The Journal-Sentinel's McIlheran don't know much about history, Part I

As one might expect for an essay that manages to describe both Hitler and Stalin as leftists, there's a great deal of sloppy, reductionist thinking in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel conservative columnist Patrick McIlheran's recent blog post "Right-wingers, such as Stalin."

There's a great deal to unpack in this one, but given the Brawler is pressed for time he'll focus on these two sentences from the piece:

And Stalin was, most definitely, left-wing. He defined left-wing for a whole Depression-era generation of American leftists, in fact.

Intimating that Stalin was some sort of lodestar for all or even most Depression-era leftists -- that they woke up wondering WWJSD? -- is a nice smear against women and men of the time. And it's a nice way to take shots at the heritage of today's "leftists." And crying "Stalinism" or "Bolshevism" is always a good way to demonize supposedly left-of-center ideas such as national health care.

Sadly for McIlheran, his claim has little basis in fact.

To be sure, there was a Communist Party in the United States during the Depression. And a fair number of intellectuals, writers and artists were members or fellow travelers (John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson and Langston Hughes among them). As were a distinct minority of influential and effective labor leaders (and CP-leaning unions ultimately were booted out of the CIO).

But to say Stalin "defined left-wing for a whole Depression-era generation of American leftists" overlooks the fact that most U.S. leftists of the time were not Communists of any stripe, neither CPUSA nor anti-Stalin Trotskyists.

Consider these numbers, courtesy of David M. Kennedy's "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945" (pp.222-223).

The CPUSA had fewer than 30,000 members in 1934, 60 percent of them foreign-born. Fully a third of them were in  New York City. CPUSA presidential candidate William Z. Foster netted 102,000 votes in 1932 -- the party's electoral peak.

That same year, Norman Thomas received 884,000 votes as the candidate of the Socialist Party (which was not a member of the Moscow-directed Third International), a party that was a shadow of its former self under Eugene V. Debs.

Patrick McIlheran can say Stalin "defined left-wing for a whole Depression-era generation of American leftists" when the party that spoke for the USSR netted less an eighth of the votes given the Socialist candidate. But it's all right if we laugh at him.

As Kennedy says:

But though they made some inroads among industrial workers, raised some hell in the streets, and fought, often courageously, for the rights of black Americans, the American Communists remained a samll and isolated group. ... After five years of depression, and with millions still unemployed, that number testified bluntly to the great distance that separated Communist doctrine and tactics from American political reality.

Who defined the left for a "Depression-era leftist"? Hard to say, as it's not clear how McIlheran is defining the term. As for who defined the possibilities of left politics for most Depression-era Americans, the Brawler would nominate the likes of FDR or John Lewis or Walter Reuther or A. Philip Randolph.

But not Stalin.

Comments

[3rd way]

Paddy Mac's vilification of the left is pathetic. Anyone that tries to lump their ideological opponents into evil groups should be shouted down, but somehow this clown is given space on the JSOnline page everyday.

Darn that lefty rag.

[somewhere in the middle]

Yeah, he's an interesting one indeed. Wonder what he would propose to get out of the Depression.

(Wonder who was President at the Great Crash...)

[Hermes]

Well done sir. Some of us legitimate commie lefties don't take kindly to being lumped in with mass murdering psychopaths.