Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

NOTES
movement. See "The Language Branch Question," The Young Worker: Official Organ of the Young Workers League 2,
no.4, (April, 1923): 12.
166. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Storming Heaven, 58.
167. Quoted in Harvey Klehr, The Heyday, 5.
168. Oliver Carlson attempted to follow the lead of his European comrades in seizing the Young People's Socialist League and
transferring its allegiance to the Third International, capitalizing upon splits that were occurring within the Socialist Party.
169. Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 343.
170. Tony Pecinovsky, "A History of the Young Communist League, USA Part 1: The Early Years," in YCLUSA Online
.
171. ECYCI, Resolutions and Theses of the Fourth Bureau Session (Berlin: ECYCI, 1923),100.
172. Martin Abern and Paul Stevens, "The Young Workers League is Discovered!," The Young Worker: Official Organ of the
Young Workers League (November, 1922): 7.
173. "YCI Observers Return," The Young Worker: Official Organ of the Young Workers League 2, no.2 (February, 1923): 11.
174. Oliver Carlson, "What Means This Independence," The Young Worker (Formerly Youth) 1, no.3 (May, 1922): 17.
175. Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
20-21.
176. Ibid., 25.
177. Thurber Lewis, "Jazzophobia," The Young Worker 2, no.4 (April, 1923):19-20.
178. Harry Ganes, "Can Students Be Revolutionary," The Young Worker: Formerly Youth (May, 1922): 14. Although the
YWL did not make a major impact of contemporary youth movements, their newspaper entitled The Young Worker provided
an extensive "reportage of then-existing conditions" of young workers resulting in an impressive continuous fourteen-year
run in circulation. See Dale Reipe, "Young Worker: Chicago and New York, 1922-1936," in The American
Radical Press: 1880-1960, Vol.1 ed. Joseph R. Conlin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), 244-245.
179. Modern industry in the twenties began implementing the production rationalization models of Frederick Taylor, a production
model also known as Taylorism. Taylorism focused on increasing the productive capacity of industrial workers and
implementing new management styles that dictated all elements of the labor process. For a Marxist critique of Taylorism
and its impact upon the labor process and modern capitalism see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation Of Work In The Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
180. E. Elston "The Task Before Us," Youth: Official Organ of the Young Workers League 1, no.1 (February, 1922): 5.
181. The influential Americanization ideologist Winthrop Talbot argued that during this era of growth that "even human prickly
pears seem to lose their thorns, and poisonous human varieties generally become harmless." Contrasting the generational
experiences of the twenties and thirties, W. Wallace Weaver reflected on the youth outlook of the twenties stating, "No
generation ever approached its career with higher hopes than the one which finished high school and college during the
last years of the postwar boom. Magazines and newspapers reflected the optimism and exaggerated it with special cases of
astounding success. It was the era of Babson, Barton, Ford, Insull, Mitchell, and Young in business; of Coolidge, Hoover,
Smith, Walker, and Mellon in politics; of "Babe" Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Bill Tilden in sports. Anything
less than a "country club" standard of living was unthinkable for the self-respecting novice. It was the golden age of prodigality,
and no sport was more popular than that of explaining why it was a logical outcome of providential forethought."
See Ricento, 625; W. Wallace Weaver, "Modern Youth-Retrospect and Prospect," Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 194, (November, 1937): 2.
182. Martin Abern, "The End of the Rope," The Young Worker: Official Organ of the Young Workers League 2, no.11 (November,
1923): 5.
183. Martin Abern, "Who's Red.. And Why," The Young Worker (Formerly Youth) 1,no.4 (June-July, 1922): 13.
184. Shirley Waller, "History of the American Socialist Youth Movement to 1929," in Early American Marxism: A Repository
of Source Material, 1864-1964 Online Archive .
185. Though Green rose to leadership of the YCL prior to the Popular Front, he led the YCL throughout the 1930s as Earl
Browder's most consistent supporter and advocate.
186. Gil Green, "Sweet Sixteen," 4.
187. Ibid., 4.
188. Ibid., 4.
189. Quoted in Ontanelli, 13.
190. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 172.
YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE POPULAR FRONT GENERATION
1. Georgi Dimitrov, The People's Front Against Fascism and War (London: Farleigh Press, 1937), 6.
2. John Gollan, Defend the People: Report by John Gollan to the Tenth National Conference of the Young Communist
League, Glasgow, Easter, 1938 (London: YCLGB, 1938), 7.
3. Communists advanced a minimalist defensive program based on democratic popular unity to defeat the forces of fascism
and halt the outbreak of a new world war. Highly misunderstood by many left contemporaries, the Popular Front was not
just a defensive position based on limited class collaboration, but was also a long-term offensive strategy for communists
and the working class. See Helen Graham and Paul Preston, "The Popular Front and the Struggle Against Fascism," in
The Popular Front in Europe, ed. Helen Graham and Paul Preston (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 1-2.
4. The transition to the Popular Front was not just a simple subordination of the revolutionary movement to the immediate
diplomatic interests of Stalin's Soviet Union as some have contended. Many historians have contended that the Popular
Front era was nothing more than a strategic posturing to Stalin's foreign policy goals, blurring many of the unorthodox
anti-fascist dynamics that were already occurring in Western communist movements during the early thirties. For an example
of this historical position see David Beetham, Marxists in Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism From
the Inter-War Period (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 23.
5. Hobsbawm, "Fifty Years," 245.
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