Chapter 23 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s representatives of what they considered the American “radical intelligentsia." To emphasize the radicals’ status as Americans, the writers scrubbed them of all complicating ethnic, national, or racial markers and elided their connections to the Soviet Union. Devoting a largely admiring passage to Alexander Kaun, a Berkeley professor, Ilf and Petrov neglected to mention that he was an immigrant. They also emphasized that the radical professor no less than the radical journalists Lincoln Steffens and Albert Rhys Williams, whom they met in Carmel, were surrounded by standard American vacuousness. Yet they still expressed hope in the power of the antifascist Popular Front in America.