Cafe Society

Cafe Society on Sheridan Square was the preferred night spot for Leftists in 1946. It was quite the thing when unemployed shoe store salesman Barney Josephson opened it in 1938 and Billie Holiday was the headliner. It was where she became associated with "Strange Fruit," the haunting anthem about lynching written by Bronx schoolteacher and secret Communist Party member Abel Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenberg children after their parents' execution. It was still popular in 1946 before the witch hunters launched their attacks on the club a year later.

Josephson modeled the club after the political cabarets he had found in Europe. He was not the first. Herbert Jacoby, who had fled Paris, had opened Le Riband Bleu in 1937 but his club, as well as his second club, the Blue Angel, reflected his European tastes, attempting to recreate Parisian-style sophistication rather than Wiemar social commentary. The atmosphere at Jacoby's clubs was snobbish. Earlier in 1938 Cabaret TAC had been opened by left-wing Broadway and Tin Pan Alley talent associated with the Theatre Arts Committee formed to support the Spanish Republicans. It lasted two years. The plan for Josephson's club was to focus on jazz, political satire and an egalitarian atmosphere.

The club satirized the nightclub culture of the era, even as it participated in it. The walls were covered in paintings by artists who had been doing WPA murals, including Anton Refregier William Gropper and Adolf Dehn. They poked fun at the excesses of New York nightlife. A doorman in rags and tattered white goves greeted arriving patrons It was the waiters, reputedly all veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, who wore tails rather than the patrons. The crowd was integrated. Racist comments and behavior were not tolerated, unlike in exclusive midtown hangouts like the Stork Club where J. Edgar Hoover and his boyfriend mingled with celebrities, gossip columnists and the mob while African Americans and other dark-skinned patrons were kept outside.

Josephson was a fervent advocate of jazz and folk music, but he disliked bebop which was the rage in the postwar era at the clubs on 52nd Street but dismissed as commercial by the Popular Front ideology. According to "The Politics of Café Society" by David W. Stower, an article that was published in the Journal of American History on March 1998, the typical show included a comedian emcee, a featured vocalist, a jazz or vocal ensemble, perhaps a dance troupe that performed "ethnic" dances to jazz accompaniment and a dance band. The club had a small dance floor. According to the listings in The New Yorker, African American folk/protest singer Josh White, best known for "One Meatball," was the featured performer at the downtown venue this week.

Although the downtown club regularly drew crowds it was a money loser. Following the dollar in 1940, Josephson opened Cafe Society Uptown on 58th Street off Park, next door to the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This room was more formal with plush decor. It drew a better dressed, bigger spending crowd. Unlike in the downtown club, musicians, other than band leaders and soloists, were asked not to mingle with the customers. The headliners this week at Cafe Society Uptown were Imogene Coca, who would become a household name in the Fifties as Sid Caesar's TV comedy sidekick, and jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams .

The matchbooks from the club declared it "the wrong place for the Right people" but from the start it attracted the "see and be seen" crowd who found it ever so much fun to mingle with the downtown bohemians, left-wing intellectuals and other social pariah. For all the denunciations of Wall Street capitalists there was a surprising mingling of "proletarian" activists and the Park Avenue set in the Popular Front era. Communism was chic in the late 1930s, don't you know. Perhaps it was their shared disdain for middle class careerists. Vanity Fair editor Helen Lawrenson, married to a labor activist, suggested the name and provided ideas on the decor and theme. John Hammond, the club's musical adviser and booker, was a Vanderbilt heir as well as Popular Front supporter.

Michael Denning noted that to its critics the club was a bizarre union of the celebrity culture it claimed to satirize and political posturing. In The Cultural Front he quoted Irving Howe and Lewis Coser who wrote in The American Communist Party: A Critical History that Cafe Society was a perfect symbol of the Popular Front, where politics was presented "for the middle-class fellow travelers and the middle-brow progressives" as a "thrill over cocktails." Denning, an historian from the Left, of course, disagreed. Jazz purists deplored the effect that agitprop songs like "Strange Fruit" had on Billie Holiday's authenticity as a blues artist, turning her into a self-conscious performer of "meaningful" songs."

The history of Cafe Society is a case study of the difficulty of telling "Popular Front" apart from "Communist front." The unfortunate double-meaning of the word "front" plays a role in the confusion. Just about everyone involved with the nightclub proudly and openly supported the Popular Front, "Front" being used in the sense of a coalition of Leftists and liberals united in support of common causes, in this case racial justice, economic fairness and civil liberties (at least as it pertained to fellow Leftists). Most also had a favorable view of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Some were Party members and many more were fellow travelers who stopped just short of placing themselves fully under party discipline. The FBI, however, suspected Cafe Society of being a Communist front as well, "front" being used in the sense of a facade hiding clandestine Party activity.

From accounts by Cafe Society performers like Lena Horne, Hazel Scott and Josh White, Josephson introduced a lot of his African American performers to Marxist theory and radical organizations. Most of them liked Josephson personally and felt that, unlike many of the club owners they encountered, he paid them well, treated them fairly and appeared genuinely to have their best interests at heart. They trusted him. He frequently served as a career adviser and unpaid manager steering them toward a leftist entertainment network. His talent pool supplied much of the entertainment at Popular Front concerts and events. Josephson supported a number of left wing causes and was particularly active in Russian War Relief. But no matter how much you might disagree with the politics and ideology of the Communist Party, none of these activities were illegal, immoral or imminent threats to American security.

According to Stower, who viewed the FBI files on Josephson for his article for the Journal of American History, the FBI believed the ties between Josephson and the CPUSA went a lot deeper. They had Josephson and his club under surveillance since 1943 and J. Edgar Hoover also put Josephson on his Security Index, a list of Americans who were to be rounded up in a national emergency and were to be denied a US passport, the 1940s equivalent of the No Fly list. Much of the information in the enormous file gathered on Josephson had been blacked out, making it impossible for Stower to tell if Hoover had anything conclusive on Josephson. The FBI had gathered bits of evidence, like typewriter samples from his office, apparently supplied by an insider or through a break-in. Hoover was looking for evidence of tax evasion, a common occurrence in the nightclub world, that would allow the agency to seize the establishment's books and financial records. He also had his agents spend a lot of time investigating the possibility that Josephson had been born before his parents' had immigrated from Latvia which would have made him deportable. Neither ploy was successful.

As Stower noted, Hoover's suspicion of Josephson was at least in part cultural. The FBI chief did not like people who questioned authority or violated social norms. Race mingling made him uncomfortable. He preferred the all-white, social exclusivity of the mob-run Stork Club to the Popular Front democracy of Cafe Society. He did not like Communists or party sympathizers.

Some of his suspicions, however, were plausible. For one, Josephson's brother Leon was an open and active Party member and lawyer for the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Party. Leon also was implicated in Soviet espionage, including a Communist Party plot in Europe to assassinate Hitler. The two brothers had shared a residence at times and Leon was listed on some papers as a business partner in the club, although he did not play a visibly active role role in the operation. Barney himself had belonged to the Party briefly just before he opened the club ,and he had visited the Soviet Union in 1935 at Party expense. Although he denied being a Party member, he was said by some witnesses to visit Party headquarters frequently.

One of the big questions was where an unemployed shoe salesman got the money to open a nightclub. Some of the leftist artists who helped decorate the place were paid in part through barter but it still took several thousand dollars to get a club up and running. Josephson said the money had come from Leon and his friends. Helen Lawrenson, who had Party ties herself and was involved in the club in its early days, wrote that the Party had supplied the seed money in the hope that they would share in the profits. Journalist Howard Rushmore, who had worked as film critic at the Daily Worker from 1938-39 before joining the right wing Journal-American and later becoming a McCarthy associate, charged that the club had been the Party's idea from the start. But Rushmore, who went on to work for the sleazy Confidential after burning his bridges with both the Left and the Right, was a man so vile that even professional rat Roy Cohn could not trust him, calling him someone who eventually turned on everyone he knew. Rushmore would later kill himself and his wife in the back seat of a taxi after an argument.

The club was not a money-making operation in its first two years. How did it stay afloat and where did the money come from for the uptown club in 1940? Perhaps, like the mob did with its joints, the Party used the club to hide financial transactions and pay off operatives. In his testimony, former Party official and Daily Worker editor-turned-professional-FBI-informant Louis Budenz said that Cafe Society Uptown was one of a number of Popular Front organizations funded through a secret party bankroll. "The purpose," he wrote, "was to make that night club a rendezvous for artists and entertainers and people of wealth, with whom Communists could then establish acquaintance." So maybe it was just a networking opportunity.

Unable to find sufficient reason to take legal action against Josephson or his clubs, Hoover used his usual tactic of press leaks and innuendo to crush Josephson. Both of the clubs did good business through the war and into the postwar years. Then in 1947 and 1948 the attacks on Josephson and the entertainers who appeared at his clubs began appearing in the columns of Hearst bottom feeders like Westbrook Pegler, who later was kicked out of the John Birch Society for being too extreme, Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen. Rumors circulated that the FBI considered the clubs places where Soviet agents made their drops and were secretly photographing all club patrons. Attendance fell off sharply. In 1949 Josephson sold both clubs. However, contrary to what has been written in some places (e,g. Wikipedia) the clubs did not close immediately. Cafe Society Downtown continued to operate under new ownership in the Village through much of the 1950s. Cafe Society Uptown was sold to nightclub entrepreneur Herbert Jacoby but the chi-chi club, Le Directoire, which he opened in the space, was a flop. Josephson would later open the Cookery restaurant in the Village which offered affordable meals and featured entertainment from some of the jazz artists that had played Cafe Downtown such as Mary Lou Williams and Alberta Hunter. I used to go there from time to time in the 1970s for their chicken dinners.

Most social historians of the era have a highly benevolent view of Josephson and his club. A book by Josephson's widow, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People, was published this year. It is based on tapes he had made before his death and author interviews with people who had worked there.