John Reed Clubs

JOHN REED CLUBS. Founded in New York in November 1929 by the editorial board of the New Masses, the John Reed Clubs (JRCs) were educational and agitational in purpose. They were modeled on literary studios for worker-correspondents created by the Proletcult in the Soviet Union, which Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman had visited earlier in the decade. The shift in Comintern policy into the Third Period in 1928 made the American Left take the class war into every aspect of culture. With the slogan “Art Is a Class Weapon,” designed to emphasize the clubs’ opposition to aesthetic doctrines of art for art’s sake, the clubs offered an alternative to the “lost generation” and the postwar voices of disillusionment. The JRCs were militant, energetic, and highly political. Branches soon formed in the larger American cities, as well as in smaller towns like Carmel, California, and Kalamazoo, Michigan. By 1934 there were more than thirty clubs, with a reported membership of twelve hundred. A journal, the JRC Bulletin, was published by the national headquarters; regional and national conventions were held; and JRCs for artists were created. The leaders of the JRC were generally members of the Communist Party, though the role of the Party was sometimes disguised. The executive committee of the national organization included Joseph Freeman, Whittaker Chambers, and the artists Louis Lozowick and William Gropper.

The full range of club activities constitutes a legacy of radical cultural practice that the American Left, or the Communist Party, has rarely approached since. Members of the Chicago JRC in 1931 made posters for demonstrations and parades in the city. Murals in the Peoples Auditorium were painted; dramatic material and scenery was provided for the Blue Blouses, a youth drama group; demonstrations were organized on high school and university campuses to win support for the International War Day on 1 August; the program for the John Reed Memorial Day held at the Peoples Auditorium was written by members and comprised songs, dances, music, a mass chant of an anti-war poem, and a talk on Reed by the former Wobbly Ralph Chaplin. A proletarian art exhibit, including work by Ivan Albright and Mitchell Siporin, and photographs from the JRC Film and Photo Group, was held in the summer. In December, a JRC Ball was held in Chicago to raise money for activities in 1932. The inner life of the JRC was less impressive: Party manipulation, ideological rows, and sectarianism were the order of the day. The New York JRC could call upon a wider range of literary talent (an impressive series of lectures was given by Kenneth Burke, Edward Dahlberg, Horace Gregory, Granville Hicks, John Howard Lawson, and Philip Rahv), but even here the Chicago JRC could boast of the discovery of Richard Wright.

The JRC sent a joint delegation with the New Masses in 1930 to the Kharkov Congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW). The delegation, which included Mike Gold and William Gropper, was divided along sectarian lines, with younger members seeking to block the affiliation of individuals like Upton Sinclair to the IURW. They called for stricter discipline and adherence, especially in the pages of the New Masses, to the rigorous demands of proletarian literature. The problem of relations with non-Party sympathizers was never solved by the JRC and remained a source of conflict. Alexander Trachtenberg, director of International Publishers and the link between the Party’s central committee and the JRC, opposed sectarianism at the JRC convention in 1934, and when it became obvious that the club was unable to keep step with the evolution of Comintern policy toward a Popular Front, the JRC was quietly dissolved and Party efforts were directed toward the League of American Writers. Isolated cities retained active clubs into the next decade, but the journals, from the modest mimeographed Proletcult (Portland and Seattle) and Red Spark (Cleveland) to the prestigious and elegantly printed Partisan Review, edited by Rahv and William Phillips, nearly all died. The loss to American letters was not severe: it takes longer than five years to change a culture. But when the Partisan Review was reborn as an anti-Stalinist journal of the Left in 1936, the erosion of Party influence on the American intellectual Left had begun in earnest.

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961.

Homberger, Eric. American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939: Equivocal Commitments. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstein. “’New Masses” and John Reed Club Artists, 1926-1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. 12(Spring 1989), pp.56-75.