Popular Fronts: Chicago and American Cultural Politics, 1935-46.

Bill V. Mullen. Popular Fronts: Chicago and American Cultural Politics, 1935-46. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 242 pp. $39.95 cloth/$16.95 paper.

Bill Mullen's Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1936-46, makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of post-Cold War criticism addressing the centrality of African Americans to the history of the U.S. left, as well as of the left to the history of African Americans. Beginning his story with the platform of the Communist Party-sponsored 1936 National Negro Congress, Mullen argues that, contrary to most narratives that end the Popular Front in 1939, scrutiny of the Chicago Negro People's Front requires that we abandon the notion that Harlem remained the center of African-American cultural activity and that we reconfigure the dating of the Popular Front so that it extends past the end of World War II: 1940s Chicago, he shows, is where much of the red-black action was. Moreover, Mullen refutes the still prevalent notions that the relationship of African Americans to Communism was at bottom antagonistic and that Popular Front culture was crude and mawkish. This study is thus r evisionary along a number of important axes--aesthetic, historical, and political.

Several diverse but interlocked arguments support Mullen's thesis. He first confronts the widely accepted view that the experience of Richard Wright--especially as codified in his 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay "I Tried to Be a Communist," reworked in Richard Crossman's The Cod That Failed and Wright's own Eight Men--typifies that of African-American writers in Chicago who gravitated toward the left in the 1930s and 1940s. Wright, who left Chicago in 1937 and Communism some years after, was anomalous rather than paradigmatic: The black writers and artists who formed the nucleus of the South Side Community Art Center, many of whom produced unabashedly pro-Communist art, were far more representative. Mullen also investigates the cultural space occupied by the Chicago Defender, arguably the most influential black newspaper of its time and, after 1940, the most consistently friendly to a class-based radicalism. Even throughout World War II, when the CPUSA to a degree "soft-pedaled" the fight against racism and the "Double-V" campaign, the editorial policies of the Defender were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Daily Worker.

Mullen also argues for the sophistication of the literary and artistic work produced in the red-black circles of Chicago's Negro People's Front. The paintings by such figures as Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett demonstrated a sure acquaintance with not only mainstream modernism but also the Mexican muralist movement. The short stories appearing in the short-lived but influential Negro Story magazine--edited by Fern Gayden and Alice C. Browning--experimented with a type of "plotless realism" that ably integrated social critique with new conventions of narrative form. Indeed, Mullen argues, the moment of literary proletarianism, thought to have passed in 1936, really began, for African-American writers, in such venues of the early 1940s as Negro Story. As a "proletarian" literary genre, moreover, the short story--often neglected in literary-historical accounts biased toward the novel-figured as a central vehicle for African-American writers bent upon bringing progressive-to-Communist ideas to a significant popular readership. Mullen ends his literary commentary with a brilliant reading of Gwendolyn Brooks that places this frequently misunderstood poet in proper historical and political context. Deeply influenced by the leftist ambience of the South Side Writers Group to which Wright only briefly belonged, Brooks is not the peculiarly wry but narrowly "urban" writer found in conventiona l literary-historical narratives, but instead the practitioner of a "radical irony" inseparable from the leftist critique of capitalism--as the site of both racist oppression and reified consciousness--formulated in Brooks's circle.

A further strength of Mullen's book is its implied theoretical stance--namely, that for all its emphasis upon cultural politics, it does not fetishize the zone of the cultural as a privileged site of oppositionality. Michael Denning's highly touted Cultural Front, while valuable for its encyclopedic--and largely unjaundiced--survey of left-influenced artistic and discursive practices during the conventionally demarcated era of the Popular Front, tends to minimize the role played by the organized left and to view the period's culture as relatively autonomous from its material base, almost indeed to the point of absolute autonomy. Mullen's study, by contrast, remains grounded in what Marx called the "real foundation" and repudiates the solace supplied by the watered-down Gramscianism that informs so many culturalist narratives of our day. When the Cold War comes on, in Mullen's narrrative, there are no spectres of the Negro People's Front haunting and subverting the discourses of triumphal capitalism. Its vict ory in the war of position leaves little meaningful space within which the war of maneuver may be kept going.

If I have any quarrel with Mullen, it centers on a certain lack of critical edge in his assessment of CPUSA politics during the years in question. The praxis of the Negro People's Front, which was premised upon a non-antagonistic relation between black entrepreneurship and Communist organizing, resulted largely from the World War II-era CPUSA's estimate that the main enemy was no longer capital as such, but only its "reactionary" wing. This analysis--embraced by all parties in the Comintern, not just the U.S. branch--reached its nadir at Teheran, where socialism and capitalism were declared capable of "peaceful coexistence" as world systems. Translated into the cultural politics of late 1930s and early 1940s Chicago, this essentially class-collaborationist strategy meant that the continual placement of socialism and communism on the back burner was not a measure of the movement's "improvisatory activism," as Mullen states in closing, but of the left's deliberate design. While I agree with Mullen's criticism that "the clearest legacy of Chicago's Negro People's Front to postwar Bronzeville was its failure to adhere to and sustain a lasting cultural politics of class struggle," I view this weakness not as a function of Chicago's "own ecumenical brand of 'radicalism,'" but as a function of the Communists' highly problematic national, indeed international, strategy.

This is a very minor quibble, however. Mullen's meticulously researched and eloquently written book provides a model for antiracist leftist scholarship in years to come.