i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository
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i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

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The Cold War Battles / 75Martyr.” Sadly, Neel’s other caricature, of the stoolpigeon Angela Calomaris(ƒg. 52), was not published, for Marion’s descriptions of the “stools, foxes,frames and hookers” who testiƒed against the communists convinces thereader of the illegitimacy of the legal process. Neel’s dirty bird, with its splayedfeathers, is modeled on the recurrent “criminal type” established in nineteenthcenturyphysiognomy studies, but Neel has upped the ante by making Calomarislook like an unshaven man in drag. One can imagine that the editors ofMasses & Mainstream might have considered this grotesquerie unpublishable,but the image provides a particularly apt description of much of the “incriminating”testimony during the McCarthy era. By rejecting it, Masses & Mainstreamdiluted its own polemic.Three of Neel’s social realist paintings from the 1950s, the now discreditedgenre she continued throughout the decade, provide even stronger evidenceof her support for the CPUSA than permitted by the restrictive editorial policiesof Masses & Mainstream. In 1951, Neel attended the funeral of one of theParty’s long-time leaders, Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor (1862–1951). Joiningthe “Nights of Labor” in the mid-1880s, Bloor had been active in organizingunion labor until World War II. A delegate to the ƒrst and second congressesof the Red International of Labor Unions and to the ƒrst international meetingof communist women, Bloor traveled as a guest in 1937 to the Soviet Unionfor the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.Her death notice in the September 1951 Masses & Mainstream eulogized thisimportant leader. 39 In her funeral portrait, The Death of Mother Bloor (1951,ƒg. 53), painted from memory, Neel reprises Ben Shahn’s The Passion ofSacco and Vanzetti, and her own Dead Father, honoring at once not only oneof communism’s founding ƒgures but also the founding of American SocialRealism. In so doing, Neel belatedly acknowledged the importance of women’scontributions to the CPUSA. In her 1940 autobiography, Bloor had gentlychided the Party for its failure to give women “full equal responsibility withmen.” 40 If, in A Bird in Her Hair, Neel visualized a ƒctional proletarian hero,here she eulogizes an historical one.Neel’s most ambitious pictorial commentary on McCarthyism, Eisenhower,McCarthy, Dulles (1953, ƒg. 54), is one of a handful of American critiques ofCold War foreign policy found in the medium of painting. Linking persecutionat home with militarism abroad, Neel transforms Dulles into a skeletaleagle with bloody talons, McCarthy into an ass brandishing a jail cell, and Ikeinto the angel of death presiding over the Western hemisphere. The bright redexplosion in Central America is no doubt a reference to the recent CIAbackedoverthrow of President Jacopo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. In1957, Paul Baron’s Political Economy of Growth, a communist analysis of postwarAmerican imperialism, argued that the historical advance of capitalism

76 / Neel’s Social Realist Arthad led to a programmed backwardness for Third World nations. 41 While Mc-Carthy was busy scaring out subversives at home, Neel made explicit theUnited States’ illegal subversion of Latin American governments, the sortof imperialist expansionism justiƒed by what to Neel was a spurious anticommunism.42If Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles is Neel’s comment on the Cold War, SaveWillie McGee (c. 1958, detail, ƒg. 55) represents her stand on the other majorcommunist issue of the 1950s, Negro civil rights. From the 1920s on, the CommunistParty, under directives from Moscow, had identiƒed the black struggleas part of its larger revolutionary struggle. During and after World War II, it remaineda major focus of Party activities. By 1938, shortly before Neel moved toSpanish Harlem, the CPUSA reached the height of its in„uence in the blackcommunity. However, the hierarchical organization of the Party worked to itsdisadvantage, breeding resentment on the part of blacks who felt dictated to bya predominantly foreign-born group of Jewish intellectuals. Yet, if the CP’srole in encouraging Negro art and culture was equivocal, its role in buildingand defending the civil rights movement was crucial. Just as it had aided in thedefense of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, so in the 1940s and 1950s theParty rallied to the defense of many persecuted blacks in the South, amongthem Willie McGee, “a black truck driver whose white lover accused him ofrape after her husband discovered their affair.” 43According to the Encylopedia of the American Left, McGee’s case becamethe cause célèbre of the Civil Rights Congress (1946–1956), called the “mostsuccessful ‘Communist Front’ of all time.” 44 The July 1950 “Political Prisoners”issue of Masses & Mainstream listed Willie and Rosalee McGee with therecently convicted “trial of the twelve” leaders Eugene Dennis, Howard Fast,and W. H. Lawson. The same issue carried Rosalee McGee’s remarks at aCivil Rights Congress dinner held in New York on May 22, 1950, illustratedwith a woodcut by Stanley Edelson. Throughout 1950 and 1951, Masses &Mainstream reported on the status of McGee’s appeals. The execution of theMartinsville Seven in Richmond in February 1951 drew justiƒable charges of“mass murder” from Sillen in the March issue, charges that were formalizedin the stunning petition published in the May issue: “Mass Murder of Negroes:We Charge Genocide!” 45Because the Communist Party expended such energy on the McGee case,Neel no doubt painted Save Willie McGee (1952) as a belated gesture of solidarityafter the demise of the CRC. The historical connection between thirtiesactivism and the continuing concerns of the 1950s is seen in Neel’s inclusionof William Zorach’s sculpture Benjamin Franklin (1935–1937), a work commissionedin 1936 by the Treasury Department for the newly completed U.S.Post Ofƒce building. Reproduced in the November 1951 Art Digest, a second

76 / Neel’s Social Realist Arthad led to a programmed backwardness for Third World nations. 41 While Mc-Carthy was busy scaring out subversives at home, Neel made explicit theUnited States’ illegal subversion of Latin American governments, the sortof imperialist expansionism justiƒed by what to Neel was a spurious anticommunism.42If Eisenhower, McCarthy, Dulles is Neel’s comment on the Cold War, SaveWillie McGee (c. 1958, detail, ƒg. 55) represents her stand on the other majorcommunist issue of the 1950s, Negro civil rights. From the 1920s on, the CommunistParty, under directives from Moscow, had identiƒed the black struggleas part of its larger revolutionary struggle. During and after World War II, it remaineda major focus of Party activities. By 1938, shortly before Neel moved toSpanish Harlem, the CPUSA reached the height of its in„uence in the blackcommunity. However, the hierarchical organization of the Party worked to itsdisadvantage, breeding resentment on the part of blacks who felt dictated to bya predominantly foreign-born group of Jewish intellectuals. Yet, if the CP’srole in encouraging Negro art and culture was equivocal, its role in buildingand defending the civil rights movement was crucial. Just as it had aided in thedefense of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, so in the 1940s and 1950s theParty rallied to the defense of many persecuted blacks in the South, amongthem Willie McGee, “a black truck driver whose white lover accused him ofrape after her husband discovered their affair.” 43According to the Encylopedia of the American Left, McGee’s case becamethe cause célèbre of the Civil Rights Congress (1946–1956), called the “mostsuccessful ‘Communist <strong>Front</strong>’ of all time.” 44 The July 1950 “Political Prisoners”issue of Masses & Mainstream listed Willie and Rosalee McGee with therecently convicted “trial of the twelve” leaders Eugene Dennis, Howard Fast,and W. H. Lawson. The same issue carried Rosalee McGee’s remarks at aCivil Rights Congress dinner held in New York on May 22, 1950, illustratedwith a woodcut by Stanley Edelson. Throughout 1950 and 1951, Masses &Mainstream reported on the status of McGee’s appeals. The execution of theMartinsville Seven in Richmond in February 1951 drew justiƒable charges of“mass murder” from Sillen in the March issue, charges that were formalizedin the stunning petition published in the May issue: “Mass Murder of Negroes:We Charge Genocide!” 45Because the Communist Party expended such energy on the McGee case,Neel no doubt painted Save Willie McGee (1952) as a belated gesture of solidarityafter the demise of the CRC. The historical connection between thirtiesactivism and the continuing concerns of the 1950s is seen in Neel’s inclusionof William Zorach’s sculpture Benjamin Franklin (1935–1937), a work commissionedin 1936 by the Treasury Department for the newly completed U.S.Post Ofƒce building. Reproduced in the November 1951 Art Digest, a second

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