American Communist History最新文献

{"title":"The Leadership of American Communism, 1924–1929: Sketches for a Prosopographical Portrait","authors":"J. McIlroy, A. Campbell","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1681200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1681200","url":null,"abstract":"Prosopography, we argued in an earlier paper, is a useful, ancillary instrument in the historian’s toolbox. Focusing on historical actors, significant and less significant, central or marginal in t...","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"1 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1681200","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45888478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"United States Communist History Bibliography 2019","authors":"P. Filardo","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1710955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1710955","url":null,"abstract":"The subject of the annual Bibliography is the English language scholarly literature of U.S. Communism, supplemented by citations from serious non-scholarly journals, journals of opinion, obituaries, etc. The literature “of” Communism includes not only material directly about Communism, but selected materials overlapping with, tangential or adjacent to the subject of U.S. Communism; or otherwise of close interest to scholars of Communism. This broad approach is especially necessary as the “classical” era of Communism (1919-1991) recedes into the past. While research output directly about U.S. Communism per se may have declined, nevertheless, scholarship related to U.S. Communism continues, and has broadened its disciplinary, topical, and theoretical approaches. Anticommunism also receives extensive coverage. Reviews are excluded. Informational annotations are provided where a work’s title does not convey its chronological or geographical scope, key personal or corporate names, subject or relevance. For most edited monographs, and for some single-author monographs, the table of contents and/or the author’s or publisher’s abstract are provided, when available and appropriate. An outstanding cumulative bibliography, through 2008, is John Earl Haynes’ American Communism and Anticommunism: A Historian’s Bibliography and Guide to the Literature. It contains over 10,000 entries, most annotated, is extensively topically subdivided, and is particularly strong on anti-Communism. Researchers are strongly urged to make use of it. (http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page94.html).","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"148 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1710955","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47818723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"McKay, Claude. Romance in Marseille","authors":"M. Levin","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2020.1758523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2020.1758523","url":null,"abstract":"The discovery and subsequent publication for the first time in 2017 of Claude McKay’s lost manuscript, Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, has led to renewed interest in the seminal Harlem Renaissance writer’s life and work. But anyone who has read Amiable with Big Teeth, and the more recently published Romance in Marseille (2020), must acknowledge the remarkably prescient nature of both texts, and their relevance to 21st-century readers. McKay’s narratives deftly weave social reality with political commentary and are filled with rich characters whose stories and struggles invite further reflection. Unlike Amiable with Big Teeth, Romance in Marseille was never a lost text because its two manuscript versions, although unpublished, were known to scholars. This book was written, rewritten, and abandoned by McKay at the height of the Jazz Age, thus preserving almost as if in a time capsule, the complexities of racial & sexual identities, radical politics, and disability in this period. It may simply be a sign of our times but, unusually, when readers open to the first page of the introduction to Romance in Marseille, editors Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell (both scholars of African American literature) warn of spoilers: “New readers are advised that this introduction makes details of the plot explicit” (vii). The plot certainly twists as it follows the very few ups and very many downs in the life of Lafala, a West African merchant seaman whose (mis)adventures introduce us to an international cast including Moroccan courtesans, French pimps, and Caribbean Marxists in the Vieux Port of Marseille. Gay and lesbian relationships are an accepted and quotidian aspect of life in the Quayside neighborhood where Lafala and his associates spend most of their days and nights. For the bisexual McKay, love was simply love, perhaps a source of discomfort for the literary agents and editors of the 1930s who continuously refused to publish this story. McKay changed his novel’s title three times before deserting it, settling on Romance in Marseille in an effort to appease those editors and literary agents who had bristled at the overt sexuality in the original title, The Jungle and the Bottoms, and its more explicit successor, Savage Loving. But this book, at heart, is a love story, so the title is apt. Love and the quest for it drives McKay’s narrative. It was North African prostitute Aslima’s humiliating betrayal of Lafala that led him to stow away from Marseille on an ocean liner bound for North America. He was swiftly discovered by the ship’s crew, confined to a cramped toilet where he suffered severe frostbite, an allusion to the horrors of the previous century’s trans-Atlantic slave trade, and was forced into a double leg amputation upon arriving in New York. Showing off the money he had surprisingly won in a lawsuit against the shipping company brought a disabled Lafala back to","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"145 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2020.1758523","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43056042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Educating Communists: Eugene Bechtold and the Chicago Workers School","authors":"J. Farr","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2020.1748874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2020.1748874","url":null,"abstract":"“Workers’ Education Is Workers’ Power.” This slogan—emblazoned atop the brochure announcing the courses for the Fall term of 1936—captured the political convictions of the Chicago Workers School. Amidst the Great Depression and located in America’s definitive working city, the School proclaimed its “main task,” to equip students with the knowledge “to understand and participate in the class struggle,” based on “the scientific teachings of Marxism-Leninism.” Amid the many courses offered that term on, among other things, political education, revolutionary traditions, and applied dialectics, two more of them—on public speaking and the history of socialist theories—were taught by a pioneer communist and instructor of the School, Eugene Bechtold. In the annals of the American communist movement, virtually nothing is known or written about Bechtold compared to other pioneer communists. And there is scarcely much more known or written about the Chicago Workers School compared to the central Workers School in New York. Paying attention to them, however, as this essay intends to do, further fills out the historical picture of Chicago’s communist politics between the world wars as they (instructor and school) experienced it—labor struggles, protest demonstrations, mass meetings, party reorganizations, recruitment drives, education campaigns, study circles, public lectures, court proceedings, vigilante spies, and a notorious raid on a secret underground convention. But it mainly underscores the enormous and elaborate energies that went into educating communists. Taking Bechtold and the School as its subjects, this essay views Chicago’s communist politics and pedagogy from their respective horizons at a busy middle level, individually in the person of Bechtold, institutionally in the case of the Chicago Workers School.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"106 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2020.1748874","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46845304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes on the Struggle for “Real Fraternity”: The American Youth Congress, 1934–1941","authors":"A. Newkirk","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2020.1752104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2020.1752104","url":null,"abstract":"In July 1950, two federal government informers gave testimony about the American Youth Congress (AYC) at a session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Martha Edminston and her husband John briefly mentioned Lee Lorch, an instructor of mathematics at Penn State College who had been at the forefront of a protest against racial discrimination by white tenants at a privately-owned housing project in New York City where he lived with his family. Four years later, when Lee headed the Fisk University mathematics department in Nashville, Tennessee, he received a summons to appear before HUAC in Dayton, Ohio. At the hearing in Dayton, Lee asked why he was summoned. Committee counselor Frank Tavenner responded Lee had accompanied alleged Communists to an AYC convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 1941. After Lee refused to cooperate, HUAC charged him with contempt of Congress. Now largely forgotten, what was the AYC? Practically moribund when Lorch supposedly attended its final conference in 1941, the AYC played a significant role in the Depression-era youth movement and had a reputation as a “party front organization”; this impression persists among historians. The reality was more complex, though. Despite Socialist, Trotskyist, and rightwing accusations that it was a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union, the AYC was an autonomous backer of equal access to educational","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"107 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2020.1752104","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46976824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian","authors":"Andrew Jacobs","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2020.1729080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2020.1729080","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"143 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2020.1729080","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44488221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The First International, the US Left and British Trotskyism: Their Relevance to Trade Unions and Workers","authors":"Victor G. Devinatz","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1708661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1708661","url":null,"abstract":"Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries and “actually existing socialism” circa 1989–1991, the traditional Left workers parties (Labor, Social Democratic and Communist) have ...","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"132 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1708661","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42841669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Clearance and the Hollywood Blacklist","authors":"H. Thorne","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1708663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1708663","url":null,"abstract":"No description supplied","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"19 1","pages":"51 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1708663","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41344479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Building a Movement: American Communist Activism in the Communities, 1929-1945","authors":"Joshua J. Morris","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1677125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1677125","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-1930s, as communist community activism reached a peak, Birmingham organizer Hosea Hudson was less concerned with organizing communist-led unions as an alternative to AFL and SPA-led unemployment councils than he was with organizing churches and civic groups throughout the city against the social pillars of racism and discrimination. The local Birmingham district Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) functioned much like other Party clubs in cities without a strong industrial working base in that it was simply given orders from larger districts such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago, to get active in “mass organizations.” The way Hudson saw it, however, it was not always so easy to implement such a plan. He found that white Birmingham citizens “didn’t have no mass organization to go to, only into the unions [sic].” Black citizens, however, had their churches, their singing groups, their book clubs, and their local NAACP; many of which had cross membership, which was important to Hudson in terms of reaching out to the black community. Because of the circumstances, Hudson understood that to be an effective political force, American communists needed to direct their attention into organizing workers in a manner that paralleled rallying communities behind specific issues, such as racism. This more community-oriented struggle was unique to non-industrial towns throughout the South such as Birmingham where communists nevertheless had a presence, in addition to other areas where the ethnic tensions of workforces surfaced to be predominant barriers to organizing tactics, such as Detroit, Chicago, New York, as well as the agricultural fields of Texas and California. The community world of American Communism was distinguished from the labor world through its emphasis on local politics, culture, unemployment relief, and ending racial discrimination either a priori to or in tandem with tactics for organizing local workforces. Communist community organizer’s fight against evictions promoted large progressive reform and activism through the lens of grassroots community politics. More importantly, only by examining the individual experiences of communists in their respective communities, removed from the organizational politics of the CPUSA, Communist League of America (CLA), Communist Party (Opposition) (CP(O)) and the Workers’ Party of the United States (WPUS), can we see these varied experiences and how it links grassroots organizers together instead of separating them ideologically.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"218 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1677125","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43627527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Famine, Trial, War: A Selected Review of Political Commentary in the New Masses from 1933 to 1939","authors":"Henry Prown","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1682455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1682455","url":null,"abstract":"In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed playwright Arthur Miller, demanding that he testify about his political history. In the course of his testimony, committee member Gordon H. Scherer posed a question to Miller about his prior affiliation with the marxist literary magazine New Masses. “Do you consider,” he asked, “those things that you have written in the New Masses as an exercise of your literary rights?” From a modern perspective, it may seem strange that a sitting congressional representative would be asking an author whether his artistic production fit under his right to free expression. However, these were different times. “I wouldn’t call it especially an exercise in freedom,” Miller responded, “it was simply an effusion of mind.” An effusion is perhaps the best way to describe the magazine itself, whose influence continued long after its closing. In fact, by the time of Miller’s hearing it had been defunct for nearly a decade. Michael Denning, one of the foremost historians of the Popular Front movement, called the magazine “central” to that movement, and “the national magazine for young radicals” in the 1930s. Its contributors included men and women who were or would become some of the nation’s leading literary lights, including Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Dorothy Day. The federal government itself maintained an abiding interest in the magazine, keeping detailed records described by the New York Times as a “555-page content analysis,” which is now partially declassified and available online. This paper’s purpose, too, is to engage in an analysis of the New Masses. In the 1930s, it served not only as a literary hub for the marxist left in America but also as one of its major sources of political commentary. This commentary, which permeated the magazine – from its short stories, to its poetry, to its editorials, to its straight news, provides a fascinating firsthand insight into the thinking of a controversial and often misunderstood group of radicals. Writing for an audience desperate to make sense of an uncertain and chaotic environment, the magazine’s contributors and","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":"18 1","pages":"296 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1682455","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43971982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}