This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
When Mister Beethoven Got Rolled Over-With The Music Of Mister Chuck Berry In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection, Chuck Berry, Chess Records, 2006
You never know when two or more old guys, two or more mature forget calling the old at your peril gals too but this one is about guys, will gather down memory lane or what will trigger that big cloudburst. Seth Garth and Jack Callahan two old time friends from high school in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston had an abiding interest in music successively rock and roll, the blues and folk music (never losing interest in any in the process just that one genre would wax and wane at any given time). Seth had eventually become as an early part of his journalistic career a music critic for the now long defunct The Eye, an alternative newspaper out in the Bay Area in the days when he, Jack and a few other guys like Phil Larkin headed out there to see what everything was all about in the later part of the 1960s.
Recently though Seth and Jack, and occasionally Phil would get together and talk music shop at the Erie Grille where they would down a few scotches to level out (their expression). One night they had been at Seth’s request discussing the first time they had heard the legendary Woody Guthrie sing his songs, or one of them anyway. As it turned out Seth had drawn a blank on when that might have occurred and he begged Jack to think the matter through since he was preparing an article, an unpaid article, for the American Folk Music Review and needed a frame of reference. Jack had come up with the answer-in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class when he put on Woody and a bunch of other stuff to try to ween them off rock and roll which he hated (and which they loved, loved to perdition). Seth had accepted that answer (although later he contacted Phil and Phil reminded him about the song This Land Is Your Land covered by the Weavers with Pete Seeger in Miss Winot’s fourth grade class on her cranky old record player and he would use that source in the article).
All this talk of that fateful seventh grade music class, and Mr. Lawrence, is probably what solidified everybody in the class in their devotion to rock and roll. Mr. Lawrence was just the front man for all kinds of parents, school principals, priests minsters, mayors and city councilors, cops and whoever else weighted in on the deleterious effect of rock and roll, on the “devil’s music in some quarters on the youth of the nation. So that unanimous devotion to rock and roll was a hard fought and paid for devotion. A few days after the night drinking with Jack at the Erie Grille Seth woke up from a nap thinking about the time in Mister Lawrence’s class when he was being crazy about Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and wanted the class to appreciate classical music, wanted the class to appreciate the finer things in life. Seth, Jack and Phil had had enough and started in one class singing Chuck Berry’s throwing down the gauntlet song Roll Over Beethoven and the class cheered them on.
Of course in this penalty-ridden world Mr. Lawrence took his revenge and the trio spent several afternoons after school listening to Beethoven and his crowd since they had adamantly refused to apologize for their outbursts. Seth smiled to himself-Yeah, rock and roll will never die. To prove that assumption just listen to Mister Chuck Berry’s gold star compilation here. And be prepared to do something rash.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Gary Ladd Danced The North
Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away
From The Archives Of Allan Jackson
A YouTube film
clip of The Shirelles performing their 1960s teen angst classic Mama Said
[As of this introduction
negotiations between Sam Lowell and current site manager Greg Green around full
credit attribution, including 2018 updated introductions and reflections, for
previous site manager Allan Jackson are still on-going. There has been
something of a groundswell by both older writers who have longtime relations
with Allan going back to high school days in their collective 1960s growing up
and coming of age in the working class Acre section of North Adamsville and the
younger writers who led the charge to have Allan replaced after he lost a vote
of no confidence. Probably all are, not unimportantly, worried about their
attribution status on a site that is committed to free usage, fair usage and
common copyright. In the meantime old high school friend Allan had asked me to
respond to any rumors that might surface, have surfaced until he can respond on
his own (assuming Greg does the right thing after having done the wrong thing
by having somebody else “front” for the series.
I have already mentioned in a
previous introduction rumors that Greg Green had somehow done Allan in, done to
him what was characterized as physical harm after the internal struggle which
led to Allan’s demise. That far-fetched notion like this was some
Stalin-Trotsky fight flight of imagination probably fueled by the older writers
who lived and died for such drama back in their 1960s radical pasts. It turned
out Greg had put the word out to the media world that Allan was “hard to work
with” almost as much a kiss of death as any physical action. That blown-up
rumor led to another which proved to be partially true that Allan was out in
American Siberia in Utah and that he had sold out to the Mormons and to U.S.
Senatorial candidate Mitt Romney to get a job after Greg had “black-listed” him
in the major markets. That turned out to be pretty true as Allan did to make
his daily bread attempt this end-around. The close-knit Mormons kind of laughed
it off given Allan’s reputation for skewering old Mitt back in in 2008 and
2012.
Allan never had a reputation say
like Josh Breslin and Sam Lowell despite his three ex-wives as a womanizer, as
a skirt-chaser and especially not as a chaser of younger women so the rumor
that he had been holed up in La Jolla out in California with some
twenty-something part time waitress met at a diner who was teaching him how to
surf and who knows what else did not ring true. When, concerned about his
whereabouts in the aftermath of the internal fight, Sam and I tracked him down
to old haunt Bar Harbor in Maine we were incredulous when he confided in us
that he had done so and that once he raised some cash he was going to bring her
out to Maine and see if she liked Eastern surfing. Yes, you can say we were
dumbfounded although Allan’s respond was “what of it” both parties were of age
and that was that. Christ he has daughters older than that.
What happened as Allan was at pains
to lay out once he saw our discomfort was that after the Utah stuff fell
through he kind of had given up hope. He knew that Mormon- Mitt Romney thing
was a longshot, he knew they took care of their own in such matters and he had
heaped as much scorn as anybody on the perfidious Mitt who would say anything,
do anything to take his main chance as he saw it. We laughed when Allan,
gallow’s humor Allan, mentioned that had he fallen under the wheel and gotten a
job he very well might meet some Stalin-like end from those sanctimonious
bastards, hell, their whole history of survival in Utah was by running
everybody else off-by nay means necessary. Once he saw the writing on the wall
and not wanting to head back East he headed to Southern California, toward
Carlsbad where he and one of his wives, Mimi Murphy if I recall, had had a time
share. Once he got to Carlsbad though he saw too many old memories on the waves
and headed further south to La Jolla.
One day, hungry, he went into Dave’s
Diner, a locale we all know both from back in the 1960s when we were all riding
on the yellow brick road bus in the Summer of Love, 1967 with Captain Crunch
(that whole thing is a long story and one of the sketches in this series will
deal with it so let’s move on) and from later golfing outings at near-by Torrey
Pines. Dave’s was the spot to get a good meal and look at the eye candy for
waitresses (now wait staff but still eye candy) who were classic Southern
California corn-fed blondes who a couple of generations before had forbears
from places like Oklahoma and Iowa when things where bad there and were
strictly from hunger. Now these sleek blondes had lost that look and had the
surfer girl look we remember from back in the Beach Boys days except now the
surfer girls don’t wait on the beaches for their surfer boys to get that
perfect wave but go for it themselves. Make enough to stay alive and surf at
jobs like wait-staffing to pursue the dream. Dave’s in any case a good tipping
crowd-or else per Dave who still hustles hamburgers on the back of the house
stove once in a while.
It was kind of a slow day when Allan
stepped up to the counter stools which are a god-sent for singles when Damask,
his blonde, blue-eyed wait person who was tending the counters which truth be
told was where in the real tips came from by single guys mostly and not that
six person booth with about a three dollar tip for a hundred dollars’ worth of
meals asked him if he would like coffee before making his meal selection. He told
her that while he once loved coffee he couldn’t deal with it anymore because
his system couldn’t take it. That got Damask started on her own inability or
desire to drink coffee and made Allan laugh when she said they would put
Starbuck’s out of business. That kind of back and forth went on throughout the
meal. Along the way Damask mentioned although Allan already had an idea that
she loved to surf and did he know how. No, Jesus, no he blurted out although
that only elicited a response from her about wouldn’t he like to learn. One
thing led to another and out of the blue he flat out asked her if she would
like to have dinner with him giving her the sad story about his being down in
the dumps and could use the company.(Allan would mention that he now knew how
old friend “forever young” Phil Larkin felt a couple of years ago when he wound
up with some young thing which formed the basis for a few stories in this
series). Just for the company, that was all. To his surprise she said that it
would be nice to go to Scudder’s, another local hot spot although very pricey.
Done (thank god for credit cards and 401ks said Allan).
As it turned out Damask was both a
surfer and a graduate student in physical therapy at U/Cal-San Diego up the
road and while totally clueless about many things, many 1960s things which
Allan had the good sense to notgo on
and on about she loved literature and they had a grand old time that night. As
they went their separate ways from Scudder’s (a good idea on Allan’s part
showing that he still knew a thing or two after three marriages about keeping
woman feeling safe around him) Damask mentioned that she was going surfing the
next day and maybe he could come by the beach around nine and she would show
him some surfing stuff. Bingo. (Neither Sam nor I had the heart to look askance
at Allan when he mentioned her name without a bit of irony since when we were
growing up Mary, Betty, Janice, Sandra and maybe something as exotic Mary Beth formed
the female names world).
As for what happened to have Allan
once again foot the bill for some love interest and Damask accepting his
invitation East (where she had never been unlike us who were all crazy to go to
California when we were younger) outside whatever surfing tips she taught him
that will have to wait until he can “tell the tale” himself (our old
neighborhood expression concerning exploits with women based on each and every
one of us lying like crazy about what did, or did not, happen under the
covers). Jack Callahan]
************
Saturday night from seven to eleven,
any third Saturday of the month from September to May, every red-blooded teen
boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop, be-bop night
could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed
high school hop. The Fall Frolic, Pumpkin Ball, Mistletoe Magic, Frozen Frolic,
and so on themes with hop at the end to give the old-timey innocent high school
feel to the night in a town which had had such dances since the school’s founding
in the 1920s, although the term “hop” had been of more recent vintage
reflecting the effect that such cultural phenomena as the afternoon television
program American Bandstand and Danny
and the Juniors classic song At The Hop
had invested the word with significant teen meaning. More importantly this
monthly hop, unlike the more exclusive Autumn Leaves, Holly Hock and Spring
Fling dances which were meant solely for juniors and seniors and their guests
and which were not designated hops or any other such shorthand reflecting the
new rock and roll breeze that had been stirring through the nation for some
time by then, anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar
admission and dance the night away.
The large attendance of wallflower-like
freshman, girls and boys alike, all red-faced, all sweaty palms, all trying to
look nonchalantly like they had been going to these things for ages to hide
their wallflower fears who were hanging off the walls in the transformed festooned
gym and of sophomores, a little more self-assured and hovering around the
bleachers which had been extended to provide some seating, but still worried
about whether they, the boys, had put on enough underarm deodorant, had swigged
enough mouthwash, had combed enough parted Wild Root-infestedhair, and the girls, whether that stolen
mother’s perfume would seem too strong, their permed hair was still in array
and that that padded dress showed their figures to good effect were witness to
the fact that anyone, sweaty palms or not if they had enough moxie could dance
the night away.
Well almost everybody in attendance had
the chance to dance the night away. And that had been the dilemma confronting
one freshman, Gary Ladd, he the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym
almost into the wall if you didn’t think you had seen him on one of the third
Saturday nights in question. And right next to him is another guy, me,
hair-slicked, underarm-protected, Listerine-inhaled, his best friend since
junior high days when I moved to town from Clintondale and we have since tried
to defend each other against the hardships of American wayward youth times,
times when we both would have rather just that moment had cool sunglasses on to
stifle our fears. But let’s get back to Gary because the night I am referring
to was his night after some many failed efforts and my story can be simply
stated. I will wind up going home at intermission kind of defeated since
nobody, nobody at all had asked me to dance, believing that I had not put
enough deodorant on, enough Wild Root or swilled enough mouthwash and had been
defeated by the ever-present bane of the wallflowers-personal hygiene.
[I would find out a couple of days
later when I mentioned my defeat to Emma Wilson in History Class that most of
the freshman girls that she knew kept an arm’s distance from me not for
personal hygiene, some girls thought that I was “cute,” but no girl, no
self-respecting girl could permit herself to be barraged by the two thousand
odd-ball facts that I would spew out in order to impress them during the dance.
I have seen decided to take her comment under advisement. But back to
Gary.]
What had been bothering Gary, though,
we might as well have our moment of truth right up front since this is a
confessional age and the truth would have come out anyway, is that he can’t
dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Couldn’t
dance in junior high when I tried to shadow-box teach him a few steps and when
the moment of truth came he almost broke poor, beautiful Melinda Loring’s big
toe. Such a reputation in a small town is hard to break. My corner boy’s
problem: two- left feet. Two left-feet despite the more recent best efforts of
one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet
have taken a terrible beating, and has earned some kind of medal for service
above and beyond the call of duty, trying to teach little brother Gary the
elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even two feet away from your
partner rock and roll moves and the twist to no avail.
All of this teaching done under the
cover of tight security since Gary had sworn Agnes to secrecy about their
doings. Agnes, for her part, one of the smartest and most popular girls in the
senior class, had no intention of telling anybody that she was talking to, much
less teaching dance to a freshman even if it was her own brother. Those are the
school conventions, and nobody, nobody who is smart and popular is going to
defy conventions like that. The freshman, as Agnes told Gary, would have their
day in a few years and would in turn snub their subordinate freshman. That is
the way it is. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has
always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right as a freshman in good
standing to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.
But that night, that warm April Bring
Spring Hop night I am talking about, things were destined to be a little
different as Gary has already staked his place against the far wall (the wall
farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact
location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, although not me, were keeping their
respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask
them to dance. First off this month, unlike most months when some lame student
DJ from Communications class spins platters on a feisty school record player,
the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, were performing live
on the makeshift bandstand and were guaranteed to have everybody who gets to
dance rocking before they are done, including Gary and me who are scared but
still hopeful. Just that minute as Gary shifted his weight and places his back
to the wall they were tuning up before their first set of three with the
appropriately named Please Stay by the Drifters. Secondly but in line
with that Gary hopeful, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, had told Gary
that she would be coming to the hop, her first since moving to town a couple of
months before. Naturally the mere fact that she said she would come was an
added reason why Gary was thereall that
exercising democratic rights stuff be damned (and also why he had tortured his
sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has
the “bug” for Elsie Mae, Yeah, as I well know since I had taken a failed and
fruitless run at her with my two thousand facts in Civics class and had
gottenthe deep freeze, he is smitten.
Now this Elsie Mae is maybe, on a scale
of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that had Gary (and about six
other guys, five and me), well, smitten. An okay body, fair legs, nice brown
hair and eyes, a so-so dresser like I say a “six” (and Gary agreed with me
although in that department although if you see Elsie Mae I never said that,
nor did he). See what Elsie Mae has is nothing but smarts, book smarts which is
how I made my approach to her in Civics class talking about this book we were
reading about President Andrew Jackson and how he broke the back of the
aristocrats like the Adams family who wanted to keep political power in the
hands of some self-selected elite, themselves and forget the guys going west,
yeah I know not exactly the smoothest move. Idea smart too which enthralled
Gary since he likes to talk about novels and such which is what Elsie Mae was
into, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side
of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very
easy to talk to about anything, if she wanted to talk to you. Yes, he is
smitten; the only unknown in his mind is whether she can dance good enough to
stay out of his way if it comes to that. That is if he gets up the nerve to ask
her. And as the Ramrods started their first set with Gary Bonds’ School Is
Out (praise be) he noticed her coming in the door. Heart pounding he
started sinking into the wall again. As they finished with Brother Bonds the
Ramrods start in on The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman before Gary realized
that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and was standing right in
front of him, turning a little red after he did not greet her. “Oh, my god,”
Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The
usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though said nothing, nothing but turned a
little redder as the Ramrods covered the Pips Every Beat Of My Heart
(nicely done too). She stood there waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can
believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he did ask her. And she smiled a little
smile as she “accepts.” Relief.
Needless to say when they did their
dance, The Edsels’ Rama Lama Ding Dong, it was nothing but a disaster. A
Gary disaster? Yes. Although you can use fake moves galore on such a tune Gary,
maybe nervous, maybe just trying to show off started moving all his arms all
over the place so he looked from my wall position like one of those devilish
Hindu gods with a ton of arms. And while in motion he hit Ella Mae a couple of
times, not hard but not cool either. Once she came close to him and he moved
back into another couple, a senior couple and I thought the senior, Bill Daley
from the football team, was going to level poor Gary but he just moved away
with his date with the meanest look of scorn I had seen in a while. So disaster
was the right word. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of
Gloversville, a town in farm country a few miles away and known for the
Gloversville Amusement Park on Route 9 and nothing else really, and new to
North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. When she
had been closing in on Gary it was because she had lost her balance and was
ready to careen into him. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully
finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told
him that he was a wonderful dancer and said she wished that she could dance
like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking
dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the YWCA, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons
solely so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See,
she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the
Mayfair Dance last month you have now solved that mystery. That night they were
sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville
Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.
[As for my fate that night I went to
the hop with Emma Wilson. See after she clued me in to what was what I ran into
her at the library and we talked, or rather she talked, not two thousand facts,
talked but talked. And I let her. And she asked me to escort her, her word, to
the hop.]
Coming Of Age In The New
Millennium-Kristine Stewart’s “In The Land Of Women” (2007)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Josh Breslin
In The Land Of Women,
starring Meg Ryan, Kristine Stewart, Adam Brody, 2007
You know getting old,
getting older, whatever you want to call it sucks. Take the genesis of this
film review of In The Land Of Women
for example. When Greg Green the site manager (and overall editor) asked if I
wanted to do this film review I thought he said it starred Adrian Brody. I
immediately agreed since I have liked Adrian Brody as far back as when he did
that role as rock and roll record producer Leonard Chess in Chess Records. It was not until I saw
the film credits as I was watching the start of this movie that I realized that
this was a different Brody. Well in for a dime in for a dollar so I watched the
thing, although in parts that was a close thing since while I have written many
articles about my “coming of age” experiences I don’t necessarily like to see
such plotlines in the cinema.So I am
paying penance for some silly borderline senility. Hey, I told you getting old
sucks, didn’t I.
Strangely, and maybe not
by intent, there are actually five coming of age stories running through this
plotline, at least five that were developed enough to recognize. Let’s start
with twenty-something Carter, the ADAM Brody role, a writer who had been dumped
by his La La Land celebrity starlet girlfriend and decided to go to clean air
suburban heartland Michigan to see his aging morbid and cynical grandmother who
lives in fear of dying, or something like that (a bit of a different coming of
age agreed but part of the general life cycle) and get a fresh start. While in
the neighborhood he strikes up a series of conversations with a maybe
forty-something woman neighbor of Granny’s Sarah, played by foxy Meg Ryan, who
has two daughters one a tween and one a teen, Lucy played by a younger fox
Kristine Stewart, and an errant husband having an affair off to the side. (By
the way the guy no great shakes was a fool to drop Sarah for some floozy and
she was well rid of him.) Sarah was facing the hard coming of middle age fact
of breast cancer not unfortunately uncommon among women of her age group. The
two daughters, the too precocious tween facing coming puberty and Lucy facing
sexual choices straight up round out the theme. So five and that is that. (I
didn’t include that errant dad who probably was facing his own male
attractiveness age question, the teen guy Lucy winds up with in that same weird
sexual choices night as her or that ex-girlfriend of Carter’s who had her own
quest to look into since as I said they were never really developed).
As my old friend and
fellow writer here likes to say with that preview “here is the skinny.” Out in
Michigan after seeing what kind of hell he was going to have to deal with tending
to dear deranged Granny he strikes up that friendship with older woman Sarah
who lives across the street. No question she is attracted to him and he to her
a bit but with her medical problems you know a twenty-something guy on average
is not going get tangled into that mess (and then there is that errant husband
who may come back to the roost one day). That thing plays out a bit and
meanwhile young impressible but smart younger women Lucy seems to be ready to
take dead aim at him as some kind of rock she can hold onto since she is in the
inevitable “mother doesn’t understand her” stage and as is well worn information
by now dad is off with some mistress. (Carter’s mother gave us the key to what
is what with the lad when she said to him before he headed East that he had always
been attractive to women. Hell even the tween was head over heels for the guy.)
Things bump along for a
while with Sarah taking her treatments, Lucy trying to figure out the sex stuff
on her own without mother’s help, and Granny going over the top with her
ranting on and on about dying. Through all of this Carter is writing and in a
way getting some mature insights and getting over that worthless ex-girlfriend.
In a film which is about the land of women that seems odd that he would get his
issues resolved as a central outcome but so be it. As Kenny Klein always said “it’s
all good.” Sarah comes to terms with her cancer and her relationship with Lucy,
Lucy finds some streak of happiness with a soda jerk, sorry showing my age, an
Orange Julius server, and comes to terms with her mother and that tween, well,
she will have to wait until the hormones settle down. As for Granny maybe she
knew herself best of all even if only in the negative. She dies on camera. I
don’t know if I can recommend this one in a serious way but what the heck I did
the review and I didn’t crucify ADAM Brody for my own mistake.
*We invite you to join our third annual conference on the theme "Building
Socialist Power: social movements and the Left in an election year." The
conference will feature speakers on important issues facing the Left and
socialists, as well as a full range of workshops.*
*ANNOUNCEMENT OF PROGRAM (in formation)*
*Saturday, March 17 **registration opens 9:00 a.m. / program begins 10:00
a.m.*
*Featured speakers*
*o Savina Martin, eastern Massachusetts coordinator of the new Poor
Peoples Campaign*
*o Monica Poole, associate professor at Bunker Hill Community College, on
a radical take on #MeToo and current women's issues*
*o Rebecca Vilkomerson, national executive director of Jewish Voice for
Peace, on Palestinian rights*
*o Jill Stein on the crisis in Korea and US imperialism*
*o member of Boston Teachers Union on labor issues and education*
*Our lunchtime plenary presents different perspectives on the 2018
elections and electoral politics, seeking common ground and strengthening
the movement: presentations will include the Socialist Party of Boston, a
member of Our Revolution, the Communist Party USA of Greater Boston, and
the Party for Socialism and Liberation*
*Two sessions of participatory workshops will showcase movement-building
work and issues. **Proposed topics so far include Puerto Rico, immigrant
rights and deportations, work of Our Revolution, Fair Trade Action, Jobs
not Jails, lessons from Gramsci, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of
Israel*
*Breakfast and lunch options available at the conference.*
For International Women's Day-From The "Histomat Blog"Cathy Porter on Early Bolshevik Leader Alexandra Kollontai Wednesday, March 07, 2012 Cathy Porter on Alexandra Kollontai http://histomatist.blogspot.com/2012/03/cathy-porter-on-alexandra-kollontai.html Personally Kollontai experienced severe isolation. She was isolated from her class as an aristocrat who was a Marxist. And she was isolated from her sex because she was one of a very small number of intellectual women in the Bolshevik underground. In exile after the defeat of the 1905 revolution she wrote about how social relations changed in revolution—and how Marxists had to bring these issues into an analysis of class relations. She was utopian about morality and believed a new self-sufficient and independent woman could be born of class struggle. She had read Frederick Engels, Karl Marx and August Bebel. But she wanted to go further to write about a new sexual morality. She talked about free love and free unions—and showed how the working class was already freeing itself from the shackles of bourgeois marriage. Change was only going to be possible if women received support from the state for the responsibilities of motherhood and other domestic functions. When Kollontai’s work was reprinted after the 1917 revolution it had a new resonance and became concrete. It formed the basis of her work as the only woman member of the Bolshevik government after the revolution. Reading Kollontai today, her writings seem timeless and modern. Full article here for more on Kollontai see here and this is Kollontai on International Women's Day Marxism, socialism, women
On Being "Red" Emma- A Book Review On The Life And Times Of Emma Goldman-"EMMA GOLDMAN: Revolution as a Way of Life" By Vivian Gornick
Markin comment: Below is the re-post of a review that I did earlier in this space on a documentary on Emma Goldman. ****** Thursday, March 20, 2008 "Red" Emma Goldman-The Fate of An Anarchist Woman DVD REVIEW MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH EMMA GOLDMAN: AN EXCEEDINGLY DANGEROUS WOMAN, PBS, 2004 Fair portions of the comments made in the following review were also made in a review of Emma Goldman's autobiography Living My Life for Women’s History Month in March 2007. This PBS documentary tracks a great deal of the chronology of events and Ms. Goldman’s reflections on her life made in that book. Needless to say, as is almost always the case with PBS documentaries the filming and editing are top notch even if the politics are fuzzy and reek of do-goodism. As always, as well, with theses types of documentaries you get a plethora of 'talking heads' giving their take on the life of this exceedingly interesting and controversial woman, some expressed quite passionately by comparison with other documentary efforts. Read on. Sometimes in reviewing a political biography or autobiography of some capitalist hanger-on such as George Bush, Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac it is simply a matter of dismissing a known and deadly political opponent and so heaping scorn up that person is part of the territory of being a leftist militant. For others who allegedly stand in the socialist tradition, like the old theoretical leader of the pre-World War I German social democracy Karl Kautsky, who provide reformist rather than revolutionary solutions to the pressing issues of the day that also tends to be true, as well. However, with an enigmatic figure like the anarcho-communist and modern day feminist heroine "Red" Emma Goldman it is harder to do the political savaging job that is necessary. Why? Ms. Goldman came out of that tradition of pre-World War I life-style anarchism (made fashionable in the Greenwich Village of the time) where her politics, to the extent that political carping is politics, placed her somewhere on this side of the angels. However, the total effect of her career as an anarchist propagandist, sometime agitator and proponent of women’s rights shows very little as a present day contribution to radical history. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) experiences (recently reviewed here), by comparison, are filled with lessons for today’s militants. Obviously someone associated with the fiery German immigrant anarchist Johann Most is by any measure going to have trouble with some government at some point in their lives. Most was Goldman's lover and first teacher of the principles of ' propaganda by the deed' anarchism. For those readers not familiar with that tendency the core of the politics is that exemplary actions, not excluding martyrdom, by individual heroic revolutionaries are supposed to act as the catalyst to move the masses. In short, these are the politics of ‘shoot first and ask questions later’. As a tactic within a revolutionary period it may prove necessary and make some sense but as a strategy to put masses in motion, no empathically, no. Emma's own life provides the case study for the negative aspects of this theory. At the time of the famous bloody Homestead Steel strike in the 1890's here in America Ms. Goldman's lifelong companion and fellow anarchist of the deed, Alexander Berkman, decided that the assassination of one Henry Frick, bloody symbol of capitalist greed in the strike, would serve in order to intensify the struggle of capital against labor. Needless to say, although Mr. Berkman was successful, in part, in his attempt both Mr. Frick and the Homestead plant were back in business forthwith. For his pains Berkman received a long jail sentence. The most troubling aspect of Ms. Goldman's career for this writer is her relationship to the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us be clear, as readers of this space know, I have not tried to hide the problems generated by that revolution from which, given the course of history in the 20th century, the Soviet Union was never able to recover. However, from Ms. Goldman's descriptions of the problems seen in her short, very short stay in the Soviet Union just after the revolutionary takeover one would have to assume that, like most aspects of her life, this was just one more issue to walk away from because she personally did not like it. She, moreover, became a life-long opponent of that revolution. In contrast, some pre-World War I anarchists, particularly from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) were able to see the historic importance of the creation of the Soviet state and were drawn to the Communist International. Others, like Emma, used that flawed experiment as a reason to, in essence, reconcile themselves to the bourgeois order. Nowhere is that position, and that tension, more blatantly spelled out that in Spain in 1936. Spain, 1936 was the political dividing point for all kinds of political tendencies, right and left. While we will allow the rightists to stew in their own juices the various positions on the left in the cauldron of revolution graphically illustrate the roadblocks to revolution that allowed fascism, Spanish style, to gain an undeserved military victory and ruin the political perspectives of at least two generations of Spanish militants. The classic anarchist position, adhered to by Ms. Goldman, is to deny the centrality of conquering and transformation of the capitalist state power (and the old ruling governmental, social, cultural and economic apparatuses). To the anarchist this necessity is somehow to be morphed away by who knows what. Yes, that is the theory but on the hard ground of Spain that was not the reality as the main anarchist federation FAI/CNT gave political support to the bourgeois republican government and accepted seats in that government. These same elements went on to play a part in disarming the 1937 Barcelona uprising that could have sparked a new revolutionary outburst by the disheartened workers and peasants. So much for anarchist practice in the clutch. Ms. Goldman spent no little ink defending the actions of her comrades in Spain. Wrong on Russia and Spain, on the side of the angels on women's issues and the need to fight capitalism. In short, all over the political map on strategic issues. Still, although Emma was, and her defenders today are, political opponents this writer does not relish that fact. Damn it.
From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-All Honor To “General” Harriet Tubman
February Is Black History. March Is Women’s History Month. Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits. Any one , or all, of those reasons can be used as the reason to honor “General” Harriet Tubman Markin comment: The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month. ******* The Revolutionary Vanguard of the Civil War
Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom Toward the end of her long life, the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman commented on her years of service to the liberation of black people in a conversation with a journalist: "She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: 'Do you like apples?' On being assured that I did, she said: 'Did you ever plant any apple trees?' With shame I confessed I had not. 'No/ said she, 'but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said, "Some day I'll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat," and I guess I did it'." —Frank C. Drake, The New York Herald, 22 September 1907, quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman In this simple metaphor, Tubman recognized the vanguard role she played in laying the groundwork for black freedom in the United States in the revolution that was the Civil War. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a military strategist and spy during the war, "General" Tubman, as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. Like John Brown, the heroic martyr of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and the outstanding political leader of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass, Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. Harriet Tubman's life is a microcosm of the struggle for black liberation in the 19th century; her life directly reflects the issues of the time. Although the hope for a complete liberation of black people was later defeated in the cowardly betrayal of Reconstruction, Tubman's "apple orchard"—freedom for the slave—was a tremendous historical advance. The abolition of slavery and the fight for full citizenship for the black population was the great historic task of the Civil War, the second American Revolution, which carried forward the unfinished business of the first American Revolution. The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, the 19th century descendant of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. The abolitionists were part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820, encompassing such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Particularly among the most politically radical wing, the abolitionists were motivated by a vision of human emancipation profoundly rooted in religion. To men like the clergymen Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, slavery was an abomination to god and the Christian Bible and a gross betrayal of the rights of man as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Although slavery was their pre-eminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers' rights. The women's suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression. As the abolitionist and women's rights leader Angelina Grimke' said at the May 1863 meeting of the Women's Loyal League, a convention of support for the North in the Civil War, "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours" (see "The Grimke' Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights," W&R No. 29, Spring 1985). The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom—which included years as a soldier in the Union Army—she lived in poverty all her life. A fugitive from bondage, black and a woman, Tubman triumphed over exceptional odds to become a leader of the second American Revolution. Like Frederick Douglass, she was able to generalize her bitter and brutal experience of oppression into a revolutionary social consciousness and a determination to fight for all the oppressed. She was an advocate of militant political action and revolutionary insurrectionism. As opposed to the "moral suasion" Garrisonian wing, she was part of the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement. As the "Moses" of her people on the Underground Railroad, Tubman was famous throughout the U.S. and beyond by the time of the war. However, many details about her work are obscure, since she operated in the secrecy of what was essentially a revolutionary underground. She was illiterate, and much of what is known about her life comes from a biography of her by Sarah Bradford, who interviewed Tubman as an old woman (quotes from Tubman which were originally printed in dialect are here transposed into modern English spelling). Thus much of the story of her life must be told by others, especially by Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared the conviction, through the bleak decade of the 1850s, that the coming war must crush the slave system and break the bonds of black oppression. She was a co-worker and friend not only to John Brown and Douglass, but to many other key figures of her time, from abolitionist William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, to Sojourner Truth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith. She knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and most of the leading women's rights activists of her day. Douglass honored Tubman's role in a letter written in 1868, in which he defended her right to an army pension as a Civil War veteran: "The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encourage¬ment at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt 'Cod bless you' has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you." —quoted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman; The Moses of Her People Slave vs. Free in the Antebellum U.S. Like Frederick Douglass, Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland, probably in 1820. At that time the country was embroiled in the first of the major fights over slavery and the expanding U.S. territory, "resolved" in this instance by the Missouri Compro¬mise of 1820. Since the founding of the U.S. in the late 18th century, when the slave system was left intact throughout the South, two economic systems, capitalism and slavery, coexisted within one country. The inevitable clash of economic interest which must lead to the victory of one over the other was postponed in a series of "compromises" centering on the maintenance of control by the slave states over the relatively weak federal government. But. the underlying economic conflicts between the two systems eventually reached the point at which compromise was no longer possible. The development of large-scale industrial capitalism required wage labor to exploit, the source of its tremendous profits, as well as a mobile and at least somewhat educated working population. Key to capitalist expansion was control of a growing home market. In contrast, the slave system was based on primitive, labor-intensive agricultural production; the slaveowners sought new lands to increase the highly profitable slave trade and to move plantations to fresh, non-exhausted soil. The clash came to a head over the huge, expanding territories of the West: would they be slave or free? Karl Marx described the slow but inexorable sweep of political power by the slave states in their effort to increase control of the growing U.S.: "The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic northwest of the Ohio... The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed." —Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19 In 1820, when Tubman was born, news of the first of these bitter debates undoubtedly reached even the slave quarters, however isolated the slaves were kept from news of the day. Perhaps the slaves with whom Tubman lived as a child heard rumors about the deep split in Congress over the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have prohibited the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and provided for gradual emancipation of those already there. This first great debate on slavery was a harbinger of things to come. Abandoning even his earlier, contradictory anti-slavery position altogether, Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed the Tallmadge Amendment. In 1821 he wrote, "All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later." As a child Tubman was acquainted with all the horrors of slavery. By the age of five or six she was at •work and suffering from whippings on her face and neck by a vicious mistress. Later she worked as a field hand. She was still a child at the time of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, put down by the slaveholders swiftly and ruthlessly. In 1832, the opposition of the agricultural South to the federal tariff designed to protect Northern industry led to the Nullification Crisis, in ' which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The slaveholders' fear of black insurrection, sparked by Nat Turner's revolt, fueled their intransigence against the federal government. Tubman was around 15 years old when the incident that literally marked her for life occurred. While trying to defend a fellow slave from the vindictiveness of the overseer, she was struck on the head with a two-pound iron weight which cracked her skull. For months she lingered between life and death, lying on rags in her family's slave cabin. The injury left a deep scar on her head and left her subject to spells of unconsciousness, sometimes three or four times a day, which plagued her for the rest of her life. But instead of being crushed by the brutality of her life, Tubman hardened and determined to fight. When she recovered, she built up her physical strength until she could lift huge barrels of produce as well as a man, despite her small size. Her master would exhibit her strength as one of the "sights" of the plantation. She let people think her half-witted because of her brain injury, and plotted her escape. She began to experience daily visions, which inspired her driving commit¬ment to black freedom as part of a deeply personal religion. In 1849, although it meant leaving her husband, a freeman who refused to go with her, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. Rumor had reached her and her family that their owners planned to sell them to the deep South, a dreaded fear of every slave in the bor¬der states. Already two of her sisters had been sent off in a chain gang, separated from their children. Her brothers lost courage for the escape; Tubman went on alone. As she later told Bradford: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me." Aided by a white woman who gave her the first address of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made her way North, traveling at night. "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter.... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also." Cooking and laundering to support herself, she began the life of a fugitive slave in the North. The 1850s: The Irrepressible Conflict at the Boiling Point Tubman arrived in the North on the eve of the biggest struggle yet over the question of slavery. Congressional debate sparked over California's petition for admission to the Union as a free state continued for months, while legislatures and mass rallies North and South adopted fiery resolutions. Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states. Over time a compromise satisfactory to few on either side was worked out, largely due to the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster, who was voted out of his Senate seat by an enraged Massachusetts legislature in 1851. Webster was replaced by the uncompromising abolitionist radical, Charles Sumner. Later a leader of the Radical Republicans, in 1856, after a stirring anti-slavery speech, Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by a Southern Congressman. The terms of the Compromise of 1850 centered on a series of tradeoffs: while California would be admitted as a free state, no restrictions on slavery were to be made in the Mexican cession; and while Washington, D.C. ceased to be a depot for the slave trade, the 1793 fugitive slave law was to be replaced with a much tougher version. This new law was an unspeakable atrocity, a threat to the lives and freedom of black people in every state. In his scathing indictment of hypocritical American "democracy," "July Fourth and the Negro" (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass described it: "For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave taw makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to near only his accusers.' —The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2 Many Northerners vowed to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, a long-time anti-slavery radical, defied even the army to enforce the statute: "Let the President... drench our land of freedom in blood; but he will never make us obey that law" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction). When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was kidnapped in 1854 under the law in Boston by a gang of thugs organized by the federal government and Burns' Virginian master, the city erupted in seething conflict from the halls of government to the men in the street. The local vigilance committee, dedicated to helping fugitive slaves, organized mass rallies; a badly coordinated assault on the federal courthouse failed to rescue Burns. The federal government and the slaveholders succeeded in returning Burns to slavery. But he was the last fugitive to be returned from anywhere in New England. In fact, nine Northern states passed per¬sonal liberty laws, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court struck down the personal liberty laws as unconstitutional. One of Harriet Tubman's most publicized actions was the courageous rescue of a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the Troy, New York court where he was pronounced guilty in 1860 under the Fugitive Slave Law. For several hours a battle raged between the abolitionists and the authorities until Tubman, with the help of others, seized Nalle and started him off on the journey to Canada. But the North was by no means free of pro-slavery or racist forces. Many states had "black laws"; Indiana, Oregon, Illinois and Iowa all eventually passed statutes banning black migration into the state. These measures reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome. Indeed, opposition to slavery was all too often based on the wish to exclude blacks altogether. And throughout the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement grew in strength, so did the pro-slavery mob. Tubman had first¬hand experience with the violence of the Northern racists when she was part of a defense guard for Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison at a Boston meeting in 1860, raided by pro-slavery hooligans. The Underground Railroad Under these conditions of mounting assaults on blacks, free and slave, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. Marked by her scarred head and subject to spells of unconsciousness, she faced incredible dangers which grew greater as the years passed. She raised money for her trips through her own labor and by fundraising among abolitionists. Given the secrecy of her missions and the price on her head—the slaveholders offered rewards totaling $40,000, an enormous sum in those days—there were few records of her 19 trips back South. She always carried a pistol and threatened to use it on those whose courage failed, on the principle that dead men carry no tales. In her native Maryland, where she returned many times to rescue dozens, including all but one of her entire family, so many slaves escaped that a panic broke out among the slaveholders, leading to the 1858 Southern Convention in Baltimore. Ancient laws were resurrected to crack down on escaping slaves; 89 free blacks were re-enslaved under a new law. But Tubman continued her work up to the Civil War. She personally brought out some 300 people altogether, from all parts of the South. In the 1880s, she spoke of these years at a meeting of women's suffragists in Rochester, New York: "Yes, ladies...I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." As Frederick Douglass said of the Underground Railroad: "I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy." —Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Indeed, the political impact of the Underground Railroad spread beyond the comparatively small numbers it freed, which have been estimated at probably less than 1,000 a year out of a total slave population of four million. As an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk imprisonment or death in their work, it was a rallying point in abolition work. Speaking tours of ex-slaves, who described the horrors of their lives in bondage, won over many to abolition. The vigilance committees not only helped to settle newly arrived blacks, but tried to fight the racism of the North. Most importantly, the Underground Railroad effectively allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote: "Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coordinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic." —W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown It was becoming more and more clear that liberation for the American slave was a national task beyond the scope of local slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Denmark Vesey's. Leadership for black emancipation thus developed in the North, among the core of militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— people like Douglass, Tubman, Brown, Wendell Phil¬lips and Charles Sumner. A small but crucial element of experienced radicals existed in the "Red 48ers/' European refugees from reaction following the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Black, white, foreign-born, many of these later formed the left wing of the Republican Party. The abolitionists were by no means a homogeneous group. One of the most famous abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, opposed all political activity—running for office, petitioning the government—on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery. Advocating "moral suasion," Garrison opposed the use of force in the fight against slavery. He finally ended up by proposing the secession of the North as the "answer"—which needless to say would have done nothing to end slavery. Although Douglass and Brown originally subscribed to "moral suasion," they both soon realized that it was doomed to fail. Even the Underground Railroad, although constantly defying the slave system and the federal laws which protected it, was not a critical weapon to end slavery and as such was more inspirational than strategic. Douglass, Brown and Tubman embraced all means to fight slavery, from petitioning and agitation to armed self-defense and insurrection. As Douglass commented in 1852 at a national free-soil convention, "The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check" ("The Fugitive Slave Law," The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2). When the war broke out, it was Douglass and the other radical abolitionists who argued for the immediate freeing and arming of the slaves. Black insurrection at last would destroy the slave power: only that way could the Union Army win the war. Harpers Ferry: The First Battle of the Civil War As the years passed,to anti-slavery forces it seemed that the slaveholders were winning every battle. Every "compromise" increased the power of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruling on the Dred Scott case effectively extended the boundaries of slavery throughout the country. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southern Democrat, led the court decision that residency in a free state did not free a slave and that the Missouri Compromise barring slavery in the Northern territories was unconstitutional. As Marx said, "... now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery" ("The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19). Most notoriously, Taney wrote that blacks had no claim to U.S. citizenship under the Constitution because blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." But many abolitionists and free-soilers were determined to fight with every weapon available. To the free-soil farmers of the West, the expansion of slave-based agriculture was a direct threat. The South hindered by every possible means the colonization of the territories by free labor, seeking instead new lands for the plantation system and for the immensely profitable slave trade. Outraged free-state settlers organized in self-defense. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened Kansas to slavery under the dubious slogan of "popular sovereignty," border ruffians from the neighboring slave-state of Missouri spread terror and murder throughout the area to prevent a free-soil government from forming. John Brown and his followers, armed with rifles and the determination that slavery would not triumph, were key in the eventual victory of freedom in Bleeding Kansas. It was shortly thereafter that Brown began to finalize and execute his plan to initiate a slave insurrection to found a black republic in the South. When Brown approached Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass and others (among whom were the Secret Six) in 1858 with his plan for launching a guerrilla war against the slavocracy, they recommended Tubman as the key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen who had settled in Canada, beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Her work in bringing slaves out of the South gave her not only detailed knowledge of the terrain throughout Brown's planned Appalachian route, but invaluable military experience. Brown went to meet the woman he called "General Tubman" at St. Catherines in Canada; she enthusiastically embraced his plan for arming the slaves and setting up mountain strongholds from which to wage war against slavery. Tubman agreed to recruit followers and raise money for the plan. She also may have attended the Chatham, Ontario convention in May 1858, where Brown and his followers discussed the constitution for the new black republic. A sternly religious man not given to superlatives, Brown wrote to his son: "Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that / ever met with. There is the most abundant material; & of the right quality; in this quarter; beyond all doubt" (quoted in Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood). But when the time came to launch the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry which was to begin the guerrilla war, Tubman was ill and out of reach. Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, kept her from being with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Thus Tubman was not there when federal troops dispatched by President Buchanan and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart rounded up Brown and his men. A few escaped; of the rest, those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia. At his execution in December 1859, John Brown's last, prescient words spoke of the years to come: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done" (ibid., emphasis in original). In the North John Brown's martyrdom was a rallying cry for abolition, while hysterical fear of insurrection swept the South and led to lynchings of suspected agitators. In later years Harriet Tubman spoke of Brown, "We Negroes in the South never call him John Brown; we call him our Saviour. He died for us." The Civil War Years The Republican Party was founded in 1854 out of the struggle for Kansas. For the 1860 presidential election the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as a moderate capable of winning wider support than more radical candidates. Although he opposed the expan¬sion of slavery, Lincoln's platform did not call for its elimination in the states where it already existed. Lincoln explicitly denounced John Brown's raid and declared his execution just. But Lincoln was still too anti-slavery for the South, and the secession of (eventually) eleven states led to the Confederate States of America. The Northern government, hoping for yet another compromise, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the war, which was forced on them by the slaveholders' cannons at Fort Sumter. To Lincoln and the majority of the Northern ruling class, the goal of the war was not to end slavery but to put down the secession of the South. Harriet Tubman again saw further, earlier: that the war for the Union must become a war to free the slaves. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child quoted her words in a letter to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (quoted in Conrad, op. c/t.): "They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer and the ague in the winter— They may send them one year, two year, three year, till they tire of sending ortill they use upthe young men. All of no use. God is ahead of Mister Lincoln. Cod won't let Mister Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Mister Lincoln, he is a great man, and I'm a poor Negro; but this Negro can tell Mister Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free. Suppose there was an awfully big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. You send for the doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolls up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again ... and so he keeps doing till you kill him. That's what Mister Lincoln ought to know." But in the early months of the war Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in a military/political maneuver to woo secessionists and would-be secessionists into the Union. When General John C. Frernont, commander of the western depart¬ment, declared in August 1861 that all property of Missourians in rebellion was confiscated and the slaves emancipated, Lincoln fired him and rescinded the order. It took two years of ignominious defeats at the hands of the rebels to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. When it became clear by late 1862 that the North could not win the war in any other way, he made plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—finally ending the spirit of compromise which had immobilized the North: "That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom." Although the Emancipation Proclamation expressly left intact slavery in Union-loyal states like Maryland, January 1, 1863 was a day of rejoicing among all anti-slavery people. Douglass described his reaction: "...I took the proclamation, first and last, for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter. Its meaning to me was the entire abolition of slavery, wherever the evil could be reached by the federal arm, and I saw that its moral power would extend much further." —Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. Harriet Tubman herself was within earshot of one of the first battles employing blacks in combat: the heroic assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863. It was here that the Massachusetts 54th, the first regiment of free Northern blacks, led by Tubman's friend Robert Gould Shaw, demonstrated before the eyes of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers. It was probably this battle Tubman was describing in her dramatic words: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." From then on black soldiers were thrown into the fighting on all fronts, tipping the balance of power for the ultimate Northern victory against the slavocracy. Fort Wagner was quite near to Port Royal, South Carolina, where Tubman spent most of the war years working for the Union Army. One of the earliest Union victories had liberated the lush Sea Islands from the slaveholders; from here the Union Army ran its Department of the South. Control of the port allowed Union gunboats to patrol the coastline from Savannah to Charleston and begin a blockade of Confederate shipping, cutting off trade between the cotton South and the textile merchants of Great Britain. Fugitive slaves and freedmen flocked to the protection of the Union Army. Abolitionists set up schools to teach the blacks, young and old, to read and write. Here Tubman worked in the army's service in many capacities. Her authority as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad was enormously important in reassuring the freedmen of the trustworthiness of the Yankees. As a nurse she first ministered predominantly to the blacks suffering from malnutrition. Later she nursed both black and white soldiers, going from camp to camp where men were dying of dysentery, smallpox and malaria. She set up a laundry and taught women to earn a living, while supporting herself by baking pies and brewing root beer at night after her hard day's labor. Tubman's outstanding contribution to the war was as a Union spy and scout. General Hunter, the commander at Port Royal, recognized her expertise, tempered by her years in the Underground Railroad; under him Tubman organized a scouting service of black scouts and river pilots who surveyed and patrolled the Combahee River area in South Carolina. In this capacity she was integral to a celebrated military action on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Three ships under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the guerrilla battles in Kansas and a trusted comrade of John Brown, raided deep into South Carolina in a blow pointing forward to Sherman's march on Georgia. The Boston Commonwealth described the battle: "Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch." The liberated slaves were brought back to Port Royal, where the able-bodied men among them were inducted into Montgomery's regiment. Reconstruction Betrayed At the war's end in 1865, over 600,000 Americans lay dead—almost equal to the number of American deaths in all the rest of the nation's wars combined. It took this bloody conflagration to resolve two key questions in American history: the Civil War forged a loose confederation of individual states into a modern nation. And underlying this question of political power lay the conflict between slavery and capitalism. The black question is the linchpin of American history. Northern industrialism, unfettered at long last from the opposition of the slaveholders, wasted no time. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. A federal protective tariff fostered the growth of domestic industry. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for the free-soil colonization of the vast territories of the West. But in 1865 the question of what position the newly liberated slaves should occupy in American society cried out for an answer. The initial conciliationist policy of the federal government under Andrew Johnson was strenuously opposed by the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Congressional legislation provided for full political equality for blacks: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are the legal codification of the gains of the Civil War. Slavery was wiped from the American Constitution, and blacks were made full citizens by law. The 15th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was passed to provide federal protection of blacks against Southern counterrevolu¬tionary violence. Black rights were enforced at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army. But the foundation upon which black equality must rest was never laid: only confiscation of the huge plantation holdings of the ex-slaveowners and their distribution'among the ex-slaves would have laid the economic basis without which "equality" remained a legal formality. Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution— the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the econom¬ic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression. Radical Reconstruction was destroyed in a political counterrevolution which stripped blacks of their newly won economic and political rights. Nightriding race-terrorists intimidated and murdered thefreedmen; the Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the war by ex-Confederate officers. The Compromise of 1877 codi¬fied the rollback of Reconstruction: the Republican Party bought the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops from the South. Over the years a new form of rural repression developed to replace the slave plantations. The Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement bound the liberated slaves to poverty and oppression as landless sharecroppers. The betrayal of the struggle for black freedom was certainly experienced by Harriet Tubman. At the war's end, almost 50 years old, she was at last able to head for her home in Auburn, New York. Exhausted by her years of labor, subject to increasing bouts of sickness, and with family members looking to her for support, her active political life was essentially over. En route North she was beaten by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass, entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. She was thrown into the baggage car, badly hurt and humiliated by this racist and sexist attack. She suffered from the effects of this injury for years. Then began a decades-long battle for the pension to which her three years of war service entitled her. Tubman commented scornfully, "You wouldn't think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds." She did not receive a penny until after the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, in 1888, when she was awarded $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government made some recognition of her service to the Union. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home, named in honor of John Brown, for indigent elderly blacks. Harriet Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old. Finish the Civil War! At the time of Lincoln's re-election in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was a leading member, sent the president a letter of congratulation: "From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholdersdared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; whenon the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up,whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man wasissued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; ...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor... " But the stars and stripes, the proud banner of the Civil War, has long since become mired in the filth of racism and imperialist war. Only the working class, under revolutionary socialist leadership, can lead mankind out of the putrid decay that is capitalist society today. Marx said, "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the "American dream" is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx's words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is fhe race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves. Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, "Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!" to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolution¬ary party. A workers party as the tribune of the people will fight for the interests of all the oppressed. Liberation for blacks and women can be won only by a workers government which will smash the capitalist system and reorganize society on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Key leadership in the revolutionary struggle will be provided by the Harriet Tubmans and Frederick Douglasses of our time. We honor these great black leaders for their role in bringing the day of liberation one giant step closer.
