***Out In The Not Philip Marlowe Or Sam Spade Night-Lloyd Nolan’s Private Investigator Michael Shayne In  Dressed To Kill 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Dressed to Kill, starring  Lloyd Nolan, 20^th Century Fox, 1941

Truth. I like my black and white film and literary detectives all filled to the brim with noir-ish attributes. You know like the ultra-cool Sam Spade in the film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon where it was touch and go whether he would let that femme fatale off the hook and spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder to see whether she would put a slug or two in him just for kicks or just cut his losses and turn her and her stuff that dreams were made of notions over to the coppers to take the fall, to take the big step off if they could ever get a jury to squeeze her pretty little head. Or the world-weary and wary Philip Marlowe in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep trying to paste together an old man’s last requests, trying to find an old reprobate guy, trying to keep a cheap hood from cleaning up the old man’s fortune, yeah, and grab some bad guys in the bargain. Or any of the several other Chandler crime novels that have been turned into film.

Yeah, I like my detective guys chasing after windmills for the good of the cause and where money places a distance second to that pursuit, like them willing to take a few hits on the noggin or a stray bullet or two for that same good cause, and of course I want my guys to go right to the very edge with some forgetful double-crossing trigger-happy  femme fatale and then walk away without a murmur when justice has to rear its head even if that means many lonely winter nights alone thinking about the vagaries of love. So it was a little disconcerting, made me a little ticked off really, to have a black and white film detective (oops, private investigator as he preferred to be called), Michael Shayne, hustling to solve first two murders and eventually three murders for filthy lucre. To not only not be in pursuit of some hot off the press femme but to be planning on the very day of first murders to get married, get married against all wise advise, to go way out of his way to avoid taking a few hits or a random slug, and worse, worse than all of that is that he takes everything with a certain detached humor and nonchalance giving the profession a bad name, making everybody think these PIs are nothing peep-hole peepers or  repo guys in the film under review, 1941s  Dressed to Kill.

But then I got to thinking about what a film or crime novel private investigator is supposed to do, why he in the end can pursue his profession with his head held up high, can blow off the cynics who think he or she lives under some rock when not looking through keyholes, and that is to outsmart, easily outsmart the coppers, the public coppers, New York City’s finest in this film set around the environs of Broadway and peopled with guys and dolls who could have come straight out of Damon Runyon’s pen. Yeah, every self-respecting PI, and Michael Shayne is no exception, lives to have the whole case wrapped up and tied with a ribbon and still have time to see a Broadway show, make bets with his bookmaker, file his nails or have them filed, empty a bottle of bottom drawer cheap low-shelf scotch or filch half the evidence which was laying around, while the cops are still scratching their heads and finishing up their coffee and crullers. And one Michael Shayne certainly does all of that, or could, almost baiting the public cops to beat him to the punch in the process.                    

Here is the way Shayne sewed the thing up without any heavy breathing, how he had the coppers sucking up air in his wake (and in the process remained a black and white film pure detecti0ve unmarried and unattached ready to worry those long winter nights alone and think about the vagaries of the love game when his honey takes a powder on him with some other Joe, and good riddance). This old time Lothrop character, something of a ladies’ man in his day doing the old love them and leave them routine like guys have been doing since Adam and Eve, maybe before, leaving a trail of forlorn women and vengeful husbands and boyfriends, a has-been show producer and owner of the Broadway hotel where Shayne’s bride to be lives, got himself   gruesomely and obscurely (found by Shayne dressed in medieval livery which counts in my book as obscure in the 20^th century) murdered in his suite along with an old time flame, Desiree, and nobody can figure out how it happened since the set-up looked like a murder-suicide by one of the two. But Shayne after a few minutes looking around the place and musing things up against all good police procedure is wise to that caper. Knows in his bones that this dastardly deed has been done by a third party for his or her own sordid reasons.  

So the chase is on once Michael gets the filthy lucre offered by a venal newspaper editor looking as always for an exclusive. Thus charged up Shayne in his casual off-beat way figures out that the murderer knew a thing or two about fake set-ups himself once he scoped to the fact that the killer used a hairpin trigger on a rifle to kill one of the pair one while killing the other with a revolver. Nice work. Naturally Shayne worked his way through to who had motive to use such a set-up staying one step, no about five steps, ahead of the coppers who are assigned to the case, including and inspector who must have had political pull to get the job because no other explanation figures for how he got it. Speaking of jobs, everything Shayne uncovered pointed to an inside job, or somebody who knew how to get in and out of Lothrop’s apartment (which had several entrances to the adjoining theater he owned and operated) without being seen (although despite the caution the murderer it turned out was seen and was being blackmailed by an ex-actor on the outs with Lothrop, a guy needed some ready cash to keep up his life-style which with one thing or another had fallen on hard times).

But the big question was who would have had the motive to set-up such a weird set of killings and then subsequently murder Lothrop’s maid for the trifecta (by the way an old theater flame of Lothrop’s who couldn’t let go of her man when he moved on to the next best thing or just got tired of her whom the killer thought knew too much, and might do some squealing about the matter to the coppers, or Shayne). Once Shayne did a simple little test involving lipstick on a glass on one of the suspects it was all downhill from there. And of course along the way he was wise-cracking and setting up red herrings with abandon. And those cops were still scratching their heads and waiting for their orders of coffee when he tagged his man.  The last we saw of Shayne after he had been jilted by that hard-hearted showgirl he had been running around with he was walking with a spring in his step up Broadway. We know too he will be back in the private investigator saddle again, one jump, no, four jumps ahead of the local constabulary. Yeah, Shayne was no Sam or Philip but that is about the right number.                   

Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters!

Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers:

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!  

       http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/09/04/boston-fast-food-workers-rally-for-wages-unions/bc1ZqZIgwsVcOw0QHIV74M/story.html         

 

 

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow  (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.

That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

Billie’ s  Truth- With Bo Diddley’s Bo Diddley In Mind

Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring
If that diamond ring don't shine
He gonna take it to a private eye
If that private eye can't see
He'd better not take the ring from me

Bo Diddley caught a nanny goat
To make his pretty baby a Sunday coat
Bo Diddley caught a bear cat
To make his pretty baby a Sunday hat

Mojo come to my house, ya black cat bone
Take my baby away from home
Ugly ole Mojo, where ya been?
Up your house and gone again
Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley have you heard?
My pretty baby said she was a bird

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Read more: Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Well, there is no need to pussy foot around on this one. There is only one big question before the house. The question before the house is simply this-Who put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll? And in a review that I did a while back of a Chess Records’ double CD, Bo Diddley unabashedly staked his claim that was featured in a song by the same name, except, except it starts out with the answer. Yes, Bo Diddley put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll. And off his performance as seen on a DVD issues as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of the tidal wave of rock that swept through the post-World War II teenage population in 1955 he had some “street cred” for that proposition.

Certainly there is no question that “black music,” “race record music,” if you like, in the early 1950s at least, previously confined to mainly black audiences down on the southern farms and small segregated towns and in the northern urban ghettos along with a ragtag coterie of “hip” whites in places like the Village, North Beach out in Frisco town, hell, even in a couple of places in staid old Harvard Square is central to the mix that became classic 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. That is not to deny the other important thread commonly called rockabilly (although if you had scratched a rockabilly artist and asked him or her for a list of influences black gospel and rhythm and blues would be right at the top of their list, including Elvis’). But here let’s just go with the black influences. No question Ike Turner’s Rocket 88, Joe Turner’s Shake , Rattle and Roll and, I would add, Elmore James’ Look Yonder Wall are nothing but examples of R&B starting to break to a faster, more nuanced rock beat.

Enter one Bo Diddley. Not only does he have the old country blues songbook down, and the post- World War II urbanization and electrification of those blues down, but he reaches back to the oldest traditions of black music, back before the American slavery plantations days, back to the Carib influences and even further back to earth mother African shores. In short, that “jungle music,” that “devil’s music” that every white mother and father (and not a few black ones as well), north and south was worried, no, frantically worried, would carry away their kids. Feared to have in their households and not a few banned anything to the left of the Inkspots and their eternal talking one verse of their song whatever the song. Feared mogrulization, feared for the neighborhood and feared for their daughters’ hidden lusts and sons’ lustful dreams. Feared that transistor radio they were forced to buy worrying what hellish music they could not hear was being played.     Well, we were washes away and we have proven none the worst for it.

Here is a little story from back in the 1950s days though that places old Bo’s claim in perspective and addresses the impact (and parental horror) that Bo and rock had on teenage (and late pre-teenage) kids, even in all white “projects” kids like me and my boys, my corner boys (although this housing project was so isolated from the rest of the town that it had no stores, pizza parlors, drugstores, even variety stores, for righteous corner boys to place their feet up on the walls in front of those establishments and so we consoled ourselves with the corner of the elementary school that served the neighborhood). In years like 1955, ’56, ’57 every self-respecting teenage boy (or almost teenage boy), under the influence of television “magic,” tried, one way or another, to imitate Elvis. From dress, to sideburns, to swiveling hips, to sneer (okay I will not dispute that the expression might have been a snarl not a sneer like a girlfriend, a short-lived girlfriend of the time, although not short-lived over this issue, claimed. Worse claimed that his snarly expression made Elvis sexier. Made usually rational young women, and some not so young throw their undies up stage. Sneer or snarl that part she had right, the sexy part-for girls). Hell, I even bought a doo-wop comb to wear my hair like his. I should qualify this whole statement about Elvis’ effect a little and say every self-respecting boy who was aware of girls. And, additionally, aware that if you wanted to get any place with them, any place at all, you had better be something like the second coming of Elvis.

Enter now, one eleven year old William James Bradley, “Billie,” my bosom buddy in old elementary school days. (By the way that Billie is not some misspelling or some homage to Billie Holiday whom he would have been clueless about then but to distinguish him from father Billy and more personally because he did not want a name whose spelling reminded him of a damn billy-goat.) Billie was wild for girls way before I acknowledged their existence, or at least their charms. He was always invited, invited early in the inviting time, to all kinds of boy-girl parties, okay “petting parties” since this was a while back and no parents are around even by girls who had gotten their shape. Me, well, I got a few invites, maybe backup invites when about sixteen other guys said no, to parties by sticks (girls who for some reason had not gotten their shapes yet). 

Billie decided, and rightly so I think, to try a different tack. Tried to be a pioneer by not following the crowd (a trait that would not stand him in good stead later, late teenage later, when he decided the deck was stacked against him and took up robberies and assorted other felonies but that was long after we had parted company, had parted neighborhoods and I had decided, although it was a close thing, that crime was not my forte). Instead of forming the end of the line in the Elvis imitation department he decided to imitate Bo Diddley. At this time we were all playing the song Bo Diddley and, I think, Who Do You Love? like crazy. Elvis bopped, no question. But Bo’s beat spoke to something more primordial, something connected, unconsciously to our way back ancestry. Something mysterious, something with raw physicality although this is mostly later rationalizations which neither Billie nor I would have been capable of articulating back then. Even an old clumsy white boy like me could sway to the beat, could fake enough moves to get by, get by where it counted on the dance floor.

Of course like I said that last bit was nothing but a now time explanation for what drove us to the music. Then we didn’t know the roots of rock, or probably didn’t care (although Billie’s small room was filled with a fair number of fan magazines and the like so he probably like in lots of things then could have given a pretty adult read on what was happening if he had been asked ), except our parents didn’t like it, and were sometimes willing to put the stop to our listening. Praise be for transistor radios (younger readers look that up on Wikipedia) to get around their madness.

But see, Billie also, at that time, did not know what Bo looked like so he assumed that he was a sort of Buddy Holly look alike, complete with glasses and that single curled hair strand. Billie, naturally, like I say, was nothing but a top-dog dancer, and wired into girl-dom like crazy. And they were starting to like him too. One night he showed up at a local church catholic, chaste, virginal priest-chaperoned dance with this faux Buddy Holly look. Some older guy meaning maybe sixteen or seventeen, wise to the rock scene well beyond our experiences, asked Billy what he was trying to do. Billie said, innocently, that he was something like the seventh son of the seventh son of Bo Diddley. This older guy laughed, laughed a big laugh and drew everyone’s attention to himself and Billie. Then he yelled out, yelled out for all the girls to hear “Billie boy here wants to be Bo Diddley, he wants to be nothing but a jungle bunny music N----r boy”. All went quiet. Billie ran out, and I ran after, out the back door. I couldn’t find him that night.

See, Billie and I were clueless about Bo’s race. We just thought it was all rock (read: white music) then and didn’t know much about the black part of it, or the south part, or the segregated part either. We did know though what the n----r part meant in our all-white housing project and here was the kicker. Next day Billie strutted into school looking like the seventh son of the seventh son of Elvis. But as he got himself propped up against that endless train to the end of that line I could see, and can see very clearly even now, that the steam has gone out of him. So when somebody asks you who put the rock in rock ‘n’ roll know that old Bo’s claim was right on track, and he had to clear some very high racial and social hurdles to make that claim. Just ask Billie.

[After I finished this sketch I thought I had done justice to Billie and I have but I felt a little queasy about Bo, about heroic Bo who seemed to play sideman to Billie here. In the interest of completion here is a snatch for a review to make up for any omissions: 

“The last time I had occasion to mention the late Bo Diddley in this space was in connection with a series of interviews and performances along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others in Keith Richards' Chuck Berry tribute film "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll." The talk centered, rightly, on the dismal fate of many black recording artists who developed what would become Rock 'n' Roll when the white artists like Elvis took it over and reaped the benefits of a mass audience. Well, those interviews occurred a while ago, back in the 1980's, but Bo's sense of not having been properly recognized I believe remained until his death. Yet, when one thinks of the sounds created by the founders of Rock 'n' Roll can anyone deny that Bo's primal beat was not central to that explosion? I think not.

Here, in one album we have, if not all of Bo's creative work then a good part of it, at least a good place to start. Of course, the classic song Bo Diddley and its offshoots and variations are here. However, the one Diddley song that will probably outlive them all is Who Do You Love? Although not a theme song it nevertheless expresses the raw energy of rhythm and blues/ rock/ carib sound like no other. Hell, George Thoroughgood was able to make a whole career on the basis of having covered that song and other of Bo's work (and to be fair, covering the work of Elmore James and Hound Dog Taylor as well[CL1] ).

And that is a good point to finish on. The really great rockers, and Bo is in that company, unlike the one-shot johnnies get covered because their work expresses something that someone else later wishes to high heaven that they had created. (George has been quoted directly on that “wishing he had created” point.) Finally, I give the same warning here as others have given in their comments about the sameness of this Chess 50th Anniversary CD from 1997 and a current one entitled The Definitive Bo Diddley Collection issued in 2007. Get one or the other and save those pennies to get more of Bo's work. "I said- I'm just 22 and I don't mind dying. Who do you love?" Thanks for that line Bo. Kudos.]

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The Anti-War Resistance Begins- German Social Democratic Left-Wing Leader Karl Liebknecht

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Also decisive although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experience in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of progressive capitalism, and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as the sinkhole trenches of Europe are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war) and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” and ran for president in 1920 out of his jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The German Spartacists-Karl Liebknecht  

 

 

    

EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.

Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography

The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.

As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was imprisoned.

Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.

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Markin comment:

Karl Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior

This comment was originally  written in 2006 in the American Left History blog but the main points hold true today:

I recently (2006) have received a comment from someone whom I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s (and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was only the beginning of political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or her other politics were weak.  The commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what kind of politician would qualify for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians, Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht, the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts. Here is what I had to say in part about that revolutionary politician:   

"…I do not believe we are lacking in physical courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s. Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who had been a friend of Karl Marx and founder of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles. Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German side in the First World War. That, my friends, is the kind of politician I can support. As for the rest-hold their feet to the fire.

"One of the problems with being the son of a famous politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for the war budget. (That photograph can be Googled.) That is the kind of leadership cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "HE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR." Wilhelm would have been proud.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner ...e. e. cummings 

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

TODAY IS MONDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2014

December 29, 2014 at 11:00 AM

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the joy and rebellion of e.e. cummings

This program was originally broadcast on February 11, 2014.
Susan Cheever on the poet e.e. cummings, all lower-case, and radical.

Poet e.e. cummings, pictured on the cover of Susan Cheever’s new biography, “E.E. Cummings: A Life.” (Random House)

In the mid-20^th century, right behind Robert Frost, e. e. cummings was the most widely read poet in the United States.  A generation of school children delighted in his impish, rule-breaking, all lower case poems.  “there are so many tictoc clocks everywhere telling people what toctic time it is,” he wrote, and impish kids got it.  It was a sweet invitation to rebellion.  He was not always sweet.  There was anger too.  And more sex than school kids ever knew.  This hour On Point:  Susan Cheever on America’s lower case rebel poet modernist, e. e. cummings.

– Tom Ashbrook

Guest

Susan Cheever, writer and author of “E.E. Cummings: A Life.” Also author of “Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography,” “Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction,” “American Bloomsbury,” and “Home Before Dark.” (@susancheever)

From Tom’s Reading List

Vanity Fair: The Prince of Patchin Place — “Nothing was wrong with Cummings—or Duchamp or Stravinsky or Joyce, for that matter. All were trying to slow down the seemingly inexorable rush of the world, to force people to notice their own lives. In the 21st century, that rush has now reached Force Five; we are all inundated with information and given no time to wonder what it means or where it came from. Access without understanding and facts without context have become our daily diet.”
The Wall Street Journal: Book Review: ‘E.E. Cummings’ by Susan Cheever — “”Susan Cheever met Cummings, who was a friend of her father, the writer John Cheever, but her book never quite makes its ambitions clear. She provides a narrative synthesis of the three previous biographies by Charles Norman (1958), Richard S. Kennedy (1980) and Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (2004), outlining the poet’s life from childhood to death. She plays with the chronology of events, beginning at nearly the end, then circling back as a novelist might to find the poet’s beginnings, yet the book offers virtually no new research and has little to say about Cummings’s working life.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer: Susan Cheever elegantly blends biography, memoir and cultural history in ‘E. E. Cummings: A Life’ – “At Harvard, Peck’s Bad Boy replaced the Little Lord Fauntleroy in Cummings, and Cummings père, a local minister, was not pleased. In college, Cummings fils discovered the allures of alcohol and sex, wrote for student publications and would soon begin the experiments with punctuation, capitalization, grammar and line spacing that still make his work immediately recognizable.”

Read An Excerpt From “E.E. Cummings: A Life” By Susan Cheever

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