A View From The Left-After “SUPER TUESDAY”. . . On Presidents and Lesser Evils

After “SUPER TUESDAY”. . . On Presidents and Lesser Evils

With Bernie Sanders’ loss in many states on Tuesday – and especially Massachusetts (CNN has an interesting statistical breakdown) – his path to a possible Democratic nomination has narrowed considerably.  Sanders and his campaign need to decide whether their priority is building a genuine populist/Left movement or preparing to support Hillary Clinton. 

 

Ambivalence on these aims has been at the root of Sanders unwillingness to attack Clinton more directly, as well as his failure to articulate a radically alternative foreign and military policy. Usually Republican Neocons are now tellingly moving to support Clinton, in fear of an unreliably militarist Trump – or for his allegedly tepid support for Israel. Some may leave the Republican Party to join a Democratic establishment that is more reliably pro-war.

 

And the failure to effectively bring his message of economic opportunity to communities of color – ironically the people who have suffered the most under neo-liberal austerity -- has been at the core of Sanders’ primary electoral failures.  Whether any of this can change during the remaining campaign season and especially whether there will be any enduring organized populist movement surviving this election season remain in question.

 

KILLING SOMEONE ELSE'S BELOVED:

Promoting the US Way of War in Campaign 2016

Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians…   But it's not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington's increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.  When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.   More

 

Building a Sanders ‘Rainbow’ Campaign

In the final analysis, the influence of the Sanders campaign on the future of American politics will be determined by what comes after the campaign. This is the question Sanders activists have to answer as the primary season winds down. Will the independent local Sanders groups, Labor for Bernie, People for Bernie, Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party and the progressive unions that have endorsed Sanders (including the Communication Workers of America and the National Nurses Union) create a post-electoral coalition that fights for Sanders’ platform (and “Sanders Democrats” and independents) at the federal, state and local level? Will local Bernie groups embed themselves in social movement and electoral politics and engage in a dialogue with activists of color as to how predominantly white progressive groups can become firm allies in struggles against racism. Too often, even the most progressive of electoral activity subsides when the charismatic candidate leaves the electoral scene… Ultimately, Sanders’ “political revolution” won’t be built by Bernie, but by us. And that us must be as diverse as those who constitute the 99 percent.   More

 

The Anti-War Position Bernie Sanders Can Represent

There's a huge opening to critique the economic foundations of America's wars — one that fits perfectly with the populist anger fueling the rise of Bernie Sanders… A comprehensive anti-war position looks at Daesh as the logical conclusion of the worst failures of global capitalism — namely the global lack of opportunity in the marketplace that imprisons and marginalizes people, especially young Muslim men. Enshrouded with gluttonous wealth — and often supporting friendly neoliberal dictatorships that quash domestic opposition — Western countries become the symbol to destroy in order to reclaim agency against American and Western modernity. When Thomas Piketty blamed Daesh on burgeoning inequality in the Arab world, he was right.   More

 

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a DNC member and combat veteran, endorses Sanders

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, whose campaign has attracted little support from fellow members of Congress, picked up a high-profile endorsement Sunday from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).  Gabbard announced that she is is stepping down as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee to support the White House bid of the senator from Vermont over that of Hillary Clinton… Gabbard, who made the announcement on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” has cut a video for the Sanders campaign in which she explains her reasoning, citing her status as one of the first female combat veterans in Congress.  “As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know firsthand the cost of war,” Gabbard says. “I know how important it is that our commander in chief has the sound judgment required … to know when to use America's military power and when not  to use that power. As vice chairman of the DNC, I am required to stay neutral in Democratic primaries, but I cannot remain neutral any longer. The stakes are too high. That’s why today … I’m endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders to be the next president and commander in chief of the United States.”   More

 

New Report Shows Hillary Clinton Drove US Into Libya Disaster

A new in-depth report from The New York Times paints a damning portrait of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the US government’s involvement in the war in Libya. While there had been previous reports citing Clinton as leading the charge for the US to enter the war and overthrow former Libyan Leader Omar Gaddafi, the Times published a play-by-play story with on-the-record comments numerous current and former Obama Administration officials.  The most prominent of those on-the-record comments came from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who claimed that the decision to go to war in Libya was heavily influence by Clinton. In fact, Gates says she made the difference in a “51-49” decision that ultimately destroyed the country of Libya and allowed ISIS to grab new territory in the Middle East.  The breakdown of the events thoroughly supports the view that Hillary Clinton learned nothing from the Iraq War debacle. And, according to the Times, “The lessons of the Libya experience have not tempered her more aggressive approach to international crises.”    More

 

ANDREW BACEVICH: Donald Trump and the Remaking of America

Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well… That a considerable number of Americans appear to welcome this prospect may seem inexplicable. Yet reason enough exists for their disenchantment. American democracy has been decaying for decades. The people know that they are no longer truly sovereign. They know that the apparatus of power, both public and private, does not promote the common good, itself a concept that has become obsolete. They have had their fill of irresponsibility, lack of accountability, incompetence, and the bad times that increasingly seem to go with them.    More

 

Donald Trump Is the Price We Pay for the ''War on Terror''

Terrorism in the United States is statistically a negligible cause of mortality: One is about as likely to die from being crushed by a flat-screen TV, and more likely to die falling in the bathtub than from terrorism. Imagine if we had spent $4 trillion to cure cancer or heart disease. Nevertheless, nearly every word US government officials have uttered about the matter during the last 15 years has been designed to instill dread of terrorism in the population. And it has worked. Voters in the Republican primary in South Carolina declared terrorism to be their foremost concern, eclipsing a stagnant, low-wage economy; deteriorating living standards leading to an actual increase in the death rate of GOP voters' core demographic; …The operatives of the national security state must have been rubbing their hands with glee: Through relentless conditioning, their agenda is now the creed of a numerically significant and highly motivated segment of the electorate.   More

 

CHRIS HEDGES: The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism

The Democrats are playing a very dangerous game by anointing Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate. She epitomizes the double-dealing of the college-educated elites, those who speak the feel-your-pain language of ordinary men and women, who hold up the bible of political correctness, while selling out the poor and the working class to corporate power.  The Republicans, energized by America’s reality-star version of Il Duce, Donald Trump, have been pulling in voters, especially new voters, while the Democrats are well below the voter turnouts for 2008. In the voting Tuesday, 5.6 million votes were cast for the Democrats while 8.3 million went to the Republicans. Those numbers were virtually reversed in 2008—8.2 million for the Democrats and about 5 million for the Republicans… There is only one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power.   More

 

Donald Trump’s Appeal to White Nationalism

Trump received an endorsement from the nation’s most popular neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer (the site often refers to Trump as “Glorious Leader” and features his face on the top of its homepage). In an August article for the New Yorker, Jared Taylor, the former editor of the defunct white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, said, “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.” … For his part, Trump has also reflected white supremacist talking points online. In November, he tweeted a bogus statistic, popular among hate groups and peddled by the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern extension of the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and ’60s, claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims were killed by African-Americans.   More

 

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In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Four-For Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht

In Honor Of The 97^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Four-For Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht          

 

 

 

The cops, the hated Federals, and their allies the Freikorps, were hunting down every Red, hell every leftist or trade union militant that would not bow his head they could find in all of stinking Bavaria after they crushed the Commune. It was awful, savage, something out of what Otto Schmidt thought it must have been like when Thiers and his hatchet-men led by the notorious General Gallifit who wound up in a later government right next to the bastard socialist traitor Alexander Millerand pulled the hammer down on the Paris Commune. He had read plenty, plenty as a schoolboy, as a proud member of the Socialist Youth, about those heroic events back in 1871 even though most of them were anarchists or just independent radicals living off their reputations from the past or ones which they had picked up on the dusty barricades so he knew that if they, they the working people did not win, then the blood would flow in the streets. And it had come to that after some bloody street fighting.

Worse those Whites (every counter-revolutionary force in the world since the Bolshevik Revolution and the damn civil war there was now called White in his and every militant socialist’s book, and rightly so since they were all kindred of the Russian Whites) they had grabbed their leader, Eugene Levine, and who knows what had happened to him (executed as it turned out later-an outcome he maybe portended with his desperate and fatalistic “communists are dead men on leave” saying which while true as long as the struggle had to continue was unnerving to hear and to think through). Hell, Otto had just barely gotten out of Munich himself and had been hiding in a small apartment of a sympathizer in the outer suburbs of Munich and only now had a chance to think about the events of the past several months since the damn Kaiser had abdicated, the war had come to a crashing halt, and working people like him, honest socialists trying to figure out a way to change this rotten old world, had unbowed their heads for once and taken some action.

Otto knew, although he was not theoretician, not even really a leader, not a big leader anyway, although he was respected among the youth for his militancy and his willingness to stick his neck out, that they, the revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries had made mistakes, made bad mistakes about what to do, and with whom. Sure they were young, mostly, hot-headed, mad as hell had never before, unlike the Russians they were trying to emulate, ever had a part in a revolution. Their leaders, their Social-Democratic leaders mostly, had told them to organize, organize, organize and vote, vote, vote, and when they had done enough of both then they would just ease into the socialist republic of their dreams, his dreams. Conveniently forgetting that as Marx himself and all the big leaders after him had said that no ruling class in history has ever thrown in the towel as long as they had one gun left to shoot workers and peasants with. They had to be swept out- a bitter lesson to learn just then.  

Then when the chance actually came those leaders, those august bootblack black-hearted leaders, just filled the governmental seats and left everybody else standing high and dry. Worse those bastards had done the bosses’ work for them; they had suppressed everything, every armed attempt to get some worker justice. Those damn leaders were just as bad as Thiers and his French companions in suppressing the Commune. Otto burned with an inner rage when he thought about what they, Ebert, that fat pig, and Noske, that goddam hangman, had done, done with glee from what he had heard, to Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and courageous Karl Liebknecht, bright shining Karl who had in the flames of war stood up and called down every kind of damnation on the German war aims (and the other side too but he aimed at his own fellow Germans first). And had paid the price. Poor Levine, poor beautiful Levine with the soul of a poet probably was slated for that same fate, a martyr’s fate.

Yes, Otto could see where the big mistakes lie, trusting those parlor socialists gotten fat and lazy off of hard-earned workingmen’s dues once they took over the bourgeois government. Somebody, he forgot who it was and some of the details but a comrade who had been to Russia or had talked to a Russian Bolshevik while he was in Germany, one night in Munich when it looked like they would win, had said when the revolution was at its hottest then the struggle against the reform socialists (in Russia the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and here the Social-Democrats) has to most merciless. They had forgotten that, forgotten that to their regret.  He had heard that same night that in Moscow earlier in the spring the Bolsheviks and their international allies had formed a new International, a Communist International to fight against the Social –Democrats tooth and nail for the allegiance of the working masses. He had had not had time to investigate that statement more since all hell had broken out a week or so after that, to sign up or anything but he knew this, knew it deep in his young bones, that he wished the effort well. He also wished that they, and he, could find some way, some righteous way to avenge those deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.  And now probably Levine too.

From The Partisan Defense Committee-30th Annual Holiday Appeal-Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners-A Report

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

30th Annual Holiday Appeal-Solidarity with Class-War Prisoners

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

 

The Partisan Defense Committee held its 30th annual Holiday Appeal in January and raised thousands of dollars for its program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. For three decades, the PDC has sent money to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and has also given holiday gifts to them and their families. Support for class-war prisoners is not an act of charity but an act of solidarity from those fighting on the outside to those behind prison walls. The fundraisers took place in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles and Toronto and were attended by PDC supporters, former political prisoners, trade unionists and others.

Launched in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived a tradition of the International Labor Defense (ILD). Under James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party and the ILD’s first secretary (1925-28), that organization provided support to over 100 class-war prisoners. Today, we send $50 a month to each of 14 prisoners: former Black Panther and MOVE supporter Mumia Abu-Jamal; American Indian Movement spokesman Leonard Peltier; Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janine Africa, Janet Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Chuck Africa of the Philadelphia MOVE organization; former Black Panther members and supporters Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Albert Woodfox; and Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning of the Ohio 7. (For more information on the prisoners, see: “Free the Class-War Prisoners!” WV No. 1080, 11 December 2015.)

This expression of support helps ameliorate the harsh conditions of prison hell, both by reminding the prisoners that they are not forgotten and to help them buy things they need in prison, such as snacks, postage, writing materials and sometimes art supplies. As expressed by Ed Poindexter in his greetings to the Holiday Appeal: “Having been abandoned by my five-member team of attorneys, it’s heartening to know that your generous donations are enabling me to retain the services of a new attorney, and for that I’m profoundly thankful.”

This year’s Holiday Appeal was dedicated to the memory of two recently deceased class-war prisoners. Phil Africa died under suspicious circumstances in January 2015. Phil and eight others known as the MOVE 9 were wrongly convicted and sentenced to 30-100 years for the killing of a police officer during a 1978 raid on their home. Hugo Pinell, a courageous anti-racist activist who fought vehemently for prisoners’ rights, was brutally assassinated in New Folsom prison in August 2015, two weeks after his release into the general prison population after 40 years of solitary confinement. Pinell was the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. They were framed up on charges stemming from the prison upheaval sparked by the August 1971 assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson by guards.

Pinell’s daughter Allegra Taylor was a featured speaker at the Oakland fundraiser (see facing page). A poignant tribute to Hugo was also sent by his San Quentin 6 comrades, Willie Sundiata Tate and David Johnson, who recalled: “Those of us who knew him loved him, and those that he railed against hated him because he would not stand by and watch injustices being perpetrated by racism and white supremacy.” On Hugo’s decades in solitary, they noted, “He never broke...and never lost touch with his humanity.”

Every year, a highlight of the Holiday Appeals is the opportunity to hear from the prisoners—and former prisoners—themselves. Mumia sent recorded greetings as did Jaan Laaman (see facing page). Thomas Manning reported that he is waiting to hear about his parole eligibility. The PDC also received greetings from MOVE 9 members Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Eddie Africa, Janine Africa and Janet Africa.

Medical needs are a constant concern for many of the aging class-war prisoners. The generally dismal state of prison health care is exacerbated by the state vendettas against them. Manning’s letter queried whether the prison authorities would allow him to receive desperately needed neck and back surgery. Leonard Peltier was recently diagnosed with a life-threatening abdominal aortic aneurysm. Participants at the New York City fundraiser heard a report of a recent PDC visit to Mumia, including an update on his medical crisis (see page 7).

In New York City we also again welcomed Lynne Stewart. As a lawyer, Stewart spent decades defending Black Panthers and leftist radicals until she was arrested in 2009 and subjected to a frame-up “war on terror” show trial for defending an Islamic cleric imprisoned for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. After nearly dying from breast cancer in prison, Stewart was finally released in December 2013 after a months-long fight for compassionate release, a demand supported by more than 40,000 petitioners worldwide, including the PDC.

Over the past 30 years, the PDC has provided stipends to over 40 prisoners internationally, including eight union militants. Many of these prisoners, largely victims of the racist rulers’ war against militant black activists, have been supported since nearly the beginning of our stipend program. Among them are victims of the notorious FBI Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, frame-up and murder.

One COINTELPRO victim, Francisco Torres, spoke at the New York benefit. Torres, along with other former members of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army known as the San Francisco 8, was falsely charged in 2007 for the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. The charges against Torres were finally thrown out in 2011.

In his speech referencing protests against the epidemic of racist cop killings in the U.S. and student protests in Puerto Rico, Torres pointed to the importance of our stipend program, emphasizing how any dissent against the racist capitalist system could land someone in the crosshairs of the racist rulers: “You are potential political prisoners. Like when you get arrested at demonstrations, they try to criminalize you, but you are a political prisoner once you are arrested.”

Protests against the epidemic of racist cop killings and other forms of police terror were in the forefront of all presentations. Other speakers in New York included Muata Greene of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and MOVE supporter Orie Lumumba. In Toronto, Bruce Allen, vice president of the Niagara Regional Labour Council, spoke to the ongoing ordeal of Albert Woodfox.

James P. Cannon described the defense work of the ILD as a “school for class struggle,” an opportunity to learn the real nature of the capitalist state. Along those lines, comrade Vincent of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste Montreal local described to the Toronto event his experience of brutal state repression during the 2012 student strike in Quebec. Experiencing that repression taught him some basic truths about the capitalist state. But, as he explained, it took the study of Marxism and the workers movement to understand that “without a perspective of socialist revolution centered on the working class, you end up vainly pressuring one wing or another of the bourgeoisie.”

We urge our WV readers to support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee and to write to these prisoners. Become a PDC sustainer to help drive the work forward. Send contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013. For more information on how to contribute and how to correspond with the class-war prisoners, go to www.partisandefense.org.

A View From The Left-From The Front Lines Of The Class-Struggle- Diary of an Auto Temp

Workers Vanguard No. 1083	12 February 2016

Diary of an Auto Temp

 

We print below a report, edited for publication, from a reader who was a temporary worker at a Midwest plant that supplies parts for Ford. Written late last summer as the United Auto Workers (UAW) was negotiating new contracts with the “Detroit Three” automakers Fiat Chrysler, GM and Ford, the report shines a harsh light on the increasing use of temps and the grueling working conditions facing all auto workers. It also highlights the anger among auto workers that can and must be mobilized in hard class struggle against the auto giants.

At the center of last year’s contract dispute was the demand to eliminate the hated tier system. Brought into the auto assembly plants in 2007 with the agreement of the union bureaucracy, this system meant that newer workers got paid less than workers hired before 2007 to do the same job. The new contracts agreed to by the union tops preserved the tiers and were opposed by huge numbers of UAW members. In the end, the UAW misleaders finally forced the sellout contracts down the throats of angry autoworkers late last year. At Fiat Chrysler, the workers rejected management’s initial offer by a two-to-one margin, while a clear majority of skilled GM workers and 49 percent of Ford workers rejected the rotten deal. In the course of negotiations, UAW workers repeatedly threatened to strike.

Workers’ bitterness at the tier system expresses their strong desire for equal pay for equal work and working-class unity. As part of the necessary fight for industrial unionism and the closed shop, all workers—including the growing legions of non-unionized temporary workers—should be organized into the unions at top pay with full benefits and union protections. In parts plants like the one described below, workers should be in the same local as the final assembly plant they supply. But, as we wrote in “UAW Tops Force Through Sellout Contracts” (WV No. 1080, 11 December), today’s union leaders, who are committed to maintaining the profitability of the auto giants, “push reliance on the capitalist Democratic Party and the government, in place of independent working-class action.” We continued:

“What auto workers need is a class-struggle leadership forged in battles like the ones that built the UAW and other industrial unions in the 1930s.... To hold to such a perspective against the many obstacles that the bourgeoisie will put in the way requires building a revolutionary workers party dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist profit system for good and forever.”

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This summer I spent some time working at an auto parts plant in the Midwest. The plant was one of several located adjacent to a large Ford auto plant. It manufactured front and rear bumpers and overheads (roofs) and is one of several different locations that all produce something different. For example, one shop manufactures axles, another front and rear bumper fascias, etc. My plant employed some 280 people in three shifts, in addition to 90 temps who were brought in this summer.

Any new-hire was actually an employee of a temp agency. Temps were paid $10 an hour. If the company hired the temp permanently (after three months), the rate of pay would increase to $12 an hour, but they would still have to wait another three months on probation before getting full union protection. The pay range for UAW workers was $12 to $24 an hour, going up in intervals of $0.25 every six months.

While the building was new, it had old machinery from the Ford plant. All parts made there were transferred by semitruck to the Ford assembly plant down the street. The parts from the various parts plants in the area were all assembled together at Ford. From there, the final product was shipped off along the supply chain.

Auto Parts Plantation

The workers at the plant were black, with the exception of a few whites and Latinos. Almost all of the black workers grew up in the ghetto, though some were now living in nicer, working-class areas because they had this job. The gender makeup was divided equally on my shift. The general feel of the place was that of a plantation, and several of the union workers commented on it being such. It’s a sentiment that puts the term “wage slavery” in a whole different light.

The two team leads were white and although they were union members, they reported directly to and worked with management (although they had no ability to discipline). My lead was known for being very pro-strike and anti-racist and was respected by most of the workers for this. The shift supervisors (who were management, not union members) were black; they walked the lines shouting: “Move it, move it, move it!” to get the operators (line workers) to work faster. All the superintendents (the plantation overseers) were white with the exception of one black guy. They sat at their computers in the break area, while the workers worked their butts off. Management was trying to get the team leads out of the union and categorized as management.

The workers (temp and union) were all fairly young, with just a handful over 40 years old. The majority of the full-timers had been employed for over three years. There were skilled workers (mechanics and maintenance engineers) who were part of the UAW like everyone else. Material handlers (forklift drivers) were also in the union and got $0.50 more per hour than the assembly line workers. All union workers were in the same UAW local, though it’s a different local from the Ford assembly plant. The temps were non-union but were generally pro-union and looked forward to joining the UAW. Some saw working at this parts plant as a way to eventually get hired at Ford, where many had friends or family working.

Life on the Line

Parts came to the factory in several pieces and had to be assembled through a network of “lines.” Some of the parts were made in Mexico, others in stamping plants in the U.S. Once the parts arrived at the plant, they were put on huge shelves in the back of the factory. A “cherry picker” was assigned to each line and was solely responsible for getting the parts down and putting them out for the line workers to use. The cherry picker operator, who was definitely overworked and underpaid, had to pick parts based on a stream of barcodes that came directly from Ford.

The primary line that I worked on made front bumpers. The parts needed to be scanned in and carried between a series of stations where various stages of the assembly were done. At the second station, for example, there was a timer and the workers had 40 seconds to complete that stage of building the bumper or else the overall shift quota would be hurt. The quota was between 500 and 600 for complete front bumpers per night. On top of that, workers had to maintain an additional “bank” of roughly 200 fully assembled bumpers.

The working conditions were extremely onerous for union and temp workers alike. This line at one time comprised 30 workers, but over time the number of workers dropped to two! So I and another woman constructed each of these bumpers and did all the hauling from start to finish. She and I were very frustrated because there was obviously a need for more people on the line.

I worked the third shift, meaning 12-hour day shifts Friday and Saturday and then 12-hour night shifts Sunday and Monday. First shift worked 12-hour days Monday through Thursday and second shift worked nights. While workers expected to work 12-hour shifts as part of “mandatory overtime until further notice,” management often avoided confirming the overtime as a way to cheat workers out of their final break.

The forklift drivers worked a different schedule from the line workers. They worked 13 consecutive days with the same break schedule and overtime requirements. This posed serious safety concerns, although no one on my shift was injured in a forklift accident. Each shift had its own set of material handlers.

During the course of the summer, management’s treatment of the workers with regard to breaks became more and more abusive as negotiations for the parts plant contract went on. The treatment of the temps regarding breaks was much worse than for union workers. On the hottest days, some of my co-workers passed out from the heat. Management provided water, but only on breaks. Workers could bring bottled water back to their stations. While there were a lot of powerful ceiling fans, there was no air conditioning or windows, so the fans just blew hot air. When it was 100 degrees outside, it would be well over 100 inside.

Generally, workers got three ten-minute breaks during their shift. For each break, there were two bells. The first bell normally meant it was time for us to finish what we were doing and then head to the break area. The second indicated that the break had started and the 10 minutes had begun ticking. When the workers had to return from break, there were two bells again: the first one meaning clean up your area, finish your smoke or whatever, and the second one meaning it was time to head back to the line. There were two minutes between each bell, which was how long it took the workers to get from their stations to the break area.

By the end of the summer, the first bell meant nothing, and we had to keep working at the line until we heard the second bell. From that point, we were to quickly take a break and be back on the line by the time the first bell rang again. This was a major source of tension between workers (including the team leads) and management. If a temp was caught coming back from break “late,” they were escorted out of the building by management (i.e., fired!). Union workers were given three days’ suspension for being “late.” The union rep on the shift said to the workers: “Please, I’m begging you; please just do what they say. Don’t give them any lip. Management is sick of hearing it and we’re sick of hearing it.” Needless to say, he wasn’t a popular guy among the ranks, especially during this speedup.

To give a sense of how precarious it was to be a temp, one of the temps that I regularly drove to work with was fired because his three-year-old daughter got sick. He needed to take the day off work to take care of her because he couldn’t find a babysitter. A union member’s child got sick once too, but the union member was able to take the day off work (with pay) to take care of her son. It should have been like that for everyone!

Social Attitudes

The “N” word was used promiscuously at my location by young black workers. I never heard whites or Latinos use it. There was a white guy who wore a Confederate flag belt buckle to work every day. He was very pro-union and apparently not actually a racist, since he hung out with black guys at work and also outside of work. He seemed like an example of the mixed consciousness of some white workers in Middle America, where the Confederate flag is sometimes looked at as a sign of “rebellion” and not as the flag of slavery and race terror.

There were a few openly gay men and women in the plant. They were treated as equals among the ranks of workers. Nonetheless, when it came to a discussion that took place on the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, there seemed to be a mixed reaction due to religious beliefs. One temp commented along the lines of, “I think it’s a sin, but who am I to judge? I’m also a sinner.” But this response was not necessarily representative of everyone. Another temp, whose best friend was gay, was very excited about the ruling.

There was also a very strong hatred for the cops. On lunch and breaks, my co-workers would check out Facebook and other social media for news headlines. Not surprisingly, a lot of trending articles were about cop killings of blacks. This would always set off an angry verbal reaction by the workers.

Contract Battle

This summer, the local contract at this plant expired, and it was a major source of contention between management and the workers—both temp and union. In short, the union had voted to strike if a contract agreement was not reached, but this strike didn’t happen. In July, the union voted down the contract: 97 percent voted no and 3 percent yes. The main topic of debate was the issue of raises. Workers wanted a raise. Bottom line. But because the proposed contract offered only about a $1 raise over the lifetime of the contract, it’s not shocking that no one liked it, considering that auto workers hadn’t had a reasonable raise since 2008.

During this same period, as a show of unity, the union members all wore red, which looked really cool. I asked my “old-timer” co-worker if I could wear red too, she said “Sure!” So I wore a shirt with red in it, as a show of solidarity. The union told the membership at the contract vote meeting to shout out “no contract, no peace” on the day shift, so that HR would hear them down the hall. Lots of people on the rear bumper line shouted it, and on overheads too, but the guys who work on the front bumpers mostly stayed quiet. The overhead guys got some crap from the union reps on shift because when they did chant, they started getting creative with contract demands, making up awesome chants like: “No talking! No substrate!” (Substrate is the material that the overheads are made out of.) Basically they were saying, “Stop the negotiating, we’re going on strike.” The union reps really didn’t like this.

After the local contract was voted down, the company had 30 days to reach agreement with the union; otherwise there would have been another meeting to vote on another strike authorization. I spoke with one of my former co-workers recently, who informed me that this August meeting never took place and that people were getting fired or quitting, but that they still didn’t have a contract.

*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

*****When The Fight To Turn The World Upside Down Was In Full Flower- With The Doors The Unknown Soldier In Mind

 

 

Wait until the war is over
And we're both a little older
The unknown soldier

Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Unborn living, living, dead
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over
For the unknown soldier
It's all over
For the unknown soldier
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Hut, hut, hut ho hee up
Comp'nee, halt
Present, arms
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television children fed
Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over
The war is over
It's all over
War is over

Well, all over, baby
All over, baby
Oh, over, yeah
All over, baby

Ooh, ha, ha, all over
All over, baby
Oh, woah, yeah, all over
All over, heh
Add song meaning

Songwriters
Robbie Krieger;John Densmore;Jim Morrison;Ray Manzarek

From The Pen of Zack James

There was no seamless thread that wrapped the counter-cultural dominated 1960s up tightly, wrapped it up neatly in a pretty bow all set for posterity except for the media types who lived day by day in those merciful times for scraps to feed the teletype hot wires and by on-the-make politicians who to this day attempt to make capital making sport of what in the final analysis was a half-thought out desire to create the “newer world” that some old-time English poet was harping about. That seamless thread business had been distracting Frank Jackman’s attention of late now that a new generation of media-types are at hand who want to refight that social battle and the politicians are whipping   up the raw meat good old boys and girls and the staid as well to provide the troops for that new battle against some phantom in their heads. Despite all the rhetoric, despite all the books written disclaiming any responsibility by those who led the march, despite all those who have now “seen the light” and have hopped back into the fold in academia and the professions (in fact that march back to what everybody used to call bourgeois society started the day after the whole movement ebbed or the day they got their doctorates or professional degrees) there was some question even in Franks’ own mind about whether “the movement” for all its high gloss publicity and whirlwind effect dominated the play as much as he and his kindred had thought then or can lay claim to these forty plus years later.

Place plenty of weight on Frank’s observation, maybe not to take to the bank but to have some knowledge about the limits to what a whole generation in all its diversity can claim as its own mark on society and history. Place plenty of weight for the very simple reason that he went through the whole thing in almost all of its contradictions. Had been raised under the star of parents who slogged through the Great Depression although that was a close thing, a very close thing for some like Frank’s parents who were desperately poor. His poor besotted mother having to leave home and head west looking, looking for whatever there was out there before coming back home with three dollars in hand, and maybe her virtue how can you ask that question of your mother when you wouldn’t think to look at her when young, later too, that she was capable of sex, not the sex you had at your pleasure with some sweet Maryjane. His father out of the Southern winds, out of tar-roof shack of a cabin, half naked, down in the coal-rich hills and hollows of Appalachia, the poorest of the poor, leaving that desperate place to seek something, some small fame that always eluded him. They together, collectively, slogged through the war, World War II, his father through Pacific fight, the most savage kind, had his fill of that damn island hopping and his mother waiting, fretfully waiting for the other shoe to drop, to hear her man had laid his head down for his country in some salted coral reef or atoll whatever they were. Get this though, gladly, gladly would lay that head down and she if it came right down to it would survive knowing he had laid that precious head down. That was the salts they were made of, the stuff this country was able to produce even if it had very little hand in forming such faithful servants so no one would, no one could deny their simple patriotism, or doubt that they would pass that feeling on to their progeny.

Made that progeny respect their music too, their misty, moody I’ll see you tomorrow, until we meet again, I’ll get by, if I didn’t care music, music fought and won with great purpose. But Frank balked, balked young as he was, with as little understanding as he had, the minute he heard some serious rhythm back-beat absent from that sugary palp his parents wanted to lay on him and he would, young as he was, stand up in his three brother shared room (when they were not around of course for they older “dug” Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney, stuff like that) and dance some phantom dance based on that beat he kept hearing in his head, and wondered whether anybody else heard what he heard (of course later when it was show and tell time in the 1960s that beat would be the thing that glued those who were kindred together, funny they were legion). Caught the tail end of the “beat” thing that those older brothers dismissed out of hand as faggy, as guys “light on their feet” and gals who seemed black-hearted blank and neurotic. But that was prelude, that, what did somebody in some sociology class call it, the predicate.                      

As the 1960s caught Frank by his throat, caught him in its maw as he liked to call it to swishy-dishy literary effect he got “religion” in about six different ways. Got grabbed  when the folk minute held sway, when guys like Bob Dylan and Dave Von Ronk and gals like Joan Baez preached “protest” to the hinterlands, reaching down to places like Frank’s Carver, nothing but a working poor town dependent on the ups and downs of the cranberry business. At one time the town was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it. That up and down business depending too on whether people were working and could afford to throw in cranberry sauce with their turkeys come Thanksgiving and Christmas or would be reduced to the eternal fallback beans and franks. But see Carver was close enough, thirty or forty miles south of Boston to Beacon Hill and Harvard Square to be splashed by that new sound and new way of going on dates too, going to coffeehouses or if times were tough just hang around the Harvard Square’s Hayes-Bickford watching with fascination the drunks, hipsters, dipsters, grifters, winos, hoboes, maybe  an odd whore drinking a cup of joe after some John split on her, but also guys and gals perfecting their acts as folk-singers, poets, artists and writers.

Grabbed on the basis of that protest music to the civil rights movement down South, putting Frank at odds with parents, neighbors and his corner boys around Jack Slack’s bowling alleys. Grabbed too the dope, the hope and every girl he could get his hands on, or get this to tell you about the times since he was at best an okay looking guy, they could get their hands on him, on those bedroom blue eyes of his they called it more times than not, that came with the great summers of love from about 1965 on.

Here’s where the contradictions started get all mixed up with things he had no control over, which he was defenseless against. So grabbed too that draft notice from his friends and neighbors at the Carver Draft Board and wound up a dog soldier in Vietnam for his efforts. Wound up on cheap street for a while when he came back unable to deal with the “real” world for a while. That failure to relate to the “real” world cost him his marriage, a conventional marriage to a young woman with conventional white picket fence, a little lawn, kids, and dogs dreams which only had happened because he was afraid that he would not come back from “Nam in one piece, would never get to marriage for what it was worth. Grabbed the streets for a while before he met a woman, a Quaker woman, who saved him, for a while until he went west with some of his corner boys who had also been washed by the great push. Did the whole on the road hitchhike trip, dope, did communes, did zodiacs of love, did lots of things until the hammer came down and the tide ebbed around the middle of the 1970s. So yeah Frank was almost like a bell-weather, no, a poster child for all that ailed society then, and for what needed to be fixed.      

That decade or so from about 1964 to about 1974 Frank decided as he got trapped in old time thoughts and as he related to his old friend Jack Callahan one night at his apartment in Cambridge as they passed a “joint” between them (some things die hard, or don’t die) was nevertheless beginning to look like a watershed time not just for the first wave immediate post-World War II baby-boomers like him, Jack, Frankie Riley, the late Peter Markin, Sam Lowell and a lot of other guys he passed the corner boy night with (the ones like him born immediately after the war as the troops came home, came off the transports, and guys and gals were all hopped up to start families, figure out how to finance that first white picket fence house and use the GI bill to get a little bit ahead in the world, at least get ahead of their parents’ dead-end great depression woes) who came of social and political age then washed clean by the new dispensation but for the country as a whole. More so since those of the so-called generation of ’68, so called by some wag who decided that the bookends of the rage of the American Democratic Convention in Chicago that year and the defeat of the revolutionary possibilities in France in May of that year signaled the beginning of the ebb tide for the whole thing, for those who are still up for a fight against the military monster who is still with us are continuing to fight a rearguard action to keep what little is left of accomplishments and the spirit of those time alive.

Thinking back a bit to that time, Frank as the dope kicked in, a thousand things, or it seemed like a thousand things, some things new in the social, economic, political or cultural forest came popping up out of nowhere in many cases, came together in pretty rapid succession to draw down in flames the dread red scare Cold War freezes of their  childhoods (that time always absurdly symbolically topped off by the sight of elementary school kids, them , crouched under some rickety old desk arms over their heads some air-raid drill practice time as if, as the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are still alive from that time can attest to, that would do the slightest bit of good if the “big one,” the nuclear bombs hit.

Yeah, the Cold War time too when what did they know except to keep their obedient heads down under their desks or face down on the floor when the periodic air-raid shelter tests were performed at school to see if they were ready to face the bleak future if they survived some ill-meant commie atomic blast. (Personally Frank remembered telling somebody then that he would, having seen newsreel footage of the bomb tests at Bikini, just as soon take his  chances above desk, thank you, for all the good the other maneuver would do them.)

For a while anyway Frank and the angel-saints were able to beat back that Cold War mentality, that cold-hearted angst, and calculated playing with the good green world, the world even if they had no say, zero, in creating what went on. Not so strangely, although maybe that is why people drifted away in droves once the old bourgeois order reasserted itself and pulled down the hammer, none of those who were caught up in the whirl thought it would be for only a while or at least thought it would fade so fast just as they thought, young and healthy as they were, that they would live forever. But if you, anybody when you really think about the matter, took a step back you could trace things a little, could make your own “live free” categories of the events that chipped away the ice of those dark nights.

Start in with the mid-1950s if you like, which is where Frank liked to start dating his own sense of the new breeze coming through although being a pre-teenager then he told Jack he would not have had sense enough to call it that, with the heat of the black struggle for some semblance of civil liberties down South in the fight for voter rights and the famous desegregation of buses in Montgomery and the painful desegregation of the schools in Little Rock (and some sense of greater  equality up North too as organizations like the NAACP and Urban League pushed an agenda for better education and housing). Also at that same time, and in gathering anecdotal evidence Frank had found that these too are a common lynchpin, the first break-out of music with the crowning of rock and roll as the wave of the future (black rhythm and blues, scat, rockabilly music all mixed up and all stirred up), and the “discovery” of teen alienation and angst exemplified by sullen movie star  James Dean, who lived fast, and died fast a metaphor that would work its way through youth culture over the next generation. (And throw in surly “wild one” movie star Marlon Brando in The Wild One and a brooding Montgomery Cliff in almost anything during those days, take The Misfits for one, to the mix of what they could relate to as icons of alienation and angst .)   

An odd-ball mix right there. Throw in, as well, although this was only at the end and only in very commercial form, the influence of the “beats,” the guys (and very few gals since that Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-William Burroughs-Allen Ginsberg mix was strictly a male bonding thing) who listened to the guys who blew the cool be-bop jazz and wrote up a storm based on that sound, declared a new sound, that you would hear around cafés even if you did not understand it unlike rock and roll, the guys who hitchhiked across the American landscape creating a wanderlust in all who had heard about their exploits, and, of course, the bingo bongo poetry that threw the old modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound out with a bang.

Then start to throw in the struggles against the old authority in places like Frisco town where they practically ran the red-baiters in the HUAC out of town (what Frank, and some of his friends although not the Carver corner boys except Markin, would learn to call “bourgeois authority working hand in hand with the capitalists”), the old certitudes that had calmed their parents’ lives, made them reach out with both hands for the plenty in the “golden age of plenty.”

Of course the biggest event that opened the doors for liberals, radicals, hell, even thoughtful conservatives was the sweet breeze coming down the road from Boston with the election of Jack Kennedy. Ike, the harmless uncle, the kindly grandfather, was for parents Frank wanted guys who set the buzz going, let them think about getting some kicks out of life, that maybe with some thought they would survive, and if they didn’t at least we had the kicks.

That event opened up a new psyche, that it was okay to question authority, whatever the limitations and shortness of the Camelot times with the struggles against some hoary things like segregation, the death penalty, nuclear proliferation, the unevenness of social life which would get propelled later in the decade with fight for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the fight against the draft, the damn war in Vietnam that drove a nail into the heart of Frank’s generation. A river of ideas, and a river of tears, have been, and can be, shed over that damn war, what it did to young people, those who fought, maybe especially those who fought as Frank got older and heard more stories about the guys who like him didn’t make it back to the “real” world after “Nam, didn’t have a sweet mother Quaker lady like Frank to save them, those guys you see downtown in front of the VA hospitals, and those who refused to, that lingers on behind the scenes even today.

There were more things, things like the “Pill” (and Frank would always kid Jack who was pretty shy talking about sex despite the fact that he and Chrissie, his high school sweetheart, had had four kids when he asked what pill if you need to know what pill and its purpose where have you been) that opened up a whole can of worms about what everyone was incessantly curious about and hormonally interested in doing something about, sex, sex beyond the missionary position of timeless legends, something very different if the dramatic increase in sales of the Kama Sutra meant anything, a newer sensibility in music with the arrival of the protest folk songs for a new generation which pushed the struggle and the organizing forward.

Cultural things too like the experimenting with about seven different kinds of dope previously the hidden preserve of “cool cat” blacks and white hipsters (stuff that they only knew negatively about, about staying away from, thru reefer madness propaganda, thru the banning of some drugs that were previously legal like sweet sister cocaine and taunt Nelson Algren hard life down at the base of society in films like The Man With The Golden Arm), the outbreak of name changes with everybody seemingly trying to reinvent themselves in name (Frank’s moniker at one time was Be-Bop Benny draw what you will out of that the idea being like among some hipster blacks, although with less reason, they wanted to get rid of their  slave names)  fashion (the old college plaid look fading in the face of World War II army surplus, feverish colors, and consciously mismatched outfits and affectation (“cool, man, cool” and “right on’ said it all). More social experiments gathering in the “nation” through rock concerts, now acid-etched, new living arrangements with the arrival of the urban and rural communes (including sleeping on more than one floor in more than one church or mission when on the road, or later on the bum). They all, if not all widespread, and not all successful as new lifestyles all got a fair workout during this period as well.     

Plenty of Frank’s kindred in retrospective would weigh the various combinations of events differently in figuring out how the uprising started just as plenty of them had their specific dates for when the tide began to ebb, when the mean-spirited and authoritarian began their successful counter-offensive that they still lived with for not taking the omens more seriously. (Frank’s ebb tide, as he had  described to Frankie Riley one time, was the events around May Day 1971 when they seriously tried, or thought they were seriously trying, to shut down the government in D.C. if it would no shut down the war and got nothing but billy-clubs, tear gas, beatings and mass arrests for their efforts. After those days Frank, and others, figured out the other side was more serious about preserving the old order than they were about creating the new and that they had better rethink how to slay the monster they were up against and act accordingly.)

Then Frank passed Jack a photograph that he had taken from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Song Society that his wife, Sarah, who worked to put the item out to raise funds for folk music preservation (see above) that acted as another catalyst for this his short screed, and which pictorially encapsulated a lot of what went then, a lot about “which side were you on” when the deal went down. This photograph Frank pointed out to Jack was almost impossible to imagine without some combination of that hell broth anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-“newer world” mix stirred up in the 1960s.

Three self-assured women (the “girls” of photograph a telltale sign of what society, even hip, progressive society thought about women in those slightly pre-women’s liberation time but they would learn the difference) comfortable with the loose and individualistic fashion statements of the day from floppy hats to granny dresses to bare legs, bare legs, Jesus, that alone would have shocked their girdled, silk stocking mothers, especially if those bare legs included wearing a mini-skirt (and mother dread thoughts about whether daughter knew about the pill, and heaven forbid if she was sexually active, a subject not for polite society, not for mother-daughter conversation, then she damn better well know, or else).

They are also uncomfortable about the damn Vietnam war, no, outraged is a better way to put the matter, that was eating up boyfriends, brothers, just friends, guys they knew in college or on the street who were facing heavy decisions about the draft, Canada exile, prison or succumbing to the worst choice, Frank’s choice if you could call his induction a choice what else could he have done gone to Canada, no,  military induction, at a heavy rate and they unlike their mothers who came through World War II waiting patiently and patriotically for their military heroes to come home, come home in one piece, have a very different sense of the heroic. A sense of the heroic going back to ancient times, Greek times anyway, when one group of women like their stay-at-home-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop World War II mothers demanded that their men come home carried on their shields if they had to rather than speak of defeat. Others, the ones that count here, refusing their potential soldier boys any favors, read sexual favors, okay, if they went off to war, providing a distant echo, a foundation to make their request stand on some authority, for these three women pictured there.

Frank wondered how many guys would confess to the lure of that enticement if they had refused induction. His own wife, quickly married at the time was if anything more gung-ho about stopping the red menace than his parents. Frank did not refuse induction for a whole bunch of reasons but then he did not have any girlfriends like that sweet mother Quaker woman later, who made that demand, his girl- friends early on, and not just his wife if anyway were as likely to want him to come back carried on a shield as those warrior-proud ancient Greek women. Too bad. But Frank said to Jack as Jack got up ready to head home to Hingham and Chrissie that he liked to think that today they could expect more women to be like the sisters above. Yeah, more, many more of the latter, please as Frank and his comrades in Veterans for Peace continue to struggle against the night-takers in the nightmare world of endless war.                     

  

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

*****Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.                  

Keeping The Blues/Folk Lamp Burning- Les Sampou's "Lonesomeville"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip On Les Sampou.

CD Review

Lonesomeville, Les Sampou, Flying Fish CD, Rounder Records, 1996

The substance of this review was originally used in the review of Les Sampou’s “Borrowed And Blue” album. I have revised that review and most of the points made apply to the other three CD’s reviewed in this space as well.

The name Les Sampou most recently came up in this space, in passing, as part of a review of blues/folk stylist/ songwriter Rory Block’s work. I made the point there that Rory (and Les, Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur and precious few others) were performing a great service by keeping the female blue singer tradition alive (and, for that matter, male-witness the songs covered by all four). Along the way doing the same for the more amorphous contemporary folk tradition with their own fair share of masterful songwriting efforts. Since I placed Les Sampou in such august company it was, thus, only a matter of time before I got around to giving her a few kudos of her own. The following paragraph from the Rory Block review can serve here for Les as well:

“But more than that, thanks for this great album of country blues classics some famous, some a little obscure and known only to serious aficionados but all well worth placing in the album with the quirky little Rory Block treatment that makes many of the songs her own. Oh, did I also mention her virtuoso strong guitar playing. Well, that too. I have gone on and on elsewhere in this space about the old time women blues singers, mostly black, like Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey and Ida Cox. I have also spilled some ink on more modern, mainly white, women blues singers like Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur and a local talent here in Boston, Les Sampou, and their admirable (and necessary) efforts to carry on this proud tradition. Rory belongs right up there with these women.”

As For “Lonesome” here is the ‘skinny’:

I will make the same point I made in reviewing the “Les Sampou” album because that same spirit pervades this effort. There are a lot of way to be “in” the contemporary folk scene. One way is to write some topical songs of love, longings for love, maybe, a little politics thrown in and maybe some snappy thing about the vacuity of modern life. Yes, that is the easy stuff and Les can, if the occasion calls for it, summon up some very powerful lyrics to make those points. Witness “Holy Land ” and “Home Again”. But, something more is going on here. This is a woman who has been through the emotional wringer, and survived. Listen up.