Culture and the Crisis

In the fall of 1932, a group of American intellectuals came together to form the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, and published a pamphlet entitled, Culture and the Crisis: an open letter to the writers, artists, teachers, physicians, engineers, scientists, and other professional workers of America. “The United States under capitalism, ” they wrote, “is like a house that is rotting away; the roof leaks, the sills and rafters are crumbling. The Democrats want to paint it pink. The Republicans don’t want to paint it; instead they want to raise the rent.” They announced their support for William Foster and James Ford, the Communist Party candidates for president and vice-president, and called on the “brain workers” of the United States to join the “muscle workers.” “We reject, ” they wrote, “the disorder, the lunacy spawned by grabbers, advertisers, traders, speculators, salesmen, the much-adulated, immensely stupid and irresponsible ‘business men.’” “We too, the intellectual workers, are of the oppressed and until we shake off the servile habit of that oppression we shall build blindly and badly, to the lunatic specifications of ignorance and greed. If we are capable of building a civilization, surely it is time for us to begin.. .time for us to renew the pact of comradeship with the struggling masses” (League, pp. 6, 3, 29).