Fellow traveller
Encyclopedia
Fellow traveler or fellow traveller is a term referring 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 state
s, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.
: 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:
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.
(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.
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.
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. Columnist Max Lerner
included the term in his 1936 article for The Nation
called "Mr. Roosevelt and His Fellow Travelers." Future HUAC chief investigator J. B. Matthews
would use the term in the title of his last book, Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler (1938). (In The Age of Roosevelt (1957), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. would call Matthews in turn a "Social Gospel fellow traveler.") In 1962, reviewing Daniel Aron's Writers on the Left, TIME states "among the famous fellows who traveled were Ernest Hemingway
, John Dos Passos
, and Theodore Dreiser
." Dos Passos was probably the most notorious of all: in 1940, he was already being cited as "Number One Literary Fellow Traveler." Whittaker Chambers
used the term in a satirical 1941 article for TIME: "As the Red Express hooted off into the shades of a closing decade, ex-fellow travelers rubbed their bruises, wondered how they had ever come to get aboard... With the exception of Granville Hicks
, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism
."
Following World War II
, membership in the US Communist Party experienced a dramatic decline. Information reached the West about the widespread purges
and show trial
s conducted by Joseph Stalin. Together with information about millions of deaths during collectivization, many adherents rethought their commitments. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union exercised power over much of Central
and Eastern Europe
, through puppet governments and its Red Army
. Revelations about Soviet use of espionage
to expedite development of an atomic bomb in competition with the US led to widespread feelings of threat throughout the U.S., which some historians have described as the Second Red Scare.
Some in the political 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.
In Masters of Deceit (1958), J. Edgar Hoover
, longtime director of the FBI, defined a "fellow traveler" as one of five types of dangerous subversives. He believed any of them might promote the goal of a Communist overthrow of the United States government. The five types were:
In Safire's Political Dictionary (1978), William Safire
defined "fellow traveler" as "one who accepted most Communist doctrine, but was not a member of the Communist party; in current use, one who agrees with a philosophy or group but does not publicly work for it."
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
the approximate term was used without negative connotation to describe writers and artists sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
who declined to join the Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
. The English-language phrase came into vogue in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative
Pejorative
Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...
term for a sympathizer of Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
or particular Communist state
Communist state
A communist state is a state with a form of government characterized by single-party rule or dominant-party rule of a communist party and a professed allegiance to a Leninist or Marxist-Leninist communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state...
s, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.
Soviet Russia
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the term "fellow traveler" (RussianRussian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
: 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 PilnyakBoris PilnyakBoris Pilnyak was a Russian author. Born Boris Andreyevich Vogau in Mozhaysk, he was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society. These views often brought him into disfavor with Communist critics...
, Vsevolod IvanovVsevolod IvanovVsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov was a notable Soviet writer praised for the colourful adventure tales set in the Asiatic part of Russia during the Civil War.-Biography:...
, Nicolai Tikhonov, the “Serapion Fraternity”Serapion BrothersThe Serapion Brothers was a group of writers formed in Petrograd, Russia in 1921. The group was named after a literary group, Die Serapionsbrüder , to which German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann belonged and after which he named a collection of his tales...
, Yesenin and his group of Imagists and, to some extent, KliuevNikolai KlyuevNikolai Alekseevich Klyuev , was a notable Russian poet...
— 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.
During the relatively open era of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
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
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, who conducted the widespread Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, 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
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
, 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.
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 SpainSpain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
(in the 1930s), and similar rightist governments in Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
(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 Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
, André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
, Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
, Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
and Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
. American writers Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist, considered by The London Daily Telegraph amongst others to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career...
were also called fellow travelers.
Greece
The Greek military junta of 1967-1974Greek military junta of 1967-1974
The Greek military junta of 1967–1974, alternatively "The Regime of the Colonels" , or in Greece "The Junta", and "The Seven Years" are terms used to refer to a series of right-wing military governments that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974...
used the term Synodiporia (literally: The ones walking the street together or fellow travellers) as an umbrella term
Umbrella term
An umbrella term is a word that provides a superset or grouping of concepts that all fall under a single common category. Umbrella term is also called a hypernym. For example, cryptology is an umbrella term that encompasses cryptography and cryptanalysis, among other fields...
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.
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 rightsCivil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
and social justice
Social justice
Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by...
.
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
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
and Dust Bowl
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936...
years, when the inequities of American society seemed overwhelming. Columnist Max Lerner
Max Lerner
Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner was an American journalist and educator known for his controversial syndicated column....
included the term in his 1936 article for The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
called "Mr. Roosevelt and His Fellow Travelers." Future HUAC chief investigator J. B. Matthews
J. B. Matthews
Joseph Brown "Doc" Matthews, Sr. , best known as J.B. Matthews, was an American linguist,and a educator, writer, and political activist...
would use the term in the title of his last book, Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler (1938). (In The Age of Roosevelt (1957), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. would call Matthews in turn a "Social Gospel fellow traveler.") In 1962, reviewing Daniel Aron's Writers on the Left, TIME states "among the famous fellows who traveled were Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
, and Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
." Dos Passos was probably the most notorious of all: in 1940, he was already being cited as "Number One Literary Fellow Traveler." Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
used the term in a satirical 1941 article for TIME: "As the Red Express hooted off into the shades of a closing decade, ex-fellow travelers rubbed their bruises, wondered how they had ever come to get aboard... With the exception of Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist as well as an anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.-Life:...
, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
."
Following World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, membership in the US Communist Party experienced a dramatic decline. Information reached the West about the widespread purges
Great Terror
Great Terror may refer to:* Reign of Terror , a period of extreme violence during the French Revolution, last weeks of which are sometimes referred to as the Red Terror or Great Terror...
and show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s conducted by Joseph Stalin. Together with information about millions of deaths during collectivization, many adherents rethought their commitments. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union exercised power over much of Central
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
, through puppet governments and its Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
. Revelations about Soviet use of espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
to expedite development of an atomic bomb in competition with the US led to widespread feelings of threat throughout the U.S., which some historians have described as the Second Red Scare.
Some in the political 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
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
of Wisconsin
Wisconsin
Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
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.
In Masters of Deceit (1958), J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
, longtime director of the FBI, defined a "fellow traveler" as one of five types of dangerous subversives. He believed any of them might promote the goal of a Communist overthrow of the United States government. The five types were:
- The card-carrying Communist, one who openly admits membership in the Communist party
- The underground Communist, one who hides his Communist party membership
- The Communist sympathizer, a potential Communist because of holding Communist views
- The fellow traveler, someone not a potential Communist or influential advocate for Communist views but who agrees with some of those views
- The dupe, a person who is obviously not a Communist or a potential Communist but whose views serve to enable Communists. Examples are a prominent religious leader calling for pacifismPacifismPacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
or a prominent jurist opposing red-baitingRed-baitingRed-baiting is the act of accusing, denouncing, attacking or persecuting an individual or group as communist, socialist, or anarchist, or sympathetic toward communism, socialism, or anarchism. The word "red" in "red-baiting" is derived from the red flag signifying radical left-wing politics. In the...
tactics on civil liberty grounds.
In Safire's Political Dictionary (1978), William Safire
William Safire
William Lewis Safire was an American author, columnist, journalist and presidential speechwriter....
defined "fellow traveler" as "one who accepted most Communist doctrine, but was not a member of the Communist party; in current use, one who agrees with a philosophy or group but does not publicly work for it."
See also
- Anti-americanismAnti-AmericanismThe term Anti-Americanism, or Anti-American Sentiment, refers to broad opposition or hostility to the people, policies, culture or government of the United States...
- Communist frontCommunist frontA Communist front organization is an organization identified to be a front organization under the effective control of a Communist party, the Communist International or other Communist organizations. Lenin originated the idea in his manifesto of 1902, "What Is to Be Done?"...
- Fraternal partyFraternal partyFraternal party literally means brother party. The term refers to a political party officially affiliated with another, often larger and/or international, political party or governmental party....
- PinkoPinkoPinko is a term for a person regarded as being sympathetic to communism, though not necessarily a Communist Party member.The term has its origins in the notion that pink is a lighter shade of red, the color associated with communism...
- Useful idiotUseful idiotIn political jargon, the term useful idiot was used to describe Soviet sympathizers in Western countries. The implication is that though the people in question naïvely thought themselves an ally of the Soviet Union, they were actually held in contempt and were being cynically used...