Introduction: Muriel Rukeyser on Antisemitism and “Lies Against the Group”
In the late spring of 1945, on the eve of the Second World War’s conclusion, Muriel Rukeyser developed an unrealized photo-essay to address the crisis of antisemitism plaguing San Francisco, the country, and the larger world at that precise historical moment. She titled it “The Faces of Peace.” Lost and unpublished for three-quarters of a century, the full text for the prose portion of the project is presented here for the first time. “The Faces of Peace” is a valuable archival artifact. Not only does it provide new, rare insights into how Rukeyser’s Jewishness informed her relationship to her antifascist politics, but it also resonates with twenty-first-century readers who are living through yet another moment when humanist visions of global peace are under siege by the resurgent forces of fascism, which, like in the 1940s, still use antisemitic hate as a weapon.
The humanist dimensions of opposing fascism are often believed to be less significant than militant antifascism. Yet, as Rukeyser shows us in works such as “The Faces of Peace,” a humanist philosophy is foundational to, even a precondition for, resistance precisely because of how fascism weaponizes antisemitism and other forms of what her essay calls “lies against the group.” Despite her unaligned leftist leanings, rooted in her firm commitment to progressive and democratic socialist ideals, Rukeyser still adhered to a distinctly liberal ethos. Key humanist concepts and principles—such as belief, freedom, humanity, individualism, democracy—proliferate throughout her work. Many are left ill-defined in her usages of them. Nonetheless, they were crucial to her articulations—what she would call her communication—of her vision, in and beyond her poetry. It is easy, sometimes tempting, to dismiss her political rhetoric as insufficiently rigorous, undertheorized. However, the liberal dimensions of her social radicalism were developed in close dialogue with, and added nuance to, her moment’s political understandings. This is particularly true of Rukeyser’s brand of antifascism, which was foundational to her evolving sense of political subjectivity from 1936, when she witnessed the eruption of the Spanish Civil War, until her death nearly four and a half decades later. At key junctures in her life, she drew on her Jewishness to formulate a foundation for her antifascist politics and other aspects of her worldview, including her peace activism, through an unwavering commitment to liberal humanist ideals. In this respect, as I soon shall explain, her political philosophy was informed by, and in turn evolved, ideas originating with liberal American Jewish organizations during and after the war.
Given that influence on her ideas, it is striking that so little of Rukeyser’s available prose openly addresses her Jewish cultural heritage. One of the few pieces that does so is a wartime biographical statement she prepared for “Under Forty,” a 1944 feature on American literature and younger Jewish writers in the Contemporary Jewish Record. “My themes and the uses I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American, and as a Jew,” Rukeyser asserts. “I do not know what part of that is Jewish; I know I have tried to integrate these four aspects, and to solve my work and my personality in terms of all four” (Muriel Rukeyser Era 34). Rather than read herself solely through a minority lens, either as female or Jewish, and rather than identify herself with her art, or even with her nation, Rukeyser wished to fuse these four primary identifiers into a multidimensional, evolving entity. That is, she claimed a composite positionality rather than a fixed intersectional identity. We might imagine these four social markers as what surveyors call reference monuments, or markers placed at a set, identifiable distance from the true center but unable to be materially fixed at the exact boundary or corner. They served her as the basis for understanding and expressing her own humanity; and by presenting her singular example of human experience, they were her means for communicating the nature of humanity writ large.
Such a humanistic and liberalist impulse, to see oneself as representative of a whole, of human commonality, is at its core a political ethos, or at least a politicized one. When Rukeyser wrote this biographical statement, the world was devastated by the twin crises of the Holocaust and of antisemitism both in Europe and at home, in the United States. But the plight of modern Jewry, as Rukeyser saw it, was not exceptional or outside the norm, especially if understood in light of her immediate political context. As she wrote for “Under Forty,” “Red-baiting, undercuts at the position of women, anti-intellectual and anti-imaginative drives such as Congress has recently been conducting—these are on the same level as the growing storm of anti-Semitism” (Muriel Rukeyser Era 35). During the war, these different objects of ideological attacks—both within and outside the federal government—were inherently related, in part because each was targeted as the others were. A year later, the context would shift as the war approached its end and the world’s politicians began to actively plan for a postwar global order. And with that shift, the position and fate of Jews also changed—or at least they seemed to change. Rukeyser would further develop her liberal antifascist vision accordingly.
From April 25 until June 26, 1945, delegations from fifty nations convened in San Francisco for the United Nations Conference for International Organization (UNCIO), also known as the World’s Peace Conference or the San Francisco Conference. On May 7, just after the proceedings began, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally. Within two weeks of the convention’s conclusion, the United States’ atomic bombings of Japan would bring the conflict in the Pacific theater to a close, too. During the three-month session, the Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice were drafted and adopted, a major step toward what many hoped would be the realization and securing of a democratic and antifascist future worldwide.[1]
Advisors from nongovernmental organizations, including US Jewish advocacy groups, played a crucial role in the UNCIO’s articulation of a postwar vision of a peace established on the promise of securing and protecting human rights. The most influential such group was the American Jewish Committee (1906-present), while more recently formed Zionist and internationalist groups such as the B’nai B’rith-affiliated American Jewish Conference (1943-1949) had considerably less impact on the conversation.[2] “Even as the European Jewish tragedy loomed over the deliberations, American Jewish liberal human rights activists focused equally on their own situation at home,” historian James Loeffler argues. “In their embrace of human rights advocacy, [Joseph] Proskauer and his colleagues [from the American Jewish Committee] sought to use a foreign policy issue to positively shape perceptions of Jewish political utility and civic virtue in America” (404). Through its involvement with the UNCIO and its intervention in the emergent global discourse about human rights, the liberal Jewish organization shaped “a new public rhetoric about American ethnic and religious pluralism, democracy, and lobbying the appeal and meaning of human rights for American civil society” (404-5). Consequently, postwar discourse about the basis for cultural pluralism and civic life in the United States would assume new shades of humanism, premised neither on a “commonality” grounded in nationalist assimilationism, whereby the dominant social group and class embodied the supposed standard, nor on a multicultural rhetoric of difference and tolerance.
When the UNCIO convened, Rukeyser was living in San Francisco. She had moved there on a more-or-less permanent basis the previous spring, while completing work on two of her great antifascist wartime projects—the poetry collection Beast in View (1944) and the first iteration of her experimental play The Middle of the Air (produced 1945, published 2027).[3] A year before she moved across the country, she had resigned from the Office of War Information’s Graphics Workshop, a governmental agency for which she, for less than six months, had helped to develop antifascist, prodemocratic propaganda such as posters and a touring library exhibit. She was recruited for the agency on the recommendation of Archibald MacLeish, a friend and fellow poet who, as the Librarian of Congress, served as the ex officio assistant director of the Office of War Information. Shortly after starting her job at the Graphics Workshop, Rukeyser told Belgian-born novelist and poet May Sarton, one of her lovers at the time, that she saw her new position as an opportunity to do the “basic work on how to set up a way of thinking and speaking that has no resemblance to Mein Kampf” (Letter to May Sarton, 11 Dec. 1942). An unpublished statement she wrote at the start of her appointment characterizes the agency’s mission as to “forever crush the fascist threat of brutalizing whatever good we have gained.” She wished she could convey to “a people” that “I know that great effort of growth will win wars as it wins land, as it wins love [. …] I would say it in every way I can: in poems, in posters, in my life” (Untitled statement).
Rukeyser’s ability to act on these convictions would be impeded by obstacles she encountered within the agency, however. In a now-infamous episode, she left the Office of War Information in the spring of 1943 because she felt that the Graphics Workshop had been overtaken by Madison Avenue advertising executives. They were more intent on selling the war as if it were just another consumer product than taking seriously the agency’s charge to wage an ideational, even an existential, fight against fascism.[4] She did not go so far as Theodor Adorno would when, that same year, he likened American consumer capitalism’s strategies of audience manipulation to those used by the period’s nativist fascists; but she came close.[5] For instance, when she immortalized her conflict at the OWI in her long poem “Letter to the Front,” from Beast in View, Rukeyser likened the proverbial adman, whose “field is bottled fizz,” to “the fascist, Malicioso King, / Contractor, business man and publisher, / Who will hire a man to hire another man / To hire someone to murder the man of strong belief” (Beast 63). Both men were fascists—one complicitous, the other willful. Both tried to sell a false vision and manipulate their audiences. In the process, they betrayed what Rukeyser felt should be at the heart of a truly democratic vision, what she refers to in the poem as “the belief in the world” (63).[6]
If her work for the federal government as a propagandist would not allow her to truly bear witness to her own belief, then other avenues might. Her art offered one such alternative route. As she put it in her talk “Belief and Poetry” (1940), poetry was one way “to take a stand,” to attempt “communication on a level of belief” and thus overcome how “the life inverted” is what is usually represented by media and art “in times of great perversity,” such as during periods of fascist creep (Muriel Rukeyser Era 73, 74, 76). A different facet of her activism and lifework—her efforts as an educator—provided another avenue for communicating her antifascist belief. Teaching, for her, as it is for many of us, was more than a means of making money: Educational settings also served Rukeyser as outlets for her cultural activism. When she was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she taught for a few semesters in 1945 and 1948 at the California Labor School (1942-1957), a relatively short-lived, accredited adult education institution with a Marxist philosophy, which served the local community, area radicals, and, in the postwar years, veterans furthering their education through the GI Bill.[7] Through her affiliation with the school, Rukeyser found an ideal audience for her antifascist efforts and opportunities to test and rearticulate her beliefs.
During the UNCIO, the California Labor School hosted some of the meetings of the United Nations delegates. At the time, Rukeyser was on the faculty, teaching two courses—a poetry workshop and a lecture-and-discussion series titled Poetry and the People, which included such lectures as the two-part “The ‘Uses’ of Poetry” (on poetry in the theater, in movies, and as jazz); “The Poetry of Resistance” (on the European antifascist underground’s songs and poems); “Poetry in Russia, China, and Latin America” (on contemporary Marxist and communist literatures); and “Poetry and Belief.”[8] The class meetings were open not only to the college’s matriculated and enrolled students, but also to members of the community who might attend on a per-class basis. Many of these lectures are lost or were improvised, surviving only as notes in Rukeyser’s archives.[9] But even those fragments, outlines, and copied out poems and quotations by other authors attest to her longtime, studied engagement with American culture and worldwide poetries as modes of antifascist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist resistance.[10] During her lectures, she and her students would have been in the same building—the sole one on the California Labor School’s campus—where representatives and activists from around the world were debating the postwar terms of peace and global unity.
Rukeyser was not just teaching about antifascist poetics in the vicinity of the United Nations delegates. She also, in her own small way, was attempting to make an intervention in the human rights discourse that the politicians and diplomats were evolving down the hall, or on the floor above or below, as they developed official charters and policies. “The Faces of Peace,” the lost text presented here, constitutes that intervention. The idea for the project likely originated with Rukeyser’s need to satisfy a condition of her employment by the California Labor School, directed at that time by its founder and her good friend, David Jenkins, an adherent of the Communist Party.[11] The pamphlet’s publication was to be coordinated with the Jewish Survey and B’nai B’rith Community Committee, a single body led by Eugene Block, a prominent Bay Area activist who also sat on the Mayor’s Civic Unity Committee, an interfaith organization seeking to heal rifts in the local community.[12] Her collaboration with Jenkins, a communist, and Block, a Zionist, is noteworthy. Although they were earnestly committed to their immediate community, these two men’s brands of ideologically defined internationalism were at odds with the more universalist, humanist vision that was espoused by the American Jewish Committee at the UNCIO and that was reinforced by Rukeyser’s narrative in her pamphlet about bridging ideological and cultural divides to continue to combat fascism even after the war ended.
In “The Faces of Peace,” Rukeyser offers what was for her, in the body of her published and still-unpublished writings, a rare address of both Jewishness and antisemitism. She examines the latter’s manifestations close to home, which she diagnoses as providing insights about the eruption of hatred against and oppression of Jews globally. Intended to serve as prodemocratic and antifascist propaganda for both the immediate community and the international audience of the visiting United Nations’ delegates, Rukeyser designed “The Faces of Peace” as she had conceptualized the posters she designed for the OWI: namely, as an integral, persuasive combination of verbal and visual messaging that moves beyond mass culture and advertising’s manipulative style of empty sloganeering. “The issues of the war have to be stated continually,” she had asserted a year previously in “Words and Images” (1943), an article for The New Republic about her experiences at the OWI’s Graphics Workshop. “They are dynamic in themselves, and they require dynamic treatment” (Muriel Rukeyser Era 145). Such dynamism—whether the antifascist messaging was for war posters, as it was at the OWI, or for raising consciousness about the root causes and implications of American antisemitism, as would be the case with her later pamphlet—depended on visual elements that complemented and extended, not just illustrated, the verbal text. “We have an emotional image, reinforced from another direction by words, so that both make their strong appeal to the critical mind and to the wish, already moved by the facts of war” (146, original emphasis).
With “The Faces of Peace,” Rukeyser sought to expand her practice of antifascist propaganda by moving from the static posters she developed for the OWI into a more rhetorically complex, narrative form. Like her lyric photo-essays from the 1930s, the pamphlet’s text evolves a narrative that connects each image, setting it in motion and into relation with the others.[13] Unlike those earlier works, though, “The Faces of Peace” is much more self-evidently political and didactic. Framed by Rukeyser’s antifascist worldview and liberal humanist philosophy, its journalistic story about the moment and immediate locale’s political climate is intended to give its readers a usable lesson about how to resist and counter still-pervasive antisemitic threats, even when most San Franciscans and other Americans presumed the war had secured and guaranteed a democratic future.
“The Faces of Peace” was never published, nor was it even fully realized as a photo-essay. Rukeyser left scant details about the four photographs she had in mind for her pamphlet, and she provided no clues about the artists she hoped would create the other paintings or drawings constituting her essay’s accompanying images. She did make sketches of all the images in a mockup, but they supply only the roughest of outline of what she envisioned.[14] Consequently, we can only imagine how her project’s visual dimensions would have appealed emotionally to her audience. Readers who wish to get a sense of the environment in San Francisco during the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and thus better visualize what Rukeyser might have been imagining when she describes the local scene early in her essay, can view San Francisco 1945, the United Nations’ official short documentary about the event. How her project would have delivered its direct emotional impact may remain the stuff of speculation, but thankfully we now have her forceful narrative for “The Faces of Peace,” in full.
What is especially remarkable about the pamphlet’s essay is that, in it, Rukeyser decouples nativist fascism from antisemitism. Instead, she sees the latter as symptomatic of what she calls “the lie against the group,” which she posits as American fascism’s foundational ideological strategy. Adorno would call such strategies “psycho-technics” (Psychological Technique 8). But he and his colleagues from the Institute for Social Research tended, problematically, to rely exclusively on the lens of antisemitism when studying American fascists, whom they called agitators to distinguish them from their European counterparts. As political theorist Alberto Tosano notes about Prophets of Deceit (1949), by Adorno’s colleagues Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, this book, “like other work by the Institute on American anti-Semitism, fascist potentials, and potential fascists, almost entirely neglects the place of anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism in the rhetoric or ideology of the agitators” (xxvi). Rukeyser does not. In fact, she is more attuned to how attacks on Jews in the Bay Area and beyond constituted a synecdoche for attacks against all minorities. That is, antisemitism, as she saw it, was just one strategy among many used by nativist fascists to pursue their primary objectives of producing divisiveness, exacting violence, and dehumanizing others to secure their own power.
To meet these ends, fascists then, as now, relied on racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and anti-labor tropes, and, as we have experienced firsthand in the twenty-first century, on homophobic and transphobic tropes which Rukeyser does not openly acknowledge. Such attacks against various minoritized groups perform an ideational violence, violations of the belief that an essential human commonality and solidarity not only is possible but actually exists, on a felt and experiential level.[15] As Albert Camus put it in “The Human Crisis” (1946), one of his postwar lectures about his experience fighting with the French Resistance, “[W]e had not revolted for ourselves alone, but for something common in all men” (26). Rukeyser was moved by Camus’s statement and copied out this passage after reading his essay in the magazine Twice A Year.[16]
Such a humanist antifascist vision is what Rukeyser hoped to communicate through “The Faces of Peace” to her students at the California Labor School, to her fellow Bay Area citizens, and to the United Nations delegates from around the world. She wished to encourage them to continue to fight, to resist and stand strong against the still-present fascist scourge, which was evident in the openly antisemitic displays and pamphleteering proliferating throughout San Franciso and its surrounding localities during the UNCIO. Unsettlingly, her unpublished pamphlet’s warning and lesson about the threat of an American brand of fascism still resonates in the twenty-first century. Ever the educator, she still has much to teach us about American fascism and its oppressive and divisive psycho-technics, both in the past and today.
On editing the manuscript
I have lightly and quietly edited the copytexts for “The Faces of Peace” and the accompanying “The Faces of Peace: A Note on the Pictures,” hereafter referred to as “A Note on the Pictures.” Annotations have been kept to a minimum, used only to identify a few historical figures or points of fact that are no longer common knowledge. I have preserved Muriel Rukeyser’s idiosyncratic punctuation, including her irregular uses of semicolons and commas, even when it results in comma splices. Serial commas have been restored where they were dropped. I also have reproduced Rukeyser’s characteristic spacing before and after em dashes and colons. When these preferred practices are not in the copytext, I used them to regularize the manuscript. Her hyphenation to create compound words has been preserved, except in those cases—such as righthand or streetcorner, for example—where the resulting compound word is, by contemporary standard practice, unhyphenated. Occasional periods used in the list of images from “A Note on the Pictures” were removed to match Rukeyser’s unpunctuated presentation of most items. At the start of “The Faces of Peace,” I have preserved Rukeyser’s mini paragraphs: Each represents a full-page image with the text constituting its caption. I have edited her ellipses in that section of her essay to conform to the convention of three periods, rather than her indiscriminate use of four or even five. In the few instances when Rukeyser used an ellipsis at the end of a full sentence, I changed it to a period to introduce consistency.
Although “A Note on the Pictures” prefaces “The Faces of Peace” in the archived copytext, I have positioned it as following the main essay. Its instructions for the pamphlet’s production, as Rukeyser envisioned it, are interesting and important; but they should not distract from the main argument of her pamphlet’s text. As I note in my introduction, the photographs Rukeyser wanted to include have not been identified and the other drawings or paintings she imagined including were never created. In “The Faces of Peace,” Rukeyser includes bracketed numbers, each of which corresponds to a description from “A Note on the Pictures” of the intended image to be included at that point in the published pamphlet. I have duplicated those descriptions in the brackets and italicized them, thus easing readers’ ability to imagine how the images would have emotionally reinforced Rukeyser’s narrative. In those descriptions, “Pix” refers to PIX Publishing (1935-1969) and “Acme” refers to ACME Newspictures (1923-1951), two Manhattan-based photojournalism agencies. To correct Rukeyser’s spellings, I have fully capitalized the names of both agencies.
After “A Note on the Pictures,” I have transcribed Rukeyser’s single page of handwritten notes for her essay, written on a sheet from the same memo notebook she used to draw the images for the dummy pamphlet. Many of these brief, unattributed details from her research and observations did not make their way into “The Faces of Peace.” I have preserved her shorthand and signaled illegible words with brackets. Readers might appreciate the look behind the curtain provided by this document, to see how the fragments preserved in her archives, even though they keep us guessing, add an enriching dimension to her completed but unpublished prose.
The Faces of Peace
by Muriel Rukeyser
BEGINNINGS have been made in San Francisco this year. Even the look of the city reflected, for a while, the Conference… [1. San Francisco — Market Street, or a hotel sidewalk — during the Conference (PIX photo)]
and the steps it was taking to make a charter of world peace. On the streets, lost in the crowds, walked people of all the nations of the world. [2. Foreign visitors outside of St. Francis (PIX photo)][17]
In the Veterans Building, the steering committee of the United Nations Conference met to represent all peoples in agreement… [3. Steering Committee (ACME photo)]
and on the floor of the Opera House, most honored guests, sat wounded veterans of the war whose end was being planned. [4. Wounded veterans (ACME photo)]
All these visitors — diplomats, soldiers, reporters — looked to this time and this city for the seeds of peace; looked at this port, these hills, as the place and source of peace; looked at the faces in the street as faces of peace. [5. View of city]
Many of the visitors had seen their countries go under and rise again… [6. Liberated Paris]
had seen street-fights and little persecutions grow to ruin and disaster… [7. Street-fighting, Germany, early Nazi period]
and the bullying of overgrown rowdies end in torture and pits of the dead who number more millions than Americans will believe. [8. Concentration camp picture of emaciated dead]
Many of the visitors, many of our soldiers, had come from countries whose downfall proved that the persecution of any group leads to the persecution of all groups except the one in power. They looked to America as the place of mixtures — the land which can prove to the world the strength of mixtures in one free people. But, during 1945, the year of the Conference, shameful handbills had been slipped under the doors of certain people. Stickers appeared on windows. Shipyard workers who tried to rip down anti-Jewish papers posted on their bulletin board suddenly lost their jobs, at a time when contracts were ending and the layoff had begun. These facts, too, made up the scene which the Conference delegates saw in San Francisco. [9. Double spread of stickers, letters, etc. in Mr. Block’s possession][18]
America has all the strength of its production, of its imagination, of its many-peopled past and present. How does anti-Semitism touch our strength today? What does it mean to us, as we begin to imagine the world that will follow a war against fascism?
A little boy, who came here during the early years of the war, said to the grownup who was taking care of him, “Why do people feel anything about Jews?” She asked him what he thought the reason was. The little boy — he was five years old, and had escaped from Germany — thought hard, and said at least, “Jews make people worry.”
The most extraordinary fact about the Jews today is that their range, in appearance, in opinion, in nationality — is so great that there is nothing that you can say about the human race that is not true about some Jewish man or woman. And the other way around. There is nothing that you can say about any Jewish man or woman that is not true of some other group. But, in a time of stress, when people are likely to turn to their own groups for protection and look for some other group on which to turn their fear or anxiety, there is this group — about which it is hard to make any true general remark. Then the old brutal guilty tradition that the Jew is a good scapegoat comes in handy to those who need to blame somebody — anybody — for something they themselves cannot face. It is then — in a difficult time, such as we had before and just as we got into the war, and are likely to have during the period just “after” — it is then that “Jews make people worry.” But what they worry about is in themselves.
This is a group that is hard to generalize about, if you stay with the truth. The Nazis did not stay with the truth, they made a point of using lies as weapons, and when they hurried into a state of war, they had to believe in all their weapons, good and bad. The “strong” boys with the race-theories killed the “weak” Germans, or tortured them to nerve and bone. But then — and it was clear to anyone — the mixed, “weak,” soft armies of three notoriously mixed peoples — the United States, the Soviet Republics, and the British Commonwealth — and their allies, put an end to the Nazi armies.
Our great strength has been devoted to finishing off armies. Another weapon — the first of the weapons they seized — remains to the fascists abroad and the Little Fascists among us. This weapon is the lie against the group. And the lie against any one group — Jews, Catholics, Negroes, labor, women — soon becomes lies against all these groups, if the first lie is allowed to take root.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, last year, when the attacks on Jews and Negroes began, a committee set itself up to inquire into and stop this activity, believing that such attacks were attacks against the foundation of American life.[19] One of the houses which had been damaged turned out to be the home of German Jewish refugees, and the wife said, “We saw this happen in Hitler Germany, just as it happened here yesterday. But the difference is this — today, in America, you have come the next day to investigate and publish your findings. Not one person came to us in Germany. That is why we think that fascism cannot come here.”
By the time the Nazis had overrun Europe, the people themselves knew that intolerance was among the greatest of enemies. The several undergrounds that were effective in the occupied countries of Europe took steps at once to abolish all anti-racial and anti-Semitic decrees.
We have no decrees. The weapon is being used in a different way in America. We know the talk that goes on in shipyards, on trains, in the meeting-rooms of the reactionaries. Archibald MacLeish, speaking recently of the forces for peace and the forces for reaction at the Conference, singled out for attack the “obscene use of the word ‘Jew.’”[20] On this level, talk can be answered with talk. Our education teaches most of us to let pass what comes like a crude attack on a group, or an attack on an individual who is used as a symbol of his “race.” Don’t pass over that kind of talk. Talk against it, at once, before the same people who have heard the original remark.
There are defensive answers, but to argue against a lie is not enough. If you go on talking about a lie, you emphasize it further. None of the “race-talk” has a scientific basis. Scientists with prejudice against one group or another have tried to establish basic differences and have failed. But the people who talk against Jews, or Negroes, or any other group, are not talking scientifically. Arguing against these lies won’t do it. There are stronger things to say : positive things about the role of Jews in this or any other country, things about the fact that the Jews have survived the wars and the persecutions, things about the Jews who have fought in American wars, about the gifts of Jews in the arts and in practical affairs and to the land.
The labor unions are fighting this fight. The CIO has said, “To win this war against fascism and tyranny, and to win the peace as well, all who believe in democracy must stand united WHATEVER THEIR RACE, CREED, OR COLOR if they would preserve the blessing of freedom and human dignity.”[21] And those forces for education toward freedom are fighting too. The viciousness here is a viciousness against the children, against the generations who will know what kind of peace we make. If you work against these lies, you do not work for the living alone.
This fight, this time, is a matter for the individual as well as for the group. Community by community and person by person, it is concerned with the strong and subtle forces that are now in our lives. In a way, the work against anti-Semitism in America is like the work that Americans will have to do all over the world, using every means, from intimate conversation to broadcasting. For peace depends — as much as on any one thing — on making clear the value of each group in the world to all the rest. The myth against the Jews is a myth against the future. It is being used to soften us up, to make us vulnerable to the next wave of fascist ideas. That is its use as a weapon. It is used nakedly, as a weapon, by the fascist-minded. And as for the little weak-headed person who may sit next to you in a streetcar and say “But I don’t like Jews” — don’t let him bother you about Jews any more than he would bother you about anything else. He can “not like” Jews all he wants — or the Declaration of Independence, or scotch, or five-year-old children, or chocolate ice cream, or Texans, or unions, or steak — as long as he doesn’t interfere with the human rights that are involved. As far as any group of people are concerned, there are human rights involved. If we understand that fully, we will better understand the peace. If we see that the professional Jew-baiters — the Klan, Gerald K. Smith — have no ideas once they leave off baiting, we will understand what we have to deal with.[22] If we see that people like the columnist Pegler, who say that there is no anti-Semitism in America, have not been looking that way because they have been too busy baiting some other group — labor, Negroes, women, anybody — we will understand how to go ahead.[23] We will understand the long-term job in the world, because this is a long-term job in ourselves. We will understand the forces for and against a sure peace, and the various, strong, and changing faces of the peace. [10. Photo in which wide range of children’s faces fills entire area]
The Faces of Peace: A Note on the Pictures
by Muriel Rukeyser
This pamphlet, as here drafted, began as a picture pamphlet, whose captions lead into the body of the text. I would suggest that its size be the size of a Pocket Book, opening lengthwise to allow for photographs, or horizontal drawings, if drawings are to be used. That is, a pamphlet of 6½ inches by 41/8 inches, with captions on the lefthand side and pictures on the righthand side, if possible. After the first eight pictures, the text lengthens; the ninth picture should be a double spread of defamation material in Mr. Block’s office, and then the text should run all the way through to the end.[24] A last picture should run all the way through to the end. A last picture should be on the last righthand page, and the back cover should contain material about the sponsors and publishers.
The list of pictures is as follows:
- San Francisco — Market Street, or a hotel sidewalk — during the Conference (PIX photo)
- Foreign visitors outside of St. Francis (PIX photo)
- Steering Committee (ACME photo)
- Wounded veterans (ACME photo)
- View of city
- Liberated Paris
- Street-fighting, Germany, early Nazi period
- Concentration camp picture of emaciated dead
- Double spread of stickers, letters, etc. in Mr. Block’s possession
- Photo in which wide range of children’s faces fills entire area
I have prepared a dummy pamphlet, which I should like to present as soon as a meeting can be arranged between Mr. Block, Mr. Jenkins, and myself.[25]
Muriel Rukeyser’s Research Notes for “The Faces of Peace”[26]
40,000 – 50,000 Jews in S.F.
few cases of job discrimination
“old families”
Jews in office lining up with business
no organized Christian Front
face of anti-S changes since war began
isolationists attracted people who hated groups
since war, not expedient
but individuals in tension
[two illegible words]
deprivation as a source
“token” Jews
tightening economy
political anti-Semitism since Hitler came into power
Eleanor Roosevelt – July Coronet[27]
Bibliography
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Camus, Albert. “The Human Crisis: A Lecture Delivered in America, Spring 1946,” translated by Lionel Abel. Twice A Year, vol. 14-15, fall 1946-winter 1947, pp. 19-33. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/twice-a-year_fall-1946-winter-1947_14-15/page/19/mode/1up.
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Keenaghan, Eric, ed. The Middle of the Air: A Critical Edition, by Muriel Rukeyser, Cornell UP, forthcoming 2027.
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—. “The Telephone Company.” Life, 17 July 1939, pp. 56-63. Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=_UEEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q&f=false. Unattributed article.
—. Untitled statement. 1 Dec. 1942. Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY, Office of War Information materials, folder 1. Typescript.
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[1] On the UNCIO, see “The San Francisco Conference,” United Nations.
[2] For the American Jewish Committee’s account of its role in shaping the United Nations Charter for Human Rights, see A World Charter for Human Rights.
[3] Loosely based on Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh involvement with the America First Committee, and experimenting with a blend of poetry, dramatic speeches, song, and various workers’ theater traditions, The Middle of the Air is an antifascist counterhistory that imagines a fascist revolution in the United States. Rukeyser developed, wrote, and revised her experimental drama between 1942 and 1951. A single production, adapted and directed by Hallie Flanagan Davis, was mounted at the University of Iowa between July 31 and August 4, 1945. Although producer and director Herman Shumlin had purchased an option for a Broadway run earlier, he never pursued a production. Because the script’s contracted publication was contingent on its staging on Broadway or by a touring company, The Middle of the Air remained unpublished during Rukeyser’s lifetime. My critical edition of her first pre-production revision includes accounts of the play’s compositional and production history, a related lost short story, “The Lights of Summer” (1950), and an eliminated scene and a variant scene from other versions of the script. See Muriel Rukeyser, The Middle of the Air: A Critical Edition, edited by Eric Keenaghan. The Middle of the Air features one Jewish character, the psychiatrist Walter Ensor. Although he is a secondary figure, he provides a point of entry for future studies of Rukeyser’s representation of nativist fascism, antisemitism, and antifascist resistance.
[4] For two strong critical accounts of Rukeyser’s work at the Office of War Information, see Eleanor Careless, “Muriel Rukeyser and the Security of the Imagination”; and Jeanne Perreault, “Muriel Rukeyser.”
[5] In 1943, Adorno developed an unpublished study of American fascist rhetoric, where he wrote that “many fascist leaders were originally propagandists rather than actual politicians—which in itself is a significant feature of our present society where the borderline between advertising and reality has become so fluent” (Psychological Technique 16). In a short essay extracted from that study and published years later, he specifies: “We know, above all, that [American] fascist propaganda, with all its twisted logic and fantastic distortions, is consciously planned and organized. If it is to be called irrational, then it is applied rather than spontaneous irrationality, a kind of psychotechnics reminiscent of the calculated effect conspicuous in most presentations of today’s mass culture—such as in movies and broadcasts” (“Anti-Semitism” 223). I have not found evidence that Rukeyser was aware of Adorno’s studies of nativist fascism or of similar studies by his colleagues from the Institute of Social Research.
[6] Rukeyser modeled the figure of Malicioso King from “Letter to the Front” on Generoso Pope, an Italian-language newspaper mogul and her father’s onetime business partner. Pope supported Benito Mussolini and used his media outlets to promote Italian Fascism and US nonintervention. He is suspected of having ordered the still-unsolved assassination of Carlo Tresca, an antifascist labor organizer. In her play The Middle of the Air, through the characters of King and Restif, Rukeyser dramatizes Pope and Tresca’s political feud. On her fictive adaptation of these historical personages, see Eric Keenaghan, “The Entrance of a Theme.”
[7] For a brief introduction to the institution, see Chris Carlsson, “California Labor School.” For an account of the school through the lens of the communism of its first director, David Jenkins, discussed below, see Robert W. Cherny, San Franciso Reds, esp. pp. 145-60.
[8] For the listing of Poetry and the People, see Spring Term 1945, California Labor School, p. 17. The course catalogue only lists some of the class’s nine lectures. For the full schedule, see A Series of Lectures and Classes by Muriel Rukeyser, American Poet, California Labor School.
[9] See Muriel Rukeyser, Drafts and notes for The Life of Poetry and related lectures.
[10] Rukeyser taught variants of this course, including at Columbia University, in 1946, and a later reprise at the California Labor School, in 1948. Her postwar poetics treatise The Life of Poetry (1949) consists of elements of some of these lectures, as well as material from Poetry and Communication, her 1940 lecture series at Vassar College which she intended to publish as “The Usable Truth: Five Talks on Communication and Poetry.” See Muriel Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser Era, pp. 37-100. Although The Life of Poetry is usually mischaracterized as based on these lectures, the book, in actuality, evolves much of Rukeyser’s earlier thinking. Particularly regrettable is that it omits much from her classes on European Resistance movements and global Marxist poetries. Although only fragmentary notes about such antifascist and wartime topics and texts covered by her lectures are extant, that evidence does suggest Rukeyser’s interest earlier in the 1940s to map out a far more radical leftist poetic tradition than what is suggested by her book-length treatise, which was written and published in the early years of postwar anticommunist and anti-leftist hysteria.
[11] “I must write a pamphlet about anti-Semitism for the Labor School—which has been keeping me on salary through all this [i.e., revising her antifascist play The Middle of the Air after her teaching had finished]—and then I want to do the Boas movie” (Rukeyser, letter to May Sarton, undated [June 1945]). Rukeyser refers to an unrealized documentary about Franz Boas, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany whose theorizations of cultural relativism innovated American anthropology. David Jenkins was the California Labor School’s founding director, a post he held from 1942 until his resignation in 1949 after the House Un-American Activities Committee targeted him in its anticommunist crusade. See note 7, above.
[12] Eugene Block was a prominent figure in the Bay Area. After the war, in 1951, when the Jewish Survey and B’nai B’rith Community Committee assumed a more local advocacy mission and was renamed the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, he served as its executive director. On the significance of his representation of the Bay Area’s Jewish community during the UNCIO, see Edith Simon, “Towards Unity in San Francisco.” On the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council’s history, see “JCRC History,” JCRC Bay Area.
[13] Rukeyser’s early photo-essays “Adventures of Children” (1939) and “Worlds Alongside” (1939) were published in the glossy photojournalism outlet Coronet, where she worked as an associate editor, and the uncredited “The Telephone Company” (1939) appeared in Life.
[14] See Muriel Rukeyser, The faces of peace [folder].
[15] Although the Institute for Social Research may not have made the leap Rukeyser did in her analysis of antisemitism to her liberalist formulation of human commonality, they did diagnose fascism as rooted in divisiveness. “The agitator explicitly rejects the ideal of universality,” Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman argue (33). “He implies that tolerance is opposed to truth”; that is, liberal tolerance runs counter to the lies and mythologies about violent ultranationalism which are upheld by fascists as the truth (34). Agitators make similar attacks on other liberal ideals, too, such as “brotherhood, humanitarianism, universal justice” (34).
[16] For her copied out passages from Camus’s essay, see Muriel Rukeyser, Notebook.
[17] During the UNCIO, the press was stationed and many international delegations were housed at the St. Francis Hotel, in downtown San Francisco’s Union Square.
[18] On Eugene Block, see note 12, above.
[19] Sarton, who at that time lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote to Rukeyser about how a group was forming to address what she called “the Cambridge troubles” and reported about how Jewish parents in Dorchester, another Boston neighborhood, were keeping their children home out of fear of the violence erupting from “the old poisons and the old evils” (Letter to Muriel Rukeyser, 13 June [1944]). In a second letter, written a week later, she discusses how the Cambridge group addressed “the racial business” targeting African Americans in the area (Letter to Muriel Rukeyser, 22 June [1944]). A few days thereafter, Sarton sent Rukeyser a long article by the novelist Wallace Stegner for The Atlantic about the Christian Front’s influence on Irish delinquent youths’ antisemitic violence in Boston. See May Sarton, letter to Muriel Rukeyser, 26 June [1944]. The article Sarton enclosed is no longer with the letter. For the article, see Wallace Stegner, “Who Persecutes Boston?” Neither Sarton’s letters nor Stegner’s article details the story in Rukeyser’s essay about the German Jewish refugee family.
[20] Archibald MacLeish was a friend of Rukeyser and, as the assistant director of the Office of War Information, had recruited her to work for its Graphics Workshop. See my introduction, above. He was a key figure in the deliberations about the human rights charter at the UNCIO and helped disseminate word to the American public about the conference’s proceedings and accomplishments. His speech about antisemitism, cited by Rukeyser, has not been identified.
[21] The Congress for Industrial Organizations (CIO), a US labor union, represented a platform for workers’ solidarity at the UNCIO that was based on antiracism and antidiscrimination. This statement quoted by Rukeyser has not been located.
[22] Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith was a Far-Right Christian minister and politician who founded the America First Party in 1943 and ran as its presidential candidate in 1944. He had not been formally associated with the America First Committee, a separate prewar isolationist and nativist fascist organization that was disbanded in 1941. On Rukeyser’s antifascist literary response to the America First Committee and its mouthpiece, Charles Lindbergh, see Eric Keenaghan, “The Entrance of a Theme.”
[23] Westbrook Pegler was a right-wing journalist who published a syndicated column for the Hearst newspaper conglomerate.
[24] On Eugene Block, see note 12, above.
[25] On David Jenkins, see note 11, above.
[26] Single manuscript page archived in: Muriel Rukeyser, The faces of peace [folder].
[27] With this line, which appears at the very bottom of the note, apart from the rest, Rukeyser is referencing a short op. ed. by the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, opposite her full-page portrait. The piece appeared in Coronet, a glossy popular magazine featuring photojournalism for which Rukeyser worked in the 1930s and where she published two of her own early photo-essays, “The Adventures of Children” (1938) and “Worlds Alongside” (1939). Roosevelt’s narrative does not touch on the details recorded in Rukeyser’s note. See Eleanor Roosevelt, “Tolerance Is an Ugly Word.”
About the author
Eric Keenaghan is the editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Middle of the Air”: A Critical Edition (Cornell University Press, 2027), a previously unpublished antifascist play, which Muriel Rukeyser wrote and revised between 1941 and 1950 and which was produced in 1945. With Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, he also co-edited The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press, 2023), a co-winner of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. He teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY. To learn more, visit Eric’s faculty website or his author website, and follow him on Instagram and Bluesky.
