Finding a Cultural Politics

2005 got off to a bad start. First, there was that inauguration. Then, within a single week, Ossie Davis and Arthur Miller both died.

They were good deaths, as deaths go. Davis was 87 and Miller was 89. They were both living active and creative lives to the very end. Davis was about to start filming a new movie. Miller died with a short story in the current issue of Harper’s magazine. No artist would complain about those endings.

But the near-simultaneous passing of these two men is certainly a bad omen for the rest of us. Davis and Miller were among our last living connections to a style of cultural politics that was not "pop" or academic, but was rooted in the lived experience and struggle of ordinary people. They were radical democrats who believed, above all, in the potential greatness of America’s sometimes silent, and often silenced, majority.

Both of these men were products of the Great Depression. Davis came from rural Georgia and hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to enter Howard University in 1935. Miller’s family owned a successful coat manufacturing business in Manhattan and then lost everything in the 1929 crash. Soon the boy who’d grown up riding in limousines found himself working in a warehouse to save money for college.

Davis and Miller both broke into the cultural mainstream in the postwar 1940s and ’50s, but they were forever formed by the experience of the Depression. But for them the Depression was not just deprivation and unemployment, it was also the struggle to extend America’s flawed political democracy into the realms of economics and culture. For them, the 1930s were the New Deal and, more specifically, that space on the Left where the New Deal blurred into the U.S. Communist Party’s "popular front."

Popular Front was the name given to the strategy pursued by the Communist Party around the world throughout most of the 1930s. It was shorthand for a "popular front against fascism," and it sought to unite all democratic, social democratic, and socialist parties in a common resistance to Hitler, Mussolini, and their sympathizers. The strategy had its origins in Moscow. The idea was to enlist allies for the Soviet Union, in expectation of a German attack. And it was abandoned by Moscow when Stalin instead signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler.

But in the United States, the Popular Front captured the democratic imagination in a way that Moscow could neither anticipate nor control. After decades of irrelevance, when the U.S. Communist Party finally began to speak of communism as "20th century Americanism," a whole generation of artists, thinkers, and organizers said, "Amen." Suddenly it became crystal clear that Roosevelt’s struggle to subdue the "malefactors of great wealth," the Reuther brothers’ struggle to organize the auto industry, and A. Philip Randolph’s struggle to end segregation were all of a piece with the 18th century egalitarianism of Jefferson and Paine. It was all one great, historic march toward the day when kings and capitalists alike would be displaced by the rule of ordinary citizens and workers.

The Popular Front was where Miller and Davis both found their feet, as men and as artists, and that is where they stood for the duration. That stance caused them both a world of trouble in the ’50s Red Scare. Both were hauled before congressional committees. Both refused to name names, though neither man was ever a communist himself. In fact, Ossie Davis was a Baptist Sunday school teacher his whole adult life. But that didn’t keep him from being blacklisted.

As the century closed, and then turned, Davis and Miller’s Popular Front style became unfashionable. Popular Front culture was about finding common ground and positive vision, while the Left of our day is largely an incoherent jumble of identity politics and nay-saying. But that never stopped either of these men from seeking common ground or looking for new possibilities.

The last time I saw Ossie Davis, he was on Bill Moyers’ PBS television program NOW. He was telling Bill about his attempts to understand his grandchildren and their hip-hop culture. That night he said that every generation needs a "moral assignment." And he was right. Perhaps our moral assignment is to find a new, positive, and inclusive cultural politics that is worthy of these two fallen ancestors.

Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing editor, teaches writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.