meat-packing, factory, and tenement district in Turtle Bay –as “the greatest housing project of them all.” In the race against global conflict that threatened the nuclear destruction of the city, White promised that the UN would “clear the slum called war.”13 For White, urban renewal was a unique accomplishment of New York and was inseparable from the city’s claim to be the global capital of a new, liberal international order. Yet, while New York was arguably on the cutting edge of urban renewal in the 1940s, the vision exemplified by Robert Moses was widely shared among civic elites across the United States at the time. Their ideas – on which business interests, politicians, urban planners, and liberal intellectuals all converged – synthesized a powerful set of premises about the nation’s changing political economy and the urban design best suited to unlock its potential. Advocacy groups such as the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a think tank established by the National Real Estate Foundation, and the American Planning and Civic Association (APCA) addressed one side of this picture. “‘Our Downtown,” the ULI asked. “Is It Growing or Dying?” Producing numerous pamphlets, studies, conferences, and editorials over the course of the decade, the organization, along with aligned interest groups, pressed state and municipal officials and ultimately the federal government for the varied policy initiatives that would be necessary to rebuild American cities. They urged local and state governments to form planning commissions, to draft transit and highway plans, to pursue slum clearance, and to pass the sweeping legislative changes that would enable a fundamental reconstruction of the urban landscape. Their signal victory came with the passage of the federal Housing Act of 1949. Its watershed Title I funded the condemnation of thousands of acres of tenement buildings – literarily clearing the ground for their replacement by middle-class housing projects – and its Title III financed the construction of public housing developments that would eventually become homes to a small portion of the city’s many displaced residents.

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Meanwhile, as policy advocates like the APCA and the ULI pressed for political action, their vision of a new metropolis earned legitimization from the era’s most prominent engineering and design intellectuals. Influential urban planners such as Harland Bartholomew – the dean of American planners – called for massive programs of slum clearance and freeway construction in the quest to make a rational city.14 Similar ideas came from the era’s theorists of architecture and urban design. José Lluis Sert, for example, the Catalan architect and colleague of Le Corbusier who founded Harvard’s School of Design, echoed the Urban Land Institute’s language of existential crisis. In the title of his historical overview of urbanism, Sert asked Can Our Cities Survive? (1942). The answer was yes, but only if the metropolis was reconstructed so that its functions (housing, commerce, leisure, manufacturing) were separated out into clearly ordered districts joined by unbroken freeways. Once the city had been rationalized, Sert claimed, the unhappy residents of the now crowded and disorderly city would be freed to live in superblock developments on wide green spaces. (Sert’s ideas, which were exported to Latin America with the assistance of the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation, ultimately found their fullest realization in the construction of the modernist utopia of Brasilia.). Similar views were expressed by the defense intellectual R. E. Lapp, whose Must We Perish? (1949) likewise saw American cities on the edge of existential peril, though in this case the threat was represented by nuclear war. Like Sert, Lapp argued that Americans could survive the terrible crisis they faced, but only if they adopted “advanced city planning, . . . molding our cities into places better adapted to living and better suited to modern . . . transportation.”15 Perhaps the most influential statement of such Promethean visions of urban reconstruction came in the work of architectural historian Siegfried Giedion, whose Time, Space, and Architecture, first published in 1941, went through four subsequent editions over the next two decades, as well as a dozen translations, to become the foundational textbook for two generations of students in architecture and urban design. “What really needs to be changed,” Giedion argued, “is the whole structure of the city.” For Giedion, the highway construction projects pursued by Moses were portents of a thrilling new metropolis. But to fully realize their potential, cities would have to clear the “blighted areas” that continued to fester “in the shadows of the skyscrapers” and replace congested urban street patterns with thoroughfares and superblocks. “Only when the whole city has adopted the new scale of its bridges and parkways,” Giedion argued, would its “civic centers stand amidst greenery” and a new “organic development” become possible.16

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So powerful was the vision of urban renewal in the 1940s that, like Moses, it ran with little interference over critics and opponents. Indeed, even though property developers, politicians, and urban planners were the prime movers in the drive for redevelopment, this agenda was supported by a wide range of political interests. In many urban centers of the industrial North, the 1940s were, as one historian has noted, “optimistic years” when rapid economic growth and the broad popular mobilization behind a successful war effort fostered the sense that great achievements in wealth and social justice would soon be possible. The era’s grand visions of slum clearance and new housing often drew support from both liberal and progressive intellectuals, from neighborhood improvement associations dominated by local businessmen, and from left political organizations spearheaded by local activists. Indeed, one reason the working-class neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn became a prime site of New York’s postwar public housing was the fact that, during the 1940s, the community’s thriving left political organizations demanded state action to meet public need.17 Thus it was that the rare dissenting voices, like the housing advocates Catherine Bauer and Charles Abrams who questioned the priorities of urban renewal and its advocates’ understanding of urban life, were confined to a small and powerless minority. Other critics of the prevailing consensus often managed to share their contemporaries’ grand vision of a new, postindustrial metropolis. The poet and philosopher Paul Goodman and his brother, the architect Percival Goodman, for instance, offered in their study Communitas (1947) a brilliant, anarchist-inspired critique of the arrogance of the era’s master planners. Their alternative, however, was no less Promethean and no less premised on the disappearance of industrial production and of the workers employed by it. They called for Manhattan to be made into a car-free and street-less bazaar dominated by markets and cultural institutions. The city’s factories, they proposed, could be moved to the periphery and run by automation.18 Similarly, the cultural critic Lewis Mumford spoke often in his long-running “Skyline” column in the New Yorker against the ugliness he saw in the autocratic plans of Robert Moses. But, in response, Mumford demanded still more radical measures to deindustrialize the city, calling at one point for 1,000 acres south of Washington Square Park – then the city’s most concentrated manufacturing district – to be razed and turned into open green space for a new United Nations headquarters. “We must think of rebuilding the interior of the city, with gardens and parks and open vistas,” Mumford declared in 1947, so that – like the suburbs springing up around it – “it, too, will be habitable.”19

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In truth, of course, American cities did not become more habitable. In the three decades following World War II, urban renewal provided the ideological justification for a dramatic, state-managed transformation of social geography. In cities across the United States, federal policy and government funding made it possible for municipal officials and local business interests to cooperate in clearing dense neighborhoods of factories and tenements and in replacing those structures with a landscape of highways, high-rise housing, and sweeping parks and plazas. The result was not the revitalization that advocates had predicted, but the metastasis of mass suburbanization and the patterns of capital flight, racial segregation, and concentrated urban poverty that observers would eventually label the “urban crisis.”20 Already, by 1955, the journalist Fred K. Vigman prophesied “the crisis of the cities.” He wrote, “The great urban centers of the industrial North have come to their dead end.”21 For most observers in the 1940s, the stark revelation of such consequences still lay in the future. But the Promethean allure of vast transformation was present and vivid throughout the cultural expression of the decade. Its hallmarks can be seen not least in the many visionary architects and planners who appear in the era’s fictional texts. Prominent among them stands the heroic Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943). But Roark had many peers. Among them is John Laskell of Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947) – “an expert in public housing” who, before the political conversion narrated by the novel, “had committed himself to the most hopeful and progressive aspects of modern life.” He is joined by Frederick, Meg Sargent’s husband in Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942), who “believed in model tenement houses, and slum clearance projects, and the Garden City of the Future.” Others in their number include Guy Haines, the ambitious architect protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950), who longs to bring cleanliness and order to “the dirty jumble of Manhattan roofs and streets that looked like a floor model of a how city should not be built,” and Scott Henderson, the unfortunate architect whose career is derailed when he is falsely imprisoned in Robert Siodmak’s film Phantom Lady (1944). “He had such plans to build model cities,” laments Scott’s lover Kansas.22 On one level, such narratives offered a perceptive and subtle rejoinder to the arrogant dreams of urban renewal, sometimes appearing to suggest that it might not be a good idea or even a plausible one to reconstruct urban life. Meg Sargent, who is locked in a battle of wills with her architect husband and his desire to coerce her into a life of middle-class banality, ends The Company She Keeps standing before a Manhattan drug store window

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and implicitly finding in its clutter a correlative to the irresolution and autonomy she seeks to preserve in her own life. As if in response to the visions of order common in the language of urban renewal, Meg prays, in her concluding thoughts, “preserve me in disunity.”23 Yet, McCarthy’s narrative, like Strangers on a Train and Phantom Lady, also expresses a yearning for deliverance from the industrial city that was widely echoed in the literature of the 1940s. In the novel that inspired the film adaptation of Phantom Lady, for instance, as in the dozens of noir thrillers he and his pulp colleagues crafted during the decade, Cornell Woolrich imagined something like the urban renewalists’ vision of “blight” raised to a metaphysical principle. “There’s an intelligence of its own hanging over this place,” Woolrich writes of New York in Deadline at Dawn (1944), a malign purpose evident especially in the way its lurking are “bunched together . . . It’s mean and bad and evil . . . the city’s got you.”24 Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) likewise attributed a malevolent agency to the physical environment of the segregated city. The tenements Lutie Johnson encounters on Harlem’s 116th Street are “ghastly places not fit for humans,” where “the good people, the bad people, the children, the dogs, and the godawful smells” are “all wrapped up together in one big package.” “It wasn’t just this street that she was afraid of and that was bad,” Lutie thinks, as she grows angry at the confinement that damages her life and that of her child. “It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can . . . until they were completely cut off from light and air.”25 Ralph Ellison, who had described the ghetto as a “ruin” in his unpublished essay from 1948, “Harlem is Nowhere,” and who lamented the “labyrinthine existence” its residents were forced to experience amid “crumbling buildings with littered areaways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-infested rooms,” resembled Petry in evoking the terms made prominent by urban renewal. At one point in his aspirations to political leadership, the narrator of Invisible Man (1952) observes “a series of cluttered backyards” and muses “that cleared of its ramshackle fences . . . it might form a pleasant park.” But, “just then a paper bag sailed from a window . . . , scattering garbage into the trees and pancaking to earth with a soggy, exhausted plop.”26 As with Meg Sargent’s concluding thoughts, the experience of Ellison’s narrator in this scene simultaneously invokes and undermines the promises of urban renewal. Here, as throughout Invisible Man, Ellison’s narrator both naively imagines a career that will bring him advancement and power in America’s political institutions and, without quite being able to surrender his hopes, also realizes how profoundly he is excluded from such possibilities. Like Lutie Johnson, who thinks of herself as an heir to Ben Franklin

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and who longs for a career that will make use of her clerical skills and artistic abilities, Ellison’s narrator seeks a path to white-collar respectability and finds it consistently denied him. In this manner, as in their depictions of the Harlem environment, Invisible Man and The Street alike registered the racial injustice at the core of urban renewal – the fact that it was executed not merely to reflect but in many respects also to intensify the geographic and social barriers of segregation. The emerging inner city landscape became, as Ellison complained “the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”27 Yet, as their language suggests, Petry and Ellison were no less drawn by the allure of urban transformation than many of their contemporaries, and the manner in which they conceived the city – as an existential prison, poised on the brink of doom or explosion – was common throughout the literature of the era. It was also as widely apparent in the film and fiction that would later be called “noir” as it was in the visions of urban planners. In Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), Sophie Majcinek observes her working-class neighborhood in industrial Chicago and thinks “the city . . . was somehow crippled . . . Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it.”28 Her sentiment is not vastly different from the one in Elizabeth Bishop’s New York poems, such as “The Man-Moth” or “Varick Street” (1947), where Bishop paints a bleak picture of confinement in the industrial city: “At night the factories/ struggle awake,/ wretched uneasy buildings/ veined with pipes/ attempt their work . . . Our bed/shrinks from the soot/ and hapless odors/hold us close.” Nor is it unlike the setting Arthur Miller envisioned for Death of a Salesman (1949), where the “towering, angular shapes” created by a “a solid vault of apartment houses” establishes the “reality” crushing “the air of dream” that Willy Loman and his son Biff associate with “grass and trees and the horizon.”29 Even less apparently grim visions of the metropolis often told a similar story. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), for example, Betty Smith’s widely beloved novel of immigrant Brooklyn, the working-class city is depicted as a primitive other world – a realm of “dream stuff” characterized by erotic passion, violent struggle, and sexual cruelty. Smith’s narrative tells of the way protagonist Francie Nolan calls on her remarkable gifts of intelligence and discipline both to draw on the energy of this world and to rise beyond it, so that she may begin her career as a white-collar professional in Manhattan. In the process, Frankie is imagined as the emblem of the rus-in-urbe celebrated by the likes of Robert Moses – herself the yearning tree that “grew out of the cement” and “struggled to reach the sky.” Appropriately, as Francie departs industrial Brooklyn for an office career, Smith imagines

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the city transformed and rationalized around her protagonist, its primitive erotic cruelty replaced by intelligent design. “In the years to come, there would be no old neighborhood to come back to,” Francie realizes. “After the war, the city was going to tear down the tenements and the ugly school where a woman principal used to whip little boys, and build a model housing project on the site.”30 Such visions of the city reborn drew from a long tradition of anti-urban imagery, but as Smith’s narrative suggests, they were given particular force by the historical context of the 1940s and by the Promethean energies that the pursuit of urban renewal had put in motion. Hence the manner in which Alfred Kazin, in the passage quoted as this chapter’s epigraph, turned the account of the metropolis he shared with his contemporaries into a portent of apocalypse. Kazin’s classic memoir A Walker in the City (1951) is a kind of complement and countertext to both Death of a Salesman and Invisible Man, as it is to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. For the memoir tells of how Kazin rose on the basis of his intelligence and literary imagination beyond the limits of tenement Brownsville to claim a place in the heart of New York, and it makes his path to prestige and white-collar respectability representative of the assimilation of American Jews nationally. The Brownsville that Kazin recalls is much like the city seen by E. B. White, just as it resembles the city seen by Ellison and Petry and Betty Smith – a tenement district brimming over with stymied desires that promise to destroy or transform it. It is not surprising to learn, then, that Kazin wrote A Walker in the City while sitting on the edge of the titanic destruction and reconstruction brought about by urban renewal. Kazin composed his memoir in the later 1940s while living in a studio in Brooklyn Heights, only a few blocks from Robert Moses’s Brooklyn Civic Center project. Reportedly the single largest urban renewal project of the era, Moses’s Civic Center, with its vision of gleaming towers and open plazas, required the demolition of some 160 acres of tenements and factories and the displacement of thousands of industrial jobs. “Urban removal and burial are everywhere,” Kazin later recalled thinking at the time. “What has not been torn down is waiting to be torn down.” Witnessing that destruction, Kazin recalled, made him powerfully aware of a tension quite similar to that implicit in urban renewal’s language of “blight.” He became powerfully attuned to the gulf between “the glowing halls of power” in midtown Manhattan, where “New York was now rich in aluminum and steel buildings,” and what he called simply “old New York”: a world of “factory buildings . . . , with their battered fronts and broken windows . . . the dirt-green scum left behind

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by . . . industrial rivers . . . , the bottom deposit of commerce that began here and moved away . . . [l]ike the tenements and clotheslines.”31 Unsurprisingly then, like Smith, Kazin imagined his own tale of upward mobility as inseparable from a story in which New York rose above its industrial past to enter a new, pastoral world, much like the rus-in-urbe conceived by Moses and his allies. In the concluding passage of Walker, an adolescent Kazin climbs with an unnamed lover to the heights of Brooklyn’s Highland Park – rising “past the factories, [and] the freight yards” – and stares off to his destiny in Manhattan. “The city was no longer real; only a view from a distance . . . But on a summer night, when we lay in the grass below, the smell of the earth and the lights from the distant city made a single background to my desire.”32 Ironically, the prophetic vision that closes A Walker in the City is not unlike the final tragic view seen by Louis Garza in The Naked City. Like Garza, Kazin casts his gaze beyond a confining neighborhood of factories and tenements to the towers of midtown Manhattan. The similarity may reveal how much, for all its tabloid populism, The Naked City, too fell within the orbit of urban renewal. Indeed, as in the works of Kazin or Ellison or E. B. White, the film implicitly linked a story of urban transformation to a vision of class elevation. The police force depicted by the film joins wise old Lieutenant Muldoon, who lives alone in a tenement walk-up, to the energetic young detective Jimmy Halloran, who lives with his wife and young son in a semidetached home in the outer boroughs, and their relations suggest a narrative of apprenticeship and historical transition. The future belongs to rising young professional cops like Halloran. It is Halloran and Muldoon’s common antagonist, the criminal Garza, who turns out to belong to the world of working-class vice and leisure that the city is implicitly leaving behind. In Garza’s confrontation with the police, we thus are permitted to see two vantages on urban geography at a pivotal moment in the city’s history – both the influence of the workingclass populism of the cultural front and the emergence of the new vision of urban renewal that would do much to displace it. Appropriately, in the climax of The Naked City, Garza is shown first against the industrial landscape of Brooklyn. Then, glimpsing the tennis courts below him, he casts his eye on an image of the middle-class leisure that the leaders of urban renewal hope to bring to the city. In his final moments, he stares out at the Empire State Building, the grandest emblem of the downtown business interests that drove the era’s vast programs of urban reconstruction. He is looking arguably not only at the elevation he desires but also at the power that dwarfs and will defeat him. He appears to understand in his

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final moments that there is little place for men like him in the world being created by urban renewal. NOTES 1 Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951; repr. Orlando: Harcourt, 1979), 69. 2 The Naked City, dir. Jules Dassin, Hellinger Productions, 1948. 3 See Sumiko Higashi, “The American Origins of Film Noir: Realism in Urban Art and The Naked City,” in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 353–80; and Christopher P. Wilson, Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57–92. 4 E. B. White, Here Is New York (1949; repr. New York: The Little Bookroom, 1999), 52, 33. 5 Qtd. in Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 226. See Fogelson, Downtown, passim; Robert A. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Jon C. Teaford, Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 6 Cleveland Rodgers, Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1952), xxvi. See, in addition to the sources in note 5: M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 203–67; Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 Robert Moses, Working for the People: Promise and Performance in Public Service (New York: Harper & Bros, 1956), 133. 8 Moses, qtd. in Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1974), 849. 9 John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (1947; repr. New York: Harper & Bros., 1951), 578. 10 Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis: The Changing Distribution of People and Jobs within the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 26; Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 7–20. 11 Chelsea Association for Planning and Action, 1939, as qtd. in Schwartz, The New York Approach, 72. 12 Charles T. Stewart, in Skyscraper Management (1943), qtd. in Fogelson, Downtown, 319; W. E. Reynolds of the Federal Works Agency, qtd. in ibid., 348. 13 White, Here Is New York, 29, 32, 45, 50–1, 55.

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14 Joseph Heathcott, “‘The Whole City Is Our Laboratory’: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge,” Journal of Planning History 4.4 (2005), 322–55. 15 R. E. Lapp, Must We Perish? (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Press, 1949), 9, 8. 16 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 285. 17 See, Wendell. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51–146; the phrase “optimistic years” is Pritchett’s, p. 51 and passim. 18 Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 19 Lewis Mumford, From the Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 230. 20 See, for example, Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 21 Fred K. Vigman, The Crisis of the Cities (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1955), 102, 142. 22 Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947; repr. New York: New York Review of Books Press, 2002), 33, 27; Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1942; repr. New York: Harcourt, 1970), 279; Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950; repr. New York: Norton, 2002), 197. 23 McCarthy, The Company She Keeps, 304. 24 Cornell Woolrich [as William Irish], Deadline at Dawn (1944; repr. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1946), 39. See David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, “Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 57–95. 25 Ann Petry, The Street (1946; repr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 206. 26 Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” Shadow and Act (1964; repr. New York: Vintage, 1995), 295–96; Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; repr. New York: Vintage, 1995), 378. 27 Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” 296. 28 Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949; repr. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 96; see Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 66–90. 29 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949; repr. London: Penguin, 2000), 7. 30 Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943; repr. New York: HarperPerennial, 2001), 477, 6, 487. 31 Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 210, 2111, 152, 155. 32 Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951; repr. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1979), 175.

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Noir and the Ebb of Radical Hope Alan Wald

Unfinished Business The decade of the 1940s, seething with social contradictions and eruptions of class conflict, was critical for shaping our own world of eviscerated trade unions, liberal antagonism toward the Far Left, betrayed struggles of Black Liberation, and disenchantment with utopian visions. Fear and dread stalked what now feels like the cinematic dreamscape of its culture and politics, which may explain why a 2012 study by Richard Lingeman, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War, took its title from one of the darker schools of filmmaking. What one intuits about the 1940s as a whole is a drift toward uncertainty and incompleteness, an awareness that older beliefs were being tested by blows that were both long simmering and unexpectedly sudden. One explanation for the narrative ambiguities of the postwar mood is the catastrophic breakup of the coalition of New Deal liberals and the left through an explosive plot twist that few saw coming. What originally gave hope for the endurance of such a coalition was a widespread belief, as the war ended, that there remained much unfinished “old work” growing out of the trajectory set in the early 1930s. At that time, following the shock of the 1929 stock market crash, there was a national political shift away from the market capitalism of the 1920s. With the beginning of the Depression came a movement of elites toward New Deal state intervention, joined by a collectivist reining in and regulating of markets. Concurrently, radicals, working people, and intellectuals began to promote mass organizations inflected by varieties of socialism. In 1935, the Communist International (Comintern) announced “The People’s Front against Fascism and War,” known in the United States as the Popular Front. (Note: When capitalized, the words “Communist,” “Communism,” and other variants refer to the pro-Soviet movement; when not, to other varieties of anti-Stalin or independent communism.) From that 262

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moment until World War II, with the exception of the eighteen months of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, much of the political left melded into liberalism and ascended to the peak of its institutional influence in government agencies, the unions, and the arts. The majority of the public seemed to favor a “moral economy”1 over laissez-faire capitalism, and liberals and the left were provisionally united in opposition to fascism above all else. As a consequence, the old term “Progressive” was redefined as a portmanteau word blending Communists and left liberals (and an occasional conservative) into a mixture characterized by sympathy for the Comintern’s foreign policy, a live-and-let-live attitude toward the Soviet Union’s persecution of alleged traitors (as in the Moscow Purge Trials), support for the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), idealization of the Roosevelt administration, and a populist cultural sensibility. For intellectuals and cultural workers, the Communist-led League of American Writers (1935–42) and its biannual meeting as the American Writers Congress stood for an alliance that comprised a “Who’s Who” of famous and up-andcoming authors.2 The organization experienced some confusing, Moscowinstigated policy switches between 1939 and 1941, and then was put aside altogether following the entrance of the Soviet Union into World War II as an ally of the United States. After the war, partly as the result of residual distrust of the pro-Communists, the former coalition was never fully reassembled to resume the common work begun in the 1930s; after 1946, it was moribund. Yet, elements of the New Deal’s social safety net survive even in compromised form until today, having received a boost during the 1960s radicalization; it was only in the 1970s that neoliberalism (deregulation, privatization) was explicitly on the upswing. The map from what happened in the 1940s to where we are in the twenty-first century may not yet be fully drawn, but there is widespread agreement among historians of all types that some fundamental chord was struck in the postwar era that has sounded its endless modulations down through the succeeding years. Like any chord, the power and clarity are most evident at the beginning, in the events leading to the devastating split between liberals and the left that never fully healed. Thus historically minded scholars are returning to the 1940s with trowels and shovels for an archaeological dig to help excavate a more accurate version of what may illuminate the underpinning of persistent features of our economy, politics, and culture.3 Five elements are most striking when exploring the dilemma of this coalition of writers and intellectuals as it entered the period after 1946: (1) the advent, unpredicted, of a poorly understood and not fully

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appreciated new phase in the march of capitalist exploitation across the world in the form of Keynesian economic growth and postwar imperialism; (2) a major interruption in the progress of the organized working class caused by a turn away from social unionism toward the consolidation of bureaucratized business unionism; (3) a dangerous polarization in world politics in which rightward-moving liberal intellectuals gave legitimacy to a new US empire by collaborating with conservatives in the rhetorical construction of the “totalitarian” enemy of communism; (4) a counterpart of this foreign policy in the domestic sphere to produce a culture motivated by panic and scapegoating rooted in the suspicion that one’s neighbor, teacher, or local civil rights activist might be a subversive Communist; and (5) the persistence of sickening racial violence even after apparent political progress evidenced by the civil rights work of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (1941–6) and the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (1946–7). Beyond these five elements, one can add that, despite palpable improvements due to the post–World War II “boom,” there persisted extraordinary social inequality. Some parts of the population experienced greater hope and security, especially indicated by the move of whites into suburbs. Yet people of color and other sections of the population continued to struggle for economic survival, experiencing a dread that the bottom could fall out from one’s life at any time due to a family illness, layoff, or any other unexpected turn. The upshot of such a catastrophe might well be to push one into outlaw status – petty crime, the informal economy, escape through drugs, or some desperate act. This chapter argues that what was possibly the most striking event in cinema and fiction of these years – the crystallization of a subculture of “noir” after the war – can be read as expressing the sum of this emotional story, one that would shadow popular art in the United States ever afterward as a reminder of the lasting legacy of the 1940s.

Sinister Currents The ambience of 1945–9 is variously characterized in the titles of books, essays, and even songs as the “Age of Anxiety,” “Age of Doubt,” “Postwar Blues,” “Affluence and Anxiety,” “A Troubled Feast,” and “Triumphalist Despair.” Such an atmosphere grew out of the general subsoil of emotion generated by a particular sequence in the social reality of those years. The high drama of the opening installment came with the postwar strike wave. From the spring of 1945 until the spring of 1947, there were two years of continual strikes in almost every industry, including Hollywood. In several cities, these escalated into general strikes, so that Art Preis, in his

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classic history Labor’s Giant Step, designated this “American Labor’s Greatest Upsurge.”4 After the stifling years of World War II, when the US government had exerted control through the “No Strike Pledge” and wage controls, the working class was again evolving as a class for itself, mindful of the significance of its struggle. Yet this extraordinary upsurge was a prelude to a swift and powerful reaction. The government and its business allies, frightened already by the victory of the Labour Party in Britain in 1945 and seeking to domestically exploit the new Cold War threat, first instituted the Taft-Harley Act in 1947. Then, as a tectonic conservative shift got underway, the government collaborated with business through the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities to rid the unions of left militants. The culmination was the conviction of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act in 1948 and the CIO’s purge of alleged Communist-led unions in 1949. The subculture of noir captures this politically repressive atmosphere of sinister currents swirling under the surface of life. Noir denotes a mood that seems doomed, malevolent, disturbing, and dark – a gathering of threatening clouds. Such clouds were indeed present in the United States after the war, soon morphing into a violent storm aimed at a literary, cultural, and political variety of “ethnic cleansing” of the Far Left, with broad implications for all those who dreamed of carrying on the unfinished work of the 1930s. From 1946 on, there was an increasing expulsion by force of Marxists from the trade unions, the mass culture industry, the educational system, and elsewhere. The method entailed the political purging of anyone who would not sign loyalty oaths; blacklisting from employment of those suspected of subversion; imprisonment by the state of US refuseniks who wouldn’t name names; forced exile (to Mexico, Ghana, and western Europe) of those who wanted to continue their professions; and the adoption of a “converso” kind of semi-underground existence, like the Marranos of the Spanish Inquisition, for all the rest. Accompanying the depopulation of these militants from the US public sphere was an eradication of accurate and detailed information about the “cleansed” from scholarly history, popular history, and collective memory itself that ensued for decades, homogenizing what had once been a mixed politico-cultural community. Although pockets of ideological resistance remained, some of this resistance worsened matters by underplaying Soviet repression and the reach of Stalin’s espionage apparatus. Nonetheless, the prevailing trend was mostly the demonization, trivialization, and obliteration of left culture, thought, and organizations, carried out relentlessly by scholars who routinely smoothed over the terrain of memory to

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create a narrative in which the institutionalized repression of dissent was mainly due to blunders caused by the excessive zeal of reactionaries. As a result, those educated during and after the 1950s inherited a deep chasm between reality and representation when it came to grasping the oncedynamic role of the Old Left in culture and political life and the perhaps permanent debilitation of the trade union movement as a force for social progress. Even today, much is missing for those who wish to look back to see emerging patterns, although conservatives are not the only ones who covered up the crime scene. Excepting the dwindling number of Progressives, liberals of various types, including former anti-Stalinist Marxists, initiated a sorry record of these years by collaborating in the state-organized assault on the left. After the rupture of the wartime coalition, aggressive anticapitalism faded from the program of liberals and the now-prestigious unaffiliated radical journal Partisan Review. Many who were frightened, repentant, and disillusioned went on to collude in the attempted “memoricide” that guaranteed the 1940s depopulation and decontamination of the public sphere. A bipartisan team effort was needed to construct the ideological rationale for the purge that hoped to secure the silence of the Far Left tradition. In the cultural realm, critics and reviewers stripped noir of its obvious political significance by “disappearing” writers and directors known for investigating the true face of capitalist democracy in their art. The recycling of wartime hatred of the Nazis into an abhorrence of communism was carried out in vulgar fashion by popular books such as Herbert Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,” Counterspy (1952) and with a liberal argument in Sidney Hook’s Heresy, Yes, Conspiracy, No! (1953). Softer and more subtle versions, yet ones that refused to defy the fundamental premises and framework of the purge, could be found in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949) and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950). Only a handful of radical writers (Sidney Lens, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois) and Marxist journals (Science & Society, Monthly Review, American Socialist) struggled in a militant fashion to complete the unfinished business of the early 1940s. For intellectuals and cultural workers on the left in the 1940s, the challenges to the moral credibility of liberal capitalism posed by domestic and colonial racism were also vital in efforts to expose the hypocrisy of the new version of “totalitarianism” under construction.5 This successful ideological gambit was the boundless unifying and rallying propaganda ploy of western capitalism, exploiting and extrapolating horrific features of Stalin’s

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rule to justify preparation for World War III. The classic accounts of the postwar rupture of liberals and the left – William O’Neill’s A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the Intellectuals (1982) and Richard Pells’s The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals and Politics in the 1940s and 1950s (1985) – appropriately cite features in the expanding fissures of the wartime coalition, such as the formation of the anticommunist Americans for Democratic Action (1947), the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace (1948), and the Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia (1948). But these accounts barely mention the downplaying of racism and anticolonialism by liberals in the anti-totalitarian camp, and the more laudable record of Communists and progressives on the issue of race. To be sure, liberals and the government made postwar concessions in an effort to enlist African Americans and other people of color as assets to the western side. There were international tours of Black jazz musicians, the prominence accorded Ralph Bunche, the desegregation of the army to fight the Korean “police action,” and increased media visibility. In the 1950s the United States tried to distance itself from its being a secret sharer in colonialism by taking a critical distance apropos the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and the Suez Canal invasion by Great Britain, France, and Israel (1956). But certain Black radicals insisted that segregation and colonialism were forms of totalitarianism too. This opinion was held by political figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, and Paul Robeson, who seemed to believe that their embrace of the USSR would put them in a stronger position to insist that Communist parties and states remained accountable to professed anticolonial commitments. But this view was also held by the Trotskyist C. L. R. James and a group of Black novelists of the noir disposition who had moved away from Stalinism in the 1940s, including Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, William Gardner Smith, and Willard Motley. To reinvestigate their work is to participate in the project of reclaiming the legacy of Black Marxism in the 1940s, a prime example of how African American literary culture reframes pivotal events, nationally and internationally, against the grain of obfuscating official representations. Luckily, in the course of the past twenty years or more, there has arisen a swelling quantity of outstanding scholarship on the structures of feeling underpinning the production of noir in the 1940s. A major topic has been the omnipresence of the “femme fatale” character in noir as a condensation of masculine fears about the new status gained by independent women in the World War II years.6 With the work of Ellen Schrecker, especially Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), the breadth of

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repression began to be acknowledged, although this was not without a neoconservative backlash. There is also abundant scholarship on the film industry’s blacklist of celebrated individuals, especially the “Hollywood Ten,” although 300 blacklistees would be a more accurate number.7 And there has been new research exploring the consolidation of the alliance of big business and big religion with the political right, beyond simply the brawling swagger of “McCarthyism.” Originally, this coalition aimed to undermine the New Deal before and after the war, but later it served as the heart of the Reagan Revolution.8 Such investigation certainly has helped limn the structures of feeling and some of the economic underpinning that produced noir.9 Nonetheless, even though many elements have been dissected in detail, the enormity of the “cleansing” has yet to be processed.

An Elusive Genre “Noir,” the French word meaning “black” or “dark,” is an elusive US film genre that crystallized in the mid-1940s, exemplified by works such as Murder, My Sweet (1944; based on the 1940 novel by Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely); The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and Force of Evil (1948). The same term is applied to select writers of detective and pulp fiction, including Jim Thompson, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Chester Himes. Variants of noir were later applied to broader culture manifestations, as in “nourish” (an ominous atmosphere, dark clothing) and “neo-noir” (used mainly for contemporary films that parody or reference noir features, such as Taxi Driver [1976]). To be sure, the noir cultural nebula is far from homogeneous; there are a plurality of streams that feed into its mid-1940s moment and that linger on as Cold War residua, perennially resurrected under new conditions. The French coinage of the term “noir” came just before the end of the war, and in the United States, the word was not widely used until the 1980s. Peering through noir’s smoky filter, we can debate whether or not we are talking about an authentic genre, a tradition, a school, a point of view, a vision, or just a style, one that seems radically modern even sixty-five years later. This could be because its configurations of plot and visual staging, its disobedient women and cynical men, convey the failure of earlier social traditions and the instability of formerly stable political frontiers. Even specifically in film, noir is an amorphous entity, although we seem to know it when we see it. A visual definition of noir might characterize it as a shadowy, seedy, low-budget B-movie about crime, often set at night.

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In writing, the language of noir is hardboiled, and the sentences are plain and declarative. The authors tend to be children of Ernest Hemingway who write in a terse manner just to tell the facts. It is not the refinement but the force and fascination of the narrative that pull the reader in, usually into an existential nightmare about entrapped people. The technical achievement is found less in plot than in atmosphere, smog-like and miasmic, reverberating with intrigue and dread. Frequently the protagonists of fiction and film are economically adrift, trying to escape punishment for crimes they know nothing about, but that are often the upshot of decadent corruption on the part of the upper classes. They are frequently antiheroes of a type associated with existentialist classics by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, indecisive and drifting through lives marked by angst and alienation. It is fair to say that noir was a crystallization of the anxieties of the age that came right in the middle of what African American Marxist writer Richard Wright deemed “that most fateful of all the world’s centuries.”10 To revisit noir as the cultural symptom of the end of the wartime coalition – the decline of New Deal Liberalism at odds with the rise of Cold War red-baiting – is to promote the insurrection of subjugated knowledge as a divining rod for subterranean memories.11 One obvious model for probing the cultural dimension of 1940s noir is Frankfurt School film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, author of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (1947). Kracauer drew on ostensibly apolitical expressionist cinema as a way of understanding the social mindset of the German people in their transition from the Weimar to the Nazi periods. Accordingly, one might probe how the anxieties of noir express social developments of the 1940s United States and why the culture through which they were articulated speaks to us today. The contemporary consumer of 1940s film and literature encounters scene after scene of life on the streets marked by lawlessness and justified anti-authoritarianism, but with no way out. Why does this seem so familiar after such a long spell? Part of the answer lies in the sequence of events of the late 1940s that served to criminalize unionists, leftists, and all who shared their outlook; this trauma created a permanent strain of outsider sensibility of apprehension and cynicism articulated by Marxist cultural workers at the time and then later on transformed, co-opted, and redeployed. As always, there is an earlier backstory that assisted the process. Poor, working-class people had always been criminalized to some extent, as they are today, and during World War II, radicals who defied the no strike pledge were deemed not only criminal but also traitorous, with the Smith Act first used in 1941 against Teamsters and US Trotskyists in the “Minneapolis

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Sedition Trial.” If these memories were not enough, the Dionysian revels we associate with V-J Day (Victory over Japan, August 15, 1945) were pushed aside by a heaviness hanging in the air due to a sense of dread – anxiety about the implications of the A-bomb and emerging details about the Holocaust, not to mention fifty-five million killed in Europe and East Asia. Next, as the strike wave was met by state repression using the legal system as its weapon, and militants were dubbed disloyal Communist poodles of Stalin, radical labor activists and cultural workers began to feel that they were outside the law – that they were fugitives and criminals who had crossed some line, leaving them hunted, isolated, sinking into the quicksand of history. Many film writers and directors in the 1940s were affiliated with the left, and so it should come as no surprise that they began to introduce narratives featuring sympathetic protagonists who had fallen into a fugitive/outlaw state of affairs. The protagonists in film noir, such as Charley Davis in Body and Soul (1947), who struggles with temptation, were quite dissimilar from the 1930s film gangster, such as Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1931), who went down with a sort of tragic dignity, paying the price for his wrongdoings. An outstanding study by film scholar James Broe, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood (2009) makes an evidence-based critique possible. Broe identifies 441 crime films released between 1945 and 1950, of which 200 have a “dominant formation” featuring a fugitive outsider for whom the viewer feels compassion and empathy.12 Taking this a bit further, he argues that a structure of feeling was created in film (and I would add fiction), emerging especially from the two years of continuous strikes. This structure communicated a war between an impulse for change and the repression of that impulse, as evoked by noir’s sympathetic central characters who find themselves outside the law and consequently doomed. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the left or Communist role in creating all instances of this pattern, just as there should not be a claim that this genre (or any other) is inherently political. Some critics have referred to noir as “socialism in one genre,” which is overdoing it.13 As Broe observes, the politics had to be muted or indirectly expressed because the film industry was an example of what a Freudian might call a “compromise formation”; that is, the conservative owners pushed in one direction and the radical artist-producers in the other.14 Nevertheless, a physical presence of the left in noir was substantial, and it came from at least three identifiable sources: 1. Many authors of the scripts and of the novels on which such scripts were sometimes based came from the Communist left; examples

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include Albert Maltz, A. I. Bezzerides, Daniel Mainwaring, and Dashiell Hammett. 2. Directors of films were often either US pro-Communists from the New York radical theater or European refugees who identified with the European antifascist left; famous directors include Abraham Polonsky, Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, Nicholas Ray, and Joseph Losey. 3. Actors and actresses were also from Communist or at least Popular Front backgrounds; notables are John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, James Cagney, Sterling Hayden, Edward G. Robinson, and Shelley Winter. All of these individuals, and hundreds in Hollywood like them, were strong partisans of the unions, feared government action to single out and persecute leftists, and were resistant to the rapidly growing belligerent mood against the USSR, their recent ally against fascism. Studio owners were wary of films with positive radical characters and explicit radical sentiments, yet marketing pressures forced the Hollywood moguls to allow stories that exhibited noir anxieties because audiences demanded them. The ordeals of ordinary people who had fallen outside the law was the dramatic foundation of noir film sensibility, but this plotline intersected with at least two other grand narratives of the time – racism and liberal complicity in the reigning anti-totalitarian ideology – both of which were used as political cudgels to isolate Far Left alternatives. At first glance, the genre of noir may appear to be a white male version of history if there ever was one, but a closer look complicates that view. The “whiteness” of the genre derives from the belief of studio owners that the paying film audience was white and would only tolerate white actors, especially in the southern region. Yet even with such limitations in play, the era of noir in Hollywood overlapped with the moment of the social problem film, which dealt mainly with race; Pinky (1949) and Intruder in the Dust (1949) are perhaps the best known. The leftist commitment to both noir and the social problem film meant a considerable overlap in the producers and writers of these two genres, which led to a cross-fertilization in their themes as well (the instances of pro-Communists Elia Kazan and Ben Maddow are two examples). The result was a pattern of crucial scenes and episodes in noir films occurring in geographical locations associated with people of color – interracial boxing rings and gyms, jazz clubs, Chinatown, and Mexico. Moreover, the darkness of noir settings made the outlaw characters appear dark-skinned,

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even Black, and incidents of frame-ups, crime-fueling poverty, and police brutality drew on Black experience. What is critical is that the US racial nightmare haunted the imaginations of left-wing writers and directors, who had a long record of support for the Scottsboro Boys, the Hollywood Anti-Fascist League, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, the organizing of Filipino cannery workers, and more. Of course, during the war itself, the Communist Party and liberals had tolerated racial segregation in the army, the Japanese American internment, and the Comintern policy of abandoning colonies to their imperial masters. But the postwar moment of noir returned to a demand for domestic racial justice in tandem with internationalist anti-imperialism. At that time, the chief marker of hypocrisy within the antifascist World War II effort, as it had also been for World War I’s “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy,” was what was called, in Frank Capra’s 1944 patriotic documentary, The Negro Soldier. African Americans were called on to defend a country that denied them equal rights, and the postwar neglect of their demands corresponded to the crushed hopes of the millions of soldiers of color recruited from western colonies to defend the European empires that subjugated them.

A Visionary Insurrectionist One notable African American author achieved a Marxist noir attendance in both fiction and film, with his art voicing suggestive crosscurrents of the time. Willard Francis Motley lived a short life: born in Chicago in 1909, he died an obscure death in 1965 during his long Cold War selfexile in Mexico. A middle-class, publicly closeted African American gay man, Motley was raised in an all-white neighborhood and debuted as a rising literary celebrity in 1947 with the publication of Knock on Any Door. The origins of the book are a decade earlier. In 1939, lured to the city’s Maxwell Street slum area as part of a private mutiny against his middleclass upbringing, Motley decided to author an art novel about the making of adolescent criminals by bullying social institutions. In 1943, after developing warm relationships with several would-be writers around the nearby Hull House and the Federal Writers Project, Motley finalized a first draft of 2,000 pages called “Leave without Illusions.” Throughout the next four years the manuscript was radically edited, retitled, and censored by potential publishers. The end product was a crime thriller and courtroom drama retitled Knock on Any Door. It features Nick Romano, a young, gorgeous, magnetic Italian gangster and presumably heterosexual hustler of older gay men, who supplied American culture with the iconic phrase, “Live fast, die

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young, and have a good-looking corpse.”15 A secondary character, Tommy, is strategically placed to suggest certain Marxist themes, but Romano dominates throughout. An iconic antihero, flawed and hence more fascinating than traditional protagonists, Romano is a mixture of good impulses and poor decisions, a bad boy who lets down those who love him but in a way that attracts the sympathy of readers. Moral lines are blurred in scenes set in dark alleys and bleak institutions, as the self-destructive behavior of Romano seems a logical response to the corruption all around him. Motley’s literary style was not typical of hardboiled noir’s pared-down narrative that resonated understatement, but his themes were archetypal. Along with Wright, Himes, and Petry, Motley depicts sympatico protagonists outside the law. In fact, Knock on Any Door is a paradigm of what might be termed “Marxist Noir.” It is at a deeper, if less obvious, level a work about the parallel lives of two reform school inmates, Nick and Tommy, bonded in what is ostensibly a bromance. Fugitives from the injustice of the capitalist system, they become by turns a petty criminal and a wildcat striker. The novel closes with Nick going to the electric chair and Tommy being beaten brutally by strikebreakers. After two years of excellent sales, the book’s popular status was boosted even more in 1949 by former Communist Nicholas Ray’s winning if domesticated noir film adaptation featuring Humphrey Bogart as Andrew Morton, Nick’s principled defense attorney. Even after all the excision and bowdlerizing, the existence of several homosexual characters and themes, as well as radical political ideas, remained obvious in the novel, but went almost entirely unnoticed in appraisals at the time and even in the initial scholarly publications after his death. Motley did not aim to entirely closet his homosexual or Marxist identities, but to insert promptings about them in a multilayered metanarrative. Knock on Any Door encompasses autobiographical material, events adapted from news reportage, and fictional episodes fully imagined. What followed its publication was a widespread misconception of Motley’s sexual orientation and politics, partly stemming from his effort to engineer his public face. He overstated his unwillingness to be labeled a “Negro author” by declining to have his photograph printed anywhere on his first book. The consequent publicity boomeranged, ending up mostly focusing on his color. Although Motley was a radical very much engrossed in Black culture and history, partly due to his uncle Archibald Motley, a painter significantly shaped by the Harlem Renaissance, at this point he became associated with a “nonracial” stance that allowed critics to erroneously place him nearer to liberalism than to the Far Left. In fact, Motley’s support for

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the Progressive Party was undeniable, which he did not hold responsible for the catastrophic breakup of the fragile coalition of liberals and the left. Perhaps his idiosyncrasies were due to his coming to socialism a bit tardily, after the Great Depression and the peak of the Popular Front, and in his own way, through the conscientious objector status he acquired after the war began. Stimulated to adopt Marxism by his novelist friend Alexander Saxton (a Communist Party member from 1941 to 1959, and later an eminent historian), Motley’s zeal for social revolution accelerated to a high pitch in the early 1940s and was sustained throughout the decade. During this time Motley disavowed pacifism, liberalism, and capitalism to openly align with Communists by studying Marxism at the Communistled Workers School, becoming a conspicuous local representative for the Progressive Party, backing the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace and the National Non-Partisan Committee to Defend the Rights of the Twelve Communist Party Leaders Indicted under the Smith Act. Refusing to oblige the growing crowd of anticommunist liberals, he approximated a one-man united front on the left, joining the Socialist Workers Party-led defense campaigns on behalf of James Hickman (a Black tenant accused of shooting his Black landlord) and James Kutcher (a Trotskyist veteran dismissed from a government job). Motley is most fittingly deemed a visionary insurrectionist rather than a rigid ideologue, a nonconforming left-wing outsider, a radical artist who wrote to rouse the world from its illusions about itself. Noir fiction comes in that ill-defined interregnum between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement. African American authors of the 1940s and 1950s are mainly known for introducing to literature Black characters of remarkably new and psychological depth, as one can find in The Lonely Crusade (1947), The Outsider (1952), and The Narrows (1953). Their protagonists, of course, are always doomed, about as star-crossed from the get-go as one could get, usually assisted by their own, very human weaknesses and poor choices. A reader is immediately struck by the searing honesty of these novelists’ sentences, but the reality is that political and sexual censorship in both fiction and film often meant that left writers were covertly writing about one subject while pretending to write about another. In the furtive architecture of Motley’s own four volumes of fiction, many passages begin in autobiographical episodes, but the author nonetheless keeps numerous secrets, mostly about his communism, illegitimate birth, and homosexuality. Motley’s subsequent 1952 work, We Fished All Night, a behemoth of a novel with a cryptic title, continues his transformation of noir into a new

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form of committed literature. In this book with a mission, Motley takes the Far Left interpretation of “The Negro Soldier” leitmotif and applies it to all working-class veterans of World War II. His three white protagonists fight to preserve the very society that crushes them at home while exploiting them as canon fodder abroad. At the same time, the framework of the novel involves the postwar split between liberals of the Democratic Party and Progressives (and Communists) of the Progressive Party, as the two movements compete in the midst of a fierce strike in postwar Chicago. On the one hand, the three protagonists share the lost, drifting, outsider, and doomed status of the classic noir protagonist. Yet their collective status as alienated, borderline sociopathic misfits is linked to the fundamental features of a social order that ruthlessly uses them in peacetime as well as war. The various pieces of the puzzle that might suggest a solution are spread out along a hardboiled expressionist landscape of urban chaos, fueled by the hidden machinations of a shadowy elite.

Writers and Intellectuals in Crisis What attracts contemporary scholars to noir is its twofold character, doubled for the reason that history changes our relationship to art. Today, we can view, read, and study noir as an informative chronicle of repressed national memory realized through artistic techniques that vacuumed up much of the psychological detritus swirling in the postwar air. The ambience of paranoia reveals how the stage was set for Korea, the destruction of much of the New Deal legacy, the establishment of a “consumer’s republic,”16 and the isolation of the left as it was abandoned by one-time liberal allies. We learn that a culture of foreboding apprehension works wonderfully for those in power, becoming a discursive field ripe for manipulation. At the time, however, for radicals working in the 1940s culture industry, noir was the means by which they carried out their duty to engage in the ruthless criticism of the existing order. They were in a fighting mood, and noir was their way of showing the world, through their imaginative re-creations, the elemental experience of living in capitalist democracy. In time, some versions of noir would come to exhibit a reconciliation with the social system (On the Waterfront [1950] is a prime example), but the late 1940s cohort was telling us why we struggle and must continue to struggle even when certain promises are broken. In films that several onetime Communist cultural workers produced just a few years later, they also showed us what was coming in the 1960s: Nicholas Ray outlined the burgeoning youth and gay rebellion in Rebel without a Cause (1955); Michael

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Wilson showed the rise of Third World women in Salt of the Earth (1954); and Abraham Polonsky foretold the new expression of Black Power in Odds against Tomorrow (1959), the last of the classic noirs. Such themes can also be found in a vast array of fiction from the period. This includes not only writers explicitly associated with noir (Vera Caspary, Kenneth Fearing, Ed Lacy, Robert Finnegan) but also others emerging from the left and variously resistant to the post–World War II crisis (Nelson Algren, Paul Bowles, Norman Mailer, and Carson McCullers). Willard Motley’s work, in which a Marxist imagination brings to the contemporary reader the shape of so many things unknown, is a reminder that sometimes in the midst of cultural chaos and confusion a resourceful artist can brilliantly address the unfinished business of history. His work emerged after the defeat of international fascism in World War II and was concurrent with the strike wave that initially raised a hope: that the promise of completing the old work of the past – the 1930s rise of internationalist class solidarity – would be honored. But that promise was broken, and there ensued a decade of very hard times before something unpredicted appeared – a bus boycott and then lunch counter sit-ins in, of all places, the Deep South! Karl Marx famously wrote in an 1843 letter to his left-Hegelian collaborator, Arnold Ruge, that “the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.”17 That dream, that unfinished promise, is actually at the core of the endeavor of noir, even though utopia appears obliquely through imagery, as in the Kentucky farm to which Dix and Doll flee in the film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), or those scenes of young working-class men of all ethnicities dancing in the streets of the slums in Knock on Any Door. In the late 1940s the fragile alliance of liberals and the left was permanently damaged, but deep longings for social transformation and restoration remained constant. NOTES 1 Popularized by works such as E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common (1991), the term means an economy based on fairness, goodness, and justice. 2 See Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994). 3 A useful volume for surveying research in the new millennium is JeanChristophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). 4 See Part IV of Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer, 1964), 257–83.

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5 Vaughn Rasberry of Stanford University has just published a book on this subject, which I read in draft: Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics and the Black Literary Imagination (2016). I am grateful to Dr. Rasberry for a number of insights that follow. 6 See, for example, Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo, Noir Anxiety (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 7 The foundational text for a broader and more accurate study of the Hollywood blacklist came earlier in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1980). 8 See Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 9 “Structure of feeling” is a term coined by Raymond Williams in 1954 and used in many of his works to indicate the cultural form or pattern of thought and emotion of a subaltern group in a precise historical context. 10 Richard Wright, Black Power: Three Books from Exile (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 709. 11 The last part of this phrase is adapted from Richard Lingeman’s wonderful description in The Noir Forties (New York: Nation Books, 2012) of his experience viewing films of the 1940s decades later at Greenwich Village’s Film Forum. 12 James Broe, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), xxiv. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Ibid., xx. 15 This is Nick’s motto, repeated throughout the book, and appears to have been recycled from street talk going back to the turn of the twentieth century. 16 For the classic study of how people’s identities as consumers shaped their politics, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003). 17 The text of this letter is available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1843/letters/43_09.htm.

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Narrating the War Philip Beidler

My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, I wish to give a critical account of the production and consumption of texts about the war as they actually came forth from publishers and producers of the related media of drama, film, and the popular arts. In the longer perspective of history, I then propose to show further how such works of the decade frequently came to shape subsequent forms of literary and popular culture response still appearing nearly seventy-five years later. It is in just this latter respect that the editors of the volume have wisely suggested the title “Narrating the War” – a characterization itself centered on the idea of process, an evolving account of American literary representations of the war through the means and manner of their actual appearance. I therefore begin by examining early texts about the war popular with American audiences at a time when much of the world was already plunged into conflagration and that appeared in the brief period just before the US entry. I next address works published during the four years of active American combat on land, at sea, and in the air. I then turn to a host of major productions coming forth in ever enlarging volume during the immediate postwar years. Accordingly, this chapter itself comprises a narrative attempt to trace out precisely the evolving patterns of representation – in novels, poems, plays, diaries, memoirs, and major works of journalism and reportage – whereby the literature of the war became a cultural genre that even now continues to be integral to the national narrative at large. In the immediate prewar era, Americans’ sense of war was deeply informed by Anglo-European and American writers of the great 1914–18 conflagration, who created a body of texts centered on the lost generation of the trenches, with its emphasis on carnage, waste, horrific disillusionment, and bloody futility. In the phrasings of Ezra Pound, echoing those of Wilfred Owen, they died non “dulce,” non “et décor,” “for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization.”1 Particularly close in memory was the great narrative explosion of the late 1920s and early 1930s, featuring 278

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works by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Ernest Hemingway, Eric Maria Remarque, and others. As events in Europe and Asia began to portend another such prospect of global conflict, such a literature of mischance, blunder, betrayal of youth by bankers, blind treaty makers, and munitions and armaments manufacturers, dovetailed with the American mood of isolationism of the late 1930s and early 1940s. For news of the embattled world, US readers depended on the distanced reportorial overviews of John Gunther’s Inside Europe (1936) and Inside Asia (1940). For a first-person account of the rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, they had the regular articles by William L. Shirer, eventually collected under the title Berlin Diary (1941). Of events in Spain that came quickly to presage the larger conflict, they could feast on Ernest Hemingway’s popular epic of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), much in the style of the author’s writings of World War I. It must be remembered that as the new decade opened, nearly two years would pass before America officially entered World War II on December 7, 1941. In the interim, what Americans read as war literature from 1940 to 1942 centered on suffering allies, and given their historically close relationship with the United States, the British predominated. The most notable work of fiction here was Jan Struthers’s novel Mrs. Miniver, conceived as a series of fictionalized news columns to the Times of London and shortly becoming the basis of one of the most popular early films of the war. It featured an upper-middle-class family learning to cope with life in early wartime Britain. Of a similar cast was William L. White’s Journey for Margaret – likewise the basis of a popular movie – depicting the adoption of an orphaned child by an American couple and her wartime odyssey to her new home. A third, if somewhat improbable, bestseller was Alice Duer Miller’s The White Cliffs of Dover (1941), a book of poems that not only, like its counterparts, spawned a popular movie but also became the basis of a Vera Lynn song that proved to be one of the most ubiquitous and memorable of the war. Depicting various other war-torn peoples, published as play scripts were Lillian Hellmann’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), about a refugee family taken in by an American upper-middle-class couple and beset by a fascist fellow house guest, and Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night (1940), set during the Russo-Finnish War, just before the German attack on Russia, depicting a Finnish American family trapped between devouring totalitarian monsters and ultimately destroyed. In 1941, Joseph E. Davies published a memoir of his prewar service as US Ambassador to Russia, Mission to Moscow, recast by 1943 as a heavily cosmeticized pro-Soviet film. In 1942, again in a quick book-to-film transition, Pulitzer Prize-winner John

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Steinbeck weighed in with The Moon Is Down, in which villagers living under Nazi terror in an occupied Scandinavian country become the moral victors and the Nazis the frightened prisoners of their own regime of terror and cruelty. The book and movie drew criticism for the depiction of the occupiers as psychologically human. Also appearing in 1942 was Dragon Seed, the latest in the cycle of China novels by 1938 Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck, which centered on experiences of villagers during the 1937 Japanese invasion. With the shock of Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s simultaneous declaration of hostilities, the war became an American one overnight, and representations of national experience struggled to keep up with crucial events. For the moment, a relative paucity of early book-length texts on the war was more than compensated for by a vibrant array of periodicals, with both early disasters and heroic resistances reported widely in newspapers and magazines. In every great metropolis, there were multiple major city newspapers, as well as uncounted smaller city and small town dailies. It was also the golden age of the popular mass-market magazine, with Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, Colliers, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post a part of the cultural lives of many American readers. Meanwhile, ubiquitous military equivalents sprang up in every corner of the globe where Americans were stationed, including the Army Times, Yank, Stars and Stripes, and countless individual unit publications from full-scale newspapers to mimeographed handouts. These unit publications became important venues for the smalltown newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle and the relatively unknown cartoonist Bill Mauldin in the early stages of their careers, both of whom were syndicated in major media by the middle of the war. At home, coverage of the conflict likewise poured out over the air – in radio, newsreels, and Hollywood films. Major directors were commissioned to produce documentaries, beginning with the Frank Capra series Why We Fight and continuing with titles by John Huston, William Wyler, Darryl Zanuck, John Ford, and others, most of whom honed new abilities to produce war films unprecedented in scope and candor. As the ascendant popular form of cultural representation, feature films quickly began to spring ahead of freestanding print texts in volume, with 150 war-related pictures produced in 1942–5 alone. Indeed, to undertake a survey of prewar, wartime, and postwar literary titles on the theme of the war is to be struck by how many of them made it into film – in a significant number of instances with the movie forms becoming the definitive version of the text for Americans then and now. At the same time, after a predictable lag in print prediction, book-length representations of Americans at war met with an eager audience, which

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purchased such narratives in large numbers. Among the earliest depictions of the American military in the Pacific theater was William L. White’s, They Were Expendable (September 1942), a novel based on exploits of PT boats in defense of the Philippines; it derived from the actions of actual combatants and included the heroic evacuation of Douglas MacArthur to Australia. The book was an immediate bestseller, serialized in Life and Reader’s Digest and eventually becoming the basis of a classic 1945 film. Equally bracing works appeared shortly thereafter that showed American forces starting the long march toward victory. Captain Ted Lawson, one of the pilots in the Doolittle raid on Japan, detailed his adventure from its training phases to the rescue and evacuation of many of its surviving participants from China in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1943). Journalist Richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary (1943) recorded the agonizing capture of that key island in the Solomons from superior Japanese forces, making legendary the banzai charges against the embattled Marines of Henderson Field, the Tenaru sandbars, and Edson’s Ridge. Also about Guadalcanal were John Hersey’s Into the Valley (1943), a candid account of a Marine rifle company on the island undergoing its early experiences of combat, and Ira Wolfert’s The Battle for the Solomons (1943), a direct chronicling of individual actions on land, in the air, and at sea. From the Pacific also came Robert L. Scott’s inspirational account of air combat in the China-Burma-India theater, God Is My Co-Pilot (1943). Book-length representations of the US participation in the early campaigns of the European theater were set in Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Two major 1943 journalistic accounts of early US combat in North Africa were Ralph Ingersoll’s The Battle Is the Payoff (1943) and Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War (1943). Meanwhile, the war at home inspired a number of popular titles: these included North Carolina newspaperman Marion Hargrove’s humorous account of basic training, See Here Private Hargrove (1942), made into a 1944 movie comedy; Jesse Stuart’s Taps for Private Tussie (1943), a light regional novel regarded as a humorous favorite at the time, about a relief-payment addicted hillbilly clan attempting to live off the $10,000 insurance death benefits of the decidedly unheroic eponymous hero; and William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943), a small, bittersweet classic of the home front, centered on a telegraph boy in a small California town who ultimately delivers news of the death of his own brother. From the European theater, 1944 marked the appearance of Ernie Pyle’s best-known book, Brave Men, compiled as he followed the GI war through Sicily, Italy, and northern Europe until moving to the Pacific where he was killed on a small island off the coast of Okinawa. Along the way, Pyle had truly become the people’s journalist of the war, with an eye not only to the

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grand campaigns but also to the individual service members he encounters, whose civilian occupations and hometowns he nearly always identifies. Here indeed was the story of GI Joe, with Pyle’s writings themselves recast under that title, shortly before his death, into an inspirational movie. Later in the same year, in large measure through Pyle’s personal agency, came the equally celebrated book of war cartoons, Bill Mauldin’s Up Front; it details the adventures of his two dogface infantrymen, Joe and Willie, accompanied by Mauldin’s own humorous but incisive commentary on soldier life and the conduct of the war generally. At the same time two of the first wartime literary fictions appear, both about the grim, bloody, neglected Italian campaign and both by literarily gifted journalists. The first was John Hersey‘s A Bell for Adano (1944), the study of a US Army major serving as an US military government functionary and his attempts to deal fairly with conquered Italian townspeople, in the face both of the loutishness and ignorance of his own occupation troops and a strutting division commander, with antics modeled visibly on those of George S. Patton. The second novel was Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun (1944), to this day one of the best books of small-unit combat to come out of the war. Notably bleak, like Hersey’s novel, in its representation of the thankless Italian campaign, Brown’s narrative was an account of a single, abortive platoon mission. We watch unit members being killed, one after another, to an ambiguous end with no particular military justification, chronicling just another day in the war. In the domain of wartime print, it is impossible to discuss popular reading without mentioning the texts made available to service members through the great cooperative publishing enterprise known as the Armed Services Editions (ASE). These, more than thirteen hundred in number, were chosen by the Council on Books in Wartime, an expert board of publishers, librarians, and booksellers. Titles were frequently selected for their emphasis on American democratic values, but also included many literary and popular classics that could hardly be considered propagandistic in any conventional sense, despite the council’s motto, “Books are Weapons.” At the height of the project, it is estimated that around 123 million copies were in circulation – in military bases, forward areas, and even POW camps – and included such varied titles as The Odyssey, My Friend Flicka, The Education of Henry Adams, The Education of Hyman Kaplan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (a particular GI favorite, it turns out), John Brown’s Body, Forever Amber, Moby Dick (abridged), The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. In line with its stated commitment to strength through an informed military

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readership, by the end the series also contained such new favorites as Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, and God Is My Co-Pilot. Not surprisingly, given the release of American civilian productive capacity from wartime constraints, political and material, in nearly every field of endeavor, postwar popular media representations of the 1941–5 conflict underwent the burgeoning everyone was waiting to see – with movies maintaining the upper hand, but now increasingly joined by major print texts across a range of genres. At the one end of the literary spectrum, there appeared no great volume of soldier poetry as in the Great War. A few figures became nationally visible, notably Randall Jarrell and Richard Eberhart, both noncombatant Army Air Force service members, whose poems ”The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” became canonical. The title of a Pulitzer Prize-winning volume was V-Letter by Karl Shapiro (1944). Written to Shapiro’s fiancé Evalyn Katz during his medical corps service in New Guinea, these poems bore the titular impress of US military mail (“V for Victory”) between service members and their loved ones and were notable for their emphasis on the quiet forbearance of the common soldier against the forces of danger and dehumanization. The great infantryman-poet of the war, Louis Simpson, who fought in Europe as part of the 101st Airborne Division, would have to wait his time. His poems such as “Carentan” partook of the postwar poetic critique in the spirit of honored predecessors such as Graves, Owen, and Sassoon. In contrast, postwar fictional narratives – along with major works of diary, memoir, journalism, and reportage – appeared in large numbers and, in case after case, were quickly transformed into major Hollywood movies. Of particular note in such post-1945 texts was the enlargement of their purview from the war against the totalitarian enemy to the frequent wars within the war; for example, the battle of individual soldiers against the institutional bigotry of the military mind itself, what Alfred Kazin came to identify as the war breeding system.2 In terms of popular success and critical acclaim, few would surpass one of the great curiosities of the era, a slim book by historical writer McKinlay Kantor titled Glory for Me, which would evolve into the William Wyler movie, The Best Years of Our Lives. As early as 1944, Samuel Goldwyn, fascinated by an article he had read in Time magazine about returning veterans, had engaged Kantor to produce a film treatment on the subject. Instead, the scriptwriter returned with a novel in the form of a narrative poem. It described the return to a fictional middle American town, Boone City, after the war’s end of three quite disparate discharged service members: a grizzled, combat-hardened infantry sergeant,

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Al Stephenson, formerly a socially prominent banker; a lieutenant and former bombardier, Fred Derry, previously a drug store clerk; and a maimed seaman, Homer Wermels, with both hands replaced by prosthetic metal claws. The plot of the film generally tracks that of the book. After substantial travails of readjustment, all three make peace between their military experience and new civilian identities. Thus did the first great book-to-film vision of a postwar nation make itself into a genuine American classic, portending for the veteran a mythologized future even as it honored wartime memory quickly receding into the past. A second contemporary classic, likewise a slim volume, achieved immense popularity and praise as a book even as it took the process of literary and artistic hybridization even further. This was Mr. Roberts, which began as a cycle of short stories about the backwater Pacific Navy, and was the largely autobiographical work of a first-time author, Thomas Heggen. It appeared in a best-selling print version in 1946, was then reshaped into an abbreviated Broadway play in 1948, and finally shot as a film in 1957. The secret of its success on all accounts lay with the conception of its title character, a faithful subordinate mediating between a tyrannical captain and the bored, frustrated crew of a supply ship working the rear areas of the great ocean war. In addition to the despised skipper with his totemic potted palm tree, Roberts is supplied with a colorful supporting cast: the unmilitary, sex-and-booze obsessed subaltern, Frank Pulver; the bemused, ironic ship’s doctor; and a boatload of unruly enlisted sailors finding brief respite in a drunken island liberty. At the end, after a general uprising in which he has championed the downtrodden crew, the last of Roberts’s requests for transfer to a fighting ship is grudgingly approved. A letter soon arrives detailing his death in a kamikaze attack. Pulver marches up the stairs to the captain’s cabin, shouting for that worthy and for all the world to hear that he has just thrown the damned palm tree overboard. Less remembered today, though at the time regarded as a major representation of another great wartime field of American experience, the European air war, was William Wister Haines’s Command Decision (1946). It was adapted to stage and screen even more swiftly than Mister Roberts, appearing in both formats by 1948. The focal subject, narrated through scenes from an American airbase in Great Britain, is the much-heralded US daylight precision bombing campaign conducted at hideous cost to pilots, planes, and crews by a division of the US Eighth Air Force. The central crisis involves a brigadier general who is deemed a butcher for sending his forces repeatedly into combat against heavily defended German airplane factories far beyond the range of fighter cover. His sanguinary logic

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is impeccable. The factories are building German jet fighters and must therefore be destroyed now with horrific casualties before the new plans can make things unimaginably worse. The general is replaced at the end of a narrative that is remarkably candid about top-level infighting, with journalists, politicians, and careerist officers waging their personal battles while planes and aircrews suffer suicidal casualty rates. Similarly neglected at the time as a chronicle of air operations was James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor (1948) about a hot young fighter general, Ira “Bus” Beal, who is being groomed for the top. Beal is cast into a world of stateside training bases that turn out to be petty fiefdoms, filled with bored administrators who reign over useless research and training directorates and produce pointless manuals and memoranda. As if in anticipation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, here is the dark, absurdist war behind the war – the war of military and political careerism – that is ultimately the root of the warbreeding system. These novels would shortly be joined by a third addition to the strategic bombing saga, in this case co-authored by writer Sy Barrett and airman Beirne Lay, Twelve O’Clock High (1948). As with Command Decision, this too centered on aerial combat in Europe and the strain on commanders and crews alike. The plot of Twelve O’Clock High revolved around breakdowns in authority: the relief from command of a brave but compassionate unit leader for insufficient results and the breakdown from nervous strain of the stern commander who has replaced him. Written first as the basis of a film script, the book appeared as a 1949 movie that was justly praised for its political and psychological insight before appearing as a novel (this was not the end of its production: Twelve O’Clock High became a popular TV series that ran from 1964–7). Far more heralded than any other print text at the time was Tales of the South Pacific (1947), a slight book by James Michener centering on wartime relationships among American military personnel, French colonials, and islanders in the region. In a bare two years, as is now well known, it was transformed into possibly the most famous musical drama in Broadway history, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. In fact, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific derived from just a few of the book’s nineteen interlinked chapters; the novel is narrated by an unnamed naval officer who serves as the local admiral’s roving emissary, and its plot culminates in one major action, a massive naval and marine assault on the fictional island of Kuralei, which serves as the book’s conclusion. Mainly, however, it is about the backwaters of the Pacific war, full of rear-area supply and administration types – “time servers,” scroungers, and wheeler-dealers – and assorted American, native, and biracial women in this largely male world.

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Further, for all the exotic charms depicted, it is in many of its episodes actually a grim, unlovely, and racist book. French-imported Vietnamese laborers (including Bloody Mary and the exquisite Liat) are “Tonks”; Melanesians are “niggers.” Bloody Mary sells her daughter Liat to Joseph Cable, the upper-crust Princeton-educated Marine lieutenant. The nurse-ingenue Nellie Forbush is nearly raped twice, once by a womanizing US Navy officer and later by a gang of enlisted renegades at the gates of the plantation of her suitor and eventual husband Emile DeBeque. In the last chapter we learn that, as a result of the Kuralei operation, most of the interesting characters die – rakish pilot and lover Bus Adams, nonpareil scrounger Tony Fry, and brave lieutenant Joe Cable. Meanwhile the rear-echelon lothario gets home alive, safe stateside with wife and family. Two other notably unsettling productions of 1947, each achieving in time their own classic status, were John Horne Burns’s The Gallery and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The first was centered, once again, in the administrative and logistical backwash of war – in this case, Naples, the rear headquarters for much of the Italian campaign and the site of the titular arcade where everything turns out to be for sale. It became for decades an underground classic, one of the few texts to introduce gay themes into the literature of the war. The second work, an early play by Miller and often considered a rehearsal for the American dream poetics of Death of a Salesman, has a special wartime twist: its success story concerns a protagonist who has become wealthy during the war selling defective cylinder heads for aircraft engines. Meanwhile, memoirs and various other nonfiction accounts began to appear. Some were the work of insiders such as Harry Butcher’s My Three Years with Eisenhower (1946). Out of the European campaign came Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). From the top echelons of command, General Dwight D. Eisenhower published Crusade in Europe (1948). In the same year appeared the first installment of Winston Churchill’s multivolume The Second World War. Other texts were the witness of civilian victims, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1946). In that same year appeared John Hersey’s Hiroshima, written from the perspectives of six ground-zero survivors of the atomic bombing. The year 1948 marked the appearance of two of the long expected “big” novels of the war, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. Both are recognizable as big-genre books and were already in the making as movies at the time of their publication, though the films were not produced until a decade later. Mailer, the younger, debut author, signed up for war in the Pacific purposefully so he could write

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the big novel of the Pacific war – the European theater, most likely in his estimation, having already been taken. He was a Harvard aeronautical engineering undergraduate initially assigned as a clerk and cook in an old Texas National Guard Cavalry division; he was able to get himself just enough combat experience on a reconnaissance mission to feel he could write about battle with authenticity. Meanwhile, he populated the novel with various figures embodying mythic strains of ideological conflict: the left is represented in the lieutenant Robert Hearn, the right in the fascist general Cummings. In technique, one sees the influence of post–World War I writers such as Hemingway and, particularly in the experimentalist flashback sections, Dos Passos. In contrast to the boy prodigy Mailer, the 1948 competitor in the big-novel sweepstakes was Irwin Shaw, who was both an experienced war correspondent and an established popular writer. Accordingly, The Young Lions, with its multiple protagonists – the German Christian Diestl, the New York playboy Michael Whitacre, and the alienated American Jew Noah Ackerman – and its complex love story/war story trajectories finally brought together in a gripping European battlefield denouement, held the promise of both bestseller and big movie. It did not disappoint. At the same time, at least in retrospect, it now seems one of the most writerly, if conventionally so, of the big books and singularly bold in its depiction of brutal anti-Semitism in the US Army among both officers and men. As noted, for post-1945 popular readers, novels increasingly became the coin of the realm. Accordingly, at the turn of the decade, texts such as Mailer’s and Shaw’s would be joined by new bestsellers from James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Leon Uris. In the interim, the grand old man of American war fiction, Ernest Hemingway, would make his own contribution. He had begun the decade with For Whom the Bell Tolls, a wide-screen epic of the Spanish Civil War much in the vein of A Farewell to Arms, and followed with a thousand-page historical anthology of writing about combat, Men at War (1943), prefaced by thirty plus of his own manly pontifications based on his intimate knowledge of the subject. In 1950, he weighed in with Across the River and into the Trees, a sad chronicle of wish projection, set in postwar Venice and featuring a dying miles gloriosus infantry colonel based on his Fourth Division military mentor, Buck Lanham. That same year, Henry Luce’s Time-Life Inc., the fount of wartime photojournalism, came forward with its immensely popular deluxe volume, Life’s Picture History of World War II, a compilation of the best photography of the war by nearly every famous practitioner of the era. In terms of comparable popularity, the turning of the second half of the century

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also brought forth two more of the classic big-volume novels of the war, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), both quickly translated to the screen in classic films. The Caine Mutiny might be said to be a kind of Young Lions version of the Navy war, with a love story and a complex multi-character war story culminating in the titular event and subsequent court-martial – the latter also the subject of a prizewinning 1953 Broadway play. In contrast, although often thought of as one of the great novels to come out of the war, Jones’s From Here to Eternity is in fact about the old US Army Hawaiian Division in the months just before the war. It is only in the last pages that a collocation of enlisted Depression-era castoffs and time-serving NCOs and officers are suddenly plunged into the Japanese conflict subsequently represented by Jones in the lives of infantry soldiers in works such as The Thin Red Line and the posthumous Whistle. Two years later, in 1953, came what might be considered the last great 1940s-style big novel of the war, Leon Uris’s Battle Cry, a saga of US Marines in the Pacific; like its predecessors, it quickly became the basis of a big movie. And so, as the war receded in time, its representations began their inexorable slip into history-as-entertainment. In the literary and popular market came forth such various and disparate other works, ranging from action-adventure to traditional service comedy, including Pierre Boulle’s Bridge over the River Kwai (French 1952; English 1954); Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants (1954); William Brinkley’s Don’t Go Near the Water (1956); Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), James Jones’s Some Came Running (1957), Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone (1957) and John Hersey’s The War Lover (1959) – all made into successful motion pictures. Psychologically notable among them, in anticipation of Richard Yates’s classic Revolutionary Road (1961), were Wilson’s and Jones’ texts for their linkage of the war memory of the veteran to the postwar duties of life in the age of what William Whyte called The Organization Man (1956). With Day of Infamy (1957), a blow-by-blow account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Walter Lord produced the first of a line of great popular docu-histories; he was quickly joined by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day (1959; movie 1962), The Last Battle (1966), and A Bridge Too Far, (1974; movie 1977). In the 1950s and 1960s, the war continued to find depictions in literature and film, while in the new medium of television, popular dramatic representations such as Combat or Twelve O’Clock High became mixed with something wartime audiences even in their strangest visions might never have imagined – World War II as thirty-minute TV situation comedy.

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Following Donald Bevans’s and Edmund Trzcinski’s Stalag 17 (play 1953; movie 1953) came Hogan’s Heroes (1965), a depiction of wily allies and farcical Germans, set in a German POW camp. Following on They Were Expendable, with a nod to the PT 109 glamor of the Kennedy presidential mystique, likewise appeared McHale’s Navy. In the print domain, largely dominated by new literary experimentalists, ever more complex, problematic representations of the experience of the mighty conflict continued to contend for status as the great American novel of the war. At the same time, given the largely dark and revisionary cast of new, later efforts, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), to name the three most prominent, it is probably worth recalling in retrospect how many of the groundbreaking 1940s and early 1950s literary texts discussed here, even during wartime and the immediate postwar era, proved unusually revealing and critical of the military and political life of the era. Careerism became a great theme, with a recurrent literary emphasis on political generals and time-serving incompetents. The armed services were indicted for racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homegrown totalitarianism, profiteering, cowardice, officiousness, and stupidity: ubiquitous screw-ups, frequently ending in pointless losses of life, resulted in even more shameful cover-ups. Meanwhile, there was the universal dominion of what Paul Fussell called “chickenshit”: “petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.”3 Yet the new revisionary novels were likely at times thematically and stylistically unfathomable to those who lived through the war and its immediate aftermath. As to the pacifist politics of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, it might even now be profitably remembered that both were written by combatant-survivors of some of the worst horrors that the war could offer. And so for Heller and Vonnegut, the enemy often remained the minions on both sides of the war-breeding system. Meanwhile, for many veteransurvivors of the conflict beginning to grow old, the memory of youthful trials would begin to operate in a less astringent key. A contrasting strain of commemorative nonfiction, written in a more nostalgic key, would eventually begin to speak to the direct experiences of the men and women of 1941–5. Studs Terkel’s watershed collection of oral histories, notable for its admixture of wise reflection and critical candor, would be called The Good War (1984). More glowingly, Tom Brokaw would write about his wartime forebears in The Greatest Generation (1998). Stephen Ambrose, eventually

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in conjunction with film artists Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, would chronicle a group of airborne infantry soldiers grown to Shakespearean stature in Band of Brothers (2001); Ken Burns would produce The War (2007) and Hugh Ambrose The Pacific (2010). Toward the end of the century would come new, candid, clear-eyed memoirs by old soldiers, including Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle (1996) and Robert Kotlowitz’s Before Their Time (1997). Along the way, it would turn out to be best left to old-soldier novelist James Jones to put a point on all of it. A Depression-era enlistee who served with the old Hawaiian Army at Fort Shafter with the 25th Tropic Lightning Division, he was actually present on the day of the attacks at Pearl Harbor. Entering jungle combat with the division at Guadalcanal, he was badly wounded, sent home to be hospitalized, and then discharged. Over the years, he was credited with a great trilogy about the infantry war in the Pacific – From Here to Eternity (1951), The Thin Red Line (1962), and Whistle (1978) – the last finished by his friend Willie Morris. Eventually, there came to him in late life a unique commission, of all the myriad texts to come out of the experience, for a volume, in handsome production, titled simply WWII (1975) and devoted to masterworks of war illustration – posters and magazine covers of combat and home-front scenes. In addition, Jones was asked to include a reminiscence, at once individual but representative of those who served in combat. This he chose to call, “The Education of a Soldier,” wherein he depicts the stages of consciousness undergone by the World War II American combatant – culminating, for the infantry veteran especially, in the simple acceptance of the inevitability of one’s own death. Miraculously, as he himself faced old age, Jones realized that some against all odds still managed to live – the old soldiers, sailors, and airmen; the nurses, WACS, WAVES, WASPS, and SPARS; and the generation of the 1940s at large who went through it with them in the houses and the schools, the shops, the offices, and the factories. This is what they would all have to face as they moved off into death, just over their shoulders. There it would always be, trailing them: their own lengthening shadow. NOTES 1 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 64. 2 Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life (New York: Delta Books, 1974), 93. 3 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80.

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c h a p ter 1 8

Paperbacks and the Literary Marketplace Erin A. Smith

In 1939, the first Pocket Books title, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, went on sale for twenty-five cents at newsstands as a trial balloon to test the market for cheap paperback reprints. This marked the launching of the “paperback revolution.”1 Pocket Books issued ten more reprint titles that year. The business was an almost instant success, selling 1.5 million titles in the first seven months.2 Competitors rapidly appeared on the scene: Penguin (1939), Avon (1941), Popular Library (1943), Dell (1943), Bantam (1945), New American Library (NAL; 1948), and Fawcett Gold Medal (1950), among others. Hardcover books sold for two or three dollars at the time, and trade bookshops were concentrated in cities, so the mass-market paperback revolutionized book marketing and distribution and democratized literacy. Mass-market paperbacks turned drugstores, train stations, bus depots, tobacco shops, gas stations, and newsstands into book outlets. They also turned millions of people who lacked significant income and education into readers by making books affordable and convenient. Moreover, the paperback revolution profoundly transformed our notions of cultural hierarchy by promiscuously mingling reprints of literary classics and works of high modernism with often lurid, sensational paperback originals. These paperback originals cemented the low literary reputation of the mass-market or “pulp” paperback. This chapter examines the paperback’s many aspects: its marketing, sales, and distribution; the Armed Services Editions that prepared the way for its success; its transformation of the literary scene; the significance of cover art; struggles over censorship; and the democratization of literacy it enabled.

“Kind to Your Pocket and Your Pocketbook”: The Business of Paperbacks Paperbound mass-market fiction circulated in the United States in the nineteenth century, often packaged as magazines or newspaper 291

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supplements that could be sent cheaply through the mail. However, the price cutting and piracy these nineteenth-century dime novels and story papers required proved unworkable after changes in postal rates and the arrival of international copyright protection in the 1890s.3 The modern mass-market paperback was an idea imported from Europe, where affordable paperback reprints of classics were published by Tauchnitz in the nineteenth century and by Albatross in the twentieth. In 1935, Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in the United Kingdom, reportedly motivated by the absence of any decent books to read on the train.4 In 1938, Penguin opened a New York office, headed by Ian Ballantine. In 1939, American Penguin books began appearing, priced – like their Pocket Books competitors – at a quarter. Hardcover trade books cost roughly ten times as much. The influence of Lane and Penguin on American paperbacks was immense. Robert de Graff (who headed Pocket Books) and Ballantine (who left Penguin to found Bantam in 1945 and Ballantine in 1952) both worked for Penguin in the 1930s. Victor Weybright and Kurt Enoch, who founded NAL in 1948, started their business by separating from Penguin UK and taking over the American Penguin/Pelican titles. The more popular Penguin fiction titles became twenty-five-cent Signet paperbacks; the more scholarly classics and nonfiction Pelican titles, thirty-five-cent Mentor Books.5 The modern mass-market paperback was a new format, and it depended on technological innovations – the much-faster magazine rotary press and quick-drying synthetic glue – but its success can be explained largely by its innovative distribution practices. Trade bookstores sold cloth-bound books for two or three dollars or more to a select clientele with the education and income to afford them. Moreover, these bookstores were concentrated in urban areas, so much of the nation was underserved. Paperbacks bypassed these trade bookshops; they were distributed like newspapers or popular magazines by the same distributors who stocked newsstands. Roughly 800 independent distributors received copies of paperbacks from “national distributors” such as the American News Corporation or Fawcett Publications. The distributors stocked the paperbacks, which, like magazines, had a short shelf life, with the old titles being retired as new ones took their place on the racks.6 This innovation in distribution practices revolutionized bookselling. For example, in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio, there were 6 trade bookstores, but 224 locations at which one could buy a Pocket Book.7 Although they shared rack space and had similarly lurid covers, massmarket paperbacks were published by two kinds of publishers. Some houses (NAL, Pocket, Penguin) were reprint houses. They negotiated with hardcover publishers for the rights to reprint works in paperback for a fixed

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period of time, usually five years. Royalties on the paperback were split evenly between the author and the hardcover publisher that held copyright. In 1940s, the usual royalty was a penny per copy (4 percent). Paperback reprinters had close relationships with the hardcover book trade. For example, Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books with 49 percent of funding from Richard Simon, M. Lincoln Schuster, and Leon Shimkin of Simon & Schuster, and early Pocket Books covers were modeled on the Simon & Schuster prototypes. These houses also reprinted “classics,” including nineteenth-century fiction by such writers as Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, D. H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.8 Although the vast majority of early paperbacks were reprints, some houses (Avon, Dell, Popular Library, Fawcett) also contracted directly with authors to write paperback originals. Unlike “legitimate” authors of hardcover trade books, the writers of paperback originals seldom got paid royalties. Instead, they got a fixed fee for each manuscript they produced according to parameters set by the publisher. Fawcett was the first to launch into large-scale publishing of originals in 1950. By 1955, paperback originals made up one-third of the mass-market titles issued.9 They were blatantly commercial fiction and were held in low esteem as a consequence. Kenneth Davis, historian of paperbacks, describes their low literary reputation as “little more than second-rate trash. Literary flotsam. Schlock turned out to appease a gluttonous mass appetite for sex and sensationalism.”10 The publishers of paperback originals came not from the hardcover book trade, but from the world of cheap fiction magazines. Men like A. A. Wyn (Ace), George Delacorte (Dell), Joseph Myers (Avon), and Ned Pines (Popular Library) knew how to produce a predictable fiction product on a regular monthly schedule, because they had been doing so in pulp magazines since the late nineteenth century.11 Most of this original fiction was genre fiction – mainly mysteries, but also romances, westerns, and science fiction – that had built a dedicated audience in the pages of pulp magazines. In 1945, more than half of all paperback titles belonged to the mystery category, although the proportion dropped rapidly, to 26 percent in 1950 and 13 percent in 1955.12 Whether reprints or paperback originals, mass-market paperbacks were distributed alongside national newspapers and magazines to approximately 100,000 retail outlets by 1945. They were sold on a consignment basis, so the retailer paid for the stock only after the consumer purchased it. Distributors filled a certain number of display pockets (determined by past sales at that location) for a paperback publisher or publishers in the retail

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outlets. For example, 20 percent of the display space on a particular newsstand might be stocked with Dell paperbacks and 15 percent with Avon (based on past sales patterns), but the individual titles frequently mattered very little. Displays were arranged by publisher imprint (that is, all the Signet books together, all the Dell books together) rather than by genre or subject into the late 1950s. This made it both easier to track sales by publisher and more convenient for the wholesaler to restock the rack.13 Publishers also hoped to build reader loyalty to their “brand.” For example, Dell romances had a red heart on the cover, so that readers could easily identify other love stories in that line.14 In accordance with the early Pocket Books advertising slogan, “Kind to your pocket and your pocketbook,” paperback publishers worked hard to keep their books at twenty-five cents, even as wartime paper shortages and rationing increased their costs. Many longer books were offered in abridged versions in the 1940s to avoid raising the price. Prices remained at twentyfive to forty cents throughout the 1940s, although NAL introduced double and triple volumes (at fifty and seventy-five cents) for longer books. Prices for mysteries and westerns stayed at a quarter, because writers of paperback originals wrote shorter books (144–92 pages) by design.15 These low prices were enabled by economies of scale. A typical print run for a mass-market paperback in the 1940s was 200,000 copies; however, runs for popular authors’ books (Mickey Spillane, Erle Stanley Gardner, Erskine Caldwell) went into the millions.16 The growth of the market for mass-market paperbacks was astonishing. In 1942, paperbacks were sold in more than 1,000 outlets in the United States, but this number increased to over 100,000 by the end of World War II.17 Total paperback sales in the United States were under 200,000 in 1939, but soon leaped to 40 million in 1943, 95 million in 1947, and 270 million by 1952, overtaking the dollar sales of hardcovers by the end of the 1950s. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, some paperback publishers were specifically targeting the college market.18 Trade bookshops began to stock mass-market paperbacks alongside hardcovers in the 1950s.19

“Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas”: The Armed Services Editions World War II was largely responsible for the success of the mass-market paperback. First, wartime restrictions on travel and the rationing of gas meant more people stayed home to read instead of pursuing other forms

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of commercial leisure. Second, millions of soldiers and sailors were turned into readers through the Armed Services Editions (ASEs) paperbacks they received at no cost while in the military. Few of these editions remain for two reasons. First, most were – quite literally – read to pieces. Second, publishers feared the circulation of these titles in the United States after the war would undercut sales of regular paperback editions, so their sale was forbidden stateside. The typical American soldier in World War II was a “citizen-soldier” with an eleventh-grade education, a man who had read only for school assignments in the past.20 However, between 1943 and 1947, more than 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were reprinted and distributed to soldiers and sailors.21 The titles were a mix of fiction and nonfiction, literary classics and the latest bestsellers. They were designed to offer both education and entertainment – something for readers of every taste – and so featured a broad range of titles, with the exception of those deemed too technical, too juvenile, or too “feminine” to interest servicemen.22 ASEs were only provided to combat troops, so women who served in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) and the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVEs) read from the libraries of hardcover books at hospitals and military bases, although they did get their own special “WAC Magazine Kit” starting in 1945, which provided issues of women’s magazines like Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Women’s Home Companion.23 The ASEs were the brainchild of the Council on Books in Wartime, which had seventy members from the world of publishing, libraries, and book distribution. It was led by Philip Van Doren Stern of Pocket Books and guided by the slogan, “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” It stressed that books in the hands of soldiers and sailors would improve morale by alleviating boredom and loneliness in camp, allowing servicemen to “escape” from the death and destruction of war, and helping them process their disturbing emotions through literature. The Council changed the publishing business in a number of significant ways: it streamlined the production and distribution of books, created cooperation across the industry and between industry and government, and democratized literacy by introducing nonreaders to books. These returning servicemen became part of an immense new audience for books after the war. The government funding of the program and the collaboration between corporations and the state it required emerged from New Deal arts programs of the 1930s. The ASEs can be seen as a natural extension of Keynesian economics and Popular Front ideas that had reshaped the literary field.

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A Council memorandum described the ASEs as “small, light and attractive . . . and completely readable even under trying conditions of light and motion.”24 This was achieved by deliberate design. The ASEs came in two sizes. The larger books were 6 ½ inches by 4 ½ inches, which was roughly the size of mass-market paperbacks on newsstand and drugstore racks; the smaller were 5 ½ inches by 3 3/8 inches, fitted for the dimensions of the pockets on military uniforms. The books were bound with staples on the short side, so they were wider than they were tall, and each page had two columns of text. This was both for size/cost (12 percent more words could fit on a page formatted this way) and because shorter lines of text were believed to be easier on tired eyes.25 Because ASEs needed to be small and inexpensive, trade presses that printed hardcover books were unsuitable. Instead, the Council contracted to use the rotary presses that printed digest-sized magazines (small ASEs) and pulp magazines (large ASEs). They were printed “two up,” that is, the pages of one book were above those of another on a single sheet and then separated after printing with a horizontal cut. The scale of this enterprise was immense – 1.5 million books published in the first month’s series, and 2.5 million books per month by the time production had ramped up. Moreover, these were the most efficiently and cheaply produced books in the history of American publishing. The government bought the books at cost, plus a penny royalty. The initial runs cost approximately seven cents per copy to produce. Once they had achieved economies of scale, each copy cost less than six cents.26 Soldiers loved these books. In a letter to the Council, one called the ASEs “as welcome as a letter from home” and “as popular as pin-up girls.”27 Many wrote to the authors of their favorite books. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, received roughly 1,500 letters per year from servicemen, and the book was reissued in a second edition. One marine wrote that the war had left him with a “dead heart,” but reading her book had allowed him to laugh and cry again. Readers of Rosemary Taylor’s Chicken Every Sunday (an account of goings-on at a boarding house filled with eccentric characters) loved her vivid descriptions of food. One described reading the book as “like taking a leave,” a brief imagined visit home. Books with sex scenes (for example, Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit) were popular.28 In addition, the ASEs gave many important books wider circulation. William Faulkner’s first paperback publication was the 1945 ASE A Rose for Emily and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity by the ASE version.29

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“Luster and Lucre”: Cultural Hierarchy, Literary Canons, and Commerce Cultural commentators and historians of the paperback revolution seem most struck by its promiscuous mingling of high and low culture. In a 1953 article in Atlantic, David Dempsey, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, characterized mass-market paperbacks as a “mélange of serious literature and trash.” Geoffrey O’Brien described the pulp paperback racks as “a stew of high and low, vigorous and decayed . . . the common ground of Shakespeare and Irving Shulman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, of Light in August and Lust Party, indiscriminately mingled and mated.”30 Trashy paperback originals mixed with reprints of literary classics, both bound in indistinguishable, sensational covers. Because paperback publishing expanded into various submarkets in the 1940s and 1950s, creating socio-economically, geographically, and educationally diverse reading publics that could not be arranged hierarchically, it contributed to the collapse of distinctions between high art and popular culture. Literary historian Sean McCann deems the paperback revolution “fatal to cultural hierarchy.”31 Progressive thinkers celebrated this collapse of cultural distinctions as the harbinger of a more democratic and inclusive literary sphere, whereas conservatives interpreted it as evidence of the destruction of fundamental values that were the bulwark of civilization. The work of Victor Weybright of NAL exemplified the complex negotiations that paperback reprinters made to balance their literary and commercial aspirations. Weybright and his colleague Kurt Enoch wanted a list that balanced “luster and lucre,” “heavy traffic and high culture.”32 Their goal, then, was to build both their reputation for publishing excellent literary work and their profits by seeking the largest distribution possible. They largely succeeded. In the 1940s and 1950s, they were the paperback publishers of Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, and Mickey Spillane. Moreover, all were published as Signet paperbacks, formatted and packaged to look alike and sold side by side in the racks at drugstores. Calling the covers “uniformly lurid,” Andre Schiffrin insisted, “If you did not look at the title, you would be hard pressed to know whether what you had in your hand was by Mickey Spillane or William Faulkner.”33 NAL’s paperback reprints profoundly affected the careers of many important writers. Both Erskine Caldwell and Mickey Spillane had exclusive relationships with NAL for their paperbound books, and Thomas

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Bonn argues that NAL acted as “gatekeeper” to a much greater degree than their trade publishers, since their paperback sales were what made them famous and paid their bills. Blockbuster sales of Caldwell and Spillane also allowed NAL to pay its bills, paying off loans and creating financial stability.34 Caldwell was a best seller first at Penguin and then at NAL, and his success prepared the way for other popular novels about the South, Gone with the Wind among them.35 Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, a story depicting poor white farmers and mill workers in Georgia, was originally published with modest sales in hardcover in 1933. The 1946 Penguin paperback, however, was the firm’s first to sell a million copies. Between 1946 and 1949 the Penguin and the later Signet paperback editions sold 4.5 million copies.36 In promotional materials, NAL called Caldwell “the world’s bestselling writer.”37 He was also among the most heavily censored, because of God’s Little Acre’s eroticism and leftist politics. A proletarian novelist with serious literary aspirations and a number of blockbuster bestsellers, Caldwell was a rare bird. Ultimately, his reputation as a serious, political writer might have been undermined by his pulp success. Criticized for representing poor southern whites as stereotypical “trash” and for the frank depictions of sex in his novels, Caldwell’s work gets dismissed by many literary critics.38 William Faulkner’s work was also published by Penguin and then by NAL-Signet. Although Caldwell’s pulp success might have undermined his reputation, Faulkner’s pulp success kept him financially afloat and introduced his work to a much broader audience, possibly enabling his winning of the Nobel Prize in 1950.39 David Earle makes the case for an alternative history of modernism – what he calls “pulp modernism” – that centers not on first editions and little magazines, but instead on the pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks in which many modernist authors published and through which they became widely known. He argues that perhaps more important than the 1946 publication of Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner (which sold 20,000 copies by 1951) was the 1947 Penguin paperback reprinting of Sanctuary, which went through thirteen printings between 1947 and 1953. Every Faulkner paperback subsequently issued blared “by the author of Sanctuary” on its cover. Between 1947 and 1950, Signet reprinted five Faulkner titles: Sanctuary, The Wild Palms, The Old Man, Intruder in the Dust, and Knight’s Gambit (a collection of mystery stories), totaling almost three million copies. As Earle notes, the Faulkner titles that Signet published were not “canonical Faulkner” (that is, The Sound the Fury, Absalom, Absalom). If the Faulkner we encountered in school showcased his formal and stylistic innovations, the pulp covers privileged his

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controversial subject matter – rape, abortion, incest, and adultery. A more accurate history of Faulkner’s literary career requires that we also engage the work most people knew him by – the Signet paperbacks.40 The man who had no trade reputation at all was Mickey Spillane, whose Mike Hammer mystery novels were blockbusters for NAL. Spillane’s trade publications were largely pro forma; it was the lurid paperbacks that made his career and connected him to the popular audience he craved. Spillane’s first novel, I, the Jury, was published by E. P. Dutton in hardcover in 1947 and sold a few thousand copies. NAL published the paperback reprint in January 1948. It sold more than two million copies in less than two years.41 Spillane wrote three more books, published in runs of 7,500 by Dutton and reprinted by NAL. By 1951, those novels had sold more than five million copies altogether. NAL was thrilled to have Spillane; it allowed them to compete with Pocket Books’s Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner (Gardner’s mysteries had sold 50 million copies).42 Spillane was a lightning rod for controversies about paperbacks, because he was immensely popular and because his books were violent, sexual, and (the critics maintained) extraordinarily poorly written. As Kenneth Davis describes Mike Hammer, Spillane’s sociopathic hero, “Hammer stood, for, in no special order, sexism, racism . . . anti-intellectualism, homophobia, and a brand of jackbooted fascist vigilantism in the guise of preserving order.”43 Like the ubiquitous titles about juvenile delinquents and criminal gangs (i.e., Irving Shulman’s Amboy Dukes), Spillane’s novels made critics worry about what kind of a world they lived in, given that these were the popular fantasies of the age. NAL was also instrumental in getting the work of African American writers into the hands and minds of Americans (including African Americans). Davis calls NAL “the only mass market printer willing to handle serious work by black writers or about blacks”; it reprinted work by Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, among others.44 As Elizabeth McHenry argues in her study of African American literary societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many black literary activities took place not in mainstream libraries, bookshops, and universities, but in churches, private homes, and beauty parlors. Much early African American literary output appeared not in books, but in black newspapers.45 Given the historical exclusion and marginalization of African Americans from mainstream literary institutions, the prioritizing of African American literature by NAL was an immense departure and a powerful attempt to bring about both a more democratic literary field and a more representative body politic. The literary canon began to look quite different, partly

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because a critical mass of African American writing was made widely available at affordable prices to a diverse audience.

“Sadism, Sex, and the Smoking Gun”: Pulp Paperback Covers Unlike their staid British brethren (the Penguin paperbacks sold in the United Kingdom), American paperbacks were (in)famous for their covers. Penguin paperbacks in the United Kingdom had text-only covers with the author and title on the front and were color-coded by genre (that is, orange for fiction, green for mysteries, dark blue for biography, and so on).46 In contrast, paperbacks in the United States had lurid, sensational covers designed to grab the attention of a passerby from the racks in the drugstore or on the newsstand. These covers in the 1940s and 1950s featured themes that historian Frank Schick boiled down to “sadism, sex, and the smoking gun.”47 They were designed by the same artists who had painted the lurid covers for their cheap fiction predecessors, pulp magazines. These covers profoundly shaped the fate of the mass-market paperback in America: they ensured the paperback’s low literary status (even Faulkner and Joyce were packaged as lurid tales of sex and crime); they drew the attention of community and religious groups urging their censorship for moral or political reasons; and they were primarily responsible for making paperbacks the stars of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 (see the next section). They did, however, ensure that people saw and were drawn to buy paperbacks in a crowded marketplace. Although most cover artists did not sign their work and many were not credited anywhere in the book, some achieved significant fame. James Avati was known as “the Rembrandt of Pulp” for his covers, which offered rich, realistic representations of scenes from the book.48 Highlighting Avati’s importance for the brand, one historian of paperbacks claimed that “Signet books are paperbacks with covers by Avati.”49 Often, the same cover artist would draw the illustrations for all an author’s books. For example, Erskine Caldwell’s paperbacks all had signature “peephole covers” by Robert Jonas that echoed the many scenes of erotic watching in the books. The reader, who viewed the action of the cover painting through a hole in a door, a keyhole, or a chink in a wall, was cast as a voyeur.50 Cover art drove the evolution of the paperback business. The debate over covers played a key role in the separation of NAL from Penguin UK in the late 1940s. Allen Lane of Penguin UK was opposed to pictorial covers, but the Americans – Weybright and Enoch – claimed that paperbacks in the United States had to compete for consumers’ attention with lurid pulp

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magazines. A dust jacket on a hardcover book could be understated because buyers of trade books were serious readers, but the Americans maintained that paperbacks needed to entice a different kind of audience, so their covers functioned more like movie posters or billboard advertising. NAL initiated new cover designs for their Signet paperbacks and, in the process, created the somber, realistic “paperback look” of commercial art. Cover designs were created to foreground brand identity. All Signet paperbacks displayed color bands on the top and bottom of the covers that created a “frame” for the cover illustration, so that – regardless of cover image – there was a strong family resemblance between all Signet paperbacks.51 Often, old titles would be reissued with new, more contemporary covers, and these new covers frequently highlighted film tie-ins.52 The sexually explicit covers of the 1940s and 1950s sold books, but they fueled significant criticism from those inside and outside of paperback publishing. Censorship groups condemned them as obscene. NAL author James T. Farrell was furious about the lurid covers on his books, which he saw as undermining his serious political intentions. Some hardcover publishers inserted a cover approval clause in their reprint contracts to protect the reputation of their books and authors.53

“Banned in Boston”: Paperbacks and Censorship In part because of these lurid, attention-grabbing covers, paperbacks garnered attention from community and government censors, and some paperback publishers spent a great deal of time defending their freedom of speech in the courts and elsewhere. Most of the protests remained local until the convening of the 1952 House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials by Representative Ezekiel Gathings (D-Arkansas). Although charged with investigating all kinds of media, the primary focus of the Gathings committee was “the kind of filthy sex books sold at the corner store which are affecting the youth of our country.” The House Select Committee accused paperback publishers of “the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy” and called particular attention to the “lurid and daring illustrations of voluptuous young women on the covers of the books.” Those who dominated the hearings claimed these cheap, ubiquitous books were fueling juvenile delinquency and called for a code much like the Hays production code governing Hollywood movies of the time.54 Inspired by the anticommunist crusades of the early Cold War, rightwing organizations challenged media – including paperbacks – they

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perceived as anti-American. Objectionable content included not only sympathetic representations of left-wing politics but also representations of sexuality (especially homosexuality) that they believed would undermine the sanctity of the nuclear family as the backbone of American civilization. Groups affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church did battle against books with graphic sexual content. The National Office for Decent Literature, to take one notable example, was founded in 1938 by Catholic bishops who hoped “to set in motion the moral forces of the entire country . . . against the lascivious type of literature which threatens moral, social and national life.” For twenty-five years, it was one of the most vocal censorship groups, building a formidable blacklist of titles they opposed.55 Such groups pressured independent distributors (who might refuse to distribute offending books in order to avoid boycotts), municipal police departments (who arrested shopkeepers who sold “obscene” materials), and ultimately the US Congress (which convened the Gathings committee). Writers who were frequently censored included James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, Chester Himes, D. H. Lawrence, Margaret Mead, Lillian Smith, Mickey Spillane, and Kathleen Winsor.56 Since the ruling in United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” (1933), the legal standard required that courts consider the work as a whole, rather than excerpting specific passages opponents deemed obscene (the “wholebook rule”).57 Nonetheless, paperback publishers were busy in the courts throughout the 1940s and 1950s; some prosecutions involved paperback reprints that had already won their day in court as hardcovers. The low price and easy availability of the books fueled much of the concern.58 Weybright of NAL spent much of March 1949 at two well-publicized trials in Boston, which were subsequently appealed all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, defending James M. Cain’s Serenade (successfully) and Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre (unsuccessfully). Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. (1949) targeted nine books for censorship (including James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan and Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre) but upheld the “whole-book rule.”59 The biggest victory for free speech/press came in 1959, however, when Grove Press won the right to publish an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Although responding to censorship groups and defending controversial titles in court and in the press took up a great deal of time and money, there is no evidence that these trials hurt sales of the challenged books. In fact, the notoriety that being “banned in Boston” brought to a title might have boosted sales.60

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“Good Reading for the Millions”: The Democratization of Literature and Literacy NAL’s advertising slogan was “Good Reading for the Millions,” a nod to the immense democratization of literature and reading that ubiquitous twenty-five-cent paperbacks enabled.61 In 1953, David Dempsey, editor of the New York Times Book Review, declared, “If the reprints have done nothing else, they have taken the classics away from the protective custody of the pedants.”62 Kurt Enoch of NAL similarly underlined the important role of mass-market paperbacks in freely circulating important ideas to a wide audience. Their mission, he argued, was to achieve “in matters of the mind and arts, as we have already achieved in the economic area, the broad and general distribution of goods that are a vital factor in the dynamic expansion of a free society.”63 Whether this democratization of literature represented progress toward an egalitarian ideal or the triumph of commercialism and cheap sensationalism over literary standards was a hotly debated question. Beyond debate, however, was the powerful effect that cheap books had on many newly enfranchised members of the republic of letters.64 One housewife wrote, “If you knew how bored I get looking after two small children, doing housework, and seeing the same old neighbors day after day, you’d understand what a godsend your inexpensive books have been. I never knew that books could be so interesting, and I’m proud of the library of your books that I’m building – for the first time in my life.”65 The African American writers published by NAL were part of a larger effort to bring in African American readers in significant numbers. Paperbacks put books into neighborhoods – including those mostly peopled by blacks and immigrants – that were not served by trade bookshops. NAL’s explicit goal was to “stimulate the distribution of books in predominantly Negro neighborhoods . . . where . . . [a]spiring young negroes were a substantial and grateful audience.”66 In the pre–civil rights era, paperback publishers were taking African Americans seriously as customers, readers, and thinkers. Moreover, many of these paperbacks raised troubling questions about racial justice in America. Paula Rabinowitz argues that “pulping” a book – that is, reprinting a classic or contemporary bestseller in a cheap paperback edition – “repositioned” it so that it was newly accessible to working-class readers of every race and gender. In this way, works that were initially written for an elite, educated audience were “re-mediated” into forms that gave them new life.67 The portability and convenience of the paperback meant that even

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those who lacked the luxury of time and space for study could become readers. Because a pulp paperback fit easily in a pocket or purse, readers could carry a book to and from work, making their way through it in small snatches during lunch breaks or while commuting. Some scholars maintain that the “classics” selected for reprinting highlighted class politics, including titles by Charles Dickens, accounts of the French Revolution, and an aspirational life of Marie Curie that represented science as a populist activity.68 By almost any measure, this democratization of literature and literacy was the most important cultural effect of the paperback revolution. A 1941 survey of 40,000 readers by Pocket Books confirmed that buyers of paperbacks covered a remarkable range of occupations: “locomotive engineers, musicians, mechanics, salesmen, clerks, waitresses, writers, editors, schoolteachers, ranchers, and farmers.” Moreover, these readers were buying two to twenty times more books than they otherwise would have because paperbacks were inexpensive and easily accessible outside trade bookshops.69 Dempsey, the New York Times Book Review editor, weighed the costs and the substantial benefits of cheap paperbacks being available almost everywhere. The “horrendous Spillane,” he argued, was “the price we must pay in a democratic culture, for being able to buy A Passage to India for twenty-five cents. As bargains go, it is not so bad.”70 NOTES 1 There were a number of smaller-scale paperback enterprises in the United States that pre-dated Pocket Books. These include Emanuel Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books (1919) and Boni Paper Books (1929), both of which were sold by subscription, and Modern Age Books (1937), which were sold through newsstands and drugstores. The first to mass produce paperback books and use magazine distribution systems was American Mercury Books in 1937. On the early history of American paperbacks, see Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), ch. 3; Thomas L. Bonn, UnderCover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin, 1982), ch. 1; Piet Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A.: A Graphic History, 1939–1959 (San Diego: Blue Dolphin, 1981), 13–17; Frank L. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America: The History of Paperbacks and their European Background (New York: Bowker, 1958), ch. 4; and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984; repr. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 21–32. 2 Bonn, UnderCover, 41. 3 For an overview of cheap fiction in America, see Erin A. Smith, “Pulp Sensations,” in Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, ed. David Glover and Scott

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McCracken (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 141–58. See also Radway, Reading the Romance, 23–5; Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, ch. 4; Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A., 13–15; Bonn, UnderCover, 28–32. On the European roots of American paperbacks, see Schick, The Paperbound Book in America chs. 1–2; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 18–29; and Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A., 5–12. On Lane’s influence on American paperback publishing, see Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, 13–18; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 25–9; Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 3–5. For the history of NAL and its relationship to Penguin, see Thomas L. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 10. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, ch. 9. Bonn, UnderCover, 42. See Beth Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, Vol. 5 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 42–7. See also Bonn, UnderCover, 36; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 31–3, 50–55. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, covers the reprint houses in chs. 8 and 9. Bonn, UnderCover, 49–50. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, xi. See ibid., ch. 5 and Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, ch. 10. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, 83. On the distribution practices of paperback houses, see Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 169–71. Livia Tenser and Jean Casella, “Publisher’s Foreword,” in Laura, by Vera Caspary (New York: The Feminist Press, 2005), ix. This foreword is published (with slightly different paginations) in all of the books in the “Women Write Pulp” series. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 74–5. Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A., 1; Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” 43; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 125. Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” 43; Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 169; Bonn, UnderCover, 42; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 44, 47. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, 83. Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” 45. Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 111. John Cole, Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (Washington, DC: Center of the Book, Library of Congress, 1984), 3. Only 99 of these 1,322 titles had been previously reprinted. See also Davis, Two-Bit Culture, ch. 4; Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, ch. 5.

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22 Manning, When Books Went to War, 81. The most popular genre was contemporary fiction (almost 20 percent of titles). 23 Ibid, 131–2, 56–7. 24 Quoted in ibid., 78. 25 Ibid., 76–8. 26 Ibid, 84, 78–9. 27 Ibid, 75. 28 Ibid, 107, xi–xii, 109–10, 125. 29 Ibid, 81. 30 David Dempsey, “The Revolution in Books,” Atlantic (January 1953), quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture 178; Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks (New York: Reinhold, 1981), 13. See also Rabinowitz, American Pulp, who calls mid-century paperbacks a “frontier” or “contact zone . . . between high and low” (42). 31 Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 201, 211. 32 Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 3. 33 Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2001), 29. 34 Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 196. 35 On the competing visions of Gone with the Wind and God’s Little Acre, see Christopher Vials, Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935–1947 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), ch. 3. 36 Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 119, 121. The trade edition sold 8,000 copies. With 8 million copies sold, it was the third best-selling work of fiction in the United States between 1900 and 1970 (Vials, Realism for the Masses, 82). 37 Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 197. 38 On Caldwell’s literary reputation, see Vials, Realism for the Masses, 90–104; on Faulkner, see David Earle, “Faulkner and the Paperback Trade,” in William Faulkner in Context, ed. John T. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 239–40. 39 Earle, “Faulkner and the Paperback Trade,” 231; Lawrence Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 38–73. 40 Earle, “Faulkner and the Paperback Trade,” 232–33. On “pulp modernism” more generally, see David M. Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 41 Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 180. For overviews of Spillane’s paperback career, see Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 205–12; Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 180–7. 42 Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 142, 197. 43 Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 184. 44 Ibid., 148. See also Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 2; Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 144–5. 45 Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–21.

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59 60 61 62 63 64

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For an examination of the alternative publication and distribution networks of African American pulp paperback crime stories after World War II, see Justin Gifford, Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 28. Schick, The Paperbound Book in America, 85. Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 24. On pulp paperback covers generally, see Bonn, UnderCover; Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A. Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A., 88. Vials, Realism for the Masses, 102–3. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 197, 179, 170, 179. See also O’Brien, Hardboiled America, 62. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 186–7. Paperback publishers were attuned to what was going on in Hollywood and made strategic business decisions to ensure that a book’s sales benefited from the newly released film based on it. Of the eleven titles released by Pocket Books in 1939, five had or soon would have film tie-ins. Movie theaters were often close to retail outlets for paperbacks – drugstores, newsstands, and tobacco shops. By the 1950s, Hollywood studios had New York offices to keep an eye on the publishing scene for new books to adapt into films and authors to recruit into screenwriting. By the late 1950s, some sought out authors to adapt their screenplays into books (154–5). Ibid., 184. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 220. Davis discusses censorship in ch. 8. See also Rabinowitz, American Pulp, ch. 9; Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, ch. 7. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 133, 148–9. Ibid., 133. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 217. Weybright at NAL explained his fervor for fighting censorship as fueled by a desire to oppose an evolving “double standard” whereby people who could afford to buy expensive hardcovers encountered a free marketplace of ideas, but those who bought twenty-five- cent paperbacks suffered censorship of their market (quoted in Earle, “Faulkner and the Paperback Trade,” 233). Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 251. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 153. For a discussion of debates over the motto, see ibid., 180. Dempsey, quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 178. Quoted in ibid., 179. See Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Quoted in Rabinowitz, American Pulp, xii–xiii.

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Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture, 220. Rabinowitz, American Pulp, ix, 23. Tenser and Casella, “Publisher’s Foreword,” ix. John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987), 296. 70 Dempsey, quoted in Davis, Two-Bit Culture 187. 66 67 68 69

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c h a p ter 1 9

Literary Radicals in Radio’s Public Sphere Judith E. Smith

Radio was the emerging medium in the middle decades of the twentieth century, creating a new public platform, new forms of cultural consciousness, and multivocal formulations of national community. Michele Hilmes has argued that radio was “significantly different from any preceding or subsequent medium in its ability to transcend spatial boundaries, blur the private and public spheres, and escape visual determinations while still retaining the strong element of ‘realism’ that sound – rather than written words – supplies.”1 By the late 1930s, the combination of radio’s promise of immediacy and US concerns about the war in Europe made it harder to enforce established public regulatory norms intended to police the boundaries between commercial, entertainment, and political content. Some leftwing writers seized broadcast opportunities to expand the form, content, and the political possibilities of radio’s public sphere, resisting conventional commercial formulas and supposed prohibition on political messages.2 Radio had a lot to offer to literary radicals, who were already encouraged to enlarge their political imaginations and to experiment with new forms of representation by the theatrical innovations and social protest movements of the 1930s. Gaining radio access conferred a kind of public legitimacy, expanded the literary marketplace, broadened opportunities for prized national exposure, and increased the likelihood of speaking to a broad popular audience. Public pressure on the networks to expand their noncommercial, unsponsored public service programs provided openings for formal experimentation with sound and narrative, which were particularly well suited to the blurring of high–low boundaries that was a hallmark of literary modernism and left cultural expression. By the late 1930s leftleaning writers appropriated space within radio‘s offerings to warn listeners of the ominous threat of European fascism and to encourage them to envision a robust social democracy that reined in the power of plutocrats and white supremacists. After Pearl Harbor, writers and producers with these concerns had much greater social and political authority to broadcast 309

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“fighting words” as part of the mobilization for the war effort.3 However, this expanded authority did not extend long into peacetime. While some artists and intellectuals expressed disdain for radio, other modernist writers were drawn to its aural possibilities. For example, when Gertrude Stein returned to the United States in 1934, she delightedly listened to the radio, addressed its national audience via a lengthy interview with an NBC reporter, and recognized its kinship with her own work: “In writing The Making of Americans I said I write for myself and strangers and this is what broadcasting is.”4 Ultimately, radio’s literary radicals worked in multiple genres. They familiarized and legitimated distinctive forms of social address with cultural experiments combining poetry, theatrical, and musical performance. This chapter maps the efforts of literary radicals Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Langston Hughes to convey a range of antifascist sensibilities as part of radio’s public sphere. When poems and plays by 1920s literary moderns MacLeish, Millay, and Parker appeared on radio, these writers, all well established in the period before there were national networks, contributed considerable cultural capital to broadcasting. Their collective contributions reshaped radio’s public sphere while making the most of its aural capacities to intertwine creative work with political concerns for popular audiences. Depression-era radicals Orson Welles and Norman Corwin, coming of age at the same time as radio, were radio insiders, writers, and producers. Their broadcast work in this period created some of the powerful aesthetic techniques most directly associated with radio’s antifascist address. Many of these writers and producers understood the dangers of fascism as encouraging racism, anti-Semitism, and exclusionary nationalism, and they aspired to challenge national practices of racial discrimination. Some were influenced by African American oral, musical, and literary culture, and they consciously promoted Black artists while publicly critiquing segregation and white supremacy. However, a well-established Black radical writer like Langston Hughes confronted serious obstacles in gaining access to national networks and so could not readily benefit from radio’s literary marketplace. The broadcast industry’s deeply ingrained, racially segregated practices placed powerful limits on radio’s public sphere, creating a firewall that was rarely breached. In the reshaped political environment and restructured radio industry of the late 1940s, the association of these literary radicals with antifascist and antiracist causes would be used to justify formal and informal censorship, effectively closing off their experimentation within radio’s public sphere.

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When acclaimed poet Archibald MacLeish’s antifascist verse play, “The Fall of the City, “ was broadcast on CBS on April 11, 1937, it was understood at the time as marking a significant turning point for literary authorship on the radio and as an aural innovation animated by an explicit political challenge to the official US stance of neutrality.5 MacLeish was no stranger to the culture industries. Although family wealth and class confidence enabled him to develop his poetic voice among literary modernists and artists living in Paris in the 1920s, he had worked since 1929 as a writer for Fortune magazine alongside the other poets and writers hired by Henry Luce to produce vivid investigative reporting on the then-faltering American corporate industrial system.6 In the years after the stock market crash, MacLeish won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and he gravitated toward the left, adopting a new mission “to integrate the role of the poet and the public man.”7 MacLeish’s turn to radio grew out of his experience in writing Panic, an agit-prop play in verse, in 1935. Determined to find a way to dramatize “what was actually happening right around us” with a poetry that would vehemently and directly engage an audience through performance, MacLeish worked out a design for a play using music, choral scenes, and archetypical characters to blame capitalists for the economic collapse without acceding to Marxist economic determinism. He aimed for an effect “in which the verse carries the action.”8 Though Panic only ran for three nights, it gave MacLeish the intoxicating experience of hearing his work performed while watching/listening to audiences respond, and witnessing the young actor Orson Welles in his first leading role in New York.9 A week later, when an excerpt from Panic was broadcast on March of Time, Luce empire’s radio show, MacLeish got a taste for what radio could offer to drama, and Welles found work as a regular actor on that program.10 MacLeish intended “The Fall of the City” as “dramatic poetry” for radio. The play’s premise, gathering civic leaders and crowds in an unnamed public square in anticipation of the arrival of an unknown conqueror, drew on historic images of the Spanish conquest of Aztec Mexico and from current headlines reporting the German occupation of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and especially the fascist-supported coup in Spain. MacLeish passionately believed that the Spanish Civil War was “the great try-out of Hitler and Mussolini, the preparation,” and he wanted his warning of the dangerous conqueror to mobilize support for the Republican cause. He brought his new play to sound engineer-turnedproducer/director Irving Reis who was running CBS’s Columbia Workshop, a noncommercially sponsored network experiment in public interest broadcasting.11 Columbia Workshop had announced its willingness to

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“attempt anything unusual in voice and sound effect” in order to create compelling drama for listeners, and Reis immediately agreed to produce MacLeish’s play. A central structural aspect of “The Fall of the City” was its reliance on radio’s own techniques, what MacLeish called “the natural paraphernalia of the ordinary broadcast.” The play makes full use of a radio announcer, who, according to MacLeish, was “the most useful dramatic personage since the Greek Chorus,” powerfully voiced by the young Orson Welles. Critic Neil Verma called attention to the broadcast’s unusual “audiopositioning.” Although Orson Welles’s announcer serves to guide characters and radio listeners to truths they cannot see, Reis’s imaginative sound design, broadcast from a New York armory, positions the radio audience as part of the crowd, creating a dissonance between the expert and the people that occurs in other forms of artistic and cultural expression in this period.12 The excitement generated by “The Fall of the City” encouraged other literary figures, such as Stephen Vincent Benet and William Saroyan, to consider writing for radio; in the introduction to the published script, MacLeish directly exhorted poets to seize the power, innovative techniques, and legitimating force of this medium. The antifascist warning of “Fall of the City” continued to reverberate when CBS rebroadcast the play from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on September 29, 1938, following the German occupation of Austria and on the very night before the Munich meeting between Britain, France, Germany, and Italy that acceded to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. The play now seemed to offer a direct indictment of “appeasement” to radio’s listeners.13 MacLeish’s second radio verse play, “Air Raid,” broadcast on Columbia Workshop on October 26, 1938, again used the radio announcer format to “report” the horrors of the 1937 German-Italian bombing of Guernica, Spain. The announcer, positioned as the credible eyes and ears of the listening audience, narrated the terrors of a devastating aerial attack on civilians.14 After accepting government appointments in FDR’s New Deal and wartime administrations, MacLeish wrote other radio plays serving morale-building and wartime initiatives, but without the notable impact of “The Fall of the City” and “Air Raid.” Another literary radical who produced an antifascist radio sensation was Edna St. Vincent Millay, the widely acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and iconic literary modernist. Her wartime verse play, “Murder of Lidice,” broadcast on NBC on October 19, 1942, memorialized the total destruction of the Czech village Lidice, razed to the ground by the Nazis for supposedly sheltering underground leaders. The broadcast of Millay’s play, characterizing Nazi brutality and Czech heroism via simple unadorned voices and

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music, was immediately shortwaved to England and Europe, with Spanish and Portuguese translations transmitted to South American countries. Millay’s literary celebrity encouraged a vigorous pre-broadcast press campaign. After the broadcast, Millay’s original handwritten manuscript was auctioned to raise money for Czech refugee relief, and Millay’s publisher released a print version the next day. Magazine reprints and a commercial recording kept the verse play in wide circulation.15 The poetic quality of “Murder of Lidice” disappointed some and cost Millay critical esteem, but she had a long history of taking public political positions and did not retreat. She fired back at her critics, “I’ve enlisted for the duration. I’ve gone over the top, and I may not return, but I do not care. Poets and critics might criticize me for writing propaganda in ‘Murder of Lidice’ but this is no time to think of one’s reputation when the world is in the midst of disaster.”16 Having authored an anti-war play in 1918 and protested the death sentences for Saco and Vanzetti in 1927, Millay had moved further left in the 1930s, and, like MacLeish, she also publicly supported the Republican side in Spain, lending her name to fundraising appeals for Spanish refugees.17 Prior to crafting “Murder in Lidice” for radio, Millay’s literary celebrity was secure. Her poetry had been recognized with a Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman poet, and her published collections were consistent bestsellers. Coming from a working-class, female-headed household, Millay had struggled to support herself by her writing labor, selling popular poems and fiction (under an assumed name) to magazines beginning in 1918. Her verse conveyed the modern “New Women” as sexually alluring and self-determining, and was enhanced by her wildly successful readings across the country. These readings (which, she wrote to a friend, sometimes made her feel like a prostitute) utilized her distinctive theatrical, carefully modulated, seductive vocal style, and continued through 1939.18 Millay’s popular modern lyrical style and representative New Womanhood had contributed to key moments in radio long before 1942. An abridged but live performance of a popular opera, The King’s Henchmen, for which she wrote the libretto, was the lead musical offering to inaugurate CBS’s first day of national broadcasting, September 18, 1927.19 Millay’s distinctive form of public reading, in full display on a specially commissioned series of national broadcasts beginning on Christmas Day 1932, provided a model for intimate address on radio. Margaret Cuthbert, head of NBC’s programming for women, would later emphasize the significance of Millay’s broadcast in terms of literary celebrity: for her, Millay’s success was the triumph of a poetic performer

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earning the remuneration usually offered to distinguished actors and concert musicians. Millay’s on-air techniques drew on her established public reading strategies – to intrigue audiences with the quality and timbre of her (trained) voice, and to project a charismatic combination of presence and intimacy. Choosing poems that were not challenging or particularly provocative and offering them as performance pieces without personal commentary made her seem both sincere and familiar. Literary critic Lesley Wheeler observed that Millay’s radio readings might have made audiences listening in living rooms feel even closer to her than they might in a library or lecture hall. Millay fully exploited radio’s capabilities for projecting intimacy: listeners wrote that they loved her voice because it could transform “our country living room into a place of magic.” They especially appreciated what sounded like informality, as in her on-air brief reassurances to herself when she couldn’t find the poem she intended to read. FDR’s first carefully designed efforts to project intimacy in his Fireside Chat format followed only a few weeks later.20 Millay returned to NBC radio in October 1939, speaking out to urge Americans to abandon neutrality and support the Allies.21 Her public familiarity via the culture industries, her forthright political sensibilities, and her prior radio experiences directed her literary path to “Murder at Lidice,” contributing to its enthusiastic reception and wide circulation. Not surprisingly, NBC turned to Millay to commission verse for a special D-Day broadcast; her “Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army” was read on air by the English actor and WWI veteran Ronald Coleman on June 6, 1944, and issued later by NBC as a special broadside. Dorothy Parker’s radio presence was inextricable from her unparalleled public literary position as perhaps her era’s most frequently quoted writer of witticism, criticism, fiction, and verse, which were published in New York’s sophisticated magazines and then collected in several bestselling volumes. A self-supporting writer after 1914, Parker became one of the best-known players in the creation of modernism that circulated via popular literature and journalism in the 1920s. She was the only woman “regular” in the selfselected and well-publicized group of journalists, columnists, critics, and playwrights identified as the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table group placed a high premium on a kind of sophisticated cosmopolitan wit, a democratizing sensibility that relied in part on insights and observations deriving from the outsider position of those from Jewish origins, including Parker22 Before being broadcast on radio, Parker’s literary work had enhanced the claims of “New Women” on the public sphere. Literary critic Nina Miller

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argues that Parker’s poetry inverted the private voice supposed by lyric conventions by foregrounding the listening audience, making “the poem’s public the site of her primary psychological investment” and transforming “the solitary musings of a speaker addressing only herself or the figure of her lover into essential public space and speech.” Parker’s poetry and short fiction exposed problematic gendered expectations within social norms and heterosexual love, encouraging distance and irony instead. Miller suggests that Parker’s creative work, which envisioned “self definition outside the heterosexual dyad,” made a significant contribution to constructing a modern civic identity for women.23 During the period in which these literary strategies positioned Parker as a popularly read woman writer who crossed over into financial success, she actively placed herself on the left. In the late 1920s she began to refer to herself as a socialist and, in 1934, a communist; she attended and spoke eloquently at many benefit events, generously lending her name for fund-raising efforts. She joined fights against what came to be called legal lynching: she picketed, got arrested, and joined the final vigil in the 1927 campaign to stay the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti24 She embraced radical organizing that recognized writing as labor and writers as potential labor unionists and labor allies. In New York she supported the Author’s League and the Newspaper Guild, and when she moved to Hollywood, she joined and then fought for recognition for the Screenwriters Guild.25 As with MacLeish and Millay, Parker’s inchoate antifascism became more urgent when the Spanish Civil War emerged as the first front of the struggle between fascism and democracy. After she returned from a trip to the front in Spain, she wrote about what she witnessed in New Masses, as well as in the New Yorker, and lent her name to solicitations to help Spanish refugees, as well as other refugees from Hitler, for the next decade.26 From early in her career, Parker seemed to have acted on a growing sense of connection between anti-Semitism and racism; in 1924, she walked out on drinks with the famous writer H. L. Mencken when he began to tell jokes about Black people. Her 1927 short story “Arrangement in Black and White,” published in the New Yorker, is a sharply observed and bold critique of the racism embedded in fashionable white social experiments in approaching Black culture, and its insights were applauded in The Crisis by the brilliant African American political journalist Marvel Jackson [later Cooke], who wrote, “We take our hats off to Dorothy Parker.” As a Hollywood screenwriter, she hosted a benefit for the Scottsboro defendants, and she noisily protested a Louisiana lynching in 1935.27

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After the United States entered the war, her name appeared prominently associated with broad labor, civil rights, and antifascist coalitions and in 1943 she explicitly pleaded for help for European Jews, arguing that “no one of us can be whole and safe and free . . . while there is one Jew in Europe driven and persecuted and tortured.”28 Parker came to radio initially because her literary prominence and clever wit made her a sought-after guest on its commercial book programs, first on her friend Alec Woollcott’s lively and popular literary review broadcast, The Town Crier, early in 1934, and then several times on Information Please, Author, Author, and Author’s Quiz.29 Parker’s radio prestige was enhanced by her Hollywood screenwriting achievements, especially her contribution to the Hollywood “success and heartbreak” fable, A Star is Born, quickly adapted and then readapted for radio.30 When Parker’s stories were performed on radio, their modern ironic distance on female socialization and heterosexual norms carved out a less constrained “women’s space” in radio’s prime-time public sphere, supplementing the gendered conventions of radio’s daytime programing. Columbia Workshop announced “Apartment to Let,” a play dramatizing marital disunion and reunion by Parker and her husband Alan Campbell, as a featured prestige presentation on its “festival” line-up, broadcast in August 1939. In the late 1930s and 1940s, actresses turned her stories into monologues on variety shows, and they were also read on radio “story” programs.31 Broadcasting Parker’s fiction enlisted radio’s airwaves in her literary mode, identifying a modern civic identity for women. Although limited to New York audiences, radio gave Parker’s 1927 short story “Arrangement in Black and White” a new life and new meanings in 1944, when the talented African American journalist Roi Ottley adapted it for his extraordinary show, New World A-Coming, broadcast on WMCA, a local noncommercial station. Ottley’s show was premised on the idea that World War II’s defeat of fascism was working in tandem with an anticolonial insurgency throughout the world to create an unstoppable momentum for racial equality. He introduced each broadcast with a musical signature composed by Duke Ellington and the pronouncement that this “new world” was arriving “with the sweep and fury of the resurrection.” Prior shows in the series featured talented Black performers, rarely heard on radio, who reenacted stories of survival, persistence, and resistance in confronting the historical and contemporary obstacles caused by racial injustice.32 For Parker’s story to be featured in this context reiterated Marvel Jackson’s acclamation of her insights. Addressing white as well as Black listeners, the dramatization of an encounter between a highly

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accomplished, Robeson-like African American concert singer and a selfcongratulatory, pretentious, unthinking party guest provided an object lesson in what every-day white supremacy sounded like, conveying a powerful race-conscious critique ordinarily off-limits in mainstream broadcasting. Parker’s literary and media prominence gave her extra clout when she spoke out as a sharp critic of postwar radio’s political concessions. Parker helped found and served as chair of the Voice of Freedom Committee, organized in the spring of 1947 to resist anticommunist surveillance in broadcasting. After liberal commentators including William Shirer began to lose broadcasting jobs, the Voice of Freedom Committee organized rallies and meetings, petitions, and monitoring campaigns addressed to the networks and the Federal Communications Commission; it also actively challenged radio’s racist stereotyping and exclusionary employment practices. Parker was one of the white signatories joining Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other prominent Black artists, writers, musicians, and singers sponsoring the July 1949 Committee for the Negro in the Arts broadcasting conference called to publicize radio’s distorted characterizations of Black people and demand an end to its segregated practices in performance and production.33 Parker’s literary and political voice shaped radio’s public sphere. Unlike MacLeish, Millay, and Parker, Orson Welles did not come to radio with literary prestige. His artistry was instead associated with the theater and later with film, but radio was a key arena that stimulated his creativity and on which he had a significant impact. A voracious cultural curiosity and confidence were products of Welles’s unusual and disrupted middle-class upbringing in and around Chicago. After returning from Europe, Welles found his way into a left theatrical world that nurtured his own inclinations to defy cultural and social hierarchies, which had been affirmed by the Federal Theatre Project’s democratizing experiment with innovative theatrical techniques and popular appeal. Radio work supported Welles as a young actor and as a theatrical visionary and drove his fascination with radio’s special capacity for expanding the imaginative realm.34 Radio broadcasts associated with Welles helped carve out space across genres to address the dangers of fascism in Europe and on the home front. The majority of his radio work involved adaptation, its own genre in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication, out of which Welles and his collaborators created startling original effects. Looking across his work in theater and film as well as radio, Michael Denning has singled out Welles as the most important Popular Front artist, “both politically and aesthetically.”35

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For an aspiring actor like Welles, radio work was a new form of bread and butter, and he auditioned assiduously, first winning a part on a CBS educational program and then on various series. After his role in Panic led to his appearance on March of Time, Welles became one of that show’s regulars, performing in its dramatic re-creations of news stories drawn from Luce empire’s Time magazine. Cross-fertilization of news and drama was appearing everywhere, from tabloid journalism to Warner Brothers crime stories, and it would be a staple of the Federal Theatre Project when Living Newspapers dramatized “stage newsreels.” March of Time, first on radio, and later on film, played an important role in popularizing news as reenactment, blending reportage, sound effects, and melodrama.36 Working from the inside, Welles absorbed its radio sound and drama techniques. He also worked across radio genres. Before he appeared as the narrator in “Fall of the City,” he had read poetry on Alexander Woollcott’s Town Crier and in between musical segments on a CBS series called Musical Reveries, devised an adaptation of Hamlet in which he starred for Columbia Workshop, and had begun to voice the mysterious lead character of the long-running suspense series, The Shadow. His work on radio supported his risk-taking innovation in theater. Welles’s experimental theatrical collaboration with John Houseman in and out of the Federal Theatre Project and with their Mercury Company led back to radio, and radio techniques became part of Welles’s stagecraft. After Welles and Houseman’s attention-getting staging of Julius Caesar as a modern-dress fascist allegory in November 1937, CBS offered them a radio series. Welles planned to organize the storytelling around a character’s “first-person singular” narrative to enhance radio’s intimacy effects, promising “to bring to radio the experimental techniques which have proved so successful in another medium, and to treat radio itself with the intelligence and respect such a beautiful and powerful medium deserves.” Welles’s radio adaptation of Julius Caesar in early September 1938 took MacLeish’s use of a radio announcer as narrator up a notch by using a current well-known radio commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn, to “report” on the action of the play. By now, this kind of “announcing” readily signaled an antifascist radio aesthetic, especially when the announcer was not actually in control of the unfolding terrors, a technique used to powerful effect in Mercury Theater’s famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. In that production, the facsimile notification, “we interrupt this program for a special bulletin,” repeated the format of fast-breaking war news from the European front. The sensational response to the War of the Worlds adaptation

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led directly to Welles’s access to Hollywood studio resources to make Citizen Kane (1941).37 While working on Kane (with its not-so veiled critique of isolationism) and other films, Welles continued to find inventive broadcast opportunities to articulate antifascism, especially what he understood to be its expression on the home front. Welles’s original radio play, “His Honor the Mayor,” was broadcast on CBS on April 6, 1941. The mayor listened to all the dangers represented by his town’s “domestic fascists,” embodied by an anti-labor, anti-Mexican, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist group of “White Crusaders” presenting themselves as a “Veteran’s League.” Rather than shutting down the Veteran’s League meeting, the mayor dramatically asserts their right to assemble, implicitly defending left-wing free assembly and speech at the same time. The Hearst press and the American Legion immediately denounced the play as communist propaganda, and the FBI prepared to open a file on Welles, although other reviews recognized and praised his intended purpose to dramatize democratic protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.38 Welles’s familiar voice was frequently heard on the radio during the war years in radio dramas, and he hosted and appeared as a celebrity guest on popular variety shows. When he had control over the airtime, he argued for the values of labor, civil rights, and internationalism that were associated with the Popular Front, never more powerfully than in his summer 1946 broadcasts publicizing the brutal attack on World War II veteran Isaac Woodard. Working with the left-wing African American cartoonist Ollie Harrington, then serving as publicity director for the NAACP, Welles created dramatic monologues for a series of broadcasts, deploying radio’s intimacy effects as he directly addressed the police officer who blinded Woodward; he insisted on accountability for the resurgence of racist terror attacks in response to wartime demands for expanding democracy. Harrington described Welles as taking “the role of somebody out hunting down these men who had committed that crime.” The five broadcasts on the Woodard case were electrifying, receiving thousands of listener letters and eventually helping push the Justice Department to file federal charges against the police officer. But these broadcasts also generated opposition, especially from Welles’s ABC network boss. These protests ended his career on American radio, the medium that had consistently supported him, that he had enthusiastically embraced, and that had made him a household name.39 Norman Corwin brought neither literary prestige nor theatrical flair to radio, but in the late 1930s and through the war, he was recognized as the

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writer most responsible for “making poetry talk” on radio, where he wrote, directed, and produced many significant broadcasts.40 His turn to radio grew out of his culture industry jobs in newspaper reporting and movie publicity; reading poetry on the air was his first “authored” radio initiative. Like Welles, he was fascinated with radio’s capabilities to use sound to revise the way listeners moved through time and space in stories, and his antifascist convictions infused his writing and producing in a number of different radio genres. Corwin’s characteristic broadcasts were particularly well situated to express solidarity in the age of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). His hybrid use of intimate as well as “kaleidosonic” sound positioning encouraged listeners both to identify and empathize with individual characters and to imagine the power and pleasure of crossing social and national boundaries in unity and solidarity.41 Using poetic assemblages of disparate voices, Corwin invited listeners to experience dramatic events as they affected ordinary families living through historical and contemporary crises, in both familiar and far-away places. In the build-up to war and for its duration, he was the writer of choice to create special broadcasts conveying urgent national concerns for the radio division of the Office of Fact and Figures (headed by CBS vice president William B. Lewis) and for the Office of War Information (headed by CBS radio commentator Elmer Davis and writer and FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood). Born in 1910 into a Jewish skilled printer’s family in Boston, Corwin developed his pro-labor, antifascist political orientation in the 1930s. These political sensibilities shaped his poetic choices. Securing a weekly nighttime broadcast slot on an experimental New York area station for an onair poetry show, he drew on modern poets and sometimes his own work, using music, sound and choral effects, humor, and dramatic emphasis to enhance their popular appeal. The night Corwin’s show caught the attention of CBS executive William B. Lewis, he featured excerpts from prairie populist poet Edgar Lee Master’s celebration of everyday small town people in Spoon River Anthology and the Greenwich Village bohemian New Woman poet Genevieve Taggard, whose poetry in the 1930s explored labor strikes and class and race-based prejudice.42 Corwin developed a new and distinctive style of poetic political radio address at CBS, where he began working in April 1938. Here he became familiar with the new sound techniques associated with Columbia Workshop’s experimental anthology drama. Once in charge of his own “radio poetry” series, he began to use multivoice narration, montage, and background effects to create a characteristic dramatic form of choral speech, using choral rhythms, counter-rhythms, and interweaving patterns. Later

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Corwin employed a “verse choir” group that specialized in blending low and high voices in harmony to enhance on-air performance.43 In 1938, Corwin’s first original CBS presentation, “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas,” conveyed an antifascist sensibility, identifying St. Nick’s enemies as anti-Semitic and racist; their “plot” relied on segregationist strategies to bribe senators and buy votes so they could “legislate a situation to rule Christmas right out of the nation.” “The Plot” also let listeners in on the secrets of radio’s artifice, with “Soto Voce” interrupting the story to call attention to the sound techniques of fades and gongs developed for guiding the radio’s audience through time and space.44 Other shows revealed more explicit expressions of Corwin’s pro-labor and antifascist politics. In January 1939 he adapted excerpts from Carl Sandburg’s 1936 book-length prose poem, The People Yes. Sandburg’s poem celebrated the common sense and resilience of working people and of American vernacular democratic traditions, and it included a plea for a collective response to the era’s economic and social crises.45 Corwin’s 1939 air raid play, “They Fly through the Air with the Greatest of Ease,” wore its antifascist politics on its sleeve by focusing on the German-Italian collaboration in the bombing of women and children in Guernica, Spain. Moving listeners back and forth between the sky and the ground, the play juxtaposed the disengaged nonchalant musings of pilots aiming at their targets with intimate family lives that the bombs would shortly obliterate. One of the bombers voiced the exact anesthetizing words used by Mussolini’s son when he visualized bombing Ethiopian cavalrymen as “a budding rose unfolding.” (Corwin made the attribution explicit in the published version of the script.) “They Fly through the Air” brought Corwin national recognition, with praise pouring into CBS.46 Corwin’s wartime broadcasts created a distinctive form of nationalizing address. In the fall of 1941, Corwin was directed to write a special national broadcast celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights – pointedly celebrating American democratic protections to encourage national resolve in the build-up to the US entry into World War II. He sought dramatic material in the contentious debates that both generated the amendments and mobilized support for ratifying the Constitution. By the time “We Hold These Truths” was broadcast on December 15, 1941, the Japanese military had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was officially at war. The show – broadcast simultaneously on all four major networks, originating from three different cities, and concluding with a special message from President Roosevelt – reached a huge audience estimated at sixty-three million.47

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The populist historical pageantry in “We Hold These Truths” represented political actors as ordinary working people, especially citizensoldiers, but this framing had certain limits. Although the broadcasts referred to discrimination and equal rights, they did not include recognizable African American characters or voices, and women only entered the narrative as mothers or widows of soldiers. Corwin’s broadcasts marking the end of the war in Europe and Japan, “On a Note of Triumph” and “August 14, 1945,“ emphasized the personal sacrifice and social costs of war, as well as the political and social imperatives of fighting to defeat fascism and create a lasting peace, but were similarly limited in the conventions used to represent “ordinary” citizenship. These conventions persisted across of much of Corwin’s highly inventive and much admired poetic radio programming.48 The Corwin programs that succeeded in broadcasting Black voices relied on musical performers and a dramatic musical format alternately called folk cantata, ballad opera, and “radioratorio.” This format derived from left-wing theatrical experiments and topical musical revues, what radio writer and editor Erik Barnouw described in 1945 as the “musical wing” of 1930s hybrid documentary drama. Beginning in the fall of 1939, when Corwin began directing a morale-building variety-format series, The Pursuit of Happiness, he engaged Paul Robeson, then an internationally recognized African American singer and radical political activist, to sing “Ballad for Americans.” This musical piece inclusively defined “the people” across lines of race, gender, and ethnicity; touched on the usually forbidden subject of lynching; and argued for civil rights as central to democracy (“men in white skin can never be free while his brother is in slavery”). Both words and music became inseparable from Robeson’s personal and political authority. His performance, for which Corwin got the network to pay twice its usual rates, conveyed the urgency of redeeming democracy’s wartime promise of full African American citizenship.49 In March 1944, when Corwin broadcast “Lonesome Train,” a partly sung, partly spoken eulogy posing Abraham Lincoln’s heroism in the terms of contemporary civil rights, again Black voices articulated Black freedom. A month later, in April 1944, with help from Langston Hughes and African American folk singer Josh White, Corwin directly confronted the reluctance to represent the citizen-soldier as Black by circulating an account of a Black hero ignored by the mainstream but lionized in the Black press. “Dorie Got a Medal” was publicized as a “boogie-woogie biographical ballad” about Dorie Miller, the untrained Navy messman who deftly undermined the Navy’s defense of its segregated practices when he took over the antiaircraft gun of a dead gunner and shot down four enemy airplanes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.50

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The widely recognized poet Langston Hughes could “help” Corwin bring the Dorie Miller story to the airwaves. But even with his considerable literary stature, he was rarely able to gain the access, available to other literary radicals, to radio’s public legitimacy, expanded literary marketplace, and huge popular audience. More often he encountered frustration and obstruction, even though Hughes’s body of work would seem to be particularly well suited to an aural medium. Kansas City and Chicago blues performers were part of the soundscape of Hughes’s youth and shaped his commitment to delivering voice and music associated with Black working people through his printed poems. By the mid-1930s, Hughes was a published poet and novelist and an aspiring playwright, and he had developed a successful strategy for reading and touring, varying his performance from the traveling preacher to the cabaret, salon, and recital mode for different audiences.51 Hughes moved left in the 1930s, publishing in The New Masses, dramatizing blatant Jim Crow injustices in Scottsboro Limited (1931), and living in the Soviet Union in 1932–3. He was a vocal and public antifascist, supporting the Republican side in Spain and traveling there in the summer of 1937. Shortly after returning, Hughes produced his own Black history merger of music, poetry, and drama in the left-wing cabaret revue style, titled Don’t You Want to Be Free? A Poetry Play from Slavery through the Blues to Now – and Then Some! – with Singing, Music, and Dancing.52 Like the other literary radicals, but with extra urgency as a Black artist, Hughes hoped his work might contribute to transforming the discourse in the public sphere, and he actively sought to work in the culture industries. He tried breaking into films, but found that industry nearly impenetrable for a Black writer. The indignity of having one’s work altered beyond recognition by producers, directors, and other writers within the studio system was much worse for a Black radical writer, given the high stakes in racial representation, the historical weight of stereotyping, and the broad-based white resistance to any intimation of racial equality. Segregated working conditions were the norm in studio facilities, and white producers who might have sought out Black writers on the grounds of their familiarity with Black culture expected them to create the familiar accommodating film characterizations to which white audiences had become accustomed. Hughes was expected to be grateful when he and Hollywood actor Clarence Muse were hired to prepare a story and screenplay for Way Down South, a 1939 musical film that white critics lauded and Black critics condemned.53 Radio was hardly more inviting. Hughes’s work would have likely been known to Norman Corwin, and he was invited to submit scripts to The Pursuit of Happiness. But his musical play “The Organizer,” dramatizing

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the struggle to form a Black and white sharecroppers union, was rejected immediately as “too controversial.” The only script he could sell to CBS featured a “model minority” figure, accommodationist Booker T. Washington, for a show to be aired in tandem with a new US Post Office stamp bearing his likeness. Hughes was approached to develop a commercial radio series based on Little Ham, his Harlem comedy about the numbers racket. He would be well compensated for such a series, but also would be readily subjected to network pressure to emulate Amos ’n Andy. Ultimately, the sponsors did not buy it and the network lost interest.54 Especially after A. Philip Randolph’s threatened March on Washington in the summer of 1941 linked Black support for the war effort with the campaign to desegregate the military and war industries, it was clear to those in charge of “morale building” that they would need some kind of Black input. In the fall of 1941, CBS paid Hughes to broadcast a previously unproduced revue of Black theatrical history he had written originally for a Chicago Negro Exposition. After Pearl Harbor, the Office of Civilian Defense approached Hughes for scripts, but when he inquired about pay, he was told, “Writers were not being paid to express patriotism.” He agreed to write some scripts anyway, but did point out that white writers had many opportunities to earn money that were closed to Black writers. Later, he complained to a close friend, “Nobody else connected with radio or theater works for nothing. Why should they expect the author to do so?“55 Hughes’s support for Black involvement in the military was conditional on the demands of the wartime Double V Campaign that linked victory over fascism abroad with victory over Jim Crow segregation at home. He wanted radio to help him to make this case. His submission to the Office of Civil Defense was “Brothers,” a radio play that racialized Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear) through the story of a Black sailor coming home from duty. This script was immediately rejected as “far too controversial.” Hughes’s response to the Office of Civil Defense charged that the radio industry “was a most reactionary and difficult medium in which to put forward any decent or progressive ideas about Negro life.”56 He observed to a friend that radio, like many war industries, was “trying their best to wriggle out of hiring Negroes.”57 Discouraged about getting dramatic scripts on the air that introduced new kinds of Black characters who fought fascism and did not accede to Jim Crow, Hughes hoped his songs and poetry could make the case for Black labor and uncompromised Black citizenship as integral to American

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wartime democracy. In 1942, he got airtime for “Freedom Road,” his popularly styled anthem to the Double V Campaign sung by Kenneth Spencer on the Treasury Department’s Treasury Star Parade, as well as on a March of Time segment. His recitation poem “Freedom’s Plow,” read on radio in 1943, emphasized the contributions of both Black and white working people in building America.58 A special wartime CIO broadcast in 1943 included poems and songs written by Hughes and performed by Paul Robeson that emphasized the significant contributions of Black labor to US victory, and Hughes’s short radio play, “John Henry Hammers It Out,” included a Hughes’s song that promised “we’ll hammer it out together, White Folks and Black Folks Hand in hand.”59 Hughes was the only Black writer invited to serve on the advisory board of the War Writers Board (WWB), which also included Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norman Corwin. He responded generously to the many requests he received, including requests for radio scripts, while continuing to register objections to radio’s continuing censorship of “any real dramatic approach to the actual problems of the Negro People.” In 1943, the WWB quickly broadcast “In Service to My Country,” a play Hughes wrote about interracial cooperation in building the Alaska-Canada highway, on New York City’s public station. However, his play “Private Jim Crow,” dramatizing the ordinary humiliations that Black soldiers encountered in the army, was never produced.60 Radio did open some doors, however. Hughes appeared on radio book shows in 1941 and 1942 to read from and answer questions about his new book, Shakespeare in Harlem. He addressed listeners directly when he participated in an interracial panel for the New York-based NBC America’s Town Meeting of the Air in early 1944 to discuss the topic, “Let’s Face the Race Question. ” The combination of his forthright attack on segregation, dissection of rhetorical opposition to “social equality,” demand for federal action, and personal amiability and charm made a powerful impact. This appearance led directly to new booking management by the top national speakers’ bureau and increased invitations to address national white and black audiences.61 Still, Hughes’s most expansive opportunity to show how he might use radio could not be heard in the United States. In 1944, he prepared the script for a musical drama, “The Man Who Went to War,” a project commissioned by a BBC radio producer in association with folk music collector Alan Lomax, who worked during the war for the Office of War Information. For this ballad opera, intended to support the military effort by promoting cultural and interracial friendship between the peoples of Britain

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and the United States, Hughes finally had free rein. He could make dazzling use of the language of blues and gospel, and he could mobilize radio’s intimacy effects while also moving listeners through time and space.62 In Hughes’s dramatic vision, Black citizen-soldiers and Black women workers who were also family members represent the ordinary characters with whom listeners are invited to identify; they are not the problem, not the “other.” They possess the personal and musical resources of courage, spirit, caring, and commitment – qualities forged in their long fight against injustice – that could inspire and sustain “everyone fighting today . . . all the people determined to win freedom for the world.” The story is set “anywhere that the war has been fought, anywhere that the bombs have fallen,” with scenes alternating between the soldier/husband (Canada Lee) serving with his buddies, and his wife (Ethel Waters) working in a war factory and caring for a grandparent and a baby. Its revision of the antifascist air raid genre positions the home front characters in an underground shelter during a terrifying and destructive attack from the air; after the bombing, a neighbor, whose house is left standing, takes in the family whose home has been destroyed. That this broadcast fully conveying the breadth of Hughes’s cosmopolitan racial vision for the public sphere, employing wonderfully talented African American actors and musicians, was heard by millions in the British Empire but was not on the air in the United States just reinforced his anger at American radio’s racial intransigence. As he wrote the following year to Erik Barnouw, a progressive radio writer and producer, radio’s efforts did not serve the public interest as far as race was concerned; radio producers rejected dramas exploring ordinary African American lives in favor of keeping alive “the stereotype of the dialect-speaking amiably-moronic Negro servant as the chief representative of our racial group on the air.” Hughes understood this limitation of radio as an example of domestic fascism: “RADIO,” he wrote, “is almost as far from being a free medium of expression for Negro writers as Hitler’s airlanes are for the Jews.”63 By the end of the war, the distinctive circumstances that had enabled the literary radicals described in this chapter to sometimes seize the airwaves were decisively altered: radio had changed. The noncommercial programming that had nurtured dramatic experimentation shrank as network executives raided radio to support the development of television and the competition for advertising intensified. Postwar radio was not the same medium for writers. Moreover, the political environment had changed. After Roosevelt’s death, unquestioning support for the Allies gave way to uncertainty

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about the Soviet Union’s territorial repositioning and Truman’s “get tough with Russia” foreign policy. The broadcast industries were the first target of growing conservative opposition, with entertainment columnists and church and veterans groups joining congressional committees to define support for refugees, labor, and desegregation as “un-American” and to identify those warning of Nazi incursions as “premature anti-fascists.” In 1950 the blacklisting “bible,” Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, published entries on Parker, Welles, Corwin, and Hughes. By this point Welles had already fled to Europe, Corwin had already been forced out by CBS, Millay would soon be dead, MacLeish turned to university teaching, and Parker and Hughes eked out what living they could from print. The formidable force of broadcast blacklisting offers an ironic testimony to the powerful, dramatic impact of literary radicals on radio’s public sphere. NOTES 1 Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xvi. 2 Michael Denning identified radio as a particularly fertile ground for radical writers in the 1930s in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 91. See also my essay, “Radio’s ‘Cultural Front,’ 1938–1948,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2002), 209–30, and Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1–37. 3 Fighting Words (1940) was the title of Donald Ogden Stewart’s highly edited version of the proceedings of the Third Congress of the left-affiliated League of American Writers, which included a chapter on radio. On wartime radio more generally, see Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during WWII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Howard Blue, Words at War: WWII Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002); and Albert Wertheim, Staging the War: American Drama and WWII (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 174–224. 4 Stein’s interview was broadcast on November 12, 1934, and was published in Paris Review 116 (Fall 1990), 85–97; Stein quoted in Sarah Wilson, “Gertrude Stein and the Radio,” Modernism/Modernity, 11.2 (April 2004), 261–78. Stein’s own work was popularized on radio when Four Saints in Three Acts was broadcast on CBS in 1942 and 1947. 5 For example, Douglas Coulter’s commentary in Columbia Workshop Plays: Fourteen Radio Dramas, ed. Coulter (New York: CBS and Whittlesy House, 1939), 349. Many of the scripts for the radio plays discussed in this chapter

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were published, some in multiple collections, and the original broadcasts are now widely available on various “old time” radio internet sites. MacLeish’s colleagues at Fortune in the first half of the 1930s included Dwight MacDonald, Wilder Hobson, Russell Davenport, Ralph Ingersoll, and James Agee; Robert Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 91–124. MacLeish quoted by Richard Somer, “The Public Man of Letters,” in The Proceedings of the Archibald MacLeish Symposium, May 7–8, 1982, ed. Bernard Drabeck et al. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 117, as cited by Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 226. MacLeish to H. Phelps Putnam [c. June 1934], in R. H. Winnick, ed., Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907–1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 267. Richard Drabek and Helen Ellis, ed., Archibald MacLeish: Reflections (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 100–7; Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (New York: Vintage, 1996), 196–205; Donaldson, MacLeish, 239–42; MacLeish in a letter to John Dos Passos, March 20, 1935, in Winnick, Letters, 275. The radical New Theater League and the left-affiliated literary journal, New Masses, sponsored the third performance, followed by a debate. The cast included prominent African American actresses Rose McClendon and Osceola Archer. Paul Heyer, The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, The Radio Years, 1934– 1952 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Welles’s complete radio history is provided in Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles (New York: Harper, 1992), 323–453. MacLeish: Reflections, 100–20; David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 17–31, 49–56. MacLeish quoted in Radio’s Best Plays, ed. Joseph Liss (New York: Greenberg, 1947), 5–7. In 1939, CBS staged “The Fall of the City” again, this time from the Hollywood Coliseum; Richard O’Brien, “Cradle of Drama: Workshop Celebrating Its Third Birthday,” New York Times, July 30, 1939, X10. “Air Raid” was enthusiastically reviewed, quickly published in inexpensive book form, and also issued on 78-rpm recordings. A recording of the play, made in December 1942, was released by Columbia Records. A fifteen-minute version of “Murder of Lidice” was rebroadcast in 1943 on the Treasury Department’s “Star Parade.” The New York Times featured four separate articles and an interview with Millay before the broadcast, and two following it. The published play appeared in Life and the Saturday Evening Post. See Mike Chasar, “Poetry and Popular Culture,” posted October 3, 2014; http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/2014/10/ in-dc-with-edna-st-vincent-millay.html.

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16 “Radio, War, Poetry,” New York Times, October 18, 1942, X10. 17 Milford, Savage Beauty, 183–4, 297–9, 387, 404–7, 419–24, 431–5, 447, 450; Millay quoted on 423–4. On Millay’s support for Republican Spain, see New York Times articles August 9, 1937, 7; December 19, 1937, 83; and January 31, 1939. By 1935, Millay had attracted the attention of the FBI. 18 See Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16–40. Milford, Savage Beauty, 160–1, 173–4, 181–7, 258–60 (reference to feeling “like a prostitute” at a reading in Chicago in 1924 on p. 260), 420–9. 19 The composer was Millay’s friend, music critic, and composer Deems Taylor. Millay’s published libretto sold out four editions within twenty days of the opera’s opening; “‘King’s Henchman’ to Be Broadcast,” New York Times, September 10, 1927, 15. 20 Milford, Savage Beauty, 367–8; “News and Gossip of the Studios,” New York Times, January 22, 1933, X10; Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 39–59, esp. 46–52, 55–9. Cuthbert and her partner Alice Blinn were part of Millay’s social circle. On FDR’s calculated projection of intimacy in his Fireside Chats, see Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota, 2005). 21 Milford, Savage Beauty, 434–5. 22 Miller, Making Love Modern, 87–118. Other regulars from Jewish backgrounds included Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, and Harpo Marx. 23 Ibid., 119–41; quotes on 125. 24 Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin, 1989), 137, 180–6, 223–4, 254, 269–78; Ann Douglas, “Dorothy Parker,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 522–5. 25 “Relief Funds to Gain by All-Star Review,” New York Times, January 23, 1933, 8. Parker joined the Screenwriters Guild in the fall of 1934; she defended the labor of writing in “To Richard With Love,” Screen Guild Magazine (May 1936), as cited by Pat McGilligan, Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters in Hollywood’s Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 7; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ War (New York: Knopf), 1982). See also Parker’s February 6, 1941, speech to the Disney Unit of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, cited by Meade, Dorothy Parker, 257. 26 Parker was one of the founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in October 1936, and like MacLeish, she contributed money to Contemporary Historians’ Spanish Earth film project in December 1936; Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Radical Hollywood (New York: New Press, 2002), 78, 89; Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 348; Parker, “Incredible, Fantastic . . . and True,” New Masses, November 23, 1937; “Soldiers of the Republic,” New Yorker, February 1938.

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27 Parker, “Arrangement in Black and White,” New Yorker, October 8, 1927; Marvel Jackson, “Reviews,” The Crisis, December, 1927, 338; Meade, Dorothy Parker, 252–4; New York Times, January 13, 1935, 33. 28 See articles on Parker in New York Times, January 8, 1939, 126; November 22, 1938, 6; June 4, 1939, 31; March 14, 1942; and July 25, 1943, 39; “Sophisticated Poetry – and the Hell with It,” address to the American Writers Congress Poetry Session, June 3–5, 1939, printed in New Masses, June 27, 1939; “Plan Paul Robeson Dinner for March 23, Anti-Fascist Refugees to Benefit,” Chicago Defender, March 14, 1942, 10; photograph of Parker with Robeson in Amsterdam Star News, March 28, 1942, 9; “Anti-Nazis Hear Warning: Audience of 4,000 Cheer Assaults on German Propaganda,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1938, 3; Meade, Dorothy Parker, 253–8. 29 Parker’s radio appearances listed in New York Times, March 14, 1939, 32; April 4, 1939, 34; April 21, 1939, 42; June 9, 1939, 21; June 6, 1945; and July 22, 1945. 30 Adaptations of “A Star is Born” appeared on Lux Radio Theater, September 13, 1937, and December 28, 1942; on “Gulf Screen Guild Theater” on November 17, 1940; “Academy Award Theater,” June 26, 1946; Ford Theater on May 23, 1948; and on Screen Director’s Playhouse, June 16, 1950. 31 Richard O’Brien, “A Cradle of Drama: Workshop Celebrating its Third Birthday, Offers Plays by Noted Writers,” New York Times, July 30, 1939, X10; Parker’s stories appeared on The World’s Greatest Stories, June 6, 1941, and on Story Dramas, December 8, 1941. Tallulah Bankhead performed work by Parker on The Royal Gelatin Hour, June 17, 1937; and later on The Big Show, November 12, 1950; February 11, 1951; May 6, 1951; and January 27, 1952. Ilka Chase performed Parker on Radio Hall of Fame, March 5, 1944, and on records; “Records: Dorothy Parker Album,” New York Times, August 27, 1944, X4. 32 On the series, see Barbara D. Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War an the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 246–60, and Smith, Visions of Belonging, 31–2. In 1944, Parker included this story in The Portable Dorothy Parker, an inexpensive, paperback anthology formatted for Armed Services circulation. 33 Parker’s left activism was publicly visible; see her New York Times coverage on March 24, 1945, 14; November 23, 1946, 2; May 9, 1947, 42; June 12, 1947, 20; and November 3, 1947, 19, 14. On the Voice of Freedom Committee, see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle For Democratic Radio, 1933–1958 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 125–55; see Counterattack’s Voice of Freedom Committee files at the Tamiment Library, TAM148, Box 8, Folder 36–7, and the CNA conference call, PE.36, Box 24. Parker’s political history is carefully documented by Millie S. Barranger in “Dorothy Parker and the Politics of McCarthyism,” Theater History Studies (2006), 7–30. 34 Callow, Orson Welles: Xanadu, 3–141; Hilmes, Radio Voices, 218–29; Heyer, The Medium and the Magician.

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35 Denning, “The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism,” in The Cultural Front, 362–402. 36 The complete chronology of Welles’s radio work appears in Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles 1992 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993); see Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 9–19. 37 “Welles to Direct Plays,” New York Times, June 12, 1938, 150; Richard O’Brien, “The Shadow Talks,” New York Times, August 14, 1938, 136; Denning, Cultural Front, 282–4. 38 Callow, Orson Welles, 556–8. 39 The last Orson Welles Commentaries on ABC before Welles lost his sponsorship protested the end of wartime rent and price controls, as well as atomic testing on Bikini; it was broadcast on June 30, 1946; the Woodward broadcasts, unsponsored, appeared on July 28, August 5, August 11, August 18, and August 25, 1946. His final broadcast was on October 6, 1946. Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans (London: Vintage Books, 2006), 323–46; Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles, 398–401; Denning, Cultural Front, 399–400; Harrington quoted in Denning, 400. 40 “Poems Become a Radio Show,” New York Times, March 26, 1939, 144. 41 This use of Neil Verma’s concept “kaleidosonic” comes from Jacob Smith, “Norman Corwin’s Radio Realism,” in Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship, ed. Jacob Smith and Neil Verma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 105–8. 42 R. LeRoy Bannerman, Norman Corwin and the Golden Years of Radio (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 21–30; Norman Corwin: Years of the Electric Ear, an interview by Douglas Bell for the Directors Guild of America (Metuchen, NJ: DGA and Scarecrow Press, 1994); and Verma, Theater of the Mind, 73–8. See also Jacob Smith and Neil Verma, eds., Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). Edgar Lee Masters was one of the writers publicly arguing that the United States should abandon neutrality and support the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, along with Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker: “98 Writers Score Spanish Rebels,” New York Times, March 1, 1937, 7. On Taggard, see Miller, Making Love Modern, 41–85. 43 Bannerman, Norman Corwin, 31–6, 44; Norman Corwin Interview, 19–25, 34– 5; Milton Kaplan, Radio and Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 102, 152. Corwin began to use the “Choralites” verse choir in the series of twenty-six plays he wrote for Columbia Workshop, beginning in 1941; “Life and Times of ‘26 by Corwin,’” New York Times, August 24, 1941, 14. 44 Bannerman, Norman Corwin, 36–8; Corwin interviewed by Bell, 22. This play was rebroadcast on Columbia Workshop on Christmas Day, 1940, and again on CBS from Los Angeles with various different actors in 1944 and 1945. Corwin cast Eric Burroughs, a politically radical African American actor, in the leading part of Emperor Nero in 1938 and 1944. Corwin published the script in The Plot

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j udit h e. sm it h to Overthrow Christmas: A Holiday Party (Mt. Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1940); Thirteen by Corwin: Radio Dramas (New York: Henry Holt, 1942); and his Armed Services collections, Selected Radio Plays of Norman Corwin (New York: Editions for Armed Services, 1944, 1945). Archibald MacLeish enthusiastically praised The People, Yes in the September 1936 New Masses. Corwin had already used excerpts of The People Yes on CBS’s educational program, The American School of the Air. The 1939 program was quickly rearranged and rebroadcast on Columbia Workshop in 1941, with a powerful musical score by the left-wing composer Earl Robinson, who composed Corwin-initiated musical historical storytelling in the broadcast of “Ballad for Americans” later in 1939 and “Lonesome Train” (1944). Kaplan, Radio and Poetry, 61. “They Fly” was broadcast initially on February 19, 1939, for Corwin’s program, Words without Music; rebroadcast just two months later on Columbia Workshop on April 10, 1939; and then first published in May 1939 (Weston, VT: V. Orton); The broadcast preceded the New York exhibition of Picasso’s 1937 painting “Guernica” at the Valentine Gallery in May 1939 and at the Museum of Modern Art in November 1939. Corwin published the script for “We Hold These Truths” along with Roosevelt’s address (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1942). It was reprinted several times and included in a special Armed Forces edition, Corwin and Louis Untermeyer, Selected Radio Plays of Norman Corwin (New York: Editions for Armed Services, 1944, 1945). An abridged version of “On a Note of Triumph” appeared in the August 1945 Coronet and was then published by Simon & Schuster in 1945. On “Ballad for Americans,” see Denning, Cultural Front, 115–59; Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 236–7; Smith, “Radio’s Cultural Front,” 216; and Lisa Barg, “Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans: Race and the Cultural Politics of ‘People’s Music,’” Journal for the Society of American Music 2.1 (2008), 27–70. “When Dorie Miller took Gun in hand/ Jim Crow started his last stand” appeared in a poem written by Langston Hughes in 1942 and published in a pamphlet of twenty-three poems, Jim Crow’s Last Stand (Atlanta: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943). Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry, 9–20, 62–8; Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes Vol. 1 (1986; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–65, 211–34 Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, 214–20, 242–75, 284–95, 306–56; James Smethurst, The New Red Negro:The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 104–7, 114–15. Scottsboro Limited was published in New Masses 7, November 1931. Don’t You Want to Be Free? was published in One Act Play 3:4 (October 1938), 359–93. Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, 308–9, 367–72. Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, 384; Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 210– 22, n 58, 60 on 340–41; Bannerman, Norman Corwin, 49–51.

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55 Ramperad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 27–8, Hughes to Arna Bontemps, March 17, 1943, cited on 69. 56 Hughes’s exchange with the Office of Civilian Defense in Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 39; Hughes to Arna Bontemps, March 17, 1943, cited on 69. Hughes submitted “Brothers” to the Treasury Department Defense Bond Drive in March 1942, where it was again judged as too provocative for the airwaves; Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 45. 57 LH to Noel Sullivan, June 20 1942, in Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 46. 58 Ibid., 58. The poem was rebroadcast from Los Angeles in April 1944: “Radio Series Is Tribute to Our Langston Hughes,” Chicago Defender (ANP), April 8, 1944. 59 “Robeson, Hughes on CIO Radio,” Chicago Defender, June 26, 1943; Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 71; James Smethurst identified this Michigan CIO broadcast as a response to the 1943 Detroit riot in The New Red Negro, 11. 60 Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 75, 77. “In Service to My Country” was broadcast on WNYC on September 8, 1943. 61 “Langston Hughes on Radio Program [Of Men and Books],” Amsterdam Star News, May 17, 1941, 16; Susan Ware, It’s One O’ Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 187; Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 83–4; Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 210–14. 62 Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Vol. 2, 82; Michele Hilmes, “Missing from History: Langston Hughes’ The Man Who Went to War,” posted on Antenna, June 12, 2015; Stephen Bourne, Mother Country: Britain’s Black Community on the Home Front, 1939–1945 (London: History Press, 2013); and Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 214. 63 Hughes to Barnouw, March 27, 1945, as cited by Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 214.

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c h a p ter 2 0

The State Cultural Apparatus Federal Funding of Arts and Letters A. Joan Saab

In April 1932 the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit at the invitation of Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company (and the son of its founder, Henry Ford), and Wilhelm Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Rivera spent the next eleven months painting a twenty-seven-panel work depicting “the industry of the town” in the DIA’s center courtyard, the Garden Court. By 1932, Detroit was one of the leading industrial centers in the world, and the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, provided the leading model of a fully automated assembly line and the system of vertical integration. The company controlled the entire means of production, from the procurement of raw materials (by the 1920s the Ford Motor Company ran coal and iron ore mines, timberlands, rubber plantations, sawmills, blast furnaces, a glassworks, and more) to the distribution networks on company-controlled railroads and waterways. By 1932, however, the city was suffering the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Unemployment was high, and production at the Rouge plant was down by almost a third. Rivera had arrived in Detroit just weeks after the March 7th Hunger March, also called the Ford Massacre, which precipitated a deadly clash that took place between Dearborn police and 5,000 unemployed workers and their supporters. Yet, despite his radical sympathies, Rivera omitted this brutal episode from his mural narrative, focusing instead on the harmonious potential of industrial collaboration. Rivera spent three months touring the Rouge Plant before painting his large-scale frescoes in the museum’s Garden Court. He made hundreds of sketches and worked with the Ford Motor Company’s official photographer, W. J. Stettler, documenting the work being done in the massive factory. Recalling the experience in his autobiography, My Art, My Life, Rivera later mused,

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As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford’s industrial empire kept passing before my eyes . . . In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men’s service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form . . . I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun.

Rivera’s resulting mural sequence was a visual symphony of Detroit industry, with man and machine working in harmony alongside doctors, scientists, and metaphorical representations of Mother Earth to create a fully integrated world led by the industrial worker. On the massive 17 × 75 foot north wall of the Garden Court, for example, he depicted a working production line. Every bit of visible wall is painted. The anthropomorphized machine pulses with life: from deep in the factory’s mechanized bowels to the men working in step with its moving belt, everything is synchronized, lending a rhythmic sense of balance to the production of automobiles and industrial life. On the museum’s walls, Rivera produced an epic visual poem celebrating American industry and presenting an iconography of work and industrial labor. In so doing, he set up the visual equivalent of Ford’s vertical integration in which the entire mural – from its inception to its consumption – was part of an integrated whole.1 I begin this chapter with Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals for several reasons. In this massive project, Rivera established a visual vocabulary for the Depression decade, one focused on labor as both subject and style. Indeed his literal fusion of Fordism and modernism would prevail across genres and media and stylistically dominate much of the work produced on New Deal cultural projects, which operated under the umbrella of “Federal One” during the 1930s. Moreover, the iconographic legacy of Federal One, as this chapter demonstrates, had a profound effect on the cultural production of the 1940s and beyond in both form and content.2 Rivera’s murals, as well as much of the work produced by American cultural workers in the Depression decade, reflect what historian Michael Denning has called “the laboring of American culture” during the 1930s and early 1940s. For Denning, laboring has multiple meanings, ranging from the “pervasive use of ‘labor’ and its synonyms in the rhetoric of the period” to the “birthing of a new . . . American Renaissance” as part of what he calls “the cultural front.” For Denning, the cultural front, “the extraordinary flowering of arts, entertainment, and thought based on the broad social movement that came to be known as the Popular Front,” resulted from the affiliation of whom he identifies as “the young plebeians, the radical moderns, and the antifascist

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émigrés.”3 All shared a radical mindset that ranged from the embrace of a new form of democratic socialism to calls for outright communism. Moreover, a new system of government patronage, fueled by this movement, created a cultural form of vertical integration whereby patron, producer, and audience were all part of what of C. Wright Mills has called the “cultural apparatus.” According to Mills, the cultural apparatus comprises “all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual and scientific work goes on, and the means by which such work is made available to circles, publics, and masses. In the cultural apparatus art, science, and entertainment, malarkey and information are produced and distributed” through a diverse set of institutions, including schools, museums, laboratories, and media outlets such as newspapers, radio networks, and literary journals.4 Federal One, I would argue, laid the groundwork for the emergence of the American state cultural apparatus that would dominate much of the twentieth century. Akin in many ways to what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer identified as “the culture industries” – inclusive of Hollywood, network radio, the major recording studios, and the publishing industry – the 1930s and 1940s in the United States saw an unprecedented effort by federal authorities to influence American taste by directly and indirectly employing a legion of painters, writers, filmmakers, and photographers to shape public opinion and boost morale through the twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II. As this chapter demonstrates, the New Deal established an important precedent for federal sponsorship of the arts through its Federal Project One, a group of arts projects conducted under the guidance of the Works Progress Administration. This cultural involvement continued, albeit in somewhat different forms, throughout the 1940s as part of the war effort, which continued to use the arts in the service of American nationalism and the quest for an American Renaissance, both at home and abroad. We return, briefly, to Rivera, since the works he produced, along with those of his compatriots, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco in Mexico City a decade earlier, are often credited as being Roosevelt’s motivation for the inclusion of cultural projects in the national relief program. From 1920–4, with state support, Los Tres Grandes, or the Big Three, painted a number of large-scale narrative works in a variety of public buildings across Mexico City. Citing Maya and Aztec precedents, José Vasconcelos, the minister of education under President Alvaro Obregon, conceived of the national mural projects as educational tools: images that would communicate the grandeur of the indigenous past, as well as the goals of the recent Mexican revolution, to the often illiterate Mexican public. Inspired

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by the success of the Mexican mural program, the American artist George Biddle has been credited with writing to his friend and former prep-school mate Franklin D. Roosevelt ten years later, encouraging him to emulate the Mexican program, which he called “the greatest national school of mural painting since the Renaissance.” Whether inspired by Biddle and the Mexican artists or not, Roosevelt made several attempts to provide employment for unemployed artists as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), his national relief program. Established in May 1935, the large-scale public works program was directed by long-time Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins. Hopkins repeatedly reminded project directors to “never forget that the objective of this whole project is . . . taking 3,500,000 off relief and putting them to work. The secondary objective is to put them to work on the best possible projects we can.” Federal One of the WPA consisted of five major divisions: the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the Historical Records Survey. As Hallie Flanagan, head of the Federal Theatre project, explained, “We all believed that theater was more than a private enterprise, that it was also a public interest which, properly fostered, might come to be a social and educative force.”5 Each project had an autonomous director and a variety of cultural programs aimed to reach wide publics of art producers and consumers. The first two New Deal art projects were administered by the Treasury Department. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) employed nearly 3,700 artists, cost approximately $1,312,000, and was overseen without any strict relief criteria. The Section of Painting and Sculpture was established in 1934; its primary concern was to obtain paintings and sculptures to decorate new federal buildings, in particular courthouses and post offices. Before it ended in 1943, the Section awarded approximately 14,000 contracts at a cost of roughly $2,571,000. The Section was not a relief program; instead, commissions were decided by anonymous competitions. Early in 1935, the director of the Section, Edward Bruce, applied to the newly created Works Progress Administration (WPA) for money to hire approximately 500 artists to decorate the nearly 1,900 buildings under the Treasury Department’s jurisdiction that did not yet have art. The WPA granted the request, but stipulated that all Treasury artists who received money had to adhere to WPA guidelines. Thus, 90 percent of the artists working for the third program, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), first had to qualify for relief. The fourth and largest program was the Federal Art Project (FAP); it was part of the WPA and overseen by Holger Cahill.6 The FAP employed

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approximately 5,300 visual artists and related art professionals who painted more than 2,500 murals in public buildings and produced approximately 108,000 easel paintings and 18,000 works of sculpture. It also ran art workshops across the country in urban settlement houses and inner-city community centers, Native American reservations, and remote rural areas. In addition, it funded galleries and art education programs across the country, as well as the Index of American Design, which hired artists to create drawings of American art and design from the colonial period to the present as part of a national salvage project to catalog examples of vanishing Americana before it disappeared.7 The Federal Music Project (FMP) was led by Nikolai Sokoloff, a former conductor of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. At its peak it employed more than 16,000 musicians and staged close to 5,000 performances in front of an estimated three million people a week. In addition to funding orchestras, operas, choral and chamber music groups, and military and dance bands, the FMP held music education and appreciation classes across the country – from remote rural areas to urban neighborhoods. By 1939, an estimated 132,000 children and adults in twenty-seven states were receiving instruction every week. The FMP funded new composers (often setting them up with full orchestration) and cataloged folk music as part of a national salvage project. FMP workers also served as copyists, arrangers, and librarians helping document vernacular forms and make music available across the country.8 Established in 1935, the Federal Writers Project (FWP) was overseen by Henry Alsberg, the former director of the Provincetown Players and a selfdescribed “philosophical anarchist.”9 The FWP published nearly 275 books and more than 700 pamphlets; by 1939, it had produced 3.5 million copies of more than 800 titles, as well as a variety of radio scripts and transcripts. At its height it employed 6,686 writers. Perhaps its best-known project was the American Guide Series, which produced encyclopedic guidebooks for all forty-eight states, as well as Washington DC, Alaska, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Each volume was a mix of detail and whimsy and often included drawings and photographs to illustrate stories of local folklore and history. Many contained oral histories and recollections of life in each locale. For the FWP, the act of writing often took precedent over form and even the quality of the work being produced. In a speech before the Second American Writers Congress in 1937, Alsberg argued for an expanded definition of good writing. “We must get over the idea that every writer must be an artist of the first class,” he said, “and that the artist of the second or third class has no function. I think we have invested art with this sort of sacrosanct,

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ivory tower atmosphere too much.” Instead, the FWP stressed the idea of writing as a vocation and as a legitimate form of work.10 Like the FAP and FMP, the FWP focused on capturing the local, the folk, and the vernacular. Nevertheless, a number of now canonical American writers were supported by FWP funds, including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and Saul Bellow. Hallie Flanagan, a friend of Hopkins who ran the experimental theater program at Vassar College, directed the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which employed almost 13,000 theater workers in thirty-one states, produced close to 1,200 plays, and funded 100 new playwrights. FTP workers put on more than a thousand performances a month to an estimated one million people (more than 75 percent of the shows were free). In addition to live theater projects, the FTP also broadcast the radio program, the “Federal Theatre of the Air” to an estimated ten million listeners and spearheaded the innovative Living Newspaper performances, which dramatically enacted current events taken from the daily headlines. Like the other programs in Federal One, the Federal Theatre Project focused on presenting a mix of American folk and experimental theater in the service of a strong national culture. Indeed, all four main projects, as well as the Historical American Buildings Survey, which created a database of American vernacular architecture, were simultaneously forward and backward looking: they showcased vanishing folk traditions at the same time as they promoted emerging talent. Moreover, all of the Federal One agencies encouraged and endorsed the idea of art – in all its many configurations – as a valuable type of work, even though the work that emerged from the projects was frequently controversial. Take, for example, two of the most famous Living Newspaper pieces produced by the FTP, Triple-A Plowed Under and One-Third of a Nation. Triple-A Plowed Under dramatized the problems faced by Dust Bowl farmers while critiquing many of the New Deal policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to destroy their surplus crops and livestock in an attempt to drive up their prices. In particular the performance advocated for farm workers to unite in common cause against commercial interests and to challenge the corruption at the heart of American agribusiness. One Third of a Nation took its title from FDR’s second inaugural speech in which he asserted, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Written by Arthur Arent, the play is part history lesson and part activist rallying cry.11 It begins by dramatizing a devastating fire in a decrepit New York tenement and then uses a series of sketches, taken from real-life events, to depict despicable urban slum conditions and

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to condemn corruption at the hands of real estate speculators and slumlords. Many of these plays were conceived as didactic, even revolutionary, tools. They valorized the worker, offered audiences explicit lessons in how to organize, and advocated for the need for collective action. For example, the FTP play, The Cradle Will Rock, written by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Orson Welles, and produced by John Houseman, passionately advocated for the creation of labor unions. In a key speech, one of the main characters, Larry Foreman, a labor organizer, explains the difference between an open and a closed shop for the audience: The difference? Open shop is when a boilermaker can be kicked around, demoted, fired, like that – he’s all alone, he’s free – free to be wiped out. Closed shop – he’s got fifty thousand other boilermakers behind him, ready to back him up, every one of them, to the last lunch pail. The difference? It’s like the five fingers on your hand. That’s (tapping one finger) the boilermakers – just one finger – but this – (pointing to finger for each) rollers, roughers, machinists, blasters, boilermakers – that’s closed shop! (makes a fist of it) that’s a union! (thumbing nose with that hand).12

But the valorization of American labor was not limited to radical playwrights such as Blitzstein or Arent: it permeated much of the work of the other projects as well. We see this clearly in two murals created by Rochester, New York, artist Carl Peters while employed by the local FAP project. While Peters was aware of the radical politics of many prominent artists of the time, he was not a fellow traveler, nor was he a member of any of the affiliated groups that Denning identifies as central to the laboring of American culture: “the young plebeians, the radical moderns, and the antifascist émigrés.” Nevertheless, Peters’s FAP-funded murals, Life of Action and Life of Contemplation, visually encapsulate what art historian Karal Ann Marling calls “New Deal iconography,” with their focus on a “verifiable, usable past of happiness and plenty, and in a future that would once again fulfill the primal needs of the forgotten man.”13 The first panel, Life of Action, depicts a generic cityscape under construction. In this all-male, primarily white, tableau, Peters presents an inventory of workers ranging from unskilled to professional, from manual to industrial, all actively performing some sort of vigorous labor as they build the city behind them. At the center of this mural is the architect of the work under construction. Recalling images dating back to the Middle Ages that feature depictions of God as the ultimate architect, Peters substitutes the New Deal planner for the divine as the ultimate hero of the future. Yet,

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on closer inspection, his plans are blank, yet to be written. In front of the architect, a muscular gentleman with his sleeves rolled up and with more plans under his arms – perhaps the foreman of the project – studies those plans. A shirtless worker in an apron, holding a hand tool, works an oversized gear with one hand. Behind him, heavily muscled men carry planks, hoist pulleys, smooth concrete, and perform a variety of other building trades. Looking closely at the mural, it is unclear what the men are building; there is no unified narrative. Instead, it is a seeming celebration of male bodies at work – their musculature and tools are all part of the same machine. Together they constitute an encyclopedia of gestures and a celebration of action as rooted in productive labor. For Peters, action is rooted in the building of a national infrastructure through physical activity. Life of Contemplation is equally busy. Like Life of Action, this panel contains a mix of individuals. But unlike the all-male Life of Action, Life of Contemplation contains a number of women and white-collar workers, such as teachers and scientists. In the front corner of the work, a woman sits against a globe with open hands, as if holding a book. However, her book is behind her, and the page clearly reads, “the young blood flows freely and tests its hope, on mottled palette – oh yet vague canvas,” suggesting that the book she will read has yet to be written. To her right sits another woman, reading an actual book. Parallel to Life of Action, another architect figure, with his back to the viewer, faces two young children and the reading woman. A man with a beaker and test tube, wearing a tie under his lab coat, performs some sort of science experiment. A standing woman, presumably a teacher, holds a book and leads a discussion. Behind her, the stories she has been reading appear to come to life: an armored rider on a white horse, identified by Peters as Joan of Arc, charges into battle in front of a medieval castle. Adjacent to this, Columbus’s ships sail toward the “New World” as a Native American scout crouches in the distance. By explicitly linking the past to the present, Peters transforms contemplation and its corollaries of education and imagination into an active process. Thus contemplation becomes a form of action akin to the work being performed in its partner panel. It should not be surprising that so much of the work produced by Federal One focused on labor, since the artists on the project, as well as much of their audience, were out of work during the Depression decade. As the economy slowly improved, fears grew of an encroaching socialism in the projects, and as the country mobilized for war, the government slowly shifted its cultural priorities. Although most of its WPA units were defunded by the end of 1941, the federal government continued to employ writers, photographers, and filmmakers through the Army Signal Corps,

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the Navy Photographic Unit, and the government-supported Bureau of Motion Pictures and Domestic Radio Bureau, which put to work many of the actors and directors who had worked on the FTP. A number of artists who had been employed on the FAP went to work making propaganda posters or working in camouflage painting units. Roy Stryker, the head of the New Deal Resettlement Administration from 1935– 7 and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) from 1937–42, became the director of the photographic unit of the Office of War Information from 1942–4. The Office of War Information (OWI) was a government agency devoted to creating propaganda at home and abroad. Through the dissemination of images and stories in newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and film broadcasts, the OWI acted as a cultural liaison between the battlefront and the home front, creating material to justify US involvement in the war effort. At the FSA, Stryker had been responsible for funding and disseminating the now iconic images of migrant workers such as those by Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans; these highly emotional photographs of disposed families and ravaged landscapes had demonstrated the importance of New Deal programs. At the OWI he turned his efforts to documenting the atrocities of the war abroad and its broader threats to the American way of life. As part of his wartime effort, Stryker and his new OWI photo unit repurposed FSA images for nationalistic ends. They re-curated Depression-era photographs of suffering migrants by artists such as Lange and Walker, now framing their subjects as quintessential icons of American determination. Moreover, following in the documentary tradition of the FSA, Stryker employed OWI photographers to record images of the effects of the war at home. For example, Esther Bubley’s Sailors Boarding the Bus (1943) documents a group of young servicemen, dressed in their Navy blues, as they embark on a Greyhound bus journey (see Figure 3). It is unclear whether the men are en route to combat or about to go on leave – instead the image captures a moment in transit. The door is ajar, the driver collects tickets, the men converse with one another as the image of the trademark greyhound seems to spring from the luggage bay. Hired by Stryker in 1942 as a darkroom assistant for the OWI, Bubley shot this image as part of a series to document the increase in bus travel brought about by wartime gasoline and tire rationing. For four weeks Bubley rode Greyhound buses through Midwestern and southern cities, including Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga. In addition to depictions of servicemen, she captured images of women

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Figure 3 Esther Bubley, Sailors Boarding the Bus (1943)

and children, the elderly and the dispossessed, as part of the larger national portrait of America at war. Similarly, in 1942 the OWI created the Voice of America (VOA) as the official broadcasting unit of the US government. The OWI’s domestic program included radio shows such as This Is Our Enemy, which provided detailed overviews of the aggressions of Germany, Italy, and Japan to a weekly American audience, and Uncle Sam, which celebrated workers on the home front through anecdotal vignettes and biographical sketches not that different from those produced in the FWP American Guide series.14 But perhaps the most successful cultural program carried out by the OWI was the documentary film series, Why We Fight, directed by the award-winning filmmaker Frank Capra with animation produced in the Hollywood studios of Walt Disney. Why We Fight consisted of seven documentary-style hour-length films. Shown to troops overseas and American movie audiences back home, they chronicle the progression of the global conflict from the Prelude to War (#1) to the United States’ involvement in The War Comes to America (#7). Years later, in his 1971 autobiography, Capra outlined his strategy – which included the heavy use of German, Italian and Japanese photographs, newspaper accounts, and documentary

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film – stating that he wanted to “let the enemy prove to our soldiers the enormity of his cause – and the justness of ours.” He wanted, in particular, to “use the enemy’s own films to expose their enslaving ends. Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud – and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform.”15 Playing with now familiar New Deal tropes of workers toiling in the fields and factories, Capra depicted attentive students and teachers, dedicated nurses and doctors, and diligent scientists and planners hard at work on the home front to characterize American values, juxtaposing these now threatened ideals with images of American soldiers heroically fighting across the globe. Through these often overwrought comparisons, Capra hoped to provoke strong emotional responses in both the soldiers abroad and the folks back home. For example, the final film in the series, The War Comes to America, begins with a close-up of a few blonde-haired children pledging allegiance to the flag. As the camera pulls back, we see that these angelic faces are part of an enormous, collective crowd of children. The camera slowly cuts to a close-of up of the flag. The voices of the children reciting the pledge give way to the sound of escalating gunfire as images of bombers merge with the image of the flag on the screen. The film juxtaposes these home front images with footage of American soldiers, identifying them as men from the fields of the South; the close-packed streets of Manhattan, Chicago; the teeming factories of Detroit, Los Angeles; the endless stretching distances of the Southwest; men from the hills and from the plains; from the villages and from the cities; bookkeepers; soda jerks; mechanics; college students; rich man; poor man; beggar man; thief; doctor; lawyer; merchant; chief. Now veteran fighting men. Yet two years ago many had never fired a gun or seen the ocean or been off the ground.

Ultimately, these men, the voiceover concludes, are all “Americans, fighting for their country while half a world away from it. Fighting for their country, and for more than their country. Fighting for an idea, the idea bigger than the country. Without the idea the country might have remained only a wilderness. Without the country, the idea might have remained only a dream.”16 The Why We Fight films are in many ways a continuation of the rhetoric and imagery of the New Deal cultural projects. With their focus on the fate of American workers – bookkeepers, soda jerks, mechanics – and nostalgia for a mythologized American way of life under attack, they demonstrate the evolution of the state cultural apparatus into the war effort. From movie

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theaters and radio broadcasts to doctors’ offices and school yards, across the land, week after week, the national propaganda machine inundated audiences with patriotic fervor to justify government action. In this way, while no longer under the auspices of Federal One, the government continued to fund art and culture in the service of national defense. Art education across genres was still a key part of the state cultural apparatus, but the collaboration seemed motivated more by national security than by issues of industrial dynamism or a contemplation or workers’ rights. The labor that had been so key to both the form and content of the work produced under Federal One became less and less visible in the 1940s. Although the aims of government sponsorship shifted from workers’ rights to wartime unity, what remained was the image of the common man and woman, collectively organized, as the engine of national growth. Nevertheless, the state cultural apparatus did not disappear: it just changed shape through new public-private partnerships – such as between the OWI and Disney – as morphing into the cultural arm of what President Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex. An excellent example of this new cultural paradigm was the governmentsupported Council on Books in Wartime, which helped shape the reading practices of millions of servicemen through its Armed Services Editions of selected literary and nonfiction works. In late 1942 the Office of War Information collaborated with a variety of publishers (including Doubleday, Random House, and W. W. Norton), as well as with librarians, booksellers, and authors, to create the Council. From 1943–5 it distributed 122,951,031 books to American soldiers fighting in the war. With books serving as “weapons in the war of ideas,” to reference the motto of the program, the goal was to produce a “nation of book readers.” The project worked. Using magazine presses and following the successful model of paperback publishing, the OWI shipped approximately 155,000 crates of books a month to servicemen overseas.17 A war reporter in the Southwest Pacific described these books: “Dog-eared and moldy and limp from the humidity [the] books go up the line . . . Because they are what they are, because they can be packed in a hip pocket or snuck into a shoulder pack, men are reading where men have never read before.” Another soldier reported that “the books are read until they fall apart.” He continued, “I have seen many a man who never before had the patience or inclination to read a book, pick up one of the Council’s and become absorbed and ask for more.” Another account described how late at night soldiers in the Marshall Islands read “by a dim flashlight under a shelter half, even after the air-raid siren has already blown and they should be in a foxhole.”18

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One of the most popular books promoted by the Council on Books in Wartime was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Written in the boom years of the 1920s, Gatsby was not a widespread critical success when first published in 1925. Reprinted as an Armed Service Edition (ASE) and distributed to soldiers and sailors across the globe, the book reached more than a million readers and quickly reached canonical status for its critique of the so-called American dream. What is interesting about The Great Gatsby and its newfound popularity in the mid-1940s is that, while the character of Gatsby certainly works in the novel, his labor – as unseemly as it might be – is never actually depicted. He talks on the phone, he takes lunch in the city, he hosts lavish parties. Unlike the construction workers and teachers in Peters’s murals or the farmhands and factory workers in the FTP Living Newspapers, all of whom labored valiantly for the good of the country, Gatsby is legible primarily as an antihero. His work is in the service of his own individual gain and is motivated by his own private desires. Ultimately, the Council ensured that a text unpalatable to readers just two decades before was now heralded as the Great American Novel and distributed by the literal boatload across the globe. After the war, many of the men who received ASE paperbacks while overseas continued to buy books as they headed to colleges or universities on the GI Bill. Commercial book clubs, such as the Book of the Month Club, which true to its name sent a volume each month to subscribers, thrived as books became status symbols signaling entry into the American middle class. Instead of advocating dissent or collective action, the state cultural apparatus set up in the Depression decade became a means of canon-building and fostered a new form of cultural consensus through collaboration with private industry in the postwar period. This brings us back to Rivera and his Detroit industry murals. One of the fundamental ironies of Rivera’s DIA murals is that a dogged and outspoken member of the international Communist Party such as Rivera went to work for Ford, one of the world’s most infamous capitalists. This collaboration between industrialist and artistic worker is in many ways at the heart of Antonio Gramsci’s conception of cultural hegemony in which the ruling class maintains control not through violent subordination but through the dissemination of ideas in seemingly harmless cultural forms. Writing in a chapter in his Prison Notebooks titled “Americanism and Fordism,” Gramsci notes of the “experiments conducted by Ford” that “hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of professional political and ideological intermediaries.”19 And, while

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hegemony can cut both ways – as the many left-leaning and even radical works produced on the New Deal cultural projects attest – even Rivera, an outspoken member of the international communist movement, depicted labor and capital in harmony in his Detroit works. Rivera was not fomenting revolution in his epic scenes of man and machine working in tandem, but rather celebrating the possibilities for collaboration between worker and capital, as well as between artist and patron. Indeed, I would argue that ultimately the forms of cultural hegemony deployed in the postwar period through public–private collaborations with the OWI and in the canonbuilding efforts of the GI Bill and the Book of the Month Club were also born in the factory and its many artistic depictions of labor in the projects of Federal One. Here, as Mills would argue, were “all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual and scientific work goes on” and that in many ways continue to this day.20 NOTES 1 For more on Rivera’s Detroit mural see Anthony Lee, “Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in The Social and the Real, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 201–20. 2 For more on the fusion of Fordism and American cultural modernism see Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 3 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. (London: New York: Verso, 1996), xvi, xvii. 4 C. Wright Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine, 1963), 406. 5 Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940), 54. 6 For an overview of the Treasury programs see Olin Dows, “The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program,” in The New Deal Art Projects, ed. Francis O’Connor (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); for statistics on the FAP, see Richard D. McKinzie, A New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 7 I discuss all of these initiatives at length in my book, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 8 For more on the Federal Music project see the Library of Congress online archive, www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/newdeal/fmp.html. 9 Alsberg quoted in Christine Bold, Writers, Plumbers and Anarchists: The Federal Writers Project in Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 16.

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10 One of the major FWP initiatives was its slave narrative project. Between 1936 and 1938, the FWP workers produced 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. 11 Sara Guthu, “Living Newspapers: One Third of a Nation,” The Great Depression in Washington State Project, http://depts.washington.edu/depress/ /theater_arts_living_newspaper_onethird shtml. 12 See https://cradlewillrock.wordpress.com/screenplay-original-blitztein-1936version/. 13 Karal Ann Marling, “A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth,” in Prospects IV (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1979), 438. Art historian Erwin Panofsky has famously defined iconography as “that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.” Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; repr. New York: Harper, 1972), 3. 14 Many of these shows are available online. To hear samples visit www.wnyc.org/ shows/this-is-our-enemy/ 15 Frank Capra, The Name above the Title: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 325, 343. 16 Frank Capra, Why We Fight: The War Comes to America, dir. Anatole Litvak. Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corp, United States War Department, 1945. Full transcript available at www.archives.gov/social-media/transcripts/ transcript-war-comes-to-america-pt1–36073.pdf . 17 Yoni Applebaum, “Publishers Gave away 122,951,031 Books during World II: And in the Process They Created a Nation of Readers,” The Atlantic (September 10, 2014), www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/ 09/publishers-gave-away-122951031-books-during-world-war-ii/379893. 18 Ibid. 19 Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 278–9. 20 Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” 406.

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Index

12 Million Black Voices, 137 Adorno, Theodor, 236–7, 336 Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 236 Agee, James and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 240–1 Algren, Nelson The Man with the Golden Arm, 69, 257 Ambrose, Stephen Band of Brothers, 290 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 31, 32 American Guide Series, 338 American League against War and Fascism, 73 American Veterans Committee, 120–1 American Writers League. See League of American Writers Anderson, Marian, 165 anticommunism, 84, 264, 265 and censorship, 97, 301–2 and conservatism, 217–20 and conversion narrative tradition, 94, 95, 100 in genre fiction, 97, 99, 100–2, 103 and homophobia, 207, 220, 302 and interventionism, 221 and “literature of disillusionment,” 89–90, 91–7 and “literature of exposure,” 91, 97–104 postwar construction of, 109–10, 265–7 and radio, 326–7 scholarship on, 90, 267–8 and unions, 265 varieties of, 90–1 antifascism as common sense, 76, 77–8, 86 definition of, 74–5 as intersectional politics, 74, 85–6 in postwar literature, 84–6 political impact in US, 86–7 and the politics of homosexuality, 200–1, 204 and radio, 310, 311–13, 318–19, 321

ubiquity on the left, 74 and Wallace Henry, 14 anti-imperialism, 67–8, 114–15, 121, 139–40, 272 within US military, 117 antiracism, 6, 132–5, 146–7, 162–3, 271–2 in African American literature, 59, 61–9, 131, 136–7 in Asian American literature, 147–57 official, 59, 61, 65 and politics of homosexuality, 198 with transnational scope, 138–42 anti-Semitism literary responses to, 45, 51–4 treatment in US literature, 48–50 Arent, Arthur One Third of a Nation, 339–40 Armed Services Editions (ASE). See Council on Books in Wartime Asch, Sholem, 46 The Asphalt Jungle (film), 276 Atlantic Charter, 34 atomic weapons atomic war as winnable, 107–8, 110–11 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 3, 107, 111, 113–14 initial support for, 111–12 legitimization of use in World War II, 112–13 opposition to, 108–9, 112–13, 115, 123 Attaway, William Blood on the Forge, 131 Avanti, James, 300 Baldwin, James, 135, 141 Ballantine (press), 292 Bantam Books (press), 292 Bellow, Saul Dangling Man, 96 The Victim, 51–5 Benet, Stephen Vincent, 312 “Freedom From Fear,” 38

349

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350 Berryman, John “The Imaginary Jew,” 51 The Best Years of Our Lives (film), 283–4 Bill of Rights (US) and “Second Bill of Rights,” 35–7 popularization of, 33, 34 blacklist, the. See anticommunism Blitzstein, Marc The Cradle Will Rock, 340 Book of the Month Club, 346, 347 Bourke-White, Margaret Shooting the Russian War, 188 Bowles, Paul The Sheltering Sky, 62, 69 Bracero Program, 130 Brinig, Myron Singermann, 201 Brooks, Cleanth, 234 Modern Poetry and the Great Tradition, 233 Brooks, Gwendolyn Annie Allen, 172–5 “Gay Chaps at the Bar” series, 188 A Street in Bronzeville, 172–5, 238 Brooks, Richard The Brick Foxhole, 85, 199–200 Brown, Harry A Walk in the Sun, 282 Bubley, Ester Sailors Boarding the Bus, 342–3 Buck, Pearl, 145–6 Dragon Seed, 19, 20–2, 280 The Good Earth, 145, 291 Buckley, William, 212 Budenz, Louis This is My Story, 98 Bulosan, Carlos, 136, 154–5 America is in the Heart, 62, 132, 155 “Freedom from Want,” 38, 83, 154–5 Burns, John Horne The Gallery, 196–8, 286 Cabin in the Sky (musical), 136 Caldwell, Erskine, 297–8, 300 God’s Little Acre, 298, 302 Capote, Truman Other Voices, Other Rooms, 203–4 Capra, Frank Why We Fight (film series), 19, 343–5 Carlson, Evans (US general), 109, 119–22 Caspary, Vera Laura, 183 Chafee, Zechariah, 33 Chambers, Whittaker Witness, 95 Chandler, Raymond, 268

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Index Chicago Defender, 136–7 Childress, Alice Florence, 185 China US intervention in, 117, 120 Churchill, Winston, 25, 34 civil rights and conservatism, 213–15 and the communist left, 132–4, 135, 162–3 historiography, 6, 132 strategic use by United States, 61, 267 and the United Nations, 40 and World War II, 17–18, 130–1, 164 Civil Rights Congress, 138 Clayton Powell, Jr, Adam, 169 Cold War, 3, See also anticommunism and African American culture, 175 coining of term, 122 emergence of, 109–10 historiography, 5 and interventionism, 25, 220–1 and modernism, 172, 230–1 as not inevitable, 8, 16, 26, 108–9, 114–22 opposition to, 108–9 relationship to World War II, 16, 70, 84, 111, 114–19 and US support for authoritarianism, 117 Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), 73, 77, 94, 97, 132, 134, 162–3, 169, 175, 272 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 216 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 134 conservatism, 6, 212 and anticommunism, 217–20 and civil rights, 213–15, 224 and foreign policy, 220–1 and labor movement, 216–17 philosophy, 222–3 political party basis, 213–15, 218–19 and religion, 223 and statism, 212–13, 217, 224 Corwin, Norman, 85, 310, 319–22, 325, 327 “Dorie Got a Medal,” 322 “Lonesome Train,” 322 “On a Note of Triumph,” 1–3, 78–80, 322 “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas,” 321 The Pursuit of Happiness (radio program), 322 “They Fly through the Air with the Greatest of Ease,” 321 “We Hold These Truths,” 321–2 Council on Books in Wartime, 7, 82, 83, 282–3, 295–6, 345–6 Cozzens, James Gould Guard of Honor, 285

Index The Cradle will Rock (1999 film), 229–30 Cvetic, Matt, 99 I was a Communist for the FBI (1952–1954), 99 Dahlberg, Edward Those Who Perish, 198 Davies, Joseph Mission to Moscow, 89, 279 Davis, Elmer, 80 “Declaration by United Nations” (1942), 34–5 decolonization, 3, 162, 171 Denning, Michael, 335–6 detective fiction, 268 and anticommunism, 100–4 Dewey, Thomas, 215 Dos Passos, John, 197 Double V campaign, 18, 163, 324, 325 Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 141 Du Bois, W.E.B., 134–5, 141, 172 In Battle for Peace, 141 Eastman, Max, 92 Eliot, T.S., 1, 173, 235 Ellison, Ralph, 133, 162, 171 Invisible Man, 94, 175, 256–7 Executive Order 9066, 35 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), 164, 264 family structures, 182 Farnham, Marynia and Ferdinand Lundberg Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, 182 Farrell, James T., 301 fascism, 76 appeal in the United States, 75 conflation with communism, 116–17 and women, 179 Faulkner, William, 19, 28, 136, 235, 298–9 A Rose for Emily and Other Stories, 296 Sanctuary, 298 Fawcett (press), 293 Fearing, Kenneth The Big Clock, 62, 68–9 Federal Art Project (FAP), 337–8, 340–1, 342 federal funding of the arts, 8, 335–6, 337–47, See also Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal One, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Writers Project, Office of War Information, Public Works of Art Project, World War II, federal funding of the arts postwar, 346–7 Federal Music Project (FMP), 337, 338 Federal One, 335–6, 337, 339–40, 345, 347

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Federal Theatre Project (FTP), 339–40 Federal Writers Project (FWP), 338–9 “femme fatale” character, 267 Fiedler, Leslie “Dirty Ralphy,” 51 Fifield, James, 223 Fight against War and Fascism (magazine), 73–4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby, 346 Flanagan, Hallie, 337, 339 Frank, Waldo The Invaders, 98, 99 Frankfurt School, 80, 233, 236–7 Freeman, Joseph Never Call Retreat, 95 GI Bill, 141 Giedion, Siegfried Time, Space, and Architecture, 253 Gitlow, Ben The Whole of Their Lives, 98 Goldman, Emma, 92 Goodman, Paul and Percival Goodman Communitas, 254 Gramsci, Antonio, 346 Greenberg, Clement, 233 “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” 233, 234 Gresham, William Lindsay Limbo Tower, 98 H.D. (poet), 237 Haines, William Wister Command Decision, 284–5 Hansberry, Lorraine, 135 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 148, 156 Hawes, Elizabeth Why Women Cry; Or, Wenches with Wrenches, 181–2 Hay, Harry, 207 Hayden, Robert, 172, 174 Hayek, Friedrich von Road to Serfdom, 222 Hays, Arthur Garfield, 32 Hearst, William Randolph, 218 Heggen, Thomas Mr. Roberts, 284 Heller, Joseph Catch-22, 289 Hellman, Lillian The North Star (screenplay), 187 Watch on the Rhine (play), 279 Hemingway, Ernest, 269, 287 Across the River and Into the Trees, 287 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 93, 279 Men at War, 287

352 Hersey, John A Bell for Adano, 22–5, 282 Hiroshima, 113–14, 286 Into the Valley, 281 Hicks, Granville Only One Storm, 100 Highsmith, Patricia Strangers on a Train, 255 Himes, Chester, 202–3 Cast the First Stone, 202 If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 62–5, 131 The Lonely Crusade, 65, 67, 94, 175 Hiroshima. See atomic weapons Hitler-Stalin Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), 89, 94, 263 Hobson, Laura Gentleman’s Agreement, 50 Hofstadter, Richard, 102, 103 Holliday, Billie “Strange Fruit,” 137 Hollywood Ten, 131, 268 Holocaust in US cultural memory, 44–5 in US literature, 44–6, 55 in US Yiddish literature, 46 homosexuality, 6 and World War II, 195–6 homosexuality, politics of, 194–5, 207–8 and antiracism, anti-Semitism, 200–1, 204 Hoover, Herbert, 32 Hoover, J. Edgar, 109 Hopkins, Harry, 337 Hughes, Langston, 73, 136–7, 169–72, 310, 327 career in radio, 323–6 “Freedom Road,” 325 “In Service to My Country,” 325 “The Man Who Went to War,” 325–6 “The Organizer,” 323 “Private Jim Crow,” 325 Simple stories, 169–72 Hull, Cordell, 33 human rights and civil rights, 40, 41 and economic rights, 30–2, 41 and individual rights, 30–1 and Roosevelt, Franklin, 29–30 Hurston, Zora Neale, 118–19, 165 Seraph on the Suwanee, 165

Index Japan occupation by US, 26 Japanese American incarceration, 35, 86, 130, 148–52, 189–90, 272 Jarrell, Randall “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” 283 jazz, 163, 171 Jerome, V.J., 161 Jessey, Cornelia Teach the Angry Spirit, 99 Jonas, Robert, 300 Jones, Claudia, 141, 169 Jones, James, 290 From Here to Eternity, 287–8 Kazin, Alfred A Walker in the City, 258–9 Keynesian economics, 4, 7, 8, 264 Kinsey, Alfred Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 205–7 Kochiyama, Yuri, 132, 135 Koestler, Arthur, 94 Darkness at Noon, 93–4 Kovel, Joel, 90 Kracauer, Siegfried, 269 Krivitsky, Walter (Samuel Ginsburg) In Stalin’s Secret Service, 93

imperialism, United States, 25–6, 60–1, 264 isolationism, 77, 220–1

labor movement, 17, 36, 130–1, 133, 215–17, 264–5 Landon, Margaret Anna and the King of Siam, 22 Lange, Dorothea, 342 Lapp, R.E. Must We Perish?, 253 Lawson, Ted Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 281 League of American Writers, 263 left wing social movements. See Popular Front Legman, Gershon Love & Death; A Study in Censorship, 55 Lippmann, Walter, 36 Lord, Walter Day of Infamy, 288 Lowe, Lisa past conditional temporality, 8, 26 Lowry, Malcolm Under the Volcano, 45, 49 Luce, Henry “The American Century,” 13, 15, 115 Lyons, Eugene The Red Decade, 94

Jackson, Shirley “The Lottery,” 180 Jameson, Frederic, 237–8

MacLeish, Archibald, 80, 327 “The Fall of the City,” 311–12 Panic, 311

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Index Magnuson Act (1943), 130 Mailer, Norman The Naked and the Dead, 48–9, 85, 286–7 Malcolm X, 135, 141 Marable, Manning, 133 March of Time, 318 March on Washington Movement (MOWM). See Randolph, A. Philip mass culture, 7, 81–2, 97, 129, 136–8, 183, 205, 232, 236, See also radio, paperback books Masters, Edgar Lee, 331 Mattachine Society, 6 Mauldin, Bill, 280 Up Front, 282 Mayfield, Julian The Grand Parade, 176 McCarthy, Catherine Ridgway Definition of Love, 98 McCarthy, Mary The Company She Keeps, 255–6 “The Genial Host,” 184 McCarthyism. See anticommunism McCullers, Carson The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, 183–4 Member of the Wedding, 188–9, 200–1 McDaniel, Hattie, 164 McKinlay, Cantor Glory for Me, 283–4 McWilliams, Carey Factories in the Field, 132 Michener, James Tales of the South Pacific, 47, 285–6 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 325, 327 “Murder at Lidice,” 312–14 Miller, Alice Duer The White Cliffs of Dover, 279 Miller, Arthur All My Sons, 286 Focus, 49, 54 Millions Like Us (film), 182 Mills, C. Wright cultural apparatus, 336, 347 Mises, Ludwig von, 222 modernism black modernism, 172–5 and formalism, 172, 229–31, 234–6 high modernism, 1, 2, 5, 232–7 late modernism, 231–7 and radio, 310 relationship to realism, 230–1, 237–42 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. See Hitler-Stalin Pact Mont Pelerin Society, 222 Mori, Toshio The Brothers Murata, 151–2 Yokohama, California, 132, 150–1

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Moscow Trials (1936–1938), 89, 92, 103, 263 Motley, Willard, 272–5 Knock on Any Door, 203–5, 272–3, 276 We Fished All Night, 274–5 Mumford, Lewis, 254 music industry, 163, 165 The Naked City (film), 246–9, 259–60 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), 31, 32, 216, 218 National Office for Decent Literature (NODL), 302 National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), 35 naturalism, 161, 167 neoliberalism, 6, 222–3 Neumann, Franz, 80 Neutrality Acts, 30, 76 New American Library (NAL) (press), 297–8, 299, 300–1, 303 New Criticism, 1, 5, 172, 174, 230, 231, 232–3, 234–6, 241–2 New Deal, 17, 30, 32, 35, 59, 60–1, 70, 134, 212, 213, 215–16, 263, 336 New World A-Coming (radio program), 316–17 New York Intellectuals, 232, 234–6 Newhouse, Edward The Hollow of the Wave, 95, 96 Nixon, Richard, 219 noir, 265, 267–76 Office of War Information (OWI), 16–17, 80, 81, 83, 320 Okada, John, 135, 152–3 “What Can I Do?,” 152–3 No-No Boy, 152 Okubo, Miné Citizen 13660, 132, 149–50, 189–90 On the Waterfront (film), 275 One World movement. See world government Orozco, José Clemente, 336 Orwell, George, 92, 94, 99 Ottley, Roi, 316–17 paperback books, 7, 183 and African American writers, 299–300, 303 and blurring of high and popular culture, 297–300 censorship of, 298, 300, 301–2 covers, 297, 300–1 sales, marketing, and distribution, 291–4 transformation of reading habits / tastes, 196–7, 291, 295, 303–4 and World War II, 82, 294–6 Paredes, Americo George Washington Gomez, 62, 135

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Index

Parker, Dorothy, 314–17, 327 Partisan Review, 92, 230, 232, 233, 266 Penguin Books (press), 292, 300 Peters, Carl Life of Action, 340–1 Life of Contemplation, 341 Petry, Ann, 62 The Street, 65–7, 164, 167–9, 185–6, 256, 257 Philbrick, Herbert I Led Three Lives, 99 Pocket Books (press), 291, 292, 293, 300, 304 Pollock, Jackson, 235 Popular Front, 26, 61, 138 Black Popular Front, 132, 172, 175–6 as Comintern policy, 4, 77, 262 definition / overview, 2, 4–5, 14 effacement in historical memory, 265–6 end of, 69, 89, 265–6, 267, 269 and feminism, 181–3 influence on film noir, 270–2 nationalism of, 83 and the politics of homosexuality, 194–5, 200, 208 postwar, 133, 262–3 scholarship on, 5 Pound, Ezra, 1, 78, 237 The Pisan Cantos, 235 Primus, Pearl, 138 Progressive (term), 263 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 337 pulp fiction, 268 queer pulp, 205 Pyle, Ernie, 280 Brave Men, 281–2 queer politics. See homosexuality, politics of racial formation African American, 164–5, 172 Asian / Asian American, 138, 144–6 during World War II, 129–32 racial justice. See antiracism radio. See also World War II and radio, antifascism and radio and African Americans, 322–6 and the political left, 7–8, 309–10 radio poems, 1 Rahv, Philip, 90, 92–3, 232 “Proletarian Literature; A Political Autopsy,” 233–4 Rand, Ayn, 97–8, 223 The Fountainhead, 98, 223, 255 We the Living, 92, 97 Randolph, A. Philip, 130, 134, 162, 163, 324 Ransom, John Crowe, 236

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realism, 82, 99, 161–2, 230–1, 237–42 Red Channels, 3, 327 Rivera, Diego, 334–5, 336–7, 346–7 Robeson, Paul, 164 Rockwell, Norman “Four Freedoms” illustrations, 39 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 30, 39–40 Roosevelt, Franklin, 16, 17, 25, 26, 29–30, 35, 77, 120, 134, 218, 337 “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, 60 “Four Freedoms,” 34, 37–9, 40, 154–5, 324 and “Second Bill of Rights,” 35–7 Roth, Philip, 85 Rustin, Bayard, 134, 141 Sandburg, Carl The People, Yes, 321 Saroyan, William, 312 The Human Comedy, 281 Sartre, John Paul, 50 Sert, José Lluis Can Our Cities Survive?, 253 Shapiro, Karl, 78, 79 V-Letter, 283 Shaw, Irwin “Select Clientele,” 50 The Young Lions, 286–7 Sherwood, Robert, 80 There Shall Be No Night, 279 Shirer, William Berlin Diary, 279 Sillen, Samuel, 82, 83 Simpson, Louis, 283 Sinclair, Jo (Ruth Seid) Wasteland, 51, 193, 200–3 Sinclair, Upton, 76 Smedley, Agnes, 138 Smith, Betty A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 257–8, 296 Smith, Lillian Strange Fruit, 138, 296 Snow, Edgar Red Star over China, 146 South, the (US), 136, 165, 213–15 Soviet Union images of Soviet women in US, 186–7 Spillane, Mickey, 294, 297, 299 I, the Jury, 299 One Lonely Night, 103 Spock, Benjamin, 182 state cultural apparatus, 336, 346–7 Stein, Gertrude, 237, 310 Brewsie and Willie, 84 Steinbeck, John The Moon Is Down, 19, 20, 279–80

Index Stevens, Wallace, 1 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 237 Stout, Rex The Second Confession, 98, 101 strike wave of 1945–1947, 216, 264–5, 270 Strong, Anna Louise, 138 Wild River, 187 Struthers, Jan Mrs. Miniver, 279 Stryker, Roy, 342 Stuart, Jesse Taps for Private Tussie, 281 Suyemoto, Toyo, 148–9 Taft, Robert (US senator), 214–15, 216, 221 Taft-Hartley Act, 216–17, 265 Tarkington, Booth “Freedom of Speech,” 37 Tate, Allen, 235 Taylor, Rosemary Chicken Every Sunday, 296 Terkel, Studs “The Good War,” 289 Thomas, Norman, 74 Thompson, Dorothy, 22 Tolson, Melvin, 172, 174 totalitarianism (concept), 264, 267 trade unions. See labor movement Tregaskis, Richard Guadalcanal Diary, 281 Trilling, Lionel, 232 The Middle of the Journey, 96–7, 99–100, 255 Triple-A Plowed Under (play), 339 Truman, Harold, 108, 141, 216, 219 decision to use atomic weapons on Japan, 112–13 Truman Doctrine, 108, 116 Tsiang, H.T. And China Has Hands, 146, 156 The Hanging on Union Square, 156 Twelve O’Clock High (film and book), 285 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). See Soviet Union United Nations Organization, 30, 35, 39–40, 139 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 30, 40 Urban Land Institute, 252 urban renewal, 249–55 in literature, 255–60 Uris, Leon Battle Cry, 288 Utley, Freda The Dream We Lost, 93

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355

Valtin, Jan (Richard Krebs) Out of the Night, 93 Vidal, Gore The City and the Pillar, 203–4 Villa, José Garcia, 156, 157 Have Come, Am Here, 156 Voice of America (VOA), 343 Voice of Freedom Committee, 317 Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse Five, 289 Wagner Act. See National Labor Relations Act Wald, Alan, 133 Walker, Margaret “For My People,” 184 Wallace, Henry, 14, 18, 37, 69, 80, 115 Wallant, Edward Lewis The Pawnbroker, 44 War Writers Board, 325 Ward, Theodore Our Lan’, 86 Weegee Naked City, 248 Weller, George Singapore is Silent, 22 Welles, Orson, 1, 310, 312, 317–19, 331 Citizen Kane (film), 319 “His Honor the Mayor,” 319 Julius Caesar (radio adaptation), 318 War of the Worlds (radio adaptation), 318–19 Wells, H.G., 33 White, E.B. Here is New York, 249, 251–2 White, Walter, 141–2 White, William L. Journey for Margaret, 279 They were Expendable, 280–1 Williams, Raymond, 5 structure of feeling, 7, 136 Williams, William Carlos Paterson, 238 Willkie, Wendell One World, 19, 81, 115 Winter, Ella I Saw the Russian People, 187 Wonder Woman (comic), 179 Wong, Jade Snow, 156–7 Woolrich, Cornell Deadline at Dawn, 256 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 337 world government, 108, 114–16 World War II, 3 American Century as imperial narrative, 15, 22–5 and civil liberties, 35

356 World War II (cont.) and civil rights, 17–18, 130–1, 164 cultural memory of, 3, 14–15, 85–6 and the culture industries, 16–17, 81–2 and federal funding of the arts, 336, 341–6 in fiction, 19, 20–5, 82–3, 84–5, 113–14, 140, 196–200, 279–81, 282, 283–8, 289, 290 in film, 16–17, 280, 288 “Free World/Slave World” narrative, 15, 19–22, 81 historiography, 14–15 and homosexuality, 195–6 and labor migration in US, 129–30 in nonfiction, 18–19, 22, 82, 188, 281–2, 286, 288, 289–90 official propaganda, 16, 81, 295–6, 320, 342–5 and paperback books, 82, 294–6 “People’s War” narrative, 15, 18–19, 26, 80–1, 82–3, 85, 86 in photojournalism, 287 plays about, 279, 286 in poetry, 279, 283 and radio, 1–2, 17, 320, 321–2

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Index and the political left, 17–19, 26, 70, 80–1, 316, 320, 321–2, 325–6 representations of Germans and Japanese, 111, 179 in television, 288–9 and US imperialism, 25–6 and US nationalism, 83–4 and wages, 17 and women, 178–82, 186–90 Wouk, Herman The Caine Mutiny, 287–8 Wright, Richard, 95, 133, 137, 202 12 Million Black Voices, 131 Black Boy, 131 “I Tried to Be a Communist,” 133 Native Son, 136, 137, 164, 165–7, 169 Wylie, Philip Generation of Vipers, 182 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 157 “Seventeen Syllables,” 153 “Wilshire Bus,” 153–4 Yutang, Lin My Country and My People, 146