JIm Simons : Remembering Cam Cunningham

15 July 2012

JIm Simons : Remembering Cam Cunningham

Former Movement lawyer Cam Cunningham passed away this month. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Defending the Movement:
Remembering Cam Cunningham

In 1971 we cleaned out our firm bank account and took off by car to the May Day action in Washington, D.C., where we started out as participants... to 'shut down D.C.' in protest against the Vietnam war and wound up lawyering to get our comrades out of jail.

By Jim Simons / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2012

Jim Simons will join his former Movement law partner Brady Coleman (now an actor and musician) and Brady's band, The Melancholy Ramblers (who will perform live) as Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, July 27, 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet.

AUSTIN -- Cameron McPherson Cunningham was a lawyer nonpareil. Although he succumbed to cancer in July 2012, he will be long remembered in Texas and California, even on the national stage, because he chose to be a lawyer for the people, not for the corporations.

It is not so uncommon now for young lawyers to go into public interest law, or legal services, or even to become radical lawyers, as Bill Kunstler described himself in his memoir. When I was Cam's law partner for the early years in Austin -- 1969 to 1978 -- we both thought of ourselves and self-identified as radical lawyers. As did other partners who came aboard the rollicking ship of our law firm, unlike most all the legal vessels of the time. We meant it to be that way. And I can tell you it was damn good fun in addition to being deadly serious politics.

It all started in Montreat, North Carlolina, in late August or early September 1969. Cam had graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1967. He received a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship which paid all or part of his salary at a designated legal services program. For him it was the DNA Navajo legal services program, federally funded as part of the War on Poverty, located in the four corners in Arizona. DNA is an acronym for the Navajo phrase Dinébe’iiná Náhiitna be Agha’diit’ahii -- which means “attorneys who work for the economic revitalization of The People."

I had met Cam when he was still in law school and I was with the OEO Regional Office in Austin. (OEO being the federal agency that ran the War on Poverty). Over the next couple of years we became friends. The Movement had galvanized a large segment of young people in the U.S. I opened my solo practice in 1968 and was immediately swamped with cases arising from anti-war demonstrations, the military draft, and civil rights.

Austin's Movement lawyers: From left, Cam Cunningham, Jim Simons, and Brady Coleman, at Austin's Saxon Pub for the first public performance by The Melancholy Ramblers in 1991. Photo by Tom Moriarty.
In December of 1968 Austin activists, including Martin Wiginton and Greg Calvert, with input from Cam in Arizona, organized a conference of lawyers and Movement people at a dude ranch in Wimberley, Texas, just outside of Austin. The purpose was to nudge fee-charging lawyers into pro bono representation of the multitude of arrestees and military resisters.

As a result of the conference, Cam was “hired” as a roving organizer or liaison with the progressively-inclined lawyers in Texas identified at Wimberley. I doubt that much money for living expenses was ever paid but at some point Cam left the legal services program to take on his new task.

He and his wife, Cris, moved into the rented house where my wife and I lived on the east side of Austin. We became closer friends, so to speak. But we did enjoy the companionship and it was the Sixties. I recall that Cam got a part-time position at the law school with the penal code revision project, in part thanks to law professor and friend, Fred Cohen, known facetiously by other faculty folk as “Fred the Red."

By 1969 Cam was committed to devoting his considerable energies and abilities to Movement law. At summer’s end we got wind of the lawyers’ confab known as the Southern Legal Action Movement (SLAM) to be held at Black Mountain near Montreat, North Carolina. Cam convinced me to go although I had been in informal rehab from the law that summer.

Like Wimberley, the Montreat conference was wild and wooly. All the Movement lawyers we ever heard of were there. From the New York Law Commune we found a model for what Cam wanted to do in Austin: a law commune. And so it was born in the wee hours one night in a long whiskey conversation between the two of us. He had the vision and I at least had some experience in such cases, which did not make me enthusiastic at first. We followed the New York lawyers up to New York after the conference and learned a lot.

Those idealistic principles seem a tad naive now. Like income limitation, legal workers and lawyers all with the same say and voice in the operation, fee cases to pay the way for Movement work, and so on. By the time we got back to Austin I did share Cam’s zeal to proceed with it; he had won me over. We rented a small suite near the University of Texas campus. We had one legal worker, Julie Howell (she is a lawyer now). But it really did not go too well.

Cam was trying to keep the penal code revision job and still practice law. We did defend Richard Chasein at a general court-martial at Fort Hood, after he declined training for riot control in American cities. This was a Movement case we did without fees. Other cases that should have generated fees didn’t. Money was a big problem that fall. I took a job at Dallas Legal Services Project in the spring of 1970. Cam soldiered on. In a few months I returned.

That summer the Radical Lawyers Caucus was formed for a run at the State Bar of Texas convention. With Bill Kunstler as our main speaker and other speeches by Maury Maverick, Jr. and Warren Burnett -- both great progressive Texas lawyers -- we made a splash at the convention. Before the convention the bar’s official journal declined to accept our paid ad about the Radical Lawyers Caucus. The suit we wanted to file was sent to Cam in Austin. I came back in time to brief the law and try the case which we won in federal court.

Our early struggles, stops and starts, changed for the better when a trial lawyer from East Texas contacted us -- or we contacted him after we saw his ad in the Texas Observer. In the fall of 1970 Brady Coleman became the third musketeer and our course was set. For the next couple of years we three were very close. We joked that we were closer to each other than to our wives, which was probably no joke. All three marriages ended in divorce in the early ‘70s.

In court: Com Cunningham, center, in beard, with Brady Coleman, right, successfully defended John Kniffen, left, a former Vietnam Marine who was beaten by Austin cops at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Brady had a lot of trial experience and he and Cam became a lethal trial team. Cases all around the state sent us into battle: Dallas, Houston, South Texas, and West Texas. Fort Hood kept us hopping. Busts on a large scale happened around the university. Cam was loving the practice of Movement law. He especially took to the criminal law. He and I defended a black activist charged with setting the UT ROTC building on fire.

Cam and Brady tried some murder cases (not political) and we all represented those charged with drugs. Brady and I tried civil cases against the city, police, even one against Ma Bell, the proceeds of which funded a great party that we dubbed the Last Annual Ma Bell Counter-Ripoff Wild Boar Feast.

In 1971 we cleaned out our firm bank account and took off by car to the May Day action in Washington, D.C., where we started out as participants in the action to “shut down D.C.” in protest against the Vietnam war and wound up lawyering to get our comrades out of jail. Later that summer we went to the riotous National Lawyers Guild convention in Boulder, Colorado, where it was decided amid great controversy that legal workers, jail house lawyers, and law students could be members of the previously all-lawyer Guild, the progressive bar association through the decades representing the Movement.

One thing we always did on these trips: have a big old good time. Cam was the leader of this fun, with all of us singing at the top of our lungs, quaffing any available spirits, toking and talking the talk, later recalling the great stories repeatedly even when they made us look bad -- especially when they made us look bad! We were doing exactly what we wanted to do in a time when it counted for more than any other time.

If Cam was the leader of merriment, Brady was the provider of mellow entertainment with his guitar and voice. I tried to crack jokes, often so droll Cam did not recognize the joke and took it literally, as a Midwesterner is wont to do. (He often spoke of growing up in Detroit.) This was the beginning I guess of small rifts between us.

One night sitting at the old Villa Capri Motel dining room in Austin, Cam excoriated both Brady and me for the conventional, sell-out law we had been guilty of prior to coming under his tutelage. It got so bad we all three slammed out of there in different directions. At a time when there was definitely a bit of tension, we were saved again by adding legal ballast to the firm. We were lucky enough to gain two great new partners, Bobby Nelson and John Howard in fall 1972 at the old 15th Street law office. And soon we were back to doing what we set out to do, representing the Movement.

Anti-war GI's and other activists gathered at the Oleo Strut GI Coffee House in Killeen, Texas, 1971. Cam Cunningham, in inset at right, with long dark hair. Brady Coleman is to his right. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
In 1972 Cam and Brady were part of the legal team that represented the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in a trial in Gainesville, Florida. The Gainseville 8 were charged with conspiring to blow up the Republican convention. In 1974 John Howard and I represented a defendant in the Wounded Knee occupation (as we might call it now). There had been a siege of 71 days to a standoff with blazing guns. The Indians and their allies who held the store against the FBI were charged with multiple felonies in federal court.

I am unsure of the year, but in that same period, Bobby Nelson was part of a delegation to Cuba. We all had our Movement cases in and around Austin involving defense of GI’s, SDS members, civil rights activists, lawsuits concerning women’s rights, gay rights, and the counterculture in myriad legal battles. The law firm was an institution in the community of Movement groups and people from that Montreat beginning -- Cam’s vision and determination -- to the end of the firm in 1977, the year Cam moved to the Bay Area of California.

[Jim Simons practiced law in Austin for 40 years, representing many movement activists, including anti-war GIs. Jim served as a counsel for members of the American Indian Movement who were arrested at Wounded Knee in 1974. After he retired he published his memoir Molly Chronicles in 2007. Read more articles by Jim Simons on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Jack A. Smith : My Life and Times with the Guardian

02 August 2012

Jack A. Smith : My Life and Times with the Guardian

Progressive journalist Jack A. Smith, 2012.
My life and times with the Guardian

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / August 2, 2012

Longtime radical activist and progressive journalist (and Rag Blog contributor) Jack A. Smith, former editor of the National Guardian (later renamed the Guardian), will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, August 3, 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. The show is streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. (EDT). Shortly after broadcast the podcast of this show can be heard at the Internet Archive.

[I asked Jack Smith to send along some background material, as I always do with my Rag Radio guests, and what he sent was so impressive that we're running it here as a stand-alone article. Jack Smith was one of the most important figures in progressive journalism in the 20th century, and his work, I believe, is underrecognized. Hopefully we're taking one small step to correct that situation! -- Thorne Dreyer]

The National Guardian was founded in 1948 to promote the views of the Progressive Party (which ran Henry Wallace for president that year). The weekly tabloid led an independent left-wing existence soon after the election and continued publishing until 1992. (It changed its name to the Guardian in late 1967, when it became a worker's cooperative.)

The National Guardian strongly opposed the Cold War, imperialism, and racism. It was against the Korean War, Vietnam War, and all the U.S. wars during the Cold War period. It generally supported the socialist countries of the time, though it was not explicitly socialist. True to its third party origins, the paper never backed a presidential candidate from one of the two ruling parties.

During the late 1960s through the 1970s The Guardian was the largest circulation independent left-wing paper in the U.S. (24,000 paid copies a week, with up to three or four pass-on readers per copy).

Jack A. Smith, then a reporter for the National Guardian, in 1964.
I was born in New York City to a low income family in 1934, so I'll be 78 this month, August. My widowed mother went to work to support her two kids, my sister, and me. I began working full time at 16, attending night school to get my high school diploma. I began reading radical papers, including the National Guardian, as a freshman in high school and developed socialist views at that time, which I still hold.

I started Queens College at night, working days first as a copy boy then wire editor and news writer for United Press International (America's second largest news agency at the time) but dropped out of school after the first semester in order to work a second job when my girlfriend became pregnant and we got married. (We divorced around the time I went to prison.)

I was involved with the radical pacifist movement in my early 20s and at 26 (1961) returned my draft card to the Selective Service System, defying the law forcing all young men to carry the card "on their person at all times." I told the SS that I opposed President Kennedy's war threats, U.S. support for South Vietnam, and the nuclear buildup, and would not carry a card in protest.

After interviews with the SS and FBI, the federal government drafted me as punishment. I was overage for the draft, 27 by now, plus I was deferred because I had two young children. When I refused the draft, I was indicted. UPI thereupon fired me, after eight years. I edited the Bulletin of the Committee for Nonviolent Action until my trial and conviction. I served nine months in federal prison. I began to identify as a Marxist in prison and drifted away from absolute pacifism.

When I got out it was evident that I was blackballed from getting work in the bourgeois media. I had written a few articles for the National Guardian in earlier years and the paper hired me a few weeks after I regained my freedom in mid-1963, and I remained for 21 years, moving from writer to news editor to the paper's editor over a few years.

My biggest accomplishments at the Guardian included: transforming the paper into a worker's cooperative (with equal, very low pay for all and a child allowance plus health insurance); doubling the size of the Guardian from 12 to 24 pages a week; increasing the paper's coverage of the vibrant U.S. movements for social change (students, peace, women's, gays, black power, civil rights, radical union struggles); switching from a "left progressive" editorial stand to Marxism; and working to make sure the Guardian contained the best coverage of the Vietnam War from a pro-Vietnamese point of view and that of the various peace groups in the U.S.


I left the Guardian on friendly terms in 1984. I was very deeply in debt by that time -- after 21 years of sub-minimum wages, and raising a child on my own -- and simply had to get a better-paying job. I edited several commercial magazines until retiring from paid work in 1999. During this time I remained politically active and was associated with Marxist groups, as I remain today.

My wife Donna Goodman and I moved from NYC to the college town of New Paltz, N.Y., about two hours north of the big city, in the early 1990s. We became politically active and began organizing a great many demonstrations and public meetings of a political nature, mostly in opposition to the imperialist wars (many of them were in conjunction with the Answer Coalition).

When I retired I began writing and editing our own email Activist Newsletter and calendar every two weeks (now monthly) to people living in the Hudson Valley region where we organize. The Newsletter circulates to over 3,000 readers, most of whom took part in one or more of our rallies, meetings, and long distance bus trips.

We've taken from two to seven buses of local people to Washington demonstrations and back 24 times, beginning in the mid-90s). Our next action will be August 26 when the Newsletter is organizing a march and rally in New Paltz in opposition to the War on Women.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Richard Seymour's 'American Insurgents'

04 September 2012

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Richard Seymour's 'American Insurgents'

Opposing the eagle’s talons

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." -- Mark Twain

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2012

[American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour (2012: Haymarket Books); Paperback; 230 pp.; $17.]

When my book The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground was published in 1997, at least one of its critics challenged my use of the terms imperialism and its opposite, anti-imperialism. These terms, he wrote, were specific to a time and no longer relevant.

My response was simple. These words would be irrelevant only when there were no more imperialist nations. Fifteen years and two wars and occupations later, these words are part of the general discourse and the concept of imperialism is considered by those who champion it and those who oppose it.

A book titled American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism, by Richard Seymour, is a recent and important addition to this discourse. Seymour, who also wrote The Liberal Defence of Murder wherein he discusses the currently popular humanitarian rationale for imperial intervention, provides the reader of American Insurgents with a historical survey of the antiwar and anti-imperialist efforts throughout U.S. history.

Within this discussion, Seymour includes religious and feminist opposition; leftist and conservative; and various coalitions of all of the aforementioned manifestations.

From the beginning of the book, it becomes clear how fundamental racism is to the U.S. mission of Empire. If it weren’t for the historical fact of African slavery in the U.S. this would not be a cause for special consideration, since most European empires utilize racism and racial superiority as reasoning for their empires.

However, the special history of men and women of African descent in the United States makes the fact of racism in the U.S. pursuit of empire especially heinous and unusual. In addition, the internalized racism of most U.S. whites, even in the anti-imperialist movement, often made alliances across the color line difficult. Consequently, this limited the effectiveness of these movements.

According to Seymour, it wasn’t until the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam that white and black Americans worked together in a substantial way to oppose the U.S. Empire. Even though the links between the racism of slavery and U.S. Empire had been made earlier, it was not until the anti-Vietnam war movement acknowledged and learned from the civil rights and black liberation movements in the United States that the union of black and white made a difference.

While Seymour does discuss the libertarian and paleoconservative elements of the anti-imperialist movement in the U.S. -- even praising the role those elements have played in the past 20 years with the website Antiwar.com and other endeavors -- he focuses primarily on the left and pacifist elements. Given the predominance of groups with these sentiments in the movement throughout history, this makes sense. Although a longer discussion of the conservative side of the movement would have been useful, its absence does not detract from the book.

Addressing a discussion very familiar among those to the left of anybody in the Democratic Party, Seymour provides an ultimately tragic history of the role Democrats have played in diverting and destroying anti-imperialist sentiment.

It was during the Spanish-American War that the future Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would oppose that adventure and align with the Anti-Imperialist League most famous for the membership of Mark Twain, John Dewey, Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1900, the League would hitch its star to Bryan’s candidacy. He lost to the empire-builder McKinley, rendering the League essentially moot.

A remarkably similar situation exists today, except that the candidate of the liberals in the Iraq and Afghanistan antiwar movement won the election. Of course, I mean Barack Obama. As Seymour points out (and as most everyone knows), the war in Afghanistan saw an escalation soon after Obama’s inauguration and the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. continues, albeit with considerably less bloodshed.

Efforts to build a movement against a possible war on Iran have failed to excite everyone but the most dedicated pacifists and anti-imperialists, while U.S./NATO military and intelligence operations against the regimes of Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria have even been tacitly supported by some in the antiwar movement.

It is my belief that a good part of the reason for the disintegration of the movement against the war in Iraq has to do with that movement’s politics. Seymour agrees, pointing out that the millions willing to hit the streets to oppose the war when George Bush was president have not even called their Congressperson now that a Democrat is in the White House.

The presence of Democratic Party allies on the coordinating committee of the largest antiwar network combined with the acquiescence of former Communist Party members to the Democrats' agenda ensured this disintegration. There was never a genuine anti-imperialist politics that guided the majority of the movement. That fact explains not only the belated opposition to the Afghanistan occupation but also the seeming refusal to address the belligerent role played by Israel in the wars against Muslim and Arab nations and peoples.

Any future antiwar movement must keep the Democratic Party at an arm’s length. Organizing amongst those who vote Democrat makes sense. Taking money and leadership from donors and operatives dedicated to the party’s domination of left-leaning politics doesn’t. In fact, as Seymour makes clear in his history of U.S. anti-imperialist movements, doing so is suicide for the movement in question. The Democrats cannot be anti-imperialist because they are essential to the very empire anti-imperialists oppose.

In the weeks and months ahead, as the nations of the Middle East remain in turmoil and Washington, Tel Aviv, and various European capitals debate how they want to control the region, the need for an anti-imperialist movement will grow. If we are to avoid making mistakes already made in the past, American Insurgents becomes essential reading.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Fred Klonsky and the Chicago Teachers' Strike

13 September 2012

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Fred Klonsky and the Chicago Teachers' Strike

Chicago teachers on strike. Photo by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog.
An interview with Fred Klonsky:
Chicago teachers in red and on strike

If the city of Chicago wins this strike it will very likely give the green light to big cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions there.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 13, 2012

Fred Klonsky, 64, retired in June 2012 after 30 years of working as an art teacher in grades k-5 in the public school system in Illinois.

He doesn’t go into the classroom to teach kids anymore, but he hasn’t retired from political activism and from protesting 101. A long-time president of his local union, he’s as politically active now as he’s ever been. With Chicago teachers on strike, he’s out in the streets with tens of thousands of other teachers and like them wears a red shirt. He also writes about the strike almost daily on his blog, FredKlonsky.com.

If the name Fred Klonsky rings a bell it might be because he’s a former SDS member and because his older brother Michael was national secretary of SDS in the late 1960s. Twenty years old in 1968, Fred participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Vietnam War era. He attended Los Angeles City College and the University of Illinois at Chicago where he graduated in 1984. “Solidarity Forever,” the old union slogan, still lights a fire in his belly.

Fred Klonsky. Photo by Anne Klonsky / The Rag Blog. Inset photo below by Fred Klonsky / The Rag Blog..
Jonah Raskin: What’s at stake in the teachers’ strike that’s going on in Chicago now and that has been getting national media attention?

Fred Klonsky: Everything! The city is attacking the unions and collective bargaining rights. The Democratic Party administration wants to make it difficult if not impossible for teachers to go on strike. They want to break the back of the teachers’ union and they want school principals to have total control of the hiring and the firing of teachers.

It sounds like they’d like to put the old patronage system in place.

Chicago is famous for people getting jobs based on who they know not what they know or what they can do. They want to apply the same principle to education.

It seems to me to be an intense power struggle.

If the city of Chicago wins it will very likely give the green light to cities such as Los Angeles and New York to go after teachers’ unions.

Are you an observer or a participant in this strike?

I’m some of both. I’ve been on picket lines. Two days ago I was on the line from 6:30 a.m. to noon. I’m also writing about the strike.

What’s it like out there on the street?

I’ve been at a lot of demonstrations over the years, but there is nothing like what’s happening here. It’s beautiful. The striking teachers are wearing red shirts and at the rallies there’s a sea of red. The picket lines are spirited and lively. I’ve seen former students out there, too, and that’s gratifying.

What’s the ethnic make up of the striking teachers?

In 1987, which is when the last teachers’ strike took place in Chicago, over 50% of the teachers were African American. Today it’s about 19%. If the mayor wins and we lose I think that the number of African-American teachers will plummet even more. Moreover, the goal will be to serve wealthier kids not the most needy kids.

Does the city want to gentrify the schools?

Chicago is following the European model in which the wealthy live in the center of the city and the poor and the working classes in suburban enclaves.

What is the big demographic picture in Chicago?

Once upon a time there was white flight. That pattern has reversed since the 1970s. The 2010 census shows that the African-American population has declined sharply. Young white professionals have settled in the center of the city, but they leave when their kids are of school age.

So the city wants the public school system in Chicago to reflect demographic changes and bring the wealthier kids back into the school district?

Yes, the city wants to do that and to privatize schools and educational services which are a multi-billion-dollar a year business.

Why are teachers demonized and made the scapegoats in our society? Are they in the way of the corporations?

To a large extent the union movement in the private sector has been destroyed. The powers-that-be are aiming to destroy unions in the public sector. The National Education Association (NEA) with three- and-one-half-million members is the largest union in the United States. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has one million members. That’s a combined total of four million organized workers. They’re the last union men (and women) standing.

In this strike the city is depicting teachers as greedy folks who are against change and who want to keep the status quo. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Are Chicago schools typical of schools elsewhere?

They are like urban schools everywhere. There are 360,000 students in the Chicago public school system that now mainly serves the poorest of the kids from the poorest of families. Eighty-five percent of the students qualify for free lunches. That means they’re very poor. Those who can afford to have taken their kids out of the public schools and put them in charter or private schools. The public schools have very few supplies and very few books. They do not have adequate resources.

Is Chicago different?

The union leadership here is taking a real stand. There is real backbone among union members. Moreover, the unions for the police and for firemen are supporting the strike. There’s real solidarity here.

What grade would you give Mayor Rahm Emanuel so far in the strike?

A failing grade and not only because of what he’s done during the strike. He has said that no matter what, 25% of students will fail. That’s unacceptable to teachers and their union. Emanuel has only been in office for a year, but violence in the city has skyrocketed. There have been more murders here in the last year than in Afghanistan. He’s turned my city into crap. Harold Washington, who was the mayor in the 1980s, was far better. He actually paid attention to the needs of the most needy. Rahm Emanuel doesn’t.

Will the strike affect the presidential election?

I can’t imagine that Obama is happy about the strike. So far he has had no comment. Of course, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have offered their support to Mayor Emanuel. We have a Democratic mayor putting Republican educational policies into practice. It’s a sad day for the city of Chicago.

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack London, is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Harry Targ : It's Time to Organize Workers

18 September 2012

Harry Targ : It's Time to Organize Workers

Label of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), circa 1900. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Lessons from history:
It is time to organize all workers

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2012

"Ten thousand times the labor movement has stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But not withstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun." -- Eugene V. Debs

After World War I workers believed it was time to unionize everybody who worked. Some organizers came out of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), some were enthusiastic followers of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), some were members of the Socialist Party -- followers of Eugene V. Debs, and many were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. Workers launched two nationwide strikes in steel and meatpacking.

The ruling classes responded with force and fraud. As to the former, they used a multiplicity of means to crush strikes and they jailed and deported known radicals. The United States government participated with other regimes to intervene in the Russian civil war and to isolate the new revolutionary government diplomatically and economically.

As to fraud, corporations initiated various worker-management schemes to mollify worker discontent: from sporting activities, to counselor home visits, to the establishment of human relations departments. Also businesses embarked on a huge campaign to stimulate consumerism, including catalog purchases of products to buying on time to creating an automobile culture.

Force and fraud worked. Labor union membership and worker militancy declined even though wages and working conditions did not improve substantially.

But by the late 1920s strikes in textile and mining occurred. With the onset of the Great Depression, radicals were organizing Unemployment Councils in urban areas. Dispossessed farmers began their long trek to the West Coast seeking agricultural work.

In 1934 alone, general strikes occurred in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toledo, and Akron, Ohio. In the late 1930s, workers in South Bend, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan, added the “sit-down strike” to the panoply of militant tools used by workers to demand the right to organize unions, fair wages, health and safety at the work place, and pensions.

Many of their goals were achieved by the 1950s. 1953 was the peak year for organized labor. Thirty-three percent of non-agricultural workers were organized. Then union membership began a slow but steady decline. The Reagan “revolution” brought a return to many of the strategies of force and fraud employed in the 1920s. Declining worker power was dramatic.

Both Republican and Democratic administrations used administrative tools, outsourcing of jobs, so-called free trade agreements, and outright banning of rights to collective bargaining in various sectors to crush unions.

But as history shows, workers from time to time fight back, regain the rights they lost in prior eras, and continue the process of pushing history in a progressive direction. The last year has been such a time for fight back. Workers in Cairo, Madison, Madrid, Athens, and Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and all across the globe are rising up.

In the United States the most recent example is that of the Chicago Teachers Union. Public sector workers have been hit very hard in recent years. Government officials rationalized anti-labor legislation as necessitated by fiscal crises. But these fiscal crises lead not to the end to services but to their privatization. Teachers, librarians, firefighters, and others are laid off and replaced or rehired at wages a third less than they made as unionized public sector workers.

Chicago teachers have said no to this scam. They are fighting against the privatization of public schools, demanding the maintenance of job security for teachers so they can continue to meet the needs of children, and are standing up for the principle that all children, not just children of the wealthy, are entitled to the best education that the society can offer. Throughout history workers’ demands have been beneficial for everybody.

Revisiting history can provide useful lessons from the past for the present. They are not specific roadmaps for action. But what the lessons of the past, the militancy of the last year, and the mobilization of Chicago teachers suggest is that now is a good time to think about all workers -- in factories, on construction sites, in offices, in universities, everywhere -- organizing unions. There is power in the union.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : The Faith and Resistance of the Catonsville Nine

24 September 2012

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : The Faith and Resistance of the Catonsville Nine

Faith and resistance:
The story of the Catonsville Nine:

Peters’ compelling narrative renders the Catonsville Nine not as saints or as villains, but as human beings who could no longer be silent in the face of injustice and war.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2012

[The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era by Shawn Francis Peters (2012: Oxford University Press); Hardback; 416 pp.; $34.95.]

Fire is a most evocative element. From Hell to the fiery tongues of the Christian Pentecost to the forges of Hephaestus and the Fire Demon of the Bhagavad-gita, the religious meanings attached to fire swirl around the concepts of death, punishment, and rebirth.

On a more real level, fire is an all too familiar part of war, whether it is the Greek fire of Byzantine warfare, the crematoriums of Buchenwald, the firebombing of Dresden and various Japanese cities in World War Two, or the searing death of napalm in Vietnam and white phosphorus in Iraq. The screams of the incinerated are impossible to fathom for those unfamiliar with the horror of war.

On May 17, 1968, several Catholics brought this fact home to U.S. citizens when they stole almost 400 Selective Service files and burned them with napalm in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board office. That act was to earn them damnation and praise; death threats and calls for sainthood; a trial and prison terms.

I myself was a questioning 13-year old Catholic kid living 20 miles away from the pyre. That action made me see my faith in a new light. Maybe there were those in the Catholic Church who understood the example of Jesus to be a revolutionary example, not an affirmation of the patriarchy and the war machine.

Maybe my occasional consideration of the priesthood might be the way to go. One didn’t have to be like the conservative clerics banning books, movies and music from the pages of the Archdiocese newsweekly or the disapproving priests in our parish who read the Pope’s 1968 encyclical on birth control with what seemed to be woman-hating relish.

Obviously, I didn’t become a priest, although the example of the Catholic anti-warriors and liberation theologians (and the conversation of some Jesuit seminarians and priests during high school) did lead me to spend a couple months in a seminary before I went off to try college at a Jesuit university. Within a year of that endeavor, my hope for the Church was gone, having washed away in a realization that if the Church didn’t hate women, they surely did not trust them.

Like most other anti-warriors, I have worked with priests, nuns, and other Catholics in a number of actions and committees and have usually found them to be sincere and committed people. It is their boss and his pronunciations I can’t abide.

Anyhow, back to the Catonsville Nine. Their action in Catonsville had been preceded by a smaller action in Baltimore that included two of the Catonsville participants: Tom Lewis and Fr. Philip Berrigan. It was followed by a much larger action in Milwaukee that saw the destruction of thousands of draft records.

The Catonsville participants went to trial in 1968 and, thanks to the arguments of their lead attorney William Kunstler and the understanding of the court, the defendants were allowed to bring the questions of the Vietnam War and the draft into the courtroom. The trial was covered by news organizations around the planet. Poet Daniel Berrigan (Philip’s brother and a Jesuit priest) wrote a well-received play titled The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. The play modified the trial transcript and addressed the moral issues involved, alluding to other instances of the struggle between conscience and authority throughout history.

Until recently, it was the play and a couple books that told the story of the Catonsville Nine and their action. Another book has joined the list. Written by The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era, who was born in Catonsville in 1966 and has two previously published books centering around religion and society, this comprehensive look at the Catonsville Nine is titled The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era.

While sympathetic to the ideals that drove the Nine to break the law in such a dramatic manner, Peters does not skimp on detailing the criticism levied against the Nine from the outside. Nor does he whitewash the internal doubts and misgivings that took place within the group during the planning, execution, and aftermath of the action.

The reader is left with a tale of commitment, spiritual certainty, and human emotion. Despair, anger, ecstasy, and determination are the ingredients of Peters’ narrative and he combines these ingredients with the skill of a master storyteller.

The personal history of each member of the Nine is presented as a prelude to the central event in the book: the draft board raid and the subsequent trial. Their lives as children brought up in a Catholic church known for its dogma and rigidity is discussed. So is the effect of the liberalization of that church during the brief reign of Pope John XXIII and the Vatican Two conference.

Equally important to many of the protagonists were the words of the Church hierarchy regarding the nature of modern war, colonialism, and imperialism. It was during the post-World War Two period that the Catholic Church became more vocal in its opposition to war, the preparation for war, and the inequality of the ever-growing world capitalist system.

The combination of these words from the hierarchy, the liberalization brought on by Vatican Two, and the desire of more and more Catholic clergy to engage in anti-poverty and antiwar work instead of just ministering to the spiritual needs of their flocks created a critical mass of activism within the Church. This included those members of the Nine whose previous work as missionaries in Latin America had revealed the disconnect between Washington’s words of social justice and the poverty and repression of daily life under U.S.-sponsored regimes. They realized they could no longer not participate in opposing those regimes.

This activism did not sit well with many more conservative church members. Peters relates this aspect of the Nine’s tale well, intertwining the reaction to the Nine and other activist Catholics with the Nine’s frustration with the Church to act on its words about peace and against war.

Although the strongest opposition to the Nine came from law enforcement and those who supported the war, there were many in the Church who had nothing positive to say about the group, either. Indeed, for some members of the Nine, it was the negative response from the Church that bothered them the most.

The Catonsville Nine have always been identified with the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel. In part, this was because the two men were the individuals that the media focused much of their attention on. Another reason was due to the sheer presence of both men. Not to be discounted was the fact that they were both priests, while the other members of the Nine were mostly laypeople, although David Darst was a Christian Brother.

Peters’ book does a wonderful job bringing the other seven members of the Nine alive. His well-researched tale makes each of these other activists fully three-dimensional. By doing so, he creates a picture of the Nine that presents the entity of the Nine as much a part of the actual story as the Catonsville action itself. While drawing this picture, he also provides the reader with a representation of the entire Catholic antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The lasting legacy of the Catonsville Nine action is Daniel Berrigan’s play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. First published in 1970, this play in free verse used the trial transcript of the Nine as its inspiration. It was produced around the world almost immediately after its publication and was made into a film in 1972, produced by Gregory Peck. I recall seeing it performed on a military base by a community theater group made up of GIs and military dependents.

Incredibly powerful and direct, it is still performed and was republished during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2004. Like the draft board raid itself, the play forces the individual, no matter what their faith, to look at their role in the war economy we live in and it asks the audience members/readers what they are going to do about it.

In its own way, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era also forces the reader to deal with this modern contradiction. It doesn’t call on the reader to become an activist; it presents them with the compelling story of individuals who did.

This is a must read for people of any faith, whether that faith is in a god or in humanity. Peters’ compelling narrative renders the Catonsville Nine not as saints or as villains, but as human beings who could no longer be silent in the face of injustice and war. They risked everything and, by doing so, gained much more than they ever could have lost.

It is a story older than Antigone but, when told as masterfully as Peters does here, it is a story that never grows old. Nor should it.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : The 'Unfinished Revolution' of the Emancipation Proclamation

25 September 2012

Harry Targ : The 'Unfinished Revolution' of the Emancipation Proclamation

Emancipation from Freedmen's viewpoint. Illustration from Harper's Weekly, 1865. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The Emancipation Proclamation:
The 'Unfinished Revolution'

The candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists since the days of segregation.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2012

"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… -- President Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” January 1, 1863.

The Purdue University Black Cultural Center on September 21, 2012, organized a panel honoring the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the final version of which was issued by the President on January 1, 1863.

The proclamation declared slaves in the states rebelling against the United States to be free. It did not apply to those border states which had not seceded from the Union. In those states 750,000 slaves were yet to be liberated.

Celebration of political anniversaries provides an important opportunity to better understand the past, how the past connects to the present, and what needs to be done to connect the present to the future. As a participant on this panel I was stimulated to reflect on the place and significance of the Proclamation and the centrality of slavery and racism to American history.

First, as Marx suggested at the time, the rise of capitalism as a mode of production was inextricably connected to slavery and the institutionalization of racism. He described the rise of capitalism out of feudalism and the centrality of racism and slavery to that process:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation (Capital, Volume 1).

Second, the Emancipation Proclamation began a political revolution, abolishing slavery in Confederate states, but it did not embrace full citizenship rights for all African Americans nor did it support economic emancipation.

The historical literature documents that while Lincoln’s views on slavery moved in a progressive direction, the President remained more committed to preserving the Union than abolishing slavery. Until the Proclamation, he harbored the view that African-Americans should emigrate to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America to establish new lives.

As historian Eric Foner wrote: “Which was the real Lincoln -- the racist or the opponent of slavery? The unavoidable answer is: both.” In short, President Lincoln, an iconic figure in American history thought and acted in contradictory ways.

Third, Lincoln’s growing opposition to slavery during his political career and his presidency was influenced to a substantial degree by the abolitionist movement. As an influential participant in that movement Frederick Douglass had a particular impact on Lincoln’s thinking.

Foner points out that on a whole variety of issues “Lincoln came to occupy positions the abolitionists first staked out.” He continues: “The destruction of slavery during the war offers an example, as relevant today as in Lincoln’s time, of how the combination of an engaged social movement and an enlightened leader can produce progressive social change.”

Fourth, the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation was never fully achieved. It constituted an “unfinished revolution,” the creation of political rights for former slaves but not economic justice. The former slaves remained dependent on the plantation system of agriculture; landless sharecroppers beholden to former slave owners.

Fifth, post-civil war reconstruction began to institutionalize the political liberation of African Americans. For a time Blacks and whites began to create new political institutions that represented the common interests of the economically dispossessed. But the collaboration of Northern industrial interests and Southern plantation owners led to the destruction of Reconstruction era change and a return to the neo-slave system of Jim Crow segregation.

Even the “unfinished revolution” was temporarily crushed.

Sixth, over the next 100 years African Americans, workers, women, and other marginalized groups continued the struggle to reconstruct the political freedoms implied in the Emancipation Proclamation and temporarily institutionalized in Reconstruction America. The struggle for democracy culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and the rising of Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians.

Finally, the contradictions of victories achieved and the escalation of racist reactions since the mid-1960s continues. And, most vitally, the unfinished revolution continues. The question of the intersection of race and class remains as gaps between rich and poor in wealth, income, and political power grow.

In this historic context, the candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists that have existed since the days of segregation.

At the same time Obama’s reelection alone, while vital to the progressive trajectory of American history since 1863, will not complete the revolution. The need for social movements to address the “class question,”or economic justice, along with protecting the political gains that have been achieved, will remain critical to our future.

One hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation the struggle for democracy, political empowerment, and the end to class exploitation, remains for this generation to advance.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : Jack Kerouac's 'Mishmash' Life

27 September 2012

Jonah Raskin : Jack Kerouac's 'Mishmash' Life

Jack Kerouac. Photo by Tom Polumbo, circa 1956. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Jack Kerouac’s 'mishmash' life
and his biographers

None of Kerouac’s biographers are as concise as he was, none of them as poetical as he, and none of them as unapologetic about his seemingly chaotic life as he.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2012

More biographies have been written about Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) than about any other American writer who lived in the second half of the twentieth century, but no biographer has written anything as alive and as punchy as Kerouac’s own three-page profile of himself modestly entitled “Author’s Introduction” that can be found at the front of Lonesome Traveler, a collection of his essays about America, Mexico, and Europe.

Of course, he was a genius. (Ann Charters includes it in The Portable Jack Kerouac, a volume of his writings that she edited and that was published by Viking in 1995.) Kerouac’s biographers, even the best of them, have been adept researchers, faithful scribes, dogged investigators, and attentive oral historians but they haven’t had his flair for language or his gift for story telling.

Word-for-word Kerouac outclassed nearly everyone who has tried to capture his furtive life in print and aimed to satisfy the seemingly endless appetite for information about his sex life, his drug consumption, and his hi-jinks on the road with Neal Cassady and others.

Kerouac’s friend and mentor, William Burroughs, the author of the surrealistic novel, Naked Lunch, once said that Kerouac persuaded a generation of Americans to drink espressos and to buy and wear Levis. Forty-three years after his death in 1969, Kerouac’s life style is still contagious and readers are still gobbling up books about him and about his work as though he were the golden boy and the patron saint of post-modern American literature.

Joyce Johnson’s The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012) is the most recent Kerouac biography, and though it weighs in at nearly 500 pages, the author wisely doesn’t call it the definitive biography. She’s much better equipped to write about Kerouac today than anyone else in or out of academia. A scholar who has studied his manuscripts, she’s also an ex-lover who knew him personally in the late 1950s.

Johnson stops her story in 1951 when Kerouac was 29 years old and still had 18 more years to go. Most of Kerouac’s other biographers try to cram his whole life into one volume; readers often feel like they’re swimming in a sea of details and can’t recognize the shore or the main currents. Johnson always provides signs and signals that provide a sense of direction. She frequently says, “for the first time...” -- and that’s helpful.

The publication of Johnson’s not definitive biography offers the opportunity to reconsider Kerouac’s previous biographies, including Paul Mayer’s Kerouac that he unwisely calls “definitive.” It’s definitely not definitive.

It’s also a good time to reflect on the larger subject of Kerouac and the art of biography itself. It feels like it’s now or never especially with three Jack Kerouac movies due to hit movie screens including Walter Salles’s cinematic version of On the Road, which will probably blur the already blurry distinctions between biography and fiction that Kerouac himself created by writing what he called “true-story novels.”

He made that statement in the three-page self-portrait at the front of Lonesome Traveler in which he also noted that he wrote On The Road in three weeks, a statement that Johnson argues persuasively is patently false. Speed mattered to Kerouac: writing fast and driving fast. Spontaneity mattered, too, though his speedy, spontaneous life style and his rapid consumption of alcoholism contributed to his death at 47.

But his early death is also part of his continuing appeal; he didn’t live long enough to betray his own youthful dreams and sense of innocence.

According to Beat scholar Ronna Johnson, who keeps count, there are 21 Kerouac biographies. They include: Tom Clark’s Jack Kerouac: A Biography, Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe, Ann Charters’s Kerouac: A Biography, Ellis Amburn’s Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, Victor-Levy Beaulieu’s, Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay, Robert Hipkiss’s Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism, Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, Barry Miles’s Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, Warren French’s Jack Kerouac, Steve Turner’s Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, and Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s, Jack Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac.

They all add to the Kerouac legend, and sometimes they shed light on Kerouac, too, though they’re often hagiography, not biography.

In some ways, Gifford’s and Lee’s 1978 book, which is still in print, is the most user friendly because it offers the voices of Kerouac’s friends, lovers, and editors -- Lucien Carr, Carolyn Cassady, and Malcolm Cowley to name just a few -- and leaves it to readers to sit in the biographer’s chair and put all the pieces together.

Everyone can have his or her own version of Kerouac. Steve Turner’s biography Angelhead Hipster -- the title comes from Ginsberg’s poem Howl -- has lots of photos of Kerouac, including one that shows him looking happy on a Montreal TV station in 1967, but for the most part Turner repeats the same old stories.

But that’s what nearly all of Kerouac’s biographers do. Many of the stories -- such as Kerouac’s first meeting with Neal Cassady, who inspired the Dean Moriarity character in On the Road -- are lifted entirely or in part from Kerouac’s novels, which means they aren’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They’re somewhere between fact and fiction, legend and history.

All of Kerouac’s biographers see aspects of him, whether it’s his spirituality, sexuality, or his duality, but none of them see as many different aspects as he saw of himself. No one has ever combined as creatively as he managed to combine, and in three pages no less, all the many congruent and incongruent aspects of his life into a kind of cubist self-portrait.

Kerouac saw himself as a man of nearly a dozen identities: an adventurer, lonesome traveler, hobo, exile, verse poet, mystic, drug taker, and solipsist. He was never just one thing. He didn’t even allow that he was an American pure and simple. He was a “Franco-American,” he insisted.

In the three-page self-portrait that he entitled “Author’s Introduction” he kept adding more adjectives to describe himself, finishing with an image of himself as “independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.” It was characteristic of him not to use commas. He never did care for conventional punctuation. Indeed, one could probably write a biography of Kerouac focusing on his grammar, his use of colons, semi-colons, and periods. They say a lot about his feeling for language, his sense of rhythm, and the spoken word.

The first rule for biographers, of course, is not to allow the subject of the biography to dictate the theme, the tone, or the meaning of the life. One wouldn’t want to be bound by Kerouac’s own outline of his brief, frenetic life. There are essentials he didn’t include, like the fact that he never learned to drive a car. Gerald Nicosia provides that nugget in Memory Babe. But Kerouac’s resume is a gift that no biographer would want to neglect, either.

None of Kerouac’s biographers are as concise as he was, none of them as poetical as he, and none of them as unapologetic about his seemingly chaotic life as he. He wasn’t embarrassed to say that his life was rudderless, directionless, and that he would go “anywhere.” His biographers have been intent on finding direction, goals, and meaning.

While Kerouac claimed in his three-page self-portrait that he had a “beautiful childhood,” most of his biographers have detected tragedy and deep troubles: the poverty of his exiled French-Canadian family, the death of his older brother, Gerard, and his father’s alcoholism. Biographers might go back to his childhood, see it through his eyes and through the eyes of his parents, too, as much as possible.

In his “Author’s Introduction,” Kerouac gave many of the essential biographical details about himself: birth on March 12, 1922; student at Columbia College from 1940 to 1942; his first novel, The Town and the City written from 1946 to 1948 and published in 1950. But he gave more than the bare facts. He gave background and he provided interpretations and insights.

Thus, he describes his father as a printer who was “soured in last years over Roosevelt and World War II.” Of his mother, he wrote that she “enabled me to write as much as I did.” Indeed, he depended on her. Kerouac mentions the death of his brother Gerard at age nine, and he acknowledges the influence on his writing of American and French authors such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Thomas Wolfe.

London’s impact on Kerouac is often downplayed, though his compact, lyrical 1984 biography, Tom Clark offers a pithy quotation from Kerouac about London. Kerouac called him “the greatest man that ever lived” and “the greatest union of the adventurer and the writer.” Clark also ends his unconventional though refreshing biography with a poem entitled “Jazz for Jack” in which he describes the author hitting the city, listening to jazz, and writing in his notebook.

What’s perhaps most striking about Kerouac's three-page creative resume is the long list of occupations and jobs that he held and that no biographer has used to paint a comprehensive portrait of Kerouac as a worker. He toiled, he noted, as a scullion and deckhand on ships, gas station attendant, railroad yard clerk, cotton-picker, forest service fire lookout, construction laborer, “script synopsizer” for 20th-Century Fox' and newspaper sports writer.

About all of his jobs and occupations he was proud. None were too lowly to mention. All of them together -- with the exception of his job for 20th-century Fox -- suggest his affinities with the proletarian writers of the 1930s, and his sense of solidarity with the hobos, tramps, and migrant laborers of the Depression.

Of course, Kerouac didn’t include everything and everyone in his three-page account of his own life. There was no way he could in that short a space. His exploration and embrace of Buddhism in the 1950s doesn’t elicit a single word. Then, too, he did not, for example, say anything about his Beat friends from New York and Columbia in the 1940s. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs do not appear, nor his wives and girlfriends, nor his daughter Jan.

Next to “Married” he wrote “Nah” and next to “Children” he wrote “No.” He was clearly in denial, though he made his brief resume with its many facts and ample details look honest and candid. Under “Special” he wrote “Girls.” He didn’t deny that he had an interest in the opposite sex or in sex itself, but he didn’t want to name names. There were too many women to name.

In 1960, when he wrote his “Author’s Introduction,” he was also eager to cut the ties he once had to Ginsberg and Burroughs, and to the Beat Generation itself. He didn’t like being called “The King of the Beats.” Beat pauper was more his style, since he identified with the down-and-outers.

So, he wrote that he was “actually not ‘beat’ but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic.” It’s as useful a label as any other. Moreover, he pointed out that he had a basic complaint about the “contemporary world.” What irked him most of all was “the facetiousness of ‘respectable’ people” who were “destroying old human feelings older than Time Magazine.”

Despite all his jobs and occupations that brought him into the work-a-day-world, he had a profound sense of himself as a solitary being and disgruntled, too. Kerouac’s solitariness is in large measure what draws readers to him, but it’s not the only factor.

Readers are also moved by his profound longing for the “old human feelings older than Time Magazine,” by which he means love, friendship, comradeship, and loyalty which he saw quickly eroding in the “sinister new kind of efficiency” that began, he thought, during the Korean War and that were in some ways, “the result of the universalization of Television.” (He didn’t write those words in the “Author’s Introduction, but in his 1957 essay “About the Beat Generation.”)

Like Burroughs and Ginsberg, he could sound conspiratorial. Ideologies and “isms” repelled him, but he was innately political and keenly aware of inequalities of wealth, power, and the force of cultural conformity.

Kerouac’s many biographers have tended to make it seem as though they discovered all on their own the hidden, secret, and subterranean life of their subject. But Kerouac revealed himself as a mystic, Catholic, “lascivious” rake, hobo, football player, worker, and more. He didn’t say “erotic” or “sexual.” He said “lascivious.” It seems as apt as any word to describe his frenetic sexual activity.

He also offered valuable clues about himself, many of which have never been pursued. His main writing teacher, he claimed, was his mother Gabrielle; “learned all about natural story-telling from her long stories about Montreal and New Hampshire,” he wrote. No biographer seems to have taken that claim seriously or to have investigated it and described it, perhaps because it’s too simple and obvious and because his mother wasn’t a published writer.

No one has been willing to say that Kerouac had a “mishmash” of a life, as he himself insisted, or that he was an abject failure as a father, a husband, and perhaps as a son, too, though he was profoundly loyal to his mother and father. Kerouac’s biographers have wanted Kerouac to be an angel -- sometimes fallen, sometimes not -- and a saint, too. They have dressed him up in a heroic suit of clothes that doesn't really fit him.

Of course, biographers don’t get paid and they aren’t published for writing about mishmashes, but rather for creating a sense of order, for imposing pattern, finding links, and offering psychological interpretations that put all the pieces together.

Joyce Johnson puts the pieces together with the help of Sigmund Freud. Kerouac, she wrote, had an “Oedipal complex” with his mother that affected his relationship with other women. But what American writer worth his very soul didn’t have a real or an imaginary Oedipal relationship with his mother, and what difference did it or didn’t it make to the writing itself? Probably none. Oedipus complexes don’t seem to help writers write or be published.

Johnson does a better job as a biographer when she discusses Kerouac’s life as a writer typing his endless sentences than when she plays amateur psychologist and shows him tied to his mother’s apron strings. She’s not the only biographer in that regard. For 40 years, biographers have enjoyed psychoanalyzing the author of On the Road.

To a large extent, they have missed the essential Kerouac: Franco-American disreputable mishmash literary genius no commas. Perhaps one day a biographer will use Kerouac’s snapshots of himself as portals into his life and work. Meanwhile, there’s the “Author’s Introduction” to Lonesome Traveler that sums up poetically the literary travels of a novelist who expressed the angst and ecstasy of the Beat Generation and nearly every generation since.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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