“The Thing Indefinable and Unconquerable”: Howard Fast's Experiment in Democracy

Abstract

Despite a prolific writing career that has spanned over six decades and has included the publication of numerous best-selling novels as well as biographies, books for children, popular histories, plays, detective fiction, journalistic prose, and film, television, and radio scripts, Howard Fast remains relatively unknown among the literary-critical communities. According to Daniel Traister, this critical neglect is the result of a number of factors: America's critical establishments have been predisposed to mistrust Fast himself for his political activities, Fast's work for its political stance, or (on occasion) both for their subsequent departure from those activities and that stance. These establishments tend also to suspect books that are produced as quickly and sell as well as his. Perhaps this generalized distrust explains the almost complete lack of attention paid Fast by the literary, historical, and critical communities.1 Indeed, when many readers think of Fast at all, the author's name tends to conjure up an image of racks of worn paperbacks in the bargain section of a used book store, most adorned with sensationalistic artwork depicting passionate embraces by muscular, handsome heroes and beautiful heroines. Whatever the popular and critical estimates of Fast, however, he has made an important and permanent mark on American literary history if for no other reason than a remarkable novel about the Reconstruction era that he published in 1944, entitled Freedom Road. That Fast joined the American literary colloquy about Reconstruction is somewhat surprising, given the fact that he is not a Southerner, does not claim an African American ancestry, and, unlike Rebecca Harding Davis and Albion W. Tourgee, did not watch the events of the post-Civil War years unfold before him. Born in New York City in 1914 to Jewish, working-class parents, Fast's background was far removed from the nineteenth-century struggle in the South to create decent lives for millions of recently emancipated slaves. In his own words, Fast was raised in bitter and unrelenting poverty, and it was the daily task of securing mere sustenance that claimed most of his family's time and energy.2 If poverty was a constant factor that threatened his family's very survival, however, it was the combination of living hand to mouth and the stigma of being Jewish in a neighborhood composed largely of Irish and Italians from which Fast would derive his knowledge of the race and class stratification of American society, a knowledge that would eventually compel him to join the Communist Party and turn to the Reconstruction era as a subject for fiction. It was this combination of factors, too, that would contribute to Fast's hatred of prejudice and fascism and to his belief in the necessity of resistance, defiance, and direct action in combating societal inequities. Recalling in his memoir Being Red (1990), his boyhood awakening to prejudice and discrimination, Fast writes, My brothers were content to avoid combat; I was not. Some wretchedly uncomfortable gene made it impossible for me to accept insults; I had to fight. There was a long list of provocations that plunged me into combat: being told that I had killed the God of practically every kid on the block, that I was a dirty Jew, a Jew bastard, a kike, a sheeny, the son of a whore, the son of a bitch-and I was always alone against two or three or five of them, and all the protective love of my brother Jerry never extended to street fighting. (34) Having survived the childhood trauma of being poor and Jewish in an extremely racist environment, Fast carved out a niche for himself as a professional writer, publishing short stories and a novel before he had reached the age of twenty. By 1942, with the Second World War claiming many Americans' time and energy and with several published novels under his belt, Fast contributed to the international struggle against fascism by accepting a position as head of the Voice of America at the Office of War Information (OWI), a propaganda and information center designed to take advantage of new radio technology. …