Ellen Perlo and
The Bold Shades of Red
Ellen and Victor Perlo
By John
Pietaro
It was a
noticeably chilly afternoon of September 2009 as I made my way over the winding
path that outlines “Red Hill”, the once notorious revolutionary pocket of
Croton-on-Hudson NY. I’d contacted Ellen Perlo the week prior to arrange for a
visit to her upstate home, the one she’d shared since 1957 with her then
recently deceased husband Victor. The couple were long-time members and
activists of the Communist Party and it’s safe to say that they stood high among
its intellectual base. He was a noted author and economist, she an artist
dedicated to the radical cultural movement and for some years the leader of the
CP’s Arts Club.
“Did you
see the John Reed House on your way?”, she asked, wearing a beaming smile.
“It’s just down the road from here. He and Louise Bryant lived there many years
ago but it’s still remembered, especially after ‘Reds’ put us back on the map.
We used to get a lot of traffic with visitors seeking it out after Warren
Beatty made the film. When was that, ’80? ’81? But long before then, a lot of
radical artists and writers were drawn to this area and that lasted decades.
They’d started moving in with Reed and then it lasted through the 1940s and
after, up and down this so-called ‘Red Hill’”.
Ellen Perlo
attended New York University’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts,
graduating in 1938. When she entered school, Ellen was so focused on her art
and studies that she was seen as apolitical, but this changed as the news of the
Spanish Civil War broke out. She became active and increasingly radical in her
political views, ultimately joining the Communist Party during World War Two.
“I joined as everybody was leaving”, she added with a chuckle.
She and
Victor Perlo married in 1943. He was then working for the US Treasury
Department, so the pair resided in Washington DC for the duration of the war. “I
had joined the Party officially in this period but Vic couldn’t become an
actual member while he was working for the government”. However not long after
VJ Day, the early frost of the cold war unleashed investigations into many on
the federal payroll, decimating reputations and careers. After a few years, Perlo
found himself among the victims; it is disputable whether or not he’d held
Party membership before this period, but he was a close associate and authored
articles and papers for the CP press and functions dating back to 1931. The
investigations turned up enough information on Perlo to earn him prime target status.
“Vic was appointed
as the US head of the United Nations
relief agency for Europe; we were set to relocate to Paris but the FBI
stopped that immediately”, she said, nonplussed after so many years of living
with the reality of those times. But the
commencement of this red scare came with a certain ferocity: Perlo, after being
named in a Congressional hearing as ‘a
Soviet spy’, was summarily fired from his government job and blacklisted. This,
too, was the reality of this time of reaction, manipulation and division.
By 1948,
the Perlos had left DC and moved to Flushing, Queens NY. Ellen became a staple
of the anti-war movement, joining into actions then and in the decades which
followed as a member of the Women’s Strike for Peace and WESPAC among other peace
and social justice organizations. All during this time she remained an active
visual artist and also worked closely with her husband, aiding his research and
editing much of the work he was now free to publish under his own name. Ellen
also holds co-authorship with Victor in their noted volume, ‘Dynamic Stability: The Soviet Economy
Today’ (1980).
The couple
were active in many aspects of Party academic and cultural work and as such
became close friends and collaborators with historic figures, renowned for
their work today but under constant fire in their time. These included Paul
Robeson, Hugo Gellert, Walter Lowenfels, Rockwell Kent, Pete Seeger and William
Gropper. For the uninitiated, it’s now hard to imagine that the American Communist
Party maintained a powerful national Cultural Commission starting with the
1920s, lasting well into the HUAC witch hunts. The relevance of the arts is
easily explained by the strength of the medium to carry messages, but its roots
lie much deeper: two of the four founders of the Communist Party USA were John
Reed and Louis Fraina (the latter is today lesser-known than his celebrated
comrade, but Fraina was a journalist, editor, political organizer and
strategist who later became a respected economist). At its height, the Party maintained
a phalanx of leading authors, journalists, playwrights and poets in addition to
noted visual artists, actors, directors, a host of modern dancers, designers
and musicians, many of them stars of stage, radio, gallery and film. The
Party’s cultural work was initially contained within its John Reed Clubs, the
network of which had a national reach and sported famous names alongside the up
and coming. It began as a Communist writers’ organization but spread widely
through other disciplines almost immediately, ushering in many artists of
conscience, particularly in the throes of the Great Depression and the rising
tide of fascism. This organization was openly revolutionary in both its philosophy
and reach and was succeeded in 1935 by the more widespread League of American Writers.
The League
was an outgrowth of the vastly influential American Writers Congress which took
place in New York City that year. The list of names of eager Congress
participants included (listed alphabetically as they were on the Call for an American Writers Congress):
Nelson Algren, Kenneth Burke, Erskine Caldwell, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore
Dreiser, James T Farrell, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Josephine
Herbst, Granville Hicks, Langston Hughes, John Howard Lawson, Tillie Lerner
(Olsen), Meridel Le Sueur, Joseph North, Samuel Ornitz, Lincoln Steffens,
Richard Wright and so many more. It was a treasure trove of the pen, boasting
the best within reportage, fiction, screenplay, drama, poetry and combinations
thereof. To better illustrate the scope of Party culture and the Congress
itself, the following comes from the Congress’ mission statement. This gathering
called for literature as a means to ‘fight
against imperialist war and fascism; to defend the Soviet Union against
capitalist aggression; for the development and strengthening of the
revolutionary labor movement; against white chauvinism (against all forms of
Negro discrimination and persecution) and against the persecution of minority
groups and the foreign born; solidarity with colonial people in their struggles
for freedom; against the influence of bourgeois ideas in American liberalism;
against the imprisonment of revolutionary writers and artists, as well as other
class war prisoners throughout the world’ (“New Masses”, January 22, 1935).
The
following year, there occurred the American Artists Congress which packed Town
Hall during the cold of a New York February. In preparation for their Congress,
a group of 110 noted painters and illustrators signed off on a Call which
stated in part:
‘We artists must act. Individually
we are powerless. Through collective action we can defend our interests. We
must ally ourselves with all groups engaged in the common struggle against war
and fascism…’ The
dye was cast. The event drew such a crowd that it was extended into a three-day
conference, with closed sessions occurring at the New School for Social
Research on the last two days.. Delegations from Mexico, Peru and Germany
joined in (Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds., Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists
Congress. Rutgers, 1986. Source: Lampert, Nicholas, A Peoples Art History of the United States,
New Press, 2013)
Stuart
Davis, by then a noted modernist painter, hosted the proceedings. Other
speakers included Rockwell Kent, Max Webber, Margaret Bourke-White, Aaron
Douglas, Peter Blume, George Biddle, Heywood Broun, and of course Hugo Gellert
who was everywhere to be found in this period.
Though
issues of aesthetics remained relevant as always, the aim of the Congress was
to radicalize artists in the service of progressive struggle, particularly in the
face of the growing fascist threat while the Depression was raging on. Davis’
opening remarks alerted the attendees of the need for a direct response to the social
fallout people faced as well as the particular pains of professional artists in
the hungry years. It was during this speech that plans for an Artists Union
were first presented, as Davis stated, a collective voice for the artists left
out of or underserved by the Works Progress Administration’s Arts Program. Max
Webber, in a speech to the American Artists Congress body stated: “A truly
modern art is yet to come, but not until the new life is here and not before
the imminent emancipation of mankind that we can envisage.” (ibid)
This amazingly
fertile ground also begat the Workers Music League, the Workers Theatre, the
Workers Film and Photo League, the Red Dancers, Red Stage and aggregations such
as the Group Theatre (founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee
Strasburg and featuring Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Will Geer, Stella Adler, Lee
J Cobb, many more) and the Composers Collective of New York; within the latter’s
ranks were Aaron Copland, Mark Blitzstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Lewis
Seeger. Soon, Party cultural leaders VJ Jerome and Michael Gold were dispatched
from the home base of Manhattan to the budding film capital of Hollywood,
establishing CP clubs within the movie industry and standing with its unions
which were embattled by the moguls as well as the gangsters often working on
the inside. But even as the Party’s reach extended well into Hollywood, the
other arts disciplines were becoming increasingly radicalized.
THE VISUAL ARTIST’S MEDIUM offers an immediate statement, one
beyond the need for commentary, and as such, painters, designers, sculptors, cartoonists,
sketch artists and other illustrators have been an integral aspect of the global
revolutionary movement. The artists associated with Industrial Workers of the
World, founded 1901, created a series of posters and placards for organizing
campaigns that had the power to move anxious workers and leap over the
boundaries of language. And some of their cartoon figures like ‘Mr. Block’
(drawn by Ernest Ried) as well as realist sketches and paintings continue to
hold relevance. Often the illustrations were by anonymous artists or those
using pseudonyms (such as “Man X”, “Bingo”, “El Picador”) however some of their
celebrated songwriters like Joe Hill and Ralph Chaplin also spent a good deal
of time as illustrators. Visual art was a vital, universal statement of the
struggle.
The
relevance of visual art was even more profound in “The Masses”, a pre-CP organ which launched the careers of many
future Party cultural workers. It is best recalled for its stirring
illustrations, starkly depicting bloody labor battles, police violence and
economic deprivation, but the magazine also championed Greenwich Village
bohemianism and the hope of modernism. “The
Masses” ran from 1911 through 1917. Many of its artists can be traced to
the ‘Ashcan school’ which offered dark visions of inner city life, all too real
for some but always imbuing a visceral connection for, if not a vehicle of,
pride among the common man and woman. The magazine was a voice for the
suffragettes’ movement, bold new philosophies and the oppressed. It championed
the Industrial Workers of the World and free speech. Among its standout artists
were Stuart Davis, Art Young, John French Sloan, Robert Minor, Alice Beach
Winter, Boardman Robinson and George Bellows. “The Masses” staff was so radical that in 1916, the artists went
out on strike. The magazine’s greatest fight, however, was with the federal
government when its negative coverage the US build-up toward the First World
War found its publishers, artists and writers indicted for conspiracy.
The demise
of “The Masses” and the American
entry into the war symbolized a crushing blow to the Left---just as the reaction
against anarchism and socialism which followed culminated in the near
destruction of the IWW, furious xenophobia, the founding of the Bureau of
Investigation, rabid union busting and a wave of arrests and deportations. Revolutionary
writers and artists, however, responded with increased radicalism and in ’22, a
new journal. Initially “The Liberator”
and then, of much greater importance, “New
Masses” went considerably further than the earlier journals dared. Artists
William Gropper (also known for his work in “Freiheit”)
and Hugo Gellert, soon to become highly celebrated, were on the “New Masses” Executive Board, securing
the illustrator’s place in the vision. Gellert also served as an editor, and he
would be joined by Robert Minor before long. All three were champion Communist organizers
as well as greatly talented creatives; the magazine was born in the main office
of the John Reed Clubs. The circle was complete when Sloan, Robinson and Young,
artists who’d been central to “The
Masses”, joined the staff. Louis Lozowick was also readily hired. Much of
the “New Masses” staff would also
become central to the CP’s primary organ, “The
Daily Worker”, founded in 1924, as
well as its West Coast imprint “The People’s World” and the special
Sunday editions of either title. But “New Masses”, initially conceived as a
purely cultural journal for revolutionaries, maintained the strongest arts
content among Communist periodicals, hence, it attracted some brilliant talent.
Gellert’s incendiary drawing adorned the first issue’s cover, as it would for
many later issues over as many years.
All this
while, other revolutionary artists of many nations were creating works of
social commentary and engaging in the struggle toward political and social
change. Most were Communists, some were Socialists, but regardless of party
affiliation, these intellectuals (using the parlance of the day) were driven by
a force greater than mere art for art’s sake. Art was indeed a weapon in the
class struggle. Much of the energy in the period of the ‘20s-‘30s originated
with the early Soviet organization ProletCult and a number of internationalist
artists’ coalitions which were again rooted in the Leninist model. Yet there
were, simultaneously, any number of independent artists influenced by this
activity. Perhaps the most prominent was Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artist
who traveled to the New York in the early 1930s and laid the groundwork for a
whole school of thought stemming from traditional Latino cultural expression in
response to the toils of factory life. His impact, and that of his wife and
partner, the artist Frieda Kahlo, was felt widely and deeply. Rivera’s series
“Detroit Industry” and perhaps much more so, his infamous tryptic “Man at the
Crossroads”--designed for Rockefeller Center in 1933 but then violently
rejected by the wealthy industrialists--remain legendary. The time and place
was nothing short of electric.
A few
years after, when Ellen Perlo had joined the ranks of the CPUSA, the tumult was
raging in multiple directions. The Spanish Civil War bore a passionate
anti-fascism throughout the Left, one which easily symbolized the economic and
social displace of oppressed peoples. Thousands were driven to the cause yet
this period of activation ran into that of Stalin’s purges, the first
clarification of the extent the Soviet leader would go to in order to hold unchallenged
power. As broken, sporadic news reports of his despotic rule became
increasingly known, many would refute the Communist Party, but the desperation
of the time in the face of a harsh US reactionary campaign against the Left,
saw a new wave of interest in the American CP. And it was in this period in
which the Party arts programs matured and became thoroughly aligned with the
unions such as the United Mural Painters (organized by Hugo Gellert) and Screenwriters
Guild (re-founded by gifted author and Party organizer John Howard Lawson), and
the final period of the Works Progress Administration’s creative arms. During
the war years, cultural worker organizations with an accent on visual art such
as Artists for the Defense and Artists for Victory held important anti-fascist
voices.
Ellen
maintained an ongoing relationship with the cultural workers of the Party and
in 1948, after the Perlos had moved to Queens, New York, their relationship
with many increased further. Victor Perlo was an important advisor to the Henry
Wallace presidential campaign that year and as a result, his comradeship with
creative artists such as Paul Robeson brought them further into the
circle---and, as it turned out, the center of the tumult.
The
infamous Peekskill NY concert by the beloved Robeson, hosted by Howard Fast and
also featuring an assortment of other progressive performers (indeed, this was
the debut gig of the Weavers) occurred the following summer. The terrible
reality of how the event devolved into a brutal riot by right-wing locals
supported by area police against the families who attended has long
overshadowed the music. Ellen Perlo explained:
“Vic and I
flipped a coin to see which of us would have to stay home with the kids. I won.
So I traveled up to Peekskill with friends. We got up to the site and joined in
on a lovely picnic. Pete (Seeger) sang and led everyone in a singalong. It was
a beautiful day with many children in attendance. The concert itself was
wonderful”.
Photographs
from this event show Robeson in performance on the makeshift stage surrounded
by a phalanx of unionists acting as guards. The threats against Robeson by the
forces of reaction had been well-established and an earlier planned concert in
Peekskill had to be cancelled, thus on this occasion, the Party and its allies
in attendance sought to take no chances. However, the event took an ominous
turn at the conclusion. Ellen Perlo explained: “On the way out, as we walked to
our cars, we saw a wall of cops and then we were encountered by these men –
they were yelling out such filth to us. We all got into our cars and the
drivers were directed by the police to one small road”. The dozens and dozens
of cars were instructed to exit by way of a single-lane wooded path flanked by
thickets of trees. The car Ellen was in was about mid-way through the long,
slow-moving caravan when it came under assault: “These men began pounding the
car with rocks. The windshield was immediately smashed! I was furious. Someone
said, “Lie down, Ellen” but I was too angry, I shouted back at them. Later I
had to comb shards of glass out of my hair. This was fascism—like what we are
starting to see again today”, Perlo stated.
Resistance
to the rising tide of fascism had led her into the Party’s ranks and then kept
her deeply active within it. Post-World War Two, the Perlos had to contend with
a uniquely American kind of rightist oppression: McCarthyism, the Red Scare and
the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In this period, the right-wing coalition of
government and industry posed enough of a threat that many Communists either
left the Party or went underground. In addition to the public hearings of the
Hollywood Ten, many other progressive artists and other activists were hounded,
blacklisted and subject to arrest if their testimony wasn’t very carefully
navigated. Leaders of the Communist Party, too, were flagrantly harassed and
then charged under the Smith Act with ‘the attempt to violently overthrow the
US government’. These were, indeed, dark days.
By the
earliest 1960s, as the Civil Rights struggle was coming to its initial boiling
point, the left parties became driven by this pressing issue. Many Communists
who’d been demoralized by the arch-right a decade before, took an open stand in
this fight for equality. The Perlos were prominent among them. And Ellen also
became a mover and shaker in both the Party’s Arts Club and within the staff of
“World Magazine”, the Sunday insert
to the CP newspaper--initially known as “The
Daily Worker” by this time the paper had become “The Daily World”. Perlo recalls Joseph North, one of the deans of
the Party’s cultural work for decades, still on staff as an editor. “We also
had Seymour Joseph, Margaret Pittman and Marla Hoffman among others. The staff
did everything: write, lay-out, proof-read”.
In
addition to regular meetings which involved discussions on socio-political
matters and the arts, the Arts Club was called on to create placards for
demonstrations. “When the Party needed anything to do with art, they called us.
Often we included the credit “Arts Club” under the slogan or imagery we
created”, she explained. “There were so many people involved in the cause, not
all of them were members of the CP but sometimes came to Club meetings and
engaged in some of our projects”. When asked about this treasure trove of
creative activists, Ellen’s eyes lit up. “Well, William Gropper lived right in
Croton, but he wasn’t a member of the Club. We all knew and admired him, but he
drifted in and out. Bob Minor’s widow Lydia also lived here; we were very close.
Seymour Joseph the cartoonist of “The
Daily World”: he was a lovely guy with a great sense of humor. Bill Andrews
and Charles Keller were also gifted cartoonists who worked on the paper. One
day in the early ‘70s Bill left, went home to Arizona and never said
‘goodbye’”, she recalled sadly.
And what
of the celebrated Rockwell Kent and Hugo Gellert? “Rockwell, around 1960 when
the worst of the McCarthy business was over, had his passport returned to him.
We’d become friends in the mid-50s or so. Vic and I called on Rockwell and his
wife Sally to congratulate him and our family spent a lot of time together at
their place in the Adirondacks during summers. I have some of his artwork
here”, she said, pointing to a moving framed sketch. He was not a Communist
Party member but he was an outspoken social justice activist. And Gellert was a
lovely fellow, a small man whose bright white hair I can still see. He was a
member of the Party, of course, and the Club”.
“Another member was Ollie Harrington who used
to work on the paper before my time. He migrated to East Germany but air-mailed
his cartoons in twice per week. He had an intense, dark look about him and his
artwork was always full, finished in appearance, never sketchy. And Harry
Gottlieb was a charming guy who was an overt Party member. He did beautiful
silk screens. And of course we had Bob Ekins, a fabulous sculptor from
Connecticut. He was very political and became one of the original Smith Act
victims. One of his best known pieces depicted a little girl in the segregated
south”.
The Arts
Club also held an Artists’ Workshop in which outside artists were invited in to
silkscreen. A wide reach of visual arts were presented to inspire creativity,
particularly in the service of social change. But not everyone associated with
the club was a visual artist. Perlo explained: “Walter Lowenfels, the great
poet, was a close friend of ours”. She smiled while recalling him. “He always wore a beret and was always full
of life. But more than anything, he was ALWAYS writing poetry no matter where
he was”.
The
Communist Party Arts Club met weekly during the 1960s and ‘70s, offering
educational and experiential activities as well as powerful discussion.
Ultimately, with members moving away from the area, it morphed into a more
general Party club. In recent times, it has dwindled. Victor Perlo continued to
be a highly visible Communist economist and wrote a regular column for the
paper that became “The Peoples Weekly
World” (these days it’s online as “The
People’s World” – www.peoplesworld.org) for the rest of his days.
Though Red
Hill ceased to be a revolutionary stronghold, residents like Ellen Perlo kept the
faith and remained active. She became a member, too, of Artists for Nuclear
Disarmament and participated in the mass demonstrations of the 1980s and beyond.
The Perlos spoke out against the Reagan and Bush administrations, war and
inequity, and fought for workers’ rights through actions, art and the books
they often wrote or edited together. And
their collection of literature and artwork served for decades as a veritable
museum of the intellectual Left. “After Vic passed away, I gave quite a lot of
our collection to the Party and they in turn had these items transferred to a
CP archive at Frostburg State University (http://www.frostburg.edu/lewis-ort-library/aboutlib/depts/arch/perlo/). But I still enjoy surrounding
myself with the special memories and the paintings, sketches, books,
photographs and journals which hold them. We came through a lot”, she explained.
“And these things are a little bit of history”.
As this
article goes to press in 2016, seven years following my visit with Ellen Perlo up
on Red Hill, it coincides with her one-hundredth birthday. Less active perhaps,
but still immersed in her core beliefs in real social change through socialism,
she extends her reach through the little bits of history she affected and may
inspire for decades to come.
