TWO TEARS OF PROGRESS
Frank was elected unanimously, amidst overwhelming applause, and
his impassioned speech closing the sessions made a deeper impression
on the delegates than anything else they had heard at the Congress.
Expressing his faith in the new League, he concluded with the cry:
"Everything remains to be said. Everything remains to be done. Let
us get to work!" Two years later, however, he was unceremoniously
replaced by Donald Ogden Stewart, a dark horse from Hollywood.
Stewart was likewise elected unanimously, and the applause fot him
was equally overwhelming. What, in the meantime, had happened to
Waldo Frank? Not only did he make no report to the Congress of the
organization he ostensibly headed for two years, but he did not even
participate in its proceedings. Frank had simply disappeared, and
the only reference made to him was in the speech of Earl Browder,
secretary of the Communist Party. Browder ridiculed Frank as a
meddler in political matters. Thus t.he hero of yesterday, chosen to
lead a political league of writers, was now denounced for daring to
think he had anything to contribute to a political discussion. Behind
it all, of course, was the fact that Frank had written an unorthodox
letter to the
New Republic
about the Moscow trials. He had dared
to speak out of turn and was excommunicated. The Stalinists, who
manage and control the League of American Writers behind a facade
of big-shot presidents and vice-presidents who seldom attend the meet-
ings where the business of the League is really decided, have chosen
well in elevating Mr. Stewart. As a stooge he will doubtless prove
more pliant than Waldo Frank.
The program of the League of American Writers is supposedly
restricted to the struggle against war and fascism. Officially it asks for
no endorsement of the Stalin leadership in Russia. It claims to ,be a
democratic, independent organization of writers free of party control.
Yet in practice it will not tolerate the active participation of anyone
who is not ready to defend every policy of Stalin. And in his speech
to the second Congress, a congress convened to defend democracy,
Browder, in the polite language and with all the paraphernalia ap-
propriate to a cultural occasion, called for the denial of free speech
and the democratic rights of public controversy to all literary and
political opinion to the left of the Communist Party.
A Manufactured Renaissance
Have we dwelt too long on the political side of the second Con-
gress?What about literature? Yes, but how can one take seriously an
approach to writing wholly determinetl by the immediate political
dividends it can be made to yield? Literature to these people is, after
all, merely a pretext for the manipulation of ideas in favor of the
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