Communist Women Writers: The Emergence of Memory Culture

Alan Wald

In the Company of Radical Women Writers
By Rosemary Hennessy
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, 304pages, $24.95, paper.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood
By Gail Crowther
New York: Gallery Books, 2024, 304 pages, $29.99, hardback.

Riding Like the Wind:
The Life of Sanora Babb
By Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024, 416 pages, $27.95, hardback.

1. In League with the Future

FOR MANY SOCIALISTS, the cultural work of Old Left has been the inspirational jewel in the crown of our collective effort to reclaim the multi-dimensional history of U.S. radicalism from what British Marxist E. P. Thompson called the “enormous condescension of posterity.”(1) We look back on earlier generations because, in one way or another, they, too, sought to live lives in league with the future.

Yet the various components of this endeavor have advanced unevenly. While it is now well-established that the interwar work of the Communist Party (CP-USA) among African Americans qualitatively enhanced the Marxist understanding of “race” beyond the “colorblind” approach of the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, the scholarly and journalistic examination of writing and lives of women cultural activists is perhaps nearer to a work in progress.(2)

What we have witnessed to date are chiefly revelations of prefigurative feminist thinking (among women who would have disdained the term “feminist”), along with resonant biographical reconstructions of resistance to patriarchy in and out of the Left. In-depth political scrutiny and interpretation seem to advance and then recede. That’s part of the challenge we all face when telling this kind of story through the prism of lives lived against the grain in the dark times of the Great Depression, World War II, and post-war anti-radical witch-hunt.

Much of the historical context (European fascism, high Stalinism) in which pro-Communist women incubated and produced their often-fascinating fiction, poetry, plays, film scripts, literary criticism, and journalism was essentially over by the mid-20th century.

Moreover, the twilight of pro-Soviet political influence during the long Cold War (especially the USSR’s atrocious interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan) left a bad taste in the mouths of subsequent radicals.

Nonetheless, even as so many beliefs and illusions have gone by the wayside, there remains a robust afterlife to certain Marxist projects of Communist women cultural workers. That’s partly for the reason that capitalism and imperialism continue to inflict their attendant miseries; but it’s also because one readily finds in the experiences and writings of the predecessor activists a remarkable pre-echo of the concerns of women in the ensuing radical upsurges that came first with the 1960s New Left and then with post-2008 millennial socialism.

2. A Communal Retention

During the last five decades, this beguiling memory culture of Communist women writers emerged, bit by bit, to allow younger activists to revisit older writings through reprints as well as new interpretative books and essays, mostly carried out at the hands of academic feminists.

This ongoing archive can be understood as the communal retention of experiences and imaginative work of women with a shared if personally tailored ideological commitment to the pro-Soviet rendition of Marxism. Nevertheless, while its conservancy has been sustained through a growing assemblage of texts by and about them, the framing of this material varies considerably. That’s because there are diverse ways in which aspects of memory culture might be deployed according to the priorities and allegiances of the editors and scholars figuring out this past in the present.

Among the noteworthy moments in this late 20th century emergence were the founding of the Feminist Press in 1970 and its publications such as the novel Daughter of Earth (originally 1929, reprinted in 1973) by Agnes Smedley, and Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-40 (1993, reprinted by Haymarket Books in 2022) edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz.(3) The current state of affairs may be appreciably registered through the recent appearance of In the Company of Radical Women Writers by Rosemary Hennessy, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther, and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb by Iris Jamahl Dunkle.

These are three very different books bound together by suggestive points of contact among the nine female writers who are showcased, four of whom are African American and two Jewish American.(4) First, all were pro-Communist for most if not all their careers. Second, there were parallel tensions in their lives among creative work, emotions, and revolutionary commitment. Third, the governing themes of their writing are implicitly feminist: control over one’s body and sexuality, the experience of gender discrimination, and a recognition of intersectionality with other identities such as class and race.

These and further connections account for the signature focus of this triad of books, which is not just on writings and activism but equally on the intimate lives of the women.

3. Private Needs and Public Activism

Radical lives and creative work can be ill-served by strict labels and typologies, and the way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. In this review essay, I must acknowledge a particular slant: My chosen emphasis on “Communist Memory Culture,” and exploration of the writers as Communist, reflect certain priorities as a socialist activist as well as academic areas of expertise. This probing the strengths and weaknesses of a pro-Soviet Communist commitment will not be the main concern of every reader and reviewer.

Moreover, such a political characterization of the nine women is by no means intended to pigeonhole the subjects or to specify what should be the central point of the books. Of the three well-established authors of the books under review, only Rice University Professor Hennessy, who has published several works on materialist feminism, identifies as a Marxist. Crowther is a self-described “feminist vegan” who wrote studies of poets Sylvia Path and Ann Sexton, and Dunkle is a poet and biographer of the writer Charmian Kittredge London.

As I see it, an ideological choice of Communism both complements and complicates the outlook and experiences of the nine subjects and is in many respects a badge of honor considering the time and circumstances in which they lived. Moreover, in harmony with the three authors, the goal here is not to socio-politically decode art and people; one must first step back and try to inhabit a writer’s experiences in historical context before attempting to appraise a political mindset.  What I find attractive in the memory culture of Left commitment is a very human effort to reconcile private needs with public activism and literary expression to extirpate a system of institutionalized oppression by class, gender and race.

At the same time, in the well-known academic dispute between the “lumpers” and the “splitters” in the discipline of History, I fall closer to the latter in the sense that the CP-USA was not merely “Left” or “radical” but had a prevailing specificity to it. The documented record of its controversial party functioning and doctrinal positions reveals acute differences between it and other Marxist currents that are more distinctive than similar, even when all profess anticapitalism and socialism.

Nonetheless, this hardly translates into a homogeneous way of liaising with the CP-USA’s organizational and political history to which the nine women held allegiance. In this regard, I should make known that I am not exactly a detached observer:   During late 20th century, I personally interviewed nearly half the nine subjects in these books, and a recollection of their sparkling intelligence, fierce independence, and self-possession remains with me to this day.(5)

4. Feminism’s “Lost Generation”

Rosemary Hennessy’s study of the “life making” and “life writing” of her group of seven Communist women releases a startlingly fresh perspective on the memory culture that has been recovered to date. These two critical terms are standard in feminist theory, in this case referring (in simple sum-ups) to “a web of dependencies that humans have a responsibility to maintain” and “provoking a heightened awareness of one’s place in history.” (2, 22) Unlike the other two books under review, Hennessy’s is a relatively dense and theoretically-informed academic volume; perhaps challenging for the faint-hearted neophyte reader but definitely worth the effort.

Hennessy’s angle of approach is that these writers comprise “a lost generation in the history of feminism” as well as “an absence in my own family” (resulting in a number of her brief autobiographical references appearing throughout). (17) Moreover, Hennessy felt compelled to research this subject because of stark parallels she saw between the “world in crisis” induced by capitalism’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-23 and that of the “global crisis” of the 1930s. (3)

In her pithy and eloquent 28-page “Introduction” to In the Company of Radical Women Writers, Hennessy makes the following case for the contributions to the CP-USA understanding of the Great Depression by journalist Marvel Cooke (1903-2000), social activist Louise Thompson Patterson (1901-1999), journalist Claudia Jones (1915-64), playwright and novelist Alice Childress (1912-94), novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst (1892-1969), proletarian writer Meridel Le Sueur (1900-96), and poet and biographer Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80):

“These writers amplified the scope of that [Communist] explanation. They confronted a Left dominated by men, and they foregrounded women’s lives in their writing, raising issues that American Communism had marginalized. They made visible the fact that Black women’s domestic labor was worth less because it was women’s work and racialized. They exposed the persistence of racist violence, confronted the social advantage offered by settler heritage and whiteness, and probed the structures of U.S. imperialism and colonial context.” (9-10)

What’s not to like?

5. Rethinking Prior Scholarship

The pages that come next are divided into three units around main themes — “Labor,” “Land,” and “Love”— that are in turn comprised of two or three chapters each. These are then introduced by an elaboration on each of Hennessy’s trio of motifs, after which the focus can be on several writers or just one. For example, “Labor” begins with a discussion of Black women’s domestic work in the 1930s and then moves to a discussion of how the Harlem-based Cooke, Patterson, Jones, and Childress found their way to the CP-USA and the manners in which their political activism inflected their writings about this variety of labor.

The middle component at first takes notice of “Land” as a vital fount of “life making” for Herbst and Le Sueur, each of whom then receives her own chapter. Here the spotlight shifts to the midwest and capitalism’s imposition on rural areas, where Hennessy has her personal roots. Moreover, the chapters also move forward to examine writings of the 1950s when the two writers addressed regional history in relation to a dispossession of Indigenous peoples that implicated their own families’ legacies.

The concluding third section (“Love”) is about eros, with an inventive approach to Rukeyser. This starts with the poet’s 446-page biography of the Willard Gibbs (1809-1933), the by-then forgotten father of physical chemistry. Willard Gibbs: American Genius (1942), according to Hennessy, presents an interpretation of erotic energy that developed into a model of “‘ecology — the study of the interrelationship of living things and their environment’ where ‘particles of intense life’ circulate across multiple intimate environments.” (26)

Linking Rukeyser’s thinking to the then-neglected writings of Bolshevik theorist Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), Hennessy revisits Rukeyser’s writings on the 1931 Scottsboro Case (when nine Black youth were falsely accused of rape by two white women), as well as her 1938 poem “The Book of the Dead” and collaboration with photographer Nancy Naumberg (1911-98) — both of which addressed the 1930-31 Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in West Virginia.(6)

This tightly argued yet wide-ranging interdisciplinary study can hardly be summarized in just a few paragraphs. To be sure, much of the material, biographical and literary, will be familiar to those who have already read broadly on Communist women. The real achievement of Hennessy is not in so much in startling new primary research as in re-thinking prior scholarship in a more contemporary theoretical context as well as foregrounding issues dramatized by the recent depredations of capitalist exploitation. The work of theorists like Nahum Chandler (The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, 2014), Sharon Holland (The Erotic Life of Racism, 2012), and Timothy Bewes (The Event of Postcolonial Shame, 2010), are just a few that provide insights that Hennessy applies.

Hennessy is most convincing when showing how the Black women writers shifted the conversation on the Left about Black domestic workers to address labor beyond the factory floor. They not only disclosed links back to the early slave trade, but also demonstrated how domestic labor was moving in the 1930s from homes to street corners (becoming a new “Bronx slave market” from which wealthier women recruited maids and housekeepers). Hennessy’s focus on white settler history and the treatment of the land, labor, and community nexus are also lucid and powerful. And her original treatment of biographies by both Rukeyser and Herbst (New Green World, 1954, about botanist John Bartram, 1699-1777) is spectacular.

6. “Bad Girl” on the Left

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild, 1893-1967) was famous for her “bad girl” transgressions, acerbically humorous light verse and epigrams, deliciously clever short fiction and plays, snarky brief reviews, and witty film dialogue. She was also a pro-Communist political sympathizer for at least a quarter of a century, with a record of activism widely misunderstood and underappreciated. At her death her estate and all royalties were willed to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then the NAACP. Nevertheless, it is her over-the-top but whip-smart personality that most people recall — daring and sarcastic, brainy and spicy, and abiding by her own rules without apologies.

Here is a sampling of Parker’s characteristic and widely cited quips: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think,” “I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true,” and this verse:

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.(7)

This has made her catnip for humorous depictions in novels, plays and films, as well in a popular one-woman theatrical performance. She also appeared on a U.S. postage stamp in 1992, and was impersonated on television in 2018 by drag queen Miz Cracker in season ten of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Almost all the crucial facts about Parker are available in numerous book-length biographies, such as Marion Meade’s Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? (1989). (The title comes from Parker’s typical reaction to anyone knocking on her door.)

Nevertheless, Crowther’s narrower focus in Dorothy Parker in Hollywood affords a more telescoped examination of her political commitments without diminishing a candid account of the many contradictions in her life. The latter include lavish living, the occasional use of homophobic and even racist language, her shockingly cruel behavior under the influence of alcohol, and the likelihood that she read almost no Marx or Lenin.

The Hollywood spotlight of this volume operates effectively to bring politics to center stage because Parker’s socialist convictions only became evident during the last days of her association with New York’s Algonquin Round Table — the group chiefly of writers who were known as “The Vicious Circle” and who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel for lunch each day between 1919 and 1929. At that time her concerns seemed mainly to be about the victimization of the poor and opposition to the death penalty.

For example, in 1927, shortly after a trip to Europe, Parker gained national notoriety by joining a Boston protest in her stylish clothes against the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Italian American anarchists accused of robbery and murder. After her arrest there for “loitering,” she continued to fundraise for the cause in New York, then published a piece called “A Socialist Looks at Literature” in the New Yorker. This was followed by a review of radical Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) where she decried racism and white privilege. (43-45)

Parker’s vague Leftism of the time next morphed into an attraction to the CP-USA and the USSR in the early 1930s. This was on the eve of her relocation to Hollywood, where she was based for most of the next 35 years. The first indication came during a 1932 ocean voyage to Paris, where she encountered Mary Mooney, the mother of socialist and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member Tom Mooney, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing. Mary Mooney was part of a delegation of Communists en route to the USSR, and Parker attended their political discussions on board.

That same year Parker, divorced from her first husband (stockbroker Edwin Pond Parker), met the actor and writer Alan Campbell (1904-1963). Following their marriage, the couple moved to California to launch Hollywood careers together that included writing the screenplay for A Star is Born (1937) and dialogue for The Little Foxes (1941), both major successes.

Parker and Campbell would live in a Beverly Hills mansion with a butler and cook, while they additionally purchased a home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Campbell, also half-Jewish, was ultra-handsome, 10 years younger, and a doting and adoring partner who shared Parker’s Left-wing views as well as her acute addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills.

7. Complicated Legacies

The challenge in centering just one period in a writer’s life means that the biographer is required to insert chunks of the subject’s backstory to provide context, circumventing a repetition of too many by-now well-known anecdotes.

Crowther accomplishes this commendably, infusing the familiar narrative of Parker’s childhood and rise in New York magazine circles, as well as her denouement into reclusiveness and alcoholism in the same city at the end of her life, with new energy and plot emphases. Overall, while many more absorbing details can be found in the work of Meade and earlier biographers, Crowther’s book ends up being a very accessible synoptic survey, with a plethora of rich vignettes and notable episodes in a succession of vivid short chapters.

It’s also full of useful observations for a less monolithic view of the Left, partly because Crowther is not driven to make Communist ideology the core narrative of her book as the principal explanatory factor for Parker’s life choices.

For example, in reviewing the contradictory claims others have made about Parker’s Jewish identity, Crowther concludes: “All evidence suggests that although she was ambivalent about her own Jewishness (‘just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute’), when she saw the creeping fascism and treatment of Jews in Europe, she was both appalled and frightened. She took action.” (123)

Parker’s priorities, then, weren’t determined by a diktat from John Howard Lawson, leader of the Hollywood branch of the CP-USA. She became an obsessive activist due to her own emotional needs and view of the world. What happened next, however, probably crystalized a life commitment to refracting her world view through a broad pro-Communist framework championed by her Hollywood colleagues.

In 1933, Parker had already taken a step significantly to the Left as one of the 10 founders of the Screen Writers Guild, along with Communists Lawson and Dashiell Hammett. In 1936, she heard a talk about fascism by the captivating Soviet agent Otto Katz (a.k.a. André Simone, 1895-1952), generally assumed to be the model for the anti-Nazi protagonist in the films Casablanca (1942) and Watch on the Rhine (1943). Immediately Parker and six others organized the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, building it into an organization of 4000 members over the next two years.

From Crowther’s angle, we see that Parker’s motivations in both instances stemmed from her idiosyncratically rebellious background and an identification with the underdog and persecuted — not an ideological belief in building a Leninist party to seize power and forge a Soviet America. It seems most likely that it was the Hollywood Left itself that was her political community, and not the organized CP-USA.

Thus the details of Marxist strategy, the machinations and changing tactics proposed by the CP-USA and Comintern, were for Parker dwarfed by the larger currents of world history swirling around her — the rise of fascism and brutality of capitalism. More than some other studies that address pro-Communist women, Crowther depicts Parker appropriately, from the inside out, as complex and impassioned, very much flesh and blood, and sometimes even rather vile beneath the sophisticated veneer.

That Parker was and remained pro-Communist in rough ideological terms is not in doubt, as can be seen by the scores of activities that ensued along with statements that she signed, and articles that she published in the Communist press. There is a consistency in her embrace of pro-Soviet positions regarding Spain (to which she traveled in support of the Republican cause), the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin-Pact, the flip-flopping stance on World War II, and post-World War II CP-USA projects such as the 1949 Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, the Civil Rights Congress, her pleading the Fifth Amendment before a subversive investigating committee (the approach preferred by the CP-USA), and much more.(8)

As a result, Parker diminished her own finances considerably through generous donations and then suffered job loss from blacklisting during the McCarthy era. This was a time when she behaved with considerable bravery, despite Campbell’s pressure on her to pull back and the strain of the ultimate collapse of her marriage followed by his suicide. Yet exactly what made Parker tick was quite different from the equally courageous activists who are treated by Hennessy.

In truth, most women on the Left have bequeathed complicated legacies that defy reduction to a political label, but their commitment can seem a simple matter to those critics and biographers who themselves have a simple perspective. This is especially true with the familiar hobby-horse obsession of those biographers who seek out and over-emphasize signs of their CP-USA associations to reduce the narrative to a concentrated essence of Stalinism. Some may be captive to an ultra-orthodox “Trotskyist” mentality, long past its shelf date; others are not committed to building a stronger socialist movement but only out to brand anti-capitalist rebels in a defamatory manner.(9)

Moreover, for those who don’t understand how the creative process works, artistic work can be drastically misread through a political prism. That is, if a writer has a known Communist allegiance, then some sort of coherent Marxist message can be presupposed about their novel or poem in advance of accurately reading them.

Fortunately, this type of over-simplification should be rendered impossible by Parker’s career because her writing style and sensibility were clearly forged long before her radicalization. Yet it would be an equivalent mistake to dismiss the political writing that she did produce because it lacks putatively Communist traits. As Crowther accurately emphasizes, Parker wrote several stories expressly about racism and class oppression.

What is more, some of her film scripts carry subversive messages and there can be serious concerns under her poetry and quips. The 1947 film Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman, for example, co-authored with Lawson and others, is a well-known noir about a woman who sacrifices her career for a man. Even the much earlier classic story “Big Blond,” which won the O. Henry Prize in 1929, has a feminist subtext in its manner of portraying the drunken loneliness, male dependence, and swelling despondency of an ageing “kept woman.” These are far from her only works that highlight, with forceful and gloomy intimacy, the lack of options faced by many women.

Especially valuable in a micro-biography such as Crowther’s is the way the case of Parker vividly reminds us that the collective pro-Communist “Left” is a political designation forged from numerous contrasting genealogies. This includes a political amalgamation at points with strands of liberalism as well as a harnessing of simple rebellion against the powers of the privileged and a somewhat arms-length identification with the “oppressed.” By depicting an activist who was with the CP-USA while not in it, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood illustrates a very different form of commitment from what appear in the two other book under consideration.

8. Rooted in the Personal

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb is the accomplishment of a fluent and vivid author who weaves a compelling tapestry of family history, the story of a complicated marriage, the repeated frustration of artistic aspirations, and a multi-decade devotion to the Communist movement.

Marked by an adept command of language and a desire to probe intimate biographical matters with depth and sensitivity, Dunkle’s engaging account blends archival and literary material in a well-spun narrative tuned to a general audience.

What I’ve always admired about Babb (1907-2005) in her Communist years (mainly from the early 1930s to mid-1950s) is that so much of her work can be rooted in the personal while implying universal human connections.

This is evident in the short fiction and journalism now collected in The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression (1987) and The Cry of the Tinamou: Stories (1997). Above all, the quality can be found in her award-winning epic of proletarian literature and radical regionalism, Whose Names are Unknown (written in the 1930s but published in 2004). This last evokes the color and texture of the era as it follows the travails of the fictionalized Dunne family in its escape from the Western Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the migrant camps in California.

Yet Babb is a writer who worked in many emotional registers, including quiet reflections that can be seen in her poetry. Many of the ones collected in her career retrospective Told in the Seed (1998) are attuned to the natural world’s minute developments — the veins of leaves, the meeting of sea and stars. This is not even to mention the gendered tensions that run throughout her writing, fully on display in the father-daughter relationship of Des Tannehill and Robin at the center of fictionalized autobiographical material in The Lost Traveler (1970).

Babb is just one among scores of writers on the pro-Communist Left whose record, seen in context and complexity, evidences a belief that a writer’s first responsibility is to the art. Dunkle puts it well: “While Babb didn’t bother to adhere to the gender norms of the era when writing about women, she wrote the way she did not as a political statement but simply because that’s how she saw the world.” (137) But I would add that a Marxist sensibility was without doubt part of the picture. For Babb, it became a crucial lens on the injustices faced by vulnerable populations in the Great Depression.

Just because one may be writing to change the way people see the world, and perhaps even to induce action, it doesn’t follow that the object of one’s literary calling can’t nonetheless be to ensure that one’s sentences are well-chosen and apposite. Writers on the pro-Communist Left like Babb, frequently members of writing workshops and classes, certainly recognized power in language in the political sense, but the most astute acknowledged that the reader is also compelled at emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic levels. The success achieved in all these areas was undeniably uneven, but at root in the case of Babb and others was a commitment to being honest and truthful to the language of the art.

9. A Self-Disciplined Cadre

Up until now, Babb’s has been a story somewhat tangled and hard to reconstruct. A breezy foray into the topic would never do; a meticulous cross-referencing of life and work is required. The organized thread of Dunkel’s 19 chapters (plus an “Introduction” and “Epilogue”) begins by taking Babb step by step from her birth in Otoe (Native American) territory in Oklahoma, to Lamar, Colorado, and next to Kansas and back to Oklahoma, before returning to Kansas once more. There Babb spent a year at the University of Kansas and then a junior college, as her father continued a peripatetic career that alternated between gambling and farming.

By Chapter 7 it is 1929, and, with some novice experience in journalism, Babb leaves her troubled family to start a new life in Los Angeles. When the stock market crash ended her first job at the Los Angeles Times, Babb found herself homeless for a period before turning to Hollywood where she discovered secretarial work and was able to write some radio scripts. In these years she joined the pro-Communist John Reed Club, traveled to the Soviet Union, spent time in England working for Communist Claude Cockburn’s The Week, and returned to the United States to become a formal member of the CP-USA at the suggestion of screenwriter John Howard Lawson.

Her subsequent political activism was as fervid as that of Dorothy Parker, but much more on the inside as a self-disciplined cadre and rank-and-filer. For example, after attending the founding conference of the Communist-initiated League of American Writers (LAW) in 1935 as a delegate just prior to the announcement of the Popular Front, Babb went on to serve as a member of its executive committee in 1937 and then became its executive secretary in 1938. She also served as the secretary-treasurer of the Hollywood LAW chapter for four years (from 1939 to 1942, when it dissolved).

When Babb volunteered to collaborate with Tom Collins, manager at the Arvin Sanitary Camp for agricultural workers (known as “Weedpatch”), it was as a CP-USA assignment and she hoped to recruit Collins. She also volunteered as an office worker for the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and raised funds for the Spanish Republic. These are all demanding and time-consuming assignments given to serious political activists, not vague fellow travelers.

Babb’s literary work in CP-USA circles was also substantial. In the ambience of the Hollywood chapter of the LAW there were two connected journals, Black & White (1939-40) and The Clipper: A Western Review (1940-41), the latter identified as under the organization’s sponsorship. Almost all the other editors were CP-USA members, and their meetings were often held in Babb’s apartment. Contributors included John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser as well as many now-forgotten figures of the Hollywood literary Left.

Even more significant was her central role as an editor of the California Quarterly from 1951 to 1956. This was at the height of the Cold War, and the publication was also headed by CP-USA members, most notably the blacklisted screenwriter and novelist Philip Stevenson (aka “Lars Lawrence,” 1896-1965) and the blacklisted poet and college professor Thomas McGrath (1916-1990). Two of McGrath’s radical students then founded a well-known successor journal, Coastlines, in 1956, in which Babb herself would publish.

Dunkle does not deny or even obscure Babb’s CP-USA connections, but details are mostly sketchy compared to information about her amply involved personal life. We are provided with much more intriguing intelligence about her love affairs, quarrels about infidelity with her famous Chinese American cinematographer husband (James Wong Howe, 1899-1976), struggles with her psychologically distraught sister (Dorothy Babb, 1909-96), and numerous friendships with famous writers such as William Saroyan, Carlos Bulosan, and Ray Bradbury.

On the other hand, we get no specifics about her role in meetings of the John Reed Club or LAW (apart from her romantic encounter with a young Ralph Ellison in New York), nor about the Anti-Nazi League, and not even one reference to attendance at a CP-USA meeting or a cultural unit (or Lawson’s “Writers Clinic,” to which her work was submitted).

Even her participation in the notorious controversy between novelist Albert Maltz and the CP-USA’s New Masses, about the evaluation of art according to the author’s personal politics, goes unmentioned, although there is readily available documentation for this online.(10) When it comes to tracing and explaining Babb’s eventual departure from the CP-USA and subsequent political thinking — in the high Cold War, a time of reinvention for many pro-Communist writers — readers may feel as if they are tracking a vapor trail.

It’s not that Dunkle keeps Babb’s politics wholly on the margin like a phantom presence, but she doesn’t seem invested in going very deep into the emotional meaning of this commitment — and even just the daily life experiences of being in the CP-USA. A person is significantly known by company they keep, but a good many of Babb’s deeply committed Communist associates in this book are not identified as such, often said simply to be a “friend.” To take just one example, Martha Dodd (1908-1990) is identified as a “journalist and novelist,” the first sentence of her Wikipedia entry. If one reads the entry a bit further, it states that Dodd, the daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany whose political life has been documented in many books, was for years engaged in Soviet espionage, fled the United States after a subpoena in 1956, and spent the rest of her life in Cuba and Czechoslovakia. Close Communist literary associates of Babb simply go unmentioned.

Of course, Babb experienced McCarthyism intensely and even decamped Hollywood for periods by spending time in Mexico. Probably, like John Steinbeck and others, she destroyed much of her correspondence and documents from the 1930s and 1940s, leaving a limited record on paper. She also chose not to directly address the CP-USA in her fiction. But the gaps of deleted history might have been acknowledged, and remaining clues and threads might have been pursued a bit more.

In pointing out this limitation, I’m hardly suggesting that Dunkel’s biography is anemic in other ways. Above all, Babb’s rough and tumble upbringing, with its poverty and violence, can make or break a person so that the detailed attention to it in this book is essential. And Dunkle has a brighter flashlight than many of us for understanding how writing about this past was for Babb a means of taming it. Babb was so dependent on giving her lived experience shape and meaning to the point where almost all her work would become a kind of balance between fiction and autobiography.

Dunkle is also strong in treating the facts about how Babb got a second chance in establishing a literary reputation in the late 20th century. Her career was brought back to life mainly through republications and especially the success of Whose Names Are Unknown. Riding Like the Wind chronicles the history of the book manuscript’s unexpected rejection by Random House editor Bennett Cerf on the grounds that Steinbeck’s best-selling The Grapes of Wrath (1940) had already saturated the market on the topic. That decision, based purely on market considerations trumping literary quality, was surely an outrage, compounded by the fact that Weedpatch manager Collins had shown Steinbeck some of Babb’s research notes.

Scholars cited by Dunkel have shown that parallel incidents and episodes exist between the two novels. Nevertheless, any claims that Steinbeck substantially plagiarized from Babb seem unconvincing, recalling the overblown allegations that Jean-Paul Sartre stole the ideas in Being and Nothingness (1943) from Simone de Beauvoir since they were intimates and shared ideas.(11) Some of the reviews of Dunkel focusing on the Steinbeck aspect run the risk of turning a full-bodied and varied career into a headline-grabbing victimization story.(12)

In addition, there is the history of Babb’s marriage to the genius Howe, exploring the promise and perils of sexual freedom in a patriarchal society. The account is a marvel in balancing Babb’s painful mixture of resilience and vulnerability as a wife, lover, and creative artist, not to mention its documentation of the anti-Chinese racism faced by the couple for decades. These aspects of Dunkel’s research are unparalleled and likely to remain so.

10. A Curious Lacuna

For those of us who still see socialism as a moral compass for how to live, the memory culture of the Left has a unique role to play. In our war against the forgotten, obscured and falsified past, scholars and journalists tunnel backwards into the caves of yesteryear to change the way it is remembered so that it deepens our understanding of how (and how not) to change the world. The humanizing portrayals in all three of these books expand our view, providing fresh and pertinent insights into how women Communist writers linked gender, class, and race in their creative work and activism.

What is to be embraced, methodologically, is that the authors start by discerning what the writers did — the observable facts — and not by initially positing value-laden assumptions about the nature and impact of Communism as the determinant of their choices. What we get are different facets of the same experience of participation in a movement formally marked by specific policies of theory and practice.

But this last point brings us to a shadow side of all these books: The authors mostly put a frame around the disconcerting and unpardonable dimensions of the domestic experience of U.S. Communism — ones that directly affected the lives and works of the nine protagonists. Hennessey and Dunkle are inclined to focus on certain aspects of Communist memory culture while neglecting others, while Crowther is inclined to report disturbing actions without analyzing.

What is inspiring is that the political community with which the women bonded — whether it was the CP-USA itself, or the Harlem or Hollywood Left — provided a common purpose, a collective enterprise of strength and support, even a new kind of identity distinct from the ones in which capitalist institutions had tried to embed them. We need this, too.

On the other hand, it was a community that managed to inculcate the women with a moral certitude that the USSR was a progressive state with the CP-USA providing an honest and accurate guide to political action over the decades. In the supportive world of the CP-USA community, everything was intertwined and enmeshed just as it is likely to be in radical communities being forged in our 21st-century anti-capitalist struggles.

This paradoxical mix is a facet of the experience we need to confront full-on if we are to draw critically on the Communist past to forge a radical culture of engagement in the present and future. What good is a culture of solidarity if it is misleading about potential pitfalls? To simply extract what we like and barely glance at the rest can be naïve and disempowering.

How and why did individuals become blind to obviously mistaken views (such as fascism described as “a matter of taste,” according to Soviet diplomat Molotov in justification of the Hitler-Stalin Pact); expulsions, shunning, demonization of rivals, and self-righteous certitudes so that the CP-USA leadership became something of a team of sycophants; and the overnight reversal of views by fiat (such as Roosevelt turning from a fascist to an anti-fascist in the mid-1930s, then from a war-monger to an anti-fascist again in 1939-41)?

If the women were not actually blind, what stopped them from acting to correct the movement? It’s likely that there are as many scrupulous answers to these questions as there are individuals featured in these books; and the familiar sweeping characterizations (that they were duped, ignorant, too trusting, or even authoritarian by nature) are so vague as to be applicable to just any social, religious, or other movement.

Still, the slightness of thought-provoking commentary on this subject in any of these books is puzzling, and must be related to different priorities. What is the cause of this curious lacuna?

The issue here is not just the appalling record of the Stalinist Soviet Union, for the beats of this history are well-known to educated socialists today. And the authors all indicate a general awareness and abhorrence of this record. For the most part, however, it is compartmentalized, unconnected to matters of socialist organization, education, strategy and tactics with which the women were surely engaged. The names Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin appear only once or twice, adding nothing of substance.

Hennessy, for example, the most politically attentive of the three, takes a clear distance from the USSR early in her volume: “In the 1920s, a ruling bureaucracy was solidifying a governing power bloc in the newly formed Soviet Union. Led by Stalin, that bloc would rule by terror, exiling and executing dissenters and undermining the revolution’s ideal of a workers’ state and the potential to build international socialist transformation.”(13)

Yet this is followed by a curious claim that the CP-USA was neither “monolithic nor ineffective” due to the role of Trotskyists in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters-led strike (she cites Bryan D. Palmer’s Revolutionary Teamsters [2014]). She then concludes that “many who aligned with the Party did not do so dogmatically; in fact, quite a few, like these writers, actually developed and augmented its ideals.”

Of course, In the Company of Radical Women Writers is entirely convincing that the seven subjects went beyond the thinking of the CP-USA on race and gender, but Hennessy never presents evidence that they objected to the major political features of Stalinism — such as the one-party state rule (by terror). More important, they acquiesced and likely gave enthusiastic support to the policies and practices of the CP-USA that directly compromised the very anti-racist and anti-colonialist ideas that its members professed.

The approach here is similar in the other two books, except for Crowther in one instance. She simply states (citing no source) that, at news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, “Parker must have been horrified.” And yet “did not publicly speak out against the agreement” or express any dissent when the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league “quietly changed its name” and “focused its campaigning against anything that seemed to be leading America into war” against the fascists.(14) No such reaction is reported in the other books.

11. Haunted by Lost Futures

Much of the problem might stem from a misunderstanding of the downside of the Popular Front in the United States.(15) Only Hennessy attempts to define this 1935 political turn at the behest of the Comintern: “a coalition of alliances that would bring together a diverse range of left-leaning organizations in order to fight the rise of fascism,” but one that had a limitation in that it involved “a new phase of co-operation with the federal government, [failing] to reckon with the state’s role as a handmaiden of the wealthy few.”

Unfortunately, the only instance of a “limitation” that she mentions comes after World War II, when “The shifting geopolitics…became a justification for state repression….” Hennessy’s subsequent treatment of Popular Front politics in the body of her book, mainly regarding Louise Thompson Patterson, reproduces this gap-filled trajectory.  At first, she describes Thompson-Patterson’s coalition building in the 1930s, then she skips to her ordeal with state repression in the 1950s.

What is missing here is a clearer description of the price paid for the coalition, which was principally with the Left liberals of Roosevelt’s New Deal (except for the 18 months of the Hitler-Stalin Pact). This alliance segued into an extreme devotion to Roosevelt’s capitalist wartime policies, followed by the early Truman administration.

What requires tart clarity is that the Popular Front policy was not about a tactical unity with liberalism, not objectionable in the pursuit of common goals. Instead, on a deeper level it was a dramatic subordination of socialist internationalism to pro-capitalist and even colonialist politics. Although the general approach came top-down from the USSR, the excessive version demanded of CP-USA members came from the over-zealous leadership of Earl Browder — reversed only on orders from Moscow after the war.

For activists in the recent Black Lives Matter movement and the current Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the most alarming example of the Popular Front’s practice would be the dramatic de-alignment of the CP-USA from existing anti-racist struggles and anti-colonial movements of the 1940s. To remain spellbound by the extraordinary anti-racist accomplishments of the CP-USA in the early 1930s, without mentioning the next stage, is throwing sand in the eyes of history. Whatever the personal ideals of the membership, one cannot ignore, or rationalize, the way that the CP-USA’s pledge of anti-racism and anticolonialism was spectacularly broken under its version of the Popular Front.

One wonders, what did Thompson Patterson et al think when the CP-USA denounced the “Double V” campaign (for victory against both international fascism and domestic racism) of the African American Community? Or when it characterized the 1943 rebellions against bigotry in Harlem and other cities as Hitler-inspired? Or when it urged its members not to protest racism in the segregated military?

What did Sanora Babb, outraged at anti-Asian racism against her husband, think when her own party expelled its Japanese American members and endorsed internment of the Japanese American population? And when the Daily Worker celebrated the incineration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?(16)

What did any of the nine say or think when the CP-USA switched its support of a democratic Palestine in 1948 to an ethno-state where a Jewish minority would control the majority territory of the former British Mandate? And then raised money and blood donations for the Haganah, falsely accusing the Palestinians of baby-killing and using poison gas? And opposing the right of return for Palestinians at the UN after the Israeli state was formed?(17)

It is entirely possible that the nine had questions and apprensions, but any sign of such material is absent from the books. Simply put, the kind of political questions that ought to be of concern to the present generation are sidelined, even as we need to develop political antibodies to prevent parallel behavior. Why is this material of so little interest to the authors, who only have the best of motives? Why did their curiosity stay so limited, why did they not want to know?

Another instance of strange indifference is the absence of a discussion of the ultimate political evolution of those who came into conflict with the official Communist movement. Herbst, for example, parted thoroughly with the CP-USA in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but kept overtly quiet on the matter even as she changed her friendships to rather hard-core opponents of the CP-USA such as Partisan Review editor William Phillips and high modernist art critic Hilton Kramer.(18)

So far as I can tell, Claudia Jones was en route to expulsion from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) for Maoist “anti-revisionism,” which was the fate of her partner one year after her death.(19) There are ways in which the experience of women committed to the CP-USA must be understood as a cautionary tale, not merely as a model of commitment; but that cannot be intelligently appraised unless one sees their trajectories unabridged.

Perhaps the memory culture of 1930s generation must next move to a more balanced relationship between the different dimensions of collective restoration; more nesting doll narratives of the type pioneered in books such as Elinor Langer’s Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (1984) and Ruth Price’s The Lives of Agnes Smedley (2004).

These three new books compellingly showcase nine protagonists marked by an admirable empathy for certain causes and populations, far ahead of most of their fellow citizens. Yet things changed when it came to select matters — Soviet victims of Stalin, Japanese Americans, African Americans protesting racism during World War II, the Palestinian majority in 1948. In these instances, they seemed to have sangfroid to spare.

Dunkle correctly quotes Babb in 1989 (in an interview with myself) saying she was “brainwashed” about socialism, but basing one’s explanation on this alone is thin gruel. (135) One wonders what exactly what Babb meant by this brainwashing (she still seems to believe that the USSR equaled socialism) and how it happened, considering her intelligence and own first-hand experiences with oppression and her outrage at those who failed to take notice. These were not writers living in an ivory tower; they read, traveled, interacted with individuals from many nations.

Until we come to terms with the memory culture of Women Communist writers holistically, we will continue to be haunted by the possibility of lost futures. And a socialist tradition, marked by so many moments of admirable achievements and heroic self-sacrifice, is a terrible thing to waste.

Notes

1. The famous expression is from E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12.
   back to text
2. For a consideration of some of the scholarship demonstrating this new paradigm, see Wald, “African Americans, Culture and Communism,  Part I,” Against the Current 84 (January-February 2000): https://againstthecurrent.org/atc084/p928/ and “African Americans, Culture and Communism, Part II,” Against the Current 86 (May-June 2001): https://againstthecurrent.org/atc086/p945/.
   back to text
3. The topic is worth a book, but I did my best to summarize some of this history in “Interview with Alan M. Wald,” William J. Maxwell, “Special Issue on ‘Sexing the Left,’” English Language Notes 53.1 (Spring Summer 2015): 33-43.
   back to text
4. Actually, Dorothy Parker was only half-Jewish but referred to herself as Jewish and is mostly treated as a Jewish writer.
   back to text
5. Those personally interviewed were Marvel Cooke, Meridel Le Sueur, Muriel Rukeyser, and Sanora Babb. In the case of Babb, I went on to collaborate with her in the publication of a chapter from the manuscript of “Whose Names Are Unknown” in Michigan Quarterly Review 29, no. 3 (1990) and she requested that I write “Soft Focus: The Short Fiction of Sanora Babb,” Introduction to Cry of the Tinamou: Stories by Sanora Babb (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), ix-xvi. Later, I wrote in more detail on her biography in “Sanora Babb in Her Time and Ours,” in Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith, eds., Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 14-26. Among other places, I have discussed LeSuer in “The Many Lives of Meridel Le Sueur,” Monthly Review (September 1997): 23-31, and Muriel Rukeyser in Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Literary Left (Chapel Hill, N.C.: 2007), 299-306.
   back to text
6. A large-scale incident of occupational lung disease involving exposure to silica dust.
   back to text
7. These are collected on several websites such as: https://www.thoughtco.com/dorothy-parker-quotes-3530066
   back to text
8. Even though Crowther’s study gives a good summary of such activities, there seem to be several hundred references to Parker in the pages of the Daily Worker that are not directly cited.
   back to text
9. As an example, see the poorly documented claim by Stephen Koch that Parker was likely a secret CP-USA member as well as a dupe of behind-the-scenes Soviet machinations in Double Lives: Stalin, Willi MünzeNberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (1994).
   back to text
10. See Sanora Babb, “Another Viewpoint,” New Masses (12 March 1946): 10, available online: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1946-1956/maltz/babb-another-viewpoint.pdf
    back to text
11. See https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/26/books/beauvoir-emerges-from-sartre-s-shadow-some-even-dare-to-call-her-a-philosopher.html
    back to text
12. See She Shared Her Notes with John Steinbeck. It was Her Novel’s Undoing: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/books/booksupdate/iris-jamahl-dunkle-sanora-babb-.html
    back to text
13. Hennessy, 14. This is footnoted to an excellent essay by the orthodox Trotskyist historian Bryan D. Palmer, “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Com­munism,” American Communist History 2, no. 2 (December 2003): 139-74.
    back to text
14. Crowther, 162. This is exactly the same as Meade states in her biography.
    back to text
15. For a thoughtful, non-sectarian, and creative approach to understanding the Popular Front, see Charles Post, “The Popular Front:  Rethinking CPUSA History,” Against the Current 63 (July-August 1996): https://againstthecurrent.org/atc063/p2363/
    back to text
16. Here are just a few places where the CP-USA’s wartime policies regarding African Americans and Japanese Americas are discussed: Alan M. Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (Chapel Hil, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Howard Eugene Johnson and Wendy Johnson, A Dancer in the Revolution: Stretch Johnson, Harlem Communist at the Cotton Club (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958 (Champaign: University of Illinois, 2024). Two days after the devastation of Hiroshima, a columnist for the CP-USA organ wrote: “So let us not greet our atomic device with a shudder, but with the elation and admiration which the genius of man deserves,” 8 August 1945, Daily Worker.
    back to text
17. Among other places, documentation for the change of position on Palestine can be found in Dorothy M. Zellner, “What We Did: The American Jewish Communist Left and the Establishment of the State of Israel,” available at: https://jewishcurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/What-We-Did-by-Dorothy-Zellner.pdf
    back to text
18. See Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), passim.
    back to text
19. In England, Jones’ personal and political partner was Abhimanyu Manchanda (1919-1985), an Indian-born Communist strongly devoted to Maoism and Stalinism. Expelled from the CPGB for his “anti-revisionist” views, Manchanda eventually formed the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League.
    back to text

March-April 2025, ATC 235