Anti-Imperialist Modern : Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War

Benjamin Balthaser

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780472902552

Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the prewar "Popular Front" through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anticolonial networks of North/South solidarity.

1 • This Land Is My Land

Cuba and the Anti-Imperialist Critique of a National-Popular Culture in the United States

In 1935, Clifford Odets was imprisoned by the Cuban national police. As perhaps the most famous playwright in the United States at the time and often cited as the “darling of the Left,” Odets was elected as the chair of the American Commission to Investigate Social Conditions in Cuba in order to publicize the labor conditions on U.S.-financed sugar plantations.1 The group included veterans of the Spanish-American War, representatives from churches, socialist parties, labor unions, and antiwar groups, and they departed with great fanfare from New York City for what was to be a week of publicity tours on the island. Held by armed guards and refused consular attention, communication, or food for over twenty-four hours while being watched by an entire company of soldiers, Odets later reported that it was the experience of seeing the U.S. consular representative collude with the Cuban authorities to detain the delegation that led him several years later to write “The Cuba Play,” a feature-length production set in Havana. Finished in 1938 for the Group Theatre, it was never performed or published. While there is no one clear reason why the play disappeared—although the Group Theatre’s lack of funds, Odets’s uneasiness with its perceived faults, and Cuba’s official status as an “ally” in World War II have been offered as answers—the play’s first act gives insight into what it meant for the United States’ preeminent proletarian playwright to set a story in Cuba.

Titled after Cuba’s ley de fuga in which the National Police or porra reserved the right to shoot anyone resisting arrest, the play centers on the life and death of Antonio Lorca, a Cuban revolutionary figure recently released from prison. “A Cuban Tom Mooney,” as Odets writes in his treatment, Lorca struggles to form a Popular Front social movement against a corrupt U.S.-backed regime, until he is finally betrayed by an old college friend and shot by the National Police.2 In the period between Lorca’s release and his final execution, the play introduces us to the multiracial movement built by Lorca’s organization, Young Cuba, which attempts to enlist broad working-class and international support for the organization. The play also includes long monologues and scenes featuring otherwise peripheral figures who represent various levels within the power structure that governs life on the island: U.S. businessmen, criollo liberals, arms traders, informants, and fascist police offers.

Yet the play does not begin its mise-en-scène in Havana. In a rare move by a cultural movement that prized the conceits of realism, “The Cuba Play” opens with a remarkable scene that draws into sharp relief the contours of literary production in the 1930s and its often complicated and contradictory engagement with the politics of U.S. anti-imperialism. Beginning in New York City, we are introduced to a left-wing writer who is listening to a “pitch” by two exiled Cuban revolutionaries who are staying with him. The Cubans want a play about their national hero, Lorca, and the writer—something of a stand-in for Odets himself—becomes increasingly impatient with their demands. He argues that he has no time, that he’s under no obligation to write anything for anyone, that during the Depression there is no privileged site of suffering, until he finally erupts:

Author: Why not? I’ll tell you why not. . . . What do I know about Cubans? I’m a New York man: I walk down the street and I tell you everything. I look at a face and I know them all. I know how he speaks, the American male. I know what he reads, what he eats, how he works. I know his opinions, I know his language. He’s got a wife—I know her. He doesn’t like the boss—I’ll tell you why. I’m up on that—I know that stuff. They go in the cafeterias—I know what they eat. What the hell does a Cuban eat—I don’t know. I’m not a Cuban. Chekhov wrote about Russians. He was a Russian. Ibsen wrote about Swedes. He was a Swede. I’m an American—I write about that. I want you to go home. Go to your committee. Tell them what I said. Miss Upjohn is going to make out a check for a hundred dollars.3

The Author’s speech suggests an interesting set of epistemological limitations around the nature and purpose of social realism in the 1930s. Given that Odets was considered, both in retrospect and at the time, the preeminent writer of realist drama of the Depression, his representational claims are more than just the idiosyncrasy of a particular writer.4 Central to the Author’s claim of authenticity as a writer is the sensual knowledge of the world about which he writes. To “know” about New Yorkers, the Author goes for a “walk down the street” to “look at a face”: both the interaction and the process of seeing are registered as necessary in order to understand the social and political world of his subject.

As Amy Kaplan writes in The Social Construction of American Realism, realism was imagined by its 19th-century practitioners to be a genre that mediated between classes that were bound by spatial and national proximity. As a self-consciously democratic genre, realism represents an ocular world in which the members can and often do confront one another on the historical stage and, as importantly, on Main Street.5 While the realism of the 20th century is far less self-consciously middle class than in the era of William Dean Howells and Mark Twain and far more integrated within mass-culture industries, the set of shared assumptions and lineages are profoundly similar.6 The attention to minute detail, the position of an omniscient narrator who can see into bedrooms and minds, and the emphasis on Howells’s “phrase and carriage of everyday life” in the public spaces of “streets” and “cafeterias” suggest that Odets intends his Author to be very much self-consciously within the tradition laid out by a previous generation of socially progressive writers. A few moments later in the conversation, the Author compares his work to “poetic plays” for which the writer only needs “to know a man’s a hero, nothing else”—not, as he demands, what “a man eats for dinner.”7

While the Author does eventually write his play for the Cuban revolutionaries, he tries to make clear that his objections are not political. He offers to give the activists money, says that he understands that “such a play is needed,” and adds that “he likes” that the two men have been sleeping at the Author’s house for the past three weeks, and also “likes” that he and the Cubans are “anti-fascists together.”8 In many ways, their political relationship embodies the many cross-race and internationalist relationships of the Popular Front, joined by a concern for labor and democracy, as well as a global imaginary that saw imperialism and fascism as intrinsically linked. The implication that the two Cuban revolutionaries would have an automatic home, and the relationship of “smoking cigars and drinking rum while talking politics” that the Author wishes to maintain, suggest the common—if now often forgotten—bonds bridged across spatial, territorial, racial, and imperial boundaries that often connected movements.

What is thus significant is the extent to which realism is posed here as a genre of national belonging. The Author poses his intimate knowledge of New York working-class life—people who have bosses and eat in cafeterias—against “poetic plays” of worlds he doesn’t know: the other nations of Sweden, Russia, and Cuba. Realism, argues the Author, is a national project, one based on the imaginary community of a coherent people who share a set of culturally specific values, habits, and language that are not easily translatable without site-specific knowledge. The revolutionaries’ answer suggests that they disagree less with the aesthetic prescriptions of realistic drama—they offer to tell the Author what their hero eats (rice and beans)—than with the political and cultural implications of the Author’s art. The two Cubans point to a candy the Author unwraps, and tell him that the sugar produced for his candy was not only made in Cuba, but on a farm owned by U.S. financial interests. In this way, the two Cubans destabilize the presumption of knowledge articulated by the Author: He does not “know” where his food comes from or how it is produced, or anything about the international connections and entanglements of the nation he proposes to represent that are part of sugar’s production. The Cubans suggest the way in which the U.S. empire destabilizes regimes of knowledge necessary for the realist project that equates a coherent and unified “people” with the discursive boundaries of the nation.

In complicating the relationship among genre, literature, and U.S. empire, Odets joined several other artists who traveled to Cuba in the 1930s. Four of the most famous, and perhaps representative, writers of the 1930s spent time in Cuba between 1927 and 1939: Josephine Herbst, Clifford Odets, Ernest Hemingway, and Langston Hughes. While their collective accounts differ in important ways, Cuba became a way for all four to narrate their relationship to the United States and their identities as subjects of a sovereign empire. For Odets, Herbst, and Hughes, Cuba offers a problem of representation and forces them into a self-conscious relationship to their own work and their role as writers—creators, one could say—of representative acts, acts that are to represent a particular political and literary constituency. This question of the dual meaning of representation is drawn most forcefully in Odets’s “The Cuba Play” by the demand of the Cuban independence activists for a play about their leader. Yet the question of representation also forces Hughes and Herbst to consider the ways in which their work was based on racial and imperial notions of U.S. citizenship. For Ernest Hemingway, the novel To Have and Have Not was his one attempt, in his own words, to write a social protest fiction. At the same time, the novel is deeply implicated in reifying the racial, national, and gendered identities produced by the U.S. hegemonic domination of Latin America. In doing so however, Hemingway’s text reveals the centrality of empire and race in the production of a white working-class subject. And all of these texts reveal the extent to which imperialism shapes the literary field in the 1930s, and the way its articulation in U.S. national discourse disrupted U.S. claims about itself as a democratically defined republic. All works, even those that tacitly embrace conceits of U.S. empire, reveal the generic considerations of the Popular Front as ones that demand both a national and a postnational imaginary. The question of realism, therefore, is also the question of who will be represented as “Americans”: “Americans” who are citizens or, as these authors suggest, all those within the range of U.S. imperial sovereignty.

For many of these writers, Cuba became an important site in an antiracist, Popular Front social imaginary. Inspired by Cuba’s long history of antiracist, anti-imperialist nationalism, Odets and Herbst saw in the progressive movements an alternative to a racially bound U.S. nationalism as well as a model for multiracial and transnational movements in the United States. As historian Ada Ferrer writes in her history of the Cuban insurgency against Spanish colonial rule, “racial equality” was a “foundation of the Cuban nation” against a slaveholding Spanish empire.9 Not only did Cuban nationalism pose an alternative to a racial nationalism of the United States, but the insurgency itself presented a model of a “mulitracial fighting force that was integrated at all ranks.”10 At a time in which the U.S. military was still segregated and the AFL was only beginning to consider integrating its own locals, such an army provided an important historical model for movements in the United States, underscoring the urgency of breaking racial barriers for a resurgent labor movement within the left wing of the CIO. Equally, the play can be read as an allegory and celebration of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as the racially integrated and trans-American Young Cuba bears many striking resemblances to the International Brigades of Spain. Herbst writes of the racially integrated sugar workers’ commune of Realengo 18 that crucially dated its deed to the land they worked to the Ten Year’s War settlement with the Spanish and thereby suggests another possible outcome for the South’s ongoing problem of tenant farming and debt peonage.

Additionally for Odets, Cuba stands as a site of racial defamiliarization. While Odets and other white-ethnic American writers like Louis Adamic, James Farrell, and Nelsen Algren actively wrote and campaigned against racism in the name of multiethnic working-class culture, many of these writers themselves were embodiments of class advancement for certain segments of the working class. Odets was hailed by a Time magazine cover story as the new American voice in theater, the tellingly labeled “white hope.”11 Yet the “whiteness” of Jews and other “white ethnics” was provisional at best during the 1930s. As Michael Rogin points out, the “whiteness” of Jewish Americans was constructed in relation to African Americans and often at their expense.12 Odets was highly aware of the way ethnic outsiders were encouraged to participate in racialized structures of power in order to secure class advancements to end their own racial persecution. Odets’s story, from outsider to ultimate insider, from a conception of Jewish American culture that was seen as foreign to one increasingly interpreted as an example of the expanding middle class, is a kind of metonym for the process of inclusion itself. As Michael Denning writes, these “second generation immigrants” were the center of the Popular Front movement, and as Matthew Frye Jacobson reminds us, despite some of their best efforts, they became its most visible beneficiaries.13 We can thus read Odets’s decision to go to Cuba, and his subsequent difficulty writing a play based on his feelings of solidarity with the Cuban revolutionaries, as an attempt to further expand the fight against racism within his work and, as importantly, his life. Yet as his own work in Hollywood—which I will discuss in greater detail below—attests, such attempts also met with larger structures of racialization from which Odets would ultimately not be able to escape.

Langston Hughes’s experiences in Cuba are more ambivalent. Hughes presents Cuba as a place in which African American writers and intellectuals can receive recognition that is denied them in the United States. He also represents Cuba as a site from which U.S. imperialism can be denaturalized. Rather than seeing U.S. race relations as inevitable, Hughes’s engagement with Cuba’s mestizo culture offers Hughes an implicit contrast to the more rigid racial lines in the United States. Subverting the colonial trope of the “metropole” exporting “civilization,” Hughes notes that the most visible import from the United States is segregation: beaches and other vacation facilities segregated at the request of white tourists who use them. Yet Hughes is also skeptical of the claims made by largely mestizo and creole Cuban nationalists about the color blindness of Cuba. While Hughes emphasizes the respect for Afro-Cuban and mestizo culture in Cuba, he also recognizes the limits of Cuba’s “race blindness.” He observes that most property is held by white creoles, and most government positions and even opposition parties are run by whites or light-skinned mestizos, while many ordinary Cubans find these implicit racial hierarchies to be “natural.” Cuba for Hughes emerges as a site of both belonging and homelessness, and I would argue his ambivalence acts to undermine both U.S. and Cuban claims to equality. Yet Cuba is also key for Hughes, and it is not an accident that he begins his transnational journey there in I Wonder as Wander. While he may feel disappointed by the mulatto elite, he also breaks with the Harlem Renaissance formula of race/roots for a far more transnational vision of race and rootlessness.

As much as Cuba becomes a site of a Popular Front political imaginary, there was still a great deal of disagreement on the left about the best way to build an international, multiethnic socialist movement. Odets’s Author becomes a kind of stand-in for a range of Popular Front positions promoted by intellectuals within the Communist Party. The same year Odets began taking notes for the play, there emerged a heated debate within Popular Front literary circles about the roles of nationalism and genre for committed writers. Inspired by the Comintern’s statement that the Communist Party should forge alliances with left-liberal groups to fight fascism, the party responded to a deep desire in progressive circles to find a common front to fight growing threats in Europe. This turn had drastic implications for cultural production, both within and outside of party circles. In Kenneth Burke’s famous address to the American Writers’ Congress, he argues t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War
• 1 • This Land Is My Land: Cuba and the Anti-Imperialist Critique of a National-Popular Culture in the United States
• 2 • Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia: Native American Modernity and the Popular Front
• 3 • The Other Revolution: Haiti and the Aesthetics of Anti-Imperialist Modernism
• 4 • The Strike and the Terror: The Transnational Critique of the New Deal in the California Popular Front
• 5 • An Inland Empire: Fascism, Farm Labor, and the Memory of 1848
• 6 • Cold War Re-Visions: Red Scare Nationalism and the Unmade Salt of the Earth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index