NYU’s Left Front Art Show-Stalinists and Artists in the U.S. “Red Decade” by Helen Cantor Workers Vanguard No. 1069	29 May 2015

NYU’s Left Front Art Show-Stalinists and Artists in the U.S. “Red Decade”

by Helen Cantor

 

New York University’s recent art show, “The Left Front: Radical Art in the ‘Red Decade,’ 1929-1940,” which closed April 4, was a bittersweet experience. (An earlier version, based on Northwestern University’s collection, was shown in Chicago last year.) In the present period, with successful workers struggles few and far between, the pro-working-class images—photos, movies of mass May Day parades in New York City, pictures of Great Depression misery, protests, strikes, the fight against Jim Crow segregation—were, of course, moving. The show included over 100 works by artists in the U.S., many of which are lithographs and etchings, reproducible techniques designed to be accessible to workers.

But there was something wrong with this picture. It wasn’t the individual artworks themselves, but the sentimental, prettifying view of and narrow focus on the U.S. Communist Party (CP). The John Reed Clubs and their successor, the American Artists’ Congress, both Stalinist front groups from day one, were the admired centerpiece of the show, to the exclusion of what was a far more complex intersection of politics and art at the time.

The show’s co-curators, Jill Bugajski and John Paul Murphy, Northwestern PhD graduates, did make some observations regarding the American CP’s relations with Moscow. And, of course, an academic art show can’t be about everything; you do need some kind of focus. The problem is that the presentation blurred out the horrible effects of Stalinism’s censorship of intellectual efforts, including art. This censorship was an ideological counterpart to the consolidation of the Moscow bureaucracy headed by Stalin (which had usurped political power from the Soviet working class beginning in 1923-24) and its murderous betrayals of the struggle for proletarian revolution worldwide. The show presented an alternate reality: a provincial “social realism”-style tin-roofed shack on the all-American prairie, false shelter from the wild storms raging internationally.

The “Left Front” referred to 1929-40 as the “red decade,” a term coined by onetime Stalinist admirer turned anti-Communist author Eugene Lyons. The curators, who unlike Lyons were approving in this description, put up a big red 1937 Spanish Civil War poster by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade union. Okay, but what about the Stalinists’ murder of anarchists, POUM militants and others after the heroic Barcelona Days? What about Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, unfought by the German Communist Party? What about the 1936-1938 Moscow Trials of the Old Bolsheviks (party members before 1917) and the executions, exiles and mass labor camps for revolutionaries in the USSR? Ending the decade, what about the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico via a Stalinist killer’s ice axe? This decade runs red with the blood of our comrades, is what I thought.

I found myself wandering around the Village after seeing the show, muttering: “Not revolutionary art, propaganda! Stalinist hacks! But some pieces were sincere, good! But Esenin and Mayakovsky committed suicide!” And so on. So what follows is not an “art review,” except for one comment: There is nothing “revolutionary” or “radical” (terms the curators flung around) about this art as such, whether in terms of experimental technique or new concept. It’s propaganda and genre art, with a few exceptions, by artists who sympathized with the poor, the workers and even with the CP. The pedestrian aesthetic level was not entirely the Stalinists’ fault, since American art in general was pretty provincial until the explosion of abstract expressionism after World War II—the 1913 New York Armory Show that introduced Cubism to the U.S. knocked everybody for a loop. Rather, I want to discuss the politics the pictures don’t show, and the revolutionary Trotskyist alternative to the CP’s lies and crimes regarding culture, as so much else.

Stalinism Lite

The Marxist program of world socialist revolution that animated the Bolsheviks of 1917 was flatly rejected with Stalin’s 1924 invention of “socialism in one country” (meaning “socialism” in only one country). This dogma and the Moscow bureaucracy’s later proclamation of “socialist realism” and ban on “modernist” art encouraged the production of some really dreary art by CP-influenced artists in the U.S. Such works are about what you could expect from a party whose big Popular Front slogan was “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”

So why is this period popular again? Theodore Draper, in a 1986 “Afterword” to his classic book American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960), writes of a generation of academic social historians (Paul Buhle, Mark Naison, etc.) who were former New Leftists: “Radicals have usually preferred to behold their promised land in the future; these post-New Leftists have been impelled to find it in the past. They have invented a radicalism of nostalgia.”

This now third-hand nostalgia seems to have impelled the New York show. Co-curator John Paul Murphy’s essay “The Left Front: From Revolutionary to Popular” references the 2007 recession and protests like Occupy Wall Street, stating: “In this context, the bracing images by 1930s artist-activists become newly vivid.” The 1930s, that’s okay, but go no further—any earlier, any more vivid, and then they would have to deal with the Bolshevik-led October 1917 Russian Revolution, which actually overthrew the bourgeoisie. That far back these historians don’t want to go. Because then they would have to take a side. So that’s why they start with 1929. It’s not really about the Great Depression.

By 1929, the U.S. CP’s subservience to the conservative Moscow bureaucracy had been solidified. Earlier, when still a revolutionary force under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, the Communist International helped “Americanize” the CP by emphasizing that the fight for socialist revolution and the struggle for black liberation are inextricably linked, as a new book, The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929 (2014) by Jacob Zumoff, details. But that perspective was dumped by the Stalinized Comintern, which in 1928 ordered the CP to chop off its left wing—the Trotskyists around James P. Cannon—and then in 1929 its right wing, centered on the loathsome Jay Lovestone, who had bet on the Right Opposition of Nikolai Bukharin a little too long. What remained was a crippled, pliant CP, faithfully lurching after every turn of Stalinist policy.

In the U.S., the CP’s “Left Turn” of 1928-29 included policies like dual unionism (leaving the AFL unions to create “red” ones), the demand for self-determination of the so-called Black Belt in the South, and attacks on other leftists, mainly the Social Democracy, as “social fascists” worse than the Nazis. Though sounding very radical, all this allowed the Communists to evade the hard political struggle to crack through the obstacles to an American revolution, a goal the CP leadership had, in fact, abandoned. At the same time, the tremendous authority of the Bolshevik Revolution and some of the CP’s activities, which included leading strikes and fighting for black rights, such as its “Scottsboro Boys” defense work throughout the 1930s, gave the Communists credibility in the eyes of many. This is the period in which the John Reed Clubs were founded, in 1929.

Ultraleftism and “Proletarian Culture”

The “Left Front” displayed the 1932 “Draft Manifesto” of the New York John Reed Club, whose Moscow-inspired Proletkult (proletarian culture) theme was that art must be a class weapon. “This class struggle plays hell with your poetry,” said the actual John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), a founder of the American CP who died in 1920 and who knew firsthand more about revolution and poetry than anybody in the Stalinist clubs named after him. Then-Trotskyist sympathizer Max Eastman recalled Reed’s statement in Artists in Uniform (1934).

An essay commissioned for the show by University College London art history professor Andrew Hemingway points out that the John Reed Clubs, and especially the Communist writer Mike Gold, held to “the notion of Proletarian Art—the idea that the working class would organically produce a great artistic style, a form of heroic realism, out of the crucible of its own direct experience.” Trotsky’s classic Literature and Revolution (1924) refutes this simple-minded proposition in two ways. First, the proletariat needs to conquer political power because under capitalism it has no access to wealth and leisure and thus cannot possibly create its own culture. Second, and more profoundly, once successful proletarian revolutions begin to create a world socialist society, the proletariat will cease to exist as a class, along with all other classes (thus the withering away of the state), and the new culture will be a truly universal human culture for the first time.

Unless trivialized as genre painting or propaganda, “Proletarian Art” is a contradiction in terms. Trotsky wrote in “The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky” (1930):

“The current official ideology of ‘proletarian literature’ is based—we see the same thing in the artistic sphere as in the economic—on a total lack of understanding of the rhythms and periods of time necessary for cultural maturation. The struggle for ‘proletarian culture’—something on the order of the ‘total collectivization’ of all humanity’s gains within the span of a single five-year plan—had at the beginning of the October Revolution the character of utopian idealism, and it was precisely on this basis that it was rejected by Lenin and the author of these lines. In recent years it has become simply a system of bureaucratic command over art and a way of impoverishing it.”

The John Reed Clubs’ “Manifesto” also intoned that artists must “fight against fascism, whether open or concealed, like social-fascism.” The Stalinist view of social democracy (“social-fascism”) as worse than fascism proved catastrophic in Germany, where the CP refused to initiate a united front with the reformist Social Democratic Party to stop the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Maybe this could have stopped the Holocaust. A few cartoons satirizing evil fascists hardly compensate for this betrayal.

The U.S. CP also regarded the “social fascists” as the main enemy. In NYC on 16 February 1934, Alan M. Wald recounts in his useful book, The New York Intellectuals (1987): “The Communist Party, carrying out its line against ‘social fascism,’ violently disrupted a Socialist Party rally at Madison Square Garden organized to protest the Austrian chancellor Dolfus’s [sic] armed attack on workers’ houses in Vienna, which were mainly occupied by Austrian Social Democrats.”

Herding Cats

Organizing artists is like trying to herd cats—and without state power, the American CP had no real coercive force, unlike in the USSR. That’s why there are some good, even famous, artists in this show—like Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh and the “Ashcan School” among others—who went their own way artistically. But the CP tried to crack down as much as it could.

In his essay, Hemingway remarks that some influential Party cadre “bemoaned the character of much of the membership as ‘uprooted bohemian elements’ and ‘hangers on of the art world,’ and complained of the difficulties they faced” [emphasis in original]. As a general rule, artists and bureaucrats of whatever stripe are oil and water. When artists in the Works Progress Administration art project held a 1937 sit-down strike against cuts in the relief program, its director, Holger Cahill, fumed: “These people are psychopaths, they are basically unemployable, and you can’t do anything with them.”

In our 1992 obituary of Fritz Brosius, a German Expressionist-inspired artist and longtime friend of the Spartacist League, we wrote: “In 1932, when the New York John Reed Clubs had been forced to admit their ‘grave error’ in asking the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera—a supporter of Leon Trotsky—to speak, Fritz [then a CP member] broke discipline by going to Rivera’s New York studio as an act of protest against the party’s campaign” (“Fritz Brosius: Artist and Friend,” WV No. 553, 12 June 1992). Later, in 1938, Fritz married a member of the Socialist Party and was “excommunicated” from the CP; he found out about it by reading the CP press.

Popular Front Abroad, “Socialist Realism” in USSR

In 1935, after the Seventh Congress of the Comintern proclaimed the “Popular Front,” the John Reed Clubs were summarily disbanded and replaced by the American Artists’ Congress, which was shorn of any “class struggle” rhetoric. Today’s “Left Front” co-curator John Paul Murphy writes: “But as the ‘Red Decade’ drew on, it became apparent that the far left could not ostracize itself entirely from mainstream liberalism if it were to have political impact. So new forms of solidarity emerged, coalescing into a ‘Popular Front’.” No, Stalin in Moscow ordered this line for all the CPs of the world, beginning in France in 1934, to further the aims of Soviet foreign policy. Namely, to enlist the imperialist “Western democracies” (formerly known as capitalist swine) in defending the USSR as Germany rearmed, and that meant no more anti-capitalist rhetoric.

George Orwell, just returned from fighting in a POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, observed in 1937 of the Stalinist line in the British context, “The Popular Front boloney boils down to this: that when the war comes the Communists, labourites etc, instead of working to stop the war and overthrow the Government, will be on the side of the Government provided that the Government is on the ‘right’ side, i.e. against Germany” (“Letter to Geoffrey Gorer,” An Age Like This, 1920-1940 [1968]). For the American CP, it boiled down to: vote Democrat and screw the working class (for example, the CP’s wartime no-strike pledge).

“Left Front” co-curator Jill Bugajski’s essay is more tart, and accurate so far as it goes, though she too skirts unpleasant realities. In “Red Paradise to Red Dilemma,” she mentions the hideous 1936-38 Moscow purge trials of Old Bolsheviks, but politely does not “name names.” In fact, leaders of the American Artists’ Congress put out a letter defending the show trials. This shameful statement was signed by its president, Stuart Davis (a modernist), as well as Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, Max Weber, Harry Gottlieb and other “Left Front” artists. Relentless repression of avowed communists, including the Trotskyists, was a complement to efforts to join hands with bourgeois forces.

Meanwhile, the USSR settled down into the stolid academic style of “socialist realism.” The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes of the American scene in his review of the show (“Left Turns,” 26 January): “The tendency most dramatically missing from the movement is Socialist Realism—utopian subjects, academic forms—which, in 1934, became by diktat the sole style allowed Soviet artists. In America, the nearest equivalents to that ideal were advanced by American Scene painters, such as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, whose patriotic content—folk heroes, sturdy Midwestern farmers—irked leftists.” Yeah, because subject and style were uncomfortably close to what Hitler, with his ban on “degenerate art,” thought uplifting: the most banal, sentimental and somehow disturbing magazine illustrations of old farmstead “just plain folks.”

Many American artists also no doubt realized that giant Stalin figures overseeing the forced collectivization of the peasantry and the crazed breakneck industrialization in the USSR wouldn’t be too popular in the U.S. This was the period of Soviet boy-girl-tractor novels like Ilyin’s The Great Assembly-line, which Trotsky read in exile in 1935, commenting, “The grimmest aspect of the assembly-line romance is the absence of political rights and the lack of individuality on the part of the workers, especially the proletarian youth, who are taught only to obey.”

Disillusionment with Stalinist orders on art took its toll, but the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and the USSR’s invasion of capitalist Finland and Poland set off a wave of hysterical anti-Communism that caused the American Artists’ Congress to lose almost all of its liberal fellow-traveler members. After World War II, the vicious McCarthyite witchhunting of the late 1940s and ’50s further crushed what was already an attenuated movement. The Trotskyists were the most consistent defenders of the USSR throughout its entire existence, upholding its socialized property forms while fighting for the Soviet proletariat to oust the bureaucratic caste that was a roadblock to world revolution. Sweeping away the global capitalist order is the only solution to the horrendous, and ultimately insoluble, problems of an isolated workers state.

Art and Revolution: So Much to Fight For

The censorship imposed in the USSR was an especially bitter blow to artists, because the October Revolution was associated with worldwide cultural upheavals that gave birth to modernism and abstract art. The Revolution offered artists the freedom and resources to explore their new visions. Vasily Kandinsky in 1919 was named Director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in Russia and put in charge of 22 provincial museums. (At the invitation of the Bauhaus, he left in 1921.) Marc Chagall established a school where Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky spread new visual and graphic languages. Lenin, while cringing privately at the freewheeling enthusiasms of culture commissar Lunacharsky—notably the futurists in their bright yellow shirts and decorated faces, painting the trees in front of the Kremlin bright colors for May Day—never considered censorship. Freedom of expression for all, except active counterrevolutionaries, was a fiercely guarded principle during Lenin’s lifetime.

Trotsky in exile rallied still-revolutionary Communists in the fight for a new, Fourth International after the historic defeat in Germany in 1933—and the fact that no opposition had been voiced nor a balance sheet drawn within the Comintern. Trotskyism won significant forces in the U.S., both in the Minneapolis Teamsters 1934 organizing strikes and among the “New York Intellectuals” (see Alan Wald’s book). Trotsky’s continued interest in art and literature brought influential cultural figures to his side for a time.

Northwestern’s “Left Front” catalog printed, amid a mosaic of different takes on art, a shard that glitters with revolutionary truth, shining a critical light on the rest of the show. This was a small excerpt from the “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” signed by French surrealist Andre Breton and Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, two of the most universally recognized and innovative artists of the period. They had held lengthy discussions with Trotsky in Mexico, resulting in that very powerful statement, first printed in Partisan Review (1938). It observed:

“In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist organizations which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution and mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to the revolution, among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.”

From the Archives of Black History and the Class Struggle:An Activist Remembers the Civil Rights Movement-Malcolm X: The Man, the Myth, the Struggle

Workers Vanguard No. 1069	29 May 2015

From the Archives of Black History and the Class Struggle

An Activist Remembers the Civil Rights Movement

Malcolm X: The Man, the Myth, the Struggle

 

We reprint below comments by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour at a December 1992 forum in Oakland, California, originally published in the Spartacist pamphlet Black History and the Class Struggle No. 10. That forum featured presentations by three comrades who had participated in the turbulent civil rights struggles of the 1960s, at the time that Malcolm X rose to prominence.

*   *   *

When I was 19 years old, I was involved with a left-wing socialist group at City College, which is located on the fringes of Harlem. We organized for Malcolm X to come and address the student body. Now, he didn’t come with a big entourage, and since I was chairing the meeting, just before he spoke I found myself standing next to him in the auditorium. I felt terribly intimidated and sheepish—I mean, here I am with Malcolm X. Just to make conversation, I noted that the previous summer I had gone to Cuba where I had met some people from the Nation of Islam. Malcolm expressed real interest and sympathy for the Cuban Revolution. He said he didn’t know very much about it and asked what my impressions were. He wasn’t just being polite. He really wanted to know what a 19-year-old college kid thought of the Cuban Revolution.

A few minutes later he spoke to several hundred students, most of them white and generally liberal, and the main point he made was to attack support for and illusions in the Democratic Party. At that particular time, Lyndon Johnson was pushing the Civil Rights Bill and a lot of people thought that the President of the United States had finally taken a hard line against white supremacy. Malcolm said, “Don’t be fooled! Johnson’s best friend in Washington is Georgia Senator Richard Russell who is an arch segregationist.” He said, “When somebody says they are against racism but their best friend is Richard Russell, it’s like somebody saying they are against train robbing and their best friend is Jesse James.”

This incident reveals what’s missing from Spike Lee’s [1992] film Malcolm X—the momentous political struggle in this country and abroad which formed the background of Malcolm’s rise to prominence. The debate that was raging among the activists. Did you support the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese Revolution against U.S. imperialism? Or did you support the U.S. government in trying to overthrow Castro and in trying to destroy the Viet Cong in blood in the name of anti-communism? Did you attack John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as war criminals who oppressed and savaged the dark-skinned peoples of the world? Or did you look to them to bring democracy and civil rights and racial equality to black people in this country? Did you believe that civil rights militants had the right to defend themselves against the cracker sheriffs and the Klan and the White Citizens Councils? Or did you maintain that in fighting for their democratic rights black people could do no more than engage in nonviolent protest?

These were the issues which polarized American society. These were the issues that defined Malcolm’s politics and determined his appeal. Because what he was in the minds of everybody—black, white, left, right, center—he was the best known, the most powerful, the most incisive enemy of what we at the time called the “white power structure.” Spike Lee doesn’t understand that because he doesn’t understand how convulsive and explosive American society was in the early 1960s. The civil rights movement, in the sweep of its mass support, in the aspirations for freedom and equality which it generated among black people, and in bringing into existence a whole generation of young radical activists, had a revolutionary potential.

In the South, the entire black community was mobilized—hundreds of thousands of people were confronting a totalitarian racist police state which they had lived under for three-quarters of a century, since Radical Reconstruction was abandoned and defeated in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the North it was different, because blacks had, legally, the formal democratic rights which the Southern civil rights movement was fighting for. They could vote, they could go into restaurants and ride buses with white people. But blacks in the North as well as in the South did not consider the civil rights movement in this narrow a way. They saw it as a movement for general social equality, even though there was no coherent or agreed-upon program for how to achieve that.

In Spike Lee’s movie, you don’t realize that at one point there were probably more civil rights militants in the town of Albany, Georgia than there were in the entire Nation of Islam nationally. A whole generation had been standing up to the cops in the South and in the North. Like Malcolm X, they came to understand the link between racism in the United States and the oppression by the American government and the big corporations of dark-skinned people throughout the world.

Preachers’ Pacifism vs. Militant Self-Defense for the Movement

That’s why the question of nonviolence at that moment was so decisive and so important. It wasn’t about the right of individuals to defend themselves or their families. In the movie they show Malcolm X’s father (who was a black-nationalist minister) warding off an attack by local Klansmen by threatening them with his pistol. But that wasn’t what the debate was. We were talking about armed self-defense for a mass movement—a movement which embraced millions and which was confronting the capitalist state.

The question of nonviolence was basically a question of your attitude toward the system. To say that the civil rights movement had the right to defend itself against racist terror was really to say that you had the right of revolution; that you didn’t accept the rules of the game. And when King pledged nonviolence, what he was really saying is he was pledging allegiance to the white power structure. He was saying that the black movement cannot go beyond the bounds set for it by the liberal wing of the ruling class represented by the Democratic Party. That’s what it meant. And that’s why Malcolm X called King a “20th century Uncle Tom” whose primary concern is to defend the white man.

When Malcolm said that, a lot of people in the civil rights movement, even people who were critical of King, thought that this was exaggerated and unfair. Yet a few months after Malcolm was assassinated, the black ghetto in Watts in Los Angeles rose up. Black youth ran through the streets demonstrating defiance of the ruling class. The police and the National Guard were sent in and killed more than 30 black kids—most of them unarmed, most of them in cold blood. What did King do? Did he call upon the LAPD and the FBI and the National Guard to “turn the other cheek,” to throw away their guns and resort to “nonviolent resistance”? No! He said it was necessary that “as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them.” Malcolm X was known above all at the time as a person who said that the oppressed black masses had the right and the duty to overthrow the system which oppressed and degraded them, although he did not have a coherent program to do that.

The Myth of “Black Capitalism”

While Malcolm X was alive, he was slandered as some kind of crazed fanatic and advocate of black violence against white America. But today there is a different kind of falsification, which in its way is no less pernicious. He is now presented as a pioneer advocate of black-owned business, as a man who believed in the economic development of the segregated ghetto within the framework and under the rules set by white-dominated American capitalism. This line and lie is perpetrated not only by nationalist hustlers like Farrakhan, who when Malcolm split from the Nation of Islam said that he deserved death for defying Elijah Muhammad, but it’s also perpetrated by the house organ of international financiers. A recent issue of the London Economist says that Malcolm’s message was “black capitalism.”

It is true that Malcolm sought, both as a Muslim and somewhat later, to break poor blacks from the degrading pathology of ghetto life: alcoholism, drug addiction, wife-beating, prostitution. He told black people that they should stand on their own two feet and not depend on the white man. But by that he did not mean that they should take over grocery stores and dry-cleaning stores and open sweatshops in the ghetto to rip off and exploit their own people! This I will tell you, that while he was alive, no one, absolutely no one believed that Malcolm X was an advocate of “black capitalism” or any other kind of capitalism. Quite the contrary.

If Malcolm X did not advocate liberal integrationism like King, and he did not advocate separatist capitalism like Farrakhan, what did he stand for in a positive sense? The movie shows that it was his pilgrimage to Mecca which broke Malcolm from a narrow, racially defined black nationalism. That is true. But the movie does not show that Malcolm undertook a second trip to North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa which had a profound effect on his political outlook. After that trip Malcolm talked not only about opposing racial or national oppression, but “overthrowing the system of exploitation.”

Does that mean that Malcolm had become a Marxist or was moving toward Marxism? This is the position that was argued by the late George Breitman, for example, a professed Trotskyist who edited a number of Malcolm’s speeches and writings. But that too is a falsification. In the last period of his life, Malcolm X came under the influence of the new bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Arab East and black Africa; people like Egypt’s Nasser and [Kenya’s] Jomo Kenyatta. These people denounced Western imperialism, Western racism. They talked about “African socialism” or some other kind of “socialism.” Malcolm bought this.

Malcolm X understood American society in his own way. He saw through the lies and hypocrisy of American capitalist politicians, including black Democrats like the slick Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. But he actually knew very little about the Egyptian or Algerian or Kenyan societies at the base. He took at face value the pretense of these new ruling elites that they were opposed to racism the world over; that they were believers in and champions of social equality. Much of Malcolm’s energy in the last period of his life was directed at getting what he called the Afro-Asian bloc to pass a resolution in the United Nations condemning racism in America. To begin with, there was no way that was going to happen, because all of these regimes depended on money from Washington and London and Paris, even though they denounced Western imperialism at every opportunity. They denounced Western imperialism, they flirted with Moscow, they said they were nonaligned in the Cold War—as a ploy to get more money from Washington and London and Paris. But even if they had passed a resolution in the UN condemning racism in the United States, the American ruling class would have ignored it.

While Malcolm’s campaign to enlist the United Nations in the service of anti-racism was misdirected, he nonetheless understood that simply by its own resources and its own efforts, the American black community could not achieve equality, could not overcome and break the power of the American government and its ruling class. That’s why he was so desirous of finding powerful allies outside the U.S. But Malcolm X did not see that there existed a powerful force within the United States, potentially hostile to the white power structure, namely the racially integrated working class.

He saw American society as racially divided, but not as class-divided. His view was shaped by his own personal experience. He had been a ghetto hustler, then a prisoner for several years, and then the minister of a black-nationalist religious sect. Unlike millions of other American black men and women, he had never worked with whites or Hispanics. He knew nothing of the trade-union movement. He had never been involved in a strike or defending a picket line against the cops and the scabs. He did not understand that it is the strategic role of blacks in the working class which gives them the potential leverage to overturn the racist capitalist system.

Black workers, armed with a revolutionary socialist program, and organized by a multiracial communist party, can lead backward white workers even though they have racist attitudes and prejudices, in struggle against the ruling class. Malcolm X believed and stated very forcefully that black people must fight for equality and freedom “by any means necessary.” The necessary means is working-class revolution. And that revolution when it comes will rightly honor Malcolm X as a courageous fighter and a martyr for the cause of the liberation of humanity.

 

A View From The Left-ILWU Contract-Shipping Bosses Buy Labor Peace, Undermine Union

Workers Vanguard No. 1069	29 May 2015

ILWU Contract-Shipping Bosses Buy Labor Peace, Undermine Union

 

Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) voted up a new five-year contract with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) with 82 percent in favor. By the standards of union contracts these days, when it is considered a “victory” for the union simply to survive, the ILWU contract might appear a veritable pot of gold. In addition to a wage increase totaling $6.50 an hour by the contract’s end and small increases in pensions, there were no cuts to the union’s health plan, which has no co-pay. This means that the ILWU will not have to shoulder the cost of the $150 million a year tax, mandated for so-called “Cadillac” plans under Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which goes into effect in 2018. But as the old saying goes, all that glitters isn’t gold.

Vast changes are posed in the shipping industry with the widening of the Panama Canal, the consolidation of shippers into ever-larger conglomerates operating ships able to carry up to almost double the number of containers and the installation of automated cranes and yard vehicles at the largest terminals in the U.S. Throwing a little money the ILWU’s way, the PMA simply opted to buy itself some time, and five years of labor peace, to see how things shape up. Meanwhile, the shipping bosses obtained provisions that will continue to erode the fighting capacity of the ILWU by heightening already existing divisions in the union. This includes contract language aimed at stopping the ILWU from honoring picket lines of its own members!

With the onset of container shipping, the union was divided in 1959 between A-men who get the first choice of available work and B-men who only get to pick from among the unfilled jobs and are not accorded union membership. The widespread automation accompanying containerization slashed the workforce by a factor of ten and brought yet another division, the “steady men.” A layer of highly paid skilled workers, consisting largely of crane operators and mechanics, the steady men work directly for individual stevedoring companies, bypassing and undermining the ILWU hiring hall that is the embodiment of the union’s power. Later, the workforce was further divided by a category of “casual” workers, who only get work when the A and B lists have been exhausted and have no benefits or union rights. These divisions are a danger to the very existence of the ILWU.

Under the new agreement, casuals and other longshoremen with less work experience will not get the full wage increase, widening the divide between those first entering the industry and the A-men. Mechanics, on the other hand, get a larger increase. It is also widely rumored that the walking bosses—who are organized in their own ILWU locals and are responsible for overseeing union work at different terminals—got a massive wage increase. If so, this is a blatant attempt to bribe the walking bosses into becoming company men. In 1919, a strike by the Riggers’ and Stevedores’ Union, which represented longshore workers in San Francisco, was defeated and the union smashed after the gang bosses of that day split off from the union in the course of the strike. They formed the notorious “blue book” company union that ran the hated “shape up” system, under which corrupt gang bosses in league with the shippers called the shots on who would get work on the docks.

Longshore workers and their union allies literally laid down their lives in the class battles of 1934 to smash the “blue book” and win union control of hiring (see “Then and Now,” WV Nos. 1050 and 1051, 8 August and 5 September 2014). The hiring hall and ILWU-run job dispatch were designed to equalize work opportunity among all longshoremen. This system has been increasingly subverted since the 1960-61 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement negotiated by the ILWU’s historic leader, Harry Bridges. In addition, the coastwide unity of the ILWU has been undermined by unequal manning scales at different ports, creating resentment and tensions between ILWU locals as well as opening the door for the shipping bosses to play port against port.

Any struggle to restore the fighting power of the ILWU must begin with bringing the steady men back to the hall and championing union rights, pay and benefits at the highest rate for all longshore workers. Equal pay for equal work! For equal manning scales, at the highest level, at all West Coast ports!iew

Socialism and Art Workers Vanguard No. 1069	29 May 2015

TROTSKY

LENIN

Socialism and Art

(Quote of the Week)

 

The 1917 October Revolution, which shattered the capitalist order in backward Russia, was animated by the goal of building a society on socialist principles—that is, the satisfaction of people’s material and cultural needs. The birth of the Soviet workers state in what the Bolsheviks viewed as the opening shot of world socialist revolution gave rise to a great wave of artistic experimentation and ferment. This creative energy was later smothered by the Stalin-led bureaucracy that usurped political power from the proletariat beginning in 1923-24 amid the continuing isolation and backwardness of the Soviet Union. In the excerpt below, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky explained the material foundation of culture.

 

If the dictatorship of the proletariat should prove incapable, in the next few years, of organizing its economic life and of securing at least a living minimum of material comforts for its population, then the proletarian régime will inevitably turn to dust. The economic problem at present is the problem above all problems.

 

But even a successful solution of the elementary problems of food, clothing, shelter, and even of literacy, would in no way signify a complete victory of the new historic principle, that is, of Socialism. Only a movement of scientific thought on a national scale and the development of a new art would signify that the historic seed has not only grown into a plant, but has even flowered. In this sense, the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.

 

Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop and become subtle. Our bourgeoisie laid its hand on literature, and did this very quickly at the time when it was growing rich. The proletariat will be able to prepare the formation of a new, that is, a Socialist culture and literature, not by the laboratory method on the basis of our present-day poverty, want and illiteracy, but by large social, economic and cultural means. Art needs comfort, even abundance. Furnaces have to be hotter, wheels have to move faster, looms have to turn more quickly, schools have to work better.

 

—Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924)

 

In The Golden Age Of Screw-Ball Comedies-Carole Lombard’s Nothing Sacred

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nothing Sacred, starring Carole Lombard, Fredric March, directed by William Wellman, 1937  

No question the laugh-hungry 1930s Great Depression audiences were entertained by films which represented the golden age of classic screw-ball comedies from the likes of directors Preston Sturgis, Frank Capra and William Wellman the director of the film under review Nothing Sacred, done in early Technicolor (the first such screwball comedy). No question as well that the subject of the media and its foibles, excesses and dishonesties, then and now, are a fit subject for screwball comedy in any age (although one has to go some to be Cary Grant’s The Front Page from that same period). And no question no screw-ball comedy is worth a damn if there isn’t a little romance thrown in to insure a happy ending for those laugh-hungry Great Depression audiences. That my friends is the trifecta.     

Here’s the scoop. Wally Cook (played here rather stiffly by Fredric March who usually played characters with a certain gravitas) a from hunger no-hold-barred field reporter for any newspaper USA in any town USA (although the actual setting in the film is New York City) got burned, got burned badly trying to stage a society charity hoax to run a story to the ground and make a name for himself in the big city. As a result he was relegated to the obits, literally the kiss-of-death for any hot-shot reporter on the make. By hook or by crook he inveigled the big boss to let him run with a story about a woman in Vermont, Hazel Flagg, (played by Carol Lombard also somewhat stiffly since she was known as a comedy star of sorts) who was allegedly dying of incurable radium poisoning (yeah this is before the atom bomb and all that). Wally swears he will have them (those city fervent newspaper readers) crying for more once he sets the story up, and jump the newspaper’s circulation up to boot. The boss buys into that proposition and Wally is on his way to the sticks.       

Things as they always do in screw-ball comedies, get tricky, get complicated once he gets to Podunk though. See Hazel has been misdiagnosed by her, well, stew-ball doctor and she is not dying. Thus she will miss that trip to New York City with all the trimming that she had dreamed about as a farewell to this world (NYC then, and now too although perhaps less so, a Mecca for those who have not been there before, especially small-town types). No problem though as Hazel decided to play “sick” and take Wally up on that trip offer. And off they go.    

Well New York City and its’ attentions to her are everything she expected, and more. But then things got sticky again. She fell for Wally, fell hard and didn’t know how to tell him she was not going to die. He has fallen for her too so that got things all mixed up until she hit on the “bright” idea of committing suicide, of fading from view before every New Yorker who could read found out she was a hoax. Eventually Wally found out about her real state, found out he has no problem with her “suicide” solution and they go off into the sunset to marital bliss. Sure the plot line had been done before, and since, but here it is all wrapped up in bows for you, wrapped up in good feelings if you were in that Great Depression audience needing a little escape from your own woes.      

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-The Culturati’s Corner

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.

They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course. 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….           

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Fred “Muhammad” Burton

 

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

 

 

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Luis Medina,

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

 

PRESS RELEASE    PRESS RELEASE    PRESS RELEASE   High Court Judge rules that the Detained Fast Track for asylum seekers is unlawful and “inherently unfair” - one more nail in the coffin for Yarl’s Wood IRC.   Black Women’s Rape Action Project (BWRAP) and Women Against Rape (WAR) welcome today’s decision by Judge Nicols that the Detained Fast Track for asylum seekers is unlawful and “inherently unfair”.    Cristel Amiss, from (BWRAP) commented: “This decision is way overdue. Over the past ten years we have worked with many hundreds of women detained in Yarl’s Wood, many of whom are survivors or rape and other violence.  Many have been put into the Detained Fast Track (DFT) and denied both time to gather evidence of the persecution they faced and appropriate legal representation.  Too many have been disbelieved and rejected and sent back to face further rape and other violence.”      Sian Evans from WAR added: “We are shocked however that the Judge agreed for this decision to be put on hold whilst the authorities appeal. This delay could have life-threatening consequences for women whose cases are in the DFT.”    On Monday 15th June, BWRAP, WAR and other supporters will deliver a dossier on rape and sexual violence by guards in Yarl's Wood to MPs. The dossier documents complaints from women since 2005 to the present day and details how Serco, the private company that runs Yarl’s Wood, has systematically condoned and covered up this abuse.   Protesters will gather in Parliament Square between 12-2pm to demand the closure of Yarl’s Wood and an end to the detention of all asylum seekers. 30,000 people are currently detained in the UK each year, for indefinite periods and despite committing no crime. Internationally protests are having enormous impact. In Greece, the Syriza government has started to close its detention centres. In Scotland the SNP has called for the closure of Dungavel. In the US, the New York Times is proposing to end detention. A recent 700 strong protest outside Yarl’s Wood brought together detainees with supporters from many walks of life including MPs and celebrities.   Women from the All African Women’s Group, a self-help group of women asylum seekers, many of whom have been in detention, will be speaking about their experience. Women from inside detention will address the protest via a sound system.   Protest and Speak Out to CLOSE YARL’S WOOD AND ALL DETENTION CENTRES! 15 June 12 noon to 2pm, Parliament Square The protest is part of a week of international actions in Belgium, Greece, Spain, the US and the UK. Women who have been in Yarl’s Wood are available for interview. For more information contact 0207 482 2496 or 07456 525227 aawg02@gmail.com   14 June 2015 The Protest is organised by All African Women’s Group, Black Women’s Rape Action Project, Payday Men’s Network, Women Against Rape, Women of Colour Global Women's Strike

 

When Little Johnny S. Got “Religion”-With Edward G. Robinson’s Brother Orchid In Mind

Fritz Jasper couldn’t believe the news once it got to him up in the joint, up in Sing-Sing if you want to know. (Fritz was doing a nickel for armed robbery where the money was, a bank, having gotten caught for doing exactly what he never had been touched for when Johnny S. ran things, ran the show with style, ran it without rancor, and without enemies, live enemies anyway but time were tough lately and so the nickel.) Yeah, couldn’t believe that Johnny, Little Johnny S had gone off on a tangent, had gone underground from what he got of the story.  Fritz wasn’t alone, a lot of guys around New York City, a lot of guys on the island of Manhattan especially, guys just like Fritz Jasper from the old Five Points  hell-hole neighborhood where Johnny got his start stealing candy from Angelo’s candy store at about age six (stealing it with ease against the hawk-like Angelo who had nabbed Fritz more times than the liked to remember until he wised up about getting in trouble for two-bit stuff like penny ass candy and graduated to banks and short terms growing longer in Sing-Sing although never when he worked for Johnny, worked the best wheel in town before the “junk” got to him, got him short-nerved). Betting guys too, guys who bet on everything including the color of their mother’s underwear if the price was right, who liked to look at every proposition from every angle couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t figure out, couldn’t put the price on, the how and why when they heard Little Johnny S., Little Johnny without the “S” to guys in the know, walked away from his kingpin crime boss job. (Only “Sky” King put a price on a proposition, a proposition that Johnny was working some king-sized scam and money would come raining down on the old town, everybody would get well in a hurry and many guys, including Fritz through the “trustie” connection to the outside world put a cool  C-note on that one.)  

Fritz thought for a moment how jobs like the candy store childhood petty larcenies were so Johnny easy, that was just like minting dough after the hard times flaked away when the Great Depression hit and the, worse, worst of all, liquor became free and easy to get and that cut the tail out of that racket. Johnny moved on though, everything he touched then turned to gold after a few heists, a good dope market connection, and bliss (and no penny ante Al Capone stuff either Johnny “bought” himself a politician who stayed bought and no copper even sneezed on any Johnny operation.

Jesus, walked away, Johnny walked away on two upright legs not carried away by six pall-bearers paid for by some up and coming guy in the food chain like Jack Buck who was Johnny’s viper sidekick on the way up and had maybe figured his own figuring that slicing the pie one way, hell, not slicing it at all was just fine (Jack too had figured the candy store gaff early and never got caught by Ma Singleton, the candy store owner in his neighborhood up in the high number Bronx, walked away without “uncle” laying a hand on him, good old uncle trying to put the squeeze on him to get out from under some crummy rap since they never could get fact one him, couldn’t break that “connection”  and the East River ran red as proof of that assertion. Nada, none of that stuff that no guy from Five Points, certainly not Fritz who rode up with Johnny and had been in on that first heist of the Bank of New York which in turn got that first shipment of opium from Morocco and the rest was history, would shake his head about for two seconds. Walked away, get this, so he could “spread the good word,” spread it around Buffalo for God’s sake, could do good deeds without reward, and really pay attention to this one, to get by with no dough, no dough of his own anyway. Nada. Jesus, double Jesus (a term Fritz hadn’t used since he was a kid but it seemed right just then. What was the world coming to for crying out loud.) Yeah, Little Johnny S. sure got “religion,” sure bought that one-way ticket. And that, dear friends is how Johnny S., Little Johnny, the toughest hombre coming out of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s and that was saying something became Brother Orchid (the brother part is because he got all twisted up with that damn bunch of guys living poor, living real poor, by choice on the outskirts of the city and, at least this part makes sense, Little Johnny S. always loved orchids, always loved to give his lady friends that flower to let them know he cared, cared for that minute anyway).          

Here is what Fritz was able to gather from a few guys who knew Little Johnny S. better than he did later on when Fritz tried one Johnny-less bank heist too many and wound up in the joint that time, guys who knew the ins and outs of the guy, and the ins and outs of what brought Johnny low (besides the obviously dame problem that has sent more than one guy to do screwy stuff, sent more than one guy screaming to high heaven although they usually didn’t take the big step fall down giving up dough and the works like Johnny). Most of the information came from Willie “The Knife” so Fritz knew it has to be pretty close to the truth because Little Johnny and he were tight at the end and because Willie was telling his tale before his own big step-off, his own nickel to a dime up to Sing-Sing and Flo, Flo Addams, you remember her right, Little Johnny’s old flame who wound up on easy street with a big time cattle rancher once Little Johnny saw her as spoiled goods, saw her as an impediment to his new “life.”   

Here is what they cobbled together between and it makes as much sense as the real story if it isn’t right as what the guy did who we are talking about. No question, Little Johnny Sarto (yeah, that’s his real name, or was, before that “Brother Orchid” moniker got laid on him), who would have been played by the old time classic shoot-‘em-up ask questions later gangster actor Edward G. Robinson in the movies if you had to describe his looks, the way every smart guy told him he looked which played on his vanity no  end) had grown up on some mean streets in the old city, no question either that like every guy (and gal for that matter) who grew up on “the wrong side of the tracks,” grew up “from hunger” poor, had serious wanting habits and was not particular about how he moved up the organized crime food chain during his younger days as a “torpedo” for “Red” Rizzo’s crowd in Flatbush. Illegal liquor, drugs, serious drugs like heroin that guys would go through hell to get (and get off of, some of them anyway), not that silly cocaine that you could buy at any drugstore and sniff your brains out, transporting women, pimping them off too, numbers, a few armed robberies and so on. And Johnny was smart, smart and tough, so he rose pretty swiftly up the chain until one day he was king of his own operation. All without spending day one in some cooped-up jailhouse. As he rose, and as the ways of criminal activity took different turns in the end he confined himself to the very lucrative and safe “protection” racket.                          

But see, and this Fritz (Willie too if you want to know, the name of the means streets might be different but the feelings were the same, almost universal) knew, knew from personal experience, poor boys, poor street urchins, getting to the top of the rackets only goes so far and so Johnny got to thinking about getting the pedigree to be a high-class guy, a high-class guy who guys (and gals) looked up to just because he was high-class. Without sticking a gun, or some fists in their face to prove the point. And that is what “The Knife,” ever-lovin’ Flo and Fritz thought was Little Johnny’s downfall. He moved out of his “safe zone” and tried to play straight up with society fake art and antiques, real estate, hell even royal titles guys and they having a few centuries of experience in the genes took him, like taking candy from a baby, no easier since Johnny didn’t have Jack Buck, Willie, or even Fritz to sniff out those cons while Johnny was in his high society heat.    

Funny one day Johnny checked his bank account, thought he saw that he had more dough than he could use in a lifetime and just walked away from his organization, gone fishing, done. Of course in the rackets, the food chain rackets, leaving doesn’t mean that is the end of the rackets but rather that Johnny was leaving his operation to his lizard right hand man Jack Buck, a guy who if you casting for types in some movie would hands down be played by Humphrey Bogart. Jack who came up the same way as Little Johnny except his was meaner, tougher and more likely to use a little gunplay to settle any problems. (He was also tough on his women, not afraid to throw a punch or two to keep them in line according to Flo.) So Johnny fled the city, leaving everything, and everybody, including his longtime girlfriend, Flo, who if you were casting her in the 1940s would be blonde, very blonde and Johnny would not have cared if it was real or from the bottle, a frilly   played by Ann Sothern type, but get this who was left in the lurch because, well, because she loved Johnny and expected him to marry her. Silly girl.      

Naturally a guy like Johnny from the mean streets figured he could buy class, buy that upscale thing with just enough money but here his instincts played him dirty. He did not know rule number one about how the rich and high class got that way, got there over a mountain of skulls, and so Johnny was an easy pick-off once it got around that he was in the “high-class” market. Poor sap many a guy had been put face down in the East River, put there by Johnny even, for doing less that those master thieves of Europe did to Little Johnny. So he busted out, went flat broke, and decided that he needed to get back to his own kind, get back to easy street, get back his old making money hand over fist operation. And so he headed home.   

But Johnny had a problem, well, really two problems, kind of inter-related. First was one Jack Buck who had built up his operation far beyond the seemingly cheapjack operation Johnny ran and so he was not inclined, very not inclined, to give it up just because some old-time hood was making some noises, and second, Johnny with his soft living had lost a step or two and did not have the current capacity to strong-arm Jack out of his place in the food chain. Christ in the end all Johnny had was “The Knife” and while he was a good guy to have in a fight he was not enough to take on Jack’s wrecking crew, including a couple of new age “torpedoes” who shot first and asked questions later. No, just shot first. One way or the other the heat from Jack’s hired help on was on and Johnny was on the lam.

That “on the lam” part is where things were hazy for Willie and Flo, the part about Johnny getting all shot up by Jack’s goons, being able to escape the worst of it, and finding sanctuary in that brotherhood monastery where he got his new moniker. Fritz could understand where Willie and Flo would have trouble with figuring out Johnny’s new thing it was so off base. See too it is hard to get inside a guy’s mind and see what he is up to, especially when he is on the lam and he stumbles into some guys, good guys who fix him up without question, feed and shelter him, but are naïve to the ways of the world is what Johnny probably thought for a long time until they showed him a different way of looking at life. It was not like Johnny went looking for something, he was just hiding out at the beginning, planning his Jack revenge and getting back on top. Well, he did get his Jack revenge in a funny way, funny since he got help from Flo’s rancher friend whom she wound up marrying and wound up on easy street as a result. Jack’s is now doing from one to ninety-nine at Sing Sing a few cellblocks away from Fritz, Flo is married to her Big Sky rancher and raking in whatever she wants, Willie is doing the best he can. And Johnny, oops, Brother Orchid is up there in the woods working for nada, or maybe his soul. Poor sap. Fritz just hoped that his luck would change and that the ten to one odds Sky King had given him on his C-note would pan out when Johnny crashed out of that old monastery out in freaking Buffalo and everybody would get well again.         

Bob Neuwirth & Eliza Carthy - Mole In The Ground

He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Jack Dawson was not sure when he had heard that the old long-bearded son of a bitch anarchist hell of a songwriter, hell of a story-teller Bruce “Utah” Phillips caught the westbound freight, caught that freight around 2007 he found out. That “Utah” moniker not taken by happenstance since Phillips struggled through the wilds of Utah on his long journey, played with a group called the Utah Valley boys, put up with, got through a million pound of Mormon craziness and, frankly, wrote an extraordinary number of songs in his career by etching through the lore as he found it from all kinds of Mormon sources, including some of those latter day saints. For those who do not know the language of the road, not the young and carefree road taken for a couple of months and then back to the grind but the serious hobo “jungle” road like Jack had been on for several years before he sobered up after he came back from ‘Nam, came back all twisted and turned when he got discharged from the Army back in 1971 and could not adjust to the “real world” of his Carver upbringing in the East and had wound up drifting, drifting out to the West, hitting California and when that didn’t work out sort of ambled back east on the slow freight route through Utah taking the westbound freight meant passing to the great beyond, passing to a better place, passing to hard rock candy mountain in some versions.

Of course everybody thinks that if you wind up in Utah the whole thing is Mormon, and a lot of it is, no question, but when Jack hit Salt Lake City he had run into a guy singing in a park. A guy singing  folk music stuff like that he had remembered that Sam Lowell had been crazy for back in the days when he would take his date and  Jack and his date over to Harvard Square and they would listen to guys like that guy in the park singing in coffeehouses. Jack had not been crazy about the music then and some of the stuff the guy was singing seemed odd too but back then it either amounted to a cheap date, or the girl actually like the stuff and so he went along with it. So Jack, nothing better to do, sat in front of guy and listened. Listened more intently when the guy, who turned out to be Utah (who was using the moniker Pirate Angel then, as Jack was using Daddy Carver, monikers a good thing on the road just in case the law, bill-collectors or ex-wives were trying to reach you and you do not want to reached), told the few bums, tramps and hoboes who were the natural residents of the park that if they wanted to get sober, if they wanted to turn things around a little that they were welcome, no questions asked, at the Joe Hill House. (No questions asked was right but everybody was expected to at least not tear the place up, which some nevertheless tried to do.)                   

Jack, not knowing anybody, not being sober much, and maybe just a tad nostalgic for the old days when hearing bits of folk music was the least of his worries, went up to Utah and said he would appreciate the stay. And that was that. Although not quite “that was that” since Jack knew nothing about the guys who ran the place, didn’t know who Joe Hill was until later (although he suspected after he found out that Joe Hill had been a IWW organizer [Wobblie, Industrial Worker of the World] framed and executed in that very state of Utah that his old friend the later Peter Paul Markin who lived to have that kind of information in his head would have known). See this Joe Hill House unlike the Sallies (Salvation Army) where he would hustle a few days of peace was run by this Catholic Worker guy, Ammon Hennessey, who Utah told him had both sobered him up and made him some kind of anarchist although Jack was fuzzy on what that was all about. So Jack for about the tenth time tried to sober up, liquor sober up this time out in the great desert (later it would be drugs, mainly cocaine which almost ripped his nose off he was so into it that he needed sobering up from). And it took, took for a while.        

Whatever had been eating at Jack kept fighting a battle inside of him and after a few months he was back on the bottle. But during that time at the Joe Hill House he got close to Utah, as close as he had gotten to anybody since ‘Nam, since his friendship with Jeff Crawford from up in Podunk Maine who saved his ass, and that of a couple of other guys in a nasty fire-fight when Charley (G.I. slang for the Viet Cong originally said in contempt but as the war dragged on in half-hearted admiration) decided he did indeed own the night in his own country. Got as close as he had to his corner boys like Sam Lowell from hometown Carver. Learned a lot about the lure of the road, of drink and drugs, of tough times (Utah had been in Korea) and he had felt bad after he fell off the wagon. But that was the way it was. 

Several years later after getting washed clean from liquor and drugs, at a time when Jack started to see that he needed to get back into the real world if he did not want to wind up like his last travelling companion, Denver Shorty, whom he found face down one morning on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge and had abandoned his body fast in order not to face the police report, he noticed that Utah was playing in a coffeehouse in Cambridge, a place called Passim’s which he found out taken over from the Club 47 where Sam had taken Jack a few times. So Jack and his new wife (his and her second marriages) stepped down into the cellar coffeehouse to listen up. As Jack waited in the rest room area a door opened from the other side across the narrow passageway and who came out but Utah. As Jack started to grab his attention Utah blurred out “Daddy Carver, how the hell are you?” and talked for a few minutes. Later that night after the show they talked some more in the empty club before Utah said he had to leave to head back to Saratoga Springs in New York where he was to play at the Café Lena the next night.         

That was the last time that Jack saw Utah in person although he would keep up with his career as it moved along. Bought some records, later tapes, still later CDs just to help the brother out. In the age of the Internet he would sent occasional messages and Utah would reply. Then he heard Utah had taken very ill, heart trouble like he said would get the best of him. And then somewhat belatedly Jack found that Utah had passed on. The guy of all the guys he knew on the troubled hobo “jungle” road who knew what starlight on the rails meant to the wanderers he sang for had cashed his ticket. RIP, brother.