Red New York - communism

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

There is no going back in time, and no reason to do so. The strength of midcentury New York left culture lay in its organic relationship to the needs and tastes of the city's working class. It remains for another generation, in its own way, to build a new culture of labor and the left.

Yet because so much of New York left and labor culture was institutional, at least some of it remains even today. A few of the labor-sponsored cooperative housing projects have dropped their nonprofit status, but many remain in their original form, places where New Yorkers of modest means can find an alternative to both the astronomical cost of city real estate and the auto-centered life of the suburbs. New York City Opera no longer attracts much of a working-class audience, but it remains as a less expensive and more innovative alternative to the Met. Meanwhile, the Sweeney-em AFL-CIO has made a few efforts to revive labor's links to the cultural world, for example sponsoring concerts by British singer Billy Bragg, who recorded two albums of songs based on unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics.

Notes

(1.) Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Cultural Capital of the World, 1940-1965 (New York: Rizzoli New York, 1988).

(2.) For a more detailed discussion, see Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000), from which much of the material in this article is drawn.

(3.) Paul C. Mishler gives a glimpse of the range of left-wing activities in Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). An investigation by the legislature in the early 1950s identified twenty-seven left-wing camps in New York State.

(4.) Martin Wolfson, quoted in Jay R S. Teran, "The New York Opera Audience: 1825-1974," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1974.

(5.) Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 366. For a more recent, more comprehensive, and more sympathetic discussion of Popular Front culture, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth-Century (London: Verso, 1996).

(6.) Jerry Wexler with David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (New York: Knopf, 1993). The fusion of Cuban and African-American sounds, brought together in the 1940s at New York dance halls like the Palladium, also had ties to the left; one of the first Latin music radio shows in the city was broadcast over WEVD (whose call letters stood for Eugene Victor Debs), a station owned by the Daily Forward.

(7.) Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue, Electra Entertainment, 1998.

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