Rebel Arts Group of the Socialist Party

REBEL ARTS GROUP OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY. From its formation in 1901, the Socialist Party of America (SP) welcomed cultural workers of note into its upper ranks, including Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Jack London. Charles H. Kerr published Socialist Songs with Music in the founding year. Assorted celebrities including Sandburg, Lindsay, and London as well as opera grand dame Amelia Galli-Curci, literary comedian Oscar Ameringer, and Helen Keller (a media sensation) all joined the presidential campaigns of Eugene V. Debs. At the local level, a variety of singers, poets, musicians and others kept audiences inspired for the socialist message.

In every immigrant socialist group, plays, choral groups and particular expressions of dance and music colored socialist holiday celebrations. The best organized, most intense activities could be found in the insular Finnish communities and in the urban Jewish, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods. The 1919 split in the Socialist Party truncated English language activities in particular. But the 1920 appearance of the Socialist Sunday School Song Book, by the Brownsville Socialist Sunday School in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then a hotbed of SP activity, demonstrated a determination among loyalists to carry on culturally as well as politically.

The Socialist Party developed a formal cultural program only with the founding of the Rebel Arts Group in 1934, based in the Rand School. Like much of the formal cultural activity around the SP, the Group owed its existence to Party leader and journalist Samuel H. Friedman (1897-1990). Friedman’s own activism surfaced first in 1917, when his anti-war editorial in the City College student newspaper defied the Espionage Act and earned him a suspension from college. An established editor of Women’s Wear Daily during the years to follow, Friedman found the time to guide a range of educational and organizing arts activities for the Group. Its Drama Club performed new, radical plays in the Rand School’s auditorium as well as in union halls to audiences of socialists and served as a recruitment among a wider, New York working-class. Party-owned radio station, WEVD-AM (named for Debs), soon began broadcasting the dramas. A Camera Club and other visual arts programming also developed, as well as music components, around the 1935 publication of The Rebel Song Book: Eighty-Seven Socialist and Labor Songs for Voice and Piano.

Serving as editor of SP organs The New Leader and The Call, Friedman compiled this omnibus collection with Music Editor Dorothy Bachman. Among its contents could be found “Come, Rally Youth” of the Young People’s Socialist League, also the “Anthem of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union” and the “Workmen’s Circle Hymn” for the Arbeter Ring/Workmens Circle fraternal organization. The Rebel Song Book also included IWW-based material, folk songs of various nations, protest parodies, and several titles by later Communist Party supporter Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (in the next decade a member of the Almanac Singers), anarchist poet Arturo Giovannitti and leftwing emigre composer Hanns Eisler. The Rebel Song Book thereby upheld the victory of the Left as its goal, notwithstanding the ongoing, often-bitter rivalry between the Socialist and Communist parties.

The same year of The Rebel Song Book’s publication, Friedman also began a monthly periodical, ARISE: Socialist and Labor Cultural Magazine. Plans for a national SP cultural organization in the first issue of this short-lived journal were set out: “ARISE wields the weapon of art for the toiling masses along the whole cultural front—graphic arts, photography, literature, the drama, the dance, music, criticism.” These were goals unattainable in or around the badly divided and fading Socialist Party during the second half of the 1930s. The departure of the more conservative Party faction in 1936 threw the Rand School and radio station WEVD into the hands of an older crowd, sentimentally devoted to the vision of socialism but unable to attract young people or major cultural figures of the day. Future Trotskyist notable George Novack (1905-1992) noted as early as 1936 that Norman Thomas was “publicly bemoaning” a reality of the Popular Front days: “the Stalinists had completely captured the cultural front.”

The Rebel Arts Group remained active during the 1930s with a series of performances and workshops at the Rand School through the 1940s but left little evidence of these events. The expansive cultural programs of the New Deal in arts, theater, and documentation allowed for the participation of artists and cultural functionaries quietly Communist until the abolition of the New Deal projects and the rise of the Cold War. The Communist Party’s own Cultural Commission picked up on the New Deal activities with mixed results. Friedman himself, meanwhile, seemed to turn to electoral work, as a frequent socialist candidate for political office, both locally and nationally. At his death in 1990, a New York Times obituary detailed his union activity and his place in the history of the civil rights movement but failed to address Friedman’s apparently forgotten arts activism.

A little-remembered contemporary of Friedman’s, Elizabeth Morgan (1910-1971), was a musician of training who began collecting radical folk-oriented songs at Hull House in Chicago. Later residing in Ohio, she ran for public office on the Socialist ticket. A multi-instrumentalist and teacher, Morgan compiled her own songbook in 1958, Socialist and Labor Songs of the 1930s, but was unable to find a publisher. It was published posthumously, largely thanks to the work of Utah Phillips, by the Charles H. Kerr Company in 1997. This ecumenical collection, written in piano arrangements, includes older standards, spirituals and folk songs plus works of Brecht/Eisler, Irish revolutionist James Connolly, Maurice Sugar, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and others, as well as Morgan originals and several pieces arranged by Dorothy Bachman.

By 1959, a revived Young People’s Socialist League published The Socialist Song Book, edited by Oscar Edelman, which in later editions included civil rights “freedom songs” along with labor numbers and glaring examples of sectarian rivalry (“the Daily Worker Song” and “That Trotskyite Mammy of Mine” among them). Its introduction stated: “The socialist movement has always been a singing movement,” contrasting the Party’s factionalized political history with the casual group singing that remained a common practice throughout. Among other musicians, Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002), during his Young Peoples Socialist League tenure (c. 1957-1964), often performed the music of the Socialist Song Book.

The 1972 split in socialist ranks saw Friedman joining the Social-Democrats USA. The badly diminished Socialist Party never revived its cultural program. New York socialist leader and sometime presidential candidate, David McReynolds (1929-2018), complained at the lack of Party-organized arts between the late 1950s and the 2010s. Members in Austin, Texas, however, encouraged a local arts circle around the jazz-rock band Jam Cadre to perform for local SP events, receiving area prominence. Leaflets advertising a benefit for the Willa Kenoyer/Ron Ehrenreich presidential ticket of 1988 announced that the event featured “multi-dimensional entertainment by Jam Cadre.”

Socialist writers have produced works through the past decades, none affiliated with the Socialist Party. In 2020, the Socialist Party boasted no cultural program or commission, the SDUSA expired, and while the expansive Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) attracted a wealth of performers and cultural activists in various public events, little formal cultural programming had developed in the national organization.

Cohen, Ronald D., and Dave Samuelson. Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926-1953. Bear Family Records, 1996.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. New York: Verso, 1999 edition.

Dean, Jodi. Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Friedman, Samuel, editor, and music editor Dorothy Bachman. The Rebel Song Book: Eighty-Seven Socialist and Labor Songs for Voice and Piano. New York: Rand School Press, 1933.

Morgan, Elizabeth, editor. Socialist and Labor Songs of the 1930s. Chicago: Charles H Kerr, 1997.