The racially mixed , smartly dressed browsers of progressive books in this 1938 photograph seem to be living out the CPUSA slogan of that time, "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism"; note the "Harvard Communist" in the lower right hand quarter of the picture, the nearby collection box for aid for Spain, and the photograph of volunteers who were fighting for the Spanish Republican cause.

The following year's cynically concluded Hitler-Stalin pact and the anticommunism of the postwar decades dealt the US left blows from which it has never fully recovered.

I wonder about the various fates of the individuals pictured here.

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