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Jazz and the “Popular Front”: “Swing” Musicians and the Left‐Wing Movement of the 1930s–1940s

2009; Routledge; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17494060902778118

1749-4079

Jonathon Bakan,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Abstract This paper locates the jazz music of the 1930s and 1940s within the context of the radical political movement of that era. During the Depression, America's pre‐eminent African American community, Harlem, underwent a profound political transformation, emerging as a center of the left‐wing "Popular Front" social movement. Many of Harlem's residents, especially among the community's intelligentsia, found themselves attracted to the left‐wing milieu centered around the Communist Party. By the late 1930s, Communist‐led organizations in Harlem and elsewhere were frequently featuring jazz bands at their social functions and benefits. It was in this context that many musicians, including several of the most prominent jazz musicians and bandleaders of the Swing Era, became actively engaged in the left‐wing milieu of the 1930s and 1940s. Notes 1. As Scott DeVeaux has noted in his important article, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition" (Black American Literature Forum 25 [Fall 1991]: 525–560), the notion of a singular and unified historical "jazz tradition" is an historiological construct, a broad consensus forged out of decades of critical debate, conflict, and compromise over what does, and what does not, constitute "jazz" music. A critique of the assumptions implied by the notion of a singular "jazz tradition" goes beyond the bounds of this paper; however, for the purposes of this discussion, I use the word "jazz" to include a wide range of urban African American‐inspired musics of the 1930s and 1940s, including big band swing, Harlem stride piano, the music of performers such as Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne (who began their careers as big band singers but later branched out in other areas of popular entertainment), as well as the music of bebop musicians who emerged out of the big bands of the late 1930s and early 1940s. 2. In Langston Hughes's The Best of Simple, for example, the character Simple seems to argue that bebop was an inspired reaction to the police brutality frequently endured by black Americans, saying "Everytime a cop hits a Negro with his billy club that old club says 'BOP! BOP! … BE‐BOP! ... BOP! … BOP!' That Negro hollers, 'Oool‐ya‐koo! Ou‐o‐o!' Old cop just keeps on, 'MOP! MOP! … BE‐BOP! … MOP!' That's where Be‐Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro's head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it." (Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple [New York: Hill & Wang, 1961], 117–118.) Amiri Baraka (writing as Leroi Jones) likewise argued that "the Negro music that developed in the forties had more than an accidental implication of social upheaval associated with it." Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: W. Morrow, 1963), 188. Similarly, Eric Lott has linked the emergent bebop movement of the early 1940s with the labor and civil rights movements of those years. Eric Lott, "Double V, Double‐Time: Bebop's Politics of Style," in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 244. More recently, Ingrid Monson has explored the relationships linking jazz music of the 1950s and 1960s to the civil rights and anti‐colonialist discourses of the Cold War period. Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In the 1960s, the association of the jazz avant garde with ideas of radical political opposition was made explicit at a concert event that was labeled "The October Revolution in Music" by its organizers. Rob Backus, Fire Music: A Political History of Jazz (n.p., USA: Vanguard Books, Emancipation, Black Graphics International, 1976), 69. In so naming their concert, the organizers seem to have linked the "revolutionary" musical ideas of the contemporary jazz avant garde to the revolutionary ideals that inspired Russia's "October Revolution" of 1917. In 1966, saxophonist Archie Shepp stated that jazz "is anti‐war; it is opposed to Viet Nam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz…. Why is this so? Because jazz is a music itself born out of oppression, born out of the enslavement of my people. It is precisely that." Down Beat, Music '66 (Chicago: Maher Publishing, 1966), 20. Quoted in Backus, Fire Music, 86. 3. During the mid‐1990s, a small number of American cultural historians outside of musicology did begin to draw attention to the connections between jazz music and the left‐wing movement of the 1930s and 1940s. See especially Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996); David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big‐Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and David Stowe, "The Politics of Cafe Society," Journal of American History 84 (March 1998): 1384–1406. That research in turn provided the basis for a number of more recent studies that have begun to further explore the social and political ramifications of Swing Era jazz. See, for example, Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin' the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Peter Townsend, Jazz in American Culture (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2000); and Kenneth J. Bindas, Swing, That Modern Sound (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). This paper is a further contribution to this body of research. I am particularly indebted to the groundbreaking work of Michael Denning, whose important book, The Cultural Front, provided many of the initial leads for this paper. 4. In 1934, longshoremen in San Francisco, teamsters in Minneapolis, and auto‐parts workers in Toledo led three separate general strikes in their respective cities. In the same year, 400,000 textile workers engaged in the largest strike to affect a single industry in American history. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser have described the rising labor militancy of the 1930s in their history of American Communism, The American Communist Party: "In 1934 alone there had been the San Francisco general strike led by Harry Bridges, a shrewd and ruthless unionist whose policies were seldom distinguishable from those of the Communists; two violent teamsters' strikes in Minneapolis led by the Trotskyist Dunne brothers, which attracted national attention; and a spectacular strike at the Toledo Auto‐lite plant, where workers reinforced by thousands of unemployed, battled National Guardsmen for two days. All through 1935 wildcat strikes were bursting out in the auto plants. By May spontaneous strikes had occurred in the Toledo Chevrolet and in Cleveland Fisher Body. In November the first great sit‐down was staged in the Akron Goodyear plants—a spontaneous outbreak, marking the real start, on a factory level, of the CIO upsurge. From Akron the flames of industrial unionism spread to Flint, where another sit‐down strike forced General Motors to recognize the CIO auto union." Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Praeger, 1962; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 370. 5. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 45; see also Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 240, 307. 6. Denning, Cultural Front, 67. 7. Alan Sears, "Creating and Sustaining Communities of Struggle: The Infrastructure of Dissent," New Socialist Magazine, July‐August 2005, 32–33. 8. Michael E. Brown, ed., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 17. 9. The socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Pan‐Africanist Marcus Garvey each had significant followings in Harlem during the 1920s. Both were renowned for their militancy, though they avoided the kind of mass‐based, direct‐action forms of popular protest that would later characterize Harlem during the 1930s. Naison, Communists, 21. 10. See Ibid., 115–165. 11. Ibid., 115. 12. Ibid., 25, 38, 96, 158. 13. Ibid., 134. 14. Ibid., 279. 15. Ibid., 280. Naison attributes the high turnover in black membership to what he calls a "gap between the political culture of the Party, and that of the Harlem masses." While Communists garnered high regard from grass‐roots Harlemites for their organizing around day‐to‐day issues such as housing and social relief, the Party did have consistent difficulties holding the working‐class blacks it recruited (perhaps ironically, the Party had much greater proportional success recruiting and holding members from among Harlem's intelligentsia). Even among those working‐class Harlemites who were inspired to sign membership cards, many did not become actively involved in the Party's broader activities, or its many social, cultural, and educational activities outside of Harlem. One source of cultural tension appears to have been the insistence that all Party meetings and social gatherings be racially integrated, even when black members wanted to meet separately from their white comrades. Naison cites Abner Berry, a leading member in the Harlem Party as recalling, "The thing I came up against most often in Harlem … was that the blacks wanted to be together. They didn't mind on occasion being integrated, but in general, they wanted to be involved in something they could call their own, something they organized and led. This was not a 'hate‐whitey' thing. Rather … they had some things they wanted to discuss by themselves, for themselves. The Party was dead set against this." Ibid., 279–280. This situation reflected an ongoing tension among Communists over the question of the independent organization of blacks within the Party. In 1928, the Communist Party officially adopted the position that African Americans constituted a distinct "nation" oppressed under imperialism, and argued for political "self‐determination" in the Southern black belt. This position was attractive to those black activists who had been introduced to politics through the pan‐Africanist nationalism of the Garvey movement. At the same time, however, the Party's national leadership insisted that all Communist Party organization be done under the slogan of interracialism and proletarian internationalism—not on the basis of independent organization of oppressed nationalities. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996), 103–121. 16. Stanley High, "Black Omens," Saturday Evening Post, June 4, 1938, 38. 17. While the subject goes beyond the bounds of this paper, connections linking prominent figures in the history of jazz to organized radical groupings may be drawn still earlier than this. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the African American poet and soon‐to‐be song lyricist, Andy Razaf, was closely associated with the African Blood Brotherhood ("ABB"), an early black radical organization strongly influenced by the politics of both pan‐African black nationalism and Soviet Bolshevism. ABB members, including the group's founder Cyril Briggs, would become the first members of the Harlem Communist Party. See Naison, Communists, 5–10; and Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), 4–29. Andy Razaf, who famously wrote lyrics for songs composed by Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, and many others, was an editor and writer for the ABB publication Crusader, as well as a contributor to Marcus Garvey's Negro World and A. Philip Randolph's Messenger. See William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African‐American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 25; and Vincent, Keep Cool, 12–13. For an interesting discussion of Andy Razaf's politics and publications in the Crusader, and the broader significance of his work within the Harlem Renaissance literary milieu, see Maxwell, New Negro, 13–61. Ted Vincent argues that the pioneering African American composer and musician W. C. Handy also had "close relations" with the ABB, and was "close to the Garvey movement for a time." Vincent, Keep Cool, 48. 18. See Liberator, March 1, 1930, 4; Naison, Communists, 36–37. 19. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919–1990 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 70. 20. Naison, Communists, 58. 21. See Ibid., 57; Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 69. 22. Naison, Communists, 71. 23. See John Hammond, "Due Process of Law in Alabama," The Nation, December 20, 1933, 701–702; and John Hammond, "The South Speaks," The Nation, April 26, 1933, 465–466. John Hammond will reappear throughout this paper as an active participant in the left‐wing movement. In his recent book, Blowin' Hot and Cool, John Gennari describes Hammond as an "anticommunist liberal[]," citing Hammond's disagreements with the Communists on various issues. John Gennari, Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 34. However, the use of the term "anticommunist" in this context seems to oversimplify Hammond's relationships, criticisms, and alliances with various Party activists and organizations during the 1930s and 1940s. Gennari does however acknowledge both that Hammond's "activism grew out of the tradition of Leftist politics in the jazz world that started in the early 1930s and intensified with the Popular Front initiative of the Communist Party after 1935," and that "Hammond was part of a group of young blacks and Jews associated with the Harlem branch of the CPUSA." Ibid. 24. See Naison, Communists, 70; "2000 Pledge Support to Mass Fight for Scottsboro Boys at Harlem Meeting," Daily Worker, May 17, 1932, 2. 25. See John Hammond and Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record (New York: Summit Books, 1977), 85; Burton W. Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 72; and Naison, Communists, 72. 26. Patterson was a prominent Harlem lawyer who joined the Party in the mid‐1920s. He rose to become a leader in the national organization, leading both the Party's legal organization the International Labor Defense, and serving as a member of the Party's leading Political Bureau (Politboro). Patterson played a significant role in shaping the cultural politics of the Harlem Communist Party. He would eventually marry Louise Thompson, another important figure who helped to bring several leading members of Harlem's artistic intelligentsia into the Communist milieu. Thompson was well‐known among leading Harlem Renaissance thinkers, and in the early 1930s she began hosting political discussions at her apartment. These meetings included many of Harlem's most prominent artists and intellectuals. She herself joined the Communist Party around the same time. Interestingly, Thompson was also a friend of John Hammond. In 1932, Hammond, Thompson, and others became involved in a Soviet‐sponsored project to produce a film about working‐class blacks in America. Hammond provided the funding that sent a delegation of black writers and actors to the Soviet Union for work on the project. See Denning, Cultural Front, 65; Naison, Communists, 42–43, 68, 100; and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 288–291. 27. Hammond and Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 85. 28. During the early 1930s, popular jazz music had often been condemned by leading Communists as a non‐proletarian art form. For example, in the February 1930 issue of New Masses magazine, editor Mike Gold wrote that "the Harlem Cabaret no more represents the Negro Mass than a pawnshop represents a Jew, or an opium den the struggling Chinese nation." Quoted in Naison, Communists, 92n53. Gold also wrote that "This cabaret obsession is but an infantile disease, a passing phase…. Negroes are plowing into the revolutionary movement. It is the Negroes [sic] only remaining hope. And among these masses the Negro will at last find his true voice. It will be a voice of storm, beauty and pain, no saxophone clowning, but Beethoven's majesty and Wagner's might, somber as night with the vast Negro suffering, but with red stars burning bright for revolt." Quoted in George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 272. This negative attitude towards popular African‐American culture was also expressed in the poem "Break That Banjo," written by I. D. W. Talmadge, and published in the Daily Worker of August 2, 1929: "Break that banjo, Black Man, / Sing no more them 'blues' / Our foes fear not our sighs— / This soft euphonious wailing / Damn Booker T. and all his pious crew / We're Uncle Toms no more / We know our foe…. / "There are no race distinctions— / We're colored all: / Our color is RED / Let yellow‐livered curs lick the white plutes's boots— / We, Reds, have learned to fight! / "Come L'Ouverture, / Blast forth your call again. / In battle we shall win our rights / Or … / die as men." (Ellipses in original. I. D. W. Talmadge, "Break That Banjo," Daily Worker, August 2, 1929, 6. Courtesy of People's Weekly World, www.pww.org.) 29. For example, in 1930, Harlem Communists launched the auxiliary organization, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights ("LSNR"). The LSNR's newspaper, Liberator, was presented as the "agitator and organizer of the Negro Liberation Movement"—a role the national Communist Party was jealous to claim for itself—and published material written in a similar language, tone, and spirit as that published in the Garveyist newspaper Negro World. This was apparently too much for the Party's Central Committee, which insisted in 1931 that the Liberator not be presented as a racialized, "Negro" publication, and that the LSNR not "substitute for the Party, which at all times must retain its leading role in the struggle for full equality." Naison, Communists, 42; Liberator, February 21, 1931, quoted in Kelley, Race Rebels, 110; for Kelley's discussion of the similar tone and style of the Liberator and Negro World, see ibid., 103–104, and 112. 30. In response to the growing threat of fascism in 1935, the international Communist movement formally initiated a major change in political strategy known as the "Popular Front." The new policy urged Communist Parties around the world to cease advocating for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, and instead concentrate on building broad coalitions of all individuals and organizations that were opposed to fascism, including non‐revolutionary social democrats, trade unionists, and even non‐socialist liberals. With the adoption of the "Popular Front" strategy, the primary and overriding task of Communist Parties around the world became building the widest possible movement against fascism. See, for example, Albert Fried, Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 227–247. 31. Naison, Communists, 193; see also Harvey Klehr and John Earle Haynes, The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 77–91. 32. Naison, Communists, 211. It is interesting to note that a number of influential white American jazz writers of the 1930s and 1940s were also informed by their involvement in the left‐wing movement, and some even before the Popular Front years. John Hammond (whose involvement in the Scottsboro campaign has been mentioned above) continued his involvements in the left‐wing movement into the 1940s. In 1933, Charles Edward Smith, another important jazz writer, contributed an article to the Communist Daily Worker under the headline "Class Content of Jazz Music," where he stated that "the revolution must be fought out on every front, cultural as well as economic." According to John Gennari and James Lincoln Collier, writers Otis Ferguson and B. H. Haggin can also be counted among those jazz writers who were involved in the leftist discourse of the 1930s. Bruce Boyd Raeburn adds jazz writer Al Rose to this list, noting that Rose was involved in the non‐Stalinist left, eventually joining the post‐Trotskyist organizations of Max Schachtman and C. L. R. James in the 1940s. See Charles Edward Smith, "Class Content of Jazz Music," Daily Worker, October 21, 1933, 7; John Gennari, "Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies," Black American Literature Forum 25 (Autumn 1991): 472; James Lincoln Collier, "The Faking of Jazz: How Politics Distorted the History of the Hip," New Republic, November 18, 1985, 37; and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style: The Awakening of American Jazz Scholarship and Its Cultural Implications (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1991), 38–39. 33. Naison, Communists, 210, 224n75. 34. James Dugan, "Stop Before You Jitter," Young Communist Review, July 1939, 3. 35. Ibid. 36. Max Margulis, "Swing‐Hi‐De‐Ho," Sunday Worker, September 12, 1937, 4. Note that the author of this article appears to be the same Max Margulis who later went on to cofound Blue Note Records. 37. According to David Stowe, in 1938 "Harlem's Communist Party founded an interracial 'swing club' and promoted jitterbugging, while the Young Communist League sponsored a 'Swing America' pageant at its 1939 convention." Stowe, Swing Changes, 65. These sorts of events were fairly common. For example, Chick Webb's band was featured with Ella Fitzgerald at shows hosted by the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker. Denning, Cultural Front, 334. Likewise, on November 23, 1938, the Young Communist League presented a "Night O' Swing" featuring the orchestras of Charlie Barnet and Reggie Childs. Daily Worker, November 22, 1938, 8. And, on December 3, 1938, the "Twenty‐Seventh New Masses Ball" featured "Dancing until three to the music of the Savoy Sultans." See Daily Worker, December 2, 1938, 10. The Savoy Sultans were also featured at the "New Masses Spring Ball" held on March 31, 1939, and at a dance advertised under the slogan "Swing Against Fascism" sponsored by the Federal Writers Anti‐Fascist Committee, held on March 5, 1938. See New Masses, February 28, 1939, 30; New Masses, March 8, 1938. On December 17, 1938, the Fur, Floorboys, and Shipping Clerks Union held a benefit dance for the "Friends of the Lincoln Brigade." The event featured a "Battle of Swing" between "Lucky Millinder and his Blue Rhythm Band" and "Charles Barnet and his Make Believe Ballroom Orchestra." See Daily Worker, December 16, 1938, 4. 38. Naison has written: "The [Communist] party's campaign in behalf of the republican government dwarfed [other Communist‐led anti‐fascist campaigns] in breadth and political significance. The revolt of the Spanish army against a freely elected, popular government, undertaken with German and Italian support, provided a textbook case of the conflict between democracy and fascism which Communists constantly spoke of. Astonishingly, not one Western government would provide military aid to the Spanish Republic; the United States, Britain, and France all kept out of the conflict while Mussolini sent troops and Hitler used the war to test his most advanced military technology. The Soviet Union's decision to send arms to the Spanish Republic, and the Comintern's sponsorship of an international brigade to fight on the republican side, inspired a groundswell of goodwill among U.S. liberals. Spanish aid committees quickly formed throughout the country, incorporating trade unions, religious bodies, ethnic associations, and artists' and writers' groups, as well as the party. But the most dramatic manifestation of U.S. support was the formation of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a contingent of more than 3,000 young Americans who volunteered to fight with the republican armies. Although people of many political backgrounds participated in the brigade, rank‐and‐file Communists, drawn from unions and neighborhood organizations, composed more than 60 percent of the recruits. Their experience dramatized the spirit of heroism and sacrifice which U.S. Communism could inspire in its best moments. Half of the brigade died in battle; half of those who returned had serious wounds." Mark Naison, "Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front," in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 56. 39. Denning, Cultural Front, 334. 40. See Naison, "Remaking America," 51. 41. Naison, Communists, 212. 42. See Hammond and Townsend, John Hammond on Record, 199–206; and New Masses, December 20, 1938, 23. Hammond staged a second "Spirituals to Swing" concert in December 1939. He later claimed that he sought financing for the first of these concerts from the New Masses editor Eric Bernay only when he was refused support by both the NAACP and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Ibid, 199–200. Interestingly, Bernay later went on to found the independent record label Keynote, where John Hammond served first on the company's board of directors, and later as its president. According to Denning, "Keynote began as a small left‐wing folk and jazz label, releasing Marc Blitzstein's No for an Answer, the Almanac Singers' Talking Union, and Josh White's Southern Exposure, as well as small sessions with Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, and Count Basie." Denning, Cultural Front, 95. Whitney Balliett has underscored the historic importance of Keynote's jazz recordings, writing that artists and repertoire man "Harry Lim supervised fifty or so small‐band sessions for the Keynote label, nearly a third of which are among the best of all jazz recordings." Whitney Balliett, "The Keynotes," in Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz, 1981–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 189. 43. James Dugan and John Hammond, program notes for the "From Spirituals to Swing" concert, Carnegie Hall, New York, December 1938; reprinted in The Black Perspective in Music 2 (Fall 1974), 194. 44. See Naison, Communists, 299; and New Masses, January 31, 1939, 26. 45. Stowe, Swing Changes, 71. 46. In the April 1939 issue of Down Beat, Ellington went so far as to engage in some mild red‐baiting against John Hammond, who, he argued, lacked impartiality as a "swing critic." Here, Ellington claimed that Hammond, "has consistently identified himself with the interests of … the Negro peoples, to a lesser degree, the Jew, and to the underdog, in the form of the Communist Party." Ellington further argued that "Perhaps due to the 'fever of battle,' Hammond's judgment may become slightly warped, and his enthusiasm and prejudices a little bit unwieldy to control." "'Situation Between the Critics and Musicians Is Laughable'—Ellington," Down Beat, April 1939, 4, 9. It should be acknowledged, however, that in spite of the negative rhetorical spin of his comments, Ellington was not wrong to point out that Hammond's multiple roles as music producer, talent scout, music critic, and even financial backer of various musical enterprises, precluded him from being considered an impartial judge of the musical merits of various "swing" or jazz bands. 47. Stowe, Swing Changes, 69–70. 48. The original score and script to Jump for Joy have not survived intact, nor has the score been recorded in its entirety. What has been recorded has been collected on Jump for Joy, Smithsonian R 037 DMM 1‐0722, 1988; these recordings have also been released on Duke Ellington, Jump for Joy, Jazz Hour 00022752, 2005, compact disc. See also Denning, Cultural Front, 524n63. 49. Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 460. 50. Ibid., 175–176. 51. Scott E. Brown and Robert Hilbert, James P. Johnson: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press and the Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1986), 219–220. 52. Ibid. Unfortunately, Brown gives no indication where, when, or how Smith made this known to him. 53. The words "alignment" and "commitment" are used here in the sense described by Raymond Williams. See Raymond Williams, "The Writer: Commitment and Alignment," in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), 77–87. With these terms, Williams provides a useful way to understand the complex and multiple relationships that existed between the Communist Party and the broader left‐wing movement. Following Marx, Williams argues that the act of becoming consciously committed to a specific political or class outlook is predicated on the achievement of a self‐conscious awareness of one's immediate needs, interests, desires, etc., which all individuals must pursue if they are to survive in their life circumstances. These immediate—and initially unconscious—interests constitute what Williams calls our political "alignments." As Williams states, "Marxism, more clearly than any other kind of thinking, has shown us that we are in fact aligned before we realize that we are aligned. For we are born into a social situation, into social relationships, into a family, all of which have formed what we can later abstract as ourselves as individuals. Much of this formation occurs before we can be conscious of any individuality…. The alignments are so deep. They are our normal way of living in the world, our normal ways of seeing the world…. [O]ur own actual alignment is so inseparable from the constitution of our own individuality that to separate them is quite artificial." Ibid., 85–86. These "alignments" inform much of what we do, providing the basis for our most pressing political choices. For example, while the majority of the rank‐and‐file participants in the left‐wing political movement of the Depression era (such as those who participated in the strike wave of 1934 and the CIO organizing drives that followed) found themselves "aligned" to the left‐wing movement—to its fight for industrial union rights, fair employment pract