Comrade Gulliver—a fable by the American Communist artist/cartoonist/illustrator Hugo Gellert (1892–1985)—was published in 1935 when the United States was two years into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal recovery from the Great Depression. Yet the nation was riddled with injustice, inequality and corruption. Gellert was a member of a growing party of native Communists who used art to protest and satirize the double standards of the ruling class in America. Reimagining Jonathan Swift’s classic satire Gulliver’s Travels as a starting point, Gellert became Lemuel Gulliver’s Moscow-born great-great-great-grandson. The original story, written sometime in the late 18th century, is about Lemuel Gulliver, an adventurous Englishman who travels to a series of strange and distant lands, each inhabited by unusual beings that reflect different aspects of human nature and society. In Lilliput he famously encounters tiny people engaged in petty political disputes. Swift likened it to his own times and politics.
“My own adventures in the United States of America are even more fantastic than the experiences of my forefather,” Gellert wrote. The extraordinary peculiarities of the country, the amazing behavior of the people and the antics of the government are far more eccentric and unaccountable than anything Lemuel Gulliver recorded—despite his numerous voyages. Nevertheless in this age of the telephone, the radio and the printing press can be easily ascertained, even by the most casually interested, that the contents of this work, the pictures and the words, unbelievable as they may seem, present the truth and nothing but the truth.”
Each lithograph illustrates one phenomenon or incident that Comrade Gulliver finds on his travels, unique to the problems faced by Americans, including inequality, oligarchy, diversity and power held by the few over the masses. Selected below is a sampling of images with Gellert’s actual excerpts and in some instances my own paraphrasing. The rare book is hard to find (but not impossible). My adaptation does not do the story the justice it deserves as a piece of interesting propaganda. Many facts have changed, but many of the ideas are repeated today.
Gulliver was in awe of the skyscrapers. “I strained my neck watching their vertical lines vanish into the sky. … Way down in the street, men were mere fleas. Those fleas built this tower [The Empire State] …many of the floors were empty” [most skyscrapers during the Depression years were empty too]. “What if we had these buildings in Moscow! What apartments they would make! Airy, well-lighted and comfortably heated, thousands of families would make their homes in them. In America they remain vacant … wasted!
On poverty, hunger and mortality: “This week we have had four children admitted [to the hospital] with the diagnosis of starvation. One who was eating out of a garbage can has died since admission. Another infant of three months is about to die. The mother was feeding it sugar and water. … These people are poor. They have no money. They cannot buy food,” exclaims a hospital administrator.
“Then why don’t they give it to them for nothing?” asks Gulliver.
“Oh, that wouldn’t be profitable,” the administer replied.
Homeless children drift across the length and breadth of America. Their parents, victims of unemployment, are unable to provide for them. Comrade Gulliver notes, “I am told that despite the efforts to herd these homeless youths into Civilian Concentration Camps, they travel in great numbers, including many girls.”
The one percent of the Depression: “When the stock market crashed and the little fellows were sinking, the illusion was spread by the newspapers that the bankers were doing everything possible to help them out. And that they did—they helped them out of everything they had.”
On prejudice in Mother Russia and Father America: “I recalled that we had learned in school that in the days of the czars in Russia, Jews were segregated, persecuted and murdered. Race prejudice served to keep people apart and prevented them from joining forces against their oppressors.”
Gulliber’s take on Salvador Dali’s “works of “art” singled out for critique: “… When you ask Mr. Dali what a painting means, he replies, ‘You’re asking me?’ Dali himself out-Dali-ed the party. In a glass case on his chest was displayed a woman’s brassiere.”
War and its aftermath scrutinized: “While me and my buddies were ‘Over there,’ the fat boys ‘did their bit,’ piling in the dough.”
On national priorities: “Roosevelt just appropriated two-and-a-half billion dollars for the coming war. As [former president] Coolidge said: ‘We can’t afford both civilization and war.’ So the hell with civilization!”
Comrade Gulliver on the mechanical world: “Machines, living architecture, the miracle of man! Created by him to make himself master of the earth, the sea and the sky.”
Gulliver learned that Southern share croppers were always in debt to their landlord: “He owns the land, he owns the mill, he owns these houses, he owns the church, he owns the school, he owns everybody in them.”
The bosses are divine: “Should you not accept the word of God, death is the wages of disobedience, the everlasting fire prepared by the Devil! It is a fire that will last forever.”
The landlords take their shares: After paying for feed, seed and incidentals, “And my share ain’t been nothing but the work part,” says the farmer.
During his travels Gulliver learns about law and its spoils: He witnesses “A huge steel cage on wheels … parked alongside a dusty road in Georgia. It was a contraption such as a circus uses in transporting the most ferocious beasts. But instead of animals I saw black men clothed in stripes, like zebras, locked in them.”
Gulliver meets a man [a Southern landlord] who says, “We sure had us a hot time last night! Forgot to get gas,” he said about the execution of an ‘organizin’ Black man.
The city was no different than the rural country: “Back in New York I saw men and women marching in the street. Workers, they clamored to be permitted to work. They came to City Hall. It was surrounded by policemen. … Suddenly the police attacked and beat the workers. Horses trampled them … this is considered to be the proper reward for their eagerness to be useful!”
Small businessmen and salesmen also suffered the Depression: “If it weren’t for a fifty cents here and fifty cents there, cleaning up rugs with my sample vacuum cleaner, I’d starve to death.”
Gulliver learned from those workers he met that mass production did not mean mass employment: “When I got the job six years ago, in my department a hundred and sixty men made three thousand tire carriers. Today sixteen men make nearly seven thousand of them. … If this keeps up we we will all be without jobs.”
Gulliver learned much aabout the anti-Communist movement of Catholic priest Father Coughlin, “savior” of the American people. “The Communists … by God I’ll shoot them!”
Gulliver hears that “every man is a king,” but only within certain jurisdictions.
A poem recorded by Conrade Gulliver: “Brass buttons, blue coats. / They think we’re sheep and nannygoats. / Our brave instructors got the sack / For fighting war! We want them back!”
Comrade Gulliver’s travels ended with an optimistic display of unity: “As the boat pulled out I was profoundly sorry to leave this strange land in which I had found so many comrades. Suddenly my girl’s voice rang out. ‘NICHEVO,’ she cried. ‘I’ll join you in the Soviet Union—soon.'”
And so said Comrade Gullilble.
