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Wednesday, April 06, 2016
In Boston Join Ths Fight For $15 On April 14th
Finding Progressive Events In The Boston Area-ACT-MA.ORG
As The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side
As
The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War Passes–In Honor
Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The
Hard Years Of War- A Sketch-Wilhelm
Sorge’s War-Take Three
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman
I would not expect any average
American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist
intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First
International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil
War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of
their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient
history. I am, however, always amazed
when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals
who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised,
very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham
Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a
number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to
show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some
memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts
with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do
so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier,Wilhelm
Sorge.
Since Marx and Engels have always
been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may
seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on
events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist
state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political
and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20th
century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were
however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of
historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the
context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation
forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone
on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified
support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support
was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the
country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the
Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive
capitalist system to thrive.
In the age of advanced imperialist
society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and
villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative
about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the
need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist
reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at
earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then
at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect
everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist
scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that
would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the
historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a
necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our
forebears, and our eyes too.
Furthermore few know about the fact
that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that
Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where
spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German
revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the
conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an
early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a
short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born
abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and
brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the last year of which we
are commemorating this month.
***********
As he looked for the millionth time at the photograph in the heart-shaped locket presented to him by Miss Lucinda Mason which he kept in his blue shirt pocket when not viewing Wilhelm Sorge thought about what hell and damnation had brought him in the year of our lord 1863 to be standing alongside of this godforsaken road headed toward Gettysburg. A long dusty road filled with sweating blue uniformed men, sweating to high stink white men that hot sultry summer day, filled with sweating horse and dust creating artillery carriages, a few the bore the markings of James Smith & Company, Boston a place where he had worked before enlisting in this blue-coated army several months before. At least the War Department would have no cause to investigate James Smith for “shoddy,” work, for cannon the wrong size for the canisters at hand, like those at the Lynn foundry of Harrison and Barnes who took the money and ran for the west from what he had heard. Or for thread bare uniforms which hardly lasted a worthy march or the horrible worm-infested rations. Those Smith markings though made his think forlornly of the events of the previous year, a year filled with thoughts of love more than thoughts of war, but a year where those thoughts of love became enmeshed with thoughts of war. As his father Friedrich, now practically a recruiting agent for Old Abe, not only among the Germans in Boston but out in the Midwest, Wisconsin and Ohio, some in Chicago, and among the German settlers in “secesh” Texas, “such are the times.” Thoughts too of how he was corralled into enlisting his services in the Army of the Potomac, and now assigned through the vagaries of war and necessity to the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, the one formed up by the grandees at Harvard, or maybe formed by the grandees but their sons were doing the bleeding, and not bitching about it either which surprised since their papas had plenty of currency to get a “substitute” for junior, but no, the juniors were volunteering and not crying about it. Which had the effect on Wilhelm of toning down his complains about being dragooned into service. Yeah, the 20th had taken it fair share of beatings, had taken several beatings along the road south and as they headed north was being filled up these days, like lots of regiments who had seen action and had been decimated necessitating the consolidation of some regiments by anybody who could carry a rifle, or think about carrying a rifle.
And, no for the millionth time no, Wilhelm Sorge had not become some great believer in “high abolitionism,” some Captain John Brown vision of slaves freed by servile insurrection launched at benighted Harper’s Ferry, like his father, Friedrich, or like Lucinda’s father Abbott. Nor had he changed his enraged mind about the tough fate of Sanborne and Son, cotton merchants, who had gone out of business when Southern cotton bales stopped piling up in their warehouses on the Boston docks due to the Union embargo (and the British refusal to seriously run the blockade leaving it to swashing-buckling Southern privateers and freebooters to give the Union admirals pause) they had had to let Wilhelm go. Nor, damn, double damn nor had he gotten used to the idea of Negro sweats and that body stink that offended his very being (although truth to tell he was now wary of white men, clean white Harvard men too, who were sweating up a storm just now on this road north. Hell, a couple of times when there was no undefended river or nothing more than a scum-filled pond he hated his own smell).
No, what had gotten Wilhelm’s dander up, what had turned him from a passive, or better, indifference Union man, although no doughface, was the fact that the Confederacy, those states that had wished to be free to form their own country in the South and he wished well, had made a serious error in judgment, Wilhelm’s judgment. They, in order to break out of what appeared to be an “anaconda” strategy, a Union strategy created to encircle and shrink their land mass, to squeeze the life out of their homeland by attrition had decided to bring the war north, to scare the wits out of Northerners enough to have many on the sideline like Wilhelm arguing for the Union government to sue for peace and a return to the status quo. The Rebs had erred when they decided to bring old Massa Linchink (that was the way the Negro sutlers said it and he picked the up words in mockery like he had with the free blacks who worked the Sanborne warehouses with their Massa this and that) to his knees, bring his father’s (and Lucinda’s too) way of life down. That possibility got to him more than a little.
Those thoughts all counted for a lot of Wilhelm’s thinking, no question, he was his father’s son in his interest in politics if not in activism, any activism. But what really brought Wilhelm to this ironic Pennsylvania crossroad, what had made him walk slowly down to Tremont Street and the Union recruiting office, what made him get on that train south to the encampments before Washington, what made him endure weeks of early morning rises, awful food, hours of drill, and plenty of extra duty when some surly drill sergeant did not like the cut of his jaw was that young woman looking back at him in that heart-shaped locket, Lucinda Mason.
Lucinda had made it clear at that last Union League dance to raise funds for the Sanitation Department which had been overwhelmed with the mass casualties and the grievous wounds coming into the rear hospitals (and in DC for the most serious long-term wounded) clear as day, that if one German-American young man did not have the “guts” (she had actually used that unladylike word) to fight for the Union (and to abolish slavery although she did not press that issue with him) like her brothers and cousins when Johnny Reb was on the march then Wilhelm Sorge could go right back to Cologne, or Berlin, or wherever his family had come from. He had half-heartedly argued that he had no fight with Johnny Reb, had no desire to free the ill-gotten slaves and no desire to lose life or limb for Old Abe or any new president either. That “no desire to lose life or limb” comment got the coldest stare that he had ever received from Miss Lucinda Mason. Since we already know from the million look heart-shaped locket and the dusty road he found himself on that Wilhelm Sorge was crazy about Miss Lucinda Mason and had done his duty the very next day once he knew the writing was on the wall. Just then as his surly sergeant started toward him with God knows what assignment and as he put his treasure in the left shirt pocket we know exactly why Wilhelm was standing looking at her locket on that dusty old road.
*****The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism
*****The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism
Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
Since 2014 the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught in the summer of that year. That is to be commended. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the now banished Milibrands after the last election debacle. They will be on sturdier ground with the new head of the Labor Party, Corbyn. I continue to stand willingly with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.
No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower American world theories and politics based on socialism, communism, hell, even left radicalism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen as something like “utopian” schemes by pro-labor leftist militants, students and intellectuals around the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of that world, including America and Great Britain, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.
As the weight of that Soviet demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the "good old cause." The scheduled events and works by socialist commentators highlighted on this Histomat blog amply demonstrate the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately that means generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution as if capitalism were the permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance in the past, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals revolutionaries.
The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-World War I theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period. A main organization concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the sometimes vast differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, has shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down.
The date August 4th 1914 when the German Social-Democrats piled onto the Kaiser’s bandwagon by voting for his war budget should be etched in the brain of every serious leftist militant. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new communications technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.
Additional Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left (mainly Stalinism but the Social-Democrats despite their democratic professions could teach a lesson or too about bureaucratic suppression) and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
One of the great sins of Stalinism (which the latter-day Social-Democrats of various stripes have honed to a fine art as well) was to silence both dissent inside the party and try like hell to keep other tendencies silent outside the party. Instead of letting various positions and programs be fought out to see who had something to add to the revolutionary arsenal the “word” came down (sometimes changing overnight) and that was that. It looks to be from this great distance that the very much still Stalinized Greece Communist Party is saddled with some of those old-time attributes when there should be in the Greek situation a bubbling up of discussion and clash of programs. Else the capitalists will once again prevail in a situation where they should be sent to "the dustbin of history" as Leon Trotsky once said in another context.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
Since 2014 the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught in the summer of that year. That is to be commended. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the now banished Milibrands after the last election debacle. They will be on sturdier ground with the new head of the Labor Party, Corbyn. I continue to stand willingly with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.
No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower American world theories and politics based on socialism, communism, hell, even left radicalism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen as something like “utopian” schemes by pro-labor leftist militants, students and intellectuals around the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of that world, including America and Great Britain, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.
As the weight of that Soviet demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the "good old cause." The scheduled events and works by socialist commentators highlighted on this Histomat blog amply demonstrate the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately that means generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution as if capitalism were the permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance in the past, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals revolutionaries.
The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-World War I theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period. A main organization concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the sometimes vast differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, has shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down.
The date August 4th 1914 when the German Social-Democrats piled onto the Kaiser’s bandwagon by voting for his war budget should be etched in the brain of every serious leftist militant. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new communications technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.
Additional Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left (mainly Stalinism but the Social-Democrats despite their democratic professions could teach a lesson or too about bureaucratic suppression) and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
One of the great sins of Stalinism (which the latter-day Social-Democrats of various stripes have honed to a fine art as well) was to silence both dissent inside the party and try like hell to keep other tendencies silent outside the party. Instead of letting various positions and programs be fought out to see who had something to add to the revolutionary arsenal the “word” came down (sometimes changing overnight) and that was that. It looks to be from this great distance that the very much still Stalinized Greece Communist Party is saddled with some of those old-time attributes when there should be in the Greek situation a bubbling up of discussion and clash of programs. Else the capitalists will once again prevail in a situation where they should be sent to "the dustbin of history" as Leon Trotsky once said in another context.
Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on.
Japanese War Act-Made In The U.S.A.-Save Article Nine-Sign And Distribute The Petition
Japanese War Act-Made In The U.S.A.-Save Article Nine-Sign And Distribute The Petition
Frank Jackman comment:
Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one such time, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
***"THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV" by Victor Serge
Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives. Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.
BOOK REVIEW
THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS OWN
Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge’s political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror, highlighted by the Moscow Trials, in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims.
Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well placed to tell this story since he was a long time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from Serge's experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank.
The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to ‘confess’ or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read: Stalinist rule).
While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communists who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man’s Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully the answer does not resolve itself easily.
What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The history of the period also bears this out not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere. For every Bukharin, Zinoviev or out of favor Stalinist factionalist who compromised himself or herself there were many, mainly anonymous Left Oppositionists and other such political people who did not confess, who did not abandon their political program and went to exile and death rather than capitulate. History being a cruel and, at times, arbitrary master may have not honored them yet. However, those courageous fighters need no revolutionary good conduct certificates before history, the reader of these lines or me.
*****************
Victor Serge
Secrecy and Revolution
A Reply to Trotsky
(1938)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published in Peace News, 27 December 1963. [1]
Translated by Peter Sedgwick.
Reprinted in What Next, No.9, 1998.
Downloaded from the What Next? Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In no.77-78 of the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition, which is his personal organ, Trotsky once more takes me to task with an extraordinary bitterness, using a technique which it is hard to know how to classify. The Trotskyist press of more or less everywhere will doubtless be reproducing this article of his; and I know from experience that they will refuse to publish my replies, denials and corrections.
Such indeed, is their idea of discussion – an approach which is not new to me, having been a Left Opposition militant for so long within Russia. On the first occasion, Trotsky objected to an article I published in the United States and France, under the title Marxism in Our Time. [4] Strangely enough, he criticised it to all appearances without having read it, imputing to me propositions which are directly opposite to my own. This time his polemical fervour and waspish intolerance have led him even further. Almost the whole of his article (The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism) rests upon charges of crying inaccuracy, which I am bound to take up despite the repugnance I feel towards debasing an argument which could be both straightforward and fascinating.
Trotsky reproaches me with being the “severest critic” of his little book Their Morals and Ours, which I translated into French for Éditions du Sagittaire. However, I have never published a single line concerning that work of his, in any publication or in any shape or form.
Trotsky credits me with the authorship of the publicity copy accompanying the distribution of his booklet to the press. On this matter, too, much to my own vexation, I must reply to him with a categoric denial. I am not the author of this prospectus; I have had no part, direct or indirect, in composing it; I have no idea who its author is; and I do not care either. Is that clear enough? Before running these false imputations to the length of five columns of argument, Trotsky would have been wise to make enquiries from the publishers, from myself or from other competent persons. The most elementary accuracy would have demanded this.
Having in this manner ascribed to me a piece of writing with which I have had nothing to do, Trotsky spends a long time refuting ideas which he fathers on to me, whilst systematically ignoring those ideas which I have frequently published on the very same subject. Once again, and sadly, I recognise here an approach which has so often been used in Russia against him and against us; a bad approach, one of small intellectual worth, stemming from a profoundly sick Bolshevik mentality.
On the theme of the civil war in the Russian revolution, Trotsky credits me with heaven knows what high-flown nonsense; although on these very issues I have written a work of nearly 500 pages, which is fairly well known: L’An I de la Révolution Russe. [5] It would have been enough for Trotsky to have opened it, and he would have seen what I say and what I do not say. But that would have been too simple. Did they ever open his books in Russia before accusing him of every crime under the sun? All the same, it is a remarkable fact that in the six columns of his “refutation” of me, he does not quote a single line of mine. Which is exactly the way Pravda used to treat him once upon a time.
I will pass over incidental charges, couched as they are in a style which, alas, could well be called “Muscovite”; as for instance that of having, along with X, who is indeed some old friend or comrade of mine, and with Y, whom I have never met, conspired against the “Fourth International”. As for these quarrels of sects and sub-sects, I am and always have been a complete stranger to them. Possibly X or Y, or even Z, has made use of my writing: I cannot help that – writings are produced with the intention of circulation, ideas belong to everybody.
In this remarkable article by Trotsky there is only one short passage which actually replies to me. Here it is: “... still another of V. Serge’s discoveries, namely, that the degeneration of the Bolsheviks dates from the moment when the Cheka was given the right of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people. Serge plays with the concept of revolution, writes poems about it, but is incapable of understanding it as it is. Public trials are possible only in conditions of a stable regime. Civil war is a condition of the extreme instability of society and the state. Just as it is impossible to publish in newspapers the plans of the general staff, so it is impossible to reveal in public trials the conditions and circumstances of conspiracies, for the latter are intimately linked with the course of the civil war.” [6]
Since the majority of regimes at the present time can scarcely be classed as stable, Trotsky is in this passage supplying all reactionaries with an excellent argument for replacing normal courts of justice by secret courts-martial. However, we shall soon see that his argument is strictly worthless. (A personal aside: Trotsky could well have recalled that between 1919 and 1936, or rather since 1906, I have not confined myself to “writing poems” about revolution. But the little device of only mentioning poems, and thereby making a passing sneer at a long and rich record of activity which has included ten years of varied persecutions in the USSR – this little business has not a great deal to do with the matter under discussion.)
Trotsky makes use of a euphemism which is so excessive that I could justifiably charge him with making light of a concept that, despite everything, has its own social and human importance: I mean the death penalty. The Cheka, he writes coolly, received the right “of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people”: whereas what the Cheka was in fact given was the right to apply the death penalty on a mass scale and in secret, without hearing the accused, who were unable to defend themselves and whom in most cases their judges did not even see! By comparison with this inquisitorial process, the “closed door” status of any court in which the judges and the defendants are face to face, and to which defence counsel are admitted, appears to overflow with safeguards. Either here Trotsky is gerrymandering the historical facts and the whole basic problem, or else the verb “to gerrymander” has lost all its meaning in this or any language.
One would gather from him that it was simply a matter of repressing conspiracies; however, the Cheka’s full title was “Extraordinary Commission for the repression of counter-revolution, sabotage, speculation and desertion”. If the necessity for secret procedures could reasonably be invoked in the case of conspiracy, is it proper to invoke it for the housewife who sells a pound of sugar that she has bought (speculation), the electrician whose fuses blow (sabotage), the poor lad who gets fed up with the front line and takes a trip to the rear (desertion), the socialist or the anarchist who has passed some remark or other in the street, or has some comrades together at home (agitation and illegal assembly)? Cases of this sort literally swamped those of conspiracy, whether genuine or non-existent; of this Trotsky cannot be unaware. Nor, at this stage, can he fail to be aware how favourable to the manufacture of non-existent conspiracies was the darkness which he champions; there were just as many of this kind of plot as of the real variety. He cannot be unaware that in all the different kinds of case that it dealt with, the Cheka made a frightful abuse of the death penalty. Why then is he so eager to defend the indefensible, and with such poor arguments?
During the civil war there was perfect order behind the front itself, in the interior of Soviet territory. Travellers to these parts have described this plainly enough. There was nothing to prevent the functioning of regular courts, which might in certain cases have sat in camera, before which the accused could have been able to defend themselves, have their own counsel present, and show themselves in the light of day. Would not the revolution have enhanced its own popularity by unmasking its true enemies for all to see? And, correspondingly, the abuses which arose inevitably from the darkness would have been avoided.
But the party’s central committee was bent on maintaining its monopoly of power, and so on confounding its too troublesome critics with spies, traitors and reactionary plotters; it would often have found itself embarrassed before the criticisms of Menshevik socialists, anarchists, maximalists, syndicalists or even Communists and spirited non-party citizens, whom the courts would not have been able to convict without discrediting themselves. In other words, the consequences of the secrecy in the Cheka’s methods lay as much in attacking and destroying working class and revolutionary democracy as in cutting off the heads of the counter-revolution. (This, even though the early Cheka only very rarely used the death penalty against members of working class organisations.)
On such questions of history (which are also, since moral reality is inseparable from social reality, questions of socialist morals) the working class movement’s whole interest is to shed light everywhere, and to make its views known without any passion beyond that of serving man and the future. Whether Trotsky wills it or not, no limit has been set to the analysis of the Russian revolution, which he has served so outstandingly, so tremendously – despite the measure of responsibility which must be laid to his name for certain tragic errors. And no amount of ponderous irony, no broadsides of discredit, directed against men who dare to think and sometimes to pronounce according to their conscience, will render him free to substitute mischievous polemic for the necessary debate to which, with a little less pretension to infallibility, he could bring the most precious contributions of all.
Notes
1. This article was written during a dispute over Trotsky’s pamphlet Their Morals and Ours, the French edition of which, translated by Serge, was accompanied by a publisher’s prospectus attacking Trotsky’s class-based conception of morality. In reply, Trotsky wrote an article entitled The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism, in which he suggested that the prospectus was written “naturally, not by Victor Serge but by one of his disciples, who imitates both his master’s ideas and his style. But, maybe after all, it is the master himself, that is, Victor Serge in his capacity of ‘friend’ of the author?” [2]
Serge responded by writing the piece reprinted here, which was intended for publication in the French syndicalist journal La Révolution prolétarienne. However, he decided to withdraw the article because, as he later explained, he preferred “to suffer this unjust attack in silence. And I still think I was quite right: truth can work its way out in different ways than by offensive polemics”. [3] The original manuscript was found among Serge’s papers by Peter Sedgwick while he was preparing the English edition of Serge’s book Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The article was translated by Sedgwick and published in the 27 December 1963 issue of Peace News.
2. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, 1973, p.54.
3. Victor Serge, letter to Angelica Balabanova, 23 October 1941, in David Cotterill, (ed.), The Serge-Trotsky Papers, 1994, p.189.
4. The article was published in 1938 in Partisan Review, and is reprinted in The Serge-Trotsky Papers, pp.176-83.
5. Published in an English translation by Bookmarks, as Year One of the Revolution, 1992.
6. Their Morals and Ours, p.58.
BOOK REVIEW
THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS OWN
Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge’s political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror, highlighted by the Moscow Trials, in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims.
Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well placed to tell this story since he was a long time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from Serge's experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank.
The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to ‘confess’ or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read: Stalinist rule).
While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communists who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man’s Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully the answer does not resolve itself easily.
What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The history of the period also bears this out not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere. For every Bukharin, Zinoviev or out of favor Stalinist factionalist who compromised himself or herself there were many, mainly anonymous Left Oppositionists and other such political people who did not confess, who did not abandon their political program and went to exile and death rather than capitulate. History being a cruel and, at times, arbitrary master may have not honored them yet. However, those courageous fighters need no revolutionary good conduct certificates before history, the reader of these lines or me.
*****************
Victor Serge
Secrecy and Revolution
A Reply to Trotsky
(1938)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published in Peace News, 27 December 1963. [1]
Translated by Peter Sedgwick.
Reprinted in What Next, No.9, 1998.
Downloaded from the What Next? Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In no.77-78 of the Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition, which is his personal organ, Trotsky once more takes me to task with an extraordinary bitterness, using a technique which it is hard to know how to classify. The Trotskyist press of more or less everywhere will doubtless be reproducing this article of his; and I know from experience that they will refuse to publish my replies, denials and corrections.
Such indeed, is their idea of discussion – an approach which is not new to me, having been a Left Opposition militant for so long within Russia. On the first occasion, Trotsky objected to an article I published in the United States and France, under the title Marxism in Our Time. [4] Strangely enough, he criticised it to all appearances without having read it, imputing to me propositions which are directly opposite to my own. This time his polemical fervour and waspish intolerance have led him even further. Almost the whole of his article (The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism) rests upon charges of crying inaccuracy, which I am bound to take up despite the repugnance I feel towards debasing an argument which could be both straightforward and fascinating.
Trotsky reproaches me with being the “severest critic” of his little book Their Morals and Ours, which I translated into French for Éditions du Sagittaire. However, I have never published a single line concerning that work of his, in any publication or in any shape or form.
Trotsky credits me with the authorship of the publicity copy accompanying the distribution of his booklet to the press. On this matter, too, much to my own vexation, I must reply to him with a categoric denial. I am not the author of this prospectus; I have had no part, direct or indirect, in composing it; I have no idea who its author is; and I do not care either. Is that clear enough? Before running these false imputations to the length of five columns of argument, Trotsky would have been wise to make enquiries from the publishers, from myself or from other competent persons. The most elementary accuracy would have demanded this.
Having in this manner ascribed to me a piece of writing with which I have had nothing to do, Trotsky spends a long time refuting ideas which he fathers on to me, whilst systematically ignoring those ideas which I have frequently published on the very same subject. Once again, and sadly, I recognise here an approach which has so often been used in Russia against him and against us; a bad approach, one of small intellectual worth, stemming from a profoundly sick Bolshevik mentality.
On the theme of the civil war in the Russian revolution, Trotsky credits me with heaven knows what high-flown nonsense; although on these very issues I have written a work of nearly 500 pages, which is fairly well known: L’An I de la Révolution Russe. [5] It would have been enough for Trotsky to have opened it, and he would have seen what I say and what I do not say. But that would have been too simple. Did they ever open his books in Russia before accusing him of every crime under the sun? All the same, it is a remarkable fact that in the six columns of his “refutation” of me, he does not quote a single line of mine. Which is exactly the way Pravda used to treat him once upon a time.
I will pass over incidental charges, couched as they are in a style which, alas, could well be called “Muscovite”; as for instance that of having, along with X, who is indeed some old friend or comrade of mine, and with Y, whom I have never met, conspired against the “Fourth International”. As for these quarrels of sects and sub-sects, I am and always have been a complete stranger to them. Possibly X or Y, or even Z, has made use of my writing: I cannot help that – writings are produced with the intention of circulation, ideas belong to everybody.
In this remarkable article by Trotsky there is only one short passage which actually replies to me. Here it is: “... still another of V. Serge’s discoveries, namely, that the degeneration of the Bolsheviks dates from the moment when the Cheka was given the right of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people. Serge plays with the concept of revolution, writes poems about it, but is incapable of understanding it as it is. Public trials are possible only in conditions of a stable regime. Civil war is a condition of the extreme instability of society and the state. Just as it is impossible to publish in newspapers the plans of the general staff, so it is impossible to reveal in public trials the conditions and circumstances of conspiracies, for the latter are intimately linked with the course of the civil war.” [6]
Since the majority of regimes at the present time can scarcely be classed as stable, Trotsky is in this passage supplying all reactionaries with an excellent argument for replacing normal courts of justice by secret courts-martial. However, we shall soon see that his argument is strictly worthless. (A personal aside: Trotsky could well have recalled that between 1919 and 1936, or rather since 1906, I have not confined myself to “writing poems” about revolution. But the little device of only mentioning poems, and thereby making a passing sneer at a long and rich record of activity which has included ten years of varied persecutions in the USSR – this little business has not a great deal to do with the matter under discussion.)
Trotsky makes use of a euphemism which is so excessive that I could justifiably charge him with making light of a concept that, despite everything, has its own social and human importance: I mean the death penalty. The Cheka, he writes coolly, received the right “of deciding behind closed doors the fate of people”: whereas what the Cheka was in fact given was the right to apply the death penalty on a mass scale and in secret, without hearing the accused, who were unable to defend themselves and whom in most cases their judges did not even see! By comparison with this inquisitorial process, the “closed door” status of any court in which the judges and the defendants are face to face, and to which defence counsel are admitted, appears to overflow with safeguards. Either here Trotsky is gerrymandering the historical facts and the whole basic problem, or else the verb “to gerrymander” has lost all its meaning in this or any language.
One would gather from him that it was simply a matter of repressing conspiracies; however, the Cheka’s full title was “Extraordinary Commission for the repression of counter-revolution, sabotage, speculation and desertion”. If the necessity for secret procedures could reasonably be invoked in the case of conspiracy, is it proper to invoke it for the housewife who sells a pound of sugar that she has bought (speculation), the electrician whose fuses blow (sabotage), the poor lad who gets fed up with the front line and takes a trip to the rear (desertion), the socialist or the anarchist who has passed some remark or other in the street, or has some comrades together at home (agitation and illegal assembly)? Cases of this sort literally swamped those of conspiracy, whether genuine or non-existent; of this Trotsky cannot be unaware. Nor, at this stage, can he fail to be aware how favourable to the manufacture of non-existent conspiracies was the darkness which he champions; there were just as many of this kind of plot as of the real variety. He cannot be unaware that in all the different kinds of case that it dealt with, the Cheka made a frightful abuse of the death penalty. Why then is he so eager to defend the indefensible, and with such poor arguments?
During the civil war there was perfect order behind the front itself, in the interior of Soviet territory. Travellers to these parts have described this plainly enough. There was nothing to prevent the functioning of regular courts, which might in certain cases have sat in camera, before which the accused could have been able to defend themselves, have their own counsel present, and show themselves in the light of day. Would not the revolution have enhanced its own popularity by unmasking its true enemies for all to see? And, correspondingly, the abuses which arose inevitably from the darkness would have been avoided.
But the party’s central committee was bent on maintaining its monopoly of power, and so on confounding its too troublesome critics with spies, traitors and reactionary plotters; it would often have found itself embarrassed before the criticisms of Menshevik socialists, anarchists, maximalists, syndicalists or even Communists and spirited non-party citizens, whom the courts would not have been able to convict without discrediting themselves. In other words, the consequences of the secrecy in the Cheka’s methods lay as much in attacking and destroying working class and revolutionary democracy as in cutting off the heads of the counter-revolution. (This, even though the early Cheka only very rarely used the death penalty against members of working class organisations.)
On such questions of history (which are also, since moral reality is inseparable from social reality, questions of socialist morals) the working class movement’s whole interest is to shed light everywhere, and to make its views known without any passion beyond that of serving man and the future. Whether Trotsky wills it or not, no limit has been set to the analysis of the Russian revolution, which he has served so outstandingly, so tremendously – despite the measure of responsibility which must be laid to his name for certain tragic errors. And no amount of ponderous irony, no broadsides of discredit, directed against men who dare to think and sometimes to pronounce according to their conscience, will render him free to substitute mischievous polemic for the necessary debate to which, with a little less pretension to infallibility, he could bring the most precious contributions of all.
Notes
1. This article was written during a dispute over Trotsky’s pamphlet Their Morals and Ours, the French edition of which, translated by Serge, was accompanied by a publisher’s prospectus attacking Trotsky’s class-based conception of morality. In reply, Trotsky wrote an article entitled The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism, in which he suggested that the prospectus was written “naturally, not by Victor Serge but by one of his disciples, who imitates both his master’s ideas and his style. But, maybe after all, it is the master himself, that is, Victor Serge in his capacity of ‘friend’ of the author?” [2]
Serge responded by writing the piece reprinted here, which was intended for publication in the French syndicalist journal La Révolution prolétarienne. However, he decided to withdraw the article because, as he later explained, he preferred “to suffer this unjust attack in silence. And I still think I was quite right: truth can work its way out in different ways than by offensive polemics”. [3] The original manuscript was found among Serge’s papers by Peter Sedgwick while he was preparing the English edition of Serge’s book Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The article was translated by Sedgwick and published in the 27 December 1963 issue of Peace News.
2. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, 1973, p.54.
3. Victor Serge, letter to Angelica Balabanova, 23 October 1941, in David Cotterill, (ed.), The Serge-Trotsky Papers, 1994, p.189.
4. The article was published in 1938 in Partisan Review, and is reprinted in The Serge-Trotsky Papers, pp.176-83.
5. Published in an English translation by Bookmarks, as Year One of the Revolution, 1992.
6. Their Morals and Ours, p.58.
Down In Mickey’s World –The Trials And Tribulations Of Sand-Bagger Johnson-Part Seven
Down In
Mickey’s World –The Trials And Tribulations Of Sand-Bagger Johnson-Part Seven
“Is there
any reason, any reason on this good green earth to come down here to Orlando except
to play golf, play golf 24/7 if you can so do so, if you can stand the pace, so
you can say you had some reason to show up here,” Sand-Bagger Johnson spouted forth
from the back seat of the van he was occupying as the dawn was set to come up
on another Florida golf day. An Orlando, Florida golf day, a Dizzy (oops) Disney
day as he and his compatriots headed toward Disneyland, toward Mickey’s world. Toward
Mickey’s world as one of the occupants, Earl the Pearl, who had suffered through
previous bouts of Orlando 24/7 golf madness in the vicinity told him when he
had inquired about how big a deal the huge Disney project there in the center
of Florida was in the area. Big was the reply and as they, Sand-Bagger, Earl the
Pearl, Jerry Jeff driving the van (and the one deserving of kudos for taking care
of the arrangements for the golf package, housing, van and six round of golf included,
airplane fare separately arranged by each party), and the felonious Roger the
Dodger (felonious with a golf club in his hand) passed the “Welcome” sign
visible for miles around.
They
would travel a many a mile and still be in Mickey’s world as Jerry Jeff explained
that he knew having been a “good” father he had taken his kids down to Orlando when
they were young and knew firsthand how big the property was after shelling out plenty
for every damn venue. (Sand-Bagger thinking to himself that thankfully he had
only to deal with the California Disney madness since his kids had been raised
in that state, he a part-time dad after a messy divorce, which seemed pretty
benign compared with what he was confronted with this day-and dawn was still only
working its way up the sky scale).
This day’s
efforts were to be centered in Mickey’s world, the two fabled old style courses,
Palm and Magnolia, managed by the Arnold Palmer Company a name seemingly
assuring them of some good golf experiences. As they entered the property (a
word that Jerry Jeff and Roger used constantly referring to any bit of land
since they were business school professors so what would one expect) and after being
cleared at the menacing security outpost arriving at the clubhouse they were
immediately inundated with all the Disney comic cartoon character hyp. Sand-Bagger
had expected that. What he did not expect when after signing in, grabbing their
carts and heading to hit some practice balls to warm up in the early morning
light was when they had teed up their balls on the first hole and saw the
tee-markers were in the form of Mickey Mouse’s profile. That stark fact would be
the case on all thirty-six holes that they played that day and the unusually
non-plussed Sand-Bagger spent half the day commenting on that “crass” commercialization.
Down in Mickey’s world was right, right as rain.
Summary
for the iterant Casey-one victory two-two-two against Jerry Jeff (as in two dollars
front nine, two dollars back nine, two dollars the whole match), a similar lost
to Roger the Dodger left him even on the day and only a last minute twenty foot
putt saved the day from being a total wash-out as he took a buck off Earl the
Pearl in their putting bet. Sand-Bagger once again longed for his regular foursome
at Pine Pond where five dollar side bets were not assumed to be highway robbery
or some nefarious golf hustle. Selah.
Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Cold War Night- Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Is On The Case- “Kiss Me Deadly”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Kiss Me Deadly.
DVD Review
Kiss Me Deadly, Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955
Sure I‘m a film noir buff. And sure I like my film detectives that way as well, Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Phillip Marlowe and so on. Normally Mickey Spillane and his 1950s-style detective, Mike Hammer, would no hit my radar though. Believe me I did, however, spent many a misbegotten hour reading Spillane’s detective stories, maybe as much for cover art work that ran to provocative bosomy, half-clothed femme fatale dames in distress as for the insipid story line that ran heavily to Mike’s anti-communist warrior pose ready to smash heads at the drop of a hat, and grab an off-hand kiss from every dame he ran into along the way. Aside for the question of that scurrilous (now scurrilous, maybe) cover art that is better left for another day my tastes in detectives were more to the “highbrow” Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet and their more knight-errant-worthy story lines, and a little more reserve in the fist department, although for a damsel in distress they were ready to duke it out with anyone, and gladly.
That said, now along comes this classic 1950s film noir Mike Hammer story line and I was hooked, well, maybe not hooked so much as intrigued by it. Moreover, director Richard Aldrich seems to have had a flair for the noir film, from those black and white filmed shots of streets scenes in the seamy Los Angeles be-bop night (and day too, come to think of it), to an incredible be-bop jazz bar scene, complete with “torch” singer where after the lost of a friend Mike gets plastered (drunk), to the endless line-up of high end “golden age of the automobile” cars on display. Of course there is the normal bevy (maybe two bevies, I didn’t count) of alluring, mysterious women just waiting to fall into Mike’s arms when he comes within fifty paces of them, and he is, as usual, ready to put on his white knight uniform when he senses that something in evil in the world, and he most definitely is willing to thumb his nose as the governmental authorities who are always just a step, or seven, behind the flow of the action. But most of that is all in a day’s work for a noir detective. What makes this one stick out is the doom’s day plot.
Of course, the 1950s was not only about the rise of the “beats” and of teen alienation and angst-driven rock and roll but the heart of the international Cold War, a scary time no question, where if things had taken a half-twist a different way. Well, who knows, but it was not going to be pretty. And part of that Cold War, a central part, was the presence of the “bomb”, and for those who are too young to remember that was nothing but the atomic and hydrogen bombs that could, at any non-be-bop minute, blow the planet away.
And it is that threat that underlines old Mickey Spillane’s tale. See, with that kind of threat, but also the power potential , private parties, evil private parties could think of all kinds of nasty ways to wreak havoc on the world. If only they could get just a little of that bomb power. And that lust, that seemingly eternal lust, for power by certain of our fellows is where we are heading. See, someone privy to the atomic secrets (no, not the heroic Rosenburgs, this guy was in it for the dough) had a little pot of the stuff ready for the highest bidder. And the highest bidder, so to speak, also happens to be a guy with plenty of dough to buy a ton of modern art (and a fondness for classic quotes). I knew there was something funny about those modern art collecting guys. Didn’t you?
And all it takes to spoil that nefarious plan is one Mike Hammer. Now, and here is the beauty of the Spillane method, this is not for governmental agents to handle, as one would think in trusting 1950s America, although they are hot on the trail but one threadworn detective. Threadworn? Yes, threadworm. See Mike is nothing but a low-rent, dirt-peddling divorce work detective (in the days when such dirt was necessary to get that desperate divorce), working this racket with his girl Friday (and lure), Velda. But see maybe Mike just fell on hard times and needed some dough (although his car, office set-up, digs… and fetching Velda belie that). But once Mike gets on the case, and only when he knows in his gut that something is wrong and he has that feeling here, then they are no limits. He faces off the mob (naturally, if there is something evil to broker they are in on it), half-mad women (one that he picked up on the hitchhike road, kind of, and her roommate) and that relentless modern art collector before he is through. I could go on but, really, this is one you have to see. And add to your list of film noir be-bop nights.
DVD Review
Kiss Me Deadly, Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955
Sure I‘m a film noir buff. And sure I like my film detectives that way as well, Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Phillip Marlowe and so on. Normally Mickey Spillane and his 1950s-style detective, Mike Hammer, would no hit my radar though. Believe me I did, however, spent many a misbegotten hour reading Spillane’s detective stories, maybe as much for cover art work that ran to provocative bosomy, half-clothed femme fatale dames in distress as for the insipid story line that ran heavily to Mike’s anti-communist warrior pose ready to smash heads at the drop of a hat, and grab an off-hand kiss from every dame he ran into along the way. Aside for the question of that scurrilous (now scurrilous, maybe) cover art that is better left for another day my tastes in detectives were more to the “highbrow” Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet and their more knight-errant-worthy story lines, and a little more reserve in the fist department, although for a damsel in distress they were ready to duke it out with anyone, and gladly.
That said, now along comes this classic 1950s film noir Mike Hammer story line and I was hooked, well, maybe not hooked so much as intrigued by it. Moreover, director Richard Aldrich seems to have had a flair for the noir film, from those black and white filmed shots of streets scenes in the seamy Los Angeles be-bop night (and day too, come to think of it), to an incredible be-bop jazz bar scene, complete with “torch” singer where after the lost of a friend Mike gets plastered (drunk), to the endless line-up of high end “golden age of the automobile” cars on display. Of course there is the normal bevy (maybe two bevies, I didn’t count) of alluring, mysterious women just waiting to fall into Mike’s arms when he comes within fifty paces of them, and he is, as usual, ready to put on his white knight uniform when he senses that something in evil in the world, and he most definitely is willing to thumb his nose as the governmental authorities who are always just a step, or seven, behind the flow of the action. But most of that is all in a day’s work for a noir detective. What makes this one stick out is the doom’s day plot.
Of course, the 1950s was not only about the rise of the “beats” and of teen alienation and angst-driven rock and roll but the heart of the international Cold War, a scary time no question, where if things had taken a half-twist a different way. Well, who knows, but it was not going to be pretty. And part of that Cold War, a central part, was the presence of the “bomb”, and for those who are too young to remember that was nothing but the atomic and hydrogen bombs that could, at any non-be-bop minute, blow the planet away.
And it is that threat that underlines old Mickey Spillane’s tale. See, with that kind of threat, but also the power potential , private parties, evil private parties could think of all kinds of nasty ways to wreak havoc on the world. If only they could get just a little of that bomb power. And that lust, that seemingly eternal lust, for power by certain of our fellows is where we are heading. See, someone privy to the atomic secrets (no, not the heroic Rosenburgs, this guy was in it for the dough) had a little pot of the stuff ready for the highest bidder. And the highest bidder, so to speak, also happens to be a guy with plenty of dough to buy a ton of modern art (and a fondness for classic quotes). I knew there was something funny about those modern art collecting guys. Didn’t you?
And all it takes to spoil that nefarious plan is one Mike Hammer. Now, and here is the beauty of the Spillane method, this is not for governmental agents to handle, as one would think in trusting 1950s America, although they are hot on the trail but one threadworn detective. Threadworn? Yes, threadworm. See Mike is nothing but a low-rent, dirt-peddling divorce work detective (in the days when such dirt was necessary to get that desperate divorce), working this racket with his girl Friday (and lure), Velda. But see maybe Mike just fell on hard times and needed some dough (although his car, office set-up, digs… and fetching Velda belie that). But once Mike gets on the case, and only when he knows in his gut that something is wrong and he has that feeling here, then they are no limits. He faces off the mob (naturally, if there is something evil to broker they are in on it), half-mad women (one that he picked up on the hitchhike road, kind of, and her roommate) and that relentless modern art collector before he is through. I could go on but, really, this is one you have to see. And add to your list of film noir be-bop nights.
*****Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers
*****Coming Of Age, Political Age, In The 1960s Night- A Baptism Of Fire-Making War On The War-Makers-The Struggle Against Nuclear War
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie De Angelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie deep psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it, not liking getting used to it but he was not tough, not even close although he was wiry, but not Franny heavyweight tough, but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. (Yes, girls scared him, not Franny scared but no social graces scared, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off with his knowledge of two thousand arcane facts that he thought would impress them but no avail then, later he would be swarmed, well, maybe not swarmed but he didn’t have to spend many lonely weekend nights studying to get to three thousand arcane facts) This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.
See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best freshman high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads, you know Ohio State by ten over Michigan stuff like that, to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.
What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as a good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.
Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.
Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-that very day.
But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Yah, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.
Heady stuff, yah, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.
Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working- class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.
But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against bad man Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.
On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap,” and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and to go.
That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got even more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.
Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime anyway) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused their unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that drew Peter Paul’s attention this day. After running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally was to take place he was amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.
Arriving at the bandstand he saw about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spotted a clot of people who were wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and was starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He went over to the clot and introduced himself and tells them how he came to be there. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.
Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.
Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.
But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh yah, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
He was scared. All of fourteen year old Peter Paul Markin’s body was scared. Of course he knew, knew just as well as anybody else, if anybody thought to ask, that he was really afraid not scared, but Peter Paul was scared anyway. No, not scared (or afraid for the literary correct types), not Frannie De Angelo demon neighborhood tough boy, schoolboy nemesis scared, scared that he would be kicked in the groin, bent over to the ground in pain for no reason, no reason except Frannie deep psycho hard boy reasons known only to himself. Markin was used to that kind of scared, not liking it, not liking getting used to it but he was not tough, not even close although he was wiry, but not Franny heavyweight tough, but used to it. And this certainly was not his usual girl scared-ness on the off chance that one, one girl that is, might say something to him and he would have no “cool” rejoinder. (Yes, girls scared him, not Franny scared but no social graces scared, except in the comfortable confines of a classroom where he could show off with his knowledge of two thousand arcane facts that he thought would impress them but no avail then, later he would be swarmed, well, maybe not swarmed but he didn’t have to spend many lonely weekend nights studying to get to three thousand arcane facts) This was different. This, and his handkerchief-dabbed wet palms and forehead did not lie, was an unknown scared.
See, Peter Paul had taken a bet, a “put your money where your mouth is" bet, from best freshman high school friend Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, if you want to know the full name. Now these guys had previously bet on everything under the sun since middle school, practically, from sports game spreads, you know Ohio State by ten over Michigan stuff like that, to how high the master pizza man and owner at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, Tonio, would throw his pizza dough one strange night when Frankie needed dough (money dough that is) for his hot date with girlfriend Joanne. So no bet was too strange for this pair, although this proposition was probably way too solemn to be bet on.
What got it started, the need for a bet started, this time, really had to do with school, or maybe better, the world situation in 1960. Peter Paul, a bundle of two thousand facts that he guarded like a king’s ransom, went off the deep end in 9th grade Civics class when he, during a current events discussion, exploded upon his fellow classmates with the observation that there were too many missiles, too many nuclear bomb-loaded guided missiles, in the world and that both sides in the Cold War (The United States and the Soviet Union and their respective hangers-on) should “ban the bomb.” But you have not heard the most provocative part yet, Peter Paul then argued that, as a good-will gesture and having more of them, the United States should destroy a few of its own. Unilaterally.
Pandemonium ensued as smarts guys and gals, simps and stups also, even those who never uttered a word in class, took aim at Peter Paul’s head. The least of it was that he was called a “commie” and a "dupe" and the discussion degenerated from there. Mr. Merck was barely able to contain the class, and nobody usually stepped out line in his class, or else. Somehow order was restored by the end of class and within a few days the class was back to normal, smart guys and girls chirping away with all kinds of flutter answers and the simps and stups, well the simp and stups did their simp and stup thing, as always.
Frankie always maintained that that particular day was one of the few that he wasn’t, and he really wasn’t, glad that Peter Paul was his friend. And during that class discussion he made a point, a big point, of not entering the fray in defense of his misbegotten friend. He thought Peter Paul was off the wall, way off the wall, on this one and let him know it after class. Of course, Peter Paul could not leave well enough alone and started badgering friend Frankie about it some more. But this was stone wall time because Frankie, irreverent, most of the time irreligious, and usually just happy to be girl-smitten in the world, and doing stuff about that, and not worried about its larger problems really believed, like the hard Roman Catholic-bred boy that he was underneath, that the evil Soviet Union should be nuclear fizzled-that very day.
But Peter Paul kept egging the situation on. And here is the problem with a purist, a fourteen year old purist, a wet behind the ears fourteen year old purist when you think about it. Peter Paul was as Roman Catholic-bred underneath as Frankie but with this not so slight difference. Peter Paul’s grandmother, Anna, was, and everybody who came in contact with her agreed, a saint. A saint in the true-believer catholic social gospel sense and who was a fervent admirer of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker for social justice movement started in the 1930s. So frequently The Catholic Worker, the movement newspaper, would be lying around her house. And just as frequently Peter Paul, taking grandmother refuge from the hell-bend storms at his own house, would read the articles. And in almost every issue there would be an article bemoaning the incredible increase in nuclear weapons by both sides, the cold war freeze-out that escalated that spiral and the hard fact that the tipping point beyond no return was right around the corner. And something had to be done about it, and fast, by rational people who did not want the world blown up by someone’s ill-tempered whim. Yah, heady stuff, no question, but just the kind of thing that a certain fourteen year old boy could add to his collection of now two thousand plus facts.
Heady stuff, yah, but also stuff that carried some contradictions. Not in grandmother Anna, not in Dorothy Day so much as in Peter Paul and through him Frankie. See, the Catholic Worker movement had no truck, not known truck, anyway with “commies" and "dupes”, although that movement too, more than once, and by fellow Catholics too, was tarred with that brush. They were as fervent in their denunciation of the atheistic Soviet Union as any 1950s red-baiter. But they also saw that that stance alone was not going to make the world safer for believers, or anybody else. And that tension between the two strands is where Frankie and Peter Paul kind of got mixed up in the world’s affairs. Especially when Peter Paul said that the Catholic Worker had an announcement in their last issue that in October (1960) they were going to help sponsor an anti-nuclear proliferation rally on the Boston Common as part of a group called SANE two weeks before the presidential elections.
Frankie took that information as manna from heaven. See, Frankie was just as interested in knowing two thousand facts in this world as Peter Paul. Except Frankie didn’t guard them like a king’s ransom but rather used them, and then discarded them like a tissue. And old Frankie, even then, even in 1960 starting to spread his wings as the corner boy king of the North Adamsville high school class of 1964, knew how to use his stockpile of facts better than Peter Paul ever could. So one night, one fiercely debated night, when Frankie could take no more, he said “bet.” And he bet that Peter Paul would not have the courage to travel from North Adamsville to Park Street Station in Boston to attend that SANE rally by himself (who else would go from old working- class, patriotic, red-scare scared, North Adamsville anyway). And as is the nature of fourteen year old boy relationships, or was, failure to take the bet, whatever bet was social suicide. “Bet,” said Peter Paul quickly before too much thinking time would elapse and destroy the fact of the bet marred by the hint of hesitation.
But nothing is ever just one thing in this wicked old world. Peter Paul believed, believed fervently, in the social message of the Catholic Worker movement especially on this nuclear war issue. But this was also 1960 and Irish Jack Kennedy was running, and running hard, to be President of the United States against bad man Richard Milhous Nixon and Peter Paul was crazy for Jack (really for younger brother, Bobby, the ruthless organizer behind the throne which is the way he saw his own future as a political operative). And, of course, October in election year presidential politics is crunch time, a time to be out hustling votes, out on Saturday hustling votes, especially every Irish vote, every Catholic vote, hell, every youth vote for your man.
On top of that Jack, old Irish Jack Kennedy, war hero, good-looking guy with a good-looking wife (not Irish though not as far as anyone could tell), rich as hell, was trying to out-Cold War Nixon, a Cold War warrior of the first degree. And the way he was trying to outgun Nixon was by haranguing everyone who would listen that there was a “missile gap,” and the United was falling behind. And when one talked about a missile gap in 1960 that only meant one thing, only brooked only one solution- order up more, many more, nuclear-bomb loaded guided missiles. So there it was, one of the little quirks of life, of political life. So, Peter Paul, all fourteen year old scared Peter Paul has to make good on his bet with Frankie but in the process put a crimp into his hoped-for political career. And just for that one moment, although with some hesitation, he decided to be on the side of the “angels” and to go.
That Saturday, that October Saturday, was a brisk, clear autumn day and so Peter Paul decided to walk the few miles from his house in North Adamsville over the Neponset Bridge to the first MTA subway station at Fields Corner rather than take the forever Eastern Mass. bus that came by his street erratically. After crossing the bridge he passed through one of the many sections of Boston that could pass for the streets of Dublin. Except on those streets he saw many young Peter Pauls holding signs at street corners for Jack Kennedy, other passing out literature, and others talking up Jack’s name. Even as he approached the subway station he saw signs everywhere proclaiming Jack’s virtues. Hell, the nearby political hang-out Eire Pub looked like a campaign headquarters. What this whole scene did not look like to Peter Paul was a stronghold place to talk to people about an anti-nuclear weapons rally. Peter Paul got even more scared as he thought about the reception likely at the Boston Commons. He pushed on, not without a certain tentative regret, but he pushed on through the turnstile, waited for the on-coming subway to stop, got on, and had an uneventful ride to the Park Street Station, the nearest stop to the Common.
Now Park Street on any given Saturday, especially in October after the college student hordes have descended on Boston, is a madhouse of activity. College student strolling around downtown looking for goods at the shops, other are just rubber-necking, other are sunning themselves on the grass or park benches in the last late sun days before winter arrives with a fury. Beyond the mainly civilized college students (civilized on the streets in the daytime anyway) there are the perennial street people who populate any big city and who when not looking for handouts, a stray cigarette, or a stray drink are talking a mile a minute among themselves about some supposed injustice that has marred their lives and caused their unhappy decline. Lastly, and old town Boston, historic old town Boston, scene of many political battles for every cause from temperance to liberty, is defined by this, there are a motley crew of speakers, soap-box speakers whether on a real soap-box or not, who are holding forth on many subjects, although none that drew Peter Paul’s attention this day. After running that gauntlet, as he heads for the Francis Parkman Bandstand where the SANE rally was to take place he was amused by all that surrounds him putting him in a better mood, although still apprehensive of what the day will bring forth.
Arriving at the bandstand he saw about twenty people milling around with signs, hand-made signs that showed some spunk, the most prominent being a large poster-painted sign that stated boldly, “Ban The Bomb.” He is in the right place, no question. Although he is surprised that there are not more people present he is happy, secretly happy, that those twenty are there, because, frankly, he thought there might be just about two. And among that crowd he spotted a clot of people who were wearing Catholic Worker buttons so he is now more fully at ease, and was starting to be glad that he came here on this day. He went over to the clot and introduced himself and tells them how he came to be there. He also noted that one CWer wore the collar of a priest; a surprise because at Sacred Heart, his parish church, it was nothing but “fire and brimstone” from the pulpit against the heathen communist menace.
Get this-he also met a little old lady in tennis sneakers. For real. Now Frankie, devil’s advocate Frankie, baited Peter Paul in their arguments about nuclear disarmament by stating that the “peaceniks” were mainly little old ladies in tennis shoes-meaning, of course, batty and of no account, no main chance political account, no manly Jack Kennedy stand up to the Russians account. Peter Paul thought to himself wait until I see Frankie and tell him that this little old lady knew more about politics, and history, than even his two thousand facts. And was funny too boot. Moreover, and this was something that he had privately noticed, as the youngest person by far at the rally she, and later others, would make a fuss over him for that very reason talking about young bravery and courage and stuff like that.
Over the course of the two hours or so of the rally the crowd may have swelled to about fifty, especially when a dynamic black speaker from the W.E.B. Dubois club at Harvard University linked up the struggle against nuclear weapons with the black struggle down South for voting rights that those in the North had been hearing more about lately. It was not until later, much later, that Peter Paul found out that this Dubois club business was really the name of the youth group of the American Communist Party (CP) at the time but by that time he was knowledgeable enough to say “so what.” And it was not until later that he found out that the little old lady with the tennis sneakers was a CPer, although she had said at the time he talked to her she was with some committee, some women’s peace committee, within the Democratic Party. Oh, well. But then he would also be able to say “so what” to that accusation in proper “family of the left” fashion.
But forget all that later stuff, and what he knew or did not know later. See, that day, that October 1960 autumn day, Peter Paul learned something about serious politics. If you are on the right side of the angels on an issue, a central issue of the day, you are kindred. And although there were more than a few catcalls from the passers-by about “commies”, “dupes”, and “go back to Russia” he was glad, glad as hell that he came over. Although nothing turned inside him, noticeably turned inside him that day, about his politics and his determination to see Jack Kennedy and the Democrats take the White House he thought about those brave people at the bandstand and what they were standing for a lot for a long time after the event faded from memory. Oh yah, it was good to be on the side of the angels. And it didn’t hurt that he won that Frankie bet, either.
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