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203 Chapter Eleven War against Fascism Money has everywhere become the ruling power. All the goods produced by the labour of man can be exchanged for money. Money can even buy men, that is to say, it can force a man who owns nothing to work for another who has money. In former times, under serfdom, land used to be the ruling power; whoever possessed land possessed power and authority. Now it is money, capital, that has become the ruling power. —V. I. Lenin (Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 253–4, quoted by Anna Rochester in Lenin on the Agrarian Question, p. 181) Tension was building, with international and homegrown fascist aggression, the trials in Moscow, and unexplained disappearances. Although Hutchins and Rochester continued to write and publish new feminist and economic arguments in response to the varying exigencies of the times, they were increasingly buffeted by political storms arising from Europe and Asia, and their arguments grew less and less effective. What’s more, their solution to the changing sexological taxonomies—to remain hidden in plain sight—discounted the growing politicization of same-sex love and desire. Although this politicizing move, like anti-Soviet publicity, was held in abeyance during World War II, it remained alive underground, waiting for the right postwar moment to emerge. On March 23, 1938, Rochester had lunch with Marjorie White, a friend of Winifred Chappell. Although White was as strongly feminist as Rochester or Hutchins, she had difficulty understanding their choice of the CPUSA to frame and promote their feminism. White later wrote to Chappell telling her about the lunch and her resultant dissatisfaction. “I always have the feeling that I get nowhere when talking with her or Grace.”1 Rochester and White probably discussed the trials taking place in the Soviet Union and the problem of Trotsky. Certainly it was getting more and more difficult to comprehend or explain what was going on. Still, Rochester joined many of the men in signing a statement in New Masses on May 3, 1938, attempting to justify the trials.2 Hutchins, however, did not sign. Within days, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, known then as the Dies committee for its pugnacious chairman, Martin Dies, D-Texas. The committee would later come to investigate both Rochester and Hutchins, perturbed by their apparent class disloyalties. Unfazed, Hutchins continued to focus on the issues that had drawn her into the movement in the first place—labor conditions and women’s rights—reviewing Mary Heaton Vorse’s new book Labor’s New Millions, an account of the rise of the Committee for 204 PASSIONATE COMMITMENTS Industrial Organization, later to become the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Rather than summarize the argument of the book, though, Hutchins showcased Vorse herself: her experience and the importance of her writing in the development of the labor movement. “Covering the steel strike of 1919,” Hutchins wrote, “Mrs. Vorse did everything that a labor journalist could possibly do—and more—to help the strikers win. She saw that splendid struggle end in defeat, and she analyzed it in Men and Steel.” Present at Passaic, Vorse had written a book about that strike and likewise about Gastonia. “But the past two years have seen something new in the labor movement, a force swift, mighty, and unbeatable. Not one major strike in a year, but a dozen or more and in basic industries at the very center of big business itself.” Only a skilled labor journalist such as Vorse, Hutchins said, could possibly tell the story of this movement. The story required “what, for lack of a better name, is called reportage. It is that much discussed method of journalism that is more than mere reporting, something that includes interpretation, feeling, and the conveying of that feeling to others. Mary Vorse has that experience, that skill, and that power”3 (emphases in the original). Hutchins followed this paean to Vorse with an explanation of the development of the CIO. In this way, Hutchins once again subtly placed a woman at the heart of the overwhelmingly male movement, demonstrating how Vorse had rhetorically intervened at the point of struggle over and over during the past few decades. Meanwhile, international conditions worsened. Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia in September, gaining Sudetenland through a treaty signed with Britain and France. In November, a German diplomat was shot in Paris, and this incident served as the excuse for Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.4 Hutchins read about these events, remembering...

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