American Dreamers by Michael Kazin

Author:Michael Kazin [Kazin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59670-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE PRO-ROOSEVELT FRONT

Even as the Communists strutted their desire for a final conflict with capital, events abroad and at home were encouraging a shift toward more sober aims. Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany emboldened right-wing parties across the continent. Declaring war on “Reds,” they sanctioned violent attacks on the offices of left-wing groups and banned or restricted them whenever possible. Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt’s vigorous efforts to generate jobs and his avuncular empathy for Americans in trouble were negating the best argument for a radical alternative: that there was no real difference between the major parties. The revolution would have to be postponed. In 1934, chastened Soviet leaders shelved all talk of “social fascism” and blessed ties between Communists elsewhere and fellow parties on the left.

The following summer, delegates to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern gathered in Moscow and announced a head-twisting change in strategy that was both shrewd and cynical. Fascism, declared Georgi Dimitrov, the charismatic Bulgarian Communist who had recently emerged from one of Hitler’s jails, was “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital.” To combat this ruthless enemy, Communists everywhere were now instructed to work with any individual or group willing to defend democracy, “bourgeois” though it and they might be. These new “popular fronts” could include all sorts of small businesses and unions, churches and synagogues, liberal and moderate newspapers, professional organizations, even elected leaders like FDR. The Daily Worker had recently called the president “the leading organizer and inspirer of Fascism in this country.” But such counterproductive, as well as absurd, charges would now have to stop. Communists around the world were under siege, and the security of the USSR was itself in doubt.25

Although there were never enough genuine fascists to build a true movement in the United States, the CP embraced the Popular Front as a politics and a culture with a zeal unmatched by comrades in other nations. The new strategy allowed rank-and-file radicals to make America’s ideals and culture their own. For men and women who had either been raised in another country or in an ethnic neighborhood, the Popular Front was an opportunity to abandon a kind of rebellion that had deepened their alienation from the citizenry. Harsh mistrust of any figure who departed from the party line was now replaced with a willingness to cooperate with a variety of other Americans in big battles for undeniably important and feasible ends: building industrial unions, demanding civil rights, combating right-wing tyrants abroad. While engaged in mass movements, Party members now avoided drawing attention to their ultimate ends. “I … discovered that those of us on the left have certain duties to perform,” recalled Louis Goldblatt, a leader of the West Coast longshoremen’s union. “Among them is to learn the technique of doing 99 percent of the work and taking one percent of the credit.”26

By pursuing this approach with diligence and skill, Communists achieved a certain acceptance in parts of the industrial North and West, as well as in Hawaii, where they formed the core of a sizable labor left.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.