i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

The Cold War Battles / 71drawings did not “advocate revolution” and her paintings had no audience. 17Anonymity had its advantages, for Neel did not have to go underground; shewas already there.The Cold War froze communist aesthetics into an equally unbendingdogma. The „exibility of the Popular Front years yielded in 1946 to the secretaryof the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov’s renunciation of all experimentationand a call for a socialist realism that “was the Party,” marked bywhat Maxim Gorky had called “the humanism of the revolutionary proletariat...” 18 Reality for the socialist realist artist was the reality of what theproletariat would become, not what it was. The rigid deƒnition of socialist realismunder Zhdanov restricted its artistic production to idealized pictures ofParty leaders and workers capable of overcoming any obstacle. This lamentableideological position was given its American voice in June 1947 by V. J.Jerome, head the cultural commission of the Communist Party USA. 19 In hisaddress to the Marxist Cultural Conference in New York City (subsequentlypublished as Culture in a Changing World) Jerome ƒrst criticized the imperialistpolicies of the United Nations and the Truman doctrine. But he reservedhis most virulent language for the Trotskyite intellectuals who had „ed theParty during the war, whom he accused of “literary lynching.” 20To American Marxists he posed a familiar task: “the development of thecultural capacities of the working class, for whom culture is a matter of struggle,a matter of heroism.” 21 Although her expressed sympathies for Jerome hadto do with his imprisonment under the Smith Act, 22 Neel, who had attendedhis lectures at the Jefferson School, was in general agreement with his call forworking-class communist heroes. This Party line was reiterated, without seriousdebate, in Masses & Mainstream, to which Neel contributed throughoutthe Cold War. A result of the merger in 1948 of Joseph North’s New Massesand Samuel Sillen’s Mainstream, Masses & Mainstream was edited by Sillen,with the authority on Negro history Herbert Aptheker, the black novelist andpoet Lloyd Brown, and the former Art Front critic Charles Humboldt (a.k.a.Clarence Weinstock) serving as the associate editors. During the run of itspublication, from 1948 to 1956 (after which it continued for another six yearsas Mainstream), the magazine published drawings by the regulars from theNew Masses, including William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey, Ben-Zion, BenShahn, and Antonio Frasconi. Although its contribution to American culturalhistory is hardly as signiƒcant as the New Masses had been, it merits more seriousdiscussion than it has received to date. 23Masses & Mainstream is the voice of a defensive and embattled Party, strugglingunder systematic governmental persecution during the Cold War. TheSmith Act of 1940 was further strengthened by the Internal Security Act of1950, which required communists to register with the attorney general. How-