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.

Langston Hughes spent a year in Carmel, California, beginning at the culmination of his round-the-world trip in 1933 and ending with his fleeing for fear of vigilante violence in the summer of 1934. During this time, he became increasingly involved in the Carmel John Reed Club (JRC), in part through his relationship with Ella Winter, with whom he wrote a play based on a local cotton strike, Blood on the Fields. He published his poem “Wait” (1934) in the West Coast JRC organ, The Partisan. This chapter argues that the work Hughes produced through his affiliation with the JRC displays a “coalitional aesthetics” that reflects the organizational mode of the clubs themselves. By addressing the specific labor concerns of the San Joaquin Valley alongside those of other regions, states, nations, and continents, it simultaneously focuses on both the molar and the molecular, ultimately enacting – at the level of form – coalitional networks of solidarity that cut across racial and geographic designations.