Despite its fundamental political problem, the Popular Front, or rather institutions created or associated with it, did a great job democratizing American culture. See, for instance, Michael Denning, _The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century_, <http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/d-titles/denning_cultural_front.shtml>; Paul Mishler, _Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States_, <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023111/0231110448.HTM>; _New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism_, ed. Michael E. Brown, Monthly Review Press, 1993 (especially Marvin E. Gettleman's "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944: Communist Education in American Society"); Michael D. Yates, "An Essay on Radical Labor Education," <http://eserver.org/clogic/2-1/yates.html>; etc.
What's interesting is that the Popular Front approach to culture and education was often an approach that involved families, rather than only targeting individual adult workers.
To this day, poorer workers in the United States are more deeply rooted in kinship networks than more affluent ones:
***** The New York Times, December 20, 2003 The Long-Lost Cousins of the Middle Class By ANNETTE LAREAU
. . . For many working-class and poor families, extended-family visits are the organizing principle of social life. According to the 2002 General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 41 percent of poor and working-class people spend a social evening with their relatives often, from once a week to as much as every day.
For many middle-class children, however, visits with relatives are infrequent. Instead of spending time with aunts, uncles and cousins, hectic schedules of soccer games, piano lessons, basketball practice and other activities are the organizing force of daily life. According to the General Social Survey, about half of middle-class people see their relatives for social evenings once a month or less. Clearly, some have moved away from their relatives or, with today's smaller families, simply have fewer cousins. But for many, it's a matter of not having the time. . . .
Annette Lareau, professor of sociology at Temple University, is author of "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/opinion/20LARE.html> *****
I don't know where Annette Lareau draws a line between her categories of "working class" and "middle class," but her generalizations (whatever her boundary is) make sense, given poorer workers' need to depend on one another within their kinship support networks to survive, especially in hard times. Taking this social fact into account, we would do well to learn from cultural and educational endeavors of the Popular Front.
As for each racial or ethnic group of workers ignoring all the others, it isn't always a matter of ignoring the others' history totally. Quite often, it is a matter of failing to understand particularities of each history of oppression at the same time as making use of productive (rather than counter-productive) comparisons to build solidarity: Cf. Lilian Friedberg, "Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust," _The American Indian Quarterly_ 24.3 (2000) 353-380, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v024/24.3friedberg.html> (the article examines how a persistently exclusivist insistence on the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews, when advanced in the American context, has made it difficult to recognize the American Indian genocide as such). Productive comparisons, in my view, try to avoid giving an impression that the point of comparison of oppressions is to assert an identity; rather, comparisons should help us clarify differences as well as similarities.
Also, all of us are multiply determined by ever-changing interlocking relations of power (based on race, gender, sexuality, etc.) within an ever-evolving relation of class. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>