The Left

The continued importance of the Left was evident in news coverage this week. A big anti-Franco rally drew thousands to Madison Avenue (see coverage in the Sunday News and The Sunday New York Times). According to a page one Sunday Times story, over 5,000 union members attended a stormy marathon meeting of the New York City Board of Estimates to demand higher wages. The Sunday papers were full of coverage of strikes and threatened strikes across the country. The CIO-affiliated National Citizens Political Action Committee met to discuss candidate endorsements in the upcoming congressional elections. The competing Independent Citizen's Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions sponsored an ambitious agenda of meetings, rallies and social events.

According to a Fortune magazine poll in 1942, a majority of Americans were open to the idea of a Socialist America with about 25 percent declaring themselves to be in favor. The numbers were likely even higher in New York City. But now that the war was over the tide was turning and the Left was slow to see what was to come. Many of its leaders assumed there would be a forward march from where they had left off. The movement was moving into a period of heightened activity in 1946 after a wartime hiatus. Some of the signs were favorable. many of the organizations of the left reached their peak membership in the two years that immediately followed the end of the war. Stalin's purges and the Soviet pact with Hitler that had caused such confusion, disarray and conflict among the faithful at the end of that decade, seemed to be forgotten. During the war the Stalinists had wrapped themselves in American flags as they became fervent supporters of the war effort. Now the Party presented itself as the defender against the resurgence of Fascism and the guardian of peace.

The Comintern recently had ousted former Party leader Earl Browder who had led the Communist Party USA through its Soviet-dictated twists and turns as it went literally overnight from Anti- Fascist to Anti-War to Pro-War. Hardliner William Z. Foster, was back in control and had ratcheted up the rhetoric. The chief objective now was to neutralize objections to an aggressive Soviet foreign policy. Party hacks shouted to cheering Communist crowds that a cabal of Nazis, Klansmen, British secret agents and Wall Street had wrested control of the government from the New Deal and was gearing up for World War Three to return Fascism to Europe and bring it to the United States. Only the Communist Party, Stalin and the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union stood in their way.

The more pragmatic Left, including many fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers, sought to hold together the New Deal coalition on domestic policy while moving it well to the Left. In April 1946 they were fired up and ready to go but the November elections would see the defeat of many Progressive incumbents, even in New York City. Meanwhile the political Right was revving up its crusade against the Left and its liberal allies, now that Stalin was no longer a wartime ally, linking support for unions, consumer rights, a competitive marketplace, social welfare, universal healthcare, the United Nations or civil rights to the Red Menace.

The year saw heightened union activity. The unions, particularly those in the CIO, had launched a wave of strikes when the war ended, as workers sought to make up for a period of frozen wages and rising prices. The unions were looking to extend their membership among white collar employees and in the South, which had proven resistant. In the more radicalized unions, leaders, many of them Communist party members, looked to using the unions to raise class consciousness and create a proletarian culture. However, the effect of the strikes on the recovery was provoking a backlash among consumers, stirred up by conservative politicians and business lobbyists who blamed unions and the New Deal for continued shortages. The role of Communists in the unions, particularly in the most radical of the CIO locals, was becoming an issue to some of the rank-and-file and non-Communist leadership as well as to government investigators and the general public. In particular ethnic blue collar Catholics whose homelands were occupied by the Army of the godless Soviet Union objected to union leaders who wanted them to march for Uncle Joe.

The Popular Front still was a major part of the New York arts scene, but not to the extent it had been a decade earlier. It had become fractured into competing ideological cliques, and was made up largely of those who had come of age during the Depression and their Jazz Age elders. The younger generation of returning vets was more skeptical and largely apolitical. In addition to its influence on the broader culture, the Left had its own cultural establishments from publications to art galleries and even its own housing projects.

In assessing the strength of the Left in 1946, one has to remember that attitudes were based on what had come in the years before and not at all on the revelations that came after. The Left took strength from the turmoil of the Thirties because it offered a compelling narrative to explain the Depression and the mounting tensions in the world. Support for the Left dropped sharply in the postwar years, although a Gallup poll as late as 1949 showed 15 per cent of Americans still in favor of Socialism.The Stalinist Left's unquestioning post-war support of the Soviet Union's aggressive imperialism and totalitarianism grew increasingly problematic. To dissident Marxists and some fellow travelers it became increasingly difficult to reconcile their idealism with the facts on the ground. The Waterloo year for was 1948 when the Soviets staged a coup in Czechoslovakia against a Popular Front government, irrevocably driving a wedge in the US between the Communists and the non-Communist left. The effort to elect Henry Wallace, the iconic American political figure to the postwar Left, proved to be a disaster. Instead of revealing the Leftist coalition as a powerful political force, it turned into a rout, further strengthening the hand of the Right.