League of American Writers
Encyclopedia
The League of American Writers was an association of American novelists, playwright
s, poet
s, journalist
s, and literary critics launched by the Communist Party USA
(CPUSA) in 1935. The group included Communist Party members, so-called "fellow travelers" who closely followed the Communist Party's political line
without being formal party members, as well as individuals sympathetic to specific policies being advocated by the organization.
The League's policy objectives changed over time in accord with the shifting party line of the CPUSA. Beginning as an anti-fascist organization in 1935, the League turned to an anti-war
position following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and to a pro-war position after the German invasion
of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The organization was prominent in the defense of Republican Spain
during the Spanish Civil War
and in providing financial and moral support to writers in need in the United States and internationally.
The organization was terminated in January 1943.
In an article in the magazine of the IURW, International Literature, League of American Writers member Alan Calmer noted that the new organization sprung from a decision made at the 1934 convention of the Communist Party's John Reed Clubs:
The convention call for establishing the first Congress of American Writers declared that capitalism
was rapidly crumbling and sought to gather the "hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists" who recognized "the necessity of personally helping to accelerate the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a workers' government."
The founding convention of the League was called to order at the Mecca Temple in New York City, attended by 400 invited "writer-delegates" in front of a total audience of nearly 5,000. Although later called a "front group," the Communist Party's role in the League of American Writers was never secret. Earl Browder
, General Secretary of the CPUSA, delivered the keynote address to the delegates of the First Congress of the League of American Writers at its opening session. Browder acknowledged that writers were typically "skeptical of all political parties, if not contemptuous." He continued:
Joining Browder in addressing the delegates to the organization's founding convention was CPUSA political committee member Clarence Hathaway
, who greeted the Congress in the name of "the entire staff of The Daily Worker," the official newspaper of the Communist Party. Other leading CPUSA activists addressing the gathering included Moissaye Olgin of the Yiddish-language Morning Freiheit, Joseph Freeman
of The New Masses
, and Alexander Trachtenberg
of International Publishers
, part of the CPUSA's publishing arm.
The group declared itself to be "a voluntary association of writers dedicated to the preservation and extension of a truly democratic culture."
Waldo Frank
was elected the first president of the new organization. The governing Executive Council elected by the first Congress included Kenneth Burke, Harold Clurman, Malcolm Cowley
, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Hart, Josephine Herbst, Granville Hicks
, Josephson, Alfred Kreymborg, Lawson, Albert Maltz, Scheider, Seaver, Genevieve Taggard, and Alex Trachtenberg.
Although the League of American Writers was technically a "mass organization" of the CPUSA in the sense that it sought to unite party members with non-party individuals sharing the general Communist Party orientation, membership in the organization was limited by design to the literary elite. Several months after the April 1935 founding congress, membership in the group was reported as only 125 — far fewer than the 400 who had attended the founding convention as delegates. "Applications for membership flow in, but the standard is kept high, membership is granted only to creative writers whose published work entitles them to a professional status," noted Isidor Schneider.
According to the group's formal membership application, membership in the League was "open to all writers whose work has been published or used with reasonable frequency in channels of communication of more than local scope, including magazines, newspapers, the radio, the stage, and the screen." In addition, members had to accept and observe a set of 7 membership aims:
The League of American Writers was governed by Congresses held every two years. The organization also had a number of local chapters which conducted various fundraising activities and events designed to raise public awareness about matters of concern to the League. Chapters were maintained in New York City
, Washington, DC, Boston
, Chicago
, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. The organization published an official newsletter, The Bulletin of the League of American Writers.
A number of prominent writers were enlisted in the cause over the next several years, including Thomas Mann
, John Steinbeck
, Ernest Hemingway
, Theodore Dreiser
, James Farrell
, Archibald MacLeish
, Lillian Hellman
, Nathanael West
, and William Carlos Williams
. The participation of many of these literary luminaries in League affairs was often nominal, limited to signature of an occasional petition. This effort at gathering prominent figures was assisted by a muting the explicitly revolutionary language and communist tone of the organization by the time of its June 1937 second convention.
The 1937 convention was a more subdued affair than the high-profile 1935 launch, with its opening at Carnegie Hall
attended by 50 "writer-delegates." The keynote speech was delivered by Ernest Hemingway, newly returned from the Spanish Civil War
. Hemingway denounced fascism as "a lie told by bullies" and declared that "a writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism." Excerpts from the film The Spanish Earth
were shown to the audience.
Communist Party General Secretary Earl Browder again spoke to the 1937 convention, emphasizing the CPUSA's "Popular Front
" analysis that the world was divided into "two great warring camps, democracy against fascism" and leaving it to writers to "adjust their own work to the higher discipline of the whole struggle for democracy." Gone was talk of the collapse of capitalism and the duty of writers to speed its demise as participants in the class struggle; now the task at hand, in Browder's view, was the building of "broad unity of all democratic and progressive forces...against the menace of fascist barbarism."
Frank was replaced as President of the League in 1937, owing to his questioning of the evidence and verdicts being rendered at the great "Show Trials" in Moscow. He was replaced as President by Donald Ogden Stewart
. The professional head of the organization as Executive Secretary from 1937 to 1942 was Communist Party stalwart Franklin Folsom. The League touted seven prominent Vice-Presidents during the last years of the 1930s, including Van Wyck Brooks
, Erskine Caldwell
, Malcolm Cowley
, Paul DeKruif, Langston Hughes
, Meridel LeSueur, and Upton Sinclair
.
The 3rd Congress of the League of American Writers, held in New York City in June 1939, once again opened with a Friday night public session at Carnegie Hall. Poet Langston Hughes
delivered the keynote address, in which he likened the situation of American blacks to that of the Jewish minority in Germany, with but one difference: "Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions.In Germany the Jews may do none of those things." Hughes' speech was broadly democratic and did not include revolutionary sloganeering.
In 1937 the League of American Writers sent out surveys to over 1,000 American writers asking their position on the Spanish Civil War
. Some 418 returned the survey forms, with 410 supporting the Loyalists to the Spanish Republic
, 7 professing neutrality, and only one — Gertrude Atherton
— supporting General Francisco Franco
and his nationalist forces. In accord with the CPUSA's political line, no effort was made to contact writers known to be sympathetic to Leon Trotsky
. When Max Eastman
, a translator of Trotsky and opponent of Joseph Stalin
, was inadvertently mailed a survey form, Eastman's reply was excluded at the insistence of Communist Party newspaper editor Moissaye Olgin. The other replies were distilled into a pamphlet published by the League of American Writers, entitled Writers Take Sides.
against fascism
in Europe to one of opposition to the so-called "imperialist war," in accord with a change in the political line of the Communist International and the CPUSA. This abrupt reversal was not cost-free to the organization, however, as series of prominent members of the League of American Writers left the group's ranks. Those exiting during this "Yanks Are Not Coming" period included Archibald MacLeish
, Malcolm Cowley
, Van Wyck Brooks
, Thomas Mann
, and Granville Hicks
, among others.
In January 1940, the League formed a Keep America Out of War Committee. This group's members included: Lillian Hellman
, Dashiell Hammett
, Lawrence A. Goldstone
, Eleanor Flexner
, Len Zinberg
, Shaemas O'Sheel
, and Sonia Raiziss
, among others.
Theodore Dreiser
was honorary president of the League of American Writers in 1941.
The League again abruptly shifted its political position, ending its anti-war stance, with the German invasion of the USSR
in the summer of 1941. Echoing another abrupt change of the political line of the CPUSA, the League of American Writers became advocates of American entry into World War II
in defense of the Soviet Union.
The League of American Writers was terminated in January 1943.
The archive of the League of American Writers is housed at the Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley
. The collection has been microfilmed, with the master negative held by the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at the university.
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
s, poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
s, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
s, and literary critics launched by the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
(CPUSA) in 1935. The group included Communist Party members, so-called "fellow travelers" who closely followed the Communist Party's political line
Political line
A political line is the general view a political party, organization, faction, or ideology takes on a given question. The existence of a political line gives its advocates guidance on what to say, which makes their work easier. It also gives opponents an understanding of who is linked together by...
without being formal party members, as well as individuals sympathetic to specific policies being advocated by the organization.
The League's policy objectives changed over time in accord with the shifting party line of the CPUSA. Beginning as an anti-fascist organization in 1935, the League turned to an anti-war
Anti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
position following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and to a pro-war position after the German invasion
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The organization was prominent in the defense of Republican Spain
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
during the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
and in providing financial and moral support to writers in need in the United States and internationally.
The organization was terminated in January 1943.
Formation
The League of American Writers was established by the First American Writers Congress, a gathering held from April 26–28, 1935. The organization was affiliated with the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) as well as the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture and was the American equivalent of the British League of Writers.In an article in the magazine of the IURW, International Literature, League of American Writers member Alan Calmer noted that the new organization sprung from a decision made at the 1934 convention of the Communist Party's John Reed Clubs:
"The chief malady of the revolutionary culture movement was characterized at the second national conference of the John Reed Clubs in 1934 as the old malady of sectarianismSectarianismSectarianism, according to one definition, is bigotry, discrimination or hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group, such as between different denominations of a religion, class, regional or factions of a political movement.The ideological...
.... Pointing to these handicaps, the delegates to the conference instructed their executive committee to take the initiative in sponsoring a broad conference of left-wing authors... A new organization committee was formed, which gradually involved more and more sympathetic writers into the leadership of the committee which issued the "Call for an American Writers Congress" at the beginning of 1935."
The convention call for establishing the first Congress of American Writers declared that capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
was rapidly crumbling and sought to gather the "hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists" who recognized "the necessity of personally helping to accelerate the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a workers' government."
The founding convention of the League was called to order at the Mecca Temple in New York City, attended by 400 invited "writer-delegates" in front of a total audience of nearly 5,000. Although later called a "front group," the Communist Party's role in the League of American Writers was never secret. Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
, General Secretary of the CPUSA, delivered the keynote address to the delegates of the First Congress of the League of American Writers at its opening session. Browder acknowledged that writers were typically "skeptical of all political parties, if not contemptuous." He continued:
"They find, however, in the new life in which they participate, there is a political party which plays an increasingly influential role, the Communist Party. They find it necessary to define their attitudes towards this Party which actively participates in their chosen world. They see that this Party is a force in fine literature, as well as in strikes, in unemployment struggles, in battling for Negro rights, even in reactionary Congress... Yes, the Communist Party is a force, in every phase of the life of the masses, even that of poets, dramatists, novelists, and critiics."
Joining Browder in addressing the delegates to the organization's founding convention was CPUSA political committee member Clarence Hathaway
Clarence Hathaway
Clarence A. "Charlie" Hathaway was an activist in the Minnesota trade union movement and a prominent leader of the Communist Party of the United States from the 1920s through the early 1940s...
, who greeted the Congress in the name of "the entire staff of The Daily Worker," the official newspaper of the Communist Party. Other leading CPUSA activists addressing the gathering included Moissaye Olgin of the Yiddish-language Morning Freiheit, Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman (writer)
Joseph "Joe" Freeman was an American writer and magazine editor. He is best remembered as a contributor and editor to The New Masses, a literary and artistic magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA, and as a founding editor of the magazine Partisan Review.-Early years:Joseph...
of The New Masses
The New Masses
The "New Masses" was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Walt Carmon, briefly by Whittaker Chambers, and primarily by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Joseph Freeman....
, and Alexander Trachtenberg
Alexander Trachtenberg
Alexander "Alex" Trachtenberg was an American publisher of radical political books and pamphlets and activist in the Socialist Party of America and later the Communist Party USA...
of International Publishers
International Publishers
International Publishers is a book publishing company based in New York City specializing in Marxist works of economics, political science, and history. The company was established in 1924 by A.A. Heller and Alexander Trachtenberg, using funds earned through a lucrative trade concession granted...
, part of the CPUSA's publishing arm.
The group declared itself to be "a voluntary association of writers dedicated to the preservation and extension of a truly democratic culture."
Waldo Frank
Waldo Frank
Waldo Frank was a prolific novelist, historian, literary and social critic. Most well-known for his studies of Spanish and Latin American literature, Frank served as chairman of the First Americans Writers Congress and became the first president of the League of American Writers.-Biography:Frank...
was elected the first president of the new organization. The governing Executive Council elected by the first Congress included Kenneth Burke, Harold Clurman, Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.-Early life:...
, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Hart, Josephine Herbst, Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist as well as an anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.-Life:...
, Josephson, Alfred Kreymborg, Lawson, Albert Maltz, Scheider, Seaver, Genevieve Taggard, and Alex Trachtenberg.
Development
The League of American Writers was a dues based organization, with annual dues set at $5 per year, payable in advance on January 1 of each year. Participants who were members of local or regional chapters paid dues to that organization, with $2 of the $5 remitted to the National Office; others stood as members at large and paid dues directly to New York.Although the League of American Writers was technically a "mass organization" of the CPUSA in the sense that it sought to unite party members with non-party individuals sharing the general Communist Party orientation, membership in the organization was limited by design to the literary elite. Several months after the April 1935 founding congress, membership in the group was reported as only 125 — far fewer than the 400 who had attended the founding convention as delegates. "Applications for membership flow in, but the standard is kept high, membership is granted only to creative writers whose published work entitles them to a professional status," noted Isidor Schneider.
According to the group's formal membership application, membership in the League was "open to all writers whose work has been published or used with reasonable frequency in channels of communication of more than local scope, including magazines, newspapers, the radio, the stage, and the screen." In addition, members had to accept and observe a set of 7 membership aims:
- 1. To enlist writers in all parts of the United States in a national cultural organization for peace and democracy and against fascism and reaction.
- 2. To defend the political and social institutions that guarantee a healthy atmosphere for the perpetuation of culture...
- 3. To stimulate the interest of other writers in our program...
- 4. To support progressive trade union organization, especially among professionals and in the liberal arts.
- 5. To effect an alliance, in the interest of culture, between American writers and all progressive forces in the nation.
- 6. To support the People's Front in all countries.
- 7. To cooperate with similar organizations of writers in other countries.
The League of American Writers was governed by Congresses held every two years. The organization also had a number of local chapters which conducted various fundraising activities and events designed to raise public awareness about matters of concern to the League. Chapters were maintained in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Washington, DC, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. The organization published an official newsletter, The Bulletin of the League of American Writers.
A number of prominent writers were enlisted in the cause over the next several years, including Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
, John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, James Farrell
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into a television miniseries in 1979...
, Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
, Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
, Nathanael West
Nathanael West
Nathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...
, and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
. The participation of many of these literary luminaries in League affairs was often nominal, limited to signature of an occasional petition. This effort at gathering prominent figures was assisted by a muting the explicitly revolutionary language and communist tone of the organization by the time of its June 1937 second convention.
The 1937 convention was a more subdued affair than the high-profile 1935 launch, with its opening at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
attended by 50 "writer-delegates." The keynote speech was delivered by Ernest Hemingway, newly returned from the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. Hemingway denounced fascism as "a lie told by bullies" and declared that "a writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism." Excerpts from the film The Spanish Earth
The Spanish Earth
The Spanish Earth was a propaganda film made during the Spanish Civil War in favor of the democratically elected Republicans ....
were shown to the audience.
Communist Party General Secretary Earl Browder again spoke to the 1937 convention, emphasizing the CPUSA's "Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
" analysis that the world was divided into "two great warring camps, democracy against fascism" and leaving it to writers to "adjust their own work to the higher discipline of the whole struggle for democracy." Gone was talk of the collapse of capitalism and the duty of writers to speed its demise as participants in the class struggle; now the task at hand, in Browder's view, was the building of "broad unity of all democratic and progressive forces...against the menace of fascist barbarism."
Frank was replaced as President of the League in 1937, owing to his questioning of the evidence and verdicts being rendered at the great "Show Trials" in Moscow. He was replaced as President by Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart was an American author and screenwriter.-Life:His hometown was Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University, where he became a brother to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity , in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I.After the war he started to write and found...
. The professional head of the organization as Executive Secretary from 1937 to 1942 was Communist Party stalwart Franklin Folsom. The League touted seven prominent Vice-Presidents during the last years of the 1930s, including Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.- Biography :Brooks was educated at Harvard University and graduated in 1908...
, Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...
, Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.-Early life:...
, Paul DeKruif, Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, Meridel LeSueur, and Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
.
The 3rd Congress of the League of American Writers, held in New York City in June 1939, once again opened with a Friday night public session at Carnegie Hall. Poet Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
delivered the keynote address, in which he likened the situation of American blacks to that of the Jewish minority in Germany, with but one difference: "Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions.In Germany the Jews may do none of those things." Hughes' speech was broadly democratic and did not include revolutionary sloganeering.
Publications
The League of American Writers somewhat irregularly published a mimeographed newsletter for its members, The Bulletin of the League of American Writers. Circulation was small, with a press run of 700 copies cited in an issue from November 1937, and few specimens seem to have survived.In 1937 the League of American Writers sent out surveys to over 1,000 American writers asking their position on the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. Some 418 returned the survey forms, with 410 supporting the Loyalists to the Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
, 7 professing neutrality, and only one — Gertrude Atherton
Gertrude Atherton
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton was an American writer.-Early Childhood:Gertrude Franklin Horn was born on October 30, 1857 in San Francisco to Thomas Ludovich Horn and his wife, the former Gertrude Franklin...
— supporting General Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
and his nationalist forces. In accord with the CPUSA's political line, no effort was made to contact writers known to be sympathetic to Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
. When Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
, a translator of Trotsky and opponent of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, was inadvertently mailed a survey form, Eastman's reply was excluded at the insistence of Communist Party newspaper editor Moissaye Olgin. The other replies were distilled into a pamphlet published by the League of American Writers, entitled Writers Take Sides.
Decline and dissolution
With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in the fall of 1939, the League of American Writers turned its official policy from one of advocacy of collective securityCollective security
Collective security can be understood as a security arrangement, regional or global, in which each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to threats to, and breaches of, the peace...
against fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in Europe to one of opposition to the so-called "imperialist war," in accord with a change in the political line of the Communist International and the CPUSA. This abrupt reversal was not cost-free to the organization, however, as series of prominent members of the League of American Writers left the group's ranks. Those exiting during this "Yanks Are Not Coming" period included Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
, Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley
Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.-Early life:...
, Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks
Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.- Biography :Brooks was educated at Harvard University and graduated in 1908...
, Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
, and Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist as well as an anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.-Life:...
, among others.
In January 1940, the League formed a Keep America Out of War Committee. This group's members included: Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
, Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
, Lawrence A. Goldstone
Lawrence Treat
Lawrence Arthur Goldstone , better known by his pseudonym, Lawrence Treat, was an American mystery writer, a pioneer of the genre of novels that became known as police procedurals. A practicing lawyer before turning to writing, he was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America and a...
, Eleanor Flexner
Eleanor Flexner
Eleanor Flexner was a distinguished independent scholar and pioneer in what was to become the field of women’s studies...
, Len Zinberg
Ed Lacy
Ed Lacy , born Leonard "Len" S. Zinberg, was an American writer of crime and detective fiction. Lacy, who was white, is credited with creating "the first credible African-American PI" character in fiction, Toussaint "Touie" Marcus Moore...
, Shaemas O'Sheel
Shaemas O'Sheel
Shaemas O'Sheel was an Irish American poet and critic. Born James Shields, he changed his name to an anglicized spelling of its Irish version soon after high school. He worked briefly for the United States Senate , held jobs with various newspapers, and did publicity and advertising work...
, and Sonia Raiziss
Sonia Raiziss
Sonia Raiziss Giop was an American poet, critic, and translator.-Life:A native of Germany, Ms. Raiziss grew up in Philadelphia. Her father, Dr. George W. Raiziss, was a professor, at University of Pennsylvania. Her first work was published while she was in high school...
, among others.
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
was honorary president of the League of American Writers in 1941.
The League again abruptly shifted its political position, ending its anti-war stance, with the German invasion of the USSR
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
in the summer of 1941. Echoing another abrupt change of the political line of the CPUSA, the League of American Writers became advocates of American entry into World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
in defense of the Soviet Union.
The League of American Writers was terminated in January 1943.
The archive of the League of American Writers is housed at the Bancroft Library
Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library is the primary special collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired as a gift/purchase from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity...
of the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. The collection has been microfilmed, with the master negative held by the Rare Books and Special Collections Department at the university.
Conventions
- 1st Congress of American Writers — New York, April 26–28, 1935
- 2nd Congress of American Writers — New York, June 4–6, 1937
- 3rd American Writers' Congress — New York, June 2–4, 1939
- 4th American Writers' Congress — New York, June 6–8, 1941
Further reading
- Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937-1942. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1994.
- Henry Hart (ed.), The American Writer's Congress. New York: International Publishers, 1935.
External links
- Guide to the League of American Writers archives, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
- Text of the Call for a Congress of American Writers, The New Masses, January 22, 1935, pg. 20.