Suse Rotolo and Bob Dylan's Left Period
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9401/
By Gerald Meyer
6-02-10
Editor's note: This is a slightly edited version of what was
originally published in American Communist History, pp. 77-87 (April 2010)
--
Introduction
Long reticent about her relationship with the protean and
transformative exponent of American popular music, Bob Dylan, Suse
(Susan) Rotolo's evaluation of her relationship with Dylan is modest,
and undoubtedly true: "Our time together fed his work. I know I
influenced him. We marked each other's lives profoundly. He once told
me that he couldn't have written certain songs if he hadn't known
me.... I served as his muse during our time together, and that I
don't mind claiming." (p. 290) A Freewhellin' Time: A Memoir of
Greenwich Village in the Sixties covers the years from 1961, when
Dylan arrived in New York City, until 1965, when after his achieving
enormous celebrity, they parted. This period of Dylan's career was
critically important to American popular culture; during this time,
Dylan composed a series of exquisite, politically engaged songs based
on a folk music movement identified with the American Left. It
concluded with his controversial adoption of more popular,
depoliticized modes of music performed on amplified instruments in
place of the traditional acoustic instruments. Rotolo's intriguing
work is the best place, to date, to assess the intense, albeit brief,
encounter with the Left of a preeminent cultural iconBob Dylan.
Suse Rotolo and Bob Dylan's relationship started when a
seventeen-year-old girl, who was hanging out in Greenwich Village,
met her first love, a twenty-year-old who, in less than five years,
rocketed into the firmament of America's rich musical culture. A
Freewhellin' Time does not retrace the tale of Romeo and Juliet; it
is a less common story whose deeper meaning is the narrator's
insistence on maintaining her separateness, her integrity, even at
the cost of losing her lover. Fearful of becoming a sidekick to a
celebrity, Rotolo withdrew from a relationship others could only
dream of possessing. Tragically for Ms. Rotolo she seems to have
derived no clear benefit from her brave decision. She senses that she
has been "forever enshrined and entombed, also, beside the legend of
Bob Dylan." (p. 3) For all but her family and a circle of close
friends, her greatest value continues to be as a source of
information about one of the most dominant, and inscrutable, figures
of American popular culture. This memoir, which should serve as a
means of converting this depressing legacy into a gain for herself,
has earned a place on the shelf of must-read books for anyone
attempting to fathom this transformative figure.
The reader of A Freewhellin' Time is pulled back and forth from
Rotolo's semi-tragic loss to bemusement as to why she forsook a
promising and truly freewheeling life for the meager attention of a
misogynistic misanthrope. Rotolo sums it all up, by saying, "[Dylan ]
was not known for his generosity." (p. 158) Sadly, for this reader,
she clings to a memory: "Bob gave me a handmade, embroidered Romanian
sheepskin jacket.... It was beautiful and very warm. I loved it."
(pp. 268-269). Dylan's extraordinary sense of entitlement and
all-around arrogance is distilled in a couple of sentences. "When I
was with him, he seemed to take my presence for granted. I was
expected just to be there by his side as he went about his business."
(p. 183) Nothing in A Freewheelin' Time contradicts the assessment of
Dylan by Suse's older sister Carla, "[He made] no effort of any kind
to be polite to anyone." And then there was Dylan's blatant
womanizing; with Joan Baez and others. Can "Don't Think Twice It's
All Right," "Boots of Spanish Leather," and other songs that
immortalize their love compensate for Dylan's narcissism? The
calculus of this relationship is best left to the individual reader.
However, few would disagree that Rotolo's memoir is an important
feminist text.
A Freewhellin' Time is rich in insights and information about a
number of compelling (and less often discussed) topics. It presents
an insider's view of a high point in the performance of American folk
music and its ultimate marginalization by commercialization, and
(even more fatally) its absorption into a more eclectic,
transmogrifying musical modality. In addition, the author chronicles
the brief transitional period between the unraveling of the Old Left
and the ascendancy of the New Left, a period that neatly coincided
with Rotolo's relationship with Dylan. Interwoven with this strand, A
Freewhellin' Time provides a glimpse of the overlooked story of
Italian American radicalism. As might be expected from devoted
Communists, Rotolo's parents transmitted aspects of this movement's
politics and culture to Suse (and to a lesser extent Carla), who in
turn shared this heritage to a force majeure of American culture.
This last theme is the least explored in the vast biographical
literature on Dylan; it is also the least satisfactorily treated part
of this otherwise compelling memoir, where it had the best chance of
coming fully to light.
Greenwich Village
A Freewhellin' Time's subtitle, A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the
Sixties, refers to the place (and what was becoming known as the East
Village) and time that this story unfolded: both.of which provide a
wider context for her story. In lieu of attending college (Dylan
spent one year attending the University of Minnesota, in
Minneapolis), Rotolo "took the subway" and entered what was for her
an enchanted urban village offering refuge from the miasma of the
McCarthy Era and its debased culture. At times, it seems that she is
not as regretful about the collapse of her relationship with Dylan as
she is nostalgic for a community that offered endless possibilities
for sociability and creativity (and where cheap apartments abounded).
Typical of Little Italies everywhere, the Village was a district
where commercial uses mixed with a wide variety of types of housing.
Denoted by names rather than numbers and largely outside Manhattan's
grid, the streets of the Village are generally narrow; they curve and
run diagonally. Along these storefront-lined streets, its residents
conveniently shopped for fresh bread, fruits and vegetables, fish,
and other daily needs. The community clustered around the parish of
Our Lady of Pompeii through whose doors, every summer, the Madonna
was carried outside to preside over a weeklong festa. The Italian
community in the Village was neither as large nor as self-contained
as Manhattan's other two Little ItalysItalian Harlem and the Lower
East Side's Mulberry Street District. Moreover its housing stock was
more modern and its population less dense than Italian Harlem and
Mulberry Street's. Nonetheless, the Village bore the salient
characteristics of Little Italys everywhere. The inward-looking,
tight-knit, predominantly Italian residents were indifferent to (or
at most mildly curious about) the goings-on of their exotic
neighborsincluding those who were gay. As the landlords of the
tenements and many smaller dwellings and the proprietors of the
commercial establishments, they also benefited from the patronage of
those rejected elsewhere. More than for any other outsider community
(arguably even the gay and lesbian community), the Village was a
community that tolerated behaviors and lifestyles treated with
opprobrium elsewhere in America.
Donald Tricarico, who wrote the most important study of this
community, commented, "the students and artists living in the
vicinity were essentially an appendage of the Italian community....
For all purposes and intents, they were guests of the Italian
population." It was the Italians who stayed while others passed
through on their way to celebrity, or much more frequently,
assimilation into more predictable and conventional identities.
Although Rotolo seems very much in touch with her Italian heritageas
evidence by her devotion to grandparents, for example, and later by
her extended stay in Italy where she learned the languageshe
expresses little interest in this aspect of Greenwich Village.
Greenwich Village provided a nurturing environment for folk music
artists and their devotees. It offered venues where alternative
entertainment took root and thrived. Gerdes Folk City (where Rotolo
first saw Dylan), the Gas Light, the Bitter End, the Limelight, all
located within a few blocks of one another, presented new and
established performers to eager audiences. It was a place (and
admittedly, an age) where Dylan could simply roll into town and begin
performing. With a sharp eye and a deft touch, Rotolo sketches many
major figures of the folk music revivalDave Van Ronk, Odetta, Jack
Elliot, Tom Paxton, Ian and Sylvia [Tyson], Joan Baez, Gil Turnerand
relates ways in which they interacted. Rotolo notes, "Many did what
they loved to do and became known for it far and wide, and others did
what they loved to do and managed to make a living at it. Still other
burned out and lost their way." (p. 131) Only one, Bob Dylan, emerged
from this small crowd to acquire immortality in the world of American
popular music.
Rorolo makes an insightful evaluation of Dylan's music. "Bob's songs
were in the folk idiom yet they were definitely and undeniably
written in the present. The writing was timeless and
timelyexplosively soand the audience gasped in recognition." (pp.
231-232) Nonetheless, aside from some banal musings about his good
work habits and ability to concentrate, Rotolo gives no hint as to
what she observed during their five-year relationship, which
coincided with his most formative years, that might explain how he
bypassed all the others. Dylan's lyrics place him in the prophetic
tradition of the Bible, Walt Whitman, and William Blake. Did Suse
Rotolo know whether Dylan actually read any of those sources? Did he
own a Bible, copies of Leaves of Grass, or The Collected Works of
Blake? Did he discuss extracts from these works? Did he channel the
spirits inhabiting the Old Testament prophets from his studies for
his Bar Mitzvah? Was there an especially talented English teacher or
two in Hibbing, Minnesota's high school who exposed him to Whitman
and Blake? Whatever Rotolo may know about these and similar questions
does not appear in the book.
Family Politics
Joachim (Pete) Rotolo and Mary Testa (Mary used the Anglicized
version of Maria for her first name and the surname of her first
husband, who died in a freak accident in 1937) were immersed in the
Communist Party. Like other Communists of that period, Suse notes
that her parents earned working class incomes but engaged in a
culture that bore little relationship to their working and
lower-middle-class neighbors and her father's workmates. She recalls,
"The culture I lived in [meant] being around interesting adults from
all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of music, and all those books."
(p. 34) Although Suse does not link her parents to the folk music
movement, she mentions their frequenting Café Society, a cabaret
located in the Village, where in addition to Billie Holiday and other
great jazz artists, featured folk musicians such a Leadbelly and
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. In any case, her associations with
other children of Communist parents and her work as a counselor at
the Communist-sponsored Camp Kinderland thoroughly acquainted her
with the folk music world. Long before she met Dylan, Rotolo points
out, "Most of us were children of Communists or socialists,
red-diaper babies raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete
Seeger. We had listened to Oscar Brand's Folksong Festival on radio
while still in our cribs." (p. 45)
Suse Rotolo's Italian-born father arrived in America at the age of
two. His parents were prosperous skilled workers (a seamstress and a
decorative iron worker) who eventually bought a brownstone in South
Brooklyn. They provided the motivation and material support to
guarantee their three children passage into the American middle
classPete graduated from high school and attended Pratt Institute on
a scholarship. At least directly, Pete was untouched by poverty or
discrimination. Together with his wife (and many other Italian
Americans), the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in
1927 contributed to his embrace of Communism. His path to Party
membership was through the John Reed Clubs, clubhouses the party
established to disseminate social realist art and encourage workers
to write. Pete's artistic endeavors were laid aside for what Suse
defines as "his duty, his 'Communist work.'" (p. 29) Pete worked in a
linotype factory, where he became a shop steward for the union.
Questions that arise from the informaton Suse Rotolo gives the reader
go unanswered in her memoir. Was Pete one of the select cadre the
Party assigned members to work in factories? Suse doesn't name the
union for which her father served as a shop steward. Was it a
Communist-led union like the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine
Workers of America? Clear answers to these queries would have
significant bearing on her father's tenacious connection to a job for
which he was clearly overqualified. One suspects throughout the book
that Suse didn't do much research to find sources outside of memories
and family lore, which could challenge, substantiate, and most
importantly, contextualize her own information base. She reports that
Pete, whose politics were known to his coworkers, was well liked by
them. After he became too sick to work, many of his shop mates
visited him on weekends and made a collection to buy him a
television, something hitherto excluded from their home where the
phonograph had pride of place in the living room. His infirmity
yielded one benefit: Pete resumed his artistic endeavors. In 1958,
while starting up his car for a visit to Ralph Fasanella, a Party
comrade, Suse's father suddenly died.
Mary Testa was the third of the four surviving children of the eight
to whom her mother gave birth. After her father, Sisto Pezzati, died
of tuberculosis when she was three, Cesarina, their widowed mother,
raised Mary and her siblings in a series of abysmal tenement flats in
and around Boston under conditions of extreme poverty. Cesarina took
in laundry and cleaned houses; her older brother left school to work
full time. Mary and her younger brother, Albert, the sibling with
whom she remained closest to throughout her life, scoured the
railroad tracks in search of lumps of coal for the kitchen stove and
chased after the ice wagon to gather ice chips to cool the food in
the icebox. The Pezzati children ate polenta every night and were
subject to taunts and beatings by local Irish kids. Later in life,
her mother refused to eat polenta, and Suse adds, she also "had
trouble digesting the Irish." (p. 71) Mary's older brother, Pietro,
became a successful portrait painter working in the Renaissance
style; Josephine, the older sister lived her life as a liberal Catholic.
In advance of Mary, Albert, of whom Suse speaks little, joined the
Communist Party. Had Suse conducted some additional research, she
would have found out that he did important work as a Communist. He
ran for State Senator for the American Labor Party in 1940, and later
served as secretary-treasurer of the International Mine, Mill, and
Smelter Workers' Union, which was expelled from the CIO in 1949 for
its Communist leadership. He was indicted under the Taft-Harley Act
for falsely signing an anti-Communist affidavit in 1956. Albert
served as the spokesperson for his union in the fight against
silicosis, a deadly disease afflicting hard-rock miners, and demanded
the establishment of a National Industrial Health Institute. Perhaps
it was not coincidental that Albert's struggle to save the lungs of
the workers he represented was associated with another rapacious lung
disease of the poor, tuberculosis, which killed his father before
Albert had a chance even to remember his face.
Suse glosses over her mother's heroic political career. From 1937 to
1939, Mary Testa was deeply involved with the Party's illegal work.
She traveled to Paris, where she met major leaders of the Italian
Communist Party including Palmiro Togliatti. During her travels, Mary
acted as a courier carrying concealed passports gathered from Italian
Americans; in Europe the passports were doctored to provide passage
for underground cadres in Italy to travel into Spain to join the
International Brigades. These passports later gave safe passage to
Italian Communists trapped in France after the defeat of the Spanish
Republic. Mary, who traveled to Fascist Italy and war-torn Spain, had
placed herself in mortal risk. This work also entailed the
possibility of imprisonment in the United States, at a time when the
federal government was indicting and convicting Communists (including
the Party's General Secretary, Earl Browder) for passport violations.
In 1940, upon her return from Europe, Mary, who had never finished
high school, became the founding co-editor of L'Unità del Popolo, a
weekly, which was the successor of four previous Communist
Party-sponsored Italian-language newspapersL'Alba Nuova, Il
Lavalatore, L'Unità Operaia, and Il Popolo. In 1942, shortly before
her first daughter, Carla, was born, she resigned from this position.
Thereafter her political work centered on giving speeches and writing
articles, in English and Italian, promoting the American Labor Party
and helping to elect its sole Congressman, Vito Marcantonio, whose
East Harlem district included Italian Harlem. Suse Rotolo remembers
that Mary took Carla and her to Marc's headquarters, where they
helped stuff envelopes for mailings to his constituents. On November
19, 1950, Mary Testa chaired a banquet that attracted four-hundred
friends and comrades of Michael Salerno, the editor of L'Unità del
Popolo, who gathered to say arriverderci before his imminent
deportation, accompanied by his American-born wife and son, to Italy.
(Salerno never returned to the United States.)
In A Freewhellin' Time there is no indication that Suse has applied
for copies of her parents' FBI files, which however heavily redacted
before their release, would have provided much information. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation was greatly interested in all the
members of he Communist Party and especially those who, as did Suse's
parents, had genuine influence. Their files are almost certainly
voluminous. Among other things, they would reveal if they had been
placed on the list for detention during a time of national emergency
as defined by the Attorney General and detail the extent of their
political activities. Rotolo never notes how her Italian-born father
obtained citizenship. If he had been naturalized, he was at risk for
deportation. (She mentions that the parents of her red-diaper friend
Pete Karmen were held on Ellis Island for deportation even though his
mother had entered the United States as a child.) A complete run of
L'Unità del Popolo is deposited in the New York Public Library. Yet,
there is no evidence that she read the paper her mother edited and
for which she frequently wrote. Had she done this work, Rotolo might
have been able to view her parents with greater equanimity. It might
also have allowed her to let go of her need to sanitize her parents
as members of "the idealistic, as opposed to the hardcore Stalinist,
wing of the American Communist Party." (p. 33)
"Parents were baggage." (p. 250) With this three-word sentence, Suse
Rotolo imagines that she has simultaneously justifies Dylan's
rejection of his parents and her dismissal of her mother as
preoccupied with drinking her way through her second widowhood.
Elsewhere, she speaks more positively of Mary Testa. "[Mother] taught
us about equality, that all men are created equal, and instilled in
[Carla and me] a sense of justice." (pp. 211-212) While still
attending high school, Suse traveled to Harlem where she worked in
support of the initiatives of the Congress of Racial Equality. She
also helped organize for The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy
Committeeorganizations her mother and father would have felt very
comfortable supporting. In 1964, Suse struck out on her own by
joining others in defying a United States government ban on travel to
Cuba. After returning back to the United States from this two-month
experience in political tourism, Rotolo found herself unable to repay
Cuba's hospitality with political work on behalf of the beleaguered
island. When at the end of a "break the blockade" rally at a college
in Boston it came her turn to give a rousing speech, she was unable
to rise to the occasion. "I was in a gloomy frame of mind that
evening [and] in general I had lost a good deal of my enthusiasm for
politics." (p. 330)
Suse Rotolo and others around Dylan discovered his identity through
rumor and a not-too-polite disclosure in a newspaper article that he
was not a runaway from a traveling circus, named "Bob Dylan," but
Robert Zimmerman, the oldest of two sons of second-generation Jewish
parents who owned and operated a clothing store in Hibbing,
Minnesota. He concealed his true identity from his friends and
associates and his whereabouts and nascent career from his parents.
Mary Testa sensed from her first encounter with Dylan that neither
his name nor his purported background were accurate. Royolo reports,
"Mother had a hunch right off the bat that the tales he told about
himself, not to mention his name, were bogus." (p. 104) Suse gives no
credit to her mother for her prescience, which surely represented a
fringe benefit from her life in the Party and especially from her
engagement in its illegal work, where identifying infiltrators was
literally a matter of life and death. Suse still doesn't quite get
what is so wrong about someone presenting himself, especially within
the context of an intimate relationship, as someone other than who he
is. Her continued protectiveness of Dylan, especially once she
crossed the Rubicon and put her pen to the first line of her memoir,
is difficult to comprehend.
At her mother's behest and by her largess, Rotolo traveled to Italy,
ostensibly to study Italian. But we hear little about her studies and
how they later enriched her life. She does not even chronicle the
typical high jinks typical of a '60' American student in Europe. A
Freewheelin' Time has no Epilogue, so the reader doesn't learn that
later, Suse returned to Italy where she found the true love of her
life to whom, along with their son, the book is dedicated. This
knowledge, withheld by the now unreasonably taciturn Ms. Rotolo, also
establishes the rectitude of her mother's motives. For her daughter,
who did not attend college, studying Italian had multiple benefits,
including something fairly rare in America, continuity with previous
generations.
American Folk Music and the Left
Rotolo's entrée into the small, but absorbing, world of folk music
was not through any musical talent; it was facilitated by a cultural
inheritance from her Communist parents with its attendant subculture.
The devotion of American progressivesCommunists and those influenced
by the Party's cultural outlook and activitiesto folk music flowed
directly from Georgi Dimitrof's insistence in 1935 in The United
Front against Fascism that Communists, "not relinquish all that is
valuable in the historical past of a country, [and that they help
create a] truly national culture that is national in form and
socialist in content." From the enunciation of the Popular Front
until the Cold War repression, the Communist movement had widespread
influence on American "high" and popular culture. Michael Denningin
his authoritative, The Cultural Front, which documents the pervasive
influence of the Communist movement on all aspects of American
culturestates, "The folk music revival was spearheaded by
Communists." They were responsible for creating an infrastructure
including an organization, People's Songs, a magazine, Sing Out, and
an organization of practitioners of this art form, People's Artists.
Major figures in the folk music world were Communists, including
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger; they along with musicologists and
performers sympathetic to the Communist movement, agreed that "the
people," its longings and lives should be the focus of progressive
music. Rotolo notes that in practice folk music movement "included
everything that wasn't easily classifiable, all of which was
freighted, most often implicitly, with left politics. [It was] an
amalgam of other genres: bluegrass to country to blues to gospel to
traditional." (p. 128) Rotolo earlier reminds the readers how much
international music (for example, the Armenian-American oud player
George Mgrdichian and the Israeli singer, Ron Eliran,) was a part of
this scene. The international music countered the dominant nativist
and chauvinist ideology of that decade, and the "folk" of the folk
music were "the workers," who (unbeknownst to themselves) had created
songs deemed inherently oppositional to the dominant culture. The
songs' subjects and underlying assumptions, in fact, rejected the
individualism, romanticism, and consumerism of the dominant culture.
However, this was much more due to their origins in a pre-industrial
society more than any association they may have had with socialism.
There were overtly Left songs, which set to traditional (often
religious) tunes had lyrics rousing the workers to join unions or
memorializing industrial accidents, but they were few in number. Be
that as it may, these songs helped sustain a besieged community.
Rotolo's Contribution to Dylan's Career
Suse Rotolo greatly underestimates her contribution to Dylan's
enthronement in the pantheon of American cultural giants. It was
neither Dylan's raspy voice nor his strumming technique that stopped
a generation in its tracks. A short list of political anthems that he
composed during his time together with Suse Rotolo enraptured a new
generation of political activists. His first album, Bob Dylan,
included an eclectic and uneven collection of traditional ballads
presented by a very young Woody Guthrie wannabe, who had some je ne
sais quoi. His second album, A Freewheelin' Timewhich featured
"Blowing in the Wind," "Masters of War," and "A Hard Rain's Gonna
Fall" – and his third album's, The Times They Are a-Changin'" – whose
soon-to-be classics "The Times They Are a Changin'," "With God on Our
Side," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol," "Only a Pawn in Their
Game," " When the Ship Comes In," and "Chains of Freedom" were
composed at a moment when American youth were poised to repudiate the
domestic cold war and mobilize a massive antiwar movement. This short
list of songs gave immediacy and gravity to Dylan's music; it
launched his work into the special space reserved for those few
performers/composers of American popular music who create classic
American popular music.
Suse Rotolo not only introduced Bob Dylan to the Left movement, she
also took him to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso's Guernica,
encouraged him to listen to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Three
Penny Opera, and exposed him to other aspects of the Old Left's
cultural amalgam of folk and high culture. "Pirate Jenny," from The
Three Penny Opera, provided Dylan with the framework for "The Times
They Are a–Changin'." "Only a Pawn in Their Game," which was based on
a front-page article published in the Leftist weekly, The National
Guardian, suggests that the murder of Medgar Evers was determined by
a culture where the ideology of white supremacy manipulated poor
white Southerners into foregoing their own economic interests, might
be the single most Marxist song composed in the United States. The
refinement of the lyrics of "When the Ship Comes In," the larger
framework of the song, its apocalyptic vision, elevate Dylan's song
to a higher category than, for example, the blithely optimistic ditty
of the contemporaneous "If I Had a Hammer" composed by Pete Seeger.
Conclusion
Suse Rotolo's memoir represents an important addition to the vast
literature on Bob Dylan, who is arguably the largest single influence
on American music to emerge from the 1960s. It also documents the
transmission of the culture of the Communist Left, to the wider
culturea topic that deserves further attention from the burgeoning
field of American Cultural Studies. At its heart, it is story of one
young woman's quest for an elusive autonomy from the complex
inheritance of heroic parents and a celebrated partner. Suse Rotolo
did something noble when she chose her own integrity over being a
satellite of a blazing star. However, she has not yet entirely worked
out the complexities of inheriting a rich parental legacy and later
attaining a larger degree of acceptance of the satisfactions of
participating in the construction of an American legend. Perhaps her
next volume should be about her parents, their own families, and
their very large, and less ambiguous, impact on her life.
--
Notes:
[1] Suse Rotolo, A Freewhellin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village
in the Sixties (New York: Broadway Books, 2008).
[2] Gerald Meyer, "Italian-Americans and the American Communist
Party," in The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics,
Labor, and Culture, pp. 205-227, eds. Philip Cannistraro and Gerald
Meyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
[3] On Italian Harlem see: Richard Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street:
Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985); Gerald Meyer, "Italian Harlem: Portrait of a
Community," pp. 57-67 in, The Italians of New York: Five Centuries of
Struggle and Achievement (New York: New York Historical Society and
the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 1999). On Mulberry
Street's Little Italy see Donna Giababacia, From Sicily to Elizabeth
Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984).
[4] Caroline Ware, Greenwich, 1920-1930: A Comment on American
Civilization in the Post-War Years (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1963), pp. 152-202; Donald Tricarico, The Italians
of Greenwich Village: The Social Structure and Transformation of an
Ethnic Community (New York: Center of Migration Studies, 1964), pp.
xvi, 2, 103.
[5] The tolerance of Greenwich Village did not extend to racial and
ethnic minorities. In 1950, in its three most Italian American census
tracts, the number of African Americans numbered only 40 out of
4,116; by 1960 there were 138 living there. From 1960 to 1980; during
this same period, the number of Puerto Ricans living in this area
actually declined from 327 to 114. Tricarico, Italians of Greenwich
Village, p. 76.
[6] It is possible that Mary retained the surname "Testa" so that her
connection with Pete was not so immediately apparent. As editor of
L'Unità del Popolo, her Party affiliation was undeniable. With few
exceptions, those Communists "colonizing" factories had to conceal
their membership. Hence, by keeping her first husband's name she was
protecting her husband's anonymity.
[7] In his autobiographical novel, Going Away: A Report, a Memoir
(New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1962), Clancy Sigal argued that the
Communist Party attracted working class youth and transformed them
into bookish petite bourgeoisie, thereby over time separating them
from the working class.
[8] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and
an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000),
pp. 40-41. Founded in 1938, Café Society, became New York City's
first truly integrated nightclub, which "marked the emergence of a
Popular Front cabaret blues, a fusion of jazz and political cabaret."
After being targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
it closed in 1948. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring
of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997),
pp. 323, 360.
[9] Gerald Meyer, "Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti: Their
Legacy," Voices of Italian Americana, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2008), p. 64.
[10] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary
Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 221-230,
271-273, 281-283.
[11] Victor Grossman (Stephan Wechsler), Crossing the River: A Memoir
of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
[12] Fasanella, who had been reduced by the McCarthy repression to
working in his brother-in-laws gas station, was soon to achieve great
acclaim for his copious production of social realist paintings many
of which are part of the permanent collections of major museums.
Patrick Watson, Fasanella's City: The Paintings of Ralph Fasanella
with the Story of His Life and Art New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.
[13] Robert Shrank, Wasn't That a Time?: Growing Up Radical in
America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 313-314.
[14] Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression
Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 406, 408.
[15] Nunzio Pernicone, "Introduction," special issue devoted to the
Italian American Press of The Italian American Review (Spring/Summer
2001), p. 5.
[16] Gerald Meyer, "L'Unità del Popolo: The Voice of Italian American
Communism, 1939-1951," Italian American Review (Spring/Summer 2001): 121-156.
[17] Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 1902-1954
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989).
[18] Meyer, "L'Unità del Popolo, pp. 126, 139. The weekly ceased
regularly publishing on August 11, 1951. During the McCarthy Era, the
Justice Department indicted, at least, fifteen editors of
pro-Communist newspapers (including those publishing in Italian,
Korean, Yiddish, Greek, Chinese, and Finnish) under the Smith Act for
the purpose of allowing the federal government to seek their
denaturalization and deportation. David Caute, The Great Fear: The
Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1978), 239.
[19] Georgi Dimitrof, The United Front against Fascism (New York, New
Century Publishers, 1950), pp. 78, 81.
[20] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 283.
[21] Robbie Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon: People's Songs, American
Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1989).
[22] Ronald Cohen, "Woody the Red?," in Hard Travelin': The Life and
Legacy of Woody Guthrie, pp. 138-152, eds. Robert Santelli and Emily
Davidson (Hanover, MA: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
[23] Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, director, Jim Brown (2007).
[24] Lieberman, My Song Is My Weapon, pp. xix, 53.
[25] Suse's two-years-older sister, Carla (who, like so many other
red diaper babies, was named after Karl Marx), worked for Alan Lomax,
the renowned folk music collector; she also contributed to Dylan's
musical and political education, but Suse's memoir does not include
this part of the story. Although she gives her no credit, Carla must
have contributed to her younger sister's involvement in folk music.
Dylan vilified Carla in "Ballad in Plain D" when he hurled at her the
epithet "parasite."
.
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