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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
Against this quickly sketched backdrop, Ellison, as many interpreters have noted, targets several familiar but nonetheless valid foci of anticommunist criticism: the Brotherhood's belief that the people are a pliable mass (302, 504-05), its compromises with white sensibilities (for example, in the design of the rainbow banner, 385), its internally undemocratic structure, its betrayal of the Harlem work, and the theoretical root of these, its abstract and teleological view of history (see Benston, "Dialectical Deacon"). Ellison further provides a gallery of Communist Party types: careerist, apologist for the changing party line, apparatchik (Wrestrum, Hambro, Jack). Though he also portrays honest, noncareerist Brotherhood members like brothers Maceo (chap. 23), Tarp, and Clifton, we learn little of their motivations. (11) Most devastatingly, Ellison makes the protagonist himself the exemplar of a particular kind of second-rank Communist--both honest and self-deluded, his decent impulses compromised by an abstract ideology, deference to authority, and personal ambition, as when he is criticized and reassigned to lecture downtown (chap. 18): "[T]here was a logic in what he [Brother McAfee] said which I felt compelled to accept.... Now was certainly no time for inactivity.... [A]nd my main concern was to work my way ahead in the movement" (407).
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With the Brotherhood's abandonment of its Harlem work (chaps. 20-23), Invisible Man's focus broadens to include the issues posed by World War II. These chapters offer a recognizable though mythologized version of the CP's wartime turn, when, in the aftermath of Germany's invasion of the USSR (22 June 1941), the party moved from an antiwar to a fervently interventionist and win-the-war stance, backed Roosevelt's no-strike policy, and emphasized victory over fascism as its predominant goal. For at least part of this period, the Daily Worker carried the masthead slogan, "National Unity for Victory Over Nazi Enslavement." (12) While trying to keep up work among African Americans, the party downplayed militant demands. "By the fall of 1941," Maurice Isserman's generally pro-CP study summarizes, "the Communists were arguing that a too militant defense of black rights at home would interfere with the war effort" (119). The party's reversals with regard to A. Philip Randolph's March On Washington movement for equal work in war industries (1941-43) were especially vivid. Ignoring the movement in its preparatory months (the first half of 1941), the Daily Worker offered a gingerly endorsement three weeks before the July I march date and attacked Randolph for calling off the march (June 25) when Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. But in the meantime the USSR had come into the war, and the Party's line gradually shifted to emphasizing Negro rights only in the context of the war effort. When Randolph organized follow-up rallies a year later in several cities, the Daily Worker initially branded them divisive. Ultimately, it covered New York's rally of 18,000 in Madison Square Garden a day late, applauding several speakers' "[s]plendid win-the-war addresses" but attacking as "insidious poison" the evening's high point, a dramatic sketch in which Canada Lee, as a Negro draftee, roused cheers and yells by declaring, "I'll fight Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japs all at the same time, but I'm telling you, I'll give those crackers down South the same damn medicine!" (13)
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