Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20th Century Art Is About Sex-The “King Of The Mopes” Edward Hopper Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Nighthawks” (1942) Without Wings

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-The “King Of The Mopes” Edward Hopper Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Nighthawks” (1942) Without Wings

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes you just can’t talk to Sam Lowell about art. Sam is my longtime companion meaning for those who feel they need to know that as one wag put the situation in the case of Whistler and one of his mistresses we are living together “without benefit of clergy.”  Meaning as well that after five, three him, two her, collective failed marriages we decided to cut out the middleman. Result: we have been together longer than any of the five, three he, two she failed marriages and a lot longer than a couple of them combined. That does not mean that Sam cannot get ornery, can’t be a pain in the ass especially about art. See he never really got over the idea that he should have followed his youthful instincts and gone to art school which his high school art teacher had paved the way for him as an alumnus of Massachusetts School of Art with a scholarship. Sam’s mother, an old Irish Catholic cross to bear whom I never met, wanted him to move up in the world by being the first in the family to go to college and to get a nice white-collar civil servant job that would have satisfied her own youthful busted dreams. Sam finally bought into her argument that life in a cold-water garret as a struggling artist would actually be a step down from the utter poverty they had already lived in the Acre section of North Adamsville.

But Sam never as long as I have known him fully accepted his path, his fate and as he has reached retirement age it has only galled him more. That said, as is well known, or should be, Sam didn’t do that civil servant bit but became over the years starting at the now defunct East Bay Other (California) and going through American Film Gazette and now American Left History and associated publications become an award-winning film critic. What is less well known is that along the way he would write, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under the name Charles Skyler, for Art Today and Art News especially if a film had an art theme like say The Thomas Crowne Affair or more famously The Girl With The Pearl Earring. Which sets up why Sam is sometimes hard to talk to about art and can get ornery about his takes on various pieces of art like the one to be discussed today Edward Hopper’s iconic if somewhat overblown Nighthawks from 1942.

By rights this assignment to traipse through the arts, art museums to select some works for commentary should be Sam’s providence. Unfortunately when site manager Greg Green originally approached him he turned down the assignment since Sam wanted to play out his hand, his term, and track down the reasons a famous California private investigator Lew Archer whom he had known, had interviewed a couple of times before he passed away had never made the P.I. Hall of Fame. Sam had chalked it up to sexual impotence which left Lew less than eager to bed whatever femme was around at a time when guys like Phil Larkin, Sam Spade, and Phil Marlowe were setting the standard for hard-boiled detectives taking a walk on the wild side while solving some bang-bang case. Sometimes Sam can stubbornly go after every possible lead and he did in the Archer case so with some decent results but to my mind not enough to not have taken his natural choice reviewing art works, especially American art works.

Sam’s pass on the assignment was my good fortune although it was Leslie Dumont not Sam who suggested to Greg when he was looking in-house for somebody to take the on-going art work assignment who clued him in that I had taken some art classes and at least had gone to an art museum once in the last fifty years. The bar thus was pretty low, and I almost did not take the assignment either except I got assurances from Greg that he would have my back if I decided to go off on a few tangents. Which I have and he has backed me up despite the hellfire and damnation from a bunch of troll evangelicals who have objected to my talking about sex and sensuality in regard to some pretty hot 19^th century art like Sargent’s Madame X and Whistler’s The White Girl. As it turned out, although they are still claiming me as Keil the devil’s servant and bound for the lake of fires, they don’t really give a damn about art one way or another but about talking about sex and art together just in case their young folk decide they want to look at some on the Internet. Yeah, as Sam, and half the guys here would be quick to say, WTF.

Sam Lowell does care about art and that is where this whole thing is heading now. Two things have come together, have collided really. Sam has basically exhausted the Lew Archer impotency bit thus having some time to think about art and when I took on the assignment I knew that I would be consulting him as I went through my paces. He would not be so foolish as to try to usurp the assignment (nor would Greg let him since he is happy to have a quirky look at the arts by me where Sam would go chapter and verse). But he has definite opinions which he thinks I should incorporate int my pieces (what he forever had called “sketches” even that 10, 000-word Archer medical report, or what amounted to a medical report). That came up a bit in Sargent, Alexander and Whistler pieces but hit hard when we discussed Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks where we have two very different takes on what was going on in that midnight hour at that funky New York diner. (By the way Sam insists on calling him Eddie this, Eddie that but I have never seen even the most democratic reference ever call him anything but Edward and so Edward it is.)     

       

Here’s the general framework Sam and I have total agreement on-all serious 20^th century art (and now reaching into the 21^st century) is about sex, erotism, sensuality. Period. The jury may still be out on the Minimalists although there are some pieces by Matty Gove that reek to high heaven of sex, rough sex too. You can’t think of a school post-Impressionist, Ashcan, Realist, Regionalist, Abstract Expressionist without being overwhelmed by the Freudian deluge. Don’t even mentioned about Action painting, Pop and Op-Art schools which are drenched with primal sexual urges and dreams. (Only some silly school boy or girl would for example fail to see the mix of sperm and womanly fluids in the drippings of Max Daddy Jackson Pollack.) Where Sam and I differed or have a difference now with Hopper’s masterpiece is interpreting the narrative. I will get to that in a minute but let me tell of a couple of controversies we had on the earlier works I have presented to set up the battle lines.

When we discussed Sargent’s Madame X Sam wanted to go knee-deep into Madame reputation as a professional beauty and as an up and coming new age courtesan where I wanted to deal with the ideal of beauty then with that hideous birdlike nose of hers which by today’s standards would place her in the wallflower category, except maybe among nerdy guys. (On the side I wanted to discuss Sargent’s devious homosexual urges to make Madame X out as a tramp, a whore I think I called her but we decided to tamp that down since while there is plenty of anecdotal material that he and his dear friend Henry James were bedmates the hard evidence through biographers is not there yet.) We took a stab at both themes since this was my first piece, but unlike Sam I was a little uneasy about casting Madame out of high society once those denizens saw how she was advertising her “wares” via the Sargent portrait.                  

Alexander’s Isabella provided a mutual agreement when two things happened- Sam “sniffed out,” his term, that the jar in which an aroused Isabella kept the severed head of her lover done in by her jealous and grabbing brothers was filled with poppies, with the stuff of opium not silly basil and she was high as a kite when she did her ceremonial caress of her doomed lover. Once Sam showed me the photograph of a poppy crop I was won over. More importantly Sam dragged me, not literally he is not like that at all even when ornery, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see not the Isabella although we did view that fine work of art but the plethora of paintings throughout history going back at least to John the Baptist, maybe before with Mendon the wanderer where some woman is swooning over the severed head in a fit of ecstatic reverie. Very enlightening and also the cause of more random troll activity responses than even poor Madame X faced.  

Whistler’s The White Girl (we both agree that the later Symphony in White designation is malarkey, nothing but show and the work of some two-bit prissy art curator ) put us at some odds since I believed, still believe that Whistler was attempting to show some age of innocence idea so he could sell the damn thing and pay his back rent and have some dough left over for wine and partying. I refused to believe that a friend of the virginal Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would be surreptitiously advertising his then girlfriend, mistress, whatever arrangement she had while they lived together “without benefit of clergy” was a latter-day Whore of Babylon. Then Sam showed me the scholarship on what that strangely out of place wolf’s head and fur meant going back to ancient times- the age old “open for business.” Damn. I didn’t like it, was furious at Whistler who by all accounts was hard on his mistresses and models but I had to concede the point.

On the Hopper Nighthawks narrative on those denizens of the deep night I think I am right. I’ll give Sam’s take first and then my own. Sam sees Hopper as strictly a voyeur, frankly a dirty old man, literally and this will not be the last time Hopper lets his sexual fantasies and dreams spill out on canvas. The key question for Sam is why he is so interested all of a sudden in the “night people,” deep night when nothing but stuff that had better not see the light of day goes on when most of his stuff is strictly daytime mopery, my expression. Sam has claimed here a certain amount of “nighttime” expertise having ended an evening more than once winding up at Joe and Nemo’s which is really Hopper’s template here. Sam is thinking of the one on Stuart Street in Boston adjacent to the Combat Zone, no further description necessary, but they were all over many Eastern urban cities including New York and he remembers one somewhere Seventh Avenues. Come a certain hour after the bars close and remember they close later in New York City and the night people come up, among them what used to be called “ladies of the evening” according to Sam. What is going on here is nothing but a “hotel, motel, no tell” between the man and the woman we can see. The distance between them tells that they are not lovers and her looking at her fingernails while he decides whether to take a chance with such a brazen hussy. (If not him then the guy with his back to the viewer is the next in line.) The pair are negotiating the fare and the location, that Hotel Deluxe just beyond the shadows on the left to be their resting place after the evening’s exertions. I at least got Sam to back off on the short order cook who is just some rum-dum who couldn’t get a day job as the “pimp” here. He might have been getting a rake-off from her  to use the diner as a business address but that is all. Christ Sam can get weird, would any woman have that jamoka do anything but serve dish-water coffee and grease-laden burgers-at an hour.         

 

Yes, sure sex is involved in this muted scene although frankly itdoes not depend on Hopper’s being a dirty old man although Sam pointed to a couple of later paintings that might make that argument. My take is that these two are lovers, disenchanted lovers. But lovers, nevertheless. They had been at Club Nana up the street, a hot spot of sorts before the war but now filled with guys either too old for military service or 4-F laggards. The Nana in those days had Earl “Fatha” Hines holding forth (this before he headed to Boston and the High Hat Café) and the evening had started out pretty well before our grumpy Gus laid up too much liquor, too many whiskeys. Got ticked off that some sailor made a pass or two at his woman and now after they closed the joint down they were doing their inevitable stop at the diner to have him sober up a bit before he heads back to his rooming house up the street and she grabs a cab to her place further downtown. Not happy campers, a not usual scene in a Hopper but not the sullen creepiness that a dirty old man like Sam suspects.            

*Poet’s Corner- Weary Blues, Indeed- The Poetry Of Langston Hughes

*Poet’s Corner- Weary Blues, Indeed- The Poetry Of Langston Hughes


Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- I, Too, Sing America

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes- I, Too, Sing America 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman



February is Black History Month

I, Too, Sing America

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides, 

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Knopf and Vintage Books. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

…he, black warrior prince proud, sage of the darkened night, spoke, spoke curse and celebration just to keep the record, the historical record straight. He spoke of ancient Spanish conquistador enslavement down in Saint Augustine prison houses. Of ancient Dutchman and Anglo-Saxon slave markets down in fetid Jamestown. Of Middle Passage ocean dumps of human flesh, sold, sold cheap, sold as the overhead price from sweated labors. Of great bustling Atlantic world ports and hectic triangular trade, sugar, rum, slaves, or was it slaves, sugar, and rum, he was not sure of the exact combination but those were the three elements.

He spoke of Cripsus Attucks and Valley Forge fights, black soldierly fights for white freedom all parchment etched, all false, all third-fifths of a man false embedded deep in that founding document. Of compromises, great and small, Missouri 1820, that damn Mex bracero land- eating war against the ghost of those long ago conquistadores, of 1850 compromises, of fugitive slave laws, enforced, enforced and incited. Of Kansas, Kansas for chrissakes, out on the plains all bleeding, and bloody, and no end in sight.

He spoke of righteous push back, of the brothers (and maybe sisters too but they got short shrift in the account books) who made old Mister scream, made him swear in his concubine bed night. Of brave hard-scrabble Nat Turner, come and gone, old Captain Brown and his brave integrated band (one kin to a future poet) at Harpers Ferry fight, and above all of heroic stand-up Massachusetts 54^th before Fort Wagner fight. Of Father Abraham and those coming 200, 000 strong what were they, contraband, or men. Of fighting back against the old rascal Mister down in Mississippi goddam, Alabama goddam and the other goddams.

He spoke of rascally push back against the democratic night. Of Mister James Crow and nigra sit here, not there, of get on the back of the bus, or better walk, it’s good for you, eat here, not there, drink here, not there, jesus, breath here, not there. Of race riots and other tumults in northern ghetto cities teeming with those who tired of eat heres, drink theres, stand over theres, and charted breathes.

He spoke of that good night, that push back against black stolen dignity. Of struggle, hard struggle against the 1930s Great Depression Mister night. Of no more backing down the minute Mister said, no, thought to say, get back. Of riding with the king, of the simple act of saying no, no more. Of great heroic figures risen from the squatter farms, the share-cropped farms, the janitor and maid cities, the prisons, above all the prisons. Of Malcolm and the “new negro” and the bust up of that old fogey “talented tenth” white man fetch. Of brothers (again sisters short-shrifted from the account book) from North Carolina, from Louisiana, from Oakland who said defend yourselves-by any means necessary -if you want to hold your head up high.

He spoke of ebb and flow, of hope, and of no hope in the benighted black America land …

For Black History Month- The Days Of Old In The Old West- The "Black Cowboy" And His Songs Via Smithsonian/Folkways

The Days Of Old In The Old West- The "Black Cowboy" And His Songs Via Smithsonian/Folkways

By Sarah Lemoyne

In 2017 in a film review of Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden’s iconic and twisted Western cowboy classic Johnny Guitar (1954) I noted that I had heard on National Public Radio a piece about the work of a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops who I do know putting together a compilation of recordings, originals and his own take, of the black cowboy song experience for Smithsonian/Folkways titled Black Cowboy.  I mentioned and gave that film as a prime example of how the black cowboy had been written out of everything from dime store novels to “oaters.” That was not the case and the black cowboy in the post-Civil War, post-hell Reconstruction period in its aftermath played an honorable role in “taming the West.” Listen up.        

Here is the link:

http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/04/23/black-cowboys-music-dom-flemons

Black Is Black And That’s A Fact -For Black History Month-Artists’ Corner-Kerry James Marshall  

If you had wanted to see some of the most arresting (and beautiful) images of blacks in the American diaspora you could have check out the retrospective of the very much alive artist Kerry James Marshall in March, 2016  at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibit had also been at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in its tour around the country. If you could not attend those exhibits please go to the library and read Darryl Pinckney’s article in the New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017, The Genius Of Blackness.        

February Is Black History Month-From The Archives -The Story of Ed Keemer Tribute to Black Socialist and Abortion Doctor

Workers Vanguard No. 1138	24 August 2018

The Story of Ed Keemer

Tribute to Black Socialist and Abortion Doctor

by Ruth Ryan

Dr. Edgar Keemer was a courageous black physician who performed thousands of abortions for poor and desperate women under conditions of complete illegality for decades before the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. His story, which has largely been lost to history, is detailed in his autobiography, Confessions of a Pro-Life Abortionist (1980), unfortunately out of print. It is an inspiring account of the fight not only for women’s rights but also for black freedom and the socialist liberation of humanity. Imprisoned for his defiance of anti-abortion laws and hauled into court for refusing to bow to the Jim Crow racism of the military in World War II, Keemer was also, for a time, a member of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There he was known for his real flair for bringing revolutionary Marxist politics to black workers who were among the most militant fighters in the struggle for industrial unions.

Keemer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1913, and learned the names and life histories of his slave ancestors as well as the story of his father’s uncle who was lynched in 1875. Against all odds, his father, who came from a poor rural background, studied chemistry and became a pharmacology professor. Inheriting his father’s defiance of racial injustice, when Keemer was confronted with Jim Crow segregation as a school boy in Nashville, he refused to sit in the “colored” seats on the city’s buses. Instead, for seven years, he walked three miles each way to and from school.

Keemer managed to graduate from college and medical school under the crushing conditions of the Great Depression, standing up to the racist taunts of white medical students who called him “boy” and “Sam.” Then, as a practicing physician in Indiana, he was routinely excluded from public accommodations, denied membership in the local medical society and refused hospital admitting privileges. He and his wife, also a physician, lived in poverty as most of their rural patients, both black and white, could not afford to pay.

Early in their practice in Indiana, a 19-year-old woman, daughter of a preacher, asked for an abortion, threatening to kill herself if the Keemers would not help end her pregnancy. Keemer recounted that, to his shame and against his wife’s pleading, he refused. The young woman carried out her deadly promise that same night. Keemer soon came to understand that his patient was the woman, not the embryo. Describing what he means by “pro-life abortionist,” he wrote in his autobiography: “Slowly the realization emerged that by not performing that abortion, I had committed more of a criminal act by far than terminating her early pregnancy would have been. I had taken an oath to save human lives when I became a doctor, not to destroy them.”

Vowing that he would oblige the next time a desperate patient asked for an abortion, Keemer went to the top abortionist on the East Coast, “Dr. G,” for training and supplies. At the time, vacuum aspiration was not available and dilation and curettage required anesthesia. The other method was the application of Leunbach’s Paste which, injected across the cervix into the uterus, precipitated a miscarriage within 24 hours. Keemer enhanced the composition of the paste in collaboration with his father and improved the sterility of the technique. He also added a next-day home visit to the patient to make sure all went as expected.

In the late 1930s, Keemer went to New York City looking for a paying medical practice that would include hospital privileges. He found his colleagues—black doctors—working as railway porters at night to make ends meet. Chicago was no better. It was in Detroit, where tens of thousands of auto workers had been unionized as a result of the great sit-down strikes of 1936-37, that Keemer found he could make a living. Additionally, the county welfare system was paying for doctors’ visits.

Keemer set up a practice in Detroit that included performing abortions. At first, his patients were the relatives of black physicians. But, since he was the only physician performing safe abortions in a clean clinical setting, the referrals multiplied. Considering it his particular duty to assist poor and working-class women, Keemer described his patients: indigent women for whom a third or fifth or seventh child would be a disaster; women who would lose their jobs and homes by continuing a pregnancy; young women unable to finish their education who would raise a child in abject poverty; women who would resort to back-alley abortions or attempt self-abortion that could end in mutilation, infection and death.

In her book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (1997), Professor Leslie Reagan wrote of Keemer’s practice:

“The fee Keemer charged for his first abortion in the late 1930s was $15; by the 1960s he charged on a sliding scale up to $125. If the procedure failed, Keemer returned the fee. In the unusual case where a dilation and curettage was needed, Keemer sent the woman to the hospital, called in a specialist, and paid all fees as well as any money lost by the patient in missing work. Keemer protected his patients by providing after-care; his sense of financial responsibility protected him from complaints and legal interference.”

Defying the Jim Crow Military

During World War II, Keemer received a notification letter, sent to doctors at the time, instructing them either to enlist in the military as a physician or else be drafted into the Army as a private. Keemer went to enlist as a physician in the Navy but was ridiculed with racial slurs and told that as a black man he could only mop floors or work in the kitchen. When he was later drafted into the Army as a private, Keemer refused induction, stating, “I will not be drafted as a private since I have been turned down as an officer in the navy because of my color. I’ll go to jail first.”

He came under enormous pressure to submit, and not only from FBI interrogation. He was urged to give in from all sides. Keemer recalled a local NAACP leader arguing: “God damn it, Keemer, this system has flaws, but it’s the best in the world and some of us Negroes are doing quite well by it. Don’t spoil it for us.” He received an equally patriotic appeal from a representative of the reformist Communist Party (CP).

After June 1941, under the direction of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the CP in the U.S. peddled the lie that World War II was a “great democratic war against fascism” and was among the most rabid supporters of American imperialism. Having long abandoned any shred of Marxist class principle, the Stalinist CP championed government strikebreaking, supported the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps and, as they did in Keemer’s case, opposed the fight against Jim Crow segregation in the military. In contrast, as Keemer recounted, only one person “came not to lecture me but to help me win my struggle. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party.”

Unlike the CP, the Trotskyists of the SWP remained true to the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. The SWP recognized that World War II, like World War I, was a conflict between the imperialist powers to redivide the world. Calling for the defeat of all the imperialist combatants, the SWP at the same time steadfastly fought for the defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state despite its Stalinist bureaucratic misleaders. On the home front in the U.S., the Trotskyists championed the cause of working-class struggle, the fight for black rights and the defense of all the oppressed.

The SWP referred Keemer to an ACLU lawyer, who went after the draft board for racial discrimination. Newspapers ran stories about his case and letters came from other black people congratulating him on his stand. As Keemer wrote: “The ones that moved me most came from black soldiers overseas who informed me that racism was being practiced even on the front lines in this so-called ‘war against racist Nazi Germany’.” When Keemer’s case finally went to court, the prosecutor moved to dismiss the charges. The draft board dropped the induction order. But the FBI continued to hound Keemer and pump his friends and associates for information about him. Keemer was characteristically unintimidated.

Inside the Socialist Workers Party

Keemer’s discussions with SWP members convinced him that racial oppression and imperialist war were inherent to the capitalist system. He joined the party in 1943, expressing his commitment to the fight to replace “capitalism with socialism wherein every man and every woman would be guaranteed a satisfying function in society and no person would be allowed to parasitize another.”

Under the pen name Charles Jackson, Keemer wrote weekly articles in the SWP’s newspaper, the Militant, some of which are reprinted in a collection of writings from the SWP press called Fighting Racism in World War II (1980). His writings illustrated the profound contradiction between the American rulers’ false claim of defending “democracy” and the brutal reality of workers being sent to die in the bosses’ war for imperialist plunder and domination. In “The Case of Milton Henry” (6 May 1944) about a black second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps who was court-martialed and discharged, Keemer wrote:

“The segregated, second-class, Jim Crow army ‘for Negroes’ is a dead giveaway to the hypocritical character of the high-sounding phrases such as ‘liberation of oppressed people,’ ‘four freedoms,’ etc., which are being applied to this worldwide slaughter.”

Other articles by Keemer included: “Plight of Japanese-Americans” protesting the mass internment of Japanese Americans; “Hellish Homecoming” on the shameful treatment of black servicemen arriving home after WWII; and “Nigerian Workers Set the Tune” about strikes and revolts against colonial rule in Africa. Keemer’s pamphlet A Practical Program to Kill Jim Crow sold 10,000 copies in three weeks, a record for the SWP. This fact was noted in the FBI records that Keemer acquired decades later under the Freedom of Information Act.

Keemer’s autobiography describes the physical attacks on SWP members doing political work under the hyper-patriotic, repressive conditions of World War II. He recalled chairing a party meeting when a firebomb was thrown up the stairway and attendees narrowly escaped death. Eighteen of his comrades, leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, were imprisoned for their opposition to the war. Throughout this time, Keemer continued to work three days a week as a doctor, still performing abortions.

By 1946 Keemer had built a powerful SWP local in Detroit centered on militant black workers. He proposed that the party launch an independent organization committed to the struggle for black equality—a transitional organization to address the felt needs of black people and to recruit them to a fighting Trotskyist program. Keemer’s proposal was referred to the SWP’s Trotsky School meeting where members of the National Committee, the party’s leadership body, were in attendance. It was roundly rejected.

Instead, the party adopted a doomed policy of joining the thoroughly legalistic, petty-bourgeois NAACP—the same NAACP that had urged Keemer to capitulate and be drafted as a private in the Jim Crow Army. Black militants who had broken with the liberal conciliationism of the NAACP in order to become Marxists were reluctant to pursue work in that organization. Not long after his proposal was defeated, Keemer resigned from the SWP, expressing his demoralization “that the party was making little headway.”

One SWP National Committee member who was dissatisfied with the rejection of Keemer’s proposal and the party’s orientation to the NAACP was Richard Fraser. As he wrote, “The basic elements in the NAACP argument, which had been put forward by all the leading people, was that they couldn’t believe or admit to the maturity of the existing consciousness among the hundreds and thousands of blacks, who were militantly pressing toward integration” (“On Transitional Organizations” [1983] printed in “In Memoriam, Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990). Fraser’s concerns led him to undertake a serious study of black oppression in the U.S., concluding that the SWP lacked a coherent program which corresponded to the actual living struggle of black people for integration and equality.

Against the liberal integrationists who looked to pressure the racist, bourgeois rulers to grant equality for black people, and also against the despairing program of black nationalism, Fraser argued that the only road to black liberation lies in the revolutionary proletarian struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in which the vicious segregation and oppression of black people are rooted. [For more information, see “In Defense of Revolutionary Integrationism,” Spartacist (English Edition) No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94.] Fraser was a mentor to the Spartacist League on this strategic question, and we carry forward his program of revolutionary integrationism.

After leaving the SWP, Keemer still considered himself a “sympathizer with international socialism.” He redoubled his medical practice, continuing to risk his freedom and his medical license by performing abortions, which had become the mainstay of his practice.

From Jailed Abortion “Conspirator” to Vindicated Hero

In 1956, Detroit homicide detectives raided Keemer’s clinic and arrested him for conspiracy to perform abortions. The case came before a fiercely conservative Roman Catholic judge, and Keemer’s patients were threatened with five years in prison unless they testified against him. Only four women agreed, three of whom testified that the abortions were performed to save their lives. The prosecution could not find a single doctor to testify against Keemer. However, one white female patient was relentlessly bullied by the prosecution until she agreed that she was unsure whether it was a speculum or “something” else that had been inserted in her vagina during treatment. The prosecutor’s insinuation of rape was an explosive appeal to white racism. Keemer was convicted and sentenced to up to five years in prison and his medical license revoked.

After a month in the notorious Jackson Prison, he was transferred to the Detroit House of Corrections. Here a “high prison officer” arranged for Keemer to perform an abortion on the officer’s daughter. This was not the first time that a government official, including police, referred family members to Keemer for a safe abortion. In prison, Keemer taught reading classes, worked as a librarian and assisted in group therapy for drug addicts (as well as fermenting “spud juice” moonshine in the attic over the library). After 14 months behind bars, he was paroled but barred from working in the medical field in any capacity.

In the 1960s, Keemer participated in civil rights marches in Atlanta and Birmingham and met with Malcolm X. Recalling his conversations with young civil rights activists, he wrote of being “struck by their militant attitudes,” concluding “that the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King would not win support of the militant youth.”

Times were changing. After Keemer repeatedly petitioned to have his Michigan medical license restored, the medical board eventually gave him that victory, determining that he should never have been convicted in the first place. Back in Detroit, Keemer resumed performing abortions and became active in the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. For the first time, Keemer realized the parallels between women’s oppression and black oppression. He aggressively addressed the argument, still heard today, that abortion is genocide against black people. Among others in the civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson and Dick Gregory argued that abortion was a plot to decrease the black population and the black vote.

Keemer also took on the anti-woman chauvinism of the black nationalists. Addressing their meetings, he argued that women, not men, have the right to choose: “If a sister chooses to defer her family until later, she goddamned well has a right to the same safe and legal treatment as a middle-class white woman.” Taking on the retrograde idea that the primary role of women was to breed more black children, Keemer exposed the nationalists for relegating black women to the same role of forced childbearing that had enriched the slaveholders. At the same time, he vigorously opposed forced abortion and forced sterilization. In one 1973 letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Keemer denounced the forced sterilization of eleven teenagers in a federally funded birth control clinic in Alabama.

By 1972, New York and California had legalized abortion, and Michigan was having a referendum to do the same. Ten days before the vote, Keemer’s office was raided and patients, staff, doctors and nurses were arrested. The abortion referendum failed, but there was an outpouring of support for Keemer. His patients filed suit against the Catholic prosecutor and the five cops responsible for the arrests, and they won.

In the context of mass mobilizations for women’s rights and ongoing protests against the Vietnam War, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in the first trimester. Congratulations to Keemer poured in and he basked in the glow of vindication, only regretting that his father, who had supported him throughout his life, had not lived to see it. Nonetheless, Keemer warned: “I can’t believe that the struggle will be over and that they will just lie down and give up. We can expect them to resort to all kinds of means to bypass and to defeat this new-won freedom for women.” No sooner had abortion been legalized than the war against it commenced—from the halls of Congress to state legislatures, and the firebombing of clinics and murder of abortion doctors by anti-abortion fanatics. Today, the limited access to abortion granted in 1973 hangs by a thread.

Dr. Ed Keemer had a profound understanding that the denial of access to safe, legal abortion especially targets poor, minority and working-class women. According to Keemer’s autobiography, he performed some 30,000 abortions under conditions of illegality, defiantly risking his career, his freedom and his life to help these women. It is a fitting juncture to resurrect the story of his life to inform and inspire a new generation with the understanding that any gains for women under capitalism can only be won through mass social struggle. And these gains can be extended and deepened only when the capitalist system in which exploitation, black oppression and the subordination of women are rooted has been overthrown. Only in an egalitarian socialist society will every man and woman, in Keemer’s words, “be guaranteed a satisfying function in society and no person would be allowed to parasitize another.”

February Is Black History Month-A View From The Left-Proletarian Road to Black Freedom (Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1138	24 August 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Proletarian Road to Black Freedom

(Quote of the Week)

We reprint below an excerpt from a 1944 speech by Edgar Keemer who, as a member of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, wrote a regular column called “The Negro Struggle” in the Militant under the name Charles Jackson (see article on page 4). Addressing the fight against Jim Crow, Keemer emphasized that full equality for black people requires the overthrow of the capitalist order. Even with the end of formal Jim Crow segregation, what Keemer laid out then is still true today, as black oppression remains the bedrock of American capitalism.

Negroes are denied equality either through official government action or official government lack of action. The government is under control of the ruling class. That class is the capitalist class which comprises only a small minority of the population. These capitalists, through their government agencies and through their control of the means of information, indoctrinate the people with the lie that a man is inferior if the color of his skin is dark. They do this so that they can keep their economic slaves, the workers, white and black, split and fighting among themselves. Thereby they are able to spend their winters in Florida clipping stock coupons while the workers toil in the shops for a mere existence. These leeches suck the life blood of the American working class by setting up the Negro as a straw man and then shouting: “Don’t give a Black a break: give the Black the boot.” By this system of capitalism, race prejudice is made profitable.

Therefore we say that this system—capitalism—is the basic and fundamental enemy of the Negro people. Here is the spring from which flows the vile potion that cascades down to form the final stream of Negro inequality. We have found the source—let us mark it well. This is the reason why the fight against Jim Crow without a fight against capitalism, well intentioned though it may be, is an endless and fruitless fight. To establish Negro equality, we must abolish capitalism.

—“How to Win the Struggle for Negro Equality” (Militant, 25 November 1944)

The Rich Really Are Different From You And I-The Film Adaptation Of Edith Wharton’s “The House Of Mirth” (2000)-A Film Review

The Rich Really Are Different From You And I-The Film Adaptation Of Edith Wharton’s “The House Of Mirth” (2000)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

The House Of Mirth, starring Gillian Anderson, Terry Kinney, based on the bool of the same name by Edith Wharton, 2000

Greg Green the new site manager has encouraged us in reviews and other assignments for this blog to tell a little about how we got the assignment. His idea is to give the reader an idea about how the assignment process goes and why. Others have written more extensively than I will do here about how they got their assignments but it basically boils down to two points. First, as a new writer here (although I had been around the hard copy of this publication when fellow writer Josh Breslin and I were companions before I moved on to a by-line in Modern Women Today), I had expressed an interest in dawn of the 20^th century period pieces and had as my first review the film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Ideal Husband which dealt with late Victorian mores and morals around the marriage agreement in English high society. The second merely that I had read the book version of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Greg insisted that I do the film adaptation review after he had expressed satisfaction with the Wilde review.           

 Of course Edith Wharton through her own high society birth and its inherently informative connections was well-placed to do writing on the later robber baron period in America after the ruthless original industrial magnate founders got “civilized.” So high society and it foibles as demonstrated here was like catnip for her. The interesting aspect though is not the main character Lily Bart’s error of judgement that would eventually lay her low but how tenuous the situation was for young women, maybe all women, without direct access to serious money in an age when men for the most part controlled the purse strings and the property deeds. One would have thought that the rich and famous despite her foibles would have provided a safety net for one of their own. Not so in Lily’s case, not so at all.      

Once that aspect of Lily’s life, of the way the episodes were portrayed in the film, is understood then a lot of the mistakes she made along the way beyond her own somewhat frivolous innocence makes a certain amount of sense. Dependent on what a rich aunt would leave her in some future she had to avoid marrying some poor guy like Seldon whom she loves and was something of a soulmate despite his stiff manner, and he loves her despite her predilection for a man with serious money to ease her way but cannot think to marry. That tension will drive both their relationship and that series of errors and missteps which will lead her down the class ladder and to an early grave via her hubris and dope dependency, that landudum which will ease her deep depression and isolation once she cannot depend on high society to cover up her mistakes. Bastards. On the way though we glimpse at the hypocrisy of that old established monied class when one of their own, only if marginally one of their own, doesn’t know how to play by the rules of the game. And a guy like Seldon finds out too late that he could have saved his Lily.

Aside from the dramatic interludes and a pretty faithful adherence to the Wharton storyline the costumes, the scenery and Gillian Anderson’s Lily are beautifully done. I hope though on the basis of two film reviews that I don’t get tagged doing these “women” films. Or super-hero ones either that Greg Green has threatened us allto do to “broaden our horizons.”