The Wondering Wanderer

Campus Report ^ | January 29, 2009 | Bethany Stotts

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The Wondering Wanderer

by: Bethany Stotts, January 29, 2009

As Accuracy in Academia (AIA) has previously documented, members of the Ivory Tower, some of whom remain ardent Marxists themselves, maintain that McCarthyite “hysteria” suppressed free expression in the 1950s and led to the unjustified blacklisting of those with socialist sentiments.

But one poet, Langston Hughes, may not be as innocent as these academics suggest.

“Yet two decades later, even as he was composing his memoir of this event, Hughes suffered an ordeal of anti-communist fervor in his own country at the hands of [Senator Joseph] McCarthy and, more portentously, [General] Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied powers in American-occupied post-war Japan,” argued Professor Etsuko Taketani from the University of Tsukuba at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention. She described how Hughes’ memoir, I Wonder as I Wander recounts the black poet’s journey from the Soviet Union to Japan, on to Shanghai, and his deportation upon returning to Japan.

“In a draft section entitled Shanghai Terror that was entirely cut from the published version of the memoir, Hughes recounts his navigation of the perilous tunnels of Soviet-allied internationalism in Shanghai,” said Professor Taketani. While in Shanghai—the heart of Chinese Communist thought at the time—Hughes first met with Harold Isaacs, who worked with the Chinese Communists’ publication World Forum....

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