Red New York - communism

Monthly Review, July-August, 2002 by Joshua B. Freeman

Yet another current of what loosely might be called left New York culture came not out of a conscious cultural program but as a byproduct of the still-unusual belief in racial and ethnic equality to be found on the left (at least unusual among whites). The proximity of so many ethnic and racial groups made New York an arena for cultural hybridization. Active efforts at cultural crossbreeding by leftists helped catalyze the process.

Atlantic Records, for example, a New York-based independent label, in its early days incarnated a Popular Front dream. Run by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat; two Jewish leftists; and Jerry Wexler, a Jew from Washington Heights whose father was a window washer and mother was a left-wing "wannabe intellectual," the company recorded one innovative black artist after another on the road to what eventually became "soul music." One of Wexler's idols was record producer John Hammond, a white NAACP activist who helped run Cafe Society, a nightclub founded by Popular Fronters as a venue for interracial entertainment. Later on Wexler would specialize in recording black r&b artists like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett backed by interracial Southern bands, while Hammond would sign Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to their first recording contracts. (6) The affinity many leftists felt for black music was reciprocated by the support among black musicians for left-wing causes. When, in 1943, African-American Communist Benjamin Davis, Jr. successfully ran for the New York City Council, his supporters included Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Perhaps no one better captures the unexpected complexity of midcentury left culture than Woody Guthrie. Having carefully cultivated an image as the embodiment of the common man, Guthrie had helped pioneer Popular Front radio, for a while hosting New York-based network shows. During the late 1940s, while living in Coney Island, he performed frequently at union rallies and political events, singing the folk and protest songs for which he was famed. At the same time he was writing hundreds of unpublished lyrics on subjects far removed from politics, including achingly beautiful love songs and a paean to Ingrid Bergman. Guthrie had an interest in modernism, marrying a Martha Graham dancer and performing with modern dance troupes. (7) In Guthrie, and in New York left culture, high and low art, the commercial and the folk, traditionalism and modernism, coexisted in a happy, fruitful, hodgepodge. The very eclecticism of New York left culture gave it depth and resiliency.

The cultural moment of the midcentury labor left seems long gone. While the anticommunist crusade of the 1940s and 1950s never completely crushed the New York left, it destroyed or weakened many of its key institutions. Eventually, changes in cultural tastes, shifts in the city's industrial structure, and generational change pushed the city's left culture into the past. Elements of the left outlook got appropriated and absorbed into commercial mass culture, but with the sharp edge of dissent removed.