Larry: The author of this essay and forthcoming publication about Langston Hughes' writings on Soviet Central Asia is a professor at Macalester, so I think you may know him, or may want to look him up. You may remember that I wrote (p.53 of my autobio) about seeing him in 1932 in Moscow's Library of International Literature (then in a former church building) when I was not yet fifteen, and introducing myself, having recognized him from a photo in the Daily Worker. This was just before he spent the months in Central Asia described in this post by Moore and the fascinating excerpts from Hughes' himself.
If you do talk to Moore, you might pass on a few criticisms and comments I have on his very useful work. I don't think Hughes thought of himself as the organizer of the meeting between East and West, as Moore writes. Never mind that it was tsarist Russia which did that by conquest, but the role of the Communist revolution there was well described in Warren Beatty's excellent film, "Reds," and in the writings of many, including my Soviet Far East and Central Asia, 1944, and Soviet But Not Russian, 1985.
New Masses was not a socialist magazine, but specifically Communist, at a time when the differences between the two could hardly have been sharper. I became a specialist on Soviet affairs by the crazy accident of discovering the American Russian Institute of New York in my capacity as a fund-raiser for New Masses in 1940.
With respect to Hughes' testimony before Joe McCarthy, the poet's biographer, Rampersad, contrasts his mild testimony with mine (Vol.2, p. 219), at the end of nine particularly good pages on McCarthyism. Incidentally, his quote from me was abbreviated to irrelevance. The whole sentence would have made it clear: "And to save you the trouble of bringing out any possible pseudonym, as you did in the matter of Mr. Auterbach, I would like to make clear that I am a Jew."
Soviet Russia Today was not a "Soviet-sponsored international public relations magazine," as Moore writes. Such magazines did exist, such as the early illustrated USSR in Construction, similar to Life Magazine in this country, which came into being shortly after that Soviet publication and I then thought was modeled after it in style. Soviet Russia Today, for which I worked as half-time researcher and which carried my first article, was edited by a former suffragist, Jessica Smith, whose husband had been an agricultural adviser to the USSR. It was most certainly pro-Soviet, but represented that not inconsiderable number of Americans who then thought that society had a great deal of merit. Its circulation hit 100,000.
We do live in a tiny world. Furuhashi, who began the circulation of this piece, is at Ohio State, where, in 1961, Gov. Mike DiSalle had the temerity, in that immediately post-McCarthy period, to reject a demand by the then powerful John Birch Society that he bar me from speaking about my 1960 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But the university president did bar me, and the brand-new Ph.D., a total stranger, who had invited me, had his contract to teach at another university cancelled over this. The American Assn. of University Professors held a very long investigation of this, and censured Ohio State. The incident created sufficient ruckus that it is described in three books published over the course of a decade: Inside the John Birch Society, 1961; The Troubled Campus, compiled by the editors of Atlantic Monthly, 1965; and Protest! Student Activism in America, 1970. Also, of course, in my Saying No To Power, 1999, pp. 378-80. Bill
> Michael Pugliese wrote:
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>> From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
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