*****In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind

*****In Search Of Lost Time… Then-With 1960s School Days In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Several years ago, maybe in 2007 or 2008 Sam Lowell, the locally well-known lawyer from the town of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, wrote some small pieces about the old days in the town, the old days being for him the 1950s and 1960s, the time of the golden age of the automobile and relative abundance but also if mocking the ephemeral materialist nature of the times also the red scare Cold War night with its threats of some errant Russkie bomb landing of top of us. At that time the town was mainly a rural outpost, the usual Main Street and drive on through like many such places in outer America, where instead of the usual rural occupation of farming, truck or raising staple crops on fertile land,  the cranberry bogs, the marches and water pits, and boggers (as kids we called them “boogers” not knowing what the hell bogs were about although knew what nasty boogers were from the eternal kids picking their noses) held sway and dominated a fair part of town life, ran the town politics and determined the ethos, determined the ethos to the extent that was possible in post-World War II America where the older cultural norms were rapidly being replaced by a speedier and less homespun way of doing business.

In the teenage life line-up, the only one that was important in Sam’s world then, since he was not a low-life bogger and had no bogger roots he had gravitated to those whose families like his  that were connected with the shipbuilding industry about twenty miles up the road. So you would have seen Sam and his corner boys on any given Friday or Saturday night if not dated up holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Main Street daring, with the exception of Jack Callahan the great school football running back and fourth generation bogger who hung with them because he thought they were “cool,” any of the bogger clan to do anything but go in and order food or play the jukebox.

(Seemingly every boy in town from junior high on, if not before, had his corner boys for protection against a dangerous world outside the corner, or something like that if you asked them. If you wanted an explanation more than that of self-preservation professional sociologists and cracker barrel philosophers of the time spent endless hours of their time analyzing that angst-driven night and could give you their take on the phenomenon although as usual they were about twelve steps behind  the curve and by the time they had caught up these guys were shedding their angst and alienation for Zen rock and roll, drugs, Nirvana and the Kama Sutra not necessarily in that  order.)

Sam had seen that small town Americana all change over his long association with the town, including a few terms as a town selectman, although the boggers were still there, still moaning about their collective water tax bills, and still a force on the board but the drift over the decades was for the town to become a bedroom community for the sprawling high tech industry running the Interstate corridor about ten miles away. Sam though hung up with some old age nostalgia twist wrote about the old neighborhood now still intact as if time had passed that hell’s little acre by (the new developments were created on abandoned bog lands to the benefit mainly of Myles Larson, the largest bogger around), largely still composed of the small tumbledown small single family homes with a patch of green like that he grew up and came of age on “the wrong side of the tracks” (along with three brothers all close in age in a five room shack, Sam had never, except in front of his parents, ever called it anything but that). Sam sighed one time to his old friend from that very neighborhood Bart Webber after they had put the dust of the old town behind them for a while on the hitchhike road west that the “acres” of the world will always be with us. Markin, in his “newer world” turn the old world upside down phase did not want to hear that, blocked it out when Sam would bring the idea up on the road. That said a lot about Markin, and about Sam as well.   

Wrote too about the old (painful, the painful being that the school drew the more prosperous new arrivals staring to come into town leaving the boggers over at John Alden Junior High and subjecting him to lots of taunts about his brother hand-me-down clothes, silly saran wrapped-brown lunch bag bologna sandwich lunches with no dessert, no twinkles, cupcakes, Jello or anything at all fruit even, stuff like that) days when he attended the then newly built Myles Standish Junior High School (such places are now almost universally called middle schools) where he and his fellow class- mates were the first to go through starting in seventh grade. In that piece he mentioned that he was not adverse, hell, he depended on “cribbing” words, phrases and sentences from many sources.

One such “crib” was appropriating the title of a six-volume saga by the French writer Marcel Proust for one of those sketches, the title used here In Search of Lost Time as well. He noted that an alternative translation of that work was Remembrances of Things Past which he felt did not do justice to what he, Sam, was trying to get a across. Sam had no problem, no known problem anyway, with remembering things from the past but he thought the idea of a search, of an active scouring of what had gone on in his callow youth (his term) was more appropriate to what he was thinking and feeling.       

Prior to writing those pieces Sam had contacted through the marvels of modern technology, through the Internet, Google and Facebook a number of the surviving members of that Myles Standish Class of 1962 to get their take on what they remembered, what search that they might be interested in undertaking to “understand what the hell happened back then and why” (his expression, okay). He got a number of responses, the unusual stuff that people who have not seen each for a long time, since the old days as school and so are inclined to put up a “front.” To show that the trajectory toward state prison or whore-houses which Miss Winot or one of them had predicted was to be their fate had been put behind them long ago, so endlessly going on and on about beautiful houses in beautiful neighborhoods putting paid to the dust of the dingy old town, what they had done with their lives in resume form, endless prattle about grandchildren (Sam admitted to a certain inclination that way himself so he was more forgiving on that issue) and so forth who also once Sam brought the matter up wanted to think back to those days.

One of those classmates, Melinda Loring, whom Sam in high school although not in junior high had something of a “crush” on but so did a lot of other guys, after they had sent some e-mail traffic to each other, sent him via that same method (oh beautiful technology on some things) a copy of a booklet that had been put out by the Myles Standish school administrators in 1987 commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the opening of the school. Sam thoughtfully (his term) looked through the booklet and when he came upon the page shown above where an art class and a music class were pictured he discovered that one of the students in the art class photograph was of him.        

That set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take art in school and outside as well unlike today when he had been recently informed that due to school budget cuts art is no longer offered to each student in school but is tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center, he was encouraged in his pursuit of artistic expression. In seventh grade after noticing some seascapes that he had done in a crude quasi-impressionist style like the French painter Monet whose work he had seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he and his brother Kenny had done a whirlwind tour of the place in about two hours going there mainly to see the Egyptian exhibits but stopping at the French Impressionists for some kindred reason Mrs. Robert’s encouraged him to become an artist, thought he had some talent, enough to carry into an art school if he worked at it hard enough. Later at Carver High his junior and senior year art teacher Mr. Henry thought the same thing after he had done some less crude and less imitative semi-Impressionist-like rural scenes from the bogs around town and some quite good Abstract Expressionist work when he discovered the work of Jackson Pollock. He was prepared to recommend Sam to his alma mater, the Massachusetts School of Art in the Back Bay of Boston.

Art for Sam had always been a way for him to express what he could not put in words, could not easily put in words anyway and he was always crazy to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see some artwork by real professionals, especially in high school the abstract expressionists that he was visually drawn to (and would leave after viewing such modern masterpieces feeling like he at best would always be an inspired amateur since he did not have the vision to break off from what he already had seen and imitated, at least that is what he thought then). Part of the appeal of art was the kind of bohemian lifestyle he imagined they led, having read a few things in the encyclopedia about various artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh and that enflamed a kid who was stuck in a three boys to one bedroom shack of a house down in the wrong side of the tracks and part was the idea of breaking out, breaking out from the traditional art that you would see on people’s walls, stuff used as decoration. His idea was to create something that someone would buy and not put on the walls for decoration by maybe highlight in a room of its own as the next new thing in art. Those were on his better days, days when he had not seen museum pieces for a while and began to believe once he had the basics down he could take off from what Picasso, Miro, Pollack, Rivers, Dove and the others were trying to do. Those were the days when he had painted a weird scene in watercolor, a medium always hard for him to work in, that was something like a breakaway from a Georgia O’Keefe Southwest mountain painting which Mr. Henry wanted him to enter into the Art for Art’s Sake competition the Boston Globe was sponsoring and he won third prize, his best effort ever.  

The big reason that Sam did not pursue that art career had a lot to do with coming up “from hunger,” coming up the hard way. When he broached the subject to his parents after he won the prize (and had already been accepted in a local college based on his high SAT score in History), mainly his mother, Delores, lowered the boom, vigorously emphasized the hard life of the average artist, and old chestnut about the million failed artists for every Picasso, and told him that a manly profession like a teacher was better for a boy who had come up from the dust of society. (“Manly” her term, although she did not mean the practice of law which he had not aspired to at the time except that his cranky old grandfather would keep bugging him to be a lawyer after he had recited the Gettysburg Address as part of a school ceremony honoring Abraham Lincoln on the centenary of that event, but like all second-generation Irish mothers in that town when they got their tongues wagging some nice white collar civil service job to support a nice wife, nice three children and a nice white picket fenced house outside the “acre,” such were motherly dreams).

Sam wondered about that long ago mother’s sensible remark after seeing the photograph, after seeing that twinkle in his eye as he was creating something with his hands, some painting because outside the brush he was not very mechanically-inclined. Wondered about the fact that after a lifetime of working the manly profession of the practice of the law all he could conclude was that there were a million good lawyers (and he included himself in that category without any undue modesty he thought) but far fewer good artists and maybe he could have at least had his fifteen minutes of fame in that field. He might not have caught he Pop Art/Op Art waves that were carrying art forward then but maybe being around such artists would have made him push his personal envelope. He resolved to search for some old artwork stored he did not know where, maybe still in the attic of the old family house which after his parents passed on his unmarried older brother, Seamus, took over, the only one who didn’t flee the place like it was the plague, to see if that path would have made sense.  

Sam had had to laugh after looking at the other photograph, the one of the music room, where he spotted his old friend Ralph Morse who went on in the 1960s to some small fame in the Greater Boston area as a member of the rock group The Rockin’ Ramrods. Actually a bit more than small fame since they had fronted for the Stones when they came to the Boston area a few years later and had had a couple of local hits that went number one on the WMEX hot rock charts. Many an after concert party in Boston or down at the Surf Ballroom in Hull where they were a fixture and were “discovered” by Alex Ginsberg from WMEX one night when he was there because his girlfriend had heard about the band from a woman she worked with and had bugged Alex to go hear them and he pushed them forward after that found Ralph and Sam drunk as skunks talking about the old days when rock and roll music was not even let into the Morse household (his parents were Evangelicals and hated “the devil’s music”). Hell barely tolerated in the pious Catholic Lowell household (a truce declared when Sam’s parents purchased a transistor radio for him one Christmas at the Radio Shack so they could not hear the music). Ralph had eventually once the Ramrods broke up as such bands do when there are personal differences or in Ralph’s case when he wanted to try his luck as solo lead singer headed west to seek his fame and fortune but kind of fell off the face of the earth in the early 1970s out in Oregon and nobody even with today’s technology, Internet/Facebook and whatever else could help track somebody down, somebody who was not hiding under the radar anyway, has been able to find out his whereabouts, if any.

That Ralph look too set off a train of memories about how in those days, days by the way when the community freely offered every student a chance to take music in school and outside as well like with art classes unlike today when he had been informed recently that due to school budget cuts music is no longer offered to each student but is also tied to some cumbersome Saturday morning classes at the out-of-the-way community center. However unlike with his art teachers Mr. Dasher the slap-dash music teacher often went out of his way to tell Sam to keep his voice down since it was gravelly, and off-key to boot.

At the time Sam did not think much about it, did not feel bad about having no musical sense. Later though once he heard folk music, the blues and some other roots music he felt bad that Mister Dasher had put a damper on his musical sensibilities. (Mister Dasher who had a band of his own, you know a swing band, playing stuff for people like his parents from the big band era, Benny Goodman, Count this, Duke that to supplement his meager teacher’s pay was something of a flashy dresser and was taunted by the kids in class, taunted by Sam right along with the others as Mister Dasher, the Nighttime Flasher. In that innocent age nobody thought anything of it except kids caught up in the nation-wide “rhyming simon” craze but today no question such a moniker would bring heaven’s own wrath down on his poor head, Jesus.) Not that he would have gone on to some career like Ralph, at least Ralph had his fifteen minutes of fame, got Mick and the boys autographs and had a few of their leftover party girls but he would have avoided that life-long habit of singing low, singing in the shower, singing up in the isolated third floor of his current home where no one, including his longtime companion, Laura Perkins a woman with a professional grade voice that would make the angels weep for their inadequacies, would hear him. The search for memory goes on….  

 

* From The Partisan Defense Committee- “The Cause That Passes Through a Prison”-18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners

Click on title to link to the 18th Annual Holiday Appeal (2003) from the Partisan Defense Committee. Supporting our class war prisoners is always in order, holiday or not. It is not charity, it is a duty to those behind the walls.

An Appeal From Veterans For Peace-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier -He Must Not Die In Jail

An Appeal From Veterans For Peace-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier -He Must Not Die In Jail  

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Paul Flewers on Stalinism and Spain and Spartacist statement on the above article (1988)-From "Revolutionary History"

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
**********
Stalinism and Spain
and
Spartacist statement on the above article

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

As in all backward capitalist countries, class confrontation in Spain had always been direct. A Liberal/Socialist coalition government elected in 1931 had made no effort to challenge the power of the industrialists, big landowners or the church. The state machine was left intact and when peasants and workers reacted as reforms promised were not delivered, they were brutally suppressed. Such concessions, however, did not satisfy the bourgeoisie and in July l936 Manuel Azana’s liberal government, which was supported by socialists, communists and some anarchists, was challenged by a military uprising supported by the vast majority of the ruling class.

This deadly threat immediately threw the workers and peasants into action. They seized factories and land which they then controlled through their own committees. They set up armed militias. The government was confronted from below by a mass revolutionary upsurge. The choice was clear: either a rapid move towards proletarian dictatorship or a military takeover. The workers and peasants were starting to exert their control over society, the ruling class was intent on securing its rule by military terror.

This is where the Stalinists stepped in. They were quick to deny that this was a fight for state power. A functionary of the Communist International explained:

In Spain it is not the proletarian dictatorship that is on the agenda of history. The struggle is not between proletariat and bourgeoisie for the establishment of the rule of the working class, but between the proletariat, the peasantry, the democratic bourgeoisie and the intellectuals on the one side, and the monarcho-feudalist reactionaries, the counter-revolutionary Fascists, on the other; against the hated monarchy, against feudal serfdom, against the fresh Fascist enslavement, for the maintenance of the democratic republic. [1]
Any attempt to hold onto this non-existent middle ground would mean the suppression of any force that was going beyond it. As Trotsky argued:

When the workers and peasants enter on the path of their revolution – when they seize factories and estates, drive out the old owners, conquer power in the provinces – then the bourgeois counter-revolution – democratic, Stalinist or Fascist alike – has no other means of checking this movement except through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. [2]
Adapting to the most conservative elements in the labour movement leadership and the scrag end of the bourgeois democracy, the Stalinists worked overtime to derail the revolutionary forces.

The first Moscow show trial was staged in the summer of 1936. Despite the commitment to ‘socialism in one country’, Stalinism is an international force. The thrust of the trials – that Stalin’s opponents in the Soviet Union were conspiring with the exiled Trotsky on behalf of the Fascist states, was largely for external consumption. Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor at all the trials, explored the international dimension at the first trial:

By rendering these accomplices of Fascism harmless, the people of the Soviet Union and its officials have not only done a service to their own country, but also to all fighters against Fascist slavery, to all friends of peace. For the fight of the French workers in the People’s Front, the heroic fight of the Spanish workers against the perfidious generals, the fight of the anti-Fascists before the Fascist courts in Germany, and lastly the fight of the peoples of the Soviet Union and their courts against the emissaries and supporters of Fascism, are all fundamentally one and the same fight, which is only being fought out on different sections of the front. [3]

Stalin’s opponents abroad could now expect the same treatment as his victims at home. Pravda brought this home in December 1936 with an unambiguous threat: ‘In Catalonia, the elimination of Trotskyists and Anarcho-Syndicalists has already begun; it will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR’. [4]

Early in 1937 came the second Moscow trial and in March Stalin gave a particularly lurid speech to the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party. He declared that Trotskyism had ‘long ceased to be a political trend in the working class’ and that Trotskyists had ‘become a gang of wreckers, diversionists, spies, assassins...working in the pay of foreign intelligence services’. Moreover, ‘the old methods, the methods of discussion’ were obsolete in the fight against them, and ‘new methods, uprooting and smashing methods’ were now the prescribed means. [5] Notice had been served upon all of Stalin’s left wing opponents (Stalinists were not fussy about whom they called Trotskyists). They could no longer expect even the kind of ‘debate’ to which they had been accustomed. Now it was the show trials, prisons and the GPU’s death squads.

The reckoning was soon to come to Spain. Tensions had been growing between militant workers and the authorities, sometimes leading to armed clashes, especially in the Catalonia region. The authorities, with the full support of the Stalinists, staged in May 1937 a provocation in Barcelona by seizing the telephone exchange which had been held until then by the Anarchists. The ensuing street fighting gave the government the pretext to clamp down on the left wing forces. Freshly back from Spain, George Orwell remarked upon the ‘thoroughness’ with which the government was ‘crushing its own revolutionaries’:

When I left Barcelona in late June [l937] the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not the Fascists but revolutionaries; they are not there because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are ... the Communists. [6]

The replacement of Francisco Largo Caballero by Juan Negrin as premier as a result of the May events was rapidly followed by an intensification of the repression against the left. Unlike his predecessor, Negrin willingly concurred with the Stalinists on the necessity to crush the left. The GPU was steadily extending its nefarious activities in Spain, not only acting in its own right, but infiltrating the republican judicial apparatus, the police and military forces, enjoying complete freedom of operation. On 16 June the leadership of the POUM, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, was arrested and its most prominent figure, Andres Nin, was kidnapped, cruelly tortured and murdered behind closed doors. Other left wing militants, Kurt Landau, Marc Rhein, Hans Freund (Moulin), Erwin Wolf, to name but a few, disappeared in the hands of the GPU.

In March 1938, as the final and most grotesque of the Moscow trials was being staged, the Spanish Trotskyists were charged with sabotage, espionage and planning the assassination of Negrin and, among others, leading Stalinists Jose Diaz and Dolores ‘Pasionaria’ Ibarruri. Time was running out for the POUM as well. In July the Executive Committee of the Communist International demanded ‘the complete extermination of the Trotskyist POUM gang’. [7] In October its leaders were brought to trial. However, Nin had not ‘confessed’, the ‘evidence’ against the accused was embarrassingly crude and, unlike the defendants in the Moscow trials who were burnt out after a decade of expulsions, exiles, isolators and capitulations, the POUM leaders demonstrated their contempt for the proceedings (one of them continually referred to the Spanish judge as Mr Vishinsky), and the more serious charges against them were dropped.

As the government and its Stalinist minions came down harder upon the left, the situation worsened for the republic. A month after the Trotskyists were charged, Franco’s forces had reached Vinaroz on the east coast, cutting republican Spain in two. Two weeks after the POUM trial had ended, republican troops had withdrawn to beyond the River Ebro. Barcelona surrendered on 26 January 1939, nationalist troops entered a defeated Madrid on 28 March. Under Negrin, much of the gains of the 1936 revolutionary upsurge had been whittled away. Land was returned to its former owners, factory directors and managers took back their old posts, restrictions on the church were eased and the army was rebuilt along traditional lines. Just before the fall of Madrid Trotsky noted:

The Spanish revolution was Socialist in its essence: the workers attempted several times to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to seize the factories; the peasants wanted to take the land. The “People’s Front”, led by the Stalinists strangled the Socialist revolution in the name of an outlived bourgeois democracy. Hence the disappointment, the hopelessness, the discouragement of the masses of workers and peasants, the demoralisation of the republican army, and as a result, the military collapse. [8]
With the revolutionary movement suppressed by the Stalinists on behalf of the republican government, Franco’s victory was assured.

No Aberration

Since the mid-1950s the Stalinists have moderated their invective against their left wing opponents and will admit that the Trotskyists and other militants were not, after all, in the pay of the Gestapo. However, the worst aspects of the 1930s, the ‘aggressive and uncritical extolling of Stalin and all aspects of the Soviet Union, including the Moscow trials’, did manifest itself ‘within the framework of a basically correct and creative strategy’, as Monty Johnstone, a leading British Stalinist, put it. [9] The slanders, show trials and assassinations are seen as an aberration, not as an integral part of the Stalinist strategy of the time. Today’s Stalinists want the omelette but not the broken eggs.

There was nothing accidental about the so-called ‘excesses’ of the 1930s either in the Soviet Union or in Spain. Even if it didn’t follow a predetermined plan, the repression was drawn along by a remorseless logic. By the 1930s the Soviet bureaucracy had developed into a despotic ruling caste as fearful as the western ruling classes of proletarian revolution. Ever since Stalin promulgated his dogma of ‘socialism in one country’, the parties of the Communist International had steadily become local agencies of Soviet diplomacy, not leading the fight for workers’ power but attempting to pressurise their ruling classes into establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union. The Popular Front of the 1930s was principally aimed at forcing the British and French bourgeoisies into concluding a collective security agreement with the Soviet Union to counter the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Stalin did not want the victory of Franco in Spain as he considered this would strengthen the position of Germany against France. He wanted the victory of a democratic capitalist Spain that would hopefully be aligned with Britain and France.

The Moscow trials were central to the Popular Front strategy even if, as Johnstone admits, they ‘made more difficult a closer relationship with and influence on the Socialists’. [10] If the Soviet Union was to forge friendly alliances with imperialist states, it would need a new image. 1917 was still fresh in people’s memories. The destruction of the Bolshevik old guard in the trials was to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was no longer a revolutionary threat to imperialism. The Stalinists were also concerned that their moderation would alienate the more active workers and were therefore determined that criticisms of their politics would not be heard. [11] If their left wing critics could be branded as ‘Fascists’ then no debate would be necessary. Those who recognised that workers’ democratic rights could only be defended by the struggle for state power received the worst of the Stalinists’ vengeance. Those who took the road of Socialist revolution would be crushed without mercy.

Still Lying

Many of the tales spread by the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War are still retailed today, if in a more moderate, more apologetic manner. They still insist that the response of the Barcelona workers to the Stalinist provocation in May 1937 was a putsch staged by adventurists and provocateurs. Despite the proven presence of the GPU in Spain, the Stalinists prefer their fond memories. Leading Spanish Stalinist Santiago Carrillo recalls:

... it is true that it has been said that there were GPU prisons. I personally have no proof that there were and I never saw one, even though I believe the Soviet people must have had certain services [!!] in Spain, connected with the presence of their volunteers who were fighting at the front. [12]

A common response of late is to admit that the allegations made against the POUM and the Trotskyists were slanderous and the persecutions unjustified, but that it is perfectly understandable why the Communist movement accepted it all at the time. To quote Carrillo on the disappearance of Nin:

In the eyes of public opinion in general the Barcelona putsch was a counter-revolutionary act; there was a revolutionary war in Spain and, for the whole of the army and the people, that putsch, which a small group of Anarchists and Trotskyists had got together to carry out, appeared to be a counter-revolutionary act aimed at opening the front and helping the Fascist offensive ... The putsch of May 1937 strengthened us in the opinion that the Trotskyists were counter-revolutionaries. [13]

The recent official history of the Communist Party of Great Britain considers that ‘it was hardly surprising that the POUM should be regarded as traitors’ and ‘the notion that Trotskyists could be allied with fascists, or used as tools of the latter seemed plausible after the experience of the POUM in Spain’. [14]

This is sheer dishonesty. The ‘evidence’ presented at all the show trials was shot through with blatant falsifications, inconsistencies and absurdities that were pointed out at the time. Nor could any honest observer describe the Barcelona May events as a POUM ‘putsch’. The Stalinists made no attempt seriously to analyse the politics of their left wing opponents. There was no excuse for believing all the filthy business at that time and there is certainly no excuse for justifying that belief four or five decades later. To have accepted the Stalinist line in the 1930s necessitated the shutting off of all critical faculties and the willing suspension of disbelief. By attempting to reject the more unpalatable features of their activities in the 1930s whilst defending the system which spawned them, the Stalinists graphically demonstrate their inability to extricate themselves from the web of slander and deceit which they themselves have spun.

Paul Flewers
May 1988

Notes
1. International Press Correspondence, 8 August 1936.

2. L. Trotsky, The lessons of Spain: the last warning, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, New York 1973, p.313.

3. International Press Correspondence, 29 August 1936.

4. Cited in P. Broué and E. Témime, The Revolution and Civil War in Spain, London 1972, p.235.

5. J. Stalin, Defects in party work and measures for liquidating Trotskyite and other double-dealers, Works Vol.14, London 1978, p.261.

6. G. Orwell, Spilling the Spanish beans, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol.1, Harmondsworth 1984, p.302. Orwell was no Marxist but he could tell a revolution (and a counter-revolution) when he saw one:

The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. (Ibid.)

7. World News and Views, 23 July 1938.

8. L. Trotsky, Only revolution can end war, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, pp.234.

9. Marxism Today, November 1975, my emphasis.

10. Ibid. And the bourgeois parties the Stalinists were assiduously courting, as Johnstone omits to say.

11. Trotsky was well aware of how Stalin used the anti-Trotskyist campaign to influence both rulers and workers in the west:

The Comintern exists and, despite the turn toward opportunism and chauvinism, in the eyes of bourgeois public opinion it bears responsibility for the whole revolutionary movement ... Stalin tried with all his might ... to prove that the Comintern was no longer a revolutionary instrument. But his word was not always so easily believed. To strengthen his credit with the French bourgeoisie he thought it useful to take bloody measures against the Left Opposition. But neither will he be able to renounce the Comintern. So-called “Trotskyism”, i.e., the development and the continuity of Marx and Lenin’s ideas, is spreading more and more, even in the ranks of the Comintern ... That is why it is a matter of life and death for Stalin, for his political authority before the workers, to destroy “Trotskyism”. With words? That is not his way. He has the apparatus, which makes it possible for him to stage frame-up trials. In this way the accusations must strengthen Stalin’s authority simultaneously among the allied bourgeoisie and among the revolutionary workers. (L. Trotsky, Stalin is not everything, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, New York 1977, pp.410-411)

12. S. Carrillo, Dialogue on Spain, London, 1976, p.52. Two British Stalinists say:

Stories about “NKVD agents” in Spain, especially in relation to the fight against Trotskyism, have been propagated so widely that one meets them almost everywhere, and this includes works by progressive historians. The authors of this article are inclined to think that most of them are apocryphal. (N. Green and A. Elliott, Our History, no.67, n.d. [late 1970s], p.22)

13. S. Carrillo, op. cit., pp.52-53.

14. N. Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941, London 1985. pp.235, 248. Ms Branson does not inform her readers of Nin’s terrible fate. He was, apparently, ‘almost certainly executed’ (ibid., p.244), by whom she declines to say.

Spartacist statement on the above article

The above article by Paul Flewers is devoted almost exclusively to a denunciation of the treacherous activities of the Stalinists in Spain, and therefore down-plays the crucial question of the Popular Front. It must be re-asserted that Trotskyists are not simply opposed to, but rather counterposed to, the Popular Front and every class-collaborationist alliance which subordinates the interests of the proletariat to those of the bourgeoisie.

Flewers’ strong Stalinophobic tilt amnesties the other reformist and centrist working-class tendencies. While the Stalinists were undoubtedly the most energetic and effective propounders and henchmen of the Popular Front in Spain, they did not occupy a social position to the right of the right wing of the Socialist Party: Trotsky spoke repeatedly of a ‘Stalin-Negrin government’. Ernest Erber, an experienced Social Democrat and former Trotskyist who spent some months in Spain during the Civil War as a representative of the American Young Peoples Socialist League, shows more political sense than Flewers: he scoffs at the idea of a Stalinist ‘totalitarian’ takeover of the Republican forces in Spain (see How real is the threat of a Communist “takeover”?, New Politics, Winter 1988).

Flewers treats the POUM, in particular, with kid gloves. But at crucial junctures the POUM – and the left Anarchists and Largo Caballero’s Socialists – each in their own way participated in the Popular Front. We cannot amnesty them from the standpoint of the revolutionary working class. This is particularly important in relation to the POUM.

Leon Trotsky broke all connections with Andres Nin and Juan Andrade when they led the erstwhile section of the International Left Opposition into fusion with the right-wing communists of Joaquim Maurin’s Workers and Peasants Bloc, giving birth to the misnamed ‘Workers Party of Marxist Unification’. The POUM’s first significant political act was to join in a common electoral bloc with bourgeois parties – the Popular Front.

Between the POUM, a member of the London Bureau ‘international of squeezed lemons’, and Trotskyism, there can be no common denominator in a revolutionary situation. Self-proclaimed Trotskyists who attempt to politically reconcile themselves with the POUM only succeed in compromising themselves – like Victor Serge and George Vereecken (the latter ended his political career writing the slanderous GPU Infiltration in the Trotskyist Movement for the political bandit Gerry Healy).

Referring to the ‘Treachery of the POUM’, in his last major work on the Spanish Revolution, The Class, The Party and the Leadership, Trotsky pointed out:

To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM ... But it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution ... It participated in the “Popular” election bloc; entered the government that liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; and took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising ... [A] centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution.

International Spartacist Tendency

In Boston- Killer Drones: Our government's assassination program

Killer Drones: Our government's assassination program

When: Sunday, December 4, 2016, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Where: Elliott Church of Newton • Center Street and Church Street • Newton Corner

We will show excerpts from "Drone"and watch a video of Christopher Aaron, an ex-drone program analyst who will speak about his experiences working in Afghanistan and Iraq. Discussion with members of the UJP Anti-Drones Campaign will follow.

Christopher Aaron is a former counter-terorism officer for the CIA and Department of Defense drone program.  He deployed twice to Afghanistan and Iraq from 2006 - 2009, serving as an intelligence analyst and liaison between the military and the intelligence community in Washington, DC.  He resigned in 2009 due to ethical objections to the conduct of the wars.

Sponsored by Newton Dialogues on Peace and War; cosponsored by United for Justice with Peace

Download a flyer for this event from here

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Drone talk & film flier December 4, 2016-r1.pdf	426.55 KB

Upcoming Events: 

Stand Out to mark UN's International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People	Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - 12:00pm	Downtown Crossing	Boston
Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance in Palestine: book talk	Thursday, December 1, 2016 - 7:00pm	Friends Meeting at Cambridge	Cambridge
The Next Four Years: Building Our Movements in Dangerous Times	Saturday, December 3, 2016 - 9:00am	Simmons College, Paresky Conference Center	Boston
Killer Drones: Our government's assassination program	Sunday, December 4, 2016 - 7:00pm	Elliott Church of Newton	Newton Corner
Sing-Along Fundraiser - #NoDAPL - Jan. 14, 2017 - save the date!	Saturday, January 14, 2017 - 7:00pm	Calvary United Methodist Church	Arlington

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*****Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

*****Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

 

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweating profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come.

Some nights they were on fire as they blew that big high white note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white note, I swear, blew out into the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. Well see we were all a little high so I don’t know about that Japan seas stuff but I sure know that brother blew that high white one somewhere out the door.  But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at later when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating “father” preacher/sinner man Son House for showing up drunk. Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them to sit here not there, to walk here but not there, to drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their own and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade corn liquor (or so he, Jack Flash called it).

 

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room in the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs lining the black streets of blustered America and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly the Stones lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, did pretty good, right.  

 

*****The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth

*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth 

  

 

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).    

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere. 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 
 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea ]  

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (and did again this year on her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

Did You Hear John Hurt-With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind

Did You Hear John Hurt-With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind 

By Seth Garth   

Jason Taylor, Fritz’s son, his eldest son, the first son in the family to go to college in his generation wondered once he got to Cambridge what it would have been like if he had landed in Harvard Square in 1963 rather than 2013 and had been able to hear a guy named Mississippi John Hurt that his father kept playing on his CD player (and later on his MP3 player hooked to the house sound system). Or Skip James, or Bukka White, or Son House, or Fred McDowell or a million other blues, country blues guys from down in places like the Mississippi Delta and stayed to distinguish that crowd from Chicago and Detroit electric blue guys who were from down in the deep South too but created a whole new jammed-up sound with the amps up. Those latter guys headed north following the Mississippi to Memphis and then sweet home Chicago. Or so they thought. Wondered why his father had spent so much time trying to teach him about the blues, about why it was important to keep the tradition going even if only for those like him who had listened to the old timers back in the day. (Jason was amazed how much his father’s “instruction” had stayed with him as he landed in the Square when he started thinking about that blues-etched influence that he must have grabbed in his DNA.).

Fritz, when he would get his son alone, when he was in high school Jason thought, and out of earshot of his mother, Betsy, would tell him about all the times he went to places like the Club 47, the Club Blue, and the Café Nana with dates or looking for dates. (Fritz had met Betsy, wife number two, from upstate New York around Albany but out in farm country in Harvard Square but that was when he was in his outlaw cowboy music minute in the early 1980s so she was not a folkie as such). The idea was cheap dates since he was a poor boy from Utica, a half generation out of the farms and so had a hard time going to college and affording dates. And none was cheaper than going to the folk clubs in Cambridge and Boston and except when serious acts like Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and the like came to play and you could for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, maybe a pastry between you, and a couple of bucks to show you were a patron of the arts for the “bucket” which sustained the night’s performer you had your date, and who knows what else if she was a folkie too. That is why Fritz and his friends hung around the coffeehouses in the Square looking for those folkie girls to share coffee and pastry with, and who knows what else. If times were tough and there was no money then you were reduced to hanging around the Hayes-Bickford listening to all kinds of talk and noise but the coffee was cheaper. And surprisingly there were girls there too who you could pick up and hang with for the night without expense. Wasn’t that a time.     

Jason, while he suffered under his father’s “instruction” about the genesis of folk and blues, would occasionally, again out of earshot of his mother since she would see red on the subject, get the story of how he saw the legendary Mississippi John Hurt down in the Village when he first came north after being “discovered” by some folk enthusiast who found him in a tiny shack down in the Delta. The seeing red part by Betsy was because that was where Fritz had met Louise, his first wife who not only took him for a ride when they got divorced but took a long time for Fritz to get out of his system. Jason would know the Louise story was coming because he father would get all wistful and he was not sure whether it was from being in the presence of a blues legend or the wiles of Louise Golden. Normally Fritz was the antithesis of wistful so Jason knew he was in for a fifteen minute journey to the past.

Somehow Fritz and his two roommates at Boston University were able to hitchhike themselves down to the Village in the days when you could do that without risking your life (and Fritz when Jason suggested that he and a girlfriend were going to hitchhike to Washington to save some money went nuts for that very reason). One of the roommates, Lenny, lived in the city, had grown up in Stuyvesant Town, so they had a place to stay that weekend. Mississippi John was playing at the Gaslight two shows a night, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The trio needed to see the show either Friday or Saturday since they had to hitch back on Sunday for classes on Monday. They were shut out of both Friday shows because they had gotten into the long line too late. Had not gotten there the mandatory two hours early to insure that they would get in. So late Saturday afternoon they headed down to the Village on the subway to wait their two hours. As they lined up Fritz saw a striking young woman with jet black hair, nice shape and nice legs, a big thing for him then in the match-up contest in line just in front of them. Waiting just like them to make the first show from the look of their placement in line. 

Fritz not known then, or ever as an aggressive man around the women he was interested in decided to “hit” on this beauty. He started with the classic line among folkies at that time about when they first heard their first folk music, stuff that they recognized as such. Rather than brushing Fritz off this woman, this Louise Golden, astounded Fritz with her arcane knowledge, knowledge far greater than his, about the roots of folk music and the roots of the blues. Apparently her parents some refugees to New York City from out in Topeka during the red scare 1940s when to be any kind of odd was the death knell were avid folk music collectors and so they had imparted their knowledge onto a willing Louise. During that almost two hour wait they must have run through every folk and blues fact they knew aided by interjections from Fritz’s roomies. The long and short of it was that Fritz and Louise agreed without much ceremony to sit at the same table (the roommates and Louise’s companion sat at the next table and were dismissed out of hand by the pair for the rest of the evening until John’s performance was over).           

Of course the by then ancient John Hurt small with a beaten down hat on his head that he must have worn for his whole long life amazed the crowd with his playing, with his clear picking even at his age. Sang beautiful simple blues like Beulah Land, Creole Belle, Frankie and Albert, the salacious Candy Man and the like. A great performance that Fritz could spin out the play list of for Jason even forty years later. Here’s the kicker though. No, not that they would meet after that performance the reader already knows that they would eventually marry. That night Louise who whatever the difficulties her parents had faced out in Topeka must have made some money in coming east because she paid for two cups of coffee for each of them and for each to have their own pastry. Yes, a match made in heaven, for a while.     

One night a fitful Jason decided to go into Harvard Square and check out whatever there was to check out as the kids these days expressed things. He decided to go to the Café Andre, the nearest thing to a coffeehouse still left in the Square and see who was playing for the “basket” that night (somethings never change). It turned out to be Eric Loftus an up and coming new age folkie who had a small following around Cambridge. As Jason entered, a little on the early side so he was not sure if she was there for a late snack or for the show he saw this willowy slender young woman with black hair and nice legs, something he noticed when looking for young women (yes, some things never do change)  sitting at a table by herself. He, like his father, was not aggressive around women but he decided he would “hit” on her. Asked her if he could buy her a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry if she was staying for the show. That started an affair which would find them many nights hanging around the café having coffee and a shared pastry.            

Yes, Jason Taylor was his father’s son alright, and the old man was right wasn’t that a time.