Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

9. Red Feminists and Methodist Missionaries: Dorothy McConnell and the Other Afterlife of the Popular Front

Founded in 1933, the American League against War and Fascism was among the most successful organizations launched by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the Great Depression. Its achievement was not in the size of its dues-paying membership, which was relatively small, but in its role in shaping public debates over fascism. The rallies, congresses, and roundtables organized by the league received wide coverage in print and broadcast media and enjoyed the sponsorship of US congressmen, state governors, and city mayors. By the end of the decade, it had become the coordinating body for the antifascist activities of 1,023 affiliate organizations representing over 7 million people. For affiliates, the league served as an information clearinghouse, furnishing its biweekly bulletin Facts and Figures and disseminating over a million booklets, pamphlets, and newspapers in 1938 alone.[1] Its periodical, Fight against War and Fascism (hereafter Fight), provides a clue as to why so many organizations came together under its banner: arranged under the heading of “the fight against fascism” were a wide array of characteristically leftist and liberal campaigns including union building, lobbying for social democratic legislation, antiracism, anti-imperialism, the struggle for women’s equality, and the drive to eliminate militarism in American culture. Most league activists were not CPUSA members, though whatever their affiliation, they used antifascism to conceptually link seemingly disparate demands and apparently distinct sites of struggle. Yet such a broad-based organization, while generative of intersectional politics and transformative coalitions, inevitably drew into its orbit—even into its leadership circles—individuals whose mobilizing passions were deeply complicit in the dominant order, a fact that has been undertheorized in scholarship on the American Left.

The class-conscious feminist Dorothy McConnell (1900–1980) was one of the central figures in this organization and provides a telling case study. Her entrance and exit from the league explains much about the kinds of individuals who were drawn to the radical Left in the 1930s but did not stay there. McConnell wrote a regular feminist column in Fight titled “As to Women” and served on its national executive board. Fight featured more bylines by women than any other communist-inspired publication, apart from those explicitly devoted to “the woman question.” In the early 1930s, McConnell and other female writers merely highlighted the contributions of women to the antifascist struggle, but by the end of the decade they used the magazine as a forum to agitate for feminist workplace demands, placing “the woman question” at the center of broader issues of democracy.[2] The capacious nature of antifascism in the 1930s allowed a space for women activists to forge what is now called intersectional feminism, keenly aware of the hierarchies of race and class through which patriarchy is reproduced and constituted. In the pages of Fight and through their activism in the league, McConnell and her cohort created what Kate Weigand and Carol Boyce Davies trace in their studies of early postwar feminists: a class- and racially conscious brand of feminism crafted by the midcentury Left, one that transmitted influential tactics and concepts to the next generation of feminists.[3]

Yet this is not the end of the story. Alan Wald’s recent trilogy on the midcentury Left concludes that what consistently drew intellectuals into “pro-Communist” circles was not a shared background in the working class but rather some kind of outsider status as people of color, gays and lesbians, “race traitors,” Jews, or bohemians.[4] McConnell was certainly a nonconformist in her own right, but paradoxically, what drove her into the orbit of the Communist Party was her background in a quintessentially insider movement: the white Methodist missionary movement in Asia, which was deeply implicated in the history of US imperialism. Influential procommunist feminists such as Mary Inman and Claudia Jones—who remained active in the Left their entire lives—were essentially reared in the culture of socialist and communist parties, aligning with them in their teenage years.[5] McConnell got involved with such organizations in her thirties and came to them from a different route. She was the privileged daughter of a nationally known Methodist bishop—Francis John McConnell—and was groomed for missionary work from an early age. For young Dorothy McConnell, like so many other women of her generation, the missionary world was an accepted sphere of public engagement that allowed a degree of freedom from a highly circumscribed role. After she joined the league, her writing for missionary publications dropped off considerably, though not entirely. McConnell authored league-sponsored, socialist-feminist tracts such as Women, War, and Fascism (1935) at the very same time she published missionary education materials such as Friends in Nippon (1934). The CPUSA’s turn to the Popular Front in the latter years of the decade allowed her a space to more openly acknowledge her missionary commitments in the secular left-wing press. In her column in Fight from November 1937, she praised the women missionaries who stayed on to care for the wounded during the Japanese invasion of China and wrote that “No matter what you may think of missionary work, it is responsible for breaking down the ‘America for Americans’ feeling—at least, so far as China is concerned.”[6]

McConnell felt comfortable expressing such positions in Fight precisely because, perhaps unexpectedly, Christian missionaries were no strangers to the American League against War and Fascism in the late 1930s. With the Japanese invasion of mainland China in the summer of 1937, the voices of missionaries became much louder in the organization’s magazine. Most of these were women’s voices, and they often took the form of reportage from the war zone in what was now a major front in the global struggle against fascism. Dr. Stewart Kunkle chronicled the medical aid and other services for refugees offered by the missions in China and proudly reported that “the missionaries have been helping in every way they could to lessen the suffering and to stand by their Chinese friends in the defense of their country.”[7] Missionaries found a home in the league because their commitment to causes of the Left was not new. The Methodist Episcopal Church had a class-conscious and even radical strand dating back to the early twentieth century and the national chairman of the league—a Methodist minister named Harry F. Ward—emerged from this radical tradition.

Fight‘s Christian missionaries in China offer another kind of international brigade than that usually celebrated in the annals of the Left. The contributions by McConnell and others in the pages of the magazine suggest that missionary work in China during the occupation was politically transformative for many young white women, deepening their critiques of American foreign policy, their sense of women’s place, and even their understanding of capitalism in general. Yet while it is unlikely that these critiques simply evaporated after World War II, the case of Dorothy McConnell suggests that this brief yet significant site of women’s involvement in the antifascist movement did not go on to directly build the postwar anti-imperialist feminism described by Weigand and Davies. The culture of the white Methodist missionaries, while it came from a socialist tradition that intersected with the cause of antifascism in the 1930s, was not as resistant to the historical shifts of the Cold War, precisely because it never shed its deep roots in the history of Western imperialism. Indeed, McConnell went on to participate in the kind of Cold War people-to-people projects traced by Christina Klein, in which Americans created affective, universalist narratives that ultimately enlisted them in US empire building abroad.[8] As such, her retrofitting of antifascist globalism to Cold War ends tells us something about the Popular Front constituencies that did not continue to build the Left, a phenomenon far less examined in the scholarship on midcentury radicalism. Scholars continue to debate what can be called “the afterlife of the Popular Front,” some arguing that its brand of internationalism and racial pluralism anticipated Cold War logics, while others suggesting that it created essential discourses, activist experiences, and institutional bases that would be quite fruitful for the Left in future decades.[9] However, the method of the in-depth individual case study, so finely developed by Alan Wald, allows us to see how both of these afterlife scenarios hold explanatory power. Clearly, some constituencies of the Popular Front went on to build Cold War liberalism, while others continued to build the Left: what is critical is the nature of one’s embeddedness in multiple communities simultaneously—and the amenability of each of these various networks to co-optation by capital and empire.

 
To be sure, missionary work was not the entrée of most female participants in the American antifascist movement, nor was it the only avenue of women’s participation in the American League against War and Fascism. In the summer of 1934, the league also formed a permanent Women’s Division, which was quite active.[10] At its Third Congress in 1936, the Women’s Committee, chaired by Margaret Forsyth, had subcommittees representing farm women, trade union women, and business and professional women. Together they collectively endorsed the fight against a clause in the Federal Economy Act that restricted employment opportunities for married women in the civil service. Forsyth admonished those at the congress to oppose fascism at home and abroad, as it relegated women to the status of “cheap labor.”[11] Yet there were limits to the organization’s feminism. Its early programs called out “to enlist for our program the women in industry and in the home,” yet from 1933 to 1939 while its key statements of purpose explicitly addressed race prejudice, lynching, and attacks on the rights of labor, none addressed male dominance (despite the violent misogyny upon which fascism depended).[12] While the league sometimes failed to acknowledge the specificity of women’s struggles, it should come as no surprise that so many women became involved in an organization devoted to fighting war and fascism. In the United States, the peace movement was an established (if not fully accepted) space of women’s activity by the 1930s, having gained particular visibility through the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915.[13] The status of the American League against War and Fascism as an antiwar movement likely drew many women to what they knew to be a relatively viable space for their activism.

During the CPUSA’s turn to the Popular Front in the second half of the decade, women writers in Fight increasingly used antifascism to show the centrality of “the woman question” to democratic transformation. As McConnell wrote in her pamphlet Women, War, and Fascism (1935), “The defeat of any discriminatory law or act against women is a direct thrust at fascism.”[14] As part of a broader and largely successful shift in CPUSA strategy to appeal to women during the Popular Front period, Fight began featuring articles about gendered wage inequalities in the United States and emphasized the pivotal role of women in shaping the antifascist resistance struggle abroad.[15] During this time, McConnell assumed her prominence in the magazine. In April 1937, Fight began a protofeminist column titled “As to Women,” written by McConnell, that theorized the relationship between antifascism and the women’s movement.

McConnell’s writings for league publications reveal how antifascism in the Popular Front Left could function as a site of intersectional feminist analysis. To varying degrees of sophistication, CPUSA-oriented antifascists argued throughout the decade that hierarchies of class, race, and gender created discontent that could be exploited by fascist demagogues who appealed to the masses’ desire for relief from suffering. Over time, they insisted, deepening structural inequalities created by ingrained modes of thinking among the people prevented the lateral unity (often class unity) necessary to oppose the social degeneration toward fascism and war. McConnell’s analysis of the divisions among American women factory workers in her booklet Women, War, and Fascism (1935) reflects this view. As she wrote, “The married women, who have been most discriminated against, are afraid of the young girls replacing them. The young girls are resentful of the married women who hold jobs that might otherwise be theirs. The workers are criss-crossed with deep and bitter antagonisms. The state is thus less threatened.” She argued that the root of the whole problem was that of “less wages for women. . . . Woman, as a cheap source of labor, is a danger to man. He resents her as a threat to his economic security.” McConnell subsequently stressed that such gendered exploitation at the point of production, left unaddressed by the labor movement, was critical to the fascist project of military expansion.[16] What becomes clear in this line of McConnell’s argumentation, as with so much antifascist writing in the 1930s, is that “fascism” is almost ancillary to her social analysis. For her, “fascism” was less a concrete regime in Germany or Italy and more a vehicle to conceive the connectedness of seemingly divergent struggles. In McConnell’s case, as with many other women in the league, this sense of “connectedness” developed into a class-conscious feminism that Kate Wiegand described as a broad phenomenon among this generation of women activists.[17]

But what of the other Dorothy McConnell, the one who defended Christian missionaries abroad even as she espoused a radical brand of feminism and who, in 1937, attended a luncheon of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Church to honor those who spread the New Testament to China, India, Korea, and Africa?[18] And how could someone so ensconced in the missionary movement wind up in the American League against War and Fascism in the first place? The involvement of devout Christians in the league was not a cynical case of bait and switch on the part of the CPUSA. The Methodists in particular had their own tradition of class-conscious political activism, and many sought out the league and other left-wing organizations as a seamless extension of their own histories of social justice work. Harry Ward, Dorothy McConnell, and her father Francis John McConnell all came into the Popular Front from a history of Methodist radicalism dating to the first decade of the twentieth century, one that Doug Rossinow calls “the left-wing of the social gospel.” In the 1920s and 1930s, even official Methodist gatherings denounced the evils of “profitism” and the inequities of a society based on market values.[19]

These individuals had direct access to the American League against War and Fascism through its national chairman—Harry F. Ward—a Methodist minister who, in his leadership role in the Methodist Federation for Social Service (MFSS), brought this organization and his other coreligionists into the league. Founded in 1907, the MFSS was led for decades by Harry Ward and Francis John McConnell and it took a more radical turn after 1919. Long before the Popular Front, Ward and others in the MFSS had become seasoned coalition builders as they broke out of the established structures of the church to work with secular activist organizations.[20] Ward’s status as a clergyman in no way dampened his procommunist commitments. He visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as did many other Protestant clergymen, and came back a true believer. Though he never joined the CPUSA, he closely mirrored the various shifts in its line in his public statements, more so than most contributors to Fight.[21]

McConnell emerged from this milieu and thus gleaned her leftist politics well before she came into contact with the American League against War and Fascism or the Popular Front.[22] From her sparse papers at Drew University, we learn that she was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1900 and that from her youth, her family and closest friends called her “Dot.” She earned a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and then went on to receive an MA at Columbia University in 1922. While at Ohio Wesleyan, a Methodist college that her father also attended, she was drawn to study English and history and took classes on missionary work. As a student she was already displaying a sharp critical voice, such as when she complained in a letter to her father that her teacher for “Missions” was a fool.[23] After graduating from Columbia, she stayed in New York to become editor of World Service News, the periodical of the World Service Agencies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which organized missions throughout the world. (This organization, it should be noted, was not the radical MFSS of her father and as such was even closer to the Methodist Church establishment.) In this role, McConnell was credited as being a very effective editor, praised for an “impudent tone” that increased the circulation of the magazine in the United States and at missions overseas. Despite her promotion of missionary work in China and India, her editorials in the mid-1920s earned her a reputation as a rabble-rouser on issues of labor and racial equality. A number of readers objected to her stance on the race question, but she appears to have received more praise than condemnation. In 1926, for instance, a minister in Jersey City lauded her transformation of World Service News: “It will wake up a lot of brethren that need waking up, and occasionally seems to run the risk of encouraging the religious Bolsheviki, of which I am one.”[24]

While McConnell was certainly more left-wing than her father, especially by the 1930s, they shared the same political temperament. Bishop Francis John McConnell had earned the ire of conservatives for his vehement support of the steel strike of 1919, and from that time into the 1930s, he promoted the kind of economy commonly touted by those aligned with the Popular Front, what Michael Denning called a “‘moral economy’ that would temper the ravages of capitalism.”[25] Speaking at a gala in honor of his life’s work at Carnegie Hall in 1937, Bishop McConnell stated that “The Marxian principles as to human values, the equitable distribution of wealth, the classless society are today recognized, virtually throughout Christendom, as substantially Christian aims—though not as to be introduced by Marxian methods” (by which he meant revolution). Dorothy’s father also endorsed the American League against War and Fascism’s Fifth Congress in 1939. With good reason, left-leaning Methodists were referred to as “McConnell Methodists” in some circles during the 1930s.[26]

Secular Communists and radical missionaries were ideologically and institutionally aligned in critical ways during the Popular Front: what they shared was a rejection of hard nationalism, promoting instead the idea of a unity of peoples across borders to be created through a softening of class hierarchies within and between nations. Yet the Methodists clearly felt the need to defend their global vision in their writings for the secular left-wing press. Missionary contributors to Fight showed an awareness of their complicity in US imperialism and made a case to secular left-wing readers for a fresh start. As Stewart Kunkle wrote in 1938, “It was the fashion some years ago to think of the missionary as the advance agent of Big Business. The missionary broke the way and the Standard Oil Company followed. Whatever the sequence of the events may have been, this was never a conscious policy of missions.”[27] Likewise, McConnell urged leftist and liberal readers to see missionary work as transforming provincial women into antifascist internationalists. In her column from November 1937, she wrote that “There is hardly a town in the Middle West that is not supporting some part of the missionary work in China. Women missionaries return to the little towns and tell of their experiences. It is not unusual to hear women who have never been farther from home than the county seat tell of the situation in some remote school in West China. It is familiar to them.”[28]

Yet the phrase “it is familiar to them” reveals a crack in these defenses of missionaries, which later helped to decisively split McConnell from the Left. There is something unsettling about Fight‘s heroic tales of white middle-class missionaries in Asia, even though these narratives overwhelmingly praised the contributions of women. Unlike Agnes Smedley’s reportage from the war zones in China, which stressed the agency and heroism of the Chinese people (and Chinese women in particular), in Fight, the missionary Dr. Kunkle focused on the hard work and dedication of the white missionaries—their care for the wounded, their continuing work as schoolteachers, and their services for refugees. This reflected a running motif in World Service News that was even more pronounced in its successor, World Outlook, which McConnell also edited. (Indeed, she also penned articles in this vein.)[29] The asymmetrical relations of power between the Americans and the Chinese come through quite clearly in one refrain by the missionaries in Fight: that for them, “China felt like home.” At a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese people from migrating to the United States or claiming citizenship, Dorothy McConnell approvingly quoted a missionary in China who stated that “I always felt that China was a part of home,” and Kunkle likewise cited an American woman who reported “that she feels almost as if the war had come to her own country.”[30] Such affective claims to citizenship—which could never go in reverse from China to the United States—worked to annex and assimilate China within an American sentimental project.

As such, Fight‘s white missionary contributors, including McConnell, did not shed the baggage of US imperialism that historically undergirded the missionary movement. Though there was certainly a social justice orientation to World Service News under McConnell’s editorship in the 1920s, there was a pronounced undercurrent of racial and cultural homogenization that guided its project even then. While the bulletin clearly stood against the nativist spirit of the Johnson Reed Act (1924), it touted domestic missionary work among immigrants as a mode of economic development governed by an ethno-racial project of “Americanization.” One article from 1925, for instance, praised missionaries working among Mexican migrant workers in California who taught their charges “lessons in American citizenship, Christian living, sanitation, [and] personal and social hygiene.”[31] This spirit was echoed in a contemporaneous children’s book authored by McConnell. Titled Uncle Sam’s Family (1924), it consisted of a series of short tales, largely centered on nonwhite children in the United States, who move from ignorance or chaos in their ethnic enclaves to an assimilated life of Protestantism, education, clean living, and middle-class living standards. In this regard, the cultures of the World Service Agencies and the Board of Foreign Missions—formative for McConnell—were informed by middle-class, turn-of-the-century progressivism and were thus further from the Left than the MFSS and its publication Social Questions.

McConnell’s papers shed no light on her shifting politics in the years after 1939, when the CPUSA abruptly pulled its support from the American League against War and Fascism as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As such, they do not provide us with a clear sense of when she broke from the radical Left or with the nature of the break. She was certainly disregarding its positions; in December 1940, she signed a petition calling for armaments and aid to be given freely by the United States to Great Britain, the kind of gesture decried as “war-mongering” and “imperialist” in the Communist press at the time.[32] That same year, she resumed her work as an editor for the Methodist missionary press, editing The World Outlook from 1940 through the 1960s. While ostensibly prolabor, under her tenure, World Outlook showed little of the vexed radicalism of her World Service News of the 1920s. World Outlook gauged the Chinese Communist Revolution almost solely on the degree to which it allowed missionaries to continue their work in country, persistently touting Chiang Kai-shek and crediting missionaries for single-handedly guiding Chinese development.[33] After 1939, there is no record of McConnell’s involvement with any other secular left-wing organization, even though she remained in Manhattan, the site of her former league activities, up until the last year of her life, when she moved back to Ohio. Yet long before her physical move, she had “gone home”—not to the Ohio of her youth but to the social world of the Methodist Church, where she remained quite active for the rest of her days. She was a prominent national leader in this regard, heading the one and a half million–member Women’s Division of the church from 1964 to 1968 and serving on the national board of the YWCA.[34]

McConnell wrote and published quite actively in the 1950s and 1960s and she was still engaged in social action that bore the echoes of her former activities but with none of the radical trappings. During the Cold War, she traveled extensively to missions in Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East. She did not explicitly emphasize the communist menace in her later writings, but a dramatic reversal is clear. In 1936, McConnell, the class-conscious feminist, had criticized Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy with Latin America as not going far enough to redress a history of Monroe Doctrine–driven imperialism.[35] But by 1952, in her book Along the African Path, she offered standard colonialist fare. A travelogue of her visits to Methodist missions in Angola, Liberia, Rhodesia, Congo, and South Africa, it tells the story of African primitivism and superstition receding before the light of Western medicine, religion, and rationality. To this end, the book fully embraces European and American economic development as a corollary to the missions. McConnell praises the Firestone Company for developing Liberia through its rubber plantations, noting that “whole villages are set up within the plantation in far more sanitary surroundings than the native villages were in the interior.” (As a vestigial trace of her earlier politics, she looks sympathetically on a strike by the plantation workers.) She similarly praises the Belgian colonial government for irrigation projects, which “bring back into fertility Congo’s starved fields” and feed its hungry people. In so doing, she argues, Belgium is preparing the Congolese for democracy, for which they are not yet ready.[36]

Yet for all its explicit embrace of US imperialism and European colonialism, McConnell’s writing in Along the African Path is continuous, in one key regard, with an aspect of her political work, which had been part of the missionary project all along. Once again, she stresses the struggles of the white missionaries, whose individual stories are detailed in the book, while failing to mention a single African by name. She also approvingly quotes a white Harvard-educated missionary who refers to Liberia as “our country,” repeating the symbolic annexation present in her and other missionaries’ writings in Fight during the 1930s. McConnell had long promoted Christian missionary work as a facilitator of economic development among nonwhite peoples, an idea she repressed in her Popular Front years.[37] When she returned to this idea in the 1950s, her experience in Marxian antifascism deepened her ability to articulate it. The older McConnell looked on Africa with the eye of a sociologist and an organizer, describing economic conditions, the relations of forces in the field, the nuances of missionary organizational strategies, and the “the social distinctions which may divide groups” at the sites she visits. At the conclusion of the book, she calls for missionaries “skilled in knowledge of economics,” revealing a lesson she learned in the Popular Front. Rather than culture singularly driving economics (as in Uncle Sam’s Family), she now saw that a transformation of culture could not proceed without a concomitant change in the economic arena.[38]

Wald’s recent trilogy on the midcentury Left, from Exiles from a Future Time to American Night, traces the lives of cultural producers over time, and the evidence it provides allows us to theorize the social forces that sustain the Left from generation to generation. In relation to Methodist missionaries and the American League against War and Fascism, his work suggests the following theoretical framework to think through the contradictions of a figure such as Dorothy McConnell and what separates her from a Mary Inman or a Claudia Jones. That is, in the postwar years, the various individuals and groups that participated in the Popular Front maintained their fidelity to their prewar alignments, based in part on the very cultural, experiential, and institutional influences that had initially made their interests converge with the procommunist Left. This is not to say that the afterlife of the Popular Front is merely an individual affair. Rather, it is to suggest that one’s embeddedness within multiple social, cultural, and institutional matrices—inside and outside the Left—has something to do with the sustainability of left-wing commitments over time. The nature of this embeddedness, while it varies in its exact details from person to person, is always social in nature. Everyone who was a Methodist missionary did not become a Cold War liberal, nor did all radicals in the Congress of Industrial Organizations or in the Committee on African Affairs retain their radicalism after World War II. Rather, the common sense of the Left seeped into the marrow of these various social constellations unevenly. Since every individual is lodged in multiple social networks simultaneously, our politics over time arguably have much to do with the resilience of each of our various networks in maintaining oppositional or alternative values; this in turn has much to do with the ubiquity of oppositional discourses across the entire social field, which will inevitably be uneven.

Thus for McConnell, the prolabor politics and global vision crucial to her particular Methodist upbringing brought her into an alignment with the Popular Front that was politically transformative. Yet the contradictions of this upbringing, brought into collision with the contradictions of CPUSA-founded organizations such as the American League against War and Fascism, were not generative of oppositional politics once the historical terrain shifted. The imperial underpinnings of the Methodist missionary movement, so crucial to structuring McConnell’s public and family life, never disappeared, making her investment in feminist and labor politics fragile. Moreover, in light of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the CPUSA revealed that it was not genuinely internationalist but was beholden to the foreign policy goals of a specific nation-state. As a result of this pact, the Party abruptly abandoned the league, an organization to which McConnell had devoted an incredible amount of energy. This sudden reversal, combined with the ubiquity of anticommunism after the war, would have made it quite easy for her to turn her back on what was a much shorter institutional relationship.

In this account of Dorothy McConnell, I do not intend to return to the narrative of the 1930s that Alan Wald has so persuasively helped to dispel: a story of betrayed fellow travelers caught up in a radical decade that ultimately left little impact on American culture. Rather, in decisively refuting this Cold War view, his work provides tools to assess the afterlife of the Popular Front as nonunitary in nature, prompting us to parse out its various players for the complex, sometimes contradictory commitments that their life worlds reveal. Such a view allows us to see that in order to properly evaluate the Left, one must recognize that those who participate in its parties and platforms often possess a privilege and a complicity in the dominant logics that makes their egalitarian commitments provisional and transitory. We would do well to remember that this complicity can be as instructive as their oppositional vision.