Sunday, January 14, 2018

Did You Hear John Hurt-With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind

Did You Hear John Hurt-With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind








By Bradley Fox 

“Are you going over to Harvard Square Friday night to hear that guy, John Hurt, everybody has been talking about at the Club Nana, the old guy that Mick Greenleaf discovered when he went on that trip down South to see if any of the old time blues singers were still around, or if anybody knew what had happened to them?,” Cecilia Taylor had inquired of Theresa Green, her college roommate at Boston University and more importantly to this conversation fellow folk aficionado. Folk aficionado on Theresa’s part ever since the previous fall when in the toss-up for roommates at the freshman dormitories on Bay State Road had produced Cecelia as her mate. Cecelia from Fort Lee on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge had been a regular coffeehouse going on the weekends in the Village since her junior year of high school and she had kind of dragged Theresa in her wake. Theresa from Podunk Riverdale about forty miles south of Boston had never even heard of folk music, could not name one song off-hand and was furthermore clueless about blues, country blues of which Mississippi John Hurt was a representative as Cecelia called it a sub-set of folk.(Theresa if she had thought about that question of not knowing a folk song off-hand only had to think back to seven grade Music Appreciation class with Miss Enos and her attempts to get her charges to sing some song such as Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land to know that she knew at least that one national anthem of folk although in high school she had been so mired in teenage heartthrobs like Bobby Darin, Fabian, and Bobby Vee that any other thoughts about music were so much wind.)            

That Theresa “dragged along” by the way, aside from the question of whether she was, or was not going to the Club Nana Friday night, was made infinitely easier by Cecilia having thrown Mel Jackson out as a lure. Mel was well-known in the freshman class, by the girls at least, as one of the sexiest guys around. Moreover he had been learning to play the guitar and to sing some of the folk songs that were making the rounds in the clubs and coffeehouses at the Tuesday night “open mics” held at the Cafe Blanc on the other side of the street from the Club Nana on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge. Cecelia had known Mel since day one of school since he had been in her freshman orientation class and on the round-robin question and answer period they had both mentioned an interest in the budding folk music movement running its course through a lot of college towns and other urban oases. They had subsequently had a couple of dates but the flame wasn’t there and so they became just friends.

That “just friends” status though had gotten Cecelia to meet Mel’s roommate Thorn Davis who did strike a flame. So one Friday night Cecelia who had been talking up her interest in the folk scene since they had become roommates talked Theresa, dateless and bored, into going on a double date with her and Thorn, Mel the bait. That night Tom Paxton, a new talent, a guy who was either in the Army or who had just gotten out down at Fort Dix in New Jersey was playing at Jerry’s Coffeehouse and so they spent the evening listening to his stuff (Jerry’s a notch below the Café Blanc and Club Nana which charged a cover and required that you at least had a cup of coffee in front of you to keep your seat so that the featured performer actually got paid from the admission fee did not charge admission. Jerry’s did as all such establishment did in Harvard Square at least require the cup of coffee and got the crowd that could not get into the formerly mentioned clubs or guys out on cheap dates with girls that they didn’t figure to get anywhere with. A whole treatise could be written on “getting anywhere with and dating etiquette back then, now to for that matter. Performers hated the set-up because they had to play for the “basket,” had to pass the hat in the audience to make their nightly wages to keep the landlord from their doors.)         

Although that night had been something of a disaster for the Mel-Theresa combination since Mel was serious about attempting to make a career out of folk music, that was his idea anyway and Theresa only knew as much about folk music as Cecelia had told her in quick flashes so she would not be totally adrift. Every time the conversation hit a  turn she would be clueless, for example, when they talked about Pete Seeger and his earlier career with the Weavers and they mentioned how the Weavers had made a big hit out of Leadbelly’s Goodnight, Irene she knew neither the Weavers nor the name Leadbelly ( except to think that it was an odd name for a singer or a person ). So that night Mel and Theresa had kind of flopped, except she did like Tom Paxton, especially his Last Thing On My Mind. That seemed to be about it, one date and done.

The next morning early Theresa woke Cecelia up and told her she needed a crash course in advanced folk (that is how she put the matter) since she had not slept a wink thinking about Mel’s blue eyes, bedroom eyes she called them and Cecelia knew exactly why she wanted that crash course. Cecelia passed Theresa her copy of Fred Allen’s A Layman’s Folk Music History  and told her to start reading from page one and then she could ask questions. Theresa thereafter learned about the roots of the roots of folk from the old country British mist of time ballads that were collected by Francis Child in the 19th century which in bastardized versions were still played in places like Appalachia and Nova Scotia. The French-Canadian Arcadian traditions that would head south to the swamps of Louisiana and Cajun music. The key role of Delta and Piedmont blues in the black musical experience all the way up to those Newport “discoveries.” More importantly for the benefit of her Mel dreams to know who the hell Peter Seeger, the Weavers, Dave Von Ronk, Josh White and the rest of the current or near current batch of folk tradition aficionados.       

Over time Theresa, granted with a great deal of help from Cecelia who after all had lived through that first crucial period of the folk revival, did become very knowledgeable about the folk scene and some folk history too although she had not seen Mel during that time she was getting tutored in the high points by Cecelia but she was determined if she did see him that she would do better than that first date. One afternoon toward the spring of 1963 she was walking along Commonwealth Avenue up by the Sherman Union and heard a guy singing a song, Come All You Fair And Tender Maidens and step closer to hear who was singing the song. Of course it was Mel. When he saw her he waved and smiled, a little. With that little encouragement after he had finished the song she went up to him and said all in one breathe, “I didn’t know that you were into mountain music, isn’t that a song that Dave Von Ronk covered on his Inside Dave Van Ronk album and didn’t that song get discovered by Cecil Sharpe, the British folklorist back in the early part of the century down in Kentucky.” Bingo. Mel asked if she was doing anything Friday night since Hedy West was playing at the Café Mark in Kenmore Square. And that was that.

So Cecelia asking Theresa if she was going to hear John Hurt was not an academic question. The answer though was “no” since she and Mel were going to the Village Friday afternoon in order to hear Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight. She did ask Cecelia to tell her what Hurt’s playlist was and any impressions she had of him when she got back Sunday night.                                  

Sunday night came and Theresa was back. After putting her luggage away Theresa asked Cecelia how the Hurt concert had gone. Cecelia laughed, said the show was great. What she was laughing about was how she had been expecting some big old black guy, maybe the size of Howlin’ Wolf or something and then on stage came kind of haltingly this little wizened old man in an old rumbled suit and a straw hat that must have been older than him. He was so short that Mike Greenleaf had to keep adjusting the mic every couple of songs when he would change positions. He had this ratty old guitar too that he said he had bought for about six dollars in the Sear & Roebuck catalogue back in the 1920s. Then he told the story about how Mike and a couple of other guys had come down to Clarksville down in Mississippi looking for him after somebody in Jackson had told them about an old blues player in the Clarksville area named Hurt. Mike and the others had known exactly who their informants meant since they had all listened to him on one of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music albums.

The way Hurt told the story here he was in this little shack of a house, a cabin I guess and had been picking cotton ever since he could remember after that minute of fame. Somebody from the audience then asked him, since some rumors were going around that Sid Dalton, his manager was working him too hard, taking too much dough for himself and not getting the best deals for his projected albums. Hurt had a funny answer, he said whatever arrangements Sid made were fine by him since playing “beats picking cotton for an old man” and he smiled his couple of teeth missing smile. He sang like heaven (played some very clean guitar picking which Thorn and Cecelia had never seen before). Sang Creole Belle, Frankie and Albert, his version of the traditional Frankie and Johnny song, Candy Man, Miss Collins Moans, Beulah Land, Coffee Spoon, and a few others they didn’t know but sounded good. “Too bad you guys couldn’t come,” Cecelia said. Theresa said wistfully that she wished they had too since Dave Van Ronk had been drinking heavily before his show and it showed-he had a very off night. And so it goes.         

From The Guys And Gals Who Know The Face Of War-The Smedleys-Veterans For Peace

From The Guys And Gals Who Know The Face Of War-The Smedleys-Veterans For Peace    




In Boston-Join The Struggle Against Homelessness


In Boston-Join The Struggle Against Homelessness








Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance   

This holiday time of year (and Political Prisoner Month each June as well) is when by traditions of solidarity and comradeship those of us who today stand outside the prison walls sent our best wishes from freedom to our class-war sisters and brothers inside the walls and redouble our efforts in that task.  

Don't forget Mumia, Leonard Peltier, Reality Leigh Winner, The Ohio 7's Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman and all those Black Panther and other black militants still be held in this country's prisons for  risking their necks for a better world for their people, for all people.

  

Something About Race And Sports -Again-The Frederick Douglass Pollard Story

Something About Race And Sports -Again-The Frederick Douglass Pollard Story

By Si Lannon

A link to a NPR Only A Game show hosted by Bill Littlefield report on an unjustly mostly unknown early black football player, Frederick Douglass Powell   

http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/01/12/fritz-pollard-football 

Readers who are familiar with what this site normally posts stuff about politics, social commentary, cultural niches know that over the past several years under the aegis of the previous site manager sports have been well under the radar. That as a result of that said past site manager’s ill-winded attempt to reach a younger and different audience by making his own personal commentary on the college football scene which he loved before the playoff system came into play and before Alabama had become the dominant college team in the land. Well you reap what you sow which was not much. Not much since as he used for his reasons for not allowing sports commentary on this site there are a billion sports sites gabbing all the time 24/7/365 about the stuff. It took me practically a civil war to do a little fluff slice of life piece on an amateur golf tournament at my golf club involving me friends and fellow players.       

Under the new site manager Greg Green sports is still not a big time subject for much the same reasoning as before but apparently something got Greg’s wind up and based on my previous couple of amateur golf articles I have become the “residence” sports commentator on those infrequent occasions when something comes up that deserves some play here.


Greg told me he was listening to a NPR show this weekend morning the erudite sport commentator Bill Littlefield’s Only A Game which featured a report about a little known but should be well-known black football player from the very early days of the game, Frederick Douglass Powell. The given name alone telling you this is no ordinary guy. This was the time of the early professional football leagues when like in baseball and virtually every other major sport blacks were persona non grata and that ain’t no lie. No lie as the story once again unfolds that a black man could not be accepted in social white society. This story is from a time when another great black football player was making a name for himself in another field, music, Paul Robeson, who faced plenty of the same racial animosities. Robeson a name well known to us. Now way too late we know another unsung, mostly, hero of the black liberation struggle who proudly bears the given name of a great black abolitionist when that was a hell of a thing to be back in ante bellum times. Maybe today too.  

From The Anti-War Archives- Vietnam and the Soldiers’ Revolt Monthly Review

From The Anti-War Archives Vietnam and the Soldiers’ Revolt

Monthly Review

Volume 68, Issue 02 (June 2016)

Vietnam and the Soldiers’ Revolt

The Politics of a Forgotten History

Derek Seidman is an assistant professor of history at D’Youville College in Buffalo. He is writing a book about the history of GI protest during the Vietnam War.

This article is part of an MR series on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

It has been nearly fifty years since the height of the Vietnam War—or, as it is known in Vietnam, the American War—and yet its memory continues to loom large over U.S. politics, culture, and foreign policy. The battle to define the war’s lessons and legacies has been a proxy for larger clashes over domestic politics, national identity, and U.S. global power. One of its most debated areas has been the mass antiwar movement that achieved its greatest heights in the United States but also operated globally. Within this, and for the antiwar left especially, a major point of interest has been the history of soldier protest during the war. This interest grew with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when both dissident soldiers and antiwar civilians looked back to the legacy of Vietnam-era GI resistance as a usable history to help oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Cortright’s classic 1975 account of troop resistance, Soldiers in Revolt, was republished in 2005, and that same year, the documentary film Sir! No Sir! helped to popularize the hidden history of active-duty soldier protest.

Activists looked back to this history for good reason. It was an exciting front within the broader antiwar movement, one that bucked conventional wisdom. Soldiers, such potent symbols of U.S. patriotism, turned their guns around—metaphorically, but also, at times, literally—during a time of war. Thousands of troops protested, petitioned, dissented, disobeyed, and deserted. Antiwar soldiers were strategically important, bestowing a special kind of legitimacy and authority on the peace movement. There was also a more concrete dream: that antiwar GIs, stationed literally at the war’s point of production, had a unique capacity to end it.

Fascinating in itself, the story of Vietnam-era GI protest also serves as a weapon in the ongoing battle over the memory of the Vietnam War. If war is politics by other means, the same could be said about memory and narrative of historical events. The battle to shape our accepted understanding of the past—the stories we recall, the icons and symbols we think of—is deeply linked to political interests.

All sides have attempted to define the collective memory of the Vietnam War in ways that advance their current visions for global and domestic politics and superimpose them on the past. Think, for example, of the persistence of the “spit upon” or “baby killer” myths, or the claim that the antiwar movement “stabbed” soldiers “in the back” (even many of my students, born decades later, say these are the first things they think about when they hear “Vietnam War”).1 The continued influence of these myths has helped prop up consent for militarism at home and abroad. The story of GI protest during the war is an important counter to the conventional story, for it hits at the heart of some of the most emotive symbols in these political battles: the soldiers. It offers grounding for an alternative politics from the antiwar left. It is history worth knowing.

Context

Three larger factors combined to create the context for the rise of Vietnam-era GI protest. The first was the nature of the Vietnam War itself. It was widely unpopular within U.S. society, and this sentiment stretched into the military’s ranks and intensified as the war went on. In Vietnam, the war was deeply disorienting: troops faced harsh natural elements and guerrilla-style tactics, and they often could not distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Few knew why they were fighting; once they arrived in-country, the Cold War rationale for the war felt like a vapid abstraction. The “body count” strategy seemed perverse, and military victories brought no political headway. As the war went on, few wanted to be, as the saying went, the last soldier to die for a mistake. This attitude reverberated beyond combat roles and throughout the whole military.

Second was the conflict between the institutional culture of the Cold War military and lower-ranking soldiers. The military’s conservative, traditionalist norms clashed with the sensibilities of many GIs of the era. Despite formal desegregation, racism was prevalent, with a white-dominated officer corps and pervasive prejudice against blacks. The system of military justice restricted troops’ civil liberties and placed arbitrary power in the hands of higher-ups. In Vietnam, many soldiers felt they were used as pawns by commanders who sent them into dangerous battles to advance their own careers. And with all this, the military was fed by the draft, which coerced two-thirds of all combat troops, mostly poor and working-class youth, into battle.2

Third was the mass appeal of protest politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were years of global insurgency, when millions embraced the spirit of rebellion. The polarization around the war deepened and sank into the consciousness of many troops heading to Vietnam. As two journalists put it, the late-Vietnam era soldier had “seen antiwar sentiment grow into a unifying force for his generation” and come to identify with it instead of the “dispirited remnant of America’s Southeast Asia fighting machine.”3 Three movements were particularly important in shaping GI protest: the antiwar movement, Black Power, and the counterculture. These galvanized many soldiers, offering radical critiques and a language of protest that they brought into the ranks.

Beginnings

The first acts of active-duty GI protest broke out in 1965 and 1966. They were isolated and individualistic, reflecting the infant stage of the broader antiwar movement, as well as the early years of U.S. escalation in Vietnam. But they pioneered a set of aims and tactics that would shape the larger wave of protest to come. Equally important, they emboldened other soldiers and compelled the civilian antiwar left to provide solidarity and material support that would enable the rise of a full-fledged GI movement.

In November 1965, Lieutenant Henry Howe, who was stationed at Fort Bliss, was arrested after attending an antiwar demonstration in El Paso, Texas. Howe was in civilian dress and carried a sign calling President Lyndon Johnson a fascist. The antiwar movement soon organized the “Freedom Now for Lieutenant Howe Committee,” and the ACLU came to his aid. Convicted and jailed for “conduct unbecoming an officer” and “contemptuous words against the President,” Howe became the antiwar movement’s first GI cause célèbre. Others soon followed, including Captain Howard Levy, a dermatologist who refused to train Green Berets headed for Vietnam, and the Fort Hood 3, a trio of young privates who refused shipment to Vietnam. The Fort Hood 3 made the biggest splash yet, sparking New York City’s antiwar left into a defense campaign that signaled the beginning of a civilian-GI alliance. One of the three was in the orbit of the Communist Party, previewing a trend of left involvement in soldier organizing.

By the end of 1966, cases like these had developed an initial set of protest tactics and an agenda for GI dissent that pivoted around civil liberties, racism, and, above all, the war. Others soon built upon these. In 1966 and 1967, Private Andy Stapp organized a group at Fort Sill, Kansas, that became the American Servicemen’s Union (ASU). The ASU framed GIs as the military’s working class and aimed to unionize them along radical, anti-imperialist lines. The group’s eight-point program included demands for “An End to the Saluting and Sir-ing of Officers” and “Rank-and-File Control over Court-Martial Boards.” The ASU was the first organized expression of a lower-ranking GI class politics, and they even garnered a cover story in Esquire.4 Around the same time, the Black Power movement emerged within the ranks. In July 1967, William Harvey and George Daniels, two black marines from Brooklyn, organized a rap session with fellow troops, where they declared that black men had no place fighting a “white man’s war” in Vietnam. The soldiers were court-martialed for “promoting disloyalty” and dealt long prison terms. The prosecutor claimed that Harvey and Daniels created “an extraordinarily dangerous situation” by urging black marines to “stick together” in refusing to go to Vietnam.5 The ASU and Harvey and Daniels drew support from the antiwar movement and politicized other troops. Taken together, these cases of dissent from 1965 to 1967 prepared the way for the larger GI movement.

Up to this time, antiwar activists mostly considered GIs moral symbols whose presence in the movement could help disarm opponents. Yet they also genuinely sympathized with soldiers, viewing them as working-class victims of an unjust war. Throughout its early years, the antiwar movement sought out veterans to speak at rallies and promoted slogans like “Support the G.I.s: Bring Them Home Now!” But the bulk of the civilian movement did not initially see soldiers as a group to be organized. “The idea of looking to GIs as part of the antiwar constituency was considered bizarre at that time by most of the movement,” wrote antiwar leader Fred Halstead.6

By 1968, however, things had changed. The rising examples of GI protest showed antiwar activists that soldiers could be much more than moral props or objects of sympathy; they could be agents for peace in their own right—a major, dynamic constituency of the antiwar movement. They did need to be organized; indeed, they were already organizing themselves. Moreover, both sides needed each other. The civilian movement created a larger atmosphere for troop resistance and could provide moral and material support. GIs offered the civilian movement a new kind of legitimacy, as well as a strategic front that struck at the heart of the war machine. And by the end of 1967, both sides were building a tighter relationship through common work in urban hubs located near military bases. In San Francisco, for example, a blossoming relationship between antiwar GIs and civilians produced new breakthroughs in creative tactics and solidarity efforts. Perhaps most famously, the October 1968 Presidio Mutiny that involved 27 troops showed the potential for collective GI resistance. Such local developments in the Bay Area would soon go national and even global.

The GI Movement

All of this set the stage for the rise of the GI movement in 1968. The GI movement was a collective effort by soldiers, veterans, and civilian activists to build dissent within the military during the war’s last half-decade. It was united by the common goals of organizing troops, ending the war, fighting racism, and defending troop civil liberties. Most organizing with the GI movement was local, shaped by the conditions soldiers confronted. The different parts of the movement, however, were knitted together through common narratives, symbols, and tactics. The GI movement grabbed media headlines and generated alarm from the military brass. It would be the first time in U.S. history that a mass antiwar movement tried to organize within the military in a sustained way, imagining soldiers as a core constituency for a radical mission of ending the war and re-envisioning foreign policy.

Two organizing breakthroughs in 1968 were crucial to the rise of the GI movement. The first was the rise of GI antiwar coffeehouses. Civilian activists established these venues near military bases to attract and politicize GIs and give them an alternative, countercultural space to gather. These coffeehouses served as centers for local antiwar organizing and helped build solidarity between GIs and civilian activists. The first coffeehouse, called the UFO, opened its doors in early 1968 in Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson, the army’s largest basic training installation. The UFO was the brainchild of Fred Gardner, an antiwar activist from the Bay Area. Gardner believed that the army “was filling up with people who would rather be making love to the music of Jimi Hendrix than war to the lies of Lyndon Johnson.”7 The UFO aimed to attract these soldiers, and it did so by the hundreds. The example of the UFO inspired others, and coffeehouses quickly spread across the United States and beyond. They soon became targets of repression, sometimes violent attacks, but not before they made an impact in spreading the GI movement.
The second breakthrough was the birth of the GI underground press. These were antiwar newspapers aimed at soldiers that circulated widely throughout the Vietnam-era military. The first GI paper, Vietnam GI, appeared in late 1967, edited by a Vietnam veteran named Jeff Sharlet, and dozens of other papers soon followed. Their titles mocked the military— The Last HarassA Four Year BummerKill for Peace—and their pages contained uncensored news about the war, heroic reports of GI protest, satiric cartoons that bashed military authority, information on legal help, and letters written by soldiers. More importantly, the production and circulation of the papers provided a common project for dissident soldiers and their allies across the world. Organizers for the GI movement distributed the papers deep into the ranks, and thousands of troops were exposed to their antiwar message. Through the GI press, troops stationed from Europe to Japan and from the United States to Vietnam could plug into the global effort to build soldier opposition to the war.8

With the first coffeehouses and GI papers came a host of new soldier organizations. Scores of dissident troops joined newly formed groups like GIs for Peace at Fort Bliss, GIs United Against the War in Vietnam at Fort Jackson and Fort Bragg, and the Concerned Officers Movement. These organizations engaged in a range of activities, from petitioning and protesting on bases to mobilizing turnout for regional demonstrations. They inevitably faced harassment and punishment, but they used this to build defense campaigns that attracted media attention and popularized soldier protest.

A burgeoning network of civilian support was also central to defending GIs against repression and expanding the GI movement. Campaigns like 1968’s “Summer of Support” and groups like the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace and the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF) spread the word about GI resistance and provided valuable solidarity, from organizers on the ground to material aid. The USSF raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that it distributed to local projects. Organizations like the Pacific Counseling Center and the GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee provided top-notch movement lawyers to defend dozens of antiwar soldiers. All this contradicts the myth of an antiwar movement that hated the troops. In fact, by working together in solidarity, GIs and civilian allies made soldier organizing a key front for the antiwar movement by the end of 1968.

The GI movement continued to grow through 1969 and into the early 1970s. Soldier protest became a ubiquitous part of the peace movement, with thousands of troops involved in mass marches, signing petitions, and small-scale direct actions. For example, 1,365 GIs signed a November 1969 full-page New York Times ad against the war. Hundreds, including those stationed in Vietnam, showed their support for the 1969 Moratorium demonstrations. One soldier wrote from Vietnam to report that “59 Marines and 1 corpsman signed our petition for Xmas moratorium and we have more planned for this month.”9 Another GI wrote from Long Binh to say he was “enlisting the support of the soldiers” and included with his a letter a signed petition that was “simply a statement of support for the Vietnam Moratorium.”10

While thousands of soldiers signed petitions like these during the war, others took more immediate measures. A soldier stationed at “Pig Headquarters, Long Binh” described a Memorial Day event at which “several of the ‘lower EM’ [enlisted men] decided to have a war protest parade in the company area.” Because the “folks at home have the privilege of parading in their hard hats and T-shirts,” he explained, “we felt it was appropriate to express sentiments against the war in the same manner.”11

Troops also defended their civil liberties against military authority. The Uniform Code of Military Justice gave commanders arbitrary power to punish dissenters. Soldiers countered military justice with “GI rights,” a broad defense of the constitutional rights of servicemembers to express their opposition to the war, even as they served. Hundreds of soldiers struggled for their free-speech rights, aided by a legal defense network led by some of the nation’s most prominent attorneys. Soldiers in Vietnam invoked the language of rights as they complained of the invasiveness of military authority and its erosion of their morale.

Vietnam was a working-class war, and most of the soldiers who resisted were the rank-and-file troops who bore its greatest burdens. In opposition to the “lifers” up top, soldiers formed groups, even unions, animated by the concerns and consciousness of the lower ranks. The class structure of the military was also deeply racialized. Top commanders were mostly white, while black GIs fought and died in disproportionate numbers and suffered an excessive amount of Article 15s, courts-martial, and other punishments. This racism existed against a backdrop of rising black political radicalism, with figures like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers serving as inspiration for young troops. Black GIs formed anti-imperialist organizations like the Unsatisfied Black Soldiers in West Germany and the Movement for a Democratic Military in California. They refused riot duty, wore African medallions, raised their fists in Black Power salutes, and sometimes spearheaded efforts at interracial GI organizing.

The depth and breadth of soldier dissent is seen most fully in the GI underground press. By the turn of 1970, scores of antiwar papers were circulating among thousands of soldiers throughout the military. Hundreds of troops took it upon themselves to order bundles of these papers and distribute them across the globe. In 1971 several GIs wrote to the Ally from Vietnam: “We, the undersigned…would like as many copies[,] over a hundred [if] possible,” and said the papers would “be distributed between two companies here in Chu Lai.”12 The Ally and other GI papers received hundreds of letters like this, and they offer a glimpse of how troops brought the antiwar press deep into their ranks. Producing, circulating, reading, and writing to GI papers were central unifiers for troop resistance from the United States to Europe and Japan to Vietnam. The pages of these papers contained news and analysis about the war and GI resistance around the world, and through them soldiers saw themselves as part of a wider movement.

In addition to distributing papers as a form of movement-building, GIs wrote them thousands of letters that reveal much about the hidden world of Vietnam-era soldier resistance. These letters captured the antiwar, countercultural politics of many troops, and described the tension on the ground between GIs and higher-ups. A Marine stationed in Chu Lai wrote that he had “a lot of people behind him” when he complained that “the pigs keep fucking with us and pulling their petty shit” because our “hair to [sic] long, mustache not trimed [sic] like Hitler…, living area not clean, for wearing peace medallions or beads…for having a peace symbol in your hooch.”13 Letters also hinted at collective solidarities among GIs. Some described group actions or were signed by multiple troops. Nearly a dozen soldiers signed a 1970 letter from Vietnam that declared: “We have all been fucked in some way by this Army. All of us would like to distribute copies of your paper. Some of us are draftees, the others enlistees, but we all agree that this war is immoral.”14

Meanwhile, coffeehouses and movement centers continued to spread. By 1971, close to two dozen had appeared across the United States, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. These continued to be hubs for organizing and the cultivation of GI-civilian solidarity that resisted the war and the military. Thousands of soldiers visited these establishments. Vibrant communities of resistance from Killeen, Texas, to Mountain Home, Idaho, sustained antiwar protest that brought the peace movement to military bases and towns. Even more, GI protest had gone truly global, with organizing efforts everywhere from West Germany to Japan to England to the Philippines, and even at obscure bases in Iceland, Turkey, and Spain. Soldiers and their allies imagined these local activities as parts of a worldwide GI rebellion.

The U.S. radical left played an important role in the GI movement. Enlisted “GI organizers” connected to civilian radicals fomented troop dissent with an impact that belied their small numbers.15 Politically driven and backed by networks of savvy activists, these troops were a vanguard within the ranks that played a catalyzing role analogous to left-wing CIO militants of the 1930s. Some had links to left groups who provided material aid and ideological motivation. Andy Stapp, for example, was associated with Youth Against War and Fascism; Private Joe Miles, who organized dozens of troops at Fort Jackson to defend GI rights, was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. Radical allies mobilized the “Legal Left” to defend persecuted troops, continuing a tradition of mass defense campaigns that went back to Sacco and Vanzetti. The legacies of the left’s role in the GI movement were mixed: sectarianism, opportunism, turf battles, alienating rhetoric, and patronizing behavior towards troops were all persistent problems. But radical leftists also played an indispensable role in providing political will and tireless organizing efforts.

The breadth and dynamism of the GI movement was displayed on May 15, 1971, when antiwar troops turned the traditional Armed Forces Day into what they called Armed Farces Day. Creative protests involving hundreds of troops occurred at nineteen separate military installations, in some cases forcing commanders to cancel their planned festivities.16 Dissent extended into the Air Force and especially the Navy. In 1971 the “SOS Movement” (Save Our Sailors) spread across the California coast, with hundreds of soldiers and civilians organizing in attempts to prevent the U.S.S. Constellation and Coral Sea from sailing to Vietnam. Throughout all this, the self-activity that fueled the GI movement continued: sailors agitated and conspired below deck; troops staged ad hoc protests in their company areas in Vietnam; African American soldiers held anti-racist rallies in West Germany.

In Vietnam

The GI movement was an organized expression of a much larger reservoir of troop discontent. By the early 1970s, the military in Vietnam was ridden with decentralized rebellion. Many combat troops felt that the unpopular war “wasn’t worth it,” and they saw themselves being used as “pawns” and “bait” in a “lifer’s game” of career advancement. To stay safe and sane, troops developed what Fred Gardner called a “vague survival politics” that responded to the immediate dangers they faced in Vietnam. These tactics became weapons that grunts used to exert bottom-up power to protect their bodies and minds as they waited out the war.17

The starkest form of survival politics was outright refusal of combat orders, but such mutiny was rare. More common were maneuvers to avoid combat without openly risking punishment. Soldiers used the “search-and-evade” tactic, in which they pretended to obey fighting orders while secretly avoiding armed contact. One veteran explained that his unit would “go a hundred yards, find us some heavy foliage, smoke, rap and sack out.”18 Combat avoidance was “virtually a principle of war” by late 1971. Troops also sabotaged military equipment: gears were jammed on ships and fires mysteriously broke out on deck, which prevented embarking to Vietnam.

The most violent form of revolt was “fragging,” or the attempted murder of higher-ups. Nearly 600 instances were reported between 1969 and 1971, though more likely went unreported. Some fragging attempts happened in the field but many occurred in the rear, often because of anger over punishment for drugs or racial tensions. One GI called fragging “the standard response of the Army’s little people” to “any action directed by their superiors that they consider unnecessary harassment.” Actual fraggings could take the form of a grenade explosion or feigned friendly fire, but more important was the widespread knowledge that they could happen. The practice of fragging, said one officer, was “troops’ way of controlling officers,” and it was “deadly effective.”19 While brutal, fraggings grew out of the surreal atmosphere of the war and its normalized violence. They reflected the disintegration of the late Vietnam-era army and the fact that some GIs saw their main conflict with the military rather than the Vietnamese.

Soldiers in Vietnam also waged a cultural rebellion that drew on the symbols and language of the 1960s counterculture. They grew their hair out and wore protest decorations. They etched peace signs and psychedelic art on their Zippo lighters, along with slogans like “Pray for peace and put a Lifer out of a job,” and “We are the unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unfortunate for the ungrateful.” They used drugs to relax and escape the stress of war, and GI “heads” celebrated getting high as a rejection of the war and the army’s authoritarianism. This GI counterculture was also a rank-and-file class culture. The rebellious identities that soldiers asserted were distinctly those of the lower ranks, of the grunts who performed the thankless labor of the war while, as they saw it, uptight lifers sat in air-conditioned buildings barking out orders.

One measure of the depths of GI rebellion is the deep sense of alarm that it generated among military and political elites. Congress devoted hours of hearings in the early 1970s to the investigation of radical subversion in the armed forces. Military intelligence closely monitored the activities of the GI movement, and even General Westmoreland worried about the GI coffeehouses. Army leaders openly lamented the scope of the crisis. Most famously, the celebrated military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl published an article in the June 1971 edition of the Armed Forces Journal titled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” It began with the stunning words: “The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.” Over the next twenty pages, Heinl elaborated in grim detail the breakdown of the military: the disintegration of discipline, the spread of dissent, and the unraveling of morale.20

The media echoed this sense of crisis. “Not since the Civil War,” stated the Washington Post in 1971, “has the Army been so torn by rebellion.” In 1970, Newsweek wrote of “the New GI” who opposed the war, embraced the counterculture, and identified with protest politics. These soldiers were “young antiwar warriors” who “flout[ed] the conventional ‘my-country-right-or-wrong’ military values of yesteryear” and “prefer[ed] pot and peace posters to the beer and pin-ups of their more traditional comrades.” The crisis in the military that these “New GIs” created would soon lead elites to completely overhaul the armed forces.21

Decline

As much as it thrived, the GI movement also faced serious obstacles, and several factors contributed to the decline of soldier resistance in the early 1970s. While many troops sympathized with the antiwar movement, most declined to actively participate. Speaking out was risky, with harassment and punishment, even a dishonorable discharge, awaiting dissidents. Moreover, involvement was unstable even for those that joined the GI movement. The military regularly transferred soldiers, and the grind of service could isolate and wear down individuals. Thousands of soldiers participated or sympathized with antiwar protest, but the finite nature of enlistment—the incentive to suck it up, wait it out, and get out—and the levers of military justice militated against many GIs acting on their beliefs.

Outright repression also hampered the GI movement. Local police and military intelligence closely monitored coffeehouses, and they were targeted with fines, arrests, and even paramilitary violence. Bullets were shot through the Shelter Half in Tacoma; the Covered Wagon in Idaho was firebombed. Soldiers who received and distributed GI papers had their mail read. Protesters were given Article 15 punishments, courts-martial, or thrown into the stockade. GIs knew that association with dissent invited unpleasant consequences.

Left sectarianism also hurt the GI movement. Some coffeehouses were taken over by tiny groups and turned into recruitment operations. Competing sects theorized GIs as the potential vanguard of their hoped-for revolutionary movements. Their dogmatic style limited the reach of local GI movements and created, as one report stated, “an atmosphere that many people can’t relate to.”22 The radical politics of organizers could be an asset, but the tactical errors of some and their often condescending attitude towards soldiers contributed to the failure of a dynamic, sustainable coffeehouse project that could draw on GI self-activity.

Most crucial was the winding down of the war itself in 1972 and 1973. Steady combat troop reduction and the end of the draft stemmed the channeling of social unrest into the ranks. GI organizing efforts continued into the late 1970s, but they were never able to achieve previous levels of success. When the ordeal of the Vietnam War ended, so did the conditions that bred the possibility of a large wave of GI dissent.

Legacies

Nearly a half-century later, what are the legacies of Vietnam-era GI resistance? First, dissident troops helped create a crisis within the military that ultimately contributed to the end of the draft and the war. With the rise of the All-Volunteer Force in the 1970s and 1980s, elites overhauled the military for a post-Vietnam, neoliberal era. It is also worth noting that protest by black GIs during the Vietnam War catalyzed substantial reforms within the armed forces to integrate the higher ranks and deal the final death blow to the Jim Crow army.

Second, Vietnam left a model of resistance for later generations. Since 2003, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been inspired by the example of the GI movement. They have linked up with Vietnam-era movement veterans and borrowed many of their tactics, from public testimony and agitprop actions to coffeehouses and antiwar papers. The precedent of Vietnam-era GI resistance and the preservation of its memory helped pave the way for the current era of troop dissent.

Third, the history of the GI movement debunks the widespread trope of a civilian peace movement that hated U.S. troops. This has long been the most potent myth aimed at discrediting the antiwar left and inciting support for militarist ventures. It is important to remember that the antiwar movement’s orientation towards Vietnam-era GIs was mostly one of sympathy and solidarity. Antiwar activists saw troops as exploited by a deceptive political class and a draft rigged by class and race. They sought to help them and organize them to defend their rights and end the war. Many troops saw the antiwar movement, not the war’s backers, as their biggest ally. As one soldier put it in a letter: “We troops here in Vietnam are against the war and the demonstrations in the states do not hurt our morale. We are very glad to see someone cares and is working to bring us home.”23

This brings us to a final point. Hegemonic “common sense” rests in part on political constructions of historical memory and popular icons. The soldier is a powerful cultural figure that has been defined by a linkage between knee-jerk support for “the troops” and uncritical support for war-making, military spending, and an emotional investment in a culture of militarism. The historical erasure of soldier protest has aided both conservative reaction and liberal militarism in marginalizing left dissent and simplistically pitting middle-class protesters against working-class troops.24 The history of Vietnam-era GI resistance is a vital counter-memory that reminds us that many troops were not against protesters, but that they were the protesters; that the civilian antiwar movement didn’t spit at soldiers but rather oriented towards them with sympathy and solidarity; that thousands of working-class troops stood for peace over war and militarism; and that it was the war and the military, not antiwar protesters, that demoralized many GIs fighting in Vietnam. This is important history to remember if the left is to challenge the dominant myths that continue to underpin a culture of military aggression.

Notes

  1. ↩On the spit-upon veteran myth and other tropes used to discredit the antiwar movement and the left, see Jeremy Lembcke’sThe Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam(New York: NYU Press, 2000) and H. Bruce Franklin’sVietnam and Other American Fantasies(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
  2. ↩See Christian Appy’sWorking-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), chapter 1.
  3. ↩Haynes Johnson and George C. Wilson,Army in Anguish (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 73.
  4. ↩Andy Stapp,Up Against the Brass (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and “Exclusive!: The Plot to Unionize the U.S. Army,”Esquire, August 1968.
  5. ↩“Two Marines Test Right of Dissent,”New York Times, March 7, 1969.
  6. ↩Fred Halstead,Out Now!: A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War(New York: Monad, 1978), 173.
  7. ↩Fred Gardner, “Hollywood Confidential: Part I,” in Viet Nam Generation Journal Online 3, no. 3.
  8. ↩For more on the GI underground press, see Derek Seidman, “Paper Soldiers: The Ally and the GI Underground Press” inProtest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
  9. ↩S.R. to theAlly, February 7, 1970, Box 2 Folder 6, Clark Smith Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society [WHS].
  10. ↩Long Binh Post, October 28, 1969, Vietnam, Vietnam Moratorium Committee Records, Box 1 Folder 7, WHS.
  11. ↩Sp4 “Getting Short and Getting Out” to theAlly, n.d., Box 2 Folder 1, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
  12. ↩R.M, S. C. K., and F.J.H. to theAlly, January 3, 1971, Box 2 Folder 6, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
  13. ↩The Gremlin to theAlly, n.d., Box 2 Folder 5, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
  14. ↩86th Maint. BT to theAlly, June 20, 1970, Box 2 Folder 3, Clark Smith Collection, WHS.
  15. ↩“GI Organizer” was a term used by Lawrence Radine inThe Taming of the Troops: Modernizations in Social Control in the U.S. Army (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974), chapter 1.
  16. ↩David Cortright,Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance during the Vietnam War(Chicago: Haymarket, 2005), 82–83.
  17. ↩Fred Gardner, “War and GI Morale,”New York Times, November 21, 1970, 31.
  18. ↩“The Troubled U.S. Army in Vietnam,”Newsweek, January 11, 1971.
  19. ↩“Fragging and Other Symptoms of Withdrawal,”Saturday Review, January 8,1972.
  20. ↩Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,”Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971.
  21. ↩“Army Seldom So Torn By Rebellion,”Washington Post, February 10, 1971; “The New GI: For Pot and Peace,”Newsweek, February 2, 1970, 24.
  22. ↩“Report From the Fort Bragg Collective (Haymarket Square Coffeehouse),” Box 1, Folder “Project Description (Internal),” David Cortright Collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
  23. ↩“Dear People”, October 23, 1969, Student Mobilization Committee Collection, Box 2 Folder 6, WHS.
  24. ↩On the construction of the middle class protesters versus working class pro-war troops trope, see Penny Lewis,Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement As Myth and Memory (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013). I borrow the term “countermemory” from Lewis.

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, with Jazzman Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and his All-Stars coming up and stealing the show-a few big scenes anyway, music and lyrics by legendary Tin Pan Alley composer Cole Porter, 1956

It is a little ironic that I am doing this assignment at the same time as my fellow writer here Sam Lowell just finished doing a short review of folk troubadour Bob Dylan’s tribute to Frank Sinatra, In The Shadow Of The Night from several years back. Ironic in the sense that those of us who came of age in the 1960s like Sam and me whatever else we may have disagreed on, no matter whether one took Sam’s hippie path or my more middle class career we almost universally rebelled against the music of our parents’ generation the Tin Pan Alley-derived stuff that got them through the Great Depression and World War II. And number one on their hit parade was “the Chairman of the Boards,” one Frank Sinatra just as Elvis was our growing up rock and roll hero and for some of us, not me, that folk minute hero Bob Dylan now covering one Frank Sinatra.    

All of this as prelude to talking about Mr. Sinatra in another of his musical performance films here. This time not about his Oscar-winning role as a wise-ass Army grunt in pre-World War II Hawaii in the film adaptation of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity, the madman “max daddy” junkie fixer man in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm or the eerily chilling role of presidential political assassin in Suddenly but as the odd-man out in a love triangle down in Mayfair 1950s Newport. In the 1950s Jazz Festival times not the old time summer watering hole of the ultra-rich robber barons who built the massive mansions back in the 19th century but still quaint and high end Newport before the tourists swarmed in.

Frank definitely gets his shots at his first career, the singing that in the 1940s made all the bobby-soxers take off their bobby-socks and who knows what else if you go by the frenzy Elvis provoked in a later generation here in the musical/drama High Society.  Add in a word as well about the jazz for the Festival being hot as per Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong or off-stage like Dizzy, Charlie, the Duke who blew away a 1954 crowd of younger upstart Mayfair swells and almost caused a riot when his max daddy sax player hit the high white note.

But enough of that Frank sex stuff, Satchmo blowing big rings around staid Newport or even Mister Cole Porter from up in Tin Pan Alley land doing his popular music American Songbook thing because musical, musical comedy if you will although the gags are strictly from nowhere, or not this is about romance, romances. And that seems about right if you figure that Grace Kelly is the protagonist who gets all the attention. I might as well say here in the interest of transparency, or drooling, take your pick, that for a while now I have been adding this too every Grace Kelly pic review. After seeing her here, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and High Noon I now understand why Prince Rainer, her husband, not a man given to public display of emotion had wept openly at her funeral when she passed away in that awful car accident.

To the film.  Here’s how the Mayfair swells go about their private business in a not so private way since half the world knows what it knows. Tracy, played by gracious Grace, now happily divorced from low-ball achiever/mere musician/composer and not classical like Mozart or Bach but jazz if you can believe that, and not a big time financial operator like her father, three name C.K. Dexter, played by another crooner from the 1940s Bing Crosby, is ready to do the deed again with a real self-starter, a guy who worked his way up the food chain and not some sportsman scion of the wealthy set like old C.K. (By the way that divorce business not then, or now for that matter, not well-disposed of by the money set as it confuses wealth transfer and other technical problems.)

That little fact, that underachiever and ne’er-do-well part sets the tone for what will be become a “battle of wills” between Grace and Bing who as you know already to my mind is still rightly in love with her. Enter Mike Connor, an world wary everyman regular guy played Frank, not at this moment like in other entry moments in the film ready to burst into song either alone or with Bing, but as a reporter who is out to get the low-down on the rich and famous for a sleaze bag publishing outfit. To get any juicy pics worldly wise Liz, played by Celeste Holms, who is half in love with Mike but letting him  out on a long leash, tags along for the ride.         

Scene set the rest of the film, interrupted by song and more importantly by savior Satchmo and his All-Stars doing some great old time jazz to make the heart flutter is a breeze through. (Please remember Satchmo and his gang and Bing are there for the Newport Jazz Festival and are merely “crashing” the wedding festivities.) Tracy and C.K. cat and mouse it while the intended groom is in the dark, clueless and moreover happy about that fact until the hammer comes down. The happy hammer coming down at the pre-nuptial wedding digs where Tracy gets blasted and runs off with… No, not C.K. things are too 1950s chaste for that but with a smitten Mike (to work partner Liz’ chagrin). That short intoxicated fling over the next morning the wedding is to be called off once that intended groom takes the high moral ground and foolishly (oops) doesn’t take Tracy in all his arms and carry her off. Wait. You cannot disappoint Mayfair swell guests come for a wedding any more than any other wedding. So Tracy and Mike, no, C.K. retie the knot. Who knows how long that rematch will last with these two wild kids.       


If this all sounds familiar, sounds like a film review plot that I have done before it is. This is just a musical remake of the classic version of the story in black and white The Philadelphia Story with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in the respective roles. Cary naturally in Bing’s place. That’s the go-to film unless like Prince Rainer you need to see Grace when she was in her prime. And Satchmo in high dungeon.