A Salute To The Working- Class 1960s
Radicals-The Sam And Ralph Stories - In The 157th Anniversary Year-Karl
Marx On The American Civil War
[In early 2018, shortly after I had
taken over the reins as site manager at this on-line publication I “saw the
light” and bowed to the wisdom of a number of older writers who balked at my
idea of reaching younger and newer audiences by having them review films like
Marvel/DC Comics productions, write about various video games and books that
would not offend a flea unlike the flaming red books previously reviewed here centered
on the now aging 1960s baby-boomer demographic which had sustained the
publication through good times and bad as a hard copy and then on-line
proposition. One senior writer, who shall remain nameless in case some stray
millennial sees this introduction and spreads some viral social media hate
campaign his way, made the very telling observation that the younger set, his
term, don’t read film reviews or hard copy books as a rule and those hardy Generation
of ’68 partisans who still support this publication in the transition from the
old Allan Jackson leadership to mine don’t give a fuck about comics, video
games or graphic novels. I stand humbled.
Not only stand humbled though but in
a valiant and seemingly successful attempt to stabilize this operation decided
to give an encore presentation to some of the most important series produced
and edited by Allan Jackson-without Allan. That too proved to be an error when
I had Frank Jackman introduce the first few sections of The Roots Is The Toots Rock And Roll series which Allan had sweated
his ass over to bring out over a couple of years. Writers, and not only senior
writers who had supported Allan in the vote of no confidence fight challenging
his leadership after he went overboard attempting to cash in on the hoopla over
the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in
1967 but also my younger writer partisans, balked at this subterfuge. What one
called it a travesty. Backing off after finding Allan, not an easy task since
he had fled to the safer waters of the West looking for work and had been
rumored to be any place from Salt Lake City to some mountainous last hippie
commune in the hills of Northern California doing anything from pimping as
press agent for Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate campaign in Utah to running a
whorehouse with Madame La Rue in Frisco or shacking up with drag queen Miss
Judy Garland in that same city, we brought Allan back to do the introductions
to the remaining sections. That we, me and the Editorial Board established
after Allan’s demise and as a guard against one-person rule, had compromised on
that gesture with the last of the series being the termination of Allan’s
association with the publication except possibly as an occasional writer, a
stringer really, when some nostalgia event needed some attention.
That is the way things went and not
too badly when we finished up the series in the early summer of 2018. But that
is not the end of the Allan story. While looking through the on-line archives I
noticed that Allan had also seriously edited another 1960s-related series, the Sam and Ralph Stories, a series centered
on the trials and tribulations of two working-class guys who had been
radicalized in different ways by the 1960s upheavals and have never lost the
faith in what Allan called from Tennyson “seeking a newer world” would
resurface in this wicked old world, somebody’s term.
I once again attempted to make the
mistake of having someone else, in this case Josh Breslin, introduce the series
(after my introduction here) but the Editorial Board bucked me even before I
could set that idea in motion. I claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that Allan
was probably out in Utah looking for some residual work for Mitt Romney now
that he is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator for Utah or running back
to Madame La Rue, an old flame, and that high- end whorehouse or hanging with
Miss Judy Garland at her successful drag queen tourist attraction cabaret. No
such luck since he was up in Maine working on a book about his life as an
editor. To be published in hard cop y by well-known Wheeler Press whenever he
gets the proofs done. So hereafter former editor and site manager Allan will
handle the introductions on this encore presentation of this excellent series.
Greg Green]
By Bart Webber
Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris met on
May Day 1971 under unusual circumstances to say the least. May Day might spring
to mind for the politically attuned, left-wing politically attuned more likely,
as an international workers’ holiday celebrated in many countries but not in
the United States as anything but an unofficial day of commemoration by the
high heaven left-wing native remnant who remember the mass marches on that day in
the 1930s in places like New York City and San Francisco and the immigrants
used to celebrating the day in their countries of origin. That day though Sam
Eaton, who had become an anti-war activist a couple of years before when in
reaction to his closest friend from high school corner boy days, Jeff Mullins,
being blown away in some God forsaken village near Pleiku in the Central
Highlands of Vietnam and Ralph Morris, an ex-Army veteran who had served
eighteen months in that same Central Highlands area and after being discharged
had also become an anti-war activist in reaction to what he called “the U. S.
government making animals, nothing less” out of him and the fellow soldiers he
served with in Vietnam had met on the football field at then RFK Stadium in
Washington, D.C.
They, respectively, had been
arrested along with thousands of others while trying to “capture” the White
House and to surround the Pentagon and symbolically shut it down. Those were
heady days and although they did not effectively shut down the government that
day and all the collective actions for years by the anti-war movement did not
beat the American government out of Vietnam (it would take a concerted effort
by the North Vietnamese Army/South Vietnamese Liberation Front offensive to
sweep away the old regime and sent the United States desperately packing to the
helicopter pads on the roof of the embassy as the famous photograph had it
which right-wing aficionados still call “a stab in the back” for not staying
the course even longer, not providing that admittedly corrupt Saigon regime yet more weapons, dough and legitimacy)
the friendship between the two men has lasted until this day (with some
periodic lapses while both men moved back from total 24/7 political commitment
to get jobs and raise families, nicely done). More importantly they remained
true to their anti-war youth even as the high tide of the 1960s turned to
ashes. They kept the faith, although in attenuated form.
One of the things that resulted
directly from that May Day 1971 defeat of their slim forces by the rapacious
government which launched a massive counter-offensive, counter-revolution to
hear Sam say it which has lasted in some form, most recently around the
so-called cultural wars, was the need felt by both of them to have a better
handle on how to actually bring down a government bend on war, and continuation
of war, by mass actions (including, if necessary as strange as it may seem to a
reader today revolution so Sam word then not so off-beat). So they in the summer
of 1972, like many thousands of other young radicals looking for some answers
since what they had been doing previously was stalled began to read a lot of
leftist literature from the past, including the works of Karl Marx, a name that
previously meant the “enemy” in their red scare Cold War upbringing in the very
working class towns of Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively.
Moreover Sam, who had been living in a commune in Cambridge with some other
free-lance radicals invited Ralph to come over from Troy for that summer and
take part in a study group which was being formed by one of the many “red
collectives” that were sprouting up around the town.
And they did so, did study although
they both confessed since they were not well-versed or deeply interested in
history, did find out what May Day and lots of other things meant in the old
days. Part of that study included a close study of Karl Marx’s relationship
with America, a fact that they were both totally unaware of from the
conventional histories they had been taught in high school. Particularly
important were the efforts by Marx and the First International that he in
effect led to support the Northern side in the American Civil War under the
imperative of the abolishment of slavery in the Marxist scheme a progressive
step for human progress and an unfettering of the capitalism system, then on a
progressive historical curve by the dead weight of slave labor. And they had
very kind words to say of one Abraham Lincoln who acted as a serious agent for
change whatever his personal views on the black liberation question (in those
old days every issue came forth as a question, the women question, the gay
question, the Russian revolution question and so on).
So that is why today as Americans commemorate
the 157th anniversary of the start of a bloody civil war Sam Eaton
and Ralph can draw inspiration from what Karl Marx tried with might and main to
support. Sam, the writer of the two, although Ralph has put in more than his
fair share of ideas, wrote a little piece on the subject as an introduction to
articles by Marx on the subject. Here is what he had to say:
I am always amazed when I run into
some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx
and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx
and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the
American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United
States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always
negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on
the need to overthrow the system one way or another in order, peacefully if
possible, but by any means necessary as Malcolm X used to say, if necessary, to
bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be
excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a
progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading
Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human
progress.
Of course, one does not expect
everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist
scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that
would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the
historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a
necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton
a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the 2010s unlike in their youth not being the
Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and
who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather
consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past
militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo struck goods,
general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were
forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations
forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of
political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s
confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell.
Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the
Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what
he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals
out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam,
having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in
some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly.
The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime
friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to
bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the
ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with
several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the
war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they
had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then
on.
They had seen high times
and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events
of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called
off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government
over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves
when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to
the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011. That term “powder puff” not expressing the
heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months
especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship
home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it
disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it
was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world
and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing
of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and
the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph
having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired
and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in
the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences.
However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly
working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry
bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled
the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about
not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this
wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from
the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time
as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left
for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,”
the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the
wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.
So Ralph and Sam would
during most of the fall of 2011 travel
down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and
stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and
his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends
usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity
both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen
to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the
police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city
administrations across the country and across the world and police departments
doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled
and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up
to).
Of more concern since they
had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull
down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a
number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided
to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had
gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the
“leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter
the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to
step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity
politics which as they also painfully knew had done much to defang the old movements, refusing
out of hand to cohere a collective leadership that might give some direction to
the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.
Ralph and Sam in the
aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to
put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic
political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since
radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly
had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had
talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in
their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to
face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal
leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national
anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points
that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and
about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think
more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,”
wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a
respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time
spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a
minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of
today’s working people to move up in the world.
