Who Belonged to the Popular Front?

In The Cultural Front. Michael Denning identified three groups participating in the Popular Front culture of the Thirties and Forties.

1. The Radicalized Modernists. These were individuals came of age around World War One. Mostly of them were Anglos from upper middle class backgrounds, although there were exceptions. Many had Ivy League educations. Some were experimental artists who were dependent on wealthy patrons for a living. Others found employment in ad agencies or wrote or supplied art for the"slick" magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Some had been involved in Village Bohemian scene. Some had been apolitical. Some had expressed their alienation from the emerging American middle class commercial culture by living in Paris or elsewhere in the 1920s. They became increasingly radicalized in lhe late 20s with the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the stock market crash. By the time of the Popular Front they were in mid-career , By 1946 they were well into middle age. Malcolm Cowley was the chronicler of this group and its experiences. Besides Crowley this group included the writers Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway and Josephine Herbst. photographer Paul Strand; composers Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington; actor Charlie Chaplin; painter Stuart Davis, fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes; critic and theorist Kenneth Burke, and playwright John Howard Lawson. In some sense to them the Popular Front was a revival of pre-World War One Greenwich Village radicalism.

2. Refugees and Emigres. Many of them were European Marxists who had taken sanctuary in New York and Los Angeles in the 1930s. Some of them returned to Europe after the War. Among thosewere still living in the United States in 1946 on Denning's list were director and actor John Houseman, filmmakers Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, William Dieterle; writers Bertolt Brecht, Christina Stead, Ayako Ishigaki (who was Japanese and not a refugee) and Andre Breton; theorists Theodor Adorno, Karl Korsch, C.L.R. James and Paul Mattick, and composers Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill . Many had been part of the European cultural front organized by impresario and Comintern member Willi Munzenberg, who committed suicide or was assassinated as he fled Nazi-occupied France with a group of other Leftists. The refugee elite gathered in emigre salons in New York and California. most famously that of Salka Viertel. Some of the European Marxists who returned to Europe did so voluntarily while others were deported for their political ideas or activities.

3. The "Plebeians." These were the intellectuals and artists who came of age in the Depression era. Most were second generation Americans from working class backgrounds. Many were Jews. Some were African American. In this group Denning includes writers Richard Wright, Thomas Bell,Carlos Bulosan (an emigre from the Philippines), Tillie Olsen, Toshio Mori (Japanese-American interned during war), Clifford Odets, Henry Roth and Pietro di Donato; singers Billie Holiday, Josh White, and Frank Sinatra; bandleaders Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Count Basie, filmmakers Elia Kazan, Abraham Polonsky, Edward Dmytryk, James Wong Howe, and Leo Hurwitz; philosopher Sidney Hook; photographers Aaron Siskind and Weegee; artists Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Fasanella and Mine Okuba; songwriter Yip Harburg; actors John Garfield and Canada Lee. These individuals had moved up into the white-collar proletariat, some through formal education and some on their own. The cultural front gave them outlets, an audience and a network of connections. Some of them became highly paid celebrities while others financially struggled throughout their careers.

Denning noted that these categories were not absolute. There were crossovers. Some of the members of the modernist generation came from working class families including Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes, Lewis Corey/Louis Fraina and Michael Gold. Some of the individuals from the Depression era generation were from the Anglo middle class, including Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, Alexander Saxton and Pete Seeger.

At times there were tensions between and within these groups. For instance some of the New York Jewish "proletarian" intellectuals found some of the Modernists like Cowley, Hicks and Matthiessen to be too "provincial," middle class and Anglophile and out of touch with European Marxism. Some of the Anglo Modernists in turn were uncomfortable with the cultural "Jewishness" of the proletarian left. Working class leftists often felt out of place in the salon culture of their monied Manhattan and Hollywood counterparts. Novelist Howard Fast, for instance, marveled at a strategy meeting at the home of Corliss Lamont where the revolution was discussed as the butler brought in a silver tureen of ice cream. There was also a clash between the commercialism of the Hollywood/Tin Pan Alley leftists, and the "authenticity" crowd. The latter accused of the former of doing little more for the sake of the class struggle than signing petitions, joining groups and attending the occasional benefit, although many of them would pay dearly during the McCarthy era even for this. The Modernists slammed the commercial artists for their lack of artistic integrity and their participation in the mass culture. They slammed the proletarian agitprop artists for their slavish devotion to party line dogma and to rigid didactic formulas. The commercial artists sometimes felt that many of the Modernists were snobs uninterested in communicating with the common man while they felt some of the most doctrinaire of the proletarian artists preached only to the choir.