Popular Front Research Articles

Nihil novum sub sole? On the Second Republic and the Popular Front

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1936: Fraude y violencia en las elecciones del Frente Popular, by Manuel Álvarez Tardío and Roberto Villa García

The February 1936 parliamentary elections in Spain were the most important national vote in that country’s twentieth-century history. It would prove to be the last Spanish democratic election until June 1977. For the nearly forty years of the Franco regime, apologists for the military rebellion of July 1936 denied that the leftist Popular Front had emerged victorious at the polls. In early 1939, a Nationalist special commission ruled that the rightist Counter-Revolutionary electoral slate had been robbed of victory, and therefore the Republican government was illegitimately constituted. In 1971, a team of historians led by Javier Tusell, making use of all the sources then available, rebutted Francoist claims of Popular Front larceny, concluding that the left did, after all, win a clear victory. Tusell also stressed that the elections were clean, providing a comforting message in the death throes of the Franco regime that Spaniards were capable of organising a democratic system. Yet important questions remained unanswered. Popular Front supporters celebrated victory hours after polls closed on 16 February following encouraging early results in some urban areas. This was premature, the Spanish equivalent of Labour declaring victory in a British general election after the first declarations in its northern heartlands. Nevertheless, it prompted popular demands for an immediate change of government and the release of leftists imprisoned following the Socialist-led insurrection of October 1934. Growing disorder led to the resignation of the caretaker centrist government of Manuel Portela Valladares on 19 February and its replacement by a Popular Front administration led by Manuel Azaña while the count was still going on in many provinces. This was unprecedented; Spanish constitutional practice then demanded that the outgoing government complete the elections before meeting the new Spanish parliament. Thus local authorities newly appointed by the Popular Front government finally finished and verified the count. This irregularity would not have mattered if one of the two main electoral slates was on course for a landslide; yet Tusell’s figures indicated the difference in terms of votes was less than 2 per cent. Given the non-proportional majoritarian nature of the electoral system, this did not translate into a hung parliament but rather a comfortable Popular Front majority of over sixty seats. In other words, could the chaotic nature of the latter part of the counting process have affected the overall outcome?

‘The Trojan Horse’: Communist Entrism in the British Labour Party, 1933–43

Entrism – the infiltration of political organisations by competitors – is typically associated with Trotskyism. Large-scale Communist entrism in the British Labour Party has been neglected by historians and reference in the literature is slight and impressionistic. Archival material permits reconstruction of a sustained attempt by the Comintern and British Communists to subvert Labour Party policy between 1933 and 1943. Documenting the development and dimensions of Communist entrism, this article establishes that, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party (CPGB) members were operating secretly inside British Labour, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. Biographies of 55 such Communists provide new data and permit a typology of entrist activity. The episode sheds new light on Popular Front initiatives and the extent of genuine support for them within Labour. It illuminates the conspiratorial side of Stalinist activity at a time when the CPGB presented itself as a conventional British party.

Judgment Day: The Workers’ Stage and the Popular Front in 1930s Finland

The Workers’ Stage (in Finnish ‘Työväen Näyttämö’) was an amateur workers’ theatre based in Helsinki. The theatre experienced its height of success when it co-operated with left-wing intellectuals between 1934 and 1939. As an organic part of the Popular Front movement, the theatre brought an international anti-fascist repertoire to Finland. In the performance of Elmer Rice’s Judgment Day (1935) the struggle for civil rights in Finland was put in the larger frame of the international struggle against Fascism. Unit­ing intellectuals and workers, the theatre and its activist personnel also functioned as a platform for the practical organising of counter-hegemonic intervention and under­ground activism. For the activist left-wing opposition, theatre functioned as an exten­sion of their political journals, as a (counter-)public sphere and a vehicle for highlighting contemporary political problems, accelerating public discussion and engaging more people – workers and intellectuals alike – in fruitful interaction. The activism had clear political results in the 1936 elections, although the personal outcome for the activist art­ists and communists turned out to be controversial, as they remained rejected from the new hegemony.

Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933–1945. By Hunter Bivens. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. x + 287 pages. $45.00 paperback or e-book.

<b>Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933–1945.</b> <i>By Hunter Bivens. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. x</i> + <i>287 pages. $45.00 paperback or e-book.</i>

Heywood Broun, Benjamin Stolberg, and the Politics of American Labor Journalism in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the First and Second World Wars, Heywood Broun (1888-1939) and Benjamin Stolberg (1891-1951) were labor journalists when the newspaper industry was consolidating into chains and industrial unionism was gaining in American society. A comparison of their lives and writings in the 1920s and 1930s illuminates the politics behind news coverage of labor. Suspicious of the Communist Party, Stolberg ultimately clashed with Broun, the quintessential Popular Front left-liberal, over the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The two were similar, however, in framing labor positively, unlike much of the rest of the press, while eschewing any journalistic ethos of “impartiality.”

The Popular Front and Marxism in Eric Hobsbawm’s Historical Works

This essay attempts to offer an understanding of the relation between Eric Hobsbawm’s historiography and politics. In order to grasp effectively this complicated relationship, we need to distinguish between his Marxist methodology (that he used in his historical studies as the main, though not exclusive, analytical framework) and his popular national frontist understanding of politics along with the support for the USSR in the postwar era, as the former is not reducible to the latter and vice-versa. The Marxian analytical tools Hobsbawm used in his works, chosen according to the needs of those studies, derived from debates developed mainly within the Communist Party Historians Group and, secondly, in discussion with other historians and intellectuals. The National Po- pular Front politics that he projected as the ideal strategy in different historical conjunctures and the endorsement of the USSR as a global counter-pole to the USA’s hegemony were an outcome of Hobsbawm’s politicisation during the 1920s and 1930s in the ranks of the Communist International. It is true that those formative experiences were coincidental and inextricable, but they are characterized by a relative autonomy.

French Television and Political Biography

This article focuses on the specificities of political biopics created by French television. First, this essay offers an overview of French televised fictional biography as it was forged over time on the narrative treatment of historical figures (Léon Blum, Charles De Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand, Simone Veil, etc.) and facts (Popular Front, resistance fighting during the war, political campaigns, May '68, legalizing abortion, etc.). The second part of this survey focuses more particularly on the subjects of recent productions (2000s and after), which explore new types of writing, for example by utilizing archival documents that enrich the biopic genre. Finally, this contribution questions the different political stakes of the biopic as a historical and cultural representation of the French nation.

Gran viraje del partido comunista de chile: de “clase contra clase” al frente popular (1928—1936)

Gran viraje del partido comunista de chile: de “clase contra clase” al frente popular (1928—1936)

América Latina y el cambio fundamental de la política de la Internacional Comunista hacia el Frente Popular

América Latina y el cambio fundamental de la política de la Internacional Comunista hacia el Frente Popular

Tracing Morocco: Postcolonialism and Spanish Civil War Literature

Increasing scholarly attention to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has exposed the colonial implications of the Spanish Republic’s fight against Franco’s fascist coup. The Spanish Republic’s refusal to relinquish its colonial control allowed Franco to exploit Moroccan antipathy and poverty in support of his forces. For many North American volunteers—and particularly for the hundred or so African Americans who fought in Spain—the war’s stakes were not only tied to European fascism and American racism, as Popular Front and black expatriate artists often depicted, but also to colonial relationships between Europe, Africa and the New World. This essay examines literary depictions of these colonial relationships in the works of Langston Hughes and John A. Williams, contextualizing their writings alongside fictional and biographical representations of Moroccan and African American participation by North American writers who, like Hughes, participated in the Spanish Civil War. Read together, the depictions and erasures of African diasporic contact across political lines reveal the underlying contradictions used to construct categories of racial, national, and religious difference—categories used as rallying cries on each side of the battle line. Williams’s retrospective positioning and Hughes’s writings from the war’s midst together represent the war’s stakes as yet another global conflict in which members of the African diaspora faced even greater risks and greater losses.

A nemzeti bizottságok Makón az 1956-os forradalom idején

This study investigates the circumstances of the formation and short existence of the town and district national committees, and the main measures taken by them in Makó, in the days of the 1956 revolution. These committees were formed on the basis of a popular front union, to replace the party-ruled council organizations. Although it was clear that the ruling party (MDP) wanted to preserve its power, this proved partially unsuccessful, as the electors thwarted the election of the communists. The leaders and members of the committees were unable to form a radical programme, because of the influence of the social democrats and the small-holders, and the very short time before the Soviet intervention. There were no radical local actions either, which could have caused real changes in the town. Thanks to all these, the local representatives of the party-ruled administration – though somewhat demoralized – managed to survive more or less without serious breaks, and could retake their positions.

Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by McCready Susan

Reviewed by: Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon by McCready Susan Colin Foss McCready Susan. Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, 157 pp. Susan McCready's Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon brings together two major discussions into a slim and engaging volume. Detailing an account of theater in times of war, McCready situates this story within the larger stakes of her book, arguing that changes to the mainstream or canonical French theatrical tradition in the interwar period took place thanks to the institutionalizing efforts of a band of directors: Jacques Copeau and the Cartel des quatre (Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, and Georges Pitoëff). Convincingly, she claims that these directors normalized theatrical modernity through a gradual redefinition of who could claim authorship of a performance. Specifically, these interwar directors "shifted emphasis from the verbal to the visual," (10) implicitly and often explicitly posing the metteur-en-scène as a "theatrical artist in his own right, apart from the author" (xiii). McCready's description of the legitimization of stagecraft ends with Copeau fully realizing his efforts to transform theatrical institutions, through his appointment as director of the ComédieFrançaise in 1940. The structure of Staging France subsumes the changes to theater performance wrought by the two World Wars within a broader history of institutions, showing how political events are internalized and processed by the stewards of cultural heritage. McCready's first chapter, "Subject to Interpretation," describes the theoretical tenets of the modern metteursen-scène Copeau and André Antoine, who viewed their performances as preserving authenticity, and defined authenticity as the returning of French classics to their historical and cultural specificity, unmooring them from their textual or verbal primacy. McCready focuses on this paradox—modernity [End Page 167] via historical sensitivity—as a central tension of a twentiethcentury querelle des anciens et des modernes. Another central distinction introduced in the first chapter, the preference of these interwar directors for French classics rather than contemporary plays, continues throughout the book. In Chapter 2, "Mobilizing the Canon," we find that the classics took on nationalist importance during the First World War, when French theater was enlisted to celebrate national heritage, becoming a "source of inspiration for its soldiers" (22). McCready presents a wide range of performances during the interwar period performed in France and in the United States, where Sara Bernhardt and Jacques Copeau were on tour as a sort of evangelizing mission for the French war effort. Mixing textual analysis with contextual writings of directors, actors, and authors, McCready argues that the plays themselves mattered less and garnered less critical and journalistic attention than the way they were performed. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, McCready offers a series of classic plays that were enlisted into the modernism of Copeau and the Cartel. These central chapters, which amount to a series of case studies of what could be called the visual turn of theater performance in the interwar period, allow McCready to showcase the various ways these directors applied their visual aesthetic and the equally varied responses they received from critics. Chapter 3 uses Molière as a litmus test for explaining the differing performance aesthetics of Copeau, Baty, and Jouvet. Chapter 4 uses productions of Racine and Shakespeare to introduce the politics of the interwar period, when directors de-politicized Shakespeare's foreignness against the backdrop of the fascist riots of 1934 and the Popular Front government of 19361937. Chapter 5 establishes the modernist directors as inheritors of the Romantic playwrights of the early nineteenth century, and ends with the modernist revival of Musset and Mérimée. With the dearth of quality contemporary authors to stage, these modernist directors reshaped Romantics into their own image. How did modernism become mainstream? Chapter 6 suggests that by the 1930s the directors of the Cartel benefitted from the comparison with the more radical avant-garde, particularly that of Antonin Artaud. Their relatively modest innovations, their reverence—albeit a modern reverence—for the canon, and their desire...

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco

Reviewed by: Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 by John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco Michelle Chase John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco. Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 307 pp. The past few years seem to have inaugurated a transnational turn in the growing scholarship on Cuba's 1959 revolution.1 John Gronbeck-Tedesco's Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left is a welcome addition to this trend. In this sweeping exploration of US-Cuban cultural and political relations, Gronbeck-Tedesco describes a shared long-term dialogue, "a larger transnational space of Left culture," constructed between Cuban and US activists (45). Yet this is not necessarily a story of unity. Gronbeck-Tedesco is sensitive to aspects of disagreement or mutual incomprehension—what he calls "gaps in the transnation" (68)—that make this a story of conflict as well as solidarity. Eschewing a teleological tendency to see 1933 as "prelude" to the 1959 revolution, Gronbeck-Tedesco argues instead for conceptualizing the "Cuban revolutions as a historical period—bridging what is usually historicized separately as the 'thirties' and the 'sixties'" (4). This broader historical scale captures intriguing continuities and parallels. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book moves from the internationalism of the old left and popular front to the rise of the new left and "tricontinentalism." Along the way we meet activists, writers, and intellectuals representative of the Generación del 30, afrocubanismo, the Harlem Renaissance, the black power movement, first- and second-wave feminism, and the US "third world left." Throughout, the book pays significant attention to race and gender, two areas where we find perhaps the greatest "gaps" between island and mainland activists. Some of the material covered here may feel familiar, as Gronbeck-Tedesco is building on work by Van Gosse, Frank Guridy, Mark O. Sawyer, and others. But the book's ambitious scope, long historical period, and careful research provide new insights. The chapters on the 1930s are particularly enlightening, adding significantly to the perennially underdeveloped historiography on the 1933 revolution. Here Gronbeck-Tedesco usefully reconstructs the enormous impact that 1933 made on progressives in the United States and beyond. Cuba's 1933 revolution, he shows, became a touchstone in left-wing literature alongside other global conflagrations such as the Spanish Civil War, the Scottsboro case, and [End Page 357] the peasant rebellion in China. Carlton Beals's widely read work The Crime of Cuba (1933) was particularly influential in this regard. In a thoughtful analysis of the book's text and photos, Gronbeck-Tedesco shows how Beals launched a powerful denunciation of Machado while also mobilizing certain condescending constructions of Cuban exoticism and racial difference that echoed tropes from tourist literature and social science. Thus the US left reproduced neocolonial language while professing authentically felt solidarity—an observation equally applicable to the 1960s and beyond. In other ways, too, it is striking how trends we often associate with the 1960s were anticipated in the 1930s. The author shows that, already in the 1930s, Cuba provided an idealized trope of agrarian revolution and mass uprising. Here he carefully reconstructs the way Pablo de la Torriente Brau's 1934 exposé of the agrarian conflict in Realengo 18 entered wider transnational circulation when the US journalist Josephine Herbst published a similar series of articles in New Masses one year later in which she positioned Realengo 18 as "a kind of agrarian vanguard, believing that she [had] discovered in the Cuban hinterland seeds for revolution" (66). Cuba's 1933 revolution seemed to provide an appealing alternative to the Soviet Union, then beset by bureaucracy, political purges, executions, and famine, just as the 1959 revolution initially raised hopes for a "humanist" revolution that might forge a third way in the polarized Cold War world. After 1959, it proves somewhat harder to flesh out individual Cuban cultural figures of the period, as Gronbeck-Tedesco does so well for writers and intellectuals of the 1930s such as de la Torriente Brau, Nicolás Guillén, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, and Regino Pedroso. In these sections the book largely provides insight into the way US activists or organizations...

The “Jewish Question” in the Black Mind: The Image of World Jewry in African American Socialism

Abstract From the Popular Front to the early Cold War, African American socialists advocated for Jewish human rights in order to advance their own cause for civil and labor rights. Activists such as A. Philip Randolph and Ralph Bunche championed an Afro-Zionism that defied reactionary definitions of race and class by fomenting unity of all oppressed minorities. They envisioned Jewish human rights as a crucial step toward the liberation of all workers, especially Black Americans. By articulating their own understanding of Blacks and Jews relationally, Black socialists condemned anti-Semitism under fascism, imperialism, and communism. The rise of fascism, coupled with the Second World War, fueled Black American criticism of both racism and imperialism. This Popular Front activism carried over into the late 1940s. During the early Cold War, Black socialists helped publicize Soviet atrocities against Eastern European and Russian Jews. Tracing the origin and impact of Afro-Zionism reveals a long and diverse history of Black American condemnation of anti-Semitism as well as the impact of world Jewry on Black internationalism.

El «contrainforme Onaindía»

Transcripción y estudio del informe realizado por Alberto Onaindía y Zuloaga para intentar justificar que un partido católico, como el PNV, defendiera el Frente Popular, texto consensuado con las autoridades nacionalistas que fue remitido al papa Pío XI al principio de la Guerra Civil.

“A new and modern golden age of Jewish culture”: shaping the cultural politics of transnational Jewish antifascism

ABSTRACTThe Holocaust and a worldwide Jewish enthusiasm and support for the Red Army’s defeat of the German Army on the Eastern Front led to a greater sense of international Jewish consciousness and solidarity often tied to an antifascist politics. Utilizing a transnational lens, I explore how Jewish antifascists of the immediate post-war period proffered a novel cultural politics as a means of addressing ongoing international issues of post-Holocaust Jewish survival in a dangerous and politically uncertain modernity. I examine three Jewish left magazines of the late 1940s that were involved in a loose international antifascist progressive Jewish network and ideological framework. These magazines Jewish Life (USA), New Life (UK) and Unity (Australia) represented similar antifascist politics and cultural outlooks in the USA, Britain and Australia, respectively. They have received little sustained scholarly attention previously. I analyse their vision of diverse multilingual Jewish cultures which were to be promoted and developed in any country where Jews lived and in whatever language they spoke. Their cultural vision represented antifascist values against bourgeois or nationalist Jewish culture and broadly reflected a pro-Soviet, progressive and Jewish internationalist, Popular Front politics and worldview.

Stalin, the Western Allies and Soviet Policy towards the Yugoslav Partisan Movement, 1941–4

This article traces the development of Soviet policy towards the communist partisan movement in Yugoslavia from the German invasion in 1941 to the liberation of the country at the end of 1944. In doing so, it addresses this topic for the first time through the lens of the Soviet decision-making process, following developments across the entire duration of the war. Based on Soviet sources, it shows that, in the context of the shifting balance of forces among the Western Allies, Moscow was ready to put aside the popular front strategy and to encourage local communists to challenge the political order supported by the British and the Americans while the Second World War was still raging. The example of Yugoslavia, however, also shows that this apparently clear strategy covered deep uncertainties on the Soviet side as to the real intentions of the British, the room for manoeuvre enjoyed by Moscow, and the way in which relations with a new communist state in the making should be established. The Soviets were largely successful in their attempt to support Tito while avoiding repercussions for the Great Alliance, although in the long term their achievements backfired.

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

Auge y ocaso del shule icufista en Argentina (1941-1968)

En base a una investigación más vasta sobre la identidad de la izquierda judía en Argentina, este trabajo analiza el proceso de auge y ocaso de las escuelas idiomáticas y complementarias en ídish adheridas al Idisher Cultur Farband (ICUF) entre 1941 y 1968. Desde los años 20 y 30, sus principales activistas estuvieron comprometidos con el Partido Comunista y bajo el clima aliancista del frentepopulismo los shules icufistas se multiplicaron. Sin embargo, cuando en la década del 60 la generación nativa apareció en escena, la continuidad del shule y la enseñanza del ídish comenzaron a perder sentido para sus protagonistas. Este artículo explora diversos factores que explican aquel proceso. Si bien la línea partidaria para la colectividad judeo-argentina ocupó un lugar en esa transformación, un análisis más complejo devela también la importancia de otras variables de cambio social y político en el país y el mundo.