by Philip Nel
Returning to London, Ruth befriended artists living in a houseboat on the Thames. She was enjoying the trip, but her mother and aunt were worried. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany, and the country had taken over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Though British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had predicted “peace in our time” the previous fall, war seemed to be on the horizon. While Germany’s invasion of Poland was yet months away, it was not a great time to be a Jew traveling abroad. Blanche Krauss Brager wanted her daughter to come home. In the spring of 1939, Ruth sailed back to New York.11
6
CROCKETT AND THE RED CRAYON
I Am a Real Red!
—slogan on sign carried by radical child on Crockett Johnson’s cover for New Masses, 27 July 1937
New Masses appealed to Crockett Johnson because, as cartoonist and contributor Mischa Richter noted, the magazine was “the only place where you could be published regularly with ideas that attacked the fascists.” In a December 1934 cartoon, Johnson likened fascism to a racket run by a gang of thugs. As they sit around a card table, one gangster cleaning his gun and a second having a drink, a third contends, “But regimentation won’t hamper your individuality, Eustace; this Fascism racket will give real freedom to our artistic souls.” With the repeal of Prohibition the previous year having dried up the profitable black market in alcohol, Johnson suggests that fascism is the new organized crime.1
The threat of fascism was growing. Benito Mussolini had been Italy’s leader since 1922, and Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933. In America, MGM explored fascism’s appeal in its film Gabriel over the White House (1933), starring Walter Huston as a fictional new U.S. president: After a near-death experience, a visit from the Angel Gabriel converts this weak president into a decisive dictator. Father Charles E. Coughlin, the popular Catholic priest whose radio programs reached virtually all of the American East and Midwest, was beginning to preach anti-Semitic fascism to his listeners.2
Against the rise of fascism and police harassment of striking workers, Americans banded together to fight back, forming the Popular Front, a loose alliance of communists, socialists, Democrats, and other liberals. According to Michael Denning, the culture born from this front “took three political forms: a social democratic electoral politics; a politics of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist solidarity; and a civil liberties campaign against lynching and labor repression.” In the 1930s, prominent artists aligned with this “cultural front” included Orson Welles, Archibald MacLeish, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Duke Ellington, and Crockett Johnson.3
Signaling his commitment to the cause, Johnson in March 1936 redesigned a radical monthly publication with close ties to the Communist Party, Fight against War and Fascism. In its two and a half years of existence, Fight’s circulation had grown to nearly thirty thousand, a promising start. Fight’s editors hoped that having Johnson transform it into “a big, colorful magazine” would help it become “the magazine of all people, worker, professional, farmer, teacher, student, housewife.” The April Fight featured cover art by Hugo Gellert and contributions from journalist George Seldes, writer Kenneth Fearing, and artists William Gropper and Art Young as well as the editors’ gratitude to Johnson: “THANKS to Crockett Johnson, who in his quiet and persistent way worked night in, night out. This magazine was his in the evenings after working in the daytime on other publications. Who said the profit makers’ press has no role in life?”4
In June 1936, Johnson joined the staff of New Masses, earning between twenty and twenty-five dollars per week. As the publication’s art editor, Johnson would redesign the weekly with the aim of increasing circulation beyond its radical readership. As editor Joe Freeman noted, the staff had “met hundreds of readers in New York at small gatherings held in private houses” before deciding that “a change in format [was] necessary.” Seeking advice, the staff invited twenty artists, among them Rockwell Kent, the best-known and most successful American printmaker, to a 30 July meeting at the Bancroft Hotel. Kent could not attend but invited Johnson to visit his home in Ausable Forks, New York.5
In early August, Dave traveled the three hundred miles north, where the two men planned an easier-to-read layout and design for New Masses, adding more artwork and pictorial covers. Johnson explained, “The idea now is to go in for decorative covers that are not too blatant (and often non-committal) about our editorial viewpoint. Titles, when we use them, will pose a question rather than dogmatically state a fact. The intention is of course not to deceive the prospective reader, but to try to avoid having him react unfavorably to our position as stated by headlines or an unpleasant or too strong political cartoon before he’s bought the magazine and read all the facts we present.” The first redesigned New Masses appeared on 15 September: Instead of listing article titles, as previous issues had, the cover bore a bold Kent illustration of a woman’s profile, facing right. Her right hand holds a pole, with a blank flag waving just over her head. Left hand cupped to her open mouth, she calls out. Her expression is hard to read: The eye is open, and the eyebrow is slightly raised. Her gaze and the angle of her hand point to the right side of the page, inviting the reader to open the magazine and discover what has made her so animated.6
Inside, readers found news with a distinct Communist Party flavor. Two articles support the Spanish Republican Army, while two others discuss the 1936 U.S. election, praising the Communists and lauding the formation of a committee (chaired by Kent) to support the party’s presidential ticket of Earl Browder and James W. Ford. A full-page piece devoted to photos of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptured wall in Mexico City’s Mercado Rodriguez quotes the sculptor: “Capitalism everywhere struggles with inevitable death—the machinery of war, coercion, and bigotry are as smoke from that fire. Labor awakens with the red flag.” Johnson expanded the “Between Ourselves” segment, which provided bios of contributors and other news, and moved it to the inside of the front cover, inviting readers to have a more intimate relationship with the magazine’s editors, writers, and artists. He also increased the number of cartoons. During his tenure, New Masses featured the work of the best cartoonists in the business: Gropper, Gellert, Maurice Becker, Adolf Dehn, Charles Martin, Gardner Rea, Art Young, Syd Hoff, Abe Ajay, Ad Reinhardt, and Mischa Richter.7
Reinhardt and Richter became Johnson’s lifelong friends and likely began contributing to New Masses because of that relationship. Ajay, who had sent his first cartoon to the magazine while he was still a Pennsylvania high school student, moved to New York in 1937 and became friends with all three men as well as with George Annand, a left-leaning advertising man and gifted raconteur.8
Although Dave was seven years older than Reinhardt, the two had much in common. Both were sons of working-class immigrants, had German-born mothers, and had served as the art editor of Newtown High School’s magazine. They also shared a sardonic sense of humor and a keen eye for detail, traits that served them well when they collaborated on New Masses. Reinhardt created the small spot drawings that Dave used to enliven the magazine’s layout, compact, sharp-angled, witty illustrations that break up the space either at the top of or in the middle of columns. Johnson did not know where these illustrations would be needed until the final stages of layout, requiring quick work from Reinhardt.9
In early May 1937, Dave attended a New Masses party hosted by interior decorator Muriel Draper, who had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1934–35 and became sympathetic to communism. At the party, playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, who would win an Academy Award for adapting his friend Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), gave a talk on behalf of New Masses. On another occasion, the Cartoonists Guild had a field day in Van Cortlandt Park, in the northwest Bronx, where they played baseball. Hoff recalled, “When Dave got up at bat, he was the greatest of us all. He kept hitting balls at least as far as Yonkers.”10
Crockett Johnson, “I Am a Real Red!,” New Masses, 27 July 1937. Image courtesy of Tamiment Library, New York University.
Used by permission of International Publishers, New York.
Johnson’s New Masses cartoons figure children’s imaginations as powerful, evincing an interest in what Julia Mickenberg has called the “Pedagogy of the Popular Front,” a movement in progressive parenting designed to produce open-minded children unfettered by their parents’ prejudices. The child who appears on the cover of the 27 July 1937 issue holds a sign reading, “I Am a Real Red!” and looks like Harold’s radical cousin. A full-page illustration from the 4 January 1938 New Masses promotes the Popular Front by having children from around the world leading the fight: The French child shoulders a “People’s Front” banner, the American child wields the power of unions (a CIO sign), the Chinese child brandishes a sword, the Spanish child grips a rifle, and the Soviet child carries a hammer and sickle. All charge into battle together, conveying the power of children to effect social change.11
In February 1938, the Communist Party grew concerned that New Masses lacked firm political leadership. Wanting to put a trusted party member in a position of power, general secretary Browder asked A. B. Magil to move from the Daily Worker’s editorial board to the New Masses board. A frequent contributor to New Masses and the author of a popular pamphlet, The Truth about Father Coughlin, Magil brought a more explicitly communist tone to the publication. He and Johnson worked closely together, and Magil remembered “a very quiet man. He worked, he devoted his time to work and not to conversation. He was an efficient worker who really did what was needed by the magazine in the way of the artwork and fitting in things into the pages of the magazine and so on.”12
Did Johnson ever join the Communist Party? Magil later recalled, “I always assumed that Dave was a party member…. I may be wrong about that, but I think he was considered a party member, as were most of the people who were working then on the magazine.” Though Johnson may or may not have been a Communist (with a capital C), he was surely a communist (with a lowercase c). Whether formal or informal, such affiliations with the communists were typical for artists of Johnson’s generation. Many people committed to social justice saw the Communist Party as a legitimate means of promoting their cause. In 1931, when nine young African American men were falsely accused of raping two white women on an Alabama train, the first organization to hire a lawyer to defend the Scottsboro Boys was the Communist Party; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People did not act until later. The Communists, too, had begun speaking out against fascism more forcefully and earlier than any other major political group. In the latter half of the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party was at its most powerful, and 40 percent of its members lived in New York City. Redder Than the Rose (1935), a collection of New Masses columns by Robert Forsythe (pseudonym of Kyle Crichton), featured illustrations by Johnson as well as Gropper, Rea, and Ned Hilton and had sold ten thousand copies by October 1936.13
As the Popular Front version of communism began to warm to FDR later in the 1930s, so did Johnson. A May 1938 cartoon, “The Primary Candidate Who Tried to Make a Mountain Out of a Mole-Hill,” displays Johnson’s changed attitude toward the New Deal and shows the clean, minimalist style that would become the hallmark of the artist’s work. In the New Masses cartoons and in all of his subsequent work, Johnson practiced what Scott McCloud calls “amplification through simplification.” He strips images down to their essential components—a curved line for a man’s open mouth, three short lines for a mole’s whiskers, an oval for a rock. As McCloud observes, “If who I am matters less, maybe what I say will matter more.”14
Crockett Johnson, “The Primary Candidate Who Tried to Make a Mountain Out of a Mole-Hill,” New Masses, 17 May 1938. Image courtesy of Tamiment Library, New York University. Used by permission of International Publishers, New York.
In April 1939, Crockett Johnson gave a talk on “the art of composing leaflets” at Commonwealth College, a radical labor school near Mena, Arkansas. Indicative of his increased prominence on the left, Johnson joined a distinguished roster of visiting lecturers that included Jack Conroy, socialist (and Commonwealth cofounder) Kate Richards O’Hare, and communist Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor. In 1935, the Arkansas House of Representatives had attempted to shut the college down because it was “being used for the teaching of atheism, free love, and communism”; supported “complete social equality of blacks and whites”; and was promoting “revolutionary changes in our form of government.” The attacks not only did not succeed but made Commonwealth a leftist cause célèbre, at least for a few years. By the time of Johnson’s visit, however, the school had become openly communist, alienating both its financial backers and organized labor, and it closed the following year.15
Back in New York that summer, Johnson drew a cartoon for the 18 July 1939 issue of New Masses, “News Item Chamberlain Warns Hitler,” that mocks British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s ineffectual attempts to secure peace with the German leader. A month later, many on the U.S. Left were shocked when the Soviet Union signed a pact with Nazi Germany in which the two countries agreed to stop war preparations against one another. Literary critic Granville Hicks, a New Masses contributor since 1932, quit the Communist Party and resigned from the magazine’s editorial board in response. Some younger staff members followed, but Johnson remained committed to the cause. In November, Johnson spoke with Hoff about an idea for a cartoon based on Marx’s idea (and Lenin’s claim) that revolution is the locomotive of history. Published in the New Masses on 28 November 1939 under the pseudonym A. Redfield, Hoff’s drawing shows the locomotive’s relentless progress over obstacles. A group of former supporters marches away from the train tracks, with leaders bearing a sign announcing themselves as “The ‘Russia Was Okay Until …’ Society” and followed by smaller groups carrying smaller signs such as “Until Trotsky Left,” “Until Kerensky Left,” and “Until that Pact.” Despite the optimism of Johnson, Hoff, and others, the pact marked the beginning of the end for New Masses, and its support, both financial and otherwise, dwindled until it finally ceased publication in 1948.16
Crockett Johnson at New Masses, ca. 1939. Unlike later photographs of Johnson “drawing” Barnaby, this one does not appear to be staged. Photo by Phil Stern. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced courtesy of Phil Stern/CPi Syndication.
As Dave’s politics entered a rocky time, so did his marriage to Charlotte. The reasons for their problems are not clear, but they decided to divorce. And Ruth had returned to New York.
7
“WE MET, AND THAT WAS IT!”
Two little people on a long winding road and they meet in the middle.
—RUTH KRAUSS, A Moon or a Button (1959)
By about June 1939, Ruth returned to America and moved back into her 36 West Tenth Street apartment. But she did not stay there for long. She “felt a definite need for a broadening of information and a deepening of insight in general—‘education’—so, when I met Maggie who was at that time just starting her postgraduate work in anthropology at Columbia, I went along.”1
“Maggie” was Maggie Parry, and in the summer of 1939, she participated in an expedition, led by Columbia University anthropologist Ruth Benedict, to the Blackfeet Indian nation in Montana. Others on the expedition included psychologist Abraham Maslow; his brother-in-law, Oscar Lewis, a graduate student who would go on to do important work on the culture of poverty; Gitel Poznanski, a blues singer and later a noted anthropologist; painter Robert Steed, whom Poznanski subsequently married; and Ruth Krauss.2
Krauss and Parry “lived in a tent full of flies” with their Blackfeet host family. As during her days with Lionel, Ruth did not mind roughing it. They bathed in Two Medicine River, even though “local health authorities” had “pronounced [it] polluted.” Drinking water was hauled from the river and then boiled. Ruth had neglected to take “any typhoid or Rocky Mountain fever injections before coming” and was regularly exposed to tuberculosis and typhoid as well as trachoma, a type of conjunctivitis: Group members “had to be care
ful not to get our hands near our eyes for fear of trachoma which nearly all the Blackfeet had or had had, many of the older ones being blind from it.”3
Krauss embraced the experience as both keen observer and active participant. She and Parry traveled “everywhere [their] Indian family went.” Ruth rode horses “to get around the Plains, riding through the river and up hillsides and down other hillsides,” although she never felt “at home” on horseback. At other times, Krauss and Parry spent “days sitting on the Plains of Montana watching the Blackfoot races and rodeo and gambling games.” They joined in, with Parry and Poznanski playing blackjack and Krauss playing “the ‘hand game’” and blithely losing her last quarter.4
