Surprise! Art and Politics DO Mix

 “The Folk Singers & the Bureau – The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party USA – 1939-1956 by Aaron J. Leonard, 2023

This book weaves together the stories of various left folkies, informers, turncoats, Communists and their pursuers before and during the severe 'red scares' after WWII. It also shows the essential and unavoidable relationship between art and politics during this period, as well as the problematic politics of the CP itself. It describes how a bourgeois 'democratic' state can suppress and destroy political organizations and dissident artists. Leonard has gathered info from the FBI files of some of the principals. These forms of repression are something that is happening now and can happen again, so pay attention.

The targeted folkies were Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Lead Belly, Paul Robeson, Burl Ives, Alan Lomax, Irwin Silber, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Cisco Houston, John Hammond, Aunt Molly Jackson, Dave Van Ronk, Sonny Terry, Tom Glazer, Oscar Brand and others. The musical groups were the Almanac Singers, the 'No-Name Quintet' and the Weavers. The alleged CP entities were People's Songs, People's Artists, the Cafe Society Night Clubs, Commonwealth College, Almanac House, Camp Wo Chi Ca, the Progressive Bookstore, the Progressive Party, Sing Out! Magazine, the Neighborhood Folk Chorus, the Musicians' Study Group, the Folksay Group, the American Labor Party and the Song Swappers. All subversive!

The main ex-CP and other informers are Louis Budenz, Boris Morros, Benjamin Gitlow, Harvey Matusow and Morris Childs. Childs informed for the FBI as Gus Hall's deputy to the USSR into the 1970s. Some of the CP leaders mentioned are Hall, William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, Henry Winston and Dorothy Healy. The main red hunters are the U.S. Congress and courts; the media; the FBI, military intelligence, the IRS, Joe McCarthy, the Subversive Activies Control Board, the John Birch Society and Bircher / ex-FBI outfits like Red Channels and CounterAttack. The FBI put Marxists – including the Trotskyist SWP – on various 'indexes' for detention, deportation, surveillance or arrest. There was one index on sabotage in case of a war with the USSR and one to recruit 'top level' CPers like Childs. Some still existed into the 1970s and I'm sure they have the equivalent now. They even left Guthrie on the indexes while he was dying in a NY psychiatric hospital.

For you lawyers and politicians, the laws invoked were the Smith Act, statutes against 'criminal syndicalism,' the McCarran Act, the Voorhis Act, the Hatch Act, the Taft-Hartley Act - all pushed by the political elite, the courts and the Dies Committee, the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and various black lists. Incidents were the 2 fascistic Peekskill riots and physical attacks on local Communists, the deportation of thousands of blue-collar workers, the dismissal of CP'ers from union positions, the arrest and jailing of the leaderships of the CP and SWP, the CP mistakenly going underground because 'fascism' had arrived, and the big nail in the coffin for them, Khrushchev's 1956 long speech on Stalin's cult of personality.

CP leaders arrested after Smith Act

Standouts! Did you know the CP endorsed the internment of Japanese Americans? Do you remember that Stalin and Hitler split up Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? Did you know that a pro-Tito Communist in the U.S. CP - John Lautner - was railroaded out of the CP at gunpoint? Or that Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” first at the 'CP' Cafe Society club in Manhattan? Or that Alan Lomax, the recorder of Lead Belly, worked at the Library of Congress and his boss was Archibald McLeish of all people. Lomax later left the U.S and went to Europe to escape prosecution and questioning. In Hollywood, Bertold Brecht got dragged into HUAC and later left for East Germany while Trumbo and Ring Lardner stayed.

Josh White recanted any association with Communist and CP-front organizations, as did Burl Ives. Neighbors, relatives, phone taps, mail opening, break-ins, internal informants, long-time leading organizational plants, tails, slander and more were used to gather info by the FBI. Now it is an added digital profile that will reveal secrets. The U.S. Supreme Court finally said that advocating the overthrow of the government “in the abstract” is protected free speech, contradicting the practice and arrests under the Smith Act of CP and SWP leaders. Vague anti-Communist allegations by informers like Matusow were later found to be suspect – even to the FBI. The IRS raided CP and Daily Worker offices due to 'unpaid taxes' – only to drop the charges later. Many targets of the red scares like Seeger were later lauded and rehabilitated as great American artists. As Lenin pointed out, the bourgeoisie will make them out to be “harmless icons” after they have been hounded into oblivion – much like MLK. All it takes is 50 or 100 years!

Lee Hays made this statement about the artistic period of the Depression and after, in defense of their musical work with left unions and the CP: “We lived in a veritable renaissance of arts and letters thanks to the WPA and various projects. The work of Steinbeck and Hellman and so, so many others was a direct result of socialist thought that was going on all over the world...” That environment no longer exists in quite the same way, which is one reason why art in the U.S. is stagnant.

This is Leonard's fourth book related to repression against various socialist currents – Maoists and CPers - along with attacks on music artists in the 1950s and 1960s. In this one he tries to determine if folkies really were Party members according to documents and testimony, mostly non-public or not. These are not just histories but warnings about the lengths the capitalist state will go to stymie opposition to their policies, even from artists. We will see these same actions in the present and future as the capital system in the U.S. 'shakes' under the impact of various forces. Be prepared!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Whole World in an Uproar,” “A Threat of the First Magnitude,” “Heavy Radicals” (all 3 by Leonard); “In Search of the Blues,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “Blues and Blues-Rock,” “The Romance of American Communism” (Gornick); “The Great Crash” (Galbraith); “The Worst Hard Time,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” “FBI Secrets,” “The Terror Factory,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “American Assassination,” “United States vs. Billie Holiday,” “Who Killed Malcolm X?” “City on a Hill,” “Green is the New Red,” “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 25, 2023 – the ostensible B-D of Hesus Christa, borrowed from pagans.