854 ★ CHAPTER 21 The New Deal
Promoting Diversity
“A new conception of America is necessary,” wrote the immigrant labor radi-
cal Louis Adamic in 1938. Despite bringing ethnic and northern black voters
into its political coalition, the Democratic Party said little about ethno-cultural
issues, fearful of rekindling the divisive battles of the 1920s. But the Popular
Front forthrightly sought to promote the idea that the country’s strength lay
in diversity, tolerance, and the rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege.
The CIO avidly promoted the idea of ethnic and racial inclusiveness. It broke
decisively with the AFL’s tradition of exclusionary unionism. “We are the only
Americans who take them into our organization as equals,” wrote labor orga-
nizer Rose Pesotta, referring to the Mexican-Americans who flocked to the Can-
nery and Agricultural Workers union.
Popular Front culture presented a heroic but not uncritical picture of the
country’s past. Martha Graham’s modern dance masterpiece American Document
(1938), an embodiment of Popular Front aesthetics with its emphasis on Ameri-
ca’s folk traditions and multi-ethnic heritage, centered its account of history on
the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. Yet Graham did
not neglect what her narrator called “things we are ashamed of,” including the
dispossession of the Indians and the plight of the unemployed. Graham’s answer
to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s old question, “What, then, is the American,
this new man?” was that Americans were not only middle-class Anglo- Saxons
but also blacks, immigrants, and the working class. Earl Robinson’s song “Ballad
for Americans,” a typical expression of Popular Front culture that celebrated the
religious, racial, and ethnic diversity of American society, became a national hit
and was performed in 1940 at the Republican national convention.
Challenging the Color Line
It was fitting that “Ballad for Americans” reached the top of the charts in a ver-
sion performed by the magnificent black singer Paul Robeson. Popular Front
culture moved well beyond New Deal liberalism in condemning racism as
incompatible with true Americanism. In the 1930s, groups like the American
Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews actively
promoted ethnic and religious tolerance, defining pluralism as “the American
way.” But whether in Harlem or East Los Angeles, the Communist Party was
the era’s only predominantly white organization to make fighting racism a
top priority. “The communists,” declared Charles H. Houston, the NAACP’s
chief lawyer, “made it impossible for any aspirant to Negro leadership to advo-
cate less than full economic, political and social equality.”
Communist influence spread even to the South. The Communist-
dominated International Labor Defense mobilized popular support for black