Robert C. Cottrell - All-American Rebels: The American Left from the Wobblies to Today

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 9781538112922 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 9781538112939 (electronic)

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Sue and Jordan

As always, I want to express my gratitude to my wife Sue and my daughter Jordan.

I also want to thank the team at Rowman & Littlefield, especially Elaine McGarraugh, Jon Sisk, Dina Gulak, and Professor John David Smith, editor of The American Ways Series.

The history of the modern American left is both storied and star-crossed. It includes genuinely luminous figures like Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Crystal Eastman, Inez Milholland, Randolph Bourne, John Reed, Roger Nash Baldwin, A. Philip Randolph, Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, and I. F. Izzy Stone. Then there are Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Sandra Cason Hayden, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, the Reverend William Barber II, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. The story of the American left involves the rise and fall of political movements that strove to empower the disfranchised as in the case of the anarchists, the socialists, and the Wobblies during the early portion of the twentieth century. It features the Communists and labor organizers who thrived before mid-century, and the antinuclear, civil rights, and New Left activists, as well as various countercultural participants, of the postwar period.

It also encompasses the wide array of movements that began to flourish during the 1960s, such as those agitating for the rights of women, gays, and Mother Earth in the 1970s and 1980s, through campaigns that highlighted local, national, and international issues, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, consumers, the elderly, the disabled, welfare recipients, and prisoners. Its distinct brand of radicalism covers the citizen activism that flourished in recent varieties of the American left including protests against globalization, violations of privacy, and assaults on human rights, whether pertaining to common citizens, LGBTQ representatives, people of color, women battling sexual abuse, children fighting for their very lives, and immigrants. Today, a revitalized American left is fighting back against an intemperate president easily given to belittling Muslims, Mexicans, a female presidential candidate, the handicapped, and left-of-center congresswomen, while consorting with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other anti-Semites. The battleground now includes the streets of America, sexual relationships, university campuses, the nations public schools, social media, and the Internet.

Conveniently, from a historians vantage point, the American left largely emerged at the start of the twentieth century, when anarchists, socialists, cultural radicals, and Wobbliesmembers of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)thrived. They found particularly receptive audiences in Greenwich Village, which had long housed bohemians, other free spirits, and those who made up the Lyrical Left. However, American participation in World War I blunted, then debilitated the nations first great left-wing movements, while providing seeds for others that endured for decades. The progressive administration of Woodrow Wilson targeted radical and antiwar groups and prominent figures, setting the stage for intolerant actions by federal operatives, state governments, municipalities, and vigilantes. And as the romanticism and innocence associated with the Lyrical Left dissipated, the repression and the example set by the Bolsheviks in post-czarist Russia convinced others of the need for radical, even revolutionary organizations in the United States. Both a communist and a non-communist left appeared, making up the Old Left that largely existed between 1919 and 1956.

During that nearly four-decade span of time, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) dominated the American left, to the dismay of anti-communist radicals and liberals alike. American communism initially attracted independent thinkers like Reed and Max Eastman. But the partys subservience to Holy Mother Russia quickly became pronounced, resulting in otherwise inexplicable shifts in direction and leadership. The zenith of American communism occurred during the Great Depression and World War II, when Communist Party membership came close to matching that of both the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Industrial Workers of the World at their height. But the willingness to accept Soviet directivesincluding for some, instructions to engage in espionageresulted in a discarding of the more successful Popular Front approach, involving accepting alliances with most, albeit not all, progressive forces. Sectarianism and dogmatism led many to leave the party, while the Cold War atmosphere prevailing after World War II proved catastrophic. By the mid-1950s, individuals associated with the Old Left but inclined to a critical perspective regarding the CPUSA began discussing the possibility of a revitalized American radicalism. The civil rights and antinuclear movements provided hope that both segregation and Cold War norms could be contested, as did the waning, though not the disappearance, of the postwar red scare. Radical pacifists helped to shape both campaigns, tendering the tactic of nonviolent direct action that Martin Luther King Jr. employed so deftly in the struggle to bring down Jim Crow barriers.