Fellow Travelers

FELLOW TRAVELERS. Persons who sympathize with a political party (usually a Marxist group) and tend to follow its political line but are not formal members are known as fellow travelers. Although they may contribute to party causes, they pay no dues, have no party card, and are not bound by party discipline. Individuals may remain in this status rather than becoming members for many reasons, the more common being that they simply are unwilling to undertake the rigors of party life or have a disagreement on some aspect of the party’s structure or agenda. In some cases the party may prefer persons to remain outside its formal ranks. In the case of famous persons, this is done in order that a celebrity may be seen as uncompromised by organizational affiliation or simply to protect that person from ideological attack. During the 1950s the term fellow travelers was used in a pejorative way by anticommunists. Fellow travelers were attacked for lacking the courage of their conviction or alternatively for hiding their true convictions from the public through a technicality.