Liberating “Shadow” America

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.