cartoon from George Lichty's "Is Party Line, Comrade!" series

The "Is Party Line, Comrade!" series was selected for republication in the Conservative Book Club's Omnibus, volume 6 which included Elizabeth Bentley's Out of Bondage, Richard Weaver's Visions of Order, and Ludwig von Mises's The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.

The signs in the cartoon read as follows: "Commisar of Music Culture (Peoples Div.)" [on the door]; "Musicians of the World arise! -- Make Sour Notes" [on the wall, middle]; "Capita[list] Be-bo[p] Must Go" [behind the middle poster]; "world No. 1 'Boogie' Man" [on wall, right, under sketch of portrait].

The caption: "Is symphony I am composing from glorious sounds of Soviet industry, comrade commisar... the din of hammers, the clash of machinery, the roar of furnaces, the groans of the populace..."

communism is the word

Over at my 1960 blog I'm pondering the use of the word "communism" in books.

Carl Rakosi on his role as a communist poet

Carl Rakosi responds to a question about his status as a communist poet in the 1930s (and 40s). Tom Devaney posed the question during a public live-audiocast interview we conducted at the Writers House in 2002, when Carl was 99 years old.

poetry and anticommunism, an essay-length primer

I've now made my essay "Modern Poetry and Anticommunism" available through Selected Works. Citation: Alan Filreis. "Modern Poetry and Anticommunism." A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ed. Stephen Fredman. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005. 173-190.

facing left

A few years ago John Serio was asked to edit the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens and expressed the hope that I'd summarize what I'd learned over the years about Stevens' response to the radical-left poetics of the 1930s, so I wrote a short paper (10 pages in print) and it appeared in that very good volume. Today I uploaded a PDF copy to my "Selected Works" site: here's the essay.

Freud on communism

Years ago I made available to my students--and then through the web to the world (this page is one of the most frequently visited pages in any of my web sites)--Freud's comments on political theory and political life in Civilization and Its Discontents. Here is a link to the excerpt, and here is his paragraph on communism:

The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature. The possession of private property gives power to the individual and thence the temptation arises to ill-treat his neighbour; the man who is excluded from the possession of property is obliged to rebel in hostility against the oppressor. If private property were abolished, all valuables held in common and all allowed to share in the enjoyment of them, ill-will and enmity would disappear from among men. Since all needs would be satisfied, none would have any reason to regard another as an enemy; all would willingly undertake the work which is necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communistic system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings--possibly with the single exception of that of a mother to her male child. Suppose that personal rights to material goods are done away with, there still remain prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancour and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect, and that is that the ineffaceable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led.

Aaron Kramer

We at PennSound have now created a new author page - that of the left-wing poet Aaron Kramer. Kramer was (for a time, and perhaps for a long time) a member of the Communist Party of the U.S. He was involved in just about every radical issue, cultural and straight-out political, of this time: the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps his first big break as a poet was his inclusion in the anthology, Six Poets in Search of An Answer (1944), which at a (brief) hopeful moment in the liberal-left alliance brought Aaron in with Max Bodenheim, Joy Davidman, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg (by then a vintage modernist who'd joined the radical left), Martha Millet, and Norman Rosten. His "Garcia Lorca" memorialized that poet murdered by Spanish fascists. "Berlin Air Raid" begins: "For ten years they were listening to different / sounds." "Natchez" is about southern racist violence, a place where "a hundred tabloid writers ran to the flame." I have been in touch with Aaron's daughter Laura for years. Recently she went through the attic and gathered together three shoeboxes of cassettes and VHS tapes and delivered them to us at PennSound. We are slowly going through them, digitizing them, and make them available--as always--for free download through our archive. Thanks to the work of Rebekah Caton, the first three readings are now up. Coming soon: a recording of a radio program featuring a discussion and performance by Kramer of poems from the sweatshops - verse of radical Jewish immigrants of the first years of the 20th century.

Miller avoided crucible

Arthur Miller might well have been a communist. He wrote for communist publications and seems to have had a significant editorial role (under a pseudonym), was involved in a series of CPUSA meetings, gatherings and projects, and there's a boatload of further circumstantial evidence. He was of course questioned by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee but managed to avert direct response to The Question, and quasi-evoked the 1st and 5th amendments to stave them off. In any case, it seems that the HUAC investigators did not have even the beginnings of the evidence Alan Wald has gathered and published in a chapter in his book Trinity of Passion, the second of his three-volume narrative of American radical writers in the 20th century. I mention Wald's Miller findings in my review of Wald's triology - in Left History's Fall/Winter 2007 issue. Here is the review (PDF).

Miller's having been affiliated with--perhaps a member of--the CPUSA doesn't alter the meaning or significance of his plays, doesn't change at least my own sense of his political views. But consider that Miller has been written about and written about--many dozens of scholarly articles, monographs by biographers and biographical critics. Are we so unattuned to the traces of American radical culture that we can't discern the evidence that Wald--not a Millerite, not a scholar of dramatic literature--found with a bit of hard work? For one thing, one has to read the long-forgotten (and in the 1950s suppressed or unavailable) communist and communist-affiliated journals and magazines. The fact is, when most academic critics of Miller's mode and genre were being trained in the graduate schools, or were getting tenure, this kind of research would not have been favored. That's saying the very least. We know a ton about his relationship with Marilyn Monroe. We know nothing (until Wald's work) about his political affiliations in the 1940s. Nearly every high school student has had to read The Crucible or Death of a Salesman but there's no way that the actual anti-anticommunism of the first play, or the anti-mercantilism (the devastating effects of alienated labor) of the second, would permit Marxist explanation if there had been a demonstrated connection between the beloved "heterodox" playwright and an actual Marxist political party in this country.

free speech and literary intention

Back in the late '80s I used the opportunity to write a review of two books about the Smith Act prosecutions of American communists to put together an essay on First Amendment theory, literary intention and the political interpretation of speech. It's called "Words with 'All the Effects of Force': Cold-War Interpretation" and was published in American Quarterly (volume 39, issue 2 - Summer 1987). Here is the essay as a PDF.

nuanced commie critic

Stanley Burnshaw, who died at 99 years of age just a few years ago, reviewed Wallace Stevens's Ideas of Order critically in the communist New Masses in 1935. Although Stanley left his association with the Party fairly early (he'd never been a member, so far as I know--and he was always skeptical of aesthetic "lines"), and was very active as a translator and anthologist, and later as a senior editor at Henry Holt, the poetry world forgot about him as he developed his literary portfolio and sensibility. They seemed to prefer Burnshaw, frozen in Depression time, as the angry young lefty, hurling Marxist critique at the insular modernist. But Stanley was right there, all along, to be found and talked to. I came to know him in the 80s and eventually spent many hours at his apartment, with Harvey Teres (then at Princeton, writing a book about Partisan Review). We recorded the interview, then excerpted it and, with Stanley, edited it. Then published it in the Wallace Stevens Journal in 1989. I've been digging around my old things, as readers of this blog will have noted, and found the interview. Made a PDF of it and here it is.

purging libraries

In March 1953, at the height of the Cold War, with the Rosenbergs awaiting electrocution, Senator Joe McCarthy investigated the presence of certain books in State Department-sponsored overseas libraries. One writer whose books the libraries stocked was William Mandel, United Press expert on the WW2-era Soviet Union. Roy Cohen, David Schine and McCarthy's other staff named Mandel as a member of the Communist Party. Televised throughout the U.S. and watched by 40 million viewers, Mandel's defiance of the powerful Senator was unprecedented. Here is a 30-minute preview of a film about the McCarthy-Mandel confrontation. Mandel's reasonable-toned rejoinders of senators' questions permits little entry-point for senatorial bullying and he goes on to give a fairly cogent reply to McCarthyism.

fascism=communism, with Obama thrown in

This morning I'm having a discussion with two Facebook friends, Dave and Peter (they don't know each other). It started when I posted a Facebook "note" with a photo of Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and a link to the New York Times obituary of her published after her death at 101 in 2003. Dave started us off by likening the Obama inauguration to the Nuremburg rally. To view the thread of Facebook comments, click on the image at right.

cell phone in the garden of exile

Alicia Oltuski, a fabulous writer (usually comic, in the Max Apple vein), tells a story about losing her father in the axis of death. Go to "Berlin Stories" - specifically here and listen to the audio.

G-men lit crits

Over at the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet" blog, there have been several postings made by Mark Nowak about recent scholarship on Claudia Jones, a writer-activist who was hounded as a subversive by the FBI. To get a sense of these blog posts and of the many comments made about them, start here and look for links to the comments.

As I prepared to write a book on the anticommunist attack on modernism, I accumulated (slowly--very slowly--over time) FBI files on a number of writers, especially poets, and read others' that had already been released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I had already written about communists' interactions with modernists in the 1930s and was generally well versed in the impact of the CPUSA and most generally of communist culture (some would say "culture" in scare quotes) on American poetry and poetics. Perhaps foolishly (insofar as use of my time goes) I read thousands of pages of materials compiled during the Smith Act prosecutions of communist leaders (especially the so-called "Foley Square trials" that began in 1949.

I wrote a review-essay on a book about the Smith Act prosecutions and in the course of writing that review realized the crucial role that language and literary interpretation played in the strategy to which the Justice Department resorted in order to prove that communists "meant" something that was (under the Smith Act) illegal and thus could cause judge and/or jury to send these people to jail for acts they did not "yet" commit but which they "meant" when they wrote what they wrote.

Here is a portion of that essay:

...the distance between the subversive language of the depleted postwar [post-WWI] CPUSA and a future violent toppling of the American government was so great, the sign pointing so indirectly toward the signified, as to make the danger extremely unclear, indeed, largely absent. Lacking the external evidence that seemed required by the Schenck interpretation [a World War I-era radical speech case--the famous "fire in a theatre" case], the prosecutors, aides in the executive branch (guided by Truman and his attorney general), the FBI, the lower court, and eventually the high court succeeded in shifting the test from the relation between language and the world to the intention of the language itself--that is, from external evidence of a powerful state imminently endangered by subversive language to internal evidence offered in a text which "meant" future illegal action. The government was ready to devalue clear and present danger in order to place great emphasis on the most impressionistic aspect of Holmes's 1919 writing: the First Amendment, Holmes had written, "does not even protect a man from injunction against uttering words that may have all the effects of force." One easily perceives instability in the relation of utterances to effects of force, let alone the susceptibility of the idea of intentionality to abuse. When Harold Medina instructed the jury that "words may be the instruments by which crimes are committed" as Steinberg quotes him (Steinberg has performed the heroic task of reading the entire million-plus-word transcript of the trial), the judge was making sure the jury understood that it was their duty to interpret intention. He was "instructing" them to read the texts of subversion thus: punishable advocacy was that which would incite illegal action "by language reasonably and ordinarily calculated to do so."

a Zelig of modern poetry

Very soon we at PennSound will be announcing a new page of recordings: those of the poet Walter Lowenfels. We've been working with WL's daughter Judy to preserve readings and interviews that have been stored on reel-to-reel and cassette tapes. First they were digitized and put onto CDs. Then we've been selecting batches to upload, tag, name and organize on the new Lowenfels author page: here. We'll be adding more soon, but check it out now. Rare stuff there.

Lowenfels is, in a way, the Zelig of modern American poetry--part of nearly every aesthetic and political movement of his time. In the 20s he was an expatriate avant-gardist living, writing, experimenting, publishing, frolicking in Paris; toward and in the 1930s he became a political activist, and a member of the Communist Party; in the 1950s he actually went to jail after having been convicted under the anticommunist Smith Act, and wrote sonnets to love and liberty while in jail; re-emerging in the early and mid-1960s, he was taken up avidly by a new generation of readers and became a leader among the poet-activists who opposed the war in Vietnam.

For my book on the poetry of the 1950s and the way it responded to modernism in the 1930s, I spend a good deal of time tracking down Lowenfels' publications and reading among his unpublished letters and other archival materials. So this new Lowenfels PennSound gives me special pleasure.

Armand Schwerner: "Way before the sixties, Walter Lowenfels perceived the lopsided canon of our poetry; he did a great deal to change the climate, in which, as he writes, the country needed to include 'the vast emotional resources and insights that Indian, Black and Chicano people express in their poetry."

poems for sale

Spring and early summer in particular have always been the season for poets setting themselves up outdoors among the other buskers of the city.

Max Bodenheim in the late 1940s and early 50s, destitute and always looking for the next whiskey, sold poems for drinks. To be specific, he set himself up on (let's say) Hudson Street right outside the White Horse Tavern, would in some way indicate to passersby or ingoing White Horse patrons that he was indeed the once-famous freewheeling Roaring Twenties novelist and poet Maxwell Bodenheim, a glimmer of those days of High Modernist Hilarity past, and you'd make an arrangement with him: he'd write you a "sonnet to order." People would pay to help out (and thus touch the life of) a broken-down old boho with bona fide modernist and radical lineage. If one ever gets to read the Bodenheim sonnets of this period, they have to be read, it seems to me, as made by the market for aesthetic-ideological nostalgia.

Back in the late 70s I spent some time reading the manuscripts of Bodenheim in the special collections department of Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. I was taking a graduate course in bibliography, textual criticism, philology, books and bookmaking, and manuscripts, taught by the eccentric and wonderful bibliographer, Lester A. Beaurline, whose love of setting type by hand was the one thing that made me realize doctoral study in English could well connect to my life as I'd already been living it. (In high school I'd been the one A-student who took "print shop" all four years. Print shop was deemed then to be a haven for guys we rather liberally called "greasers.")

One of the assignments Beaurline gave us: find a cache of unpublished manuscripts and make something of them. I think he was hoping students would read around in Arnold, Tennyson, Chaucer (there are 4 Chaucer manuscripts there), Poe, even Thomas Jeffrerson (patron saint at UVa), Faulkner (junior patron saint there). The other students went in canonical directions. I went for Max Bodenheim - and specifically Bodenheim's final post-communist post-modernist years on the streets of New York. He lived not just symbolically but literally on the Bowery. He was murdered in 1954 by a man who in court later said he was proud to have killed a commie poet. I read a pile of these sonnets, composed by a bad shaky hand. (Somewhere I have the notes from this - and possibly some photocopies. I'll look.)

Yesterday photographer Lawrence Schwartzwald happened upon a 21-year-old poet, one Robert Samel Snyderman, who sets himself up in Central Park to write on a portable typewriter: he will sell you a poem for $5. He told Lawrence that he "writes all the time" and prefers to write on his typewriter in the park "rather than in an academic environment." Of course there are many places to write poems in the large space between on one hand the "academic environment" and, on the other, Central Park, but never mind. The photo, I think, captures the early-summer post-communist post-modernist Bodenheimian sensibility perfectly.

There--see?--I used the term "post-modernist" to mean something much more specific (I mean it as ex- something) than the dead-metaphor term that gets deployed to indicate vaguely any 1945-present or 1960-present art that either continues out of modernism or reacts against it. Bodenheim's fate is thus finally instructive. He went through his modernist phase (Replenishing Jessica and other flapperistic fictions) and went through his communist phase (in the 30s and early 40s, as actually an activist member of CPUSA), and by the time we meet him selling sonnets for, shall we say, a flow of cash, beyond those aesthetic -isms and (back to? on to? down to?) the poem as a vital (desperate) function of the quavering body in need, setting itself up (through poetry!) to be needy. As you can see I'm still thinking about the possible import of C. A. Conrad's (Soma)tic Midge (see "Poems under the Influence" below). Not advocating it as an end to the coherent movement, just being sure I remember that not everyone befits such. It's possible that Lawrence's photo romanticizes this not-fitting; quite likely that Mr. Snyderman would join the first aesthetic category that would have him. And that's my point: Bodenheim would have done the same in a flash, if it would have saved him from the extremity that wrote those sonnets, some of which someone saved and which later I saw at Alderman. I'm glad I saw them. I've never known until now (blogs are fine things) how or when I could ever mention them.

Credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald/Splashnews

poem as news, news as poem

I've had a lot to say - too much, for most people, I'm sure - about the cardboard caricaturing of American communist poets, an invention of the 1940s and 1950s after the apparent/alleged dominance of such poets in the 1930s. I don't mean their politics, which often can be aptly caricatured (or at least predicted); I mean their aesthetics.

To take an instance: Collage, one would think, would be anathema to a communist poet at the height of the anti-fascist movement.

Responding to the death of Franklin Roosevelt in the spring of 1945, the communist Aaron Kramer constructed an elegy of words he found in the New York newspapers of April 13th and 14th. The result is a poem that is most certainly not an effort to respond coherently to a major political event - maybe emotionally, but not ideologically. It's not, in my view, a great instance of collage, but it is a newspaper collage and it was published in the American communists' official newspaper. The whole text is available in my modern American poetry site/English 88. Here are a few parts:

QUESTION: What did President Roosevelt mean to you
personally?
Place: Times Square...

A black crepe bowknot
either with or without streamers...

They came up out of the subways to put the question...

the flag is flown at half-staff, it was pointed out,
but never with the blue field down,
as that signifies a signal of distress...

close listening

I was pleased to be invited to be Charles Bernstein's guest on his radio show, "Close Listening," a series (now 38 shows) done in collaboration with PS1.org. We talked about the cold-war politics of modernism, about literary history as a method for poetics, about my new book, etc. The show is about 35 minutes long. Have a listen. All of the Close Listening shows are listed and linked in PennSound.

I don't like what you said...no, what you read

Years ago I wrote a review-essay on a book about the Cold War-era prosecutions of leaders of the Communist Party of the U.S. - the so-called Foley Square Trials which began in 1949 (Dennis v. U.S.). What interested me was the theory of language implicit in the way the prosecution presented--or felt they had to present--their case. They went after these American communists for acts they didn't do but said they would do; but they didn't even have evidence for such saying, so they proved that illegal acts would occur in the future based on what the communists read and said about what they read.

Here are two paragraphs from the beginning of the review and part of a third paragraph from a little later on - and here is the whole review (published in the summer 1987 issue of American Quarterly):

Peter Steinberg's The Great "Red Menace" tells the story of the 1949 Smith Act trial of leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which culminated in the 1951 Dennis v. United States decision. In that decision the Supreme Court upheld Judge Harold Medina's ruling that the First Amendment certainly does not extend to those who conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of the American government. The exposition is brilliant: Steinberg alternates between groups of chapters written from the perspective of the government and its prosecutors on the one hand, and the beleaguered CPUSA on the other. Telling the story of the prosecution of a small and by-then uninfluential political group may not seem to require the time and space it has taken, but if we focus on a shift in the conception of American language marked by the trial and the Dennis decision, we will find plenty to go on.

The shift will seem as dramatic to "new" American literary historians as to a new, skeptical generation of legal theorists, and that is perhaps why, with the two disciplines now sharing much the same ground, Steinberg's good work is so timely. In the 1919 Schenck decision, the Supreme Court ruled that to decide if subversive language was not protected by the right to free speech the courts would have to test the direct relation between the writing and the prohibit able action. One could not shout fire in a theater if there were no fire, Justice Holmes wrote in the famous metaphor; if one did falsely shout, the falsity would be clear enough (where was the fire?), and the connection of the language shouted to the ensuing harm was present (for example, theatergoers trampling one another to get out). A court could expect the prosecution to demonstrate both clarity and presence. The high court thus used an abstract notion of proximity--that is, of language to action; of language intended to lead to action to the action itself--but tried to look away from the intention in the language and as exclusively as possible at the action, and in this way demanded the relevance of external evidence to the interpretation of language. Investigators and attorneys working on behalf of the American government in 1951 had no choice but to reshape the doctrine of clear and present danger if they wanted to define American communist language as suggesting illegality; and, as Steinberg demonstrates, they wanted this very badly.

...When Harold Medina instructed the jury that "words may be the instruments by which crimes are committed" as Steinberg quotes him (Steinberg has performed the heroic task of reading the entire million-plus-word transcript of the trial), the judge was making sure the jury understood that it was their duty to interpret intention. He was "instructing" them to read the texts of subversion thus: punishable advocacy was that which would incite illegal action "by language reasonably and ordinarily calculated to do so." At this rate--and in a moment I will turn to the Congressional hearings of writers to show this specifically--Holmes' falsely shouted "Fire!" in the theater may as well have been uttered by a player in the play for all the attention actually paid to text in context. In order to shift attention away from the expectation that some evidence, any evidence, would be brought into the court establishing that any one of the twelve communist defendants had themselves acted illegally at a certain time, or had proposed to act illegally, or had taught others the specific duty to act illegally--no such evidence was ever introduced--the prosecution began with the witness Louis Budenz whose testimony is undoubtedly the oddest ever admitted in an American criminal trial. The strategy was to ask the judge to allow as evidence readings from "classic texts," works by or about communists, which would establish what all communists do by suggesting what one of them once intended. Anticipating that the defense, conducted by Eugene Dennis himself, would offer counter examples of classic texts arguing for change through peaceful means, Budenz then stunned the defendants by introducing the notion of "the Aesopian language thesis." According to the Aesopian language thesis, communist language was hardly ever meant literally. CPUSA communicated in codes of metaphors, synecdoches, and antitheses. If Dennis produced a text which claimed "peace" as the communists' objective, it was to be read as intending "war." The trick was to catch the communist-influenced writer off his guard, saying what he really meant.

commies taking over tomorrow

The first postwar "Imagine if..." dramatizations of the Russians conquering and enslaving America, Is This Tomorrow? was published in 1947 by the Catechetical Guild Educational Society of St. Paul, Minnesota. At ten cents a copy, this fifty-two page, full-color comic book was a smashing success. It enjoyed several reprintings, and was used as a giveaway, presumably distributed to church groups. Some four million copies were printed.

Feverish Commie-takeover scenarios emerged in the mass media in the years to come, including Life magazine's "The Reds Have a Standard Plan for Taking over a New Country" (1948), the M-G-M cartoon "Make Mine Freedom" (1948), Columbia Pictures' 1952 film Invasion USA, the 1962 TV special Red Nightmare ("presented by the Department of Defense"), and such comic books as "The Sneak Attack" in the first issue of Atomic War (1952). But none of them could quite match Is This Tomorrow? for pure holy terror.

For more materials of this sort, see my 1950s site.