The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
By Michael Denning
Verso, 1996. 556 pp., $55.00 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Swimming against the stream all the time can be tiring and unrewarding, for Marxists as much as for spawning salmon. Fish know no better, but for Marxists, the temptation to go with the flow and join the mainstream is ever present.
The 1930s and 1940s era of popular fronts was a time when it appeared that Marxism had finally come in from the political margins, discovered popularity and joined a mass, popular march towards socialism.
Communist-Socialist popular front governments ran France and Spain. Social democrats and socialists sank their differences in the labour movement during a mighty upsurge of workers' struggles. In the cultural sphere, communists and radical leftists could display their wares to wide acclaim.
The Popular front, however, was a policy child of Stalin, and was berated by Trotsky, which should give some cause for scepticism about Marxism's alleged golden years.
Michael Denning's book surveys the cultural front in the USA, the "extraordinary flowering of arts, entertainment and thought based on the broad social movement called the Popular Front", critically analysing the results of the left upsurge in the sphere of culture.
The right dismiss this cultural era "when writers went left, Hollywood turned Red and painters and musicians were 'social-minded'" as simply a time when artists were dupes of communism. But Denning redeems the political and artistic integrity of the time when popular cultural stars like Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Anthony Quinn, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin joined with a mass political and cultural movement of the working class.
Denning calls this episode "the laboring of culture", the increased role of, and orientation to, the working class in culture and the arts — not just the Woody Guthries, Paul Robesons and Billie Holidays who rose to popular fame, but also the hordes of unsung plebeians in the "proletarian literature clubs, workers' theatres, camera clubs, film and photo leagues, composers' collectives, Red dance troupes, revolutionary choruses".
A vast array of cultural figures publicly associated themselves with the causes of the left — from the blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee to the folk of Burl Ives, from the gospel singing of the Golden Gate Quartet to the cabaret of Lena Horne, from the novels of John Dos Passos to the glove work of boxing star Joe Louis.
Although it is too simplistic to measure the degree of their radical commitment by simply listing the "organisations joined, petitions signed, marches marched in and benefits attended", the popular front cultural figures did take unusually up-front left wing stands on such issues as anti-fascism, the Spanish Civil War, racism and lynching, and frame-ups of labour leaders.
Denning sees the proletarian incursion into the cultural limelight and the politicisation of the stars as flowing from a powerful democratic social movement emerging from the social upheavals of 1933-34.
Though strongly supported and influenced by the Communist Party, this movement was largely independent of the party, argues Denning. The non-CP "fellow-travellers" were the popular front, and not just the apple skin around the CP core.
The culture and politics of the popular front were criticised from various quarters. Both the right, who got excited over real or imagined communists pulling the strings, and the liberal anti-Stalinists, who saw popular culture as a betrayal of "real", i.e. elitist, culture, were wide of the mark.
The non-CP Marxist left, however, were more accurate in their criticisms. The culture of the popular front, they argued, was populist, dissolving class conflict in the imagined anti-fascist and New Deal unity of "the people". It was bourgeois nationalist — the 1940 Republican Convention took a Paul Robeson song, "Ballad for America", as its theme song, and Woody Guthrie sang of "the stars and stripes of the land of the free" in his anti-Hitler enthusiasm.
Denning argues that the reality was more complex and that the popular front often took a radical and militant stand on class, race, ethnicity and gender issues. But Denning's efforts are not wholly convincing. When Stalin, looking to build alliances with the capitalist democracies against Nazi Germany, whipped the world's Communist Parties into line in 1935 behind a new cross-class, anti-fascist alliance with the "progressive bourgeoisie", the resulting class collaboration inevitably worked its way into the political and cultural spheres, from hosing down strikes to singing hymns to US "democracy".
The popular front was not simply New Deal liberalism, but the Communists travelled much further to meet Roosevelt than vice versa.
For all the Stalinist handbrakes, however, the radicalisation of culture and the political popularisation of (a diluted) communism were real, and the postwar political witch-hunt had to work overtime to eliminate this menace.
No longer would a union-sponsored revue, Pins and Needles, performed by New York female garment workers, triumph as the longest running musical in Broadway history. No longer would the election of a Harlem Communist candidate for New York City Council win the support of a dazzling cast of jazz legends — Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Sidney Bechet, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald.
Denning captures the enormous energy and hope of the popular front years, but still leaves open the question of whether the revolutionaries of those days were, by joining the mainstream, swimming towards the socialist future or hightailing away from it. Were it not for the dead hand of Stalinism, they might very well have done the former, and we'd all be stars in an all-singing, all-dancing socialist spectacular by now.