Opinion

What was American Communism? And how does Pete Seeger really fit in?

Jack Ross Author, Rabbi Outcast
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The death of Pete Seeger, and the outpouring of tributes that have accompanied it, has inevitably led to some reconsiderations of the legacy of the American Communist movement – that is, the Communist Party USA and its larger sphere of influence, the so-called “Popular Front,” in the 1930s and 1940s. Seeger had few, if any rivals as the most widely known personal legacy of that movement. Yet his relationship to it was more complex and less damning than some have realized.

When he left the Communist Party in 1950, it was undoubtedly less a principled decision than to advance the career prospects of what would be his most successful group, The Weavers. Yet however unsatisfactory his second thoughts may have been, by the peak of his fame in the 1960s and 1970s he was clearly his own man. All Americans should be forever grateful for Seeger’s efforts to clean up the Hudson River, which in the book of life should far outweigh his quite small role in furtherance of the political evil that defined the 20th century. Instructive is the contrast with his mentor Woody Guthrie, a more gifted artist and poet despite his turgid aesthetic, who remained a devout party member until his death in 1967.

In the Atlantic, David Graham is more right than wrong to explain the quintessentially American roots of the American Communist experience, which is not, of course, to deny that the movement was first and foremost an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. But in many ways it is that very reality, and what it reveals about American politics both past and present, that is overlooked in the moral grandstanding on both the left and the right regarding the legacy of both Communism and anti-Communism.

Perhaps nowhere is this more shockingly on display than in the column by Bhaskar Sunkara, “In Defense of Pete Seeger: American Communist.” The founder of Jacobin magazine, widely seen even by some conservatives as a fresh and engaging outlet of Marxist thought and analysis, Sunkara proves to be nothing of the sort, repeating some of the most brazen and preposterous myths about American Communism, in almost every particular asserting the very opposite of the truth.

Probably the most widely accepted of these myths in our day was that the Communist Party “represented the earliest and most fervent supporters of civil rights.” To the contrary, the Communists only began recruiting significant numbers of African-Americans at the tail end of their 1930s heyday, most of them rather conservative, disillusioned NAACP Republicans. The direct organizational forefathers of the civil rights movement were in the bitterly anti-Communist Socialist Party, most notably A. Philip Randolph, who launched the first “March on Washington” movement in the 1940s.

Opposing the principal objective of the Popular Front – getting the United States to enter and fight the Soviet Union’s war in Europe – Randolph was a founder of the Socialist-led Keep America Out of War Congress in 1938. Though he resigned in early 1941 to lead the March on Washington Movement, right up until Pearl Harbor the Congress counted among its leaders James Farmer, Randolph’s young protégé who became a major civil rights leader in the 1960s. Farmer was also supported in that lost cause by two of Randolph’s earliest collaborators, George Schuyler and Ashley Totten. It is a tragedy and a scandal that rather than these unmistakable and unmistakably radical roots of the civil rights movement, many would locate them in such Communist figures as Paul Robeson, whose frank Stalinist apologetics bore no substantive relationship to the actual struggle for civil rights.

Sunkara insists that “stateside Communists were the underdogs, the victims of censorship and police repression, not its perpetrators.” Quite the contrary, to put it politely. As early as the Moscow Trials of 1937-38, supporters of the defendants and other opponents of the new warmongering line of “collective security” were ruthlessly abused and purged by Popular Front operatives at such redoubts as The Nation and the New York Times. Before the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist was the pre-Pearl Harbor blacklist of such anti-interventionists as Lillian Gish and Morrie Ryskind. And before the leaders of the Communist Party itself were convicted under it in 1949, they were the biggest cheerleaders for Smith Act prosecutions, from the successful case against the Trotskyists in 1942 to the unsuccessful case against assorted right-wingers in 1944. Indeed, long-time party leader Israel Amter bluntly advised regarding all wartime critics of FDR, “Let us rather adopt the methods of the Soviet Union.”

Even the Communist point of pride in being at the forefront of the drive for industrial unionism in the late 1930s is highly problematic. The quintessential Communist-led union, the United Electrical Workers, was essentially a company union of General Electric, whose president, Gerard Swope, had a New Deal-aligned vision denounced by Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas as “a complete denial of the bases of the old capitalism, but it set up instead a capitalist syndicalism still operated for profit, a scheme which in essence is fascist.” The Communists effectively served as enforcers for CIO leaders John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman to toe the New Deal line, while it was the ostensible “right wing” of the CIO, led by Homer Martin and David Dubinsky, who remained in favor of forming a Labor Party after 1936.

Labor movement Communists were also, naturally, the most zealous enforcers of the wartime no-strike pledge, and thus deeply complicit in the little-known reality that there were more American casualties on war industry shop floors on the home front than on the battlefield. African-Americans were disproportionately affected by this, and their protests within their unions were far from the only wartime black protest movement angrily opposed by the Communist Party, further accentuating the sickening irony that it is seen by so many as having been in a vanguard role for civil rights.

In short, it is deeply scandalous that the Communist Party USA and its fellow travelers constitute so much of what American history remembers as “radicalism.” There is, of course, the matter of the tens of millions killed by Josef Stalin and the yet larger number killed by Mao Tse Tung. But seldom has the designation of American Communism as a radical movement been properly challenged. At the height of its power and influence, the Communist Party was militant in its defense of the Roosevelt administration, and particularly aggressive enforcing its line in the labor movement. Bitterly opposed to independent political action, they rarely if ever shied away from calling for Soviet-style repression of their opponents.

And all, of course, was the product of cultish servitude to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, with which the United States ultimately found itself allied in war – a war the Communist Party played no small role creating a favorable climate for in American public opinion. Seen in light of the extreme leftism from which it began in the years just after World War I, American Communism is best understood historically in a pattern with the neoconservative movement. That they met such a violent end in the McCarthy era should in no way bestow them with a halo of martyrdom.

The paean to American Communism by Bhaskar Sunkara is a throwback to the most extreme of the apologetics that became fashionable with new left radicals entering the academy and middle age in the late 1970s and early 1980s; brilliantly skewered in the New York Review of Books by the late Theodore Draper, the dean of historians of the Communist Party, for seeking to “depoliticize the most political of all political movements.” As that generation enters its dotage, most of the particulars are largely forgotten, but their watered down legacy has proven both pernicious and consequential. The romance for the Popular Front has been awkwardly jammed into a new consensus history of the liberal left, along with the quite anti-Communist early new left of roughly 1959 to 1964, to serve a contemporary liberalism that sees activist government not as a means to the ends of social justice but as an end in itself.

The contribution of Pete Seeger to this phenomenon is not insignificant. Consider the proudly worn Guthrie-Seeger-Dylan enthusiasms of Sean Wilentz, the nominal liberal most recently distinguished for his scurrilous McCarthy-style attack on Glenn Greenwald, arguably the last old-fashioned ADA-style civil libertarian liberal. Even more shocking may be the case of The Forward, an institution credited by Seth Lipsky, the eccentric neocon founder of its English version, with making a major contribution to the growth of American anti-Communism. Editor J.J. Goldberg wrote a laudatory obituary to Seeger, crediting him with a major role in popularizing Israel among Americans in the 1950s and recalling how beloved he was at the Zionist summer camps he attended in those years. One wonders if Goldberg considered the implications of drawing such a sharp kinship and parallel between the American Communist and American Zionist movements.

Ron Radosh, a one-time banjo student and summer camp comrade of Pete Seeger, wrote in his 2001 memoir of the Communist subculture in which he grew up in the postwar years, “I am convinced that much of the radicalism that [Camp] Woodlanders would carry with them in later years came from the illusions they developed as a result of the weekly sing-alongs with Seeger.” This may only be slightly less true of his legions of young baby boomer fans a decade later, probably most of whom didn’t know the first thing about his politics.

Today, Radosh inhabits the most fanatical quarters of the contemporary right, one of their leading polemicists elaborating the “radical” and “socialist” background and agenda of Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio. Many if not most of the facts involved are typically accurate enough, but it misses the point, more than anything, to feverishly equate the politics of the very real foreign conspiracy that was American Communism with conventional liberal public policy preferences. The real tragedy of the American Communist experience was that it displaced, and even largely discredited, an older American radical tradition with a fundamental Jeffersonian commitment to the ballot box and against foreign entanglements.

Beginning with the Popular Front and culminating in the experience of the civil rights movement, protest displaced politics, leading today to a so-called “next left,” typified by the New York Working Families Party, in which bombastic far-left rabble rousing and crass machine-boss politics are indistinguishable one from the other. The greatest political legacy of Pete Seeger may well have been to provide the sunnier, soothing cadences to help convince a generation that this brand of political juvenility was the path to a better world.