This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Showing posts with label literature and revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature and revolution. Show all posts
Click On Title To Link To Guest Book Review Of The Life Of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Commentary
Although I have reviewed a number of novels, political or otherwise, in this space over the past several years the name of the Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been mentioned here only in passing as one of the "talking heads" in documentary reviews about his long time friend, the Cuban Revolution's Fidel Castro. This recent biography of Marquez, which I have not read yet, according to the guest book review cited above delves into that relationship. In any case, for those with a bent toward biography this will have to do for now. I will review the few Marquez's novels that I have read, including the magically realistic (whee!) One Hundred Years Of Solitude, at some later time. GGM-RIP-April 2014
I am devoted to a local
folk station WUMB which is run out of the campus of U/Mass-Boston over near
Boston Harbor. At one time this station was an independent one based in
Cambridge but went under when their significant demographic base deserted or
just passed on once the remnant of the folk minute really did sink below the
horizon.
So much for radio folk
history except to say that the DJs on many of the programs go out of their ways
to commemorate or celebrate the birthdays of many folk, rock, blues and related
genre artists. So many and so often that I have had a hard time keeping up with
noting those occurrences in this space which after all is dedicated to such
happening along the historical continuum.
To “solve” this problem
I have decided to send birthday to that grouping of musicians on an arbitrary
basis as I come across their names in other contents or as someone here has
written about them and we have them in the archives. This may not be the best
way to acknowledge them, but it does do so in a respectful manner.
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Bob Dylan performing "Blowin' In The Wind" in 1963.
CD REVIEW
The Times They Are A-Changing, Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963
In this selection we have some outright folk classics that will endure for the ages like those of his early hero Woody Guthrie have endured. "The Times They are A-Changing" still sounds good today although the generational tensions and the alienation from authorities highlighted there is markedly less now than than in those days-not a good thing, by the way. "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a powerful tale out of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" about the plight of an up against the wall family farmer out on the then hardscrabble prairies (and it has only gotten worst since and Dylan made one of his periodic 'comebacks' doing this song at a Farm Aid concert in the 1980's).
"With God On Our Side" like "Masters of War" is a powerful anti-war song although some of the tensions of the Cold War period in which it was written have gone (only to replaced today by the fears generated by the `war on terrorism'). "Only A Pawn In Their Game" was a powerful expression of rage after the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers. The "Hattie Carroll" song shows Dylan's range by dealing with injustice from a different perspective (and a different class) than "Only A Pawn In Their Game". But with no let up in highlighting blatant discrimination and animus in either case. Finally, in reviewing these early Dylan albums (and some of the later ones, as well) I have noticed that they are not complete without at least one song about lost love, longing or perfidy. Here, there is no exception to that rule with the haunting, pleading voice of "Boots of Spanish Leather".
posted by markin at 10:49 AM
7 Comments: Kim said... The problem is that Dylan himself clearly states that Masters of War is not an anti-war song:
Q: Give me an example of a song that has been widely misinterpreted.
A: Take "Masters Of War." Every time I sing it, someone writes that it's an antiwar song. But there's no antiwar sentiment in that song. I'm not a pacifist. I don't think I've ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it's about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in this country. I believe strongly in everyone's right to defend themselves by every means necessary... you are affected as a writer and a person by the culture and spirit of the times. I was tuned into it then, I'm tuned into it now. None of us are immune to the spirit of the age. It affects us whether we know it or whether we like it or not.
from http://expectingrain.com/dok/int/2003tour.html
And I think to say that "With God on Our Side" is an anti-war song is reducing the song to something topical. The idea that it is simply an anti-war song really ignores the last verse in the piece regarding Judas Iscariot. Judas Iscariot fought in no war, so then, if this is an anti-war song why is he even in the picture? I believe it is far less an anti-war song and far more a song about asking the question: what does it mean to believe in God? To me, it's more about asking the question: shouldn't we be on God's side and not He on ours?
THIS question then throws into the spotlight the idea that God is on the side of America and that she is always right. Dylan, it seems to me, is not quite buying into that. None of us should. But he's not an either/or kind of a guy. He's not an "America is all bad or all good" kind. Hattie Carroll bites into two groups, and both come out severly wounded: the racists and their racist application of "justice" AND the liberals who decry injustice but do nothing about it.
7:10 PM markin said... When I used the term ‘anti-war’ in relationship to Bob Dylan’s song Masters of War I meant that in a generic sense rather than giving it some specific political or pacific meaning. According to the Dylan quote that Kim cited in her comment there is a tendency, including by Dylan, to equate the terms ‘anti-war’ and ‘pacifist’. I would not give such a narrow meaning to the term ‘anti-war’. In Dylan’s context it is essentially anti-militarism, especially the dramatically American militarism of the time by the Brecht-like phrases that he uses. That concept does not preclude the concept of just wars against the escalation of such militarism. Leftists except probably Quakers, as a rule, subscribe to some form of just war theory. Certainly in my youth the concept of just war meant supporting the struggle of the Vietnamese against the American presence.
One need not go back that far for an example, though. Much closer in time is the current ‘struggle’ by Iraqi forces against the American presence there. Although the situation is definitely murkier than in Vietnam, to the extent that any one is fighting directly against the American presence (as opposed to indiscriminately bombing everything that moves), theirs is an example of just war. Hell, in 2003 the simple act of the Iraqis, with or without Sadaam, defending themselves against the American invasion was an example of a just war. So Kim, you see that ‘anti-war’ is a pretty elastic term and that brother Dylan and I are, after all, not so far away in our idea that everyone has a right to defend themselves. It is a question of whose right to such defense is supported at any given point that is at issue.
After the above rather abstract discussion, let us cut to the chase about whether Masters of War is an ‘anti-war’ song. During the Vietnam War I was involved with a group of active duty anti-Vietnam War G.I.s (Army soldiers, in this case) who faced court-martial for disobeying lawful orders. Those orders being refused were orders to go to Vietnam, a rather serious offense for a soldier. As part of their defense at the court-martial a few of them, when they got on the stand to make statements, started reciting Master of War in order to have it placed in the transcript of trial. The colonels and majors who made up the court-martial board tried to, red-faced with anger, stop them. Those officers, at least, knew what ‘anti-war’ lyrics were when they heard them. Enough said, I think.
11:01 AM markin said... The question of whether “With God On Our Side” is an anti-war song is a little more problematic than that of “Masters of War”. I would only comment that one should not get hung up on the ‘god’ part as I consider this more a common political convention of the time in order to get a hearing for your song (a not unimportant consideration, by the way) that a universalistic appeal to for America to get “on the right side of god”. In the 1960’s, an age wedded to existential concepts, references to god could be as directed to the void as they could to some religious supreme being. Later, as Dylan entertained more religious feelings in his life and in his work that argument might make more sense but certainly not in the early 1960’s. If one did not have a sense of irony then, one was ‘lost’. That ironic sense is why we listened to Dylan and others. They expressed in song things about the world that disturbed us at the time.
What really interests me today about Dylan’s lyrics on this song is how passive they are in relationship to the task that he has presented. In those days, the threat of nuclear annihilation was palpable as things like the Cold War –driven nuclear arms race and the Cuban Missile Crisis made plain. Dylan was apparently entirely willing to let some ultimately ‘just’ god pull the chestnuts out of the fire for us. Alternately, in those days a number of us preferred to take to the streets to organize the fight for nuclear disarmament. “God” could come along if he/she wanted to-no questions asked. Hell, we were so desperate for recruits that Judas Iscariot was welcome if he wanted to turn over a new leaf.
11:12 AM markin said... Here are the lyrics to Masters of War and you can make your own judgment about whether it is an anti-war song or not. I have given my opinion above. Markin
Masters Of War
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you Even Jesus would never Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand o'er your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead
Nod To Bob: An Artists’ Tribute To Bob Dylan on his Sixtieth Birthday, various artists, Red House Records, 2001
A musical performer knows that he or she has arrived when they have accumulated enough laurels and created enough songs to be worthy, at least in some record producer eyes, to warrant a tribune album. When they are also alive to accept the accolades as two out of the four of the artists under review are, which is only proper, that is all to the good (this is part of a larger review of tributes to Greg Brown, Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt and Hank Williams). That said, not all tribute albums are created equally. Some are full of star-studded covers, others with lesser lights who have been influenced by the artist that they are paying tribute to. As a general proposition though I find it a fairly rare occurrence, as I noted in a review of the "Timeless" tribute album to Hank Williams, that the cover artist outdoes the work of the original recording artist. With that point in mind I will give my "skinny" on the cover artists here.
It seems hard to believe now both as to the performer as well as to what was being attempted that anyone would take umbrage at a performer using an electric guitar to tell a folk story (or any story for that matter). It is not necessary to go into all the details of what or what did not happen with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 to know that one should be glad, glad as hell, that Bob Dylan continued to listen to his own drummer and carry on a career based on electronic music.
Others have, endlessly, gone on about Bob Dylan’s role as the voice of his generation (and mine), his lyrics and what they do or do not mean and his place in the rock or folk pantheons, or both. I just want to comment on a few songs and cover artists on this 60th birthday album. Overall this Red House Records (a well-known alternate folk tradition recording outfit) production is a true folkies’ tribute to old Bob where the artists while well-known in the folk field probably as not as familiar to the general listener. Nevertheless several covers stick out: John Gorka’s rendition of the longing that pervades “Girl Of The North Country" is fine, as is the desperate longing of Martin Simpson’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather”. Greg Brown does a rousing version of “Pledging My Time” and the long time folk singer Rosalie Sorrels does a beautifully measured version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”. The finale is appropriately done by old time folkie, and early day Dylan companion on the folk scene Ramblin’ Jack Elliot with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” Solid work here. Kudos.
3:32 PM markin said... In the interest of completeness concerning my earleir evaluation of the Dylan songs "Masters Of War" and "With Good On Our Side" on his early albums here are the lyrics to the latter song.
Interestingly, except for changing the Cold War theme against the Russians then to the so-called War On Terror now against seemingly every Moslem that any American presidential administration can get it hands on (Bush in Iraq and Afgahnistan) and Obama (same and, maybe, Pakistan) these lyrics "speak" to me today. The word they speak is hubris, American hubris, that the rest of the world has had reason to fear, and rightly so. What do they "speak" to you?
"With God On Our Side"
Oh my name it is nothin' My age it means less The country I come from Is called the Midwest I's taught and brought up there The laws to abide And the land that I live in Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it They tell it so well The cavalries charged The Indians fell The cavalries charged The Indians died Oh the country was young With God on its side.
The Spanish-American War had its day And the Civil War too Was soon laid away And the names of the heroes I's made to memorize With guns on their hands And God on their side.
The First World War, boys It came and it went The reason for fighting I never did get But I learned to accept it Accept it with pride For you don't count the dead When God's on your side.
When the Second World War Came to an end We forgave the Germans And then we were friends Though they murdered six million In the ovens they fried The Germans now too Have God on their side.
I've learned to hate Russians All through my whole life If another war comes It's them we must fight To hate them and fear them To run and to hide And accept it all bravely With God on my side.
But now we got weapons Of the chemical dust If fire them we're forced to Then fire them we must One push of the button And a shot the world wide And you never ask questions When God's on your side.
In a many dark hour I've been thinkin' about this That Jesus Christ Was betrayed by a kiss But I can't think for you You'll have to decide Whether Judas Iscariot Had God on his side.
So now as I'm leavin' I'm weary as Hell The confusion I'm feelin' Ain't no tongue can tell The words fill my head And fall to the floor If God's on our side He'll stop the next war.
11:32 AM markin said... Guest Commentary
I have mentioned in my review of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home; The Legacy Of Bob Dylan" (see archives) that Dylan's protest/social commentary lyrics dovetailed with my, and others of my generation's, struggle to make sense of world at war (cold or otherwise)and filled with injustices and constricting values. Here are the lyrics of three songs-"Blowin' In The Wind", "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Like A Rolling Stone" that can serve as examples of why we responded to his messages the way we did. Kudos Bob.
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you Is worth savin' Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'.
Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin'. For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'.
Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is Rapidly agin'. Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'.
How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand? Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.
How many years can a mountain exist Before it's washed to the sea? Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist Before they're allowed to be free? Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head, Pretending he just doesn't see? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.
How many times must a man look up Before he can see the sky? Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry? Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you? People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall" You thought they were all kiddin' you You used to laugh about Everybody that was hangin' out Now you don't talk so loud Now you don't seem so proud About having to be scrounging for your next meal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it You said you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realize He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And ask him do you want to make a deal?
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns When they all come down and did tricks for you You never understood that it ain't no good You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat Ain't it hard when you discover that He really wasn't where it's at After he took from you everything he could steal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1990-91, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
***************
Culture, Class and Censorship-Forbidden Art
By Helen Cantor
"Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies." —Rep. George A. Dondero
Back in the McCarthy witch hunt days, abstract art was supposed to be a Commie plot, subverting and/or making fools of the American people, as the above 1949 quote from Michigan Representative George A. Dondero indicates. Today, when you can tell exactly, precisely, down to the last hair follicle, what's happening in certain works of art, the same generic yahoo Congressmen still don't like the stuff. Today it's North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms ranting against the late Robert Mapplethorpe's classic, precise photographs because they have sexual themes he doesn't happen to like. Back then it was Dondero and his ilk howling against works they charged were deliberate gibberish done by "germ-carrying vermin," "international art thugs" and "human termites" they darkly claimed were Communist agents boring from within.
Then and now, such hysterical assaults serve the same purpose, which isn't art appreciation but an attempt to ensure the government's social control over the population through intimidation and witch-hunting. In the first Cold War, the focus was on "the Commie menace" and fluoridation; in the past decade it's been sex (it was a/so sex then, of course, and some anti-homosexual campaigns rivaled the anti-Communist hunts in their hysteria). Having pretty successfully expunged the "Reds under the beds," during the Reagan/Bush years the government has turned directly to the beds, unleashing an army of sex police to try to overturn the '60s "sexual revolution" and return Americans "to their places," passive and socially obedient. They even tried to shut down the art museums this past summer. But the American public is pretty fed up with this reactionary assault, as the recent stunning jury decisions in favor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center's Robert Mapplethorpe show and for the black rap group 2 Live Crew demonstrate.
Artists need support, and should try to get all they can ' out of this government, which is supposedly a democracy. The government has no business telling us what we can look at—or telling artists what they should paint. As New York artists rudely and aptly put it in protests at the Metropolitan Museum last year, "Jesse Helms, You Old Fart! Keep Your Hands Off Our Art!"
Congress' current deal is that the National Endowment for the Arts will give you grant money, and you don't have to sign the "no dirty sex" Jesse Helms pledge. But if a local sheriff finds your work "obscene," you have to pay it all back (not to mention possibly going to jail). Joseph Papp, impresario of New York's renowned Public Theater complex, turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEA grants as a protest against this policy, which continues government censorship in only slightly disguised fashion. This is a courageous act, even if he can afford it. For poorer struggling souls, however, it may come down to a Woody Allen "Take the Money and Run" guerrilla approach. But don't kid yourself—they are not nice guys handing out free money up there. As Lenin used to say, "If you're going to sup with the Devil, you'd better bring a long spoon."
Of course performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, with their feminist and lesbian themes, have just as much right to NEA grants as anybody else. But it is hard to imagine government policy, wedded to the concept of the monogamous family as the cornerstone of society, really going for "gay and lesbian art." It's unlikely there will be enthusiasm in Congress for some of the works, for example, in a recent Soho exhibition titled "Queers"—for good or ill, the gigantic lavender plastic male with the big purple penis is never going to grace the Senate lobby. Judy Chicago's equally massive Dinner Party, with its plates representing the vaginas of historical women, lost its home at the University of the District of Columbia. Congress, which still rules over D.C. like a feudal plantation, vindictively cut $1.6 million from the University's appropriation as punishment for accepting what one Congressman called "ceramic 3-D pornography" (meanwhile, students' protest over their rotten education and lack of funding led the artist to withdraw her work in sympathy with their demands).
As the sordid history of official support to the arts shows, the' politicians, even when they appear to be totally disinterested and liberal, dole out their crumbs with careful control. From the Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration) up through the Rockefellers' sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s, official interest in art has been reluctant or self-interested. This history hasn't been raised much in the current fights over the NEA, but then, neither the "progressive" artists nor the government bureaucrats come off too well in what's been a tentative, awkward relationship rich with embarrassment, farce and sheer McCarthyite terror.
The WPA: "A sound, fresh ear of corn"
What I want, said Edward Bruce, one of the early advocates of massive public arts projects during the Roosevelt administration, is work that has "the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn," things that "make me feel comfortable about America." Well, he got the corn anyhow. If American "progressive art" of the 1930s tended toward self-righteous preaching, and state-sponsored "official art" tended toward the horribly dull and morally uplifting, the combination was practically fatal, at least aesthetically. The American Stalinists of the Communist Party, solemnly proclaiming "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" during the heyday of the "Popular Front," contributed their share of turgid murals, all of which seem to be variations on Davy Crockett and Babe the Blue Ox leading oppressed Indians, Negroes picking cotton and starving coal miners reading volumes of Marx by flickering coal lamps as huge tornadoes rage in the dust bowl and floods carry scrawny chickens downstream. As we noted in "Women, Culture and Class Society," an earlier article on feminist art, "The caricatures of 'womanhood' (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda" (W&R No. 6, Summer 1974).
Some people claim there's such a thing as "totalitarian art," massive, relentlessly upward stuff churned out in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. But examination of the work of Roosevelt's WPA reveals the same styles and themes—the aluminum horses, monster eagles, heroic workers rebuilding society, simple-minded peasant families. Bruce's "fresh ear of corn" line isn't so different from the Nazi historian who said, "Pictures have to have a certain smell of the soil." The heated rhetoric of the self-styled "American regionalists" like Thomas Hart Ben-ton and Grant Wood versus Communist Party sympathizers is hard to grasp 50 years later, as they all dug into that same soil stylistically.
"Any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art Project should have his head examined," another Roosevelt honcho proclaimed. One of the few artists whose works were openly, even grotesquely, sensual was one of the first to be censored and, ironically, at the very same Corcoran Gallery in D.C. that canned the Mapplethorpe show. Paul Cadmus today enjoys a renewed reputation as a kind of pioneer of "lesbian and gay art." His work, The Fleet's In, was initially chosen as one of the 500 paintings for a 1934 show of state-sponsored art. While the bulging, randy sailors, arms around one another, and the equally bulging females, were enjoyed in the Navy Department's salons without incident, one high-ranking narrow-minded admiral spotted the picture and had a fit. After much protest, the offending picture was removed, and Eleanor Roosevelt opened the affair to music by the Navy Band Orchestra. The president praised show as "robust and American."
It was hardly "the greatest art event in this country since the Armory," as one of the organizers had hoped. The faithful members of Roosevelt's court had comfortably forgotten that the 1913 art show in New York's Armory, which introduced the American public to modern European art, had horrified another Roosevelt. The show, including Marcel Duchamp's infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, set off the former president, according to exhibitor William Zorach, who recalled Teddy "waved his arms and stomped through the Galleries pointing at pictures and saying 'That's not art!'"
Other artists had better luck at subverting the nitpicking rules and pompous censors of the WPA agencies. Among the first big projects of Edward Bruce's Treasury "Section of Fine Arts" were murals for the Justice and Post Office buildings. The jury looked at 91 designs —mainly of chain gangs, evictions, third degrees, electrocutions, battling juvenile delinquents and gangsters—and promptly rejected them all. Rockwell Kent, however, got a commission for a Post Office mural. He painted a mailman delivering a letter to delighted Puerto Ricans with the words (in Eskimo language): "To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free." When no one noticed he finally called up a newspaper columnist and broke the story. Delighted by the resulting tempest, he cheerfully told reporters, "I think it's a swell thing when people want independence and I think it's the most American thing one can do to wish them luck." The seething bureaucrats demanded he change it, but rejected his suggestion for a quotation from Lincoln's first inaugural address on the right of oppressed minorities to revolution. The unamused Treasury officials insisted the only motto he could paint was "To commemorate the far-flung front of the United States Postal Service." Kent properly refused to paint this bombast, and so the letter is blank to this day (see The New Deal for Artists, by Richard D. McKinzie, Princeton University Press, 1973).
The Communist Party "Popular Front" and Artists
The WPA did give work to thousands of artists on relief. In its first year alone (1935), over 5,300 artists joined the WPA's Federal Art Project (FAR). About half the artists in the FAR were in New York City, home of the large and influential Communist Party-inspired American Artists' Congress, also formed in 1935. Earlier New York State and federal art relief efforts had sought to exclude known Communists, by not inviting the "Unemployed Artists Group," connected to the CP's John Reed Clubs, to participate.
The noblesse oblige of Roosevelt's cultural overseers was often severely strained, especially in New York, where militant artists' actions sought to extend the benefits of the WPA. In December 1936 (after the national elections), Roosevelt tried to cut the relief programs, but artists packed the Art Project offices in a sit-down strike. Police waded in and arrested 219 of them. In May of 1937, another protest and sit-in was called. Though it didn't win its demands, this protest finally pushed FAR director Holger Cahill, a former bohemian fellow traveler, over the edge: "These people are psychopaths, they are basically unemployable, and you can't do anything with them," he fumed, stating later that "these people were pretty wild...they were left-wingers who thought that if they could get a portrait of Marx or Lenin into a meeting, this somehow would bring about the revolution."
In fact, the American Artists' Congress was not for "red revolution," but was formed precisely because the Communist Party's previous artistic groups, the John Reed Clubs, were too radical for the "Popular Front," proclaimed in August 1935 at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. This "front" was supposed to enlist the "Western democracies" (formerly known as capitalist swine) in the fight to defend the Soviet Union against fascism—which for the CP meant in practice calling off the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. The John Reed Clubs were summarily disbanded during the winter of 1935-36, while their emphasis on class struggle and "proletcult" (proletarian culture) was abandoned.
"By building an alliance among Communists, Socialists, independent leftists, and Democrats, artists could feel as if they were part of American society," noted the editors of Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress (Rutgers University Press, 1986). This novel feeling^—both for artists and Communists—was not to survive the war. The organization reached over 900 members by 1939, with exhibits like "To Aid Democracy in Spain." Though the group took no official position on what style of art it preferred, a paper by Max Weber on "The Artist, His Audience and Outlook" outlined a view close to the party line:
"We must cast away therefore chameleon cleverness, and discard mental and optical illusions born of bourgeois decadence and ennui of a fast expiring civilization.... Let us, instead, turn to the gladiatorial heroism, ambition, and tempo of modern beneficent and yielding industry, science and technology, to scenes of joy and verve of happy toilers in their own made environments, to the new home-life, nursery and school, to the new comradeship and brotherhood hitherto unknown."
Yech. Following the twists and turns of Stalinist politics, artists in the group put out a letter defending the Moscow Trials, signed by president Stuart Davis as well as Raphael Soyer, William Cropper, Max Weber, Harry Gottlieb and other well-known artists of the period. But the increasing strain of following the Moscow line, especially when in 1938 "modernist" influences in art were officially banned in the Soviet Union, took its toll, as did the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in August 1939. As well, artists and writers around Partisan Review and others were coming to the defense of Leon Trotsky, Stalin's Bolshevik opponent; the 1937-38 John Dewey Commission exonerating Trotsky of Stalin's slanders had an important impact.
The bureaucratic perversion of "socialist realism" imposed by Stalin in the USSR was an especially bitter blow to artists, because the triumphant Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had been associated with the great cultural upheavals that gave birth to modernism and abstract art. Recalling the heady atmosphere of those days of artistic experimentation and enthusiasm in the midst of poverty and civil war, Trotsky sought to re-establish what had been the Marxist norm when he and Lenin were leading the young workers state. As he wrote in a 1938 letter to Partisan Review:
"...a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power—which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity."
Essentially it was World War II that swept away the CP's art groups and the WPA. The war finally got American capitalism out of the Depression, ending all the Rooseveltian experiments in subsidizing artists. Its conclusion, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushered in a new era of American world imperialism.
"Advancing American Art": Censorship and McCarthyism
In 1947 the State Department organized a big art show, "Advancing American Art," to prove to the not yet totally grateful Europeans and South Americans that the American conquerors were not really the new barbarians. Instead the State Department ended up with egg on its face when it was forced to cancel the successful show in mid-tour by an outbreak of nativist yahooism and anti-Communism in Congress and the Hearst press.
The paintings themselves, bought in 1946 for the show by the State Department, represented a fairly broad range of American painting at that time (a 1989 paperback, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, published by the University of Alabama Press, includes 36 of the paintings). This was before the smashing success of Abstract Expressionism, so most works had recognizable subject matter, some mildly surrealistic, some still carrying on the '30s and early '40s themes of social injustice, like Ben Shahn's painting of a gaunt boy titled Hunger. There was a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape, a seascape by John Marin, a Marsden Hartley, a painting by the black artist Romare Beardon—all artists accepted today as standard figures of American modern painting.
William Randolph Hearst's papers went wild during a preview of the show in New York City. His New York journal American carried a series on the "Red Art Show," attacking "left-wing painters" like Stuart Davis, William Cropper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others as "a lunatic fringe." With slashing sarcasm, the Hearst writers denounced works like Karl Zerbe's Around the Lighthouse: "SHEER LOVELINESS...Is there anything more beautiful than a dead fish? Of course there is: Two dead fish, for example, or three or five. That's what makes this painting...so wonderful. You get five dead fish. And so did the State Department!"
Look magazine ran seven of the paintings under the provocative title "Your Money Bought These Pictures," while Newsweek ran a spread originally widely distributed by the Republican National Committee, which claimed that five of the seven works were by artists with Communist connections. The Republican majority in Congress, along with some nativist Democrats, seized on the show to settle scores with old New Deal enemies. Congressmen passed reproductions around the floor to raucous laughter, amidst charges it was a Communist plot because the faces of people in the paintings "are always depressed and melancholy. That is what the communists and other extremists want to portray. They want to tell the foreigners that the American people are despondent, broken down or of hideous shape—thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot and eager for a change of government. The Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers have selected art as one of their avenues of propaganda."
Finally President Truman was moved to denounce the show as "so-called modern art" and "merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people." He said of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl Resting, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." On 4 April 1947 the Hearst papers triumphantly screamed "Marshall Halts World Tour of Red-Linked U.S. Art." Secretary of State George C. Marshall had the 79 art works brought back and sold as government "surplus property" at a gigantic loss—a Romare Beardon painting went for as little as $5.00!
Enter the evil age of Richard Milhouse Nixon, of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, "the Great Fear" era dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department," he charged in his famous scare speech of 1950. He never had such a list, but the "Red Scare" rolled on to full, raging hysteria, as loyalty oaths, flag salutes, enforced finking, "confessions" and witch hunts sought to drive CPers and other leftists out of the trade unions, the schools and every other field of American life, while crushing any sympathy for them. A 1949 Life magazine photo spread of "Dupes and Fellow Travelers" of the "Red Peril" was practically a who's who of famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.
This was the heyday of Republican Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan, who served an incredible 25 years in Congress. He was honored by Vice President Nixon at a 1957 dinner saluting Dondero's many contributions to alerting the public to "the Communists' evil designs for pollution of American art." This McCarthy of the art world had a genuine obsession with modern art: "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.... Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason," he explained.
The CIA, the Rockefellers and Abstract Expressionism
This uncontrolled ranting was viewed with dismay by more rational bourgeois ideologues, who knew perfectly well it was making American society look like the revolting combination of terror and idiotic cultural boorishness it in fact was, a dippy "hula hoops from hell" suburban nightmare where a Picasso print on the wall was proof you'd made a pact with the Commie devil. (The FBI, in fact, kept a huge file on Picasso, extending on for years even after his death!) The United States Information Agency, perhaps hoping the worst storms had subsided, tried later in the '50s to present some international shows of American artists, but with similar disastrous results, as William Hauptman detailed in "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade" (Artforum, October 1973).
The USIA supported a show on "Sport in Art" (partially funded by Sports Illustrated), scheduled for the 1956 Olympic Games. A preview in Dallas, Texas was vehemently protested by Colonel Owsley, the Dallas County Patriotic Council and other art-loving ladies of Dallas, because it contained paintings by supposed Communist or Commie dupe painters like Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Max Weber, Diego Rivera and the seemingly ubiquitous Ben Shahn. The USIA canceled that one. They tried again with "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century." Again, it was claimed that ten of the artists were politically "unacceptable" and "pro-Communist." The USIA had to cancel that one too. Shortly afterward, the USIA announced in exasperation that it would ban from any of its traveling exhibitions any "American oil paintings dated after 191 7"—that is, after the Russian Revolution—to avoid any possible Communist taint!
Somebody had to rescue America's international reputation on the cultural scene, to win over European intellectuals in the Cold War—and it turned out to be the Rockefellers, the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA. A fascinating article by Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," in Artforum (June 1974) lays out the connections. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was founded in 1929 by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. In 1939 Nelson Rockefeller became its president, going on to become Roosevelt's coordinator for South and Latin American affairs, and returning to MOMA in 1946. A 1941 wire story called the museum the "latest and strangest recruit in Uncle Sam's defense line-up," quoting the museum's chairman John Hay Whitney on MOMA's mission to "strengthen the hearts and wills of free men in defense of their own freedom." Whitney (a veteran of the OSS, predecessor of the CIA) himself set up a trust exposed as a CIA conduit in 1967. Cockcroft details:
"Primarily, MOMA became a minor war contractor, fulfilling 38 contracts for cultural materials totalling $1,590,234 for the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, and especially Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. For Nelson's Inter-American Affairs Office, 'mother's museum' put together 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting which were shipped around Latin America, an area in which Nelson Rockefeller had developed his most lucrative investments—e.g., Creole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the single most important economic interest in oil-rich Venezuela."
Rockefeller's Latin American experts were bodily transferred over to MOMA after the war, including Rene d'Harnoncourt, who had helped cultivate the Mexican muralists at the time Mexico's oil nationalism threatened Rockefeller oil interests. Head of the art section of Nelson’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in 1943, he was brought to MOMA as vice president in charge of foreign activities, and in 1949 d'Harnoncourt became MOMA's director. In 1952 MOMA launched its international program with a $625,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Under the direction of Porter A. McCray, another Office of Inter-American Affairs veteran, MOMA added its International Council. Reassuringly "modern" exhibitions of contemporary American art were sent to Europe, South America and Japan, as MOMA "assumed a quasi-official character, providing the 'U.S. representation' in shows where most nations were represented by government-sponsored exhibits," Cockcroft points out. At the Venice Biennale, the most important European international art show, MOMA took over the U.S. pavilion, the only privately owned booth, from 1954 to 1962.
Abstract Expressionism, the slashing, dripping, floating huge canvases whose primary subject is the world of paint and canvas itself, became MOMA's favorite art. Not only was it new and artistically avant-garde, in refreshing contrast to the stale old "smell of the soil" Thomas Hart Benton "regionalism" pushed by more primitive anti-Communists, but it was really "American." Many of the leaders of the movement had past left-wing connections: Jackson Pollock was influenced by left-wing Mexican mural painting, Mark Rothko had done paintings of the city poor, Willem de Kooning did work for Artist Union protests, while Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell had "dabbled in Marxism," according to art critic and "Action Painting" advocate Harold Rosenberg. While this may have kept them from getting Congressional approval, it wasn't entirely bad from the more sophisticated Cold Warriors' viewpoint. It heightened the propaganda value of these artists in demonstrating the supposed "freedom of expression" of America, since they ostentatiously avoided "politics" in their new work. Though as Rosenberg noted in The Anxious Object, the old impulse wasn't entirely gone: "It is hard to imagine a Johnson campaign billboard in the manner of the late Franz Kline, though in 1952 the Action Painters of the Artists Club in Greenwich Village turned out placards for [Adlai] Stevenson (how much these contributed to his defeat is not known)."
Of course, totally abstract art was safer for the Rockefellers too. Those earlier attempts to woo the Mexican muralists were not a total triumph. In 1933 the Rockefeller family ordered Diego Rivera off the scaffolding at Rockefeller Center, because the artist refused to remove a head of Lenin from his mural Mankind at the Crossroads. Later the entire mural was pulverized. At least with a Pollock drip painting or an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black, there was no obviously subversive, rude content. In any case, MOMA began showing the Abstract Expressionists early and often, in 1956 touring a "Modern Art in the U.S." show with works by de Kooning, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko and others through eight European cities, including Vienna and Belgrade.
MOMA also sought to influence intellectuals behind the so-called "Iron Curtain." In 1961the museum gave the Polish painter Tadeusz Kantor and other "nonobjective" Polish painters an exhibition at MOMA. The CIA funded cultural institutions like the National Student Association, Encounter magazine and even a 1952 Paris tour by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of the bourgeois feminist Ms. magazine, knowingly took CIA money as director of the "Independent Research Service," which sponsored young Americans going to youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1962. "I found them liberal and farsighted and open," she said of the CIA agents with whom she collaborated, according to the Washington Post (18 February 1967).
MOMA's executive secretary from April 1948 to November 1949, Thomas W. Braden, joined the CIA in 1950, supervising its cultural activities from 1951 to 1954. In "I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral'," in the 20 May 1967 Saturday Evening Post, Braden said that "dissenting opinions within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals" made effective propaganda abroad, and in any case "the idea that Congress would have approved of many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch society's approving medicare." This initial suave CIA impression was later buried in the swamps of Vietnam, as they were revealed as the bloody killers they were and are. And Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York in 1971, will go down in history as the "Butcher of Attica."
One of the few bright lights in this sick period between McCarthyism and the explosion of the New Left was the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. "The most beautiful body I've ever seen was at a party in 1954," Lenny would occasionally muse on stage, "I was in the bedroom getting the coats...and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt. 'You like what you see? They are nice, aren't they?' she said, caressing the area near her medallion. 'Yes, they are very nice.' 'Would you like to touch them?' 'I'm—I'm—' 'You're shocked,' she said, 'aren't you?' Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen." For this gentle satire, Lenny was arrested at Greenwich Village's Cafe Au Co Co for giving an "indecent performance." The legal complaint was headed "Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits"! Lenny Bruce died on 3 August 1966, after having been unable to get work for months, harassed and hounded by the state's vicious censors.
No to Censorship!
The current debate over whether the National Endowment for the Arts, itself a creation of the Kennedy-Johnson "Great Society" days, should place conditions on its grants seems like a somewhat paler repeat of this turbulent past. The total amount of money being debated isn't much—military bands get more money than the entire arts budget—but the point, as we've said, is attempted political repression. Jesse Helms is every bit as reactionary a piece of work as the Donderos and McCarthys of the 1950s, and the spectacle last summer of Senator Alfonse D'Amato ripping up an Andres Serrano art catalogue on the Senate floor was a chilling replay of earlier witch hunts.
There are encouraging signs that the "heartland of America" is finally getting fed up with the lying cant and censorship shoveled down its throat for the past decade. The six-year-long ghastly expensive trial against teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Southern California finally ended early this year as a jury acquitted the defendants of some 52 counts of child abuse, renouncing the prosecutors' witches brew of hysteria over the devil, drugs and day care. The jury in the Washington, D.C. Marion Barry trial refused to be suckers for the feds' attempted frame-up of the black mayor in a drug/sex sting.
And in early October an eight-person jury in Cincinnati, Ohio, acquitted the city's Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie of obscenity charges for its retrospective exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos. "High art" devotees had plenty to cheer about, since this was the first-ever obscenity case against an art museum. The prosecution strategy of picking people they thought were hicks from the sticks backfired, as one juror said afterward: "We thought the pictures were lewd, grotesque, disgusting. But like the defense said, art doesn't have to be beautiful or pretty."
Then "low art" got its licks in, as a jury in Broward completed the one-two punch, acquitting the rap group 2 Live Crew of obscenity charges on October 20. "You take away one freedom, and pretty soon they're all gone," said one juror in that case, while others noted they thought the black group's raunchy lyrics were really a gas. This tendency toward common sense, decency and tolerance on the part of ordinary citizens is deeply disturbing to our rulers.
Government censorship is going to continue as long as this capitalist government goes on. The heart of it is that this system of government is not neutral. It was created to uphold capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. Pared down to its essentials, the state is an executive committee of the capitalists as a whole, for keeping the ruling class on top through state coercion of those at the bottom, mainly through the selective use of cops and prisons and murder. State subsidies for health care, education and the like are given reluctantly, as part of the necessary overhead to keep the population minimally content and at least a section of it competent to work. Subsidies for artists are extra frills, given or taken away depending on how the political winds are blowing. It's especially so in this country, where the Puritan legacy still hangs heavy with its dour suspicion of the arts, especially live theater, as agencies of sin and the devil.
Meanwhile, as the hogs at the public trough complain they don't want to spend our "taxpayers' money" on sexy art, but would really rather use it for strange new weapons and to bail out their buddies in the savings and loan scandals, there is some poetic justice around to relish. While the Mapplethorpe show's director was acquitted, the man who gave "Censornati" its nickname, the founder of various Cincinnati Legions of Decency, is himself under indictment today, the Lincoln Savings & Loan's own Charles H. Keating Jr. And another figure in this latest farcical episode in American cultural life has met her appropriate end as well: Christina Orr-Cahall was the curator who canceled the Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to avoid Congressional ire, in the Vietnam-era spirit of "bombing the village in order to save it." She was last heard from in a New York Times Travel Section, down in the Nancy Reaganland of West Palm Beach, curating the no doubt culturally deep show "Pools," a survey of swimming pools in recent American art.
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I Paint What I See
It's no good taste in a man like me,
Said John D's grandson, Nelson.
To question an artist's integrity Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
But I know what I like to a large degree,
Tho art I hate to hamper.
For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks You painted a radical.
I say, shucks,
I never could rent the offices—
The capitalistic offices.
For this, as you know, is a public hall And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
And tho your art I dislike to hamper,
I owe a little to Cod and Cramper,
And after all,
It's my wall ....
We'll see if it is, said Rivera.
— E.B.W.
Excerpt of poem printed in The New Yorker, 20 May 1933
