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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Date: Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 7:27 AM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Socialisms]: Dennis on Enyeart, 'Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy' To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org> John P. Enyeart. Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy. Working Class in American History Series. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2019. xii + 216 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08432-4; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04250-8. Reviewed by Michael Dennis (Acadia University) Published on H-Socialisms (March, 2020) Commissioned by Gary Roth Louis Adamic, Fascism, and Democracy Remembered primarily as an exponent of cultural pluralism in the left-wing press of the 1930s, writer Louis Adamic was in fact a radical antifascist who championed a bold vision of economic and racial democracy, while it was fashionable in the interwar years and during the period of growing Cold War conformity that followed VE Day. So contends historian John Enyeart in a persuasive and perceptive study of a neglected mid-twentieth-century left intellectual. Enyeart's is a work of engaged revisionism that seeks to revive and rehabilitate the memory of this popular front intellectual. The author is determined to rescue the Yugoslav émigré from the kind of sentimental liberal tolerance that prevailed among the American intelligentsia of the era as well as from the accusations of communist fellow-traveling that dogged him in the last years of his life and continues to warp at least some scholarly treatments of him today. Carried on the massive waves of immigration that brought millions of southeast Europeans to America in the early twentieth century, Adamic lived the life of a prototypical immigrant, working a variety of unskilled jobs, studying English at night, navigating periodic unemployment, and developing the literary skills that would transform him into a distinctive American voice of dissent. In response to an offer by the US government to accelerate the immigration process by serving in the armed forces, Adamic joined the US Army in 1917. By this time, the young Slovene was already a voracious reader, one who compulsively sought out public libraries to fuel his need to understand modern America. Discharged from the army in 1923, the autodidactic and literary impulses continued. Landing in Los Angeles, he became a close acquaintance of Carey McWiliams, the lawyer-journalist who would eventually edit the _Nation_, as well as other luminaries in the local literary scene. These experiences fueled his desire to write. His efforts began to pay off when H. L. Mencken's _The Mercury_ and other literary journals began to publish his short stories and essays. Benefiting from the indispensable editorial assistance of his wife, Stella Sanders, whom he married in 1931, Adamic developed his voice as a modernist writer, imbibing Sigmund Freud, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche, but also the social realism of American writers Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. It was in Los Angeles that Adamic began, through his journalistic output, to shape a coherent image of his new country. The image was not pretty: a country of deluded religious zealots (radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson) and misguided idealists who foolishly dared to challenge the political and economic status quo (as detailed in his 1936 short story, "The Crusader"), and a venal and materialistic society fixated on a delusional success myth that left most, as Enyeart writes, "existing in a perpetual state of alienation and despair." If ever Adamic was wide-eyed about America, he now found himself disillusioned by "the depths of immigrants' misery, capitalism's supremacy, democracy's failure, and the limits of radicalism" (p. 25). Capitalism was too entrenched to imagine any meaningful challenge to it. It was more a tragic, cynical sensibility than a righteous indignation that he channeled in his most popular book, the 1931 _Dynamite_, a history of how violence became the method and the consequence for labor radicals and social dissidents alike who imagined they could square the American promise with the American reality. Out of this stew of modernist reading, indignant social commentary, and immigrant disaffection, Adamic began to fashion a critique of the imagined American identity. By the early 1930s, he had honed an attack on the myth of the American melting pot that harkened back to Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen. It was a critique that resonated among an immigrant readership who felt similarly alienated. Anglo-Saxon dominance and the concomitant demand for assimilation stood at the center of why the United States had yet to become a place in which democracy, due process of law, and racial equality prevailed. While his book _The Native's Return_ (1934) championed Slovenian liberation against the autocratic rule of King Alexander, Adamic was still too much the disenchanted modernist to descend into what he considered misguided activism. Yet the combination of witnessing first-hand the authoritarian repression in Yugoslavia and the incipient fascist movement in Italy convinced Adamic that he could no longer afford the posture of literary aloofness. "The fear of fascism politicized Adamic," as Enyeart writes, which brought an end to the sense that he was a permanent exile. "Instead, exile became the starting point for creating a new humanity" (p. 39). Through a stream of writings that appeared in _The Nation_ and as independent monographs, Adamic crafted this new sense of humanity. It would be predicated on the repudiation of a narrow and bigoted version of the American identity and on the retrieval of an American past that included African Americans and immigrants. Cultural pluralism would underwrite a vibrant democracy and provide the antidote to the virulent nationalism then surging through Europe. Much to the chagrin of writers like Granville Hicks of the journal _New Masses_, Adamic still held himself aloof from visions of revolutionary transformation. Yet neither hewing to the communist line nor making weak liberal overtures to a banal racial tolerance, he crafted a fighting version of antifascism. Critical to this vision was the idea that a united progressive front against fascism could only be built by fusing industrial democracy to cultural pluralism and racial equality. The threat was not confined to Europe, since fascism combined "an anti-Enlightenment counterrevolution[ary]" worldview that "sought to destroy democracy by appealing to beliefs in racial superiority and by glorifying violence" (p. 2). Americans were not innocent. As much as the hired thugs who violently thwarted unionism in California's Imperial Valley and the Klansmen and other white supremacists who terrorized African Americans in the South, those seeking to build "a militaristic white nationalist authoritarian federal government shared a worldview with the Nazis" (p. 58). As Adamic studied the phenomenon, he came to understand that it simultaneously exalted corporate power, all the more reason to defend the self-determination of an ethnic and racially diverse working class. Through his fiction, Adamic articulated this egalitarian, leftist political vision. In his 1935 novel _Grandsons_, Adamic made his hero a revolutionary union organizer who escapes from the shadows of a shallow and alienated American society, achieving authenticity through direct action that did not capitulate to communist discipline. Yet as Enyeart notes, Adamic expressed this growing proletarian sensibility, this developing affinity for the working-class struggles of the 1930s, most powerfully through his labor journalism for _The Nation_. In a series of articles, Adamic championed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as the authentic agent of working-class emancipation, since it avoided the organizational and ideological defects of both the Communist Party and the American Federation of Labor, instead developing "organically out of workers' collective desires for greater democracy in their workplace and in the nation as a whole" (p. 54). As Enyeart effectively demonstrates, by the time the Hitler-Stalin pact blew apart the popular front, Adamic had become a leading architect of the antifascist logic that dominated the American left. Through his establishment and editorship of _Common Ground_, his support for John Lewis and the CIO, his ground-level labor journalism, and his contributions to the Federal Theater Project, Adamic had made cultural and racial pluralism "the defining characteristic of the antifascist political culture" that prevailed in the 1930s (p. 69). In some sense this past was only prologue to the most significant chapters in his career. In the war years, he would develop into an exponent of internationalist cultural pluralism. He would advocate for and actively support a pro-partisan, pro-Tito movement among the Slovak diaspora and a vigorous critic of colonialism. Enyeart draws on evidence that illustrates how Henry Wallace's left internationalism and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms fueled the writer's conviction that American antifascism could assist rather than impede the revolutionary anti-colonial tide then sweeping the developing world. If the author sometimes leads the reader into a thicket of Slovenian organizations the importance of which and distinctions between are not always clear, he convincingly demonstrates that Adamic proved pivotal in building an alliance of left-wing, diasporic South Slavs throughout the United States, Canada, and England in support of the partisan movement that took power in 1943. Connected to leading officials, exiles, journalists, and politicians in both the United States and Europe, the popular writer "played an essential role in making Yugoslavism a reality and advancing the global antifascist revolution" (p. 74). He also overcame his misgivings about Tito's communism, since the latter's independence from Stalin and the fact that the People's Liberation Anti-Fascist Front (LF) that supported him constituted a diverse coalition of liberals, socialists, and Catholics suggested a thoroughly democratic alternative to the Soviet experiment. Facing off against right-wing American Croat and Slovak opponents of the Yogoslav Partisans, Adamic drafted his 1943 _My Native Land_, an ode to the Partisans as the carriers of "revolutionary pluralism" and Yugoslavia as a critical bulwark against fascism in Eastern Europe. Yet his connections to a communist government of any persuasion, however independent of Stalin, steadily brought Adamic under suspicion, particularly as the war came to an end. What is particularly valuable about _Death to Fascism__: Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy_ is Enyeart's portrait of an antifascist author and activist who did not capitulate to Cold War liberalism despite his animosity for the Soviet Union. As Enyeart elucidates, Adamic's antifascist commitment evolved into a comprehensive critique of American imperialism in the postwar years. For Adamic and his allies, American intervention in Greece under the aegis of the Truman Doctrine was compromised by the fact that Greek monarchists had been favorable to Hitler and retained fascist connections. The Marshall Plan was dubious because it lumped Yugoslavia in with the rest of the Soviet Union, depriving it vital aid that might have made the country into a valuable American ally in Eastern Europe. Instead of regional self-determination, Adamic argued, the US favored a military presence in the Gulf region to ensure access to Middle Eastern oil. Advocating in the pages of the _Negro Digest_ in 1946 for racial diversity as the American norm and for interracial labor activism as a forgotten tradition in the American experience, Adamic simultaneously called on his readers to take an active interest in the political developments and anti-colonial struggles of Nigeria, Guatemala, Palestine, India, China, and Yugoslavia. Supporting Wallace in 1948, critiquing US unilateralism toward the Soviet Union, and condemning the coalition of southern white supremacists and the northeastern establishment Republicans as "proto-fascists" out to undermine the social democratic aspirations of the working-class majority, Adamic became a leading voice in the American left at a time of intensifying right-wing resistance. An internationalist, he argued that the American effort to oppose Jim Crow and defend a multiracial working-class movement was part of the worldwide struggle of democratic anti-colonialism against reactionary capitalism in the aftermath of the war. Despite divisions within the Progressive Party over communist participation, Adamic would go so far as to argue that "in many nations communist revolutionaries represent the only force capable of establishing 'equality among men, education, peace, old age security, medical protection for every citizen, [and] universal material well-being'" (p. 132). Of course, in this era of hysterical anti-communism, every call for international peace, every critique of American foreign aggression, every appeal for colonial self-determination abroad and economic democracy at home was interpreted as evidence that Adamic had become a fellow traveler at best and a Soviet agent at worst. Enyeart's final chapter focuses on how the forces of anti-communism used Adamic's mysterious death in 1951--shot in a farmhouse in Connecticut--to perpetuate the myth that Stalin had the writer murdered. This only furthered the anti-communist agenda and deliberately obscured Adamic's antifascist radicalism. But the book's real strength lies in the analysis of a committed intellectual who joined the ranks of the movement against fascism, never abandoning his writing or intellectual independence but steadily seeing it in the light of the urgent need to confront the global threat of fascism. One could quibble with a few aspects of Enyeart's analysis. Did Adamic ever develop a strong sense of the political and institutional forces that would be necessary to advance his vision of revolutionary pluralism? For all of this disdain for the Communist Party and his veneration of the CIO, did he understand or acknowledge that rank-and-file communists proved critical to building the labor movement, and that the same kind of labor militancy would be indispensable to any future effort to secure the Four Freedoms? This was one of the key weaknesses of the Progressive Party, but Enyeart is silent on the point. Other objections might be raised but most would seem trivial in comparison to the book's achievements. It is almost _de rigueur_ for historians who come even close to the question of fascism to nod in the direction of President Donald Trump and the winds of authoritarianism now blowing sporadically throughout Europe. Enyeart is no exception. Yet his commentary is, since he reminds us not only of Adamic's vision of internationalist, egalitarian labor solidarity as an alternative to xenophobia and free market fundamentalism, but also of the defining characteristics of fascism. "His time and ours are different," writes Enyeart, "but they are connected by what he identified as the persistence of a fascist ethos that linked white supremacy and a thirst for violence" (p. 165). White supremacy and a thirst for violence, not elaborate theories of the relationship of the individual to the state or corporatism or the discontent of the white working class were the issues most important to Adamic. Using that standard, readers might indeed come to some discomfiting conclusions about the current state of American politics. For this reason, but primarily because Enyeart has captured the life and work of an antifascist democratic radical who continues to resonate today, _Death to Fascism_ is a major accomplishment. Citation: Michael Dennis. Review of Enyeart, John P., _Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic's Fight for Democracy_. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. March, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54405 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
