Pub Date : 2019-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626
P. Filardo
“... essays... examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics...many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other’s trade union and political cultures.” Chad Pearson, “Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies part 2.” History Compass 16, no. 8 (2018): 1–16. AMERICAN COMMUNIST HISTORY 137
{"title":"United States Communist History Bibliography 2018","authors":"P. Filardo","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","url":null,"abstract":"“... essays... examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics...many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other’s trade union and political cultures.” Chad Pearson, “Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies part 2.” History Compass 16, no. 8 (2018): 1–16. AMERICAN COMMUNIST HISTORY 137","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2019.1599626","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47621303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his recent book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, Teishan Latner makes a key contribution to the growing literature about the Cuban Revolution and U.S. leftists. Cuban Revolution in America provides a multi-faceted look into why and how “the Cuban revolutionary project remained the most consistent foreign influence on left-wing radicalism in the United States” (6) in the 1960s and subsequent decades. Through five thoroughly-researched and well-written chapters, Latner convincingly demonstrates this argument, and lays an important foundation for the political history between the U.S. radicals and the Cuban State. A range of scholars and readers will find Latner’s book compelling. Cuban Revolution in America speaks to historians of U.S. foreign relations, political history, and U.S.–Cuba relations, while scholars of African American Studies and Cuban American history will find much here. There is a lesser emphasis on cultural history, although Latner certainly posits the idea of the radical imagination. And although communist history is not the book’s focus, scholars of the left should consider this required reading. It is these multiple lefts, white, Latinx, and African American, that Latner explores over twenty-five plus years, arguing that Cuba was the biggest global inspiration for a new generation of activists who shunned the Old Left for the new. Latner begins his book in the cauldron of the late 1960s, arguing that U.S.–Cuba connections in the early 1960s have had greater coverage. The first chapter on the Venceremos Brigade (VB) provides Cuban Revolution in America’s foundation. Beginning in 1969, and continuing to this day, the Brigade sought to facilitate solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by bringing work brigades of Americans to Cuba and challenging U.S. policy towards Cuba in the United States: “a radical Peace Corps for the civil rights and antiwar generation” (28). As Latner points out, the Brigade is woefully understudied given the thousands of “brigadistas” in our midst. Originally conceived of by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Carl Oglesby, the VB arose as SDS splintered, and Latner argues that it was “as much about the reconstitution of the U.S. Left,” (34) and the transformation of U.S. society as it was about supporting Cuba. The Brigade was marred by its official homophobic stance and marked by racial tension. But the persistence required for the Brigade to send diverse delegations to Cuba year after year amidst enormous logistical challenges and political tension makes it a fitting microcosm for the U.S. left’s solidarity with the Cuban Revolution in the coming decades: fraught and messy, yet creative and persistent. Another consistent thread is the United States government’s antipathy not only toward the Cuban Revolution, but with the U.S. left’s support of it. In chapter two, Latner examines the dialectic between Cuba’s replacement of the Soviet Unio
在他的新书《美国的古巴革命:哈瓦那和美国左派的形成，1968-1992》中，Teishan Latner对古巴革命和美国左派的文学发展做出了重要贡献。《古巴革命在美国》提供了一个多角度的视角，探讨为什么以及如何在20世纪60年代和随后的几十年里“古巴革命计划对美国左翼激进主义保持了最一致的外国影响”(6)。通过五章深入研究和精心撰写，拉特纳令人信服地论证了这一论点，并为美国激进派和古巴政府之间的政治史奠定了重要基础。许多学者和读者都会觉得拉特纳的书很有吸引力。《美国的古巴革命》向研究美国外交关系、政治史和美国-古巴关系的历史学家讲述，而非裔美国人研究和古巴裔美国人历史的学者将在这里找到很多东西。虽然拉特纳肯定提出了激进想象的观点，但对文化史的强调较少。尽管共产主义历史不是这本书的重点，左派学者应该认为这是必读的。拉特纳在超过25年的时间里研究了白人、拉丁裔和非裔美国人等多重左派，他认为古巴是全球最大的灵感来源，启发了新一代的激进分子，他们避开了旧左派，转向了新左派。拉特纳从20世纪60年代末的大锅开始他的书，他认为美国和古巴的关系在60年代初得到了更多的报道。第一章介绍了古巴革命在美国的基础。从1969年开始，一直持续到今天，该旅通过将美国人的工作旅带到古巴，并在美国挑战美国对古巴的政策，寻求促进与古巴革命的团结:“一个激进的和平队，为民权和反战一代服务”(28)。正如拉特纳所指出的那样，考虑到我们中间有成千上万的“游击队员”，对“旅”的研究严重不足。最初由民主社会学生组织(Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)领导人卡尔·奥格尔斯比(Carl Oglesby)构想，随着民主社会学生组织(SDS)的分裂，VB应运而生。拉特纳认为，它“与美国左翼的重建”(34)和美国社会的转型一样重要，也与支持古巴有关。该旅因其官方的恐同立场和种族紧张关系而受损。但是，在巨大的后勤挑战和政治紧张局势中，该旅年复一年地向古巴派遣不同的代表团所需要的坚持，使其成为未来几十年美国左派与古巴革命团结一致的一个合适的缩影:令人担忧和混乱，但富有创造力和坚持不懈。另一个始终如一的线索是，美国政府不仅对古巴革命反感，而且对美国左派的支持也反感。在第二章中，拉特纳考察了古巴取代苏联成为20世纪60年代美国左派的主要灵感来源与美国政府对古巴人的特殊关注之间的辩证关系
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Pub Date : 2018-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1523533
R. Hamm
To begin, it was a strong friendship. For about twenty-five years, Arthur Garfield Hays and Charles Fulton Oursler were close friends, spending time together, writing to each other, and sharing ideas and confidences. Even though they sprung from different backgrounds they had many similarities in aspiration and personality. For a while they embraced the same causes and positions. But they also differed widely in their reception of cultural and social modernism and over various public issues. Yet, for decades they managed to bridge significant cultural and ideological differences. Oursler saw Hays as one of his great friends and Hays treated Oursler as one of his closest friends. But with the Cold War heating up, and the fears of internal communist subversion reaching new peaks in 1950, their friendship was altered by Oursler. He wrote a letter to Hays which accused him of being a dupe of the communists at home and someone who refused to criticize communist regimes’ actions abroad. Hays in several replies to this letter attempted (and failed) to bridge the gulf that had grown between them over issues raised by the Cold War. Though patched together, never in the few years that remained in each man’s life was it restored to what it had been. This story is significant not just because Hays and Oursler were important opinion shapers at the time, but because what it shows about the effects of the second red scare on people’s thought and lives. It shows how the public disagreements of the Cold War entered people’s private lives. Arthur Garfield Hays was one of America’s leading civil liberties lawyers and one the nation’s leading advocates for civil liberties. Born to a prosperous Jewish-American manufacturing family from Rochester, Hays was educated at City College, Columbia, and Columbia Law School. From his family’s move to the city when he was twelve, cosmopolitan New York City became his only real home. He was a religious skeptic who always identified himself as a Jew. Before the First World War, he had established himself among New York City’s elite bar. The income from his private practice underwrote his activities on behalf of civil liberties. He was a key lawyer for the young American Civil Liberties Union, serving as its co-general counsel from 1929 to 1954. He was one of the first free speech absolutists in the ACLU and he was a notable critic of over active policing. In the 1920s, he began writing articles and books on public issues, usually civil liberties related. He was the author of four popular books advocating civil liberties and was a frequent public speaker and appeared on both radio and television. Thus, through virtually every medium available he pushed the United States toward
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Pub Date : 2018-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1479573
Philip F. Rubio
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Pub Date : 2018-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1499263
J. Murphy
Can abstract art lead to nuclear war? The idea seems farfetched, to say the least, but it had currency among postwar Marxists in the United States. In a 1953 article celebrating African-American artist, Charles White, Communist artist Hugo Gellert argued that “so-called abstract, non-objective” art—the avant-garde experiments of New York School painters like Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko—had potentially cataclysmic consequences: “By their elimination of the human form and their negation of humanism,” Gellert wrote, “artists of this type help in their own way to condition the human mind to become reconciled to the possible annihilation of mankind. For there is a connection between destruction of the human form in the abstract and its actual atomic destruction.” However implausible, this dramatic leap from formal abstraction to atomic destruction hinged on the phrase the “negation of humanism.” Humanism served during the Cold War as the answer to what Marxist critics perceived as the “antihumanism” of nonfigurative abstract art, guilty-by-association with the wealthy patrons and elite institutions that supported it. The drawing by White accompanying Gellert’s article, Dawn of Life, represented a contrasting model of socialist humanism in its allegorical content and expressive figuration: a dove of peace released from, or alighting on, the open hands of a young black woman. The drawing appeared on the cover of Marxist monthly Masses & Mainstream in February 1953 (Figure 1), the same issue in which art and music critic Sidney Finkelstein’s essay, “Charles White’s Humanist Art,” anointed White the standard bearer for the journal’s ideology. “Compared to the infantile character of the formalist, non-objective and symbolist art,” Finkelstein wrote, “[White’s] portrayals of people have a true maturity which comes from the role he plays as a person and artist in social life.” From 1947 to 1956, White played a leading role “as a person and artist” in the social life of the radical left in New York. Beginning with his first one-person exhibition in 1947 at the progressive American Contemporary Art (ACA) Gallery, White emerged in the postwar period as the country’s preeminent socialist realist. From 1951 to 1956, he
抽象艺术会导致核战争吗?退一步说，这个想法似乎有些牵强，但它在战后的美国马克思主义者中很流行。1953年，共产主义艺术家雨果·盖勒特在一篇颂扬非裔美国艺术家查尔斯·怀特的文章中指出，“所谓的抽象、非客观”艺术——杰克逊·波洛克、阿道夫·戈特利布和马克·罗斯科等纽约学派画家的前卫实验——可能会带来灾难性的后果:盖勒特写道:“通过消除人类的形式和对人文主义的否定，这类艺术家以他们自己的方式帮助调节人类的思想，使人类与可能的灭绝和解。”因为在抽象人类形态的毁灭和它实际的原子毁灭之间是有联系的。”无论多么令人难以置信，这种从形式抽象到原子毁灭的戏剧性飞跃取决于“人文主义的否定”这一短语。在冷战期间，人文主义被马克思主义批评家视为非具象抽象艺术的“反人文主义”，因为它与支持它的富有赞助人和精英机构有联系而感到内疚。怀特在盖勒特的文章《生命的黎明》(Dawn of Life)中所画的这幅画，以其讽喻的内容和富有表现力的形象，代表了一种对比鲜明的社会主义人文主义模式:一只和平鸽从一位年轻的黑人妇女张开的双手中被释放出来，或者落在她的手上。这幅画出现在1953年2月的马克思主义月刊《大众与主流》(mass & Mainstream)的封面上(图1)，在同一期杂志上，艺术和音乐评论家西德尼·芬克尔斯坦(Sidney Finkelstein)的文章《查尔斯·怀特的人文主义艺术》(Charles White’s Humanist art)将怀特奉为该杂志意识形态的旗手。芬克尔斯坦写道:“与形式主义、非客观主义和象征主义艺术的幼稚特征相比，怀特对人物的描绘具有真正的成熟，这种成熟来自于他作为一个人和艺术家在社会生活中所扮演的角色。”从1947年到1956年，怀特在纽约激进左派的社会生活中“作为一个人和艺术家”发挥了主导作用。1947年，怀特在进步的美国当代艺术画廊(American Contemporary Art Gallery, ACA)举办了他的第一次个人画展，从此他成为战后美国杰出的社会主义现实主义画家。从1951年到1956年，他
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Pub Date : 2018-10-02DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431
Vernon L. Pedersen
In March of 1939 Stanley Postek, sat down in front of the window of his room at the Hotel Minerva in Paris and opened a blank notebook. On the first page of the book he wrote the title “My Memories of Spain.” The M and the S in the title are much larger than the other letters and are surrounded by dots to either emphasize the letters or present the illusion that they shine. The M looks almost like a valentine’s heart with a half smiling face hidden inside it, while the striped S, somewhat disturbingly, resembles a headless snake. Although the elaborate title appears juvenile Postek’s signature is very formal, written in large clear cursive letters of the sort used for signing legal documents. Postek turned to the next page and wrote a paragraph describing how many deep breaths he had to take before picking up his pen then added another paragraph about not being able to write. The young merchant seaman intended to record his recent experiences fighting as a member of the Abraham Lincoln battalion in the Spanish Civil War. But, despite the immediacy of events he doubted he could recapture the intensity of his experiences because of the loss of “the little diaries and sheets” he kept while serving with the International Brigades. The notes had been strongly written and timely, elements Postek feared he could not reproduce. Aware that his journal might not remain private Postek asked his future readers, when tempted to “giggle, sneer or criticize,” to remember that he was not writing for their benefit but for his own. Postek’s journal benefited him greatly, as writing it helped him deal with the trauma he endured in Spain, but, the reader benefits as well. Postek’s diaries do more than recount his experiences in Spain, they document the life of a seaman and communist organizer, provide insight into a sexual milieu profoundly at odds with mainstream, Hays Code America and tell the story of a life lived at the edge of society and yet at the center of world events. Postek kept numerous diaries over the course of his life; this study is primarily concerned with two: “My Memories of Spain” and a second journal that he called his logbook. The logbook fits inside “Memories.” Postek’s first entry in his Spanish memoir is dated 3 March 1939 he wrote in the book steadily until July when he stopped writing for three months. A single entry in October announced his intention to move to Boston and recounted a drunken party with two of his girlfriends in New York the night before his departure. The logbook starts on 23 November 1939 the same day that Postek signed on board the SS Oneida, a cargo ship running between Boston, New York, Charleston and Jacksonville. Postek declares that he is making a new start reinforcing
{"title":"Sex, Communism and the Spanish Civil War: The Diaries of Stanley Postek","authors":"Vernon L. Pedersen","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","url":null,"abstract":"In March of 1939 Stanley Postek, sat down in front of the window of his room at the Hotel Minerva in Paris and opened a blank notebook. On the first page of the book he wrote the title “My Memories of Spain.” The M and the S in the title are much larger than the other letters and are surrounded by dots to either emphasize the letters or present the illusion that they shine. The M looks almost like a valentine’s heart with a half smiling face hidden inside it, while the striped S, somewhat disturbingly, resembles a headless snake. Although the elaborate title appears juvenile Postek’s signature is very formal, written in large clear cursive letters of the sort used for signing legal documents. Postek turned to the next page and wrote a paragraph describing how many deep breaths he had to take before picking up his pen then added another paragraph about not being able to write. The young merchant seaman intended to record his recent experiences fighting as a member of the Abraham Lincoln battalion in the Spanish Civil War. But, despite the immediacy of events he doubted he could recapture the intensity of his experiences because of the loss of “the little diaries and sheets” he kept while serving with the International Brigades. The notes had been strongly written and timely, elements Postek feared he could not reproduce. Aware that his journal might not remain private Postek asked his future readers, when tempted to “giggle, sneer or criticize,” to remember that he was not writing for their benefit but for his own. Postek’s journal benefited him greatly, as writing it helped him deal with the trauma he endured in Spain, but, the reader benefits as well. Postek’s diaries do more than recount his experiences in Spain, they document the life of a seaman and communist organizer, provide insight into a sexual milieu profoundly at odds with mainstream, Hays Code America and tell the story of a life lived at the edge of society and yet at the center of world events. Postek kept numerous diaries over the course of his life; this study is primarily concerned with two: “My Memories of Spain” and a second journal that he called his logbook. The logbook fits inside “Memories.” Postek’s first entry in his Spanish memoir is dated 3 March 1939 he wrote in the book steadily until July when he stopped writing for three months. A single entry in October announced his intention to move to Boston and recounted a drunken party with two of his girlfriends in New York the night before his departure. The logbook starts on 23 November 1939 the same day that Postek signed on board the SS Oneida, a cargo ship running between Boston, New York, Charleston and Jacksonville. Postek declares that he is making a new start reinforcing","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1516431","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42617528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-26DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175
D. Lynn
It was a warm summer night in August 1935 when Dorothy Sherwood walked into the Newburgh, New York police station with her son’s murdered body. Earlier that day, Sherwood took her 2-year-old son Jimmy to a creek and held his face under the water. She then took his body home, where she changed him into clean clothes and brought his body to the police station where she admitted her crime to an “astounded” police lieutenant. Sherwood told the police that she had recently fallen on tough times and had been abandoned by Jimmy’s father. After failing to find permanent employment and facing eviction, Sherwood decided to take her son’s life because it was “too hard to make a living” for herself and her children. Reporting for the American Communist Women’s magazine, The Woman Today, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley zeroed in on what led Sherwood to murder her own son. It was poverty, a poverty unique to women and children. Bromley argued that despite Sherwood’s best efforts, she did not have “even half a chance.” Sherwood grew up without her mother, and her father left her with any family member that was willing to take her in. He used his daughter in a barter system, selling her labor to his family members who would treat her not as a relation but as a domestic. After caring for other people’s homes and children for several years, Sherwood left and traveled with a Salvation Army family for a time. She also tried her hand at waitressing. Eventually, she found herself working with a burlesque troop, an occupation the press immediately zeroed in on. But that too did not last. Sherwood struggled to find steady work and had no home to speak of. But, then, she met her husband, and for a few years of her life, there was stability. At 20-years old, Sherwood gave birth to her first child, a little girl, and for a time she was happy and settled. Until her husband contracted tuberculosis and soon after died, leaving Sherwood to care for herself and her child. Attempting to recreate the years of stability she found with her husband, Sherwood took up with a man who, according to Dunbar Bromley, “promised to look after her and her baby,” but instead he “left her cold” and with another child. Alone and with two children, Sherwood desperately tried to secure work, but that proved difficult. She tried to have her young son placed in a
{"title":"Reproductive Sovereignty in Soviet and American Socialism during the Great Depression","authors":"D. Lynn","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","url":null,"abstract":"It was a warm summer night in August 1935 when Dorothy Sherwood walked into the Newburgh, New York police station with her son’s murdered body. Earlier that day, Sherwood took her 2-year-old son Jimmy to a creek and held his face under the water. She then took his body home, where she changed him into clean clothes and brought his body to the police station where she admitted her crime to an “astounded” police lieutenant. Sherwood told the police that she had recently fallen on tough times and had been abandoned by Jimmy’s father. After failing to find permanent employment and facing eviction, Sherwood decided to take her son’s life because it was “too hard to make a living” for herself and her children. Reporting for the American Communist Women’s magazine, The Woman Today, Dorothy Dunbar Bromley zeroed in on what led Sherwood to murder her own son. It was poverty, a poverty unique to women and children. Bromley argued that despite Sherwood’s best efforts, she did not have “even half a chance.” Sherwood grew up without her mother, and her father left her with any family member that was willing to take her in. He used his daughter in a barter system, selling her labor to his family members who would treat her not as a relation but as a domestic. After caring for other people’s homes and children for several years, Sherwood left and traveled with a Salvation Army family for a time. She also tried her hand at waitressing. Eventually, she found herself working with a burlesque troop, an occupation the press immediately zeroed in on. But that too did not last. Sherwood struggled to find steady work and had no home to speak of. But, then, she met her husband, and for a few years of her life, there was stability. At 20-years old, Sherwood gave birth to her first child, a little girl, and for a time she was happy and settled. Until her husband contracted tuberculosis and soon after died, leaving Sherwood to care for herself and her child. Attempting to recreate the years of stability she found with her husband, Sherwood took up with a man who, according to Dunbar Bromley, “promised to look after her and her baby,” but instead he “left her cold” and with another child. Alone and with two children, Sherwood desperately tried to secure work, but that proved difficult. She tried to have her young son placed in a","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491175","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47277114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-09-26DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222
Melvyn Dubofsky
{"title":"The Politics of Non-Assimilation: The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century","authors":"Melvyn Dubofsky","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1491222","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49622719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968
William C. Pratt
On 28 April 1921, New York police and Bureau of Investigation agents raided a Greenwich Village studio, arresting several people and seizing a large cache of Communist documents. The raid was reported in the New York Times and later many of the documents were discussed at a 1924 U.S. Senate hearing on diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia. Among the seizedmaterials were two items that related to Communist interests in American farmers. The first of these documents was an “Agrarian Report,” which was prepared to brief the Comintern in Moscow; the second was a letter from the editor of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)’s daily newspaper in Fargo. In a way, these two artifacts reflect the dual character of the American Communist experience. On the one hand, Communists saw themselves part of an international movement directed from Moscow; on the other, they were tied to an older indigenous left as well. In this article, I explore these two themes in regard to Communist efforts in the countryside in the 1920s. In recent years, a treasure trove of documents from this era previously unavailable to scholars have been made available inMoscow.Much of what follows is drawn from those materials, but I also have utilized FBI documents and movement and local newspapers among other sources.
{"title":"Communists and American Farmers in the 1920s","authors":"William C. Pratt","doi":"10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","url":null,"abstract":"On 28 April 1921, New York police and Bureau of Investigation agents raided a Greenwich Village studio, arresting several people and seizing a large cache of Communist documents. The raid was reported in the New York Times and later many of the documents were discussed at a 1924 U.S. Senate hearing on diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia. Among the seizedmaterials were two items that related to Communist interests in American farmers. The first of these documents was an “Agrarian Report,” which was prepared to brief the Comintern in Moscow; the second was a letter from the editor of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)’s daily newspaper in Fargo. In a way, these two artifacts reflect the dual character of the American Communist experience. On the one hand, Communists saw themselves part of an international movement directed from Moscow; on the other, they were tied to an older indigenous left as well. In this article, I explore these two themes in regard to Communist efforts in the countryside in the 1920s. In recent years, a treasure trove of documents from this era previously unavailable to scholars have been made available inMoscow.Much of what follows is drawn from those materials, but I also have utilized FBI documents and movement and local newspapers among other sources.","PeriodicalId":35150,"journal":{"name":"American Communist History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14743892.2018.1460968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42114698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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