*****Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind -Sam Eaton’s Take

*****Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind -Sam Eaton’s Take

From The Pen Of Bart Webber 

A number of years ago when I was in the midst of one of my periodic re-readings of the gritty Chicago-etched novelist Nelson Algren who worked the steamy, misbegotten streets of that town when it was like now "an anything goes" place from the endlessly brutal and arbitrary cops, Chicago's finest, doing what they damn well please to the mayhem and lost dreams down at the base of society if not up on Lake Shore Drive I wrote a rat-tat-tat rush of words and phrases extolling his work. My old friend from Carver in Massachusetts where I grew up, Sam Eaton, read the piece recently after he had read Walk On The Wild Side arguably one of the great novels chronicling the plight of the white trash in the last century who could not adjust, did not want to adjust when the deal went down and got nothing but knuckles and billy-clubs for breakfast for their efforts said he wanted to give his take on Algren, a more nuance  take. Sam said to me that he would take responsibility for what was written. He had better since I will not, no way.      

********

Yeah, Bart was right about Nelson Algren, right about how he had the misfits, the guys and gals who because of upbringing, hubris, fate didn’t cut the mustard, couldn’t go the distant in normal society and thus got burned up in the process, pegged. Had their number just like the midnight copper captain in one of his more famous who, just like today if you want to know the truth about cops, got tired of their same old, same old in a story Bart had me read one time. That is what got me interested in reading Walk On The Wild Side, got me hopped up on one Dove Linkhorn, a guy born to lose, imprinted with that born to lose sign so he might as well not have been born. Period. Here in this book or rather in the description of the origins of the Doves when they came to this green breast of American land, the origins of the Tobacco Road set, the “white trash” guys, is where I knew Algren was no fake, no fake at all no matter how good he might have had it growing up himself, no matter how far away from cheap street he might have actually been (and after Bart filled me in about a junkie girlfriend he tried to help go “cold turkey, ” more than once knew I was on to something about what Algren knew about what Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, Marx called the lumpen, who have always been with us we just don't see them except when they are pan-handling around the inner cities or conning somebody anywhere).

Bart, although these days he probably would not admit to it, wouldn’t mention it unless he was asked directly, and I came from Doveville, came from that “white trash” environment that Algren captured in the first couple of chapters about where guys like Dove got off the rails right from the start. We both grew up in the “projects” in Carver, you know the public housing every town and city has provided for a while to those who are down on their luck, can’t do better, or won’t. No matter how pretty a town tries to make the place look and the town of Carver didn’t bother much it is still the projects. It’s the projects because it is not so much the condition of the places, the lack of space and amenities people out in the leafy suburbs expect as a matter of course, or the sameness of everybody’s condition and thus poor material to jump up in the world in but because of the way it breaks your spirit, the way it grinds you down worrying about the basics of life and not having them, making your “wanting habits” larger than life.                 

Although Bart, whose father was just a poorly educated man who got caught up in World War II, got stationed for a while in Boston before being discharged, met Bart’s mother and decided to stay rather than going back up to rural Maine and his white trash kindred (I am not being unkind here to the old man, believe me, Bart said he could not believe a place was worse than the Carver projects when he saw the broken down shack, complete with rusted non-descript vehicles, the outhouse which served for relief of the bodily functions and the rat’s ass condition of the interior, the couple of times he went up there as a kid to see where his father grew up) and I, whose father was a drunk, a drunk straight up without the excuse of military service to explain his rotten ways escaped the worst the projects had to dish out it was a close thing, a very close thing. We saw Doves all around us, had some for friends, got tied up a little with their wanting habits which intersected our own.       

Let me give you one example, the one Bart would pick too if I had asked him to name the guy from the old neighborhood who could go toe to toe with the Doves of the world. “Red” Radley was the toughest hombre around (and that “red” moniker was not about his political affiliations, not in the red scare 1950s when we grew up under the cloud of the Cold War, he would have clobbered anybody who said that, clobbered anybody who claimed to be a red, or maybe even though about it too).  A couple of years older than us so his exploits worthy of our attention and admiration (and garnered us a couple of appearances in “juvie,” in kid’s court as a result for the "clip,"  you know the "five-finger discount" and trying to jack-roll a guy, an old town drunk after he got his monthly check, Jesus) Red didn’t look that tough but everybody knew that he was the guy who almost chain-whipped a guy to death from another neighborhood, another corner really which is the way “turf” was divided in those days leaving a bloody mass on the ground when he walked away just for being in Red’s corner (Harry’s Variety where even tough and "connected" Harry once told me long after Red went up to do his first armed robbery stretch that he was afraid of Red when he was only sixteen and that was why he never made an issue of Red staking out his store as his corner for him and his boys even though he was "protected" by the cops).       

Red had the classic story, a drunken long gone father (if it was his father since the guy he knew as this father before the guy split always claimed Red was not his kid), a tramp of a mother whose claim to fame was that she could outdrink most guys and gave the best blowjobs in town. No one questioned the latter by the way and there was plenty of anecdotal evidence for that claim from high school guys to old time winos who knew her when she was younger and they cared more about satisfaction of their sexual urges, having her "toot the whistle" they called it then than the hunt for Ripple). Red didn’t care if school kept or not once he got the idea to start “clipping” stuff from department schools and selling it to us (or anybody else) cheap to keep himself in clover. Got himself a gang of corner boys (Harry’s Variety, remember) including Bart and me for a few minutes (that is where our “juvie” experiences came in) and ruled his ‘kingdom” with an iron fist until he graduated to armed robberies (the place where Bart and I jumped ship). Wound up pimping his younger sister, only thirteen, for a while in between robberies (we thought it was cool although we were far from knowing what that pimping really meant). There was some talk too of incest with her but we let that slide not being sure what that meant or understanding the implications. Later, when he was between jail terms he would pimp whatever girlfriend he had to keep himself in dough.

Funny despite his outlaw status he could get some good-looking novena, rosary bead and "Bible between their knees" Catholic girls who you wouldn’t think would look at him once although he was a good-looking wiry guy and turn them into whores. And they didn’t think twice about it according to what Red told Bart one time about Cissie Gaffney whom Bart had had a crush on in his younger days. It took no big brain to know that Red’s attitude toward women was about the same as his attitude about doormats.         

Naturally the Reds of the world just like their kindred Doves try to go further than their inner resources will take them. Begin to think the whole world is just a little larger than the small pond they are swimming in where they have all the other fishes terrified, forget there are a ton of other tough hungry guys out there. Forget the coppers will throw you down if you do not own them. And so early on at about sixteen Red started getting taken down many pegs. The first time for a botched armed robbery of a gas station up on Palmer Street when a cop car was passing by and saw the action, the coppers put Red down to the ground and he stayed down as they handcuffed him, trussed him really. That began the cycle from which Red never broke until, from what we heard about twenty-five years later, Red fell to earth down South, North Carolina I think, strung out on junk, a habit which he picked up in one of his jail terms (and which made more than one girlfriend a whore to keep him from his horrors), fell down in a shoot-out with local cops when he was trying to rob a White Hen convenience store, armed to the teeth. So when we say Algren knew the Reds, (and us) of the world, wrote about them true you can take that wisdom to the bank. Here’s why if you need a more rounded out picture:       

He, Nelson Algren, the poet-king of the midnight police line-up, poet-king and true, no short-cuts, no pretty pictures, no lies leave that to the dopes in the line-up, leave that to the prosaic night watch captain who has heard it all, night court shuffle (whores, pimps, winos, and denizens of the all-night Hayes-Bickford weak coffee but cheap who are out and about gathered up by a whole unknown to John and Jane Q Public justice system which is grinding away relentlessly keeping John and Jane ignorant), drug-infested jack-roller (who likes the sound of a roll of nickels on bone, likes to work the dark streets around Jimmy the Polack’s Tavern on Friday nights when guys get paid and he gets “paid”), dope-peddler (mostly the guy who takes the fall, the guy who cuts the dope so tight that it makes Minnie squeal to high heaven but also the guy when that fifteenth “cold turkey” time didn't make it is the sainted bastard savoir our lord “fixer-man” all hail), illicit crap game back alleys (watch the Doves, Reds, and Shortys for they will always tilt the game if not watched just like back in some Harry’s Variety time when the messed up Madame La Rue pinball wizard games and Harry caught hell from his connected boys, Chicago-style, what did Carl Sandburg the old dusty poet call Chi ( a very far stretch from old hosanna westward trek all men are brothers Walt Whitman although he too knew grime), oh yeah, hog-butcher and steel-driver of the world. Wrote of small-voiced people(you know Joe regular guy this gas jockey smelling of greases and oils even with the Borax treatment, Jane regular gal waitress in the dead-end Pops’ Eats diner complete with stained tight white uniform and tired legs), mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder.

Small-voiced except that solitary confinement in some locked room junkie wail when deep in the “cold turkey” fits screaming for sweet Jesus lord fixer man, except that drunk dark tavern cheap low-shelf rye whiskey shrieking in the early morning high moon can’t find the way home some blind and another shriek when Lenny works that roll of nickels on his bones, yeah, except that stealthy jack-roller cry of delight once his victim wears that spot of blood on the back of his neck like some red badge of sap-dom, except that scream when some he-man decides that for a minute he would gain a big voice and smack his woman a few times to straighten her out (and she sporting a bruised eye and crippled shoulder, nowhere to go, what about the kids, and oh how he used to love her so and maybe he will change some day), except that holler when some john decided to bust up his paid-up junkie whore just because he could  (hell, she tried to hold out on him her protector, tried to do a trick on her own hook, tried to take the night off, the reasons are endless), except, oh, hell, enough of exceptions in the neon-blazing small voice night. Let little sketch, do, do for all the suffering mass who fall way under the social radar: 

“Frankie, I ain’t feelng so good, need a little something to calm my nerves down, get me back on top, get be back to being your sweet loving lady, your sweet Lorraine,” Marybeth Dolan said to her latest lover man Frankie, Frankie Malone, whom she had met about a year before when she was feeling blue and had gone out to Skipper’s Bar &Grille over on Division, that’s Chi town for the gyps, to have a few drinks, maybe pick up a guy for the night, maybe more she wasn’t that picky that night when she had her wanting habits on that way, when she needed a man in her bed to stop the crazy feeling she got when she didn’t have a man around.

She had seen Frankie around, around Division, remember in Chi town,  and around Skipper’s before, Skipper’s her home away from home when she wanted a man, heard he was “connected” to Lance Kelly, the big guy in the dope scene and who knows what else and as she was strictly a whiskey drinker she kind of passed him by, kind of brushed him off her dance card even if he was pretty good looking, and looked like he might be good in the saddle, her saddle. Heard too though that he had been hung up on junk, H, horse, whatever the guys at Skipper’s called it to show they were hip, or something after he got back from Iraq, back the first time in 2005 but had gone “cold turkey” and kept off the stuff as far as she knew.           

That first night they met she had gone into Skipper’s with her best red “come hither” dress on (some girlfriend had told her when she was just a girl, just starting to figure out guys, started wanting to figure out guys that red was the primo color to attract guys who were looking to score with girls, red come hither dresses seemed to work the best), sat down on a stool at the bar and ordered her regular drink, Chivas on the rocks, from Benny the bartender who sometimes when the place was not busy would have her drink ready as he spied her coming in the door, although not this night when the place was crowded since Eddie Clearwater, the old time electric blues guy who played with Magic Jim back in the day was performing on the small stage in the back room and he always drew a crowd.

Frankie had been sitting a few seats down when he first noticed her but since the seat next to hers was clear he came up to the empty seat and asked if anybody was sitting there. After the obvious “no” he asked if she wanted a drink, she said “no” since she already had a drink in front of her and thought that would be that. Instead Frankie said in a low murmur so nobody else would hear, “I’ve seen you in here before, seen you with Lenny Price a few times, and then lately by yourself. What did you do, get old Lenny the brush-off?”

“No,” she answered starting to think that very subtle thought that this guy was trying to pick her up and that might not be so bad, might be very good if he was off the junk like she had heard, “Lenny drifted out West somewhere, left me high and dry if you want to know, and good riddance since the guy was going nowhere and wasn’t that good a lover anyway.” That last part startled Frankie a little as he replied, “I’m a guy going somewhere, I’m a guy who you might want to get to know,” looking her up and down. Marybeth blushed her always Irish Catholic novena rosary bead blush which came up whenever a guy was giving her the sexy treatment although she had long ago given up her maidenhead, quaint word, and the Church.

Then Marybeth said, “Well, maybe I might if you are clean these days.” Frankie turned his head back away from her as if to say that how did she know that, and why, and answered, “Yeah, I’m clean, clean as jaybird although it wasn’t something I wanted to do, no way.” And thus started the love affair between one Francis Malone and one Marybeth Dolan, both to the Church born but now wayward sinners as she took him to her small studio apartment later that night after they had talked, danced a couple of slow ones when Eddie was finishing his last set and had closed the joint.                         

And so it went along for a couple of months they alternating between her place and Frankie’s room, efficiencies they call them in Chi town with a small kitchenette and half shower bathroom but really one big room, so room, going out to eat supper at various spots, some ritzy like The Four Winds, some just plain apple America steamed Wagon Wheel Diner when their appetites were up (usually after sex and she had performed a few tricks on him, “played the flute,” she called the trick which both agreed no self-respecting Irish Catholic girl should even know about less be able to do, to get down her throat that far although both laughed when she said from Frankie’s very limp penis he was glad that she did know and he just smiled the smile of a guy who knew he could get her to do that trick whenever he wanted). Skipper’s when the place had live music playing and just kind of going along.

Then one night, one Saturday night when they were in Frankie’s room after drinking the night away at the Sunset Club over near the Loop Frankie suggested they try a little something for the head, some righteous cocaine, girl, cousin he called it. Marybeth was confused, wasn’t sure that what Frankie meant was junk, heroin that he was offering her. So Marybeth asked what the hell was going on she thought he was off the stuff, off of heroin. Frankie laughed a sly laugh and said, “Yeah, I’m off that stuff but a guy needs a little something for the head to even out after tough days and so a little sniff, a couple of snorts gets me right. Besides its not addictive, really.” For some reason known only to her, a reason she would search for over the next few months she took him at his word.

Furthermore she was just drunk enough to want to stay high, wanted some “kicks” to go with their love-making, see where that led. See it made it easier to “play the flute,” not that Frankie wanted that steady and sometimes when she was drinking too much she had trouble gagging for some reason. Frankie took out his packet of white dust, grabbed a small plate from his kitchen cabinet and started crushing the stuff up with a razor. Then he took a dollar bill out of his pocket and roll it up to make a straw and say “Ladies, first” after explaining to Marybeth that you had hold the dollar bill straw to your nose and inhale through your nose. She did so and after taking a hit started to cough a little. Then she said she felt funny in her stomach and Frankie said that was natural as the cocaine dissolved. He told her to take another hit to cool her out. The second inhalation was not so bad and kind of made her horny. Made her want Frankie, who said just take another hit and I’ll take a few and we will hit the sheets. That night Marybeth had some of the best sex of her life, had an orgasm or thought she did, screamed through their love-making enough.

For the next few months almost every time Frankie and Marybeth made love they got going by doing a few lines, a few more each time although nobody was counting. Then one day a couple of months back Marybeth went into the bureau drawer where Frankie kept his stash opened the packet and set herself up a few lines to chase the blues away. That is what she told Frankie when he asked whether she had opened his stash or not, had said yes and then quickly asked if he wanted her to “play the flute” to get his mind off of her invading his stash. This went on a few more times when Marybeth said she was feeling blue before Frankie started to keep his stash outside the rooming house. He would bring just enough to keep her from feeling blue if she asked or if they were making love which was less frequent these days.     

Then this night, this lowdown night when Marybeth pleaded with him to give her a few lines Frankie for the first time realized, or maybe realized was too strong a word that Marybeth was getting too crazy on the stuff and he told her she would have to give it up, give it up just like he had kicked junk. She begged, pleaded with him, told him she would let him chain her to the bedpost and do what he wanted to do to her which she had previously refused to do as being too kinky, as not being sex but a perversion, if he would only make her well. She started jabbering loudly and Frankie could only calm her down a little by saying he would go get his stash. She cried out after him as he left, Oh Frankie, you are my angel of mercy, you are my guardian angel.” As Frankie walked down the stairs he shook his head in disgust, some angel of mercy."          

Yeah, Nelson had it right, had that ear to the ground for the low moan (more of a groan, not for him his contemporary Jack Kerouac’s moan for man, “beat” moan for man, all Catholic beat and rise, although they heard those same longings, that same rat’s ass despair of the midnight oil), the silence in the face of ugly Division Street tenements not fit for the hogs much less the hog-butchers (cold water flats, rooms so small so no space to breath, no private thoughts except that some guy next door knew what you were thinking and said cut it out, peeling wallpaper or paint it does not matter, dripping sinks that spoke of no recent plumbing and why should the landlord care but get this Division Street had kindred in Taffrail Road, Carver, Columbia Point, south-side Racine, the Bronx, they are legend), had the ear for the dazed guys, drunk, disorderly, maybe on the nod so quiet (that nod not the nod of youth when you recognized some guy you sort of knew in passing as a sign he was cool with you but the low-down nod of somebody in a place that nobody can reach) spilling their pitter-patter to Captain just like back in home sweet Mississippi, Georgia, wherever ( and could never go back to face Mister James Crow and his do this, don’t do that, stay here, don’t stay there, keep your head down enough of that).

Algren had the ear for the strange unrequited fates of what did that same Jack Kerouac of the “moan for man” call them, yes, the fellahin, the lump mass peasants (and what is the same thing once they get off the farms and the out of the country air, the urban peasants, for at least in America they are when you scratch underneath their surly looks and bitter end despair they are not that far removed from their roots, from all their old sack of potatoes lives), met coming out of men’s bars on fugitive mile long riverbank mill town Lowell streets loud and boisterous ready for a fight or a kiss with some waylaid back alley); broken-back Fresno fruit fields (stoop labor, bracero labor that only the Aztec bronzed “wetback” could stand picking cucumbers here, garlic there going norte); and, Mexican nights all night bumpy bus ride sweating and stinking coming of going someplace) except now they are hell-bound bunched up together on the urban spit ( a righteous word and it fits), small voices never heard over the rumble of the thundering subway build to drown out the cries of men), working stiffs (stinking hog-butchers with blood-stained hands hulking slabs of pork, sweated steel-driving men edging toward the melting point as they hurl their metals into the grinder to mesh and mix the great urban superstructure, grease-stained tractor-builders out at John Deere, frayed-collared night clerks in some seedy flop (frayed collar both necessary for night work since the winos could have cared less about what some holy goof wore, the  con men are sneaking out the back door and the whores are trying to hold off their latest john until they see cash), porters sweeper out Mister’s leaving from his executive bathroom, and glad they have the work since it beats down home sweated fields).

And their women too, the fellahina [sic], cold-water flat housewives making do with busted up toasters, egg-shelled stained coffee pots (shaking their heads at some Anglo-American poet going on and on about measuring lives by coffee spoons), Bargain Center leftover drapes, frayed kitchen curtains; cheap Jimmy Jack’s Diner waitresses to earn the family daily bread their misters of the golden dream youth the world is our oyster promises couldn’t deliver surly pencil in ear and steam-tray sweated too tight faded white uniform with telltale leftover gravy stains hustling for nickels and dimes; beaten down shoe factory workers flipping soles and heels by the score at piece rate, piece rate if you can believe that, work men did not do, would not do; working back room donut shops filling donuts with jelly, cream, whatever, hairnet caked with debris, ditto her ill-fitted sugar encrusted uniform, to feed the tribe that she had too close together and proved too much when the deal when down; the younger ones, pretty or plain, hitting Benny’s Tavern for a few quick ones and maybe a quick roll in the hay if some guy pays the freight (the plain ones depending on that); older women sitting alone at smoke-filled bars on early evening paydays looking that look, that come hither honey look, doing tricks for extra no tell husband cash to fill those weekly white envelopes when the rack-renter and the utilities bill collectors hammer at the door; other older women, younger ones too come to think of it, hustling for a fix if she is on the quiet jones).

Sometimes despite all their best wishes and fruitless rantings their kids (already street-wise watching older brothers working back alley jack-rolls, cons, hanging in front of Harry’s Variety doing, well, just doing until the midnight sifter time rolls around),  growing up like weeds with nobody at home in an age when mothers stayed at home, who turned out to be disappointments. But who could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, of guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of Carver, a smaller version of Chi town, another town filled with small-voice people, just fewer, small tenements, cold-water flats, same seedy places not fit to hang in, genteel people hang in).

Nelson never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people those who Greek tragedy played big but rather those who stumbled, tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors (that damn elevated shaking the damn apartment day and night, rattling the windows, so close passengers got an eyeful when some floozy readied herself for her night’s work or not bothering with modesty, high as a kite, just letting herself not feel anything). Never spoke of people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall, not some Edenic fall, not some “searching for the garden” like Jack and Burroughs uptown tea-fed hipsters claimed they were seeking just ask them, but a silly little worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored.

Wrote instead of the desperately lonely, a shabby-clothed wino man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the donut and coffee stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to move him on, or else; a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, maybe two, no more, and that eternal price of a by-the-hour flop over on neon hotel, motel, no tell Mitchell Street.

Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did T.S. Eliot, the poet and a guy who if strait-laced and Victorian knew what he was talking about call it like I said before but it all fits, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Nelson wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man  about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. (Studs Terkel, a guy Algren knew, a guy who knew a thing or two about the fellahin and the dirty linen Chi streets, could quote chapter and verse on these guys and their eternal studies about the plight of man, and they merely made of the same clay.)

Wrote of the night people, not the all night champagne party set until dawn and sleep the day away but of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all sharp angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers with all the fixings from the look of it meaning a no go night and so that lonely burger and cup of joe, fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well), or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen sunken doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal “only the moment.” The next fix, how to get it, worse, how to get the dough to pay the fixer man, he, sending his woman out on the cold damp streets standing under some streetlight waiting for Johnnie and his two minute pleasures, she if she needed a fix, well, she trading blow jobs for smack, so as not to face that “cold turkey” one more day. The next drink, low boy rotgut wines and cheap whiskies, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment.

Waiting eternally waiting to get well, you in such bad shape you can’ t get down the stairs, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any medical doctor could prescript, better than any mumbo-jumbo priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them.

So not for Algren the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn walking the road to their proper Sunday white-clad church after a chaste Saturday red barn dance over at Fred Brown’s; not for him  the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions hot off some doctor’s pad and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine without prescription for whatever the traffic would bear; and ,not of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred whom of course they would never tell to keep the mills rolling do when the whole thing goes public.

Nor was Algren inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard. One suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent like those who in the pull and push of the writing profession had (have) forsaken their muses for filthy lucre. No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him his due took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly, maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, others to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, from The Man With The Golden Arm, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden needle arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, from Walk On The Wild Side, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night already mentioned, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

Bart said he remembered reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration (but that is just a moniker to stick on those people they were legend all over the South and Southwest as the fields of gold went fallow) segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and after Bart mentioned the idea re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist who looked at the in the Age of Jackson when they were coming over in swarms once the industrial wheels seriously kicked up in Great Britain, call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And proper society said good riddance (and proper Eastern seaboard would later echo that sentiment).  

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the progeny, the feckless “hot rod” boys who took some wreck of car (sometimes literally) and made to “spec,” boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia like their older brothers would be the vanguard of the “golden age of the 1950s” now spoken of with reverence, building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those Pacific coast ocean-flecked highways can’t you just picture them now looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it in Mill Valley or Pacifica and who was to stop them not the good citizens of the “golden age” and maybe not the cops, not when they were in a swarm anyway) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious gang bang felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, put paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

Algren spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell’s rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers (the hamburger joint with cheap fast wares before Big Mac drowned out everybody else), all Pops’ Eats night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.

*****From The Archives Of The International Labor Defense (ILD)-1925-1946)-In Defense Of Political Prisoners

*****From The Archives  Of The International Labor Defense (ILD)-1925-1946)-In Defense Of Political Prisoners

Click below to link to an introduction to the work of the ILD-

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/other/ild/ild.html

Click below to link to New York Public Library materials on ILD

http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20647


From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introducing The Committee For International Labor Defense

Mission Statement

The Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD) is a legal and political defense organization working on behalf of the international working class and oppressed minorities providing aid and solidarity in legal cases. We stand today in the traditions of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense (ILD) 1925-1946, the defense arm of the American Communist Party which won its authority as a defense organization in cases like Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, defense of Black Sharecropper’ Union and Birmingham steelworkers union efforts in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and garnering support in the United States for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 

The ILD takes a side. In the struggles of working people to defend their unions and independent political organizations and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity against their exploiters. In the struggles of the oppressed and other socially marginalized peoples to defend their communities and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity with their efforts against their oppressors.  While favoring all possible legal proceedings for the cases we support, we recognize that the courts, prisons and police exist to maintain the ruling class’ dominance over all others. To paraphrase one of the founding members of the original ILD said “we place 100% of our faith in the power of the masses to mobilize to defend their own and zero faith, none, in the ‘justice’ of the courts or other tribunals.”

As we take the side of working people and oppressed minorities we also strive to be anti-sectarian. We will, according to our abilities, critically but unconditionally support movements and defend cases of organizations or individuals with whose political views we do not necessarily agree. We defend, to paraphrase the original statement of purpose of the old ILD, “any member of the workers and oppressed movement, regardless of their views, who has suffered persecution by the capitalist courts and other coercive institutions because of their activities or their opinions.” As the old labor slogan goes-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

More information-  c_for_intl_labor_defense@lists.digitalexplorations.org

In the long arc, the now fifty years long arc of Sam Lowell’s left-wing political activism, the question of the plight of political prisoners, class-war prisoners to distinguish them from death squad Nazis and thugs and the commonality of other criminals has always played a central role in his work. Part of this was out of necessity in the old days when the American government was whipping away drafter resisters for their righteous opposition to the Vietnam War then raging and threatening to take a whole generation down with it both soldiers and civilians, military resisters who once a critical mass of soldiers started coming back and telling the real story of the war became more prevalent as the American Army was in near mutiny before the thing got closed down by the heroic Vietnamese resistance fighters, the civilly disobedient from little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers, Shakers and later radicals and reds, rowdy according to them anti-war protesters, Black Panthers, at least the ones they did not try to just outright kill in their beds like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark or frame up almost to death like Geronimo Pratt (when he was going by that name before his conversion to a Muslim name he could not remember) or anybody else who got in their way when they pulled the hammer down and began the long “night of the long knives” that we have been subject to ever since without any apparent end in sight.

Since then through the vagaries of whatever small struggles he and what he calls the “remnant,” those who still hold the torch seeking the “newer world” and those too few who have joined those old new leftists political prisoner work has been the one constant when other struggles have failed like the now endless wars of the American government or situations that have been resolved at least partially like the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

(Sam by the way has this very big thing about not calling the government “our government” ever since those days, those days when his best friend from high school, Jeff Mullins, was killed in Vietnam and in letters home begged Sam to tell a candid world what the hell was going on over there and he saw what the hell it was doing to young kids, kids out of high school just like him making them nothing but animals and so unless you want, and I don’t, a ration of grief we will stick with his designation.)

So Sam Lowell in his time has defended, has tried to publicize the plight of political prisoners as they have come up starting back in the day with the various anti-war protestors rounded up on May Day, 1971 (including himself), the Panthers and other black nationalists when they were under the gun of the American government, the victims of the coup in Chile in 1973, the aforementioned anti-apartied fighters led by the later Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the British coal-miners in the 1980s, many anti-death penalty struggles including the Mumia Abu Jamal (now serving a “living death” life without parole sentence) Troy Davis (executed by the state of Georgia in 2011)cases (and lately the case of the surviving member of the Boston Marathon bombings now under death sentence when he stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the Federal Courthouse in Boston down by the waterfront with Catholic Workers and Veterans for Peace but not anybody from Amnesty International or Massachusetts Committee Against the Death Penalty), and lots of others. All done, whether Sam was conscience of it at the time or not under the old slogan from the Wobblie days (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW)-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Lately Sam has been thinking, as he has reduced his law practice work, let others run the day to day operations of his small practice down in Carver about thirty miles from Boston, about that slogan, about the history of that idea. On the face of it the proposition makes total sense but what Sam was looking at was how that proposition was made concrete at least since the high holy hell days when the Wobblies needed all the defense they could muster against the bosses and their state. Now Sam, and you need to know this about him as well, has some method to his madness when he is thinking along such lines and this is the case here as well. Back in August of 2015 he had been invited to a planning meeting of an ad hoc group of Boston left-wing political activists who were interested in setting up a Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD). That name was not accidentally picked since what the group was trying to do was revive the traditions of the International Labor Defense (ILD) which been set up under the aegis of the American Communist Party in 1925 to deal organizationally with the continuing struggle for freedom for left-wing and labor militants under ban from the American government by Jim Cannon, Bill Haywood and others. That organization in turn had been affiliated with the International Red Aid which had previously been set up by the Communist International shortly after its own establishment in 1919.

Sam’s first reaction to the invitation and afterward thinking about the meeting which he had attended that August was that you cannot go home again, that whatever virtues the old ILD had any they were many especially in the 1920s and 1930s well before the operation went out of business in1946, that was over and done with. Then one night he began to think about that “traditions” part, about what the ILD had actually done in its best days. Back then, back in the 1920s when it all started the Wobblies had been decimated by the American government in its vendetta against that organization for its opposition to the First World War and a goodly number were still languishing in jail. Bill Haywood, a Wobblie founder, contacted Jim Cannon then a big wheel in the leadership of the CP and former Wobblie himself about setting up a non-sectarian pro-labor, political prisoner defense group since despite the low level of struggle then the CP was the only organization with the political, financial and legal resources to put together an effective organization. The ILD first won its spurs as a labor defense organization in the unsuccessful fight to save the framed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1927. The organization was critical in the 1930s in saving the lives of the Scottsboro boys, nine young black men who were accused of raping two white women and who were being railroaded to death row by the state of Alabama. All through the 1930s the ILD helped out labor militants in nasty strike actions and other social struggles like support for the Spanish Republican.

Sam had to admit that in its heyday the ILD did very good work and it would not be disrespectful to try to try to resurrect the traditions of such an organization. But know this about Sam as well he is a devout student of history  so he has to dig into the archives and find material that might be helpful in working through the logistics of “an injury ot one is an injury to all.” Hence this archival piece.                        

                      

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access

 

 Frank Jackman comment:

 

One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.

        

To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).

 

Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.  

 

Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         

Unionize Low-Wage Workers!-Now

Workers Vanguard No. 1094	26 August 2016

Unionize Low-Wage Workers!

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-initiated Fight for $15 campaign held its first national convention on August 12-13 in Richmond, Virginia. Several thousand young and overwhelmingly black and Latino workers from some 20 industries across the country, including fast food, home health care and airport operations, were bused in for the occasion. Packing the meeting hall and filling the streets in a follow-up march, the boisterous workers expressly wanted to engage in a fight to achieve union representation and end the poverty wages and tenuous employment that are increasingly common for workers—black, white and Latino—in capitalist America. Winning such gains will take serious class battles. But the SEIU bureaucracy, long wedded to the illusion of a partnership of labor and capital, is committed to the opposite course: the lie that the way to advance workers’ interests (here a still-paltry $15 minimum wage) is to lobby capitalist Democratic Party politicians.

Union officials set up the weekend as one big pre-election photo-op for the Democrats, who no less than the Republicans are a party of the capitalist class enemy. In her headline speech, SEIU honcho Mary Kay Henry contended that labor unity “is especially important this year, with this election. We all know that one of the candidates for president is trying to divide us in dangerous and sometimes frightening ways.” Donald Trump is certainly frightening, but Hillary Clinton—the favorite of Wall Street—is no “friend of labor.” Notably, several black workers told Workers Vanguard that they were not voting for any candidate.

The “Richmond Resolution” passed at the convention called for pushing the right candidates for president, Senate and other elected offices, which alongside other activities would supposedly “balance the power that the richest Americans have in our government.” No amount of voting for, or pressuring, the Democrats will change the reality that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist masters of this class-divided society, in which the handful who own the banks and industry amass profits by exploiting the laboring masses. There can be no “balanced power” between the exploiters and the exploited in the capitalist government. The only way for workers to throw off their chains is to wrest the productive wealth from the hands of the capitalists in a socialist revolution and establish a workers government.

The Fight for $15’s upcoming September 12 national day of action planned for state capitols across the country is more of the same—another attempt by the union tops to divert into legalistic channels the evident fighting spirit of the low-wage workers, who are frustrated by the campaign’s four years of incessant begging with little to show for it. Truth is, an entirely different kind of mobilization is needed to win increased pay and union recognition from the bosses: strike action at the workplace. By withholding their labor and cutting off the flow of profits, workers have the potential to wrest better wages and working conditions from the employers and to organize the unorganized. Unions are forged in class struggle. With low-wage workers often atomized and easily replaced, crucially important to victory are concrete acts of labor solidarity by existing unionized workforces in related industries, such as the transportation and warehouse supply chain in the case of fast food.

Campaign organizers said they selected Richmond, the seat of the former Confederacy, as the convention site in order to draw the link between the country’s racist history and low wages. (Conveniently for the union bureaucrats, the city is also the home base of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.) This link was hardly news to the many black workers in attendance. Chants of “Black lives matter!” erupted throughout the weekend’s events in protest against the rampant cop terror endemic to this viciously racist society, where the black population is confronted every day by the legacy of chattel slavery.

With anti-black racism wielded by the bosses to pit black and white workers against one another, what is urgently needed is for the working class as a whole to champion black liberation. Especially in the South, any serious effort to unionize will have to directly confront the deep racial divide that has crippled past organizing drives. The labor fakers, who do their level best to avoid struggle even to defend and expand their own organizations, must go, to be replaced by a new union leadership willing to fight it out class against class.

After the march through the streets of Richmond ended at a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, pockets of workers cried out: “Tear it down!” Like chattel slavery before it, the system of wage slavery deserves to perish. To those who want to make a fight of it instead of begging the Democrats for crumbs, we offer the perspective of building a multiracial workers party in which black workers will be within the front ranks. Such a party will be dedicated to shattering the capitalist order once and for all and ushering in an egalitarian socialist society.

President Obama Free Oscar Lopez Rivera -Sign The Petition

President Obama Free Oscar Lopez Rivera -Sign The Petition

*****Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

*****Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Every hobo, tramp, and bum and there are known social distinctions long recognized among the brethren even if with a touch of envy by those not among the elect although the general population, you know, the honest citizenry who make the rules against vagrancy and pay the enforcers to keep the riffraff out of their towns called the whole heap nothing but bums knows the road is hard, but that is the road they have chosen, or had chosen for them by their whole freaking life choices. Despite the claims of oneness for the whole heap of bummery by those honest citizens of small town America (or these days the world) where the fear exists every really honest person, even every thoughtful amateur sociologist should know that among the wandering tribes the hobos, “the kings and queens of the transient peoples,” are merely migrant or walking through the land rucksack on the back day laborer-type worker, what Oswald Spengler and Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, the outcasts, who has not forgotten the dignity of labor, just not for him (or occasionally her) the nine to five grind and such brethren can be found out back in many a restaurant throughout the land especially at diners and truck shop eateries “diving for pearls, working,” working as dishwashers.

Every hobo has some problem, usually some Phoebe Snow problem, a woman problem, that forced him or her on the road (I don’t know what it would be for the distaff side so call him Jack Snow, any other sexual combination more acceptable today although definitely not unknown in the male-heavy “jungle camps” along the transcontinental railroad lines). That Phoebe Snow designation from some old time railroad advertisement when they finally figured how to keep their respectable passengers from looking like coalminers after alighting from a train by changing the way the engine was maneuvered and to express that new found discovery they had a virginal young woman in white getting on their trains ready for every civilized adventure in some faraway place (or maybe an illicit tryst but we will ask no questions). And so many a campfire night as the trains went westbound, or wherever bound, you would find many a man, maybe in his cups just then, dreaming back to their own Phoebes and wondering damn why they ever left Peoria, Lima, Scranton and that white dress with flowers in her hair standing in the wind. So, make no mistake, fear of work is not what drove the hobo out on to the roads.

See that royalty, the hobo, and his or her ability to work is why the Industrial Worker of the World (IWW, Wobblies, moniker origin unknown so Wobblies) went into the jungle camps (and gin mills too) in order to recruit labor fighters against the bosses when the deal went down, particularly in the West. (Although more famously in the great Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike of 1912 when they gathered in the nations of immigrants that the textile bosses recruited on the assumption that they could “divide and conquer.” Yid and gentile, Mick and Dago, Hunky and Frog, name your national derogatory moniker but didn’t they get a surprise that first morning when the nations gathered against the Wasp oligarchy.) Of course that transient work habit was also the down side of that organization as the kings of the transient road hit the road west, or somewhere, when it came to defending the unions over the long haul.

As for the other two, the tramp who only worked when forced to like on some thirty day county jailhouse for vagrancy gig or some Salvation Army work program to keep the body and soul together for a few days when whatever con, what grift was played out and the bum, Jesus, the bum wouldn’t work if he was Rockefeller himself, the dregs, winos, jack-rollers, sappers, petty crooks, mother’s purse stealers, the crippled up, sorry, and the dumb, sorry again, to put the matter plainly in the old- fashioned parlance how the hell could you organize them. You might as well try to organize air, might as well go down without a fight since they have probably already sold you out and the boss man will be waiting arms in hand, you can bet on that. There was a very good reason that the beloved heroic Paris Communards in 1871 as desperate as they were for fighters placed the placate “Death to Thieves” above the Hotel de Ville. Yeah, they had that right, don’t give the lumpen a change to breathe or he will steal your breathe just for kicks, or a jug of low-grade wine.          

Now that you are all caught up on the differences, the “class differences,” between each cohort recognized among themselves, oh how recognized, and subject to fierce dispute including some faux fists, if not quite so definitely by rump academic sociologists who lump them all together but that is a story for another day (there is some hope for the amateur versions as long as the avoid the graduate schools of social work the bane of every person on the road, and rightly so). What they do have in common since they are out in the great outdoors more than the rest of us gentile folk is that they to a person have seen starlight on the rails. Yeah, had their fill of train smoke and dreams.

Now all these sullen subtle distinctions among the brethren I probably would have not been able to draw in my youth when I would have lumped the lot together as collective losers and riff-raff, the bums to honest citizens, before I hit the hitchhike road heading west at one time in search of the blue-pink great American West night out there somewhere. Thought I found it for a minute out in Mendocino with a sweet Lorraine all long hair, long granny dress and flowers, garlands really around her neck and in her hair. Go check out a  Botticelli painting if you are near an art museum something or google up the man’s name on the Internet if you can’t wait, my own Phoebe Snow, before the hordes descended.  Thought I had it another time in a hash/opium dream outside of Monterey after the jazz festival and some dark-haired, dark laughing eyes, hot-blooded, Juanita curled my toes for a while until I fought there were seventeen burn down the country club golf course and I had not enough matches and fled. Ah, you know and man’s reach should exceed his grasp like the Jack poet said.

I had, broken dreams aside, broken but not forgotten Botticelli dreams included, on one more than one occasion along with the late Peter Paul Markin who led the way among the North Adamsville corner boys on that trail been forced to stop along a railroad trestle “jungle camp,” under a cardboard city bridge, or out in the arroyos if you got far enough west to live for a few days and rest up for the road further west.

The hobos of the “jungle” were princes among men (there was no room for women then in such a male-dominated society, not along the jungle although at the missions and Sallys, Salvation Army Harbor Lights, that might be a different story) as long as you did not ask too many damn questions. Shared olio stews, cigarettes, cheap rotgut wine, Thunderbird “what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice” and that eighty cents tough to gather some days no matter how smooth the pan-handle, or Ripple, ‘save the nipple, cripple” sorry, whichever was cheapest after cadging the day’s collective pennies together. Later, after the big dream American West busted me up when my “wanting habits” (getting many worldly goods off easy street paid for by working the drug trade down south of the border along with Markin before he became the late Markin face down in some dusty Mexican bracero fellahin town when a drug deal he was trying to finagle caught him short, two slugs to the head short by some angry hombre who didn’t like gringos messing with their trade, or their dark-haired, dark laughing-eyed, hot-blooded women) built up from the edges of that sullen youth got the better of me and my addictions placed me out in that same “jungle” for keeps for a while that distinction got re-enforced.  

But hobo, bum or tramp each had found him or herself (mainly hims though like I said out on the “jungle” roads) flat up against some railroad siding at midnight having exhausted every civilized way to spent the night. Having let their, our, collective wanting habits get the best of them, us. Maybe penniless, maybe thrown out of some flophouse in arrears and found that nobody bothers, or did bother you out along the steel rails, I won’t vouch for that now with all the weirdness in the world, when the train lost its luster to the fast speed Interstate automobile and one coast in the morning the other in the afternoon plane and rusted and abandoned railroads gone belly up, Union Pacific, SP, Denver, Rio Grande, Baltimore and Ohio, Illinois Central, all train smoke names for lack of use provided safe haven from the vagaries of civilization. So sure I too have seen with the brethren, those nameless hobos, tramps, and bums  (to you they had among themselves monikers like Railroad Shorty, Black River Red, Smokestack, Philly Jack, mine, the Be-Bop Kid although I always had to explain what the be-bop was since these guys were well behind the curve, back in Benny Goodman swing time)     the stars out where the spots are darkest and the brilliance of the sparkle makes one think of heaven for those so inclined, think of the void for the heathen among them. Has dreamed penitent dreams of shelter against life’s storms, had dreamed while living for the moment trying to get washed clean after the failure of the new dispensation to do the job (hell, what did they/Markin/me think just because the drugs or alcohol flowed freely once, just because the fixer man fixed, fixed fine, that that was the Garden of Eden, that was Nirvana, hell, those ancient forebears all after they had been expelled from the earthly paradise saw that same starlight as they/he/we/I did).   

Maybe this will explain it better. An old man, or at least he has the marks of old age, although among the iterant travelling peoples, the hoboes, tramps, and bum, who have weathered many of life’s storms bottle or needle in hand, panhandled a million quarters now lost, old age, or their marks wear a soul down early so a guy who has been on the road enough years if he is say thirty looks about fifty by the time the train smoke and the busted dreams have broken his will, white beard, unkempt, longish hair, also unkempt, a river of lines in his face, deep crow’s feet setting off his vacant eyes, a second-hand soiled hat atop his head, a third-hand miner’s jacket “clipped” off some other lonesome traveler (“clipped”- stolen for clueless or those who led sheltered childhood and did not in order to satisfy some youthful wanting habit stakeout a jewelry store say and grab a few trinkets while the salesperson was looking the other way), shredded at the cuffs chino pants of indeterminate age, and busted up shoes, soles worn, heels at forty-five degree angles from crooked walks on crooked miles and game legs is getting ready to unroll his bedroll, ground cloth a tablecloth stolen from Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s somewhere, a blanket stolen from a Sally [Salvation Army] Harbor Light house in salad days, rolled newspapers now for a mattress for the hundredth, hundredth time against the edge of the railroad trestle just outside Gallup, New Mexico.

Do not ask him, if you have the nerve to approach him, and that is an iffy proposition just ask a guy going under the moniker of Denver Shorty how he got that deep scar across his face, where he is going or where he has come from because just that moment, having scratched a few coins in the town together for a jug of Thunderbird he is ready to sleep his sleep against the cold-hearted steel of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just ten yards from where he stands.      

And this night, this starlit brown, about eight colors of brown, desert night he hopes that he will not dream, not dream of that Phoebe Snow whom he left behind in Toledo when he had no beard, no longish unkempt hair, and no rivers of lines on his misbegotten face. (Why the brethren called every long gone sweetheart Phoebe Snow, why they would get misty over the dying campfire after some younger traveler stopped by and told his tale of leaving some young thing behind is unknown except, according to some old wizened geezer who might have just made the story up, in the old, old day when the railroads finally figured out how to keep people from being blackened by the train smoke every trip they took they started advertising this the fact with this white-dressed  virginal young woman who went under the name Phoebe Snow. That’s probably as good an explanation as any since whatever the name, or the young woman almost every guy in camp would in his sorrows get weepy about that situation. Hey, didn't I tell that story before, Jesus, the dope or old age is getting to me but what the hell maybe that Phoebe Snow dream is worth a repeat I know it got me through many a restless night thinking about sweet Botticelli Lorraine and Goya Juanita.) Dream as he always did about whatever madness made him run from all the things he had created, all the things that drove him west like a million other guys who needed to put space between himself and civilization.

Dream too about the days when he could ride the rails in the first-class cars (having not only left Phoebe Snow behind but a growing specialty printing business started from scratch before the alcohol, and later the dope although now back to cheapjack alcohol got the better of him), and about the lure of the rails once he got unhinged from civilization. About how the train pace had been chastised by fast cars and faster planes when a the speed of a train fitted a man’s movements, about the days when they first built the transcontinental, this line that he was about to lie his head down beside, about the million Chinks, Hunkies, Russkies, Hibernians, hell, Micks, Dagos who sweated to drive the steel in unforgiving ground, many who laid down their heads down to their final rest along these roads, and later guys he knew on the endless road like Butte Bobby, Silver Jones, Ding-dong Kelly, who did not wake up the next morning and were carried out to the carcass vulture desert having left no way to get a hold of kin. Almost all guys had left no forwarding address, no real one anyway, no back address, for fear of the repo man or some other dunning, an angry wife or about ten thousand other reasons. So the desert was good enough as a potter’s field as any other place.

As he settled in to sleep the wine’s effect settling down too he noticed the bright half- moon out that night reflecting off the trestle, and the arroyos edges, and thought about what a guy, an old wizard like himself told him about the rails one time when he was laid up in Salt Lake City, in the days when he tried to sober up. The guy, a guy who had music in his soul or something said to him that it was the starlight on the rails that had driven him, rumble, stumble, tumble him to keep on the road, to keep moving away from himself, to forget who he was. And here he was on a starlit night listening down the line for the rumble of the freight that would come passing by before the night was over. But as he shut his eyes, he began to dream again of Phoebe Snow, always of Phoebe Snow.         

But not everybody has the ability to sing to those starlit heavens (or to the void if that is what chances to happen as the universe expands quicker than we can think, bang- bang or get smaller into dust if that is the deal once the philosopher-king physicists figure out the new best theory) about the hard night of starlight on the rails and that is where Rosalie Sorrels, a woman of the American West out in the Idahos, out where, as is said in the introduction to the song by the same name ripping some wisdom from literary man Thomas Wolfe who knew from whence he spoke, the states are square (and at one time the people, travelling west people and so inured to hardship, played it square, or else), sings old crusty Utah Phillips’ song to those hobo, tramp, bum heavens. Did it while old Utah was alive to teach the song (and the story behind the song) to her and later after he passed on in a singular tribute album to his life’s work as singer/songwriter/story-teller/ troubadour.         

Now, for a fact, I do not know if Rosalie in her time, her early struggling time when she was trying to make a living singing and telling Western childhood stories had ever along with her brood of kids been reduced by circumstances to wind up against that endless steel highway but I do know that she had her share of hard times. Know that through her friendship with Utah she wound up bus-ridden to Saratoga Springs up in the un-squared state of New York where she performed and got taken under the wing of Lena from the legendary Café Lena during some trying times. And so she flourished, flourished as well as any folk-singer could once the folk minute burst it bubble and places like Café Lena, Club Passim (formerly Club 47), a few places in the Village in New York City and Frisco town became safe havens to flower and grow some songs, grow songs from the American folk songbooks and from her own expansive political commentator songbook. And some covers too as her rendition of Starlight on the Rails attests to as she worked her way across the continent.

Worked her way to a big sold out night at Saunders Theater at Harvard too when she called the road quits a decade or so ago. Sang some nice stuff speaking about the west, about the Brazos, about the great Utah desert which formed Utah Phillips a little too, formed him like his old friend Ammon Hennessey, the old saint Catholic Worker brother who sobered some guys up, made them take some pledges, made them get off the railroad steel road. Sobered me up too, got me off that railroad track too, but damn if I didn’t see that starlight too. So listen up, okay.         

  

*The Struggle For Gay Marriage Rights- A "Workers Vanguard" Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link the the Marx-Engels Internet Archive's copy of Engels' "Origin of The Family,Private Property and The State".


For the Right of Gay Marriage...and Divorce!

Marriage and the Capitalist State

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 824, 16 April 2004.

"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
"The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
—Communist Manifesto (1848)

Until the welcome day capitalism does vanish, the monogamous family remains the legally enforced social model, at least in Western societies, for the organization of private life in its most intimate aspects: love, sex, bearing and raising children. It is the central social institution oppressing women; anti-gay bigotry flows from the need to punish any "deviations" from this patriarchal structure. Why anyone not under social pressure or economic duress would voluntarily enter the bonds of matrimony is, of course, one of life's mysteries. Nonetheless, it appears that these days the only people who actually want to get married are the only ones President Bush wants to stop: gays and lesbians.

Absolutely, they ought to have the right to marry. And just as absolutely, we socialists fight for a society in which no one needs to be forced into a legal straitjacket in order to get medical benefits, visitation rights, custody of children, immigration rights, or any of the many privileges this capitalist society grants to those, and only those, who are embedded in the traditional "one man on one woman for life" legal mold.

Controversy over "gay marriage" has roiled the U.S. since last November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that permitting only "civil unions" for gay couples was unconstitutional, thus establishing the right to gay marriage in Massachusetts. In February the San Francisco mayor ordered same-sex marriage licenses issued, and 4,037 gay and lesbian couples from 46 states and eight countries got hitched before ceremonies were ordered halted on March 11. The Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York, jumped into the fray, officiating at 25 same-sex marriages. When he was barred by court order from continuing, two local Unitarian ministers took over, only to have criminal charges filed against them by the Ulster County D.A. for solemnizing "unlicensed marriages" in March.

In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which pronounced, "the word ‘marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife." With unholy glee, Christian fundamentalists of all sorts are now pushing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning states from recognizing gay marriage (39 states already refuse to countenance it). Others warn direly that the floodgates of unspeakable immorality are now open. Polygamy is the least of it; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from last year's Supreme Court decision overturning Texas sodomy laws, claimed that decision could abolish bans not only on same-sex marriage, but also "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity."

President Bush, supporting the anti-gay constitutional amendment, intoned: "The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith," complaining that "After...millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, beady profit-making eye on the bottom line, featured a piece on "Cashing In on Gay Marriage" (March 11), while vendors presented "Loveland," a "Same-Sex Wedding Expo" at New York's Jacob Javits convention center.

All this sudden churning of the crazed, hypocritical witches' brew that passes for American political discourse these days, especially on questions involving sex, certainly has its darkly humorous and bizarre side. Partly that's because the messy reality most people actually live in bears little resemblance to the rigid official portraits of Christian moral rectitude this government claims as models of social behavior. But the deeper social issues involved are deadly serious, ranging from the most intimate personal questions to broad areas of responsibility for raising new generations, and how to care for others, whether family, friends or lovers; in short, how "private life" in its entirety is defined and organized.

Workers Must Fight for Democratic Rights for Gays!

Apocalyptic predictions of the end of civilization if gays are allowed to marry are obviously hysterical fantasies; at the same time, gay marriage in itself will not end the often deadly prejudice and pain gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people encounter every day in this homophobic, anti-sex society. But that pain makes it even more important to fight for every possible democratic right, every form of social and political equality that can be wrested from this society.

It is a vital task of the workers revolutionary vanguard to fight for full democratic rights for gays—including, today, marriage rights—and to fight to win the working class to this cause. The Spartacist League has done this since its inception. As Lenin pointed out in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?:

"Working class consciousness cannot be genuinely political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected....Why is it that the Russian workers as yet display so little revolutionary activity in connection with the brutal way in which the police maltreat the people, in connection with the persecution of the religious sects, with the flogging of the peasantry, with the outrageous censorship, with the torture of soldiers, with the persecution of the most innocent cultural enterprises, etc.?... We must blame ourselves for being unable as yet to organize a sufficiently wide, striking and rapid exposure of these despicable outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the muzhiks and the authors are being abused and outraged by the very same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life."

Here in the United States, one of the most politically backward "advanced" capitalist countries on earth, saddled with a huge burden of puritanism and religious fundamentalism to boot, there is a lot of backwardness on the gay question.

Even among black workers, historically among the most militant in the proletariat and in general those with the fewest illusions in the "good nature" of this rotten capitalist social order, there is a significant amount of anti-gay prejudice. Much of it is pushed by conservative forces in the black church, although even the black churches are deeply split on this question. As we wrote in our article, "For the Right to Gay Marriage!": "In its extreme, one gets the phenomenon of a black Baptist minister, the Rev. Gregory Daniels, who declared, ‘If the K.K.K. opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them' (New York Times, 1 March). He might saddle up, but it will be a short ride—the first target of this motley collection of nativist, anti-labor fascists is black people" (WV No. 821, 5 March).

In contrast to this myopic anti-gay prejudice is the compassion so many black people feel because they know firsthand the torment and danger of oppression and discrimination. A Massachusetts State Senator from Roxbury put it well: "I know the pain of being less than equal, and I cannot and will not impose that status on anyone else. I was but one generation removed from an existence in slavery. I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone to that place from which my family fled." Others can't see that an injury to one is an injury to all, and so in a backhanded way end up in the camp of the racist anti-gay bigots. Black columnist Adrian Walker, writing in the Boston Globe (12 February), quoted one clergyman: "Think about Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, and those police dogs in Birmingham—and then tell me they've faced what we've faced. This has nothing to do with civil rights." This reflects in part the pernicious influence of Democratic Party "constituency" politics, where one sector of the oppressed is pitted against another in the scramble for aid from a state which defends capitalist rule.

Of course there are many, and qualitative, differences between black oppression and gay oppression in this society. Racism is the bedrock of American capitalism, the great fault line in American politics since the founding of the nation on the backs of black slaves. The ruling class consciously manipulates racism to weaken the proletariat. The fight for black freedom will be central to the proletarian revolution in the U.S. For that revolution to succeed, the working class, including its strategic black component, must understand its historic task is to abolish class society in order to open the road to human freedom for everyone. And that most certainly includes gays—and everyone else who, however self-defined, rebels against the straitjacket social roles imposed by the capitalist ruling class.

Further, violence against gays, lesbians and, increasingly, transgendered people is a deadly constant on America's mean streets and in the repressive holding pens known as public schools. The grisly 1998 murder in Laramie of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay Wyoming student who was kidnapped, beaten, burnt and then left tied to a fence to die, shocked the nation. Though accurate statistics are almost impossible to come by, given that many victims don't come forward because they rightly fear more harassment from cops, school authorities or parents, and because official statistics don't always accurately list "hate crimes," there are still well over 1,000 reported cases a year of violence, sometimes fatal, against gays and lesbians and others deemed sexually "deviant."

A recent Internet search uncovered an article from the Arizona Tucson Citizen (23 February) titled "Gays, Jews Top Targets of Hate Crimes Here," which described the June 2002 beating to death of 24-year-old Philip Walsted, who was gay. It was a hate crime, according to police. In January of this year another gay man was found lying on the street, badly beaten, near a gay bar in Tucson, while a gay University of Arizona student was stabbed in 2000. That's just a few stories from one city. According to the Winter 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, there were 27 murders of transgendered people in a 21-month period (2002-2003) in the United States. The point of these few examples is not to "prove" that any social group is more or less hurt than any other, but to indicate that moral regimentation is part of what keeps this unjust society running the way it does.

It was a good thing that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy statutes in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, because it explicitly overturned the Court's infamously reactionary 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld states' anti-sodomy laws. That decision castigated gays with statements like "proscriptions against sodomy have ancient roots." Chief Justice Warren Burger practically called for a holy war against homosexuals, writing approvingly in his concurrence that "Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature' as an offense of ‘deeper malignity' than rape, a heinous act ‘the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature,' and ‘a crime not fit to be named'." This is the legal language that gives cover to gay-bashing.

Gays still don't have full civil rights: they aren't allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, for example. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a gay rights group, in the ten years since Democratic president Bill Clinton adopted the infamous "don't ask, don't tell" policy, around 10,000 service members have been discharged for being openly gay. As we stated when that policy was raised: "Open gays and lesbians have just as much right as anyone else to participate in the armed forces," while raising the classic Marxist slogan of "Not one man, not one penny" for the military ("Gays in the Military," WV No. 569, 12 February 1993). This is the tradition of militant Marxism in opposition to imperialist war. At the same time, the military is a microcosm of society as a whole, and so we fight against racist atrocities and discrimination in the armed forces just as we do in the rest of society. The fight to integrate black soldiers fully into the armed forces toward the end of World War II created a potentially powerful base for struggles for black emancipation—and in fact black civil rights activists also fought for homosexual rights in the armed forces then.

Government and Social Control of Women

Many people still would argue, gays should have democratic rights, but why marriage? The capitalist politicians running for president are all dancing around the pretty meaningless "civil union" cop-out, basically catering to religious reactionaries with votes. But isn't marriage in some sense "special," more private, more "sacred" somehow? Not at all. Monogamous marriage is a creation of society, not god (since there isn't one), and it has been used historically as a means of reactionary social control by the ruling class.

We advocate effective consent in all sexual relations and think that what any combination of individuals do in bed is nobody's business but the participants themselves, as long as it's consensual. While defending the right to gay marriage, we also argue that the "marriage mania" represents a fundamentally conservative thrust by the well-to-do petty-bourgeois gay milieu. It's a far cry from "free love" and the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 to today's marriage ceremonies, PTA meetings and Democratic and Republican Party fund-raisers. In the quest for bourgeois "respectability," gay pride day organizers have viciously banned NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) from their marches (thereby fueling the "anti-pedophilia" hysteria which targets all gays) and welcomed contingents of gay cops who spend a good part of their time busting "sex offenders."

Nonetheless, by analogy to our position on the armed forces, we oppose excluding any category of people from access to the privileges and benefits such institutions offer in this society. At the same time, in the course of fighting for these rights, we seek to convince activists that to really resolve women's and gay oppression it is necessary to create a socialist society, in which the current functions of the bourgeois family are socialized: communal childcare; communal kitchens; free, quality health care; and in all ways freeing women from the burden of child rearing and household slavery.

A look at the history of monogamous marriage in the United States reveals its use as a tool of governmental control. A valuable book on this subject, Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000), states: "The structure of marriage...facilitates the government's grasp on the populace.... In the form of the law and state enforcement, the public sets the terms of marriage, says who can and cannot marry, who can officiate, what obligations and rights the agreement involves, whether it can be ended and if so, why and how." The following history is largely drawn from that book; quotations from other sources are noted.

One of the book's central themes is how entire categories of people, especially those deemed "inferior," were denied the legal right to marry in many states. This included, most notoriously, black slaves, who of course had no rights whatsoever. And for decades after the Civil War, blacks and Asians were banned from marrying whites. Additionally, as Cott writes, "Prohibiting divergent marriages has been as important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model." Thus polygamous Mormons and Native Americans were forbidden to practice their own forms of "marriage," while attempts at utopian communes made in the years before the Civil War came under massive assault following the North's victory and the consolidation of the American nation under the strengthening grip of industrial capitalism.

In America from the beginning, marriage, though infused with Christian doctrine, was a matter of governmental control, not primarily a religious institution, because the U.S. was established on the formal basis of separation of church and state. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, marriage itself, based on older common law, was seen as "a form of governance.... A man's headship of a family, his taking the responsibility for dependent wife and children, qualified him to be a participating member of a state.... Under the common law, a woman was absorbed into her husband's legal and economic persona upon marrying, and her husband gained the civic presence she lost." This concept in fact continued right up through the 20th century, and was really only dealt a decisive blow, in terms of public civil rights at least, with women getting the right to vote nationally in 1920. However, Congress determined in 1922 that a wife would lose her citizenship if she married a foreigner and stayed in his country for two years; other grounds for female loss of citizenship included marriage to an Asian, a polygamist—or an anarchist!

Within the strict confines of the marriage relationship, male supremacy remained largely intact. Cott describes three U.S. Supreme Court cases, in 1904, 1908 and 1911, all of which essentially upheld the husband's right to control of his wife's body. The 1904 case determined a husband's right to collect "damages" from his wife's lover in a case of adultery, even asserting that the husband's right to "exclusive" sexual intercourse was "a right of the highest kind, upon...which the whole social order rests" (rhetorical excess, to be sure; were this literally true, civilization would have collapsed long ago). The 1908 case justified Congress's ban on bringing women to the U.S. for an "immoral purpose," thus keeping out a man and his mistress and upholding the government's authority to legislate monogamy and punish women who transgressed. The 1911 case involved a woman's attempt to sue her husband for assault and battery. The Supreme Court refused to interfere between man and wife, rejecting the "radical and far-reaching" belief that a wife could sue her husband for injuries "as though they were strangers," and that it was "better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze," as an earlier North Carolina court decision put it, on the prerogatives of male brutality within the family circle. It took massive social upheaval and a wave of New Left-derived feminist activism in the 1970s to finally breach what was in fact the husband's right to rape his wife; only in 1984 did a New York court finally overturn that state's marital rape exemption, then followed by others.

Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Immigrants: Forced or Banned Marriages

The creation of the American nation rested on the backs of black slaves— and on the virtual obliteration of the native Indian population of tribal hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists—resulting in the creation of a bourgeois democracy for white, male property owners. How much more we could have learned about the early history of our species from these indigenous peoples, relentlessly slaughtered and driven onto "reservations," is a question American Marxists must feel keenly. Friedrich Engels' work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), was after all inspired by American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan's pioneering research into the family patterns of North American tribes. It was this research, in good part, that led to the Marxist understanding that in fact human beings have lived "for millennia" in non-patriarchal relationships, in tribal, matrilineal societies in which women were not enslaved within the straitjacket of monogamous marriage, in which children were the responsibility of both men and women. Monogamous marriage is a social invention brought to North America by the colonizers, along with their diseases, their "sacred family" and their slaves.

So the Native American population, when not simply killed, was offered an "enlightened" choice by their overseers: rot on the reservation or give up your "heathen" ways. As Cott puts it, "Most groups—notably the Iroquois, who dominated the eastern part of North America—did not make the nuclear family so fundamental an economic and psychological unit as Protestants did, nor did they generally recognize private property as such.... The federal government consistently encouraged or forced Indians to adopt Christian-model monogamy as the sine qua non of civilization and morality." In some cases it was considered that Indians could be "civilized" by converting to Christianity, and marriage of an Indian woman to a white male was tolerated, though in some dozen states marriages between Indians and whites were declared non-valid. The 1887 Dawes Act stole Indians' communal land and undermined their tribal way of life, assigning male family "last names" to Indians (against native cultural tradition), and establishing "individual property-ownership, and further subverted native American women's roles as agriculturists by presuming the Indian male should be the landowner and farmer." Cott writes: "Like ex-slaves and ex-polygamists, Indians were required by the federal government to adopt monogamy as ‘the law of social life' to become citizens."

On the other hand, for black slaves in America, legal marriage was out of the question, though slaveholders did encourage childbearing to reproduce and expand the slave population, especially after 1808 when importation of slaves was banned. "Concubinage, which is voluntary on the part of the slaves, and permissive on that of the master…in reality, is the relation, to which these people have ever been practically restricted," wrote the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1838. Thus the fight for the right to marriage, as an assertion of the right to control one's own body and make a free contract with another human being, was seen as an important aspect of the fight for black freedom.

As it is with just about everything else in America, racism is deeply intertwined with marriage law. Attempts to keep the "white race" "unmixed" were a unique feature of the American colonies since their inception (with the peculiar result that people of all different skin tones and ancestral background are automatically considered "black" if there is even a hint of a black ancestor somewhere). Ever since the inception of monogamous marriage and the family, from ancient times on, laws against intermarriage between different classes aimed to preserve ruling-class privileges. Spain in 1776 had such laws, as did the British imperialists in Ireland in the 14th century, for example. But America uniquely developed the illogic of racism, due to its slaveholding history, to such an extent that even after the victorious Civil War that freed the slaves, many states still banned black-white marriage; in Mississippi the penalty was life imprisonment. The miscegenation law was not repealed in Alabama until 2000!

The relationship between slavery and women's subordinate position in marriage was widely noted and utilized by those on both sides of the issues. Southern evangelical Protestant ministers, who published more than half of pre-Civil War pro-slavery tracts, regularly quoted the Bible; a typical claim was that god "included slavery as an organizing element in that family order which lies at the very foundation of Church and State." On the other side, those among the anti- slavery abolitionists and early women's rights advocates who shared the liberal ideals of individual freedom and the view that "self-ownership" was a natural right, saw that both slaves and married women lacked this basic right. As Lucy Stone put it, "Marriage is to woman a state of slavery. It takes from her the right to her own property, and makes her submissive in all things to her husband."

Following the Civil War, successive stages of immigration fed the fires of growing industrialization in the U.S. Here too the government's marriage policies were aimed at social control. Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, who first came in the gold rush, were in demand for mining and railroad-building, but when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, an explosion of anti-Chinese racism was unleashed. The first federal step to restrict immigration, the Page Act of 1875, was aimed at Asian women, who were supposedly all prostitutes, and required "the U.S. consul to make sure that any immigrant debarking from an Asian country was not under contract for ‘lewd and immoral purposes'." By 1913 eight states had laws against whites marrying Japanese or Chinese people.

"Free Love" Utopias and Polygamy

In the stormy years leading up to the great social explosion that was the American Civil War, the last progressive gasp of the bourgeoisie (like the 1848 Revolutions in Europe) in North America, many experimental utopian socialist alternatives to monogamous marriage flowered. There were many "free love" communities established in the U.S., inspired by such utopian visionaries as Robert Owen, Claude Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, whose profound insight that the status of women is the decisive indicator of social progress inspired further Marxist theory on the subject. The New York Oneida community, founded in 1849 with a pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue, did away with the exclusive pairing of couples, though within a rather formal structure. These groups, though ridiculed and condemned, were not by and large prosecuted before the Civil War, but afterward, when in the name of "consolidating" the nation, a crackdown on most forms of "social deviation" began.

One interesting—and still contemporary—group stands out in all this: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, one of whose founding tenets is the right of men to polygamy, or multiple marriage to many women at once. Right-wingers today throw up their hands in horror at gay marriage, breathlessly bemoaning that polygamy will be next. Well, guess what, it's already here, and has been for over a hundred years, out in Utah and other Western states, where an estimated 30,000 old-style Mormons still practice the sect's early preaching, though the "official" church formally renounced it a long time ago. We believe the Mormons have the right to be left alone, to practice their religion and live their private lives however they see fit. Our position for the right of gay marriage, like the right of Mormons to practice polygamy, stems from our opposition to government interference with the rights of individuals to effect whatever consensual arrangements they wish. We pointed out that American Mormons, including the women, essentially freely choose their practice, unlike in countries without bourgeois revolutions, where women are still little more than property of their patriarchal masters and where polygamous social systems must be relentlessly opposed. As we wrote in "Free Tom Green! Mormon Polygamists: Leave Them Alone!" (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001), defending a man convicted of felony bigamy charges:

"The family structure—whether monogamous or polygamous—necessarily oppresses women. However, not everybody understands the source of their oppression, and people do all sorts of things that are undoubtedly bad for them that the state still has no business throwing them in prison for. As Marxists we understand that the family serves a real social purpose and cannot simply be ‘abolished,' even in a workers state, but must be replaced with alternate social institutions."

Women's Liberation, Individual Freedoms and the Fight for Socialism

So, as radical columnist Alexander Cockburn put it, "Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about" ("Sidestep on Freedom's Path," CounterPunch, 20/21 March). Cockburn quotes early ACT UP activist Jim Eigo on the question: "Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others?... Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"

It certainly would. And it is the modern Marxist movement which has figured out how to break those shackles, through abolishing the system of private property in the means of production, thus abolishing the need for the bourgeois family structure to pass on such private wealth. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote in response to the magazine Liberty (14 January 1933) which asked, "Is Bolshevism deliberately destroying the family?":

"If one understands by ‘family' a compulsory union based on the marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.

"If one understands by ‘family' the unbounded domination of parents over children, and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism has, unfortunately, not yet completely destroyed this carryover of society's old barbarism.

"If one understands by ‘family' ideal monogamy—not in the legal but in the actual sense—then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never was nor is on earth, barring fortunate exceptions."

Damn It-Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier-Sign The Petition

Damn It-Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier-Sign The Petition    


Please sign Friends of Leonard Pelletier and the ILPDC's petition to grant executive clemency to Leonard Pelletier of the American Indian Movement who has unconscionably locked up by the U.S. federal government since 1975.   

Go to:    http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/peltier_clemency2008