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• 1 media/Missile Lobber v20.jpg media/Missile Lobber v20.jpg 2024-10-13T08:28:34-07:00 Suffering Bodies: The Making and Unmaking of British and American Communist Manhood in the Interwar Period 17 image_header 2025-01-29T18:21:36-08:00 Lisa Jackson
  University of California, Berkeley
  
  Abstract
  
  Communist Party literature is filled with representations, both real and imaginary, of working-class manhood transformed by rising fascism and the global economic crisis of the interwar period. These images illustrate how men once proud of their labor had been reduced to cogs in a failed capitalist system, their emaciated bodies the physical evidence of that failure. Yet, they also showed readers how their masculinity could be renewed through the collective strength of membership in the Communist Party or one of its affiliated organizations. This was no mere rhetorical campaign but rather a roadmap for any man hoping to become a professional revolutionary. That campaign facilitated the production of a cadre of operatives in the United States and Great Britain who privileged the collective over individual desires and who labored for little or no pay with the expectation that they would suffer physically for their beliefs. This essay reveals how the body—discursive, material, and social—became the site for demonstrating one’s belief in socialism and its Bolshevik iteration at the most basic level.
  
  
  Keywords: Radicalism / Body / Masculinity / Communist Party of Great Britain / Communist Party of the United States
  
  
  Comrade J. M. Adhikari, a Communist and valued Labour leader in Bombay, has just succumbed to prolonged illness. After a brilliant academic career, he threw himself into labour politics in 1928, to fill the breach created by the mass arrests of labour workers in connection with the Meerut Conspiracy Case. In 1929 he was editing Kranti, the leading Marxist journal of that day. He gave his best to the education and organisation of workers. He had, in the course of his work, to undergo periods of imprisonment. His ailing health was completely shattered by the strain of arduous work and the rigours of prison life.
                                                                        —“Death of a Comrade”
  
  Introduction
  
  In 1938, readers of the International Brigade’s Volunteer for Liberty learned of the death of Dr. Jagannath M. Adhikari, the brother of Dr. Gangadhar M. Adhikari, Meerut defendant and Secretary General of the Communist Party of India from 1933 to 1935.¹ Jagannath had been arrested in 1934 in a “round-up” of Bombay labor leaders who were charged with violating the Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers Act, 1932 (“Bombay”; “Disqualification”). Section 4, Sub-Section (1) of the Act included a provision allowing for the “control of suspected persons,” meaning anyone who challenged colonial rule in British India. In response to appeals to remove this clause and allow Jagannath to seek medical treatment in Europe, the British Home Member declared it a necessity to keep tabs on “Communist agitators,” especially those “chemists and druggists who refused to do business during the civil disobedience movement,” and declined to revise the terms of Jagannath’s sentence (“Disqualification”; “Internment”). J. M. Adhikari suffered from hemophilia, a disease at the time treated with whole blood and/or plasma transfusions, so the Home Member was likely correct in stating that doctors in Bombay could treat him as well as any in Europe. But to the editors of Volunteer for Liberty, his continuing detention “hastened his end. He had gifts that would have proved invaluable in the constructive age—but in our times his great gifts invited for him internment and premature end” (“Death of a Comrade”). Adhikari’s obituary is but one example of the Communist press using both real and fictive damaged bodies for political purposes that in turn served as guideposts for the construction of militant masculinity.
  
  This essay is divided into two parts. The first examines the rhetorical construction of radical masculinity in cultural material produced by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in the 1930s. Radical newspapers illustrated how the economic crisis had undermined men’s ability to create and maintain their masculinity and, in muscular representations of the Communist Party, showed readers that restoration of their manliness could be achieved through militant activism (Espinosa; Leab; Pivens and Cloward). The CP press also provided evidence of that militancy in photographs of bruised and bloodied men fresh from the frontlines of the class war. Though in many respects these images sought to undermine capitalist and governmental attempts to hide broken bodies from the public (Fahy; Faue; Field; Jarvis, Koureas; Meyer; Slavishak; Verdery), they also offered readers a vision of diminished manhood transformed by Marxism and the power of the collective. These images enabled Communists in Great Britain and the United States to envision themselves as militant, manly warriors even as they suffered physical deprivation and defeat in violent confrontations with anti-Communist forces. That the party rewarded such behavior with laudatory coverage in the press and the occasional promotion within the Communist hierarchy suggests that the CPGB, CPUSA, and Comintern leadership expected operatives to sacrifice their bodies despite never explicitly making it a requirement for membership or employment.
  
  Examined in isolation, this rhetorical strategy could be perceived as an attempt by the Communist press to romanticize suffering, to make martyrs of damaged radical bodies, but it served a greater purpose for those on the front lines. The second part of this essay avoids such critiques through analysis of life as a Communist operative. For paid employees especially, commitment to the Party often meant a life of physical and economic deprivation as well as mental and physical harassment from law enforcement and vigilantes. As Stuart MacIntyre notes in his history of the Communist Party of Australia, “official repression [. . .], constant surveillance, censorship, and prosecution [. . . strengthened] the conviction of communists that their class war was just and their sacrifices worthwhile” (5). By juxtaposing radical discourse with evidence of the actual suffering endured by Communist operatives, this essay reveals the price that some willingly paid for those convictions.
  
  As has been demonstrated in other scholarly works on gender in the first half of the twentieth century, the body became, in essence, a propaganda tool by which political organizations, social movements, and religious groups conveyed specific, often conflicting, gendered and racial messages in support of their individual agendas (Jarvis). Early twentieth-century city boosters in Pittsburgh, for example, commissioned public works of art that gendered the industrial city male and linked the region to working class masculinity, while memorials to British World War I veterans worked to reinscribe prewar gender ideologies through the commemoration of an elite white masculinity (Slavishak; Koureas). New Deal art administrators similarly used public sculptures and murals to establish and reaffirm acceptable gender roles and expression in fictive accounts of American expansionism in attempts to bolster the country’s flagging national identity (Melosh). Likewise, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration employed members of the burgeoning advertising sector to sell to young, unemployed men the idea that in unskilled manual labor they could renew their “diminished manhood” (Jarvis). The combined forces of capital and the British and American governments, one could argue, succeeded in these endeavors by reinforcing collective narratives of patriotism and normative gender.
  
  To accomplish this, city boosters, corporations, and government officials found it necessary to downplay or outright hide certain realities that would have shattered those narratives. Both Edward Slavishak and Christina Jarvis peel back the veneer of physically imposing manhood established by boosters and political operatives to reveal the broken and injured bodies of early twentieth century steel workers and World War II soldiers carefully hidden from public view (Jarvis 156-84; Slavishak 224-64). Likewise, beneath the nation-building project of World War I memorials in Britain existed a quest to control unacceptable masculinities—the radical, the mentally and physically infirm, and the homosexual (Koureas). Still, certain groups turned those collective narratives on their heads, equating physical strength with labor militancy, or making the broken body a symbol of strength in the face of adversity and as a metaphor for “eroded optimism and opportunity” (Faue 71).²
  
  The political cartoonists and photographers who contributed to the CPUSA and CPGB press employed similar strategies to those of other Depression-era photographers and labor unionists, depicting working-class men as either “strong or weak” depending upon the message they wished to convey (Fahy 10). Most often the Party’s newspapers used allegorical images of radical masculinity to foster passion and commitment to socialism among an audience receptive to the notion of Communists as muscular, militant working-class men, but they also employed the rhetoric of victimization, particularly when lambasting government relief and jobs programs during the first half of the 1930s. Moreover, published photographs of broken radicals’ bodies, though ostensibly suggestive of physical weakness, also showcased radicals’ strength despite overwhelming opposition. This essay reveals how the body—discursive, material, and social—became the site for demonstrating one’s belief in socialism and its Bolshevik iteration at the most basic level. The Communist Party and its disciplinary regimes, I argue, produced a cadre of operatives who privileged the collective over individual needs and desires and who labored for little or no pay with the expectation that they would suffer physically for their beliefs.
  
  The Communist Body in Print
  
  Elizabeth Faue has found that Left-leaning political cartoons showed “brawny” male workers “[possessing] the saintly qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice,” while capital’s engorged “body suggested waste, impotence, and emasculation” (74, 82). This juxtaposition of corpulence and muscular masculinity appears to have been a common theme in labor-Left culture during this period, as Communist cartoonists in both the United States and Great Britain turned frequently to this symbolism. In various depictions, jowly, beady-eyed capitalists and/or politicians strolled uncaringly past a Black body hanging from the rafters, observed medical examinations of emaciated young men, or stared defiantly toward the viewer demanding religious devotion (Figures 1-3). Many times, the bosses, almost always men, appeared incapable of supporting their massive frames and either sat or leaned upon a cane lest they stumble under the enormous weight of their own greed. Moreover, they cowered in the presence of righteous radical masculinity.
  
  Images of diminished manhood typically did not focus on Communists but on the unnamed masses. Political cartoons about economic insecurity and rampant hunger, for example, often did not feature the symbols or slogans of the Communist Party. Instead, they depicted embodiments of capitalism, usually in the form of corpulent excess, in contrast to the emaciated bodies of the unemployed or working poor. One such cartoon in California’s Western Worker took aim at Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program designed to give young men work but whose regimented organization looked a bit too much like military training to the CPUSA (Figure 3). It depicted an obese general—his body straining against the confines of an office chair—overseeing a medical examination of two “homeless youth” who would serve as cannon fodder for the impending imperialist war. Standing bare-chested with bulging ribs exposed, the young white man and his African American counterpart stare defiantly past the doctor at the well-fed officer, knowing that their fate is in his hands.
  
  In Britain, organizations like the Minister’s Advisory Committee on Nutrition and the British Medical Association issued reports in the early 1930s that, in the eyes of the CPGB, reduced working-class families to numbers on a chart and their health to percentages of protein and calories (“The Nation’s Health”; “Minimum Diet”). Desmond Rowney, a political cartoonist for the CPGB’s Daily Worker who published under the pseudonym “Maro,” chose to critique those committees and their focus on the minimum nutrition required to maintain “working capacity,” equating the so-called experts to that paragon of false virtue, Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. As one well-fed capitalist weighs a miniscule bit of food, a second bends down to poke at a child’s belly while Mr. Bumble denounces the youngster for wanting more (Figure 4).
  
  Another Maro cartoon protested London County Councillor and Labour Party stalwart Herbert Morrison’s proposal to create a green zone around the city when the funds for such an undertaking could have been better spent alleviating suffering among the poor. Emaciated working-class men, some without clothing or shoes, kneel in this imagined landscape, feeding like livestock in a pasture. As two attempt to abscond from this degrading scene, Morrison screams at one, “Eat your damn grass!” while a police officer hauls the other off to jail (Figure 5). In both this and the previous cartoons, capitalism—exemplified in the rotund bodies of government and the military—dominates the frame, offering stark contrast to the undernourished bodies of the poor. Moreover, they served as visual reminders that working-class male bodies belonged not to the souls that resided in them, but to the individuals and institutions who profited from their labor.
  
  By contrast, the radical press depicted Communist men as masters of their environment in larger-than-life perspectives. Like members of the mainstream labor press, radical journalists used manhood and the inherent strength in muscular working-class bodies to remind members that the CP collective body could accomplish more than any individual. The workers of the Trade Union Unity League, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, and the Young Communist League loomed large over the landscape they intended to conquer or the masses that they led to enlightenment (Figures 6-8). So too did those in the UK who fought against homegrown fascism, politicians, and government suppression of the Communist press (Figure 9). Much like New Deal commissioned artworks showing robust workers as lords and masters of both the untamed frontier and industrial landscape, these workers rolled up their sleeves, forearms rippling as they marched heroically forward to confront imperialists and the boss class (Melosh; “Strike!”). Communist operatives may not have enjoyed professional and physical mobility, but these images, by depicting actual forward movement, gave radicals the impression that they were leading an economic, political, and social revolution. Moreover, this forward momentum coupled with the symbolism of rolled sleeves suggested that Communists did not shy away from physical exertion or violent confrontation, marking them as antithetical to the parasitic elite who fed off the labor of others (Figures 6-9). At times, the acronym of a mass organization appeared on the clothing or body of the worker, indicating that this manly body represented not an individual radical, but the collective strength of the CPGB or CPUSA and their affiliated organizations (Figure 6).
  
  Men of color, so often subjected to emasculation in the mainstream press, could look to Communist newspapers for more positive, manly depictions. At the time, the Communist Party and the International Labor Defense demonstrated a commitment to racial solidarity by applying limited financial resources and significant time in the defense of nine African American young men wrongfully accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama; anti-colonialists like the Meerut Conspiracy defendants mentioned in the introduction; and any foreign national threatened with deportation. One could argue that these efforts were little more than thinly-veiled recruitment drives, but the fact remains that at this time the Party was one of the few predominantly white organizations willing to challenge entrenched and legislatively sanctioned racism. By simply depicting men of color as manly and not as infantilized racial caricatures, Communist artists acknowledged their masculinity while they simultaneously depicted the CP as an organization committed to interracial solidarity.
  
  Cartoonists in the United States occasionally depicted African American manhood, like that of white radical masculinity, in comparisons to the emasculated obese bodies of capitalists, but more often in relation to other workers. Group settings gave artists the opportunity to emphasize the importance of cross-racial coalition building, and to that end they portrayed workers of color as masculine equals to their white comrades. It must be noted, however, that often artists situated white male Communist operatives and strike leaders at the front of these group images or centered within the frame unless the cartoon’s message specifically dealt with efforts to use racial discord to undermine striker resolve (Figure 10). This had the perhaps unintended effect of implying that radical white men would lead people of color out of poverty. This is less evident in drawings regarding the fight of the International Labor Defense to free the Scottsboro Nine or to end lynching, as artists deployed John Henry imagery of oversized, muscular African American men wielding sledgehammers or pickaxes (Figure 11).
  
  When depicting people of color, radical British political cartoonists appear to have focused not on the South Asians, Caribbeans, and Arabs living in the United Kingdom, but on those in the colonies. Like images of Black workers in the United States press, these seem to have been largely positive representations of muscular masculinity, such as the larger-than-life “Indian masses” facing down British imperialists and their South Asian collaborators (Figure 12). By this time, most of the Meerut defendants had been released and, at a December 1931 conference, the Communist Party of India had reorganized itself and elected Dr. G. M. Adhikari General Secretary. Gangadhar, who translated The Communist Manifesto into the Marathi language while incarcerated, played a significant role in radicalizing his trade unionist co-defendants, many of whom came out with a greater understanding of and appreciation for Marxism-Leninism than they had prior to their arrests (Shaikh 65-66). Over the course of the next few months, government repression of Indian trade unionists and nationalists increased significantly, including the arrests of G. M. Adhikari’s brother Jagannath the day after Figure 12 appeared in the Daily Worker (UK) (“Bombay”; Chowdhuri 91; Manzer 777-78).
  
  When the All-India Congress seized control of the Madras Presidency in the 1937 elections, political cartoonist James Friell, pseudonym “Gabriel,” celebrated this achievement with another depiction of Indian muscular masculinity in the form of a shirtless drummer performing with future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Depicted playing the pungi, Nehru glances up bemusedly at Governor-General and Viceroy of British India Victor Alexander John Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, wearing the regalia associated with his many titles and holding “Britain’s Constitution of Bondage for India,” none of which protect him from the snake charmer’s music. But by choosing to employ this racist trope of South Asian manhood in a critique of British imperialism, Gabriel and the editors of the Daily Worker (UK) revealed that the CPGB quest to eliminate “white chauvinists” from their ranks had yet to be achieved. (Figure 13)
  
  The Communist Body at Work
  
  Despite these images of militant masculinity, membership in the Party, especially employment by the CPGB or CPUSA, often meant an acceptance of economic and physical deprivation while working for a socialist future. Any war involves deprivation, and the most committed Communists enlisted in the class war fully aware that they would suffer in this fight. And suffer they did, willingly and resolutely. They gave up promising careers or decent wages during an economic slump and depression. They slept in strike camps with migrant farmhands, intimidated strikebreaking loom operators and stingy Public Assistance Committee members, protested pit closures with the unemployed, and, above all else, confronted law enforcement and vigilantes knowing they would be beaten, arrested, and possibly killed. Not content to offer rhetorical support for the common man, these men put themselves at risk for the sake of others, making them heroes to many and dangerous to those who wished to maintain the status quo.
  
  Communists expected to suffer because they were told as much by Soviet novelists, theorists, and propagandists. Many Stalinist realist novels and films translated for and shown to English-speaking audiences were “filled with damaged male bodies” whose injuries sometimes accumulated alongside their rise through the party ranks, giving observers the idea that Soviet men and women would be rewarded for their sacrifices (Kaganovsky 3, 22). Likewise, when Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky urged readers of The ABC of Communism to rise and save the world from the “horrors of capitalism” and imperialism, they admitted that this would not be an easy task: “The worker may suffer defeat in individual battles, and even in individual countries. But the victory of the proletariat is no less certain than the ruin of the bourgeoisie is inevitable” (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 137).
  
  Though the Party would be loath to admit it, the representations of emaciated young men in political cartoons more closely resembled the bodies of Communist operatives, as the all-encompassing nature of their commitment to working-class struggles only exacerbated the effects that malnourishment and government-sanctioned harassment had on radical bodies. In a letter to Max Bedacht written in the second year of his tenure as a CPUSA organizer in California, Sam Darcy noted with little fanfare that his involvement in the effort to free political prisoner Tom Mooney, organize local and state hunger marches, publish the Western Worker, and get the Communist Party included in upcoming elections had resulted in an exhaustion-fueled illness (Darcy, Letter). He later described his activities during the 1934 longshoremen’s strike as a “taxing life physically and often harrowing on the nerves.” This might seem hyperbolic until compared with Adhikari’s obituary and a New Masses profile of Harlem activist Claudia Jones that noted with little fanfare that her Young Communist League mentor Jimmie Ashford “worked himself to death a couple of years ago” (United States).
  
  Darcy’s frenetic schedule can be partially explained by the Party’s desire to be all things to all workers, but the limited number of paid operatives meant that at certain times, there was no one else to do the job. While Darcy traveled to the United States national office in 1931, Morris Rapport wrote to him about the lack of sufficient manpower for an approaching unemployed conference, noting, “the only one available is Hogardy who is sick and will have to go to the hospital. [Elmer] Hanoff and I are trying to prevail on him to wait until after the conference.” He also reported that Cooper in the Los Angeles office “took sick,” and because the rest of the LA personnel had been imprisoned, Rapport anticipated that he would be traveling south to take over that section for a while (Rapport, Letter to Sam Darcy). This appears to have been the case in both countries. For several months in 1931, CPGB operative Maurice Ferguson exchanged letters with the national office requesting that he be removed as Birmingham District Organizer, citing the need for hemorrhoid surgery. They declined to do so, opting to make his wife Lily Webb interim head while Ferguson was in hospital and bringing in Tom Roberts during Ferguson’s convalescence in the country (Great Britain, Special Branch, Maurice Ferguson). If many operatives like Hogardy and Ferguson put off trips to the hospital for the sake of the movement, it is not surprising that some of them, including Darcy, felt old before their time (Darcy, Letter).³
  
  Evidence shows that some operatives could not withstand the pressure; the long hours, inconsistent wages, and threats of bodily harm led some to request leaves of absence and others to disappear altogether. The CPGB gave David Ramsey a less stressful job after he suffered a “temporary breakdown in health, a breakdown caused by devotion to […] party work” (Great Britain, Special Branch, David Ramsey), while Comrade Daniels, an organizer in Los Angeles, “disappeared for a whole day” after the CPUSA refused to grant him a leave of absence. In his report to CPUSA headquarters, Morris Rapport acknowledged that when he left for Los Angeles, Daniels was not in the best of health and weighed at most 107 pounds. A “few weeks [sic] hard work” resulted in a breakdown of sorts, and Morris speculated that Daniels’ temporary desertion was an attempt to “force the District Committee to send him some help” (Rapport, Letter to Secretariat).
  
  Subsequent actions and reactions by all parties reveal much about these men’s perceptions of ideal radical manhood. Ramsey, whose undercover work for the CPGB made him a stranger to many in the community, chafed at his apparent demotion to a less important position. He said as much to Communist Member of Parliament William Gallacher, who suggested he take it up with the CPGB leadership. And though he had requested three months off, Daniels returned to the Los Angeles office after a single day, a day in which he spent some time composing a letter apologizing for his actions (Great Britain, Special Branch, David Ramsey; Rapport, Letter to Secretariat). These are both secondhand accounts in letters to CPUSA and CPGB headquarters, so the evidence must be read with a measure of skepticism, but in each case, the men seeking or seizing time away from the struggle expressed regret, guilt, and perhaps even some embarrassment about the need for it, suggesting that they understood that their behavior did not align with proper Communist masculinity.
  
  Daniels’ concern that the District Organizer for California might deny him a leave of absence proved to be appropriate, as Samuel Darcy and the National Office did exactly that to his comrade Charles Bakst a few months later. In June 1931, the CPUSA National Office received a letter from Bakst appealing Darcy and Rapport’s decision to grant him a week off rather than the month he had requested. A member of the District Secretariat and Committee at the time, Bakst stated that he intended to remove himself from both positions. “My nervous system is naturally a reflection of my physical condition and […] I don’t consider myself fit to fill either post,” he wrote, concluding with a criticism of those who regarded his request as a “vacation” (Bakst).⁴ The Central Executive Committee of the CPUSA denied his appeal, telling Bakst:

  Your request for a leave of absence on the basis of bad health is something that concerns the responsible leadership of the District. You cannot simply demand a blank leave of absence for a month. The District Secretariat is entitled to know how you expect to spend this month so that you can regain your health and return to your activities in the Party. (CPUSA, Central Committee)

  
  Eventually, Bakst agreed to spend two weeks on a comrade’s farm, much to everyone’s relief. Still, the Committee wondered about his initial reluctance. “If Comrade Bakst is really sick,” they wrote Rapport, “this should give him an opportunity to go someplace where he can regain his health. However, this does not mean that such a leading comrade can simply walk off any time he desires” (CPUSA, Central Committee, Organization Department, emphasis added). This response could have been a simple indication that at least one person at CPUSA headquarters doubted the veracity of Bakst’s claims, but the underlying implication that he feigned an illness to get out of work suggests this may have been an ongoing problem for the Party. It also lends credence to the idea that comrades may have used sickouts as a means of avoiding potentially violent direct actions, preserving their masculine credentials under the cover of illness.
  
  While it is true that Communists endured economic and physical deprivation, especially if they worked for the Party and its insufficient wages, it is also true that industrialists, law enforcement, and governments in Great Britain and the United States fought vigorously to discourage their activities. Municipal governments passed laws against obstruction of entryways, leafleting, picketing, speaking without permits, and the catchall “breach of the peace” (called disturbing the peace in the United States), all for the purposes of limiting radical activism and protest. A favorite in the United States was the vagrancy law. Though designed in part to funnel African Americans and other people of color into the prison pipeline and convict lease system, the nebulous definitions of “vagrancy” in these statutes allowed law enforcement to arrest anyone on any pretense, including suspected radicals (Alexander 28, 31; Blackmon 53-54, 124; Lichtenstein 72, 169; May; Dyl; Weinrib; White). Though usually misdemeanors, many convicted of these crimes had no choice but to serve time in jail because they could not pay the fines.
  
  Violent suppression of labor activism in the United States began in the second half of the nineteenth century, when industrialists hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency and similar private companies to infiltrate shop floors and unions and undermine organizing efforts. Such practices continued well into the twentieth century, with vigilante groups hired by corporate organizations like the Industrial Association and Associated Farmers of California that attempted to put down strikes in the 1930s (Weiner; Olmsted, Right; Olmsted, “British”; Selvin; Weiss). The reemergent Ku Klux Klan, now with a broadened list of enemies, assisted in the effort by terrorizing political dissidents, labor activists, and foreign nationals of all kinds (Blee). Similar groups existed in the United Kingdom, including British Fascisti, the Imperial Fascist League, and, most famously, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. And in both countries, veterans’ organizations like the American and British Legions sometimes operated alongside law enforcement to deter radical activism (Stoker; Worley; Linehan, East London; Linehan, “Christ” Tilles; Catterall; Thurlow; Donnelly; McIver; Olmsted, “British”).
  
  Communists were often subjected to physical harassment, sometimes solely by these anti-Communist civilian groups, but frequently with the tacit approval or active involvement of law enforcement. Sometimes the police simply arrested speakers, but on occasion they engaged in severe violence, usually unprovoked, against Communists and anyone who happened to be in the vicinity. Hosea Hudson described an Unemployed Council meeting that took place on the steps of the North Birmingham, Alabama courthouse where the crowd consisted of unemployed whites and Blacks and others who, out of apparent curiosity, paused for a moment to find out why they had gathered there. According to Hudson, the police did not discriminate when they drew their batons. “They were just ordinary white people,” he remembered. “That’s where they learnt their lesson. They learning [sic], many of them that day, that they were no more than the Negroes in the eyes of the ruling class of Birmingham and their police” (Hudson and Painter 137). Hudson could make comparisons between anti-Black violence and police brutality against radicals because he had firsthand experience of it as an African American Communist working in Alabama in the 1930s. With a few well-placed blows to the head, Hudson contends, police batons had the power to knock a radical white man from his perch atop both the racial and gender hierarchies, making him the social equal of his African American comrades.
  
  Rather than hide bodies broken in confrontations with anti-Communist forces, the radical press instead prominently displayed them as living symbols of the Party’s commitment to working class struggles. Some accounts celebrated radical strength and determination to hold fast despite overwhelming opposition, while others lamented the damage done to already depleted manhood. The CP considered the struggle for economic justice to be class warfare, and the Communist press often provided photographic evidence that they had indeed been engaged in battle. One such image in California’s Western Worker shows organizers Mike Marvos and Pat Calihan, of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, looking almost giddy, despite obvious injuries to their heads and faces. According to the caption, deputy sheriffs broke Calihan’s jaw using the butts of their rifles, and Marvos received the same treatment in his attempt to rescue his comrade. Though probably in considerable pain, both men appear happy to have survived their foray on the frontlines of the war against capitalist exploitation of the working class. This image of bloodied and bandaged Communists demonstrates radical men’s willingness to sacrifice their bodies for the sake of the labor movement while simultaneously showing the viciousness of the other side (Figure 14).
  
  Evidence of that sacrifice is prominently displayed in the photograph of four members of a Los Angeles Unemployed Council who joined ninety-six others in a protest over relief distribution at the local welfare office. By staging protests outside governmental agencies that controlled their economic fates, the council offered alternative sites for gender construction to men who had lost the primary means by which they created and maintained their masculinity (Faue 82). On this day, demonstrators clashed with members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad,” and Robert Myers, John Hester, Fred Daniels, and William Coper were subsequently beaten and arrested. Taken after their release, this image shows Myers, Hester, and Coper swathed in bandages, each sporting facial lacerations and puffy jawlines. The framing is key, for it allows the viewer to see that Daniels, Hester, and Coper also have bloodied and swollen hands, an indication that these three did not attempt to avoid the confrontation. Only Daniels avoids the gaze of the camera, which may be an attempt to escape recognition, or a sign that he is in considerable pain. Combined, the four faces show determination, humility, discomfort, and calm (Figure 15).
  
  Unemployed workers and union organizers did not face anti-Communist violence in isolation, as many bespectacled intellectuals who supported their organizing efforts frequently suffered alongside them. To show the ruthlessness of the Los Angeles Police Department and its government-sanctioned Red Squad, the editors of the Western Worker repeatedly published an image of International Labor Defense attorney Leo Gallagher, whose round glasses seemed to have survived the beating that he and other LA liberals suffered during a protest over a raid on the local John Reed Club (Marquardt; Homberger). Though Gallagher never joined the Communist Party, he did serve as attorney for those who did, and in many respects, he embodied the spirit of radical masculinity—intelligent, committed to the legal defense of the working class, and unafraid to challenge the inhumane policies of the Los Angeles Police Department (Figure 16).
  
  Communist men did not simply respond to anti-radical violence; they often initiated confrontations, especially with those they considered enemies of the working class. In 1930s London, Communists frequently battled against members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and they did so intentionally and with vigor. Pat Devine relished the opportunity to match wits with BUF soapbox orators, occasionally setting up his own speaker’s platform within sight of theirs in Bethnal Green’s Victoria Park, a green space adjacent to the borough of Hackney, a BUF stronghold in London’s East End (Great Britain, Special Branch, Pat Devine; Marriott 305-6). When the CPGB learned that BUF leader Oswald Mosley planned to hold a rally in Trafalgar Square on July 4, 1932, the Stepney branch (another East End borough) urged people to demonstrate against the use of this space by a “band of ruffians” who would attack innocent young men like the unnamed teenager pictured in Figure 17. This flier, intended as a letter to be sent to the Home Secretary, explained that, following a BUF meeting, about 20 Blackshirts attacked this 15-year-old Jewish boy. It describes the beating as brutal, continuing after the young man lost consciousness, and resulting in abrasions, bruising, and the potential loss of an eye. This incident, as reported, was an act of racist violence and not about this young man’s political affiliation, but it serves the same rhetorical purpose as news articles about and photographs showing anti-Communist vigilantism because it features an image of a worker staring defiantly into the camera lens, resolutely facing his enemy, his masculinity intact despite the beating he had received (Figure 17; “Fascist Politics!”).
  
  Such beatings could signal diminished manhood, but the radical press argued that Communist men’s resilience and perseverance proved that defeat had the opposite effect. When the Daily Worker (UK) reported that another “hooded band of ruffians” had abducted CPUSA operatives Bob Minor and David Levinson near Gallup, New Mexico, they took great pains to make that distinction. Kidnapped and driven to the desert, where they were beaten until “bleeding heavily and almost unconscious,” Minor and Levinson refused to allow this injustice to prevent them from continuing the good fight. Though left to die in an unfamiliar and hostile environment, the two survived thanks to the kindness and assistance of an unnamed Navajo man who helped them get medical treatment and a ride back to town (“Hooded Fascists”). This, then, was the ultimate example of radical masculinity: persistence in the face of great adversity and the willingness to accept defeat in the individual battle in the hopes of winning the war (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 137).
  
  Perhaps even more revealing of what it meant to embody radical manliness were stories about Communist men’s arrest records and prison sentences. While Communist literature kept readers apprised of the many activists in jail on various (in their minds) trumped up charges, they also celebrated these men for being willing to risk their physical health and freedom in support of working-class struggles. In an article reminding readers that Bob Lovell remained behind bars, the Daily Worker (UK) praised his “fine fighting record,” including “eight convictions . . . for working-class activity” (“Send Him a Card”). In their opinion, “no man in the movement [had] fought so strenuously and courageously against police brutality or so fearlessly led the workers in the fight against exploitation and oppression” (“Bob Lovell”).⁵ In announcing their endorsement of Karl Hama for California Assembly, the Western Worker told readers of his previous convictions for labor organizing in Osaka, Japan, and said that he “continued with unbroken militancy” to fight for the working class despite having been “beaten and jailed many times by the Los Angeles Red Squad” (“Karl Hama”). Such praise served as a signal of commitment to the struggle; a person’s rap sheet signified their worthiness to advance within the revolutionary ranks. This is precisely why questions about fines, arrests, and prison terms appeared on applications for membership renewal, election to Party offices, and selection for training schools, and also why operatives sometimes listed them in letters to Party officials (David Ainley; Great Britain, Special Branch Report, David Ainley; Great Britain, Special Branch Reports, Morris Ferguson).
  
  Evidence of police and vigilante brutality served the dual purposes of casting radical men as both manly and victimized. By promoting what Elizabeth Faue calls a “romantic and heroic perception of violence” in photographs and articles about labor militancy, the CP placed a masculine stamp on their activities and supplied proof for their readers that the radical labor movement was indeed engaged in a war against a formidable enemy (73). And while it convinced readers of capital’s power, it also argued that the Left—collectively—had the power defeat it. Though each bloody lip and broken jaw signaled a temporary defeat of the Left, the battered faces of these men revealed the cowardice and inhumanity of capitalist forces, and in some respects emasculated the capitalist victors while boosting the masculinity of those they presumed to have vanquished.
  
  Conclusion
  
  Communist Party literature is filled with representations, both real and imaginary, of working-class manhood transformed by rising fascism and the global economic crisis of the interwar period. These images demonstrate how men once proud of their labor had been reduced to cogs in a failed capitalist system, their emaciated bodies the physical evidence of that failure. Yet, they also demonstrated to these men how their masculinity could be renewed through the collective strength of membership in the Communist Party or one of its affiliated organizations. Readers learned that they could reestablish their manhood by uniting with likeminded comrades in the battle against economic and social injustice and by confronting those people and institutions who cared little for the plight of the common man. The manly radical man, these images revealed, was not created through individual endeavors but through collective resistance to capitalist forces that sought to keep them emasculated and dependent on a system based on inequality and subjugation. Workers who stood bravely in defiance of that system and its violent enforcers, the radical press argued, symbolized the collective strength of Marxism and the Communist Party, their battered faces and bodies a testament to enhanced, if not fully restored, radical manhood. This was no mere rhetorical campaign but rather a roadmap for any man hoping to become a professional revolutionary. Party literature that equated bodily harm with militant masculinity revealed that suffering was in fact the price of admission.
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  Many thanks to Luke Seaber and Joshua Lam, whose thoughtful comments and editing prowess greatly improved this article. Any remaining mistakes are the fault of the author alone.
  Notes
  
  1. The International Brigade was a volunteer army organized by Communists and other radicals to help the Spanish Republican Army defeat Francisco Franco’s insurgent forces. Dr. Gangadhar Adhikari was one of 32 men arrested in 1928 in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, and charged with conspiring to overthrow the British colonial government and attempting to establish a Communist Party in India (Chowdhuri 70-77; Shaikh 66).
   
  2. See also Fahy 3 and Street 400.
   
  3. In this letter, Darcy was commenting on the death of a comrade named Louis who he had speculated would live “forever if anyone would.” When he wrote that he “didn’t realize [he] was getting so old,” Darcy had just celebrated his 28th birthday (Darcy, “Storm”).
   
  4. Bakst worried that comrades would accuse him of being a social parasite at a time when he was apparently receiving government assistance while working for the CPUSA (Bakst).  Though the timing is unclear, he also became an informant, so it is possible that he was receiving money from the FBI as well (Cherny 44).
   
  5. See also “Arrested for Dock Meeting” and “Get Lovell Out!”
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