Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM
comrades… we must remember that speaking, writing, and teaching are arts. This
means that all of us must become artists… we should make our own all aspects of our
native folk-cultures, making them "socialist in content, while regional or national in
form." 207
The Leninist Generation rejected such cultural tactics as sentimental social-democratic
methods that distracted youth from the class struggle. An article by Joe Starobin, editor
of the Young Communist Review, critiqued how some older comrades did not understand
the value of lively cultural initiatives. Such cultural approaches were vital to attracting
the youth, especially in YCL publications:
The basic problem which confronted the magazine in the past year is posed by the question:
for whom are we publishing… [our readers] wanted a youthful magazine, full of
short stories, poems, skits and sketches, livelier illustrations, political articles educationally
presented… the YCL became a youth organization, wielding political influence not
only because it had attracted young people to a struggle for their economic needs, but
basically because it satisfied their cultural, recreational and human needs… to win a person
politically today, one must win him as a human being.... Our leading people are still
too narrowly occupied with politics, failing to appreciate that politics means everything.
208
The YCL focussed on appealing to youth through the medium of youth culture, not the
revolutionary formulas and slogans of the Leninist Generation. 209 During the Popular
Front era, the YCL urged members to "acquire a thorough knowledge… of music of art,"
reflecting their "knowledge…of the civilized world," standing in stark contrast to the
"barbarism" of fascist culture. 210
The YCL infused its cultural propaganda with American traditions to portray the YCL
as integral members of the American youth movement defending democracy. In 1938
the YCL supported the creation of "The Young Labor Poets" who published a cultural
magazine entitled Sing Democracy. The YCL described the work of the Young Labor
Poets in terms of a shared British-American democratic heritage:
Claiming the democratic spirit of Whitman, Shelley, Byron and Burns as their guide and
inspiration.... The present application of this tradition, they declare, lies in poems that
will sing out the songs of the fight for peace and democracy; poems that will sing of the
CIO and the sweep of unionization; poems of the factory, poems of the field.... We mean
poetry for the people. 211
Communists contended that immigrant influences had forged an internationalist, democratic
and inclusive political culture in the United States. Joe Starobin, spoke of how the
"hopes, struggles and ambitions of immigrant people" had created in America a "new
nation and a new culture;" such a culture could be utilized to "undermine the forces of
barbarism who mock, insult, and deny the fundamental ideals of the Declaration of
Independence." 212
The YCL blended traditions of African American and union struggles with patriotic
rhetoric about American democracy. One article highlighted the importance of the
cultural traditions of African Americans, drawing parallels between "slave songs of
protest" and modern movements for emancipation from fascism. 213 In 1939 the YCL
122