p1393 -
"More than Just Comrades?: Grace Carlson and Vincent Dunne's 'Illicit Affair.'"
“More than Just Comrades?: Grace Carlson and Vincent Dunne’s ‘Illicit Affair.’”
Grace Carlson (1906 – 1992) was a leading Trotskyist partisan during the 1930s and 1940s. As a state party organizer in Minnesota she ran for the U.S. Senate in 1940 and in 1946 and stood as the party’s vice presidential candidate in 1948. Her public career is clearly outlined in her papers and the records of the SWP. But there was also a private side to Carlson’s life that is largely hidden from history, in part, because of the silences surrounding it in the archives: her alleged “illicit affair” with fellow partisan Vincent Dunne. In this presentation I want to explore the significance of this relationship (revealed in declassified FBI files) both for its impact on Carlson’s career in the SWP and for what it can tell us about the private lives of radical women during the twentieth century who tended not to discuss such things openly. I will engage in the “difficult conversation” about the power dynamics surrounding sexual relationships within the SWP to explore some of the broader implications for women of such intimate relationships on the political left. Those relationships are significant not only because they have their own historical value (as heretofore repressed subjects in autobiography and monographs), but also because they shed light on how gender and sexuality actually “worked” on the radical left, a topic similarly often dismissed as irrelevant to broader public/political projects in the construction of radical political (his)stories.