Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hicham el Guerouj, the Moroccan Knight, setting the one mile run world record in 2008.
Funny how things come back to haunt you, or maybe haunt is not just the right word here, but rather a word connoting how you all balled up but I think haunt is probably the right word now that I think of it. I, probably like you were, was over the top in high school about the school teams, especially football and basketball. Many a granite grey, frost-tinged, leaves-changing autumn afternoon I spent (or maybe misspent) yelling myself hoarse cheering on our gridiron goliaths, the North Adamsville Red Raiders, to another victory. Cheering for guys I knew, knew personally, like Bucko, Timmy Terrific, Thundering Tommy, Bullwinkle, Spit (ya, I know), Lenny, and Slam (ditto Spit).
Oh sure, I was interested in the big issues of the day too. I could, and did, quote chapter and verse on why we should have nuclear disarmament, why Red China (ya, it has been a while) should be in the United Nations, and why black people should have the right to vote down South. The big literary issue too like who was the “max daddy” of the books scene between the wars (oops, I better say between World War I and II so you know which wars I am talking about), Hemingway of Fitzgerald? (Hemingway). And, of course, the big, big questions like the meaning of existence, the nature of mortality, and how human civilization can progress. But on any given fall Saturday those issue, those big weekday issues, were like tissue in the wind when the question of third down and six, pass or run, held the world on its axis.
Those guys, those brawny guys, who held our humbles fates, our spiritual fates in their hands if you must know because many of us took the occasional defeats just slightly less hard than the teams, deserved plenty of attention and applause, no question. But today I don’t want to speak of them, but of those kindred in the lesser sports, specifically my own high school sports, cross country, winter track and spring track. Running, running in shorts, in all seasons to be exact. I will mention my own checkered career only in passing here. It will be filled out more below, although I can tell you right do not hold your breathe waiting for thundering hoofed grand exploits, and Greek mystical night olive branch glory.
What I aim to do though is give, or rather get, some long overdue recognition for the outstanding runner of my high school days, Billy Brady, and arguably the best all-around trackman of the era, the era of the “geek” runner, the runner scorned and abused by motorist and pedestrian alike, before the avalanche of honors fell to any half-baked runner when “running for your life” later had some cache. Christ, even the guys, and it was all guys then, on the just so-so billiards team got more school recognition, and more importantly, girl recognition than track guys, and their king hell on no wheels champion Brady. Hell, even I went over to Joe’s Billiard Parlor (although everybody, let’s face it, knew the place was nothing but a glorified pool hall and that Joe was “connected” connected bookie connected, but the less said the better about that just in case) on Billings Road when the team had competitions. Do you think I was there to bleed raider red for them? Be serious. It was nothing but the boffo, beehive-haired, Capri-pants-wearing, cashmere sweater-wearing, tight sweater-wearing, by the way, honeys (yes, honeys) who draped the tables not being used that drove me there. So there you have it.
Needless to say no such fanfare tarnished our lonely pursuits, our lonely, desolate, hand-on pursuits, running out in all weathers. Even the girl scorer was nothing but a girlfriend of one of the shot-putters, and she served only because no other girl would do it, and she loved her shot-putter. So there again. Here is how bad it was- a true story I swear. I spent considerable time talking up to one female fellow classmate whom I noticed was looking my way one day. That went on for a while and we got friendly. One day she asked me if I played any sports and so I used this opening to pad up my various meager exploits figuring that would impress her. Her response- “Oh, do they have a track team here?” Enough said, right? Yes sad indeed, but so that such an injustice will not follow Billy Brady’s very not needing padding exploits to eternity I, a while back, determined to pursue a campaign to get him recognition in the North Adamsville Sports Hall of Fame. To that end I wrote up the following simple plea for justice, the superbly reasoned argument for Mr. Brady’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame:
Why is the great 1960s cross country and track runner, Billy Brady, not in the North Adamsville Sports Hall Of Fame?
“Okay, Okay I am a “homer” (or to be more contemporary, a “homeboy”) on this question. In the interest of full disclosure the fleet-footed Mr. Brady and I have known each other since the mist of time. We go all the way back to being schoolmates down at Adamsville South Elementary School in the old town’s housing project, the notorious G-town projects that devoured many a boy, including my two brothers and almost, within an inch, got me. We survived that experience and lived to tell the tale. What I want to discuss today though is the fact that this tenuous road warrior's accomplishments, as a cross-country runner and trackman (both indoors and out), have never been truly recognized by the North Adamsville High School sports community. (For those who still have their dusty, faded yearbooks see page 63 for a youthful photograph of the “splendid speedster” in full racing regalia.).
And what were those accomplishments? Starting as a wiry, but determined, sophomore Billy began to make his mark as a harrier beating seniors, top men from other teams on occasion, and other mere mortals. Junior year he began to stake out his claim on the path to Olympus by winning road races on a regular basis. In his senior year Bill broke many cross-country course records, including a very fast time on the storied North Adamsville course. A time, by the way, that held up as the record for many years afterward. Moreover, in winter track that senior year Bill was the State Class B 1000-yard champion, pulling out a heart-stopping victory. His anchor of the decisive relay in a duel meet against Somerville's highly-touted state sprint champion is the stuff of legends.
Bill also qualified to run with the “big boys” at the fabled schoolboy National Indoor Championships at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His outdoor track seasons speak for themselves. I will not detain you here with the grandeur of his efforts, for I would be merely repetitive. Needless to say, he was captain of all three teams in his senior year. No one questioned the aptness of those decisions.
Bill and I have just recently re-united, the details which need not detain us here, after some thirty years. After finding him, one of the first things that I commented on during one of our “bull sessions” was that he was really about ten years before his time. In the 1960s runners were “geeks.” You know-the guys (and then it was mainly guys, girls were too “fragile” to run more than about eight yards, or else had no time to take from their busy schedule of cooking, cleaning, and, and looking beautiful, for such strenuous activities. Won’t the boys be surprised, very surprised, and in the not too distant 1970s future when they are, are passed by…fast girls of a different kind) who ran in shorts on the roads and mainly got honked at, yelled at, and threatened with mayhem by irate motorists. And the pedestrians were worst, throwing an occasional body block at runners coming down the sidewalk outside of school. And that was the girls, those “fragile” girls of blessed memory. The boys shouted out catcalls, whistles, and trash talk about maleness, male unworthiness, and their standards for it that did not include what you were doing. Admit it. That is what you thought, and maybe did, then too.
In the 1970's and 1980's runners (of both sexes) became living gods and goddesses to a significant segment of the population. Money, school scholarships, endorsements, soft-touch “self-help” clinics, you name it. Then you were more than willing to “share the road with a runner.” Friendly waves, crazed schoolgirl-like hanging around locker rooms for the autograph of some 10,000 meter champion whose name you couldn’t pronounce, crazed school boy-like droolings when some foxy woman runner with a tee-shirt that said “if you can catch me, you can have me” passed you by on the fly, and shrieking automobile stops to let, who knows, maybe the next Olympic champion, do his or her stuff in the road. Admit that too.
And as the religion spread you, suddenly hitting thirty-something, went crazy for fitness stuff, especially after Bobby, Sue, Millie, and some friend’s grandmother hit the sidewalks looking trim and fit. And that friend’s grandma beating you, beating you bad, that first time out only added fuel to the fire. And even if you didn’t get out on the roads yourself you loaded up with your spiffy designer jogging attire, one for each day, and high-tech footwear. Jesus, what new aerodynamically-styled, what guaranteed to take thirteen seconds off your average mile time, what color coordinated, well- padded sneaker you wouldn’t try, and relegate to the back closet. But it was better if you ran. And you did for a while. I saw you, and Billy did too. You ran Adamsville Beach, Castle Island, the Charles River, Falmouth, LaJolla, and Golden Gate Park. Wherever. Until the old knees gave out, or the hips, or some such combination war story stuff. That is a story for another day. But see, by then though, Bill had missed his time.
Now there is no question that a legendary football player like Thundering Tommy Riley from our class should be, and I assume is, in the North Adamsville Sports Hall of Fame. On many a granite gray autumn afternoon old "Thundering Tommy" thrilled us with his gridiron prowess running over opponents at will. But on other days, as the sun went down highlighting the brightly-colored falling leaves, did you see that skinny kid running down East Squantum Street toward Adamsville Beach for another five mile jaunt? No, I did not think so. I have now, frankly, run out of my store of sports spiel in making my case. Know this though; friendship aside, Bill belongs in the Hall. That said, what about making a place in the Hall for the kid with the silky stride who worked his heart out, rain or shine, not only for his own glory but North's. Join me. Let's "storm heaven" on this one.
March 22, 2010
*********
Markin comment, April 10, 2010:
I really do want to solely talk about the subject matter described in the headline and that I have forcefully argued for above but apparently in this confessional age, an age when anyone with the most rudimentary cyberspace skills can feel free to sabotage even the most innocent project, the simple task of getting track legend Billy Brady into the North Adamsville Sports Hall Of Fame, I feel compelled to answer, generally, some of the already crazed responses received from old time North Adamsville alumni before proceeding.
*****
What kind of madness have I unleashed? What kinds of monsters have I let loose? Recently, as a simple act of friendship, I wrote a commentary in this space arguing that my old friend and classmate from 1964, Bill Brady, should be inducted into the North Adamsville High School Sports Hall of Fame. Now my e-mail message center is clogged with requests from every dingbat with some kind of special pleading on his or her mind. A few examples should suffice, although as a matter of conscience (mine) they shall remain nameless.
One request argued for my writing up something in recognition of his finishing 23rd in the Senior Division of the North Adamsville Fourth of July Fun Run. Well, what of it? Move on, brother, and move faster. Another, arguing for inclusion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, touted her near perfect imitation of Mick Jagger on Gimme Shelter. Please!! A third sought a testimonial from me for an employment opportunity, including a resume that made me truly wonder where she had been all these years. Here is my favorite. A fellow classmate wants me to get in on the ground floor, as a financial backer of course, for his idea of putting the ubiquitous teenage cell phone use and the Internet together. Hello! Jack (oops, I forgot, no names) I believe they call that Sidekick, or some such thing. And so it goes.
Listen up- I hear Facebook and YouTube calling all and sundry such untapped talents. Please leave this space for serious business. You know this writer's musings on the meaning of existence, the lessons of history, and the struggle against mortality. That said, at the moment that serious business entails getting the gracefully-gaited speed merchant, Mr. Brady, his shot at immortality by induction into the Sports Hall of Fame. Let us keep our eyes on the prize here. Join me in that effort. Enough said.
**********
Markin comment, April 14, 2010:
And yet what could one make of this twisted saga, other that something, in the water in old North Adamsville, from this unknown fellow townie:
Apparently being Billy Brady’s friend since the “dog days” of Adamsville South Elementary School down in the "projects" is not enough. Recently, strictly as a sign of that friendship, I argued the merits of his case for entry into the North Adamsville High School Sports Hall of Fame. Now it seems that I am to be eternal "flak," you know, "press agent," "spin doctor,” "gofer," or "stooge" for every wannabe “sports figure” who ever donned the raider red garb in any sport, at anytime. Isn't there some kind of constitutional provision against indentured servitude? Here is why I ask that question:
I feel, after an extended e-mail from Brian Kenney, North Adamsville Class of 1965, a man unknown to me unless my memory is more befogged that unusual, now “duty-bound” to announce the latest 'newsworthy note' about this, according to his resume, silky-striding, fleet-footed, fast moving tennis player from the Class of 1965. He wants, as a matter of due, apparently, a full course Bill Brady treatment by me on his behalf as another lonely and neglected “athlete.”
Brother Brian, as part of that projected relentless campaign has upgraded his photograph on his class profile page. Ya, I know, for starters, hold the presses, right? Earlier this year he stated that had placed his Commonwealth of Massachusetts driver's license on his class site for your inspection. (For those who did not get a chance to see the picture I have not made this up. I really don't have that kind of imagination.) As one would expect of such a photo, Brother Brian, of course, looked like he had just finished a long stretch in Cedar Junction State Prison (Walpole, for those who have been out of the area for a while). And maybe he had, and just “forgot” to include that in his rather extensive e-mailed resume. Christ, Brian those driver’s ID photos would make the Madonna look like an axe murderess. What did you expect?
In any case Mr. Kenney has rectified that situation with a new downloaded photo on his profile page. As to the photo itself, and his pose, there is a method to the madness. Brother Brian insists that one and all should know that he is no longer that slender and svelte tennis player of 135 pounds of his misbegotten youth. Like we could not figure that out for a quick peep, right? He mentioned, in passing, that now people who did not know that he was on the boys’ tennis team will think that he was a maybe a bleeding raider red football player. In short, a person not to be messed around with, a person one would not dream, in a thousand night dreams of throwing sand in his face like in the old tennis days. Nice, right? And so it goes. Good luck brother but I swear I do not know you, and while I wish you luck, my eyes are on the Brady prize. And so it goes.
Markin comment, June 23, 2010:
Below is the traffic on this Billy Brady question, mainly unedited, from an old track guy duffer, Clarence “Shaker” Boren, Class of 1957, that at least has the virtue of being on the subject at hand, mainly, and includes, where necessary, my response:
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, April 16, 2010:
Hi, Markin-Good post for us old-timers-I agree that "back in the day" the cross country, winter track and spring track athletes were usually the "forgotten ones," “los olvidados,” as we say out here in San Jose (New Mexico, not California) where I have lived in splendid and sunny retirement the past several years. Although maybe “batos locos” is more like it. You know, crazy, crazy as a loon, for running around in all weathers with just shorts and a white tee-shirt on, and funny black sneakers, or black spiked track shoes that looked like regular shoes, regular Thom McAn shoes, except they has spikes in them. Funny looking then anyway when tennis sneakers, white tennis sneakers (for girls) and black Converses (for guys), were cool and track shoes, with or without spikes were not, definitely not. ********
Markin reply, April 18, 2010
Jesus, I remember those “uniforms”, black shorts always too big or too small so that they either cut off your circulation, you know where, or practically came down to your knees. Half the time I ran in my white gym shorts, well kind of white by the race time after taking a beating all week in gym and on the roads. They probably could have run the race without me sometimes. And the brazen singlet tee-shirt that draped off your shoulder and made you look like some alluring old time female movie star like Veronica Lake, or Rita Hayworth. No wonder guys, and girls too now that I think of it, kind of steered clear of us like maybe we were contagious. What you would do to get a “uniform,” and here my memory is clearest, is at the start of the season rummage through this big old cardboard box in Coach Jenner’s class room, a box filled with about twenty years worth of discarded shorts and shirts, in all conditions except new, and try to get a fit, as close as you could. I think the track budget must have been all of fourteen dollars then, maybe less, but certainly not more.
The shoes, oh the shoes. Well, we were not too bad off for cross country and indoor track (at the armories anyway) because we could wear those old thick rubber-heeled black-striped track shoes that we would get up at Snyder’s in Adamsville Square. And get them cheap because the school has some kind of deal with that store if you brought in a note from the coach. Every fall, starting with freshman year, at the beginning of school there was always the annual trek up there to get my pair. A pair would last both seasons, no problem. Of course those low-tech days shoes, those hard-pounding, asphalt-bending shoes are, probably, at least partially responsible for our later hip and knee replacement worthiness. But the spiked spring track shoes were something else. Again we would rummage through some cardboard box for a pair that both matched (not always the case) and were within a couple of sizes of your actual foot measurement. They were mostly black and looked like shoes your grandmother might have worn, or like Jesse Owens’ if you have every seen a picture of the pair that he might have worn back in the 1930s. And then, if you did find that elusive matched pair, have to hit the coach up for spikes, if he had them. I do remember more than once, if memory doesn’t fail, having to share spiked shoes with other track team members. Ouch!
***********
Shaker Boren , Class of 1957, April 20, 2010:
…It may have been in part because those sports [referring to cross country, indoor and outdoor track] were not considered "team sports" like football, basketball, baseball, hockey, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, gymnastics, golf, squash, swimming, tennis, billiards, badminton, volleyball, ping pong, table tennis, darts, and bowling (did I forget any? And I forget, was billiards a team sport then, I included it anyway) since other than the relays (4X440 and 4Xmile, outdoors) each individual ran or did a field event on his own hook, the 100, 220, 440, 880, mile, two mile, shot put, discus, javelin, high jump broad jump, triple jump, pole vault and the hurdles, high, low and intermediate. (All measured in the English system then: inches, feet, yards, miles, not the metric system, millimeters, centimeters, meters and kilometers, kilograms, and so on). I don’t think anybody, officially anyway, did the decathlon (100, 440, mile, 110 high hurdles, broad jump, high jump, shot put, discus, javelin, pole vault). I don’t think anyone did the hammer throw either. About the only way a track athlete (cross country, winter or spring track, runner or field man) would be recognized would be if he were a star in at least one of the team sports, the big team sports like football, basketball and baseball not billiards and bowling or those other lesser team sports, except maybe soccer.
Markin reply, April 21, 2010:
…I, by the way, as you seemingly endlessly rattled them off, pretty much remembered the various sports offered at North, although like you I am not sure whether billiards was a team sport or not. All I know is that after the football guys, naturally, in a time when we lived and breathed raider red every granite grey-skied fall Saturday, home or away, the billiard guys always seemed to have the pick of the best looking girls. I would go over to Joe’s Billiard Parlor on non-running days just to check out the girls hanging around, hanging around looking, well, looking very interesting. But let us keep that between us, okay. I, in any case, never took up billiards. Did you? I can’t believe though that I forgot the badminton team, mixed boys and girls. Christ, they were state Class B champions three years in a row during my North time, or maybe twice champs and once co-champs. Thanks for the reminder. I know that we are getting older but I do not think that darts was a recognized team inter-mural sport. I do know that it was an intra-mural sport and that every spring there would be a championship, and every spring my ragamuffin gang that couldn’t shoot straight team would lose in the first round, and lose badly, but I thought that was strictly part of gym class.
I also, since I did cross country and track for all four years at North, pretty much remembered the various events that composed the track programs, indoor and out except, I think that the indoor hurdles, while high, were 45 yards. I also remembered that the events used the English system of measurement and not the metric system then. Although, as you know, the old home town track was actually five laps to the mile so that meant two and one half laps for the 880, and so on. I don’t know what they would be in the metric system. Anyway, the five lap system didn’t help when we went to “real” tracks for pacing purposes.
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, April 23, 2010:
[In response to an off-hand Markin question about his running career story]… My "running career" at North was only in sophomore, junior and senior years, and was not continuous. As I mentioned before, my 9th grade English teacher Dave Mooney was the reason I considered running. At the beginning of the 10th grade (1954), he called a few of us to his classroom to see if we might be interested in cross country. I took the chance and ended up as the 5th, 6th or 7th kid in most meets that season. That gave me enough to barely get a letter. I didn't compete in the 1954-55 indoor season; because I didn't know it existed. I started 1955 spring track and got as far as running the 880 in the first meet. Sadly, I ran the race with the start of a case of the mumps and ended up missing the rest of the season.
I began working nights at a variety store on Billings Road the summer of 1955 and didn't go out for cross country that year. Then a friend, Ron Kiley, convinced me to try out for winter track in the 1955-56 season. We started running the 1000 and even ran in the State Meet at the old Boston Garden. I was near the end of that race. Running on a 10 or 11 lap board track for the first time was scary. In any given race, Ron was ahead of me, because he was faster and had a good "kick" at the end. If he was 1st, I was 2nd. If he was 2nd, I was 3rd, and so on. Coach Jenner switched me to the mile just past mid-season. I still didn't win a race, but came in second once to Natick's 1000 yd. State Champion. Jenner even tried to get me to break 5:00 during practice around the circle in front of the school. He put 2 or 3 guys who normally ran the 600 to act as "rabbits," but the best I could do was 5:01.5. Somebody later said the mile wasn't measured right around the circle, but I never knew if it was short or long. I did manage a letter for that season. Somewhere in there coach Mooney had a heart attack and I didn't go out for spring track in 1956.
I started cross country in the fall of 1956 with Coach Jenner. We had a bunch of good young distance runners that year, so I was put on the "junior varsity" team, which ran a shorter course. We even ran up and down Hemmings Avenue at the edge of North Adamsville to get some hill practice, and also ran out to Coach Jenner’s house in South Adamsville where he served refreshments. I barely made it to mid season when I decided to leave the team. I started the 1956-57 winter track season. Then in January I chopped off part of my right index finger slicing bologna where I worked nights. So much for my senior winter track season. Then came spring track again. That time I tried to give it "my all." We held a "Junior Olympics" in which all competed in all track and field events. I was one of a very few who actually did compete in all events even though I still had my arm bandaged from the January accident. Those who competed in everything were given new uniforms and shoes. I think I was near the top in the overall competition, but probably because I did try all events, though the results were far from spectacular. I ran the 880 all season with Ron Kiley again just ahead of me. The most fun race was the last one against arch-rival Adamsville High at Memorial Stadium. Coach Mooney was back and for some reason put Ron in the mile. He also switched Slim Baldwin and Slacker Russ Tandberg to the 880. Jim was a good all-round athlete who also played football and basketball. Russ was a good all-round runner. I thought, "Oh, boy, a chance to win a race." We swept the 880 with Russ 1st, Jim 2nd and me 3rd. I was a bit disappointed, but was ecstatic over our sweeping the race. I thought we had won that meet, but Ron didn't think so. Oh, well. At least my last meet was fun and I again managed to get a letter. Memories that made the rest of life in those days bearable.
Regards, Shaker
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, April 22, 2010
…[ in response to a question about what got him running from Markin] I probably never would have participated in track at all if it hadn't been for my 9th grade English teacher, Mr. Mooney. See, he was crazy for literature, and made us crazy for it too, so when I found out that he was the track coach I figured I’d try out just be able to ask him questions about Shakespeare, Hemingway, Hardy, and Flannery O’Connor who I was crazy for after reading the short story, Wise Blood. Jesus, Mr. Mooney knew his literature, and poetry too come to think of it. Especially the magical mad man William Blake, Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, T.S Eliot, W.H. Auden, and William Butler Yeats, naturally, because of the Irish thing. Not much new “beat” stuff though, like Allen Ginsberg with his huge up-front homo fag references and doings and swearing, no howling it, in about every line. That was not to Coach Mooney’s tastes, maybe because he was an old guy and that just didn’t appeal to him. I found out more about it later in college, and read it too.
Markin reply, April 23, 2011
I’m glad you brought up literature because I was crazy for it too in ninth grade, although I did not have Mr. Mooney but Mr. Larkin. I guess they must have both been crazy for William Butler Yeats because Mr. Larkin made us memorize his Easter 1916 in the Spring of 1961 because of his Yeats’ Irishness (even if it was Anglo-Irish, meaning in those days, Protestant Irish, and maybe just maybe not really Irish but I have since learned better). Mr. Larkin sure could make a story jump off the page when he read in that deep bass voice of his and then discussed with us what he had read to us. And asked us questions, hard questions. That’s where Wise Blood came in but also Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and lots of poetry like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (I loved that name). Like Mooney, no way was Larkin going to tout Allen Ginsberg to a bunch of high school kids although I read his Howl, through the Harvard Square grapevine poetry network that filled every coffeehouse there in the early 1960s. If I remember the names of other books and poems I’ll let you know. What else did you guys read?
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, April 24, 2010:
…. [Continuing on with his reasons for taking up running] And I’d also figured that I would be able to stay in shape for the summer beach job as a lifeguard I was promised by running, as well. (That job didn’t pan out because I had cut my hand doing something, cut it badly, and it hadn’t healed in time so I couldn’t swim up to the regulation speed or lift anybody, except maybe little kids.) For him thinking I could run, Mr. Mooney that is, I guess that he thought my being just over 6 ft. tall and just under 150 lbs. I had a possibility of being a distance runner because most distance runners then, and now too, were tall and thin. He did answer a lot of my questions about literature even though his tall and thin theory was probably wrong. In other words you could be, like me tall, thin, and slow too.
Markin reply, April 25, 2010:
As for why I ran. I don’t know really except one thing for sure- to get out of the house, to blow off steam when my mother, mother and father, my mother and father and brothers, mix and match the combinations, got on my nerves about, well, about kid’s stuff really when you think about it now. Starting from getting a job (basically why didn’t I to help out) to why are you hanging around with the corner boys at Harry’s Variety over on Sagamore Street so much you are going to only get in trouble to why do you need money for this, that, and the other thing since you don’t work and are only going to spent it on some girl, some girl who is just using you (that from mother, usually, read Freudian implications at your peril though). See, really kid’s stuff. But real enough then, starting in middle school, enough to get me out of the house with my long black chino pants (cuffed, as was my odd-ball, off-the-wall fashionista statement then) since I didn’t have shorts, or didn’t like to wear them, or something like that, a white tee shirt and some kind of sneakers, maybe Chuck Taylor’s, and just run over to the oval in front of the high school, run the oval a few times, and I would feel better. So put it down as therapy if you want. To get out of my kid head, and cool out.
That and to play sports, or rather play a sport. Unlike you I was not tall and thin though. But probably like you, if talking to other guys who ran track (not field event guys because they usually were football players or other rugged sports-types) was any indication, it was because no way, no way in hell, was I big enough, brawny enough, physically tough enough or plain old-fashioned coordinated enough, mainly the latter, to play team sports like football, basketball, or baseball. And like I said I was never into billiards (or volleyball or badminton, and the like) so there you have it. The one, sour, lonely attempt at football was in seventh grade when I was a center, a ninety-eight pound center, who go to play in one game (a game that we were far out of reach as for winning), for about three plays and was manhandled, no kid-handled like some kind of dish rag by the one hundred and fifty pound guys on the opposite side. Enough said.
Running was thus the only other option. Now I mentioned that not playing billiards (and the others) idea for a reason. Tell me if I am wrong but part of playing sports, any sport it seemed, or at least it seemed at the time was about using athletic prowess to act as a magnet for the, umm, girls. And it worked, worked big time for the…football players who had more chicks around them than they could shake sticks at, if they were so inclined. Or, like I said before, those damn billiard players who had babes hanging off the rafters. Runners though, and field event guys too unless they were football players got nada, zilch, zero. I already told you about the response of that girl I was trying to chat up –no dice. I also don’t think the running teams collectively got more than one sentence in the daily P.A. end of the day notices. Maybe less. So like I said it was for the joy of running, of being at one with ancient Greek Olympus spirits, of being at one with the ancient marathon men, the ancient wind runners, and nothing as crass and crude as trying to do it in order to be a magnet for babes.
Regards, Markin
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, April 30, 2010
… [continuing his spic saga of his high school running career which has probably by now taken him more time that the combined time it took him to run all his races in high school] Coach Jenner was the winter track coach and got me to try the mile after being in a few 1000 yd. races in the old Metropolitan Indoor Track League over at the Newton Street Armory in Boston. That was where I first saw black kids running, running like the wind some of them, and others slow like me. But those fast guys were great to watch. I was not so good in that indoor stuff, however, because I couldn’t get the hang of “elbowing” other runners around those tight corners. See, an indoor track is smaller, maybe ten or eleven laps to the mile, and the events are different, the running events anyway, 50, 300, 600, mile, two mile, 55 high hurdles, shot put, high jump, and relays. So a lot shorter program with less choices for events. What I remember most of all from those days was that we always seemed to enjoy ourselves and had a lot of laughs, regardless of a meet's outcome. Although I do not know if Coach Mooney or Coach Jenner saw it the same way, or if their jobs depended on winning or stuff like that. Then maybe we wouldn’t have laughed so much, especially on the bus back to school after losing.
I have often wondered if anyone kept track of North's cross country and track meets over the years. Winter track competitions were not always held indoors. During the 1956-57 winter track season we had a meet against Weymouth which had an outdoor slightly elevated board track. We even had to walk through about 8 inches of snow to get to the track. Those were the days. Take care, and keep it country.
Regards, Shaker
******
Markin response, May 2, 2010:
Shaker- Thanks for the latest attached material and note and all the good information about the years just before Billy and I ran at North. When I get a few hours, or more, I will read it through more closely. Much of the material, at first glance, was unfamiliar to me, especially about the guys who were the third or fourth best runners or field men on a team in the different events in the Metropolitan Track League. It was nice to see that you have remembered those in our era who also tended to be also-rans like us. Most of the names of the coaches, other than North Adamsville’s coaches Mooney and Jenner, were unfamiliar to me as were the locales and conditions of the various track facilities, indoor and out in the Greater Boston area. This seems like a massive task, and apparently you have some time on your hands to compile it. Or was it part of a doctoral dissertation, or something?
I do see in the blizzard of data sent that you guys ran at the same armory (Newton Street) for winter track as we did a few years later. I know what you mean about that elbowing problem because I could never get the hang of it either. I would either get too far inside and get “boxed” in or, if I laid back to avoid the box I would get too far back to be able to get back in contact with the lead runners and would have to run like crazy at the finish. I did have a fast finish, although it was not enough many times, too many times.
The situation was even worst on that outdoor Weymouth track that you mentioned. The oval was smaller, maybe thirteen or fourteen lap to the mile, and so you also got dizzy running it. And always, always, always it would be about seven below zero out when we had the meet because it was usually in January before the Met League got under way. I never ran well there because of the frostbite on my feet, the failure to bring snowshoes, and/or I would get “shuffled off to Buffalo (my expression)” on those hairpin turns. Once I got run off the track on a turn but you probably know all about that. As bad as the Newton Street Armory was it was better than that.
The worst shuffling (although not always to Buffalo) though was in ninth grade in the 600 yard dash that was the only event available for ninth graders then. Every kid, every ninth grade kid who wanted to run had to run in that one event (or maybe they divided in two sections, but either way it was massed chaos like the start of the Boston Marathon these days-for the also-rans) and sprint, sprint like mad for the first corner. That, most of the time, determined how you would do because as you know the 600 is a short, fast race that does not allow much room for error since it was only in a little over a minute, and some change.
Markin response, May 3, 2010:
…A couple of points for your information [in response to Shaker’s unsolicited, earlier in the day detailed chronology of his life immediately after high school which included service in the U.S. Navy where his ran unattached in Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)-sponsored events]. It is amazing how many good runners, not just average or below average runners like us right after high school, for a number of reasons, also joined the Navy or some branch of the military. That was kind of the point behind my comment about Bill Brady being somewhat before his time as a great runner in one of our “bull sessions.” Nobody from colleges, and places like that, was offering track guys, good track guys, much of anything in those days, especially guys who were not already on the way to college anyway and track prowess was the clincher for acceptance at say, Villanova or New York University, so the military was the escape route from a tough home situation. A few guys told me their stories and from what I can gather they had rougher home situations than mine, and mine was just the ordinary garden variety hell. Unfortunately that garden variety hell was kids’ stuff, pure kids’ stuff, compared to the impeding escalation the war in Vietnam that was staring them deadass in the face when they enlisted.
By the way looking at the meet results you sent me with your attachment my career in track and cross country seems to have paralleled yours. A few good races but mainly "the slows." I got letters in all three sports but some of them, frankly, were gifts. My best year in cross country was probably in 11th grade. Indoor and outdoor track were not memorable. Like I told you I started running in the 9th grade (actually in eight grade for fun- and to get out of the house) and thought I was going to be a star. As I pointed out in another thing I wrote "A Walk Down Dream Street" so much for some dreams. The reason I ran, at least thinking back on it, and like I mentioned before, was because I was not, and am not now, good at team sports, like baseball or volleyball, yet I wanted to do some physical activity. Such is life.
Markin response May 4, 2010;
… [in response to Shaker’s observations about the lack of college opportunities in those days for academically-challenged track runners compared to today and whether that affected their performances-Markin] I saw many, many great runner who really had the silky stride and the determination to go for it. I know guys that ran the beaches, the sand dune beaches of New England, mainly down the Cape [Cod] in the early morning summers. I would do some such running but these guys were driven to go farther and harder. With added coaching and some encouragement they could have reached for the stars. Remember that many of the best runners ran for running clubs, like the Los Angeles Striders and Grand Street Track Club (New York City). What a waste of human capital.
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, May 6, 2010
[… In response to Markin’s question about his take on Coach Jenner’s coaching techniques, or lack of them]. You have mentioned that Coach Jenner just seemed to be "doing his time" while you were at North Adamsville. I first became acquainted with him when I went out for winter track for the 1955-56 season. I was told that he was teaching at one of the junior high schools while coaching winter track at North. I never had any difficulties in my dealings with him. Maybe my expectations weren't very high, because my "running talent" was somewhat limited.
He did seem to pay a bit more attention to those of us who needed more guidance and let the more talented kids just "do their thing." He did seem to want to get the most out of the talent he had "for the good of the team" and may have rubbed a few egos the wrong way. He, like coach Mooney, may not have been perfect, but I felt they both were fairly sympathetic to the weaknesses of all of us. In 1955-56 Coach Jenner was probably around 50 years old, so by the time you guys dealt with him, he was closing in on 60. His seeming to be just "doing his time" may have been due to other causes outside of school and coaching.
Who knows? Teachers and coaches are more-or-less human, too. We had a few who may have been a bit on the "nutty side" or may have had problems with booze or at home. Adolescents, as in most eras, don't really understand adults and vice versa. Sometimes it might just be a lack of "chemistry" between pupil/athlete and teacher/coach. Life isn't always "fair" and some of us may not be as flexible or adaptable as we could be.
Anyway, I saw Jenner as a decent coach and we may have actually won a few meets with him. We had one runner who was Class "C" State Champion for the 300 yd. dash (George Dolan) one year and later ran for the four years he was at Brandeis University. He told me that in those four years Brandeis didn't win a track meet, but he did end up in their Hall of Fame. However, it is good that you are campaigning for your friend’s being recognized. It is time to recognize the "marginal sports," including those of the past. I have tried to keep up with track at North, but it's not easy from San Jose. I even sent a message to the Adamsville Gazette a couple years ago asking about high school sports, but they said they were not allotted enough space to cover everything. As I said, life is not always fair and we may not always get what we want when we want it. I constantly tell my 9 year old grandson that he should not let frustration cause him to give up on anything.
Regards Shaker in San Jose
P.S. While touring the old school last year, I asked a guy who seemed to be a teacher or coach why there was little or no recognition for some of the sports teams after 1992, which seemed to have been a banner year. His answer was brief; "Budget."
Markin response to Shaker, May 12, 2010
Shaker- Thanks for your take on Coach Jenner. It certainly was true that he tended to cater to the better athletes but he left the rest of us to dangle in the wind in my time. But at this remove that is just so much water under the bridge or over the dam, take your pick. I know from my own observations since that time that some high school coaches take on the job as a source of extra income as much as to fulfill a desire to coach. That probably was true, or truer, in the old days when teachers' wages were very poor indeed. That is not the problem that I was trying to address though. What was the problem, as far as Bill was concerned, was that in him Jenner could have had that one extraordinary athlete of a coaching career. And he, frankly, blew it. But like I say, let’s leave sleeping dogs lie.
On another matter, a matter of the utmost historical importance I have a question. Did you guys run your practices and official track meets over in the old "dust bowl" off of Hollis Ave near the North Adamsville Middle School, a place where the football team also practiced in the fall? More importantly, did anyone come out alive?
Regards, Markin
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, May 19, 2010:
… I think the "dust bowl" you refer to is still called Hollis Field. The first time I ever set foot on that track was our first or second practice for cross country in the fall of 1954. We started by jogging 5 laps (1 mile) and the legs were hurting for a week, since I had never really run more than a few yards before that. Then there was spring track in 1955 when I ran my first 880. The mumps prevented me from finishing my first season of track. It may have been that same spring pre-season when I tripped over a teammate's heel and fell. I suffered a pretty bad scrape, but I got up and finished the 220 without looking at the wound. It was just practice, and most were trying all events to see where we would fit in on the team. Coach Mooney cleaned up the scrape the best he could with his first aid box. The bleeding soon stopped and I still have a couple cinder chips in my left knee.
Anyway, we did have our home track meets at Hollis Field. I don't remember it as being that "dusty," but it was far from being a good track facility. There were bleachers on both sides of the field, but never many spectators. The 5-lap track made it difficult for me when I had to run on a 4-lap (440 yd./400 meter) track. Most of us still had fun at Hollis in spite of its failings. Where does North hold its home meets these days? Most tracks these days appear to have a rubberized asphalt surface instead of the old cinder/dirt. I never have run on such a track. My only running after high school was for the Navy right after high school as an unattached AAU runner, or now an occasional jog around the neighborhood. I tried to get to the Hollis Field in 2007, but was confused by the way they have one-way streets around it. It was easier when we walked from the school to the field "back in the day."
Regards, Shaker
Markin in response, May 24, 2010:
Shaker, thank you for your memory of the "dust bowl." I know, from a trip over to the old oval last year, that Cavanaugh was its real name. Strangely, after not having seen it for something over forty years it was basically the same. A little better surface on the track (although not much). They had taken out, and not replaced, the old wooden bleachers that were there in 1964.
Now for my "dust bowl" war story. This saga takes place during the spring track season in the seventh grade, which would be in 1959, when I competed for the newly-minted North Adamsville Junior High School (now Middle School). If you recall the dash was about one hundred yards and was in those middle school years the longest race junior runners could run. I assume, like with young girls and older women for an even longer period then, that the running gurus of the time, the august Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) probably thought that any greater stress than about eight yards would give us heart palpitations, or something. In any case, as I have mentioned before, I had the "slows" which were not so bad in longer races which required more stamina than speed but which would leave me in the dust in so short a race. Nevertheless I was determined to try it. Naturally, also being somewhat teenager clumsy I fell down, or was tripped, after the start of a dash. I took “cinders,” as you mentioned in your comment. Last year I had a knee replacement operation and noticed that the cinders were still there. I believe that I should get a "purple heart" and maybe a veteran’s pension or something, right? Do you have a "cinder" story?
Regards, Markin
Shaker Boren, Class of 1957, May 26, 2010:
That's what's good about getting more people involved in these message swaps. I stand corrected concerning the name of the old "dust bowl." Cavanaugh Stadium does ring a bell. Have they put that rubberized asphalt on the track?
I just remembered another incident that could have been fatal to one of our track team mates about the spring of 1957. The team's javelin throwers were practicing one day and one of the other guys took it upon himself to throw the javelin back to them from the other end of the field after each toss. The "returner" was waiting for one of their tosses when it seemed something off the field distracted him. The javelin grazed one of that "returner's" eyebrows, nicking him slightly. Talk about lucky. Another centimeter and the thing would have lodged in his eye socket and probably killed him. He didn't say much for a few minutes and had a very surprised expression on his face. I ran into that guy at our 50th reunion last year and asked if he remembered the incident. He laughed and said, "Oh, yeah. I haven't been the same since." He was another of our good all-round athletes and had a heckuva sense of humor. Good to see he still has it.
As an aside to that incident, I think it may have been Coach Dave Mooney who had told us that most high schools in the Western states didn't have the javelin throw as one of their events. That's still true today, at least here in San Jose. That scary incident at Cavanaugh Stadium kind of confirmed what he had said. Curiously, the discus probably isn't much safer.
Anyway, thanks for the correction.
Regards, Shaker
******
Markin response, May 28, 2010:
….Shaker- is there anyone who went on to that track [the dust bowl of blessed memory] (at least in the old days) who does not still have cinders somewhere on their body as a reminder of their youthful activity? I asked around about it and, naturally, one and all related their “cinder” experiences. Was this a "rite of passage" from the vengeful track gods and goddesses? I think you could still pick up some these days from what I saw of the track last year.
Okay, let’s keep what I have to say next between us. I have never known a javelin thrower, ah, a spear-chucker, or “returner” who had the sense that evolution has given geese. These guys (and nowadays, gals) lived in a world of their own, probably deep down in some recess caveman remembrance thing and that is probably why the Tarzan in the story you related barely remembered the incident. All I know was that whenever I ran, or meant to run, I checked, and checked carefully, to see if the javelin boys were “practicing.” If they were I, and other runners as I remember, would run out in the streets. It was safer there, honking horns and all, a lot safer. Hey, and the swarthy, whip-lashed, spin-dazzled discus throwers were not much better, believe me. In fact the only field men that had a lick of sense were the shot putters, although maybe I am giving them much the best of it. I do know I was sweet, secretly sweet, in order to protect my life even now on our number shot putter Caveman McKenney’s girlfriend, Beth. But like I say let’s keep that between us. I think she married him.
Regards, Markin
And so it goes.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-The History Of The Vietnam War Era Oleo Strut GI Coffeehouse From The "Under The Hood (Fort Hood, Killen, Texas) Cafe" Website
Click on the headline to link to the Under The Hood Cafe website.
Markin comment:
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
**********
The Oleo Strut Coffeehouse And The G.I. Antiwar Movement
By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver (2008)
Writing in the June, 1971, Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. stated: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state of approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous... Word of the death of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units. In one such division, the morale-plagued Americal, fraggings during 1971 have been running about one a week.... As early as mid-1969 an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail... Combat refusal has been precipitated again on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders... "
Shortly after this article appeared, President Nixon announced the new policy of "Vietnamization" and direct American combat operations came to an end within a year.
In 1971, desertion rates were soaring, re-enlistment rates plummeting, and the United States Army was not considered reliable enough to enter major combat. Today, the G.I. Antiwar movement that accomplished this is little-known, but it was the threat of soldiers not being willing to fight and die that stopped that war. Soldiers refusing to fight is the most upsetting image to all of those who claim to rule, since the monopoly of armed force is their ultimate weapon to retain their power. Much of what they have promoted in the 37 years since Heinl wrote that article -- the all-volunteer Army, the Rambo version of Vietnam, the resurgence of patriotism that crested with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 --has been in direct response to the specter of GIs deciding a war wasn't worth it.
The war against the war within the American military began almost as soon as America became directly involved in Vietnam, which can be dated to the so-called "Tonkin Gulf Incident," the excuse for direct American combat.
By 1966, veterans like my old friend, former Army intelligence specialist the late Jeff Sharlet - who would later found "Vietnam GI," the major GI antiwar newspaper - had returned from their tour of duty and were trying to tell those back in America who they met at college what the real truth was about the war they had served in. Many in the campus antiwar movement did not respond to we veterans, with some purists telling us we were part of the crime for our participation. Somehow we were neither fish nor fowl to many. The result was that veterans began searching each other out.
Eventually, in early 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded in New York City and took part as an organization in the spring mobilization against the war. No one was more surprised than the veterans at the positive response they got from bystanders as they marched together as opponents of the war they had fought.
By 1967, Fred Gardner, a former editor of the Harvard Crimson who had served as an officer in Southeast Asia, had returned to civilian life.By September, Fred had raised enough money to start the organization he had been thinking about for two years: an group that would bring the antiwar movement to the GIs still in the Army who opposed the war.
In September 1967, Gardner and a group of friends arrived in Columbia, South Carolina, home of Fort Jackson. Jokingly known as the "UFO," a play on the military support organization USO, the coffeehouse quickly became the only integrated place in the city (this was the old South of the 1960s). The regulars soon consisted not just of black and white GIs, but also students from the local university.
A few months later, Gardner returned to San Francisco where he established Summer Of Support (later called "Support Our Soldiers") which was to coordinate the spread of similar coffeehouses to other Army bases. The first two were to be outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and outside Fort Polk in Louisiana. The Missouri coffeehouse managed to open, while the organizers sent to Louisiana were run out of town before they could even obtain a site for a coffeehouse. Fort Hood was chosen to replace the Fort Polk operation. At the time, no one knew what a momentous decision this would be.
In August, 1967, riots broke out in Detroit, and the 101st Airborne Division was sent to stop it. This was the first time active Army troops had been used to quell a civil disturbance in the United States since the Civil War. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and riots spread across the country. In response, the Army was called on to establish an organization for suppression of riots that were feared that summer as the time got closer and closer to the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Chicago that August.
Fort Hood in 1968 was the main base where Vietnam veterans who had six months or less left on their enlistments were sent upon completion of their tour of duty in the war. Somehow, the Army thought that these combat veterans would be perfect for use in suppressing the war at home.
The Army brass weren't the only ones who didn't know the mood of the troops. Neither did we. These were men who had experienced the Tet Offensive, men who had known the truth before Tet - that America was not winning the Vietnam War. They were turned off from their experience and unwilling to participate in a new war, a war against their fellow citizens.
Killeen at the time was a typical "old South" garrison town. The town lived off the soldiers, but hated them at the same time. Soldiers at Fort Hood were seen by the businessmen in town as being there strictly for the picking. Avenue D was a collection of loan sharks (borrow $30 and pay back $42 - the payday loan industry's been around a long time), pin ball palaces, sharp clothing stores - one had $100 alligator shoes, a brilliant green Nehru jacket in the window with 12 feet of racks stacked with cossack shirts in satin colors - insurance brokers, and overpriced jewelry stores. If a soldier walked into one of these establishments and didn't pull out his billfold within ten minutes, he'd be asked to leave.
Local toughs - known by the derogatory Texan term "goat ropers" - carried on their own war against the GIs, who they would try and catch alone at night and with assault and robbery on their minds. The local police generally sided with the "good old boys" against the "outsider" GIs.
The town was as segregated as any in the South; there was an active Klavern of the KKK to enforce segregation. Killeen had grown from a population of 500 in 1940 (when Fort Hood was established to train Patton's coming armored corps) to around 35,000 by 1968. It was not a place that was going to welcome "outside agitators" from California and Massachusetts, as we were. I remember an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who visited that September and told me he considered Killeen more dangerous than Sunflower County, Mississippi.
The Oleo Strut opened on July 4, 1968, with a public picnic in the local park. GIs had been checking the place out over the previous month as the staff worked to set it up, and there was a large enough crowd that a reporter from the New York Times thought the event important enough to write a story about, that received national play.
The coffeehouse was given the name "The Oleo Strut." An oleo strut is a shock absorber, and we saw this as a metaphor for what we hoped the place would be for the soldiers we hoped to work with. We had no idea what a shock we were about to absorb.
Within a week of opening, soldiers were coming in at night to tell us of riot control training they were taking part in during the day. They'd been told they were going to Chicago to "fight the hippies and the commies" who were going to show up for the Democratic Convention the next month. They were terribly upset at the thought of having to possibly open fire on Americans who they agreed with about the war and the need for change here in America. Soldiers were talking about deserting, about running away to Mexico, about "doing something."
Our response was a little yellow sticker, two inches by two inches. On it was a white hand flashing the "peace sign," backed by a black fist. We printed up 1,000 of them and passed them out. GIs said they would put these on their helmets if they were called into the streets, to identify themselves to the protestors. At this point, the Army got very upset with us.
The Monday of the convention, 5,000 troops were ordered to board the transports. They were headed for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago, as backup for the Chicago Police Department.
As the soldiers were preparing to board the airplanes, the bravest act of antiwar protest I ever knew of happened.
43 Black soldiers, all combat veterans, refused to board the airplanes. Due to the self-separation of the races on the base, we had no idea this was going to happen. The Black troops had organized themselves. They knew what they were going to get for this. The minimum qualification to be one of those who would refuse was the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, so the Army wouldn't be able to call them cowards.
As this was happening on the base, we were on the way from our house to the Oleo Strut, when we were stopped by the Killeen Police. A search of the car found drugs - we knew immediately we were set up, since we were completely drug-free. We also knew immediately what a terrible threat this was, since at that time the possession of a joint could get one a sentence of 20 years in Huntsville Prison, as had recently happened to an SNCC organizer in Houston who'd had marijuana planted on him by an undercover officer. We were scared. In the end, only Josh Gould was held, since he had been identified as our "leader." He would stay in the Bell County Jail for six weeks until the Bell County Grand Jury would vote a "no bill" on the indictment, thanks to the tireless efforts of local attorney Davis Bragg.
The world knows what happened in Chicago. A government cannot put soldiers on the street without the prior knowledge that if they are ordered to crack heads, they all will. No one knew how many of the GIs would carry out their threat of resistance if put in the streets, so all were held back. Deprived of their military backup, the Chicago Police Department staged their historic "police riot." The GI antiwar movement had inflicted its first major blow against the government.
In the months following, the antiwar movement took hold at the Oleo Strut. Soldiers started publication of "The Fatigue Press," an underground newspaper we ran off down in Austin on a mimeograph the local SDS chapter found for us on the UT campus. In November, 1968, GIs from Fort Hood staged an antiwar teach-in at UT, despite the best efforts of the Army to close the base and prevent their participation. We also endured the daily reports of the court-martials of the 43 Black GIs, each of whom received several years in Leavenworth and a Dishonorable Discharge for their courageous act.
Perhaps most importantly, a GI named Dave Cline walked through the front door that September. Wounded in action with the 25th Infantry Division the year before, Dave was only now out of an extended tour of Army hospitals to deal with his wounds. He was completely dedicated to the cause of opposition to the war, and became the center of the GIs who were involved in anti-war activities on-base. He became the editor of Fatigue Press.
In later years, the rest of the country and the world would come to know Dave Cline, who spent all his life until his death on September 15, 2006, from the wounds he received in Vietnam, fighting for peace and justice as the President of Veterans for Peace. He fought the Veterans Administration for proper care and benefits for all Vietnam vets, fought for both American and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange; he fought against America's intervention against the Central American revolutions in the 80s; he stood up against the attack on Panama, the Gulf War, and intervention in Somalia in the early 90s; he opposed the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 and traveled to Vieques to show solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their fight to stop the U.S. military using it as a practice range; he organized against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and as his last act organized a Veterans for Peace caravan to bring relief to New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and neglect by every level of government.
A GI Dave knew in the 25th Infantry Division was so impressed by him that in 1986, that GI - Oliver Stone - memorialized him as the main character of "Platoon."
Things weren't all heavy politicking. Then as now, Austin had an active music scene and I was able to find bands willing to make the trek up I-35 to entertain the GIs. The most popular of these bands that fall of 1968 was a new blues band fronted by a great young singer who was only 16. Given they couldn't play in the Austin bars due to his age, they were happy to come up and play for the peanuts I could offer. The place would be packed whenever they appeared. 18 years later, in 1986, when I was at the United States Film Festival in Dallas, Stevie Ray Vaughn recognized me and thanked me for being the first guy to ever give him a break.
Over the years between 1968 and 1972, when the Oleo Strut finally closed, many name musicians came and entertained the troops. Among them were Pete Seeger, who played to a packed house in 1971, s followed by Country Joe McDonald and Phil Ochs.
By 1970, there were some 20 coffeehouses - not all part of Support Our Soldiers - to be found in the vicinity of Army, Air Force, Marine and Navy bases across the country. Their most important role was giving soldiers who had come to understand how wrong the Vietnam war was the knowledge they were not alone. Eventually, this dissent within the military spread to the front lines in Vietnam, as reported by Colonel Heinl.
Of the three original SOS coffee houses, the UFO was closed in 1970 by a court order declaring it a "public nuisance." The coffeehouse outside Fort Leonard Wood succumbed to harassment and threats in 1969. The Oleo Strut stayed open till the war ended in 1972.
Today, the site of the coffeehouse on the corner of 4th and Avenue D (101 Avenue D) is an office complex. One can still, however, find the red paint in the cracks of the sidewalk that was thrown on the door and windows weekly, back 40 years ago.
Markin comment:
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
**********
The Oleo Strut Coffeehouse And The G.I. Antiwar Movement
By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver (2008)
Writing in the June, 1971, Armed Forces Journal, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. stated: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state of approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous... Word of the death of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units. In one such division, the morale-plagued Americal, fraggings during 1971 have been running about one a week.... As early as mid-1969 an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail... Combat refusal has been precipitated again on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders... "
Shortly after this article appeared, President Nixon announced the new policy of "Vietnamization" and direct American combat operations came to an end within a year.
In 1971, desertion rates were soaring, re-enlistment rates plummeting, and the United States Army was not considered reliable enough to enter major combat. Today, the G.I. Antiwar movement that accomplished this is little-known, but it was the threat of soldiers not being willing to fight and die that stopped that war. Soldiers refusing to fight is the most upsetting image to all of those who claim to rule, since the monopoly of armed force is their ultimate weapon to retain their power. Much of what they have promoted in the 37 years since Heinl wrote that article -- the all-volunteer Army, the Rambo version of Vietnam, the resurgence of patriotism that crested with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 --has been in direct response to the specter of GIs deciding a war wasn't worth it.
The war against the war within the American military began almost as soon as America became directly involved in Vietnam, which can be dated to the so-called "Tonkin Gulf Incident," the excuse for direct American combat.
By 1966, veterans like my old friend, former Army intelligence specialist the late Jeff Sharlet - who would later found "Vietnam GI," the major GI antiwar newspaper - had returned from their tour of duty and were trying to tell those back in America who they met at college what the real truth was about the war they had served in. Many in the campus antiwar movement did not respond to we veterans, with some purists telling us we were part of the crime for our participation. Somehow we were neither fish nor fowl to many. The result was that veterans began searching each other out.
Eventually, in early 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded in New York City and took part as an organization in the spring mobilization against the war. No one was more surprised than the veterans at the positive response they got from bystanders as they marched together as opponents of the war they had fought.
By 1967, Fred Gardner, a former editor of the Harvard Crimson who had served as an officer in Southeast Asia, had returned to civilian life.By September, Fred had raised enough money to start the organization he had been thinking about for two years: an group that would bring the antiwar movement to the GIs still in the Army who opposed the war.
In September 1967, Gardner and a group of friends arrived in Columbia, South Carolina, home of Fort Jackson. Jokingly known as the "UFO," a play on the military support organization USO, the coffeehouse quickly became the only integrated place in the city (this was the old South of the 1960s). The regulars soon consisted not just of black and white GIs, but also students from the local university.
A few months later, Gardner returned to San Francisco where he established Summer Of Support (later called "Support Our Soldiers") which was to coordinate the spread of similar coffeehouses to other Army bases. The first two were to be outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and outside Fort Polk in Louisiana. The Missouri coffeehouse managed to open, while the organizers sent to Louisiana were run out of town before they could even obtain a site for a coffeehouse. Fort Hood was chosen to replace the Fort Polk operation. At the time, no one knew what a momentous decision this would be.
In August, 1967, riots broke out in Detroit, and the 101st Airborne Division was sent to stop it. This was the first time active Army troops had been used to quell a civil disturbance in the United States since the Civil War. In April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and riots spread across the country. In response, the Army was called on to establish an organization for suppression of riots that were feared that summer as the time got closer and closer to the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Chicago that August.
Fort Hood in 1968 was the main base where Vietnam veterans who had six months or less left on their enlistments were sent upon completion of their tour of duty in the war. Somehow, the Army thought that these combat veterans would be perfect for use in suppressing the war at home.
The Army brass weren't the only ones who didn't know the mood of the troops. Neither did we. These were men who had experienced the Tet Offensive, men who had known the truth before Tet - that America was not winning the Vietnam War. They were turned off from their experience and unwilling to participate in a new war, a war against their fellow citizens.
Killeen at the time was a typical "old South" garrison town. The town lived off the soldiers, but hated them at the same time. Soldiers at Fort Hood were seen by the businessmen in town as being there strictly for the picking. Avenue D was a collection of loan sharks (borrow $30 and pay back $42 - the payday loan industry's been around a long time), pin ball palaces, sharp clothing stores - one had $100 alligator shoes, a brilliant green Nehru jacket in the window with 12 feet of racks stacked with cossack shirts in satin colors - insurance brokers, and overpriced jewelry stores. If a soldier walked into one of these establishments and didn't pull out his billfold within ten minutes, he'd be asked to leave.
Local toughs - known by the derogatory Texan term "goat ropers" - carried on their own war against the GIs, who they would try and catch alone at night and with assault and robbery on their minds. The local police generally sided with the "good old boys" against the "outsider" GIs.
The town was as segregated as any in the South; there was an active Klavern of the KKK to enforce segregation. Killeen had grown from a population of 500 in 1940 (when Fort Hood was established to train Patton's coming armored corps) to around 35,000 by 1968. It was not a place that was going to welcome "outside agitators" from California and Massachusetts, as we were. I remember an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who visited that September and told me he considered Killeen more dangerous than Sunflower County, Mississippi.
The Oleo Strut opened on July 4, 1968, with a public picnic in the local park. GIs had been checking the place out over the previous month as the staff worked to set it up, and there was a large enough crowd that a reporter from the New York Times thought the event important enough to write a story about, that received national play.
The coffeehouse was given the name "The Oleo Strut." An oleo strut is a shock absorber, and we saw this as a metaphor for what we hoped the place would be for the soldiers we hoped to work with. We had no idea what a shock we were about to absorb.
Within a week of opening, soldiers were coming in at night to tell us of riot control training they were taking part in during the day. They'd been told they were going to Chicago to "fight the hippies and the commies" who were going to show up for the Democratic Convention the next month. They were terribly upset at the thought of having to possibly open fire on Americans who they agreed with about the war and the need for change here in America. Soldiers were talking about deserting, about running away to Mexico, about "doing something."
Our response was a little yellow sticker, two inches by two inches. On it was a white hand flashing the "peace sign," backed by a black fist. We printed up 1,000 of them and passed them out. GIs said they would put these on their helmets if they were called into the streets, to identify themselves to the protestors. At this point, the Army got very upset with us.
The Monday of the convention, 5,000 troops were ordered to board the transports. They were headed for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Chicago, as backup for the Chicago Police Department.
As the soldiers were preparing to board the airplanes, the bravest act of antiwar protest I ever knew of happened.
43 Black soldiers, all combat veterans, refused to board the airplanes. Due to the self-separation of the races on the base, we had no idea this was going to happen. The Black troops had organized themselves. They knew what they were going to get for this. The minimum qualification to be one of those who would refuse was the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart, so the Army wouldn't be able to call them cowards.
As this was happening on the base, we were on the way from our house to the Oleo Strut, when we were stopped by the Killeen Police. A search of the car found drugs - we knew immediately we were set up, since we were completely drug-free. We also knew immediately what a terrible threat this was, since at that time the possession of a joint could get one a sentence of 20 years in Huntsville Prison, as had recently happened to an SNCC organizer in Houston who'd had marijuana planted on him by an undercover officer. We were scared. In the end, only Josh Gould was held, since he had been identified as our "leader." He would stay in the Bell County Jail for six weeks until the Bell County Grand Jury would vote a "no bill" on the indictment, thanks to the tireless efforts of local attorney Davis Bragg.
The world knows what happened in Chicago. A government cannot put soldiers on the street without the prior knowledge that if they are ordered to crack heads, they all will. No one knew how many of the GIs would carry out their threat of resistance if put in the streets, so all were held back. Deprived of their military backup, the Chicago Police Department staged their historic "police riot." The GI antiwar movement had inflicted its first major blow against the government.
In the months following, the antiwar movement took hold at the Oleo Strut. Soldiers started publication of "The Fatigue Press," an underground newspaper we ran off down in Austin on a mimeograph the local SDS chapter found for us on the UT campus. In November, 1968, GIs from Fort Hood staged an antiwar teach-in at UT, despite the best efforts of the Army to close the base and prevent their participation. We also endured the daily reports of the court-martials of the 43 Black GIs, each of whom received several years in Leavenworth and a Dishonorable Discharge for their courageous act.
Perhaps most importantly, a GI named Dave Cline walked through the front door that September. Wounded in action with the 25th Infantry Division the year before, Dave was only now out of an extended tour of Army hospitals to deal with his wounds. He was completely dedicated to the cause of opposition to the war, and became the center of the GIs who were involved in anti-war activities on-base. He became the editor of Fatigue Press.
In later years, the rest of the country and the world would come to know Dave Cline, who spent all his life until his death on September 15, 2006, from the wounds he received in Vietnam, fighting for peace and justice as the President of Veterans for Peace. He fought the Veterans Administration for proper care and benefits for all Vietnam vets, fought for both American and Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange; he fought against America's intervention against the Central American revolutions in the 80s; he stood up against the attack on Panama, the Gulf War, and intervention in Somalia in the early 90s; he opposed the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 and traveled to Vieques to show solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico in their fight to stop the U.S. military using it as a practice range; he organized against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and as his last act organized a Veterans for Peace caravan to bring relief to New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and neglect by every level of government.
A GI Dave knew in the 25th Infantry Division was so impressed by him that in 1986, that GI - Oliver Stone - memorialized him as the main character of "Platoon."
Things weren't all heavy politicking. Then as now, Austin had an active music scene and I was able to find bands willing to make the trek up I-35 to entertain the GIs. The most popular of these bands that fall of 1968 was a new blues band fronted by a great young singer who was only 16. Given they couldn't play in the Austin bars due to his age, they were happy to come up and play for the peanuts I could offer. The place would be packed whenever they appeared. 18 years later, in 1986, when I was at the United States Film Festival in Dallas, Stevie Ray Vaughn recognized me and thanked me for being the first guy to ever give him a break.
Over the years between 1968 and 1972, when the Oleo Strut finally closed, many name musicians came and entertained the troops. Among them were Pete Seeger, who played to a packed house in 1971, s followed by Country Joe McDonald and Phil Ochs.
By 1970, there were some 20 coffeehouses - not all part of Support Our Soldiers - to be found in the vicinity of Army, Air Force, Marine and Navy bases across the country. Their most important role was giving soldiers who had come to understand how wrong the Vietnam war was the knowledge they were not alone. Eventually, this dissent within the military spread to the front lines in Vietnam, as reported by Colonel Heinl.
Of the three original SOS coffee houses, the UFO was closed in 1970 by a court order declaring it a "public nuisance." The coffeehouse outside Fort Leonard Wood succumbed to harassment and threats in 1969. The Oleo Strut stayed open till the war ended in 1972.
Today, the site of the coffeehouse on the corner of 4th and Avenue D (101 Avenue D) is an office complex. One can still, however, find the red paint in the cracks of the sidewalk that was thrown on the door and windows weekly, back 40 years ago.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- For Class Action Against the War: Against NPAC Pop Fronts (1971)
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.
What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.
That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
*******
For Class Action Against the War: Against NPAC Pop Fronts
Spartacist Supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe’s threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP’s much-touted "mass movement" accomplished?—the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism—there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year—an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion—produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivaling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres of students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoades to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fitzsimmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons—labor’s "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed—at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to face down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters, who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country’s strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes—a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC’s Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year’s "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officially endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew" —a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidarize with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions, Committees, Conferences, Caucuses, Congresses, Conventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party’s proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobilizations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world—by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie’s program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War."
(Militant, 28 May 1970)
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions," Jenness’ statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla, at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP’s "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back-handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP’s current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism’s continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrell Dobbs—then and now a principal leader of the SWP—wrote:
"… the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along we must be in the unions… ."
—SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15, No. 6, March 1953 [our emphasis]
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simply a matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course—the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration—the SWP’s conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWP electoral campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism—like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question—tail-ending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967—recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP’s usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces that NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlain with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left’s attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS’s "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP’s Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartke) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers’ own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP’s sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most self-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity—a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence" the SWP-NPAC leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement. The major activity of the movement’s "mass actions" has been to provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the adherence of "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation of the SWP-NPAC—no negotiations, no timetables! We must make it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions—de-escalation, troop shifts, moratoriums—to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution—No Confidence in Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands "self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People’s Peace Treaty). All Indochina Must Go Communist!
[Inset box]
It Takes One to Know One
In an article on the antiwar movement, veteran anti-communist Michael Harrington evaluated the role of the "Trotskyist" SWP in the single-issue, anti-war movement to which it has devoted so much attention since 1965. Discussing the April 24 demonstration, Harrington showed he and his co-thinkers have reason to be grateful to the SWP for the results of its "leadership" in the anti-war movement:
"… to the extent that the Trotskyists did influence the event, they carried out one of the most remarkable exercises in dupery in our political history: they duped themselves. For they are sworn opponents of the ‘class collaborationists’ in the Kennedy and McCarthy movements and bitter foes of the notion that Democratic Congressmen can end the war—and yet they helped assemble a gigantic audience which demonstrated in favor of just such an approach. What happened was that the Trotskyists, who were organizing the rally at the start and doing their best to attract a reasonably large crowd, so successfully adapted to the position of the masses they were supposed to be manipulating that they did yeoman work pushing views they regard as dangerous and illusory." (Michael Harrington in the New York Times magazine, 30 May 1971)
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.
What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.
That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
*******
For Class Action Against the War: Against NPAC Pop Fronts
Spartacist Supplement, July 1971
The "Spring Offensive" is over, but the Vietnam war drags on. The Mayday Tribe’s threat to "Stop the Government" if the government did not stop the war only demonstrated with what ruthless efficiency the government handles radicals who talk about stopping the government but lack any means except wishful thinking. The Mayday Tribe represented merely a new chapter in the conflict of perspectives which has been ingrained in the anti-war movement since its inception: "respectable" reformism vs. petty-bourgeois adventurism. Each outbreak of confrontationism is greeted by a new wave of "we told you so" from the radical-liberal-bourgeois coalition dominated by the astute class-collaborationist maneuvering of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). What hypocrisy! For it is precisely the obvious liberalism of the mainstream anti-war movement which has driven the frustrated student protesters in desperation into the ranks of the Mayday Tribe. And as for futility, what has the SWP’s much-touted "mass movement" accomplished?—the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) "peace action" of April 24 only produced the traffic jam to which the Mayday Tribe aspired. So long as the anti-war movement continues to be circumscribed by these two alternatives—reformism or adventurism—there can be no way forward.
Kent State Revisited
The outraged opposition spontaneously generated last year by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent-Jackson State massacres has been completely dissipated. The invasion of Laos earlier this year—an escalation and expansion of the war equal to the Cambodia invasion—produced only scattered protests. The July 2-4 NPAC Convention takes place after the first relatively quiet spring in nearly a decade on college campuses, heretofore the bastion of the anti-war movement. Instead, the campus has become a breeding ground for reactionary cultism (with Campus Crusade for Christ Revivals rivaling anti-war rallies for attendance) and relative political apathy.
The energy of the May 1970 upsurge was dissipated precisely because its lessons have been ignored. The massacres of students took place in the midst of a massive, ascending strike wave representing a radicalization of the U.S. and international working class unprecedented since World War II. One of the most important episodes of this strike wave was the nationwide teamster wildcat. In Ohio during April-May 1970 twenty thousand teamsters went out. Joining with the trucking owners in calling on right-wing Republican Governor Rhoades to mobilize four thousand National Guardsmen to break the wildcat were "friends of labor," "friends of the peace movement" like Senator Saxbe and Mayor Stokes, and the international "leadership" of the Teamsters, including President Fitzsimmons and Vice-President Harold Gibbons—labor’s "representative" on the podium at the April 24 rally in Washington and endorser of this NPAC Convention.
The trucking owners tried to move scab trucks in convoys of five, supported by a massive show of firepower: military helicopters, armored cars and armed Guardsmen literally riding shotgun in each cabin. The teamsters countered by organizing flying-picket squads which massed—at terminal gates whenever the owners tried to move scab trucks. The teamsters were able to face down the Guardsmen and defend their strike.
It was from this strike-breaking detail that four hundred Guardsmen were taken and sent to Kent State. Unlike the teamsters, the students put up no resistance. But it was students, not teamsters, who were gunned down. Why? A massacre of teamsters, in the middle of a tense, militant nationwide wildcat by one of the country’s strongest unions, would have precipitated a series of nationwide protest and sympathy strikes—a far greater show of social power than all the student strikes, peace crawls and police confrontations combined. In contrast, the massacre of students had little more long-term social impact than starting summer vacation three weeks early on college campuses.
What made the protesting students so vulnerable was precisely the question of brute social power: the teamsters and other organized workers have it; students do not. Likewise, while polls, parades and police confrontations may demonstrate that the overwhelming majority in this country is against the war, no variation or combination of protest politics can force the U.S. ruling class out of Indochina. Only a combination of social forces whose consciousness and militancy pose a greater threat to the world hegemony of U.S. imperialism than military defeat in Vietnam can force a halt to the war.
NPAC’s Predecessor
The predecessor to this NPAC Convention was last year’s "Emergency National Conference Against the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam War" held in Cleveland over June 19-21. Mayor Stokes, fresh from helping break the teamster strike, officially endorsed the conference and proclaimed June 19-21 as "Peace Action Days." The SWP-dominated conference immediately proposed a demonstration in downtown Cleveland "against Agnew" —a demonstration which any liberal Republican or Democratic hustler like Stokes could solidarize with. SDS, supported in their demand by Progressive Labor and the Spartacist League, counterposed a demonstration in support of the teamster wildcat and against Stokes as well as Agnew. The SWP, predictably, was enraged at the suggestion of anything that might "divide" the peace movement and alienate its "friends" in the Democratic Party and trade union bureaucracy.
In addition to marching "against Agnew," the conference attempted to reassemble from the wreckage of various Mobilizations, Coalitions, Committees, Conferences, Caucuses, Congresses, Conventions and other concoctions an even newer, broader, more indivisible peace-group-to-end-all-peace-groups—the "National Peace Action Coalition." Although maneuvering in lesser arenas, the SWP has adopted the Communist Party’s proclivity for forming coalitions only to toss them out again when their treachery is no longer of service. Such was the history of the "Spring," "National" and "New" Mobilizations behind which the SWP was the motivating force, and such will be the history of NPAC. NPAC is a Popular Front combining the SWP with the liberal bourgeoisie and Cold Warrior "socialists," through which the SWP can "lead" masses of people and rub shoulders with Vance Hartke and Victor Reuther. The SWP is able to "lead" these masses through the oldest opportunist sleight-of-hand in the world—by adopting the liberal bourgeoisie’s program! Capitalist politicians like Hartke know that the real decisions about when and how to "end" the war are made in Wall Street high-rises and Pentagon sub-basements. They come to these conferences as they go to livestock shows and state fairs—to garner votes.
"Mass Actions"
To the accusation that formations like NPAC are Popular Fronts of class collaboration, SWPer Doug Jenness responded:
"If NPAC was watering down its program to get support from capitalist politicians, your charges would be justified. But NPAC follows an entirely different course. It has an independent perspective to unite as many people as possible, regardless of political affiliations or views, in mass actions against the Vietnam War."
(Militant, 28 May 1970)
And to be sure, the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" dutifully passed a resolution calling for "mass actions," Jenness’ statement is perfectly clear—and perfectly meaningless. The SWP wants to "unite" lots of "people" (explicitly regardless of politics) in "mass actions." "Unite" which "people," on the basis of what program, in what kind of "mass action"? The massacre of a million Indonesian communist workers was a "mass action." So were the Cossack pogroms. So, for that matter, was the October Revolution. The demonstration "against Agnew" and the teamster wildcat were also "mass actions." However, the SWP endorsed the former while one of their spokesmen (Miguel Padilla, at Cleveland) dismissed the latter as "racist and reactionary." Why do the self-proclaimed "Marxists" of the SWP have so much difficulty understanding that society is made up of classes, not undifferentiated masses, and that the two primary classes in capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and the working class? It is absurd to talk about having "an independent perspective"; the reformist anti-war movement is deliberately organized as a classless formation, but though it may opt to ignore the class struggle, the class struggle does not ignore it! The middle-class youth who have flocked to the anti-war movement in moral outrage must choose sides in the class struggle; they can play no role outside it. The SWP’s "independent perspective" in reality means independence from the fight for the international proletarian revolution, in favor of back-handed support to the class enemy of U.S. workers and their class brothers in Indochina.
Lest anyone should think that the SWP has gone astray through simple ignorance of these elementary tenets of Marxist analysis, it is instructive to compare the SWP’s current politics with its analysis of the way to conduct anti-war struggle at the time of the Korean war, another instance of imperialism’s continuing assault on the gains of limited social revolutions abroad expressed militarily. In March 1953 Farrell Dobbs—then and now a principal leader of the SWP—wrote:
"… the most vital place to carry on anti-war agitation and participate in anti-war actions is in the unions where the masses are. We have always envisaged the struggle against war as an extension of the class struggle onto a higher plane. The fight against the war can really be effective only to the extent that the workers adopt class-struggle policies in defending their interests. If we are to help this process along we must be in the unions… ."
—SWP Internal Bulletin Vol. 15, No. 6, March 1953 [our emphasis]
Now this is neither a particularly profound nor a particularly eloquent polemic. It is simply a matter-of-fact statement of an orientation which stands blatantly and diametrically counterposed to the current politics of the SWP. The SWP leaders are not naive would-be revolutionaries ignorant of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; they have consciously rejected Trotskyism in favor of a perspective of reformist class collaboration.
Clear-Cut Choice
Like the national postal strike before it and the recent two-day mini-general strike of New York City public employees, the teamster wildcat produced a clear-cut line-up of class forces. The trucking owners, cops, courts, the bourgeois press and politicians (from the most liberal to the most conservative) stood united as a class and, together with their agents in the unions, the labor bureaucracy, tried to crush the teamster struggle. On the other side of the barricades were the teamsters. The SDS resolution put before the Cleveland "Emergency Conference" a clear-cut, inescapable choice: support the teamsters (which would have forced NPAC to break with capitalist politicians like Stokes and the "lieutenants of capital" within the workers movement like Fitzsimmons and Gibbons); or cement the Popular Front bloc by calling the teamsters simply "racist and reactionary" and demonstrating against Agnew. The SWP chose the latter course—the course of class collaboration and betrayal.
On the main issue facing the Cleveland conference—class collaboration—the SWP’s conduct was unequivocal. Not so that of the pseudo-Trotskyist Workers League (WL) which, in a frenzy of the same opportunist appetite which led it to enthusiastically and virtually uncritically endorse the wretched 1970 SWP electoral campaigns, insisted that the real issue was "Trotskyism vs. Stalinism." By this catchy slogan the WL meant that its main enemy at the conference was PL ("Stalinism") and the SDS motions which posed, in a limited but generally correct way, an anti-liberal, working-class orientation for the anti-war movement. The WL in effect made a bloc with the SWP ("Trotskyism"—but since when is the SWP legitimately Trotskyist?) against opposition from the left, thereby endorsing the essence of Stalinism though not the label, for Stalinism—like all varieties of revisionism—is nothing more or less than the abandonment of an international, proletarian and revolutionary perspective in favor of alliances with some wing of the class enemy, precisely the SWP's policy in the anti-war movement! (The WL, which has jumped all over the map on the anti-war question—tail-ending the Popular Front in 1965, offering critical political support to the NLF Stalinists and Ho Chi Minh in 1967—recently adopted a new face: calling its own rally on April 24, the WL denounced all those who participated in the "official" rally, thus condemning the mass of anti-war activists for the betrayals of their reformist, social-chauvinist leaders.)
The SWP Rediscovers Workers
The SWP and its succession of front groups have made their choice—class collaboration rather than class struggle. But since the SWP’s usefulness to its bourgeois allies depends precisely on its continued ability to lead the would-be radicals among the anti-war protesters into the Popular Front trap, the SWP now needs the left cover of a pseudo-working-class orientation. Many of the more conscious student activists cannot fail to compare the futility of the April 24 "mass action" with the virtual paralysis of New York City caused by a few thousands of militant workers, even despite their sellout leaders. So the SWP is making renewed efforts to develop the facade of a labor base. A call in the June 18 Militant for the NPAC Convention announces that NPAC is preparing a series of letters addressed to "various anti-war constituencies." Prominent among these separate-but-equal "constituencies" is "trade unionists," and several union bureaucrats are listed among the sponsors of the Convention.
But a Marxist working-class perspective does not consist of the willingness to orient towards workers (mediated through the class traitors of the labor bureaucracy, to be sure) for the purpose of including them among the various other "constituencies" assembled under the political banner of the liberal bourgeoisie. The empirical reflex of much of the U.S. left, faced with the demonstrated revolutionary aspirations of the working class following the 1968 French upsurge, has been to go where the action is by adopting a simple-minded "workerism" underlain with the social do-goodism previously characteristic of the New Left’s attitude toward the "Third World." In this respect PL-SDS’s "tactics" of "allying" with workers by showing how much you want to help them is not atypical, and provides yet another excuse for the right wing of the radical movement (perfectly typified by the SWP’s Padilla as well as the old New Leftists) to justify dismissal of the working class as the force for revolution because of the false consciousness (racism, patriotism) which simple-minded "workerism" must ignore as a principle.
To the extent that sections of the working class do remain imbued with the ideology of the bourgeoisie, groups like the SWP have only themselves to blame. Workers see their most sophisticated enemies (McCarthy, Lindsay, Hartke) lauded by the supposed "Marxists," cheered on by the labor parasites who serve the bourgeoisie within the workers’ own organizations. The sections of the left who recognize the SWP’s sellout for what it is must go beyond "workerism" to a program which can break the disastrous unity of anti-war militants with the most self-conscious and dangerous wing of the bourgeoisie, and replace it by a real unity—a unity based on a program of international class struggle:
Class Struggle Program
1. No Liberal Bourgeois Speakers at Anti-War Rallies! Under the rubric of "non-exclusionism" and "independence" the SWP-NPAC leadership welcomes the class enemy into the anti-war movement. The major activity of the movement’s "mass actions" has been to provide both the forum and a captive audience for liberals to do their canvassing. The only real "independence" for the movement is irreconcilable opposition to the class enemy.
2. For Labor Political Strikes Against the War! No amount of student strikes and weekend peace crawls can force U.S. imperialism to end the Indochinese war. But a strike by U.S. workers in solidarity with the Indochinese working people could compel the capitalists to face an enemy even more potent than the Vietnamese Revolution—a powerful, organized and conscious working class in struggle for its own class interests in the very citadel of imperialism. The NPAC leadership opposes this perspective because it wants to maintain its alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, trading away the potential of a powerful, working-class-based mass movement in order to win the adherence of "moderates" to a classless, implicitly pro-capitalist line.
A struggle for this demand means the struggle against the conservative, self-interested labor bureaucracy which mortally fears any class action which would upset its peaceful coexistence with the bosses and their politicians.
3. Break with the Capitalist Parties—For a Political Party of the Working Class! The U.S. working class will remain politically trapped until it has built, by struggle against its fake "leaders," its own party. A workers party must have a consistent class program as well as a working-class base. We do not call upon the tested servants of capitalism, the labor bureaucrats, to form this party; we do not seek to pressure them into building a trap for the workers along the lines of the British Labour Party. We must fight from the beginning to make the workers party a revolutionary party.
4. Smash Imperialism—All U.S. Troops Out of Asia Now! We must expose the pro-imperialist liberals who speak at the invitation of the SWP-NPAC—no negotiations, no timetables! We must make it clear that we want no bourgeois evasions—de-escalation, troop shifts, moratoriums—to interfere with the defeat of imperialism in Asia!
5. Victory to the Indochinese Revolution—No Confidence in Sellout "Leaders" at Home or Abroad! The SWP-NPAC demands "self-determination" for Vietnam. But for Marxists there is an even higher principle at stake: the class nature of the war. We have a responsibility to take sides. Our commitment to the revolutionary struggle of the Indochinese working people demands that we must give no confidence to the Stalinist traitors who have repeatedly sold out the struggle (from the Geneva Accords to the People’s Peace Treaty). All Indochina Must Go Communist!
[Inset box]
It Takes One to Know One
In an article on the antiwar movement, veteran anti-communist Michael Harrington evaluated the role of the "Trotskyist" SWP in the single-issue, anti-war movement to which it has devoted so much attention since 1965. Discussing the April 24 demonstration, Harrington showed he and his co-thinkers have reason to be grateful to the SWP for the results of its "leadership" in the anti-war movement:
"… to the extent that the Trotskyists did influence the event, they carried out one of the most remarkable exercises in dupery in our political history: they duped themselves. For they are sworn opponents of the ‘class collaborationists’ in the Kennedy and McCarthy movements and bitter foes of the notion that Democratic Congressmen can end the war—and yet they helped assemble a gigantic audience which demonstrated in favor of just such an approach. What happened was that the Trotskyists, who were organizing the rally at the start and doing their best to attract a reasonably large crowd, so successfully adapted to the position of the masses they were supposed to be manipulating that they did yeoman work pushing views they regard as dangerous and illusory." (Michael Harrington in the New York Times magazine, 30 May 1971)
From The "Courage To Resist" Website- On Conscientious Objectors And War Resisters Day, May 15, 2011- And A Short Note With A Different Position On War Resistance
Click on the headline to link to a Courage To Resist website entry for Conscientious Objectors and War Resisters Day, May 15, 2011.
********
On Bolshevik Work In The Military- A Short Note
In the last of a recent series of posts in this blog entitled From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs (see archives, dated May 11-18,2011) I noted that in late 1969 and early 1970 there was a desperate need for Bolsheviks in the American military, especially among the ground troops (“grunts” for those who know military terminology then, and now) in Vietnam who, according to estimates by grunt knowledgeable and un-ostrich-like sectors of the Army brass, were “unreliable”. Unreliable for the brass meaning that the troops could no longer automatically be counted on to pack up their gear at a minute’s notice, go out on patrol, blow away some forsaken village in conjunction with eight billion tons of airborne bombs raining down all around them, and then come back to barracks, or more usually, some ill-defined base camp, kick back, have a few beers (or a couple of joints, ya, it was like that at the end of the 1960s), and forget about it. Unreliable for a Bolshevik, of course, meaning something different, that the rebellious mass of troops who were sticking it to the brass in their own ill-defined way needed some political direction if the whole thing was not to just blow up in a huge increase of stockade numbers, or worst, just the endless quagmire of drink, drugs, and isolated officer fraggings.
Of course Bolsheviks were as scarce as hen’s teeth on the military ground in Vietnam, and here in America, for that matter. My point, and I included myself as a target of that 1969 point, was that there were real possibilities for serious Bolshevik inroads among the troops just then, and from there who knows. And that is where the real heart of my comment was directed. The mainline policy of the left, organized and unorganized, in regard to anti-war GIs was directed (to the extent that some elements even saw this movement as a fruitful area of work, except as the “vanguard” of the eight million “mass marches” in such front-line “hot spots” as New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C but certainly not Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon), if anything, at providing, in essence, social services to get individual GIs out of the military anyway they could, or to provide a platform for free speech, free class-war prisoners-type legal defense efforts once the brass started to seriously pull down the hammer on GI anti-war activities (notably in places like Fort Hood Texas, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina).
Needless to say this comment evoked a certain degree of incomprehension and misunderstanding among some of the younger comrades that I work with in a local anti-imperialist, anti-war committee. The thrust of one comrade’s argument is what has prompted this short note. His argument/question was basically what was wrong with Bolsheviks (or leftists, in general, since the questioner does not consider himself a Bolshevik devotee), acting in their roles as “tribunes of the people” (my shorthand phrase for what he was getting at) in trying to get individuals soldiers out of the military, and out of harm’s way. Of course my short answer to that was “nothing, nothing at all.” In a mass struggle situation with a workers party representative in some bourgeois legislative body, or better, as a commissars in some incipient workers’ council of course such “constituency services” are part of the job. In the direct military context of a union for enlisted service personnel Bolsheviks would perform such tasks as part of their work, just like a trade union does for its members. Of course that begs the long answer.
The long answer really defines the different in approach and, frankly, outlook between those very large forces who were committed to a moral opposition to war, perhaps any war, and those who actually wanted to end an unjust war, an imperialist war, and Vietnam as an unjust and imperialist war qualified for that designation in triplicate. As I also noted in that last post in the series comment cited above when active duty GIs started to emerge looking for civilian support the bulk of the anti-war movement embraced that sector in the same way that it related to the military draft of that day-“hell no, we won’t go.”
And that slogan really gets to the crux of the matter. Since we live, for now at least, in a no military draft time I will quickly outline the Bolshevik position on military service. We did not then, nor do we now, volunteer for the imperial military services. But back then, if drafted, you went. No shilly-shallying about it. No conscientious objector status, no Canada, or other exile spots, and for that matter, no prisons. And if ordered to Vietnam (or wherever) you went, even if that means the possibility of shooting at comrades on the other side of the "front," and even if you wish to high heaven for the victory of the other side, like the DNV-NLF in Vietnam. Today, obviously, with a formally all-volunteer military service corps, some of the above does not apply but if we run into a radicalized soldier, and in turn recruit him or her, then they go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or whatever other hell-hole American imperialist has it eyes on. No shilly-shallying now either.
That said, most of the other points in that last post can be placed here to buttress my argument above:
“Individual action vs. collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if that is where the fates took them. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done, especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. That organization, however, was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and that of those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
And that last phrase, my friends, is what separates the Bolsheviks from everybody else, always.
********
On Bolshevik Work In The Military- A Short Note
In the last of a recent series of posts in this blog entitled From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs (see archives, dated May 11-18,2011) I noted that in late 1969 and early 1970 there was a desperate need for Bolsheviks in the American military, especially among the ground troops (“grunts” for those who know military terminology then, and now) in Vietnam who, according to estimates by grunt knowledgeable and un-ostrich-like sectors of the Army brass, were “unreliable”. Unreliable for the brass meaning that the troops could no longer automatically be counted on to pack up their gear at a minute’s notice, go out on patrol, blow away some forsaken village in conjunction with eight billion tons of airborne bombs raining down all around them, and then come back to barracks, or more usually, some ill-defined base camp, kick back, have a few beers (or a couple of joints, ya, it was like that at the end of the 1960s), and forget about it. Unreliable for a Bolshevik, of course, meaning something different, that the rebellious mass of troops who were sticking it to the brass in their own ill-defined way needed some political direction if the whole thing was not to just blow up in a huge increase of stockade numbers, or worst, just the endless quagmire of drink, drugs, and isolated officer fraggings.
Of course Bolsheviks were as scarce as hen’s teeth on the military ground in Vietnam, and here in America, for that matter. My point, and I included myself as a target of that 1969 point, was that there were real possibilities for serious Bolshevik inroads among the troops just then, and from there who knows. And that is where the real heart of my comment was directed. The mainline policy of the left, organized and unorganized, in regard to anti-war GIs was directed (to the extent that some elements even saw this movement as a fruitful area of work, except as the “vanguard” of the eight million “mass marches” in such front-line “hot spots” as New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C but certainly not Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon), if anything, at providing, in essence, social services to get individual GIs out of the military anyway they could, or to provide a platform for free speech, free class-war prisoners-type legal defense efforts once the brass started to seriously pull down the hammer on GI anti-war activities (notably in places like Fort Hood Texas, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina).
Needless to say this comment evoked a certain degree of incomprehension and misunderstanding among some of the younger comrades that I work with in a local anti-imperialist, anti-war committee. The thrust of one comrade’s argument is what has prompted this short note. His argument/question was basically what was wrong with Bolsheviks (or leftists, in general, since the questioner does not consider himself a Bolshevik devotee), acting in their roles as “tribunes of the people” (my shorthand phrase for what he was getting at) in trying to get individuals soldiers out of the military, and out of harm’s way. Of course my short answer to that was “nothing, nothing at all.” In a mass struggle situation with a workers party representative in some bourgeois legislative body, or better, as a commissars in some incipient workers’ council of course such “constituency services” are part of the job. In the direct military context of a union for enlisted service personnel Bolsheviks would perform such tasks as part of their work, just like a trade union does for its members. Of course that begs the long answer.
The long answer really defines the different in approach and, frankly, outlook between those very large forces who were committed to a moral opposition to war, perhaps any war, and those who actually wanted to end an unjust war, an imperialist war, and Vietnam as an unjust and imperialist war qualified for that designation in triplicate. As I also noted in that last post in the series comment cited above when active duty GIs started to emerge looking for civilian support the bulk of the anti-war movement embraced that sector in the same way that it related to the military draft of that day-“hell no, we won’t go.”
And that slogan really gets to the crux of the matter. Since we live, for now at least, in a no military draft time I will quickly outline the Bolshevik position on military service. We did not then, nor do we now, volunteer for the imperial military services. But back then, if drafted, you went. No shilly-shallying about it. No conscientious objector status, no Canada, or other exile spots, and for that matter, no prisons. And if ordered to Vietnam (or wherever) you went, even if that means the possibility of shooting at comrades on the other side of the "front," and even if you wish to high heaven for the victory of the other side, like the DNV-NLF in Vietnam. Today, obviously, with a formally all-volunteer military service corps, some of the above does not apply but if we run into a radicalized soldier, and in turn recruit him or her, then they go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or whatever other hell-hole American imperialist has it eyes on. No shilly-shallying now either.
That said, most of the other points in that last post can be placed here to buttress my argument above:
“Individual action vs. collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if that is where the fates took them. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done, especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. That organization, however, was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and that of those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
And that last phrase, my friends, is what separates the Bolsheviks from everybody else, always.
The Latest From The "Coffee Strong" GI Coffeehouse At Fort Lewis, Washington
Click on the headline to link to the Coffee Strong Coffeehouse website at Fort Lewis Washington.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
From The ISO Website- "International Socialist Review"- Class struggle in Wisconsin
Class struggle in Wisconsin
Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper
A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:
The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.
What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.
What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)
The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.
Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.
The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.
The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.
Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.
The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.
Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”
Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.
Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.
Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.
Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.
“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”
Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.
Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.
Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.
The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.
This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.
The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.
After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.
The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.
But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.
The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.
Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.
While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.
Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.
But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper
A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:
The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.
What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.
What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)
The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.
Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.
The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.
The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.
Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.
The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.
Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”
Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.
Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.
Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.
Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.
“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”
Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.
Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.
Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.
The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.
This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.
The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.
After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.
The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.
But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.
The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.
Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.
While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.
Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.
But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)