POPULAR FRONT

In 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) announced the opening of the "Popular Front." The campaign called for an international alliance against fascism and shifted Communist emphasis away from building proletarian revolution. In the United States, the Communist Party responded by reducing opposition to the New Deal, re-concentrating efforts in the mainstream of the trade union movement, and building alliances against fascism in Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain. Internationally, the Popular Front took multiple forms. In Spain, the Popular Front organized to defeat fascist forces under Francisco Franco. In Chile, the Popular Front political party organized workers against old ruling parties and won the 1938 presidential election. In China, Soviet influence persuaded Chinese Communists to compromise with the Nationalist Party to defeat Japanese imperialism. In August 1939, the Comintern retracted its popular front campaign after Stalin and Hitler signed a nonaggression pact. In 1941, Germany attacked Russia, and a "democratic" anti-fascist emphasis returned to international communism's line.

Its populist undertones and democratic rhetoric made the Popular Front the high point of Communist influence in U.S. history. Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), famously declared during the Popular Front that "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism." Browder's 1938 book The People's Front invoked mainstream liberal American appeals: support for Roosevelt and trade unions, freedom of the press, democracy and the constitution. Abraham Lincoln was embraced as an American freedom fighter during the Popular Front, and American leftists, including the poet Langston Hughes, volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. Black Americans also responded to the Popular Front's appeal for interracial solidarity against fascism. In 1936 the Communist Party helped to organize the National Negro Congress in Chicago and opened its "Negro People's Front," a companion movement to the larger Popular Front. James Ford, the black vice-presidential candidate for the CPUSA in 1932 and 1936, published The Negro and the Democratic National Front in 1938, praising Communist efforts in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Southern Negro Youth Movement, and the defense of Ethiopia against Italy.

The Popular Front also promoted "people's culture." The American Writers' Congress was created by the CPUSA in 1935 to replace its John Reed clubs. Shortly thereafter the Popular Front League of American Writers was formed. League work was carried on by a broad range of American writers: Nelson Algren, Kenneth Rexroth, Meridel Le Sueur, Franklin Folsom, among others. African-American writers were among the league's most enthusiastic supporters: Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and Frank Marshall Davis were members. In the visual arts, the Mexican Popular Front artists Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco, and David Siqueiros and the American populist Thomas Hart Benton impressed folk materials and a progressive representational style on American painting. Swing, jazz, and folk music, particularly the ballads of Paul Robeson, were enlisted against fascism, if not for communism, during the Popular Front.

The Popular Front remains the most vexing period in U.S. Communist history: Detractors perceive its ideological compromises as fatal to international proletarianism, while admirers value its capacity for progressive political and cultural alliances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Browder, Earl. The People's Front. 1938.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth-Century. 1996.

Drake, Paul W. Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–52. 1978.

Ford, James W. The Negro and the Democratic Front. 1938.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. 1990.

Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. 1999.

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Great Depression. 1983.