NATIONAL JOHN REED CLUB
CONFERENCE
The national meeting of the John
Reed Clubs, held in Ch;cago the
last week in September, opened with
the reading of a radiogram which
had been received from the Secret–
ariat of the International Union of
Revolutionary Writers. Greeting
the conference in the name of the
world revolutionary movement, the
Secretariat called upon the mem–
bers of the Clubs to "give the best
of their creative powers to the task
of fighting fascism, war and reac–
tion and the building of a socialist
culture in America."
Among the writers and artists
present were Jack Conroy, M eridel
Le Sueur, Alan Calmer, Orrick
Johns,
].
S. Balch, Joe Jones, Nel–
son Algren, William Pillin, Philip
Rahv, Alfred Hayes, Wallace
Phelps,
A.
B.
Magi!, Bill Jordan,
Mark Marvin, Paul Romr.ine, Gil–
bert Rocke, Jan Wittenber, Jack
Kainen, Boris Gorelick, M. Childs,
and others. Many new faces were
to be seen, showing the extent to
which the Clubs had been drawing
into their work the numerous young
writers and artists who had been
appearing in the revolutionary mag–
azine during the last few years.
Alfred Hayes, who presented the
opening address for the writers,
60
stressed· the importance of the wide–
spread campaign led by the Amer–
Ican League Against \Var and
Fascism, and indicated the necessity
of the cultural movement breaking
down its sectarian approach, in order
to win large sections of the Amer–
ican intellectuals in the fight against
the two monsters of modern cap–
italism.
The others members of the writ·
ers' commission unanimously de–
nounced the "leftist" character ot
some aspects of our young revolu·
tionary literature. They condemned
those practices in our work that
lead fellow-travelers to think that
they must become revolutionary–
proletarian writers overnight. They
directed a collective attack against
writing which consists of uncon–
vincing, sloganized tracts disguised
as poetry and fiction..
Together
they showed that a living revolu–
tionary literature could grow only
out of genuine aesthetic recreation
of the class struggle. In this connec–
tion, the discussion in the writers'
commission indicated that
Partisan
R eview
was exerting a wide in–
flu~nce
among the young writers.
A.
B.
Magi!, who was one of the
John Reed Club delegates to the
Kharkov Conference in 1930, point-
