The Cultural Front: Labor, Culture, Ideology (In-Person)

In the oft lamented history of the American Left, the decade of the 1930s shines through as a unique moment of political potential realized in widespread mobilization and influence. Responding to the global crisis set in motion by the Great Depression, labor activists, policy intellectuals, and creative voices came together in a diverse and spirited leftist coalition anchored in the mass unionization of industrial workers – what historian Michael Denning has termed “the Age of the CIO.” This historical bloc became a key pillar of FDR’s New Deal coalition, but also generated a renaissance of working-class cultural production and visibility as part of an anti-fascist Popular Front alliance with liberal institutions and federal agencies like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Office of War Information (OWI). As Denning has argued, the 1930s left “triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture” through a “laboring of American culture” that helped to define American democracy in left populist terms as both pluralist and liberatory. In our own political moment, with renewed possibilities of a broad-based left-liberal coalition rising to forcefully challenge the Right’s aggressive political agenda, what can the Cultural Front teach us about how intellectual and cultural influences can constitute a counter-hegemonic force?

In the course, we will trace the political history of the American Left across the 1930s and ‘40s, using Denning’s The Cultural Front as a key text. In addition to historical analyses by Denning, William Leuchtenberg, Vivian Gornick, and others, we will explore the era through the intellectual debates and cultural production of writers and artists–whether social democratic, anarchist, or communist–as they responded to the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism. From the proletarian literary clubs and modernist journals of the early ‘30s to the federal cultural agencies and radicalized culture industry workers of the latter half of the decade, we will consider questions of access, ideology, and production. What types of new voices did this movement cultivate and support, how did they transform understandings of labor, “the people,”  solidarity, and aesthetic forms? How did questions of race, gender, and ethnicity influence, and limit, the movement? What was the relationship between the American Left and its international counterparts, in particular the Communist Party under Stalin as well as partisans in the Spanish Civil War? How did participation by leftists in wartime bureaucracy allow them to shape the meanings of the war, democracy, and Americanism in the public consciousness? In addition to Denning’s wide-ranging narrative, students will explore fiction, poetry, theater, film, photography, and music by Mike Gold, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Orson Welles, Clifford Odets, Billie Holiday, and Woody Guthrie among others. We will also use the theoretical writings of Kenneth Burke, Sidney Hook, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Adamic to frame the intellectual debates of the period in context.

Course Schedule

Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
June 02 — June 23, 2026
4 weeks

$335.00

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