Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Always Looking” (2012)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Three And More

Traipsing Through The Arts-With The Ghost of Novelist John Updike And His Three Books On His Travails Through The Art World In Mind- “Always Looking” (2012)-A Book Review Of Number Volume Three And More

Book Review

By Laura Perkins

Always Looking, John Updike, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012

Apparently this piece, this mercifully final piece not for the substance but for the now obligatory disclaimers, will be swallowed up by various disclaimers. I am running neck and neck with the disclaimers that the drug companies throw out with their products. I  originally presented this disclaimer I guess that is what it is called but you would have to contact my “ghost” in the shadows helper in this series Sam Lowell’s old hometown corner boy leader Frankie Riley now a very successful high-powered lawyer in downtown Boston wearing the title of “of counsel” meaning plenty of dough and no heavy-lifting leaving that for some hard-pressed intern clerks to see what the legal term is in the first book Just Looking I reviewed in this three-book series by John Updike. (See Archives dated February 23, 2019.)

I presented the second review without that formal notice of transparency (check with Frankie again for the right legal term) and site manager Greg Green, after consulting the legal department kicked it back to me for inclusion. Since I am essentially a free-lancer I am complying yet again on this third volume. If parts of the statement sound very familiar then just head right down to the review section which is what you want to do anyway unless you are a budding legal eagle and read about the stuff, the sex stuff, that Updike missed as good a writer as he was if not the most careful viewer of art when he traipsed the museum world like some holy monk searching, searching for the sublime, searching in the wrong places as this irreverent series has proclaimed more than once.

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Since we live in the age of transparency probably honored more in the breach that the observance what with everybody telling only what they need to tell and keep the rest as secret and silent as the grave unless some moneybags publisher comes hither with filthy lucre to loosen up tongues I should mention here that my “ghost” in this Traipsing Through The Arts on-going series Sam Lowell played in several charity golf tournaments in Ipswich and other North Shore of Massachusetts venues with the author under review, John Updike. Despite both being golf nuts, and believe me that description is accurate on both counts as both have written extensively about their trials and tribulations “on the links,” whenever there was a chance to talk say at the after round of golf banquet Sam and Updike would go round and round about art which both were crazy about although I would not use the word ‘nut” on that interest.

[Although it is not strictly germane I will, at Sam’s badgering, say that while the term “golf nut” may apply to these two late bloomers to the game that compared to the 24/7/365 crowd that haunts golf courses all over the world to satisfy their addictions that John and Sam were only mildly addicted which showed in their respective scores against the ringers brought in by those basket case world-trotters. Both agreed that bringing in “ringers,” good golfers who can hit the ball long and accurate for a charity scramble event just to for the procurer to add another driver or iron to their overstuffed collection of golf clubs was, is ludicrous. Beyond that John and Sam agreed that John was the better putter on the green and Sam was a better pitching wedge artist from some yards from the green. Beyond this I will not speak. If you don’t know such terms as scramble, driver, irons, putters and wedges be my guest and look on Wikipedia to sharpen up your knowledge of this frankly arcane venture.]      

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Back to art which is what this piece is about although I don’t know after fighting over disclaimers and bogies (look it up) I am not sure what this is about except I am trying to honor and show weaknesses in John Updike’s looks at art works. Come peaceful banquet time after that overwrought round of golf they would get in a dither especially if Sam had read one of Updike’s hot museum exhibition reviews in The New York Review Of Books which is where a good number of the reviews in the book under review got their first breath of life. The majority of the art reviews in all three volumes come from that source because Updike was something like their free-lance agent in the art world once he decided that the angst and alienation of suburban middle age crisis men and golfing were not all there was to a creative life. Done.

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What I had to say in the first Updike review Just Looking still stands. Since the beginning of an on-line series titled Traipsing Through The Arts series published in Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s and its sister and associated publication of, hopefully, off-beat AND irreverent personal takes on works of art that have interested me I have railed against  what I call the art cabal, what in an earlier time I might have scornfully called the academy. (The academy in various guises what the “Young Turks” of the art world rebelled against once enough of them were rejected out of hand and set up their own exhibitions, most famously the Impressionists in Paris and by extension the famous 1913 New York Armory show that brought that breathe of fresh air and other trends like Cubism and the wild boys, forgive me, the Fauvists into the rather stuffy America world of the time.

The art world like any other subset of society has historically has its favored art forms and artists, what like I said in the old days would be the academy, run by the self-selected grandees, almost exclusively male at the grandee level, and not much different today although the infrastructure is increasingly female. If your particular type of art was not accepted by the cabal then you would wind up peddling your works out of carts in the streets or today at your local flea market, or God forbid, a farmer’s market.   

That cabal for your inspection includes the usual suspects, I could name names and I will below including the Updike review where Updike has given us a complete dossier on the Clark Brothers, yes those Singer sewing machine magnates, or rather more like coupon-clippers, one of whom put a whole museum of great art together out in God-forsaken Williamstown out beyond civilization at the Massachusetts border which is a serious hassle to get to, as a classic example of the way the cabal operated in the earlier parts of the 20^th century. Guess what things have not changed all that much except this mania for mega-exhibition retrospectives (their term). Today let us just scorn the generic universe, the up-ward striving art directors staging improbable mega-exhibitions filled with loads of hype not so much in the interest of art as expanding their revenue flows via outrageous ticket price sales, souvenir sales, and 24/7/365 (or however long the exhibition goes for) drumbeats about not missing the work of the latest previously correctly neglected artist, ancient or modern.

To continue with this rogues’ gallery the press agents and flak-catchers who protect their turf by merely re-writing the releases somebody in the art director’s office threw together.* The upward striving curators hoping against hope that they will get to move up the ladder, what Sam always and maybe correctly calls the food chain, after curating some exhibition including the obligatory five-thousand-word essay about the meaning of whoever they are touting that day’s works not knowing that this profession is almost as cutthroat as the film review profession. The art patron/ donors whose only part in the drama is to pony up serious cash, look good at cocktail parties and make sure their names are etched correctly on whatever museum room, wall, cafeteria, elevator, restroom, janitorial closet they ponied up for. The poor sappy hedge fund manager art collectors whose only knowledge of art is how much their agents bid at auction driving up the prices beyond any rational number, more importantly tucking those works away from public view for who knows how long.           

*(The press agents and flak-catchers, mostly free-lance, and mostly underpaid at least earn an honest living merely repeating in their own words the morsels provided by the art directors’ offices who in turn have been given their takes from the various kept art critics. The so-called arts journalists for the glossy magazines and nationally-known major newspapers are the worst not even re-writing this palaver but sending it straight in to the editor unedited maybe clipping the title off but usually not even then. Sam Lowell already mentioned in his personal take published a while back (see Archives, February 18, 2019) all you ever need to know including his own similar slimy outrages in the days before he went into a twelve- step program. Of course Sam was in the cutthroat film reviewing business and not up in the rarified airs of high-end art and would have some young intern re-write or write a review for him. When he was on a three or five-day bender he would just take the studio copy maybe rewrite the first sentence, throw his name on it and sent the damn thing in. And the editor(s) knowing he was on a bender took the stuff like it was manna from heaven especially after Sam got wise to the publishing schedules and space requirements and would send the material along in just a nick of time before the editor(s) started pulling their hair out.

Once Sam dried out, recovered from both drug and alcohol abuse, he moved up the publishing ladder and wound up as film editor at various publishing houses, most notably the American Film Gazette which published other types of reviews on the arts and culture as well as films despite its name. While there, now having gotten religion about what was right and wrong with sending in bogus copy, he had a run in, had to fire one Clarence Dewar. Dewar now the chief art critic for Art Today was then a groupie of famous art critic Clement Greenberg and being essentially a flak-catcher then, maybe now too, he would just send Greenberg’s columns in with his name on the piece. (It is still unclear whether this was with Greenberg’s blessing or just the clumsiness and immaturity of young free-lancer.) Busy Sam did not notice anything until one of his writers pointed out that they had seen the same piece in Art News under Greenberg’s by-line. Adios Dewar, although the attentive reader will note that he has resurfaced as the main opponent of our sex and sensuality theory about 20^th century art.)       

Worst, worst of all warranting their own separate paragraph the vaunted art gallery owners, I won’t name names here since this is a book review of sorts, who without the infrastructure mentioned above to cater to the average collector off the street since most of the other stuff is at auction or private, very private sale, would be stuck with plenty of unsaleable merchandise. I made Sam laugh one time when I mentioned that these gallery owners without that backup from all the nefarious sources would have stiff competition with your off-hand priceless Velvet Elvis hangings at the local flea markets and God forbid farmers’ markets which they would be reduced to for hawking their wares, their various now trendy bricks, tiles, pipes, rosary beads, typewritten messages, color-coded indexes, steel girders thrown hither and yon and declared art.

On second thought under art gallery owners I should mentioned right now Monet Plus Gallery owner one Allan Dallas, the now imprisoned ex-owner who had until he was caught red-handed after many years of working the scam of having his still at large master forger, Claude Le Blanc, do a reproduction of say a Renoir or whoever the greedy little hustler art collectors were directed to outbid each other on and “sell” that at a public auction using his acknowledged say so as providence for the work and then the real one to some superrich and discreet private collector or keep it for his own stash. (Dallas held about seventy such paintings from Holbein the Younger to Robert Ray in a private room in the basement of his Hudson River mansion which after the police raid were estimated to be worth about two hundred million dollars on today’s open market.) Who knows Dallas may have had a hand in the infamous mass art thefts at the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston. Certainly, Dallas could not be discounted any more than anybody else since the merchandise has not reappeared for many years. None of the paintings found in his basement room were from that heist but he could have been the so-called fence with his extensive networks of private collectors and hustlers.

Now that I have my blood up in the future when my backlog of art works to review settles a little I will scorch earth this art cabal with plenty of names and their evil deeds beyond the seemingly benign idle-rich  Clark Brother churning over the art works operation and the discredited Dallas (now serving a nickel to a dime, Sam’s expression not mine, in some federal country club from which he has been recently changed so I am not sure where he is today). The Clarks were to say the least eclectic although seemingly on top the market trends probably having somebody like Benny Bach shilling for them to keep prices down (laughable now when price has no relationship to anything but overweening desire to own say a Dali or a Lamont.

The only ones connected with the cabal, if marginally, that have my sympathies are the poor, totally bored security guards who these days have all matter of device sticking out of their ears whether to keep eternal vigilance or to hear whatever music they have tapped into I don’t know. Oh, and the average museum-goer cum non-art critic writer like the author under review novelist John Updike and his travelling museum exhibition road show put in book form, non-coffee table book form Still Looking. Updike (see above in the brackets for his “relationship” with Sam Lowell) has loved art and going to art museums since he was a kid in Pennsylvania and his dusty backwater local art museum drew him in to create his forever attitude toward art. He had something in common with me, and more generally Sam, in that he was an art aficionado, a self-described artist, without having the wherewithal to pursue that as a profession. Writing about art turned out to be his later in life métier. Join the amateur junior league club brother and welcome.

I have (along with my “ghost” Sam) as I have alluded to above staked out a certain way to look at art, especially the art of the 20^th century which is the period of art that “speaks” to me these days around the search, although that is not exactly the right word and I hate it as well, for sexual awakening and eroticism in the post-Freudian world. (I will provide a provisional disclaimer that Updike has never been associated with that theory of art despite his sex-driven angst novels) Not the only theme but the central one for which I, we, have decided to take on all comers to defend. And we have had to so far in the birthing process beat off self-serving Brahmin reputation protectors, and here I will mention the name of one dowdy Arthur Gilmore Doyle who seems to have been left adrift in social consciousness around 1898, irate evangelicals who could care less about art, hate it, would not let their kids go to an art museum for love nor money but are worried that their kids might read that art and sex are not mutually exclusive, and a hoary professional art critic who is fixated on the search for the sublime, for pure abstraction, art for art’s sake and maybe art to cure headaches and gout for all I know. He has a name already mentioned in connection seedy doings among the denizens of the art cabal Clarence Dewar from Art Today who as noted Sam long ago exposed as a toady and sycophant. Updike’s beauty beyond the casual way he leads the reader to his insights is exactly that. Unlike the finicky Doyle, or the rabid Dewar he has no axe to grind, he has no monstrous and ever-hungry cabal to protect and although he would by no stretch of the imagination subscribe to the sex theory of modern art, along with a couple of other flaky but true observations not directly related to defending the thesis, he has some interesting things to say. I can understand why Sam and he went round and round after a round of golf. 

As noted in the first review Just Looking and continues to be true here Updike is as eclectic in his wanderings, observations and “takes” on his assignments as I am, (as Sam would be as well if he ever had taken the on-going series when he was offered it on a plate). A quick run-through of this the second of three books (the third one published posthumously in 2012) going through Updike’s keen-eyed writerly paces. Maybe not so strangely I have been able to “steal” a few ideas he has presented to go off on my own quirky tangent which I will mention as I detail his experiences at the world’s major art museums, and a couple of minor ones as well.

In his essays Updike might well have had in mind the idea of rounding up the usual suspects. After grabbing some nostalgia from his own childhood artistic endeavors and reading choices which is what has animated Updike in all of his musings on the arts including this last post-humous selection Always Looking many from his occasional stints as roving art critic for The New York Review Of Books he takes a somewhat unusual detour to deal with one example of collectors of how strong art interest and cash combine, the Clarks of Clark Museum out in God forsaken Williamstown at the edge of the wilderness in Massachusetts. The two brothers, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune which made many a by-gone mother happy to not have to sew those button and things by hand although maybe angry that she had one more tool to keep her housebound, were serious art collectors although they were a little eclectic in that they swapped many of the paintings with each other or auctioned them off. The most interesting thing Updike mentioned about them, individually and together, is how strong their dislikes were on certain more modern artists like Jackson Pollack and his drip paintings. Enough said about that essay since it does not directly relate to my general theory about 20^th century art.

By the way we can dismiss out of hand Updike’s late in life basic summary essay of the drift of American art from early on to the near present as well as the holy goof Gilbert Stuart and his ten million portraits, some not finished, of General Washington and the who Revolutionary era crowd. Since he already dealt with the Hudson River school and their visions of pristine innocent Westward Ho Garden of Eden America of the Manifest Destiny long gone except in national parks and such we can pass on his essay about Frederic Edwin Church. (We will pass but I will note a certain exotic and suggestive possibility in some of his mountain stream productions but notice is all it is worth at this time until we can explore more closely his works and career when we have time.)             

Yes, I know we have roasted Claude Monet over an open fire for putting up with his wife’s flirtations after he outfitted her in a Japanese kimono and a blonde wig (what Japanese person do you know who has naturally blonde hair that hard fact telling me something was wrong with this guy, some kinkiness). What did he expect when even one hundred plus years later guys are lingering over the painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston wondering some pretty salacious thoughts. We have also roiled Monet for his own kinky and worse romps with some chorus girls and other women whom he had what we would in today’s #MeToo era call unfair power over them. I know it is too late to bring charges even if the young girls and women would talk, would say the words that needed to be said in court to put this bum of the month behind bars. Instead he got a free ride to do whatever he pleased, and nobody said squat (Sam Lowell’s roughhewn expression not mine but right for the moment).

It still bugs the hell out of me that Monet was able to get a name for himself as a “max daddy” of the moderns (another Sam expression from the old neighborhood he said), a leading Impressionist and was able to do his breakthrough water lilies work without getting a hand laid on him. Apparently that is not Brother Updike’s take since of all the artists in the world he could have featured in Monet’s place he has given him two serious essays in this three-book series. Since this is a book review and not my take on this mad monk holy goof I will hold my nose and give what Updike refused to mention when discussing his famous variation haystack and church series. Everybody now knows the reason why Monet painted those haystacks at odd hours, or if you don’t I will fill you in. Not only was Monet kind of kinky (think about a grown man painting water lilies, the code for sexual connections in late 19^th century high society, of all the subjects he could have tackled even out in the country where absolutely nothing was going on) but he was a voyeur. Take another look at those stacks of hay and see if you don’t see a couple of humans, could be man and woman, or two men or two women rolling in the hay as they say (my expression)               

What people don’t know is why a barely religious man, if religious at all except that way all lapsed Catholics are still Catholics as long as they don’t go under the ground cursing the church’s name, was hanging around a church, again at odd hours. Well-known art critic Bret Barre in a recent expose has gotten some evidence, enough for thoughtful speculation anyway, that across the street from the church and from his temporary studio he was keeping a mistress and trying to keep it from the flirty Camille of the kimono so she would not go off on her own lust-filled excursions. Poor sap Updike apparently hadn’t heard thing number one about the rumors back in his day and just kept going on and on about the idea of seeing innocent fixed figures at various hours. Okay, John.

I can barely utter the name, the Degas name, it so disgusts me to even mention it. On the last go round with Degas (funny how two of the most depraved artists of their times got two reviews each form the sullen writer and although I won’t delve into his motives it is strange very strange when he had many, many other choices) despite Updike’s naivete I was able to summon up (via #MeToo uprisings) my accusations of extreme sexual depravity on Degas’ part. At least Monet had the spine to leave the younger ones alone, Degas went right after the trapped ballerinas who due to their dedications to their art were vulnerable to an old man who admired them, gave them little treats and a few francs for their attentions. Jesus, what a monster?  I have been given some information that Degas didn’t just bother ballerinas although that was his main hang-out but also among the young horsey set. Updike obvious to all the swirl around the Degas scandals decided that everybody had to know the guy could paint outdoor scenes just like the other mad monks who put brush to canvass. I never thought I would say this, but Updike was what we today would call an enabler. I can’t,  and won’t. say any more about this monster except to renew my plea for reparations for any descendants of those poor young ballerinas who can prove some relationship to those places where Degas hung out. Some museum should sell their ill-gotten Degas paintings and put a fund together. More likely though the bastards will throw Degas another mega-retrospective and laugh all the way to the bank.

Gustav Klimt-sex, Gustav Klimt-erotica. Finally, as we head into the 20^th century proper Updike all of a sudden can use the “s” words to describe what this major artist was about. Klimt ran amok in Vienna in the fin de siècle days when the wine was plentiful and the women like precious ripe fruit. That was before World War I tore the facade off of bourgeois society and it quests for progress and culture. Not figuring in that optimistic age that there are regressions in society and in art too. Not to worry though I almost don’t have to work up a sweat (and neither did Sam although I did see him perspire over some of the nude drawings) with that kinky gold dust stuff he threw his “patroness” Adele of the one thousand dreams (and rich and accommodating husband who was having his own flings much like dear Madame X and her hubby) and silky sheets. One would have a hard time not working up the sexual stuff in Klimt although I am sure professional art critic Clarence Dewar will say Klimt was merely looking for the sublime. We have already had a good laugh at the water cooler over that one when he claimed Monet in his haystack painting was looking for that lame excuse of an excuse. For once Updike and I are on the same page so forward.              

Max Beckmann-sex, Max Beckmann-erotica (and old-fashioned B&D and S&M which would make de Sade proud). Mercifully we are deep into the 20^th century now and can fling all the art for art’s sake jive out the nearest window. The Nazis when they came to power declared his paintings “degenerate art” and in philistine and merciless way they were right by their standards if not the rest of the world who appreciated his bringing stuff not even found in the Kama Sutra to wider audiences. Of course the Nazis ideas of virtue and good art were pagan and Greek who we all know had no problem dealing with sexual subjects in their artwork. What the Nazis deemed degenerate is what makes Beckmann’s work so stimulating trying to figure out what strange sexual taboo he was trying to highlight (and break) once he got into stride. His Brother and Sister is a prime but hardly the only example of him “going outside the box” in depicting sexual themes, especially in those enigmatic triptychs. Like with holy goof and mad monk run amok in the post-Freudian world Klimt not much needs to be said although I expect that somebody like Clarence Dewar, a thorn in my side art critic of the professional variety, will say I am “cherry-picking” my artists known for coded sexual expression in their works or have expressed that sentiment in words. That only a few artists delved in to explicit sexual or sensual themes. For now just let me say on Beckmann like Klimt even John Updike has to admit the guy was crazy to put sex to brush to canvass.

If you look at Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, a founding document of that movement in art and literature you will notice that it is peppered with references to the subconscious, to unspoken dreams and thoughts. Maybe in the 18^th or 19^th century that would have been covered in art under some theory of the search for the sublime or beauty. In the post-Freudian era, now, although not all of Freud’s insights have withstood the test of time and his anecdotal evidence not extensive enough the relationship between the subconscious of the Surrealist dream state and sex is still pretty clear, and raw. I will just mention two key Surrealist painters who fit that mold Joan Miro who although I know he had his sexual dreams tied into his very strange collages I still am puzzled by most of it and Rene Magritte who is more straight forward. Updike seems to follow that scheme as well. Like I say in terms of this book review when you get to the 20^th century my theory pops out of every crevice. These past several artists mentioned are easy but I will show that even Mark Rothko, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Harry Samuel, Grady Lamont and others are deep into the same ideas when I get this burden down.     

Roy Lichtenstein rounds out what retrograde art critic Stuart Appleton has called the rogues’ gallery of 20^th century artists Updike has taken under his wing. Of course, Appleton will not touch comment except snide remarks about 20^th century art and is stuck somewhere around the Impressionist and maybe Arthur Dove on his good days. Anybody like the small group of founders of Pop Art including Lichtenstein are beyond his understanding never mind whether they exhibit any sexual content. What Appleton apparently forgot or maybe never knew as a child was that comic books, a staple of Pop Art one way or another is where we first learned visually about sex even if understated and not central to whatever story-line was being followed. I know I wanted to look just like Veronica in the Archie high school hijinks comic books with her womanly shape almost before I knew what womanly shape meant. Lichtenstein is just playing an old song in his various creations.

Make no mistake John Updike except almost by indirection and inference has not added any fuel to my claims for the overriding sexual nature of serious modern art. Fair enough. But then in the very last essay in Still Looking on writers and artists he forsakes all the many acute observations he had about art, about the times of the art, and about where art stood in the cultural pantheon. Then, subdued, no that is not the right word, suppressed artist turned writer Updike bleeds all over himself about the sympathetic relationship between the narrative of the painting and the narrative of some piece of writing. He brings in a cast of characters like Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Larry Roman, Sid Smith and a fistful of others all to pay homage to his amateurish art work. In this good green earth is possible to do more than one profession, one hobby, one avocation well but sometimes one should check the ballast at the door. A great job overall though with a nice selection of paintings and photographs to ponder while reading his museum musings (and the same is true as I have already noted for the other two legs of the trifecta.)           

Enough said

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 -*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-All Honor To “General” Harriet Tubman

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for “General” Harriet Tubman

February Is Black History. March Is Women’s History Month. Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits. Any one , or all, of those reasons can be used as the reason to honor “General” Harriet Tubman

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest for those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

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The Revolutionary Vanguard of the Civil War

Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom

Toward the end of her long life, the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman commented on her years of service to the liberation of black people in a conversation with a journalist:

"She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: 'Do you like apples?' On being assured that I did, she said: 'Did you ever plant any apple trees?' With shame I confessed I had not. 'No/ said she, 'but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said, "Some day I'll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat," and I guess I did it'."

—Frank C. Drake, The New York Herald, 22 September 1907, quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman

In this simple metaphor, Tubman recognized the vanguard role she played in laying the groundwork for black freedom in the United States in the revolution that was the Civil War. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a military strategist and spy during the war, "General" Tubman, as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. Like John Brown, the heroic martyr of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and the outstanding political leader of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass, Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. Harriet Tubman's life is a microcosm of the struggle for black liberation in the
19th century; her life directly reflects the issues of the time.

Although the hope for a complete liberation of black people was later defeated in the cowardly betrayal of Reconstruction, Tubman's "apple orchard"—freedom for the slave—was a tremendous historical advance. The abolition of slavery and the fight for full citizenship for the black population was the great historic task of the Civil War, the second American Revolution, which carried forward the unfinished business of the first American Revolution.

The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, the 19th century descendant of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. The abolitionists were part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820, encompassing such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Particularly among the most politically radical wing, the abolitionists were motivated by a vision of human emancipation profoundly rooted in religion. To men like the clergymen Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, slavery was an abomination to god and the Christian Bible and a gross betrayal of the rights of man as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Although slavery was their pre-eminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers' rights. The women's suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression. As the abolitionist and women's rights leader Angelina Grimke' said at the May 1863 meeting of the Women's Loyal League, a convention of support for the North in the Civil War, "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours" (see "The Grimke' Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights," W&R No. 29, Spring 1985).

The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom—which included years as a soldier in the Union Army—she lived in poverty all her life.

A fugitive from bondage, black and a woman, Tubman triumphed over exceptional odds to become a leader of the second American Revolution. Like Frederick Douglass, she was able to generalize her bitter and brutal experience of oppression into a revolutionary social consciousness and a determination to fight for all the oppressed. She was an advocate of militant political action and revolutionary insurrectionism. As opposed to the "moral suasion" Garrisonian wing, she was part of the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement. As the "Moses" of her people on the Underground Railroad, Tubman was famous throughout the U.S. and beyond by the time of the war.

However, many details about her work are obscure, since she operated in the secrecy of what was essentially a revolutionary underground. She was illiterate, and much of what is known about her life comes from a biography of her by Sarah Bradford, who interviewed Tubman as an old woman (quotes from Tubman which were originally printed in dialect are here transposed into modern English spelling). Thus much of the story of her life must be told by others, especially by Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared the conviction, through the bleak decade of the 1850s, that the coming war must crush the slave system and break the bonds of black oppression. She was a co-worker and friend not only to John Brown and Douglass, but to many other key figures of her time, from abolitionist William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, to Sojourner Truth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith. She knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and most of the leading women's rights activists of her day.
Douglass honored Tubman's role in a letter written in 1868, in which he defended her right to an army pension as a Civil War veteran:

"The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encourage¬ment at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt 'Cod bless you' has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you."

—quoted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman; The Moses of Her People
Slave vs. Free in the Antebellum U.S.

Like Frederick Douglass, Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland, probably in 1820. At that time the country was embroiled in the first of the major fights over slavery and the expanding U.S. territory, "resolved" in this instance by the Missouri Compro¬mise of 1820.

Since the founding of the U.S. in the late 18th century, when the slave system was left intact throughout the South, two economic systems, capitalism and slavery, coexisted within one country. The inevitable clash of economic interest which must lead to the victory of one over the other was postponed in a series of "compromises" centering on the maintenance of control by the slave states over the relatively weak federal government. But. the underlying economic conflicts between the two systems eventually reached the point at which compromise was no longer possible. The development of large-scale industrial capitalism required wage labor to exploit, the source of its tremendous profits, as well as a mobile and at least somewhat educated working population. Key to capitalist expansion was control of a growing home market. In contrast, the slave system was based on primitive, labor-intensive agricultural production; the slaveowners sought new lands to increase the highly profitable slave trade and to move plantations to fresh, non-exhausted soil. The clash came to a head over the huge, expanding territories of the West: would they be slave or free?

Karl Marx described the slow but inexorable sweep of political power by the slave states in their effort to increase control of the growing U.S.:

"The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic
northwest of the Ohio... The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed."

—Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19

In 1820, when Tubman was born, news of the first of these bitter debates undoubtedly reached even the slave quarters, however isolated the slaves were kept from news of the day. Perhaps the slaves with whom Tubman lived as a child heard rumors about the deep split in Congress over the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have prohibited the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and provided for gradual emancipation of those already there. This first great debate on slavery was a harbinger of things to come. Abandoning even his earlier, contradictory anti-slavery position altogether, Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed the Tallmadge Amendment. In 1821 he wrote, "All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later."

As a child Tubman was acquainted with all the horrors of slavery. By the age of five or six she was at •work and suffering from whippings on her face and neck by a vicious mistress. Later she worked as a field hand. She was still a child at the time of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, put down by the slaveholders swiftly and ruthlessly. In 1832, the opposition of the agricultural South to the federal tariff designed to protect Northern industry led to the Nullification Crisis, in ' which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The slaveholders' fear of black insurrection, sparked by Nat Turner's revolt, fueled their intransigence against the federal government.
Tubman was around 15 years old when the incident that literally marked her for life occurred. While trying to defend a fellow slave from the vindictiveness of the overseer, she was struck on the head with a two-pound iron weight which cracked her skull. For months she lingered between life and death, lying on rags in her family's slave cabin. The injury left a deep scar on her head and left her subject to spells of unconsciousness, sometimes three or four times a day, which plagued her for the rest of her life.

But instead of being crushed by the brutality of her life, Tubman hardened and determined to fight. When she recovered, she built up her physical strength until she could lift huge barrels of produce as well as a man, despite her small size. Her master would exhibit her strength as one of the "sights" of the plantation. She let people think her half-witted because of her brain injury, and plotted her escape. She began to experience daily visions, which inspired her driving commit¬ment to black freedom as part of a deeply personal religion.

In 1849, although it meant leaving her husband, a freeman who refused to go with her, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. Rumor had reached her and her family that their owners planned to sell them to the deep South, a dreaded fear of every slave in the bor¬der states. Already two of her sisters had been sent off in a chain gang, separated from their children. Her brothers lost courage for the escape; Tubman went on alone. As she later told Bradford: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me."
Aided by a white woman who gave her the first address of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made her way North, traveling at night. "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter.... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also." Cooking and laundering to support herself, she began the life of a fugitive slave in the North.

The 1850s: The Irrepressible Conflict at the Boiling Point

Tubman arrived in the North on the eve of the biggest struggle yet over the question of slavery. Congressional debate sparked over California's petition for admission to the Union as a free state continued for months, while legislatures and mass rallies North and South adopted fiery resolutions. Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states. Over time a compromise satisfactory to few on either side was worked out, largely due to the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster, who was voted out of his Senate seat by an enraged Massachusetts legislature in 1851. Webster was replaced by the uncompromising abolitionist radical, Charles Sumner. Later a leader of the Radical Republicans, in 1856, after a stirring anti-slavery speech, Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by a Southern Congressman.

The terms of the Compromise of 1850 centered on a series of tradeoffs: while California would be admitted as a free state, no restrictions on slavery were to be made in the Mexican cession; and while Washington, D.C. ceased to be a depot for the slave trade, the 1793 fugitive slave law was to be replaced with a much tougher version. This new law was an unspeakable atrocity, a threat to the lives and freedom of black people in every state. In his scathing indictment of hypocritical American "democracy," "July Fourth and the Negro" (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass described it:

"For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave taw makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to near only his accusers.'

—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2

Many Northerners vowed to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, a long-time anti-slavery radical, defied even the army to enforce the statute: "Let the President... drench our land of freedom in blood; but he will never make us obey that law" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction). When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was kidnapped in 1854 under the law in Boston by a gang of thugs organized by the federal government and Burns' Virginian master, the city erupted in seething conflict from the halls of government to the men in the street. The local vigilance committee, dedicated to helping fugitive slaves, organized mass rallies; a badly coordinated assault on the federal courthouse failed to rescue Burns. The federal government and the slaveholders succeeded in returning Burns to slavery. But he was the last fugitive to be returned from anywhere in New England. In fact, nine Northern states passed per¬sonal liberty laws, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court struck down the personal liberty laws as unconstitutional.

One of Harriet Tubman's most publicized actions was the courageous rescue of a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the Troy, New York court where he was pronounced guilty in 1860 under the Fugitive Slave Law. For several hours a battle raged between the abolitionists and the authorities until Tubman, with the help of others, seized Nalle and started him off on the journey to Canada.

But the North was by no means free of pro-slavery or racist forces. Many states had "black laws"; Indiana, Oregon, Illinois and Iowa all eventually passed statutes banning black migration into the state. These measures reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.

Indeed, opposition to slavery was all too often based on the wish to exclude blacks altogether. And throughout the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement grew in strength, so did the pro-slavery mob. Tubman had first¬hand experience with the violence of the Northern racists when she was part of a defense guard for Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison at a Boston meeting in 1860, raided by pro-slavery hooligans.

The Underground Railroad

Under these conditions of mounting assaults on blacks, free and slave, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. Marked by her scarred head and subject to spells of unconsciousness, she faced incredible dangers which grew greater as the years passed. She raised money for her trips through her own labor and by fundraising among abolitionists. Given the secrecy of her missions and the price on her head—the slaveholders offered rewards totaling $40,000, an enormous sum in those days—there were few records of her 19 trips back South. She always carried a pistol and threatened to use it on those whose courage failed, on the principle that dead men carry no tales. In her native Maryland, where she returned many times to rescue dozens, including all but one of her entire family, so many slaves escaped that a panic broke out among the slaveholders, leading to the 1858 Southern Convention in Baltimore. Ancient laws were resurrected to crack down on escaping slaves; 89 free blacks were re-enslaved under a new law.

But Tubman continued her work up to the Civil War. She personally brought out some 300 people altogether, from all parts of the South. In the 1880s, she spoke of
these years at a meeting of women's suffragists in Rochester, New York: "Yes, ladies...I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." As Frederick Douglass said of the Underground Railroad:

"I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Indeed, the political impact of the Underground Railroad spread beyond the comparatively small numbers it freed, which have been estimated at probably less than 1,000 a year out of a total slave population of four million. As an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk imprisonment or death in their work, it was a rallying point in abolition work. Speaking tours of ex-slaves, who described the horrors of their lives in bondage, won over many to abolition.

The vigilance committees not only helped to settle newly arrived blacks, but tried to fight the racism of the North.

Most importantly, the Underground Railroad effectively allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote:
"Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coordinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic."

—W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown

It was becoming more and more clear that liberation for the American slave was a national task beyond the scope of local slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Denmark Vesey's. Leadership for black emancipation thus developed in the North, among the core of militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— people like Douglass, Tubman, Brown, Wendell Phil¬lips and Charles Sumner. A small but crucial element of experienced radicals existed in the "Red 48ers/' European refugees from reaction following the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Black, white, foreign-born, many of these later formed the left wing of the Republican Party.

The abolitionists were by no means a homogeneous group. One of the most famous abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, opposed all political activity—running for office, petitioning the government—on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery. Advocating "moral suasion," Garrison opposed the use of force in the fight against slavery. He finally ended up by proposing the secession of the North as the "answer"—which needless to say would have done nothing to end slavery.

Although Douglass and Brown originally subscribed to "moral suasion," they both soon realized that it was doomed to fail. Even the Underground Railroad, although constantly defying the slave system and the federal laws which protected it, was not a critical weapon to end slavery and as such was more inspirational than strategic. Douglass, Brown and Tubman embraced all means to fight slavery, from petitioning and agitation to armed self-defense and insurrection. As Douglass commented in 1852 at a national free-soil convention, "The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check" ("The Fugitive Slave Law," The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2). When the war broke out, it was Douglass and the other radical abolitionists who argued for the immediate freeing and arming of the slaves. Black insurrection at last would destroy the slave power: only that way could the Union Army win the war.

Harpers Ferry: The First Battle of the Civil War

As the years passed,to anti-slavery forces it seemed that the slaveholders were winning every battle. Every "compromise" increased the power of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruling on the Dred Scott case effectively extended the boundaries of slavery throughout the country. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southern Democrat, led the court decision that residency in a free state did not free a slave and that the Missouri Compromise barring slavery in the Northern territories was unconstitutional. As Marx said, "... now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery" ("The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19). Most notoriously, Taney wrote that blacks had no claim to U.S. citizenship under the Constitution because blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

But many abolitionists and free-soilers were determined to fight with every weapon available. To the free-soil farmers of the West, the expansion of slave-based agriculture was a direct threat. The South hindered by every possible means the colonization of the territories by free labor, seeking instead new lands for the plantation system and for the immensely profitable slave trade. Outraged free-state settlers organized in self-defense. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened Kansas to slavery under the dubious slogan of "popular sovereignty," border ruffians from the neighboring slave-state of Missouri spread terror and murder throughout the area to prevent a free-soil government from forming. John Brown and his followers, armed with rifles and the determination that slavery would not triumph, were key in the eventual victory of freedom in Bleeding Kansas.

It was shortly thereafter that Brown began to finalize and execute his plan to initiate a slave insurrection to found a black republic in the South. When Brown approached Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass and others (among whom were the Secret Six) in 1858 with his plan for launching a guerrilla war against the slavocracy, they recommended Tubman as the key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen who had settled in Canada, beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Her work in bringing slaves out of the South gave her not only detailed knowledge of the terrain throughout Brown's planned Appalachian route, but invaluable military experience. Brown went to meet the woman he called "General Tubman" at St. Catherines in Canada; she enthusiastically embraced his plan for arming the slaves and setting up mountain strongholds from which to wage war against slavery.

Tubman agreed to recruit followers and raise money for the plan. She also may have attended the Chatham, Ontario convention in May 1858, where Brown and his followers discussed the constitution for the new black republic. A sternly religious man not given to superlatives, Brown wrote to his son: "Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that / ever met with. There is the most abundant material; & of the right quality; in this quarter; beyond all doubt" (quoted in Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood).

But when the time came to launch the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry which was to begin the guerrilla war, Tubman was ill and out of reach. Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, kept her from being with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Thus Tubman was not there when federal troops dispatched by President Buchanan and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart rounded up Brown and his men. A few escaped; of the rest, those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia. At his execution in December 1859, John Brown's last, prescient words spoke of the years to come: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done" (ibid., emphasis in original). In the North John Brown's martyrdom was a rallying cry for abolition, while hysterical fear of insurrection swept the South and led to lynchings of suspected agitators. In later years Harriet Tubman spoke of Brown, "We Negroes in the South never call him John Brown; we call him our Saviour. He died for us."

The Civil War Years

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 out of the struggle for Kansas. For the 1860 presidential election the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as a moderate capable of winning wider support than more radical candidates. Although he opposed the expan¬sion of slavery, Lincoln's platform did not call for its elimination in the states where it already existed. Lincoln explicitly denounced John Brown's raid and declared his execution just. But Lincoln was still too anti-slavery for the South, and the secession of (eventually) eleven states led to the Confederate States of America. The Northern government, hoping for yet another compromise, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the war, which was forced on them by the slaveholders' cannons at Fort Sumter. To Lincoln and the majority of the Northern ruling class, the goal of the war was not to end slavery but to put down the secession of the South.
Harriet Tubman again saw further, earlier: that the war for the Union must become a war to free the slaves. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child quoted her words in a letter to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (quoted in Conrad, op. c/t.):

"They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer and the ague in the winter— They may send them one year, two year, three year, till they tire of sending ortill they use upthe young men. All of no use. God is ahead of Mister Lincoln. Cod won't let Mister Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Mister Lincoln, he is a great man, and I'm a poor Negro; but this Negro can tell Mister Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free. Suppose there was an awfully big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. You send for the doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolls up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again ... and so he keeps doing till you kill him. That's what Mister Lincoln ought to know."

But in the early months of the war Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in a military/political maneuver to woo secessionists and would-be secessionists into the Union. When General John C. Frernont, commander of the western depart¬ment, declared in August 1861 that all property of Missourians in rebellion was confiscated and the slaves emancipated, Lincoln fired him and rescinded the order. It took two years of ignominious defeats at the hands of the rebels to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. When it became clear by late 1862 that the North could not win the war in any other way, he made plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—finally ending the spirit of compromise which had immobilized the North:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."

Although the Emancipation Proclamation expressly left intact slavery in Union-loyal states like Maryland, January 1, 1863 was a day of rejoicing among all anti-slavery people. Douglass described his reaction:

"...I took the proclamation, first and last, for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter. Its meaning to me was the entire abolition of slavery, wherever the evil could be reached by the federal arm, and I saw that its moral power would extend much further."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. Harriet Tubman herself was within earshot of one of the first battles employing blacks in combat: the heroic assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863. It was here that the Massachusetts 54th, the first regiment of free Northern blacks, led by Tubman's friend Robert Gould Shaw, demonstrated before the eyes of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers. It was probably this battle Tubman was describing in her dramatic words: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." From then on black soldiers were thrown into the fighting on all fronts, tipping the balance of power for the ultimate Northern victory against the slavocracy.
Fort Wagner was quite near to Port Royal, South Carolina, where Tubman spent most of the war years working for the Union Army. One of the earliest Union victories had liberated the lush Sea Islands from the slaveholders; from here the Union Army ran its Department of the South. Control of the port allowed Union gunboats to patrol the coastline from Savannah to Charleston and begin a blockade of Confederate shipping, cutting off trade between the cotton South and the textile merchants of Great Britain. Fugitive slaves and freedmen flocked to the protection of the Union Army. Abolitionists set up schools to teach the blacks, young and old, to read and write.

Here Tubman worked in the army's service in many capacities. Her authority as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad was enormously important in reassuring the freedmen of the trustworthiness of the Yankees. As a nurse she first ministered predominantly to the blacks suffering from malnutrition. Later she nursed both black and white soldiers, going from camp to camp where men were dying of dysentery, smallpox and malaria. She set up a laundry and taught women to earn a living, while supporting herself by baking pies and brewing root beer at night after her hard day's labor.

Tubman's outstanding contribution to the war was as a Union spy and scout. General Hunter, the commander at Port Royal, recognized her expertise, tempered by her years in the Underground Railroad; under him Tubman organized a scouting service of black scouts and river pilots who surveyed and patrolled the Combahee River area in South Carolina.
In this capacity she was integral to a celebrated military action on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Three ships under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the guerrilla battles in Kansas and a trusted comrade of John Brown, raided deep into South Carolina in a blow pointing forward to Sherman's march on Georgia. The Boston Commonwealth described the battle:

"Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch."

The liberated slaves were brought back to Port Royal, where the able-bodied men among them were inducted into Montgomery's regiment.

Reconstruction Betrayed

At the war's end in 1865, over 600,000 Americans lay dead—almost equal to the number of American deaths in all the rest of the nation's wars combined. It took this bloody conflagration to resolve two key questions in American history: the Civil War forged a loose confederation of individual states into a modern nation. And underlying this question of political power lay the conflict between slavery and capitalism. The black question is the linchpin of American history.

Northern industrialism, unfettered at long last from the opposition of the slaveholders, wasted no time. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. A federal protective tariff fostered the growth of domestic industry. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for the free-soil colonization of the vast territories of the West.

But in 1865 the question of what position the newly liberated slaves should occupy in American society cried out for an answer. The initial conciliationist policy of the federal government under Andrew Johnson was strenuously opposed by the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Congressional legislation provided for full political equality for blacks: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are the legal codification of the gains of the Civil War. Slavery was wiped from the American Constitution, and blacks were made full citizens by law. The 15th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was passed to provide federal protection of blacks against Southern counterrevolu¬tionary violence. Black rights were enforced at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army.

But the foundation upon which black equality must rest was never laid: only confiscation of the huge plantation holdings of the ex-slaveowners and their distribution'among the ex-slaves would have laid the economic basis without which "equality" remained a legal formality. Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution— the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the econom¬ic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression.

Radical Reconstruction was destroyed in a political counterrevolution which stripped blacks of their newly won economic and political rights. Nightriding race-terrorists intimidated and murdered thefreedmen; the Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the war by ex-Confederate officers. The Compromise of 1877 codi¬fied the rollback of Reconstruction: the Republican Party bought the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops from the South. Over the years a new form of rural repression developed to replace the slave plantations. The Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement bound the liberated slaves to poverty and oppression as landless sharecroppers.

The betrayal of the struggle for black freedom was certainly experienced by Harriet Tubman. At the war's end, almost 50 years old, she was at last able to head for her home in Auburn, New York. Exhausted by her years of labor, subject to increasing bouts of sickness, and with family members looking to her for support, her active political life was essentially over. En route North she was beaten by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass, entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. She was thrown into the baggage car, badly hurt and humiliated by this racist and sexist attack. She suffered from the effects of this injury for years. Then began a decades-long battle for the pension to which her three years of war service entitled her. Tubman commented scornfully, "You wouldn't think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds." She did not receive a penny until after the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, in 1888, when she was awarded $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government made some recognition of her service to the Union. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home, named in honor of John Brown, for indigent elderly blacks. Harriet Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old.

Finish the Civil War!

At the time of Lincoln's re-election in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was a leading member, sent the president a letter of congratulation:

"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholdersdared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; whenon the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up,whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man wasissued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; ...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy crusade of property against labor... "

But the stars and stripes, the proud banner of the Civil War, has long since become mired in the filth of racism and imperialist war. Only the working class, under revolutionary socialist leadership, can lead mankind out of the putrid decay that is capitalist society today.

Marx said, "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the "American dream" is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx's words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is fhe race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.

Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, "Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!" to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolution¬ary party. A workers party as the tribune of the people will fight for the interests of all the oppressed. Liberation for blacks and women can be won only by a workers government which will smash the capitalist system and reorganize society on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Key leadership in the revolutionary struggle will be provided by the Harriet Tubmans and Frederick Douglasses of our time. We honor these great black leaders for their role in bringing the day of liberation one giant step closer.

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- ***Big Bill Haywood-Working Class Warrior

Big Bill Haywood-Working Class Warrior

Book Review

Big Bill Haywood, Melvyn Dubofsky, Manchester University Press, Manchester England, 1987

If you are sitting around today wondering, as I occasionally do, what a modern day radical labor leader should look like then one need go no further than to observe the career, warts and all, of the legendary Bill Haywood. To previous generations of radicals that name would draw an automatic response. Today’s radicals, and others interested in social solutions to the pressing problems that have been bestowed on us by the continuation of the capitalist mode of production, may not be familiar with the man and his program for working class power. Professor Dubofsky’s little biographical sketch is thus just the cure for those who need a primer on this hero of the working class.

The good professor goes into some detail, despite limited accessablity, about Haywood’s early life out in the Western United States in the late 19th century. Those hard scrabble experiences made a huge imprint on the young Haywood as he tramped from mining camp to mining camp and tried to make ends mean, any way he could. Haywood, moreover, is the perfect example of the fact that working class political consciousness is not innate but gained through the hard experiences of life under the capitalist system. Thus, Haywood moved from itinerant miner to become a leading member of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and moved leftward along the political spectrum along the way. Not a small part in that was due to his trial on trumped up charges in Idaho for murder as part of a labor crack down against the WFM by the mine owners and their political allies there.

As virtually all working class militants did at the turn of the 20th century, Big Bill became involved with the early American socialist movement and followed the lead of the sainted Eugene V. Debs. As part of the ferment of labor agitation during this period the organization that Haywood is most closely associated with was formed-The Industrial Workers of the World (hereafter IWW, also known as Wobblies). This organization- part union, part political party- was the most radical expression (far more radical than the rather tepid socialist organizations) of the American labor movement in the period before World War I.

The bulk of Professor Dubofsky’s book centers, as it should, on Haywood’s exploits as a leader of the IWW. Big Bill’s ups and downs mirrored the ups and downs of the organization. The professor goes into the various labor fights that Haywood led highlighted by the great 1912 Lawrence strike (of bread and roses fame), the various free speech fights but also the draconian Wilsonian policy toward the IWW after America declared war in 1917. That governmental policy essentially crushed the IWW as a mass working class organization. Moreover, as a leader Haywood personally felt the full wrath of the capitalist government. Facing extended jail time Haywood eventually fled to the young Soviet republic where he died in lonely exile in 1928.

The professor adequately tackles the problem of the political and moral consequences of that escape to Russia for the IWW and to his still imprisoned comrades so I will not address it here. However, there are two points noted by Dubofsky that warrant comment. First, he notes that Big Bill was a first rate organizer in both the WFM and the IWW. Those of us who are Marxists sometimes tend to place more emphasis of the fact that labor leaders need to be “tribunes of the people” that we sometimes neglect the important “trade union secretary” part of the formula. Haywood seems to have had it all. Secondly, Haywood’s and the IWW’s experience with government repression during World War I, repeated in the “Red Scare” experience of the 1950’s against Communists and then later against the Black Panthers in the 1960’s should be etched into the brain of every militant today. When the deal goes down the capitalists and their hangers-on will do anything to keep their system. Anything. That said, read this Haywood primer. It is an important contribution to the study of American labor history.

Channeling Bobby Kennedy 2019 -From The Archives -On Bobby Kennedy- A Personal View From The Left On The Anniversary Of His Assassination

On Bobby Kennedy- A Personal  View From The Left On The  Anniversary Of His Assassination

Commentary

Every political movement has its ‘high holy days’, its icons and its days of remembrance. We on the international labor left have our labor day-May Day. We pay tribute each January to the work of Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. Some of us remember the assassination by Stalin of the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Others celebrate November 7th the anniversary of the Russian revolution in 1917. The Democratic Party in the United States is no exception to those symbols of group solidarity. They have their Jefferson- Jackson dinners, their nomination conventions and their remembrances of their modern political heroes like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and so forth.

It is somewhat ironic that at just the time that when presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, a recent addition to the Democratic Party pantheon of heroes and heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, is claiming the nomination of the party that the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1968 is being remembered in some quarters. That event holds much meaning in the political evolution of this writer. The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was the last time that this writer had a serious desire to fight solely on the parliamentary road for political change. So today he too has some remembrances, as well.

In the course of this year I have read (or rather re-read) and reviewed elsewhere the 1960, 1968 and 1972 presidential campaign writings of Norman Mailer and those of 1972 by Hunter Thompson. I have, additionally, written reminiscences of my own personal political evolution that point to 1968 as a watershed year personally and politically for those of us of the Generation of ’68. Just a quick thumbnail sketch of my own political trajectory that year will give the reader a flavor of the times.

I committed myself early (sometime in late 1967) to the reelection of Lyndon Johnson, as much as I hated his Vietnam War policy. Why? One Richard M. Nixon. I did not give Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent campaign even a sniff, although I agreed with his anti-war stance. Why? He could not beat one Richard M. Nixon. When Booby jumped into the race and days later Johnson announced that he was not going to run again in I was there the next day. I was a senior in college at the time but I believe I spent hundreds of hours that spring working the campaign either out of Boston, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Why? Well, you can guess the obvious by now. He COULD beat one Richard M. Nixon.

It was more than that though, and I will mention more on that below. I took, as many did, his murder hard. It is rather facile now to say that something of my youth, and that of others who I have talked to recently about this event, got left behind with his murder but there you have it. However, to show you the kind of political year that it was for me about a week after his death I was in the Hubert Humphrey campaign office in Boston. Why? You know why by now. And for those who don’t it had one name- Richard M. Nixon.

But let us get back to that other, more virtuous, political motive for supporting Bobby Kennedy. It was always, in those days, complicated coming from Massachusetts to separate out the whirlwind effect that the Kennedy family had on us, especially on ‘shanty’ Irish families. On the one hand we wished one of our own well, especially against the WASPs, on the other there was always that innate bitterness (jealousy, if you will) that it was not we who were the ones that were getting ahead. If there is any Irish in your family you know what I am talking about.

To be sure, as a fourteen year old I walked the neighborhood for John Kennedy in 1960 but as I have mentioned elsewhere that was a pro forma thing. Part of the ritual of entry into presidential politics. The Bobby thing was from the heart. Why? It is hard to explain but there was something about the deeply felt sense of Irish fatalism that he projected, especially after the death of his brother, that attracted me to him. But also the ruthless side where he was willing to cut Mayor Daly and every politician like him down or pat them on the back and more, if necessary, to get a little rough justice in the world. In those days I held those qualities, especially in tandem, in high esteem. Hell, I still do, if on a narrower basis.

This next comment will I hope put the whole thing in a nutshell. Recently I was listening to a program commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Robert Kennedy’s assassination on National Public Radio where one of the guests was the journalist and close Kennedy friend Pete Hamill. Hamill, who was in the Los Angeles hotel celebrating the decisive California primary victory when the assassination took place, mentioned that a number of people closely associated with Kennedy at that time saw history passing through their hands in a flash. By that they meant, sincerely I am sure, that the last best change to beat Nixon and hold off the "Night of the Long Knives" had passed.

Well, if nothing else they were right in one sense and here is where one including this writer, as politically distance from Kennedy’s party as I am today, could appreciate the political wisdom of Robert Kennedy. In his incisive way Kennedy cut to the chase and through all the political baloney when he said that Richard Nixon represented the dark side of the American spirit. True words, I would only add these words-the dark spirit that the world has rightly come to fear and loathe. Forty years later and one hundred years politically wiser I can still say though - Bobby Kennedy, oh what might have been.

The Fire This Time-The Cold Civil War Cometh-Who Will Go Down In The Mud (And Win) Against The Trump Machine-Channeling Bobby Kennedy, 1968-The Times Call For A Street Fighter-Bernie Sanders’ Time Has Come        

By Frank Jackman

Last year well before the presidential candidates as least publicly started putting their eggs in their respective baskets I made a big deal, a big splash out of commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, our beloved Bobby who I have shed more than one cyber-tear over just saying his name (and some misty moments off computer). Like many past events in this publication that death required some commentary as a watershed moment not just for me personally but as a point where things could have gone the other way in a perhaps dramatic fashion. So beyond a tear for my (and Bobby’s) youthful idealism gone awry it was also a “what might have been” moment. History in the conditional is always problematic but there you have it.  

A great part of why I, a senior in college who had basically completed his course work, worked like seven dervishes as a youth organizer all along the Eastern part of the country for Bobby was that I feared for the fate of the country if one Richard Milhous Nixon had been elected POTUS (Twitter speak). That prospect in the wake of the disastrous Goldwater campaign in 1964 against Lyndon Baines Johnson which had opened the floodgates to get the Republican back somewhere off the edge of the cliff made Nixon and his henchmen the “chosen” choice early on. As it turned out my “prophecy” turned out to be correct as Nixon’s presidency brought us to the brink of the breakdown of republican rule (small “r” let’s be clear).         

Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent Nixon victory over Humbert H. Humphrey also had personal consequences since I had projected, not without reason, that if Bobby had gone on to be nominated by the Democrats (which seemed more certain after the fateful California primary victory over tough opponent Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Irish poet-politician) and finished off Nixon’s so crooked he needed a corkscrew for his valet to fit him into his pants every morning I would be in line for a political job most likely in Washington which would have gone a long way toward my childhood dream of being a political make and shaker in the traditional sense. Without a doubt part of that whirling dervish Spring of 1968 was the threat of the draft hanging over my head without some kind of political pull. (I have come to realize through many, many conversations with the male segment of my “Generation of ‘68” that every guy had that Vietnam War decision with no good choices hanging over his head one way or another).

The lasting memory though was of fear for the fate of the country for a man who truly believed in a modern-day version of the “divine right of kings,” that he was above the law. You can see where this is leading. As I have written and others like my old friend Seth Garth from my growing up Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville I was drafted, was trained as an 11 Bravo, an infantryman, at a time when the only place that skill was needed just then was in Vietnam. After much anguish and confusion, I would refuse the orders to go and wound up in an Army stockade and a long legal battle to get my freedom. The long and short of that experience was that my personal political perspective changed from concern over becoming a maker and shaker to being concerned more about issues like war and peace, social justice and being a thorn in the side of whatever government was in power. From the outside. I have kept that perspective for the past fifty years being involved in many issue campaigns, some successful others like the struggle against the endless wars and bloated military budgets not so.       

Back to Bobby Kennedy. Everybody knows what trouble, serious trouble, what I have called in the title to this piece and elsewhere for the past few years “the cold civil war” we are in now (this predated the Trump presidency which has only put the push toward hot civil war on steroids). Now when another POTUS, Donald J. Trump, really believes in the modern-day version of the “divine right of kings” and has upped the ante some old-time feelings have reemerged. In other words, conditions (although I would not have called it cold civil war then) looked very much like what drove me to “seek a newer world” Bobby Kennedy’s camp.

Naturally, or maybe not so naturally, but out of necessity that means at this time “stooping” (and I used that expression in a jovial way) to get involved in presidential politics, to get “down in the mud,” to join what will be come 2020 an old-fashioned take no prisoners “street fight.” To be part of what was called in the early stages of Senator McCarthy’s seemingly quixotic challenge to a sitting president a “children’s crusade.” To support someone who can speak to the better angels of our natures and WIN. That candidate for many reasons, but mainly because he has been down in the mud many times and can keep pace with the treacherous stuff that will come out of the Trump campaign is Bernie Sanders.       

Bernie is no Bobby from looks to style. Also as far as I know he never had nor now has that ruthlessness Bobby had combined with that that “seek a newer world” drive which I have always loved in a politician (and with Jack and Bobby Irish politicians, those who wrote the book on ruthlessness and vision). But Bernie has the kids eating out of his hand and that is exactly what we need right now. So for better or worse I am with Bernie, willing to work like seven dervishes to get him over the finish line. Channeling Bobby Kennedy every misty-eyed moment.