Adamic, Louis

ADAMIC, LOUIS (1898-1951). A talented and popular journalist and organizer, Adamic played a highly prominent role in the American antifascist and antiracist coalition of the 1930s and 1940s. Because antifascists did not comprise a single organization or even a single movement, they worked necessarily within large and overlapping groups and coalitions, including Communists, Socialists, anarchists and left-leaning liberals like himself who chose the “progressive” label. For more than a decade, he helped bind this coalition together, delivering speeches to packed crowds, offering radio commentary, and writing books and articles that appeared in such venues as the New York Times, The Nation, Harper’s Weekly, and the Saturday Evening Post. A whirlwind of energy, he had penned some 13 books and over 500 articles by the time of his death in 1951.

Born in Slovenia on 28 March 28 1898, Adamic arrived in the United States at the age of fourteen in December, 1912. He worked various jobs including agricultural laborer, janitor, and auto worker before joining the Army during World War I. After the war, he worked as a clerk, which gave him time to write. Adamic’s career took off when H.L. Mencken, the US’s leading humorist and editor the American Mercury, the most popular periodical in the country at that time, published eight of Adamic’s articles. From there, Adamic wrote Dynamite (1931), if misleading in some respects, one of the first popular histories of the US labor movement. He then turned to the story of being an immigrant in the United States, Laughing in the Jungle (1932). His The Native Return (1934) made him a veritable household name, as he wrote one of the first books in English about Yugoslavia. Severely critical of the autocratic and ethnocentric ruling Serbian monarchy that controlled the new nation since its formation after World War I, he likened Yugoslavia’s King Alexander to fascist leaders in Italy, Germany, and Spain. For Adamic, the emergence of anti-fascist leader Josef Broz Tito not only promised a new beginning for Yugoslavia, but a model of egalitarian pluralism for the rest of the world.

Adamic argued that the United States was not fundamentally a white Anglo Protestant nation, as so often claimed by nativists, but a land of racial minorities, migrants and refugees continuously redefining themselves and their role. He considered the rise of fascism to be a great danger, not only to the world but also to the United States itself. For Adamic, fascism had successfully united disparate strands of conservative and reactionary outlooks into an anti-Enlightenment counterrevolution. That counterrevolution sought to destroy democracy by appealing to racial superiority, championing corporate hegemony, and glorifying violence. To successfully oppose this menace, antifascists had to take up the struggle for racial and ethnic equality, workers’ rights, and the rights of nations to self-determination.

Adamic’s advocacy for racial and ethnic equality during the New Deal and War years had a wide impact. His writing and speaking, urging the New Deal coalition further leftward, effectively helped to change middle school, high school, and college curricula. As a spokesman of the American Slav Congress, he attracted an especially wide following around the ethnic groups crucial to the CIO and to the political victories of the Roosevelt coalition. In 1941, he also became one of the few voices opposed to Japanese incarceration. His activism became even more controversial from the perspective of federal officials when he called upon Americans to support Yugoslavia’s radical guerrilla fighters, the Partisans, and their leader, Tito.

Tito had promised his soldiers of Serb, Slovene, Croat, Montenegrin, Bosnian Muslim, and Macedonian descent that defeating their Axis occupiers would bring a Yugoslavia based on ethnic equality, and when he delivered on that promise, Adamic considered himself vindicated. He continued to support Tito after the Yugoslav leader broke from the Soviets in 1948. Adamic hoped that under Tito’s determinedly pluralist guidance, Communist Yugoslavia would evolve into a true democratic republic, even if the Russians had become imperialists like the Western powers. He predicted correctly that Yugoslavia would join with colonized nations, in what would become the Non-Aligned Movement, to champion a world where countries did not have ally with either the United States and Soviet Union.

After the War and the death of Roosevelt, Adamic’s status slipped rapidly downward. American liberalism quickly lost its progressive edge. His own progressive politics and his work with antifascists alienated him from the newest Europen arrivals, militantly anti-communist and sometimes racist or pro-fascist refugees from Eastern Europe. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had long considered him a danger, agents surveilling him for nearly a decade, certain that anyone who praised a Communist was a subversive and anyone militantly supporting Black rights could not be far from Communist subversion. Ironically, as the FBI considered Adamic a threat to national security for supporting Tito, the US government poured millions of dollars into Yugoslavia as the Truman Administration attempted to maintain the Soviet-Yugoslav division.

To a frustrated Adamic, both liberals and Communists had proven themselves unreliable. Liberals, too afraid to enact measures that would directly confront racism, corporate power, and imperialism, mirrored Communists who blindly followed the dictates of Moscow. Adamic’s final political crusade, in support of Henry Wallace for president in 1948, cost him the last of his popularity as a writer. Like many other victims of the Cold War, he fell almost overnight into poverty and obscurity.

Adamic died from a gunshot wound to the head on 4 September 4 1951, at his New Jersey farmhouse. The coroner ruled his death a suicide, but New Jersey State Police detectives, the FBI, and a number of others suspected foul play. Adamic had been working on his thirteenth book, an account of his 1949 visit to Tito’s Yugoslavia. His anticommunist critics used his death to narrate their own version of his life. They naturally portrayed him as an agent of Stalin who broke with the Kremlin and was assassinated as a consequence. Teachers and college professors ceased assigning his books, and his very version progressive politics, rooted in his opposition to fascism, faded into the background. Adamic’s memory among labor scholars suffered from his own conspiracy-like treatment of unionists, in Dynamite, bombing the anti-socialist Los Angeles Times in 1910. Adamic had believed, as sympathetic readers of his books believed, that his real aim was to characterize individual violence as a tragic but apparently endemic part of American life and the American labor movement.

Christian, Henry A. Louis Adamic: A Checklist. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971.

Enyeart, John P. Death to Fascism: Louis Adamic’s Fight for Democracy. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2019.

Klemenčič, Matjaž. “American Slovenes and the Leftist Movements in the United States in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of American Ethnic History 15, (Spring 1996).

Shiffman, Dan. Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adamic. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.