Communism as Real as Baseball

 

The socialist basis of the United States today has its origins in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of the Communist Party USA, and Roosevelt the Second’s appropriation of the collectivist vote to hold power.  For those connecting the dots, the civil rights outbursts of the 1950s had CPUSA underpinnings, and the 1960s saw an American cultural revolution as a predictable result.   Bernhard Thuersam

Communism as Real as Baseball:

“In an attempt to reinforce ties between the country’s past and the CPUSA’s socialist program for the future, the ideological roots of the Communist party grew beyond Marx, Lenin and Stalin, who were placed on an equal ideological standing with the founding fathers.  The preamble to the Party’s new constitution . . . stated that American Communists carried “forward today the traditions of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Lincoln, and of the Declaration of Independence.”  The Declaration of Independence became the Communist Manifesto of the eighteenth century . . . and important Party functions were held to coincide with Washington’s Birthday, a date the Party leadership insisted had to be “politically utilized.” 

The claim of the continuity of the country’s revolutionary past and the Communist program, culminated in [CPUSA Presidential candidate Earl] Browder’s slogan, “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.” 

A changed political reality led to a new terminology: “anti-fascist,” “progressive,” and “democracy” became the new catch-words replacing “proletarian,” and “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  The Daily Worker opened its pages with a range of nonpolitical topics including reviews of popular movies and a column on the problems of raising and disciplining children.  The paper’s sports writer, Lester Rodney, successfully combined first class reporting with the denunciation of racial discrimination in professional sports.

The Young Communist League, not to be outdone, sponsored fashion shows complete with models sporting the latest in “anti-fascist style” women’s clothing, and promoted the boycott of Japanese silk in favor of synthetic substitutes and cotton. 

When young Communists met in convention they no longer limited themselves to speeches and passing resolutions. They now rocked Madison Square Garden with jitterbugging and ever performed a musical revue, “Socialism in Swing” . . . Communists also began promoting Big Band music, more specifically black music such as swing, jazz, and even traditional spirituals as embodiments of the county’s national character and popular music. 

Black artists such as W.C. Handy, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie, and boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons and Meade Lewis, played at Party-sponsored events.

In commenting on the decision to introduce a sports page in the Daily Worker as a regular feature in 1936, [it was commented that]: “When you run the news of a strike alongside the news of a baseball game, you are making American workers feel at home. It gives them the feeling that Communism is nothing strange and foreign, but is as real as baseball . . . let’s loosen up.  Let’s begin to prove that we can be a human being as well as a Communist. It isn’t a little sect of bookworms or soapboxers.”

(The Communist Party of the United States, Fraser M. Ottanelli, Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 123-128)