CULTURE AND THE CRISIS

Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists, and Other Professional Workers of America was an influential pamphlet-manifesto issued in 1932 by the League of Professional Groups. Its immediate goal was to boost support among American professionals for the Communist Party's 1932 presidential ticket of William Z. Foster and James W. Ford. The pamphlet maintained that the Communist candidates alone acknowledged the collapse of capitalism behind the suffering of the Great Depression. The pamphlet struck a more distinctive note in arguing that only a Communist America would allow professionals freedom in the studio, classroom, or lab. Professionals composed a social class in their own right, one distinct from the class of "muscle workers" and that of the "irresponsible business men." The economic crisis presented this class of professional "brain workers" with the historic opportunity to join with their "true comrades," the muscle workers, and to liberate themselves from "false money-standards."

Historians justly remember Culture and the Crisis for signaling the radical turn of American literature in the early 1930s. Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Langston Hughes, and Edmund Wilson were among the fifty-two signatories willing to declare their intent to vote Communist. No less significant, however, is the pamphlet's trailblazing effort to theorize the rise of a technical-intellectual "New Class" in modern society, a central concern of social theory beginning in the 1970s. Culture and the Crisis is also notable for predicting the focus on the political economy of culture that would characterize the Popular Front years of 1935 to 1939, and for announcing what Michael Denning calls the "cultural front" of mid-century America, "the terrain where the Popular Front social movement met the cultural apparatus during the age of the CIO" (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; FOSTER, WILLIAM Z.; LITERATURE; POPULAR FRONT; SOCIALIST PARTY.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1996.

Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society, rev. edition. 1992.

William J. Maxwell