Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

210 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN 0. G. KELLEY
agogue Itche Goldberg proclaimed in 1942 that the "melting pot has a scorched
bottom," he argued for a multicultural, even multilingual, future which only a
cooperative society could bring. 36 Black Communists, heavily situated among the
Harlem intelligentsia and artistic crowd, could share this vision because they presumed
that whites (i.e., Jews and some others) would patronize Black culture
while elaborating their own. The Cold War devastated this working model of
interracial unity without, however, destroying it entirely. Jewish artists had
already seen the limits of public presentation in their Hollywood efforts. Body and
Soul (1947), written and directed by two Jewish Communists, Abraham Polonsky
and Robert Rossen, starred John Garfield and Canada Lee in an extraordinarily
ambitious boxing film showing the destruction of an interracial friendship as a
metaphor for capitalism's effect on human beings. It was one of the last credited
productions by Polonsky for more than twenty years, and one of the last for
Garfield and Lee (both personally destroyed by the effects of Blacklist). 37
In the literary world, a group of anti-Stalinist Jewish intellectuals who
emerged after the war as a dominant force on the high cultural landscape occasionally
took up issues of race, and sometimes engaged in dialogue with Black
writers like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. Too often, especially
in Commentary and the Partisan Review, they used such issues mainly to slap
at Black opponents of the Cold War, and to remind Black intellectuals of their
good fortune as Americans. By contrast, Communists fallen on political hard
times seized upon real Black-Jewish intellectual and artistic collaboration as one
of their few remaining attractive features. The editorial board of Masses and
Mainstream, for instance, was made up almost entirely of Jewish and Black artists
and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Charles White,
Theodore Ward, Lloyd Brown, Samuel Sillen, Herbert Aptheker, Howard Fast,
Hugo Gellert, and Sidney Finklestein. At the height of the Cold War, Jewish
Communist critics were celebrating Black literary achievements, highlighting a
new generation of Black visual artists, and attacking Hollywood's portrayal of
African Americans in popular film. Masses and Mainstream also became a vehicle
for Black scholars writing on history and politics in the United States, Africa, and
the Caribbean. Likewise, the Communist Party-influenced magazine Jewish Life
devoted its entire February 1953 issue to African American history, reprinting the
writings of Frederick Douglass as well as more contemporary essays by Black
Communists. 38
Even as the last moment of radical hope in a generation ebbed, remarkable
occurrences suggested lost possibilities. The doomed Henry Wallace campaign of
1948 inspired without doubt the most interracial social network ever seen on the
Left, and perhaps in American society at large. Bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie's
appearance on the cover of Life magazine, surrounded by white teenagers, captured
(or perhaps distorted) the surge of common generational sensibilities later
recalled by many veteran radicals. Gillespie was not oblivious to the interracial
culture of the pre-war Left, having known "a bunch of musicians more socially