Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti-The Case That Will Not Die-Nor Should It

Immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti-The Case That Will Not Die-Nor Should It-Free All Class War Prisoners 


Caught up in the anti-immigrant hysteria and Red Scare that swept the U.S. in the aftermath of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, anarchist workers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested in May 1920 and framed up on murder and robbery charges of which they were manifestly innocent. In an article written after their execution in the Massachusetts electric chair on 23 August 1927, James P. Cannon, at the time a leader of the Workers (Communist) Party (CP) and secretary of the International Labor Defense (ILD) and later the founder of American Trotskyism, declared:
“The electric flames that consumed the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti illuminated for tens of thousands of workers, in all its stark brutality, the essential nature of capitalist justice in America. The imprisonment, torture and murder of workers is seen more clearly now as part of an organized system of class persecution.”
—“A Living Monument to Sacco and Vanzetti,” Labor Defender (October 1927)
Pointing to the ILD’s role as the leading and organizing center of a protest movement that had rallied millions of workers around the world behind Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause, Cannon called for building “a stronger, more united and determined movement for labor defense on a class basis.” He noted that “the industrial masters of America” who had carried out the execution to deal a blow to the entire labor movement “were not without allies, both conscious and unconscious, in the camp of the workers themselves.” “Sacco and Vanzetti will have died in vain,” he wrote, “if the real meaning and the causes of their martyrdom are not understood in all their implications.” These lessons are indeed of crucial importance in the struggle against capitalist repression today and are posed with particular urgency in the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal who, despite massive evidence of his innocence, was railroaded to death row for his political beliefs and lifetime of struggle against black oppression.
The Defense Movement
With little known about their arrests outside the Boston area, the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was initially limited to a local group of Italian anarchists who founded the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. The defense committee won the support of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a well-known radical, and her companion Carlo Tresca, an anarcho-syndicalist who edited the newspaper Il Martello in New York. The two members of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) helped line up Fred Moore, who had a long record of defending union militants and radicals, to be lead attorney in the case.
Moore appealed to IWW members, union leaders and socialists to mobilize in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The American Civil Liberties Union, of which Flynn was a founding member, and its New England affiliate voiced their support as did a number of prominent liberals, notably the journalists Elizabeth Glendower Evans and Gardner Jackson. Various unions and even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) tops came out in defense of the two workers. As Sacco and Vanzetti faced trial in May 1921, some 64 union locals from across the country contributed to the defense, and a flood of labor support swept in following their conviction in July. As we noted in Part One of this article, in the fall of 1921 the CP and Communist International (CI) called for a worldwide campaign of protest centered on the working class. The AFL passed a resolution in 1922 calling for a new trial and two years later declared Sacco and Vanzetti “victims of race and national prejudice and class hatred.”
In a 1927 ILD pamphlet, Max Shachtman described the wide range of support for Sacco and Vanzetti in the workers movement and observed:
“With many of these it was because they realized the class nature of the issues involved in the case; that it was not merely an incident of an accidental ‘miscarriage of justice’ but that the judge, jury and prosecutor were striking as severe a blow at the labor movement as was struck thirty-five years before in the trial of the Haymarket martyrs. With the others, it was the result of the feelings and pressure from the mass, who felt, however vaguely, a working class kinship with the two agitators.”
Sacco and Vanzetti:
Labor’s Martyrs
According to Massachusetts court procedure at the time, sentencing was postponed until all post-trial motions and appeals were decided. Although it was clear to everyone that the murder conviction could only mean a death sentence, that sentence was not pronounced until 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyers, meanwhile, attempted to overturn the conviction with a series of motions before the same biased Judge Webster Thayer who presided over the kangaroo trial and appeals before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that rubber-stamped Thayer’s every move.
Thayer denied the first post-conviction motion for a new trial on Christmas Eve 1921. Beginning the month before and throughout the next two years, a series of six supplemental motions were filed by the defense. In July 1924, with those motions pending, Moore resigned as attorney in the case. With his replacement by William Thompson, the tactics of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee changed as well. As recounted in Bruce Watson’s Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (2007), Thompson flatly declared that he did not believe “the government was actuated by any ulterior purpose in bringing the charge against them.” Despising the mass protest movement, Thompson appealed instead to the legal and business establishment to use its influence on the courts and state house.
In turn, the Boston defense committee called for a stop to the workers’ protest actions. As Shachtman described in his pamphlet, for the next two years this strategy “helped to discredit the honest and powerful class support of the toilers…. They demanded the substitution of the movement of the masses by the movement of the lawyers.” Shachtman pointed out, “The defense turned more and more towards reliance upon those false friends concerned more with the vindication of ‘confidence in our institutions and their capacity to rectify errors,’ and ‘those high standards which are the pride of Massachusetts justice’ than with the vindication of two unknown immigrants.”
Based on the Marxist understanding that the courts, cops, prisons and armed forces are core components of the capitalist state—a machinery of organized violence to protect the rule and profits of the exploiting class—the CP and ILD tirelessly fought against illusions in the capitalists’ rigged legal system. They fought instead for workers to rely only on their class power, derived from the fact that it is their labor that creates the wealth of society. In his important new biography, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (2007), Bryan Palmer includes a thorough account of Cannon’s leadership of the ILD, not least in regard to its efforts in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti.
The CP and ILD were determined that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be added to the long list of labor’s martyrs. They understood that mobilizing labor’s power in protest and strike action could compel the bourgeois rulers to relent in fear of the social costs that executing or imprisoning the two men for life would bring. They fought as well to imbue militants with the consciousness that to tear down the walls imprisoning fighters against exploitation and oppression once and for all requires a socialist revolution that destroys the capitalist state and replaces it with a workers state, where those who labor rule. In this, they were following the path laid out by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who wrote in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done? that the communist’s ideal
“should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
Battle of Class Forces
In October 1924, Judge Thayer denied all motions presented by Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyers. In December, the Communist International issued an appeal “To the workers of all countries! To all trade union organizations!” calling to “Organize mass demonstrations! Demand the liberation of Sacco and Vanzetti!” The Daily Worker, newspaper of the Workers (Communist) Party, continued to publicize this struggle, and the party organized a Chicago labor rally for Sacco and Vanzetti on 1 March 1925 and mobilized heavily for rallies in Boston and other cities that day. Shortly after its inception that year, the ILD issued a call for workers internationally to demonstrate solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti. In a 23 May 1926 letter to the ILD, Vanzetti wrote, “The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart.”
Thayer’s 1924 decision was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which sat on the case before affirming the convictions on 12 May 1926. Two weeks later, lawyers filed another motion for a new trial based on the affidavit of Celestino Medeiros confessing his involvement in the robbery that led to the murder charges against Sacco and Vanzetti, exonerating the two men. In October, Thayer rejected the Medeiros confession along with affidavits of two federal agents documenting the government’s involvement in the frame-up and confirming that the two were targeted for their political activities. This was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court.
The court proceedings touched off renewed protest activity. Labor Defender published a special “Save Sacco and Vanzetti” issue in July 1926 featuring “An Appeal to American Labor” by Eugene V. Debs, historic spokesman of the Socialist Party. Resolutions on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti were adopted by the Washington Federation of Labor and the New York Socialist Party.
The ILD initiated Sacco-Vanzetti committees and conferences throughout the U.S. that drew IWW militants, anarchists and delegates from the AFL and other union bodies around the call “Life and Freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti!” These meetings were an application of the tactic of the united front, through which a wide range of workers organizations unite in action around a common call while engaging in political debate based on their own programs. Through this means, the ILD sought to lay the basis for mass labor protest and strikes. The ILD also participated in rallies called by the Boston defense committee and other organizations. Cannon wrote to a wide array of public figures seeking statements in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. But the ILD’s primary focus was unleashing labor strikes and protests.
In New York City, the ILD-initiated Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee encompassed individuals and organizations representing nearly half a million workers. Rallies organized by the committee drew over 15,000 in New York’s Madison Square Garden on 17 November 1926 and another 25,000 in Union Square the following April. Equally large gatherings were organized by ILD-led committees in Milwaukee, San Jose, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Chicago. Across the country, a network of two to three million workers was enlisted in the committees. The International Red Aid mobilized its organizations around the world, forming united-front committees in hundreds of cities and organizing mass protests. Millions throughout the entirety of the Soviet Union demonstrated in solidarity with the two class-war prisoners.
Thayer’s rulings opened up a period of sharpening political struggle over the way forward in this fight that would last up through the executions. The Socialist Party, AFL tops and anarchists organized some working-class protest, at times mobilizing significant forces. But such efforts were in the service of appeals for Sacco and Vanzetti to get their “fair day in court,” to be accomplished by tapping into liberal public opinion that hoped to spare the men’s lives for the sake of America’s “democratic” image. As for the national AFL leadership, rather than issuing a call for labor mobilizations, it pushed a resolution through the October 1926 AFL convention appealing to Congress to investigate the case. The SP and AFL tops undermined the growing mobilization of the workers by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion.
Throughout the 1920s, the SP leadership under Morris Hillquit, which in 1919 had purged the left-wing Socialists who supported the Bolshevik Revolution, waged a campaign against Communist influence in the labor movement that was particularly fierce in the needle trades in New York City. For his part, Matthew Woll, a member of the AFL Executive Council, ranted that the AFL was “the first object of attack by the Communist movement.” The same Woll was acting president of the National Civic Federation, an anti-union business group that viciously opposed the campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti’s freedom.
In November 1926, the Ohio State Socialist Party refused to join in a rally called by the ILD-initiated Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and the SP’s New Leader (18 December 1926) retailed lying charges by the Boston defense committee that the CP and ILD had solicited funds for legal defense that were not forwarded and for which no accounting was made. In response to these slanders, Labor Defender (January 1927) published the ILD’s accounts and copies of checks forwarded to the Boston committee. The article pointed out that an earlier Labor Defender (September 1926) had printed, as part of its regular practice, an accounting of its receipts and ILD campaign expenses and had called for contributions for legal defense to be sent directly to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee in Boston rather than to the ILD.
The smears against the ILD were gleefully seized upon by the bourgeois press at the time and are repeated to this day. In answering the blatantly false charge that the ILD had pocketed $500,000 raised for Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense, Labor Defender (October 1927) remarked that this slander only aided “the Department of Justice and other agencies which consummated the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti” and now hope to prevent the protest movement from “being drawn into the fight in behalf of the other victims of the frame-up system now in prison or facing trial.”
Class-Struggle Defense
With the case again before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Cannon alluded to the sectarian exclusions and counterposed a class-struggle defense perspective in “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927):
“The Sacco-Vanzetti case is no private monopoly, but an issue of the class struggle in which the decisive word will be spoken by the masses who have made this fight their own. It is therefore, necessary to discuss openly the conflicting policies which are bound up with different objectives.
“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale. It calls for unity and solidarity of all workers on this burning issue, regardless of conflicting views on other questions. This is what has prevented the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti so far. Its goal is nothing less than their triumphant vindication and liberation.
“The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle. It shrinks from the ‘vulgar and noisy’ demonstrations of the militant workers and throws the mud of slander on them. It tries to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way. The objective of this policy is a whitewash of the courts of Massachusetts and ‘clemency’ for Sacco and Vanzetti in the form of a commutation to life imprisonment for a crime of which the world knows they are innocent.”
The battle between these counterposed strategies took center stage following a 5 April 1927 decision by the Supreme Judicial Court again upholding Judge Thayer. Four days later, the front page of the Daily Worker carried an appeal by Cannon, “From Supreme Court of Capital to Supreme Court of the Masses,” in which he wrote, “The New England bourbons want the blood of innocent men. This was decided from the first, only fools expected otherwise. Only fools put faith in the courts of the enemy.” Cannon added, “It is time now to appeal finally to the masses. It is time for the workers to say their word.”
On April 9, Sacco and Vanzetti were called into Thayer’s courtroom for sentence to be pronounced. The two men spoke defiantly. Sacco told the judge, “I know the sentence will be between two class[es], the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will always be collision between one and the other.” When Vanzetti got his turn, he stated: “I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian;...but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already” (quoted in Herbert P. Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti [1969]). They were sentenced to die in three months.
Following the sentencing, the ILD issued a call for a national conference “of all elements willing to unite to demand and force freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti.” On April 16, 20,000 workers filled New York’s Union Square in a protest called by the ILD-led Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee. As part of an intensive effort over the next several weeks, more than 500 May Day meetings were organized by the ILD across the U.S and Canada.
The SP’s response to the sentencing was to further promote false hopes in bourgeois politicians. The New Leader (16 April 1927) wrote, “The next move is up to Governor Fuller, and there seems to be no doubt that he will have to accede to the world-wide demand that he act to save the lives of the two men.” The SP declared the scheduled execution date of July 10 as “a day of national mourning for the death of American justice,” while Hillquit called upon “the government and the governor of the State of Massachusetts to order a full and impartial investigation of the whole case” (New Leader, 23 April 1927).
After SP organizers of Sacco-Vanzetti meetings in Philadelphia and Cleveland refused to seat delegates from the ILD and other organizations, Cannon issued a statement printed in the Daily Worker (4 May 1927) condemning the disruption of the “labor reactionaries,” noting that “their aim is to isolate the militants and then sabotage the movement.” With the social democrats, anarchists and labor tops working to undermine the ILD’s efforts, the plan to hold a national Sacco-Vanzetti conference fell through. The Boston defense committee sought to head off growing sentiment in the unions for such a conference by appealing instead for Governor Fuller to appoint a commission to review the case. On June 1, they got their wish, as Fuller announced the appointment of a three-man panel to advise him on Vanzetti’s petition for clemency filed the previous month.
The panel was led by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, a patrician reactionary who had campaigned for the draconian 1921 Immigration Quota Act, banned black students from living in Harvard dorms, restricted Jewish enrollment at Harvard and opposed legislation reducing child labor in the textile industry. This record did not stop the Boston committee from lauding the commission as “men reputed to be scholarly, of high intelligence and intellectual probity, with minds unswayed by prejudice.” The committee advised the governor to implement the power of commutation because that would be “far less likely to undermine public faith in the courts of the Commonwealth.” The SP affirmed its faith that “while the members of this commission are conservatives, it is generally believed that their high professional standing gives fair assurance that they will make a report justified by all the facts in the case” (New Leader, 9 July 1927).
Rumors swirled that Fuller would respond to the growing international protests by commuting the death sentences. Recalling how an earlier movement on behalf of class-war prisoners Tom Mooney, who faced execution, and Warren Billings had been sapped by the commutation of Mooney’s death sentence to life imprisonment, Cannon cautioned in “Death, Commutation or Freedom?” (Labor Defender, July 1927): “The great movement for Sacco and Vanzetti, which now embraces millions of workers, must not allow itself to be dissolved by a similar subterfuge.” Calling a life sentence “a living death,” he warned, “The hearts of the Massachusetts executioners have not softened with kindness, and their desire to murder our comrades has not changed.... The working class must reply: Not the chair of death, but life for Sacco and Vanzetti! Not the imprisonment of death, but freedom to Sacco and Vanzetti!”
Political Battle Comes to a Boil
As the scheduled execution date of July 10 neared, the social democrats brought their anti-Communist campaign to a fever pitch, regurgitating the slander about the ILD’s fundraising and stepping up their divisive attempts to exclude CP and ILD militants. This came to a head at a mass rally of 25,000 workers in Union Square on July 7. Called by the labor-based Sacco-Vanzetti Liberation Committee (SVLC), some 30 unions joined in the call for a one-hour protest strike that day, bringing out half a million workers. The ILD and its Emergency Committee built heavily for the protest, distributing 200,000 leaflets. The rally went ahead despite the granting of a one-month reprieve by Governor Fuller.
In negotiations before the rally, the SVLC had agreed that there would be four platforms, with two allotted to the Emergency Committee. But the SP had other plans, and only two platforms were set up, both controlled by the SP. After a number of Socialist speakers addressed the crowd, a contingent of workers hoisted Ben Gold, a CP member who had led a successful Furriers strike, onto their shoulders. As they approached the podium demanding that Gold speak, SP honcho Abraham Weinberg kicked Gold in the chest, sending him reeling into the crowd. When the workers carried Gold to the other platform, SP bigwig August Claessens attacked him as well.
Claessens and Weinberg then called in the police, who charged the crowd on horseback and broke up the rally. After the attack, SP spokesmen made absolutely clear that driving out the reds took priority over carrying out a united action in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. The SP’s Samuel Friedman baldly stated, “We would rather have the meeting broken up than allow a faker like Gold speak” (Daily Worker, 8 July 1927). The New Leader (16 July 1927) declared that due to “known antagonism” and “charges of misconduct…it had been decided that the Communists were not to be permitted to co-operate in the meetings.”
The SP’s exclusionism only served to weaken the movement in the face of a furious onslaught by the bourgeois state. As the new execution date of August 10 approached, the ILD helped build a July 31 protest at Boston Common called by the Boston defense committee. As described in the New Leader (13 August 1927), after the cops broke up the SP-led rally at one end of the Common, most of the demonstrators moved to another part of the park, where the Communists held a permit. That rally, too, was dispersed by the cops. Around the country, cops broke up protest meetings with clubs, guns and tear gas.
Governor Fuller denied clemency on August 3. The next day, the ILD’s Emergency Committee issued a call for a half-day strike of New York labor on August 9. The labor tops tried their best to sabotage the strike, with the AFL leadership spurning calls from numerous unions and other workers organizations to take action while many local union officials announced in the capitalist press that they opposed the strike. Nonetheless, 50,000 turned out in Union Square, and another 50,000 struck in Philadelphia. A Chicago protest of 20,000 the same day was fired on by the cops. Fuller’s denial had finally spurred AFL head William Green to “action,” writing Fuller to ask for “executive clemency.” As the Daily Worker (10 August) commented, an appeal by Green to AFL unions “would aid tremendously in staying the hand of the executioner! But an appeal to Fuller couched in such honeyed words as Green uses only enhances that vile enemy of labor in the eyes of his class and indirectly sanctions the murders.”
As the hour of execution neared, a wave of protests took place around the world. In the U.S., police forces brutally moved against the protesters: offices were raided in New York, Detroit and San Francisco, and meetings were broken up. On the night of August 10, cars of heavily armed cops roamed through Chicago, breaking up every gathering of more than a dozen workers. Earlier that same day, U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a liberal icon, had turned down a habeas corpus petition for Sacco and Vanzetti, and shortly before midnight they were brought to the death house. A half hour before the time set for execution, Fuller announced a reprieve until midnight, August 22, to allow their attorney to argue a new motion before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
On August 16, the day of the hearing, the ILD announced plans for protests in 200 cities. The 18 August Daily Worker carried a front-page appeal by Cannon, titled “No Illusions,” that warned the “working masses not to be fooled with false hopes and false security.” He stressed:
“The great task, therefore, in the few fateful days remaining, up to the last minute of the last hour, is to put all energy, courage and militancy into the organization of mass demonstrations and protest strikes. All brakes upon this movement must be regarded as the greatest danger. All illusions which paralyze the movement must be overcome. All agents of the bosses who try to sabotage and discredit the protest and strike movement must be given their proper name.”
Another front-page appeal by Cannon the following day declared: “Put no faith in capitalist justice! Organize the protest movement on a wider scale and with a more determined spirit! Demonstrate and strike for Sacco and Vanzetti!” When the Massachusetts high court turned down another appeal on the 19th, the Emergency Committee called for a mass protest strike on August 22.
On August 20, Oliver Wendell Holmes refused to stay the execution, and a similar request was turned down by Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone on August 22. Millions took to the streets worldwide. But Sacco and Vanzetti were executed shortly after midnight.










Organized defense of Sacco and Vanzetti was initiated by Italian anarchists in Boston and joined shortly after by a number of civil libertarians. But it was the intervention of the International Red Aid and the ILD in the U.S. that played a central role in the proletarian protest movement. And at a time when executions routinely took place shortly after convictions, it was the mobilization of millions that kept Sacco and Vanzetti alive for six years.
The Communist International and the CP in the U.S. issued appeals for a worldwide campaign for Sacco and Vanzetti in the fall of 1921. The first issue of Labor Herald (March 1922), publication of the CP-allied Trade Union Educational League, called for “Labor! Act at Once to Rescue Sacco and Vanzetti!” The CP’s Daily Worker reported on each twist and turn in the case and regularly reported on protests internationally. In a front-page appeal, the CP called in the Daily Worker (27 December 1924) for “all organizations of workers in America to join with it in a united front for Sacco and Vanzetti, against their capitalist enemies and for their immediate release.”
The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a feature of the founding convention of the ILD in 1925. The ILD grew out of discussions in Moscow between James P. Cannon and ex-“Wobbly” Big Bill Haywood. Non-sectarian labor defense had been a theme of Workers (Communist) Party propaganda since its inception, but the ILD gave it flesh and blood. A former IWW member himself, Cannon had a history of experience in labor defense cases. He recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice” (quoted in Bryan Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 [2007]). Seeking to overcome the limitations of past labor defense practices, in which each case would lead to the establishment anew of an ad hoc defense committee, Cannon sought to build a labor-based defense organization for the entire workers movement.
As Cannon described in The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962), the ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of “any member of the working class movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinions.” The ILD fused the IWW tradition of class-struggle, non-sectarian defense—captured in the Wobbly slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all”—with the internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon its founding, the ILD identified 106 class-war prisoners in the U.S. and instituted the policy of financially assisting them and their families. Within a little more than a year, the ILD had branches in 146 cities with 20,000 individual members as well as 75,000 members of unions and other workers organizations collectively affiliated to the ILD.
The ILD publicized Sacco and Vanzetti’s struggle and organized rallies and political strikes to demand their freedom. The ILD struggled to prevent the workers’ militancy and class solidarity from being dissipated by the liberals, social democrats and AFL tops who preached the inherent justice of the capitalist courts. The ILD mobilized on the basis of the united front, seeking maximum unity in struggle of the various organizations standing for defense of Sacco and Vanzetti while giving a thorough airing of the political differences between the CP/ILD and others. The slogan “march separately, strike together” embodies the two aims of the united-front tactic: class unity and the political fight for a communist program.
The international protest movement wrote a historic page in the textbook of class-struggle defense. The ILD initiated 500 May Day Sacco and Vanzetti meetings in cities across the country and played a key role in organizing labor protests and strikes, from a rally of 20,000 in New York City’s Union Square in April 1927 to protests and strikes involving hundreds of thousands on the eve of the executions. The ILD understood that in order to stop the executions and win their freedom, it could rely only on mounting such a powerful wave of labor action that the capitalist rulers would refrain from carrying out their plans.
However, the anti-Communist AFL tops sabotaged the strike movement at decisive moments, abetted by the SP social democrats and others. Countless articles and books have since been written vilifying the CP and ILD—from those that acknowledge a “miscarriage” of justice in the case to others preposterously claiming that either Sacco or both men were guilty. Representative of the former is the newly published Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson, which parrots anti-Communist slanders passed on for generations, from the grotesque claim that the CP couldn’t have cared less whether Sacco and Vanzetti lived or died to the lie that the ILD pocketed the money they raised for the defense.
The Red Scare
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on 5 May 1920 amid a virulent anti-immigrant, anti-Red hysteria. When U.S. imperialism entered the First World War, the government implemented a plethora of repressive measures criminalizing antiwar activity. The 1917 Espionage Act mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the following year Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the “U.S. form of government” a felony.
The Red Scare hit full stride in 1919. That year saw the crest of a wave of labor radicalism that swept Europe in response to the carnage of WWI and under the impact of the Russian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks of the SP swelled to more than 100,000, mostly foreign-born workers, with two-thirds supporting the pro-Bolshevik left wing. The U.S. was hit by the biggest strike wave up to that time, as four million workers walked off their jobs in response to inflation induced by the war. In Seattle, a general strike brought the city to a halt for five days in February 1919, while later that year longshoremen refused to load munitions being sent to counterrevolutionaries seeking to overthrow the young Soviet workers state.
The U.S. bourgeoisie whipped up hysteria over a series of bombings attributed to anarchists. After an attempt to bomb his home in June 1919, U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer unleashed an additional wave of repression, ranting that revolution was “licking at the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundation of society.” In November the Palmer Raids were launched with the arrests of over 3,000 foreign-born radicals. Ultimately, at least 6,000 would be deported. As the world capitalist order stabilized, the 1920s in the U.S., now the world’s chief capitalist power, was a decade of rampant reaction: further anti-immigrant legislation was passed in 1921 and 1924; anti-trust laws were used to break strikes; labor militants and Communists were thrown in jail. Growing by leaps and bounds, the Ku Klux Klan marched 40,000-strong in Washington, D.C.
Sacco and Vanzetti came to symbolize those caught in the web of repression. Each had come to the United States in 1908. Within five years they had become anarchists and subscribers to the Italian-language anarchist newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (Chronicle of Subversion) of Luigi Galleani. Sacco’s name appeared frequently in the paper’s column announcing organizing activities, particularly raising money for political prisoners and jailed strikers. Sacco helped raise funds for workers and their arrested leaders during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The following year he helped organize strike pickets at the Hopedale Paper Mill and in December 1916 was one of three Massachusetts anarchists arrested for holding a meeting without a permit in solidarity with striking iron workers in Minnesota. Also in 1916, Vanzetti raised funds to support strikers at the giant Plymouth Cordage plant, at which he had previously worked.
Sacco and Vanzetti met for the first time in 1917 in Mexico, where many Galleanists had gone to avoid registering for the draft. Sacco returned to the U.S. after a few months. Vanzetti returned later, at a time of intense repression against Cronaca Sovversiva, including repeated raids on its offices and confiscation of the paper, which was banned from the mails. In February 1918, federal agents raided the Cronaca office in Lynn, Massachusetts, seizing 5,000 addresses of subscribers, including Sacco and Vanzetti. Eighty Galleanists were arrested, and Galleani himself was deported in 1919.
The Frame-Up
On 24 December 1919, an attempt was made to rob a payroll truck as it approached the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. When payroll guards fired back, the two gunmen fled to a waiting black car which drove off. Witnesses described the gunmen as “foreigners.” One who fired a shotgun was said to have a dark complexion and black moustache. On 15 April 1920, two employees of the Slater & Morrill shoe company in South Braintree, outside of Boston, were attacked by two men as they carried the factory payroll. Paymaster Frederick Parmenter and his assistant Alessandro Berardelli were shot and killed, and the bandits escaped with others in a dark-colored car.
Three weeks later, on May 5, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in a trap set by Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart, who sought to pin both robberies on anarchists. The two anarchists, along with their comrades Ricardo Orciani and Mike Boda, had sought to retrieve Boda’s car from a West Bridgewater garage where it was being repaired. As prearranged with Chief Stewart, the owner refused to turn over the car, and his wife called the cops. After the anarchists left the garage, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar to Boston.
Never told that they were robbery suspects, Sacco and Vanzetti believed that they were being arrested for their political activities. In his court testimony, Vanzetti described the questioning by Stewart: “He asked me why we were in Bridgewater, how long I know Sacco, if I am a Radical, if I am an anarchist or Communist, and he asked me if I believe in the government of the United States.”
The immediate backdrop to their arrests was the death two days before of fellow anarchist Andrea Salsedo, who had plunged 14 floors from the Department of Justice office in New York City. Arrested in February, Salsedo and Roberto Elia had been held incommunicado. In late April, Grupo Autonomo, a cell of Italian anarchists, had sent Vanzetti to New York to obtain information about the two. There he was advised by the Italian Defense Committee to dump any radical literature as more raids were anticipated. For that purpose, on May 5 they went to retrieve Boda’s car. When arrested, they did not tell the cops the purpose of their visit to the garage.
Vanzetti was first tried on frame-up charges for the failed robbery in Bridgeport in an attempt by the state to stick either him or Sacco with a criminal record before trial on the Braintree murder charges. Felix Frankfurter described the farce in The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927):
“The evidence of identification of Vanzetti in the Bridgewater case bordered on the frivolous, reaching its climax in the testimony of a little newsboy who, from behind the telegraph pole to which he had run for refuge during the shooting, had caught a glimpse of the criminal and ‘knew by the way he ran he was a foreigner.’ Vanzetti was a foreigner, so of course it was Vanzetti!”
Despite the testimony of 18 witnesses that he was in Plymouth selling eels at the time, Vanzetti was convicted of assault charges. Vanzetti and Sacco were then immediately indicted for the Braintree murders.
The murder trial began on 31 May 1921 in Dedham, Massachusetts, with a platoon of cops armed with riot guns stationed on the courthouse steps. Even a federal agent noted that “the feeling in Dedham against Italians is very strong, and will probably get stronger as the trial progresses” (quoted in William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti [1985]). Five of the jurors were chosen from a pool of personal acquaintances of a sheriff’s deputy. Jury foreman Walter Ripley was a former police chief who began every court session by ostentatiously standing and saluting the flag. When a friend told Ripley before the trial that he didn’t believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, Ripley snapped back, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!”
In his opening remarks, Judge Thayer called on the jurors to render service “with the same spirit of patriotism, courage and devotion to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas.” With Thayer’s support, prosecutor Frederick Katzmann cross-examined Sacco as to whether his collection of anarchist and socialist literature was “in the interests of the United States.” To inflame the jury, Katzmann asked repeated questions about their avoiding the draft by going to Mexico, and in his jury instructions Judge Thayer repeatedly referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as “slackers.”
Despite the utter lack of evidence, the jury returned with guilty verdicts after only five hours of deliberation. In December 1921, Judge Thayer turned down a motion for a new trial. Though conceding the weakness of the prosecution’s case, Thayer ruled that “the evidence that convicted these defendants was circumstantial and was evidence that is known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt’,” supposedly manifested by the lies Sacco and Vanzetti told when arrested in order to protect themselves and their comrades. As the 1927 ILD pamphlet Labor’s Martyrs written by Max Shachtman put it, “The consciousness of guilt attributed to Sacco and Vanzetti was nothing but a healthy consciousness of the class struggle and the methods of the enemies of the working class.”

   

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind

An Encore Presentation-In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute- With Tom Rush’s No Regrets In Mind 








I know your leavin's too long over due
For far too long I've had nothing new to show to you
Goodbye dry eyes I watched your plane fade off west of the moon
It felt so strange to walk away alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

The hours that were yours echo like empty rooms
Thoughts we used to share I now keep alone
I woke last night and spoke to you
Not thinkin' you were gone
It felt so strange to lie awake alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again

Our friends have tried to turn my nights to day
Strange faces in your place can't keep the ghosts away
Just beyond the darkest hour, just behind the dawn
It feels so strange to lead my life alone

No regrets
No tears goodbye
Don't want you back
We'd only cry again
Say goodbye again



From The Pen Of Zack James 

A few years ago, maybe more like a decade or so, in an earlier 1960s folk minute nostalgia incantation fit Sam Eaton, who will be described further below, had thought he had finally worked out in his head what that folk moment had meant in the great musical arc of his life. Had counted up, had taken up and put value on its graces, did the great subtractions on its disappointments, that lack of beat that he had been spoon fed on in his head having heard maybe in the womb the sweats of some backbeat that sounded an awful lot like a band of the devil’s bad ass angels giving battle to the heavens, and got his head around, his expression, its clasps with certain young women, some absolute folkie women met in the Harvard Squares of the heated horny sex night and loves too not always with folkie women but just the muck of growing up and taking what came his way. So he had taken a back-flip, his expression, when he was required not out of his own volition like that great prairie fire burning before in his youth about why he felt after all these years that he needed to go back to what after all was a very small part of his life now that he was reaching four score and seven, going back over the terrain of a small part of the musics that he had cultivated since early childhood.

Some of those musics from his parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II be-bop swing big band Saturday night get your dancing slippers on imposed on his tender back of brain not to be revived and revisited until many years later when he had heard some ancient Benny Goodman be-bop clarinet backing up a sultry-voiced Peggy Lee getting all in a silky sweat rage because her man like a million others was not a "do right" man but had been chasing her best friend the next best thing when he got his wanting habit on and Peggy turned ice queen when he ran out of dough after shooting craps against the dealer and decided he had been wrong to dismiss such music out of hand. Some of the music along the edges of his coming of  age from that edgy feeling he got when he heard the classic rock that just creeped into his pre-teen brain and lingered there unrequited until he found out what in that beat spoke to his primordial instincts, what caused his feverish nights of wonder, of what made him tick, of what he had missed.

Folk, the folk minute he deeply imbibed for that minute, at least the exciting part of the minute when he heard, finally heard, something that did not make him want to puke every time he turned on the radio, put his ill-gotten coins, grabbed from mother’s pocketbook laying there in wait for his greedy hands or through some con, some cheapjack con he pulled on some younger kids in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner jukebox to impress a few of the girls in town who were not hung up on Fabian or Bobby, heard something very new in his life and so different from the other musics that he had grown up with that he grabbed the sound with both hands. He thought that sweating a decade ago where he done a few small pieces to satisfy his literary sense of things and put them in a desk drawer yellow, frayed and gather dust until he passed on and somebody put the paper in a wastebasket for the rubbish men, thought he had ended those thoughts, closed out the chapter.

Recently though he did another series of short citizen-journalist sketches of scenes from that period for various folk music related blogs and social media outlets. Sam had done that series at the request of his old time friend, Bart Webber, who will also be described in more detail below, from Carver, an old working-class town about thirty miles south of Boston which at the time was the cranberry capital of the world or close to it, and close enough to Boston to have been washed by the folk minute that sprouted forth in Harvard Square and Beacon Hill in Boston.

Sam and Bart, who in their respective youths had been very close, had been corner boys together when that social category meant something, meant something about extreme teen alienation and angst combined with serious poverty, dirt poor poverty as in hand-me-down older brother clothes, as in no family car for long periods between old wreak of cars, of many surly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, many Spam suppers, all fashioned to make these young men forever talking about big break-outs, about getting something for them and theirs but also for big candy-assed dreams too all put paid to, as one would expect of sons of “boggers,” those who cared for and harvested those world famous  cranberries, but also close because that was the way that corner boys were then, “having each other’s backs” was the term they used which confused even the best of the social scientists who investigated the phenomenon when that corner boy life meant juvenile delinquency, meant some unfathomed anger, some lack of socialization, some throwback to primeval muds, to some rising of the unkempt heathens they were payed to watch out for. Meant as well worry to those in power who were trying to weld society as one piece of steel to fight the internal and external red scare Cold War fight against the faithless, fang-toothed Ruskkie reds wielding nuclear weapons from the hip.

Like a lot of high school friends the cement that bound them in high school, that alienation, that comradery, those best left unsaid larcenous moments, the “midnight creeps” in Bart’s words when somebody asked him later what had made him and the corner boys put their reputations at risk for such small gain, a fact which also played a part in that “having each other’s back” broke apart once they graduated, or rather in their case once they had sowed their wild oats in the 1960s, those wild oats at the time meaning “drugs, sex, and rock and roll” combined with drifting the hitchhike road west in what one of their number, the late Pete Markin, called the search for the great blue-pink American West night.

Sam had stayed out in the West longer than the others except Markin and Josh Breslin whom he and Markin had met on a yellow brick road merry prankster bus before he drifted back East to go to law school and pursue a professional career. Bart had returned earlier, had gotten married to his high school sweetheart and had started up and run a small successful specialty print shop in hometown Carver based on the silk-screening tee-shirt and poster craze. They would run into each other occasionally when Sam came to town but for about twenty years they had not seen each other as both were busy raising families, working and travelling in different circles. One night though when Sam had been sitting in Jimmy Jakes’ Diner over on Spring Street in Carver having a late dinner by himself after having come to town to attend the funeral of a family member Bart had walked in and they then renewed their old relationship, decided that some spark from high school still held them together if nothing else that they both had been deeply formed, still held to those old corner boy habits toward life whatever successes they had subsequently enjoyed.

Along the way to solidifying there new relationship they would alternate meetings, some in Carver, some in Boston or Cambridge where Sam lived. On a recent trip to Boston to meet Sam at the Red Hat at the bottom of Beacon Hill Bart had walked pass Joy Street which triggered memories of the time in high school when he and his date who name he could not remember but she was a cousin of Sam’s “hot” date, Melinda Loring, who they went to school with and whom Sam was crazy to impress even though Melinda was not the daughter of a “bogger” but of school teachers and so from among the town’s better element and he was constantly on eggshells that she would toss him aside once she had figured out he was just another Fast Eddie corner boy trying to get into her pants, had taken them on a cheap date to the Oar and Anchor coffeehouse which stood at the corner of Joy and Cambridge Street to hear Lenny Lane. Lenny was an up and coming folk singer whom Sam had met on one of his clandestine midnight trips to Harvard Square on the Redline subway to hang out at the Hayes-Bickford.

That "cheap" part of the cheap date thing was important since Bart and Sam were as usual from hunger on money in the days when around Carver, probably around the world, guys paid expenses on dates, girls just looked beautiful or if not beautiful glad to not be forever hanging around the midnight telephone waiting for some two-timing guy to call them up for a date, and so short of just hanging at the Hayes for free watching weirdoes, con men, whores plying their trade, drunks, winos and occasional put upon artists, poets, writes and folk-singers perfecting their acts on the cheap, for the price of a couple of cups of coffee, a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” for the performer you could get away with a lot especially when Bart was doing Sam a favor with that cousin (and worse could have gotten in trouble if Besty Binstock, his high school sweetheart. found out he was two-timing her although the two-timing involved the possibility of some off-hand sex with that cousin who was supposed to be “easy” but that in another story although come to think of it the situation could serve as another  prime example of “having each other’s back” when one of them was up against it).

Bart remembered that he had been very uncomfortable that night since he had had some feelings of guilt about two-timing (and lying to) Betsy starting out, had had trouble talking about anything in common, school, sports, the weather, with that cousin since she said she was doing Melinda a favor in order that she could go to Boston with Sam which Melinda’s mother would have balked at if she had told her they were going into Boston alone, going into Boston with a “bogger” alone. Moreover she knew nothing, cared nothing for folk music, didn’t even know what it was, said she had never heard of the thing, was fixated on Bobby Vee, dreamy guys, or something like that. What made that date worse was that Bart too then could hardly bear the sound of folk music, said repeatedly that the stuff was all dreary and involved weird stuff like murder and mayhem done on the banks of rivers, in back alleys, on darkened highways just because some woman would not come across, Jesus, strangely thwarted love reminding him of Sam’s forlorn quest for Melinda which seemed like some princess and pauper never the twain shall meet outcome, or hick stuff about home sweet home down in some shanty town in some desolate cabin without lights or water which sounded worse than Boggertown, singing high holy Jehovah stuff that made him wince, and of the hills and hollows in some misbegotten mountains made his teeth grind. So not a good mix, although it did turn out that the cousin was “easy,” did think he was dreamy enough to have sex with (with their clothes mostly on which was how more than one quicky one night stand wound up down by the boathouse near the Charles River after they had split from Sam and Melinda after the coffeehouse closed and that helped but had been the result of no help from the folk music they half-listened to but more some dope that she had in her pocketbook after she had passed a joint around to get things going.            

After telling Sam about his recollections of Joy Street and that cousin, whose name was Judy Dennison Sam told him and who Sam had gone out with and agreed was a little sex kitten once she was stoned, Bart started asking some questions about folk music. Sam said he was not finished with that Judy story, told Bart that fling was after the thing with Melinda had passed due not to class distinctions but to that hard fact that she was saving “it” for marriage, and had been very glad that he had that run around with Judy and was not sorry he did. Bart started in again and asked Sam a million questions about various folk-singers and what had happened to them, were they still playing, still alive since Sam although he did not have the same keen interest of his youthful folk minute still kept small tabs on the scene, the now small scene through his long-time companion, Laura Perkins whom he met one night at the Café Nana several years before when Tom Tremble was playing there after Sam had not heard him in about forty years.

The reason for Bart’s interest given that above he had said that the genre made his teeth grind was that after that night with Judy Bart did go on other double dates with Sam and Melinda, and later Suzanne when she was Sam’s next flame and a real folkie, to folk places and while he still would grind his teeth at some of the stuff he did develop more tolerance for the genre, especially if the date Sam set up was a real foxy folkie girl (thinking on it now he couldn’t believe how unfaithful he had been to Betsy in those days but she too was saving “it” for marriage and some of those young women were very willing and had apartment or dorm rooms too).

The upshot of all of Bart’s questions was that Sam found that he was not really except for Tom Tremble who had lost his sweet baby James voice, forgot lyrics and had “mailed it in” that night he had met Laura and was cold “stonewalled” by the audience but possibly motivated by that old folkie feeling, or maybe just feeling sorry for a guy who had a big local following back in the day when the “basket” went around everybody put some dough in, Sam and Laura included, and a couple of other guys up on what had happened to the old-time folkies since for years he had merely listened on radio station WCAS and when that station went under WUMB out of U/Mass-Boston or listened to records, tapes or CDs. (Sam got big points from Laura that first night when he panned Tom, who Laura had never heard before being enough younger not to have been bitten by the folk minute craze and she agreed that Tom had “mailed it in”.) Since Sam was not all that familiar with what had happened to most of them he thereafter did some research, asked Laura some questions to lead the way and wound up writings that series of sketches. One series entitled Not Bob Dylan about the fate of prominent male folk-singers was a direct result of the Sam and Bart conversation. Here’s what he had to say about Tom Rush who back in the day he knew best from hanging around the old Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street:     

“…Other than enigmatic Bob Dylan who is the iconic never-ending tour male performer most people would still associate with that folk minute period they would draw a blank on a list of others who also were aspiring to make names for themselves in the folk milieu. I am not talking about guys like Lenny Lane who had one hit and then went back to graduate school in biology when he couldn’t get another contract, when his well ran dry, or like Tom Tremble who had a big local following around the old Club Nana when it was on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge not where it is now on Brattle Street but who did mainly covers and just never broke out or Mike Weddle who had good looks, a good stage presence, had the young women going crazy but who just walked away one day when some good looking woman from Radcliffe came hither and he “sold out” to her father’s stockbroking business.

I’m talking about people like Tom Rush from New Hampshire who lit up the firmament around Cambridge via the Harvard campus folk music station, Dave Von Ronk the cantankerous folk historian and musician who knew more about what happened in the early, early days in the Village at the point where “beat” poetry was becoming passe and folk was moving in to fill in the gap, Phil Ochs who had probably the deepest political sensibilities of the lot and wrote some of the stronger narrative folk protest songs, Richard Farina who represented that “live fast” edge that we were bequeathed by the “beats” and who tumbled down the hill on a motorcycle, and Jesse Collin Young who probably wrote along with Eric Andersen and Jesse Winchester the most pre-flower child lyrics mid-1960s hippie explosion before folk got amplified of the bunch.

My friend Bart had just seen a fragile seeming, froggy-voiced Bob Dylan in one of stages of his apparently never-ending concerts tours up in Maine and had been shaken by the sight and had wondered about the fate of other such folk performers. That request turned into a series of reviews of male folk-singers entitled Not Bob Dylan (and after that, also at Bart’s request, a series entitled Not Joan Baez based on some of the same premises except on the distaff side (nice word, right, you know golden-voiced Judy Collins and her sweet songs of lost, Carolyn Hester and her elegant rendition of Walt Whitman’s Oh Captain, My Captain, Joan’s sister Mimi Farina forever linked with Richard and sorrows, and Malvina Reynolds who could write a song on the wing, fast okay, and based as well on the mass media having back then declared that pair the “king and queen” of the burgeoning folk music minute scene).

That first series (as had the second) had asked two central questions-why did those male folk singers not challenge Dylan who as I noted the media of the day had crowned king of the folk minute for supremacy in the smoky coffeehouse night (then, now the few remaining are mercifully smoke-free although then I smoked as heavily as any guy who though such behavior was, ah, manly and a way to seen “cool” to the young women, why else would we have done such a crazy to the health thing if not to impress some certain she)  and, if they had not passed on and unfortunately a number have a few more since that series as well most notably Phil Ochs of suicide early, Dave Von Ronk of hubris and Jesse Winchester of his battle lost over time had come, were they still working the smoke-free church basement, homemade cookies and coffee circuit that constitutes the remnant of that folk minute even in the old hotbeds like Cambridge and Boston. (What I call the U/U circuit since while other church venues are part of the mix you can usually bet safely that if an event is scheduled it will be at a U/U church which is worthy of a little sketch of its own sometime in order to trace the folk minute after the fanfare had died down and as a tribute to those big-hearted souls at radio stations like WCAS and WUMB and in places like Club Passim whose efforts have kept the thing going in order to try to pass it on to the younger generations now that demographics are catching up with the folkies from the 1960s heyday). Moreover, were they still singing and song-writing, that pairing of singer and writer having been becoming more prevalent, especially in the folk milieu in the wake of Bob Dylan’s word explosions back then. The days when the ground was shifting under the Tin Pan Alley Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ Jerome Kern kingdom.   

Here is the general format I used in that series for asking and answering those two questions which still apply today if one is hell-bent on figuring out the characters who rose and fell during that time: 

“If I were to ask someone, in the year 2005 as I have done periodically both before and after, to name a male folk singer from the 1960s I would assume that if I were to get any answer to that question that the name would be Bob Dylan. That “getting any answer” prompted by the increasing non-recognition of the folk genre by anybody under say forty, except those few kids who somehow “found” their parents’ stash of Vanguard records (for example, there were other folk labels including, importantly, Columbia Records which pushed the likes of Dylan and John Hammond forward) just as some in an earlier Pete Seeger/Weavers/Leadbelly/ Josh White/Woody Guthrie records in our parents’ stashes. Today’s kids mainly influenced by hip-hop, techno-music and just straight popular music.

And that Dylan pick would be a good and appropriate choice. One can endlessly dispute whether or not Dylan was (or wanted to be since he clearly had tired of the role, or seemed to by about 1966 when he for all intents and purposes “retired” for a while prompted by a serious motorcycle accident and other incidents) the voice of the Generation of ’68 (so named for the fateful events of that watershed year, especially the Democratic Convention in America in the summer of that year when the old-guard pulled the hammer down and in Paris where the smell of revolution was palpably in the air for the first time since about World War II, when those, including me, who tried to “turn the world upside down” to make it more livable began to feel that the movement was reaching some ebb tide) but in terms of longevity and productivity, the never-ending touring until this day and releasing of X amount of bootleg recordings, the copyrighting of every variation of every song, including traditional songs, he ever covered and the squelching of the part of the work that he has control over on YouTube he fits the bill as a known quality. However, there were a slew of other male folk singers who tried to find their niche in the folk milieu and who, like Dylan, today continue to produce work and to perform. The artist under review, Tom Rush, is one such singer/songwriter.”

“The following is a question that I have been posing in reviewing the work of a number of male folk singers from the 1960s and it is certainly an appropriate question to ask of Tom Rush as well. Did they aspire to be the “king” of the genre? I do not know if Tom Rush, like his contemporary Bob Dylan, started out wanting to be the king of the hill among male folk singers but he certainly had some things going for him. A decent acoustic guitar but a very interesting (and strong baritone) voice to fit the lyrics of love, hope, and longing that he was singing about at the time, particularly the No Regrets/Rockport Sunday combination which along with Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm and Joshua Gone Barbados were staples early on. During much of this period along with his own songs he was covering other artists, particularly Joni Mitchell and her Urge For Going and The Circle Game, so it is not clear to me that he had that same Dylan drive by let’s say 1968.

I just mentioned that he covered Joni Mitchell in this period. A very nice version of Urge For Going that captures the wintry, got to get out of here, imaginary that Joni was trying to evoke about things back in her Canadian homeland. And the timelessness and great lyrical sense of his No Regrets, as the Generation of ’68 sees another generational cycle starting, as is apparent now if it was not then. The covers of fellow Cambridge folk scene fixture Eric Von Schmidt on Joshua Gone Barbados and Galveston Flood are well done. As is the cover of Bukka White’s Panama Limited (although you really have to see or hear old Bukka flailing away on his old beat up National guitar to get the real thing on YouTube).”

Whether Tom Rush had the fire back then is a mute question now although in watching the documentary, No Regrets, in which he tells us about his life from childhood to the very recent past (2014) at some point he did lose the flaming “burn down the building fire,” just got tired of the road like many, many other performers and became a top-notch record producer, a “gentleman farmer,” and returned to the stage occasionally, most dramatically with his annual show Tom Rush-The Club 47 Tradition Continues held at Symphony Hall in Boston each winter. And in this documentary appropriately done under the sign of “no regrets” which tells Tom’s take on much that happened then he takes a turn, an important oral tradition turn, as folk historian. 

He takes us, even those of us who were in the whirl of some of it back then to those key moments when we were looking for something rooted, something that would make us pop in the red scare Cold War night of the early 1960s. Needless to say the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge gets plenty of attention as does his own fitful start in getting his material recorded, or rather fitful starts, mainly walking around to every possible venue in town to get backing for record production the key to getting heard by a wider audience via the radio and to become part of the increasing number of folk music-oriented programs, the continuing struggle to this day from what he had to say once you are not a gold-studded fixture.

“Other coffeehouses and other performers of the time, especially Eric Von Schmidt, another performer with a ton of talent and song-writing ability who had been on the scene very, very early on who eventually decided that his artistic career took first place, get a nod of recognition.  As does the role of key radio folk DJ Dick Summer in show-casing new work (and the folk show, picked up accidently one Sunday night when I was frustrated with the so-called rock and roll on the local AM rock station and flipped the dial of my transistor radio and heard a different sound, the sound of Dave Von Ronk, where I started to pick up my life-long folk “habit”).

So if you want to remember those days when you sought refuse in the coffeehouses and church basements, sought a “cheap” date night (for the price of a couple of cups of coffee sipped slowly in front of you and your date, a shared pastry and maybe a few bucks admission or tossed into the passed-around “basket” you got away easy and if she liked the sound too, who knows what else) or, ouch, want to know why your parents are still playing Joshua’s Gone Barbados on the record player as you go out the door Saturday night to your own adventures watch this documentary and find out what happened to one Not Bob Dylan when the folk world went under.   


   

In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread

In Honor Of The 98th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread    

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership, if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they came up short, the leadership so-called came up short. They didn’t have the guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what to do next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded, nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call, than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint at the Black Swan after a hard day of unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the game.    

Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it involved the Chartists of blessed memory.

Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint or two with the boys at his beloved Black Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners, the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And hence the strike.

Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone of father’s blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward (and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell them out.

Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out. Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…    

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance-Support The General Strike On International Women's Day-March 8th

A Mea Culpa… Of Sorts-Down With The Trump Government!- Build The Resistance-Support The General Strike On International Women's Day-March 8th     

A while back, last year, during the American presidential election campaign of 2016 at a point where the two major contenders, now President Donald Trump and now failed contender Hillary Clinton had been nominated by their respective organizations, I was under constant and hard-core pressure from personal friends and political associates to let up on my opposition of support to the candidate of either of the major parties. I had planned, and had made my stance clear early on to one and all, that I planned to cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate once socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign went down in disgraceful flames (disgraceful because of the horrible way he was treated by the Democratic Party establishment which went out of its way, way out of its way, to favor weak-kneed leading candidate Clinton). On November 8th I did just that here in Massachusetts whose Electoral College votes were overwhelming won by Mrs. Clinton. 

The gist of my opposition to the two major party candidates was that I could discern no qualitative difference between war-hawk Clinton and war-hawk Trump, the issues around war and peace being the central reason that I have steadfastly opposed both major parties since my military service during the Vietnam War. A war whose long duration like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were started by one party’s president (Johnson in the case of Vietnam and avidly pursued by another before the fall of Saigon, Nixon/Ford). While I was not, and have not been, agnostic on my differences on other social and personal liberty issues that war and peace issue has always anchored my politic perspectives since the old days. And those personal friends and political associates have known that as well. Yet as the general election campaign progressed, if that is the right word for the down and dirty slug-fest between both candidates which nobody could rightly accept as reasonable political discourse, they continued their drumbeat. Something in that hard sell twisted me to become more adamant in my opposition-in my seeing that there was as the late great American novelist Gore Vidal no stranger to mainstream politics only “one ruling party in America with two branches-Democratic and Republican.”

I wrote a number of blogs and other commentaries as a result all along this line which not only included my opposition to the two parties but my fervent desire to get on with the real business of people with my brand of politics-organize against the endless wars and home and abroad. Here is a sample of my thinking at the time:

“Now several years ago, maybe late 2007, early 2008 when one Barack Obama made his presence felt on the American national political stage and sought to slay the dragon, to slay what we would come to find out was the dragon lady but who just then was in the first blush of her endless drive to win the Oval Office I noted that the Hillary-Obama race for the Democratic Party nomination looked like a breath of fresh air and although I would not have voted for either for love nor money I decided to try to chronicle the beginning storms of the campaign that year. (In the interest of full disclosure I voted for Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party that year a natural choice as a black and woman with a political past which she need not be ashamed of and who had at least a passing acquaintance with the truth-a big plus that year after all the bullshit was cleared away)   

“Early on though somewhere around the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary (which Hillary had won late by a hair and kept her campaign alive) in 2008 I gave up the enterprise as so much blather and as so much hot air and realized that the “promise” of 2007 had turned to ashes as neither candidate could give the approximate location of the truth in a time when all hell was breaking loose in the economy and working people, the working poor were being beaten down mercilessly by what would be called the Great Recession of 2008. And as we witness in 2016 working people, hard-working working people of all ethnic, racial and gender identifications have been taking it on the chin lo these many years. Taken it on the chin so they have in some cases fervently listened as one Dump the Trump (sorry I could not resist that slam, not the worst thing that will ever happen to that ill-bred bastard) lulls them to sleep with his balderdash, with his contempt for those who have so fervently supported him despite any good sense. We will find no truth coming from anywhere in that precinct. Worse this year milady Hillary has lost all her slight girlish charms from 2008 and is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of next week’s coronation as war-monger-in-chief.      

“Here is the hard truth, the truth neither billionaire Donald nor Wall Street Hillary have a clue about. For working people, for the hard-working people of this country who have been put up against the wall and blindfolded for a while now there is no salvation this side of capitalism, this side of that  defunct system that has had its day and had long ago lost any progressive content that it had in its golden age. “Speak the truth no matter how bitter” and that is the bitter truth as we will, once again learn over the next dreary four years. Yeah, Leon Trotsky, one of his books the place where I first read the truth of that “bitter” phrase, would have said it himself if he was not beyond the pale. You heard it here-think about it okay.”    

I was almost as surprised as everybody else come the morning of November 9th to find one Donald “Dump The Trump” (no apology for that now) had been an upset winner of the 2016 American election. Although maybe not as surprised as most as I kept hearing a small drumbeat from working class guys and gals too whom I would meet in my work, or somebody would tell me about that there something underground in the political world, something down at the base was happening for Trump. Hell I even heard stuff when I played golf with guys on public golf courses (not Donald’s private ones) in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire that Trump was their guy for jobs, for keeping black and Latinos down, keeping the fucking immigrants out and making America an armed fortress. 

Then as the transition began its awful cycle on the turnover Trump daily almost shocked me, and everybody else like me, with his choices for who would aid him in his government. This is where the “mea culpa” of the title of this piece comes in. I now am ready to concede that there is some qualitative difference between a Trump government and what Hillary’s would have looked like- if only because she would leave us alone. I still stand by my vote of “no confidence” and am still glad, very glad, that I cast my protest vote for Jill Stein but we are in a mess for the next four years no question. Practically speaking though I was down in Washington on January 20th to express my opposition, no, my resistance to the Trump government on day one.


Down with the Trump government!-Build The Resistance