A Legacy of Labor

A Legacy of Labor

Culture exists as an inherently malleable machine, taking the shape of the surrounding social environment of the era in which it exists. As technology adamantly advances, political philosophies also must adjust to changing economic climates. Sometimes, necessary change occurs naturally and subtly, while there are instances in which history reveals the importance in the innately human capacity to create, which ultimately gives birth to seemingly revolutionary thought. The addictive inclinations of the human species generates vice, whereas laziness persisted causing the domestication of food, which ultimately lead to varying forms of power structures. Individuals found themselves in newly formed positions of power, and they liked it. It is a high, and as pleasurable feelings reinforce action, abuse always seems to arise. This is where creative capacity must mitigate metastasizing social madness. This doctrine can be seen in the work of leftist authors in the 1920s and 30s. Party politics experienced a wide spectrum of Marxist realizations in definition and practice. Authors of the left, Michael Gold and Woody Guthrie, are two such artists that even though they both proclaimed themselves communists, had differing views on their role as members of the party.

The Cold War grotesquely mutated Americans perception of the word communism, as fearful policy makers created draconian public policies. They saw Communism as a threat to the very way of American life, as Americans witnessed a demagogue take complete control over foreign citizens in the name of the party. What people in positions of power failed to see, or indeed ignore, was the satiable virtues in the philosophies of the proponents of American leftist culture, and the artistic legacy the movements of the 20s and 30s left behind.

When considering the politics of leftist literature in America it is essential to examine the importance of Michal Gold’s novel, Jews Without Money. Proclaimed by many as exemplifying the “proletarian fiction” genre, Gold’s harsh portrayal of the ethnic ghettos of East-Side New York City shocked many readers who lived complacent in their relative security. His work illuminates the daily struggle of ghetto life and forces public-awareness to the plight of the immigrant working class. Jews Without Money does more to demonize and illustrate the failures of capitalism then it does extrapolate any sort of solution from the left. Gold know his Marx, and his novel insists that in order for revolution, first there must be realization. His essay “Towards Proletarian Art” is the first significant call for a distinctly American working-class culture. In the essay Gold writes:

In blood, in tears, in chaos and wild, thunderous clouds of fear the old economic order is dying. We are not appalled or startled by the giant apocalypse before us. We know the horror that is passing away with this long winter of the world. We know, too, the bright forms that stir at the heart of all this confusion, and that shall rise out of the debris and cover the ruins of capitalism with beauty. We are prepared for the economic revolution of the world, but what shakes us with terror and doubt is the cultural upheaval that must come. We rebel instinctively against that change (62).

Gold presents some interesting ideas through his linguistic capacity to create a foreboding atmosphere. Gold assumes that the masses share his ideals as he continually uses the pronoun “we”. This pronoun is essential to the Communist philosophy, but what Gold fails to understand is the intrinsic, instinctive, indignant individualism of the American psyche. Americans are rebellious in nature, but we tend to resent being told what we should know, and tend to respond better to empirically presented evidence allowing us to evaluate the situation in order to draw our own conclusions. There then arise the question, at the time of authorship did the American public realize all these things of which Gold speaks? Perhaps this is the reason why radical counter-cultural movements have a tendency to remain in the background of mainstream society, even though these movements tend to spawn a great number of culturally important artistic works.

In the same essay Gold does in fact call for a revolution, as he notes the social tendency to remain in the comforts of conservatism and writes, “We cling to the old culture, and fight for it against ourselves” (62). This statement seems to suggest the enemy as being one’s own psyche and its capacity to create an unnaturally elevated sense of comfort. This can be seen in Jews Without Money as his family continues to embrace their old way of life and even in the face of severe adversity retain their trust in the “American Dream”. Gold may be suggesting that his family’s mistake was the problematic way in which they viewed their place in American society. Their position as Jewish immigrants in a viscously intolerant society offered them little chance of ever realizing their preconceived notions of the glory in the “American Dream”, and Gold constantly reminds the reader of this. The portrayal of the plight of his father is so utterly tragic and seemingly hopeless that the reader has little choice but to sympathize with him. His constant attempts at advancement coupled with his bountiful optimism and trust in the system are endearing, and are traits that are revered in American culture, but Gold presents them with seemingly sarcastic undertones.

His father’s faith in magic reveals a tendency of the poor, working class to formulate irrational solutions from realistic problems, which Gold views as problematic. The story of the Golden Bear may illuminate the psychology of Gold’s father and also demonstrates Gold’s philosophical insistence on growth and change. When describing his father, Gold writes, “His large green eyes stared at the world like a child’s” (81), and like a child his father remains naïve to his position. The story itself is about a hunter who is advised by his mother to make for himself a new life in Turkey, which can be seen as representing foreign peasant ideas about America as the “Promised Land”. Gold writes, “My son, when you grow up you must go to Turkey. There, in the south, it is warm. The roses bloom in December, and the birds sing. No one is poor there, every one has enough. Promise me you will escape there, my son. I want to see you happy” (85). The Hunter then finds himself in a proletarian predicament as Gold continues, “But he married, and raised a family, and found himself a man in a trap. How could he take his family to Turkey? He had no money” (85). Out of hunger and the need to provide for his family The Hunter follows the tracks of a bear to its home. He discovers three cubs and a mother bear “the color of golden money”, but instead of killing the bears, the mother makes a deal with him to help him realize his dream of going to Turkey, in exchange for sparing the lives of the cubs. The reader can only assume the hunter completes his journey, but as of what happens to The Hunter in Turkey is left a mystery. Gold relates the story to both the absurdity and the necessity of such stories as he writes, “The story was the eternal fable of the man to whom the good things of life come by magic. All poor men believe in such magic, and dream of the day when they will stumble on it. My father was one of the many” (86). Gold is clearly placing his father in the category of the many individuals belonging to the proletarian class who are disillusioned about their place in society by relaying on some sort of “magic”.

As simple as this analysis may seem, it is in fact, much more complicated. As Gold enunciates the importance of a class realization that rejects archaic means in understanding life, he also maintains a position that everyone’s own ethnically traditional works of art should not be forgotten. It is in the art of the people in which he sees hope. Despite the sometimes-nihilistic nature of Jews Without Money there are hopeful moments, most of which occur in Gold’s description of his father’s stories and story-telling ability. These stories represent Gold’s own desire to convey the intricacies of the proletarian condition and he writes, “My father was an unusual story-teller. Had he received an education, he might have become a fine writer. I envied him then, and I envy him yet, his streak of naïve genius” (81-82). Perhaps this communicates Gold’s own motivation in writing the novel, a quest to produce a piece that displays the innate “naïve genius” of the working classes.

In “Towards Proletarian Art” Gold calls for a revolution of representation. He calls for courage; courage to be oneself, unafraid of the constant pressure to conform. He writes, “We have been bred in the old capitalist planet, and its stuff is in our very bones. Its ideals, mutilated and poor, were yet the precious stays of our lives. Its art, its science, its philosophy and metaphysics are deeper in us than logic or will” (62). Gold notes the difficulty of what he is about to propose, and understands the control that cultural norms have on citizens, yet he insists, “We cannot consent to the suicide of our souls” (62). The suicide he speaks of is the injustice of the necessity of conformity that he saw presiding over American culture. He continues with his manifesto and writes:

The old ideals must die. But let us not fear. Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution. For out of our death shall arise glories, and out of the final corruption of this old civilization we have loved shall spring the new race-the Supermen (62).

The potency of this passage is both amazingly profound and startlingly

strange in terms of the language. It is dripping in melodrama, which may in fact be required in order to incite revolution. His insistence of a community formed by individual creativity is apparent as he suggests that we “fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution”, and one almost perceives an image of “the melting pot” which would indeed spell the creation of a form of new society containing a multitude of human ingredients. So, the notion of “proletarian art” according to Gold can be boiled down to its simplest form as a means for truthful representation that denies tendencies to conform to capitalist culture, and in doing so the Revolution may then begin.

As involved as Michael Gold was in leftist politics, he still remained merely an author and a philosopher like most self-proclaimed communists. Artist advocating proletarian ideals often incidentally strove toward bourgeois lifestyles. This is not the case with Woody Guthrie. Populist poet, singer, songwriter and folk icon, Guthrie’s legacy lives on in the artistry of the masses to which he dedicated his life. Woody not only created art to the masses, he created art for the masses and with the masses. He was a populist and fervent communist, yet America remembers him more for his musical contributions than they do his political affiliations. His song “This Land is Your Land” almost functions as an alternate national anthem despite its communist propaganda undertones. Indeed, that’s what Woody spent a good majority of his life doing; writing support songs for the party.

He was a member of the “Popular Front” movement, which functioned as a conglomeration of anti-fascist; leftist thinkers, scholars, workers, and artists who attempted to develop a voice for what they saw as mass culture. In the book entitled The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Michael Denning describes the Popular Front as:

…the insurgent social movement forged from labor militancy of the fledgling CIO, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China, and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal. Born out of the social upheavals of 1934 and coinciding with the Communist Party’s period of greatest influence in U.S. society, the Popular Front became a radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionist, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching (4).

There is some difficulty in actually defining the member base of the Popular Front because of the wide variety of other political affiliations that members proclaimed, but in the simplest terms, The Popular Front acted as a means to combat fascism. Guthrie’s work exemplifies some of the ideas of the movement, as Guthrie himself became the poster child for the labor movement and his songs were used at rallies and meetings to bolster morale. The labor movement even used the refrain of the song “Union Maid”, and in Guthrie style defiance the mantra held fast as laborist bellowed, “Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m stickin’ to the union”.

What made Guthrie so appealing was his complete immersion in the culture he advocated, propagated and cultivated. His songs moved people, not by propagandized coercion, but they portrayed Woody’s sincerity and determination. In the book Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, author Morris Dickstein deems Guthrie, “Shakespeare in overalls: an American troubadour” (496), and this description seems to describe both the importance of the contributions he made to American culture and his vagabond type lifestyle. What Guthrie tried to accomplish, unlike Gold, was to become a representation of not only the proletariat, but also of the oppressed marginalized masses that included, beggars, thieves, tramps, vagabonds, and all sorts of social outcasts. Dickstein makes the claim that, “Unlike some other populists of the thirties and forties, Woody Guthrie was the real thing” (496). His passion for the arts and innately defiant nature created in him a desire not to merely write about his surrounding environment and postulate about overly ambitious revolutionary formulas like other leftists, but to be part of the world and experience it as he attempted to stimulate change and awareness from the inside. Dickstein also indicates Guthrie’s prolific contributions to the Popular Front movement and writes, “Woody was the latest and perhaps the greatest ornament of the “progressive” culture created by the Popular Front, a culture of songs and books, nurseries and summer camps, radio shows and newspapers” (498).

Another uniquely interesting aspect of Guthrie’s persona according to Dickstein is that his political realization came, “more out of an instinctive populism than from any ideological conversion” (500). This is evident in Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, as Woody describes his life growing up and riding the rails. Guthrie’s simplistic language and his child-like self-characterization contribute to the sincerity of the novel and his legitimacy as a member of the masses. Through Guthrie’s narration of the novel one witnesses meaningless violence coupled with moments of endearing humanity yet Guthrie refuses to expound upon the events with any sort of philosophically analytical passages. He is simply witness to the events, which allows the reader to formulate their own conclusions as to their meaning.

The one aspect of the novel that is impossible to deny is its treatment and portrayal of the existence of everyday fascism and the importance of the role of community. An extremely potent example of Guthrie’s portrayal of the everyday struggle of the marginalized masses versus the rising tide of fascism can be found in the chapter entitled “New Kittens”. Guthrie recollects a moment in his childhood regarding the birth of kittens on his grandmother’s farm. His grandmother displays communist inclinations as she answers little Woody’s question on the labor of the animals on the farm, and she says, “I wouldn’t even have a cat or a dog or a chicken on my place that didn’t do his share of the work. Yes, even my old cat does a lot of work” (66). The farm then becomes a metaphor for American society as it is filled with diversity, yet everything has a place and offers up their unique contributions. His cousin Warren upsets this balance with a single act of fascism as Guthrie describes the incident:

He put the sharp toe of his shoe under the belly of the first little cat, and threw it up against the rock foundation. “Meow! Meow! You little chicken killers! Egg stealers!” He picked the second kitten up in the grip of his hand, and squeezed till the muscles bulged up. He swung the kitten around and around, something like a Ferris wheel, as fast as he could turn his arm, and the blood and entrails of the kitten splashed across the ground, and the side of the house. Then he held the little body out toward Lawrence and me. We looked at it, and it was just like an empty hide. He threw it away over the fence (80).

Little Woody makes an attempt at becoming the savior of the family of cats, but Warren’s size and power is no match for the small child even though his intentions pervade. It is this innate desire to protect the weak from being prayed upon that motivates Guthrie’s enduring involvement in the Popular Front and its ongoing quest to secure the rights of American civilians seeking representation. Guthrie not only sought to help procure the rights he felt were inherited by every American, his ability to create meaningful cultural work that appeals to the masses has earned him a place in history as a champion of American ideals. The image of his legacy seems to supersede the realty in his existence and Dickstein manages to create an appropriate description as he refers to Guthrie as a “disembodied folk spirit” (497).

The contributions of Gold and Guthrie to American culture remains undeniable even if the Cold War and the McCarthy era transformed the connation of the word Communism to mean everything un-American as fear permeated into American society. The fact is, the culture of the American left and the corresponding movements strove to empower the people and utilized doctrines already set forth by the U.S. constitution as well prominent leaders such as Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s speech on the battlefield of Gettysburg encompasses these ideologies as his words still retain potency as he urges the American people not to accept anything less than a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The genius of this philosophy is what created the United States of America in the first place, as Americans have always held this “core democratic value” with the utmost respect, pride, and dignity. Gold’s attack on capitalism and Guthrie’s battle against fascism were simply formulated out of a growing sense of the betrayal of an increasingly power hungry government controlled by greed. Even though the corresponding movements in which Guthrie and Gold were involved are considered “counter-cultural”, they merely refused to be marginalized and in doing so begged the question, “what does it mean to be an American”.