—LEWIS COREY, THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM (1934) LEWIS COREY, A JOURNALIST and radical political theorist who helped fight just such a battle, saw the shape, if not the tone, of the future. I first learned about Corey in a history of the United States’ original cultural front, an alliance of radical workers, artists, and intellectuals that briefly flourished in the 1930s, guided by Stalin’s invisible hand, and then was thought to have disappeared. Or so held conventional wisdom, until Yale scholar Michael Denning discovered that the cultural politics of those years were an unstable mix of totalitarian influence and wild diversity that didn’t dead-end with the close of the decade. Rather, the cultural front of the 1930s flowed into postwar American life in diluted but more widespread form. The cultural front—the spirit of a more tightly defined “Popular Front” of antifascist political parties, sects, and factions—transformed class politics in America: it gave classes a sense of themselves as struggling over not just wages but also ideas, aesthetics, rituals, customs, the imagination of things to come.1 The idea of “classes”
