The cultural front : the laboring of American culture in the twentieth century

620 Pages·2010·29.094 MB·English

by  Michael Denning

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The Cultural Front
V

The Cultural Front
The Laboring of American Culture
in the Twentieth Century
-♦-
MICHAEL DENNING
VERSO
London • New York
First published by Verso 1997
© Michael Denning 1997
Paperback edition first published by Verso 1998
Paperback updated with a new afterword by Verso 2010
Afterword © Michael Denning 2010
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
3579 10 8642
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-464-0
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Printed in the US by Quad Graphics
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
PART I: THE LEFT AND AMERICAN CULTURE 1
1 Waiting for Lefty 3
1. The Popular Front as a Social Movement 4
2. The Age of the CIO 21
3. The Cultural Apparatus 38
PART II: ANATOMY OF THE CULTURAL FRONT 51
2 Marching on May Day: Cultural Politics 53
1. Proletarian Avant-Garde 64
2. Movement Culture 67
3. The State Apparatus 77
4. The Culture Industries 83
5. Theories of the Cultural Front 96
i. The emergence of modem mental labor 96
ii. A league of professionals 97
iii. Spies and propaganda 104
iv. A league of frightened philistines 107
v. Repossessing the apparatus: hacks, stars, and the
New Left 110
3 Ballads for Americans: Aesthetic Ideologies 115
1. Toward a Revolutionary Symbolism: The Proletarian
Grotesque 118
v
VI Contents
2. The People, Yes? 123
3. Panther Women of the Needle Trades 136
4. The Laboring of American Culture 151
PART III: FORMATIONS OF THE CULTURAL FRONT 161
4 The Decline and Fall of the Lincoln Republic:
Dos Passos’s U.S.A. ^ 163
1. From the Cubist Barricades 163
2. Dos Passos’s “New Clean Construction” 169
i. “The great imperial steamroller of American finance” 170
ii. “But mosdy U.S.A. is the speech of the people” 175
iii. The world a cocktail party 182
iv. Vag; or, The proletarian on the road 186
v. The proletarian sublime 192
5 “The Literary Class War”: Rethinking Proletarian Literature 200
1. Proletarian Literature as a Formation 201
2. “Revelations by Rebel Chambermaids” 203
3. “These Clubs of Often Famished and Angry Youth” 205
4. “Mushroom Mags”: Modes of Proletarian Writing 211
5. The Legacy of Proletarian Literature 222
6 “The Tenement Thinking”: Ghetto Pastorals 230
1. The Emergence of the Genre 232
2. “Symphony of Struggle” 243
3. The Lure of the Gangster 254
7 Grapes of Wrath: “The Art and Science of Migratin’” 259
1. The Okie Exodus 260
2. Migrant Narratives 269
8 Labor on Revue: The Popular Front Musical Theater 283
1. Epic Theater in Steeltown: Marc Blitzstein 285
2. Needle Trades on Broadway: Pins and Needles 295
i. “All of Odets in six minutes” 296
ii. “What good is love?” 299
3. “Fare Thee Well, Land of Cotton”: Duke Ellington 309
4. Jazz/Opera: The Antinomies of Popular Front Musical
Theater 319
Contents vii
9 Cabaret Blues 323
1. Weimar on the Hudson: The Popular Front Political
Cabaret 325
2. “Hot Jazz and the CIO” 328
3. Jazz at the Cabaret: Billie Holiday’s “Love” Songs 338
4. Blues from the Piedmont: Josh White’s Jim Crow Blues 348
10 The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of
Anti-Fascism 362
1. Toward a People’s Theatre: New Theatre and Film 365
2. The Aesthetics of Anti-Fascism 375
3. Citizen Kane’s Anti-Fascist Newsreels 384
4. Black Jacobins, Native Sons, and the Mexican Border:
Race, Nation, and Fascism 394
11 ‘"Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Walt?” Disney’s Radical Cartoonists 403
1. The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: Cartoonists on Strike 405
2. Animation Learns a New Language 413
12 American Culture and Socialist Theory 423
1. The Americanization of Marx 425
2. Means of Communication: Kenneth Burke’s Symbolic Acts 434
3. Common Ground: Louis Adamic, Carey McWilliams,
Oliver C. Cox, and the “Racial-Cultural Situation” 445
4. The Popular Arts 454
Conclusion: The Old Left: Eleven Outlined Epitaphs 463
The Success and Failure of the Cultural Front:
Afterword to the 2010 Edition 473
Notes 495
Index 569
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/culturalfrontlabOOOOdenn