They were Marxists. They were more radical than Communists

(Fairfield Porter  -  Interview  -  1968)

Introduction:

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was an American painter and art critic, who radicalized during the 1930'ies and got involved on the left communist szene.

In 1968 Paul Cummings did an Interview with Fairfield Porter for a project at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, to collect tape-recordings to an Oral History of American Art. This interview is rather extensive and covers both the life time of Porter as well as a broad range of his opinions on arts.

The following extracts are only short passages that does not at all cover the main contents of the interview. Actually there are just marginal sidetracks from a very long discussion on paintings, literature, art critics and persons connected to these matters.

However  -  the following passages are important as political account. They document not only the personal political preferences or interests of Fairfield Porter in his youth, but also the political activities of the American Council Communists in the 30'ies. As historical account this loose interview-form leaves much to be asked. Nevertheless this is one of very few eye-witness-reports of the activities of Paul Mattick, Fritz Hentzler, Walter Auerbach and others of the American Group of International Communists. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Interview:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I went to Europe; that was in 1932. I painted in new York, and I went to Europe in 1932. I came back and I got married. I have five children. And I just kept on painting.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And you lived in New York?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I lived in New York and outside New York near Croton, near Peekskill. When my grandmother died, we moved to Illinois to her house right next to my parents' house for a couple of years. Then my father died and we moved back East again. And very soon the war came. I didn't have any gallery then. I showed occasionally in group shows at the Art Institute, or at the Philadelphia Academy once in a while, or with the Artists' Union in Chicago. 

I also got interested in radical politics. But what I was interested in was... I met in Illinois  -  in Chicago  -  some German Marxists who weren't Communists. They were Marxists. They were more radical than Communists. They had never been Communists. They were associated with some American ex-IWWs, things like that. I was interested because of Hitler's advent to power. I thought this was too bad. I had been in Russia in 1927. I sort of read things  -  you know, what people said  -  and I noticed that the Trotskyites said there should be a united front with the Socialists. I thought obviously that is right, of course there should have been. I didn't like the way the Communists reasoned or rationalized. I thought I was a Trotskyite. Then I met these radical German Marxists and they showed me. They demonstrated. They didn't say, but I learned that Trotsky was just another Bolshevik and that the trouble was with Bolshevism, not Trotsky versus Stalin. It's Bolshevism that is the mistake, because of its method of organization.

The interesting thing about these Germans was that they had belonged to something in Germany called the Communist Workers Party, which was somewhat Rosa Luxembourg. I mean, she died before it was formed; so you can't say it was she but they were very concerned with... They thought it was very important that her criticisms or Trotsky's early criticisms of Bolshevism shouldn't come about; that is this becomes a centralized thing, one man dictates. So they were organized in a way that their enemies were never able to call them by a man's name with "ite" on the end of it, because they couldn't find anybody like that. They were organized in this way: Every year in Germany, the central committee of this party would sit in a different city in Germany; and it would be elected totally from the members in that city. One year the central committee was in Dresden, and it consisted entirely of the Dresden members. The next year it would be in Berlin, and it would consist entirely of the Berlin members. There was never any one bureaucracy or something that controlled it. So it was democratic. They thought that was essential.

They were very, very intelligent people. Paul Mattick was sort of a leading personality, and there were other Germans who were just as clever as he  -  and some Americans, too. What I got from them, from him was that they were sort of anti-theory. I mean, what you do comes first; and there isn't a theory which you then put into practice. You are what you are right now.

PAUL CUMMINGS: While you're doing it.

FAIRFIELD PORTER: Yes. Which also, I like to think, is a common American way of thinking - that action comes before theory. Or it's a common Anglo-Saxon way of thinking. It's like British empiricism a little bit, and it's like...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

PAUL CUMMINGS: Great. You mentioned that, in 1936 when you were involved with the Socialist group, you started writing?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: The first thing I wrote was for Arise magazine, which was art criticism.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And that interested you into writing more and more?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I didn't write any more after that; that was the end of that. But when we moved to Chicago, we still had somewhat of a connection with the Socialist Party. Soon it was more of a connection with this group of Council Communists group with Mattick and so on. But my wife in Chicago was asked to write something for May 1 in celebration of the anarchists, and she just by tour de force wrote something that could be sung. I remember Anne showing it to Wheelwright and Wheelwright saying: Of course, it's a tour de force. It's not very good, but I couldn't do it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, you knew a lot of people involved with Socialist politics and so on.

FAIRFIELD PORTER: Yes, but they were obscure people, the people I knew best. I liked them. I got to know these Germans; because when Hitler came to power, I used to see the advertisements for little publications; and I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to see every point of view, and one thing would advertise another. Though their publication in which they announced a meeting, I met Paul Mattick and Fritz Hentzler and Walter Auerbach. Those were the Germans whom I knew best; and there were some Americans - Givens I think, his background was IWW, and Bereiter, a German-American. His background was maybe something like that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was it about these.....?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: They seemed to me to be more intelligent; their ideas seemed to be better than anybody else's. That was why I was interested in them. Then I found out that they were among the few people in the world who had really read Marx all the way through, not just a little bit of it. At the same time, they weren't interested in measuring every opinion against Marx. As Matik once said - and this again seemed to be very intelligent of them - when somebody said to him: You're a good scholar, and you ought to stick to that. You don't know anything about practical affairs. This was a union man in Chicago at one of the meetings. His answer to that was: I don't care what Marx said; I'm only interested in action. It seemed to me that he was saying, too, that what is valid bout Marx is not that he is an authority but that it is scientific, and what is scientific is a description of the world. And a description of the world isn't to be measured by a book; it's to be measured by the world. I couldn't agree more.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How long did this interest in the Socialist group maintain itself?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I realized I never was good at reading Marx because I read too slowly. I liked these people because they were bright, clever; and they seemed to me to be... Well, they just knew more than American liberals or American Communists, who were also a form of American liberals I guess. I suppose it's a kind of dilettantism on my part; but still, if you're going to be interested in things out of curiosity, there's no point in taking second best.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes, that's true. Well, was this your first active...?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I wasn't really very active.

PAUL CUMMINGS: ...interest in politics?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: Yes

PAUL CUMMINGS: Have you always maintained this interest in politics?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: I used to read, because my family got The New Republic and The Nation. I read what they said about the Spanish Civil War and I'd read these other things. I realized that what they were saying referred to things that came out in other publications and that disagreed with them. So it showed that these things were not untrue, were not made up; but they suppressed them. So I felt... Well, this liberal point of view or the Communist point of view about the Spanish Civil War is not true. It's an edited one. It's a censored one. 

Walter Auerbach himself said that his interest in the radical movement in Germany after the First World War... I mention this because his interest came about in a similar way to mine. After he got out of , I suppose secondary school, he just stayed at home and read. He was interests in radical politics, and his brother said: Well then, you should go to the Communist Party. They're the people that put that into practice. So he went to a Communist meeting. They were denouncing the Trotskyites, and he didn't know who the Trotskyites were. He just knew that some people were being denounced. He said he'd like to hear what they have to say, and he was denounced. So he thought that was not for him. Then he found the Trotskyites weren't for him either.

Oh, I know what I wanted to say. What impressed me most deeply about this group of Germans was not just that they were more intelligent or that they knew more than anybody else but their manner of discussion was something that I had never met with before. If anybody said anything at one of those meetings, they were never interrupted even if they talked for three hours. People just sat and listened until the person had said everything that he had to say before somebody else got up to speak. There was no interruption. There was no bullying. I admired that very much. I never had seen that, and I don't see it now much either.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes, that's very funny, very dissimilar people. Let's see, what else was going on in the 30s? Actually then the war started to come along.

FAIRFIELD PORTER: In 1939, yes. That's when we went to the Pacific Coast  -  my wife and I and one of these Germans and his American girl friend. He was a very interesting person. He had been a lawyer in Germany and also a radical, and he knew German law and the way things were organized in Germany very, very well. I remember his being quite scornful of the fact that, during the war, he was assigned by the United States Government to teach Americans, who would be in the Army of Occupation in Germany, to teach the Germans democracy. He said that what these people were supposed to present t the Germans as an example of democracy was the government of the city of Milwaukee, which, as Fritz pointed out, was copied from the government of German Socialist cities. They were just getting it back. There was a certain naiveté there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who was this fellow?

FAIRFIELD PORTER: Fritz Hentzler. He also was the person who pointed out the similarity to me between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. He knew it in detail. When he first said this in a talk in Chicago, people were very offended that they were almost the same thing. He said the only difference is... he said they both even have red flags. He could give specific examples. He said that, for instance, the difference was that aside from anti-Semitism, which was more overt in Germany and no so overt in Russia... he said, for instance, that one of he economic differences was that in Germany there was much more local initiative. He pointed this out as the example of the Hitler regime being really Socialist. He said, if you're a ship manufacturer, you have to first get permission from the German government to build the ship; and before they give you permission, you have to sign a contract with them as to what cargoes this ship will carry for several year and where. So he said it's private capitalism, but the government says exactly what shall be done, how it shall be used. Then about local initiative, he said the difference in the agricultural policy, the farmer' organizations said what they could raise instead of the State telling hem what to raise, where there was certain reference back to the producer as to what the situation is. So it was less foolishly centralized.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -