April 30, 2024: Communist Culture: Dos Passos and Wright

[In honor of MayDay/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling culturalrepresentations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to aspecial weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]

On twostrikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s American arcs.

As I mentionedin yesterday’s post, despite our longstanding collective national antagonismtoward communism there have been both moments and communities in which thepolitical philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s,two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohortof writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Great Depression’sheightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed tohighlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of uncheckedcapitalism, leading a numberof American writers and artists to imagine and depict alternative socialand communal ways of living; and those economic woes, coupled with thecontinued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal illsand threats, led many AfricanAmericans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant Americansystems.

Those responseshappened (and thus differed) within multiple communities, but they can besuccinctly illustrated by two individuals, writers whose most significantnovels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passoshad been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy thatcame to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both hisstylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wrightlaunched his career with the short story collection UncleTom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere twoyears later with NativeSon (1940), the best-selling and hugely controversial novel thatfeatures both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism(in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragicand brutal arc makes numerous, purposefully ineloquent but nonetheless compellingarguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the CommunistParty: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be aCommunist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of publicstatements and positions that culminated in his qualified supportfor Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also arguethat their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and nationalnarratives: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the ColdWar, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives;whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and hecame instead to see, as does for example RalphEllison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeedfailed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such adistinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a newgeneration of African American activists found anew a compellingalternative in American socialism.

Next culturalcommunism tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?