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 The sentence given in the Manning case is by far the longest given by the US government for anyone convicted of leaking information. Supporters in at least 17 cities were out Wednesday to protest quickly. There are demands for clemency, reduction of the sentence, and for a presidential pardon. Protest Photos Video from San Francisco Video from NYC Free Speech Radio News CHEERS! Pro-Manning Disruption of Obama speech in Syracuse On August 22, David Coombs, Bradley Mannings's lawyer, read a statement on theToday show which said, “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition.” So, we will do so. Follow bradleymanning.org while supporters transition to the use of Chelsea Manning. Write to Chelsea at this new address (use Bradley on the envelope, Chelsea on the letter): Bradley E. Manning 89289 1300 N. Warehouse Road Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304 Must-see new video:  Sign the White House petition to pardon Pvt. Chelsea Manning.  |
Egypt Widens
Crackdown and Meaning of ‘Islamist’
Bryan Denton for
The New York Times
A demonstrator
at a march against Egypt’s military-backed government in Cairo on Friday.
Published:
August 24, 2013
CAIRO — Having
crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian authorities have begun cracking
down on other dissenters, sometimes labeling even liberal activists or labor
organizers as dangerous Islamists.
Ten days ago, the police arrested two left-leaning Canadians — one of them a
filmmaker specializing in highly un-Islamic movies about sexual politics — and
implausibly announced that they were members of the Brotherhood, the
conservative Islamist group backing the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In
Suez this month, police and military forces breaking up a steelworkers strike
charged that its organizers were part of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize
Egypt.
On Saturday, the
chief prosecutor ordered an investigation into charges of spying against two
prominent activists associated with the progressive April 6 group.
When a
journalist with a state newspaper spoke publicly about watching a colleague’s
wrongful killing by a soldier, prosecutors appeared to fabricate a crime to
punish the journalist. And the police arrested five employees of the religious
Web site Islam Today for the crime of describing the military takeover as a
coup, security officials said.
Police abuses
and politicized prosecutions are hardly new in Egypt, and they did not stop
under Mr. Morsi. But since the military takeover last month, some rights
activists say, the authorities are acting with a sense of impunity exceeding
even the period before the 2011 revolt against Hosni Mubarak.
The government
installed by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has renewed the Mubarak-era state of
emergency removing all rights to due process or protections against police
abuse. And police officials have pronounced themselves “vindicated.” They say
the new government’s claim that it is battling Islamist violence corroborates
what they have been saying all along: that it was Islamists, not the police, who
killed protesters before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
“What is
different is that the police feel for the first time in two and a half years,
for the first time since January 2011, that they have the upper hand, and they
do not need to fear public accountability or questioning,” said Heba Morayef, a
researcher for Human Rights Watch.
In the more than
seven weeks since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, security forces have carried out at least
three mass shootings at pro-Morsi street protests, killed more than a thousand
Morsi supporters and arrested at least as many, actions Ms. Morayef
characterized as “massive police abuse on an unprecedented scale.” But even
beyond the Islamists, she said, “anyone who questions the police right now is a
traitor, and that is a protection that they did not have even in 2010,” when
public criticism was tolerated and at least a few complaints were investigated.
Prosecutors had
already begun investigating Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal former United Nations
diplomat, for “betraying the public trust.”
President Obama
has said the new government is on a “dangerous path” marked by “arbitrary arrests, a broad
crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s associations and supporters” and “violence that’s taken
the lives of hundreds of people and wounded thousands more.”
Warning that
“our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being
killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” the president canceled
a planned joint military exercise. He pledged a review of the $1.3 billion a
year in military aid to Egypt, and the State Department took steps to hold back
some of the roughly $200 million in nonmilitary aid. But mindful of Egypt’s
importance in the region, he stopped short of declaring the takeover an illegal
“coup” or cutting off the aid, instead urging an early return to democracy.
Officials of the
new government insist they are committed to establishing the rule of law, as
soon as they overcome what they describe as the mortal threat to Egypt of
violence by the Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi.
The police
appear to be rounding up Brotherhood members on the basis of their affiliation,
without other publicly known evidence of crimes. Mr. Morsi is being held
incommunicado at an undisclosed location. But government spokesmen insist that
every individual, including Mr. Morsi, will be tried by a court and released if
acquitted.
“It is up to the
courts,” Nabil Fahmy, the interim foreign minister, said in a recent interview.
All will be handled “in accordance with the rule of law,” he said.
But some of the
recent charges, like those against the two Canadians, strain credibility. Tarek
Loubani, a Canadian physician with Palestinian roots and a history as a liberal
and pro-Palestinian activist, was in Egypt on his way to the Gaza Strip to
provide training to Palestinian doctors. John Greyson, a liberal Toronto
filmmaker whose work often focuses on cosmopolitan sexual themes, was with him,
documenting the trip for a possible movie. A lawyer for the two said they were
stopped at a checkpoint near a street battle, trying to walk back to their hotel
after the 7 p.m. curfew.
“They were just
in the wrong place at very much the wrong time,” the lawyer, Khaled
El-Shalakany, said Saturday.
The exact
circumstances of their arrest were unclear. In a public statement, Egyptian
prosecutors accused them of “participating with members of the Muslim
Brotherhood” in an armed assault on a police station and “taking part in bloody
crimes of violence.” Prosecutors told reporters at the time that the police had
detained 240 Brotherhood “members,” including two Canadians. (Mr. Shalakany said
they remained in jail as “overwhelmed” prosecutors tried to deal with a backlog
of hundreds of arrests in the crackdown.)
At the Suez
steel plant, workers started a sit-in several weeks ago over compensation,
health care and the firing of about a dozen employees. On Aug. 12, state news
media reported that the Egyptian military had tried to force an end to the
strike, arresting two of its leaders. “They picked the ones with beards!” a
bystander shouts in a video of the arrests.
An army
statement at the time used unmistakable coded language to blame the Islamists,
charging that “infiltrating elements” who were “exploiters of religion” were
trying to poison the workers’ meetings “in the name of religion.”
A state-run
newspaper quoted the interim labor minister, Kamal Abu Eita, saying that
security forces had found Brotherhood members from another factory involved in
the strike. A privately owned newspaper supporting the military takeover, Youm
El Saba, quoted Mr. Eita blaming the Brotherhood for inciting strikes in several
cities.
Among some
supporters of the new government, “Islamist” has become a popular indictment.
After Mr. Obama criticized Egypt’s crackdown on the Islamists, Tahani el-Gebali,
a former judge close to the military, publicly accused him of having ties to the
Brotherhood, claiming his Kenyan half brother directed investments for the
group.
The activists
with the April 6 group being investigated for spying, Asmaa Mahfouz and Esraa
Abdel Fattah, were associated with the group when it was working in opposition
to Mr. Mubarak. State news media reports on Saturday indicated the charges were
a revival of old allegations that the group had worked on behalf of Western
powers to stir unrest in Egypt. The notion was first floated by Mubarak
intelligence agencies and the generals who succeeded him, no evidence has
emerged to support the claims, and the group has denied the charges.
The journalist
who spoke out about his colleague’s killing had been driving with the colleague,
Tamer Abdel Raouf, the head of the local office of the official newspaper, Al
Ahram, in the delta province of Beheira. When their car was at a checkpoint,
soldiers enforcing the 7 p.m. curfew shot and killed Mr. Abdel Raouf.
The authorities
have granted journalists a curfew exemption, and Mr. Abdel Raouf was driving a
car bearing an official press badge from a meeting with the governor. A military
spokesman offered no apology, only condolences, and warned others not to try to
speed through checkpoints.
The next day,
the journalist who had been in the passenger seat, Hamed al-Barbari, began
giving television interviews contradicting the spokesman. Rather than speeding,
Mr. Barbari said, his colleague was shot in the head while slowly turning his
car in response to a soldier’s instructions. “A foolish act” by one soldier,
said Mr. Barbari, who was injured when the car crashed.
About two hours
after he spoke, a prosecutor arrested Mr. Barbari in the hospital and placed him
in custody for four days, for allegedly possessing an illegal shotgun in the car
at the time of the episode.
Prosecutors set
a court date to begin investigating a citizen complaint against Mr. ElBaradei
after he quit as vice president to protest the police violence against the
Islamists. (A conviction could carry only a fine, and he had already left the
country.)
Last week, a
prosecutor even opened an investigation into some of the young organizers behind
the protests calling for the military to remove Mr. Morsi. The prosecutor was
weighing a complaint of “disturbing the public order” because they criticized the release from prison of Mr. Mubarak.
Such a case
would be an attack on the new government’s first supporters. Prosecutors have
not yet begun a full investigation of the complaint and could still set it
aside.
“It is
ridiculous,” said Mai Wahba, a leader of the group.
Mayy El Sheikh
contributed reporting.
No
Limits
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman
He, Roy Bluff could have had his
pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary
fashion interest. (Roy’s real name, Ronald Smith, but the performance stage was
filled to the brim with Smiths and so one night, one night after a drunken
fight, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight,
losing it badly to a smaller man.)He had run through the alphabet with such
catches but she, Laura Perkins she to give her a name, although he called her
“sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better
moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the
wind would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that
was just the way it was almost from the first, and he accepted that sometimes
with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes.
Right then he was in a sly grin mood
and so, before he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work
since he was giving a concert later that evening, he was going through the
maybes. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love
‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and
the ways, that she got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.
The first maybe was that Laura was
not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let
him know that she was. Given the circumstances of how they had met he knew deep
down that, publicly or privately, that was not the way she was built. Christ,
he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was
drinking back then. Some customer who didn’t like his song selections told him about
it, told him loudly. Having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day
he responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked
in with a girlfriend to the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers where he was playing.
She gave him a look, and Roy,
bloodied and all, gave one back. Later he had a drink sent to her table, and
she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had
better bring it to the table himself. Yeah, yeah that was the start. She never
asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds
were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first
meeting. All he knew was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was
the last time he fought anybody for any
reason, fought physically anyway.
Maybe it was that at the beginning,
not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was
finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for
her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with
her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (she put it
more elegantly than that but that was what she meant) and that she would pack
her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Funny, he was still then grabbing
whatever caught his eye before she said that, and what guy who was starting to
get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was
grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what
they later called the “suitcase” pledge although he never told her that, it
just kind of happened.
Maybe it was that Laura would refuse
the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses
on her birthday. She said if what they had wasn’t good enough without trinkets
then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.
Maybe
it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering
and as his star started rising in the business with his first big album hits
that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the
grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around
money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night
crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as their saw
him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly
waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond
the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words.
Waiting to say “sell-out.”
Maybe
it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard
monster night of the early years, the years right after the turn of the new
century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel
room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room,
east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars,
the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the
music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.
Maybe
it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet
dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else
was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on
him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of
abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he
finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of
some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She
said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.
And
maybe, just maybe, it was out in the thundering night, it was out in the windstorms of
human existence, it was out in the rain, it was out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out in,
she was, she just was…
Phillip Marlowe Lives-The Television Series
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
DVD Review
Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, television series starring Powers Boothe, 1983
Sure I have been on a Phillip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from the 1930s and 1940s which feature the tough guy, seen-it-all private detective. Those novels ranging fromThe Big Sleep to Playback (seven in all) pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town where an avenging angel had tough times against the wave. Marlowe was from a time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its’ high and low life without a map. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, to life things his forever tilting after windmills for one thing or another, usually a dame in trouble but not always, always playing by his own rules, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.
Some of those traits, and Chandler’s early character development of Marlowe, were first written in some short stories in the 1930s collected in one volume called Trouble Is My Business (the original twelve story volume not the more recent four story volume or the Library of America volume). Those twelve short stories were presented in a British television series in 1983 under the title Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, the DVD under review, starring Powers Boothe as out intrepid P.I. And while, for my money, it is always better with Chandler, and fellow crime novel pioneer Dashiell Hammett, to read their works to get a real flavor of how he presented Marlowe over time this series is worth watching.
Of course there have been many Marlowes starting with the king hell king Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart, in The Big Sleep and working through such Hollywood stars as Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elliot Gould. Powers Boothe fits somewhere in the middle of that tribe, maybe being just a little too handsome and a little too nonchalant to be a top shelf Marlowe. Still, like every Marlowe, he intrepidly works his way through the twelve story set tangling with bad guys, bad women, good women, competent and incompetent cops, guys on the take, lamos, loses , drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters. The normal bill of fare for any Marlowe worth his salt. Remember though read the twelve stories first and then watch this series which, except for additional tough guy and world-weary dialogue, is faithful to the plot line of those stories.
From The Marxist Archives-Karl Marx and the U.S. Civil War
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Workers Vanguard No. 931
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27 February 2009
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Karl Marx and the U.S. Civil War
(Quote of the Week)
February is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham
Lincoln, the president during the U.S. Civil War. While Lincoln was not a
radical abolitionist and had initially opposed only the expansion of slavery,
Karl Marx nonetheless recognized that Lincoln came to the understanding that
defeating the Confederacy required the smashing of black chattel slavery. Marx
hailed the Civil War as a great bourgeois-democratic revolution and rallied the
European working class to support the victory of the North. We reprint below
excerpts from an address drafted by Marx for the First International on the
occasion of Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. This was written before the
systematic export of capital —i.e., imperialism—had come onto the world
scene.
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a
large majority.
If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your
first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to
Slavery....
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave-holders dared to inscribe, for
the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed
Revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great
Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the
Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution
of the 18th century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with
systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the [...] ideas entertained
[...] at the time of the formation of the old Constitution,” and maintained
“slavery to be a beneficent institution,” indeed the only solution of the great
problem of “the relation of labour to capital,” and cynically proclaimed
property in man “the corner-stone of the new edifice,” then the working classes
of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper
classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the
slave-holders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of
property against labour, and that for the men of labour, with their hopes for
the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict
on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the
hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the
pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their betters—and, from most parts of
Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the working men, the true political power of the North,
allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered
and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the
white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were
unable to attain the true freedom of labour or to support their European
brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has
been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of
Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the
American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an
earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the
single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the
matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of
a social world.
—Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of
America” (November 1864) [brackets in original]
***********
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861
The North American Civil War
Written: October 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861;
Online Version: marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: Bob Schwarz;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney in 1999.
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861;
Online Version: marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: Bob Schwarz;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney in 1999.
London, October 20, 1861
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?
Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.
The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.
But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.
The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?
Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?
Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.
However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.
If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.
At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.
In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.
Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.
For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the lists against the government and his allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.
The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."
As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.
Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.
A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.
The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders' party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas's settlers' sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln's victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.
In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible solution of the conflict.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Yeah, That Old Seven-Year Itch-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
You never know when a guy, a rationale ordinary guy under most circumstances is going to go off the deep end, going to get, ah, that seven –year itch. You know what I am talking about if you are a guy, hell, now that we live in a more enlightened time, a little more anyway, women too. But today I speak of the male version of the itch. Take Professor Joseph Sanders, yes, that Joseph Sanders, the well-respected second generation acolyte of Sigmund Freud, who wrote the book, THE book, on the psychological dysfunctional of American family a generation or so back, and which is still footnoted by eager doctoral candidates, and for all I know is still frantically consulted in tough family-related cases in the real world.
That though was in the days before the good professor got the itch, before he went off the deep end, back in the days when one and all would see him coming and going cutting diagonally through Washington Square, New York City’s Washington Square, the one made famous, or infamous if you prefer, by Henry James back around the turn of the 20thcentury, with that patented homburg of his and that obligatory cigar sticking out of his mouth as he headed to the Compton Club after a hard day of lecturing the young and innocent at New York University where he had taught for many years. But that was before she, and you knew damn well if a guy was going off the deep-end, stevedore or professor, a dame, a frail, a twist, a femme fataleif you go for such descriptions, or whatever you call a heart-breaker of a woman in your neighborhood, had to go with the story. So we might as well get to it.
Funny, funny because of all people Joe Sanders, he liked to be called Joe to show that he could be a regular guy and show too that he hadn’t forgotten his working poor roots growing up in Paterson across the river, the Hudson River if you need to know the exact river, was the guy least likely to get the itch, to go off the tracks. For one thing off he was strictly a square, although that was not the term used in his circles, his mainly male club circle who hiding their own, ah, placid existences, liked to call Joe, ah, stuffy. Joe kept to a routine, up at dawn, maybe before, do some work, some heavy think work, eat a light breakfast, teach a couple of classes in the morning, then heading across that Washington Square diagonal to lunch at the Compton Club, a little advising on this and that in the afternoon, then back to the club for a few drinks, home, supper and to bed by nine or ten. Like clockwork and like I say a square. No lady’s man, not with that homburg and cigar a constant presence, and not with his tight circle of male friends who, with their own secret lusts well disguised behind grey flannel suits, the male professional attire of the time, gathered at the club and provided whatever he desired for non-family companionship (desired like I said before until she knocked him of his moorings).
Funny too because strictly speaking Joe Sanders did not technically have a seven-year itch, although he had an itch all right, but it came at the thirteenth year of his marriage. His rather late marriage to the former Louise Daye, whom he courted for almost a decade before he married and with whom he produced two daughters, and whom he constantly said, said to her and to one and all, that he was quite happy with. And maybe that was to be his downfall. New York City had been a bear that summer, that summer of 1953, had had day after day of high temperatures and high humidity which made things worse in the closed- in city. So because he loved his wife and two daughters dearly he sprung for a summer’s vacation for the whole lot down at Atlantic City. He had to finish some paper and would join them on week-ends later so on the face of it the whole idea would work splendidly.
No sooner than the good Professor had seen his family off on the train at 42nd Street than he ran into her. Now the guys, his friends, his circle of male friends in particular, at the club later, later when recalling the start-up events counted, were not sure whether he bumped into her or she bumped into him but there was no question that an off-hand bump started it. He made that clear when he started to miss the club gathering, for, for, pressing business, That is when Joe “met” Alice, Alice Reed, the woman for whom he would go off the rails. Not in dispute is that Joe, in any case, made apologies as a well-bred and thought of gentleman would, and offered to buy her a drink as a token of good –will.
The good professor expected to be turned down and that would be the end of it. He expected to be turned down mainly because, at best, he was aware that he a very ordinary looking aging guy with homburg and cigar, not appendages that would set a flaming young New York City woman on fire. And turned down too because one Alice Reed, a photographer’s model, and make of that what you will, was drop-dead beautiful, was all that a man, a handsome young rich man would try to catch, and an old man dream of, dream of to disturb his sleep. Alice, a brunette wearing her hair in that longest 1950s New York fashion, long legs, well-turned ankles, nice figure, maybe a bit on the slim side, and great big laughing blue eyes.
What one Professor Joseph Sanders, now many years removed from those from hunger Paterson tenement days, dead father, single mother working the textile mills to bring in a few dollars, did not know was that drop-dead beautiful girls, or maybe ugly women for that matter, who were struggling in the New York City heat and night were not turning down an offered drink from anybody for any reason that year. And so it started. They went to the Skyline Club, a couple of blocks from the train station, ordered drinks and more drinks and talked for a couple of hours. She said he was funny, witty, amusing and he said she was beautiful. At the end of the evening, and here again there is a dispute whether he or she said they should get together again, for dinner maybe. That maybe turned into a date. And so they had dinner the next night.
After that next night dinner, or maybe it was that first encounter, that first off-chance bump, she, Alice Reed she, had her hooks into our good professor bad, bad as a woman can have those hooks with a man. He started to send her presents, started to visit her at her flat (a walk-up studio, fold-up wall bed, small kitchenette, you know small as befits a struggle young, ah, photographer’s model), started taking her build-up of him more seriously as time went on. At first he could not quite believe her protestations that she was tired of flashy guys with no manners and big wanting habits, wanting habits with nothing but front to show her. That she was tired, very tired of living hand-to-mouth and tired of not having things, not having what the Mayfair swells who would buy photographs of her had to offer.
She said he was different, that he knew from hunger after he told her his Paterson poor boy story, knew her needs. As time went on though Joe began to believe her words, wanted to believe her words. His only complaints, silly things really, were her constant chewing of gum, Wrigley’s, that he said took away from her look while chewing and her dropping of her “g’s” which bespoke (his word) of a lack of language skills. Then the other shoe dropped.
One night while they were having supper at her place an ex-lover, Jack Rogers, well, really an ex-walking daddy, a sugar daddy as she explained to Joe later, turned the key to her door and walked in on them. Needless to say this Rogers who was an older man, rich, and a sugar daddy that Alice had neglected to mention had until the month before been paying her, ah, rent and expenses. They had had a row over expenses, overhead expenses for beauty, or something and they had split up, or so she thought. This Rogers had quite apparently been drinking and put up a frenzied an argument about why was Joe there, arguing too right in Joe’s face that Alice was private stock, and things like that. Rogers tried to attack Alice and Joe, no prize-fighter, somehow had to fend him off. They finally got him out of the flat, and Joe thought that would be the end of it, especially when Alice stated that Joe was the only man for her.
And that is really where a woman getting her hooks into a man came into play. Alice convinced him, although he probably needed little convincing by that time, that their happiness depended on getting rid of Jack, getting rid of Jack for good. So in the course of events Joe purchased a gun, a gun for Alice’s protection he said. About a week after that first encounter with Jack Rogers he came to her door again drunk, drunk and nasty. Before Joe realized what had happened Alice took the gun from a desk drawer and shot Jack point blank, shot him dead, very dead.
Once Joe realized what had happened, once he started thinking he knew his die was cast, knew that their fates were now joined. They fled the flat, her taking a rushed suitcase of things with her, went to his house where he got a suitcase full of his things and grabbed a cab to the bus station, the Greyhound bus station, and headed out of town. The last anybody had heard, and that was sketchy by an old friend of Joe’s, a manlooking very much like Joe and a young woman were seen in Paterson, seen being escorted by an old time hood, a gangster from his boyhood streets, from Joe’s old neighborhood to parts unknown. Yeah, you never know about that itch, that seven-year itch.
***From The Archives- Labor’s Untold Story- A Personal View Of The Class Wars In The Kentucky Hills And Hollows-"Once Again, Hard Times In Babylon- Growing-Up Working Poor"
Once Again, Hard Times in Babylon-revised
Markin comment:
I had, several years ago, received a recent comment (not on this site) concerning my take on the labor movement these days. (See my entry at the American Left History blog, The AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the 2008 elections, dated September 25, 2007). The gist of the comment concerned my argument on the necessity of organizing (or rather, in effect, re-organizing) the coal miners, in the eastern and western sections of America (and elsewhere as well). As part of that comment I noted that one of the problems in such organization is the geographical and physical isolation of the mines. I also noted that the miners tend to be a parochial lot and mistrustful of outsiders, as a result. That seemed to have set the reader off. In short, that person questioned my ‘credentials’ to speak on the question. He or she, apparently, missed the sentences about my father’s experiences as a young coal-miner in Eastern Kentucky. That does not qualify me to be president of the United Mineworkers Union (which, I believe, at last look required five years in the mines before one could run for that office) but I know the ‘coal’ in an indirect way. Here’s a little bio sketch on that point.
GROWING UP DIRT POOR IN THE 1950’S
Several years ago I wrote a personal commentary about a childhood friend from back in the old neighborhood in North Adamsville where I grew up in the 1950’s who had passed away.(see An Uncounted Casualty of War,, May 8, 2007 archives). I had also at that time been re-reading the then recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, that covers that same basic period. Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period, in contrast to the reality of my own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age,’ rekindled some memories, a few painful. It is no exaggeration to say that those were hard times in Babylon. Not so much for individual lacks like a steady (and reliable) family car to break out of the cramped quarters, house on house, where we lived once in a while. Or the inevitable hand-me-down clothes (all the way through high school, almost), or worst the Bargain Center bargains that were no bargains (the local “Wal-Mart” of the day to give you an idea of what I mean). Or even the always house coldness in winter (to save on precious fuel even in those cheap-priced heating oil times) and hotness in summer (ditto, save on electricity so no A/C, or fans).
They, and other such lacks, all had their place in the poor man’s pantheon, no question. No, what, in the end, turned things out badly was the sense of defeat that hung, hung heavily and almost daily over the household, the street, the neighborhood at a time when others, visibly and not so far away, were getting ahead. Some sociologist, some academic sociologist, for, sure, would call it the death of “rising expectations.” And for once they would be right, or at least on the right track. Thinking back on those times has also made me reflect on how the hard anti-communist politics of the period, the “red scare” left people like my parents high and dry, although they were as prone to support it as any American Legionaire. The defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement, principally pro-communist organizations, of that period has continued to leave a mark, and a gaping vacuum on today’s political landscape, and on this writer.
There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war (World War II just so there is no question about which in the long line of wars we are talking about) was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide.' The experience of my parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like my parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, my parents were of the now much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not in it.
I will not go through all the details of my parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II are plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. One detail is, however, important and that is that my father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, near Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and story and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book The Other America. This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these “hillbillies” were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder that when World War II began my father left the mines to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting in the Pacific, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.
By all rights my father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown (New York and elsewhere) described in Halberstam’s book and shown on such classic 1950s television shows as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But life did not go that way. Why? He had virtually no formal education. And moreover had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There was (and is) no call for coal-miners here. My father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two-parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead, my mother went to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working we were always “dirt poor.” I have already run through enough of the litany of lacks to give an idea of what dirt poor meant in those hard times so we need not retrace those steps.
Our little family started life in the Adamsville housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell-holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. Hell, why pussyfoot about it, a shack. The house, moreover, was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped, and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off into decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. This is social progress?
But enough of all that. Where in this story though is there a place for militant left-wing political class-consciousness to break the trap? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that kind of consciousness in our house. A phrase from the time, and maybe today although I don’t hear it much, said it all “keeping up with the Jones.’” Or else. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like my father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them? No where. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, this writer, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. My father’s hurts needed much more. The "red scare" aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That dear reader, in a nutshell, is why I proudly bear the name communist today. And the task for me today? To insure that future young workers, unlike my parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice.
Once Again, Hard Times in Babylon-revised
Markin comment:
I had, several years ago, received a recent comment (not on this site) concerning my take on the labor movement these days. (See my entry at the American Left History blog, The AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the 2008 elections, dated September 25, 2007). The gist of the comment concerned my argument on the necessity of organizing (or rather, in effect, re-organizing) the coal miners, in the eastern and western sections of America (and elsewhere as well). As part of that comment I noted that one of the problems in such organization is the geographical and physical isolation of the mines. I also noted that the miners tend to be a parochial lot and mistrustful of outsiders, as a result. That seemed to have set the reader off. In short, that person questioned my ‘credentials’ to speak on the question. He or she, apparently, missed the sentences about my father’s experiences as a young coal-miner in Eastern Kentucky. That does not qualify me to be president of the United Mineworkers Union (which, I believe, at last look required five years in the mines before one could run for that office) but I know the ‘coal’ in an indirect way. Here’s a little bio sketch on that point.
GROWING UP DIRT POOR IN THE 1950’S
Several years ago I wrote a personal commentary about a childhood friend from back in the old neighborhood in North Adamsville where I grew up in the 1950’s who had passed away.(see An Uncounted Casualty of War,, May 8, 2007 archives). I had also at that time been re-reading the then recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, that covers that same basic period. Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period, in contrast to the reality of my own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age,’ rekindled some memories, a few painful. It is no exaggeration to say that those were hard times in Babylon. Not so much for individual lacks like a steady (and reliable) family car to break out of the cramped quarters, house on house, where we lived once in a while. Or the inevitable hand-me-down clothes (all the way through high school, almost), or worst the Bargain Center bargains that were no bargains (the local “Wal-Mart” of the day to give you an idea of what I mean). Or even the always house coldness in winter (to save on precious fuel even in those cheap-priced heating oil times) and hotness in summer (ditto, save on electricity so no A/C, or fans).
They, and other such lacks, all had their place in the poor man’s pantheon, no question. No, what, in the end, turned things out badly was the sense of defeat that hung, hung heavily and almost daily over the household, the street, the neighborhood at a time when others, visibly and not so far away, were getting ahead. Some sociologist, some academic sociologist, for, sure, would call it the death of “rising expectations.” And for once they would be right, or at least on the right track. Thinking back on those times has also made me reflect on how the hard anti-communist politics of the period, the “red scare” left people like my parents high and dry, although they were as prone to support it as any American Legionaire. The defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement, principally pro-communist organizations, of that period has continued to leave a mark, and a gaping vacuum on today’s political landscape, and on this writer.
There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war (World War II just so there is no question about which in the long line of wars we are talking about) was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide.' The experience of my parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like my parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, my parents were of the now much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not in it.
I will not go through all the details of my parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II are plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. One detail is, however, important and that is that my father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, near Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and story and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book The Other America. This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these “hillbillies” were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder that when World War II began my father left the mines to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting in the Pacific, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.
By all rights my father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown (New York and elsewhere) described in Halberstam’s book and shown on such classic 1950s television shows as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But life did not go that way. Why? He had virtually no formal education. And moreover had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There was (and is) no call for coal-miners here. My father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two-parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead, my mother went to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working we were always “dirt poor.” I have already run through enough of the litany of lacks to give an idea of what dirt poor meant in those hard times so we need not retrace those steps.
Our little family started life in the Adamsville housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell-holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. Hell, why pussyfoot about it, a shack. The house, moreover, was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped, and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off into decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. This is social progress?
But enough of all that. Where in this story though is there a place for militant left-wing political class-consciousness to break the trap? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that kind of consciousness in our house. A phrase from the time, and maybe today although I don’t hear it much, said it all “keeping up with the Jones.’” Or else. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like my father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them? No where. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, this writer, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. My father’s hurts needed much more. The "red scare" aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That dear reader, in a nutshell, is why I proudly bear the name communist today. And the task for me today? To insure that future young workers, unlike my parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice.
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