Saturday, April 13, 2019

Sinister Attack on Citizenship Let Hoda Muthana Return to U.S.!

Workers Vanguard No. 1151
22 March 2019
 
Sinister Attack on Citizenship
Let Hoda Muthana Return to U.S.!
In an ominous attack on citizenship rights, the Trump administration is refusing entry to a U.S. citizen and her 18-month-old son. Hoda Muthana, who went to Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State (ISIS), and her son are now stateless and stranded in a refugee camp in that country. Born in New Jersey in 1994 to Yemeni parents, Muthana’s American citizenship has been recognized by the government more than once; she was issued a passport in 2005 and again in 2014. In 2016, the Obama administration revoked her passport and argued that she was not a citizen on the bogus grounds that her father was a foreign diplomat when she was born, a claim now picked up by the Trump administration. In fact, her father lost his job as a diplomat two months before her birth. Hoda Muthana and her child are citizens and must be allowed to come back to the U.S.
Charles Swift, the Muthana family’s lawyer, rightly asserted, “If they can do this to Hoda, they can do it to anyone.” In fact, the government is frontally assaulting birthright citizenship as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment, which issued out of the Civil War that destroyed black chattel slavery. Citizenship is the right to have rights. But under the rubric of the “war on terror,” those rights have been steadily shredded by both Democratic and Republican administrations. While Muslims have been particularly targeted, these attacks are a threat to the rights of the whole population, particularly black people, immigrants, leftists and the working class. The accusation of “terrorism” is a tool of government repression that provides the state with a license to suspend democratic rights, criminalize political activity and ultimately to engage in legalized murder.
In 2011, the Obama administration asserted that a U.S. citizen accused of being a terrorist can be summarily executed, launching drone strikes in Yemen that killed American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. In 2002, the Bush administration labeled Jose Padilla an “unlawful enemy combatant” and disappeared him in a South Carolina Navy brig for three years with no charges filed against him. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee argued in a 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief on behalf of Padilla, the government’s “anti-terror” laws aim at giving “the Executive unchallengeable authority to strip citizenship from Americans who ‘provide material support’ to an organization which at some time may be deemed ‘terrorist’ by the U.S. government.” Tortured and threatened with execution, Padilla was finally charged with “conspiracy” in 2005 and subjected to a show trial that led to a 21-year sentence.
Hoda Muthana is one of 59 Americans estimated to have joined ISIS at a time when it controlled a swath of territory across Syria and Iraq. Now that ISIS is confined to a scrap of land on the Syria-Iraq border, thousands of its supporters have fled to refugee camps. Leaving Muthana and her son stateless and in the camp could be a death sentence. On March 7, the three-week-old baby of Shamima Begum, a British citizen, died after the British government stripped her of her citizenship.
Some calls for Hoda Muthana’s repatriation, like the one from Democratic Senator Doug Jones, have been made on the grounds that this is the only way to prosecute her. All that has been presented as a basis for prosecuting Muthana is her membership in ISIS and tweets in support of its actions. In short, what Muthana has been accused of so far is no more than political advocacy. This would set another dangerous precedent for attacking leftists, anti-racist activists and anyone else the government wants to silence. As communists, we are in sharp opposition to everything that the bloodthirsty ISIS stands for. But the greatest threat to the working people and oppressed of the world is U.S. imperialism and its far more murderous ruling class.
As we have always stressed, what the U.S. capitalist rulers get away with in attacking the civil liberties and democratic rights of the population will largely depend on the level of social and class struggle in this society. It is in the interest of the working class and all opponents of U.S. imperialism to demand that Hoda Muthana and her son be allowed to come home.

*Poet's Corner-Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead"-In Honor Of The Union Side On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The Second Year Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to essay by poet and literary critic Helen Vendler about Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead".

Guest Commentary

On the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War in honor of the Northern armies that fought and died defending the union and/or the abolition of slavery a poem written by Robert Lowell during the Centenary in 1964. Markin

Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead- 1964


"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."


The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

*From The Pages Of American Pre-Civil War History- When Boston Enforced The Fugative Slave Act

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 11, 2010, concerning the initial reaction of Boston society to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law that was strengthened by the Compromise of 1850.


Markin comment:

Boston is rightly seen as a "hotbed" of slavery abolitionism but, as this article points out, that was not always the case. Moreover, as I have noted elsewhere, the prosperous merchant/factory owner sector of the capitalist class in pre-Civil War Boston was dependent, very dependent, on Southern cotton so that in 1850, at least, the federal and state authorities were able to find more than enough "bravos" to enforce the hated Fugitive Slave Law.

Friday, April 12, 2019

In Honor of The Union Side On The 150th Anniversary Of The American Civil War-"We Are Coming Father Abraham"- A Song Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of a New York Regiment performing We Are Coming Father Abraham.

All Honor To The Union Armies On The 150th Anniversary Of The Start Of The American Civil War.

This is an example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, Civil War Curiosities by Webb Garrison.

In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.


WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

*"We Are Coming Father Abraham- In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 - A Song Of The American Civil War

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of a New York Regiment performing "We Are Coming Father Abraham".

On the 167th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.

An example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading the book, Civil War Curiosities" by Webb Garrison.

In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.


WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

On The 158th Anniversary- In Honor Of The Union Side In The American Civil War-"The Internationale"- A Working Class Song For All Seasons

Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of a performance of the Internationale.

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist. Sadly though, hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground and have rather more often than not been fellow-travelers. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
********************
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
L'Internationale

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud

L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Die Internationale

Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!

Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht

Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!

In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(The English version most commonly sung in South Africa. )
The Internationale

Arise ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye toilers of the earth
For reason thunders new creation
`Tis a better world in birth.

Never more traditions' chains shall bind us
Arise ye toilers no more in thrall
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We are naught but we shall be all.

Then comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Zulu) i-Internationale

n'zigqila zezwe lonke
Vukan'ejokwen'lobugqili
Sizokwakh'umhlaba kabusha
Siqed'indlala nobumpofu.

lamasik'okusibopha
Asilwise yonk'incindezelo
Manj'umhlab'unesakhiw'esisha
Asisodwa Kulomkhankaso

Maqaban'wozan'sihlanganeni
Sibhekene nempi yamanqamu
I-Internationale
Ibumb'uluntu lonke
*****
British Translation Billy Bragg's Revision[16] American version

First stanza

Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!

So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.

Stand up, all victims of oppression,
For the tyrants fear your might!
Don't cling so hard to your possessions,
For you have nothing if you have no rights!
Let racist ignorance be ended,
For respect makes the empires fall!
Freedom is merely privilege extended,
Unless enjoyed by one and all.

So come brothers and sisters,
For the struggle carries on.
The Internationale,
Unites the world in song.
So comrades, come rally,
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal,
Unites the human race.

*Bric-A-Brac Of The American Civil War- Strictly For Aficionados

Click on title to link to Marx/Engels Internet Archives for their writings on the American Civil War. Remember we,as Marxists, were fervent partisans of the Northern side in this one.

On the 149th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War.

Book Review

Civil War Curiosities; Strange Stories, Oddities, Events, and Coincidences, Webb Garrison, Rutledge Hill press, Nashville, Tennessee, 1994


In the course of a life long study of history, especially when looking at the impact of great revolutions on the course of history, and the American Civil War fits into that category, I have read many books that narrate the main events of those upheavals. I have honed in on the lives of the most important political actors in those dramas as well. Further, I have gone to the backs streets of the events to find out what the “people”, who formed the backbone for all the major revolutions, at least in the West, had to say. I have even, and here is where this book, “Civil War Curiosities”, falls, run into compilations of the oddities and contradictions that have emanated from this historic events. This, my friends, as the headline to this entry indicates is a task for aficionados. So once you’ve gotten the main narrative of the Civil War down, have read about the major actors and checked out was happening in the back streets then you can take some time for some light, but informative , reading about the oddities.

Of course, on the subject of the American Civil War there is no shortage of books covering individual oddities and topics, or at least the subject has been covered in such depth that at this distance from the event there is not much room for fresh commentary except for the running through the ephemera. Personally, my tastes run to more detailed mainstream studies, like James McPherson’s, that center on the fight to abolish slavery or of Bruce Catton’s that detail the struggle to preserve a unitary state on this part of the continent. However, Mr. Garrison, a noted author with a resume filled with books that center on compiling the bric-a-brac of this war fills a rather different niche. And along the way provides some interesting information about the personage of Lincoln, his adversary Jefferson Davis, the women of the Civil War, plenty of material on battles and leaders, and most importantly, some new information about the role of blacks in their own liberation as soldiers. Not a book for everyone but interesting nevertheless.

*****

An example of an American Civil War song that I gleaned from reading this book.
In the event, although the United States Congress authorized and budgeted for those 300,000 soldiers, I do not believe that the quota was met.

WE ARE COMING, FATHER ABRAHAM
Words by James Sloan Gibbons
Music L.O. Emerson


We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

If you look across the hilltops that meet the northern sky,
Long moving lines of rising dust your vision may descry;
And now the wind, an instant, tears the cloudy veil aside,
And floats aloft our spangled flag in glory and in pride;
And bayonets in the sunlight gleam, and bands brave music pour,
We are coming, father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

If you look up all our valleys where the growing harvests shine,
You may see our sturdy farmer boys fast forming into line;
And children from their mother's knees are pulling at the weeds ,
And learning how to reap and sow against their country's needs;
And a farewell group stands weeping at every cottage door,
We are coming, Father Abr'am, three hundred thousand more!

CHORUS

You have called us, and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom's sake, our brothers' bones beside;
Or from foul treason's savage group, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

CHORUS

On The 158th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment (Also Called The "Bloody" 20th and "The Harvard Regiment")

Click on to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated April 10, 2011, about some Massachusetts regiments in the American Civil War.

Markin comment:


On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-Honor The 20th Massachusetts Regiment ("The Harvard Regiment")

On The 158th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
********
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861

The North American Civil War


Written: October 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861;
Online Version: marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: Bob Schwarz;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney in 1999.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

London, October 20, 1861
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?

Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.

The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) 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 degrees 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. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.

However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, 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.

At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.

In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.

Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the lists against the government and his allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.

The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.

The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.

The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."

As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.

A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.

The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders' party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas's settlers' sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln's victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.

The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.

In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible solution of the conflict.

The Ghost Of Delores Landon (nee Riley)-A Si Landon Story

The Ghost Of Delores Landon (nee Riley)-A Si Landon Story  

By Zack James

[The Pete Markin mentioned in the sketch below is the late Peter Paul Markin who despite a lot of serious work as a journalist back in the early 1970s fell off the wagon down south of the border and fell down shot dead with a couple of slugs in some desolate back alley in Sonora after a busted drug deal as far as anybody in America was able to find out. The Peter Markin who moderates this site is a pseudonym for a guy, Frank Jackman, who along with Si Landon, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, Josh Breslin and a bunch of other guys knew Markin in the old days and has taken the pseudonym in honor of his fallen comrade who before his untimely end taught him a lot about the world and its ways. “Peter Paul Markin”]          


Si Landon like a lot of guys, gals too, but this is about guys from his now creeping aging generation, a generation a guy, Pete Markin  who hung around with Si in the old days, the old high school days around North Adamsville where they grew up called the “generation of ‘68” because that seemed to have been the watershed year in the explosive 1960s which they all had been  washed by, washed clean by at least for a while, was a man of hard-bitten memory. Had remembered whatever needed to be remembered when called upon by the surviving members of the tribe, the corner boys they called themselves back in the late 1950s, early 1960s when everybody, every professional everybody from teachers and the cops to the Governor was trying to figure out why ordinary growing up working class guys were so sullen, so “alienated” was the term most frequently used, from what has been called the golden age of the American working class and its progeny. Had despite drifting away from the old crowd more than most in the recent past had that “remembering” gene activated big time after a period of dormancy.      

Si was, according to Frankie Riley, who was anointed the leader of the leaderless corner boys who hung around the corner of Doc’s Drugstore up on Sudbury Street near the Josiah Adams School (the town was named after this head of an illustrious ship-building family who had help settle the town back, way back, when religious dissenters, dissenters from orthodox Puritanism, were not welcomed in Boston) something of a loner. A guy who was genial enough on those awkward Friday and Saturday nights when they shared their individual alienations collectively, but more inclined than anybody to brood endlessly and walk alone along the existential beaches that dotted the old town. So it had been no surprise that he was the first to leave the group, drift away would probably be a better way to put it, once they graduated from hallowed North Adamsville High School.        

What the corner boys, what anybody who came in contact with Si back then, did not know was that Si’s family life was something like a living hell on a day to day basis. The only one who did have an inkling was that same Markin mentioned up in the brackets whom Si would confide in when things got really bad and he had to stay over at Markin’s house when he for the umpteenth time got kicked out of his family house for some schoolboy misbehavior. Si would tell the others, tell the lie, the big lie, that he had walked out of the   
house, had decided to seek the next best thing, had decided to seek a newer world a term he learned from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that he had read in English class in school and then a few days later would be seen coming out of the family house. You get the drift.   

The cause of Si’s constant anguish had a name, had a name to be conjured with. Delores Landon nee Riley the latter surname reflecting the overwhelmingly Irish “Acre” neighborhood where Si and about three prior generations of Rileys had grown up, some to prosper others like the Landons to suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune since Delores had not only married outside the neighborhood, outside the religion, outside the Irish diaspora, a decided no-no, but had married what the whole clan had determined was beneath her status as lace curtain progeny. Had married Si’s father, a southern redneck transported by fate, and world politics, World War II-style, to finish up his time as a Marine at the well-known Riverdale Naval Depot and the rest was history, family history mostly kept under the rug. That rug referring to a neighborhood steeped in the tradition of not “airing the family business in public,” of keeping closed-mouth about what was going on inside the house (or inside the brain). Si’s father Lawrence was nothing but a high school drop-out whose lack of skills and education would be the torment of one Delores Landon once the reality of that teenage marriage and the five subsequent children, all boys, sunk in.     

Moreover it did not help that Si was the oldest of the lot and therefore bore the brunt of Delores’ unspoken anger at her situation. Unspoken to anybody but Si upon whom it came out as continual carping and belittling from the time that the last, mercifully the last, of the Landon siblings were born. The anger, the righteous Delores anger came out in little ways and large. Little by the constant pressure on Si to act beyond his years as a secondary father figure to the younger boys. Any variation, any trouble that normal Acre boys got into without much damage got magnified way out of proportion in screaming matches that while they were held in private could be heard all the way to Adamsville proper. An example, small but one that the great rememberer would brood about even fifty years later. 

In fifth grade at a time in the neighborhood where boys and girls started to see each other as interesting rather than as something to be avoided like the plague Si had been sweet on one Rosalind Lahey, a born heartbreaker as would later prove to be the case but just then the focal point of his un-channeled lust. As things went in school life then Miss Willow had planned a dance exhibition to show parents what little well-versed social creatures their off-spring had turned into. As blind fate would have it the dance exhibition was about square dancing which Miss Willow had spent several months trying to teach her charges. As double fate would have it Si was to be paired with Rosalind. So Si thought it natural when Miss Willow told the class that they should make an effort to dress up as country folk, farmers to do something to impress Rosalind. That was when overheated brain Si decided that if he cut up the bottoms of the one of two pairs of dungarees to his name that he would impress the lady Rosalind. He did so as it turned out before the exhibition and before the parents arrived including Delores Landon (Lawrence was trying to hold onto for dear life a nighttime extra pay job and so could not attend which was probably just as well).           

Things were okay until the dancing squares were formed and somehow Delores spotted what Si had done to his pants and let out a blood-curdling cry against her son. Said right there in public so you know that it was a bad time how could Si disgrace and disrespect his parents meager hold on reality and cut  up one of his only two pairs of pants which moreover were slated to be handed down soon to the next oldest boy, Norman. Needless to say that was the end of any “romance” with the fickle Rosalind. But that was not the worst of it for he was grounded for the next two weeks and the subject of the “belt” from his father. Even that was not the worse since for about the next four years until something more serious replaced it in Delores ammunition dump of grievances Si and whoever else was around the hearth got an earful about Si’s rotten deed.

That event four years later would set up what would be an on-going battle between mother and son for the next forty years or so until she passed away. (Si would be estranged for longer and shorter periods from high school onward and would not even attend Delores’ funeral so you know how bad the blood between them had been.) The simple fact was that Delores between her young age at marriage and on-going health problems from complications in a couple of her deliveries coupled with extreme economic distress for most of Si’s time at the family house was in way over her head whatever love she had, and it was untiring devoted love, for Lawrence Landon. (Si would regale his corner boys with his stories about that extreme economic distress-long-hand for the weekly “envelopes”-the envelopes which sat on the kitchen table every Thursday payday for the various bill collectors one at least each week would be empty and the stall would be on for a week’s reprieve. When things got really bad the envelopes were all “short.” Si dearly knew those weeks because those would be the weeks when he from about age six to twelve after which he refused to do the arduous chore anymore and it was farmed out to his brother Norman had to go with the envelope to the landlord and look very sheepish, very sheepish with the “tide over until good times” short money. Little did Si know then that in “don’t air your dirty linen in public” Acre that his corner boys could have retailed the same kind of stories.       

That inability of Delores to do anything more than rant and rave at Si in her frustration combined with that economic distress which the late Pete Markin called the “wanting habits” the whole crowd suffered from left him with very few outlets for his own anger. Made him very malleable when it came to any kind of ways to grab some dough or to do some other misadventure. That misadventure part happened one night when Si had just turned sixteen and he and a few corner boys, he would not mention any names, still wouldn’t almost fifty years later, when he was the only one caught, had “hot-wired” a 1959 Chevy and went joy-riding down the causeway one hot summer night. Problem: Si had no driver’s license when he crashed into a stone wall and the others fled leaving him to face the inevitable coppers alone. Fortunately the guy whose car was stolen had adequate insurance to cover the damage but Si wound up with six months’ probation in “juvvy.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Delores and was the very first of an untold number of kicks out of the house (Si always disputed whether he was kicked out or had left of his own volition on each occasion including the last serious one when he left the house for good never to return to stay, never.)  That was the way things went for the next forty years as was already mentioned with longer and longer periods between temporary reconciliations. The main thrust of the battles royals was that Si was some version of the devil incarnate which Delores was made to suffer against some unknown offense against the church, the church being the holy apostolic Roman Catholic Church which was the only serious religious expression in the Acre dominated by the Irish and the Italians.      

Here’s the funny thing in the long haul which will make the story sort of byzantine. Si would go on to be a fairly successful lawyer in Boston although Delores refused to recognize that accomplishment. She would dwell on the more mundane fact of his three unsuccessful marriage, no that is not right, she would have known only about two of them but the three unsuccessful marriages is right and the failure of that third one is what brings us back to the ghost of Delores Landon. A few months before, maybe six months, his third wife, Maria, had given Si his walking papers. Had told him that between his eternal moodiness and withdrawal and her own need to “find herself” they were done as a couple after nearly a decade of marriage. (Delores had always hated Maria since she was “one of those,” a heathen, a bloody Protestant, English to boot, forgetting, conveniently forgetting, that the late Lawrence Landon, the love of her life, had been a Southern Baptist before he converted after agreeing to raise the children as Catholics when they were married. Married not in the church because he was a Protestant but in the rectory by the parish priest who from all accounts was not pleased to perform the ceremony.)         

The immediate effect of their separation was that Maria would stay in the marriage house for the sake of the children and that “rolling stone” Si would go fend for himself someplace. Initially he had taken a sublet from a friend’s daughter who was heading to Europe for six months. When that six months was up, actually before that six months was up Si decided once it was finally very clear that Maria was not going to attempt any sort of reconciliation that he needed some feeling of rootedness, some grounding after all the years of feeling out of sorts, feeling like some silly alienated youth which he found that he never really grew out of. So he decided to go back to the old town, old North Adamsville. Since he was not up for buying a condo he had decided to rent one for a year and see if that helped his situation. He eventually found a place not far from where he had grown up. The place had been an old elementary schoolhouse which had been several years before due to changes in the demographics of the neighborhood and its ethnic composition closed down, sold and converted to condos.       

Although Si had not gone to the school, Adams, named after that same Josiah who was a big wheel in shipbuilding in the town’s more prosperous days, since he had gone to elementary school across town at the Harbor school, three of his younger brothers had and so he thought it ironic that “what goes around, comes around.” He did not think much more about the matter until he moved into his new rental, his condo. Of course converting an old school into individual units was no big deal just reconfigure the old classrooms. What the converters had done though was to keep some of the flavor of the old school in the main foyer by preserving various aspects of the school when it was functioning as such. One of the things that they had done was to place many of the early graduating classes on the walls. Si still didn’t think much of the matter until he noticed a newspaper article in the North Adamsville Gazette announcing the opening of the school in 1925. Damn.

The school was located only a block from where Delores had grown up and so she would have gone to elementary school there in the early 1930s. And sure enough when he perused the various class pictures from the early 1930s there among the Class of 1931 was one Delores Riley. Si freaked. A few nights later when he was a little restless not about his discovery but about the finality of the split with Maria he thought he heard a voice, a shrill voice calling out that he would never amount to anything. Probably just the wind gusting outside but he shuddered to think that he would have to live with the “ghost” of Delores Landon for the duration. Double Damn.       

  

Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film Summer Of 1942 (1971) In Mind


Coming Of Age In World War II-Torn America- With The Film Summer Of 1942 (1971) In Mind



By Fritz Taylor

Seth Garth, the once well-known free-lance music critic for many of the big music and specialty publications that have come and gone over the years since he first put pen to paper some forty years ago, including the long gone alternative press where he got his start and first breaks (literally put pen to paper, forget beauties of the world processor then), had been thinking about the old days a lot recently. Had been, having the luxury of semi-retired status, also doing a run through of films via the good graces of Netflix that he had first seen when he was a youngster sitting in the dark every week for the double feature at the old Strand Theater in his hometown of Riverdale, a town a few dozen miles from Boston. Or else films that due to publication commitments that he had not run through when they came out in the 1970s in the days when he was determined to catch the wave of being a music critic and missed many of those films, left them by the wayside.

One night at Jack’s, his watering hole hang-out over in Riverdale that he increasingly frequented on his forays back to his old hometown to see if he could “channel” the past by being physically present on the old sacred soil (although not the Strand long ago turned into a condominium complex), Seth had mentioned to Brad Fox, an old friend from high school days who went through many of the experiences with him, that he had just reviewed a film, Summer of 1942, for Sal Davis the editor of Cinema Now who was looking for copy to fill a space quickly. The film which had been released in 1971 about coming of age, coming of sexual age during the early years of World War II. The big point he made to Brad, who had told Seth that he had seen the film when it came out but did not remember the details except that this foxy older woman played by Jennifer O’Neil had “robbed the cradle” and bedded a teenage boy, swore the film could have been about their generation, the generation of 1968 as easily as of 1942.     


Seth had mentioned, before giving Brad the details that he had missed about the film, he had started his review speculating on the fact that each generation goes through its coming of age period somewhat differently. “Coming of age’ in this context meaning after Brad had been unclear about what aspect of the term Seth meant, meaning the beginning the treacherous process of understanding all the sexual changes and commotions once you got to puberty. He said he had taken the one he, and Brad, had known about personally of coming of age in the early 1960s in the age of the “Pill,” of technology-driven space exploration and of some new as yet unspoken and undiscovered social breeze coming to shake up a lot of the old values, to turn the world upside down, from their parents’ generation. He said he tried to contrast that with the one before theirs, the one represented in the film about the coming of age of their parents’ generation. The generation that on one edge, the older edge went through the whole trauma of the Great Depression that brought barren days to the land and of slogging World War II and at the other edge, the younger edge, missing the trauma of war and its particular stamp on those who survived went on to form the alienated youth who turned “beat,” rode homespun hot rods to perdition, grabbed a La Jolla perfect wave surf board, revved up hellish motorcycles to scare all the squares and come under the immediate spell of jailbreak rock and roll. The funny thing at least on the basis of a viewing of the film on the question of dealing with sex, sexual knowledge and experiences there was a very familiar (and funny) sense that our parents who, at least in their case and the case of their growing up friends, went through the same hoops-with about the same sense of forlorn misunderstanding. (Of course in talking about parents and their sexual desire both Seth and Brad admitted they would have had a hard time linking up their own respective parents with sexual desire but their own kids if asked would probably say the same thing about them.)                   




Brad mentioned that his memory wasn’t so good of late and that although while they were talking he had been trying to dredge up some more facts about the movie other than the one he had mentioned earlier in the conversation about that sexy older woman cradle robber making Seth laugh that whatever the taboos were about intergenerational sex they both would have given their eye-teeth if some world-wise fox had come across their paths. Seth then went on to give Brad a rough outline of how the film had played out.

He told Brad that his habit of late was after viewing a film, particularly a film that he was being paid good dollars to produce a review on, was to go on-line and look up what somebody had to say about the film on Wikipedia.  Wistfully stated that service was something he wished had been around earlier in his career which would have saved him a lot of time in the library or looking at the archives of various publications of the time and allow him under the constant press of deadlines to be able to write better thought out copy. The story line of the film had been based on the essentially true-to-life experiences of a Hollywood screen-writer Hermie Raucher (played by Gary Grimes), coming of age 15, and his two companions, gregarious Oscy and studious Benji, known as “the Three Terrors,” three virginal teenage boys, who were slumming in the year 1942 at the beautiful but desolate end of an island retreat in the first summer of the American direct involvement in the Pacific and European wars after the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor. (The island had been Nantucket Island in the book published after the movie but had been filmed off desolate Mendocino in California). They like a million other virginal boys of that age during war or peacetime were driven each in their own way by the notion of sexual experimentation and conquest and so the chase was on.      

That chase had been on at two levels. The rather pedestrian one of seeking out young girls of their own age to see what shook out of the sexual tree and Hermie’s almost mystical search for “meaningful” love in the person of an older foxy woman, Dorothy, played by Jennifer O’Neil, who had been a young war bride staying on the island after her husband headed off to war. The own age part, funny in parts, driven mostly by pal Oscy’s overweening desire to “get laid” with a blonde temptress whom he finally got his wish with on night at the secluded end of the beach with his most experienced partner. On that occasion Hermie was shut out of any desire he had to do the same with her friend who was as bewildered by sex as he was. The “older woman” (in our circles she would have been a “cradle-robbing” older woman although she was only 22) notion of love is what drove him the moment he has set eyes on her when the trio was spying on her and her husband in their cozy cottage so he was “saving” himself for her. And after a series of innocent (and some goofy) encounters with Dorothy one night, after she has just found out that her husband had been killed in the war, she bedded him (there is no other honest way to put the matter). That was that though, for when Hermie subsequently went back to the cottage she had left the island and left him a more solemn young man.              


Having given Brad those details Seth mentioned that those were the main lines that got played out but what had made this film more than of ordinary interest to him was the whole lead-up, the whole “foreplay” if you will of the desire of the trio to be doing something about getting out of that dreaded virgin status. Said all the guys were fearful of being tagged with the “homo” tag and didn’t Brad remember how vicious teenage guys could be about the “manhood” question. Before he could go further Brad mentioned how when they were fourteen or fifteen he could not remember when how all the guys from around the corner that they hung on, including Seth used to “fag” bait him because he had refused to kiss Sarah Langley at a “petting” party and had actually run out of the house where the party was being held he had been so embarrassed. At the time he had been sweet on Jenny Price who had been at the party although nobody was aware of that situation. Nothing ever came of that desire and so he had spent some time living down the “fag” tag until he found Sandy Lee in junior year and she took him out of that status since she was something of a fox herself. Although nobody thought anything of calling another guy a “fag” as masculine craziness about sex and sexual identity erupted nobody seriously thought that the guys were gay or anything like that it was just a separation expression. Who knows who at the time really wasn’t interested in girls, wasn’t into “getting in their pants” although Seth speculated that some guys around the block must have since not a few guys lived at home with their mothers and were not seen with woman companions. Nowadays nobody would think twice about it although the usual baiting in school and among the jocks would still go on given the unchanged nature of certain heterosexual young males. Seth mentioned that he could not believe the pressure to “lose your virginity” that all the guys suffered through, although he admitted that it also took him a long time, long after the Christopher Street riots in the Village that began the serious modern gay rights movement to stop his calling gays “fags.” Not until his eyes were opened up when gay musicians and actors whom he interviewed and assumed were straight came out of the “closet.”   

Seth had laughed at the very realistic scenes when Hermie and Oscy picked up a couple of girls at the movie theater (playing Bette Davis and Paul Henried in Dark Voyage, a film that he actually had reviewed when it came out in a film retrospective at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square for the old Avatar alternative newspaper). The scene which showed the guys “feeling up,” or trying to, had been amazing with Oscy grabbing his just met girl almost from minute one and Hermie, missing the mark thinking his girl’s shoulder was her breast. Jesus. Brad laughed but reminded Seth that no way would that kind of thing have happened in their days since everybody, or almost everybody knew the drill at the Strand Theater Saturday matinee double-header or Saturday night date it did not matter. Some ancient tradition, hell, maybe going back to 1942 for all anybody knew about the original of the practice made it clear that those who sat in the orchestra were not going to “make out.” If they were in the balcony then whatever went on, went on from “feeling up” to blow jobs. It was solely a question of asking your date where she wanted to sit. That sealed the deal, and in many cased meant a last date.

Brad’s reminder of the old “policy” reminded Seth of the time that he was cray for Rosalind Green in junior high, they had gotten along well, had been a couple of chatterboxes in English class about books by a bunch of foreign guys to show they were “hip.” One day after a few weeks after all this “foreplay” Seth had finally asked her to a Saturday matinee (the usual strategy for a girl you were not sure would accept your date) and she accepted. When after paying for their tickets and hitting the refreshment stand for popcorn and sodas he asked her where she wanted to sit she had answered “silly, of course the balcony why else would I have come with you.” Bingo. Of such events decent youthful memories are made. Brad on the other hand spent many hours in the orchestra section once he latched onto Betsy Binstock (whom he eventually married and was still married to) who was “saving” whatever she was saving for marriage. Okay, too-now.        

Seth quickly mentioned the scene, the awkward scene, where Hermie was helping Dorothy with storing some packages and he got sexually excited, okay, okay, an erection, by her off-hand helping hand touch since neither man wanted to talk about those nighttime wandering hands that came down when they got an erection.  Nor did he spent much time on the scene where the three friends “discover” what sexual intercourse is all about through the good graces of Benji’s mother’s medical books since that scene rang false in their old neighborhood where sexual information was passed from older brother or sister to younger, a lot of it wrong, very wrong when the girl had to go out of town to see “Aunt Emily” (she was pregnant) in other works right out on the streets. Nobody back in 1942, or 1962 expected uptight parents who were assumed to probably not have had sex to give any serious information except some twaddle about the birds and the bees.  And of course the fumbling by the numbers (off-screen) when Oscy has his first sexual experience with the girl he had picked up at the movies. That scene had little over the top and as reticent about talking about sex as parents were guys and gals might give an inkling about what they were doing behind the bushes but a “free show” was off the charts.


The best scene of all though and it really showed the difference between then and now when the younger generations can grab condoms off the shelf at any drugstore or in some places right in schoolhouse restrooms (formerly “lav’s”) and who might not quite appreciate enough the scene where Hermie tried to buy “rubbers” at the local village drugstore from the jaded disbelieving druggist. Brad automatically remembered that scene once Seth recalled it. Remembered too, as he told a disbelieving Seth that night, his own confusion when he was in junior high and had found some condoms in a bottom bathroom drawer in his family house when he was looking for some band-aids. Had asked a kid at school, actually had shown a kid at school one and the kid had said they like balloons you fill them with water and throw them at somebody. It was not until high school and he had begun his own sexual explorations (obviously not with ever-loving Betsy) that he found out their real purpose and blushed silently about his parents’ sexual practices. Hence another example of the very general understanding about the young that their own parents never had sex. Whatever else being a youth today may be about in terms of trauma at least there is a hell of a lot of good information hanging out there on the Internet for the young to inquire into with embarrassment. 


Yeah, Seth gave Brad the word as they finished up that last round of drinks and began to head to their respective homes -watch this film and remember your own, either sex, torturous rumbling around coming to terms with sex.