In the chaotic disarray of 1934, Aaron Copland, an aspiring composer riding the early wave of his success, found himself disillusioned by the hollow promises of the avant-garde, its glittering façade crumbling under the weight of his growing class consciousness. America’s working class was still reeling with the effects of the Great Depression and many composers felt like they needed to do something.
Copland himself had joined the Composers’ Collective, a left-wing collective of composers charged with the task of bridging their work with mass movements. Due to its proximity to the Communist Party, being a member of the Composers’ Collective was a real risk to one’s career. This didn’t stop Copland from being openly involved with them or any groups or publications associated with the party; in fact, he was one of the most brazen of the composers to do so openly.
However, if any uncertainty was felt toward Copland’s politics, it was laid to rest by the end of the summer of that year when, in a break from rural norms, farmers in the Minnesota town where Copland was vacationing asked him to speak at a rally for the state’s Communist candidate for governor. It was a seemingly rare, but not unheard of, occurrence when Communist cultural figures intersected with the class struggles of America’s Midwestern farmers.
Red notes in the rural north
It was shortly after attending a symposium titled “The Problems of the Composer in Modern Society”—an event sponsored by the Communist Party’s Degeyter Club and featuring Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger), Elie Siegmeister, and Roy Harris—that Copland fled to a cabin in Lavinia, Minnesota, with Victor Kraft, his secretary and secret lover (their sexuality was not outed until Copland’s death in 1990).
It was during a trip into Bemidji, the nearest town, that Kraft met a “little wizened woman” selling the Daily Worker on a street corner. She put them in touch with local Communist farmers.
“Communists are well known in Bemidji,” Minnesota Communist S.K. Davis wrote. He said that the town had to move their relief office from the ground floor to the third floor so “the ‘Reds’ wouldn’t be able to get up there as easy with their committees fighting for more relief. But they were mistaken.”
Copland was taken aback by the rugged character of the Communist farmers. “What struck me particularly was the fact that there is no “type-communist” among them, such as we see on 14th St.” in New York, Copland wrote to Israel Citkowitz in 1934. “They look like any other of the farmers around here, all of them individuals, clearly etched in my mind. And desperately poor.”
The pair, both of whom were not unfamiliar with the format of party and other forms of “radical” meetings, ended up at an all-day election-campaign meeting for the local Communist Party. “If they were a strange sight to me, I was no less of a one to them. It was the first time that many of them had seen an ‘intellectual.’”
It was initially unclear what impact the meeting had on Copland, whom Kraft later criticized for his reservedness. Was he nervous as an outside intellectual among farmers or simply bored? These questions would be answered shortly after their first meeting, as it was not their last engagement with the local Communist Party.
A Communist picnic
It was no other than a picnic, one hosted by the Communist Party, where Copland gained a kind of footing among the farmers. He gave a speech that stirred something in him. Copland wrote: “I was being gradually drawn, you see, into the political struggle with the peasantry!”
An outsider might be surprised to learn that such activity was taking place in somewhere like Minnesota. But the state was a center for radicalism, especially from Scandinavian immigrants and farmers. In fact, the city of Minneapolis was engaged in a general strike that summer that stemmed from a Teamsters strike.
The Communist journalist Meridel Le Sueur wrote her famous article “I Was Marching” during one of the marches, writing that she joined “in that strange shuffle of thousands of bodies moving with direction, of thousands of feet and my own breath with the gigantic breath.” (Her parents were prominent socialist organizers in the state before her, as she outlined in her book Crusaders.)
When Minnesota’s Communist gubernatorial candidate S.K. Davis came to Bemidji for a stump speech in a public park, the party was prepared. (The same could not be said, however, for Grand Rapids, where Davis started his speech to two individuals on a street corner—a farmer who was the local Communist Party organizer and his wife).
At the rally, farmers asked no other than the comrade intellectual, Aaron Copland, to speak again. If his first speech was a snowball, this was an avalanche. He wrote to Citkowitz: “It’s one thing to think revolution, or talk about it to one’s friends, but to preach it from the streets—OUT LOUD—Well, I made my speech (Victor says it was a good one) and I’ll probably never be the same! Now, when we go to town, there are friendly nods from sympathizers, and farmers come up and talk as one red to another. One feels very much at home and not at all like a mere summer boarder. I’ll be sorry to leave here with the thought of probably never seeing them again.”
It was clear that Copland was neither a nervous intellectual nor was he bored. In his material experience in the Midwest, he was becoming truly radicalized. His friend Harold Clurman was ecstatic, writing, “Some people go east to the U.S.S.R. to become ‘radicalized’ but you went west to the U.S.A.” Copland’s biographer, not exactly one to endorse the Communist Party, conceded that “the summer of 1934 found [Copland] no mere fellow traveler, but rather an active, vocal ‘red.’”
That Midwestern summer of 1934 left Copland with more than just romantic memories of a cabin getaway: It left him with a conviction, a sense that music was not merely an art but an argument, a force moving with the rhythm of labor and struggle. The melodies he once composed in the dusty unheated lofts of lower Manhattan now carried a new weight—fetching not only the ear of the avant-garde, but those of the farmers, the workers, the comrades who had, for a summer, accepted him as one of their own.
(Sources include Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man; Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music; Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century; and Earl Robinson (with Eric A. Gordon), Ballad of an American: The Autobiography of Earl Robinson.)
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