Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950

265 Pages·2008·1.296 MB·English

by  Claire A. Culleton, Karen Leick (eds.)

Modernism on File
Modernism on File
Writers, Artists, and
the FBI, 1920–1950
E
DITED BY
C A. C K L
LAIRE ULLETON AND AREN EICK
MODERNISMONFILE
Copyright © Claire A.Culleton and Karen Leick,2008.
Softcover reprintof the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60135-2
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-37076-4 ISBN 978-0-230-61039-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230610392
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modernism on file :writers,artists,and the FBI,1920–1950 / edited by
Claire A.Culleton and Karen Leick.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-230-60135-2
1.American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2.Politics and literature—United States—History—20th century.
3.Literature and state—United States—History—20th century.4.Art
and state—United States—History—20th century.5.United States.
Federal Bureau of Investigation—History—20th century.6.Freedom
of speech—United States—History—20th century.7.Anti-communist
movements—United States—History—20th century.8.Modernism
(Literature)—United States.9.Modernism (Art)—United States.
I.Culleton,Claire A.II.Leick,Karen.
PS228.P6M57 2008
810.9(cid:2)112—dc22 2007027102
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:February 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Silence, Acquiescence, and Dread 1
Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick
Part I The FBI and Modern Writers
1. Ghostreaders and Diaspora-Writers: Four Theses
on the FBI and African American Modernism 23
William J. Maxwell
2. Raising Muscovite Ducks and Government Suspicions:
Henry Roth and the FBI 39
Steven G. Kellman
3. Telling Stories from Hemingway’s FBI File: Conspiracy,
Paranoia, and Masculinity 53
Debra A. Moddelmog
4. Most Wanted: Claude McKay and the “Black Specter”
of African American Poetry in the 1920s 73
Josh Gosciak
5. Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound’s FBI File 105
Karen Leick
6. Investigative Savagery: Figuring Hoover in Richard Wright’s
Savage Holiday 127
Andrew Strombeck
7. “Poetess Probed as Red”: Muriel Rukeyser and the FBI 145
Jeanne Perreault
vi Contents
Part II The FBI and the Arts
8. An Archive of the (Political) Unconscious:
Jean Renoir at the FBI 163
Christopher Faulkner
9. New Information from the FBI, CNDI LA-BB-1:
The Surveillance of Bertolt Brecht’s Telephone in
Los Angeles 181
Alexander Stephan
Translated by Emily Banwell
10. Sour Notes: Hanns Eisler and the FBI 197
James Wierzbicki
11. Communism, Perversion, and Other Crimes
against the State: The FBI Files of Klaus and Erika Mann 221
Andrea Weiss
12. Extorting Henry Holt & Co.: J. Edgar Hoover and
the Publishing Industry 237
Claire A. Culleton
List of Contributors 253
Index 257
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to acknowledge generous support from the Kent
State University Research Council and The Ohio State University—Lima
Research and Special Projects Committee. Kent State undergraduates Derek
Bailey, Alison Guerin, Douglas Hite, Emily Dale Mitchell, Kurt Voss-Hoynes,
and Anastasa Williams apprenticed on this project and worked diligently as
proofreaders and indexers. Professor Culleton acknowledges their support
and intellectual exuberance.
We are grateful for permission to quote from the following copyrighted
materials: excerpts from Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth by Steven G.
Kellman used by permission of W.W.Norton andCompany, Inc.; a version
of Christoper Faulkner’s essay originally appeared in the Canadian Journal of
Communication, vol. 26, nos.2–3 (2001): 191–209, and is reprinted by per-
mission; a version of Andrea Weiss’s essay originally appeared in GLQ: A
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 7.3 (2001): 459–481, and is reprinted by
permission; Alexander Stephan’s essay originally appeared in neue deutsche
literature, vol. 51, no. 549 (2003): 123–144, and is reprinted with the
author’s permission.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Silence,
Acquiescence,
and Dread
Claire A. Culleton and
Karen Leick
Institutional surveillance seems commonplace to Americans in an
age where everyone can be tracked via credit card purchases and E-Z-Pass
registries, watched via satellite, and monitored by the National Security
Agency (NSA) and its collaborative partners. In our post-9/11 world, where
perfectly ordinary, everyday settings and events in the lives and activities of
world citizens are cast with criminal suspicion, we are easily reminded of the
authority wielded by agencies and institutions of power. As happens, measures
and practices designed to protect citizens during national emergencies tend to
inhibit the span of their freedom, reduce the richness of their opportunities,
and limit the boundaries of their worlds as well as their imaginations. Such
was the case for hundreds of thousands of people during J. Edgar Hoover’s
reign as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As the 12 chapters in
this book show, for nearly 50 years Hoover’s investigative practices had
considerable effect on the lives and creative activities of writers and artists
working during his directorship, and as often as his efforts curtailed their
work and artistic license, their counterefforts to stave off or circumvent
government interventions shaped and affected the burgeoning modern arts
movement consequently making it a self-conscious movement fed on and not
starved by the twentieth-century federal gaze.
Analyzing, classifying, and scrutinizing the work and lives of modernist
writers and artists has long been a preoccupation of scholars, and the debate
over which characteristics make the work of a writer or artist authentically
2 Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick
modernist shows no signs of waning, and has in fact “become something of
an academic obsession” (Rainey xx). Hoover’s obsession with modernism’s
leading figures caused him to expend considerable energy investigating the
activities of some of the movement’s most prominent modernists. Not inter-
ested in fine distinctions among the aesthetic choices of these artists, the FBI
focused on an array of criteria: one’s political views and activities, his or her
engagement with the political culture of the day, and his or her standing as a
leading figure poised to inspire significant changes in domestic and interna-
tional thinking by their publications, lectures, readings, international travels,
and celebrity status.
Still startling, the massive surveillance of private lives during J. Edgar
Hoover’s reign at the FBI clipped short the civil liberties of creative artists as well
as other American citizens and immigrants in an effort to maintain the security
of the nation; those who trusted the government to monitor only the lives of the
most dangerous among these were disheartened to learn how wide a net Hoover
cast during the modernist period, and the thousands and thousands of bureau
files that chronicle particular aspects of modernist discourse still staggers the
American imagination. Individuals who belonged to the Communist Party,
participated in radical demonstrations, or criticized the U.S. government
became targets of FBI investigations and surveillance. Incongruently, modernists
who avoided political activism or whose politics obviously leaned to the right
could arouse the suspicions of the FBI, as well. After a reference to T.S. Eliot
appeared in a 1949 issue of the Daily Worker, the bureau opened a file on the
expatriate, although he had famously defined himself two decades earlier as “an
Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics”
(Robins 424; Eliot 7). Equally absurd and indicative of the bureau’s undiscern-
ing shrimp net, American poet Marianne Moore came under suspicion in 1935
after the FBI received an unmarked envelope containing a list of communist
writers that included Moore (Robins 435).
Like Eliot, the apolitical expatriate Gertrude Stein attracted bureau atten-
tion. Her tenuous association with Partisan Review, a publication already
flagged by the FBI as “radical,” garnered the bureau’s suspicion. Though the
name of the journal remains redacted in her file, it was likely Stein’s response
to the 1939 Partisan Review symposium, “The Situation in American
Writing,” that prompted the bureau to open her file, even though her
responses to the interviewer’s questions would have allayed bureau fears about
her loyalty: when asked “How would you describe the political tendency of
American writing as a whole since 1930?” Stein replied, “Writers only think
that they are interested in politics, they are not really it gives them a chance
to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in
politics” (40–41). Sometimes offhand remarks made by friends or acquaintances
to bureau Special Agents in Charge (SAC) came to fuel the investigations and
Silence, Acquiescence, and Dread 3
to steer their conclusions. For example, when one subject whose name is
redacted in Stein’s file (probably Francis Rose’s friend, Carley Mills) com-
mented to an agent in 1945 that Stein “had resided in Europe so many years,
her sympathies were not very strongly with America else she would not have
stayed abroad so long” and that “he considered her as not having been
strongly in favor of any political theory, although he knew her to be very anti-
Roosevelt,” pages were swiftly added to the file.
No wonder the acceleration: J. Edgar Hoover was nicknamed “Speed” as
a boy, after the swiftness with which he would deliver groceries. Raised in a
family of mapmakers, something William Beverly proposes had a “suggestive
influence upon the man and administrator he would become” (Beverly 30),
Hoover spent his career mapping out the contours of degenerative ideologies
such as anti-Americanism and Communism, and locating communities of
anarchy and sedition, to name a few. After working from 1913 to mid-1917
in the Library of Congress, Hoover began his career with the Justice
Department working in the Aliens Registration office, where he developed
knowledge of and cultivated information about political radicalism that
would prove useful to him in the future (Jeffreys 55). “Hoover’s first months
in the Justice Department put him in the middle of...hysteria over traitors,
spies, and saboteurs,” Richard Gid Powers notes (47). Later that year, Hoover
would be responsible for organizing the haphazard files of the Justice
Department, and would organize them obsessively, “out of a great personal
and political need to control the flow of information in America” (Robins 33).
Though a functionary in the Aliens Registrations office, Hoover’s reputation
as a Red-baiter matured when at the height of the Red Scare in 1919, he
successfully deported hundreds of alien radicals and foreign-born agitators
following November and December raids. The hysterical search for anarchists
and radicals that would eventually be called the Red Scare began in mid-1919,
when, as Christopher Finan explains,
eight bombs exploded outside the homes of prominent men, including the
mayor of Cleveland and judges in New York City, Boston, and Pittsburgh....
The June bombings convinced many that the United States must be ruthless if
it was going to meet the threat of Communist revolution. A Montana senator
introduced a bill making it a crime to advocate violent revolution. [Attorney
General A. Mitchell] Palmer appointed a new chief of the Justice Department’s
Bureau of Investigation to take charge of the search for the bombers and
created a new assistant attorney general to help. Congress gave the federal Red
hunters $500 million to speed their work. (127)
Palmer’s home targeted, he encouraged Hoover and the bureau to open and
maintain files on subversives and anarchists likely responsible for planning
and carrying out the multiple explosions. As a result, Sanford Ungar reports