Encyclopedia of the American left by ed. by Mari Jo Buhle

Author:ed. by Mari Jo Buhle ....
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Socialism -- United States -- Dictionaries, Communism -- United States -- Dictionaries, New Left -- United States -- Dictionaries, Socialism -- Dictionaries, Communism -- Dictionaries, Right and left (Political science) -- Dictionaries
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

McKINNEY, EDWARD BRITT

a Hollywood film, Ruth McKenney joined the Communist Party of the United States in the late 1930s and edited the "Strictly Personal" weekly column in the New Masses. Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, and educated at Ohio State University, McKenney worked for a time as a newspaper reporter and contributed short fiction to such mainstream magazines as Harper's and the New Yorker. In 1937 she married fellow New Masses writer Richard Branstein, who wrote under the name Bruce Minton, and later published a fictionalized version of their courtship and marriage, Love Story (1950).

When McKenney met Branstein, both were working on books on the American labor movement. McKenney's Industrial Valley (1939) recounts the conditions surrounding the Akron, Ohio, rubber workers' strike of 1936. McKenney used articles in local newspapers to piece together a daily journal of the strike. Industrial Valley presents a vivid portrait of class relations in Depression America and follows political events into the homes of individual workers. A sociological study and political commentary, Industrial Valley was judged at the time of its publication "the most original and readable piece of American labor history ever written." The American Writers Congress awarded McKenney its prize for nonfiction in 1938 and again in 1939.

McKenney next tried her hand at a proletarian novel, Jake Home (1943), a story about a fictional union organizer and Communist that met, despite favorable reviews, with little popular acclaim. McKenney's unsuccessful novel nevertheless provided a vivid portrait of problematical sex and class relations within the labor movement, a subject that eventually earned McKenney sharp criticism from the Daily Worker. While McKenney herself believed her protagonist was too pious, she concluded that her Communist critics required a yet more idealistic and one-dimensional treatment that placed labor organizers "in a sort of left-wing Little Women fireside atmosphere."

McKenney wrote several articles in the New Masses on the relationship between wage-earning and women's domestic responsibilities. Unlike Mary In-man, she did not value domestic labor and argued to the contrary that women's emancipation depended upon their equal access to the realm of social production.

In 1946 McKenney and Branstein were expelled

from the Communist Party for failing to condemn the discredited leadership fo Earl Browder. They drifted in the political wilderness while collaborating on historical fiction and travel literature.

[See also Communist Party, USA; New Masses; Proletarian and Radical Writers, 1930s-1940s.]

— Mari Jo Buhle

McKINNEY, EDWARD BRITT (early 1900s?-1940s?). Afro-American preacher and Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) organizer, Edward Britt McKinney—called E. B. or Britt by his friends—was a bald, garrulous preacher and a near-legendary organizer for the biracial New Deal-era STFU. McKinney joined the Socialist Party in 1933 and was greatly influenced by Marcus Garvey's black nationalism. He was the first black vice president, and therefore the highest-elected Afro-American official of the STFU from its founding in 1934 to 1938. He organized an STFU local in Marked Tree, Arkansas, on the principle of biracial cooperation, inviting whites to Afro-American meetings. Through his leadership, Afro-American and white STFU locals in Marked Tree grew together instead of apart.

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