Folk Revival - Indigenous Communists

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.

Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]

Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.

In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]

The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]

The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]

Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]

A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.

Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]

Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]

The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]

In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]

More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]

Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]

The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]

Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]

In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]

The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]

Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:

"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]

She added:

"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]

Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]


End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.

1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."

4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]

5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.

6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.

7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]

8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."

9. Kaufman. 104.

10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.

11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.

16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.

17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."

18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.

19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.

20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.

21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.

26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.

27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.

31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.

32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.

33. Denisoff. 42.

34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.

35. Denisoff. 44.

36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.

37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.

39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]

40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]

41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."