Thursday, October 06, 2016

When The Pictures Got Small-With Gloria Swanson and William Holden’s Sunset Boulevard In Mind

*****When The Pictures Got Small-With Gloria Swanson and William Holden’s Sunset Boulevard In Mind








From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Yeah, Joe, Joe Anybody if you really want to know, Joe just another guy who went through the traumas of World War II like a lot of other guys although don’t ask him about those traumas because you will get the pat “I did my duty, I did what had to be done and that is that,” yeah, a pat answer if that is what you want, if anybody in this cuckoo world is asking about yesterday’s news. Yesterday’s news is exactly the way Joe expressed it one time back in 1947 to a guy he worked with, a sports writer a couple of years older than Joe but who somehow ducked out of the war like a lot of guys for reasons they are not discussing, not discussing this side of a bottle, so a guy whose closest call to combat was the battle of the barroom stool he fought most nights after work dribbling down low-shelf whiskies in order to come up with yet another superlative to fawn over some Triple A baseball prospect, on the Daily Tribune, a newspaper, or rather the newspaper of record if you will in Lima, Ohio where Joe landed feet first after he got his discharge papers and headed home.
Yeah in this cuckoo world only supply sergeants, class clowns, and barroom stool heroes tried to trade off their war experiences for so much as a drink when things were back to normal, normal as they were going to be, tried to bring what they did or did not do up from the dregs now that everybody else, everybody including our own Joe Average, don’t worry we will give Joe a last name in a minute, once we get this issue of what we are never going to know about what Joe did in the war, beyond what he had to. Yeah, stick with the pat answer, brother, stick with the pat answer. See though back in 1941, and maybe I don’t need to say more than that but if I do let’s say after Pearl, Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 for the forgetful, or those too young to have remembered what that was all about a lot of Joe Average guys, guys who were working out in some factory making whatever they were making, other guys were plowing fields for hungry mouths out in the plains, and guys like Joe, literary types, were going to places like Big Ten Ohio State where they expected to move up in the world, move past those parents who got their dreams decapitated, there is no other word for what happened and if Joe had written that word he would not have been far off in his own family history. 
But Pearl put the world on hold for Joe Average guys who flocked to the recruiting stations forming big long lines to get into uniform just like our Joe Average did when he got the word, when Roosevelt put the word out. Not that they, those Joes, expected to get a hell of a lot of whatever the war’s conclusion would bring but they were kind of funny about a bunch of night-takers in places like Tokyo and Berlin trying to crowd them, trying to make them cry “uncle” and holler. Yeah, they whatever else they ready to they were ready to lay down their heads in some mephitic swamp, on some salted atoll, storming some heavily defended beach, traipsing through the dusty roads of wherever they had to go to give the night-takers the short stick. That is the stuff that our Joe Average was made of, don’t mistake that by his cavalier attitude now that the war was yesterday’s news. If you don’t believe me a quick look at the fruit salad on that laid away uniform up in the closet of his parents’ house in Lima, Ohio will disabuse you of that notion.               
All that said now is time to take our Joe Average out of the shapeless clay of Joe Average-dom, give him a name, a name   fit for a guy on the move in the hustle-bustle. Joe Gillis is the name he went by, Joseph Francis Gillis is what it said on the birth certificate, later adding an Xavier when the Bishop came down from Cleveland to confirm him so he was brought up at least that far Catholic but don’t to run that Joseph Francis Xavier Gillis by him, not if you don’t want a ration of shit like that drunken sports writer did one night to bait Joe when he got a commendation from Charley Squire, the city editor, for a big story he did on returning veterans who had no place to live, had not housing except the damn county farm after all they went through in the Atlantic and Pacific wars. Don’t ask him either, except maybe if his mother was around, if he still had the religion, still was a believer in the message of the Roman Catholic Church because you will get another pat answer, one you may not like if you are sensitive about your religion, or anybody’s.
So Joe Gillis, to bring everything and everybody up to speed,   is the name that the studio, or better studios since he was strictly a free-lancer, strictly on “spec” in those days put on the couple of screenplays he got some credit for anyway, although the story lines he had submitted had been totally flipped by the screen-writers from what he had originally written. Don’t ask him the wrong way what he thought of that maneuver, not if you want the same fate as that ill-advised sports writer back in Lima. See before the war, while Joe was at Ohio State he majored in English (mainly because in high school he could tell stories in English class that both the teachers and his fellow students were spell-bound by and he was nobody from nowhere in math, science and history but he certainly had literary ambitions). Of course the war had put a big detour on that vocation, except Joe would write like crazy when he had five minutes to collect his thoughts and the bullets were not whizzing over his head. So when the war ended he landed that job in Lima, a job that was practically promised him at the time of his enlistment. Joe though only thought of that assignment, that city desk assignment, as a stepping-stone to becoming a serious writer, a screen-writer at least. Like a lot of young men who served their country in the war, who had left their small towns, city neighborhoods, villages, who had lost their moorings once out in the big world, and who could no longer be contained in the Limas of the country Joe drifted West, drifted to see what a couple of guys in his unit were talking about when they said that California was the future, and by that Joe took what they said to mean for him the dazzle of Hollywood, to see if he was made of the right stuff. He sold some stuff, some “spec” stuff but as we pick him up on in Hollywood he is trying to figure if he can borrow another ten bucks from his old buddy Artie who had showed the ropes when he hit town and was clueless how the “system” worked except stay by the phone, stay healthy and stay ready to eat crow to get off the ground.
Here is the funny about Joe, maybe about a lot of guys like Joe, he wouldn’t give you the time of day about his war record, about his bouts of religious faith and faithlessness but given the slightest encouragement and maybe a nice shot of high-shelf liquor to tide him over, in short set him up the right way, he would give you chapter and verse about the ups and downs of his life in Tinsel-town. Some guys are funny like that, the literary types are built that way, no question. They say with Hemingway and Fitzgerald it didn’t even have to be high-shelf liquor if there was no quality around, with younger guys like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac slip them a joint andthey would go on and on.           
So you would, will, get a full answer from Joe about that little tragedy, small size in the great movies scheme of things but meaning a lot to a guy like Joe who just knew he had the stuff to make it, after all his schoolmates and his city editor tapped him on the head, people who go to movies in any case if not interested in great literary squabbles, about the miserable fate of his scripts though, and a little harangue about Hollywood, its producers, directors, assistant directors, not a few stars, or starlets (although he, a good-looking guy, with that Gary Cooper “ah shucks” handsomeness one would expect from a corn-fed Midwestern boy that the jaded ladies of Hollywood were eager to try on so he had had had a few rather nice casual affairs on some very downy billows with a few on the way up,  his way up, theirs they were on their own about but mainly they would go back to Davenport, or whatever Lima they had to get the dust off their shoes from), hell, even the best boy and grip not knowing true literature, true art if it hit them in the face with a cannon (and wouldn’t he just like to). Apparently nobody told Joe, or he didn’t listen, probably the latter if he was invoking his heroes Hemingway and Fitzgerald as literary giants and not just their skills with the bottle, that “the cinema” was filled to the rafters with guys and dolls who had that right stuff, join the line brother, join the line.
Joe had a little system about how much he would tell you depending, no matter how good the scotch, on whether he was on an “up” or on a “down” meaning that he was either borrowing or not borrowing money from Artie, this according to Artie who had a pretty good idea what Joe was about since he had done everything from nurse-maid him when he, a raw kid out of the sticks Lima came to town with googly eyes to getting him laid from among the bevy of starlets he knew from the casting couches of the studios since Artie had with lots of hard work raised his own position in the Hollywood firmament meaning that he did all the real work on the birthing of a film.
If Joe was the chips he would give you every detail of his time in the town, “in the chips” meaning he had some gainful work and was not collecting that measly unemployment that barely got him by in that crummy two-bit rooming house and that junk heap of a car he was still paying money on, and was found at The River, a favorite watering hole for the Hollywood back lot crowd either on their way up or down because the booze was cheap and Hank, the bar-tender owner, was not stingy with his drinks, or with credit if you had some decent hard-luck story to throw his way, once or twice no more.  
One of Joe’s stories, his baby, From Hell and Back, that he had brought out to Hollywood with him, had written the piece while at that city desk during slack time to reflect what Tinsel town was buying and producing just then, had written the outline under fire in Europe when the 1st Division, the Big Red One, his division, was on the move east, ever east, male-centered war movies or Westerns which were really the same thing except taking play about one hundred years earlier but with that same male lonely introspective brooding to capitalize on the good feelings for the guys coming out of the war and the women who continued to fill the seats with their guys in tow were looking to see what it was all about since their guys were as silent as the grave, as silent as  Joe Gillis about what they had done for Uncle and home (one guy from Joe’s unit passing through Lima on his way to the West s had over drinks at Harry’s across the street from the Daily Tribune told Joe that it was almost like every guy signed a pact that they would keep their wounds, physical and mental, to themselves as one final act of “being buddies,”). Joe’s baby was a Western since it was easier to deal with that a war movie where his own emotions but bungle the plotline beyond repair was about a high plains drifter, a guy who came out from the East to see what the West was all about and got his fill of it, just wanted to stay in one town long enough to see his shadow, who came into some wild ass desert town, maybe a town like Tombstone the way Joe had it figured in his head, and tamed it like some old Wild West desperado character or some long-bearded biblical prophet who could call the judgement day, call the angels home (and bed the local whorehouse owner, Ella, a good-looking redhead, too but that was a shadow he was willing to cut if it did not make it by Hayes) turned into a romance about a minister (with Henry Fonda in the lead) and the virginal but fetching girl next door (Priscilla Ford, the classic “girl next door” even if she was turning the high side of thirty).
The other script, Two To Go, started out as romance, always worth a try if you are short of script ideas as Joe was then, from hunger in other ways too when he hatched that one, about two writers, one a she, the other a he, who worked together in the script rooms of Hollywood film mill of the 1940s, fell in love after the usual boy meets girl stormy arguments before they realized, happy-ending Hollywood realized that they were meant for each other and thereafter produced great story lines. That perfectly serviceable script, maybe with a little work on the background of the two writers, he had in mind a Waspish guy from the Midwest and a Jewish girl from Brooklyn maybe with the two worlds colliding, maybe work through some deeper issues about literature and life before they hit the sheets got turned into a murder mystery based on one of the stories Joe had them working on in the script about some failed fading actress from the 1920s, from the silent movie days when good looks and gestures carried the day but whose voice turned out to sound a train horn and she was unceremoniously dumped by MGM, who had a thing for younger men, had had a notorious stable of them to keep her young while “keeping” the guys since she had a ton of dough made and invested when that was easier to do to avoid taxes,   and who was insanely jealous when the younger women came around was just “keeping a soda jerk” she ran into at Liggett’s, the one over on Hollywood and Vine naturally since “from hunger” writers could make a milkshake or a cheese sandwich as well as anybody else and off-handedly shot him on the rumor that blew her way that he was seeing somebody in wardrobe, also a job that “from hunger” writers could do as well as anybody else.
Here’s how weird the revised plot got though they, the coppers when they came to the faded actresses house up in the secluded hills, since there were no witnesses, any that would come forward once the studios pulled the hammer down, never did find out who killed the soda jerk although every teenager in America, the audience the studio was going for with the gratuitous violence since the studio bosses felt that they were losing older women, those women who would have a few years before gone for the original script and brought their ex-servicemen with them, to motherhood and the newly emerging television, could see plain as day on the screen that it was that faded actress who did the deed. The old dame must have still had some great connections to pull the tent down on that one.
 
Joe swore to himself on more than one occasion that he should have done like Jack Donne and Joan Ditto, a couple of top shelf screen-writers on the lot had done (the models for his small idea movie) who he would have drinks with in their Malibu cottage and walked away from their own stories when they became unrecognizable in the “mill.”  But because he was three months behind on his rent, a fatal two on his car with the repo man breathing down his back, the cupboard was bare and because he no longer had stardust in his eyes he, what did he call it to a co-worker, Betty Smith, you might have seen some of her work on Some Came Running a while back, a fellow screen-writer working in the word “sweatshop” on the United Majestic (U/M) studio lot he let those “revisions” go by since he had to “make a living.”
Funny the original stories Joe had submitted and which had been reworked out of existence by the time he got his moment in the sun credit later, later after he was long gone and wouldn’t be around to fuss over copyrights and royalties won a few art house kind of awards and nominations (the coveted Globe among the literary set and the Lawrence from the high-brow cinema set). But by then the scripts were the property of U/M and some smart guy in accounting figured that the studio could cash in to on the notoriety around Joe’s name. Still when the deal went down Joe Anybody, no, Joe Gillis buckled under, got in the payroll line on pay day. This is how a guy who knew Joe, pieced the price that Joe would wound up paying for getting in line like a million other hard-bitten guys:
Yeah, Joe Gillis, Joe from Anywhere Ohio, Lima, to give the place a name, the guy with the stardust in his eyes coming out of World War II all alive and everything, a college boy after all was said and done on the big ass GI Bill finishing out at Ohio State that was the ticket out of the doldrums night city desk reporter for the Daily Tribune and later the Steubenville Sentinel had dreams just like every other guy (girls too if anybody was asking although not that many were then, not after that boomerang of guys coming off the troops ships needed jobs and space). See Joe saw what a lot of guys and gals saw, saw that there was nothing but gold waiting for them in the hills above Hollywood, gold sitting there just waiting for them to come west and pick it up.
Hell Joe had said to himself more than once, and told the guys on the night desk too when around two in the morning the bottom drawer whiskey bottles came out that he could out write whatever hacks wrote up the screenplays passing for good work in the studios in a day and still have time for cocktails and diner. Could write, for example, one he always liked to give, circles around whoever wrote that silly story about some smart-ass detective out in Frisco town back about 1930 whose partner got iced on a case out job getting taken in, getting blind-sided about six different ways by some bimbo wearing some jasmine scent that had him up in the clouds and who admittedly had some charms got him all worked up about some statute worth a mint and figured to use his services to get the damn thing. And then flee leaving him to take the fall, maybe take the big step off if it came to that. Kids’ stuff.        
And so our boy Joe borrowed fifty bucks from his mother (promising to have her paid back in a month, a long month as it turned out since Joe never got around to paying her back), another twenty-five from his brother Jim on the sly (ditto on the payback), and took another twenty five from his old sweetie, Lorraine (no need to pay that back she said after he had taken her down to the river front shoreline one Saturday night and gave her a little something to remember him by if you got his drift when he told the boys at the news desk about his conquest)  he was off and running to sunny California. Got himself a room, small but affordable filled with many, too many, people who had the same stardust in their eyes as Joe (and if any of them had bothered to look closely many, the rooming house not only had the latest immigrants but too many long in the tooth denizens who had missed the big show only they were not smart enough to know it. Or if smart enough decided the stardust was better to live with than what beckoned in Tulsa, Odessa, Kansas City. Moline.)
Got himself a typewriter too, rented, and re-wrote those two stories that U/M hired him to work the screenplays on. And so our Joe was on his way. Onward and upward. Then the roof caved in, not literally but it might as well have. See U/M and a lot of places made plenty of room for returning GIs and so Joe squeezed through the door on that basis (and the fact, which had not come out until later, until that too late mentioned before that his stories were excellent and that some reader, a reader being a smart Seven Sisters college girl who could sniff out a few gems among the million scripts left at the studios’ doors from hungry guys like Joe, had recommended to her boss that they go with those original stories as is but he too could see their possible later value and see that Joe was from hunger enough to stand the gaff for the big rewrites that would turn his work into dross).
But that door only remained open long enough for the studio to “fill their quota,” take the government heat off, and once those conditions were smoothed over they began laying off writers (and others too). And Joe found that he was just another payroll number to be blanked out, pushed out on to the mean streets of Hollywood, the streets of surly repo men, sullen landlords and sharp-eyed grocers. So Joe sat, sat like the thousand other guys looking for work, at Liggett’s Drugstore, the one near Hollywood and Vine, close to the studio lots just in case job calls came in while Mister Liggett was getting rich off of selling cups of coffee to the “from hunger” clientele hanging out.
And then she came in, came in like a rolling cloud of thunder, she who he would later find out, later when it was almost too late that those who had been around a while, had been long in the tooth on those stardust dreams maybe turned to cocaine sister dreams if you asked a certain night pharmacist nicely and were discrete enough to keep that information on the QT, called the Dragon Queen, came in with her teeth bared that night. Joe, a movie buff of long standing from the Lima Theater re-rerun Saturday afternoon black and white double features from the 1930s just after they started to talk on the screen days when he and his other from hunger friends would sneak in the back door and slip up into the balcony and while away a lazy afternoon (and later when he came of age taking that same Lorraine mentioned above for some heavy petting although they did not sneak in the back door then), though he recognized her, but for a moment could not place her name.
Then Artie, a fellow screen-writer whom he would pal around with when Artie was not out with his girlfriend, Sarah, also a writer although over on the Paramount lot, said in a low voice “Here comes the Dragon Lady she must be on the prowl.” Joe asked “Who is the Dragon Lady, I recognize her but I can’t place her name.” Artie answered that Joe must be losing it, whatever stuff was in his brain because the Dragon Lady was none other than the legendary actress Norma Desmond who won three, count them, three golden boy awards back in the day. Joe turned red not knowing her since while she had in her turn gotten long in the tooth there was some kind of commanding presence about her still, the way she carried herself, the way the room hushed a bit when she breezed in along with her “secretary” Maxine, a real terror in the old days protecting Miss Desmond, no question (rumored to be her lover, her Boston marriage partner, her Isle of Lesbos companion, her Sapphic muse, you know her “love that cannot speak its name friend, hell, her dyke pal, although that information would also come a bit too late).
Joe should have taken that hushed room lack of sound and the silent actions of lots of the guys drinking up their last gulps of coffee (or bit of sandwich because under the circumstances of being reduced to Liggett’s luncheonette fare one was not sure when or where the next meal would come from), of the sudden need to head to the telephone booth with a bag full of dimes to check with your merciless agent, your merciful mother, your have mercy baby, or heading toward  the magazine section with bended head looking at the latest from the scandal sheets more seriously, or making it look that way. Or he at least have checked with Artie who knew what she was there for. But no stardust boy had to step forward to “impress” Miss Desmond with his arcane knowledge of every film she ever starred in back in those re-run 1930s Strand days and asked her-“Aren’t you Miss Desmond.” And she returned his question with her brightest viper smile with a simple “yes.” Then to go in for the kill he asked “Haven’t seen you in a picture lately, too bad for you were a big star.” Of course vanity personified (and maybe necessary to get through the day when you have convinced yourself that film studios and the “day of the locust” common clay depend on seeing your every feature) Norma answered “she was still big, it was the pictures that had gotten smaller.” And with that Joe Anybody, yes, I know, Joe Gillis got caught up in the spider’s web. (What he didn’t see that night were the daggers in Maxine’s eyes once Norma began her peacock dance.)       
Nothing happened that night except upon request about his employment status Joe had answered Norma that he was a writer, currently unemployed (later she would tell him she already knew he was not working since why else would he be at Liggett’s at nine in the evening rather than slaving away trying to save some stinks-to-high-heaven script at one of the studio writers’ cubbyholes and why else would she go into Liggett’s on her own when she could buy and sell Mister Liggett ten times over), that he had a couple of scripts to his credit (he did not mention the butcher job done on them and she did not ask), and that “no” he was not looking for work as a reader for some seemingly corny sounding script about some gypsy woman with seven veils that Norma said she wanted help on in order to make her big comeback on the screen. Frankly as she got more animated about her project, got more flirtatious for an old dame (he at twenty-five, good-looking and despite his Hollywood stardust eyes with many sexual conquests under his belt was fairly repulsed by the thought of an old dame of at least fifty if he figured her career right, he was only off by a couple of years when the deal went down, coming on to him so graphically and sexually), and more urgent in the need to have him come out to her place on the high number end of Sunset Boulevard (the numbers where the mansions begin and the hills rise away from the heat of the city but he did not know either fact then) and at least read the script before he refused her offer he seriously balked. Told her he was not the boy for her.                    
 
And for a few weeks that resolve held out, until that inevitable wave of bill notices, rent due, repo man madness and food hunger got in the way and he  made his way to Sunset Boulevard. He hadn’t bothered calling because until Maxine answered the door with a vagrant smile he was not at all sure he was going to go through with the whole thing. Artie had filled him in on what he knew about the Dragon Lady which while correct as far as it went was far from being very knowledgeable although toward the end he did not blame Artie who was after all deeply in love with Sarah, hell, Joe was half in love with Sarah himself since she had said some very kind things about a few sketches of his Artie had shown her and although he was not usually attracted to the Sarah “ girl next door” type there was something very refreshing, not all jaded and facing the world just for kicks, about her even though she had been born in the devil’s kitchen, born on Vine Street a few blocks from Liggett’s. So when that Maxine door opened he was on his own.
Sure when the blats got a hold of the story later when it really didn’t matter, or would not have helped they drew a bee-line picture that Joe, a war veteran and not some skimpy-kneed kid like a few of the “soda jerks” (literally) that Norma had picked up over the years and threw over like some much trash when their number was up, knew the “score” all along and just got on the gravy train and rode, took the ticket, took the ride so no one should bleed for him, except maybe Artie who took it hard (and apparently Sarah too who Artie suspected was half in love with Joe too although he never mentioned that idea to her, and they did in the end get married so make of that what you will).
Forget about the blats, forget about what Hedda Hopper had to say about the whole mess, and that was plenty, none of it having Joe as anything as just another gone boy on the hustle from nowhere Ohio (hah, and her out on Podunk Indiana) here is  how it came down though. Joe went into that open door, into that opulent if run down mansion with his eyes open, once he figured out the score, figured it to his advantage. And for a while it worked, worked out kind of nice. That script of Norma’s, her ticket back to the top was a stinker, strictly nothing except a poor rehash of half the films she had ever been in back in the days when her every expression was plastered over every newspaper review and imitated by every young girl (and not a few boys) who had nothing but stardust in their eyes. But Joe figured that the “salary” she was giving him made it easy to believe that he was working “legit” that he was not just a “kept man,” Miss Desmond’s pet poodle. And for a while that illusion held up, although Artie began to suspect when he showed up at a New Year’s Eve party all decked out in fine top shelf Hollywood clothing that something more than earning a screen-writer’s salary was going on up in high number Sunset Boulevard.
And there was. Joe could see after a few weeks that Norma was going for him in a big romantic way, and he was playing into that a little, playing into her vanity that she still had something that a younger man would want. Although at first he was repelled by the idea that he would bed somebody his mother’s age he began to get a feel for the moral climate of Hollywood where the stage hands might titter over the age difference but would just nod it off as another gold-digger story like ten thousand others up in the hills, and on the lots. And so one night he took the plunge, went walking slowly to her sullen bedroom and to his fate.
Here is where the story got mixed up, got all balled up if you believed the blats who had their own reasons to play the story as a gigolo playing way over his head. After they “did the do” Joe no longer figured in the script-writing for Norma business but rather they made the rounds among her old time friends in the new Hudson she had custom-fitted for him so she could show off her new trophy. And for a while, a long while, that worked out just fine but Norma, maybe as a former actress used to getting whatever outlandish wishes of hers met, maybe just as a woman of a certain age who knew her limited appeal over the long haul or maybe that crazy streak that she had which drove more than one producer crazy in her wake Joe could not keep up, could not phantom the idea of forever being Norma’s fancy man, never to get out from under that decaying set she was parading him around to.
So Joe started taking long rides out to Malibu at night in his new Hudson to get the “stink blowed off” as his farmer grandfather used to say. That is where he met Cara, young sweet new star on the horizon Cara. And that was his fatal mistake, or part of it.  One night along the Pacific Coast Highway parked in a parking lot who came up to them in her own Hudson (or rather Norma’s) but Maxine. Maxine told the startled pair that she has been following them for weeks and that they had better break it off or she would tell Norma. Fair enough if the world ran in Norma time, Joe was no longer happy with being Norma’s pet poodle now that the wrinkle-free Cara (and gymnast in bed which he appreciated since Norma was like a corpse one minute and then “do this, do that” the next) but Joe was tired of Norma time.
That tiredness is what really did Joe in. When Joe would not break it off with Cara (and from her description in the papers and a quick glance off her going to court on the television why would he, why would any guy) then Maxine told Norma the tale. Norma was livid, was ready to kill the ingrate, ready to ship him back to Steubenville or wherever he hailed from in a body bag-minus the three piece suit she had just purchased for him- let him go back in that foolish Robert Hall’s sport jacket he showed up at her door in. But here is where things got dicey. Norma for all her Dragon Lady reputation, all the headaches she gave every even sympathetic director had portrayed every kind of villainous woman from axe murderer to midnight poisoner hated the sight of blood. The sight of blood sickened her and maimed bodies revolted her, even stage dummies. So she held her grief in, almost.
Here is where the rumors about her and Maxine and their illicit love nest got all kinds of play. Although the rumor about their love was false, at least on Norma’s side, Maxine really did love Norma in that straight Boston marriage way and once Norma seemed so prostrate that she could barely move, seemed like she would never get over the Joe betrayal (that is the way Norma constantly pitched her grief) Maxine went into action. She had a final confrontation with Joe, told him to break off with Cara or she would personally do something about it. Joe, now ready to leave, ready to face the scorn of society about being an older woman’s kept man, was now ready to laugh in Maxine’s pathetic face as he walked out the door to his room toward the swimming pool to take his daily exercise.
This last part is under any theory of the story that Norma and Maxine would later tell other than as an “act of god” which in high Babylon got no play is frankly filled with too many holes, has too many moving parts to make sense. Allegedly Maxine, in broad daylight, heard noises coming from the pool area, loud noises which frightened her and she grabbed the gun that Norma kept in the house to prevent burglaries (although how a pearl-handled .38 was going to stop serious breaking and enterings raised a few eyebrows. Out of her wits she saw what looked like a huge man in the shadows and just fired, fired five times in that direction. Then she called the cops who found one Joe Gillis in the pool face down with five, count them, five slugs in his body. That is the story she swore to and no one could shake her, or Norma’s story then or later at the inquest. So Joe Anybody, no, no definitely no, Joseph Gillis, Junior went to sleep as another killing, a domestic dispute after the papers got through with the war-circus that ensued like a million others nothing more.
Nothing more except to Artie, Artie Shaw to give him a name the only guy who every tried to stop Joe Gillis in his tracks, in his wrong tracks. One day a few weeks after they laid Joe to rest and went to put some flowers on his poor misbegotten grave out in the hills Artie said to Sarah that although he knew that there would never be an end to the stardust eyed kids coming to Hollywood to pursue whatever dreams they were dreaming for God’s sake Joe’s story should get out there in the hinterlands. And so it has. That and Artie’s reminder for all that stardust to keep the hell away from the high numbers on Sunset Boulevard.                            


 
 

 

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James P.Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s now deceased after a brutal prison murder class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

*Free The Last of the Ohio Seven-They Must Not Die In Jail

COMMENTARY

ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON (2006). THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.


Free the last of the Seven. Below is a commentary written in 2006 arguing for their freedom.

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.

YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.

From The Archives-2014



 
 
 
 

 
 


I’m Going Away My Own True Love-With Bob Dylan’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather” In Mind

I’m Going Away My Own True Love-With Bob Dylan’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather” In Mind   


By Sam Lowell
Lana Jamison had been frustrated for most of her twenty-eight young life years. Frustrated by her whole past, her past that included a serious bout of a childhood where she was not listened to by her parents, was treated like dishrag, was told to be silent and like it by her tyrannical father and her go-along-with-father mother. Had spent years in therapy after college trying to get to the bottom of what that dishrag business did to her psyche and had come up with few good clues as to how to proceed with her life without feeling she had to look over her shoulder every time she made a remark that expressed her true feelings. That situation had been made worse by the seemingly inevitable run of boyfriends and lovers who had decided on the basis of her demur presence that they could treat her like a dishrag as well. They collectively with few bright spots which usually didn’t last because of Lana’s moodiness  didn’t feel the need to expect that she might have an opinion of her own and tried might and main to direct her life for her. That woeful series included one husband, Jeff Mullins, who made an art form of putting her down wherever she had an idea that did not jell with his. That marriage had fallen apart of its own weight after a couple of years when Jeff decided one night to run off with the next best thing that came along and left Lana cold.     
Then Fritz, Fritz Taylor came along, came along like a fresh breeze after that disaster with Jeff. She had met him one night when she was feeling lonely at a bar in Cambridge that she would frequent before her marriage to Jeff and where they played country music of all things in the heart of Harvard Square. That country music thing had been a throwback to her days on that silent father upstate New York hard-scrabble truck farm and he would play the stuff on the radio every day. Fritz’s interest had been more recent, what he called his outlaw country music minute when that genre had a run even in urban areas of this country. The Wheat-stack had been playing, a group that he followed and which played Willie Nelson covers among others and so he had shown up there one Friday night and kissed fate. He had spied her, so he said, while he was sitting a bit forlorn at the bar since he had recently been divorced from his own didn’t understand him wife. Spied her sitting like heaven’s own angel at  a corner table with her girlfriend, so he said as he told her as she passed by his bar stool as she was going to the Ladies’ Room. She had been impressed by his light touch when he invited her to sit down upon her return from the Ladies’ Room, his giving her room to speak about what interested her, and most of all by the no pressure way that he handled the idea of calling her up once she insisted that she really had to go home with her girlfriend and not with him someplace. But she gave him her phone number. In response he gave her the most gentle good night handshake she had ever received from a man. And so started their love affair.           
Fritz proved, mostly, to be as advertised that first night, except his own bouts of withdrawal and distance which he told her he had inherited from his own dismal childhood down among the working poor by parents who were way over their heads trying to raise six kids on an unskilled worker’s pay. He called them, he and she, soulmates and that stuck, stuck as true as anything he ever said. Lana could take those bouts of darkness for a while as long as they were mixed in with days of happiness. But that mix had of late fallen on hard times. Many times burned she needed some space, needed room to think things through and so one day she mentioned to Fritz that she wanted to head to California by herself, wanted drive across at her own pace and see the country she had missed seeing all her sweet young life. They battled back and forth on the matter for weeks. Fritz telling her that he would improve his disposition and she, having heard it all before and really wanting to get away, arguing for her space. Finally one morning out of the blue he gave in, wished her Godspeed and that she should keep in contact with him in case anything happened along the way. The idea being when she left that she would return and they would try to start over again, start their love on a higher plain.                
So one sunny April day Lana took off in her Chevrolet, a car filled to the brim with seemingly every possible thing that she owed. No pioneer woman trekking across the country bare-boned and intrepidly, not Lana. Told Fritz as they kissed good-bye that she would call him when she hit Philadelphia. Would see when she got there if she couldn’t find him some nice gift to make him feel better, make him get through their separation better. Fritz said in reply simply that he didn’t want any material gift but that the thought of her speedy return was enough to keep him going. That brought a tear to her eyes but she still insisted that she would get him something. So in Philadelphia she called him up one night and asked him if he wanted a nice gold ring that she had seen in a jewelry store that would be a sign of their friendship and love. Fritz begged off again saying he only wanted her own sweet love. They left it at that for a while, didn’t speak of the matter of a gift again when they talked on the phone every couple of days.          
Out in Denver she made a call one night asking Fritz once again whether he wanted a beautiful silver Native American-made bracelet that she knew he had mentioned that he would like to have one time when they had gone to an Intertribal Festival out in Charlton one fall. This time Fritz got his hind legs up, started getting angry since he had previously made it clear that all he wanted was for her to stop roaming and come back home. Did she find another guy in her travels? No, she said almost too quickly. Then he told her that she must not be thinking very highly of him, must have been more interested in travelling and being free to stop and go as she liked. Maybe wanted to stay in California since she had not stopped talking about it for weeks before her departure. Maybe Fritz wasn’t good enough for her. No, no she kept saying with less and less conviction. They got off the phone not on the best of terms. Fritz had asked when she expected to be home again.  Her non-committal answer she had said she was not sure, a few weeks many a month, maybe more. Fritz was steaming.      
One hot late summer night Lana called from Phoenix and before she could say much of anything Fritz said that he would wish her Godspeed and hoped that she would be happy in California as long as she expected to stay there. He was bailing out. Had had it. Before he got off the phone realizing where she was then in the heart of Native-American country he told Lana that she could sent him one of those  Native-American-made silver bracelets that she had mentioned in that  earlier conversation. Enough said.  

The Tale Of The Seven Samurai-Oops-Denzel Washington’s The Magnificent Seven (2016)-A Film Review

The Tale Of The Seven Samurai-Oops-Denzel Washington’s The Magnificent Seven (2016)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington, 2016    

No question every once in a while this reviewer likes to view a good shoot ‘em up in the old cowboy Western tradition that he grew up with in the black and white (film and virtues of the sides) 1950s. Of course the beauty of the film under review, the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven, is that it revisits the theme first started with the Japanese version of this idea, The Seven Samurai, and later taken up by the original film of a group of small seemingly disinterested warriors coming to avenge the doings of the evil ones against the small honest folk. Fortunately since the plot line of this version is emphatically not a replay of the original it works rather better than expected if you hide the kids from the constant gunfire.    

Here is how the thing played out. Mister Bad (only the names change) has run rough-shot over a small farming community out West once gold was discovered there. In order to clear the area Mister Bad tried every trick in the board including murder and mayhem to drive the settlers out. Then one brave citizen, a woman whose husband had been murdered in cold blood for the slightest resistance, got in contact with Sam Chisolm, played by Denzel Washington, who as an arresting officer of some sort, the law in some instances, seemed to be able to handle himself in tough spots. He balked at first but when he found out who the villain was he was ready to move heaven and earth to help the small folk (he also as the film ended had a very personal motive since Mister Bad had killed his kin in Kansas to fuel his greedy empire).       

Needless to say one man, even a good man with a gun could not face the onslaught Mister Bad could bring by himself. So the early part of the film is spent rounding up the other six who will be the core of the resistance (and if you included the woman solicitor who was handy with a gun herself you had eight). Yeah, seven is still enough against a massed army as long as they are good and disinterested. The only startling thing is who makes up the group this time with a Chinese and Native American on the good side and of course Sam is black and a leader which reflects the real Old West a little better than when I was a kid. The rest of the film is spent figuring a suitable defense using the poorly trained settlers as part of the defense. Then those tasks out of the way there is the big blowout with the defenders holding their own in the end despite Mister Bad’s bringing in of a rapid fire Gatling gun that mowed many citizens down. But you know old Sam will have his vengeance in the end in the mano y mano face-off with Mister Bad. Yeah, a good shoot ‘em up.      

 

Finding Progressive Events In The Boston Area-ACT-MA.

Finding Progressive Events In The Boston Area-ACT-MA.




 
ORG

 

*****The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

*****The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism




 
Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  

Markin comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.

Since 2014 the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught in the summer of that year. That is to be commended. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the now banished Milibrands after the last election debacle. They will be on sturdier ground with the new head of the Labor Party, Corbyn. I continue to stand willingly with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.      

No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower American world theories and politics based on socialism, communism, hell, even left radicalism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen as something like “utopian” schemes by pro-labor leftist militants, students and intellectuals around the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of that world, including America and Great Britain, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.

As the weight of that Soviet demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the "good old cause." The scheduled events and works by socialist commentators highlighted on this Histomat blog amply demonstrate the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately that means generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution as if capitalism were the permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance in the past, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals revolutionaries.           

The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-World War I theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period. A main organization concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the sometimes vast differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, has shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down.


The date August 4th 1914 when the German Social-Democrats piled onto the Kaiser’s bandwagon by voting for his war budget should be etched in the brain of every serious leftist militant. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new communications technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.        

Additional Markin comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left (mainly Stalinism but the Social-Democrats despite their democratic professions could teach a lesson or too about bureaucratic suppression) and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

One of the great sins of Stalinism (which the latter-day Social-Democrats of various stripes have honed to a fine art as well) was to silence both dissent inside the party and try like hell to keep other tendencies silent outside the party. Instead of letting various positions and programs be fought out to see who had something to add to the revolutionary arsenal the “word” came down (sometimes changing overnight) and that was that. It looks to be from this great distance that the very much still Stalinized Greece Communist Party is saddled with some of those old-time attributes when there should be in the Greek situation a bubbling up of discussion and clash of programs. Else the capitalists will once again prevail in a situation where they should be sent to "the dustbin of history" as Leon Trotsky once said in another context.   

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

A View From The International Left Archives- Ontario’s 1912 Ban on French Education-Canada: Equal Language Rights for All!

Workers Vanguard No. 1095
9 September 2016
 
Ontario’s 1912 Ban on French Education-Canada: Equal Language Rights for All!

The following article is reprinted from Spartacist Canada No. 189 (Summer 2016), newspaper of our comrades of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League.

Barely a month goes by without one or another government official issuing a hypocritical apology for past transgressions by the Canadian capitalist rulers. In one of the more recent, Ontario’s Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne stood before the Legislature in February to apologize for the banning of teaching in French in provincial schools more than a century ago.
Regulation 17, enacted in 1912, effectively outlawed French-language education in all Ontario schools beyond the first two grades. At the time, francophones made up about 10 percent of Ontario’s population, and a much higher proportion in the north and parts of the east and southwest. This blatantly discriminatory legislation produced a defiant backlash: francophone teachers ignored the ban and led students out of classrooms, while mothers blocked entrances to schools and confronted police who tried to impose the regulation. In Quebec, outrage over Regulation 17 contributed to the revolts against conscription during World War I, which were brutally repressed by the police and military.
The Ontario government’s edict exemplified the Anglo chauvinism of the Canadian ruling class, which suppressed the national rights of overwhelmingly francophone Quebec and the linguistic rights of French speakers elsewhere. In 1837-38, Quebec’s bourgeois-democratic Patriote rebellion was drowned in blood by British troops. Following Confederation in 1867, the battles of the largely francophone Métis people [of mixed Native-European descent] for language and property rights in Manitoba and later Saskatchewan led to the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. The subsequent hanging of Métis leader Louis Riel by the Tory government of John A. Macdonald led to mass protests in the streets of Montreal. To this day, francophones in Ontario—who number over 600,000—and elsewhere in nominally bilingual Canada keep having to fight for French-language education, hospital services and other basic rights.
This is the backdrop to the Ontario government’s apology, which naturally included no promise of compensation. The purpose of such apologies for crimes of a supposedly distant past—whether to francophones, Native people, Japanese and Chinese Canadians or Sikhs—is to maintain the deceitful fiction that modern capitalist Canada is a beacon of fairness, freedom and equality for all. The ruling class uses its cant about a progressive, multicultural and bilingual Canada to keep the national and language questions at bay in a country where more than 20 percent of the population primarily speaks French and where immigrant languages now also abound. The historic treatment of francophones has become something of a template for dealing with minorities arriving from all over the world: ugly chauvinism is papered over with soothing words, alongside the co-opting of “cultural” elites including religious leaders and corrupt politicians of all hues.
The Battle for French Schools in Ontario
The provincial Conservative government of James Whitney passed Regulation 17 in July 1912 following an official inquiry into the state of Ontario’s bilingual schools. Protests and school walkouts began that same year. The Globe (25 November 1912) reported that “about 1,000 young French-Canadians” rallied against Regulation 17 the previous day in Ottawa, which was then about 25 percent francophone. The reporter summarized: “It was asserted that the new regulations, particularly No. 17, were contrary to every right, natural and constitutional, possessed by French-Canadians under the [1867] British North America Act, and that their purpose was to Anglicize the children who attended the bilingual schools.”
During the 1914 provincial election campaign, a rally for a Conservative candidate ended abruptly when he was hit by a rotten egg thrown by a protester against Regulation 17. Two years later, mothers formed a chain around Ottawa’s École Guigues to stop police from evicting two teachers who refused to comply with the regulation. Pulling out their long hairpins for self-protection, they managed to keep the cops out. In 1917, Catholic French Canadian parishioners near Windsor revolted when the police tried to enforce the installation of a priest deemed an opponent of bilingual education. Nine were arrested and ten injured, including two women in their 70s. The next year, protesters in Montreal and Quebec City confronted police and the military in anti-conscription demonstrations. Four protesters were killed in Quebec City. These angry rallies showed that Quebec’s francophone population had no desire to fight and die in a war for British imperialism and its Canadian lapdogs.
To complement police repression, government officials responded to the protests against Regulation 17 with patronizing contempt. Declaring that “French-speaking citizens…are noted for their obedience to duly constituted authority,” Premier Whitney added: “those who are exciting prejudices and misrepresenting the situation are counselling the minority to defy the whole authority of the Province of Ontario” (Globe, 9 October 1912).
Part of the basis for this condescending claptrap was the role of the Catholic church, to which nearly the entire French Canadian population belonged. The priests and bishops had long enforced acceptance of francophones’ inferior status under British and English Canadian rule, imposing obedience to authority through fear of excommunication and damnation. But defense of the French language was one of the key pillars that justified the church’s political existence, and French-speaking priests could not defend Regulation 17 without discrediting themselves. So a civil war of sorts erupted in the Ontario Catholic church between its French-speaking leadership and the English-speaking Irish wing. Faced with the raw bigotry of the Protestant Orange Order, which held great sway in the province, the Irish priests largely supported Regulation 17, fearing that all Catholic schools—English as well as French—might be targeted for suppression amid the debate over bilingual education. These debates were argued all the way to the Vatican, where Pope Benedict XV sagely declined to take a side.
Increasingly unenforceable and a nagging source of national and linguistic tensions, Regulation 17 stopped being formally applied in 1927. However it was not rescinded until 1944, and French schools were not officially recognized in Ontario until 1968 while access to them only became a legal right in the 1980s. The battle for francophone rights in Ontario flared up again in the 1990s when the Conservative government of Mike Harris tried to shut down the only French-language teaching hospital in Ontario, Ottawa’s Hôpital Montfort. This led to huge protests, which eventually saved it from closure.
Today, Ontario maintains two school systems, a public and a separate, publicly funded Catholic system. Many French-language schools are tied to the latter and are often older and ill-maintained. As Marxists who advocate the complete separation of church and state, we call for a single, secular public school system with bilingual and where necessary multilingual education. Francophones and other minorities, wherever numbers warrant, should have the same level of access to quality education in the language of their choice as the English-speaking majority.
In Quebec, the hold of the Catholic church was finally broken through the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which saw the emergence of a distinct French-speaking capitalist class. The emergent Québécois bourgeoisie soon began its own drive to assimilate non-francophone minorities, especially immigrants, through restrictive language legislation. Just as we oppose anti-French discrimination in English Canada, we also oppose the restrictive provisions of Quebec’s French-language charter, Law 101, notably in the field of education. At the same time, we recognize that the primary root cause of the linguistic and ethnic divisions within Quebec is the Canadian rulers’ longstanding anti-Quebec chauvinism and hostility toward French language rights.
At around the same time as the battles for French schools in English-dominated Canada, V.I. Lenin, the future leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was tackling the interlinked questions of national and language rights in the multinational tsarist empire, which was dominated by Great Russian chauvinism. In concluding a polemic against Russian liberals who advocated that Russian be made the “official” language, he stated:
“That is why Russian Marxists say that there must be no compulsory official language, that the population must be provided with schools where teaching will be carried on in all the local languages, that a fundamental law must be introduced in the constitution declaring invalid all privileges of any one nation and all violations of the rights of national minorities.”
— “Is a Compulsory Official Language Needed?” (January 1914)
For Lenin, advocacy of the democratic right of all nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to separate, together with opposition to privileges for any nationality or language, was crucial to combating divisions among the workers and uniting them in the fight for socialist revolution.
Canadian Nationalism Rooted in Anti-French Chauvinism
After the Conquest of New France in 1760-63, the British crown was dead set on wiping out any remnants of the French colonies in North America. Between 1755 and 1763, the British deported about 10,000 Acadians from Nova Scotia, with thousands dying on the journey. In Quebec, the British sought to eradicate French education while trying to swamp the French population through immigration from Britain, though the high francophone birthrate proved to be an insuperable obstacle.
A small number of francophone missionaries and coureurs des bois fur traders had arrived in Ontario as early as the 17th century. Later, Quebec’s high birthrate and the scarcity of arable land pushed the French-speaking population further afield in the 1800s and early 1900s. Attempts to colonize new areas within Quebec had limited success, as most of the province essentially sits on hard rock. Many workers seeking jobs ended up in the U.S., northern Ontario and further west. French Canadian nationalists like Henri Bourassa argued that sparsely populated Western Canada should be open to both English and French colonists, but the Anglo rulers begged to differ.
Canada had received quasi-independence from Britain in 1867 under the stewardship of arch-reactionary Tory prime minister Macdonald, a member of the Orange Order. Macdonald’s crushing of the Northwest Rebellion and hanging of Louis Riel ensured that this region would be controlled by the English. (Manitoba had been majority francophone, largely of Métis heritage, when it entered Confederation in 1870.)
The ideology that drove Canada’s ruling elite was epitomized by the phrase “One Language, One Flag, One Country,” associated with D’Alton McCarthy, a Tory MP and Orange Order leader from central Ontario. The importance that the capitalist rulers placed on stopping the spread of French language rights was captured in an early history of the Métis struggle written by Charles P. Mulvaney, a military officer who himself participated in the suppression of the Northwest Rebellion. Mulvaney criticized Macdonald for his intransigence towards the Métis’ desire for the right to own their own farms, but when it came to the demand for language rights, he declared:
“The other demands were purely political, and were introduced by Riel himself in order to found an exclusively French Province in the North-West. To grant this would have been to repeat the lamentable error by which England at the Conquest perpetuated the French language, law, and religion, and established an island of mediaevalism and of alien race in the midst of the spread of English Canadian civilization.”
The History of the North-West Rebellion of 1885 (1885)
Elsewhere in the country, “English only” bigotry targeted Chinese and other immigrants, especially in B.C. [British Columbia]. And of course Native people suffered for generations under the residential school system, which aimed at destroying their identity and making them “Canadian,” including by wiping out their languages.
For Working-Class Unity Against Capitalism!
While the francophone minority suffered the blows of chauvinist policies, they were not simply victims. In the course of the 20th century, many Franco-Ontarians became a key component of the labour movement, notably in the mines of northern Ontario. The Communist Party-led Mine Mill union in the Sudbury area, one of the world’s main nickel-mining centres, had thousands of French Canadian members. In her book, Voices from French Ontario (1982), Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos described how “by the 1950s Mine-Mill local 598, with its 15,000 members, was bigger than most northern Ontario towns and more influential than any other institution in Sudbury—including the Roman Catholic church.” In the words of a francophone Mine-Mill unionist quoted by Arnopoulos: “The church had a rival. The priests didn’t like it, and they decided to find a way to run it out of town.”
The Catholic hierarchy allied with the bosses and right-wing union leaders to drive out Mine Mill in one of the key battles in the anti-Communist purges that sapped the fighting strength of the Canadian labour movement from the late 1940s to the early ’60s. In response, many francophone workers broke with the church. While the northern Ontario mining industry has since been devastated by closures and mass layoffs, workers of francophone origin remain a strong component of the working class in many parts of the country.
In recent decades, overt “English only” bigotry has largely been sidelined, at least at official government levels. But the ethos of “Canadian unity,” with Anglo chauvinism as a necessary corollary, remains at the heart of capitalist Canada. Confronted with the powerful class and other social struggles that shook Quebec in the 1960s and ’70s, the federal government combined cosmetic reform with the fist of repression. Thus, Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who had introduced official bilingualism, sent the army to occupy Quebec and orchestrate the jailing of hundreds of left-wing and nationalist militants in October 1970. And through two referendums on Quebec independence in 1980 and 1995, Liberal-led federal governments resorted to threats, lies and dirty tricks in order to maintain a “united” Canada.
Since the events of a century ago, the national divide between Quebec and English Canada has deepened to the point where it has poisoned prospects for united class struggle against the capitalists. The Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste advocates Quebec independence, recognizing that this would create better conditions for the workers to see that “their” capitalists are class enemies, not allies, and thereby clear the way for struggle against the bosses in each nation. At the same time, we recognize that in the event of Quebec independence, the Canadian ruling class would seek to roll back democratic gains won by French speakers outside Quebec. Moreover, today’s Quebec bourgeois nationalists, who seek to become the exploiters of their “own” working class, are utterly indifferent to the plight of francophones outside Quebec—who are themselves, for misguided though understandable reasons, generally hostile to the idea of an independent Quebec.
In the event of Quebec independence, Marxists would continue to fight for the defense and extension of language rights for linguistic minorities, including immigrants and indigenous people, in both English Canada and Quebec. As an elementary democratic measure, predominantly francophone regions that are geographically adjacent to Quebec (e.g., largely Acadian parts of New Brunswick) should have the right to decide whether to join an independent Quebec or remain within Canada.
Our perspective is the forging of a Marxist vanguard party that would act, in Lenin’s words, as a “tribune of the people,” opposing all instances of chauvinism and oppression in order to unite the working class in the fight for socialist revolution. French-speaking workers in Ontario, New Brunswick and elsewhere will play an important role in this struggle. Down with anti-French chauvinism! Equal language rights for all!