This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The Founding Myths From Mother Africa And The African-American Diaspora-Professor Henry Louis Gates And Maria Tatar Hold Forth-“The Annotated African-American Folktales”
By Jeffery Jones
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[I am fairly new to working on this site although I got the full treatment concerning the internal dispute alluded to above about the short-comings which led to the demise of Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin) long time administrator. I will after some further reflection put my “two cents” worth in but for now the only comment I have is about the dearth of black writers here and subject matter except the heroic civil rights struggles from the 1960s. Strange, or maybe not so strange since Jackson (and the real Markin) had cut their eyeteeth supporting those struggles in the 1960s both in Boston and by heading down south. Jeff Jones]
I think it was Joseph Campbell a man who spent something like a lifetime studying world-wide foundation myths, and if not him then somebody like him doing the same kind of research, who noted that all societies across all the civilizations since humankind started wondering, wondering about this place they found themselves and why have created foundation myths to keep them going in good times and bad. Added to that though were later myths, first passed down orally in cultures which did not have written languages or as the case here when African slaves were denied under penalty of death reading and writing skills, created to explain why things turned out as they did. How to survive in the dreaded diaspora when stolen away from Mother Africa where strangely, and to some incomprehensible if not downright scary, all subsequent civilizations emerged.
All of this to point to a recent gigantic anthology of African-American both in Africa where a lot of the material originated and then got transmuted by the slavery experience mainly in the American south edited by Professor Henry Louis Gates out of Harvard University and folklorist Maria Tatar where they go root and branch to the cross-transmission from the old countries via the horrible Middle Passage to the plantation death knell. Along the way they have done a great service to line up, and not shabbily either, these myth-drawn folktales right alongside more universal myth tales from Christianity, from Greek days, and from ancient India and China times. Sustaining people hungry for some hope of salvation if not in this life then as Gates mentioned “fly away time.”
To get a full hearing, an earful of not just what Professor Gates and Ms. Tatar have to say but how listeners responded to those foundational tales in their own lives when prompted by the show’s ideas I have linked up the NPR On Point show where the pair held forth:
Searching For The American Songbook - In The Time Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With The Joy Street Coffeehouse In Mind-Introduction
Introduction
Sketches by Jack Callahan
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
[As many readers may know now and if not then the above note should inform you in general there had been a serious shake-up on this blog site (which is linked in with several related although independent other websites that have cross-posted relevant materials) with the untimely, untimely by my lights, ouster of long time administrator Allan Jackson (who as is not unusual in cyberspace for all kinds of reasons simple or nefarious used the moniker Peter Paul Markin, a name which has much meaning to me but which will be explained soon by either Zack James, formerly the cultural czar here, or the new administrator Greg Green so I will move on). Although his current whereabouts are unknown to me since what some of us call a “purge” which will also be gone into by others at some later point Allan and I go back a long way to our high school days in seriously working poor North Adamsville (he said we met in junior high school but I don’t remember him that far back). We have been permitted, encouraged in fact to air our perspectives about what has gone on over the past several months (years really but things have come to a head in this period).
I always got along with Allan even in high school when he stood deep in the shadow of the real Peter Paul Markin whose name he appropriated for his on-site moniker and whom he feared above all for being both intellectually smarter than him and more larcenous. I don’t want to tell tales out of school but will say that I stood by Allan in the recent onslaught against his management mostly by the younger writers who dubbed themselves somewhat dramatically as the “Young Turks” like nobody ever used that designation before and am sorry to see him go.
On one point though and this can be taken as either a new introductory point or as a second introduction where Allan and I locked was over this project that I started several years ago to look back to the folk minute of the early 1960s as my vivid part of discovering the American songbook that I was interested in. I wished to continue well beyond what I had started and he had posted but he put a stop to the series when he told me that he needed me more for political work and so scrubbed what I was doing.
As it turned out the real story behind Allan’s denial of my project was that he was putting together his own series in the days when he used to write material for the site and solely manage as he has done the past couple of years entitled “Not Bob Dylan” (and later another series “Not Joan Baez”) and wanted no competition for his folk minute work. When I asked Greg Green, by the way no fan of folk music which he said made him want to throw up since he heard it constantly in his growing up home from his old folkie parents who had it on the recorder player or tape deck all day, if I could revive the series he gave me the green light. So I have an initial very good opinion of him and the new direction. Maybe like the younger writers kept harping on Allan’s time had come but I still miss the old bastard wherever he is these days. Jack Callahan]
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(Praise be work-saving computers below is the original introduction I had written before I was dragooned into other work. It reads well enough to start with only a couple of points needing updating.)
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I recently completed the second leg of this American Songbook series, sketches from the time of my coming of age classic rock and roll from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, record player, television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. This series was not intended to be placed in any chronological order so the first leg dealt, and I think naturally so given the way my musical interests got formed, with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s.
This third leg is centered on the music of the folk minute that captured a segment of my generation of ’68 as it came of social and political age in the early 1960s. It is easy now to forget in the buzz of the moment that this segment was fairly small to begin with cluttered up people who stayed with it for a few years and then like the rest of us got back to the new rock and roll driving by the British “invasion” and the West Coast “acid” rock that was taking center stage by the time of the summers of love in the mid to late 1960s. Today when talking to people, to those who slogged through the 1960s with me, those who will become very animated about Deadhead experiences, Golden Gate Park Airplane goings on, their merry-prankster-like “on the bus” experiences, even death Altamont when I ask about the influence of folk they will look at me with pained blank expressions or cite ritualistically Bob Dylan confirms how small and where that folk minute was concentrated.
Early on though some of us felt a fresh breeze was coming through the land, were desperately hoping that it was not some ephemeral rising and then back to business as usual, although we certainly being young did not dwell on that ebb tide idea since like with our physical selves we thought our ideas once implanted would last forever. Silly kids. Maybe it was the change in political atmosphere pulling us forward as men (and it was mostly men then) born in the 20th century were beginning to take over from the old fogies (our father/uncle/godfather Ike, General Ike, Ike Eisenhower and his ilk) and we would fall in behind them. Maybe it was the swirl just then being generated questioning lots of old things like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) red scare investigations, like Mister James Crow in the South and the ghettos of the North, like why did we need all those nuclear bombs that were going to do nothing but turn us into flames. Maybe it was that last faint echo of the “beats” with their poetry, their be-bop jazz, their nightly escapade trying to hold onto that sullen look of Marlon Brando, that brooding look of James Dean, that cool pitter-patter of Alan Ginsberg against the night-stealers, and Preacher Jack, Jean-bon Kerouac, pushing us on to roads not taken. Heady stuff, no question.
Maybe too since it involved cultural expression (although we would be clueless to put what we felt in those terms, save that for the folk music academics complete with endnotes and footnotes in bigh dissertations to warm their night-fires after the fire had burned out) and our cultural expression centered around jukeboxes and transistor radios it was that we had, some of us, tired of the Fabians, the various Bobbys (Vee, Darin, Rydell, etc.), the various incarnations of Sandra Dee, Leslie Gore, Brenda Lee, etc., wanted a new sound, or as it turned out a flowing back to the roots music, to the time and place when people had to make their own music or go without (it gets a little mixed up once the radio widened the horizons of who could hear what and when). So, yes, we wanted to know what on those lonely Saturday nights gave our forebears pause, let them sit back maybe listen to some hot-blooded black man with a primitive guitar playing the blues (a step up from the kids’ stuff nailed one-eyed string hung from the front porch but nowhere near that coveted National Steel beauty they eyed in the pawnshop in town just waiting to rise up singing), some jazz, first old time religion stuff and then the flicker of that last fade be-bop with that solid sexy sax searching for the high white note, mountain music, all fiddles and mandolins, playing against that late night wind coming down the hills and hollows reaching that red barn just in time to finish up that last chance slow moaning waltz. Yes, and Tex-Mex, Western swing, Child ballads and the “new wave” protest sound that connected our new breeze political understandings with our musical interests.
The folk music minute was for me, and not just me, thus something of a branching off for a while from rock and roll in its doldrums since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a small musical break-out from the music that we came of chronological age to unlike the big break-out that rock and roll represented from the music that was wafting through many of our parents’ houses in the early 1950s.
In preparing this part of the series I have been grabbing a lot of anecdotal remarks from some old-time folkies. People I have run into over the past several years in the threadbare coffeehouses and cafes I frequent around New England. You know, and I am being completely unfair here, those guys with the long beards and unkempt balding hair hidden by a knotted ponytail, flannel, clean or unclean, shirt regardless of weather and blue jeans, unclean, red bandana in the back pocket, definitely unclean and harmonica at the ready going on and on about how counter-revolutionary Bob Dylan was to hook up the treasured acoustic guitar to an amp in about 1965 and those gals who are still wearing those shapeless flour bag dresses, letting their hair grow grey or white, wearing the formerly “hip” now mandatory granny glasses carrying some autoharp or other such old-time instrument like they just got out of some hills and hollows of Appalachia (in reality with nice Ivy League resumes after their names and affirmative action-driven jobs-that to the good) arguing about how any folk song created after about 1922 is not really a folk song both sexes obviously having not gotten the word that, ah, times have changed. In short those folkies who are still alive and kicking and still interested in talking about that minute (and continuing to be unfair not much else except cornball archaic references that are supposed to produce “in the know” laughs but which were corny even back then when they held forth in the old Harvard Square Hayes-Bickford of blessed memory).
For those not in the know, or who have not seen the previously described denizens of the folk night in your travels, folk music is still alive and well (for the moment, the demographic trends are more frightening as the dying embers flicker) in little enclaves throughout the country mainly in New England but in other outposts as well. Those enclaves and outposts are places where some old “hippies,” “folkies,” communalists, went after the big splash 1960s counter-cultural explosion ebbed in about 1971 (that is my signpost for the ebb, the time when we tried to “turn the world upside down” in Washington over the Vietnam war by attempting to shut the government down and got nothing but teargas, police sticks and thousands of arrests for our troubles, others have earlier and later dates and events which seemed decisive but all that I have spoken to, or have an opinion on, agree by the mid-1970s that wave had tepidly limped to shore). Places like Saratoga, New York, Big Sur and Joshua Tree out in California, Taos, Eugene, Boise, Butte, Boulder, as well as the traditional Village, Harvard Square, North Beach/Berkeley haunts of memory.
They survive, almost all of them, through the support of a dwindling number of aficionados and a few younger kids, kids who if not the biological off-spring of the folk minute then very much like those youthful by-gone figures and who somehow got into their parents’ stash of folk albums and liked what they heard against the current trends in music, in once a month socially-conscious Universalist-Unitarian church basement coffeehouses, school activity rooms booked for the occasional night, small local restaurants and bars sponsoring “open mics” on off-nights to draw a little bigger crowd, and probably plenty of other small ad hoc venues where there are enough people with guitars, mandos, harmonicas, and what have you to while away an evening.
There seems to be a consensus among my anecdotal sources that their first encounter with folk music back then, other than when they were in the junior high school music class where one would get a quick checkerboard of various types of music and maybe hear This Land Is Your Land in passing, was through the radio. That junior high school unconscious introduction of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land had been my own introduction in Mr. Dasher’s seventh grade Music Appreciation class where he inundated us with all kinds of songs from everywhere like the Red River Valley and the Mexican Hat Dance. For his efforts he was innocently nicknamed by us “Dasher The Flasher,” a moniker that would not serve him well in these child-worried times by some nervous parents.
A few folkies that I had run into back then, fewer now, including a couple of girlfriends back then as I entered college picked up, like some of those few vagrant younger aficionados hanging around the clubs, the music via their parents’ record collections although that was rare and back then and usually meant that the parents had been some kind of progressives back in the 1930s and 1940s when Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Pete Seeger and others lit up the leftist firmament in places like wide-open New York City. Today the parents, my generation parents would have been in the civil rights movement, SDS or maybe the anti-war movement although the latter was drifting more by then to acid rock as the foundational music.
That radio by the way would be the transistor radio usually purchased at now faded Radio Shack by frustrated parents, frustrated that we were playing that loud unwholesome rock and roll music on the family record player causing them to miss their slumbers, and was attached to all our youthful ears placed there away from prying parents and somehow if you were near an urban area you might once you tired of the “bubble gum” music on the local rock station flip the dial and get lucky some late night, usually Sunday and find an errant station playing such fare.
That actually had been my experience one night, one Sunday night in the winter of 1962 (month and date lost in the fog of memory) when I was just flipping the dial and came upon the voice of a guy, an old pappy guy I assumed, singing a strange song in a gravelly voice which intrigued me because that was neither a rock song nor a rock voice. The format of the show as I soon figured out as I continued to listen that night was that the DJ would, unlike the rock stations which played one song and then interrupted the flow with at least one commercial for records, drive-in movies, drive-in theaters, maybe suntan lotion, you know stuff kids with disposable income would take a run at, played several songs so I did not find out who the singer was until a few songs later.
The song was identified by the DJ as the old classic mountain tune “discovered” by Cecil Sharpe in the hills and hollows of Appalachian Kentucky in 1916 Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, the singer the late Dave Von Ronk who, as I found out later doubled up as a very informative folk historian and who now has a spot in the Village in New York where he hailed from named after him, the station WBZ in Boston not a station that under ordinary circumstances youth would have tuned into then since it was mainly a news and talk show station, the DJ Dick Summer a very central figure in spreading the folk gospel and very influential in promoting local folk artists like Tom Rush on the way up as noted in a documentary, No Regrets, about Rush’s fifty plus years in folk music. I was hooked.
That program also played country blues stuff, stuff that folk aficionados had discovered down south as part of our generation took seriously the search for roots, music, cultural, family, and which would lead to the “re-discovery” of the likes of Son House (and that flailing National Steel guitar that you can see him flail like crazy on Death Letter Blues on YouTube these days), Bukka White (all sweaty, all feisty, playing the hell out of his National face up with tunes like Aberdeen, Mississippi Woman and Panama, Limited) Skip James (all cool hand Luke singing that serious falsetto on I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man which got me in trouble more than one time with women including recently), and Mississippi John Hurt (strumming seemingly casually his moaning Creole Belle and his slyly salacious Candy Man).
I eventually really learned about the blues, the country stuff from down south which coincides with roots and folk music and the more muscular (plugged in electrically) Chicago city type blues that connects with the beginnings of rock and roll, which will be the next and final leg of this series, straight up though from occasionally getting late, late at night, usually on a Sunday for some reason, Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour from WXKE in Chicago but that is another story. Somebody once explained to me the science behind what happened on certain nights with the distant radio waves that showed up mostly because then their frequencies overrode closer signals. What I know for sure that it was not was the power of that dinky transistor radio with its two nothing batteries. So for a while I took those faraway receptions as a sign of the new dispensation coming to free us, of the new breeze coming through the land in our search for an earthly Eden. Praise be.
If the first exposure for many of us was through the radio, especially those a bit removed from urban areas, the thing that made most of us “folkies” of whatever duration was the discovery and appeal of the coffeehouses. According to legend (Dave Von Ronk legend anyway) in the mid to late 1950s such places were hang-outs for “beat” poets when that Kerouac/Ginsberg/Cassady flame was all the rage and folkies like him just starting out were reduced to clearing the house between shows with a couple of crowd-fleeing folk songs, or else. But by the early 1960s the dime had turned and it was all about folk music. Hence the appeal for me of Harvard Square not all that far away, certainly close enough to get to on weekends in high school. With Club 47, the “flagship,” obviously, Café Nana, the Algiers, Café Blanco, and a number of other coffeehouses all located within a few blocks of each other in the Square there were plenty of spots which drew us in to that location.
(That Club 47, subject a few years ago to its own documentary, was the spawning grounds and the testing ground for many folk artists like Dylan, Baez, Rush, Von Schmidt, Paxton, and Eric Saint Jean an up and coming performer who got laid low early taking too much sex and too much cocaine before it was the drug of choice among the heads, to perform and perfect their acts before friendly appreciative audiences that would not heckle them. The Club which has had something of a continuous history now operates as a non-profit as the Club Passim in a different location in Harvard Square near the Harvard Co-Op Bookstore.)
The beauty of such places for poor boy high school students like me or lowly cash-poor college students interested in the folk scene was that for the price of a coffee, usually expresso so you could get your high a little off the extra caffeine but more importantly you could take tiny sips and make it last which you wanted to do so you could hold your spot at the table in some places, and maybe some off-hand pastry (usually a brownie or wedge of cake not always fresh but who cared as long as the coffee, like I said, usually expresso to get a high caffeine kick, was fresh since it was made by the cup from elaborate copper-plated coffeemakers from Europe or someplace like that), you could sit there for a few hours and listen to up and coming folk artists working out the kinks in their routines. Add in a second coffee unless the girl had agreed to an uncool “dutch treat,” not only uncool but you were also unlikely to get to first base especially if she had to pay her bus fare too, share the brownie or stale cake and you had a cheap date.
Occasionally there was a few dollar cover for “established” acts like Joan Baez, Tom Rush, the Clancy Brothers, permanent Square fixture Eric Von Schmidt, but mainly the performers worked for the “basket,” the passing around of the hat for the cheap date guys and others “from hunger” to show appreciation, hoping against hope to get twenty buck to cover rent and avoid starving until the next gig. Of course since the audience was low-budget high school students, college kids and starving artists that goal was sometimes a close thing and accordingly the landlord would have to be pieced off with a few bucks until times got better.
Yeah, those were “from hunger” days at the beginning of their careers for most performers as that talent “natural selection process” and the decision at some point to keep pushing on or to go back to whatever else you were trained to do kept creeping foremost in their thoughts when the folk minute faded and there was not enough work to keep body and soul alive whatever the ardent art spirit. Some of them faced that later too, some who went back to that whatever they were trained to do and then got the folk music gig itch again, guys like Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin from the Kweskin Jug Band, David Bromberg, gals like Carolyn Hester, Minnie Smith after somebody said “hey, whatever happened to….” and they meant them. That natural selection thing was weird, strange for those who had to make decisions in those days (now too) about talent and drive over the long haul. You would see some guy like Paul Jefferson a great guitar player who did lots of Woody Guthrie covers and had a local following in the Café Nana working hard or Cherry LaPlante who had a ton of talent and a voice like floating clouds and had steady work in the Café Blanc fold up their tents once they hit a certain threshold, a few years working the local clubs and no better offers coming along and so they bailed out. They and those like them just did not have the talent or drive or chutzpah to keep going and so they faded. You still see Paul once in a while at “open mics” around Boston performing for much smaller crowds than in the old days and the last I heard of Cherry was that she had drifted west and was getting a few bookings in the cafes out in Oregon. But in the day it was all good, all good to hear and see as they tried to perfect their acts.
For alienated and angst-ridden youth like me (and probably half my generation if the information I have received some fifty years later stands up and does not represent some retro-fitted analysis filtered through a million sociological and psychological studies), although I am not sure I would have used those words for my feelings in those days the coffeehouse scene was the great escape from household independence struggles of which I was always, always hear me, at the short end of the stick.
Probably the best way to put the matter is to say that when I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, over a non-stop weekend I was so engrossed in the page after page happenings, I immediately identified with Holden Caulfield whatever differences of time, place and class stood between us and when asked my opinion of him by my English teacher I made her and the whole class laugh when I said “I am Holden Caulfield”), or when I saw The Wild One at the retro-Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville if one could call it that term I instinctively sided with poor boy Johnny and his “wanting habits” despite my painfully negative experiences with outlaw motorcycle guys headed by local hard boy Red Riley who hung out at Harry’s Variety Store as they ran through. If I had been able to put the feelings into words and actions it would have been out of sympathy for the outcasts, misfits, and beaten down who I identified with then (not quite in the Jack Kerouac beaten down hipsters or night-dwellers who survived with a certain swagger and low hum existence sense).
So yeah, the coffeehouses offered sanctuary. For others (and me too on occasion) those establishments also provided a very cheap way to deal with the date issue, as long as you picked dates who shared your folk interests. That pick was important because more than once I took a promising date to the Joy Street Coffeehouse up on Boston’s Beacon Hill where I knew the night manager and could get in for free who was looking for something speedier like maybe a guy with a car, preferably a ’57 Chevy or something with plenty of chromes, and that was the end of that promise. For those who shared my interest like I said before for the price of two coffees(which were maybe fifty cents each, something like that, but don’t take that as gospel), maybe a shared pastry and a couple of bucks in the “basket” to show you appreciated the efforts, got you those hours of entertainment. But mainly the reason to go to the Square or Joy Street early on was to hear the music that as my first interest blossomed I could not find on the radio, except that Dick Summer show on Sunday night for a couple of hours. Later it got better with more radio shows, some television play when the thing got big enough that even the networks caught on with bogus clean-cut Hootenanny-type shows, and as more folkies got record contracts because then you could start grabbing records at places like Sandy’s in between Harvard and Central Squares.
Of course sometimes if you did not have dough, or if you had no date, and yet you still had those home front civil wars to contend with and that you needed to retreat from you could still wind up in the Square. Many a late weekend night, sneaking out of the house through a convenient back door which protected me from sight, parents sight, I would grab the then all-night Redline subway to the Square and at that stop (that was the end of the line then) take the stairs to the street two steps at a time and bingo have the famous (or infamous) all-night Hayes-Bickford in front of me. There as long as you were not rowdy like the winos, hoboes, and con men you could sit at a table and watch the mix and match crowds come and go. Nobody bothered you, certainly not the hired help who were hiding away someplace at those hours, and since it was cafeteria-style passing your tray down a line filled with steam-saturated stuff and incredibly weak coffee that tasted like dishwater must taste, you did not have to fend off waitresses. (I remember the first time I went in by myself I sat, by design, at a table that somebody had vacated with the dinnerware still not cleared away and with the coffee mug half full and claimed the cup to keep in front of me. When the busboy, some high school kid like me, came to clear the table he “hipped me” to the fact that nobody gave a rat’s ass if you bought anything just don’t act up and draw attention to yourself. Good advice, brother, good advice.)
Some nights you might be there when some guy or gal was, in a low voice, singing their latest creation, working up their act in any case to a small coterie of people in front of them. That was the real import of the place, you were there on the inside where the new breeze that everybody in the Square was expecting took off and you hoped you would get caught up in the fervor too. Nice.
As I mentioned in the rock and roll series, which really was the music of our biological coming of age time, folk was the music of our social and political coming of age time. A fair amount of that sentiment got passed along to us during our folk minute as we sought out different explanations for the events of the day, reacted against the grain of what was conventional knowledge. Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That clueless in the past about the draw included a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Village Jack or Jill or Chi Old Town frat or frail. My father in his time, wisely or not considering what ill-fate befell him later, had busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from the commercial Tin Pan Alley song stuff. The staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he our parents’ organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike). Hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had restless night’s sleep, a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family fall-out shelter bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential. And as we matured Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind.
We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a newer world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.
These following sketches and as with the previous two series that is all they are, and all they pretend to be, link up the music of the generation of ‘68s social and political coming of age time gleaned from old time personal remembrances, the remembrances of old time folkies recently met and of those met long ago in the Club 47, Café Lena, Club Paradise, Café North Beach night.
The truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of old-time corner boys like me and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully.
Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. Those lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days then, and that was about par for the course, wasn’t it. But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.
From The Marxist Archives-In Honor Of Martin Luther And The Protestant Reformation (1517)- "Historical Materialism and the Protestant Reformation"
Workers Vanguard No. 1123
1 December 2017
TROTSKY
LENIN
Historical Materialism and the Protestant Reformation
(Quote of the Week)
October 31 marked the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses criticizing the Roman Catholic church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. Friedrich Engels explained that behind the cloak of religious ideology lay a clash of class interests between the rising bourgeoisie and the decaying feudal order that was more starkly shown in the 17th-century English Revolution led by Oliver Cromwell.
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalised Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, full one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organisation, had to be destroyed....
The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants’ War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns—an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-East Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith—the value of gold and silver—began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory.
—Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
“The Last Of The Beats”-
Frank Jackman’s In Search Of Todo el
Mundo-A Critical Review Book Review by Professor
V.E. Grant, Chair, Creative Writing Workshop-University of Wisconsin-Racine In Search Of Todo el Mundo,
Frank Jackman, Black Dog Press, Boston, 2014 In Search ofTodo el Mundo (hereafter Todo) is Mr. Frank Jackman’s first
longer work since he received some acclaim several years ago for his
compilation, Ancient dreams, Dreamed, including from this reviewer who
saw in that effort a turning away from his earlier, there is no other way to
put it, self-indulgent jabs at the world in his prior short story compilations.
More than that move away from self-indulgence though was a turn toward a, for a
lack of a better expression, more karmic sense of the universe, a more spirited
work which broke some new ground in reflecting on the condition of humankind in
the last third of the 20th century among those who had come of age
in the generation before mine, what he called the generation of ’68, those who
came of age in the 1950s post-World War II baby boom. A generation whose
reflections we will be inundated with as that generation takes stock of itself
and its follies now that it will have more time on its hands and access to more
self-publishing outlets. [The
good professor has hit the nail on the head since over the past couple of years
during my tenure first as day to day operations manager and now has site manager
the number one kind of works, generally unsolicited, seeking publication, are
from that very demographic finding time apparently to take infinite “nostalgia”
trips back to those times, those 1960s when as one of the prospective writers
put it quoting early Wordsworth-“to be young was very heaven.” Since any publication
can only bear the weight of some many pieces of a similar kind most ate rejected,
including the piece that had the Wordsworth quote. Greg Green] Unfortunately,
Mr. Jackman has reverted back to that former incessant self-indulgence in this
short tale of his addictions, mainly but not exclusively drugs, back in the
1980s when he went to Todo on the Central California coast in a failed bid to
“dry out” thinly veiled and explored through his main character, Josh Breslin,
in this short work.(A work which he has
called a sketch, although it reads more like a short novella and probably could
have been judiciously trimmed to a longish short story). Perhaps it is the
distaste that I have for the current seemingly endless wave of post-addiction
cautionary tales that the reading public favors if the best-seller charts are
any indication which has colored my take on the work but this one that could
have been left in Mr. Jackman bottom drawer until he had some other trimmed
short stories with which to surround it. [The
good professor has also, perhaps accidentally, hit upon another aspect of that nostalgia
business mentioned in the bracketed comments above which is driving many, many
of those still standing and coherent, of the confessional tales being submitted
of late. Centrally concerning their own over the top drug experiences back when,
according to Si Lannon, you couldn’t go into a room in most young adult apartments
and communes without grabbing a big whiff of second-hand marijuana smoke. Later
or current problems with addictions are not discussed, or hopefully have been overcome
or at least suppressed. G.G.] The
eminent cultural critic, Stanley White, a man who has impartedmany very important insights about the
writers of the so-called “beat” generation which surfaced in the 1950s and to
avoid any additional generation-naming Mr. Jackman’s subsequent “generation of
’68” put the problem, put my problem with the book, in perspective when he
wrote in the introduction the following: “It
is always hard to fathom at this remove, a remove now of well over fifty years,
what effect writers and poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso,
Gary Snyder, William Burroughs and the lesser lights associated with
publicizing that cultural phenomenon, known collectively as the “beat”
generation (Jack’s coined word meaning beaten down, beaten around, from hunger
beat, from unsated wanting habits beat, from Zen-like karma angel-dream
beatitude beat all meshed in one and hence all misunderstood by a rush to
judgment world) had on the subsequent generations other than the obvious
romance of the road that most young people associate with that term.And hard as well to fathom the effect
characters created by and lives led by the beats such as attractive-repulsive
fugitive figures like William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, his various wives and
mistresses, and the winos and wistfuls who populated the Route 66, or whatever
route, roads and the way that mass culture was shaped for a period by such
personalities. In a sense the answer to that question will determine whether
this nifty little work by Frank Jackman will have a shelf-life or will be
submerged by an onslaught of more pressing and expressive post-modern literary
movements.” I
had asked that very question myself long ago about those who influenced my own
youth, a youth influenced by those writers two generations before mine, the
hard shell, no nonsense razor-like writings of Ernest Hemingway in his best
novels and short stories, the flight of metaphoric language by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, all bow down before Jay Gatsby, in describing the ebb and flow of
the Jazz Age, the rugged cross adventures portrayed by John Steinbeck in his
classic tales of American uprooted-ness The
Grapes Of Wrath and down in the depths skid row Cannery Row, and, of course, Thomas Wolfe and his sagas of a nation
turning in on itself and which came up short of the promised land once that
damn frontier stopped at Western ocean’s edge. I
grew up not doubting in the least the influence those writers exercised on me
including my exercise books filled with little pieces “cribbed” from their
handsome books. But Ialso
had an uneasy feeling then that Mr. Jackman must have had when he wanted to
extend the life of the beat generation beyond its “sell by” date. I found that
it was not accidental, if somewhat mystifying, that he fashioned himself in Todo (through that main and only
non-stick character Josh Breslin the other characters being mere foils for his
jabs) as he put it in in one of his earliershort sketches “the last of the beats,” much as I had in my youth
fancied myself as the “lasts of the modernist realist school writers” (although
unlike Mr. Jackman I never made that declaration in any published work putting
such words in the mouth of some character that I created in order for future
doctoral students to be able to titter at and to make erudite remarks and
endless footnotes about what I was referring to). Such are our vanities, and
our debts. But
in the writer’s world there is a need to move on and not keep on re-packaging
the same old material which in the end is what Mr. Jackman had left us with,
faded beat-ery. Faded beat-ery owning a huge debt to Jack Kerouac’s lightweight
alcohol addiction book, Big Sur. I
often wondered about the purpose of that incessant sameness, that incessant
re-packaging of some small beat ideas while reading this work and had been
surprised when I read in Literary Age
that Mr. Jackman had said in an interview that to be candid he thought the
“beats” had become “old-fashioned” by the time he began to appreciate their
virtuous writings. Join the club brother, join the club but why the continual
re-hash and the failure to move on if you had enough insight to know that these
days nothing but nostalgia publications and workshops lean on the major “beats”
works, and less so the other lesser lights. (Although I do not intend this
remark to bolster my argument very rarely these days does the writing institute
I am associated with and other workshops with which I am familiar accept
applicants who claim their muse is say Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs unless
they have some stronger credentials, very much stronger credentials, going for
them.) That
tension between the “old-fashioned” beat epiphany and the jail break- out that
their writings represented to those who came of age in the post-World War II
period is more than evident in this work, this admittedly Mr. Jackman’s most
ambitious work to date that pays at least fleeting homage to the beats who
enchanted his youth. One can see almost from the first pages that he is
satisfied with some vapid post-beat anthologizing, some pallid re-rerun of the
Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg/Burroughs gas-fueled, pedal- floored, thumb-stuck out
bologna sandwich, coffee and bennies run across cultural America in the
immediate post-World War II period. Strangely satisfied to my mind for the
simple reason that he was not formed by the Great Depression and the sloughing
through World War II that formed the pool for their social facts, formed their
generation, and the same hard fact that had precluded me from totally
understanding what drove those writers two generations before me like Hemingway
to prostration and Fitzgerald to the bottle in the aftermath of the glow of the
gilded Jazz Age back in the 1920s. Frankly
though I have felt more alienated from the beats, mainly from their manic
antics, and from their fudgy flinging of language as the be all and end all of
literary life at the expense of coherent narrative, who were in the cohort a
generation before mine than the Jazz Age writers since I had worked the more
traditional avenues of writerliness in the 1980s being much closer to the
“other” 1950s New York writers like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jim Jones, and
Bill Styron. And
I feel that same sensation, that same sense of off-key alienation from the
direct heat of the beats in Mr. Jackman’s efforts. For one thing his sketch has
more interior dialogue than anything the explosive self-publicizing beats ever
tried to do. Of course addiction writing, either under a powerful opiate like
that which sustained old Sam Coleridge searching for some modern Xanadu or
post-addiction writing which is in favor in this confessional age complete with
a happy ending and plenty of cautionary tale which actually withers into the
maudlin has a long and cherished history so that Mr. Jackman has tapped into a
well-versed literary genre. With this difference that he offers this short
sketch from the perspective of some thirty years after the events and
sensations described in the narrative so his claim to some studied spontaneity
which was a hallmark of the beats runs dry. He, on the facts known to me about
his life from his biographical information, was not looking for any particular
Xanadu (on the contrary he was just looking for his next eight-ball), and he
emphatically was not providing us with some cautionary tale. So while Mr.
Jackman owes much to the “beat” rhythm, the “beat” pacing of the drama he has
failed to move on past that, tellingly, as he told a reporter for the Boston Globe once in a review of his
beat-etched short stories he did not believe that he was breaking new ground,
was not doing an exercise in spontaneous writing (which he did not believe was
either possible or a good thing since every writer likes to tinker with what he
or she has written and if they did not then the damn editors and copyists would
when they grabbedhold of any manuscript). But
enough ofsearching Searching For Todo el Mundo for its niche in the literary pantheon
because what is good, what is exquisite if I may use that old-fashioned word,
what is essential in the sketch although it cannot save it is that shift of
voice and person that floats through the eighty some pages. Use of such
literary devices has not been unheard of but they are rarely used now
especially in a short piece where it is hard enough to develop a character and
a narrative never mind switching up voice and person. Yet the piece would
disastrously fall apart if there were no such shifts. Mr. Jackman in an
interview with Jerry Gomes of radio station WMEX mentioned that he had
originally tried to tell this story strictly from the vantage point of the main
character Josh’s experience in the 1980s when he went to Jack K.s cabin in the
canyon at Todo el Mundo to dry out from his rather severe addiction to cocaine,
nose candy he called it then, although there are a plethora of names out in the
junkie world for it that the reader may be more familiar with. He told Mr.
Gomes that he was unsuccessful in that effort since he did not have the
advantage of writing the sketch under the influence of drugs and that his
remembrances of the events back then needed to be fortified by the introduction
of Josh’s (his) friend Sam Lowell’s recollections. At
first reading I thought that having Sam introduce the drug problem, put the
problem in the distant past only to be dragged up again in later years after
they had reconnected with each other would work. When I started reading though,
once I got past the first pages where Sam set the story up, basically from the
point where Josh in all his desperate struggles to get through from one day to
the next takes over the story line there is a sense of incompleteness, a
falling off of the power of the sketch to convey that sense of isolation,
physical, mental, and social that was driving Josh crazy back then and which
made it a very close thing that he would ever survive the experience if Sam had
not set us up for what was tofollow.
Although I was glad that Josh in the end grabbed that rainy day ride out of the
canyon I felt empty of any emotion that he did not get the “cure” on that trip.
Or that thirty years later Mr. Jackman thought he would be able to stir us
about the experience. Too bad.
The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love (1967)-In The Time Of Hunter Thompson’s Time –Hey, Rube- A Short Book Clip
Short Book Clip
Hey, Rube, Hunter Thompson, 2004
Make no mistake the late, lamented Hunter Thompson was always something of a muse for me going way back to the early 1970’s when I first read his seminal work on the outlaw bikers The Hell’s Angels. Since then I have devoured, and re-devoured virtually everything that he has written. However the present book leaves me cold. This is a case where ‘greed’ (on whose part I do not know although the proliferating pile of remembrances of Thompson may give a hint) got the better of literary wisdom. This compilation of articles started life as commentary on the ESPN.com, part of the cable sports network. And perhaps that is where the project should have ended. Hey, this stuff has a half-life in cyberspace so nothing would have been lost.
So what is the basis for my objection? Part of Hunter’s attraction always has been a fine sense of the hypocrisy of American politics. Although we marched to different drummers politically I have always appreciated his ability to skewer the latest political heavyweight- in- chief, friend or foe. That is missing here although he does get a few whacks in on the then current child-president Bush. But this is not enough. What this screed is really about is the whys and wherefores of his lifelong addiction to sports betting and particularly professional football, the NFL. A run through the ups and downs of previous seasons’(2000-2003) gambling wins and losses, however, does not date well. Hell, I can barely remember last week’s bets.
But the real problem is that like in politics we listen to different drummers. I am a long-time fan of‘pristine and pure’ big time college football and would not sully my hands to bet on the NFL so his whining about the San Francisco 49’ers or the Denver Broncos is so much hot air. However, I will take Notre Dame and 3 points against Alabama in the2012 major college national championship game. That’s the ticket. I miss Hunter and his wild and wooly writing that made me laugh many a time when I was down and needed a boost but not here. Enough said.
***Sagas Of The Irish-American Diaspora- Albany-Style- William Kennedy's "Very Old Bones"
Book Review
Very Old Bones, William Kennedy, Viking Press, New York, 1992
Recently, in reviewing an early William Kennedy Albany-cycle novel, “Ironweed” I mentioned that he was my kind of writer. I will let what I stated there stand on that score here. Here is what I said:
“William Kennedy is, at least in his Albany stories, my kind of writer. He writes about the trials and tribulations of the Irish diaspora as it penetrated the rough and tumble of American urban WASP-run society, for good or evil. I know these people, my people, their follies and foibles like the back of my hand. Check. Kennedy writes, as here with the main characters Fran Phelan and Helen Archer two down at the heels sorts, about that pervasive hold that Catholicism has even on its most debased sons and daughters, saint and sinner alike. I know those characteristics all too well. Check. He writes about that place in class society where the working class meets the lumpen-proletariat-the thieves, grifters, drifters and con men- the human dust. I know that place well, much better than I would ever let on. Check. He writes about the sorrows and dangers of the effects alcohol on working class families. I know that place too. Check. And so on. Oh, by the way, did I mention that he also, at some point, was an editor of some sort associated with the late Hunter S. Thompson down in Puerto Rico. I know that mad man’s work well. He remains something of a muse for me. Check.”
Although “Very Old Bones” is structurally part of Kennedy’s Albany-cycle of novels it is far more ambitious than the other novels in the cycle that I have read. Those previous efforts, led by the premier example, “Ironweed” set themselves the task of telling stories about particular characters in the Phelan clan and their neighbors in particular periods of the cycle that runs from approximately the 1880s to, as in the present novel, the late 1950s. Here we get a vast view of the clan, its trials and tribulations and its cursedness as a result of the insularity of the Irish diaspora, Albany style.
I am, frankly, ambitious about the success of this endeavor. While it is very good to have a summing up of the history of the Phelan clan, it struggle for "lace curtain" respectablity, and its remarkable stretch of characters from the cursed Malachi generation through to Fran (of “Ironweed”), and here his brother Peter as well, and on to Orton, the narrator’s generation (and Billy Phelan’s) there is almost too much of this and it gets in the way of the plot line here, basically the current survivors trying to cope with the traumas brought on by those previous generations. Conversely, I ran through the book at breakneck speed. Why? Change the names and a few of the incidentals, and a few f the specific pathologies, and this could have been the story of my Irish-derived family in that other diaspora enclave, Boston. Hence the ambiguity. Moreover, there is just a little too much of that “magical realism” in the plot that was all the rage in the 1990s in telling the sub-stories here and then expecting us the sober, no nonsense reader to suspend our disbelieve. Is this effort as good as "Ironweed"? No, that is the standard by which to judge a Kennedy work and still the number one contender from this reviewer's vantage point.
The Partisan Defense Committee’s annual Holiday Appeal raises funds for its program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. The PDC’s stipend program revives a tradition of the early American Communist Party’s International Labor Defense. James P. Cannon was the ILD’s first secretary, a Communist Party leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism. In motivating support for those who have been imprisoned for taking the side of the working class and oppressed, he stressed that such support is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity.
The New York Times, the organ of big business, is making its annual plea for contributions for Christmas to the “100 Neediest Cases.” Other capitalist papers and organizations are conducting similar drives. The men, women and children of the working class, who have been on the rack of capitalist exploitation and are now dropped into the abyss of misery and poverty, are chosen and classified by these arch hypocrites—so their sanctimonious appeal can be made to the comfortable capitalists, to soften the bitterness of these few workers with the insult of charity, and to salve their own conscience by acts of “generosity.”
This horrible farce is annually repeated in scores of other cities.
The militant workers have nothing but hatred and contempt for such appeals and drives. This year, therefore, they are again following the world-wide custom that has developed in the ranks of the working class for many years. It is the custom of raising a special fund for the men in prison for the labor cause and their wives and children, of transforming the hypocritical spirit of Christmas into the spirit of solidarity with the class-war fighters behind bars.
The International Labor Defense has already started a campaign for a Christmas Fund for the men in prison, and their dependents who suffer on the outside. The labor militants throughout the entire country are working to collect this fund. Nowhere has the appeal or the response been made on the basis of charity. Everywhere has been emphasized the duty of those who are outside toward the men on the inside....
The men in prison are still a part of the living class movement. The Christmas Fund drive of International Labor Defense is a means of informing them that the workers of America have not forgotten their duty toward the men to whom we are all linked by bonds of solidarity. It is the Christmas drive of Labor and must have its generous support!
—James P. Cannon, “A Christmas Fund of Our Own,” Daily Worker, 17 October 1927, reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (Pathfinder Press, 1973)
Click on title to link to an article posted from Alan Wald's "The New York Intellectuals", "Portrait: Irving Howe", which is useful to read in connection with some of the points that I make below.
BOOK REVIEW
Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, Gerald Sorin, New York University Press, New York, 2002
The last time we heard the name of the subject of this biography, Irving Howe, in this space it was as a (well paid) cameo 'talking head' performer and resident literary expert in Woody Allen’s comedic send up of mass culture, Zelig. If Woody Allen is regarded as the consummate New Yorker, then Irving Howe, for better or worst and I think for the worst, represented the consummate post- World War II New York intellectual. Furthermore, as detailed here Howe came to see himself, as reflected in various shifts in his literary work and his politics, as a New York Jewish intellectual. (The Jewish intellectual aspect of this biography is a little beyond the scope of what I want to review here but should be mentioned as it is a central theme of Professor Sorin’s work).
Moreover, as a perusal of this sympathetic, sometimes overly sympathetic, biography will reveal, as if too add insult to injury, this long time and well known editor of the social democratic journal Dissent fancied himself a New York socialist intellectual, as well. And that is the rub. As I will argue below Howe and his ‘greatest generation’ cohort of public intellectuals did more than their fair share of muddying the political waters as people of my generation, the generation of ’68, tried to make political sense of the world. And tried to change it for the better, despite the best efforts of Howe and his crowd to make peace, for the nth time, with bourgeois society.
I have mentioned in a review of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon’s The Struggle for the Proletarian Party, a book about the faction fight over defense of the Soviet Union and the organizational norms of a Bolshevik party in 1939-40, found elsewhere in this space that I have long questioned the wisdom of the entry tactic into the American Socialist Party by those forces who followed Leon Trotsky in the 1930’s. Irving Howe is an individual case study that points out, in bold relief, the impetus behind that questioning.
Howe, born of poor New York Jewish immigrant parents in 1920, came of political age in the 1930’s as he gravitated toward the leftward moving Socialist Party in high school and later at that hotbed of 1930's radicalism, City College of New York. As a result of the Trotskyist entry (as an organization then called the Workers Party) into the Socialist party they were able to pull out a significant portion of the Socialist Party’s youth group, including Howe, when they were expelled from that party in 1938. This cohort of, mainly, young New York socialists thereafter formed a key component of the anti-Soviet defensist opposition led by Max Shachtman that split from the main body of Trotskyism, the SWP, in 1940. From there on, especially in the post World War II period with the onrush of the Cold War, these ‘third camp’ socialists made their peace, quietly or by warm embrace, with American imperialism.
The bulk of Howe’s intellectual career, as a niche magazine editor and professor at various top-notch universities, thus was spent explaining the ways of god to man, oops, American imperialism to newly minted graduate students. So, not only does Professor Howe serve here as a whipping boy for the errors of the 1930’s Trotskyists but also as a prima facie case of what happens when one’s theoretical baggage breaks away from a hard materialist conception of history. Therefore, by the time that my generation was ready to ‘storm heaven’ in the 1960’s we dismissed Howe and his intellectuals in retreat out of hand.
Professor Sorin does a very good and thorough job of describing the tensions between Howe’s branch of the Old Left and the various components of the New Left as each group squared off against the other in the Sixties. Sorin gives, as to be expected from his sympathetic portrayal, his protagonist Howe much the best of it. For our part, we of the New Left may have made every political mistake in the book due to more than our share of naiveté and overzealousness but we had a better sense than Howe and his ilk of how irrational the forces that we opposed (and still oppose) really were. But read the biography and make your own decision on that. I will have more to comment on this question in future entries.
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for Woody Allen's "The Front".
DVD REVIEW
The Front, starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel, directed by Martin Ritt, 1976
The various blanket infringements on the rights of ordinary American citizens and others since the criminal actions by Islamic fundamentalists of 9/11 hardly represent the first time that the American government has seen fit to curtail those rights. The Palmer Raids roundup of reds, radicals and foreigners in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution at the tail end of World War I comes to mind. As done the subject of this film, the 'red scare' against communist and other labor radicals after World War II with the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, a former ally. The name of this period narrowly is given in the history books as the McCarthy witch-hunt era, although that hardly dose justice to the widespread political paranoia, high and low, in America at that time. The signature event was the execution of the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, for passing 'atomic secrets' to the Soviet Union. As this film points out as it unfolds that political perfect storm dragged in and ruined many people from many fields, probably none more publicized than in the entertainment industry, especially film and the emerging television medium.
Woody Allen has performed many roles over the year from nerdy romantic lead to nerdy neurotic New York intellectual and social commentator but this is one of the few roles of his where the subject matter is more than just fodder for his sardonic writing or comedic talents. The story line here is rather simple, if the politics are rather more complex. Woody, a bright but underachieving New York bar cashier Howard Prince, as a favor (and to get some much needed cash as well) to his blacklisted lefty childhood television writer friend (played by Michael Murphy) agrees to “front” for him. This means that said friend does the writing and Woody gets the credit, the cash and, off-handedly as is the case with many commercial productions, the girl. In short order Woody gets to like the notoriety and the new lifestyle and agrees to front for other blacklisted writers. Then the real trouble starts.
During the early 1950’s it was not enough to write sanitary material for the mass media (approved by outsiders with their own agendas), it was not enough to apologize to various Congressional committees and their cohorts for youthful, innocent and, frankly, acceptable leftist political beliefs in order to survive in the entertainment industry (the subject here but it could have been in the trade unions, educational field, governmental service or almost any other facet of American life at the time). One had to grovel and name names. And the bulk of those who were called before the committees or faced other types of pressure did do, with regret, with relish or with indifference. But they did it.
There is an incredibly poignant sub-theme that runs throughout this film that details the pressures in the career-shattering of one of the “recanters”, Hecky Brown (masterfully played by Zero Mostel, blacklisted in the 1950’s himself as was the director Martin Ritt and some of the others), who in the end gives up Woody to the committees- finks on him, in other words. However filled with remorse Hecky commits suicide. That was not common to be sure. Hell, those were desperate times and not everyone has the courage to say no. Woody’s character, in the convoluted, Allen way does just that. And pays the consequences. So in the end there were choices. For every Elia Kazan, Elizabeth Bentley and the like there was a Howard Fast, a Dashiell Hammett and the like who said no. As some recently released information has indicated the Rosenbergs paid the ultimate price for their refusal to name names. That, in the end is what this film is all about and that is what should be honored. Just say no.
