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John Reed Clubs/League of American Writers
- University of Illinois Press
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John reed clUBs/ leagUe of aMerican Writers James smethurst The John Reed Clubs (JRC) and its successor, the League of American Writers (LAW), played crucial roles in the development and direction of the Chicago Renaissance. Both organizations were major institutions of the cultural world of the Communist Left during the 1930s and early 1940s. Though the national images of the two groups reflected quite different political and cultural moments , in practice both played much the same role with respect to black artists in Chicago. Each actively sought the participation of African American artists and intellectuals, breaching the walls of Jim Crow in a notoriously segregated city and providing black artists a connection to their literary counterparts beyond the South Side. At the same time, both groups provided models and networks of support for the organizations and activities of Left African American arts groups and institutions, such as the South Side Writers Group and Negro Story, which formed much of the base of the Chicago Renaissance. The JRC grew out of attempts in the late 1920s to merge the legacy of the so-called “lyrical Left” associated with Greenwich Village and the Masses and Liberator magazines during the teens and the early twenties with a newer “Proletarian literature” impulse greatly influenced by European (especially Soviet and German) Communist artistic movements. Much of the impetus for this merger emerged from the movement to save the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, a movement that brought together older radicals and liberals with younger (and not so young) activists associated with the new Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The New Masses magazine was founded in 1926 in part as an attempt to keep this Leftliberal alliance together. It included as contributors and/or editorial board members a considerable number of black artists and intellectuals associated with the New Negro Renaissance, among them Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond. Countee Cullen, an activist in the effort to free Sacco and Vanzetti, also fell within this circle. As the name suggests, the journal was posed as suc- 488 • JaMes sMethUrst cessor to the Masses. A stalwart of the old “lyrical Left” (and a close friend of Jean Toomer), Waldo Frank, was initially elected editor-in-chief. However, Frank quickly departed as editor, leaving the younger writers, Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman (who, too, despite their relative youth, had come of age in the “lyrical Left” of Greenwich Village and the Masses) to take the editorial lead. As the 1920s wore on, Gold (a native of the Lower East Side most famous as a writer for his 1930 novel Jews without Money) became increasingly dominant, taking the journal more and more into the “proletarian literature” movement. Essentially, the proletarian arts movement, including activists in literature, theater, the visual arts, dance, music, photography, and the relatively new medium of film, sought to break with established artistic forms and institutions and to allow workers and farmers to create new art forms, journals, organizations, and so on, that both expressed current identities and concerns of the working class as well as prefigured or heralded what a new proletarian culture might look like when the international working class has (as “The Internationale” predicts) become all and the state has withered away. It also looked to the CPUSA, the Communist International (Comintern), and the Soviet Union for political and ideological leadership. This movement took root in the United States during the “Third Period” ideological era of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term Third Period referred to a formulation of Stalin in which he saw the revolutionary moment during and immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution (the “First Period”) as being followed by a phase of relative capitalist stability (the “Second Period”). However, Stalin predicted in the late 1920s that the Second Period would soon end and be followed by another (and deeper) era of capitalist crisis (the “Third Period”) in which the working class around the world would be receptive to the leadership of the revolutionary parties associated with the Comintern. However, Stalin and the Comintern also concluded that the workers might be misled by various sorts of liberal and non-Communist Left groups, especially the various Social Democratic groups. As a result, what became known as Third Period ideology (which in fact was a product of the so-called Second Period) emphasized the establishment of countercultural “workers’” institutions, such as workers’ theaters , bookstores, visual...