American Communist History最新文献

{"title":"Marcus Garvey and His Relation to (Black) Socialism and Communism","authors":"D. Hanglberger","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1464786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464786","url":null,"abstract":"“Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts,”Marcus Garvey, the creator, heart, and soul of the prodigiously successful Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), warned his followers in July 1925. From his jail cell in the Atlanta penitentiary—having been sentenced to five years in prison for allegedly having used the mail to defraud—he urged that the “Negro should keep shy of Communism or the Worker’s party of America.” Those groups, he judged, are “more dangerous to the Negro’s welfare than any other group at present.” Statements such as these and clashes such as the one in 1930 in which Alfred Levy, a Black communist, was killed in a dispute with Garveyites in Harlem, gave Garvey and Garveyism (his variety of Black nationalism) the reputation of having been “particularly anti-Communist.” In 1967, Harold Cruse portrayed the New Negro era after World War I as an ideological battlefield. “Garvey Nationalism, Black Socialism, Black Communism, Black trade unionism, Black civil rightsism [...] were at each other’s political throats.” “It is a fact,” Cruse reinforced this view of enmity between the Black Left and Garvey, “that [A. Philip] Randolph’s Messenger writers were implacable enemies of the Garvey movement.” This perception of Garvey as a staunch anti-Communist prevailed and was reiterated by various scholars in the following decades into the twenty-first century. Tony Martin in his study on the Garvey movement set the scene as one of strict antagonism. In spite of “continuous onslaughts from communists” (and others), Martin writes, Garvey nevertheless managed to","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464786","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43531105","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":"From Aspiration to Frustration: Emma Goldman's Perception of the Russian Revolution","authors":"F. Jacob","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1464302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464302","url":null,"abstract":"Many anarchists had believed in the Russian Revolution, but the realities of Bolshevist rule would bitterly frustrate them. The German anarchist Augustin Souchy (1892– 1984), retrospectively evaluating the events of 1917, remarked that “the great passion ... electrified us all.” It was in Russia where Souchy and others believed to have witnessed the rise of the “sun of freedom.” Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), another famous German anarchist, shared this opinion: “The Russian Revolution released Europe from the terrible spell of a gruesome hypnosis” by an autocratic rule that suppressed the masses. The anarchist reactions were predominantly euphoric in the beginning, but the struggle between Anarchism and Marxist Bolshevism would soon break out and destroy all hopes about the initial changes that were expected in 1917. One of those who witnessed the developments in Russia was Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Although the famous Russian-American anarchist—who, to quote historian Oz Frankel, “has assumed a unique position in American politics and culture”—had defended the Russian Revolution against all criticism in the United States, she found her own hopes and beliefs betrayed by the realities of Bolshevism after her deportation to Russia in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids. Her aspirations turned into frustration, and Goldman would become one of the fiercest enemies of Russian Bolshevism and the corruption of the ideas of the Russian Revolution. The present article will discuss this transformative process and demonstrate how and why Goldman’s perception of contemporary Russia changed. First, her defense of the revolution while she was still in the United States will be retraced. The second part will deal with her criticism of the Bolshevization of the revolutionary ideals in the years after “Red October.” The article will focus on Goldman’s writings and correspondence in the years after her Russian experience to show that “Red Emma” used every chance she could to criticize the new system established by Lenin and his companions, even if she often faced problems in finding an audience receptive to her criticism.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464302","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44325857","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":"Paul Frölich, American Exile, and Communist Discourse about the Russian Revolution","authors":"Riccardo Altieri","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1464827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464827","url":null,"abstract":"Paul Fr€olich (1884–1953) was among the most important politicians in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later in the Communist Party of Germany Opposition (KPDO) and the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD). His 1939 biography of Rosa Luxemburg (1871– 1919) also confirms his importance to historical scholarship, as the three volumes he edited about Luxemburg’s estate reflect his own position within communist history. In his early days as a communist, Fr€olich was ideologically similar to his former idol Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). The two men met for the first time at the Kienthal Conference in 1916, and Fr€olich followed Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ policies in the following years. On the eve of the National Socialist “seizure of power,” Fr€olich praised Lenin’s policies in the immediate aftermath of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Fr€olich’s exile in European countries, time in prison, time in a concentration camp, exiles in Czechoslovakia and France, and emigration from Europe changed nothing for him at the time. Only after he and his future wife Rosi Wolfstein (1888–1987) were exiled to New York in","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464827","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47831005","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":"What Went Wrong? The Communist Party, the US, and the Comintern","authors":"J. Barrett","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1463743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1463743","url":null,"abstract":"The Bolshevik Revolution marked an enormous expansion of possibilities welcomed not only by revolutionaries in the United States and around the world, but also by millions of common people who saw it as a chance to create a better world. Given what happened in the years since the Revolution, however, and particularly the effects of Soviet influence on the prospects for radicalism in the United States, it is vital to consider what went wrong in the relationship between the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) and the international movement. For all of the problems caused by the particular nature of the relationship between the American and the Soviet parties, being part of an international socialist movement was not necessarily a liability. I note some cases where directions from the Communist International (Comintern) actually worked to the advantage of the CPUSA. More importantly, with the increasingly transnational character of capitalism and the spread of fascism from the 1920s through the period of World War II, some form of international organizing was essential. The problem had to do with the particularmodel followed by the Comintern and the decisive influence of the Soviet party in that organization. Often considered a historical basket case, the CPUSA had considerable potential at various points in its history. Its failure was not inevitable and so it is important for both political and scholarly reasons to understand its ultimate failure. To fully explain this, we would need to consider far more factors than I can develop here.Whether one considers the Communist Party a vast conspiracy or a legitimate movement, there is no doubt that government and employer repression greatly weakened the organization in the post–World War I and post–World War II Red Scares. By the end of the 1920s, for example, 38,000 immigrants, including many radicals, had been deported. The significance of this loss was vital in amovement populated largely by immigrants. Offices were raided, newspapers seized, activists imprisoned, thousands of union members expelled. Again, in the period from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, close surveillance, a series of political trials, and numerous deportations of immigrant members hobbled the party’s efforts. Likewise, very","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1463743","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47400338","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":"We the Living: The First American Novel on Soviet Russia, the Soul of “Any Dictatorship,” and Its Aftermath in the Cold War","authors":"V. Vukadinović","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1464869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464869","url":null,"abstract":"Russian-born American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most important contributors to political thought in the US. However, contrary to her long-lasting popularity historiographical research on the polarizing writer has not taken shape until the last decade. “The mere mention of Ayn Rand’s name in academic circles can evoke smirks and a rolling of the eyes,” summarizes Chris Matthew Sciabarra such defensive demeanor in his study The Russian Radical: “Most often she is dismissed, without discussion, as a reactionary, a propagandist, or a pop-fiction writer with a cult following. The fact that her work appeals to the young seems proof that her ideas are immature or simplistic.” Such hasty yet prevailing conclusions – repeatedly affirmed by distorting accounts that, by now, even attribute a destructive force of global proportions to the name Ayn Rand – have long prevented the scholarly engagement with a body of work that also, among other aspects, belongs to the history of communism and anti-communism in the United States. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1905, Alisa Rosenbaum had witnessed the October Revolution as a young girl, and had spent the first years of the Soviet reign studying at Petrograd State University. At the age of 21, she had the opportunity to visit relatives abroad, upon which she never returned. After her arrival in the US in 1926, she took the pen name Ayn Rand. She began a stunning literary career, which eventually lead to the publication of her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, published in 1943 and 1957 respectively. Both of them sold several million copies each, and obtained the status of “stubborn bestsellerdom” in the US, because the writer “had a grip on some key components of the national fantasy life, not least because the novels were her fantasy life too,” as Judith Wilt once remarked. Because of her fiction’s recurring theme–individualism–and due to her political activities and involvements, Ayn Rand is usually considered to be a foremost anti-communist author. In the 1940s, she was close to activists on the political right who fought against a socialist","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1464869","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48378319","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":"“A Spy Who Turned His Family In”: Revisiting David Greenglass and the Rosenberg Case","authors":"Michael A. Meeropol","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1467702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1467702","url":null,"abstract":"“Doubtless if that [Greenglass] testimony were disregarded, the convictions could not stand.” (Opinion of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)Eth...","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1467702","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48943691","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":"Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive","authors":"S. Moazeni","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1446577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1446577","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1446577","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48141119","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":"Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem","authors":"Geoffrey Jacques","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1443664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1443664","url":null,"abstract":"Near the end of this rollicking, uneven, newly discovered novel, the Ethiopian envoy Lij Tekla Alamaya says to Gloria Kendall, his new romantic interest, that it’s “better to be the individual slave of love than to be the mindless slave of a movement” (247). This is just one of many remarks of its kind in Amiable with Big Teeth, by Claude McKay, and the sentence appears at a point in the novel where both Kendall and Alamaya have just gone through a process of unmasking in a narrative that is full of masquerades and unmasking, all in the service of repeatedly unmasking the Comintern and its politics, as those politics related to the African American community and the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935. As such, the “mindless slave of a movement,” a common enough trope of anti-Communist fiction, appears here in a kind of masking of its own, as this comic tale focuses less on social movements or fleshed-out fictional characters, and more on a set of ideas that were animating both national and African American discourse during the years in which this novel was written. This book is something of a literary phenomenon. Then-Columbia graduate student JeanChristophe Cloutier discovered it while he worked as an archivist in the Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at the university. The manuscript was found among the papers of Samuel Roth, a smalltime publisher and pornographer who would serve prison time for his efforts. How the manuscript came to be among Roth’s papers is something of a mystery, Cloutier informs us, in an introduction to the book that he and Columbia University English Professor Brent Hayes Edwards co-wrote. In a 2013 article he published on the novel, Cloutier also contextualizes Amiable with Big Teeth’s place both within McKay’s own life and work, and within the literary and political situation that prevailed while the novel was being written. McKay’s own relationship with the Communist movement was complex. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the U.S. early-1920s left, as an editor of the Liberator magazine; his most famous public association with the Communist movement was his speech as an unofficial delegate to the 4 Congress of the Communist International, and his involvement in the movement lasted for several years after that. Meanwhile, he had become one of the leading participants in the Harlem Renaissance, with his poems, especially “If We Must Die,” and his novels, beginning with Home to Harlem, serving as major expressions of what was also known as the “New Negro” movement. He spent several years abroad, and by the time he returned to the United States in 1934, he had become a stanch anti-Communist critic. Amiable with Big Teeth focuses on the movement that emerged in the wake of the 1935 Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, and tells the story of two organizations that were competing to channel protest energies in opposition to the invasion. On the one hand, there is the all-black Hands to Ethiopia, headed by Pablo Peixota, ","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1443664","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48504359","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":"Sophie Melvin Gerson: The Brooklyn Years","authors":"Deborah A. Gerson","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1427962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1427962","url":null,"abstract":"In 1972 I applied to graduate school and wrote an application essay that indicated I would explore my mother’s (Sophie Melvin Gerson) move from labor organizer and activist, to wife and mother. Steeped in the very particular – and limited – consciousness of early women’s liberation, I accepted an all too simple narrative of Sophie’s life: a narrative of a gendered loss of agency and activity. Fortunately, I never wrote that Master’s thesis, but rather went on to research and write about The Families Committee of Smith Act Defendants. About 20 years later, I was sitting in a Kings County (Brooklyn) courthouse at a guardianship hearing for both my parents, who were in their nineties and increasingly frail in both mind and body. My father (Si Gerson) turned to the judge and asked him, “Do you know why we’re here?” The judge, quizzical and curious, awaited further elucidation. Si began a rambling, but very familiar to me, explanation. We were in Brooklyn because Pete Cacchione, New York’s first Communist councilman, had died while in office, and Simon W. Gerson was picked by the CPUSA to replace him. While Si never got to serve as City Councilman and the electoral reforms known as proportional representation that allowed left and minority party candidates to get elected were shortly eliminated, the Gerson family was in Brooklyn—for good. So the narrative centers on Si’s political trajectory and the story of Sophie – labor militant and youthful organizer – is subsumed. In 1948, when the family moved to Brooklyn, Sophie was wife, mother of two children, and homemaker for a household that included Si’s elderly and frail mother, Helen. While Si’s political and logistical trajectory were realized within the Communist Party, Sophie had to find and develop arenas for action feasible within the constraints of childrearing and homemaking, helpmate to her husband “in leadership,” and the political landscape of a Jewish and Italian Catholic neighborhood.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1427962","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42766218","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":"“A Mandolin Orchestra Could Attract a Lot of Attention”: Interracial Fun with Radical Immigrants, 1920–1955","authors":"Robert M. Zecker","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1438010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1438010","url":null,"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,","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1438010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46489322","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}