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Raising Reds
Paul C Mishler, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-231-11045-6.
Between 1922 and 1944 the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) organised and ran an extensive range of programmes, clubs, camps and societies designed to nurture, educate and discipline the children of American communist families, and to draw in recruitable youngsters from outside the party's immediate circles. Raising Reds provides an illuminating and broadly sympathetic account of the CPUSA's attempts to generate and sustain a 'young communist' current, that is sensitive to the shifting ideological perspectives that guided the party's 'youth work', and able to incorporate the perspectives of both participants and organisers. Richly sourced, the author makes effective use of archival and manuscript collections, party publications, anti-communist federal government documents, and interviews with party youth workers and organisers, as well as a wealth of secondary material.
In his introduction, Mishler argues that this exploration of the 'lived culture' of the US communist movement is a necessary corrective to the 'Soviet-determined' models of the CPUSA being aggressively promoted by a number of hostile historians now able to raid the archives of the Comintern. Yet the temptation facing new cultural historians of the American CP, anxious to rescue the object of their fascination from accusations of treachery and illegitimacy, is to 'over-compensate' for the crude determinism of Haynes, Klehr and others, and in so doing produce an excessively optimistic or indulgent account of party life. Mishler's evident desire to 'accentuate the positive' does, on a number of occasions, lead him to accept the formal 'mission statements' of the CPUSA's youth programmes at face value, rather than subject them to critical scrutiny.
With that proviso, Raising Reds remains an intriguing and insightful text on a fascinating and little explored area of early western communist party activity. Mishler succeeds in isolating the central dilemmas and tensions that the CPUSA's youth projects were confronted by, and his assessments of the way that the party struggled to reconcile them is sophisticated and suitably nuanced. Through his evocative descriptions of party youth activities Mishler captures some memorable images — Paul Robeson umpiring a summer camp baseball tournament; earnest young communist volunteers knitting socks for the war effort; campfire folk evening sing-alongs conducted by Pete Seeger — to name but three.
In the 1920s, a high percentage of CPUSA members were new immigrants. This left both party officials and party families with a clear, but far from straight-forward, choice. Should the party direct its energies into efforts to establish supportive, but culturally distinct, ethnic societies among immigrant communists; or should it seek to integrate immigrant communist communities into mainstream 'indigenous' US society? The party's youth agencies pursued both 'separatist' and 'assimilationist' strategies at different times in response to this tension. Although the early CPUSA upheld a 'scientific' Marxist-Leninist vision of the communist project, at particular moments youth work could represent a 'warm current' in party thinking, in which summer camps could be conceived of as both 'vacation resorts and utopian experiments.' (p.83) In the most sectarian of the Third Period years, however, youth work could be didactic, austere and narrowly instrumental. Shifting party perceptions of gender found expression in youth activities, which at times could be integrated and equally supportive of girls and boys, and at other times differentiated and sharply restrictive for both. The 'historical certainty' of the CPUSA's marxism also imbued its early youth projects with a bold sense of self-confidence and excitement which provided much needed (if wholly illusory) reassurance for an often marginalised and precarious communist community.
In its early years the CPUSA saw in its youth work the opportunity (and the duty) to reproduce 'the party in miniature.' Youth work followed party-prescribed political objectives, and in its campaigns served as a junior adjunct to the parent organisation. The priorities were to inculcate a 'revolutionary' consciousness amongst the young, and combat the 'insidious' influence of school and 'capitalist society.' Importantly, the intention was also to displace particular ethnic allegiances with a suitably 'internationalist, marxist' identity. The metaphors were simple ones. In this vision, youth needed to be moulded into 'the littlest proletariat'. In the directed activities of the YP summer camps, the children were seen to take on the identity of 'the workers' while the adults played the role of 'the party'.
Mishler's positive view of the Popular Front strategy, common to a majority of the 'new historians' of the CPUSA, is reflected in the priority afford to that period of party youth work. The onset of Popular Front politics saw the Young Pioneers disbanded, and the promotion, in its place, of the youth sections of the International Workers' Order (IWO), the organisation which became 'the center of the political culture of Popular Front communism in working-class communities.' (p.67) Greater emphasis was now placed on recognising and seeking to synthesise particular ethnic identities into new radical senses-of-self and community, and on negotiating new relationships with the dominant culture. The scope of youth work itself was redefined to include recreational, sporting and cultural activities as well as the traditional political ones. The stated goal of 'socialism' was gradually replaced in the IWO's lexicon by new 'democratic' and 'social' objectives and with a special concern for a breadth of 'labor and progressive movements.'
The effort of jewish communists to construct a radical, secular jewish working class culture — in particular through the work of the after-school clubs, the shules — is also examined and the tensions between ethnic, religious and political affiliations with which jewish members of the CPUSA grappled is discussed. A chapter on 'primers for the revolution' provides a diverting and thoughtful account of the little-studied theme of communist children's literature — an overview enhanced by the inclusion of a discursive booklist in an accompanying appendix. In these works Mishler finds additional evidence of the tension that pitted 'particular' against 'universal', and 'insider' against 'outsider', identities — here rehearsed in the morality tales of children's story books, and the 'lessons' of approved educational and scientific texts.
Three radical summer camps from the Popular Front era are analysed in some detail. The renowned Camp Kinderland evolved from the work of the shules, celebrated and explored radical jewish culture, and was recognised as autonomous from, if still closely allied to, the CPUSA. In the work of Kinderland, art, music and creative self-expression were seen as central concerns. Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, also strongly influenced by jewish culture, pursued a multicultural programme of work and recreation. The integrated ethnic and racial mix at the camp drew the hostile attention of both camp neighbours and the state authorities. Camp Woodland looked to merge 'urban-based radicalism with the "naturally" democratic traditions of rural America' (p.99), to create a new and authentic oppositional culture, in which folk music was to have a significant place.
Mishler offers a measured appreciation of the similarities and specificities of each of the three camps. However, in doing so he remains too reliant on formal statements of camp practice, such as the authorised testimony recorded in year books, which, by their very nature, communicate a particular version of the actual experience of camp life. In this account no-one complains of a stolen summer, or moans about irksome parades or tedious lecture programmes. Political conflicts are rare, and camp workers and children co-operate harmoniously. The chorus is one of contentment and fortitude. Mishler does acknowledge the existence of a number of tensions between camp visitors, but his decision not to explore these — more problematic — themes can be frustrating.
In a brief concluding chapter Mishler notes how the crises that rocked the CPUSA between 1946 and 1956 made it all but impossible to sustain a viable youth programme. Given the impact that wider social, political — and generational — changes had on the party's ability to function and exert influence more widely, this is, Mishler concedes, hardly surprising. The Families Committee of Smith Act Victims is highlighted as the last CPUSA-backed body of the time directly concerned with issues of child welfare. With the party now in retreat, the Committee's work reflected the narrow, defensive pre-occupations forced on party families by the increasingly hostile anti-communist climate. Mishler suggests that in the inhospitable context of the Cold War years, US communist culture retreated from the public social sphere to resettle in the more discrete and introspective setting of familial party networks.
Mishler argues that the children of CPUSA members played a significant role in the emergence of the New Left in the US, as a generation of post-war 'red diaper babies' grew to maturity and entered the political fray. This contention is certainly open to challenge. It can be questioned for privileging the inspirational role played by 'red diaper babies' ahead of other actors. It might also be queried for its reluctance to acknowledge the fact that one of the defining characteristics of the New Left was its outright rejection of what it saw as a sterile, regressive — and even counter-revolutionary — 'Old Left'. In this the CPUSA was seen as fully implicated — 'Stalinist' summer camps and all, and Popular Frontism notwithstanding. Yet it is self-evident that Mishler does not conceive of the CPUSA's cultural legacy in such negative terms.
Although the question is a valid one, this story of the struggle of American communists to construct a youth culture, able to support communist families and recruit radical youth, does not need to justify itself by reference to its more recent historical resonances. An alternative approach would have been to reflect on the meanings that these experiences had for those who lived and worked through them — parent; youth worker; cheerful volunteer; miserable conscript; or investigating federal agent. But Mishler's desire to secure later historical 'significance' for his subject, brings his account of communist youth work to a conclusion without a considered final judgement on the complexities involved in 'raising reds' that he teases out in the preceding narrative.
