U.S. Radical Culture of the Early 1930s Russell Campbell1 Marx had analyzed the contradictions of capitalism. In Europe left-wing artists were building a whole aesthetic around them, the aesthetic of montage. But in the United States they were not so visible, and a theory – that of American Exceptionalism – had even been erected to explain their absence. And then the Depression struck. After that the myths of uninterrupted progress, of prosperity and upward mobility could no longer be sustained. The radical culture of the early thirties was created out of personal experience, sometimes harsh, of a faltering economic and political system. The contradictions surfaced; and even when, beginning in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal restored some stability to the nation, millions remained unemployed, and the irrationalities of a market economy – as in the slaughter of the piglets – still stood out in high relief. Leo Hurwitz, who became one of the important left-wing filmmakers of the decade, wrote in retrospect:

This America we were living in – with factories, farms, and technical skills – had the capability of feeding, clothing, sheltering everyone with adequate security. At that very moment people were widely hungry, insecure. Their labor was being wasted. In the early thirties the radical dislocations of the world led people to face the dislocations in the structure of society.... A lot of people became radicalized. I was one of them.2

For those propelled into political commitment, art became a weapon: a weapon in the struggle to transform society so that the causes of widespread misery could be eradicated, a weapon of agitation and propaganda, a weapon in the class war. For “class against” class!” was the operative slogan of the most militant organization of the Left, the Communist Party. At this time, when artists and intellectuals became radicalized, it was inevitable that they come within the orbit of the CP; the Socialist Party was perceived as tepid, milquetoast (joining it, said John Dos Passos, “would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer”3), and the other groups were much too small for their influence to be felt. The Communists had a fighting body of troops, a revolutionary program – and a variegated array of cultural groups in which the artist (or would-be artist) could find comradeship, sustenance, and political direction. The party’s policies in the critical early years of the Depression decade are of key significance in understanding the ideological stance of radical art of the period. The years 1929-34 in the international Communist movement were ones of intensified militancy, with a renewed emphasis on class struggle and redoubled efforts to destroy the influence of rival parties of the Left. The new line was officially signaled in the decisions of the Sixth Congress of the Communist

International, held in Moscow in July-September 1928, which declared that the socialist parties were “a particularly dangerous enemy of the proletariat, more dangerous than the avowed adherents of predatory imperialism.”4 This “ultra-Left” policy, marking a sharp break with the programs of united- front collaboration with social-democrat organizations (and nationalist movements in the colonial countries) during the middle twenties, was promulgated partly in response to the struggle for ascendancy in the Communist party of the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists had been expelled the previous year, and Stalin’s victory over the “Right” opposition led by Bukharin, which soon followed, resulted in the final liquidation of factionalism within the world movement and its evolution into a disciplined, monolithic force which could be relied upon to defend Soviet interests. In the United States, the repercussions of the final factional struggle for power were felt in the removal of Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, and Bertram Wolfe from positions of power in the Party in 1929, and the installation, in 1930, of Earl Browder as general secretary, a post he was to hold throughout the Depression years. Lovestone’s expulsion meant a defeat for the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, which he had been favorable towards. The stock-market crash confirmed the position of his opponents, who believed that the United States was subject, like all other capitalist countries, to the Marxist law of increasing contradictions and crises. The impact of the Crash and worsening unemployment resulted in modest but steady gains in the numerical strength of the party. CPUSA membership, which was at a low of 7,500 in 1930, grew to 9,257 in 1931, l4,475 in 1932, 19,165 in 1933, and 23,467 in 1934. There was, however, a high turnover rate.5 During the early Depression years keen Communist hostility to reformist parties was formulated in the theory of “Social Fascism,” which stated that the policies of class collaboration followed by social-democrat organizations, particularly the parties of the Second International, eased the way for the assumption of power by the fascists. William Z. Foster, Communist candidate for president in 1932, wrote in his book Toward Soviet America published that year:

A cornerstone of the Communist class-struggle policy is a ruthless fight against the Social Fascist leaders, especially those of the “left” phrase-mongering type. “Class Against Class” implies a war to the finish against such elements, who are part of the oppressive machinery of the Capitalist class. They are enemies within the gates of the working class and must be treated as such. They head the labor movement only in order to behead it.

Correct strategy was to form a “united front from below” with workers in reformist organizations. “The united front of the Communist and non-Communist workers against the bourgeoisie,” warned the Party Organizer, “must be unequivocally contraposed to the social democrats’ policy of the united front with the bourgeoisie.”6

The CP was as violently opposed in this period to the American Federation of Labor as it was to the Socialist Party. Contending that the AFL had fitted itself into the capitalist strategy by developing a “privileged aristocracy” of skilled labor while ignoring the plight of the millions of unorganized workers, the Communists created in 1929 an independent umbrella organization, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), and sponsored the formation of “revolutionary” unions under Communist leadership. Of these, the most important were to be the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), the National Miners Union (NMU), the Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union (SMWIU), the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) , the Auto Workers Union (AWU), and in California, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU). In each case organization was on industrial lines rather than the craft basis favored by the AFL. TUUL organizers were first prominent in the strike of textile workers in protest against speedup measures in the mills at Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. Other major organizing campaigns involved the agricultural laborers of California for several years beginning in 1930, and the miners of Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee in 1931-32. In the severe deflationary crisis of the early Depression years, the militant TUUL unions were often able to garner support in situations where the existing AFL unions retreated or accepted wage-cuts without a fight. The CP began organizing the jobless in January 1930 in local Unemployed Councils. Simultaneous nationwide demonstrations, involving a million and a quarter workers, were held on March 6 of that year, and in July, at a conference in Chicago, the unemployed groups were linked in a national organization under Communist leadership. In succeeding years the Councils, whose membership was put at “at least 75,000” in 1932,7 conducted a sustained struggle for work and unemployment relief through actions such as demonstrations and fights against eviction. A widespread tactic was the “hunger march”, in which jobless delegates from various parts of a community or region would converge on the seat of government to present demands; in December 1931, and again the following year, the Unemployed Councils organized national hunger marches to Washington DC. In early 1935 the Councils took the fight to Congress more conventionally through sponsorship of the Lundeen Bill, aimed at providing unemployment compensation at prevailing local wage rates. The Unemployed Councils belonged among what the party termed its “mass organizations”. These were special-interest bodies designed to attract non-Communist workers into the movement. Other significant mass organizations included the Workers’ International Relief (WIR), a strike support agency which also had left-wing cultural groups under its purview, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a legal aid body, the International Workers’ Order (TWO), a fraternal insurance society, the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU), the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League (WESL), the Young Pioneers, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) , the Labor Sports Union (LSU), the League for the Protection of the Foreign Born (LPFB), the United Farmers League (UFL), the

National Student League (NSL), and so on. The party was particularly active in dramatizing and organizing resistance to the oppression of blacks. Official party policy during this period (as outlined by the Political Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Communist International8) called for “self-determination in the Black Belt” – the right of blacks in those Southern states in which they were a majority to rule and to secede from the United States – but most organization took place around more immediate issues of racial discrimination and injustice. A major focus of struggle here was the Scottsboro case. In the spring of 1931 nine black youths were charged with the freight-train rape of two white women in Alabama, and subsequently eight were condemned to death. The campaign to secure the reversal of this obvious lynch verdict took on international proportions under the leadership of the ILD, and appeals were brought as far as the Supreme Court. The partial success achieved through legal defense in the case (some of which was shared with the NAACP) was matched by the publicity the campaign was able to achieve for the cause of black liberation.9 An indication of the CP’s attitude toward religion in the class-struggle phase of the early thirties is given in Foster’s Toward Soviet America. “In the USSR, as part of the general cultural revolution, religion is being liquidated,” he wrote. “Religion is the sworn enemy of liberty, education, science.”10 In the United States several atheist societies were launched or planned, but none seems to have become firmly established, and in general the party tended not to antagonize potential recruits by a too blatant attack on religious beliefs or organizations. A significant feature of Communist policy in the years 1933-35 was the hostile line it adopted toward the New Deal reform measures of Roosevelt. Earl Browder’s analysis in the Daily Worker of July 8, 1933, indicated the party’s stance:

The system of policies developed by the Roosevelt administration, which are collectively known under the name of the “New Deal,” represent a rapid development of bourgeois policy under the blows of the crisis, the sharpening class struggle at home, and the imminence of a new imperialist war. The “New Deal” is a policy of slashing the living standards at home and fighting for markets abroad for the single purpose of maintaining the profits of finance capital. It is a policy of brutal oppression and preparation for imperialist war. It represents further sharpening and deepening of the world crisis.

Though at this point Browder emphasized that the Roosevelt regime was not, itself, fascistic, he argued, “It is true that elements of fascism long existing in America are being greatly stimulated and are coming to maturity more rapidly.” And subsequently the Communist press would make the charge more directly: a four-part cartoon published in the Daily Worker in August 1933 showed an NRA eagle whirling into a Nazi swastika, and headlines in the fall read “Fascist Tendencies Grow as NRA Fails to Solve Crisis” and “Big Trusts Openly Take Over NRA for Fascist Drive.” Such accusations were of course dropped with the demise of the NRA and the adoption of the People’s Front line in 1935; and as the Roosevelt government took a leftward turn with measures such as the Wagner

Act and Social Security, the CP moved towards a partial accommodation with it.11 A significant factor, probably, in the moderation of the party’s militant class-struggle posture of the early thirties was the recognition of the USSR by the Roosevelt administration in November 1933. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, as part of the agreement, signed a declaration pledging his government not “to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of any part of the United States, its territories or possessions.... Not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organization or group which has as its aim the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States.”12 Though it was subsequently claimed that the assurance had no bearing on the CPUSA (which had no formal ties with the Soviet government), recognition itself, with the trading arrangements which followed, very likely had an impact in the weakening of the party’s “revolutionary” rhetoric at about this time. But in the critical first years of the Depression, in the period of economic collapse and seeming bankruptcy of capitalism, there appeared no equivocation in the CP’s fighting commitment to radical transformation of American society. The literature, painting, drama, and photography which sought to participate in this social struggle was inevitably marked, to a greater or lesser degree, by the particular ideological and programmatic emphases of the Communist movement; and it is valuable to examine some characteristics of this left-wing culture.

* Radical literature in the United States during the early Depression years was shaped and sustained by the existence of writers’ organizations with affiliations to the Communist movement. Preeminently, there were the John Reed Clubs (which also admitted artists to membership) – named after the pioneer revolutionary journalist and author of Ten Days that Shook the World. The original club was founded by The New Masses in New York in October 1929, and in subsequent years similar groups were established in many cities of the country. The John Reed Clubs functioned to bridge the gap between the working class and the intelligentsia, to break down the isolation which leftward-leaning writers had suffered from during the twenties, and to spur workers themselves to create their own proletarian culture. (The Chicago John Reed club was particularly successful in nurturing a working-class literature with its encouragement of writers such as Jack Conroy, Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.) One of the founders of the New York club was the poet and film critic Harry Alan Potamkin, who in November 1930 was one of the American delegates (with Fred Ellis, Michael Gold, William Gropper, Joshua Kunitz, and A. B. Magil) to the international writers’ conference held at Kharkov, in the Ukraine. The conference, officially the 2nd World Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature, served to strengthen the links between the John Reed Clubs and The New Masses, on the one hand, and the international revolutionary

movement, on the other. The degree to which politics was the focus of attention is indicated by the report that “the entire work of the Plenum pivoted around the war danger with particular stress on the necessity of organizing the defense of the Soviet Union.” Gold and Magil were elected to the Presidium of the International Bureau, and Potamkin to its Control Commission.13 The conference drew up a “Program of Action” for the United States, recommending that the John Reed Club and The New Masses extend their base both among workers and among intellectuals, paying special attention to work among blacks, and building national federations of left-wing cultural groups. The publication of mass pamphlets and the organization of agitprop troupes of entertainers was also urged.14 In May 1932, a national conference of the twelve John Reed Clubs then in existence was held in Chicago at the suggestion of the international organization, now known as the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW). Reports from the clubs described a broad range of cultural activities, including art exhibitions, debates, dance and theatre presentations, and the support of film and photo leagues, as well as the establishment of writers’ schools and direct participation of members in working-class political struggles. A draft manifesto carried over the CP’s militantly anti-capitalist position into the field of culture, calling on “the disillusioned middle-class intelligentsia” to “break with bourgeois ideas which seek to conceal the violence and fraud, the corruption and decay of capitalist society.” Much discussion centered on the need to attract sympathetic middle-class writers, and the degree to which this goal conflicted with the aim of training proletarian writers to express their own class position. The conference resulted in the establishment of a national federation of John Reed Clubs.15 Meanwhile, established authors were also organizing under Communist auspices to become more actively involved in the political struggles of the day. A key figure here was Theodore Dreiser, who had become steadily more radical since his 1927-28 visit to the USSR. In November 1930 Dreiser issued a statement through the John Reed Club calling on American workers to vote Communist, and the following spring he became head of a new body, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, formed initially to demand justice in the Scottsboro case. Associated with him in the group were writers such as John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood Anderson, Lincoln Steffens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Franz Boas.16 A delegation from this organization, led by Dreiser and including left-wing writers Lester Cohen, Samuel Ornitz, Josephine Herbst, Edward Dahlberg, and Anna Rochester, visited Harlan County, Kentucky, in November 1931 to investigate conditions there. A reign of terror implemented by mine-owners in collaboration with local law-enforcement officers was in effect following the defeat of the miners’ strike and NMU attempts to organize, and the Dreiser Committee held hearings verifying the state of affairs and publicized their findings as a book of documentary reportage, Harlan Miners Speak.17

In February 1932, a similar delegation ventured into the mine fields of Kentucky with four truckloads of food for starving strikers. Led this time by Waldo Frank, the group included, among others, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Mary Heaton Vorse, Liston Oak, and John Henry Hammond, Jr. In Bell County, most of the food was confiscated, and the writers were arrested and “kidnapped” by police, finally being driven out of the area. Frank and an ILD lawyer were heavily beaten.18 The extent to which intellectuals had swung left under the impact of the Depression was revealed in the fall of 1932, when some fifty writers and artists announced their support for the CP presidential ticket. Shortly after the publication of their “open letter”, they organized in the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, and expanded the letter into a sharply-phrased denunciation of the bourgeois parties, Culture and Crisis. Among the signatories were Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Sidney Howard, Langston Hughes, Samuel Ornitz, Lincoln Steffens, and Edmund Wilson. The pamphlet, after diagnosing the breakdown of American society under capitalism, concluded with a declaration of commitment. “We have acted,” the “professionals” said; “As responsible intellectual workers we have aligned ourselves with the frankly revolutionary Communist Party.” The group survived for a few months after the election (as, simply, the “League of Professional Groups”), but according to Daniel Aaron, a number of the members “very quickly withdrew from any affiliation with the party.“19 It was as a way of retaining the allegiance of professional writers that the Communist Party, in early 1935, shifted its support from the essentially amateur John Reed Clubs towards an organization strictly of established authors. The history of the League of American Writers properly belongs to the latter half of the decade, but the moves which led to the formation of the organization offer a revealing picture of radical culture on the verge of the People’s Front period. When, at a conference in Chicago in September 1934, John Reed Club delegates unanimously endorsed a proposal for an American writers’ congress, they were no doubt unaware they were taking the first step in the dissolution of their own organizations. The CP was beginning to move away from class-conscious proletarian ideology and organization in order to bring a broader contingent of “progressives” into the struggle against fascism, and hence the decision was taken to disband the John Reed Clubs and replace them with a League of American Writers, whose capacity to mold public opinion was potentially much greater.20 The call issued in January 1935 for a congress at which the League would be formed discloses left-wing ideology in the process of transformation. Authored by Granville Hicks and signed by over seventy writers, most of them CP members or fellow-travelers, it begins with a prediction, proper to the class-struggle period, of the imminent disintegration of capitalism, and the need to assist its demise:

The capitalist system crumbles so rapidly before our eyes that, whereas ten years ago scarcely more than a handful of writers were

sufficiently far-sighted and courageous to take a stand for proletarian revolution, today hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics and short-story writers recognize the necessity of personally helping to accelerate the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government.

But the statement immediately shifts into the defensive mode which was to became characteristic of the era of the People’s Front, in which the goal is no longer revolutionary transformation of society, but preservation of it in the teeth of the fascist threat:

We are faced with two kinds of problems. First, the problems of effective political action. The dangers of war and fascism are everywhere apparent; we all can see the steady march of the nations towards war and the transformation of sporadic violence into organized fascist terror. The question is: how can we function most successfully against these twin menaces?

Though the call continues to refer to the “revolutionary” cause, the objectives outlined for the League of American Writers include, first and foremost, the struggle against war and fascism which would become ever more urgent as the decade lengthened. Noticeably absent, however, is the rhetoric of “democracy” and American tradition which would be introduced as the People’s Front period truly began, later in 1935.

The program for the League of American Writers would be evolved at the Congress, basing itself on the following: fight against imperialist war and fascism; defend the Soviet Union against capitalist aggression; for the development and strengthening of the revolutionary labor movement; against white chauvinism (against all forms of Negro discrimination or persecution) and against the persecution of minority groups and of the foreign-born; solidarity with colonial people in the struggles for freedom; against the influence of reactionary ideas in American literature; against the imprisonment of revolutionary writers and artists, as well as other class-war prisoners throughout the world.21

The first American Writers’ Congress was held as scheduled in New York in April 1935, and as planned, the disbanded John Reed Clubs gave way to a single national body, the League of American Writers, under the chairmanship of Waldo Frank. Not altogether coincidentally, the year of the Congress marked a high point in the Depression decade’s characteristic contribution to left-wing literature: the proletarian novel. Specimens of the genre would continue to be produced in the later thirties, but the animating drive was strongest during the earlier period of militant class struggle. The proletarian novel (about which much debate was centered at the Congress) resulted from a systematic attempt to merge Marxist ideology with the aesthetic of social realism; and it flourished only at a time of economic crisis and the upsurge of a revolutionary labor movement. During the twenties, Joseph Freeman wrote in 1935, the group of writers

associated with The New Masses was small and “isolated both from the mass organizations of the workers and from the mass of intellectuals, who, despite liberal reservations, were at this time attached to the existing social system.” Creative output was minimal, and “the handful of revolutionary writers active in the Coolidge-Hoover era devoted themselves chiefly to criticism.” They agitated for a conscious proletarian art, but were unable to produce it them- selves: “The historic conditions necessary for such a literature,” said Freeman, “did not appear until the economic crisis overwhelmed the country and altered the life of its people.” He went on to trace the pattern of events subsequent to the Crash:

Most men of letters come from the middle classes, which have both the education and the incentive for literary production. These classes shared the pangs of the crisis together with the workers and farmers. The unemployment, poverty, and insecurity which spread over the country hit the educated classes like a hurricane; writers and artists, among others, were catapulted out of privileged positions; and many of those who remained economically secure experienced a revolution in ideas which reflected the profound changes around them. And at the very moment when our own country, to the surprise of all except the Marxists, was sliding into a social-economic abyss, the new social-economic system of the Russian workers and peasants showed striking gains. The contrast between the two worlds loomed up above the wreckage of old illusions. Writers and artists, like other members of the educated classes, began to read revolutionary books, pamphlets, and newspapers; they came to workers’ meetings; they discovered a new America, the land of the masses whose existence they had ignored. They saw those masses as the motive power of modern history, as the hope for a superior social system, for a revival and extension of culture.22

Meanwhile, The New Masses under Michael Gold’s editorship was campaigning for a proletarian literature created by workers themselves. As early as July 1928, Gold proclaimed:

WE WANT TO PRINT: Confessions – diaries – documents – The concrete – Letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and schoolteachers – Revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters – The sobs of driven stenographers – The poetry of steel workers – The wrath of miners – the laughter of sailors – Strike stories, prison stories, work stories – Stories by Communist, I.W.W. and other revolutionary workers.23

The response from worker-correspondents was not overwhelming, but by 1930 Gold was sufficiently encouraged to outline the characteristics of a new literary aesthetic which he believed to be emerging: that of “Proletarian Realism.” As summarized by Daniel Aaron, the objectives were as follows:

l. Workers, because they are skilled technicians, must write with the technical proficiency of a Hemingway, but not for the purpose of engendering cheap and purposeless thrills. 2. “Proletarian realism deals with the real conflicts of men and women.” It spurns the sickly, sentimental subtleties of Bohemians, best illustrated by “the spectacle of Proust, master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature.” The ”suffering of the hungry, persecuted and heroic millions” precludes the inventing of “precious silly little agonies.” 3. Proletarian realism is functional; it serves a purpose. “Every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme, or it is merely confectionary.” 4. It eschews verbal acrobatics: “this is only another form of bourgeois idleness.” 5. Proletarians should write about what they know best. “Let the bourgeois writers tell us about their spiritual drunkards and super-refined Parisian emigres ... that is their world; we must write about our own mud-puddle.” 6. “Swift action, clear form, the direct line, cinema in words; this seems to be one of the principles of proletarian realism.” 7. “Away with drabness, the bourgeois notion that the Worker’s life is sordid, the slummer’s disgust and feeling of futility. There is horror and drabness in the Worker’s life; and we will portray it; but we know this is not the last word; we know that the manure heap is the hope of the future; we know that not pessimism, but revolutionary elan will sweep this mess out of the world forever.” 8. “Away with all lies about human nature, We are scientists; we know what a man thinks and feels. Everyone is a mixture of motives; we do not have to lie about our hero in order to win our case.” 9. “No straining or melodrama or other effects; life itself is the supreme melodrama. Feel this intensely, and everything becomes poetry – the new poetry of materials, of the so-called ‘common man’, the Worker molding his real world.”24

The influence of Zola is apparent, as is a reaction against the squalor of Naturalism in point 7 – indeed, Gold’s adumbration of the worker-hero acting to transform his world anticipates the aesthetic of socialist realism as it would be promulgated, beginning several years later, in the Soviet Union. The one event which touched off the surge in proletarian writing at the start of the decade was the Gastonia textile strike of 1929. A long history of exploitation, the unexpected outbreak of spontaneous militancy in the South, the strong Communist presence, the severe repression by mill-owners and hired thugs, the solidarity of the workers, the murder of the popular balladeer Ella May Wiggins, the killing of a police chief during a raid, and the sensational trial at which a juror went insane, all provided drama for the breakthrough in working-class fiction. Novels devoted to the strike, in whole or in part, with greater or lesser fidelity, included Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1930), Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread, Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart, Dorothy Myra Page’s Gathering

Storm, and Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire (all 1932), and William Rollins, Jr.’s The Shadow Before (1934). Though all were left-wing in orientation, the six novels offered a broad range of contrast in the extent of their commitment to an explicitly Communist interpretation of events. To Make My Bread, for example, is non-specific in its organizational references, while Beyond Desire presents a sympathetic but distanced portrait of party organizers. The most openly doctrinaire of the group was Gathering Storm, which has activist characters moving through the Socialist Party and the IWW en route to true class-consciousness in the CP. The AFL union, the United Textile Workers, is depicted as selling out a strike, and there are scathing allusions to the AFL in general and John L. Lewis in particular.25 The proletarian novels spanned a wide range of occupations, particularly in heavy industry. Alongside the textile workers of the Gastonia books there were the lumberjacks and sawmill employees of Lumber (Louis Colman, 1931), The Land of Plenty (Robert Cantwell, 1934), and Marching! Marching! (Clara Weatherwax, 1935), the longshoremen of A Child is Born (Charles Yale Harrison, 1931), the black sharecroppers of Free Born (Scott Nearing, 1932) and Georgia Nigger (John L. Spivak, 1932), the construction laborers of The New Bridge (Meyer Levin, 1933), the seamen of S.S. Utah (Mike Pell, 1933), the packing-house workers of The Executioner Waits (Josephine Herbst, 1934), the agricultural laborers and cannery employees of Parched Earth (Arnold B. Armstrong, 1934), and the auto workers of Conveyor (James Steele, 1935) and Moscow Yankee (Myra Page, 1935). One of the most celebrated of contributions to the growing proletarian literature, Jack Conroy’s picaresque The Disinherited (l933), dealt with work in the mines, on the railroad, in steel mills, rubber mills, auto plants, road construction camps. In addition, there were the lumpenproletariat novels investigating the milieu of the unemployed or shiftless: Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1930) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932), Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (l935), Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935), and others.26 Though the pattern was by no means universal (charges of “artists in uniform” leveled at the radical authors cannot be seriously sustained), the proletarian novels often followed a general line of increasing solidarity and class-consciousness, as workers become enmeshed in a strike and discover where their real interests lie. In this design the strike is more than an incident in the daily struggle for survival; it is a critical occurrence which, by unleashing the violence of the owners and their vassals, educates workers as to the true nature of class relationships in society. In this respect Zola’s Germinal and Eisenstein’s Strike are instructive forerunners. If radical fiction was given a boost with the emergence of the proletarian novel, there was also a simultaneous spurt, in the field of nonfiction, of radical documentary reportage. “It is a form which has sprung up,” wrote the author of the preface to the reportage section in Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935), “because the revolution requires it.” Richard H. Pells, in Radical Visions and American Dreams, observes that many well-known writers turned to documentary as part of their political response to crisis conditions:

Faced with the enormity of the crisis, some found it advisable to abandon literature altogether. As long as people remained jobless and hungry, the very occupation of writing seemed ineffectual, pointless, and even parasitical – an irrelevant luxury in an age of crushing necessities.... Instead they turned to journalism and documentaries, hoping merely to record the experience of a nation in upheaval. An extraordinary number of artists and critics (among them Edmund Wilson, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, Louis Adamic, Nathan Asch, and James Rorty) interrupted their other work to travel around America in search of the thoughts and aspirations of ordinary people.27

Michael Gold, at The New Masses, hoped to stimulate a rather more systematic program of radical reportage. In early 1930 he announced he would make the following proposal to the John Reed Club:

That every writer in the group attach himself to one of the industries. That he spend the next few years in and out of this industry, studying it from every angle, making himself an expert on it, so that when he writes of it he will write like an insider, not like a bourgeois intellectual observer.

Thus experienced, the writer would be able to assist in strike publicity, would be strengthened through specialization, and would “have his roots in something real.”28 Gold’s program received a critical response from lumber worker and New Masses contributing editor Joseph Kalar, who argued: “The casual proletarian – the floater to whom it doesn’t matter so much what he works at – and to whom, of necessity, all jobs are his province, can probably get and report a truer picture of a steel plant than a real steelworker – in two weeks.” According to Kalar, “The brutality of it, the cruelty of it, are undoubtedly more apparent to one ‘fresh’ than one hardened to the grind, for the years can make even injustice seem commonplace.” There is no evidence that Gold’s suggestion was ever seriously taken up, but his and Kalar’s views, disparate as they are, reveal the strength of the impetus toward factual documentation which took hold in the early Depression years.29 In contrast to the years of study proposed by Gold, the author of the Proletarian Literature piece thought that what distinguished reportage was its instantaneity: “The writer of reportage must react to the immediate political questions immediately,” he or she wrote, “His writing must thunder with today.” The masters of reportage – people like John Reed, Agnes Smedley, John L. Spivak – were those who had “encountered the deadlines and ... mastered them.” But in this conception of reportage, principles and radical goals were by no means to ·be lost sight of in recording the fleeting surface of events:

The writer of reportage is not merely an observer, a recorder. He is not just the scribe, getting history down on paper. Not only must he get the sound of the bullet; not only the cries of the wounded and the songs of the marchers. He must explain the strategy of the armies – and altogether his writing must result in an experience,

which in turn induces a mode of action. All this must be done in time for the deadline. The world, asking questions, is waiting for the answer – and next week brings new questions.

Well done, reportage shared the “aesthetic, dramatic, descriptive qualities which are akin to all works of literature.”30 Some of the most striking examples of radical reportage appeared in The New Masses after it became a weekly at the beginning of 1934: Robert Gessner, for example, on conditions in the anthracite coal region (May 15, 1934), Albert Maltz on the drought in the Dust Bowl (July l4, 1934), John L. Spivak on anti-Semitism in the US (October 2, 1934), Ernest Hemingway on a Florida hurricane (September l7, 1935). The mode was participant journalism, in which the personal witness of the reporter was the crucial factor.31 Personal testimony was also a cornerstone of most book-length reportage of the period. Lauren Gilfillan’s I Went to Pit College (l934) was a 22-year-old’s account of investigating conditions in a Pennsylvania coalmining district. A strike led by the NMU is in progress. The author boards, initially, with UMW strikebreakers, attends meetings of the Young Communist League, goes on the picket line, descends into a mine disguised as a man, establishes a friendship with a budding proletarian novelist, is eventually suspected as a spy. Sym- pathetic but detached toward the CP, the book is above all concerned with the revelation of uncomfortable truths by means of close observation and direct personal experience.32 The same ambition motivated the established authors who went in search of America. “Through it all,” says Richard Pells, “they cherished the pure, unadorned ‘facts’ of daily life. Before the simple human drama of the depression experience there was no need to embroider, to speculate, to theorize, to indulge in the conventions of ‘art.’ Talking to living people and observing their actual behavior seemed more important, and more honest, than creating fictional characters or issues.” Pells goes on to argue that, in this genre of reportage – he has in mind books such as the Dreiser Committee’s Harlan Miners Speak (l932), Dos Passos’s In All Countries (1934), James Rorty’s Where Life is Better (l935), Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America (l935), Spivak’s America Faces the Barricades (1935) –

the very imposition of political formulas or artistic devices would interfere with and distort the author’s understanding of his world. Thus a rigorous objectivity became the norm. Rather than adopt the ideological or cultural preoccupations of their colleagues in the intellectual community, many writers chose to let the facts speak for themselves. In The American Jitters (l932) and Travels in Two Democracies (1936), Edmund Wilson rarely commented on what he saw or heard: he relied instead on direct narration and description, hoping this might evoke the appropriate feelings of horror and anger in his readers.33

Only on the surface, however, was such writing free of ideology. In fact, its political orientation was conveyed via the skillful marshalling and

juxtaposition of (usually) documentary materials. This procedure, which was followed in some of the radical fiction as well as the reportage of the period, had much in common with the new political aesthetic of film, theatre, and photomontage: the aesthetic of montage. The most renowned practitioner of montage in the radical novel was of course John Dos Passos, whose deployment of the device in the USA trilogy – and particularly the first volume, The 42nd Parallel (l930) – became a model for later experimentation. The structure of the novel itself, in Dos Passos’s hands, was new: it no longer had a single narrative thread, but was composed of heterogeneous elements intercut in collage fashion, imparting a transpersonal sense of the contemporary epoch. Interspersed among the various fictional stories, in The 42nd Parallel, are sketch biographies of historical figures (Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, Andrew Carnegie, Robert La Follette), together with sections entitled “The Camera Eye” and “Newsreels”. The “Camera Eye” pieces consist of disjointed scraps of narrative having little or no obvious connection with the major fictional segments; the “Newsreels” are built up of (supposedly authentic) newspaper headlines, extracts from press reports, and lines of popular songs. It is here that the montage principle is most fully developed: references to episodes in class warfare and revolution are juxtaposed with mundane journalistic trivia and romantic song lyrics to create an incongruous sense of a world about to split apart at the seams. Thus in Newsreel IV:

Three Columbia Students Start Auto Trip to Chicago on Wager GENERAL STRIKE NOW THREATENS

It’s moonlight fair tonight upon the Wa-abash.34 The concept of incorporating documentary material into a basically fictional context was taken up, after Dos Passos, by a number of radical American writers. Of his novel A Child is Born, for example, Charles Yale Harrison noted: “Some of the italicized passages are authentic quotations from newspapers, magazines, reports of speeches, and excerpts from standard works, the sources of which the reader will readily recognize.” Likewise George Marlen’s The Road: A Romance of the Proletarian Revolution (l932) contained sections such as a long montage of news items from the World War (tracing the growing involvement of Wall Street financiers), and printed in full an advertisement for high explosive shells which appeared in The American Machinist of May 6, 19l5.35 In other cases, radical novels employed imitation documentary passages. Thus Parched Earth interrupted its narrative to quote supposedly verbatim radio reports from “Station KOG.” Similarly, Marching! Marching! contained a montage chapter of adjacent columns, the first of clippings and editorials from the rightwing press and like material, the second of extracts from workers’ papers, strike bulletins, leaflets, etc., each describing the progress of the strike from opposed class viewpoints. The chapter opens as follows:

[CLIPPING] [CLIPPING] STRIKE MENACE LOOMS MILITANT WORKERS FIRED –––––––––– ––––––––––

Crisis Imminent in Mill District Pete Hancock, jitney driver, –––––––––– active rank-and-file leader of Hope Maintained the Lumber Workers Union, –––––––––– and Harry Carson, boom In the company offices on Water man, were discharged today Street, Mr. George P. Bayliss, from the Bayliss Lumber Senior, in an exclusive interview, Company mill. Company expressed the opinion that in officials refused to discuss spite of the activities of alien the matter....36 agitators, he is confident that the existing industrial disturbance will be terminated in a manner satisfactory to all....

One of the most ambitious of montage experiments was The Shadow Before, by William Rollins, Jr. In one section a workers’ parade is rendered by the insertion into the narrative of the phrase “WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR...“ in gigantic typeface, repeated several times in a variety of languages. At another point, there follow in direct succession a supposed press report of a back-to-work sermon, the lyrics of the song “Hallelujah I’m a Bum”, and a segment of orthodox narrative beginning, “A semisecret society was formed to combat the strike....“ The interplay of imitation document, “found” material, and original prose narrative usurps the dominance of any one mode of address and makes of the text something apparently more public, of more general sociological and political significance, than that achieved by conventional fictional techniques.37 Though John L. Spivak was the decade’s exponent of documentary reportage par excellence, he chose, for his book-length study of chain-gang barbarism, Georgia Nigger (1932), to employ a fictional format. The tale of escape from torture could then, he reasoned, be given a more generalized signification; but he felt impelled, because “some of the scenes described are so utterly incredible,” to append a section of photographs and documents. The way these are arranged offers yet another version of the montage aesthetic in practice. Photographs of convicts undergoing penal torments are interspersed with official punishment reports in which the trivial reasons for the treatment are listed; a death certificate for a certain prisoner is printed alongside a letter of complaint written by the same man shortly before his death; and so on. The whole appendix transforms the fictional character of the novel from “make-believe to exemplary instance of the operation of a very real and vicious system”.38 In his reportage, Spivak, along with other radical journalists, adopted another variety of montage which William Stott has termed the technique of “exposé quotation”. By means of this, an interviewee’s statements are counterposed to contradictory documentary evidence. Thus in his 1934 article “Shady Business in the Red Cross,” for example, Spivak undercut the supposed neutrality of the organization by quoting, alongside an assertion by its head to the effect that the Red Cross was exclusively noncombatant, the Oath of Allegiance nurses were required to take. The technique worked admirably to expose the contradictions

of capitalist institutions; through it, facts could indeed seem to “speak for themselves.”39 There was one further application of the concept of montage to radical literature of the early Depression years that deserves at least a passing reference. This was its appearance in poetry in the attenuated form of yoked historical/political references. In Harry Alan Potamkin’s “Paris Commune” (1932), the device serves to link two revolutions separated widely in time and space:

Greetings, Communard, dictator of ‘71, Seventeen greets you, October greets March! There is no blind spot in the memory of the proletariat....

On the other hand, montage in Ben Maddow’s “August 22, 1927” (1933) evokes the contrast of socialist and capitalist worlds:

While USSR brightens with Lenin’s voltage, socialist engines suckling the cemented river, long past such playthings, capital restrains Niagara to electrify a chair. Thayer has shaved Nicola Sacco’s skull; Lowell on Vanzetti fits the wet iron. Morgan, Mellon, Ford, and Rockefeller at the copper switch twice clamp death down.

It is perhaps no coincidence that both Potamkin and Maddow were intimately involved with the radical film movement of the thirties.40

* Of the several organizations which sustained leftward-leaning artists in the early Depression years, the earliest and most influential were the John Reed Clubs, whose genesis and development have been described above. The clubs provided a milieu in which artists, becoming increasingly radicalized as the Depression deepened, were oriented towards proletarian subjects and realist (or satirical) styles. Through ties with other Communist-sponsored cultural organizations, the clubs offered their participants a sense of belonging to an international working-class movement, which must have provided, for traditionally isolated artists, a powerful stimulus. Cartoonists Fred Ellis and William Gropper attended the Kharkov conference of 1930 as John Reed Club delegates, and though future opportunities for such foreign contacts were limited, the proliferation of the clubs throughout the United States and their loose federation into a national body in 1932 served to maintain for members a sense of collective growth and political solidarity. The John Reed Clubs ran art schools at various times (the last, in New York, was reorganized in 1936 as the American Artists School and survived until 1939), made posters for working-class organizations, and held exhibitions of socially-conscious paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, both by club members and by invited artists. The first major show of this kind, entitled

”The Social Viewpoint in Art”, was held in New York in February 1933, and something of its impact may be judged from the fact that The Nation’s reviewer thought it as “significant as the historic Armory exhibit which brought the aesthetic heresies of twentieth century Europe to the United States.”41 (The violent controversy it provoked in the leftwing press is touched on below.) With the Depression had come a precipitous slump in the art market. The index of art prices, established on a base of 1925=100, had risen to l65 in 1929, but fell back to 100 in 1930 and dropped to 50 by 1933 (by comparison, the price of stocks never fell below their 1925 level.) As a result, some 10,000 artists were unemployed by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933.42 Organization of artists along union lines was undertaken in order to create pressure for government-funded employment programs in the arts, and, when these were established, to promote the interests of people thus supported. The first such organization was the Emergency Work Bureau Artists Group, formed in September 1933 and comprising approximately 25 artists who had obtained or were seeking employment under the New York City EWB relief program. The Group, subsequently renamed the Unemployed Artists Group (or Association), sent delegates to Washington in December 1933 petitioning Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), “to institute programs in classroom instruction in mural painting.”43 The federal artists’ scheme which was initiated at this time, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) became a focus of discontent for the Unemployed Artists in New York when regional administration was put in the hands of Mrs Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many militant demonstrations were held to protest her management of the program. Much enlarged, the Group was restructured in May 1934 as the Artists Union, and began to represent artists in significant numbers outside the New York City area. It soon became firmly established in its role as collective bargaining agent for artists employed on government projects, mounting stormy campaigns against the cutbacks and layoffs which were forever threatening the livelihood of its members. The Artists Union was in good shape by the time the largest government program for artists, the WPA Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) got under way in October 1935.44 Though the Artists Union itself laid down no aesthetic guidelines, the impact of its energetic organizing under left-wing leadership, inspired by the unionizing drive in heavy industry, probably helped propel its members towards variants of the social realism then receiving favor in Communist circles. (There were anomalies, however: Stuart Davis, a prominent radical in the union and at one time editor-in-chief of its journal Art Front, was and remained throughout the thirties an abstractionist.) Since the government projects provided the means of support for a large number of artists during the thirties, and particularly those with leftwing tendencies, their structure and scope should be sketched in here.45

The New York City Emergency Work Bureau (later Emergency Relief Bureau) program was initiated in 1932 at the instigation of the College Art Association, and employed approximately a hundred artists to decorate public buildings. It received its funds from the State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), which in 1934-35 also directly employed artists in New York State. ERB and TERA projects were taken over by WPA/FAP in 1935. The Public Works of Art Project was a temporary, federal, non-relief program for artists nationwide. In operation from December 1933 to June 1934, it was a part of the US Treasury Department, though funded by the Civil Works Administration (CWA). Under the direction of Edward Bruce, PWAP aimed to furnish work for unemployed artists in the embellishment of non-Federal public buildings and parks. The number of artists employed during its short life was 3,749, and works produced totaled l5,660, including 700 murals. When the PWAP program was terminated it was clear that there was a need for continued federal funding of arts projects. There was also a conflict, as historian Francis V. O’Connor notes, “between the goal of aiding indigent artists and that of acquiring quality works of art for the government from artists with different levels of professional experience and ability.” Two separate art programs were, as a result, eventually established.

The Treasury Department, several months after the end of the PWAP, set up the Section of Painting and Sculpture specifically to employ the best available professional artists to decorate government buildings. Art relief, on the other hand, had to wait until the Fall of 1935 when the Works Progress Administration established the Federal Art Project. These two programs then operated concurrently, with several important administrative changes) until they were liquidated by Presidential order early in 1943.46

The history of the Treasury Section and the WPA/FAP, together with that of a third, subordinate program, the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), belongs predominantly to the latter half of the decade. “Social Realism,” argues David Shapiro, “was the dominant art in the America of the thirties.”47 If this is so, the pre-eminence was not achieved quickly; and other critics maintain that competing trends, including regionalism, surrealism, structural abstraction, precisionism, and expressionist abstraction, were of comparable importance.48 It is certainly true, nevertheless, that the expressed bias of most of the federal projects towards everyday American subjects treated in an undistorted representational style, together with pressure from the political Left for the depictment in the visual arts of workers and the class struggle, led to the emergence in strength of a new, social realist aesthetic. It began to take shape first in a revival of the Ashcan School tradition by a group of New York painters centered around the teacher Kenneth Hayes Miller in the late twenties. The members of the “Fourteenth Street School,” including Moses and Raphael Soyer, Morris Kantor, and Reginald Marsh, took delight as their predecessors had done in documenting the face of urban life: the sidewalks, el

trains, burlesque houses, dance halls, tattoo parlors. With the onset of the Depression new subjects emerged, and the works of these painters began to take on political connotations hitherto absent. The “School” itself did not survive, but the style it had promoted was appropriated for an art of witness to economic dislocation. The prolific Reginald Marsh was perhaps the most influential of the artists to graduate from Miller’s “School”. Not himself politically radical (and indeed a favorite of the conservative critic Thomas Craven), Marsh nevertheless contributed to the growth of social realism with his crowded canvases of proletarian life under Depression conditions. Among the Coney Island revelers and taxi dancers, there were studies of the hungry in breadlines (Holy Name Mission, 193l; Breadline – No One Has Starved, etching, 1932), of the skid row destitute (The Bowery, 1930; Smoke Hounds, 1934), of the Hooverville unemployed (East Tenth Street Jungle, l934). There was a sharper critical edge to the paintings of Moses Soyer and Philip Evergood. Like Marsh, these artists liked to focus on working-class people at leisure (chosen or enforced); but their pictures projected an anger or bitterness, sometimes satirical, which was absent from Marsh’s work. Soyer’s brooding Hooverville (l934), for example, with its homeless unemployed grouped listlessly around a fire, lacked the anecdotal busyness characteristic of Marsh’s comparable paintings; his Employment Agency (l935) – a woman and two men waiting in a bare room – captured the hopeless tedium of the Depression experience. Evergood’s ironically titled Spring (1934) depicted a handful of unemployed men hanging out in a junked car under a bridge, while his Dance Marathon (l934), unlike Marsh’s Zeke Youngblood’s Dance Marathon (1932), concentrated, with its skeletal hand dangling a $1000 bill toward the exhausted dancers, on the exploitative nature of the event. A second, and more optimistic vein in the developing social realist aesthetic was that devoted to images of women and men at work, and the machinery of modern industrial society. The equation of progress with the development of a society’s productive forces has been made both by capitalist ideologists and by Marxists, and hence the introduction of the iconography of industry into art in the twentieth century has carried double-edged political connotations. The 1921 declaration, for example, of Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, shortly to become a leader of his country’s Communist party and pioneer in the modern mural movement, is very close in tone to the proto-fascist futurist manifestoes of a decade earlier. “We must live our marvelous dynamic age!” he exclaimed, adding:

Love the modern machine, dispenser of unexpected plastic emotions, the contemporary aspects of our daily life, our cities in the process of construction, the sober and practical engineer of our modern buildings, stripped of architectural complexities (immense towers of steel and cement jammed into the ground)....49

In the United States the introduction of industrial subjects into painting during the twenties and especially the thirties usually carried left-wing overtones, but

there were exceptions. The factory scenes of precisionist Charles Sheeler, for example, were, as Frederick S. Wight has observed, ”sweatless”. (“They appear to be conjured out of blueprints, and correspond closely to a certain American concept of industry – at once highly organized, idealized, and detached from humanity.”50) Grant Wood’s 1925 series devoted to skilled workers (Turret Lathe Operator, The Covermaker, The Painter, Coppersmith, Coil Welder, and others were commissioned by the employing company and are tinged with a paternalistic sentimentality. Thomas Hart Benton’s 1930 murals, America Today, for the New School in New York, share some of these conservative traits, but they directly anticipated, in iconography, the generally left-wing social realist art of later in the thirties. City Building, for instance, is a montage of images of a ship, skyscrapers, a black worker with a pneumatic drill, white construction laborers, and so on; Power is a composite design incorporating elements such as a steam locomotive, an aircraft, a piston, a flywheel, a generator, and an electric pylon. Following Benton, American painters increasingly turned their attention both to the industrial worker – as in Joe Jones’s Roustabouts (1934), Evergood’s Railroad Men (c. 1935), and Selma Freeman’s Strike Talk (garment workers, c. 1934-35) – and to machinery – for instance in Zoltan Sepesky’s Scranton Coal Chute (1935) and Marsh’s Locomotives Watering (1932) and Erie Railroad (c. 1932). The extent of penetration of industrial iconography into American art at this period is indicated by the content of a PWAP exhibition in 1934:

Critics noted the absence of nudes, night club subjects, pretty women, aristocratic-looking men, and genteel houses. They noted a predominance of machinery, locomotives, steamships, workers, and common subjects of village and farm life. One reporter calculated that at least 192 of the 498 subjects were of labor and industrial character.51

The most significant contribution to this strand of social realism was probably the series of frescoes painted by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Museum in 1932. Devoted to the theme .of “the industrial life of the city,” the 27 panels featured depictions on a vast scale of men at labor and machinery in motion, including work in a foundry, an automobile assembly plant, and an aircraft factory. Rivera’s inspiration was close to that of his compatriot Siqueiros, with whom he had served on the central committee of the Mexican CP until being expelled in 1929. Rivera wrote:

I have always maintained that art in America, if some day it can be said to have come into being, will be the product of a fusion between the marvelous indigenous art which derives from the immemorial depths of time in the center and south of the continent (Mexico, Central America, Bolivia, and Peru), and that of the industrial worker of the north. The dynamic productive sculptures which are the mechanical masterpieces of the factories, are active works of art, the result of the genius of the industrial country developed in the historico-social period which canalized the plastic genius of the superior and gifted individual within the broad

stream of the workers for the creation of industrial mechanical art. Bridges, dams, factories, locomotives, ships, industrial machinery, scientific instruments, automobiles, and airplanes are all examples, and merely a few of them chosen at random, of this new collective art.52

Rivera’s Detroit workers were not, however, engaged in class struggle.53 Scenes of militant organizing, strikes, demonstrations, and repression were a slightly later development in the growth of the social realist aesthetic, and began to emerge only slowly in response to political pressure from cultural organizations on the Left. When the New York John Reed Club held its “Social Viewpoint in Art” exhibition in February 1933 it was announced beforehand that “many of the works, especially those of the John Reed Club members, are a definite expression of the class struggle and of the revolutionary working class.” The New Masses reviewer, however, was not impressed. “More than half the objects shown,” John Kwait charged, “express no revolutionary ideas; and of the rest, only a few reenact for the worker in simple, plastic language the crucial situations of his class.” In response, Jacob Burck argued that the point of inviting well-known uncommitted artists to exhibit was to draw them and their followers towards the Club’s cultural program – which implied making class conflict the subject of their paintings:

The John Reed Club has shown its political and artistic alertness by inviting these artists to hang their “left” subject matter side by side with more conscious revolutionary works, and in this way orientating them still farther to the left – to the scenes of the class struggle of the workers. It said to them that a “social viewpoint” was not sufficient, that only a revolutionary social viewpoint was the one that can produce vital, dramatic works of art, and that a mere decorative treatment of working-class subject matter was static, inert art without the dynamic, life-giving force of class struggle in their compositions.54

Examples of the more explicitly political art which such an emphasis entailed include George Picken’s Strike (c. 1934-35), with picketers and militia uneasily confronting each other, Freeman’s Strike Talk, in which women clothing workers at their machines guardedly discuss strategy, and Russell Limbach’s Kiss That Flag (c. 1934-35), depicting an incident in which vigilantes rough up a radical or labor organizer. Again the strongest work of the kind, however, was not by a U.S. artist, but by Rivera. Rivera’s series of 21 mural panels for the New Workers’ School in New York, painted in 1933, depicted the history of the United States in terms of class conflict, repression and resistance. Panel l, “Colonial America”, for example, centered on slavery and the invading settlers’ conquest of the native American population by means of whisky jug, Bible and blunderbuss; Panel 8, “The Labor Movement”, included a police attack on demonstrating workers; and Panel 9, “Class War”, incorporated scenes portraying strikes by coal miners and metal miners. In Panel l2, “The New Freedom”, a worker in shackles is lashed, while punch press operators are manacled to their machines; Panel

13, “Imperialism”, showed resistance to the U.S. presence in Latin America being crushed by the deployment of tanks in the streets; while the compositions of Panel 14, “Depression”, and Panel 15, “The ‘New Deal”, were dominated by depictions of bonus marchers, miners and dressmakers battling with the forces of law and order.55 The New Workers’ School murals were manifestly Marxist-Leninist but non- sectarian. In panel 8, for example, Marx and Engels are ringed with (uncaricatured) portraits of labor leaders as diverse as single-tax theorist Henry George, violent anarchist Johann Most, and moderate Knights of Labor president Terence V. Powderly; and in Panel 16, “Division and Depression”, feuding leftists are oblivious to police at their backs about to gun them down. Rivera’s most explicit statement of his political position, however, was in Panel 19, “Proletarian Unity”, an affirmation of working-class solidarity in which large portraits of Lenin and Marx are set amid smaller heads of Stalin, Engels, and Trotsky, and are surrounded by the figures of a bevy of other radicals, many (in life) mutually hostile, including Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, and among the Americans, William Z. Foster, chairman of the CPUSA, Jay Lovestone, secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (Opposition), and James P. Cannon, secretary of the Communist League of America (Trotskyists). Earlier in 1933, Rivera had attempted to incorporate a portrait of Lenin in his mural Man at the Crossroads executed for the Rockefeller Center in New York. The Rockefeller interests took exception, and when Rivera refused to give ground, he was forced to relinquish the commission, and the partly-finished painting was destroyed. The incident illustrates the difficulties artists faced in imparting a specifically Communist orientation to their work. A similar episode took place in San Francisco the following year, in connection with a mural series carried out in the Coit Tower for the Public Works of Art Project. A storm ensued when it was discovered that one of the artists, Bernard Zakheim, had included in a library scene Marx’s Das Kapital and the Communist paper the Western Worker, while another artist, Clifford Wight, was at work on a series of three panels entitled “Rugged Individualism”, “The New Deal”, and “Communism” – the last explained as “another alternative which exists in the current American scene”. Hearing of the controversy, PWAP director Edward Bruce uncompromisingly wrote: “I hope they don’t fool around with this Socialistic thing any longer and wipe the damn painting out of the Tower.” The San Francisco Artists’ and Writers’ Union, however, set up pickets to protect the muralists’ work, and in the end, except for one Soviet emblem painted by Wight, it was saved. (An apposite newspaper headline in Zakheim’s library panel reads “Destruction of Rivera Fresco: Local Artists Protest”.)56 One of Rivera’s assistants in the painting of the Rockefeller Center and New Workers’ School murals was Ben Shahn, whose recent works, Rivera noted, possessed “the necessary qualities, accessibility and power, to make them important to the proletariat.” Shahn was one of the first left-wing American artists to have recourse to documentary material in the elaboration of his aesthetic. Breaking from the abstract styles he had essayed while in Europe

during the twenties, he completed, in 1932, a series devoted to the case of Tom Mooney, imprisoned California labor leader: among the individual paintings were Governor James Rolph of California (Rolph had refused Mooney a pardon), My Son is Innocent, a portrait of Mooney’s mother, and Two Witnesses, Mellie Edeau and Sadie Edeau. In the same year Shahn exhibited a series of gouaches, watercolors, and tempera paintings entitled The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. The series recreated, by means of portraiture of the individuals involved, the circumstances surrounding the execution of the two anarchists in 1927: in addition to several pictures of the condemned men, there were renderings of Judge Webster Thayer (who had pronounced the death sentence), the Lowell Committee (which had recommended against granting a pardon), and others such as “Six Witnesses who Bought Eels from Vanzetti.” Shahn’s biographer records that he “had gone to the blurred photo-engravings in the newspaper files at the New York Public Library for his documentation,” and In the Courtroom Cage, for example, is clearly closely based on a UPI photograph.57 Gravitation towards a documentary style was evident also in the paintings of the John Reed Club members. Contemporary episodes of political significance formed the subject matter of a number of entries in the 1933 Club exhibition, as a preliminary description indicates:

There will be pictures of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Hunger March, and other scenes of class struggle. One is a group of drawings by Sara Berman, a Hunger March delegate, who was injured in the battle of Wilmington. The drawings to be exhibited were made on the march. There will also be Bonus Army pictures.58

All of Diego Rivera’s American murals contained some documentary elements (to achieve accurate renderings in portions of the Rockefeller Center fresco he “was assisted with the generous collaboration of distinguished scientists, engineers, biologists, inventors, and discoverers”59), but this tendency was given freest rein in his New Workers’ School set. Included were depictions of the Haymarket martyrs, the Homestead steelworkers’ strike (1892), the Pullman railroad strike (1894), the lynching of IWW organizer Frank Little (1917), the Ludlow massacre (1914), the mutiny of Detroit troops at Archangel (1919), Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair, Tom Mooney, the Scottsboro defendants in prison, a hunger march, and the eviction of bonus marchers from Washington (l932), in addition to portraits of significant figures in American and recent international history. The assumption was made that a painting need not be overtly agitational for it to be effective as propaganda; as with documentary reportage, it was believed that an objective rendering of the “truth” in itself carried the power to bring workers to an understanding of their class condition. Thus Rivera wrote that his Detroit frescoes, being “nothing but a simple plastic expression of the subjective and objective truth of the time and place in which I was working,” contained “not the slightest tinge of demagogy” and were not “paintings of agitation”. Likewise he declared that there “was nothing grandiloquent or demagogic” in his Rockefeller Center mural, “nothing that did not correspond accurately to the reality of the

existing social situation.” Rivera goes on to argue that “had its functioning been less efficient, its interpretation of the given theme less penetrating and accurate, the bourgeoisie would not have proceeded against it with all the force and power at their command, and, finally, destroyed it.”60 The subversive potency of the destroyed mural lay, of course, not simply in its inclusion of a portrait of Lenin, but in its forceful assemblage of imagery in accordance with the principles of the aesthetic of montage. Montage in painting had been pioneered by Rivera and his coworkers, Siqueiros and Orozco, in Mexico in the twenties; here the system was deployed to contrast potential capitalist and socialist paths of development. Rivera’s explanation of the Rockefeller Center mural indicates his awareness of how closely the aesthetic strategy was linked to the painting’s radical political statement:

The attack on the portrait of Lenin was merely a pretext to destroy the entire Rockefeller Center fresco. In reality, the whole mural was displeasing to the bourgeoisie. Chemical warfare, typified by hordes of masked soldiers in the uniforms of Hitlerized Germany; unemployment, the result of the crisis; the degeneration and persistent pleasures of the rich in the midst of the atrocious sufferings of the exploited toilers – all these symbolized the capitalist world on one of the crossed roads. On the other road, the organized Soviet masses, with their youth in the vanguard, are marching towards the development of a new social order, trusting in the light of History, in the clear, rational, omnipotent method of dialectical materialism, strong in their productive collectivization and in their efforts for the abolition of social classes by means of the necessary and logical proletarian dictatorship, result of the social revolution. This was expressed without demagogy or fantasy, with a simple objective painting of one of those marvelous mass demonstrations in the Red Square, under the shadow of the Kremlin and the Tomb of Lenin, which year after year give to the entire world an unequalled spectacle which makes visible and tangible the revolutionary march of the 160,000,000 inhabitants of the Soviet Union towards a better world.61

In the New Workers’ School series, the montage principle was developed further, in the articulation of savage contrasts and ironic juxtapositions. A full analysis is beyond the scope of this study, but a few representative examples may be cited. In the “Depression” panel, for instance, striking fanners tip out milk, while alongside the hungry unemployed scrounge in garbage cans; in the “World War” panel, munitions dealers are set beside famine victims and the hideous mangled faces of war casualties. In the latter, too, Woodrow Wilson is pictured with a dove and a streamer bearing the motto, “He Kept Us Out of War”; while the rostrum on which he is banging his fist turns out to be a jail cell containing anti-war activists Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, and Charles Ruthenberg, and beneath his sheltering cloak are Kerensky and the White Russian general Kolchak. Ben Shahn had demonstrated a similar concern for montage of a political

character in his Sacco and Vanzetti series. The simple juxtapositions served as vivid accusations against the representatives of the Massachusetts establishment responsible for putting the anarchists to death (Shahn’s first political art had been a series of drawings made in 1930 illustrating the Dreyfus case, inspired by Zola’s “J’accuse!”). In one painting, Vanzetti and Sacco are depicted with a protest demonstration in their support, while in the background Governor Fuller remains unmoved. In another, the members of the Lowell Committee stand beside the open coffins of the electrocuted men, while behind them Judge Thayer is seen at the window of his courthouse. In this variety of montage, spatial proximity stands for cause and effect: because Thayer imposed the death penalty, and the Lowell Committee recommended that it not be overturned, and Fuller refused to grant a pardon, Sacco and Vanzetti lie dead. The calculated, political montage style practiced by Rivera and Shahn must be distinguished from the apolitical agglomerations of imagery which began to appear during the early thirties in the work of painters whose radical sympathies were far less pronounced. In the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, for example, whose America Today series has been mentioned, there was seldom an attempt to make a political point by means of contrast or irony. The left-wing critic John Kwait noted this in remarking that in Benton’s murals at the Whitney Museum, The Arts of Life in America (l932), “the city is an intentionally confused panoramic spectacle, of overlapping speakeasies, strikers, gunmen, and movies, that corresponds to the insight of the tabloid press.”62 As mural painting developed extensively with public support during the thirties, the Benton approach proved a viable model for artists unwilling to make a political commitment. Yet the political origins of the mural revival movement could not be totally erased. When the movement began in Mexico in 1922, the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors had stated, in their “Declaration of Social, Political, and Aesthetic Principles”, that “our fundamental aesthetic goal must be to socialize artistic expression and wipe out bourgeois individualism,” adding: “We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favored by ultra-intellectual circles, because it is aristocratic, and we praise monumental art in all its forms, because it is public property.”63 The movement had first spread to the United States in 1927 when left-wing artists Boardman Robinson and Hugo Gellert took up the form, Gellert painting a series of murals in the cafeteria of the Daily Worker building in New York City.64 As the Mexicans had perceived, the mural was a visual art medium preeminently suitable for the advancement of a radical aesthetic, and further exploration of its political potential would take place later in the decade.

* The major force in radical theatre of the early thirties was New York’s Workers’ Laboratory Theatre (WLT). Founded in 1928, it was reorganized in November 1930, becoming part of the Cultural Activities Department of the WIR. A mobile theatre, Communist in orientation, the WLT’s program was to present short agitprop plays chiefly at political or social functions of workers’ organizations. In the first six months of 1931, for example, it

gave performances “at affairs held by, among others, the WIR, various unions of the Trade Union Unity League, the International Labor Defense, the Inter- national Workers’ Order, the New York City Scottsboro Conference, various workers’ clubs, the United Front May Day Committee, the National Youth Day Committee, units of the young Communist League and of the Communist Party.” In addition, it entertained 20,000 at a Lenin Memorial Meeting in January and 12,000 at a May Day pageant. The WLT soon established a large repertory of original material and became equipped for street performances, taking an active part in the election campaigns of 1931 and 1932.65 The WLT’s success was such that by 1932 it was able to support, at bare subsistence level, a permanent collective of about a dozen actors, the “Shock Troupe,” who lived communally and devoted their full time to dramatic training and performance. Backing them up was the “Evening Troupe” with a membership fluctuating around the hundred mark. During 1932 the WLT severed its connection with the WIR, but remained committed to militant political theatre. At the beginning of 1935, still going strong, the WLT broadened its base in line with the mounting trend towards a nonsectarian anti-fascist coalition, changing its name to the Theatre of Action and switching its attention to the production of full-length plays in a conventional theatrical setting. The WLT was emulated in other parts of the country. A cultural conference sponsored by the John Reed Club and held in June 1931 was attended by nineteen workers’ theatres, and a Dramatic Bureau was set up to act as a national clearing house for scripts. The following year 53 groups were represented at a national radical drama festival in New York, and the League of Workers’ Theatres was established as a coordinating body for organizations such as the Blue Blouses of Chicago, the Solidarity Players of Boston, and the Rebel Players of Los Angeles. National workers’ theatre festivals were again held in 1933 and 1934. The organ of the WLT, and subsequently of the League of Workers’ Theatres, was the journal Workers’ Theatre, whose growth provides an indication of the strength of the Left theatre movement of the early Depression years: first issued in mimeographed form with a print run of 200 in April 1931, it achieved (under the title New Theatre) a circulation of 18,000 by September 1935. In February 1935, the League of Workers’ Theatres became the New Theatre League. The original thrust of the workers’ theatre movement, one of whose “basic principles” had been the idea that “it must go to the masses rather than wait for the masses to come to it,” was now modified, and the mobile theatre or “theatre of action” was accorded lesser priority. The New Theatre League had a “simple program”: “For mass development of the American theatre to its highest artistic-social level” and “for a theatre dedicated to the struggle against war, fascism, and censorship”. An editorial in New Theatre explained the shift:

Thus the facts of the social situation have already provoked theatrical expression of a radical, progressive opinion in all branches of the theatre. The original program and forces of the League of Workers’ Theatres, designed primarily to build theatres of action, was not wide enough to embrace and coalesce the manifold forces now at work in the professional and amateur

theatres. What became necessary was a new and broader organization to coordinate all the constructive, socially conscious elements in the theatre, and to rally the vast masses of audiences as yet unaware of the dangers which confront us.66

The WLT’s work had been paralleled by two other New York groups, Artef and the Prolet-Buehne. Artef (an acronym for Arbeiter Teater Verband or Workers’ Theatrical Alliance), founded in the mid-twenties, performed in Yiddish. Like the WLT, it had mobile troupes which performed mass chants and agitprop plays, but after 1930 it also presented full-length radical plays at its small permanent headquarters. A pioneer in audience organization, Artef was strongly rooted in the Jewish working community and survived throughout the thirties. The German-speaking Prolet-Buehne split off from its parent Workers’ Club in 1928, and under the inspiration of the Soviet and German agitprop troupes devoted itself to militant, class-conscious theatre. Its performances were brief propaganda sketches featuring chanting, mime, and dance. The Prolet-Buehne was dissolved during 1933, but its key personnel remained active in other branches of radical theatre. The Theatre Collective was an offshoot of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, formed in 1933 with the aim of establishing a permanent acting company and presenting more elaborate plays than the WLT, on a professional basis. The “general perspective and program of the Collective” was stated (in 1935) to be:

1. A permanent company of artists, actors, directors, playwrights, and technicians. 2. Training from the most elementary beginnings as artists, as revolutionists. 3. The development of a repertory of old and new, short and full-length revolutionary plays. 4. Complete divorce from commercial competition in the Broadway theatre field. 5. The development of a critical and participating audience. 6. The building of an organizational framework on collective lines.67

The Theatre Collective achieved its greatest success in its theatrical training programs, which were conducted by actors and directors such as Mary Virginia Farmer, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Morris Carnovsky, and Cheryl Crawford. More successful in producing left-wing plays on a professional basis was the Theatre Union. A united-front organization in which both Communists and socialists participated, the Theatre Union was established in 1933 and in its four years of existence was able to present, in competition with the commercial producers of Broadway, seven full-length radical plays, several of them for extended runs. The Theatre Union’s success was predicated on its attraction of working-class audiences by means of block bookings to labor unions, workers’ clubs, etc. The group hoped to form a permanent company, but never achieved the financial solvency to make this possible. Maintaining a permanent company was the great achievement of the Group Theatre, which, though not committed to a left-wing political stance, became a focus of radical interest through its communal organization and the militancy of many of its members, who wrote and produced short political plays as an extra-

curricular activity. Founded in 1931 as an offshoot of the Theatre Guild, the successful mainstream Broadway producer, it soon attained full independence, and survived, on a precarious footing, for the whole of the decade. The Group produced an average of two or three plays a year, most of which (with significant exceptions) offered a critique of bourgeois values within. a middle-class setting; its audiences, unlike those of the radical theatres, were predominantly of traditional Broadway composition. Among the Group Associates, and actively involved in its work, were two photographers who have acknowledged its influence and who became important figures in the radical film movement: Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner.68 An idea of the content of the short radical plays of the early thirties is given by a list of thirty which were announced as available through the League of Workers’ Theatres in August 1932. A number were specifically designed for use in CP election campaigns, and probably dealt satirically with the three “bourgeois” parties (Republican, Democrat, and Socialist): these included Liberty in U.S.A., I’ll Tell You How to Vote, Three of a Kind, Vote Communist, Yoo-Hooey, and Home Relief Buro. Three plays (Work or Wages, The Big Stiff, We Demand) dealt with unemployment, four (Fight Against Starvation, Our Miners are Striking, Miners on Strike, Help the Miners) with the miners’ strike, and one (The Fight Goes On) with the textile strike. Mr. Fox, Mr. Nox, and Mr. Box was a “one-act satire with mass recitation on the capitalist system”. I Need You, You Need Me was a “farce, showing the treacherous role of the Socialists, labor fakers, and the priests,” who also came under fire in Step on It. Mr. God is Not In was a “farce on religion”. The WIR’s role was explained in Solidarity, a mass recitation, and Charity, an agitprop play in verse. Scottsboro was a group recitation on the case, and Bonus Thieves on Trial demanded payment of the soldiers’ bonus. The oppression of workers on the assembly line was dramatized in On the Belt and in Tempo! Tempo! (an adaptation of a Prolet~Buehne success), in which the “speed of capitalist exploitation” was contrasted with the “tempo of socialist construction in the USSR.” Soviet themes were also featured in the 15-Minute Red Revue (which again compared capitalist America with socialist Russia), Lenin Calls, and The Groggy Compass, a “one-act play on forced labor in the Soviet Union”. The situation in Manchuria was examined in China Wakes, while Hands Off was an “anti-war play, exposing the role of the League of Nations, American capitalism, and Japan.” Finally, Art is a Weapon was announced as a “collective report on the task of the revolutionary workers’ theatres”.69 Three years later, in 1935, New Theatre League repertory offerings concentrated on similar themes of labor struggle, but with fewer of the sectarian emphases of the “Class Against Class” period. Strikes remained favorite topics. At the head of the list was Clifford Odets’s outstandingly successful drama of striking taxi drivers, Waiting for Lefty, followed by The Great Philanthropist on the Klein-Ohrbach retail strike, Road Closed on the Iowa farm strike, and Hunger Strike devoted to an action by coal miners in Hungary. Further plays available to workers’ theatres around the country included Exhibit A, an anti-war drama, We Shall Conquer, an exposé of Nazism, Sharecroppers Unite, which depicted black and white sharecroppers banding together to prevent a lynching, and Newsboy, a popular survival from earlier in the decade, which was an attack on the

irresponsibility and sensationalism of news coverage in the capitalist press. Other radical plays of the period treated comparable subject matter. Union struggles were dealt with in Steel (1931),70 Stevedore (1934, Theatre Union), on the New Orleans waterfront, Marion Models (1934, Theatre Collective), on the garment industry, The Tide Rises (1935), on the San Francisco general strike, and Black Pit (1935, Theatre Union), on West Virginia coal mining. The Depression was the theme of the Group Theatre’s 1931 – (1931). Peace on Earth (1933), the Theatre Union’s first presentation, was an anti-war drama, while anti-Nazi plays included Dimitroff (l934), Judgment Day (1934), Till the Day I Die (1935, Group Theatre), If This Be Treason (1935), and We Shall Conquer (1935). Also depicted on stage were a revolt of drought-stricken farmers (Can You Hear Their Voices?, 1931), the Tom Mooney case (Precedent, 1931), a rebellion in the Austrian Navy (The Sailors of Catarro, 1934, Theatre Union), and militaristic conditions in camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (The Young Go First, 1935, Theatre of Action). Under the impact of the CP’s publicity drive, the Scottsboro case became the subject of numerous theatrical pieces from agitprop recitations in verse to full-length social-realist dramas. The League of Workers’ Theatres’ Scottsboro was in fact an English-language version of a Prolet-Buehne mass recitation of the same name, first performed in 1931; also that year the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre presented Lynch Law. In 1932 Artef followed with their own Scottsboro, while the poet Langston Hughes brought out his agitprop Scottsboro Limited. The Chicago WLT performed The Scottsboro Boys Shall Live! in 1933, and in 1934 the case came to Broadway in the Theatre Guild’s presentation of John Wexley’s They Shall Not Die. Two further dramatizations were Legal Murder (Denis Donohue, 1934) and Scottsboro, Scottsboro (1935). In general, plays performed by the agitprop troupes seem to have frankly espoused the Communist cause, while other left-wing drama of the period made more general statements of commitment to the working class and against capitalism, fascism and war. (The Theatre Union, as a united-front coalition, was compelled to be particularly circumspect in its treatment of specific labor unions or political organizations.) Plays advancing an outright Communist position were also more common in the earlier years of the decade. The ties of the League of Workers’ Theatres to the CP were evidenced in a “Dram Buro Report” prepared by its chairman, John Bonn, in May 1932. “COMRADES,” he wrote: “Two weeks ago the Agitprop Departrnent of the Communist Party called upon the workers’ theatres in New York for active participation in the coming election campaign. And the report went on to outline the political stance which member groups of the League should adopt:

In contrast to the bourgeois theatre, the workers’ theatre shows openly its political character: it is the theatre of the revolution, it is a weapon for the workers in the class struggle. We expose the whole capitalist system with all its tools. We expose the class character of the bourgeois press, of the police, of the army, of the

courts, of the church, of the schools, and of all capitalist institutions. We must propagandize the campaigns for Unemployment Insurance, for liberation of political prisoners, for strike relief. We must report and analyze the day-to-day events. We must prove that the revolution is the only way out. And we have to broadcast the truth about the Soviet Union, and the necessity for all workers to defend their only fatherland.71

There was, naturally, explicit Communist identification in the election plays: thus “VOTE COMMUNIST!” was the tag line of the agitprop of that name, of Hands Off, and very likely of other entries in the genre.72 The call for Party support in Scottsboro Limited was also undisguised:

RED VOICES: We’ll fight! The Communists will fight for you. Not just black – but black and white.... 8TH BOY (to audience): In the heart of a fighter, death is a lie: O, my black people, you need not die! BOYS: Together, black and white, Up from darkness into the light. ALL: Rise, workers, and fight! AUDIENCE: Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! (The curtain is a great red flag rising to the strains of the Internationale.)73

Among later plays in the agitprop tradition, Dimitroff, by Art Smith and Elia Kazan, based on the Reichstag fire trial, ended with a cry to liberate the imprisoned German Communist leaders (“Free Torgler! Free Thaelmann!”).74 Waiting for Lefty, on the other hand, resorted to metaphor in its crucial finale (Communists as “stormbirds of the working class”), although in an earlier scene a stenographer invites an unemployed actor to “come into the light” while handing him a copy of The Communist Manifesto (the scene was deleted in later acting and published versions of the play).75 Of plays outside the agitprop vein, the one which came closest to an openly Communist interpretation of events was Can You Hear Their Voices? by Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford. The sympathetic Communist protagonist, Wardell, is seen reading Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and is given lines such as “Right now communism means free groceries to all poor farmers,” and “Some people come into communism through their minds and others through their bellies, but I guess most of ‘em come in because they can’t stand to see the folks they care about go hungry.” In an extended statement of his position, Wardell argues:

Don’t you see, Rose, it ain’t Purcell that’s wrong. It’s the plan we live under: it’s the whole system. Listen! Maybe I think, like you, that there’ll come a time when we can stand [on] our feet like free men instead of crawlin’ on our bellies askin’ for help. But that time

ain’t come yet. Some of us believe in a time comin’ when everybody will have to work, and there’ll be enough work for everybody. Some of us believe that the land and the crops and the cattle and the factories belong to the men that work ‘em. But we ain’t strong enough yet to take ‘em. And that’s why some of us think it’s more important to work for that time than to shoot up a few rich guys now.

The action ends with Wardell sending his two sons off hitchhiking to Communist headquarters while he prepares to face the state troopers. But the authors capped the play with a conscience-pricker for their Vassar College audience, a slide reading: “These boys are symbols of thousands of our people who are turning somewhere for leaders. Will it be to the educated minority?” The sentiment was understandably rejected by critics of the Left, and in a later version by Artef the ending was modified, the drama concluding with preparations for the coming battle between farmers and National Guard.76 The mobile theatre of the early Depression years, compelled as it was virtually to dispense with scenery, tailoring its performances to fit a break in proceedings at a union meeting or to attract a shifting sidewalk crowd, relying often on relatively untrained performers, spawned a lively variety of aesthetic styles, drawing on the traditions of vaudeville, mime, and circus as well as the expressionism of avant-garde theatre of the twenties and the more immediate model of the political agitprop troupes of Germany and the USSR.77 There was a conscious effort to break with the Broadway tradition. Thus, for example, there was no depth of characterization: in the satirical morality play, which seems to have been a popular form, characters consisted simply of types – the Boss, the Worker, the Organizer, the Politician, the Manufacturer, the Welfare Worker. (“Portraying characters, a thing that sounds very difficult and high flown, is really much easier than it seems,” wrote WLT founder, Hyam Shapiro. “It is to be remembered that it is not necessary to portray a particular character but rather a class angle or conception of that character, which should not be difficult for a class-conscious worker.”)78 A theorist of the movement argued at the time: “The workers’ theatre cannot rely only on forms taken over from the bourgeois theatre, [it] has to search for new forms which express the content more clearly and thoroughly.” And seconding the postulate, Prolet-Buehne’s John Bonn declared in 1931: “Workers’ theatre is for the exploited, bourgeois theatre is for the exploiters ... the only relation between them is antagonism.”79 The aesthetic espoused was one which was openly propagandistic. “Plays written for a bourgeois theatre,” the WLT theorists declared, “are written with the aim of amusing, entertaining people for money.... [But] the workers’ play must teach a moral, a lesson for the working class.” Workers’ Theatre of December 1931 carried a revealing review of 1931 –, a play which drew no political conclusions from its depiction of Depression desperation. The review read:

We are told by a sympathizer who possesses the price of admission that 1931 –, a recent production of the Group Theatre, is full of good propaganda, although the propaganda is not obvious. (The

non-obviousness being, of course, a recommendation as to its intrinsic value as a play.) This is extremely interesting though somewhat puzzling. We can’t for the world understand the value of that sort of propaganda, unless it is meant to sort of put one over on the audience. To our somewhat naive way of thinking it would seem that the clarity of the message need not at all interfere with the power of the play. However, we must point out as a matter of fairness that the fault may lie with us, since we have forgotten some time ago the meaning of intrinsic value. We must point out also, and that also as a matter of fairness, that the play 1931 – carries its message pretty obviously, except that it is just as obviously not entirely our message. Conclusion: let us carry on our obvious propaganda and let us make it good and obvious.80

But the radical didactic drama in experimental forms to which this writer was committed was short-lived. By 1932, the workers’ theatres were coming to an accommodation with the bourgeois dramatic tradition, which meant, in practice, a gradual abandonment of agitprop styles in favor of social realism. Bonn recanted, asserting:

Our attitude toward the bourgeois theatre was up to now incorrect. I in particular had taken a wrong leftist standpoint.... But after a close study and wider experience I now fully agree with my critics, who urged a more active attitude toward the bourgeois theatre.81

There were various factors precipitating the shift. Jay Williams argues that the practitioners of radical theatre “had found that styles of performance which seemed to suit Europeans had very little impact on Americans.” There was a desire to learn professional skills, and to make room for former Broadway employees thrown out of work by the Depression. But it is probably also no coincidence that the move toward realism coincided with a worldwide trend in Communist cultural circles, not least in the Soviet Union, where all forms of artistic experimentation were in the process of being curtailed.82 In any event, the theorists of the workers’ theatre movement in New York found good reasons for their new policy. In the fall of 1933, Workers’ Theatre changed its name to New Theatre, and the significance of the development was pointed out in an editorial:

The change ... signifies a broader conception of the revolutionary workers’ theatre as the historical successor of the bourgeois theatre, the theatre that as an element of the system of capitalism has already made its contribution to the development of culture and is now in its period of decay. The workers’ theatre now understands that it must study the technique of the theatres of the past, adapting the best of the old to the service of the masses – experimenting –studying – criticizing itself.... The workers’ theatre now understands that ... professional theatre workers and artists who are being expelled by the thousands from the bourgeois theatre

must be attracted to the revolutionary theatre, where they can give technical training to the workers, farmers, and students, and where they can practice their art in a more socially useful way than they ever could before.83

The new aesthetic found expression most immediately in the productions of the Theatre Union, which were decisively social realist in their writing and staging. Peace on Earth, it is true, boasted an expressionist final act, but no such deviations seem to have threatened the realist mode of later Theatre Union productions (until Brecht’s unhappy clash with the group over their staging of his Mother in late 1935).84 Stevedore was consistently realist in its depiction of the pro-union and anti-racist struggles of New Orleans longshoremen, playwrights Paul Peters and George Sklar striving, for example, for an accurate rendering of black dialect, as Albert Maltz would attempt, the following year, a painstaking reproduction of the English spoken by Croatian immigrants. The degree to which the naturalist tradition dominated set design for these plays is suggested by one of Maltz’s stage directions for Black Pit:

Now that it is daylight, we see the company house in all of its squalor and ugliness. The shack is a rusty black from the coal smoke and sulphur fumes of the slate dump. The roof sags, the porch is broken in spots, the three little steps leading from the porch to the hard, bare ground look as though ready to collapse. Three of the chimneys are regulation, black cylinders – one is a makeshift, hammered piece of tin. The shingles are decayed; a window is broken and stuffed with a rag; the rain gutters are twisted and full of holes – there is no end to the details of this poverty.85

The last holdover of the agitprop style in the workers’ theatre movement was probably Waiting for Lefty, designed to be played on an empty stage, and culminating in the famous interaction in solidarity of spectators and cast:

AGATE (to audience): Well, what’s the answer? ALL: STRIKE! AGATE: LOUDER! ALL: STRIKE! AGATE AND OTHERS ON STAGE: AGAIN! ALL: STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!

Yet the scenes themselves were, like Odets’s later work, conventionally realist in their character development and dialogue flow.86 In March 1935 Herbert Kline (later to become a radical filmmaker) summarized the trend represented in the entries received for the New Masses - New Theatre playwriting contest (won by Odets with Waiting for Lefty). “Perhaps the most significant fact about the plays submitted,” Kline wrote, “is the trend toward realism.”

Most of the playwrights have dropped the primitive “agitprop”

style that, as most everyone in the workers’ theatres knows, has limited their development for several years. For no matter how grateful we may feel to this form from the early Prolet-Buehne’s Tempo! Tempo! to the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre’s Newsboy, these beginnings of the short realistic play promise such fine social drama that we may well regard them as having as much importance as the full-length plays....87

Waiting for Lefty was announced as “A Play in Six Scenes, Based on the New York City Taxi Strike of February 1934,” and in thus being directly inspired by an episode in the struggle of labor to organize it was fairly typical of radical theatre of the period.88 The League of Workers’ Theatres coal-mining plays undoubtedly referred to the NMU-led strikes of 1931 and 1932; Art Smith’s The Tide Rises interpreted the 1934 maritime and general strike on the West Coast, Philip Barber’s The Great Philanthropist was a dramatization of the 1935 Klein-Ohrbach store workers’ strike, and so on. But there were instances in which left-wing theatre went further than this, being not merely based upon factual incident, but directly incorporating documentary material. Can You Hear Their Voices? was an early specimen of this quasi-documentary style. Opening at Vassar College in May 1931, it was an adaptation of a story by Whittaker Chambers which had been published in The New Masses. The story itself drew on an event of January 3, 1931, in which five hundred armed farmers had stormed the town of England, Arkansas, demanding food for their children. In her writing and staging of the play, Hallie Flanagan adopted techniques strongly reminiscent of Piscator’s theatre, with which she was probably familiar from her European travel and research.89 The play opens with the projection of slides carrying the following texts:

A play of our time, based on a story by Whittaker Chambers in The New Masses for March, 1931; also on material appearing in the Congressional Record, Time, The Literary Digest, The New Republic, The Nation, The Christian Century, and The New York Times. Every episode in the play is factual. Colonel Arthur Woods, Chairman of the President’s Emergency Committee for Unemployment, reports to the Appropriations Committee of the Senate: Total no. of unemployed persons in the US, 4-5 million [etc.]

It is noted that 250,000 are destitute in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and the Carolinas on account of the drought.90 In the same fashion, slides carrying factual information are inserted at later stages of the drama, imparting to it the immediacy of a newspaper headline and transforming (as did the documents in Spivak’s Georgia Nigger) an individualized narrative into a sociological treatise and a political call to action. Can You Hear Their Voices? soon left the Vassar precincts and became a widely-performed item in the repertory of workers’ theatres – notably in a militant version by Artef.) There was a documentary input, also, into several of the Scottsboro plays, which drew on published records of the arrests and trials. They Shall Not Die was

probably the most systematically authentic of all the efforts to dramatize the case. In this efficient social-realist rendering, the real participants were thinly disguised (Haywood Patterson became “Heywood Parsons”, Victoria Price was “Virginia Ross”, Roy and Andrew Wright were named Roy and Andy “Wood”), and the actual organizations participating in the defense were given easily- decoded nomenclature, the “American Society for the Progress of Colored Persons” (depicted as pandering, church-dominated, insincere and ineffectual), and the “National Labor Defense”. Characteristically, in his handling of the Decatur (“Dexter”) trial, Wexley used many lines taken verbatim from the court transcript.91 The deployment of montage in the radical theatre of the thirties was interestingly prefigured in a 1929 production of the New Playwrights’ Theatre, Airways Inc. by John Dos Passos. The play contained a scene in which the soapbox speech of a union organizer to striking workers was intercut with the words of a businessman concluding a share promotion deal, in the following fashion:

AMARI: Company think to own mills, think to own our hands.... That is what it means to strike, to show that worker is the industry, not the boss. MCGOVERN: The promotion of the said stock shall be as hereafter arranged by the designated officers. To the above preliminary arrangement we hereby set our hands and seals, etc. etc.

Thus the conflicting interests of labor and capital were made manifest.92 Can You Hear Their Voices? was probably the first large-scale play in which the montage concept was adopted as an organizing device. Flanagan dispensed with traditional breaks between scenes so that, when slides were projected, they joltingly disrupted the dramatic flow. (“The seven scenes, interspersed occasionally with screen projections, are played without a curtain and with no intermission,” it was stated. “By this simplification realism is discarded and reality gained.93) A scene in which a congressman’s family plan a $250,000 coming-out ball, for example, is interrupted by slides which detail the fact that federal appropriations have been made for farm loans, but not for food to keep the hard-hit farmers alive. The ordering of scenes was also based on the montage principle, with drunken hysteria at the Washington ballroom being followed immediately by a scene in the kitchen of an Arkansas farm in which a woman admits killing her baby to save it from starving to death. In 1931–, by Claire and Paul Sifton, episodes in the personal drama of a warehouse trucker who loses his job were interspersed with scenes of an anonymous crowd of unemployed at various factory gates, pushing and battling with police and militia. In the final scene a marching crowd singing the Internationale troops past the restaurant in which the protagonist, cowed into servility, has finally found work. Though, as the Workers’ Theatre critic pointed out, the politics of the play left something to be desired (the central character is not himself radicalized, but on the contrary loses his feisty self-assurance and becomes a scared wage slave grateful for the chance to keep from starving), its aesthetic structure boldly exploited the principle of montage. In 1933,

when a revised version of 1931– was staged by the Theatre Collective, a New Masses reviewer remarked:

Thus we see that the straight line, end to end, logical, unrolling-story form is incompatible with a content which comprehends such a vast interplay of conflicting social and individual forces. The form necessary is one based on the “Dynamic Principle” (to use another apt term of Eisenstein’s), which means the dialectical arrangement of conflicting images (the conflict may be in content, or in rhythm, or in visual form or in all of these and more), the inter-impact of which synthesizes (“explodes”) into the concept desired.94

1931– became a model for other radical productions. The short play Newsboy, adapted from a poem of V.J. Jerome by Al Saxe of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre, used, according to Mordecai Gorelik, “the montage method of the cinema – a kaleidoscope of movements, lights and voices.” Jay Williams expands on this analysis:

The film concept of montage, used extensively by Eisenstein whose films were familiar to the Shock Troupers, had been gaining some currency and had been tried out by cameramen in the Film and Photo League.... As he began fitting action to the poem, Saxe saw illustrative dramatic scenes developing, some of them growing out of the actors’ improvisations – a technique they had learned from the Group Theatre – others based on plays he had seen, particularly the production of 1931–. The Siftons’ play had not had conventional acts but short scenes which sometimes melted into one another and which were interspersed with brief mimed Interludes. The technique of dissolving scenes into each other in its turn suggested a montage of sequences, some done in stylized movement, some straightforwardly dramatic, some echoing the old mass chant, some the sloganizing format of Scottsboro. It was agitprop – but agitprop translated into highly sophisticated theatrical terms.95

Newsboy’s political meaning emerged from this interplay of contrasting elements – and from the central collision of trivial “news” with the bleak facts of economic crisis and racist injustice. A short extract suggests the piece’s flavor:

VOICE: Don’t you get tired, Newsie, shouting all the time about – ALL (in rhythm): Hold-ups – and divorces – and raids on love nests? (with a change of pace) Seventeen million men and women ... seventeen million men and women ... (They form into a bread line and as they shuffle they repeat the phrase, above which is heard) VOICES (in sequence): Starving in mines – sweating in mills – tortured in flop joints with hymns about Saviors.96

Montage approaches were no doubt also adopted in other agitprop plays of the early thirties, particularly those, such as Tempo! Tempo!, which contrasted the United States and the Soviet Union. One ether example of theatrical montage pointed to its kinship with techniques adopted in expressionist drama of the twenties. In Peace on Earth, by George Sklar and Albert Maltz, a militant anti-war professor is framed on phony charges

and sentenced to death. The final act, expressionist in style, takes place in the penitentiary, where the professor waits to be executed as nationwide war hysteria mounts. Montage juxtaposes the booming stock exchange with the countdown to the hanging:

THIRD RUNNER: Wheat is one fifty, wheat is one fifty, wheat is one fifty. (The drum roll suddenly becomes softer and slower. THE GUARD walks across stage with a sign reading “10”.) GUARD (intoning monotonously): Ten minutes; ten minutes; ten minutes.

The scene recalls the exposé of war profiteering in Ernst Toller’s Masse Mensch, produced in New York in 1924 as Man and the Masses, which contained tableaus such as the following:

2nd PICTURE (Dream-Picture): A room of the stock exchange – A VOICE: I offer Munition works at one-fifty. A VOICE: I offer Liquid Flame Trust. A VOICE: I offer War Prayer-Book, Ltd. A VOICE: Offer Poison-Gas Works. A VOICE: Offer War loans. THIRD BANKER: I’ll take another One hundred thousand.

(There is a suggestion, also, of the montage intercutting of frenzied stock-market speculators and soldiers meeting death in the trenches, in Pudovkin’s film The End of St Petersburg.) In Peace on Earth, montage made possible a pointed political comment on the interconnection of imperialist war, capitalism, and injustice, which was perhaps unattainable by other aesthetic means.97

* Still photographers with radical sympathies were organized in the early Depression years under the auspices of the Workers’ International Relief and (for a short while) the International Labor Defense. The Workers’ Camera League (known also as the Workers’ Camera Club, the Nippon Camera Club, and the Japanese Workers’ Camera Club), with WIR backing, and the Labor Defender Photo Group, formed in 1930 as a support force for the ILD and its pictorial monthly Labor Defender, evidently coalesced at the end of that year into the WIR-sponsored (Workers’) Film and Photo League (WFPL), whose still photography section led a lusty life until the League’s demise in 1936 (and reemerged in strength in 1937 as the Photo League). The purpose of these groups – which soon spread from New York to many cities around the country – was to provide militant workers with the skills to create photographic records of the class struggle, to assure a flow of illustrations for radical publications, to orient established professional photographers more to the

Left, and to help publicize the work of the WIR, the ILD, and other Communist-led organizations. Discussions centered on the use of photography as a political weapon. The groups sponsored lectures, ran training courses, and held frequent exhibitions. In carrying out this program, the FPL, in particular, gave a powerful impetus to the growth both of photo-journalism and of documentary photography, neither of which were at that time greatly developed. The FPL photographers, in fact, discovered a demand for pictures of the class struggle not only from radical publications, but also from a range of liberal and mainstream journals. In January 1935, several months after the formation of a National Photo Exchange as a central clearing house for League photographs, it was reported:

During the past year the New York League has had an unprecedented call for photos from the workers’ press, from magazines and book publishers and from picture services. We were able to supply only an average of about 60 photos per month. The demand is so great that we feel that we could easily place three times as many pictures. This we were not able to do in the past due to the local nature of our photos. Publications soon become glutted with local material. Our photos have appeared in the Daily Worker, Freiheit, Der Arbeiter, Labor Unity, Labor Defender, Better Times Magazine, Fortune magazine, Jewish Daily Bulletin, Survey Graphic, and other publications too numerous to mention.98

The supply of stills to the commercial press in fact provided a much-needed source of revenue for League members. Former WFPL photographer Leo Seltzer recalls:

Motion-picture film couldn’t be sold, no one would want to buy it, the newsreels had their own crews going out. But we could sell photographs, because very often we could get things the commercial news photographers couldn’t get. So I took quite a lot of photographs as well as movies, and these could be sold to the newspapers to get a few bucks. A lot of times we’d know about a picket line or something that was going to happen, we could scoop the press, and that’s what made our photos valuable.99

Members of the workers’ camera groups were in the forefront of a struggle over what constituted the most vital subject matter of photography. They rejected, of course) the romantic landscapes and nudes of the Pictorialists, who at this time still dominated the photographic salons; and they had no interest in the products being advertised or film stars being glamorized by pioneer commercial photographers such as Edward Steichen. They also, however, gave low priority to the type of subjects then being treated by the serious artists who were battling for the aesthetic acceptance of “straight” photography: the cloud formations, for example, of Alfred Stieglitz, the details of plant life pictured by Paul Strand, the shells and peppers of Edward Weston. Emancipation from the influence of established photographic tendencies nevertheless did not come easily. Thus while, at the 4th Annual Photo Exhibition

of the Japanese Workers’ Camera Club (December 1929 - January 1930), the New York artists “contributed photographs mainly concerned with proletarian life and the class struggle,” the members of a California workers’ photo group, “relaxing under a more gentle climate (?), are represented by photographs picturing scenes of water, storm, the changing seasons of the year, and nature in its variety of moods.” One photographer, it was reported, “even probes abstractions with photos called ‘line study’, ‘design’, and ‘still life’.”100 In 1931, when a “Proletarian Photo” exhibition was being planned by the Workers’ Film and Photo League, it was felt necessary to point out:

It is to be understood that worker-photographers intending to exhibit ... are to concentrate on the photo of class-struggle and proletarian life. No bourgeois portraiture, nudes, landscapes, still lifes, will be exhibited.101

Some precedents for the type of photographic content fought for by the workers’ photo groups had been established prior to 1930. Most significantly, of course, there were the extraordinary early documents of slum life and child labor produced by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. The next step in the direction of a social-realist aesthetic was the shift several important photographers made during the twenties toward industrial subjects. In 1922, for example, Weston took a series of shots of the Armco Steel plant in Ohio, introducing the iconography of pipes and smokestacks into American photography. In the same vein were Charles Sheeler’s commissioned photographs, made in 1927, of the Ford River Rouge plant in Michigan. His monumental, highly detailed and objective studies of power house flues, slag buggies, stamping presses, etc., were widely disseminated and very influential (on the strength of them Sheeler was invited to photograph in the Soviet Union, but he declined the offer).102 Continuing in Sheeler’s tradition, but with less of a detached, scientific eye,103 was Margaret Bourke-White, who felt an enthusiasm for machinery akin to that of Siqueiros and Rivera. She wrote in 1931:

In this industrial age, if one understands the industry of a people, one comes close to the heart of that people.... Through the American factories beats the pulse of the people. There is a power and vitality in these industries that is a direct expression of the power and vitality of our industrial nation. In the factories is evolved an unconscious beauty. The machine was never designed to be beautiful. It has symmetry and force because it has no decoration. Not a line is wasted. Every curve of the machine, every attitude of the worker has an eloquent simplicity, a vital beauty.104

Bourke-White made her reputation with several series of industrial subjects made for the press and corporate clients in the late twenties, including photographs of the Niagara Falls Power Company (l928), Otis Steel in Cleveland (1928), the Ford Motor Company in Detroit (1929), the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York (1929), and ore loading docks in Superior, Wisconsin (l929). She was hired as an associate editor of Fortune magazine prior to its first appearance in February 1930, and in subsequent years concentrated on the pictorial coverage of industrial processes for that journal. (Her first photo

story detailed the fate of pigs at the Swift meat packing plant in Chicago.) In 1930, 1931, and 1932, Bourke-White photographed in the Soviet Union, eagerly documenting – for the press and books such as her Eyes on Russia, 1931– the impact of the Five Year Plan, in shots of “the world’s biggest dam,” “the world’s largest blast furnace”, electric generators, bridges under construction, textile mills, tractor plants, etc. Unlike Sheeler, Bourke-White frequently photographed workers as well as machinery, but her shots of this period seldom had the force of a Lewis Hine image either in exposing exploitation or in capturing the dignity of labor.105 Less excited by the prospect of a machine aesthetic was Paul Strand (who had nevertheless lovingly photographed the sprocket drive of his Akeley motion-picture camera). In the early twenties he had written to an Italian correspondent:

We are not ... particularly sympathetic to the somewhat hysterical attitude of the Futurists toward the machine. We in America are not fighting, as it may be somewhat natural to do in Italy, away from the tentacles of a medieval tradition towards a neurasthenic embrace of the new God. We have it with us and upon us with a vengeance, and we will have to do something about it eventually.... The new God must be humanized unless it in turn dehumanizes us.106

Strand’s attitude was to inform both his own work, as he became increasingly radicalized during the thirties (and turned his attention toward film), and that of other photographers, such as Hine, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and the often anonymous members of the FPL, who developed a version of the social-realist aesthetic turning more on people than on things. Lewis Hine’s work in the Depression years shared characteristics both of the positive portrayals of working life he had begun in the twenties – which had climaxed in his 1931 Empire State Building series and the 1932 publication of Men at Work – and of his outraged pre-war exposés of child labor. In 1931 he photographed rural victims of a drought in Arkansas in imagery which strikingly prefigured the better known work of Farm Security Administration photographers later in the decade. In their stark but undramatized directness, shots such as Another of the Children of War Vets Living in Foothills of Ozarks, Who Lost All of His Foodstuffs in the Drought and Colored Beneficiary of the Red Cross on Ozark Foothills helped give precise definition to the concept of socially-conscious documentary photography, Other significant Hine work of the period included a 1933 series depicting construction workers on the new dam projects of the Tennessee Valley, for the TVA, and a group of photographs taken in 1934 of transient hobos, in their own jungles and in camps administered by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.107 In 1931-33 Walker Evans and Ben Shahn were roommates in Greenwich Village, and both at this time made important contributions to social documentary photography. Their styles, of course, differed: with Evans, the photographer by vocation, images were studied and formally composed, while the shots of Shahn, who considered himself primarily a painter, were spontaneous and seemingly

composed by chance. Evans photographed street scenes in Brooklyn, the Fulton fish market, a Bowery lunchroom, a waterfront poolroom, a flophouse entrance. He also did some of the most brilliant photography of his career in 1932 in illustrating Carleton Beals’s book The Crime of Cuba, with shots of shanty towns and the dock workers and street vendors of Havana.108 Shahn photographed working-class children in the streets, youths at play, the unemployed and destitute seated on steps and park benches, a vagrant asleep atop an abandoned baby carriage. In 1934-35, in preparation for a mural series he was commissioned, with Lou Block, to paint at the Rikers Island Penitentiary, he made an extensive photographic study of street life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and photographed in reformatories and prisons. Shahn also covered labor demonstrations, including the May First parade in 1935 of the Artist Union, in which he was active.109 In 1934 the photographer Willard Van Dyke wrote of his San Francisco colleague, Dorothea Lange, that “she sees the final criticism of her work in the reaction to it of some person who might view it fifty years from now. It is her hope,” he continued, “that such a person would see in her work a record of the people of her time, a record valid of the day and place wherein made, although necessarily incomplete in the sense of the entire contemporary movement.” Lange had not started out as a documentary photographer; it was only in response to Depression conditions and rising labor militancy that she left her portrait studio and took her camera into the street. In 1933, she photographed the May Day demonstrations; the following year, she covered the general strike (Workers, Unite!, a shot of a union leader at the microphone, was used to illustrate an article on the strike in the Survey Graphic). Van Dyke described her method of operation at this time:

In an old Ford she drives to a place most likely to yield subjects consistent with her general sympathies. Unlike the newspaper reporter, she has no news or editorial policies to direct her movements: it is only her deeply personal sympathies for the unfortunates, the downtrodden, the misfits, among her contemporaries that provide the impetus for her expedition. She may park her car at the waterfront during a strike, perhaps at a meeting of unemployed, by sleepers in the city square, at transient shelters – breadlines, parades, or demonstrations. Here she waits with her camera open and unconcealed, her mind ready.

One of the powerful images which resulted from this strategy was White Angel Breadline (1934), which captured simultaneously the faceless anonymity and the intensely personal suffering of those who had to rely on charity to survive. Early in 1935 Lange began her documentation of the migrant agricultural workers in California, which was to become her major preoccupation in the later years of the decade.110 In Lange’s case, there was a direct connection between the subject matter of her photographs and her political sentiments. (She was invited to CP meetings, and though she never joined the Party, she had friends who did: “I’m not sure it wasn’t the right thing to do in those days,” she later observed.111) This was

equally true of the photographers connected with the Workers’ Film and Photo League and its forerunners, for whom documentation of living and working .conditions and of manifestations of class struggle were inseparable from their own political activism (though, of course, individuals differed in the extent of their involvement with radical causes). The pattern for openly committed social documentary photography of the decade was set by the 1929-30 exhibition of the Japanese Workers’ Camera Club, in which the New York contingent pictured

... scenes of May Day, demonstrations of food workers, laborers at construction work, a factory, fishermen, etc. Class consciousness is the theme of pictures bearing the titles: Sabotage, Movement, Workers, Speed-Up, Exploitation, Red Day, Mobilization to Work, etc.

At this time the Club announced that it was “particularly interested in photographs of industrial and farm life, natural scenes, workers’ homes, labor sports, machines, engines, and pictures of individual workers at their tasks,” and gave notice of an exhibition scheduled for February 1930 of photographs “dealing with the life of the workers in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Central and South America.”112 By 1933, the general scope of such workers’ photo exhibits remained the same, but had expanded to include pictorial commentary, from a Left perspective, on Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. For a major exhibition in the fall, the Workers’ Film and Photo League assembled a collection of photographs intended to portray “’America Today’ and all the social and economic transformations it has undergone during the last four years.” Subjects which would be covered included unemployment, housing conditions, militarism, and child misery; and a later appeal for entries was even more explicit, calling for “pictures from North, South and West, pictures of industry, of farming, of unemployment, misery, stagnation, reforestation camps, child labor, political speakers, the ‘New Deal’, pictures of struggle, strikes, picket lines, demonstrations, etc.”113 The extent to which such subjects remained of priority importance to the League is indicated by several published calls for photographs and reports of work from around the country in 1935. In January of that year, the National Photo Exchange stipulated the nature of the material it wished members to submit:

One - General photos of Social and Economic Implication. For example: unemployed workers, child misery, breadlines, prostitution, housing conditions, destruction of crops, man-power replacing machinery. Two - Labor Actions. For example: strikes, demonstrations, protest meetings. Three - Demonstrations Against War and Fascism.114

In the same month the New York FPL announced some forthcoming photo exhibitions. “The City Child”– “undoubtedly the most important photographic document the New York League has made”– was designed to show the “home, school, and recreational background of the New York City child” and would be accompanied by statistical charts. “City Streets” was scheduled for April and was envisaged as a “comparative photo exhibit on this subject” in which five

photographic organizations of the Metropolitan area would be invited to participate.115 The Chicago Film and Photo League planned to take part jointly with the Workers’ International Relief in a “campaign to expose the horrible living conditions of the Negro and white workers in Chicago’s notoriously impoverished South Side.”

Efforts will be made during the next weeks to make a photographic survey of the general living conditions in the district, with particular attention to the alarming effects of malnutrition on the children of the workers, both employed and unemployed. The evidence will be used in public hearings to arouse the entire working class of Chicago against the starvation program of the city and federal governments.116

In Detroit, a photo display was held on the subject of the “Forgotten Man”. The San Francisco Film and Photo League published an intriguing “proposed plan of work” which outlined a scheme to expand from scenes of proletarian life to embrace a complete pictorial class analysis of American society:

We want to seek subjects that are powerful and representative factors in the present struggle of social forces. We want bankers, workers, farmers (rich and poor), white collar workers, policemen, politicians, soldiers, strikers, scabs, wandering youth, stock brokers and so on and so on. We want to see them in relation to those things they do, where they live, how they work, how they play, what they read and what they think. In other words we want to see them as they are in their most significant aspects. This means seeing them in relation to each other. We want this most of all because in this period of economic crisis the whole population is shifting into groups with equally uniform demands. In this shaking down of people into more and more clearly defined classes lies the prospect of vast social change.

Subjects which were specifically suggested included: “1. Waterfront, San Francisco. 2. S.E.R.A. Work Relief. 3. White Collars. 4. The New Legislature. 5. Cold. 6. Disarmament or the Next War. 7. Section 7A (of the National Industrial Recovery Act).”117 Examples of the work of Film and Photo League photographers are now difficult to locate, but a sampling of issues of the heavily illustrated Labor Defender from 1930 gives a good indication of the actual practice of their predecessors. As might be expected, coverage centered on the unemployed: standing in breadlines, evicted from their homes with furniture piled on the sidewalk, queuing in joblines, surging forward at employment agencies, demonstrating in the streets, undergoing police attacks (a dynamic high-angle shot of the March 6 unemployment demonstration in New York showed running demonstrators pursued by uniformed and plainclothes policemen, one with his baton raised: the caption read, “[police chief] Whalen testified that no clubs were used by uniformed and ununiformed police on Union Square....”Another category of photographs depicted employed workers – miners, railroad men,

lumberjacks – often in the course of a strike. Widespread attention was paid to demonstrations, street fighting, mass funeral marches, etc. A few photographs pictured individual militants (as, for instance, March 6 demonstration leaders William Z. Foster, Robert Minor, and Israel Amter being led in shackles from the Supreme Court), while others covered meetings and conferences of the International Labor Defense. There were also photographs from foreign sources, both exposing exploitation and oppression (in countries such as Haiti), and portraying socialist construction and working conditions in the USSR.118 The most commonly employed method of imparting a specifically Communist point of view to a photograph, where this was desired, was incorporating into the shot either a known Communist leader, or, much more commonly (there was no cult of personality in the CPUSA at the time), the banners of the Party or of a party-affiliated labor union or mass organization. Simple documentation of party activities (such as Walker Evans’s series to illustrate a Fortune article in 1934) did not, of course, imply a commitment on the part of the photographer to the CP program.119 If radical photography of the early thirties was unrelentingly social realist in content, it was determinedly documentary in technique. Objects were not arranged for the camera, subjects were seldom posed. Following the lead of men such as Hine, Strand, and Weston,120 the left-wing photographers totally rejected such aesthetic fads as soft focus, gum prints, and manipulation of the image (although they were forced occasionally to resort to retouching to overcome limitations in reproduction techniques). They worked normally with available light or flash, and were quick to adopt the “miniature” (35mm) camera in order to photograph in the streets inconspicuously and with ease of action. In composition, the predominant trend in social documentary photography of the period was toward unstudied groupings, with subjects caught unawares and movements strikingly arrested. Though the immobile, classically balanced imagery of Paul Strand probably exerted a certain influence, a more potent model was the spontaneous style of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who exhibited in New York in 1932 (and again in 1935, in a joint show with Evans). Ben Shahn, for example, was deeply impressed by Cartier-Bresson’s work, and became probably the most significant American photographer of the time utilizing a freewheeling, highly mobile approach to his subject. Shahn’s pictures, with their gazes out of frame, multiply opposed movements, and figures bisected at the edge of the image area, strongly recall in visual impact the paintings of Degas. (One of the determining factors of this style was technical: Davis Pratt records that Shahn “often ... used a right-angle view finder, which made formal composition difficult and sometimes resulted in severed heads and bodies; however, this device permitted him to record his subject unaware and added a powerful spontaneity to his pictures.”)121 Also derivative from Degas and his successors was the series concept in the documentation of social life. Always present, of course, in a group of photographs taken to illustrate an article or a book, or in a photographic exhibit

on a single theme, the concept was systematically applied by the Film and Photo League in their more ambitious undertakings, such as the Chicago and San Francisco projects described above. Predicated on the notion that a single image takes on added significance in a context of other, related images, the concept of the documentary series was to be evolved to a high level in Roy Stryker’s photography unit at the Farm Security Administration in the later thirties. In left-wing journals, the political implications of documentary photography as opposed to imagery of artificially-lit, posed, costumed scenes, epitomized by Hollywood, were demonstrated by means of contrast juxtaposition. Experimental Cinema, in 1934, illustrated “Hollywood versus American Reality” by printing a still from the MGM movie The Bowery alongside a photograph of “the Bowery as it actually is” taken by the New York Workers’ Film and Photo League. In commentary on the film, the magazine noted:

Unseen are the hungry derelicts in this section, wandering workers, homeless, products of a ruthless capitalism. We are shown beer barons and gangsters enjoying privileges with women and politicians. Hollywood knows what it is doing when it attempts to keep reality from the masses and gives them instead “entertainment” – by – escape to the past.

Similarly, New Theatre in April 1935 published a shot of a real, emaciated “war baby” (from Lawrence Stallings’ book of documentary photographs, From the First World War) next to a still of Shirley Temple and playmate toddlers in diapers, ammunition belts and uniform caps, from the short War Babies.122 Such juxtapositions point to the possibility of montage in still photography, which several of the radical artists and groups operating at the time were aware of. There was, first, what might be termed “internal montage”, or the presence of sharply contradictory or ironically opposed elements within a single image. A pair of stills by Leo Seltzer of the New York FPL recently published illustrate the principle: in East River an unemployed man with crutches and rough plaster cast on his leg gazes across the harbor to a floating hospital (the montage is inconclusive, since one cannot tell if the man did, or did not, receive treatment there); in Pray for Work: Lower East Side a solitary, out-of-work bystander observes a group of Salvation Army ladies, heads bowed in prayer, on the other side of the street.123 A second variation of the concept was employed in the side-by-side or sequential display of contrasting images in published layouts or photo exhibitions. John L. Spivak’s use of photographs in Georgia Nigger in this way has been described, and the San Francisco FPL’s call for shots of “bankers, workers, farmers (rich and poor) ...“ clearly points to a montage-based documentation. Technical and financial limitations in half-tone reproduction precluded the incorporation of photographic spreads in journals such as the Daily Worker and The New Masses in the early thirties, and probably inhibited the further development of montage arrangement at this time.124 Finally, there was the practice, under the influence of European artists like John Heartfield, of photomontage. The filmmaker Lewis Jacobs, for a time associated

with the New York Film and Photo League, notes that he was “much excited” by Heartfield’s work, and “did some photos of a similar nature about the Depression in America, photomontages and things.”125 At about the same time, in March 1935, the Nature Friends Photo Group, affiliated with the National Film and Photo League, planned to hold an exhibition of photos, “including a number of photomontages”.126 None of this work, presumably, survives, but in the pages of the Labor Defender there are some examples of the technique. Thus the “peace conference” held in London in 1930 was lampooned in a photomontage under the title “The Peace Pipe!” and aptly described in the caption: “General Dawes, Yankee ambassador in London, smokes it calmly, unaware that we have given it its true meaning by attaching a cannon to it, with battle smoke coming from it.” (The composition, analogous to Heartfield’s later Hymn to the Forces of Yesterday, which depicted a cathedral constructed of bombs, gave visual expression to the page’s text: “The imperialists have met in London – to discuss how best to look peaceful while developing more efficient and deadly instruments of war.”) An example of a slightly different: kind was a photomontage of images of a slave cabin in the South and of a poor black farmer with a primitive plow, linked by a chain which, we are told, is “the one with which Laura Wood, 65-year-old Negro woman, was hung by Southern landowners, near Salisbury, N.C.”127

* There are obvious dangers to the type of analysis undertaken in this essay, which attempts to subsume developments in four disparate arts under a single set of concepts. But the very possibility of describing, without too forced a use of language, shared characteristics of literature, painting, theatre, and photography by means of the notions of social realism, documentary, and montage, reveals the extent to which left-wing artists in the fevered milieu of the early Depression years were wrestling with a common problem: how to bridge the gap between politics and art. ________________________________________________________________________                                                                                                                1 This unpublished essay was written in 1977 as an intended second chapter of the author’s

PhD dissertation Radical Cinema in the United States, 1930-1942: The Work of the Film and Photo League, Nykino, and Frontier Films (Radio-Television-Film, Northwestern University). In the event it was not included. It has not been revised except for minor modifications to enable it to stand alone.

2 Leo Hurwitz, “One Man’s Voyage: Ideas and Films in the 1930’s,” Cinema Journal 15:1 (Fall 1975), 8.

3 John Dos Passos, quoted in Daniel Aron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon, 1965), 208. 4 Quoted in Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973), 362. 5 Figures given at the 1934 CP convention, cited in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American

Communist Party: A Critical History (New York: Praeger, 1962), 225. 6 William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America (New York: Coward-McCann, 1932), 256; Party

Organizer 6:2 (Feb 1933), 40. 7 Foster, 232. 8 See “Extracts from a Resolution of the ECCI Political Secretariat on the Negro Question in the

United States” (October 26, 1930) in Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents (London: Frank Cass, 1971), III, 130-33.

                                                                                                               9 On the Scottsboro case, see e.g. Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, Scottsboro Boy (Garden

City, NY: Doubleday, 1951) and Allan Chalmers. They Shall Be Free (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951). See also Nancy Cunard, “Scottsboro”, Close Up 10:3 (Sep 1933), 274-78: publication of this article in an English film journal is an indication of the extent of international interest in the case.

10 Foster, 113. 11 Earl Browder, “The Roosevelt ‘New Deal’ and Fascism”, Daily Worker [DW], Jul 8, 1933, 5;

Limbach, “Revolution of the Eagle”, DW, Aug 2, 1933, 6; DW, Oct 25, 1933, 1, and Nov 2, 1933, 1.

12 Quoted in Ulam, 367. 13 The New Masses [NM] 6:9 (Feb 1931), 6. 14 Aaron, 238. 15 Aaron, 240-47. John Reed Club aims were described, in the document finally adopted, as

follows: “(a) To make the Club a functioning center of proletarian culture; to clarify and elaborate the

point of view of proletarian as opposed to bourgeois culture; to extend the influence of the Club and the revolutionary working class movement.

“(b) To create and publish art and literature of a proletarian character; to make familiar in this country the art and literature of the world proletariat, and

particularly that of the Soviet Union; to develop the critique of bourgeois and working class culture; to develop organizational techniques for establishing and consolidating contacts of the Clubs with potentially sympathetic elements; to assist in developing (through cooperation with the Workers’ Cultural Federation and other revolutionary organizations) worker-writers and worker-artists; to render technical assistance to the organized revolutionary movement.” (Quoted in Oakley Johnson, “The John Reed Club Convention,” NM 8:1 (Jul 1932), 15.

16 DW, Nov 30, 1930, 1, and May 20, 1931, 3. 17 DW, Oct 7, 1931, 2; Aaron, 195-96; Theodore Dreiser, ed., Harlan Miners Speak (New York:

Harcourt Brace, 1932); W.A. Swanberg, Dreiser (New York: Bantam, 1967), 461-66. 18 DW, Feb 9, 1932, 2, and Feb 12, 1932, 1; Aaron, 199. 19 Aaron, 213-15, 437. 20 Aaron, 298-300. 21 Quoted in Henry Hart, ed., American Writers’ Congress (New York: International Publishers,

1935), 10-11. 22 Joseph Freeman, in Granville Hicks et al., eds., Proletarian Literature in the United States: An

Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 25-26. 23 Michael Gold, quoted in Aaron, 221-22. 24 Aaron, 225-26. 25 Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (New York: Macaulay, 1932); Sherwood Anderson, Beyond

Desire (New York: Liveright, 1932); Dorothy Myra Page, Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (New York: International Publishers, 1932).

26 On the proletarian novel of the thirties, see Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1956), Chapters 6-8.

27 Proletarian Literature in the United States, 212; Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depresson Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 195.

28 Gold, in NM 5:8 (Jan 1930), 21. 29 Joseph Kalar, in NM 5:11 (Apr 1930), 21. 30 Proletarian Literature in the United States, 211-12. 31 William Stott has traced this theme of personalized documentary in detail. See Stott,

Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University, 1973), Chapter 3. 32 Lauren Gilfillan, I Went to Pit College (New York: The Literary Guild, 1934). 33 Pells, 196. 34 John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (New York: Pocket Books, 1952), 59. 35 Author’s Note, in Charles Yale Harrison, A Child is Born (New York: Jonathan Cape &

Harrison Smith, 1931), n.p.; George Marlen [George Spiro], The Road: A Romance of the Proletarian Revolution (New York: Red Star, 1932), 364-67.

                                                                                                               36 Arnold B. Armstrong, Parched Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1934); Clara Weatherwax [Clara

Strang], Marching! Marching! (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 209. 37 William Rollins, Jr., The Shadow Before (New York: McBride, 1934), 212-15, 182-83. 38 John L. Spivak, Georgia Nigger (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932), Postscript,

Appendix. 39 Stott, 173-75. 40 Harry Alan Potamkin, “Paris Commune”. NM 8:12 (Aug 1933), 12; David Wolff [Ben

Maddow], “August 22, 1927” in Proletarian Literature in the United States, 199. Maddow’s poem is a slightly revised version of “August 22, 1927-1933”, published in NM 8:12 (Aug 1933), 11.

41 Quoted in David Shapiro, ed., Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: Ungar, 1973), 20. 42 Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now (Greenwich,

Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1989), 16, 63. 43 Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930’s (New York: Praeger,

1974), 46. 44 I have not been able to discover any membership figures for the Artists Union. 45 Information on the government arts programs is derived from O’Connor; Baigell; Richard D.

McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1973); and Forbes Watson, American Painting Today (Washington, DC: American Federation of Arts, 1939).

46 O’Connor, 21. 47 Shapiro, 4. 48 See e.g. William C. Agee, The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America (New York: Whitney

Museum of American Art, 1968). 49 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 21. 50 Frederick S. Wight, Milestones of American Painting in Our Century (New York: Chanticleer,

1949), 60. 51 McKinzie, 31. 52 Diego Rivera, Portrait of America, text by Bertram D. Wolfe (New York: Covici Friede, 1934),

19. 53 The “Ford Massacre” of unemployed hunger marchers occurred in March 1932, but it is not

surprising that it was not featured in Rivera’s murals, which were financed by Edsel Ford. Rivera likened himself to a “guerilla fighter” and argued that “on the walls of the bourgeoisie, painting cannot always have as fighting an aspect as it could on the walls, let us say, of a revolutionary school” (Rivera, in Shapiro, 62).

54 DW, Jan 26, 1933, 2; John Kwait, in Shapiro, 66; Jacob Burck, in Shapiro, 72. 55 For descriptions and illustrations of the New Workers’ School murals, see Rivera, Portrait of

America. 56 Rivera, 24-29; McKinzie, 24-26. Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco included a portrait of

Lenin as a stately figure looming over a multi-racial Red Army in his 1931 series of frescoes for the New School, New York.

57 Rivera, in Shapiro, 63; Selden Rodman, Portrait of the Artist as an American: Ben Shahn, A Biography with Pictures (New York: Harper, 1951), 120.

58 DW, Jan 26, 1933, 2. 59 Rivera, 24. 60 Rivera, 20, 25. 61 Rivera, 28. 62 Kwait, in Shapiro, 67. 63 Siqueiros, 24-25. The Declaration was drawn up by Siqueiros and signed by, among others,

Rivera and Orozco. 64 Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1967),

99, 103. 65 B. Reines, “The Workers’ Laboratory Theatre of the WIR”, Workers’ Theatre [WT], Jul 1931, 8;

Karen Malpede Taylor, People’s Theatre in Amerika (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1972), 39. On radical theatre of the period, see also Jay Williams, Stage Left (New York: Scribner’s, 1974).

66 Albert Prentis, “Basic Principles”, WT, May 1931, 1; New Theatre [NT], Feb 1935, 3. 67 NT, Feb 1935, 27.

                                                                                                               68 On the Group Theatre, see Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre

and the Thirties (New York: Knopf, 1945). Clurman records that the Group became aware of the possibility of drawing a working-class audience during the run of 1931— (1931), but that they subsequently failed to tap it: “The production of 1931 — had made us aware, for the first time, of a new audience.... We sensed its stirring, but we did not yet fully appreciate its value. Mordecai Gorelik, who designed the sets for 1931 –, tried to call our attention to it. But he had an impatient manner and an extremist approach – or so it seemed to us. It appeared that he wanted us to abandon Broadway at once to reach the audience that couldn’t afford Broadway prices. Broadway, he thought, was hopeless. We were impatient with his impatience. Gorelik became instrumental in forming a new theatre unit, which came to be known as the Theatre Collective – one of the first off-Broadway groups of the time.” (pp. 72-73).

69 WT, Aug 1932, 2. Many of the plays were offered also in languages other than English, including German, Hungarian, Yiddish, Yugoslavian, and Ukrainian.

70 In February 1932 Steel, a three-act play, was performed in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs by Margaret Bourke-White depicting steel production in the USSR – an experiment in multi-media montage.

71 John E. Bonn, “Dram Buro Report”, WT, May 1932, 7. 72 See Gerald Weales, Clifford Odets: Playwright (New York: Pegasus, 1971), 48. 73 Langston Hughes, Scottsboro Limited (New York: Golden Stair, 1932), n.p. 74 See Morgan Y. Himelstein, Drama Was a Weapon: The Left-Wing Theatre in New York 1929-1941

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1963), 26-27. 75 See Weales, 54. 76 Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Can You Hear Their Voices? (Poughkeepsie, NY:

Experimental Theatre of Vassar College, 1931), 35, 36, 61-62, 70. 77 “These troupes [WLT and Prolet-Buehne] and their repertory were closely patterned on

similar German mobile stage units such as the Kolonne Links and Rotes Sprachrohr, as well as on the Blue Blouse troupes of Soviet Russia. Both the German and Russian prototypes dressed in blouses and overalls, grouped themselves on the platform or stage, chanting through megaphones in solo or mass voices. The scripts were terse and journalistic.” Mordecai Gorelik, New Theatres for Old (New York: Samuel French, 1940), 402. The development of agitprop groups was an international trend in radical theatre in the late twenties and early thirties. In 1930 a British delegate to the recent World Congress of Workers’ Theatre Groups, held in Moscow (at which the US was unrepresented), wrote to The New Masses: “The discussions at the Conference showed that the general line of development in all capitalist countries was remarkably similar, although the stages reached differed widely ... in no capitalist country can the naturalistic stage be considered the ideal propaganda weapon of the proletariat. It demands too much in the way of resources, it is static, it invites the workers to come to it instead of going to where the workers are found. So there has grown up what is called for want of a better name the ‘Cabaret’ form, for which a stage, curtains, and lighting are unnecessary, where properties can be transported by hand, and a performance of which can be given literally anywhere. ”Tom Thomas, letter, NM, 6:6 (Nov 1930), 21.

78 H. Shapiro, “Training the Actor for the Proletarian Theatre”, WT, Jul 1931, 3. 79 Quoted in Ben Blake, The Awakening of the American Theatre (New York: Tomorrow, 1935), 22;

Bonn, quoted in Williams, 50. 80 “Red Spotlight”, WT, Dec 1931, 27. 81 Bonn, in WT, May 1932, quoted in Blake, 23. 82 American workers’ theatre productions were criticized from Moscow in 1934 for “too much

schematism and sloganism”. See NT, Sep 1934, 3. 83 NT, Sep-Oct 1933, 3. 84 According to Himelstein, plans to stage Peace on Earth nonrealistically were dropped during

rehearsal. 85 Albert Maltz, Black Pit (New York: Putnam, 1935), 65. 86 Clifford Odets, Two Plays (New York: Random House, 1935), 52. An exception to the realist

characterization – and a survival from agitprop theatre – is the corrupt union boss Fatt, who is “of porcine appearance”, speaks directly to the audience, and “represents the capitalist system throughout.”

                                                                                                               87 Herbert Kline, “The New Plays: New Masses - New Theatre Prize Winners”, NT, March 1935,

23. In 1938, Bertolt Brecht wrote: “What was known as ‘agitprop’ art, which a number of second-rate noses were turned up at, was a mine of novel artistic techniques and ways of expression. Magnificent and long-forgotten elements from periods of truly popular art cropped up there, boldly adapted to the new social ends. Daring cuts and compositions, beautiful simplifications (alongside misconceived ones): in all this there was often an astonishing economy and elegance and a fearless eye for complexity. A lot of it may have been primitive, but it was never primitive with the kind of primitivity that affected the supposedly varied psychological portrayals of bourgeois art.” John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), 111.

88 Odets’s immediate source was an article, “Taxi Strike”, by Joseph North in the April 3, 1934, issue of The New Masses.

89 Hallie Flanagan had toured Europe and the Soviet Union studying comparative theatre under a Guggenheim fellowship in 1926-27. Her book Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre (New York: Coward-McCann, 1928) does not, however, mention Piscator.

90 Flanagan and Clifford, 1-2. 91 John Wexley, They Shall Not Die (New York: Knopf, 1934); Himelstein, 131. The production

was designed by Lee Simonson. In New Theatre magazine (and later in his book New Theatres for Old), Mordecai Gorelik published his conception of a non-Naturalistic setting for the Dexter courtroom scene. It featured a stylized mural depicting a court, caged prisoners, etc., and above it a montage of projected photographs showing mass rallies and demonstrations. The intention, Gorelik explained, was to make it clear that the case was “being tried in the streets of the U.S. as well as in the Dexter courtroom .” See NT, Feb 1934, 6, and Gorelik, facing 428.

92 John Dos Passos, Airways Inc. (New York: Macaulay, 1928), 91. There is an interesting parallel to this scene in the finale to the Living Newspaper Injunction Granted (l936), in which anti-labor speeches by members of the Steel and Iron Institute are interspersed with entrances by various CIO union groups, culminating in a statement by John L. Lewis.

93 Flanagan and Clifford, vii. 94 Claire and Paul Sifton, 1931 –: A Play (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931); Etienne Karnot, in

NM 8:10 (Jun 1933), 30. 95 Gorelik, 403; Williams, 89. 96 Quoted in Williams, 91. 97 George Sklar and Albert Maltz, Peace on Earth: An Anti-War Play in Three Acts (New York:

Samuel French, 1934), 110; Ernst Toller, Man and the Masses (Masse Mensch), trans. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Doubleday Page, 1934), 25-26.

98 Filmfront 1:2 (Jan 7, 1935), 12. 99 Leo Seltzer, in Russell Campbell, “’A Total and Realistic Experience’: Interview with Leo

Seltzer”, Jump Cut 14 (1977), 26. 100 Frances Strauss, “”Workers’ Photo Exhibit”, NM 5:9 (Feb 1930), 20. 101 NM 7:1 (Jun 1931), 22. 102 Martin Friedman, Charles Sheeler (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1975), 71. 103 Perhaps “scientific” is not the most appropriate word to describe Sheeler’s photography,

which betrayed the same tendency toward idealization inherent in his painting, and which was likewise criticized by the Left. Charles Corwin wrote: “Sheeler approaches the industrial landscape, whether it be farm buildings, textile mills, or oil refineries, with the same sort of piety Fra Angelico used toward angels. His architecture remains pure and uncontaminated by any trace of humans or human activities, an industrialist’s heaven where factories work themselves. In revealing the beauty of factory architecture, Sheeler has become the Raphael of the Fords. Who is it that will be the Giotto of the U.A.W.?” DW, Feb 4, 1949, l2, quoted in Friedman, 213.

104 Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931), 22. 105 Particularly in the early thirties, Bourke-White’s politics were unformed. (“I did not go to the

USSR to study it as a political and social experiment,” she wrote, “1 knew very little about its politics and sociology.“) She was, however, a member of the Advisory Board of the Film and Photo League, and her Soviet photographs proved valuable to radicals. See note 70 above. She also shot some documentary movie footage in the Soviet Union, described at its New

                                                                                                               York showing as consisting of “colorful and intimate close-ups”. DW, Oct 2, 1934, 5.

106 Paul Strand, quoted in Michael E. Hoffman, ed., Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1976), 149.

107 Some of these photographs were published in Survey Graphic, January 1934 and September 1934. In the later thirties Hine, down on his luck, made contact with the Photo League, where his photography was honored and he became an influential presence until his death in 1940.

108 Evans also photographed details of Rivera’s New Workers’ School murals for the book Portrait of America.

109 The Rikers Island project was cancelled by the authorities as the artists were transferring their sketches to the walls of the penitentiary.

110 Willard Van Dyke, “The Photographs of Dorothea Lange – A Critical Analysis”, Camera Craft 41:10 (Oct 1934), 461, 464; Survey Graphic 22:9 (Sep 1934).

111 Dorothea Lange, in Suzanne Riess, Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer (Berkeley: University of California Regional Oral History Office, 1968), 151-52.

112 Strauss, 20; NM 5:8 (Jan 1930), 20. 113 DW, Aug l1, 1933, 5, and Oct 2l, 1933, 7. Among the members of the sponsoring committee of

the “America Today” exhibition, which opened in November, were Margaret Bourke-White, Joseph Freeman, Ralph Steiner, Berenice Abbott, David Platt, and Irving Lerner.

114 “Send Photos to the National Exchange!”, Filmfront 1:2 (Jan 7, 1935), 13. 115 Filmfront 1:3 (Jan 28, 1935), 14. 116 “The Fight Against South Side Misery in Chicago”, Filmfront 1:2 (Jan 7, 1935), 13. 117 Filmfront [1:5] (Mar 15, 1935), 9. 118 See Labor Defender, various issues of 1930, especially April, 63. 119 See Fortune 10:3 (Sep 1934), 69, 73. 120 In 1933, “Lens” (Samuel Brody) reported in the Daily Worker that Edward Weston had

informed the New York Workers’ Film and Photo League that he saw no sense in contributing to the “America Today” exhibition, “unless you could use the social relations of trees and rocks.” Brody commented, “No Ed, we can’t use em.... Might spoil your business with the fat dames at twenty dollars a print if we did.” Two weeks later Brody retracted the remark. “Your Lens hereby reports itself completely out of focus in its crack about Edward Weston a couple weeks ago.... Permit me to eat dirt in full view of all my readers and take it all back.... Tom Brandon, National Secretary of the Workers’ Film and Photo League, is good and sore and wants me to inform you that Weston reads the Daily and is a friend....” ”Lens,” “Flashes and Close-ups”, DW, Sep 5, 1933, 5, and Sep 19, 1933, 6.

121 Davis Pratt, ed., The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1975), viii. For pertinent examples of Shahn’s work, see the photographs reproduced on pp. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, l3, 15, 21, 26, 27, 31, 33, etc.

122 Experimental Cinema 1:5 (1934), 25, 40; NT, Apr 1935, 16. 123 Jump Cut 14 (1977), 26, 29. 124 The liberal journal Survey Graphic published a photographic spread inspired by montage

principles in its December 1933 issue (p. 586). Entitled “Current Economics (4th Year),” it juxtaposed photographs of wealthy opera- goers in the Metropolitan’s “Diamond Horseshoe”, unemployed veterans applying for work at the Ford Motor Co. in Detroit, milk dealers dumping their product in a price war in New York State, farmers defying lawmen in an attempt to prevent a farm sale in Iowa, striking coal miners marching in Pennsylvania, and an NRA parade in New York City.

125 Lewis Jacobs, interview with author, April 13, 1977. The photomontages were done at Leo Seltzer’s urging in a successful attempt to obtain work in the photography department of the WPA.

126 Filmfront 1:3 (Jan 28, 1935), 15. 127 Labor Defender, Feb 1930, 27, and Apr 1930, 73.