Left-wing isolationism, literature and ideology in America during the run-up to World War II Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford, John Strachey and the New Masses

Abstract

In the run-up to the Second World War, the left in the US came under increasing pressure to conform to the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist line. The relation between literature, ideologies, political analysis and a world actually preparing for war became extremely complex and fraught. In October 1940, the American Communist journal, New Masses, denounced the well-known American writers Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford and the British Marxist intellectual John Strachey as virtual Nazi sympathisers. This article takes a cartoon relating to the denunciations and reconstructs in historical detail the reasons for them. The stories throw a new and complex light on the sometimes surprising relations between ideology and literature of the period as well as adding a footnote to debates on pre-war American isolationism.