ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Bay Area Reds
PAUL BUHLE recommends a thorough and necessary history of communist organisation and the difficulties it faced in California
(L) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, May 29 1942. A group of Block Leaders who are drawing up the Constitution for this War Relocation Authority center - front row (L to R) Karl Yoneda [communist], H. Inouye; back row, (L to R) Bill Kito, Ted Akahoshi, Tom Yamazaki, and Harry Nakamura; (R) Dorothy Healey, chair of the CPUSA in Southern California, standing before jail cell in Los Angeles, California, June 29 1949
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958
Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press £22.05
THE story of the US left has been pretty much ups and downs, something hardly surprising in world capitalism’s leading nation with a working class historically divided by race and ethnicity.
Among the most startling cases is surely the California Story.
The California Socialist Party of pre-1920 days elected mayors, guided at least some craft unions, had quite a following among displaced Yankees and a scattering of ethnic groups. The rough conditions of what would one day become known as the Left Coast meanwhile prompted IWW-like, semi-anarchist labour activism.
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