A Russian Journal Read Online Free PDF Page A

on Steinbeck since 1943. The truth was that Steinbeck had long despised the communist agenda:
In Dubious Battle,
a novel about striking workers in California, shows the communist organizers to be self-serving, willing to sacrifice the people's needs for the party's. When writing
The Grapes of Wrath,
with its emphasis on fair treatment for the working man, Steinbeck insisted that the lyrics for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed on the endpapers so that there would be no doubt about his patriotism. "The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary," he wrote his publisher. "They will try to give it the communist angle. However, the Battle Hymn is American and intensely so … if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning."
    In spite of his protestations, however, muted accusations that Steinbeck was "Red" lingered into the 1950s. In 1939, as
The Grapes of Wrath
was about to be published, he was convinced that the FBI was investigating him-in Monterey a local bookstore owner reported being questioned by Hoover's men and in Los Gatos his name had been turned into the local sheriff's office. FBI files on Steinbeck uncategorically deny that he was under investigation in the late 1930s, but they do detail a full investigation made of the writer in 1943 "to determine his suitability to hold a commission in the U.S. Army," a commission denied because of suspected communist sympathies. "Associates and friends," the FBI report notes, said that although he "exercised poor discretion during his early days of writing by associating with some elements of the Communist Party, he was not interested in advancing the cause of the Party but in gathering material for his writings on certain social conditions existing in the US at that time." In fact, evidence of communist leanings is decidedly thin: in 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck published two articles in the liberal Carmel magazine owned by Ella Winter and Lincoln Steffens, the
Pacific Weekly;
in 1936, he also lent his support to and possibly attended the Western Writers Conference, later labeled a "communist front" according to the committee on Un-American Activities; in 1938, he gave his 1936
San Francisco News
accounts to the Simon Lubin Society, allegedly "a Communist front for California agrarian penetration"; in 1938, "the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers was organized under Steinbeck's leadership"; in 1946, he was invited to a reception in New York for three visiting Soviet literary figures. That was it. John Steinbeck was-no communist, but he was very curious about communism's effect on the average man.
    Nor was Robert Capa a communist, although his passport was confiscated in Paris in 1953 on allegations of communist sympathies; the evidence in his FBI file as thin as that in Steinbeck's. According to Whelan, Capa's dossier records only trivial associations with communism: "he had sold photographs to
Regards
during the Spanish Civia War; some of his pictures had appeared in a magazine published by Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; he had been either a member or an honorary member of the 'Radical anti-fascist' Photo League; he had gone to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck; the
Daily Worker
had reported his
Herald Tribune
Forum speech with approval. In 1950 it was added that he had spoken out against jailing the Hollywood Ten." Both men, according to Capa, "stated very clearly before and during our trip that we were not Communists or Communist-sympathizers." For their careful stance, however, they were reviled by the Soviet press after the book's publication, described as "gangsters" and "hyenas."
    In the cold war climate of mutual distrust between the two countries, the most emblematic moment in
A Russian Journal
may well be Capa's first photographs:
    Three huge double windows overlooked the street. As time went on, Capa posted himself in the windows more and more, photographing little incidents