The Popular Front on Campus

Abstract

The international threat posed by fascism became the central concern of the student movement during the second half of the Depression decade. For this generation of college students not a year passed without some ominous reminder of the rising strength, belligerence, arid brutality of European fascism. There was Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s military support of the Spanish fascist revolt in 1936 and 1937, Germany’s anti-Jewish pogrom and conquest of Austria in 1938, and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslavakia and Poland in 1939. These events, along with Japan’s escalating war on China, prodded many student activists to rethink the isolationist assumptions their anti-war movement had popularized on campus in the early 1930s. The increasing aggression of the fascist powers led these activists to worry that the very neutrality that their movement had urged upon the United States to promote peace, instead, bred war by preventing America from orchestrating an international effort to thwart fascist expansionism. This mindset facilitated the rise of a major challenge to isolationism within the student movement, which by 1938 pushed the movement’s largest organizations to abandon their isolationist policies and embrace collective security. The first influential group within the student movement’s leadership which sought to shift the movement away from isolationism was the communists. These radicals had the earliest and clearest vision of the student movement’s need for a more explicitly anti-fascist foreign policy. Their thinking on this matter had been strongly influenced by deliberations of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (CI) in August 1935. The CI became concerned about the triumph of Nazism in Germany, its spreading influence in Europe, and the potential threat these developments posed to the U.S.S.R.’s security. The Seventh World Congress therefore urged the formation of broad national coalitions and international collective security arrangements on behalf of a Popular Front against fascism. For communists in the American student movement, this implied the need to turn the movement’s foreign policy away from American neutrality and toward the endorsement of collective efforts among the United States, the Soviet Union, and other anti-fascist states to prevent military aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan.