***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – The Two Knives

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

You know not all cops are on the level, in fact most of them aren’t, aren’t on the level, and maybe don’t know what being on the level entails. Oh yeah, there is a good cop every once in a while, a guy not on the take one way or another, a guy who is okay with working for coffee and crullers, a guy like Detective Danny Shea down in the Los Angeles Police Department, a guy I have worked with on a few cases. But even Danny gets squirrely ever once in a while like the time he threatened to have me locked up as a material witness in the Galton case when I refused to tell what I knew, knew confidentially, in that grisly murder case. See I should know about cops and their easy on the take ways since I run up against them as an operative for the International Operations Organization and have to pay a courtesy call on them occasionally. But that coffee and cakes part is right, they work for peanuts and so maybe they don’t feel too bad about shaving the law in the interests of their pocketbooks. And just maybe they are around crime so much it rubs off, gets easy to blur the distinctions between law and the jungle. Here’s a case in point from one I worked on the sides, the official cops get all the credit for busting one their own but it was a close thing, and a murder to boot. 

Detective Johnny Ladd and Sergeant Billy Brooks had been partners for a few years, had cracked a couple of big cases and so were moving up the line in the San Pedro Police Department. Both were on the take to Marty Sheen’s criminal operation but that doesn’t enter into this story, not the “on the take part” but Marty’s part. This was strictly an independent operation on Billy Brooks’ part. It seems that he had met some dame, Lana Wadsworth, a divorcee over at the Kit Kat Club across from the 6^th Precinct Station and the favored hang-out for off-duty cops. Well he went for her and she went for him and they talked of marriage. One night she told him about her ex-husband, a rich guy, and how she didn’t want a penny from him. Things just didn’t work a while back out and she wanted it left that way. But like I say the guy was loaded, had no relatives, known relatives anyway except Lana, and that got Billy thinking, thinking about easy street, about getting away from the coffee and cakes life, finally. 

Of course a cop, a police officer has access to all kinds of information: finger prints, criminal records, evidence room materials, and the like. So Billy grabbed some opium from the evidence room and has one of hi stoolies goes over to this Wadsworth guy’s house in El Segundo and plants the dope in the house, in Wadsworth’s study, after having given one of the servants some cock and bull story about inspecting something. Then a few days, maybe a week later, he planted an anonymous tip to his fellow officers that this Wadsworth character was selling high-grade dope to the Hollywood crowd. Then Billy went all out by saying, through one of his confidential sources, that this Wadsworth operation was protected by some high-powered weaponry in the house. Naturally the cops, including Billy who asked personally to be in on the bust,  working under  some “eminent danger” theory went in like gang-busters. Wadsworth never knew what hit him as Billy fired point blank at the man. Billy later said that Wadsworth threatened him with a gun, a gun that later proved to have been placed in his hand by Billy.  

After the dust had settled and after some civilians wanted to know what the hell happened when one of the leading citizens in El Segundo was shot down like a dog the Police Commissioner was forced to conduct an investigation. The long and short of it was that Detective Ladd was assigned to do the investigation. Billy figured he was in clear, was all set to grab the dough, especially when Wadsworth’s will had been left as it was when Lana and he were married. She was to get all the dough. Thing was though that Ladd saw early on that this thing stank to high heaven. Even then, even after he figured out that Billy had set the whole thing up, had done it for the big payoff he was willing to cover him if he would just leave town and stay out, go east someplace. Billy offered him a cut of the proceeds and he almost went for it, had in fact agreed to it when a higher up in the department learned of Billy’s role in the caper through that stoolie who set the whole thing up. Then Detective Ladd was forced to turn Billy in, did it with a certain relish roughing Billy up before he brought him in.  Yeah, so the next time somebody, some rube tells you the cops are on the level tell them the little story I just related to you, okay?   

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Nils Dahl-Some memories of Walter Held

... I have mentioned before the importance of cadre to any revolutionary movement and the critical importance for propaganda groups and circles. The essentially stillborn fate of the Fourth International in the late 1930s and through World War II cane be directly traced to the decimation of its cadre in that period, and to call a thing by its right name its military defeat at the hands of Nazis and Stalinist alike. Walter Held's fate is a prime example of that proposition. 

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible. 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Nils Dahl-Some memories of Walter Held

From Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

No-one knows if Held had met Trotsky before he came to Norway but Trotsky mentioned him in his Diary as ‘Our comrade in Oslo’. Held wrote a letter on 27 March l935 asking if Trotsky was to come to Norway. He was not at all keen to go. Three people took up the task of getting him to Norway. They were Walter Held, Scheflo, who was the former leader of the Communist Party, and Falk, who was the leader of Mot-Dag. I was a political and personal friend of Walter Held, who was Trotsky’s representative in Norway. In those days I was a regular reader of the German Trotskyist paper Unser Wort. I met Trotsky as soon as he had settled down in Honnefoss, which is a little town about an hour’s drive from Oslo. In those days I had a car at my disposal and took Walter Held over to see Trotsky on many occasions. Held was his pen name and he was very well acquainted with politics, and was a very good writer with a leaning towards literature, too. In 1933-34 he was allowed to use Mot-Dag’s secretariat as his forwarding address, being on good terms with Erling Falk its leader. [1] When I was working in an aeroplane firm in 1935, Held’s second wife was my secretary. It was thanks to Walter Held that I moved from the KPO [2] to Trotskyism. On the other hand, when any questions were discussed with Trotsky, Held did most of the talking.

Walter Held was one of the key people around Trotsky and the Fourth International. He went to Paris to take over the job as international secretary when Rudolf Klement, the previous secretary, was found headless in the Seine. But Held had to leave Paris and return to Oslo immediately because the Stalinists were on his tracks.

Held’s real name was Walter Heinz Epe. He was born 26 December 1910, in Remscheid in the Ruhr. He was the son of a painter-meister Epe whose wife’s maiden name was Held. One of his younger brothers is still alive in Remscheid. After he had taken his student examinations he studied at Cologne and in 193I he was recruited to the Trotskyist movement and was elected to the editorial board of Unser Wort and Permanente Revolution. Because of economic difficulties he had to take a job as an assistant to a member of the German parliament.

Into Exile

After the Reichstag fire he had to leave these jobs and Germany and he went to Czechoslovakia where he carried on with his studies. He studied law and political science. In 1934 he went to Holland. He represented the German Revolutionary Youth together with Willy Brandt and in this youth conference there were three Norwegian representatives, one from Mot-Dag, the student organisation, and one from the Labour Party which was still outside the Second International in those days. [3] They tried to set up a conference at Laren which was close to the German border. Laren had a Nazi Mayor, and they were all arrested and four of them were deported back to Germany. The rest were sent to prison in Amsterdam. There the Dutch did not know what to do with them, and they were deported to Belgium. The Belgians freed them and they carried on their conference at Lille. From there they issued a printed declaration, and this was the start of working out a programme for a Youth International. They elected a bureau. and on that bureau were Walter Held, Willy Brandt and a Norwegian representative from Mot-Dag. Mot-Dag gave them an office and a place to work from, and they produced a paper and a manifesto of the International Bureau of Youth Organisations. Held had to go to Oslo to take up a position there. He arrived in June l934 and worked in the International Bureau of Youth Organisations in the Mot-Dag office from then until August 1935 as the editor, together with Willy Brandt, both of the internal paper, Organisationsbriefe and the external one, Internationaler Jugendbulletin.

Personally Held was the sort of man who had lived a sheltered life. He was of medium size, rather weak looking. He was not tough, but he was not weak either. and he was quite athletic. He told me once that when he was a child he was called ‘Wein Heinz’ that is ‘Crybaby Heinz’. My impression is that he was quite good at standing up to the physical strain in Norway at the time when Trotsky was in danger and Held could have been kidnapped by the Russians. He had charm, he was able to win people and he spoke well and fluently in Norwegian. He was able to put a case in an editorial and he could develop theory.

What stopped Held taking over the secretariat after Klement was murdered was that Trotsky thought that Held might be killed too. I am not sure if I am right, but I understand that Klement was not so competent in the matter of publications as Held. Held in 1938 had been in the movement continually since 1931, and in addition he was a marvellous writer, and he had been involved in the preparation of the Fourth International. When he tried to go to America via Russia he intended to live by his pen. He was marvellous at picking up Norwegian. He took about a year and spoke it fluently. I remember once he produced an article that he had written for the Swedish liberal paper and the editor was impressed and wrote in the preface, ‘I do not want to translate this article into Swedish because of the excellent Norwegian the author has used’. [4] He had a job as a language teacher of German in Oslo. Held was as much an artist and literary man as a politician, and he got on well with authors at parties. When we met I was working with the publication of Mot-Dag’s paper. The organisation was rather well off and used to give a lunch meeting every day with plenty of food to their members and foreign guests, which in that period of unemployment was very welcome. These lunches resulted in much political interaction between the Mot-Dag Norwegians and the political refugees. Held’s wife’s maiden name was Synneove Rosendahl-Jensen. She had been adopted by a railwayman’s family, and it was said that her real father was a rich bourgeois. She was with another immigrant before Walter Held and when she broke with this man he tried to cut her throat, and she had a very nasty scar. They married in the late autumn of 1935. Their son’s name was Frar Roland Epe.

Walter Held recruited two important authors in Norway in 1934, Sigurd Hoel and Helga Krog, and two engineers, myself and a man called Terje Morseth, and we four were able to make contacts in all the different parts of Norway.

Held wrote a good article on the Kristallnacht. [5] He said that this showed the content of the Fascist dictatorship and what they have done to the Jews they will do to others when the time is ripe. This will be perfected for other people. He wrote a wonderful article about it in the Arbeiderbladet under the pseudonym of ‘Audi’ and this was reported to the Germans by another immigrant. Just before he disappeared I remember a lot of violent discussions about the Three Theses – these were that after Hitler occupied Europe the world would be thrown far far back. [6] Thereafter liberal moderates would have to reconstruct the labour movement. That was the Three Theses and Held was violently against them. Walter Held and all the Norwegian supporters of Trotsky disagreed strongly with Trotsky’s position on the Finnish Winter War. A protest letter was sent to the Secretariat of the Fourth International but we received no reply.

What was rather surprising was that Held was not directly attacked by the Norwegian bureaucrats in 1936 at a time when Trotsky was under great pressure and violently attacked. In the meantime, during 1935 Held had broken with the Bureau of the Youth International. I do not know whether Trotsky advised him to do so or not. Held was fairly fully occupied by writing, and he was very good at it. In spite of his being expelled from the Labour Party the editor of the main Labour Party paper, Tranmael, took his articles with pleasure. I know that this editor was very influential in the leadership of the labour movement. He stood up for Held and printed his articles. It was said that the reason Held was not deported like van Heijenoort was that he had married a Norwegian woman, but I believe that the main reason was that this editor protected him. But anyway, when Erwin Wolf and Jean van Heijenoort were arrested when Trotsky was interned, Held was not.

Held’s disappearance

After the occupation of Norway, Walter Held went immediately to Sweden where he got Norwegian citizenship. He was deprived of his German citizenship in May 1941!

I was in Stockholm when Germany attacked Russia, and so Norway and Russia became allies. Before that in the spring of 1941, being a Norwegian officer, I was supposed to go to Canada where the free Norwegian forces were to be built up. I got the Canadian visa but did not get a transit visa through Russia. Norway was only a little country and everybody in politics was more or less inter-related and acquainted with each other. I had been known as a Trotskyist in the labour movement and in the trade unions for a long time. The Communists used to say that I was a member of the axis Kristiansand-Berlin-Mexico City (Scheflo-Hitler-Trotsky). That was a way of slandering us in those days, by implying that behind us stood the Gestapo. Konrad Knudsen went to Sweden together with his wife and children. His daughter, Hjordis, got a new name because she married in Sweden. Hjordis and Knudsen got their visas and went through Russia without any difficulties, though Hjordis had been the companion of Erwin Wolf. He had been Trotsky’s secretary and had disappeared, murdered by the Stalinists in Spain.

Walter Held wondered whether he should take the chance. I remember my last discussion with him, and I strongly advised against it, and said that if they knew about me they will certainly know about you. He said that he had never been a secretary of Trotsky’s, which was strictly true. He was quite sure that sooner or later the Germans would invade Sweden and violate its neutrality. That was certainly the impression in those days, and the only way of coming out would be through Russia to America. Walter Held thought that the war-time confusion would help him to get out through Russia. It was just possible that my visa was refused for military reasons in the Stalin-Hitler Agreement period. Held was much better known as a Trotskyist in the emigre grouping in Stockholm. We discussed it and he said ‘I’ll take a chance. I think that the situation is really quite confused. I’ll take a chance.’ He made a declaration beforehand. When he did not get through, it was published in the syndicalist paper in Sweden where he declared that if he was taken and if he should confess, it would be forced. He was arrested on the railway between Moscow and Odessa. It was reported by a Norwegian who was on the train and who went on to Constantinople. Held’s wife and the child disappeared in Russia with him. Then we published his declaration. Later we got information through the Polish Bund (the Jewish organisation in Poland) that he had met Erlich and Alter in a prison cell. [7] The report in the Norwegian Foreign Office is that Alter, who was released for a short time, then went to the Norwegian Embassy in Russia and gave a report about Walter Held. This probably cost him his life. The Embassy enquired about Held and the Russians denied all knowledge of him. Then Alter was arrested again and both Alter and Erlich were shot. It was claimed that they had been in contact with foreign spies. The last that I heard was the report of a Swede who came out much later who said that Held had been interrogated by Beria in person. Then I was sent out ot Sweden by aeroplane to England. There I met Blidt who was a leader of the Bund and had this report from him. The Polish forces were sent from Russia to England. The Poles would not fight under Russian command and so they were taken out of prison and put in military formation and sent to England so that they were not under Russian command. So both I and the Poles were defending Scotland against the Germans! They told me that Held was in a concentration camp in Saratov in 1942. He may have been moved to Saratov as some things were shifted there at the end of 1941 since Moscow was too dangerous because of the German advance. Later we heard from some Jews coming out of Russia (this was not long ago) that Walter Held had probably died in 1942. [8] When Held left Stockholm he did not take his papers with him since he travelled under a false name. Some Swedes had Held’s papers at first, and I got them later.

The Norwegian authorities were not very willing to investigate and follow up this case. Since he had got Norwegian citizenship as a refugee in Stockholm Held was not regarded as really Norwegian. We pushed them on the question of Synneove and Roland. She was a tough type who might have been able to survive the life in concentration camps and exile to Siberia. We hoped that she might have been used as a teacher in some obscure village, and we tried to trace her after the war. She could have been easily identified from the scar on her throat. Our efforts only resulted in numerous rumours. That Alter and Erlich had been in the same prison as Held is certain, but the Norwegian Foreign Office told me that they did not know anything about the three for sure.

Nils Kaare Dahl
May 1988

Notes

1. A Norwegian left-wing student organisation. It is intended to publish a further article on Trotsky in Norway and the Norwegian Trotskyist movement by Nils Dahl in a future issue of Revolutionary History where there will be further details of this organisation.

2. KPO: The Communist Party Oppositionists – German Brandlerites.

3. The Norwegian Labour Party broke with the Comintern in l923 and was independent of all Internationals in 1931-35. It joined the Second International later. The third member was Kurt Forsland of the ‘Independent’ Swedish Young Communists.

4. Swedes can understand Norwegian without too much difficulty.

5. Kristallnacht November 1938 – 'The Crystal Night’ or 'Night of the Broken Glass', was when the Nazis smashed and looted Jewish shops and burnt synagogues in alleged retaliation for the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew in November l938. cf L.D. Trotsky, For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels, Writings of Leon Trotsky l938-39, New York 1974, pp.l91-3.

6. The Three Theses of the AK (Committee Abroad) of the IKD (German Trotskyists) were issued in l94l. They argued that the Nazi terror had thrown the whole of Europe so far back that the progressive task of the future was the reconstruction of bourgeois democracy.

7. See the references to Alter and Erlich in the Encyclopedia Judaica. At the time that they were shot there was no persecution of the Bund by the Stalinists, so the fate of these two Polish Jewish socialists was almost certainly the result of their heroic and honourable internationalism in attempting to protect a German Marxist with whom they had political differences.

8. Since Erlich and Alter were shot in December 1941 it is quite possible that this report is incorrect and that Held was murdered at the same time.
Further information about Heinz and Synneove Epe is to be found in an article written by Einhaut Lorenz of Kiel University in the Norwegian periodical of Labour History in Oslo – Tidschrift for Arbeiderberegelsens Historie, No.1/86 – under the title Our Comrade in Oslo. This draws not only on what has been published in Norway but also on the Nazi archives. Lorenz is a specialist in the Norwegian Labour Movement and Communist Party and has written books on both.

 

***Out In The 1960s Psychedelic Night- The Byrds-Fifth Dimension - A CD Review

CD Review

Fifth Dimension, The Byrds, Warner Brothers, 1966
Eight miles high and when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s stranger than known
Signs in the street that say where you’re going
Are somewhere just being their own

Nowhere is there warmth to be found
Among those afraid of losing their ground
Rain gray town known for it’s sound
In places small faces unbound

Round the squares huddled in storms
Some laughing some just shapeless forms
Sidewalk scenes and black limousines
Some living some standing alone


Hari, hari, hari, rama, hari, hari came some hidden from view sound from the street, the street of street dreams and scores, or just the street outside Harvard Yard, just off Mount Auburn Street near Tommy’s Lunch, as music, stereo music, blared out from some fourth floor garret signaling the advent of the next day of the “new world.” Music, blaring night and day, and if anybody minded they kept it to themselves. More likely they craned their ears for a closer listen, listening until the notes meshed with their brains, and the slightest trance-like movement began to shake their bodies. Then the guitar sound high and shrill like no Bobby Darin flip or Percy Faith bong from a couple of years before when the music was s-q-u-a-r-e gave forth sounds that became you, man, became you. Dig it.

Just another mid-1960s Cambridge day, a day that had started fresh with a joint passed around by those fourth floor garret “squanders,” (not really, the guy whose name was on the lease was away in Europe for the summer trying to find himself and he had “sublet” the place to his hometown friend, some Cos Corner place in Connecticut, and that friend had multiplied his friends in his midnight crave wanderings around Cambridge Common), four refugees at this hour, jammed every which way on the floored mattresses that passed for sleeping quarters. Four refugees, two boys and two girls, trying to keep their heads attached, literally, against the hard war news, another seventy death casualties this week and no end in sight and one of the boys very, very draft ready.

Trying to keep their heads together, literally, against the crowding day, the do this and do that day, the day of work and more work for no real purpose in a world they did not make, and were scratching their heads to figure out. And not winning on that bet. Topped off, trying to keep their heads together, literally, against some hard drug news, hearing earlier that another comrade had been busted “for possession” down in death hole Texas. Adios amigo, there are not enough prisons for us though

That chant, that hidden from view chant, could only mean, that the Hari Krishnas, just then thick as thieves and growing in the incense, jingle-jangle bell, saffron, or whatever they called their silken sheet garb, in Harvard Square were getting ready to attend to their daily ministrations, meditations, and frankly irritating beggings. Then, like magic, The Byrds’ Eight Miles High started playing on the stereo. And another joint, or maybe just a bogart made the rounds and the four denizens of that new world started to, well, giggle, giggle that pretty soon they too would be eight miles high. And the daily bummers could wait a little longer to be figured out.

***Song To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bruce Springsteen’s “Brothers Under The Bridge- With A Story From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
Recently in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to “burn” and download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped in my tracks, the one highlighted in the title to this entry Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me this assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from a story that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round it into shape. The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for language). I have reconstructed that story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Jeff and Zeb’s story as told by Jeff, probably one of the only stories that have ever driven home to me the hellishness of war and what it does to men’s souls.

For the record Jeffrey James Adams served in Vietnam from mid-1969 to-early 1970 and Zebulon Samuel Johnston from mid-1969 to late 1971. Zebulon Johnston’s name appears in no rededicated wall down in Washington but just maybe it should. Read below why. Josh Breslin
**********
This conversation took place one afternoon (date, unknown) in late October, 1977 under a massive concrete overpass along U.S. Interstate 5 just south of Inglewood near Los Angeles, California.


“Ya, Zeb was quite a guy in his time, a guy you could depend on, a guy you could count on, if you know what I mean. Who did you say you worked for, mister? Oh, ya, The East Bay Eye. I still miss the bastard, miss him for leaving me here without a guy I could count on, and will until I leave this good green earth and that ain’t no lie, no sir. A real brother, unlike my own brother who sometimes was a brother to me and sometimes just a same last name.

Zeb and I went back, went back to basic training in the Army down at Fort Gordon in Georgia. Jesus just remembering that hellhole place and that hellhole time and that hellhole way the good citizens outside in Augusta treated us the couple of times we had weekend passes just like the blacks just because I was a Yankee and old Zeb was from broken down Appalachia, some dink town called Hazard, a coal dust town from what he said about it. A town he always said was full of history and written up in song and in the books. But I had never heard of it, and truth, never have heard of it since so I think that was old Zeb just being old Zeb. Just so you know when you write this story his real name was Zebulon Samuel Johnston, named after his father, his pa-pa he said, simple as that. And don’t call him a Johnson, either. He was a Johnston, born and bred, he said.


But the big thing about how we hit it off right from the start was that first day when we got off that olive drab bus and hit the barracks and Jeb was bunked across from me and I had to show him how to tie his boots. See, he never had proper shoes from the way he told it and the way he tried to tie those boots before the boot camp sergeant snapped his neck back for him I can believe that and maybe that was the way things were down in broken down Hazard. All I know is that all through basic training, through rough woods stuff, Zeb paid me back, paid me back big time, for my minute kindness. See he knew more about the woods, and how to survive in them, and little tricks about how to use this and that to get stuff done than a city boy, a big time Boston city boy, Yankee to the core, and corner boy smart not woods smart could ever know.

So he kept me on, as he said, as his mascot. And anytime he needed some fancy way to get out of something he would yell for me, and then he would be my mascot. Tight we were right from basic. Same tight, and you'd better be tight, or get our asses kicked when we took Advanced Infantry Training down at Fort McClellan down in Alabama where the civilians put Yankees and hillbillies below blacks in the pecking order they had established, or so it seemed every time we had town leave.

And then shipped out to ‘Nam. Ya, ‘Nam hellhole of all hellholes and I know, know for certain I never would have made it out alive if not for Zeb. See one time after we had a few days off from the line we hit Saigon and jesus, the place looked just like home, or somebody’s home if that home was Vegas or one of those glitter town, action night or day. I couldn’t leave the place, or want to. Zeb could take it or leave it so he went back first. Well one day, yes, day time he pulled me out of some brothel, some sweet Eurasian girl specialty house just in time to keep me from being locked up for about six months in Long Binh for being, well, a few days over my leave time.

But I am getting a little sidetracked and confused because that is not really the time he saved my young white ass. No that was when we were out in the boonies, out in the Central Highlands, near Pleiku just doing a routine patrol, keeping as far away from the enemy as we could and as close to this little river, a crick Zeb called it, but really a creek, a little low during the dry season. From out of nowhere we start taking fire from “Charlie,” or maybe NVA regulars because the field of fire was pretty concentrated like these guys had done it together for a while. In any case the fire was getting heavy and so I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was heading. Next thing I know I am in the creek, water all around and muddy, big muddy, and I can’t get out, no way. I take a round in the shoulder; see that scar there, ya, that’s Purple Heart territory. I guess the hit made me crazy, crazy not with pain as with fear, animal fear, and that ain’t no lie. I could smell it and it wasn’t pretty.

I started crying out, started crying out like crazy “Zeb, don’t leave me here to die alone so far from home, please Zeb.” And you know I don’t have to say anything more about it because as you can see Jeb did not leave me in any 'Nam. Ya, he got the Bronze Star for that, and a Purple Heart to boot for his own wounds carrying me to the medivac area although I must have passed out because I don’t remember much after the screaming and that fear smell. My war was over, and I lost a little contact with Jeb as guys will do when they get split up in wartime.

Back in the real world and out, maybe 1972, I was doing okay, a little of this and that, nothing big and nothing that couldn’t be shoved aside like air if I wanted to take off. Then about a year later I heard through a mutual friend that Jeb had made it back to “the real world” after another tour of duty in ‘Nam and was out in Los Angeles. What that friend didn’t tell me, or didn’t know, was that second tour took the stuffing out of Zeb and he had started doing some girl. You know what that is right? Cocaine. Ya, drugs to ease the pain and erase the horror. And once girl couldn’t shake the dreams and the pain then boy, plenty of boy took you out of this world. Boy, since you didn’t know what girl was, is nothing but horse, heroin, sweet dreams, for a while heroin.

Ya, Jeb was in a bad way out there in L.A. living on the streets, knocking off drug stores and I don’t what else is what he told me later when he was sober a couple of times. Somehow our mutual friend gave Zeb my number and one night, one hellish stormy night up in Maine where I was staying working at a small shipyard, I got a phone call from Zeb saying, “Jeff, don’t leave me out here alone to die, please Jeff.” And you know I don’t have to say anything more because I did not leave Jeb to die alone in any L.A. Jesus, no, not a good old country no shoes boy like Zeb in L.A. They would eat him alive.

So, a few days, maybe a week later, we met in a Mission Of God house or some such place over on Wiltshire, not the good part, and I got him fixed up there for a while. He was shaky, very shaky. Then, after a few months, he decided that he had to get out of that mission house and live on the streets. Well not exactly the streets but in a place like this, near the railroad tracks, in case he wanted to head home he said, just a hobo jungle really. So I stayed with him naturally. Somehow he got some boy from god knows where and he went off to the races again. He wouldn’t even consider getting help or leaving the jungle. He said he felt at home under bridges, and along railroad tracks.

Well, somehow one day, I wasn’t around that day I was down at the pier looking for a couple of days work to tide us over, he got a hold of some badass smack , some poison left-over stuff and started dancing on the tracks from what some ‘bo who was there said later. You know as well as I do you can’t dance on any railroad track and not draw a wrong number. They say he tried to get off the track but he wasn’t fast enough.

Ya, Zeb was quite a guy in his time, a guy you could depend on if you know what I mean. I still miss the bastard and will until I leave this good green earth and that ain’t no lie, no sir. Poor Jeb lived on sweet dreams and train smoke and I guess I will for a while. Maybe do a little of this and that again. But not right now, okay.

This evening will mark 99 years since the Christmas Truce of 1914. Let's remember the courage of these soldiers who refused orders to fight, threw down their weapons, and came together peacefully. These men made history with their spontaneous efforts.

We can all learn from their actions.

Today, with war and violence integrated as a part of our daily lives, peace may seem like some unachievable, distant goal.  If these soldiers could lay down their weapons in the middle of battle and recognize each other’s humanity, then we can as well.  If it is possible for them, then it is possible for us.

We have more to gain from recognizing each other’s humanity than by denying it. Regardless of religion, race, country, or any other difference, we are all human. On each end of the riffle, we are all the same.

Happy holidays to all.

Sincerely,



Michael McPhearson
Interim Executive Director

 

Follow this link to donate to Veterans For Peace. Forward to a Friend Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec, St. Louis, MO 63105, 314-725-6005 www.veteransforpeace.org

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

 

 

… she had not really been interested in boys, men, not that she was like that, like some daughter of Sappho (whom she had read about in a book on Greek mythology she liked from the North Adamsville branch of the library), no, but she didn’t understand them, understand their wants. Besides helping out at home by working behind the notions and sundries counter at Doc’s Drugstore after school, doing that math/english/history/science homework, putting the younger brothers and sisters to bed, and a dozen other things since her two older brothers were overseas now left her no time, no time at all, to understand boys, men, or their wants. Until he came in, until her soul-mate came in, came in all gaggling, kind of bashful, kind of awkward, new in town, but there was something about him, oh, just something, she couldn’t  put in words, some cool breeze that trailed behind him. Came in and put his nickel (looked like maybe his last nickel too) in Doc’s newly installed jukebox across from the soda fountain counter and headed with a sheepish grin toward her notions and sundries counter while in the background his selection came on, her favorite song….         

 

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin –The Scorched Earth

  

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars drinking cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Oh sure I have a million stories to tell about my experiences now that I have retired after forty years working as an operative (peeper, shamus, gumshoe, private dick or whatever your dig at name for us)     with the International Operations Organization. Stories about murder and mayhem, deceit and deviousness, strange mental states and cold-bloodedness. Yes I have seen it all the worst side of mankind (male and female okay, and sometimes the women were the worst capable of things no guy would even think of doing no matter how much he hated whoever he hated), the backbiting, the scratching eyes out to beat someone out of something, the heat of passion and not in the bedroom where it belongs turning to dust. Not a pretty sight and not for the faint-hearted which is why I lasted for forty years, forty years of slugging it out to get a little rough justice in this wicked old world, and some days just for the pay. Right now my mind in on one of the last cases, the Bradford case, not because it was the worst, far from it, but because it didn’t make sense, didn’t make sense that a couple of well-off young women would go over the deep end for no real reason. Let me tell you about it    

It all started when John Bradford, the biggest banker in San Francisco (yes he was some distant descendant of somebody on the Mayflower crew although that doesn’t, I don’t think, explain what happened, not by any reasonable accounting) came to the agency looking for help when his two daughters, Anne and Prudence, went missing after not checking in for about a week. We had done a previous case with Mr. Bradford over an employee embezzlement scheme and so he came back to us on that recommendation.

You might well ask why if he was worried about his missing daughters, maybe having been kidnapped or worst, he didn’t go to the police, the FBI or something like your average guy would do. That is where the rich, and in his case the very rich, are different. They are worried about image, maybe about what would that Mayflower forbear think, or the country club set so they want things, including messy things and maybe especially messy things hushed up. They can also afford to pay for extra service, extra service that hard pressed police forces could not or would not provide. Besides in this case the two young women had something of a history of walking on the wild side and so hush it was just in case they were involved in some freefall caper. And so it landed on the agency’s lap and the boss assigned me to the case since he believed from what Bradford told him (not all of which he told me since Bradford worked on a need to know basis) that it would involve no heavy lifting, meaning no shooting or fists, something easy as I eased into retirement.     

Here is the way it went down, I started with the servants at the Bradford estate to see if they knew anything. Nothing, except some information about the pair having packed several suitcase before they left. None of them saw that as unusual since they had done that before even on short trips. Then I went the rounds of friends, relatives and acquaintances but no dice, no dice mainly because their friends were apparently working under some national security directive about giving information to a cop, public or private. A breakthrough did come when I went to the Knickknack Club, a place, a watering hole for the young, rich, and infamous where they hung out.

That tipster, who shall remain anonymous just in case the forces of evil that were unleashed decide to do something further about it, told me that I should check with a guy named Johnny Firestone because they had often been seen in his company. At first that name did not ring a bell but checking back with our agency files I found out that the name should have been ringing many bells. Johnny or rather his father and then he was knee-deep in the drug trafficking business in the Bay Area which meant some big time operations. It also seemed that Sonny Boy had branched out into high-end pornography. High-end meaning that the models were rich, wicked, perverted or whatever else made them get their kicks. 

So I followed that trail over to a converted warehouse in Haywood where Sonny Boy did his shoots. What would happen, and what did happen with Anne and Prudence, was that Johnny would get them high, high as kites, for a while and then suggest that modeling scam. 

In this case both young women were eager to get their kicks that way. Before it was all over though some shots were fired, some fists flew and a very large sum of Bradford money changed hands in order to get all the negatives and all the prints bought and burned. Last I heard the girls were married to some stockbrokers who are clueless about what their brides are capable of. Good luck, good luck reigning that pair in.  

 

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broué-Walter Held  
... I have mentioned before the importance of cadre to any revolutionary movement and the critical importance for propaganda groups and circles. The essentially stillborn fate of the Fourth International in the late 1930s and through World War II cane be directly traced to the decimation of its cadre in that period, and to call a thing by its right name its military defeat at the hands of Nazis and Stalinist alike. Walter Held's fate is a prime example of that proposition. 
    

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

 

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible. 

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Pierre Broué-Walter Held

From Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1, No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

This short biographical sketch of Walter Held is translated from the French by Ted Crawford from a piece entitled Quelques Prôches Collaborateurs de Trotsky by Pierre Broué in the Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No.1, January 1979, and is published here with the author’s permission for the first time in English. 

Heinz Epe was born in 1910 at Remscheid; his father had a small painting business and right-wing views. As a young man he was noticeable for his quick intelligence and undeniable charm together with perhaps a certain excessive self-confidence. A law student at Cologne, Berlin and Vienna he was active first in the young Communists and then the KPD, from which he was expelled in October 1932 as a 'Trotskyist'. He started but never finished his doctorate in sociology. In January 1933 he was coopted into the leadership of the German Section. The activity of his group in Remscheid had attracted the notice of the Nazis, and he was one of the first to get out of Germany as soon as they came to power to escape being rounded up immediately. He was in Prague in the middle of May 1933. We have not been able to obtain confirmation in the German archives that as a result of this activity he was condemned to death in his absence by a Hitlerian court, since they are often incomplete on this sort of topic. [1]

Married to a young Czech activist of Otto Friedmann’s group, he took an original position in the German section in 1933: he called for a ‘new party’ in Germany at that time – like Trotsky but against the leadership of the German Opposition – and for a new International – three months before anyone else. It was perhaps under his influence that this position was defended by the Cologne delegate against the majority led by Eugene Bauer at the clandestine national conference in Leipzig on 12 March 1933. In any case he defended this position against Bauer in a debate in one of the first numbers of Unser Wort and he signed the article with the initials ‘HE’. He was the first editor of this publication, standing in for Otto Schussler who was coming from Prinkipo to do it, and this responsibility led him to correspond directly with Trotsky.

When the decision was taken to transfer Unser Wort to Paris, Heinz Epe – who started to call himself Walter Held, his mother’s maiden name – arrived in Paris in the second half of September. He did not stay there. Henricus Sneevliet, whose party, the RSP, was about to join the international organisation, wanted a person on whom he could rely sent to work alongside him in Amsterdam. He pushed hard to have Jean van Heijenoort whose Flemish origins made him think that the latter would adapt to his language and country. But it was eventually Held who, without any ties in Paris, was chosen to do the liaison. He was certainly one of the last visitors to Saint Palais and discussed his German and Czech experiences and his tasks in the Netherlands with Trotsky. He settled in Amsterdam at the beginning of October.

As soon as he arrived he was hurled into a debate around the question of fusion of Sneevliet’s RSP with the OSP, led by Peter Schmidt and Jaques de Kadt, both parties being signatories in August of the appeal of the Four for a new International. Held took part in the unity negotiations. He reported regularly to Trotsky, and this correspondence has recently been made available in the Sneevliet archives at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, while at the same time he wrote mostly on German matters to Bauer, who represented the International Secretariat. It seems that Sneevliet told Trotsky that he both welcomed and had a high opinion of him. But to Held’s great sorrow he was not able to find in this ‘puritan and petit bourgeois’ country a man who would make a marriage of convenience with Maria Reese to naturalise this ex-KPD Reichstag deputy who had become a supporter of the Fourth International. [2]

At this juncture the initiative of the youth organisation of the OSP in calling for a world conference of Socialist and Communist revolutionary youth organisations gave him an important role in the construction of the International, for he was given the responsibility of representing the LCI and its youth sections in the preparatory work. LD attached the greatest importance to this task in building the Fourth International itself. Held was present at the youth hostel in Laren when it was raided by the Dutch police just as the conference was starting in February 1934. Since his papers were in order, he was able with his companion Willy Brandt, who was furnished with Norwegian documents, to avoid the late of four German comrades, illegal refugees, whom the democratic Netherlands government was to hand over to Hitler.

Interrupted at Laren, the conference took place at Brussels – officially at Lille – and ended by electing an International Bureau of three members, of whom Held was one, together with Willy Brandt and Kurt Forsland of the ‘Independent’ Swedish Young Communists. The International Secretariat hoped for a lot from this because the centre would be at Stockholm and it looked unfavourably on the idea that Held would stay in Brussels with possibilities for him of starting work around the party and youth of Karl Kilbom. Trotsky was unhappy that Held had in his words "capitulated" to Brandt; he scolded him without restraint and warned him against holding far too optimistic Swedish perspectives. [3] In fact Held could not get to Sweden and had to satisfy himself with setting up in Oslo in June 1934. There he would be in close contact with Willy Brandt who, in spite of his youth, played an important role in the SAP in exile and had close relations with the Norwegian Labour Party which was about to become the government.

While in exile Held does not seem to have had much activity centred on Germany, though nominally he was in the leadership of the IKD. He was a determined opponent of ‘entrism’ in the SFIO – he is said to have compared Trotsky to Plekhanov and even Kautsky – but he finally came round. He supported the SL Johre/Oskar Fischer (Josef Weber and Otto Schüssler) group though he was never really a whole-hearted supporter. [4] He occupied himself with the Norwegian workers’ movement and had political contacts with Olav Scheflo, Helge Krog, Kjell Ottelson and Haakon Meyer which were valuable for Trotsky and which in a certain sense laid the foundations for the Norwegian section that first saw the light in 1937. It was under his influence that the Youth Bureau came out in favour of the International, which obliged Brandt to vote at the February conference of the LAG for the Sneevliet-Schmidt resolution in favour of the Fourth International.

This was the period when the SAP definitely turned its back on such an orientation and no doubt Brandt was not the most backward in pushing it this way. The LCI denounced what Trotsky termed his ‘treason’ for, when representing the Youth Bureau, Brandt had voted for the Fourth, but as a member of the SAP spoke against it. LD wanted Held to make an energetic intervention to break up the anti-Trotskyist bloc which was forming. The SAP moved first, and the only result of this attack was the expulsion of Held from the bureau on 18 August 1935.

At this date LD was already installed at Hönnefoss. Held made great efforts to get a residence permit for him from the new Labour government. He had welcomed LD’s arrival at the quayside in Oslo on 18 June and had accompanied him to Hönnefoss, the home of the Knudsens, where he would live, and made frequent and long visits there to see him. The presence of the young Held couple, (he had just married a young Norwegian, Synnoeve Rosendahl), was very precious to the Old Man in that terrible period. In December 1936 Trotsky asked Trygve Lie for permission for Held to accompany him to Mexico [5]; the government’s refusal prevented this.

It seems that during the next period Held spent his efforts in turning the Norwegian Youth Section towards the Fourth International. The veteran militant Jeanette Olsen was the standard-bearer in this effort. But he was still an influential member of the IKD and the only German to work at the same time both for Unser Weg, the organ of the Johre-Fischer tendency and den Eisen Weg, which was edited by the International Secretariat. He wrote regularly for the New International with theoretical, historical and reporting articles of excellent quality. [6] He played an important role in the inquiry into the Moscow trials and particularly in his search for witnesses in Denmark for the events that had taken place in Copenhagen in 1932.

Trotsky at this time wished to see Held where his abilities would be fully utilised by appointing him to the International Secretariat. The phoney letter sent by Rudolf Klement after his kidnapping referred to projects about Held’s future activity. In 1938 LD suggested that he should come to Paris to the International Secretariat as a step on the road to the United States, where the IS would move after the start of the war in Europe. [7] We do not know why this never happened and why Held was still in Norway in September 1939.

Daniel Guerin, who was a delegate of the PSOP, met him with the veteran Czechoslovak Alois Neurath, the latter also a refugee. He recalled later his memories of these ‘two militants of exceptional quality’, ‘the cream of the Fourth International’, mentioning Held in particular as ‘a real frilly-shirted revolutionary, of a most refined and subtle culture’. [8] But at this time the general conditions in which information circulated make it unclear exactly what happened. It seems that in the quarrel which broke out in the US SWP following the Hitler-Stalin pact and the debate on the nature of the USSR, Held took the side of the minority led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham. It seems on the other hand that he denounced the split in the party and in the International: both factions were to claim him after his death.

But the curtain was coming down on the drama: after the occupation of Norway by German troops in 1940, Held could not stand the temporary political inactivity to which he was reduced by his refugee status in Sweden. Friendly relations with an American diplomat made him think of an audacious plan: furnished with a proper passport and all the necessary visas he attempted at the beginning of 1941 to cross the Soviet Union by train to the Soviet Far East and there to embark by ship for the United States with his companion and their son Ivar Roland. [9]

The enterprise was doomed in advance: the GPU were ignorant neither of his identity nor his activity, and he was, like Klement and like Wolf, a man to strike down. Asked by the police to get off the train at Saratov to be interrogated, he disappeared. Some Polish Bundists seem to have seen him some weeks later in prison in Moscow, where they were also detained. It is certain that he was executed as a ‘Trotskyist’ like so many others; in his case Stalin also carried out the sentence pronounced by Hitler. Walter Held was not yet thirty-one years old.

Pierre Broué

Notes

1. learning what information is contained in the dossiers of the Gestapo preserved in the FDR. However Dr. Zieghan of the Hauptstaatsarchiv at Dusseldorf has promised to tell us of any information of the registrar concerning births, marriages and deaths that he has extracted for us from the dossiers of the Gestapo on Heinz Epe and others.

2. Correspondence between Walter Held and Erwin Ackerknecht (Bauer) in December 1933 and January 1934, Sneevliet Papers. International Institute of Social History. When we saw this dossier it had the erroneous note that this correspondence was between Held and Erwin Wolf. (The confusion is explained by the similar first names.) [After this, Reese rapidly moved over to the Nazis – editors]

3. Letter to Trotsky from Held, 29 March 1934, Glotzer Papers, New York, published in the Oeuvres November 1933-April 1934, pp.298-302.

4. See on this subject the abundant correspondence between Held and Wolf in the Wolf dossier, Vereeken papers.

5. Trotsky wrote about this in Quatrieme International in February-March 1937 at the end of a piece about his leaving Norway.

6. Held was also the author of the document, The Evolution of the Comintern that was adopted at the First International Conference for the Fourth International in July 1936. It appears in Documents of the Fourth International – the formative years (1933-1940), New York 1973 pp.l13-l31. See also Walter Held’s thesis on the evolution of the Comintern, Writings of Leon Trotsky Supplement (l934-l940), New York 1979, pp.685-686. [editors’ note]

7. Letter from Trotsky to Cannon and Shachtman, 20 April 1938, Cannon Papers. [More on European Problems, Writings of Leon Trotsky l937-l938, New York 1976, p.322 – editors]

8. Daniel Guerin, Front Populaire, Revolution Manque, Paris, Maspero 1970, p.255.

9. A certain number of precious details have been given to us by Wolfgang Alles who has just submitted a thesis to the University of Mannheim entitled Zur Politik und Geschichte der Deutschen Trotzkisten ab 1930.

 

First Night Against the Wars! When: Tuesday, December 31, 2013, 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm Where: steps of the Boston Public Library • Boylston & Dartmouth Sts. • Copley T • Boston starting at Noonish till sixish after the parade We'll have free hot chocolate and snacks for passersby who stop to pick up your literature. We're also going to have a bright sticker that has broad appeal and that everyone opposed to these wars can wear.   We're organizing an educational action that reaches the 100,000s of people who will be in Boston to celebrate First Night. We want to welcome them. We want to celebrate. But we also want everyone to be fully conscious of the many wars: Wall Street and Government's War on Us! The wars on women. The wars on people of color and immigrants. The wars on working people. The wars in Africa and Middle East. The war on the environment. These are all connected! Help make this happen! To help with the planning and organizing, please call Dan the Bagel Man at 857-272-6743. Daniel.Kontoff@yahoo.com   United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today. info@justicewithpeace.org 617-383-4857

***Like A Rolling Stone-The Hunter Thompson Papers

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, introduction by Jann Wenner, Hunter S. Thompson, 2013

Sometimes it is just nice to be able to grab an author’s work, especially an author whose stock and trade was essentially working as a free- lance journalist, in one place. That is the idea behind this collection of all of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s (Doctor Gonzo’s) work for Rolling Stone magazine which launched him to some fame in the counter-cultural world in the early 1970s and later. Although the bulk of the work was done in that 1970s period occasional articles pop up almost until his death. An added feature is that Jann Wenner, the editor/owner of the magazine and Hunter’s ally/nemesis, introduces the book and each individual piece to give a little back-ground history of what did (or did not) happen with each article.

Hunter Thompson first became widely known as a crackerjack journalist when he “rode” and wrote about Oakland’s Hell’s Angels and set a new path for a proper way to write journalistic articles. No more so-called objective on the one hand, on the other stuff but considered reportage with the writer in the middle of the drama. Not everybody liked it (or likes it) but it got the attention of whole generation of kids (the now fading, greying generation of ’68) excited about more than drugs, sex and rock and roll (although that too).

Here you have articles ranging from Thompson’s 1970s Freak Power alternative political campaigns in the Rockies, the tense happenings in the East Los Angeles barrios, the skewering (there is no other word for it) of one Richard M. Nixon, one time President of the United States and common thief, a solid tribute to the old war-horse and ally Oscar Acosta (the Brown Buffalo), the Pulitzer Palm Beach divorce case and a quick swing through the hardships of the polo set to name a few. All done with factual accuracy and blazing wit (and occasional head full of dope, booze, cigarette smoke, and who knows what else).      

Many of these articles (although in some cases here heavily-edited) have appeared in previous volumes by Thompson, notably The Great Shark Hunt, but it is nice to have them all in one place to once again ponder over and get a few private chuckles from. Yeah, buy the ticket, take the ride, Thanks Hunter, wherever you are.