Michael Denning's The Cultural Front

...In the end, Denning's passionate reclamation project claims too much for the artistic left...

...Yertle falls, snout-first, into the mud...

...Denning shows that an individual producer of CIO culture—whether writer or painter, playwright or actress—who belonged to one party could still thrive creatively with artists from a supposedly enemy camp...

...Their individual tragedies are easily forgotten, while the swift decline of Proust's Charlus, a narcissistic aristocrat, can still move us to the core...

...In Bigger Thomas, Wright created one of the great antiheroes of American literature...

...And personal connections usually did the rest...

...Thus, the two-year run of Marc Blitzstein's celebrated musical Pins and Needles, in which New York garment workers—some communist, some socialist—sang and joked about their own lives, coincided with the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...

...Of course, events in Spain and especially in Moscow inflamed factional conflict...

...But both Yertle the Turtle and his creator, a staff cartoonist during the 1940s for the left-wing daily PM, seem to bolster Denning's main argument: During the Great Depression and World War II, the left did much to transform the popular arts in the United States...

...For evidence, he points to some of the greatest works of Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit" and "God Bless the Child"), of Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil), of Bob Dylan (his songs of homage to Woody Guthrie and the DISSENT / Winter 1998 • 139 album The Times They Are A-Changin), and to the ongoing discovery of folk traditions...

...A pro-worker, ethnically pluralist sensibility the author dubs "CIO culture" permeated and enriched American film, theatre, music, painting, journalism, and fiction...

...The great fight against fascism gave the cultural front its most dramatic moments and perhaps its most lasting ones...

...The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them," intones Welles's announcer after an unnamed city has fallen to huge Martian invaders who raise their arms in stiff salutes...

...about a class-conscious feminist named Elizabeth Hawes who wrote with insight and wit about both women's fashion and wartime factory work...

...Although he was not eager to acknowledge his Pop Front past, every decade or so Seuss would put out a book that updated its concerns...

...The author contends that Welles's signature film, Citizen Kane, pursued the same goal in a different way—by exposing the hollowness of dictators...

...Denning's account of ethnic progression in American literature has some merit as social history...

...It's a bold thesis...

...But such details do little to explain the influence of swing and bebop on American popular culture...

...But radicals in countries like Germany and Italy lost a good deal more than their jobs and reputations in the thirties and forties...

...Denning understands Mercury's 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds," the drama that millions mistook for breaking news, as an allegory of a fascist invasion...

...Kane's tragedy echoes the fatal quest of Captain Ahab and of a number of Shakespearean villains—particularly Macbeth and Richard III—who also engender the kind of empathy that comes from recognizing their human flaws...

...10017...

...is essentially due to the social background of its author...

...To his credit, he describes how a multiracial left nourished artists like Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie...

...This requires him to confront the disdain of posterity—in particular, the idea that Popular Frontists were a band of maudlin populists in thrall to Soviet tyranny "To this day" wrote Sean Wilentz in 1985, "when I hear the words Pop Front I think of atrocious art...

...Seuss's work, like that of Holiday, Welles, and any fine artist, was fed by many streams of form and content...

...For Denning, the waning of interest in U.S.A...

...None is an immigrant or the child of one...

...Dos Passos, he points out, was not struggling, like Richard Wright, Henry 140 DISSENT / Winter 1998 Roth, and many other writers of the thirties, to make art out of a ghetto life he had recently escaped...

...Independent radicals and Marxist party members alike were building a new kind of working-class culture whose appeal transcended doctrinal conflicts...

...Yet former cast members recall only "a lot of left-wing kids" instead of warring factions...

...Ever the master showman, he and his collaborators in the Mercury Theatre made brilliant use of German and Italian images of harmonious masses and their hypnotic leaders...

...Citizen Kane may have originated as a left-wing take on media Mussolinis, but its art transcends that time and its conflicts...

...And any comparison between Howard Fast and Richard Wright should stop at the edge of genre...

...all the turtles are free,/ As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be...

...Second, he rediscovers unappreciated writers and visual craftspeople...

...I'm ruler," explains Yertle, "of all that I see./ But I don't see enough./ That's the trouble with me...

...Denning further credits "CIO culture" with mounting the first sustained challenge to racist thinking in the twentieth century—ushering in a new age of (public) racial tolerance and paving the way for the black and Chicano freedom movements...

...It recognizes the dark forces in American society but avoids a direct challenge to those forces...

...But since when has a songwriter needed the left to tell her that the poor need luck and perhaps a touch of divine intervention...

...The qualities of durable art cannot be accounted for with an aesthetic like Denning's, which depends so resolutely on historical contingency...

...Witness the success of Mario Puzo, Martin Scorsese, and Howard Fast (who, in his communist days, turned out didactic historical novels like Citizen Tom Paine...

...He strains, for instance, to find Popular Front echoes in Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child," citing its "working-class realism" and "utopian assertion...

...Seuss gets only a passing mention in Michael Denning's otherwise splendidly informative book, The Cultural Front...

...From his perch atop their shells, Yertle imagines himself to be "king of the trees" and "king of the bees...

...Readers and librarians who wish to receive a copy of the index for Volumes 43 and 44 of Dissent (Winter 1996 through Fall 1997) may write to Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1700, N.Y., N.Y...

...But the cause of industrial labor narrowed the gaps between artistic Trotskyists, Stalinists, and social democrats...

...The very breadth of Denning's definition of the "cultural front" undermines his larger goal—to establish the staying power of this vast mélange of creative productions and political notions...

...Denning analyzes how Welles paid backhanded homage to the enemy's powers of persuasion...

...A brief summary of this illustrated story in rhyming couplets for readers who may not have a copy on hand: The happy king of a pondful of contented reptiles suddenly gets infected with big ambitions...

...Fast was only a maker of progressive soap operas...

...The most vivid characters in U.S.A...

...They played at Pop Front events, and "virtually all of the major jazz critics of the period were on the left...

...Index 1996 — 1997 Dissent is indexed in Academic Abstracts, the Infotrak Academic Index, Magazine Article Summaries, the PAIS Bulletin, University Microfilms, Inc...

...The breadth of this output underscores Denning's conviction that far more united the cultural left in the thirties and forties than divided it...

...The main problem with U.S.A...

...For all his intelligent and ferocious research, Denning misses the motive of his story: the left needed its artists more than its artists needed the left...

...And his masterpiece, for all its experimental technique, looked backward to what Denning calls "the Lincoln republic" that emerged triumphant from the Civil War and then got betrayed by monopolists and sycophantic publicists for "the big money...

...These included attacks on racism (The Sneetches), corporate pollution (The Lorax), and the nuclear arms race (The Butter Battle Book...

...Seuss the most influential children's author in the English language...

...The Mafia epic speaks to Americans now in a way sagas by Protestant leftists like Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Hemingway do not...

...John Howard Lawson, a blacklisted communist screenwriter, criticized Citizen Kane for treating the newspaper baron "with ironic sympathy...

...The story ends with a stanza that would do any Popular Frontist proud: "And today the great Yertle, that marvelous he,/ Is King of the Mud...

...Then he notes that Holiday was "sustained by the audiences and institutions of the Popular Front...

...and about Carey McWilliams, who, years before he became editor of the Nation, wrote pathbreaking studies about the multiracial cauldron of the Far West...

...And Denning notices that nearly every critical juncture in Dos Passos's novel turns on a cocktail party—a space filled up "with ill-assorted people who really hate each other," as one character remarks before killing herself...

...Yertle, enraged, tells Mack he has no "right to talk to the world's highest turtle...

...DENNING IS GUILTY of a different kind of reductionism in his chapter on Orson Welles, "one of the cultural monuments of the Popular Front era," as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser called him...

...Welles could not decide if he hated Kane or loved him—and that tension is still what makes the film so vital...

...Every contemporary leftist thus becomes a child of the cultural front...

...The central genre of left fiction became what he usefully dubs "the ghetto pastoral"—tales of growing up in plebeian neighborhoods filled with class pathos and ethnic passion...

...But does it live as a monument to the cultural front...

...If nostalgic narratives of desiccated cultures so quickly lose their audience, why do Proust and James still captivate readers...

...Denning, who teaches American studies at Yale, wants to affirm and elaborate the same radical vision cherished by left-wing artists of that era...

...TAKE THE long chapter on U.S.A., the modernist trilogy by John Dos Passos that is seldom read today...

...This sensibility, Denning maintains, survived and even prospered long after the Red Scare and early cold war had all but extinguished the left as a political movement...

...And Seuss had honed his craft under capitalist auspices...

...cannot be resurrected...

...MICHAEL KAZIN's latest book is The Populist Persuasion: An American History...

...Twothirds of a century later, "tales of how our half lives"—their politics absent or implied rather than overt—can still fill theaters and land a spot on the best-seller list...

...To view Welles's heroic wretch, as Denning does, solely through the scrim of an "anti-fascist aesthetic" is to miss his far older cultural lineage...

...In the twenties and thirties, he drew ads for a bug spray manufactured by Standard Oil...

...Lawson had a point, one that might have given Denning DISSENT / Winter 1998 141 pause...

...He commands his turtle-subjects to stack themselves up into a throne...

...Mack counters with an eloquent burp that upsets the throne...

...The American left, to our eternal sorrow, never built a movement that large or that strong...

...He's far more convincing, I think, as a revisionist historian of the left than as an interpreter of the larger impact of "CIO culture...

...He laments that "Cold War repression [has] left a cultural amnesia," one that he hopes to remedy...

...The world Dos Passos memorialized in U.S.A...

...But as a historian, Denning redeems himself in two ways...

...He was the son of a financier and had graduated from Harvard...

...But he has produced a rich, formidable study that demands a close reading—and often rewards it...

...are villains, rich or becoming so...

...A "plain little turtle" named Mack protests in the name of the terrapin masses: "I know, up on top you are seeing great sights./ But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights./ We turtles can't stand it./ Our shells will all crack...

...In the 1941 film, the autocratic but painfully insecure press mogul, modeled on both William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, isolates himself and destroys his political influence...

...Read Denning to learn about the left-wing animators who made Disney's landmark films...

...At times, Denning seems to conflate artists' left-wing politics with the sources and meaning of their art...

...But as literary theory, Denning's brand of Marxism is only a slight improvement over the older and cruder variety in which class consciousness was all...

...First, he gives us lapidary portraits of the engage artists themselves—both as social types and as individuals...

...As a result, "progressive" artists had less incentive to stand by the existing one in scoundrel times...

...his characters are mere bundles of attributes any good leftist of the day despised...

...Any formulaic "challenge" to Kane—perhaps by an ad hoc coalition of plebeian readers and underpaid journalists?—would have rung even falser than the saccharine endings of some of Frank Capra's films...

...Yet they kept their cultural legacy, and even some of their institutions, intact...

...Writes Denning, "Welles and the Mercury Theatre attempted to turn the magic of the Nazis against them...

...That is all he can see./ And the turtles, of course...

...142 DISSENT / Winter 1998...

...Dos Passos's angry rejection of communism during the Spanish Civil War and his subsequent migration to National Review are just a small part of the answer...

...Take another look at Yertle the Turtle...

...Writers' origins and choice of themes tend to overshadow the virtues or defects of their work...

...However, like many another monarch, Yertle is undone by his hubris...

...That is why Denning identifies the culture he seeks to restore with the CIO rather than with the Popular Front, eternally branded, rightly or wrongly, as a communist masquerade...

...Unfortunately, when he turns to interpreting the more memorable works that emerged from the cultural left, Denning tends to make the same error as did many Pop Frontists themselves: he confuses quality with social relevance...

...Denning begins with a good question: why does this novel, once regarded as "the master narrative" for the entire Pop Front generation, now seem rather quaint—unlike novels by other depression-era leftists, like Native Son and Call It Sleep...

...is that Dos Passos was too "political" a writer...

...Although Denning is a leading figure on the cultural studies left, he manages to avoid most of its stylistic sinkholes...

...And it cut channels through American culture far deeper and more unpredictable than Denning's radical romanticism suggests...

...UMI), the Social Sciences Index, and the Social Science Source...

...What's more, Theodor Geisel, unlike Dos Passos, never really changed his politics...

...Please include 55 cents postage...

...Denning argues that a narrative so rife with decay and despair could not retain its power after young novelists of far different heritage began to publish their own kind of stories...

...What distinguishes Yertle the Turtle from any number of books that intend to teach kids moral lessons is its crisp meter, its brash humor, and its visual inventiveness...

...But it wasn't ideology that made Dr...

...On a few occasions, quotations from the likes of Jameson and Gramsci, and Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, clot the manuscript...

...Where critics like Wilentz and his forerunners at Partisan Review and elsewhere saw little but vulgar melodrama, Denning discovers stimulating plots and moving evocations of universal themes...