Fellow traveler

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The term fellow traveler or fellow traveller (see American and British English spelling differences) refers to a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of an organization or cooperates in its activities without maintaining formal membership in that particular group. In the early Soviet Union the approximate term was used without negative connotation to describe writers and artists sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution who declined to join the Communist Party. The English-language phrase came into vogue in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative term for a sympathizer of Communism or particular Communist states, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.


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[edit] Usage in Europe

[edit] Soviet Russia

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the term "fellow traveler" (Russian language: попутчик, poputchik; literally: "one who travels the same path") was sometimes applied to Russian writers who accepted the revolution's ends but were not active participants. The term became famous because of Trotsky's 1924 book Literature and Revolution, in which he discussed "fellow-travelers" in Chapter 2: "The Literary 'Fellow-Travellers' of the Revolution." Trotsky wrote:

Between bourgeois art, which is wasting away either in repetitions or in silences, and the new art which is as yet unborn, there is being created a transitional art which is more or less organically connected with the Revolution, but which is not at the same time the art of the Revolution. Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nicolai Tikhonov, the “Serapion Fraternity”, Yessenin and his group of Imagists and, to some extent, Kliuev — all of them were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group, or separately. ... They are not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist “fellow-travellers”, in the sense in which this word was used by the old Socialists. ... As regards a “fellow-traveller”, the question always comes up – how far will he go? This question cannot be answered in advance, not even approximately. The solution of it depends not so much on the personal qualities of this or that “fellow-traveller”, but mainly on the objective trend of things during the coming decade.[1]

During the relatively open era of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, some writers were able to write on subjects as they chose. During the following periods of repression, particularly after the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin, who conducted the widespread Great Purge, many intellectuals found their positions difficult. Writers, as well as millions of political activists, teachers, farmers and ordinary people, were arrested and sent to labor camps in Siberia, where many perished. Some writers emigrated when the authorities refused to allow publication of anti-regime works, while others ceased writing altogether, sometimes under coercion.[citation needed]

[edit] General European use

Throughout Europe, the term was used to describe those who, without being Communist Party members of their respective countries, had Communist sympathies. They may have attended communist meetings, written in communist journals, and fought alongside communists against Franco's fascist government in Spain (in the 1930s), and similar rightist governments in Greece (in the late 1940s).

Many French journalists, intellectuals and writers in the 1930s and 1940s were described (and sometimes referred to themselves) as fellow travelers, including André Gide, André Malraux, Romain Rolland, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. American writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were also called fellow travelers.

[edit] Greece

The Greek military junta of 1967-1974 used the term Synodiporia (literally: The ones walking the street together or fellow travellers) as an umbrella term to denote leftist sympathisers and in general all domestic democratic opponents of the junta. Diethnis (i. e. international) Synodiporia was used by the Greek junta for the international supporters of the domestic leftist sympathisers and their allies.

[edit] Use in the Americas

[edit] United States

In the United States, the term was adapted from Europe to describe those who, while not Communist Party members, may hold views shared by Communists. Given the economic and social problems in the US and the world in the 1920s and 1930s, many younger people, artists and intellectuals, had sympathy for the Communist cause and hoped that it could lead to better societies. Some African Americans joined because the Communist Party held political positions sympathetic to their struggle for civil rights and social justice.

As in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s numerous American intellectuals sympathized or joined the Communist Party in the United States as young activists. In part this also reflected people's search for answers to social problems during the drastic dislocations of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years, when the inequities of American society seemed overwhelming.

Following World War II, membership in the US Communist Party experienced a dramatic decline. Information reached the West about the widespread purges and show trials conducted by Joseph Stalin. Together with information about millions of deaths during collectivization, many adherents rethought their commitments.

After WWII, the Soviet Union exercised power over much of Central and Eastern Europe, through puppet governments and its Red Army. Revelations about the Soviets' use of espionage to rapidly develop an atomic bomb in competition with the US led to widespread feelings of threat throughout the country, which some historians have described as the Second Red Scare. Some in the poltical establishment were quick to capitalize upon it.

Beginning in 1946, a new round of Congressional hearings were held in an attempt to detail the extent of Soviet influence in American government and society and its cultural institutions. It was during this super-heated period that the term "fellow traveler" came into common use as a political pejorative. US Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin claimed there were numerous public and secret sympathizers of the Soviet regime within the State Department and US Army. Many individuals in publishing, film, TV and theater were blacklisted on mere suspicion of Communist sympathies, even when any active affiliation was decades in the past.

Even after the period of the Communist Party's greatest influence in the US, J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, believed it constituted a severe domestic security threat. In his 1958 book on the Communist Party, Masters of Deceit, Hoover defined a "fellow traveler" as one of five types of dangerous subversives.[2] He believed any of them might promote the goal of a Communist overthrow of the United States government. The five types were:

  1. The card-carrying Communist, one who openly admits membership in the Communist party.
  2. The underground Communist, one who hides his Communist party membership.
  3. The Communist sympathizer, a potential Communist because of holding Communist views.
  4. The fellow traveler, someone not a potential Communist but nevertheless who may hold views shared by Communists.
  5. The dupes, a person who is obviously not a Communist or a potential Communist but whose views may coincide with some of the American Communists. Examples are a prominent religious leader who opposed increased military expenditures and war, or a prominent jurist who opposed Red-baiting tactics on civil liberty grounds.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Chapter 2 Cnn.com.
  2. ^ Hoover, J. Edgar (1958). Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1-4254-8258-9. 

[edit] Further reading

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