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Langston Hughes’ account of the Spanish Civil War in his 1956 autobiography I Wonder as I Wander either soft-pedals or eliminates important radical observations he made in his dispatches from Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American between 1937 and 1938 — dispatches from which he drew, sometimes word for word, for his 1956 book. Rather than point exclusively to Hughes’ more moderate political stance in the 1950s, the contradictions between the Afro-American articles and the 1956 autobiography limn the “absent presence” of a historical reality that actively shaped the poet's observations in the later text — namely, the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Hughes’ revisions to his original Afro-American account of the “Good Fight” refute the tendency in the scholarship to ignore the tensions among the different materials that he wrote about the conflict throughout his life. In I Wonder Hughes carefully avoids explicit references to such things as the power that ruling classes wield over the state; multiracial (and cross-national) working-class collaboration and militancy; the deployment of racial and nationalist ideologies by the ruling classes; and the ideological affinities between the Spanish Fascists and American white supremacists.
