Taylor Dorrell is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer.
Before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, he was a disciple of Woody Guthrie. But Guthrie and his contemporaries were more than folk singers — they were blacklisted radicals, shaping American music while staring down the Red Scare.
Behind the confusion and debates about fascism lies a simple truth: it’s a power game driven by economic elites. Communists recognized that fascism’s form is shaped by class dynamics — an insight we shouldn’t forget.
Paul Robeson’s encounters with the international labor movement inspired his socialism and anti-imperialism.
When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the United States would touch his novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution means his 70-year blacklist will finally end.
Telling the story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, the 1960 film Spartacus was penned by two blacklisted Communist writers. Its arrival in theaters was a middle finger to the McCarthyist witch hunt in Hollywood and publishing.
Mike Gold was a pioneer of proletarian literature and once one of America’s best-known writers. But his refusal to capitulate to McCarthy-era blackmail saw him written out of history.
In 1925, Russian communist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky toured the Midwest, visiting Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, reciting his revolutionary and romantic poetry. His reflections on his visit combine amazement and disgust at industrial modernity.
One of the Cuban Revolution’s most colorful characters was William Morgan, a former circus performer from Toledo, Ohio, who became a commander in the rebel forces. But Morgan’s final act was his most brazen: he became a counterrevolutionary for the CIA.