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chapter seven heaven and earth: revelations and doubt in the sacco-vanzetti decade The revolutionary moment of 1919 passed rapidly, a consequence both of the government’s stern repression of left-wing activity and of Left activists’ unreadiness, or unwillingness, actually to undertake the revolutionary violence the government accused them of plotting. Membership fell precipitously in both the Socialist Party of America and the several, successive Comintern-aligned parties that splintered off from it.1 Even as problems multiplied for socialism in the United States, those who remained committed to the movement were alternately tantalized and inspired by promising developments internationally. Parliamentary socialists could look to the success of Great Britain’s Labor Party, which in the 1920s rapidly overtook the Liberal Party as the primary rival of the Tories and counted members of the Fabian Society among its most important leaders.2 Militant revolutionaries had still more to celebrate and seek to emulate: actually existing socialism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For many freshly minted communists, a trip to the USSR was something akin to a pilgrimage, inspiring rhapsodies such as the one Michael Gold penned in 1924 to his comrade and literary mentor Upton Sinclair: One feels so normal and strong in Russia; and all the things one only theorizes about here and feels a little bitter and savage in defending, are so simple and real in Russia. It’s a great new amazing place, everything beginning , life young and hopeful and strong. There are some things one doesnt like, for it is not Utopia by a long shot; it is the earth and not heaven; the earth in the throes of the birth of a new race of giants. Since 230 I have come back here (about three or four days ago) I have found myself thrust into many arguemnts [sic] with liberals, anarchists, Socialists etc. and I am not used to it yet. They argue about shadows, most of them; and after one has seen the reality, with its good and evil, one doesnt know how to answer the dialecticians. You must certainly get over there, Upton . I saw nothing in Europe or in America or Mexico that stirred me so much as hum-drum Russia at its business of bringing in Communism. A trip to Russia searches one’s soul; strips away sentimentality and nonsense ; makes or breaks one.3 In the main, Gold’s panegyric lays claim to the real, the material actuality , as contrasted with the ethereal, the “shadows” of theory and an ideal but impossible “utopia.” This binary seeks to separate the Communists from their socialist and liberal comrades and, by the same token, to separate the prewar social democracy from the harder-headed postwar communism. But of course this very binary opposition is itself deeply rooted in socialist debates going back some seventy years, in which Marx and Engels and their more moderate comrades took turns claiming the science of their socialism and charging their rivals with utopian wishful thinking. Moreover, Gold’s text is shot through with forms of religious expression that, we have noted, also played a central role in the prewar socialist narratives of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois. Not only does Gold invoke straightforwardly the favored metaphor of conversion when he speaks of an experience that “searches one’s soul,” “makes or breaks one,” but he frames the ideal of a natural supernaturalism with the same ‹gure of the emergence of a colossal, collective proletarian body favored by his social democratic predecessors: “the birth of a new race of giants.” The more that Gold seeks to hail a new socialist millennium , it seems, the more he repeats the tropes by which socialism had de‹ned itself dating well back into the previous century. On these points, moreover, there is a curious homology between postwar discourses in radical politics and in the arts. The received version of literary modernism treats the Great War as a kind of historical continental divide. Just before the war, Ezra Pound had proposed “Make It New” as the credo of a poetry making a dramatic, even revolutionary, break with the past. And lo, once the high passes of war and revolution were traversed, there was no going back. Anyone clinging to the old ways of doing and seeing things was lost in nostalgia and irrelevance, however appealing some of the prewar hopes and methods might seem. Willa Cather’s One of Ours might beat out John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers...

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