The Popular Front was still strong in 1946 even as the Stalinists and the non-Communists pulled further apart. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning's interesting account of the Popular Front's cultural activities in the Thirties and Forties from a Marxist perspective, the author wrote that it is wrong to see the Popular Front as essentially a Communist-led movement with fellow travelers going along for the ride. He concedes that the well-organized Communist Party played an outsized role in the movement, but asserts that it was the non-affiliated Left, particularly the members of the CIO unions, who were the principal driving cultural force. To this day it is not an easy task sorting out Communists, crypto-Communists, fellow travelers, Communist sympathizers and independent Marxists in the movement. and to a historian like Denning, there is no need to. They were all "progressives." While they might differ in the degree that they were willing to dissent from Party policy and methods, they shared a worldview. There was a considerable overlap between CIO union activists and party operatives. Most of the participants in the Popular Front were neither Communist secret agents nor mindless dupes. Their cultural leaders were drawn from the Jazz Age Modernists, who came of age around the time of the First World War, the European refugees who sought sanctuary from Hitler in New York and Los Angeles during the 1930s, and the Proleterians from working class backgrounds who came of age during the Depression. Many of the World War Two cohort who went from school straight into the service, were less interested in radical politics than those who came before.
According to Denning the Popular Front in New York City had three pillars: the garment and needle trades, the white collar unions and the Harlem community organizations. Much of the needle trade workers at the time were Italian and Jewish women but the union leaders were men.
The ILGWU, one of the largest and most active of the city's unions, had stopped participating in Communist front organizations by 1946, but Sidney Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing Workers was still active as were the unions representing retail and wholesale workers and warehouseman.
The Harlem left included the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters led by A. Philip Randolph; the Communist activists William Patterson and Benjamin Davis, who had led the campaign to free the Scottsboro Nine; and Adam Clayton Powell's Abyssinian Baptist Church. The Popular Front took institutional form in the African American community through the National Negro Congress, a coalition that at its peak consisted of 585 organizations with a membership of 1.2 million. Randolph was its first titular head. Powell was elected to city council in 1941 and to Congress in 1944. Harlem Communist Party leader Benjamin Davis was one of two City Council members in 1946 who had been elected as Communists, thanks to the system of proportional representation used briefly to allot seats, an experiment that ended in 1947 mostly to keep the Communists out of city government. Davis subsequently was sent to prison under the Smith Act as a subversive. Harlem also had its own left wing weekly newspaper, People's Voice, published by Powell. Prominent African-American cultural figures in the movement included Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
By the 1940s conflict had developed between the NAACP and the Communist Party and between A. Philip Randolph and the Party. Randolph resigned from the National Negro Congress in 1940 because it was being run by the Communist Party. Many of the other non-Communist organizations and individuals joined his exit. Powell also backed away from the Party after the Hitler-Stalin pact, although his wife, jazz pianist Hazel Scott, was very active in Popular Front events and organizations. The National Negro Congress was still in existence in 1946 and was sponsoring a benefit concert Easter Sunday at Town Hall.
The American Labor Party was the political manifestation of the Popular Front in New York. It was funded by the unions and endorsed Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and nominal Republicans like LaGuardia and Marcantonio as well as electing city council members of its own like Mike Quill, the leader of the largely Irish Transport Workers Union. Quill had close ties to the Communist Party which he severed in 1948 , forcing Party members out of the union that they had dominated. The impetus was CPUSA head William Z. Foster's plan to split off the more radical unions, like the TWU, from the CIO, to form a Communist-led union organization (the CIO national leadership was becoming increasingly less cooperative with the Party by this point). Although Foster supposedly offered the leadership of this proposed new organization to Quill, the TWU leader was a better reader of the political tea leaves than the clueless Foster and chose instead to split with the Party. In 1944 the anti-Soviet faction in the ALP left to form the Liberal Party.
The Popular Front was particularly influential in the theater community. Many performers. writers, composers and directors were involved in 1946 and some of the dramas on Broadway reflected the politics of the Left. Although the agitprop plays and socially significant revues of the Thirties had fallen out of favor with Broadway theatergoers, a mobile theater group, Stage For Action, sought to keep them alive. Fairly typical of those in the entertainment industry who were drawn into the Popular Front in 1946 was a young academic from Texas named John Henry Faulk who had recently come to New York to start a radio career and would become known later as a man who helped end the Black List era. His experiences are told on this page.
Among the most active Popular Front (or United Front, as it was often called in the post-war era) organizations was the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which would later become part of the coalition that formed the Progressive Party to run Henry Wallace for president in 1948. Among the Popular Front adult education organizations was the Communist-run Jefferson School of Social Sciences which had an enrollment at its peak of 5,000 students. Under the guise of being a broadbased humanitarian effort, the Committee for Russian War Relief also provided a platform to spout Stalinist propaganda.
The Popular Front was not the only political and cultural voice in town. Much of the city's working class got its news from the Right Wing tabloids and Henry Luce promoted an alternative world view, the American Century, which saw the postwar period as the triumph of American democracy, corporations and media.