1919

When the novelist John Dos Passos set out, in the midst of the Great Depression, to portray recent American history and pierce it to the marrow, he underscored the importance of 1919. The three novels he wrote were revolutionary in style and politics, their innovative “Camera Eye” and “Newsreel” features giving expression in print to the new modes of perception made possible by technology and mass culture, their composite storylines weaving a tapestry of a conflict-ridden nation in a rush of development, and their episodic allusions to the radical élan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) pointing toward the prospect of a more egalitarian America, sourced from within. Upon completion, the trilogy would be bound in a single cover under the name U.S.A., but as issued they were distinct – and in the time spans of their coverage, intriguingly asymmetrical. The first novel, The 42nd Parallel (1930), is named for the line of latitude that runs from Chicago through New York to Europe and Russia, the geography that provides structure to its narrative beginning in 1900 and ending in 1917. The Big Money (1936), the final novel, is named for the superficial prosperity and business hegemony of the 1920s, its narrative transpiring between 1919 and 1929. That leaves 1917, 1918, and 1919: the three years upon which, for Dos Passos, hinged the entire first third of the twentieth century. In his middle book, published in 1932, Dos Passos aimed to capture “a certain crystallization (call it monopoly capitalism?) of society that didn't exist in the early part of 42nd Parallel (call it competitive capitalism?),” as he wrote to Malcolm Cowley.Footnote ¹

What title did Dos Passos give to that crucial middle volume? 1919. Why not 1917? It would not be difficult to make a case for 1917 as the more decisive year, it being the time of American entry into the Great War and of the two fateful Russian Revolutions that would shape the rest of the century. Even in the novel itself, almost all the action occurs in 1917 and 1918. Dos Passos did not arrive upon his titular year by accident, however, for 1919 was, for him, the moment when American capitalism's transformation from proprietary to corporate capitalism was over – as well as the year when it became crystal clear that the war had left not only multitudes dead in Europe's trenches but also two domestic casualties: American liberalism and American radicalism.

Liberal idealism had, in Dos Passos's account, revealed itself in the course of the war to be adjunct to empire, to the Morgan loans and Standard Oil. His description of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles conference table of 1919 is apposite:

Versailles itself, not the treaty's subsequent Republican repudiation in the Senate, was for Dos Passos the end point of Wilsonian idealism. American liberalism's moral claim to represent an alternative to the Old World lay in ruins. As for American radicalism, 1917 provided inspiration in the establishment of the first workers’ republic and the Soviet experiment, but the bogeyman of the Hun, followed by the Red Scare, had by 1919 shattered the American working-class radical movement, as the Wobblies, Eugene V. Debs's Socialist Party, and all the rest of the insurgent working-class forces that sought to oppose war and exploitation in the name of international solidarity were stamped out in a spasm of intolerance.

Those outcomes for liberal and radical hopes, however, were not entirely fated in the spring of 1919, when other results still seemed possible. Hence Dos Passos's title. What he understood was that 1919 was postwar in both senses of the term: it came after the Armistice, but was still defined by the problems the war set in motion. In 1919 the war and the potentially revolutionary upsurge it produced came to settle, both internationally and domestically.

From a century's distance, 1919 remains riveting because it was a year of contradictions – located, as Dos Passos perceived, on the cusp of a great transition. In one sense it was a year of promise, a harbinger of modern times, a pathway to the Roaring Twenties. The arts saw a deepening modernist sensibility with the founding of Bauhaus and Mondrian's turn to grid-based painting, while in American literature Sherwood Anderson opened up new experimental vistas with Winesburg, Ohio – a collection that, incidentally, featured what is perhaps American fiction's first sympathetic portrait of a queer character in the story “Hands.” Woman suffrage, still controversial only a few years before, had by then taken on an air of inevitability. Newspapers were already running headlines such as “The ‘Flapper’ – Can She Be Defined?” or “Is the ‘Flapper’ Doomed?”Footnote ³ In that very same year, however, Prohibition became a Constitutional amendment, Progressive reform ran aground, and the symbiotic rivalry of liberalism and radicalism ended in the triumph of neither. Instead stark political reaction was triumphant, to be manifested in the next decade's immigration restrictions, Ku Klux Klan heyday, and Republican domination of politics. In this sense, equally, 1919 was a pathway to the 1920s. Although the year is now lost to public memory between the Great War and the Jazz Age, it was historically decisive. What made it such a watershed? The confluence of three occurrences: strike wave, race riots, and Red Scare.

Seemingly everyone, from Boston police to Broadway actors, walked off the job in 1919. Beginning with the Seattle general strike in February, more than 3,630 strikes erupted, involving more than four million workers.Footnote ⁴ It was the greatest strike wave in American history to that point – and, by some measurements, ever, with only 1946, another postwar moment, perhaps ever exceeding it. This working-class upsurge had its roots in the First World War, when business enjoyed cost-plus contracts and War Labor Board corporatism meant a constraint on strikes but allowed American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions to enrol 3.5 million workers. The resultant full-production economy caused wages to lag behind profits and inflation, and it was to close those gaps that workers struck. So paramount was the labor question in 1919 that even the Chicago White Sox's notorious throwing of the World Series is traceable to it; ballplayer resentment of club owner Charles Comiskey's evisceration of their salaries made collusion with the bookies a form of resistance akin to the IWW's notion of “striking on the job.”Footnote ⁵

The infamous frenzy of white violence in 1919 grew out of the war as well, for the Great Migration of African Americans from South to North was the pretext for race riots. The year saw fifty-two lynchings and hundreds more deaths nationwide from twenty-five major race riots, the most famous erupting in Chicago in July. Some of those killed were returned soldiers still in uniform. Their belief that in fighting to make the world safe for democracy they would advance the race lent poignancy to the new self-assertiveness expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis:

Claude McKay justified armed self-defense in his poem “If We Must Die” (1919), and in Harlem, where Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association was at its apex, the slogan “The New Negro Has No Fear” appeared on banners. Such proud gestures of defiance, however, could not stem the bloodbath that James Weldon Johnson, Du Bois's counterpart at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, aptly called “Red Summer.”Footnote ⁷

The Red Scare, too, had wartime origins – in the Espionage and Sedition Acts in the United States and, in Russia, in the October Revolution, where the Bolsheviks’ opposition to empire and war was epitomized in the slogan “Peace, Land, Bread.” Allied armies were in fact still in the field in 1919, participating in the invasion of the Soviet Union that saw US troops occupy Vladivostok. Nevertheless, to the surprise of almost all observers, the Soviet Union persisted and endured. In March 1919, the Communist International was created, prompting the formation of two small American Communist parties, one boasting John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), as a leader. The immediate effect of these rival claimants to Bolshevik fealty, however, was to fragment and weaken the American left.Footnote ⁸ That did not prevent hysteria about the danger of “Bolshevism” from mounting in the American press and comfortable classes. In that year, J. Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation's Radical Division, the Palmer Raids were launched, and a tremendous crescendo of political repression, including vigilante action and deranged press accounts, all but finished off American radicalism.Footnote ⁹

These three trends – class, race, politics – were profoundly interrelated. The US Senate's Overman Committee held hearings in February 1919 that launched the Red Scare; that inquiry, in turn, was organized because the Seattle strike of that same month raised fears of American Bolshevism. The race riots in six instances emerged directly out of strike situations, according to a recent study.Footnote ¹⁰ Surely, however, that does not fully capture the extent of class causality. All of the year's race riots were seasoned by resentments bred of employers’ conscious fomentation of racial division and workers’ competition for jobs, which were becoming scarcer as demobilized troops returned home seeking work and as wartime production wound down. With regard to racial wage differentials, the black economist George Edwin Haynes stated, “Most of this thing we call a race question is down at rock bottom a labor question.”Footnote ¹¹

Never was the meaning of the word “reaction” clearer than in 1919, when racial animosity and fear of radicalism were stoked by forces using those irrationalities to beat back working-class advances. This was clear in the Seattle general strike, which elevated the city's red-baiting mayor, Ole Hanson, to the national lecture circuit, and in the Boston police strike that brought Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge to national prominence. It was also clear in the year's most epic strike, that of 350,000 steelworkers, that broke out in September when the rank and file boiled over after a year-long organizing drive by a coalition of twenty-four different craft unions. The chairman of US Steel, Elbert Gary, said his workers had been content until they were stirred up by agitators seeking “the closed shop, soviets, and the forcible distribution of property,” and, to complete the circle of reaction, the steel strike was defeated in part by use of black strikebreakers, their presence flaunted to create an impression of resumed production and stoke working-class divisions.Footnote ¹²

This pattern – pent-up working-class frustration bursting forth in social unrest, only to be bested by reaction – was a transatlantic phenomenon in 1919. January saw the Spartacist uprising in Berlin that ended in the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht, March through August saw Béla Kun's short-lived Hungarian Soviet, and the May Fourth Movement accelerated student radicalism and opposition to imperialism in China. In Britain, a burst of soldiers’ and sailors’ mutinies, the militancy of Clydeside engineers, and railwaymen and miners’ agitation marked a year of strikes, desperation, and instability, down to racist violence in Liverpool and Cardiff. It was, according to John Saville, “the most difficult year of all the postwar years for the Government and the propertied classes,” though one that “never reached revolutionary proportions,” a judgment that could apply just as well to the United States.Footnote ¹³ Likewise, an English journalist making his way through cold, demoralized, hunger-ridden, and desperate Central Europe wrote with regard to Poland, “The reaction is striking behind the Communists at the whole working-class movement.”Footnote ¹⁴ The year 1919 could sometimes look like a revolutionary situation, but in the end it was a counterrevolutionary situation.

Despite Red Scare fears of subversion, few American radicals of the time were persuaded that revolution was imminent in 1919. “I don't look on the labor movement of this country with very much enthusiasm for the people, they have not the men at the helm,” the aged Mother Jones wrote Terence V. Powderly, onetime leader of the Knights of Labor, bemoaning the AFL convention in Atlantic City, “and to tell you the truth going over the country as I do, if a revolution started tomorrow I don't know where they would get a leader, and I think the capitalist have got that down fine.”Footnote ¹⁵ Such sourness was disproportionate in that year of insurgency, but Mother Jones's lament illustrates that the impetus for much of the labor agitation of 1919 was not overt political radicalism but rather a combination of spontaneous labor conditions and – as her dyspepsia could not permit her to admit – the emergence of a progressive wing within the AFL. That wing was typified by Chicago's John Fitzpatrick, who presided over a successful wartime drive in meatpacking and then persuaded Samuel Gompers's conservative AFL leadership to support the 1918–19 steel drive. The steel campaign's key organizer under Fitzpatrick was William Z. Foster, a former syndicalist. Though later a Communist, Foster in 1917–19 was firmly committed to the AFL, if to the Fitzpatrick vision of “amalgamation” of craft unions, proto-industrial and militant in its social unionism. The nation's press reproduced excerpts from Foster's earlier syndicalist calls for revolution, blending them with themes of Bolshevik insurrection, but that distorted what was actually emergent within the AFL: not Bolsheviks so much as militant liberals and radicals of the kinds who would, by the 1930s, spearhead the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and at last conquer American manufacturing and basic industry for unionism.Footnote ¹⁶ Key to that subsequent effort would be the CIO's appreciation of the need for racial and ethnic inclusiveness, a lesson learned the hard way in 1919's dress rehearsal.

What 1919 demonstrates, then, is double-edged with regard to Marxism. It shows that America has had class struggles comparable to – indeed, related to – those of Europe, despite the American ideology's denial of them. The strike wave of 1919 was nothing if not at heart a clash over how to divide the surplus: profits or wages? At the same time, 1919 illustrates how American history has thrown up tremendous obstacles to class consciousness and class solidarity, let alone revolution. The year's race riots and political hysteria epitomize how American working-class cohesion has so often been short-circuited.

Any romanticism that would see the 1919 strike wave as revolutionary must recognize that the actual outcome was the political conservatism and labor febrility of the 1920s. That stabilization, however, would prove fleeting. As wage suppression issued inevitably in income inequality, a straight line may be drawn from 1919 to 1929, with capitalist accumulation generating capitalist crisis. That slump, in turn, would enable the left and the working-class movement to rise from the ashes. The prominence in that later moment of the American Communist Party, subordinate to Soviet authority in the age of Joseph Stalin and consequently given to excusing forced collectivization, show trials, and mass purges, produced a structured left that was the diametric opposite of the earlier autonomous working-class rebel spirit that Dos Passos celebrated in U.S.A., a tragedy hinted at in its final pages, and one that eventually propelled Dos Passos and many others rightward.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite all of this – or, rather, because of it – the year 1919 remains alluring in the alternative futures it contained. As Dos Passos wrote in the year 1919 was published, “Any spring is a time of overturn, but then Lenin was alive, the Seattle general strike had seemed the beginning of the flood instead of the beginning of the ebb, Americans in Paris were groggy with theatre and painting and music; Picasso was to rebuild the eye, Stravinski was cramming the Russian steppes into our ears, currents of energy seemed breaking out everywhere …”Footnote ¹⁸

1939

In June 1935 Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), declared that “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.” A modern Declaration of Independence would draw not on the ideas of “French Encyclopedists and the British classical political economists,” but instead on “the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the modern representatives of human progress.” By the mid-1930s, Communism cast a long shadow over radical traditions such as syndicalism, anarchism and socialism, and Marx's legacy had been claimed by the CPUSA and the Soviet Union. In the Popular Front years, Browder's party also claimed the mantle of “the revolutionary traditions of Americanism.” Indeed, Browder said, “We are the only ones who continue those traditions and apply them to the problems of today.”Footnote ¹

That year in Moscow, Stalin's government had begun rounding up Old Bolsheviks such as Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, accusing them of conspiracy against the Soviet regime in league with “Japanese–German–Trotskyite Agents.” The “show trials” that started in 1936 were held in open court, featuring elaborate confessions by the accused of extraordinary plots, before Western journalists from publications such as the New Statesman and the New Republic. Trotsky fled to Mexico City for refuge, where he produced a steady stream of denials, refutations, and denunciations of the show trials. He did so for a simple reason: the show trials were extremely convincing. As a New York Times reporter explained in March 1938, while many wondered, “Are the Moscow treason trials faked?” in fact the “cases were well-founded” and “at the very least there had been a widespread and dangerous conspiracy to overthrow the Stalin regime.”Footnote ² The apparatus of a public inquiry – the accused facing the accusers, a panel of cross-examined witnesses, a respected judge, and evidence available for observers to assess – could confer legitimation on the adjudication of great controversies.

In the US, there was a proliferation of public inquiries into matters involving Marxism and Communism in the late 1930s. Some were governmental, such as the Congressional Dies Committee on Un-American Activities (first convened in 1938), or the New York legislature's Rapp–Coudert Committee investigation of subversion in schools (begun in 1939). Others were organized by trade unions and political organizations to investigate and pronounce on the loyalties of their members. They took up similar questions: who was a Communist? Could Communism be compatible with other loyalties, to party, union, or country? What was the difference between Marxist ideas and class solidarities and Soviet – or American – Communism? Most of these inquiries focussed on American Communist organizing, particularly within industrial unions, and on Communist influence on American cultural and political institutions (such as the Dies Committee's examination of the Federal Theater Project.) As if following Browder's lead, they tended to focus on Communism's American manifestations.

Three of these inquiries show radicals attempting to carve out ideological space between Marxism and Stalinism, and they illuminate how the political spectrum of American radicalism began to narrow in the late 1930s. It became increasingly difficult for American Communists to separate themselves from events in the Soviet Union. In 1937, Leon Trotsky successfully defended himself against charges of treason by claiming that he, not Stalin, was the true heir of Marx. In 1939, maritime union leader Harry Bridges won his deportation trial by disavowing Communism, while heartily endorsing Marxism. But after the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Non-aggression Pact, Stalin eclipsed Marx in American politics. In 1940, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn lost her fight against expulsion from the American Civil Liberties Union when she tried to defend the Soviet Union and the CPUSA as socialist projects. Despite Browder's best efforts, Stalinism had become the sign of Communism in twentieth-century America.

These struggles over the nature of American Communism remind us of the importance of transnational dynamics in shaping the politics of what Michael Denning called “Popular Front solidarity.” Since its publication in 1997, Denning's The Cultural Front has served as a touchstone for interpretations of the culture and politics of the Popular Front years. Denning sought to show how the culture of the “CIO working class” had grown organically out of domestic substrates such as an American “moral economy” and “working-class ethnic Americanism.” In Denning's account, the “zigzags of international diplomacy” and the “internal crises of foreign movements, parties and regimes” were less important than the internal dynamics in American political economy.Footnote ³ International dimensions appeared largely in his descriptions of American radicals’ involvement in the Spanish Civil War or support for Ethiopia. The Moscow show trials and Nazi–Soviet Pact scarcely appear in the book, nor does the Comintern. This domestication of the American left reproduced the discourse of Earl Browder's Popular Front nationalism. Revisiting The Cultural Front now, after the transnational turn, Denning's version of the American 1930s looks strikingly insular. Recent literature on the interwar left has brought the Soviet Union back into the story. Scholars such as Erik McDuffie and Minkah Makalani have shown how the Comintern played a central role in facilitating international black liberation movements, and also how the contradictions of Soviet Communism forced black radicals to forge New Left political identities.Footnote ⁴ Just as historians can no longer write out the international dimensions of interwar radicalism, the “zigzags” of international events, especially in the Soviet Union, cannot be written out of the crises of the Popular Front.

In August 1936, the sixteen defendants in the first Moscow show trial were convicted of sabotage of the Soviet state and executed, and another eighteen went on trial beginning in January 1937. In absentia, Trotsky featured centrally in the hearings, and he frantically tried to vindicate himself in the eyes of the West, if not in a Soviet courtroom. He unsuccessfully sought a tribunal from the League of Nations, then made a dramatic plea for a “public and impartial Commission of Inquiry.” Trotsky promised that if such a commission found him guilty “in the slightest degree” of Stalin's charges, he would place himself “voluntarily in the hands of the executioners of the G.P.U.” Trotsky's allies organized a “Joint Commission of Inquiry” to hold the trial. They recruited ten activists, intellectuals and writers to serve as commissioners, most of them critics of Stalin, such as Otto Ruhle and Carlo Tresca; half of the members were Americans, including journalists Benjamin Stolberg, Suzanne LaFollette and John R. Chamberlain. The panel was not particularly renowned, with the exception of its chairman, John Dewey, who was nearly eighty years old. Dewey, an avowed liberal, had been a longtime critic of the Soviet Union, which gave Dewey real credibility. Trotsky trumpeted the panel's objectivity, embodied by Dewey: “Fortunately, not everybody can be bought. Otherwise humanity would have rotted away a long time ago. Here, in the person of the Commission, we have a precious cell of unmarketable public conscience.”Footnote ⁵

The inquiry, held at the home of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, lasted a wearying ten days. There was no prosecutor; instead the commission's counsel John Finerty put questions to Trotsky about the various accusations made against him in Moscow, and Trotsky rebutted them with his characteristic eloquence and invective. The proceedings were transcribed as a public record. Throughout, Trotsky sought to vindicate the ideology of the Bolshevik Revolution from Stalin's perversions. Marxism was not implicated in Stalinism; to the contrary, “The formulas of Marxism, expressing the interests of the masses, more and more inconvenienced the bureaucracy, in so far as they were inevitably directed against its interests.” Indeed, Trotsky himself embodied the true spirit of Marxism, he claimed: “From the time that I entered into opposition to the bureaucracy, its courtier-theoreticians began to call the revolutionary essence of Marxism – ‘Trotskyism’.”

Trotsky's devastating critique of Stalin's regime was hard to ignore. Trotsky painstakingly dissected the factual inconsistencies and illogic of the show trials: “Either the entire old generation of Bolshevik leaders, with a single and sole exception, has really betrayed Socialism for fascism, or the present leadership of the USSR has organized a judicial frame-up against the founders of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state.” He offered a tart explanation of the defendants’ confessions as simple terror: “When anybody has to choose between death at one hundred per cent, and death at ninety-nine per cent, when he is in the hands of the GPU, he will choose the ninety-nine per cent against the hundred per cent.” The Trotsky Commission supplied a real-time counterpoint to the show trials, and a crack in the edifice of legitimacy that Stalin had sought to create. Late in 1937, Dewey's commission issued a blanket acquittal of Trotsky plainly titled Not Guilty. While few allies or critics of Trotsky changed their mind about him, clues of Soviet repression circulated more widely among leftists and liberals, and acknowledging the truth of the trials “became a measure of intellectual integrity,” in Judy Kutulas's words. “The result was anti-Stalinism.”Footnote ⁶

In his closing remarks, Trotsky told the commission that, “dragged into the light of day, the Stalinists are not fearsome.” Trotsky's assassination in 1940 by a Soviet agent is a well-known tragic coda to this story. Less well known is that in late 1939, a Dies Committee investigator invited Trotsky to testify before the committee, and Trotsky accepted the invitation. He later insisted that he had intended only to further expose Stalinist abuses, not to succor the forces of American reaction. Humiliatingly, the committee shortly withdrew the invitation, leaving Trotsky as a seeming collaborator without an opportunity to justify himself. On May Day in 1940, Communists marched through Mexico City with a banner demanding his ouster from the country. Trotsky called on Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas to make a public inquiry into the matter, to no avail.Footnote ⁷ The politics of the late 1930s continually trapped leftists in a conundrum: criticizing the Soviet Union and its increasingly tight control over international Communist parties also gave ammunition to red-baiters and antiradicals.

Harry Bridges navigated this dilemma better than anyone. Bridges, born in Australia, had been an activist in the West Coast longshoremen's union since the early 1930s and he had helped lead the 1934 Pacific Coast maritime strike that produced a general strike in San Francisco, a coastal maritime agreement, and a new CIO union, the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Bridges was a stalwart of the radical unionism of the 1930s, and like CIO leader John L. Lewis, he always worked closely with radical and Communist unionists. Unlike Lewis, Bridges himself was also a radical. As an immigrant from Australia, this made him vulnerable to deportation under the 1918 Immigration Act, which permitted deportation of aliens who advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Throughout the 1930s, he was hounded by labor spies and freelance antiradical investigators such as Harper Knowles, and also denounced by AFL unionists as a dangerous Communist. The problem for Bridges's opponents: there was no hard and fast evidence to prove that he had actually joined or worked with the Communist Party. Since Bridges himself had never publicly advocated the overthrow of the government, proving his party membership was a crucial proxy.

Several of the early Dies Committee hearings focussed on the West Coast longshoremen and Bridges. Witnesses such as Knowles alleged that the Communist Party was behind the labor unrest and that Bridges was a secret party member. But they rarely had good evidence to prove it. In 1938 and 1939, being a member of the Communist Party was not illegal, to the frustration of antiradicals, but it did provide a basis for deporting radical aliens. Thus the Dies Committee witnesses repeatedly called on the Labor Department to initiate deportation proceedings against Bridges. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins had met Bridges and reviewed the evidence purporting to establish his party membership, and found it unconvincing. But Dies threatened to impeach Perkins if she did not take up the matter. Bridges, for his part, thought that letting Dies carry on with his Congressional investigations would taint the case against him. Bridges thus requested that Perkins issue an arrest warrant and begin the deportation process. Harry Bridges wanted a public trial.Footnote ⁸

So did Perkins. Her credibility was on the line, and she knew that the evidence against Bridges was weak. Rather than order a standard deportation hearing, presided over by Department of Labor officials, Perkins enlisted a high-profile judge to adjudicate the case: James W. Landis, dean of the Harvard Law School. Landis was a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and the recent chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission. His New York Times obituary described him as having the “rare distinction of being regarded as a conservative by liberals and as an extreme liberal by conservatives.”Footnote ⁹

Like Trotsky, Bridges and his judge sought the maximum publicity for the case. The trial was held at the immigration station at Angel Island in San Francisco, and Landis insisted that the trial would be open to the public, issuing press passes and admitting representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Labor Defense, and the Associated Farmers of California. The trial ran from 10 July through 14 September 1939, with fifty-five witnesses. It was quite a spectacle. For Bridges, the audience was not merely the immigration authorities, but also the trade unionists whom he hoped to attract and retain in the new ILWU.

In the trial, the question of deportability hinged on whether Bridges was a member of or affiliated with the CPUSA, and Bridges said that he wasn't. A stream of witnesses from the Oregon National Guard, antiradical organizations, and former party members insisted that Bridges had formally joined the party, but none of them stood up under cross-examination. Finally, it was Bridges's turn. According to Landis, Bridges actively sought the help of the Communist Party in his organizing efforts: “he not only welcomed Communist aid, but protested against severance of this friendly relationship when the red-baiting cry of the other side made severance a wise policy.”Footnote ¹⁰ Bridges refused to exclude Communists from the union and “regarded them, in the main, as ‘militant and sincere’ and as good union men.” Moreover, Bridges endorsed “the social ownership of the means of production,” spoke at length about the class struggle, and argued that in the event of a “capital strike,” workers should seize the factories and operate them. But to Landis, this was not evidence of Communism. Rather, Bridges distanced himself from the “reliance placed by Communist theory in true revolutionary tactics,” because “pursuit of such aims was utterly impracticable, indeed, so impracticable as to not deserve the dignity of governmental suppression.”Footnote ¹¹ Instead, Bridges's testimony drew on the discourse of American populism: he framed farmers and workers as arrayed against a small cabal of special interests, and insisted on “the extension of the democratic machinery” as the best cure for political unrest.

Landis's finding: there was no evidence to justify Bridges's deportation. As with Trotsky, Bridges's public strategy had paid off. Bridges laid claim to the core tenets of Marxism, but brushed off their Communist or Soviet variants. Bridges was vindicated, but it didn't last long. The Smith Act of 1940 made it easier to deport aliens suspected of radicalism, and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI swiftly opened its own investigation of Bridges, resulting in his trial in 1941, again in 1950, and again in 1955. Remarkably, Bridges managed to prevail in all of these cases, and he retired from the ILWU in the 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1990.

Bridges was one of the last radicals of his era to operate within the outlines of Browder's framing of Communism as Americanism. It began falling apart during the summer of Bridges's trial, when the Nazi–Soviet Non-aggression Pact was announced in August 1939. The pact smashed the last bonds of antifascism that had kept the Popular Front coalition together. The ACLU had already begun to sever its strong links to the CPUSA, and the pact only accelerated the process. By early 1940, the ACLU formally resolved to bar Communists from its board of directors and staff. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a charter member of the ACLU, having made her mark as an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. After a hiatus away from politics from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, Flynn joined the Communist Party in 1936 and became a member of the national committee in 1938. Fellow ACLU board members Morris Ernst and Norman Thomas, head of the Socialist Party, led a campaign to oust her.Footnote ¹²

Unlike Trotsky and Bridges, Flynn's trial was not public, but held at the City Club of New York, with no spectators. Colleagues she had known for decades sat in judgment of her. As a syndicalist for most of her life, Flynn had quite thin connections to the CPUSA, and very little experience of the Soviet Union, having never been there. In many ways she was an unlikely Communist. Yet she defended the Soviet Union, insisting that “the U.S.S.R. is not a totalitarian dictatorship; it is a Socialist state of workers and peasants.”Footnote ¹³ She added that “the U.S.S.R. guarantees and the majority of her vast population enjoy a larger degree of civil liberties enjoyed by the population of the British Empire,” while the ACLU's antiradical resolution showed little concern for Irish, South Africans and Indians. She rebuffed criticisms of the Soviet Union in part by pointing out the hypocrisies of the West, and her aim with these arrows was true. An audience would have served her well.

Flynn also made a case for the CPUSA. When pressed by Arthur Garfield Hays about members’ “obedience to the Communist Party,” Flynn read out the CPUSA membership pledge. It read in part, “I pledge to work actively for the preservation and extension of democracy and peace, for the defeat of Fascism and all forms of national oppression, for equal rights to the Negro people, for the establishment of Socialism.”Footnote ¹⁴ This hardly seemed objectionable. Flynn tried hard to reclaim socialism for the CPUSA. In response to challenges about the CPUSA's commitment to civil liberties, Flynn retorted that the “Communist Party does not want to try to control the government. It is trying to bring about the control by the people of this country of the Government, and the setting up of Socialism in this country.”Footnote ¹⁵

By 1940, this defense landed with a thud. Flynn was booted from the board, and the ACLU began its sharp turn toward legal liberalism. Flynn's failed defense marked an ending point for the discourse of American Communism as a force independent of the Soviet Union. After World War II, a new wave of investigations of American Communists commenced, headed by often undistinguished authorities such as Senator Joe McCarthy, with much less tolerance for the nuances of Marxist thought. There was no space for American Communism outside Stalin and the discourse of totalitarianism, even for someone like Flynn, the “rebel girl” of the early IWW and an exemplar of native American radicalism. Flynn's trajectory marked the pitiless boundaries of the new era, and the intractable politics of the late 1930s.

1949

Two narratives of American Marxism intersect in 1949, one reaching a crescendo, if not coda, the other sounding its opening notes. For most of the twentieth century, the former was dominant. In this account, 1949 represented the solidification of the Cold War order in the wake of the collapse of the wartime alliance and the division of Europe into East and West. This narrative threads through the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April, the collapse of the Berlin blockade in May, the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in August, the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in September and the German Democratic Republic a month later, and the collapse that same month of the Communist insurgency in Greece that, two years earlier, had led to the Truman Doctrine. To a remarkable extent, the geography of the Cold War in Europe had been entrenched by the end of 1949, and its boundaries would not substantively shift for the next forty years.

Looked at through this lens, the crisis of mid-century Communism in the United States simply represented the working out of the domestic implications of the Cold War in Europe. Bipolarity on the world's stage translated into an either/or politics at home. Above all, this meant coming to terms with the vexed position of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in public life. The early Cold War witnessed a dramatic movement away from the Popular Front era, in which broad progressive collaborations had seemed to their advocates to be not only viable projects but crucial strategic alliances for defeating fascism. Although damaged by the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, support for a capacious antifascist coalition persisted during the war years, only drifting again in its aftermath as anticommunist feeling surged in the West and Stalin asserted a harder line of control over an American party that under Earl Browder had been showing worrying signs of going native. In fact, there were three impulses behind the postwar fragmentation of the Popular Front: attacks from the right and alienation on the left were combined with a sense that in the political order built from the New Deal and the Warfare State, the Democratic Party offered richer pickings than Communism ever could.Footnote ¹ In this sense, one might argue that the Popular Front had functioned not as a vehicle for injecting the bacillus of revolutionary politics into America, as had been warned by so many on the right, but rather as a transmission belt for social-democratic politics into the revolutionary left.

The chief casualty of these fracturing alliances was, of course, the CPUSA. The failure of Henry Wallace's efforts in 1948 to resist the tide of red-baiting as he pushed for an alternative to the rapidly freezing politics of the Cold War had underscored the political vulnerability of the party. Former allies attacked the CPUSA for its deference to Moscow. The ACLU began including an anticommunist disclaimer in every brief it filed.Footnote ² Union leaders such as Philip Murray and Walter Reuther, who had once cooperated with Communists, sought to exclude them. In November 1949, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) voted to expel two of its Communist-led unions; nine more followed in 1950. Within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter White challenged W. E. B. Du Bois's attacks on Truman's foreign policy.Footnote ³

The dissipation of sympathy could be seen among the intelligentsia, too, who had once been the party's most vocal allies. The Waldorf Conference in March showed how far the party's reputation had fallen. Irving Howe, who attended alongside other members of the anti-Stalinist left in order to disrupt the proceedings, offered an unsparing assessment of the thin intellectual pickings the party had put on display. “Few prominent American intellectuals are now willing to work with them,” he argued, “some because of intellectual conviction and others because it is no longer safe or fashionable.” Having lost sway among the intellectuals and in the labour movement, he concluded that the party “retains strength only in the urban middle classes, particularly the professions and the mass culture and amusement industries.” Though it didn't compensate for their weakness among the workers, Howe claimed that Communists found their supporters in Hollywood and on Broadway to be a “profitable substitute for the intelligentsia … [they are] less troublesome, ask fewer questions than the intellectuals; they are less prone to fool with notions about independent thought; and they have much more money to contribute.”Footnote ⁴ Yet the cost was clear: the Waldorf Conference had no John Dos Passos or Richard Wright or Edmund Wilson. And over the next years Hollywood, too, would rid itself of Communism.

Divisions on the postwar left both were a response to attack and made it easier for anticommunists to move against the party. Indeed, as Phelps and Brick note, the effectiveness of the postwar anticommunist project was a sign not of American Communism's strength but of its weakness.Footnote ⁵ Campaigns that had struggled to gain traction in the 1920s and 1930s now had far greater impact, and much of the work had already been completed by 1949. In the state bureaucracies, Communist influence had always been limited to relatively small pockets. The uncovering of Communist spies, at least those who operated on principle rather than for profit, was largely resolved before McCarthy reached the national stage. Truman's loyalty program and the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations were already well entrenched. The public was already familiar with state loyalty laws, corporate and academic anticommunist oaths, and blacklists and denunciations. These would grow in scope and scale in the early 1950s, and their consequences would become more divisive. More often than not, though, as with Eisenhower's expansion of Truman's loyalty program, this was because attacks increasingly focussed on people who were not Communists, but whose identities or lifestyles were considered incompatible with the conservative mores of the era. As far as it is possible to disentangle the two, the heat of the Second Red Scare was generated less by the assault on Marxism that had already been underway for several years, and more from an emerging culture war targeting women, civil rights activists, and homosexuals.Footnote ⁶

By the end of 1949, the idea that the United States could live peacefully with the Soviets seemed an absurd proposition, almost otherworldly. Such was the power of this shift in public common sense, it seemed almost like a joke to point out that only half a decade earlier the nation had been bankrolling the Red Army with billions of dollars. The Second Red Scare did not mark the final end of hopes for a Popular Front, or even for a Stalinist America, which stumbled on until 1956. But the writing was on the wall for anyone who cared to read it. Harassed from without by the FBI, local police forces and a wide array of anticommunists, there was no space within the party for creative innovation. Alongside its internal demons of Browderism and Trotskyite deviation, the party became paralyzed by fears of surveillance and espionage. CPUSA politics became characterized by an extreme defensiveness. Gone were plans for moving “toward a Soviet America”; what remained were complaints about their own victimization. By far the most consistent coverage in the Daily Worker during the course of 1949 was of the twelve leaders of the Communist Party tried under the Smith Act. The Foley Square trial lasted nearly a year and was constitutionally outrageous, and the behaviour of Judge Harold Medina certainly generated good copy, but despite their best efforts the conviction and imprisonment of eleven of the defendants failed to generate a broad movement of support in a society that for the larger part had few qualms over their prosecution. The party's presumption had always been that politicized trials could be used to spread sympathy for Communism, but this did not happen. Instead, prosecutions of more than a hundred lower-ranking members of the party followed over the next decade. Similar efforts to propagandize through the case of the Trenton Six, a group of young African American men convicted by an all-white jury in 1948 for the murder of a white shopkeeper in New Jersey, were a pale echo of the Scottsboro case. One of the eleven party leaders to be convicted in the Foley Square trial was John Gates, who went on to serve five years in Atlanta Penitentiary. As he sat in his jail cell he reflected on the history of American radicalism, and compared his situation to that of Eugene Debs, who had run for the presidency from the same prison in 1920 and won 900,000 votes. There were no such numbers defending the CPUSA now.Footnote ⁷

This 1949 offers a story of crisis on the left leading to a political caesura that lasted a generation. But it struggles with loose ends. It doesn't account for the persistence of Marxist-influenced political radicalism in the 1950s at the grassroots, among minorities, among sectarian anti-Stalinist radicals, in and outside the labour movement.Footnote ⁸ It struggles to unpick the ways in which the New Left was connected to and influenced by the old, rather than born of its absence.Footnote ⁹ It cannot accommodate the stories of civil rights radicals like Claudia Jones, William Patterson, Benjamin Davis, Esther Cooper Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, or W. E. B. Du Bois, who continued to work with or inside the CPUSA (in Du Bois's case actually joining the Communist-affiliated Council on African Affairs in 1949 and taking party membership a decade later), except by seeing them as outliers moving along erratic paths away from the broader traffic of history.

This brings us to the second narrative, less a story of endings than of new beginnings. This 1949 was marked by the capture of Beijing by the forces of the Chinese Communist Party in January and of Nanjing in April. It follows the march of the People's Army southwards and eastwards over the summer as the forces of the Guomindang retreated to Formosa, and culminates with the formal establishment of the People's Republic of China on 21 September. No event in the world history of Marxism since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was of comparable significance. In the West, the psychological shock of a quarter of the world's population turning toward revolutionary socialism was, even at the time, as critical as the Soviet bomb in entrenching the American culture of fear. Indeed, for a section of American conservatives who had an entrenched, paternalistic view of the United States’ custodial relationship toward China inherited from the Christian missionaries, Mao's seizure of power was even more offensive to their sensibilities since it represented a kind of filial betrayal, not to mention evidence of treason in America. Without the China lobby and the blame game they launched at home in the wake of Mao's assumption of power, the McCarthyite coalition would have been robbed of some of its richest and most influential advocates in the 1950s, and the anticommunist movement would have been weaker and less incendiary. The Chinese revolution drove the Truman administration to the right and enabled the conflict in Korea, while the fear of another “loss of China” would be the critical historical memory that shaped later Democratic administrations’ steps into the quagmires of Vietnam.

The transformative significance of Mao's revolution was not clear in 1949. For most commentators in the United States, China was seen as an extension of the struggle against the Soviet monolith rather than a new door opening in the hallways of Marxism. This was as true for American party members as for anticommunists. The Daily Worker faithfully reported the advance of the columns of the People's Army through the summer and fall of 1949 and attacked the Truman administration for seeking to undermine the revolution, but despite endorsing the Cominform's description of the PRC's creation as an event of “world historical significance,” discussion of China later in the year was surprisingly thin, and Mao was barely mentioned.Footnote ¹⁰ Foreign-affairs coverage followed the Stalinist line, which meant focussing on Europe: criticizing the Atlantic pact, attacking the Marshall Plan, and presenting the Soviet acquisition of the bomb as part of a general effort to restore peace to the continent. The abuse of Tito was given more inches than the praising of Mao in the Communist press that year.

Nevertheless, as Soviet influence on the American left eroded, China would come to the fore. Mao's regime represented something powerful in the American radical imagination that had once been promised by Japan, and only later by Russia: a model of a modernizing state that promised a route out of empire. The revolution stands alongside Indian independence in 1947 as one of the first nails hammered into the coffin of European colonialism, and a vital precursor to the nonaligned movement in the mid-Cold War years. At the same time, as an alternative locus of power within global socialism, China's existence encouraged challenges to Marxist orthodoxy. For radical Americans, and African American radicals in particular, Mao's example and theses would offer a new path for radical protest, one that was less deferential to the white working classes, less concerned with rigid interpretations of historical materialism, and less interested in Europe.Footnote ¹¹

Much as had been the case with Bolshevism after 1917, this image of China would in large part be an American invention. The embargo severed ties of communication and exchange for much of the 1950s. And unlike Stalin, while offering asylum to radical Americans in exile and criticisms of American racism, Mao made no effort to build political organs in the United States to act as transmission belts for his ideas and objectives. Nevertheless, even as an idea, revolutionary China would have a powerful effect on American Marxist thought over the coming generation. Bolshevism had promoted an ethos of discipline and organization. It was a doctrine that foregrounded professionalism, institutional coherence, and, increasingly, state power as the key elements of revolutionary struggle. Its fundamental claim on the loyalties of the left was that only Bolshevism could deliver on Lincoln Steffens's promise of a future that worked a future that worked. In the interwar battles between the Communist International and other forms of Marxian socialism, anarchism and independent revolutionary Communism, time and again the Bolshevik orthodoxy reminded their rivals and challengers that Lenin was the only man who had succeeded in building a revolutionary state and a new international.

The oscillations of the Communism line that led to the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, the subsequent alliance with the capitalist democracies, and the renewed hostilities with the West after the war were, from this perspective, seen as a necessary statecraft. Without state power, radical projects – most poignantly shown by the failure of the anarchists in Spain to fight a revolutionary war against Franco – were doomed to fail. Nevertheless, even aside from the crimes committed by the Soviet regime, accounts of which even by the mid-1930s were circulating widely in the West, the reputation of Bolshevism as a supremely practical mode of revolutionary politics wore thin, especially as the Comintern grew less and less concerned with promoting reform or revolution elsewhere in the world. The preservation of Soviet Russia took precedence over all other concerns. Anything that was good for Stalin was good for Marx.

In this sense, if we understand the anticommunist politics of the McCarthy era as essentially a hegemonic project, one that sought to equate Americanism with capitalism in the public mind, American Communists at least partly supported this effort. It suited the CPUSA to present themselves as the only true custodians of Marxism in America, rather than just one among many bickering clans.

When it was successful, the CPUSA showed how a comparatively small group of disciplined radicals could use institutions around it as a kind of force multiplier for radical change. But the Bolshevik obsession with discipline shut down alternative visions of liberation. It shouldered to one side the politics of spontaneity, individuality and authenticity that had been more characteristic of the Marxism before 1917, and would come to the fore again in the wake of the CPUSA's collapse. Correctly or incorrectly, American Maoism would offer a more improvisational and spontaneous revolutionary alternative, while those who continued to stress the need for discipline, organization and rigour remained in the smaller orbit of the old party apparatus. In this sense, the destruction of the CPUSA would, ironically and against the expectations of its enemies, give radicals the space to innovate and the opportunity to multiply. In this sense, rather than thinking of the history of American Marxism generationally, in terms of old politics breaking against the new, perhaps it is better to think of competing Marxist traditions, some coming to the fore and others receding at different moments in time and space. Focussing on contestation and difference, rather than a singular, coherent narrative, connects the important but incomplete account of the rise and fall of the CPUSA to the larger stream of American Marxism.

1969

I write this in the month when we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which saw several nights of violent resistance to police brutality against LGBT people in New York City in June 1969. The riots, spearheaded by some of the most marginalized queer communities, in particular trans* people, are commonly viewed as marking the emergence of a new era of gay liberation in the United States, when coming out and defying heteronormative conventions brought sexual dissidents out of the shadows.Footnote ¹ The year 1969 witnessed the birth of the Gay Liberation Front, and the following decade would see the elimination of antisodomy laws in numerous states, as well as a dramatic positive shift in medical discourses around sexuality. The years immediately following 1969 also constituted a critical turning point for the relationship between the US left, including Marxist organizations, and sexuality, as virtually all socialist groups shed or modified their long-standing antipathy to sexual dissidence and openly debated the place of sexual minorities in wider struggles for social change. Placed in the context of a modern gay rights movement forged in the late 1940s and the 1950s in part by men active in the Communist Party, it seems appropriate to use the year 1969 as a way of exploring what a discussion of both Marxism and LGBT rights in tandem can teach us about the history of social movements of the era, as well as ways in which Marxism as a tool of historical analysis can play a critical role in understanding the distinctive trajectory of sexual politics in the United States since the rights revolutions.

My discussion falls, therefore, into two parts. The first explores the evolving relationship between Marxist organizations and LGBT issues after the emergence of gay liberation in 1969. Some of these groups, such as the Freedom Socialist Party, committed to socialist feminism and closely connected to women's liberation; the Workers World Party, the Spartacist League, and the Revolutionary Socialist League actively embraced sexual dissidence as a core plank of their revolutionary praxis. The early gay liberation period also saw the formation of a specifically queer Marxist organization, the Lavender and Red Union, calling itself “a group of dyke and faggot communists” and adopting the slogan “Gay Liberation is Impossible without Socialist Revolution – Socialist Revolution is Impossible without Gay Liberation.”Footnote ² Other groups, notably the Socialist Workers Party and its youth wing, the Young Socialist Alliance, retained a more ambivalent and conflicted relationship with sexual politics, but ended their policy of automatic expulsion of gay members in November 1970, a direct result of the pressure brought to bear by the liberationist forces of the late 1960s.Footnote ³ Some notable figures in the early Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, such as John Lauritsen, David Thorstad, and John O'Brien, had cut their political teeth in the YSA and SWP. While membership in radical Marxist organizations was never especially large, and queer membership even less significant, their importance to our understanding of LGBT history cannot be doubted. It is no accident that two important LGBTQ community archives, the Stonewall Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the Sexual Minorities Archive in Holyoke, Massachusetts, both contain significant holdings related to communist activism from the 1970s and 1980s: the Socialist Newspapers Collection at Stonewall, and the personal archive and library of trans* activist and prominent member of the Workers World Party, Leslie Feinberg, at SMA. The passionate commitment of the WWP to sexual liberation and LGBTQ rights has meant that the party's newspaper, Workers World, gave much more extensive and engaged coverage to LGBTQ politics and activism than did many other news outlets; its coverage of the HIV/AIDS crisis during the 1980s was impressive, and its having found a home at Stonewall has enhanced our ability to excavate our queer past.

The second part of my discussion relates to the parameters of my own current research, which examines the relationship between the US health and welfare systems and LGBT rights since the 1960s. It became clear to me during the course of working on this project that the capitalist structure of health care provision in the United States, in which health is a consumer commodity rather than a public right, has imbued LGBT rights politics with a particular form of class stratification and has yoked questions of individual rights to notions of personal responsibility. “Coming out” in the context of gay liberation in the years after 1969 did not simply represent an individual affirmation of sexual identity, but also was a demand to access social and health services, without which sexual revolution would remain incomplete. Understanding sexual minority politics in a US context therefore demands an understanding of class and economic forces that draws on Marxist historical analysis. We might call my part of this roundtable How I learned to stop worrying and love Marxism.Footnote ⁴

Marxism and gay liberation became uneasy but important bedfellows in the late 1940s, when CPUSA member Harry Hay formed Bachelors for Wallace during Henry Wallace's Popular Front run for President in 1948, followed shortly thereafter by the formation of the Mattachine Foundation. The foundation's 1950 manifesto described it as “a service and welfare organization” opposed to “encroaching American Fascism,” its rhetoric very much in tune with Communist and Popular Front political nostrums. The document urged members, who remained anonymous and part of a secretive network of Mattachine cells on the CPUSA model, to “work collectively on the side of peace … for the full-class citizenship participation of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves.”Footnote ⁵ Hay recalled, “I thought of the Freemason movement and the type of Communist underground organization that had existed in the 1930s, which I had known and been a part of … The whole organizational setup was based on what I had learned from the old left”.Footnote ⁶ Several other founders of Mattachine were also Communists, and though they left the party as a result of their association with homophile activism, the Popular Front heritage of gay rights activism at mid-century was never fully disavowed. The hysteria of the McCarthyite witch hunts of the early 1950s encouraged the rapid shift of Mattachine away from its early collectivist roots, but the fact that sexual dissidence encompassed both enforced marginality and collective identity within society rendered it a potentially attractive cause for later socialist organizing.

Of course, some LGBT people simply happened to be Communists, and were committed to broader social transformations that the dramatic decade of the 1960s seemed to herald. They had to contend, however, with a legacy of Stalinism deeply hostile to sexual liberation and deeply rooted in the international Communist movement. The Venceremos Brigades to Castro's Cuba barred the participation of gay people, in thrall to the brutal homophobia and machismo of Castro's regime.Footnote ⁷ Maoism also dismissed sexual dissidence as a bourgeois affectation with no place in class struggle. Marxists of all sectarian bents struggled to reconcile class consciousness and solidarity with individual desires for sexual freedoms, a tension made only more acute by the radical demands of gay liberationists for the overturning of heteronormative societal structures that loomed as large over international socialism as any other political worldview.

Yet liberationist struggles of the 1960s around gender and sexuality, symbolized by the dramatic events of the summer of 1969, had significant impact on the ideological direction of Marxist organizations. The Revolutionary Socialist League, founded in 1972 as a response to the enormous social reverberations of the previous few years, argued that a

RSL member Paul Carson produced a booklet entitled Socialism and the Fight for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, in which he portrayed the heterosexual nuclear family as a product of capitalism, and saw lesbian and gay liberation as undermining “the sexual repression that is built into capitalism and that flows from the idea that people exist for the purpose of accumulating capital.”Footnote ⁹ The Spartacist League, which absorbed the overtly queer Lavender and Red Union in 1977, explicitly tied sexual liberation to the overthrow of capitalism and a politics of class war:

That this forceful commitment to sexual liberation as but a strand of a wider commitment to the overthrow of the existing order appeared in an article in the Spartacist League newspaper attacking fellow Trotskyists the Socialist Workers Party should surprise no one even vaguely familiar with sectarianism on the left. The pages of rival Trotskyist party newspapers were full of angry denunciations of rivals for ideological waywardness or some other transgression. The Freedom Socialist Party newspaper in 1977 ran a headline “Lavender and Red Union Dumps Gay Liberation,” arguing that the latter's merger with the SL (a gay liberationist minority “Revolutionary Faction” fled to the Revolutionary Socialist League) tied it to a group “whose arrogant sexism is exceeded only by its holier-than-thou sectarianism.” The irony seemed to be lost on the article's author, as he excoriated the SL and Red Flag Union (as the LRU had now become) for apparently placing “gay liberation at the bottom layer of their rigidly structured hierarchy of social issues, such as class, race, sex, and sexuality.”Footnote ¹¹ The dramatic implosion of the former LRU in 1977 over the priority assigned to gay liberation within Trotskyism demonstrated the ongoing difficulty Marxists had integrating sexual freedom into a wider politics of class struggle.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, the fact that gay liberation was by the 1970s an important point of debate and ideological ferment on the Communist left demonstrates the pivotal importance of the spirit of 1969 in reshaping radical leftist discourse and action.

Just as significant to our understanding of the relationship between gay liberation and Marxism is the fact that the multiple movements for sexual freedoms after 1969 depended to a large degree on the provision of health and social services for queer communities. My research into the public-policy dimension of the rights revolutions demonstrates clearly the close relationship between access to money and LGBT identity. Having to pay for health services in the United States did not simply reveal the class dimension to LGBT rights, but also placed the transactional element of capitalist exchange at the heart of the development of LGBT identity. For example, trans* people found their self-definition influenced by the need to access the private insurance marketplace. Since most private insurance refused to pay for sex reassignment when explicitly named as such, trans* patients were forced to redefine themselves as medically diseased in order to secure payment for surgery or treatment: “Best results have been obtained when the condition (transsexualism) is presented as ‘a neuroendocrinological or psychohormonal disorder,’ absolutely requiring and responsive to surgical and hormonal treatment.” This helpful advice, included in a brochure produced by transgender advocacy group the Erikson Educational Foundation, went on,

For transgender people, seeking medical attention represented a coming-out process framed by stigmatization and economic marginalization, demonstrating the value of Marxism as a tool of historical analysis when analysing the dynamics of sexual liberation.

Many LGBTQ service providers in the 1970s internalized the capitalist health system's association of payment for services with full social citizenship, stressing their commitment to notions of personal responsibility as they took pains to distance themselves from any association with a welfare state. A memo to staff at a gay therapy service in Boston in 1979 urged them to be less lenient on clients missing payments for services. The

The memo's author mirrored dominant narratives about the pernicious effects of welfare dependency on the mental well-being of claimants, going so far as to argue that, if the clinic can sort out its financial relationship with clients, “you will hopefully begin to understand the importance of money in the therapeutic relationship.”Footnote ¹⁴ Mental well-being, in this reading, went hand in hand with financial independence and self-reliance, however fanciful such ideas were when applied to all sexual minorities regardless of social status. Professional gatekeepers of queer community services mimicked dominant neoliberal thinkers and politicians, as they developed a class consciousness which linked full citizenship to capitalism and joined together their economic status with their sexual identity.Footnote ¹⁵

For me, then, thinking about 1969 as a point of departure in the history of Marxism in a US context directs us towards the rapidly growing importance of gay liberation in American Marxist thought and praxis in the following two decades. But it has also encouraged me to think about the value of class analysis and Marxist critiques of capitalism as tools in understanding LGBT politics after 1969, a time when private health care was showing its inability to respond to the demands of new social movements and when the ramshackle public welfare system was coming under sustained attack, both ideologically and from funding cuts. The concern of Marxist groups in the 1970s with intersections between class struggle and identity politics was therefore validated in LGBTQ politics, although capitalism's neoliberal reconfiguration would frustrate the hoped-for liberation.

1989

This is the year socialism crumbled. As Kristen Ghodsee has explored, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc was almost unimaginably sweeping and unexpected. “In the course of a few short years,” she writes, “hard-earned college degrees in Eastern Europe were rendered useless, massive enterprises went bankrupt, life savings were eaten up by hyperinflation and banking collapses while the promise of a comfortable retirement evaporated.”Footnote ¹ In the West, meanwhile, “politicians and scholars … were just as surprised as Eastern European citizens. Indeed, the entire world was more or less caught off guard by the relatively unspectacular resolution of the Cold War.”Footnote ²

Caught flat-footed, Westerners shocked at their victory made overconfident pronouncements. Most notorious of these was neoconservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama's proclamation that history was over. “In our grandparents’ time,” he famously wrote,

While this pronouncement hardly made sense historically or even logically (isn't Fukuyama himself positing a world in which politics is “somehow overcome”?) it did capture something of the triumphant mood of the capitalist West. In his book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, Joshua Clover argues that Fukuyama's pronouncement seems less ridiculous if the emphasis is placed more strongly on the phrase “we have trouble imagining”:

It is this question of what becomes thinkable in the West in and after 1989 that I focus on here. And, following Clover, I do this through considering the popular culture of the moment, revisiting and employing the methods of the much-reviled “cultural turn” in Marxism. I'll focus particularly on the roles intellectuals played, and failed to play, as mediators who might have, as Stuart Hall writes, imagined “the future of socialism in ways which are in touch with the cultural categories the mass of ordinary people use to imagine theirs.”Footnote ⁵ I want to argue, along with both Hall and Michael Denning, that rather than excoriating the cultural turn, we might do better to understand the specific role of culture in its moment: why culture seemed to break on the side of the forces of reaction, but also when and how popular culture expanded “what's thought and what's thinkable” and what were the missed opportunities for building the left in America, particularly for cultural workers and critics.Footnote ⁶

Hall's writings on Thatcherism force us to amend Clover's insight about 1989 as failure of imagination in two ways. First, this “trouble imagining” was specifically a left-wing trouble rather than a universal one; the transatlantic right, Fukuyama's “we” aside, never stopped its brutal campaign “to turn the tide on every front – in civil society and moral life as much as in economic habits and expectations.”Footnote ⁷ Second, the left's “trouble imagining” did not begin in 1989: Hall's writings suggest that while the 1970s and 1980s British left was preoccupied with “defending the immensely valuable things it has accomplished,” the right was busy assembling a coherent worldview.Footnote ⁸ Fukuyama likewise snidely notices that the 1980s left in the United States and Britain believed in “the legitimacy of Marxism–Leninism for other people” but had largely abandoned the project of building it for themselves.Footnote ⁹

If anything, the situation for socialism in the United States was even worse than that in Britain. The installation of radical movement ideas in the form of black, ethnic, gender and queer studies in the academy was not accompanied by a resurgence of union politics or workers’ rights struggles in those workplaces. Huey Newton and C. L. R. James, Marxist intellectuals and revolutionaries engaged in social struggle (Newton in the United States, James throughout the Atlantic world), both died that year. Meanwhile the Reagan administration was constructing its own overarching imaginary, drawing on myths about small-town worker–boss–consumer alliances while stoking reaction to the modest gains of feminism, black power, and the welfare state by constructing demonic stock-character figures like the welfare queen and the criminal migrant.Footnote ¹⁰ These cultural figures made the brutal rollback of government services seem coherent with the pro-family agenda gaining traction through the rise of the Christian right: as Melinda Cooper has shown, the demonization of single mothers, “deadbeat dads” and drug users made “intact [nuclear] families” into shock absorbers for the diminution of both wages and the social safety net.Footnote ¹¹ Leftist, feminist, queer, and racial justice activists seem not to have perceived this particular turn to personal responsibility as something around which they could build a movement; to some degree, the left remained caught up in the rhetoric of “cultural poverty” advanced in the 1960s even by socialists like Michael Harrington.Footnote ¹² Hall's insight that the right was constructing a worldview while the left scrambled to defend its gains thus applied even more intensely to American politics, where the left had gained less to begin with.

With this dire situation in mind, it is worth revisiting some cultural moments of 1989, the left's responses, the lost opportunities for Marxist critique and coalition, and the opportunities that are not yet lost. The extraction here comes from two episodes, the first musical and the second philosophical.

First, the year of the boom box. While Clover observes that the pop music of 1989 performed the passive “magic-of-the-moment” sensibility, he also notes how the same music contained the seeds of something else. This is particularly true, I want to argue, for music as it connected to public space in 1989, and a new generation of independent filmmakers was particularly adept at capturing how music might, in fact, do more than incite passivity. Two films that year feature young men with boom boxes. First Cameron Crowe's debut film Say Anything, set in a strikingly low-tech Seattle suburb, imagines anticapitalist, antimilitarist feminism as simple common sense. Hero Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) articulates this common sense when queried by his girlfriend's father about his future:

Lloyd not only eschews work, but also categorically rejects his own father's military career path. “What I want to do for a living is, I want to be with your daughter,” he says. “I'm good at it.” Indeed, the film centers on determination to love and help and follow “brain” Diane Court, who is headed to England on a prestigious scholarship. Her dad says she'll go work for “an international think tank” at the end of it, but there is no reason to believe him; he is revealed as a liar and a bad planner by the end of the film; his anxious capitalism has led him to fleece seniors out of their retirement savings.

The film thus imagines a kind of post-Vietnam, feminist heterosexual masculinity akin to that in 1970s antiwar films like Coming Home, but one not seen in teen films until this one, an emergent heterosexual masculinity that (perhaps predictably) never becomes dominant. It imagines a different path for men who felt emasculated by the coincidence of the decline of manufacturing, alongside US economic stagnation, and the partial triumph of second-wave feminism. If, as Barbara Ehrenreich notes, this conjuncture led mostly to antifeminist rage from men, Crowe's film allows for the possibility that it might instead have resulted in solidarity, as women were offered new, still limited opportunities and work became more precarious. In any case, this is a text that imagines a certain kind of masculinity being abolished by feminism for good; it posits, as Andrea Dworkin asserted, that sex can survive equality.Footnote ¹³

The boom box serenade scene is the height of this feminist anticapitalist abjection. Standing a good distance from Diane's window, Lloyd plays Peter Gabriel's 1986 song In Your Eyes. Lloyd has hipper tastes – he likes the Clash – but he stoically blasts the song because Diane likes it. Lloyd's use of In Your Eyes helps us hear the abjection or subsumption: “Without my pride,” Gabriel sings, and the song gains meaning as a pledge of devotion, a promise that Diane, and not any career, is Lloyd's religion and destiny. These dreams, in their moment, positioned antiwork feminist politics as viable and even beautiful. The slacker could be feminist, could be consciously anticapitalist and against exploitation. If this connection to a possible anti-imperialist, anti-work, feminist politics feels tenuous, Cusack's offscreen career helps to bolster the connection: raised in a radical-left Catholic tradition, he has remained a committed and outspoken leftist. His offscreen politics contribute to an understanding of Lloyd not just as a smitten slacker, but rather as someone who might have helped us reimagine a less violent and acquisitive masculinity.

The boom box appears as a completely different cultural phenomenon in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn than in the suburbs of Seattle. In Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, the boom box is a purveyor not of music but of noise, showing us that “noise” is a racialized category, but also, following Hall (and Tricia Rose), that hip-hop has become a “whole culture of resistance around the appropriation of modern sounds and advanced technological equipment.”Footnote ¹⁴ This “culture of resistance” reached a high point in the intricate sound collages and militant lyrics of Public Enemy, whose songs are featured in the film. And it was targeted as such: Lilian Radovac brilliantly documents how the boom box was the earliest object of the broken-windows policing pioneered by New York City mayor Ed Koch. Beginning in the late 1970s, Koch's crackdown campaigns targeted transit routes through African American and Latino neighborhoods, accompanied by constant announcements on the PA system. The issue was not broken windows at all, or even noise (since the PA systems were just as loud as the boom boxes), but rather young black people daring to make new sounds in public spaces. Over the course of the 1980s, Radovac writes, “As transit police cracked down on Box use, the units became bigger, louder, and more rugged, just as hip hop shifted away from its disco roots and toward a harder-edged sound.”Footnote ¹⁵

This is reflected in the enormity of the boom box in Do the Right Thing, a Prosonic Super Jumbo J-1. Although Radio Raheem is peaceful – his first words in the film are “Peace, y'all” – the size and strength of the boom box gets him killed. In the climactic sequence, he and black nationalist Bugging Out storm into Sal's pizzeria, “Fight the Power” blaring, and demand that Sal put photos of black people on the walls alongside his pantheon of Italian celebrities. Sal erupts, yells racist slurs, and smashes the boom box. A brawl ensues, and then the police come and kill Raheem. In the film's most famous moment, a grieving Mookie, played by Lee himself, throws a trashcan through the window and incites a riot, which burns down Sal's. However, the film doesn't, as a 1960s revolutionary film might, end there – the next day Mookie goes to collect his paycheck, and talks with Sal, who will collect the insurance. Nothing much has changed.

What to make of this film, charged with riotous energy but ultimately both measured and pessimistic? Denning argues that there are three ways to think about culture as potentially anticapitalist (rather than autonomous): cultural resistance, cultural justice, and cultural revolution. Cultural resistance is embodied by Radio Raheem. Raheem's actions reflect what people of nondominant classes, oppressed people, do when they're not organized or working collectively towards a particular goal, but they are still able to carve out oppositional spaces. Cultural justice is what drives Raheem and Bugging Out's attempt to change the legends on the wall of the pizzeria – cultural justice would be having pictures of black people. Cultural revolution, though, would be something else. It is the potential of the riotous sound collages of the Public Enemy song, or the riot, to transform everything.

Lee's vision is one of cultural justice rather than cultural revolution. Even if his film knows the violence of reification, of the police protecting white property over black people, even as it captures the 1970s and 1980s state strategy of deliberate “benign neglect” of cities and “the race problem” combined with the heightened criminalization of the drug war and broken-windows policing, he does not have a particularly anticapitalist worldview. Radical scholar Manning Marable wrote in a review, “One is struck by contemporary parallels to Palestine or perhaps the bantustans of South Africa,” but also, “Lee's film actually understates, if anything, the race and class tensions in contemporary America.”Footnote ¹⁶

This understatement reflects how the film seems born of Lee's realization that just to get cultural justice, a riot might be necessary. Lee, at Cannes in a “no sellout” T-shirt, proclaimed, “In the year of our lord 1989, I'm leaning more towards the philosophies of Malcolm X.”Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, he was only leaning. As Roger Ebert remarked in a review, the film is exceptionally fair, and sympathizes with Sal's investment in the pizzeria.Footnote ¹⁸ Lee might be fairly typical here as a left-mediating figure, sympathetically bringing overtly politicized hip-hop into art-cinematic worlds while subtly deradicalizing its message. We can see this in Do the Right Thing’s reconfiguration of Public Enemy's invocation of black power, its focus on Malcolm X and his capitalist black-self-up doctrines and bypassing of Public Enemy's chosen progenitors, the Marxist Black Panthers.

If the academic left did consider the boom box and its wielders as serious subjects, it did not seem to recognize these things – the slacker, the hip-hop kid – as anticapitalist or potentially socialist formations. Socialism, oddly, disappeared rhetorically as a term to describe these popular movements, even when it might have addressed either the anti-work downwardly mobile politics of the slacker or the movement of seizure and reparations enacted by early hip-hop's ripping off and sophisticated repurposing of copyright-protected hooks. This disconnection of leftist intellectuals from any sort of socialist or even economic-redistributive project is not synonymous with the cultural turn; this disconnection was happening before 1989, and kept on happening long after. Even the 1990s antiglobalization movement used the language of retrenchment, of arresting an intensification of capitalism rather than destroying capitalism.

Second, the “last man” and resurgent imperialism. As Clover and others have remarked, the indelible image of 1989 is not one of the Berlin Wall falling. Rather it's of Tank Man. Holding two shopping bags, this lone, anonymous man stops a row of tanks, uniform and regimented as life under communism. Despite the diversity of the demands, and the clear primary demand of the many workers involved for “democracy in the workplace,” as Yueran Zhang writes, the Tiananmen Square protests were a moment when the growing divide between student and worker consciousness emerged, and also deepened, in China.Footnote ¹⁹ However, the shopping-bag-wielding Tank Man was immediately read as congruous with the wall falling, as proof of the new equation of free markets with free people.

The right never stopped imagining destruction and renewal. Fukuyama's “Last Man” sections, rarely discussed, resuscitate Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to make the case that men who are the beneficiaries of rights for which they did not fight would suffer from ennui and thus be “ready to drag the world back into history with all its wars, injustice, and revolution.”Footnote ²⁰ Masculine restlessness, in this silly but oddly prophetic formulation, would lead powerful and enfranchised men to continue their violent and acquisitive pursuits. This is more or less what happened at the end of 1989, when President George H. W. Bush temporarily vanquished the “wimp factor” that had allegedly lowered his polling numbers by invading Panama, going to war against former ally and CIA asset Manuel Noriega. During the invasion, the sonic wars precipitated by the boom box were reimagined, as US troops bombed Panama City, targeting working-class neighborhoods, killing thousands of civilians and destroying the homes of many more.

When the United States invaded Panama, what was the reaction of the broad coalition of leftists who had spent the 1980s in solidarity with Central Americans? Demonstrations had low turnout – at most in the hundreds – and many were organized by Panamanians in the United States.Footnote ²¹ Thousands of Americans had pledged to carry out massive civil disobedience in the case of a “full-scale invasion” of Nicaragua or El Salvador, but in the case of Panama, nothing on that scale occurred.Footnote ²² The left responded so tepidly partly because this remilitarization happened so fast that it was hard to apprehend, and partly because they were caught by surprise. Noriega was not a leftist, and the Cold War was over. This is yet another example of the right's imaginative grasping – its desire, paraphrasing Fukuyama – to demonstrate its alpha-maleness, in this case by decimating utterly nonthreatening former allies, while the left remains off guard and unimaginative. This is exactly a moment like one Hall describes, when the left does not have the imaginative resources to fit what is happening into a worldview that might spur the reinvigoration of the anti-imperialist left and racial justice coalitions around the plight of working-class black Panamanians. It lacked the ability to act on the knowledge that US empire can be unethical and disastrous, even when it's attempting to displace genuinely bad leaders. This is the power of “Tank Man” again: more than an avatar of economic liberalism, his image conveyed the idea that people around the world would rather stand up to tanks, and maybe have US bombs rain down on them, than live under a dictatorship.

These images, particularly of Tank Man, are so powerful that it took a long time to remember that hypercapitalist states are just as capable of building walls as Communist ones. America does, in 2019, have leftists or near-leftists who seem able to “imagine the future of socialism in ways which are in touch with the cultural categories the mass of ordinary people use to imagine theirs.”Footnote ²³ The most prominent of these, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born in 1989, and thus was too young to learn that history was over.