I’ve always been especially interested in antiwar efforts made by the U.S. left of the day. It's a story that connects the global politics of Russia, Europe, and the U.S. with the horrible long sufferings of Ukraine, so it refracts our current tense period of crisis, during the current war, over what kind of U.S. involvement might or might not be warranted. The story also connects—crucially for me—with American musical and folk-revivalist fantasies that I’ve written about on this blog and elsewhere: here and here and here.
It begins once upon a time, before June of 1941, when the folk-singing American left opposed U.S. entry into WWII.
Not, of course, for the isolationist, white-supremacist reasons of a Charles Lindbergh. This opposition had to do with a commitment to equality. The Almanac Singers, a young folk-revival group that included at various times Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, Josh White, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis Cunningham, and others, played agit-prop songs at progressive events in lofts and apartments around New York City in support of labor organizing and civil rights, and their repertoire was not only anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and pro-labor but also anti-war, specifically anti-U.S. involvement in WWII.
So that looks like a pretty classic case of the young idealism that can see clearly, and rightly enough, the horrible effects of war, especially as a modern, industrialized enterprise in which a lot of investors get rich. Given what had come to light about WWI, and especially before Hitler’s real aims were fully understood—a lot of experienced people got that wrong—associating an antiwar attitude with progressive causes and criticism of the capitalist powers of the day might have made a lot of sense.
But the Almanacs weren’t really singing for peace. They were following what was known as the party line.
The term has become a cliché, but back then it was literal: the policy of the Communist International, borne out via the Communist Party—in the case of the Almanacs, the Communist Party of the United States—as communicated via The Daily Worker, which came out, per its name, daily, and let readers know what the party line was. Because the line could change.
The Communist International met in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, the first communist country and thus in the vanguard of the international communism that was supposed to be demolishing capitalism worldwide. The party line had it that the Soviet Union’s aims were to be advanced and defended by all Communists internationally.
The historic territorial desires of Russia were thus woven into an ideological global showdown over the future of capitalism—really the future of humanity. In 1939, when Hitler, the dictator of Germany, and Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, signed a mutual non-aggression pact, any U.S. involvement in a war against Hitler, the party line now had it, ran contrary to the aims of international Communism, as represented by the policy of Stalin’s Russia.
