As Powers was later forced to allow, the fascist menace was alarmingly on the rise, and there was much on the world stage to concern working-class militants during the IWO’s first decade of existence. As early as August 1932, the German-born Bedacht was warning, “Open Fascist Dictatorship Threat-ens the German Workers!” Bedacht addressed a meeting in New York’s heavily German Yorkville section. Although Adolf Hitler would not assume power for another five months, he had already made an impressive showing in a 1932 run for the German presidency. Posters for the rally presciently warned, “The bankers, big industrialists and land owners are ready to make Hitler chancellor of Germany,” and that “this attempt to set up an open fas-cist dictatorship of blood and terror” would “drown the working class in a sea of blood.” Posters for the talk augured, “A Hitler dictatorship in Ger-many means immediate war on the Soviet Union and world war,” although they also blamed German and American Socialists for contributing to fas-cism’s rise, an indication of the battles on the Left that impeded a genuine united front against fascism.11
Bedacht had been warning of the ominous rise of German fascism even years before the creation of the IWO. In a November 1924 article, “In the Catacombs of Democracy,” he complained that while leftist protesters had been imprisoned or murdered, “the perpetrators of the Kapp putsch, . . . very few of whom have ever been brought to justice, have all been pardoned,”
while 540 army officers involved in the attempted takeover had never been punished. Meanwhile, “the participants in the Hitler putsch in Munich are all free, with the exception of one, and all over Germany they are publicly feted as heroes.”12 Bedacht saw the rise of fascism as the reaction of bourgeois democracies to a militant working class:
Wherever Dame Democracy feels herself crowded by masses who no longer consent to accept the phrase for the substance, the lady calls for aid on her twin brother, Fascism. While Democracy strangles free speech and free press in the name of the law, Fascism chokes them in spite of the law. While Democracy covers its crime under a cloak of virtue, Fascism openly revels in the bloodstains of its deeds.13 Condemnation of parliamentary democracy as an only slightly better behaved strangler of workers’ rights was in line with the Party’s revolution-ary stance in the 1920s, and likely to find little acceptance outside the im-migrant Left. Still, commentators such as Bedacht were some of the few writers warning as early as 1924, and into the 1930s, of the fascist threat.
That few were listening to this early “premature anti-fascist” is lamentable.
Once the Nazis assumed power, the IWO continued to alert Americans to the fascist menace. Hungarian lodges worked with other Hungarian pro-gressives on an “anti-Nazi united front campaign,” while S. M. Loyen, who worked with South Slavs in the IWO as well as the CFU, was instructed to alert these groups to the dangers of fascism spreading from Germany to Yugoslavia. Non-Communist progressives such as Adamic drew the same conclusion after a trip to his native land, and from the 1934 publication of his book, The Native’s Return, warned of the authoritarian strains in King Alexander’s Yugoslavia. Adamic frequently wrote on this danger and addressed IWO meetings and, after 1942, ASC gatherings on the fascist menace to Europe.14
The IWO sought to unite with other leftists in as broad an antifascist coalition as possible. Doroshkin of the English language branches wrote to Thompson, who was on an organizing trip to Birmingham, Atlanta, and other Southern cities, asking if she could “recommend an IWO woman member” to send as a delegate to a Women’s Congress against War and Fas-cism planned for Paris. Doroshkin wrote, “It would be good if we can find a woman comrade in the South, one who is a steel worker, a sharecropper, or generally a good proletarian negro or white comrade.” She added, “Such a
tour would be an excellent thing both for the campaign against war and fas-cism and for building the Order.” Three years later Thompson attended a Paris antifascist congress as a delegate of both the Order and the NNC, a left-wing black civil rights organization. This conference brought together delegates from French colonial Africa and black people from the United States, linking the injustices of European fascism and colonial subordina-tion. Thompson also traveled to Spain following the 1937 antifascist World Congress to provide IWO assistance to the Spanish Loyalists defending Ma-drid from Franco’s Nazi-supported revolt. The IWO’s interracial activism extended to international defense of fascism’s victims.15
Not every IWO member could contribute to the antifascist struggle on such a lofty level. A Chicago shop paper, the North Side Workers News, reported in 1934, “IWO Gives Generously to Heroic German Communists.”
Rogers Park’s IWO branch “voted to give 15% of all affair profits to the German C.P.,” whose members were some of Hitler’s first victims. In Rogers Park, however, the depth of members’ commitment perhaps outstretched their pocketbooks; the brief article noted that branch members’ “voluntary contributions already total $3.66.” Similarly, Andy Hromiko of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, sent his contribution of $2.35 to the CP of Italy “to fight against Mussolini and his Italian fascism.” Hromiko felt compelled to do his best for this purpose after he saw that some IWO lodges sent $3 to support the Italian antifascists. Even if it was not yet fashionable, and the amounts they could contribute were often minimal, IWO members were not afraid to exhibit
“premature anti-fascism” as they worked to stem the totalitarian tide.16 In larger cities it was possible for the IWO to make more substantial contributions to progressive antifascist campaigns. In June 1935 the IWO cosponsored a United Anti-Nazi Conference at New York’s New School for Social Research. The IWO and the ILD joined with non-Marxist leftists such as activist-writer Waldo Frank and the ACLU’s Arthur Garfield Hays in in-viting “All Friends of Freedom, Peace, Justice” to discuss actions that would
“back the German people in their struggle against Hitler fascism.” From this conference arose plans for a series of anti-Nazi marches and demonstrations in New York to call for the United States to boycott products made in Nazi Germany as well as a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. But the Anti-Nazi Federation of New York, in which the IWO participated, had trouble secur-ing public venues. Frank complained to Mayor La Guardia when the group was denied a permit for public rallies and a People’s Parade against Nazism to Columbus Circle. “To refuse permission will inevitably stamp him as hav-ing taken sides against the Cause of Democracy which the people of New York wish to defend in peaceful demonstration,” Frank wrote the mayor.17
The managers of Luna Park in Brooklyn similarly reneged on a commit-ment to rent the amusecommit-ment park’s arena for an anti-Nazi rally. The park’s board of directors vetoed the agreement because they “feared a riot might
ensue because of their German patronage.” The Anti-Nazi Federation issued a news release decrying the ban as “a startling indication of how far-reaching the effects of the Nazi terror are.” The park’s managers evidently worried many German American revelers would not find an anti-Nazi rally amusing.18
Into the 1970s amusement parks and other recreation sites marketed themselves as safe, conflict-free spaces offering virtually all-white patrons a respite from the harsher realities of industrial cities. In effect this policy of safe spaces often meant barring African Americans from visiting such parks;
park managers often argued that they had no other option because of the violent disturbances white patrons caused when black people tried to use public amenities.19 Luna Park’s 1935 reluctance to offend the perceived pro-Nazi sensibilities of its German American patrons indicates public amusement parks also erected barriers to prevent ideological conflicts with-in their gates.
Throughout the 1930s, though, the Order worked to expose the dangers of fascism. In March 1936 a resolution was passed calling on members to boycott stores selling Nazi-made goods. All members were “urged . . . to actively participate in the mass picketing of such stores to the end that Nazi goods shall not be sold in the city of New York.” The Order’s fears of the in-ternational reach of fascism were apparent as this resolution was followed by one denouncing the murder of labor leaders by the police of Brazilian dicta-tor Getúlio Vargas. The IWO sent telegrams to the governments of Brazil and the United States demanding an investigation into the death at the hands of Vargas’s police of a U.S. citizen suspected of sympathy with the Brazilian labor movement.20
By 1938 the IWO was working with other progressive organizations to publicize the danger of fascism. Ben Gold, Communist president of the In-ternational Fur and Leather Workers Union, reached out to the IWO as president of the Jewish Peoples Committee for United Action against Fas-cism and Anti-Semitism. Gold sought the IWO’s financial assistance for a planned National Unity Conference in New York. Since the IWO’s president, Weiner, was vice president of the Jewish Peoples Committee, it is likely the Order donated to this anti-Nazi conference. By this point the Popular Front coalition combating the growing power of Nazi Germany had expanded so that the Jewish Peoples Committee, headed by a Communist union president and endorsed by the IWO’s Jewish Peoples Schools, also listed as sponsors Republican and Democratic congressmen. In 1938, too, the IWO held out-door New York rallies to call on the United States to curb Hitler’s growing might; Thompson, the Order’s African American secretary, addressed one such enthusiastic rally of three thousand, demanding steps to thwart “the Nazi terror.” And when the Nazis unleashed the Kristallnacht on German Jews, Secretary Saltzman of the Jewish Section wrote to Roosevelt expressing
“gratitude for the outspoken condemnation you expressed of the Nazi atroci-ties against the Jewish people.” Saltzman welcomed the recall of the U.S.
ambassador but urged further acts such as a trade embargo “to show the present rulers in Germany that America condemns a reversal to the Middle Ages.”21
As an internationally minded, multiracial organization, the IWO also endeavored to alert the country to the fascist threat in Asia and Africa and took care to warn African Americans of the true nature of militarist Japan.
In the spring of 1938, Solidarity Lodge inaugurated its Harlem Community Center with a series called Seminars in Negro History. The Sunday seminars were followed by swing dancing, another example of the IWO’s blending of activism and leisure. In announcing the seminars, however, Solidarity Lodge stressed the urgency of African Americans developing “a correct under-standing” of world upheavals. The threat posed by Japan merited particular attention, as the IWO feared propaganda asserting that Tokyo was the pro-tector of the world’s colored peoples was gaining a hearing. To counter this narrative, the center scheduled a lecture by Max Yergan of the NNC, “A Negro Views the Tokio-Rome-Berlin Axis.” The lecture brochure noted Yer-gan “has an intimate knowledge of African and Far Eastern affairs and will answer the question of Japan’s role in the destiny of the darker people.”22
Judging from other material prepared by Harlem Communists, the Soli-darity Lodge likely made sure its speakers came to criticize, not praise Japan.
Although not every member of the IWO’s Harlem lodge was a Communist, and Yergan would in a few years resign from the NNC over differences with the Party, the Harlem Community Center’s director, Thompson, made no secret of her Party affiliation. In 1938 both Yergan and Thompson agreed on the need to counter pro-Japanese sentiment in African American neighbor-hoods such as Harlem. In February 1938 the Educational Department of the Harlem Division of the CP prepared a book on “material for discussion”
regarding The Sino-Japanese War and the Negro Question to help counter
“misguided pro-Japanese sympathies among a large section of Negroes.” As examples of such worrisome support for Japan, the book cited editorials in the Baltimore Afro-American endorsing Japan’s invasion of China and a syn-dicated column by the NAACP’s William Pickens, who asked, “Well, who in the name of the Lord ought to be master in the Orient, if not the Japanese or some other Oriental Race?” Tokyo’s propaganda claiming that “Japan is the champion and defender of the darker races” was evidently swaying some people.23
As a countermodel for African Americans, the authors proposed Chi-nese resistance to JapaChi-nese invasion as anti-imperialism worthy of emula-tion. The authors derided the Baltimore Afro-American, which dismissed China as the “Uncle Tom of Asia,” and pointed to the subjugation of captive peoples in Korea and Taiwan as well as Tokyo’s support for imperial
parti-tion of Shanghai as proof that “Japan helps to bear the ‘White Man’s Burden’
in Asia.” The book’s authors rejected Japanese arguments that China was not ready for self-government as a replication of European colonialists’ argu-ments belied by Chinese resistance to invasion.24
This 1938 book is evidence, too, that African American Communists looked quite early to revolutionary China as a model to emulate in their own struggles at home and abroad. Robeson Taj Frazier argues that the U.S. CP remained Eurocentric in locating the seat of world revolution in Moscow and discounting anticolonial movements by Chinese and other people of color. In the 1950s, Frazier argues, African American radicals chafed at this model and began looking to Beijing as their lodestar. Works such as The Sino-Japanese War and the Negro Question, however, indicate that Chinese and other non-European freedom struggles were central to militant black people within the Communist milieu long before the late 1950s.25
What really gave the lie to Japanese leadership of nonwhite peoples was its abandonment of Ethiopia “when Fascist Italy launched its piratical in-vasion.” The book’s authors argued that when Japan extended recognition to Mussolini’s “Ethiopian Empire” and made alliance with Germany and Italy, any pretense of Tokyo leading the darker races was revealed as a sham.
Tokyo’s collaboration with “Mussolini, the man who raped Ethiopia and shed the blood of tens of thousands of Negro men, women and children,”
sealed the question of whether African Americans could support Japan. In 1938, three years after Italy first threatened it, Ethiopia remained for black militants a rallying cry of fascist aggression and colored people’s abandon-ment by the world’s nations. At the IWO’s Harlem Community Center, too, the sponsors of the Seminars in Negro History linked Japan’s aggression in China to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia and a broader pattern of fascist ascen-dancy.26
Members of the IWO often took an active role in combating racial op-pression at home, and now they linked domestic atrocities to imperialism abroad. As with their domestic activism, IWO members often went beyond rhetorical commitment. In defending Ethiopia, and to an even greater ex-tent, Spain, many Order members put their bodies on the line.