Antifascism on the Home Front

Hurwitz’s early work addressed the profoundest political matters of the 1930s and early 1940s. He served as a producer on 1937’s Heart of Spain, a report on the Spanish Civil War. And the most ambitious project of his career, the labor epic Native Land, surveyed the upheaval of class struggle in the U.S. that led to the organizing of labor. Codirected with the photographer Paul Strand, that film mixes documentary with dramatizations and stirring narration by Paul Robeson in order to capture the spirit of the Popular Front.

Hurwitz was just the partner that the ambitious but inexperienced Rosset needed. A veteran of left-wing cultural work, he took the idea that Rosset brought him and expanded it. In some ways, Strange Victory fuses the concern with common, ordinary folk as exhibited in Hurwitz’s labor film with the gripping antifascism of his Spanish Civil War film.

“Yesterday wanders through today like a ghost,” says the narrator of Strange Victory, echoing Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” After all, anti-Black racism is a phenomenon grounded in chattel slavery, which has existed on these shores considerably longer than emancipation and abolition.

Consequently, when zeroing in on the villains of this story, Hurwitz points the finger of accusation at the sons of Dixie, including Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi and Congressman Martin Dies of Texas (both of Un-American Activities Committee). Both men and their ignominious committee were at the vanguard of branding any steps toward racial desegregation as evidence of a so-called “Communist taint,” weakening the Popular Front while debilitating antiracist politics too.

This double-barreled assault also meant that avowed antiracists of the socialist persuasion, like Robeson and Hurwitz, were marginalized from mainstream politics and culture. Hurwitz found himself blacklisted after releasing Strange Victory, and for the next decade he was able to find work only through so-called “fronts” or camouflage. Robeson was denied a passport by the U.S. state department, kept from leaving a country whose government had come to see him as a Cold War enemy. These Red Scare purges guaranteed that when, a few years later in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court initiated the grudging and agonizing retreat from the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow, there would be a lessened focus on the social dimension of racism and the redistribution of wealth, a tendency that has yet to disappear from this nation’s politics.

Strikingly, Strange Victory spends considerable time detailing the dearth of African Americans in certain occupations and professions: medicine, engineering, railway conductors, symphony-orchestra instrumentalists, stenographers, etc. The tragic irony of Strange Victory is that, almost seventy-five years later, this lamentable state of affairs has hardly changed. The film’s warning remains clear: to the extent that a stern and forceful struggle against racism and anti-Semitism is delayed or short-circuited, we shall find this nation on a trajectory that brought so much misery and devastation not only to Europe but to the world at large.

This message is not delivered without hope though. Another revealing aspect of Strange Victory is how many infants are shown, the takeaway being not just the obvious: that these girls and boys are the future. Hurwitz also stresses that they come into the world “unprogrammed” with racism and anti-Semitism. Alien ideologies have to be implanted, which opens up room for agency on the part of the antifascist audience. This festering problem, Hurwitz suggests, is reversible with adept organizing and sound education.

During the Red Scare, a telling phrase came to describe some who had been clamoring for more demonstrative anti-Hitler manifestations before the U.S. entered the war in late 1941: “premature antifascists.” Outside a narrow wartime period, antifascist convictions were now seen from a postwar vantage as suspect, evidence of Communist loyalty. Now forgotten is that there was an offshoot of this tendency: one whose adherents we might call “premature antiracists.” For keep in mind that, although an apparent antiracist consensus—at least in the most rudimentary sense—has emerged since, this consensus hardly obtained in 1948 when this worthy documentary was produced. Though the United States took up the antifascist cause for a limited time when it went to war, it has never fully committed itself to antiracism, and the movement has remained marginalized as “premature” by the powers that be. In other words, Strange Victory was—and still is—visionary, refusing to surrender to U.S. apartheid but, instead, seeking to undermine it.