“A Mandolin Orchestra Could Attract a Lot of Attention”: Interracial Fun with Radical Immigrants, 1920–1955

Abstract

As Antonio Gramsci and others have noted, all the way back to Karl Marx himself, cultural institutions very often are employed to buttress the socioeconomic elite and a society’s status quo. Schools, literature, popular songs and other cultural productions are often employed to inculcate lessons that society is just and those who are in political and economic command are there because they earned it or that the social order is “natural.” However, this hegemony, Gramsci recognized, was imperfect and in constant need of shoring up–or tearing down if one believed wealth has been unfairly appropriated or maldistributed. In moments of crisis the same cultural productions—plays, schools, musical groups and camps—are deployed by adherents of social movements to harness discontent to imagine that another world is possible. As sociologists of social movements recognize, so too, activists quickly realized that they had to “weave together a moral, cognitive and emotional package of attitudes” if they were to win converts. “Cognitive liberation,” James M. Jasper argues, “is probably more important for its bundle of emotions than for any ‘objective’ information about odds of success. ‘Liberation’ implies heady emotions that ‘cognitive’ then denies.” Ann Swidler too argues that social movements are often most effective when they transpose group allegiances and cultural symbols into new causes. While during the Depression, Communist Party USA (CP) activists offered lengthy and intricate expositions on Marxism at their rallies, heavy on the cognitive, they didn’t slight the emancipatory appeal to emotions and fun, either. Education and entertainment mixed at Workers’ Halls. Leftwing rallies also employed ethnic singing societies and theater troupes to preach a new gospel of Marxism via cultural institutions with which Jewish, Italian and Slavic workers were familiar. During the early twentieth century, radical immigrants made plenty of room for dancing while advancing the revolution. As Michael Denning notes, after the New Deal took hold in the 1930s, a “laboring” of popular culture developed in which working-class agendas and themes flourished in theater, art, literature and music. What’s less frequently noticed,