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Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Alan Wald
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Extract

On the morning of June 20, 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their gray trenchcoats, and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms, and dragged sixteen Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the U.S. government. This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.

Type
Special Section: The Politics of Culture in Cold War America
Information
Prospects , Volume 20 , October 1995 , pp. 479 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

1. This description is based on Belknap, Michael R.'s Cold War Political Justice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977), 153.Google Scholar

2. V. J. Jerome was born Jerome Isaac Romaine in Poland in 1896 and died in New York City in 1965.

3. See New York Times, 07 25, 1951, 12: 6.Google Scholar

4. See Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Guilty by Omission,” in Placing Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 292–94.Google Scholar

5. Moreover, in the index of Louisiana Women Writers (Baton Rouge), and in the introductory overviews and internal subchapters, neither Marxism nor Communism nor a socialist Left tradition exist as categories or even possible perspectives, even though revolutionary writers of the period of the 1930s–50s from that state include Arna Bon temps, Barbara Giles, Theodore Ward, Douglass Turner Ward, Alfred Maund, and James Neugass.

6. Only recently was Flannery O'Connor reinscribed in her actual 1950s' context in the stimulating new book by Bacon, Jon Lance, Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture (1994).Google Scholar

7. These newspaper column “conversations” are now available as the book Like One of the Family, republished after thirty years in 1986 in the Beacon series of Black Women Writers, edited by Deborah McDowell and introduced by Trudier Harris.

8. Of course, famous pro-Communists Richard Wright and Langston Hughes had important theater connections as well.

9. See the unpublished oral history of Julian Mayfield at Howard University Library, Civil Rights Collection, and correspondence between Graham and Earl Browder in the Earl Browder Papers, Syracuse University Library.

10. See Duggan, Lisa, “Audre Lorde,” in The American Radical, ed. Buhle, Mari Jo et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 353–60.Google Scholar

11. Interview with Cooke, Marvell, New York City, 10, 1994.Google Scholar

12. Watts, Jerry, Heroism and the Black Intellectual (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 8.Google Scholar

13. See my discussion of these policies in the chapter “Lloyd Brown and the African American Literary Left,” in Writing From the Left (London: Verso, 1994), 212–32.Google Scholar

14. Oral History of Julian Mayfield, Howard University Library.

15. Quoted in Wald, , Writing From the Left, 215.Google Scholar

16. Brown, Frank London, Trumbull Park (1959), 432.Google Scholar

17. See Julius, and Rosenberg, Ethel, Death House Letters.Google Scholar

18. Fast, Howard, Tony and the Wonderful Door (New York: Blue Heron, 1952), 5.Google Scholar

19. This is an early 1950s' mimeographed bulletin published by the Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions in New York City, featuring Sojourner Truth and Ella Mae Wiggins singing a cantata called “Women Are Dangerous.”

20. Interview with Weil, Jonathan, New York City, 10, 1993.Google Scholar

21. Interview with Rubinstein, Annette, New York City, 10, 1992.Google Scholar

22. It is a tradition in left-wing guerrilla movements in Central America for the names of deceased comrades to continue to be read during roll call, with the remaining troops calling out “presente!” in unison as a tribute.