American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–39: Equivocal Commitments

281 Pages·1986·27.793 MB·English

by  Eric Homberger (auth.)

AMERICAN WRITERS AND RADICAL POLITICS, 1900-39
Also by Eric Homberger
A CHRONOLOGICAL CHECKLIST OF THE
PERIODICAL POEMS OF SYLVIA PLATH
THE CAMBRIDGE MIND: NINETY YEARS OF THE
'CAMBRIDGE REVIEW' 1879-1969
(editor with Simon Schama and William Janeway)
EZRA POUND: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
(editor)
THE ART OF THE REAL: POETRY IN ENGLAND
AND AMERICA SINCE 1939
THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN FICTION
(editor with Holger Klein and John Flower)
AMERICAN WRITERS
AND RADICAL
POLITICS, 1900-39
EQUIVOCAL COMMITMENTS
ERIC HOMBERGER
Lecturer in American Studies, University of East Ang/ia
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-18486-6 ISBN 978-1-349-18484-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18484-2
©
Eric Hornberger, 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly & Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY lOOlO
First published in the United States of America in 1986
ISBN 978-0-312-02792-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hornberger, Eric.
American writers and radical politics, 1900-39.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. American literature-20th century-History and
criticism. 2. Radicalism in literature. 3. Politics
in literature. 4. Authors, American-20th century
Political and social views. I. Title.
PS228.R34H65 1986 810'.9'0052 86-1760
ISBN 978-0-312-02792-6
To Paul Kennedy
Contents
Preface
VlIl
Acknowledgements XlI
1 JACK LONDON 1
2 UPTON SINCLAIR 34
3 GREENWICH VILLAGE INTELLECTUALS
AND THE LUDLOW MASSACRE, 1914 59
4 JOHN REED 80
5 PROLETARIAN LITERATURE AND THE
JOHN REED CLUBS 119
6 EDMUND WILSON TURNS LEFT 141
7 COMMUNISTS AND OBJECTIVISTS 163
George Oppen
The Invention of the Objectivists
Appendices
I A Letter on john Reed's 'The Colorado War' 187
II Some Versions of the Isadora Duncan Myth 189
III Trotsky and Partisan Review: A Correspondence 197
Notes and References 212
Bibliography 242
Index 261
Preface
There was no shortage of events in the nineteenth century which
dragged American writers to the centre stage of political
controversy. The abolition of slavery and the rise of American
imperialism were such issues, but it was not until the twentieth
century that the forms of radicalism shifted away from an ad hoc
preoccupation with specific issues to a more general sense that the
system itself was wrong, and that far-reaching changes were
needed.
The following studies describe three 'generations' within the
literary radicalism of the period between 1900 and 1939. The
experience of each 'generation' was shaped by different political
environments, and by dramatically different ideological
aspirations. The generation which came of age in 1900, which is
represented in Chapters 1 and 2 by Jack London and Upton
Sinclair, was shaped by the struggle to create a Socialist Party. In
The Jungle and The Iron Heel, the ambiguities of conversion to
socialism, and some of the tensions of Socialist Party policy of
1900-10, are revealed. The third and fourth chapters concentrate
on the generation which came of age with The Masses, Max
Eastman's magazine, which got into its stride in 19l4.John Reed
was the chief discovery of The Masses and has come to stand for a
larger group of writers, artists and thinkers who were increasingly
drawn to left-wing political commitments. Reed's career, from
Harvard College to the Kremlin, was given important direction
by the bitter industrial dispute in Colorado in 1914. The events in
Colorado brought together divergent strands of socialism: Reed
and Eastman visited the scene of the worst violence in Ludlow, as
did Upton Sinclair, whose King Coal (1917) attempted to
reinterpret the causes of the strike. The dramatis personae of
Colorado in 1914 stirred the nation: there was an exploiting
capitalist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr; a brilliant liberal journalist,
Walter Lippmann; a clever and forceful lawyer, Frank P. Walsh,
to put the people's case; and a well-meaning but seemingly
vin
Preface IX
ineffectual President in Washington. The Colorado strike and its
aftermath provide a microcosm of the interplay of personality,
economic interest, political ideals and intense commitments
which marks the transition from the 'socialist' generation of
writers to the 'Communist' generation symbolized by John Reed.
The period ofC ommunist predominance remains in certain key
respects ill-understood. The more obvious manifestations of the
'literary class war' in the 1930s have received some attention. The
careers of Dos Passos, Hemingway, Farrell and Steinbeck have
been exhaustively studied. It is equally possible, and perhaps
even more illuminating, to watch the commitments and
ambivalences of the decade as they appear in less familiar
institutions, such as the John Reed Clubs, and groups such as the
Objectivists. The John Reed Clubs enable us to understand the
impact of Soviet Marxist theories of proletarian culture upon the
American literary left. And the fate of the Objectivists is one of
the most revealing facets of the encounter between literary
modernism and the Communist Party. The Objectivists were a
small group of radical Jewish poets in New York in the late 1920s.
They attempted to hold together divergent commitments to
modern poetry, which derived from Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams, and a growing involvement with the Communist
Party. In the end, the taste ofC ommunist Party reviewers, editors
and writers could not be reconciled with high modernism. The
Objectivists dispersed: George Oppen ceased to write poetry, and
devoted himself to party work among the unemployed in
Brooklyn. Others withdrew into personal life: Carl Rakosi
pursued his career as a therapist and social worker; Charles
Reznikoffturned to a Jewish subject-matter for his writing, thus
condemning himself to bourgeois nationalism in party eyes, and
resumed the printing of small editions of his own work. Louis
Zukofsky found it easier to print his essays than his difficult poems
in the aftermath of his An Objectivists' Anthology (1932). There was
no precise equivalent to John Reed's role in the 1930s, but one
figure, Edmund Wilson, seemed to represent many liberal intellec
tuals in America who were drawn to the Communist Party. His
subsequent disillusionment with the party, and with Marxism as
a theoretical system, anticipates yet another period, another
generation, in which the ex-Communist emerges as culture hero.
x Preface
It has often seemed to me that feelings matter more than ideas,
and ideas more than economic forces, in the making of radicals.
Socialism and Communism are intellectually complex systems of
thought. Few imaginative writers have attempted to master the
intricacies of Marxian economic doctrine, and fewer still in
America were familiar with the philosophic thought on which
Marxism rests. But of course the mastery of economic theories is
not a prerequisite to political commitment. If anything, it comes
later, providing something of an intellectual rationale for
emotional commitments already made. It is even possible that the
usual concerns of politics have little or nothing to do with the
making of radicals. Such people find themselves in sensitivities
suddenly aroused, in a range of human sympathies discovered by
a process analogous to religious conversion. It all sounds like
something out of George Eliot or Mrs Gaskell, but the premiss of
many a hopeful Victorian novel, in which everything depends
upon a turn of heart, is not so very remote from the experience of
socialists and even some Communists in the period from 1900 to
1939. There is no Marxist theory for the psychology of conversion,
and in the face of rigorous materialism there is little room for
psychology at all. There was a sometimes bitter debate within the
Socialist Party, and then within the Communist Party, about
whether bourgeois converts to socialism (or Communism) could
or should be accepted into the party and be allowed to playa full
role. The suspicion that they would shape the party into
something congenial to their class values, a process that would
inevitably lead to reformism and accommodation with capitalism,
was frequently voiced. Men of letters generally fell into this
category of well-meaning bourgeois converts. There is no simple
equation between class background and ideological affiliation
within socialism; however often, like Eastman and Reed, they
shared the perspectives of the left wing of the Socialist Party, or
were involved in any of the sectarian groupings within the
Communist Party, they could regularly expect to have their
accent, table manners, social life, mode of dress and family
background thrown back at them. The cult of proletarianism in
the left was often the vehicle for older American hostilities
towards intellectuals, whose books never quite seemed truly
socialist or Communist. A bourgeois social background was a
kind of original sin, endlessly to be expiated. Intellectuals,
especially those within the Communist Party, soon learned to talk