Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

226 // PAUL BUHLE AND ROBIN 0. G. KELLEY
38. See for example, Samuel Sillen, "Charles W. Chestnut: A Pioneer Negro
Novelist," Masses and Mainstream 6, no. 2 (February 1953), 8-14; Sidney Finkelstein,
"Charles White's Humanist Art," Masses and Mainstream 6, no. 2 (February 1953),
43—46; V.J. Jerome wrote small pamphlet, The Negro in Hollywood Films (NewYork,
1951) published by Masses and Mainstream. On the New York intellectuals, see Alan
Walcl, The New York Intellectuals (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987); Judy Kutulas, The Long
War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940 (Durham, NC,
1995), 209-33.
39. See Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not.. .to Bop (New York, 1979),
287; Kenneth L. Kann, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers (Ithaca, NY, 1993). Despite the
admiration beboppers like Gillespie and Charlie Parker felt for Robeson, the leading
Communist cultural critics had little admiration for bebop. They generally characterized
the music as "mindless" improvisation with pretensions of high culture, comparing
it unfavorably to Negro spirituals and early swing jazz. See Abner W. Berry,
"The Future of Negro Music," Masses and Mainstream 6, no. 2 (February 1953),
15-22; Sidney Finklestein,_/tfzz: A People's Music (New York, 1948).
40. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 326; Leibman, Jews and the Left, 507—14;
Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 164-70; Melech Epstein, The Jew and Communism,
1919-1941 (New York, 1959); Gerald Home, Communist Front?: The Civil Rights
Congress, 1946—1956 (Rutherford, NJ, 1988). Cruse argues, with some insight, that
the stylized cultural policies of the Harlem Communists (as reflected in Paul
Robeson's Freedom tabloid of the early 1950s) restrained creative approaches of Black
intellectuals. But as Cruse makes too much of the Jewish intellectuals' role among
Black communists, he fails to capture the complexity and the variety of artisticapproaches
among Black radicals, demanding (for instance) that Raisin in the Sun be
more than a "family" drama when the road to commercial success lay in that direction
as it would for many non-Black productions fitted to commercial styles. Moreover, the
folk and jazz stylings of musicians around the Left, the canvas-work, poetry, and
fiction cannot be confined to "realism" or "naturalism," whatever the preferences of
Daily Worker reviewers may have been. The same is true for the Yiddish sector which
saw a last efflorescence in the 1950s.
41. Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth
of the New Left (New York, 1987), 33, 143, 186-88.
42. Half-Jewish Joan Baez, the early Bob Dylan, and a multitude of others should
be included. On the folksong movements, see Robbie Lieberman, "My Song is My
Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930—1950,
(Urbana, IL, 1989).
43. Conrad Lynn, There Is a Fountain (Brooklyn, 1993 edition), 108. Indeed, even
A. Philip Randolph's formation of the Negro American Labor Council could create