Vivian Gornick: What Endures of the Romance of American Communism
It is perhaps hard to
understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world
solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of
men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that made life feel large: large & clarified. It was to this inner clarity that so many became not only
attached, but addicted. While under its influence, no reward of life, neither
love nor fame nor wealth, could compete
One summer night in
the early 1960s, at a rally in New York City, the cold war liberal Murray
Kempton admitted to an audience full of old Reds that while America had not
been kind to them, it had been lucky to have them. My mother was in the audience
that night and said, when she came home, “America was fortunate
to have had the Communists here. They, more than most, prodded the country into
becoming the democracy it always said it was.” I was surprised by the
gentleness in her voice, she’d always been a hot-under-the-collar socialist;
but then again, it was the 1960s, and by then she was really tired.
The Communist Party
USA (CPUSA) was formed in 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution. Over
the next forty years, it grew steadily from a membership roll of two or three
thousand to, at the height of its influence in the 1930s and 1940s,
seventy-five thousand. All in all, nearly a million Americans were Communists
at one time or another.
While it is true that the majority joined the Communist
Party in those years because they were members of the hard-pressed working
class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit-pickers),
it was even truer that many more in the educated middle class (teachers,
scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a
moral authority that lent concrete shape to a sense of social injustice made
urgent by the Great Depression and World War II.
Most American
Communists never set foot in party headquarters, nor laid eyes on a Central
Committee member, nor were privy to internal party policy-making sessions. But
every rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of
industrial labor in this country; that it was mainly party lawyers who defended
blacks in the Deep South; that party organizers lived, worked, and sometimes
died with miners in Appalachia, farm workers in California, steel workers in
Pittsburgh.
On a day-to-day basis, through its passion for structure and the
eloquence of its rhetoric, the party made itself feel real and familiar not
only to its own members but also to the immensely larger world that then
existed of sympathizers and fellow-travelers. It had built a remarkable network
of regional sections and local branches; schools and publications; organizations
that addressed large home-grown miseries - the International Workers Order, the
National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils—and an in-your-face daily
newspaper that liberals as well as radicals regularly read. As one old Red put
it, “Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the
Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold
out in minutes.”...
Svetlana Alexievich: Second hand time // Imagine the tragedy of abandoning Communism without knowing how to live with capitalism
Book review: The murder of Mayakovsky’s poetry ...
