Christopher Phelps

The Sexuality of Malcolm X

This article engages the controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters. A minute sifting of all evidence and claims, augmented by new findings, yields strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts. If set in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, these acts position him not as a “homosexual lover,” as has been asserted, but in the pattern of “straight trade”—heterosexual men open to sex with homosexuals—an understanding that in turn affords insights into the black revolutionarys mature masculinity.

Herbert Hill and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

This article points to previously undetected evidence demonstrating that Herbert Hill, labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1950s to the 1970s, informed for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on his former political associates in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It shows that the FBI subsequently sought to use Hill in 1962 to obstruct a rumored fraternization between the NAACP and the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants (CAMD), an organization initiated by SWP members in support of the black militant advocate of armed self-defense Robert F. Williams and the movement he led in Monroe, North Carolina. The article concludes by posing a series of questions raised by the evidence and connecting the matter to recent scholarship on the Cold War and civil rights activism.

War and Peace, 1939–1948

In January 1946, a council of 240 delegates in the Philippines representing more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers chaired by Sergeant Emil Mazey (Sub-Base R, Batangas, Luzon) lodged a protest with the War Department against the slow pace of troop demobilization. The war was over. American troops had clasped hands with Red Army soldiers at the River Elbe in April 1945; Berlin fell in May, Japan in August. Why were they not yet home? Continued occupation of the Philippines was needless, for the Filipinos were friendly. Guerrillas in the Hukbalahap – the Peoples Anti-Japanese Army – had helped secure the islands. Since the Huks were initiated by the Communist Party of the Philippines, however, the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) was overseeing their suppression by measures including summary execution. In this context, GI resistance was not just about going home; it was an act of solidarity with Filipinos. When two Senators visited Luzon, Emil Mazey stood in a room full of generals risking court martial to testify that the Army had burnt surplus shoes, blankets, and jackets that could have gone to Filipinos. The occupation, he held, was laying the groundwork for peacetime conscription and a permanent military presence in Asia. As part of a worldwide U.S. troop “bring us home” movement, the Philippines rebellion was connected in myriad ways to a 1945–1946 working-class upsurge in the United States, where pent-up resentment about an inflation-pinched standard of living and vast wartime corporate profits resulted in the largest strike wave in American history. Millions struck in one sector after another: oil, coal, lumber, glass, textiles, trucking, meatpacking, and steel. The epicenter was auto, where the United Automobile Workers (UAW) – whose factory-occupation sit-down strikes in 1936–1937 propelled the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) – walked out at General Motors (GM), the nations largest corporation. “Open the books!” declared Walter Reuther, director of the unions GM department, demanding that the company boost pay without increasing consumer prices – or lay bare its ledgers to prove it could not. That was a page taken from Leon Trotsky, who had envisioned factory committees saying, “Show us your books; we demand control over the fixing of prices.” Soon GM granted a large wage increase, though without keeping prices down. Mazey, the son of Hungarian immigrants raised in Michigan, had worked in Detroits auto plants before entering the armed services.

Two Letters from 1936 on Science & Society, the Marxist Quarterly and the New Republic

The extent to which the political dimension of academic life in the USA was altered by the 1930s may be measured by examining an exposé from the prior decade: The Goose-Step by Upton Sinclair. This author, a Socialist best known for his novel The Jungle (1906), despaired of higher education in the 1920s. The campuses, he held, were craven places beholden to wealthy benefactors. Since dissenting faculty were shown the door by boards of trustees, professors understood orthodoxy in defense of the established order to be requisite. The American university, charged Sinclair, was handmaiden to ‘‘capital.’’ Higher education in the 1930s may not have been handmaiden to Capital, but the influence of Karl Marx was far more widely felt in that decade than it had been in the 1920s. A new generation of scholars emerged, shaped profoundly by such events as the Great Depression and the Nazi seizure of power, by new winds of liberal reform in Washington, and by the apparent contrast between the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union and a capitalist world in the grips of crisis. Many graduate students and new faculty in the 1930s were aroused by the social reawakening reflected in mass movements of the unemployed, labor, and the left. They felt the influence of trends of opinion among American intellectuals outside the universities, namely the sharp leftward turn among novelists, poets, critics, artists, actors, and musicians. During the interwar years the mode of intellectual production did not center as exclusively on the academy as it would in postwar decades, when population boom and exceptional economic growth combined with Cold War expenditures to compel a tremendous expansion of higher education. During the Depression intellectual life still centered upon small independent magazines whose

The Radicalism of Randolph Bourne

“At twenty-five,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “I find myself full of the wildest radicalism, and look with dismay at my childhood friends who are already settled down, and have achieved babies and responsibilities.” In the seven remaining years of his brief life, Bourne’s refusal to reconcile himself to convention or existing society, his “wildest radicalism,” only deepened. As he steadfastly opposed an immensely destructive war whose futility had not yet registered in Americans’ minds, and which most other American intellectuals embraced unreservedly, Bourne’s alienation from the established classes became ever more pronounced, as did his longings for radical social transformation. His most famous refrain, “War is the health of the State,” meant in Bourne’s words that “We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State,” for war and state “are inseparably and functionally joined.” Nevertheless, the radicalism of Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), a student of the philosopher John Dewey who breathed life into Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday, has often been interpreted as cultural, not political. In the 1940s, Louis Filler wrote that Bourne was “emphatically not political-minded in the strictest sense of the word” but rather a thinker whose “concern was with the American psyche and its moral and cultural manifestations.” Max Lerner, likewise, described Bourne as “a sort of amateur at political theory.” Attempts to view Bourne as a cultural as opposed to a political thinker have been issued in many idioms since – most recently, the postmodern. The reasons for making this distinction between Bourne’s cultural philosophy and his political judgments have varied

Book Reviews: Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe, by John George and Laird Wilcox. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992

Importantly, this book is a strong argument against those ’leftist’ postmodern and the neoconservative thinkers who argue that the project of the enlightenment is pass6 or a failure. As this study details, it is undeniable that substantial elements of contemporary social movements and intellectuals continue to be orientated by the utopian ideals of modernity : justice, basic rights, liberty, equality, and democracy. The authors lead us through and out of the contemporary theoretical morass of critical pessimism and the confusing obscurity of the contemporary public sphere debates. It is for this reason that the praxis potential of this book is substantial.