Erwin Knoll. The Progressive. Volume 58, Issue 10, October 1994.
As we survey the barren, desolate landscape of the American Left at the end of the Twentieth Century, we have every right and reason to ask, What happened? How did we arrive at this forsaken place? Where did we take a wrong turn—if we took a wrong turn?
There were times in this century, after all, when the most solidly entrenched plutocrats thought a new American revolution was in the offing. There were times when labor unions were determined to transform—not merely meliorate—the lives of working people, times when movements of the Left mobilized millions of Americans, times when every dirty electoral trick had to be deployed to keep, for example, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign from turning California upside down, times when radical newspapers rivaled the commercial press in circulation and influence.
How did we come to lose all that? What brought us to the poor, shriveled prospect that is the Left today?
Oh, I know there are devoted individuals and even dynamic groups waging intensive political struggles in behalf of the interests to which they assign priority—environmentalists, feminists, lesbians and gays, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, the disabled, the elderly, people on welfare. There are dedicated activists committed to resisting militarism and war, and to protecting civil rights and civil liberties. In no way do I denigrate any of these admirable efforts when I say that, even taken together, they are no substitute for a broad, visionary political movement that focuses on building a better society and, for that matter, a better world for all.
Without self-consciousness or embarrassment, the Left used to talk about its concept of “a beautiful tomorrow.” How did we lose that dream?
We need to ask the question not to assign blame or engage in sectarian recrimination. The Left, even in its heyday, did too much of that, and what’s left of the Left still does too much of it even in its current pitifully debilitated state. But we need to understand the past if the Left is ever to have a future.
The easy explanation, of course, is that we fell victim to the wily misrepresentations and repressive machinations of American capitalism and its obedient servant, the State, which deprived the Wobblies of their free-speech rights and locked Gene Debs away in the Atlanta penitentiary and smashed radical organizations in the Palmer Raids and mounted a great Red Scare after World War I and another after World War II, invoking the Smith Act and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. And all of those measures and many more did have telling consequences. But they don’t explain the total rout of the American Left.
Fortunately, we can begin our search for understanding with a recent spate of books—histories, biographies, analyses from varying perspectives—that focus on the Left’s triumphs (there were a few) and defeats (there were many) in this century.
Those who recall William Z. Foster’s name at all these days may recognize it as that of an austere, dogmatic American Communist who was a leader of his party for the better part of three decades until his death in 1961. During that period, the party reached its peak and then declined dismally in numerical strength and political significance. When Foster joined its ranks it was still in its in fancy, but already a force to be reckoned with on the Left. When he died, it was, to all but a handful of diehards, a laughingstock. That wasn’t all Foster’s doing, but as Edward P. Johanningsmeier, a University of Delaware historian, makes clear in a thorough and thoughtful biography, Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster (Princeton University Press. 433 pp. $29.95), he did his share.
Anyone who encountered Foster’s jargon-ridden Communist rhetoric and his slavish devotion to Stalinism in his middle and late years might have found it difficult to believe that he started out as an authentic American radical—one of the few Communist leaders of his generation, in fact, to spring from genuine working-class roots. Foster grew up in the grinding poverty of Philadelphia’s Irish slums and started his working life—and his career as an agitator and organizer—on the railways. In 1909, as a young labor journalist covering one of the Wobblies’ free-speech fights in Spokane, Washington, for the Workingman’s Paper, he was jailed for forty-seven days, including a stretch in solitary confinement on a bread-and-water diet, for helping to organize IWW activities among his fellow prisoners.
By the time Foster joined the Communist Party in 1921, at the age of forty, he had been an organizer—and, by all accounts, an extremely effective one—in the meat-packing and steel industries. Three years later, he was the party’s Presidential candidate, a task for which he had little enthusiasm, though he undertook it twice more. Even in 1924, he displayed a newly acquired talent for stiff ideological rhetoric that would repel rather than attract American workers.
“Some day,” he wrote, “a Communist will lead the government that rules over America, [but] when that time comes the position will not be called president, it will be chairman of the all-American Soviet.” As Johanningsmeier observes, “Increasingly, Foster’s rhetoric departed from the vernacular and slipped into the style of the Third International.” Foster’s 1932 book, Toward Soviet America, setting forth the aims of the Communist Party, was “heavy with line and jargon, statistics and apocalyptic predictions.”
But the rhetoric wasn’t the disease; it was merely a symptom—a manifestation of the two central assumptions that guided Foster and his party and ultimately contributed substantially to the decline of the Left. One assumption was that a Leninist vanguard was indispensable to the struggle for a better world; he defended “with clerical certainty,” says Johanningsmeier, “the idea that a militant minority, a gifted priesthood of revolutionists, could somehow design the downfall of a corrupt and inefficient capitalist order.” The other assumption was that unwavering support of the Soviet Union was vital to the success of the American movement.
These were fatal defects. They led inevitably to the party’s isolation from the rest of the Left—and from America’s working class. And they led just as inevitably to political analyses and policies that diverged drastically from reality. Foster believed that unity on the Left was “a waste of time”; that Communists should work with the two major parties until a labor party emerged; that American unions would inexorably increase in power, and that the 1956 merger of the AFL and CIO—a rightward move from which labor has not yet recovered—was “a long stride towards independent working-class political action.”
It’s difficult to imagine anyone being more consistently wrong in his political judgments. But Foster, says Johanningsmeier, “refused to be constrained by a coherent set of beliefs.” Earl Browder, his long-time comrade in the party leadership (until he was expelled on Soviet orders after World War II), said Foster “could abandon his ideas with the greatest facility of any man I’ve ever met—and repudiate them publicly, without the slightest embarrassment.” That description applied to the party, too, and accounted for its total loss of credibility, effect, and influence. And it stunted the growth of the entire Left, which devoted much of its energy and resources to evading Communist manipulation or at least dissociating itself from the Communists.
Whatever inner doubts Foster may have had—and Johanningsmeier suggests he had them—his public stance was ruthless intolerance of critics and “revisionists.” In the turmoil that followed Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, Foster’s choice was to preserve the old party structure and the old party line. Even when he was in the grip of his final illness, he wrote from Moscow to his designated successor, Gus Hall, “Our Party is part of a great world-wide Communist movement … It is indestructible, and is part of a movement which will eventually dominate the world.”
Foster is the subject of one of forty-six profiles collected by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye in The American Radical (Routledge. 380 pp. $49.95, cloth; 17.95, paper). James R. Barrett, a labor historian at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), arrives at an assessment quite similar to Johanningsmeier’s: “Both Foster and his Communist movement were born in the heart of the American working class, but their program and activities were fundamentally shaped by the influence of Soviet Communism. Foster and his party perished, isolated from American workers’ daily lives and concerns.”
Scott Molloy, an associate professor at the Labor Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, portrays an altogether different kind of socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs, who “stands alone,” Molloy remarks, “at the acme of the American socialist pyramid, a symbol of courage and dedication even to those not associated with the cause.” Perhaps the greatest tribute to Debs’s stature is that communists, socialists, and independent radicals of sundry persuasions, who agree on little else, join in honoring his memory and claiming him as one of their own.
Debs came out of the railway labor movement and achieved prominence as leader of the great Pullman strike of 1894. He spent six months in prison for contempt of court and, Molloy notes, “emerged in mid-1895 as America’s first national working-class hero.” Like Foster, he was no great theoretician of the Left, but unlike Foster he never lost touch with the American tradition. Shortly after his release, he wrote: “To the unified hosts of American workingmen Fate has committed the charge of rescuing American Liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril.”
Starting in 1900, Debs was the Socialist Party’s standard bearer in five Presidential campaigns, garnering almost a million votes in 1912 and a similar number in 1920, when he ran from the Federal prison cell to which he had been confined for opposing World War I. Campaign badges of the time stated, FOR PRESIDENT—CONVICT No. 9653. But by the time Debs died in 1926, the Communist Party, more disciplined and advocating a more militant program, had come to dominate the Left.
Robert M. LaFollette Sr. didn’t go to prison for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. He was, after all, a Republican, a U.S. Senator, and a former Governor of Wisconsin. Still, writes R. David Myers, the librarian at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, “vigilante groups called for his ouster, and the Senate ordered an investigation to consider his expulsion. He was deeply hurt by a petition signed by 421 University of Wisconsin faculty members who deplored his failure to support prosecution of the war.”
Though LaFollette ran for President as an independent progressive in 1924 (and received an impressive five million votes), he never brought himself to a decisive break with the two-party system. And he never called himself a socialist, though his anti-corporate, anti-imperialist stance brought him many admirers on the Left.
The incredible range and diversity of America’s radical heritage is amply demonstrated in The American Radical. From the Ottawa warrior Pontiac, who led a rebellion against Britain’s North American empire in the 1760s, by way of such compelling figures as Tom Paine and Sojourner Truth, Walt Whitman and Emma Goldman, Mother Jones and Dorothy Day, Woody Guthrie and I.F. Stone, to the African-American poet Audre Lorde, who died in 1992 after a lifetime of artistic and political struggle, this book presents figures who inspire as well as instruct, and serves as an excellent introduction to American radicalism. The editors conclude with a quotation from the late University of Wisconsin historian, Harvey Goldberg: “For very compelling reasons, the study of American radicals should be essential homework for this generation: because their record can give heart and stomach to Americans who are watching democracy weaken under the weight of conformism; and because their insights and errors, their accomplishments and failures can cast light, even many years later, on the problems of the present.”
Joel Kovel, the Alger Hiss professor of social studies at Bard College, brings an original and ingenious perspective to the history of the American Left in Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti-communism and the Making of America (Basic Books. 331 pages. $25.00), though his book is not so much about the Left as about efforts to suppress it. Kovel set out to discover “why this nation, of all the capitalist powers the least threatened by Communism, has been the most floridly anticommunist.”
Kovel concedes that “Communism failed, both in the United States and in the world at large, for intrinsic reasons as well as because of what was done to it,” but his focus is on what was done to it and why. His thesis is that there was never a “Soviet menace” that actually imperiled the United States, or an internal threat of the kind conjured up by generations of right-wingers. Rather, he posits a mythic persecution of vulnerable outsiders that dates back to the beginnings of the American experience, and that directly relates persecution of minorities to persecution of political dissidents.
“Black Americans,” Kovel writes, “were considered basically subhuman animals while Native Americans became the inhuman devils (a beast, too, though of the apocalypse) flitting through the wilderness beyond the city upon the hill; two nightmares as yet indigestible by the dominant culture, the one sedimenting into white racism, the other into anticommunism.”
In a brief review, I can’t begin to do justice to the intricate connections Kovel draws between America’s treatment of its original inhabitants and its relentless attack on radicals. The parallels are fascinating, though I found them not fully persuasive. Still, Red Hunting in the Promised Land is well worth reading, if only for its keenly etched portraits of such red-hunters as Father Coughlin, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph R. McCarthy, and John Foster Dulles.
Kovel also provides a cogent response to the capitalist triumphalism that has flourished since the collapse of Soviet communism, and a moderately hopeful perspective from which to view the current disarray of the Left.
He writes, “Many sophisticated people have come around to the view that left and right no longer have real meaning in today’s fragmented politics. But it seems to me that we still need to think in these terms, not because there is anything like a substantial, organized Left in America today (after all, if there were, then how could we write of the triumph of anticommunism?) or because there is any coherent “left” program to rescue us, but because the term, left, signifies the voice that speaks for the underside. This voice may not speak out; it may not be conscious at any given time. But as long as society is polarized by domination it exists as a potentiality.”
Alan M. Wald, a cultural historian who teaches at the University of Michigan, has been an activist and scholar on the Left since he came of age in the 1960s. In the introduction to his The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Humanities Press. 250 pp. $45.00) he offers an important answer to the question of when and how the Left went astray. Antiwar activism and other radical movements of the 1960s, he writes, not only carried on traditions of the older American Left, but also began to develop the “liberatory strains” of feminism, the nationalism of the oppressed, and lesbian and gay rights. But he adds:
“In retrospect, however, the 1960s manifestation of commitment was also retrogressive in the failure of its leading participants to construct a serious, internally democratic, coherent socialist organization with a pro-working-class perspective that could have embodied the experiences of the past and synthesized those of the present. By the end of the decade a polarization had begun. On the one hand, there were groups of self-proclaimed ‘Leninist parties’ that evolved at different rates into tight-knit dogmatic political sects. On the other hand, there was a general retreat from militancy accompanied by a simplistic rejection of caricatures of classical Leninism. By 1990 most of the left groups had become hermetically sealed cults, reduced to impotency. From the ex-radical apostates came tragic-comic declarations of allegiance to ‘post-Marxism.'”
The twenty pieces collected in The Responsibility of Intellectuals (the title is borrowed from a justly celebrated essay by Noam Chomsky) encompass more than a decade’s work and thought and cover a broad range of subject matter: individual writers, artists, and thinkers; academic controversies; historic perspectives on the Stalinist, non-Stalinist, and anti-Stalinist sectors of the Left. Wald’s approach to his sometimes arcane topics is always lucid and, considering his own vigorously held views, remarkably fair, rational, and unpolluted by sectarian venom. It is not necessary to agree with all of his positions—I take strong exception to his support for movements to regulate “hate speech”—to appreciate his willingness to conduct a reasoned discourse.
Considering the varied ground Wald covers, it is remarkable how often he addresses the question with which I began this review. And the answer that emerges, consistently and, I believe, undeniably, is that the Left cannot succeed unless it adheres to the values it professes to seek: democracy within the movement, intellectual rigor, absolute candor, and faith in people. Or, as Wald puts it, a serious, coherent, democratic movement that remembers the lessons of the past.
With a little luck, we’ll eventually find that kind of movement, or it will find us.