“He gave the impression,” recalled the novelist Arthur Koestler, “that bumping against him would be like colliding with a steam roller.”2 Struck by his ideological fervor and tactical ingenuity, Leon Trotsky brought
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I N N O C E N T S ’ C L U B S
Münzenberg into the small circle of Marxist intellectuals that surrounded exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Zurich. Münzenberg was not, however, in the company of Russian revolutionaries who in 1917 famously boarded the train that carried them in a sealed compartment to the Finland station in Petrograd. Instead, he moved to Berlin and, as the highest-ranking Bolshevik outside the Soviet Union, set about leading the western world into revolution.
Münzenberg’s first major assignment was to raise money for victims of the ghastly famine that swept the Volga region of Russia in the early 1920s. Despite massive incompetence in the actual handling of funds and an obsession with discrediting outside humanitarian interventions such as Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Association, Münzenberg’s famine appeal was a propaganda coup, generating considerable sympathy for the Bolshevik regime, not least in the United States, where the Friends of Soviet Russia committee “literally raised more money in its first two months than it knew what to do with.”3 Out of these early efforts grew the so-called Münzenberg trust, a vast media empire of newspapers, publishing houses, movie houses, and theaters which, “on paper at least,” stretched from Berlin “to Paris to London to New York to Hollywood to Shanghai to Delhi.”4 The financial profitability of these ventures has probably been overestimated—Münzenberg’s most recent biographer thinks that the
“Red Millionaire” was in fact a poor businessman who lost rather than made money for Moscow5—but their effectiveness as instruments of propaganda has not. Particularly successful were Münzenberg’s various “front”
groups, committees superficially devoted to some undeniably benign cause, such as anti-imperialism, peace, or antifascism, whose real purpose was to defend and spread the Bolshevik revolution. Using such devices as letterhead adorned with famous names, spectacular cultural festivals, and carefully stage-managed mock trials, these organizations proved irresistible to politically well-meaning progressives, whose participation made them, in effect, “fellow travelers” of the international communist movement. Münzenberg referred to the front committees as his “Innocents’
Clubs.”6 “These people have the belief that they are actually doing this themselves,” he once told an associate. “This belief must be preserved at any price.”7
The apotheosis of the front tactic came in August 1935, when the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International proclaimed the
T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E C I A F R O N T
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People’s Front against fascism. The Popular Front, as it was known, lived up to its name. In the United States, for example, writers and artists flocked to the antifascist cause. Just returned from the front line in the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway told the Second Congress of the League of American Writers that fascism was “a lie told by bullets.”8
Movie stars such as Melvyn Douglas, Paul Muni, and James Cagney sponsored the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. “This machine kills fascists,” proclaimed the guitar of hobo balladeer Woody Guthrie. And these were only the most conspicuous converts. Across the whole spectrum of American society, citizen groups gravitated to the Front. African Americans, already impressed by communists’ apparent sympathy for their civil rights (the International Labor Defense, which saved nine young black men accused of raping two white women from a legal lynching in Scottsboro, Alabama, was a branch of Münzenberg’s International Workers Relief) joined the National Negro Congress. Factory workers in heavy industries, long regarded as untouchable by the established trade unions, formed the rank-and-file of communist-led organizing drives that coalesced in a new national labor confederation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Student protestors, attracted by the campus campaigns of the American Student Union, formed a national mass youth movement some thirty years before the university strikes of the 1960s.9