Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale

Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale

By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the now deposed and self-exiled previous site administrator Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul  Markin on this site) was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[As the above notice has indicated the former site administrator, Allan Jackson, an old friend of mine from high school days and a man whom I supported during the recent intense bitter internal struggle at this site which centered on future direction and purpose, has been deposed and banished to exile (self-banished according to him but seen differently by the survivors). Because the fight was along generational lines, self-styled “Young Turks” and branded “old-timers” as much as anything else new administrator Greg Green, with the endorsement of the newly-revived Editorial Board, has decided to let each combatant give their take on the issues at dispute, if they so desire. The reasoning as far as a I know is to clear the air and to let the reading public know what goes on behind the scenes of every publishing operation, old-fashioned hard copy and new-fangled social media driven before any material sees the light of day.

I have no serious gripe about Allan’s tenure except that I did notice he got more set in his ways as he got older. Was less inclined to “go off the reservation” with any new idea presented to him to expand the subject matter which forms the living experience of the American scene.  What I am about to speak of though, hopefully without setting off an avalanche of gripes about the old regime, is related to the subject of today’s post, sports, specifically golf, my favorite sport. Sports, including golf, something which Allan was adamantly against posting material on reasoning that there were an infinite number of sports outlets putting an infinite amount of information about every possible sport or game and we did not need to, could not, compete against that reality. Furthermore although this site is about important nodal social, political and cultural happenings in America which includes an overweening love of sport by significant segments of the population he would pass on assigning or accepting any sport-related posting.

As a general proposition for the direction of this site I would, and did, agree with him on that. Except my sports perspective was not the television, radio, on-line professional and top amateur stuff but down in the average American trenches. How an average Joe goes about the business of doing some sport, again specifically golf, which I enjoy and having been a member of a golf club long enough have plenty of “slice of life” material. No go, no go until recently that is which I will mention in a minute.             

What busted me up, almost at one point busted up our friendship which has been pretty solid since high school many, many years ago was that several years ago, Allan was all over the idea of having a significant sports angle posted on this site. And not some “literary” (his term stolen from the real Peter Paul Markin, a big friend in our youth) touch like Ring Lardner did with his baseball series around the title You Know Me, Al  in the early 20^th century or Damon Runyon with betting horses (or betting on anything) in a million shrewd short stories centered on old Broadway a little later.

Allan’s idea, reflecting his personal interest in college football, was to write, or have somebody write weekly commentaries during the college football season every fall. And for a couple of years, this before I started writing regularly for this site, I guess he thought he had cornered the wisdom on the “sports” market. Thought that doing so would make American Left History more relevant to some anonymous “average Joe” who would then pick up on the various historical and political points which are the hallmark of the site. The hook? Project the winners of each week’s games. Not just the winner’s but as always in sports, certainly in football, provide a numbered point spread for the readers to use when making their bets elsewhere.

There were two problems with that approach. First Allan, unlike the real Markin always known as Scribe, didn’t know the first thing about football, at least what college teams to focus on for betting purposes. Here is how bad I heard it was (he would never talk about it to me when I came on board or when we went out for a few drinks with the other surviving high school guys). Alan actually would run a line on the Harvard-Yale game like anybody outside those two schools gave a fuck about the point spread. Was clueless about such teams as Miami (which he thought was Miami of Ohio and wondered why nobody wanted to bet when they played Kent State) and had no idea outside a certain devotion to Notre Dame about serious big-time college football (our “subway” fan Irish neighborhood “go to” team from way back even when they sucked during our high school days team). Worse, that second problem, was that readers were complaining about a guy whose percentages against the point spread had been about ten percent even doing such an operation. One reader told him to use a Ouija board, a couple have his wife make the picks and numbers out a grab bag, stuff like that. 

After a pile of those complains Allan suddenly stopped, stopped cold before the bowls season started the second season. Never to let another live sports piece muddy this site. Until recently when after something like a civil war between us he granted me a reprieve. Let me do a “slice of life” piece about an amateur, very amateur, golf tournament that some friends at my golf club were participating in. I didn’t ask but I assume since the war clouds were looming on the internal disputes after one of the younger writers flat-out refused to write a CD review on Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume l2 declaring it nothing but mishmash and a distraction that he was trying to shore up support from the older writers as the “Young Turks” were throwing down the gauntlet. When I asked Greg Green about doing a short follow up piece after the smoke settled, the one below, he said such, said maybe I should do a whole series of “slice of life” vignettes if I could jumble the thing up with other sports as well as golf.  Si Lannon]           

********

This screed, let’s call it a screed since I am up in arms about what I consider a dastardly deed provoking screed time in me,  is being written on Saturday morning December 9, 2017 from “not the golf course, that expression to be explained posthaste since “weenie,” there is no other way to put it, Frog Pond PGA Golf Professional Robert Kiley  declared yesterday December 8^th the end of the golf season as we know it due to what he called, seemingly in panic, a snow emergency demanding all entrances and exits to the property under penalty of death be shuttered for the year since some foul-mouthed weatherman, oops, weatherperson had predicted the first snow of the season. A first snow that however was not projected to start until mid-morning on the 9^th.   

Well maybe not under penalty of death on the question of entering the property since we are all paid up members who actually “own” the course through our initiation fees and bond and are entitled to enter all year and play golf weather permitting all year as well using temporary green in the winter, but remember this is a screed. He nevertheless has certainly placed himself as a self-serving “weenie” since when the course “closes” for the year he hightails it down to Naples, Florida and golfs his brains out while we all suffer the “hot stove” winter golf roundtable blues until blissful come hither March. And certainly “panic” is an appropriate expression under the circumstances trusting in some holy goof weatherman, person whatever whose error rate is higher than any golfer’s score. (We by the way for those looking for harsher, rougher words use “weenie” rather than some other derogatory term since golf, unlike rough-hewn sports like bowling and badminton, is a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly pursuit and rather civilized except the vast “open secret” of the not too pleasant fates awaiting the golf balls used to further the sport’s aims.

In any case it is approximately 9:30 AM and I stepped outside for a minute and actually had a flake, one flake, hit my nose. I don’t like to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood especially when he holds the ticket to a person’s season-long entertainment but couldn’t certain rugged individual golfers of my acquaintance, my infamous 6:06 club, named as such for the usual tee time which we start playing at most of the season, that is 6:06 AM by the way so you know these rugged individuals are also old rugged individuals, have faced that one, possibly two snowflakes, and played a robust round at “the Frog” before the heavens erupted.   

Enough of moaning and groaning about short golf seasons though after all in New England unlike Florida or Arizona the serious season has to come to an end at some point. What I am up in arms about is the line in the sand that was drawn yesterday between real golfers and fakahs (what in the rest of the English- speaking world outside of Boston are called fakers). For the uninitiated modern day notice is by ever quick-mail even in ancient golf world and one and all were informed of the closing by e-mail early Friday morning. Certain real golfers, 6:06 Club golfers, knowing the end was near, showed their metal by dropping everything they were doing once the clarion call panicky weenie e-mail came over cyberspace from Golf Central to announce a cease-fire in place. One guy, Sand-bagger Jackson, the moniker tells all, came running from the netherworld of the City of Presidents where he was working diligently on yet another report. Another, Kevin Zonk, moniker also tells a lot, put down pen abruptly and called a halt to yet another so-called earth-shattering conference about some bogus crisis in the health care system to heed the call to arms and yet another, Redoubtable Steve, came speeding from out of nowhere some fifty miles away ready to let the environment in this wicked old world go asunder to get one final fix, to have one final stab at the brass ring. 

On the other side, and by now one and all know what side that is, there are certain guys, okay a certain guy, Kaz, who apparently knows only three letters, who in the interest of making mere filthy lucre debased themselves, no, himself, in order to do mundane things like cover mortgage payments, pay the armed bandits for upcoming educational expenses with daughter college loaming and the like. Now like I said I am not one to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood but what else can one think could be the reason for such an obvious no show. Especially when in the crucial final Frog Pond betting scheme, five dollar a man quota, a certain guy from the City of Presidents found fifteen dollars on the ground, or so it seemed like it.

Later Si Lannon  

    

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

By Greg Green  

[Recently, shortly after the death of Charles Manson [November, 2017] was announced and then later when I felt under some pressure at the time to write a bit more about the 1960s than I was aware of at the time which had more to do with the beginnings of the internal struggle over the direction this site was taking and going to take, as something an introduction of myself into this space, I wrote two shorter versions of this piece.

I felt those pieces were as much about my understanding of went on, and what went wrong, in that big 1960s “jail-break” that the then administrator of this space Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) now deposed and off in “exile” (his term according to Sam Lowell his close friend who wound up as the lone older writer siding with the “Young Turks” as they styled themselves in the internal struggle) somewhere in Utah looking for a by-line in some Salt Lake newspaper was looking at from me when he was in charge. That was before a sudden vote of no confidence was taken by the whole staff at the urging of the younger writers whom he had brought in over the past several years but who were in their words, under-utilized and narrowly directed to write, as I was asked to do as well, about the turbulent 1960s whether they knew or cared a damn about those times or not. I, who had come over from the American Film Gazette where I had held a similar position, was supposed to take over the day to day management of the site and pass out assignments under Allan’s guidance, found myself asked to run the whole operation without him after the vote (with the assistance of the newly–formed editorial board, an organization which Jackson had virtually ignored during his tenure).

Jackson ran a funny mix, a core group of writers whom he had either known since high school and who had been exposed to the Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who Allan was trying to honor by using his name as his moniker and who was a big influence on that whole group exploring all kinds of situations in the 1960s or had met in hotbed places like San Francisco, LA, the Village, Harvard Square after high school when everything according to the older guys exploded and you had to take sides from drugs to sex to wars. Then several years ago he brought in those young guys (and a few gals but they were mostly stringers, free-lancers) who knew nothing of the 1960s but were force-pressed to write about subjects related to that time which they only vaguely had heard about (or again cared about). His argument to the younger writers something not necessary to throw at the old guard “true-believer” older writers was that this was a watershed period, a period when many were “washed clean” and the period needed to be dealt with accordingly.    

So the gist of my article was as much about Allan and the older writers being “washed clean” by the experience as about what the criminal mind of someone like Charles Manson who while a sensational figure and a prime example of what went wrong with the 1960s when the still thriving cultural counter-revolutionaries took to the offensive and needed an example to feed off of when that moment ebbed. Some of the writers in this space like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, and Josh Breslin knew the real Markin, known to them as always as “Scribe” either from the North Adamsville neighborhood where they grew up or met him as a result of a very fateful (according to Sam Lowell’s estimate in any case) decision that he made during the turbulent days of the Summer of Love in 1967. That year and that event marked them all once Scribe was able to fire them up to head out west to San Francisco the epicenter of the whole explosion and consummate the jail-break.        

I am, like Zack James, Jack Jamison, Bradley Fox, Jr. and Lance Lawrence at least a decade removed from that 1960s experience and sensibility and that second-hand knowledge was reflected in the original articles. I had no axe to grind with those times. But neither did I bow down to what guys like Frank, Sam, and Josh told me about their experiences. That said, Allan Jackson the then supposedly soon to be retired administrator and something of a guiding light in this space (and the on-line version of The Progressive American) suggested after several talks that I expand my article somewhat to include his and the others reflections of the 1960s in order to give a more rounded approach to those days and events. As I did with that second article I do here as well-Greg Green]      

***********

  

A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, names that I recognized although I was not familiar with their music (the free concert concept in line with a lot that went on then under the guise of “music is the revolution” and the recruits would be those who got turned on by the music, straight or doped –up, and lived by it too), to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West (the beginning of an alternative way to entertain the young in formerly rundown arenas which would keep ticket costs down and provide indoor night space for those same young patrons against predators and cops), to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric Kool-Aid acid much written about by “square” Tom Wolfe in a book dealing with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (I think that should be capitalized at least I have always seen it that way in books) to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, which you can smell even today at certain concerts in places where the stuff is legal or the young don’t give a fuck who knows they are smoking stuff, communal soup kitchens (to curb those midnight ganga cravings taking a tip from the old hobo, bum, tramp railroad “jungle” camps and just throwing everything in a stew pot and hope for the best), to communal living experiment (say twelve people not related except maybe some shacking up sharing an apartment or old house and dividing up tasks and expenses or in country on an old abandoned farm not very successful although I hear in Oregon and Vermont if you look closely enough will find the “remnant”), communal clothing exchanges (via ironically given the pervasive anti-war sentiments Army-Navy Surplus or Goodwill/Salvation Army grabs)and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience (the “pill” helping ease the way, the drugs too and a fresh look at the Kama Sutra no doubt) reached something like the high tide during that time.

(According to Josh Breslin who at the time was just out of high school and looking for something to do during the summer before his freshman year of college much to the chagrin of his hard-working parents who expected him to work that summer to help pay for tuition it was almost like lemmings to the sea the draw of San Francisco was so strong. For many kids like Josh and others he met out there aside from Scribe and the North Adamsville guys it really was something of a jail-break although I still can’t feel the intensity which drove Josh and the others to forsake, most for just a while, some family, career, settle down path during those admittedly turbulent times. My generation, and I was among the loudest up in Rockland, Maine where I grew up and where a cohort of the hippie-types encamped once the cities became too explosive, kind of laughed off the whole experiment as the hippies liked to say “ a bad trip,”  a waste of time and energy. Although the idea of free or cheap concerts seems like a good idea especially when you see the ticket prices today for acts like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones who were ready to perform gratis then, the rampant uncontrolled use of illegal drugs, the idea of communal living outside of say very safe dorm life, wearing raggedy second or third hand clothes which looked like and were out of some Salvation Army grab box or Army-Navy surplus store, the idea of even eating out of some collective stew pot of who knows what composition and unbridled and maybe unprotected sex seemed weird, seemed seedy when I would see these people on the streets in town when they came for provisions or whatever they were looking for that brought them to town.)     

So as even Josh and a couple of others would admit not all of it was good or great even at that high tide which he personally placed at 1967 (others like Sam placed it at the Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969 and Scribe for his own reasons had placed it at May Day, 1971 when the government counter-attacked a demonstration in Washington with a vengeance and they took devastating amounts of arrests, tear gas, and billy-clubs) since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate “seeking” something people. (Allan chided me on this point originally because he did not believe that those he knew, he met were desperate, most had come from comfortable middle class homes and just wanted to shake things up a little before, which many, too many according to him did, going back to that lifestyle without a murmur when the tide ebbed.)  

Not good either which was also noted by Zack James (who got the information from oldest brother Alex another veteran of 1967  who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) and which I used as a counter-argument to Allan’s wisp-of-the will attitude about desperate people flocking to the coast a photograph taken at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.

Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and with the latter’s with Scribe spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed.  The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and who now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora. Years like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which Frank has said they have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since. 

Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph, there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to as Scribe would say seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” as Frank likes to say when recounting his youthful days out west and in New York City when he was starting out as a writer and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. My very strong feeling after having had a small personal bout with cocaine when that was the drug of choice and you could hardly go anywhere socially without somebody bringing out a mirror, a razor and rolling a dollar and daring you not to snort just to be friendly maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs. Maybe too it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated and left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus” as Allan mentioned was a term used frequently to distinguish the winners from the losers in those days).           

And as if to put paid to that ebb tide there were all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day [November 2017] after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Allan, Frank, Josh, Sam and I am sure Scribe if he were around would write that off as an aberration, a fluke. Still sobering thoughts for those guys like Frank and Josh who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated their youth.  

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-*Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Billie's Fifteen Minutes Of Fame

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bill Haley and The Comets performing Rock Around The Clock to aid a little flavor to this entry.


Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Billie’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fsqYctXgM


CD Review

The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: 1956: Still Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989


I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing this Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-58, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.

And we, we small time punk in the old-fashioned sense of that word, we hardly wet behind the ears elementary school kids, and that is all we were for those who are now claiming otherwise, listened our ears off. Those were strange times indeed in that be-bop 1950s night when stuff happened, kid’s stuff, but still stuff like a friend of mine, not Billie who I will talk about later, who claimed, with a straight face to the girls, that he was Elvis’ long lost son. Did the girls do the math on that one? Or, maybe, they like us more brazen boys were hoping, hoping and praying, that it was true despite the numbers, so they too could be washed by that flamed-out night.

Well, this I know, boy and girl alike tuned in on our transistor radios (small battery- operated radios that we could put in our pockets, and hide from snooping parental ears at will) to listen to music that from about day one, at least in my household was not considered “refined” enough for young, young pious you’ll never get to heaven listening to that devil music and you had better say about eight zillion Hail Marys to get right Catholic, ears. Ya right, Ma, like Patti Page or Bob (not Bing, not the Bing of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? anyway) Crosby and The Bobcats were supposed to satisfy our jail break cravings.

In many ways 1956 was the key year, at least to my recollection. And here is why. Elvis may have been burning up the stages, making all the teenage girls down South sweat, making slightly older women sweat and throw undergarments too, and every guy over about eight years old start growing sideburns before then but that was the year that I actually saw him on television and started be-bopping off his records. Whoa. And the same with Bill Haley and the Comets, even though in the rock pantheon they were old, almost has-been guys, by then. And Chuck Berry. And for the purposes of this particular review, James Brown, ah, sweet, please, please, please James Brown (and the Flames, of course) with that different black, black as the night, beat that my mother (and others too) would not even let in the house, and maybe not even in our whole white working class neighborhood. But remember that transistor radio and remember when rock rocked.

Of course all of this remembrance is just so much lead up to a Billie story. You know Billie, Billie from “the projects” hills. William James Bradley to be exact. I told you about him once when I was reviewing a 30th anniversary of rock film concert segment by Bo Diddley. I told the story of how he, and we, learned first hand down at the base, the nasty face of white racism in this society. No even music, and maybe particularly not even music, was excepted then from that dead of night racial divide, North or South if you really want to know. Yes, that Billie, who also happened to be my best friend, or maybe almost best friend we never did get it straight, in elementary school. Billie was crazy for the music, crazy to impress the tender young girls that he was very aware of, much more aware of than I was and earlier, with his knowledge, his love, and his respect for the music (which is where the innocent Bo Diddley imitation thing just mentioned came from although that story was later than the story I want to tell you now).

But see we were projects kids, and that meant, and meant seriously, no dough kids. No dough to make one look, a little anyway, like one of the hot male teen rock stars such as Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. Now this “projects” idea started out okay, I guess, the idea being that returning veterans from World War II, at least some vets like my father, needed a leg up in order to provide for their families. And low rent public housing was the answer. Even if that answer was four-family unit apartment buildings really fit for one family, one growing three boy family anyway, and no space, no space at all for private, quiet dreams. Of course by 1955, ‘56 during the “golden age” of working class getting ahead (or at least to many it must seem so now) there was a certain separation between those who had moved on to the great suburban ranch house dream land and those who were seemingly fated to end up as “the projects” fixtures, and who developed along the way a very identifiable projects ethos, a dog-eat-dog ethos if you want to know the truth. It ain’t pretty down at the base, down at the place where the thugs, drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters feed off the rough-edged working poor.

That didn’t stop Billie, or me for that matter, from having our like everybody else dreams, quiet spaced or not. In fact, Billie had during his long time there probably developed the finest honed-edge of “projects” ethos of anyone I knew, but that came later. For now, for the rock minute I want to speak of, Billie was distractedly, no beyond distraction as you will see, trying to make his big break through as a rock performer. See Billie knew, probably knew in his soul, but anyway from some fan magazine that he was forever reading that old Elvis and Jerry Lee (and many of the rockers of the day, black and white alike) were dirt poor just like us. Rough dirt poor too. Farm land, country, rural, shack, white trash, dirt poor which we with our “high style” city ways could barely comprehend.

And there was Elvis, for one, up in big lights. With all the cars, and not junkie old fin-tailed Plymouths or chromed Fords but Cadillacs, and half the girls in the world, and all of them “hot” (although we did not use that word then), or so it seemed. Billie was hooked and hooked hard on that rock star performer fantasy. It consumed his young passions. And for what purpose? If you answered to impress the girls, “the projects” girls right in front of him, hey, now you are starting to get it. And this is what this little story is about.

This was late 1956, maybe early 1957, anyway it’s winter, a cold hard winter in the projects, meaning all extra dough was needed for heat, or some serious stuff like that. But see here old Billie and I (as his assistant, or manager, it was never clear which but I was to be riding his star, no question) had no time for cold, for snow or for the no dough to get those things because what was inflaming our minds was that a teen caravan was coming to town in a few weeks. No, not to the projects, Christ no, but downtown at the high school auditorium. And what this teen caravan thing was (even though we were not officially teens and would not be so for a while) was a talent show, a big time talent show, like a junior American Bandstand television show, looking for guys and girls who could be the next teen heartthrobs. There were a lot of them in those days, those kinds of backwater talent shows and maybe now too.

This news is where two Billie things came into play so you get an idea of the kind of guy he was back then. First, one night, one dark, snowy night Billie had the bright idea than he and I should go around town and take down all the teen caravan announcement advertisements from the telephone poles and other spots where they were posted. We did, and I need say no more on the matter. Oh, except that a couple of days later, and for a week or so after that, there was a big full-page ad in the local newspaper and ads on the local radio. That’s one Billie thing and the other, well, let me back up.

When Billie got wind of the contest he went into one of his rants, a don’t mess with Billie or his idea of the moment rant and usually it was better if you didn’t, and that rant was directed first to no one else but his mother. He needed dough to get an outfit worthy of a “prince of rock” so that he could stand out for the judges. Moreover the song he was going to do was Bill Haley and The Comet’s Rock Around The Clock. I will say he knew that song cold, and the way I could tell was that at school one day he sang it and the girls went crazy. And some of the guys too. Hell, girls started following old Billie around. He was in heaven (honest, I on the other hand, was indifferent to them, or their charms just then). So the thought that he might win the contest was driving him mad (that same energy would be used later with less purpose but that story is for another day)

Hell, denim jeans, sneakers, and some old hand-down ragamuffin shirt from an older brother ain’t going to get anyone noticed, except maybe to be laughed at. Now, like I said, we were no dough projects boys. And in 1956 that meant serious problems, serious problems even without a damn cold winter. See, like I said before the projects were for those who were on the down escalator in the golden age of post-World War II affluence. In short, as much as he begged, bothered and bewildered his mother there was no dough, no dough at all for the kind of sparkly suit (or at least jacket) that Billie was desperate for. Hell, he even badgered his dad, old Billie, Senior, and if you badgered old Billie then you had better be ready for some hard knocks and learn how to pick yourself up off the ground, sometimes more than once. Except this time, this time something hit Old Billie, something more than that bottle of booze or six, hard stinky-smelling booze, that he used to keep his courage and television-watching up. He told Mrs. Billie (real name, Iris) that he would spring for the cloth if she would make the suit. Whoopee! We are saved and even Billie, my Billie, had a kind word for his father on this one.

I won’t bore you with the details of Mrs. Billie’s (there you have me calling her that, I always called her Mrs. Bradley, or ma’am) efforts on behalf of Billie’s career. Of course the material for the suit came from the Bargain Center located downtown near the bus terminal. You don’t know the Bargain Center? Sure you do, except it had a different name where you lived maybe and it has names like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, etc. now. Haven’t you been paying attention? Where do you think the material came from? Brooks Brothers? Please. Now this Bargain Center was the early low rent place where I, and about half the project kids got their first day of school and Easter outfits (the mandatory twice yearly periods for new outfits in those days). You know the white shirts with odd-colored pin-stripes, a size or two too large, the black chinos with cuffs, christ with cuffs like some hayseed, and other items that nobody wanted some place else and got a second life at the “Bargie.” At least you didn’t have to worry about hand-me-downs because most of the time the stuff didn’t wear that long.

I will say that Mrs. B. did pretty good with what she had to work with and that when the coat was ready it looked good, even if it was done only an hour before the show. Christ, Billie almost flipped me out with his ranting that day. And I had seen some bad scenes before. In any case it was ready. Billie went to change clothes upstairs and when he came down everybody, even me, hell, even Old Billie was ooh-ing and ah-ing. Now Billie, to be truthful, didn’t look anything like Bill Haley. I think he actually looked more like Jerry Lee. Kind of thin and wiry, lanky maybe, with brown hair and blue eyes and a pretty good chin and face. I would say now a face that girls would go for; although I am not sure they would all swoon over him, except maybe the giggly ones.

So off we go on the never on time bus, a bus worthy of its own stories, to downtown and the auditorium, even my mother and father who thought Billie was the cat’s meow when I brought him around. Billie’s father, Old Billie of the small dreams, took a pass on going. He had a Friday night boxing match that he couldn’t miss and the couch beckoned (an argument could be made that Old Billie was a man before his time in the couch potato department). However all is forgiven him this night for his big idea, and his savior dough. We got to the school auditorium okay and Billie left us for stardom as we got in our rooting section seats. A few minutes later Billie ran up to us to tell us that he was fifth on the list so don’t go anywhere, like out for a cigarette or something.

We sat through the first four acts, a couple of guys doing Elvis stuff (so-so) and a couple of girls (or rather trios of girls) who did some serious be-bop stuff and had great harmonies. Billie, I sensed, was going to have his work cut out for him this night. Finally Billie came out, prompted the four-piece backup band to his song, and he started for the mike. He started out pretty good, in good voice and a couple of nice juke moves, but then about half way through; as he was wiggling and swiggling through his Rock Around The Clock all of a sudden one of the arms of his jacket fell off and landed in the front row. Billie didn’t miss a beat. This guy was a showman. Then the other jacket arm fell off and also went into the first row. Except this time a couple of swoony girls, girls from our school were tussling, seriously tussling, each other for it. See, they thought it was part of Billie’s act. And what they didn’t know as Billie finished up was that Mrs. Billie (I will be kind to her and not call her what Billie called her) in her rush to finish up didn’t sew the arms onto the body of the jacket securely so they were just held together by some temporary stitches.

Well, needless to say Billie didn’t win (one of those girl trios did, and rightly so, although I didn’t tell Billie that). But next day, and many next days after that, Billie had more girls hanging off his arms than he could shake a stick at. And you know maybe Billie was on to something after all because I started to notice those used-to-been scrawny, spindly-legged, pigeon-toed giggling girls, their new found bumps and curves, and their previously unremarkable winsome girlish charms, especially when Billie would give me his “castoffs.” So maybe his losing was for the best. My for the best.

Happy Birthday To You-***Singing The Blues For His Lord- The Reverend Gary Davis Is On Stage

Happy Birthday To You-

By Lester Lannon

I am devoted to a local folk station WUMB which is run out of the campus of U/Mass-Boston over near Boston Harbor. At one time this station was an independent one based in Cambridge but went under when their significant demographic base deserted or just passed on once the remnant of the folk minute really did sink below the horizon.

So much for radio folk history except to say that the DJs on many of the programs go out of their ways to commemorate or celebrate the birthdays of many folk, rock, blues and related genre artists. So many and so often that I have had a hard time keeping up with noting those occurrences in this space which after all is dedicated to such happening along the historical continuum.

To “solve” this problem I have decided to send birthday to that grouping of musicians on an arbitrary basis as I come across their names in other contents or as someone here has written about them and we have them in the archives. This may not be the best way to acknowledge them, but it does do so in a respectful manner.    

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Reverend Gary Davis playing Children Of Zion on Pete Seeger's 1960 television show Rainbow Quest.

CD Review

Twelve Gates To The City: Reverend Gary Davis: In Concert 1962-1966, Shanachie Records, 2000

I have mentioned many of the old time black male country blues singers in this space, for example, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James. I have also mentioned the close connection between this rural music, the routine of life on the farm (mainly the Mississippi Delta plantations or sharecropping) and simple religious expression in their works. The blues singer under review meets all of those criteria and more. The Reverend Gary Davis, although not as well known in the country blues pantheon, has had many of his songs covered by the denizens of the folk revival of the 1960's and some rock groups, like The Grateful Dead, looking for a connection with their roots. Thus, by one of the ironies of fate his tradition lives on in popular music. I would also mention here that his work was prominently displayed in one of the Masters Of The Blues documentaries that I have reviewed in this space. That placement is insurance that that the Reverend's musical virtuosity is of the highest order. As an instrumentalist he steals the show in that film. Enough said.

Stick out songs here are the much-covered Samson and Delilah (most famously, I think, by Dave Van Ronk), Cocaine Blues (from when it was legal, of course), Twelve Keys To The City and the gospelly Blow Gabriel and Who Shall Deliver Poor Me.

Some Biographical Information From the Back Cover Of This Album

Durham, North Carolina in the 1930's was a moderate sized town whose economy was driven by tobacco farming. The tobacco crop acted somewhat as a buffer against the worst ravages of the Depression. During the fall harvest, with its attendant tobacco auctions, there was a bit more money around, and that, naturally, attracted musicians. Performers would drift in from the countryside and frequently took up residence and stayed on. Two master musicians who made Durham their home, whose careers extended decades until they become literally world famous, were Reverend Gary Davis and Sonny Terry.

REV. GARY DAVIS

Reverend Gary Davis was one of the greatest traditional guitarists of the century. He could play fluently in all major keys and improvise continually without repetition. His finger picking style was remarkably free, executing a rapid treble run with his thumb as easily as with his index finger and he had great command of many different styles, representing most aspects of black music he heard as a young man at he beginning of the century. Beyond his blues-gospel guitar, Davis was equally adept at ragtime, marches, breakdowns, vaudeville songs, and much more. Born in Lawrence County, South Carolina in 1895, Davis was raised by his grandmother, who made his first guitar for him. Learning from relatives and itinerant musicians, he also took up banjo and harmonica. His blindness was probably due to a congenital condition. By the time he was a young man he was considered among the elite musicians in his area of South Carolina where, as in most Southern coastal states, clean and fancy finger picking with emphasis on the melody was the favored style. Sometime in the early 1950's, Davis started a ministry and repudiated blues. In 1935, he recorded twelve gospel songs that rank among the masterpieces of the genre. In 1944, he moved to New York where he continued his church work, and sometimes did some street singing in Harlem. By the early 1960's, with the re-emergence of interest in traditional black music, Davis finally received the recognition and prominences he so richly deserved.

The Russian Revolution and World Socialism (Quote of the Week)

	Workers Vanguard No. 1165	15 November 2019

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Russian Revolution and World Socialism

(Quote of the Week)

November 7 (October 25 by the calendar then used in Russia) marked the 102nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism in that country. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote the statement below at the request of the Swedish Left Social Democratic Party shortly after that revolution and as World War I continued to engulf Europe. He stressed that the solution to the crying needs of the world’s exploited and oppressed—an end to mass hunger and imperialist slaughter—required the proletarian seizure of power internationally, crucially in the advanced capitalist countries.

Two questions now take precedence over all other political questions—the question of bread and the question of peace. The imperialist war, the war between the biggest and richest banking firms, Britain and Germany, that is being waged for world domination, the division of the spoils, for the plunder of small and weak nations; this horrible, criminal war has ruined all countries, exhausted all peoples, and confronted mankind with the alternative—either sacrifice all civilisation and perish or throw off the capitalist yoke in the revolutionary way, do away with the rule of the bourgeoisie and win socialism and durable peace.

If socialism is not victorious, peace between the capitalist states will be only a truce, an interlude, a time of preparation for a fresh slaughter of the peoples. Peace and bread are the basic demands of the workers and the exploited. The war has made these demands extremely urgent. The war has brought hunger to the most civilised countries, to those most culturally developed. On the other hand, the war, as a tremendous historical process, has accelerated social development to an unheard-of degree. Capitalism had developed into imperialism, i.e., into monopoly capitalism, and under the influence of the war it has become state monopoly capitalism. We have now reached the stage of world economy that is the immediate stepping stone to socialism.

The socialist revolution that has begun in Russia is, therefore, only the beginning of the world socialist revolution. Peace and bread, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, revolutionary means for the healing of war wounds, the complete victory of socialism—such are the aims of the struggle.

—V.I. Lenin, “For Bread and Peace” (December 1917)

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- ***The Roots Is The Toots-A Labor Of Love- Harry Smith's "Anthology Of American Folk Music"

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Harry Smith's "Anthology Of American Folk Music" and links to the 80 plus songs in the anthology. Wow!

CD Review

Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music, various artists, six CD set plus booklet, Smithsonian/Folkways, 1997

It is no secret that the reviewer in this space has been on something of a tear of late in working through a litany of items concerning American roots music, a music that he first ‘discovered’ in his youth with the folk revival of the early 1960s and with variations and additions over time has held in high regard for his whole adult life. Thus a review of musicologist (if that is what he though he was, it is not all that clear from his “career” path that this was so) Harry Smith’s seminal “Anthology Of American Folk Music” is something of a no-brainer.

Since we live in a confessional age, however, here is the odd part. As familiar as I am with Harry Smith’s name and place in the folk pantheon, his seemingly tireless field work and a great number of the songs in his anthology this is actually the first time that I have heard the whole thing at one sitting and in one place. Oh sure, back in the days of my ill-spent youth listening to an old late Sunday folk show I would perk up every time the name Harry Smith came up as the “discoverer” of some gem of a song from the 1920s or 1930s but to actually listen to, or even attempt to find, the whole compilation then just didn’t happen.

In 1997 Smithsonian/Folkway, as least theoretically in my case, remedied that problem with the release of a high quality (given the masters) six CD set of old Harry’s 80 plus recordings. Not only that but, as is usual with Smithsonian, a very nicely done booklet with all kinds of good information from the likes of Greil Marcus and the late folklorist Eric Von Schmidt (of songs like “Light Rain” and "Joshua’s Gone Barbados”, among others, fame) accompanies this set. That booklet is worth the price of admission alone on this one.

Here is the funny thing though after running through the whole collection. I mentioned above that this was the first time that I heard the collection as a whole. Nevertheless, over time I have actually heard (and reviewed in this space), helter-skelter, most of the material in the collection, except a few of the more exotic gospel songs. So I guess that youth was not so ill-spent after all. If the "roots is toots" for you, get this thing.

Note: For a list of the all the tracks in the entire collection just Google “The Harry Smith Collection” and click onto Wikipedia’s entry for Harry Smith. Or keep watching on this site over the next several days for entries for each one of the songs in the collection. Easy, right?

50 Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been- The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler”

50 Years Gone Jack Gone And What Might Have Been-  The Lonesome Hobo-In Honor Of Ti Jean Kerouac’s “Lonesome Traveler” 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Million-word pre-word processor so golf score pencil and Woolworth’s 5&10 cent store notebook fitted for flannel shirt pockets Jack (nee Jeanbon, nee Ti Jean, nee everyman, every man, and every woman with the fire in the belly to write) bellowed out in the good earth night, bellowed out in the night from the womb, bellowed about loneness, loneness in crowds, and sign of the age loneness. Not loneliness, not on the surface, not with Acre kidding corner boys crowding around (mostly French-Canadian boys who set the tone of the town, adieu this and that, but some Irish and Greek boys too, especially mad monk poet Sammy, hanging around Leclerc’s Variety Store), Jack-crowding, small-breasted F-C loves (oohing ,aah-ing in the dark- haired angel man thought ) swaying to Benny on the be-bop 1930s night and tossing and turning over Ti Jean words and clowning arounds (and secret Irishtown  girl love spoken of before and now done), Jack-crowding, Adonis full field, full football field heroics, crowds cheering against bread and roses fed arch –rivals, Jack-crowding, Village cafes, full, chock full of the hip, the want-to-be hip, the faux hip, waiting, waiting on some dark-haired golden boy to rescue them from the little box night, Jacking-crowding, ditto Frisco, ditto New Jack City redux, ditto Jack-crowding. 

So not loneliness he but lonesome cosmic wanderer from  youth as partner to the crowds, up in small, immensely small twelve- year old bedrooms playing full- fledged leagues of solo jack baseball, sitting solo in fugitive Lowell libraries reading up a storm from Plato to kinsman Voltaire (via Acadian Gaspe dreams), sitting solo in some sigma phi dorm room munching chocolate bars, vanilla puddings, great greasy sugared crullers after hearty beef meals, as companion pouring over tales of greek gods and Homer, sitting solo (hard to do, believe me ) astern ships on big wave oceans ready to devour man, beasts and ship whole, sitting solo in midnight slum New Haven rooms, small hot stove, coffee pot percolating, ditto later in Frisco town, ditto in big sur town, ditto in Tangiers town, ditto down in mere Florida town, ditto solo.

Ditto too solo adventures on west coast work ship piers, solo sweaty dusty south of the border Mexican nights adventures, solo brakeman of the world trackless night adventures, solo sea- sick sailor going to fugitive night adventures, solo weird New Jack City 1950s beat scene adventures, solo big rock candy mountain and the void adventures, solo stumble around Europe on a dollar a day adventures, and solo mad cap late night chronicler of the hobo jungle world vanishing adventures. And hence crowded solo lonesome karmic writings and big word blasts, and smiling, smiling, maybe Buddha-like, at the connected-ness of it, of the one-ness of it, of the god-like symmetry of it. And a Ti Jean kindred tip of the hat.             

A Page from Labor History How Local 1199 Organized NYC Hospital Workers

Workers Vanguard No. 1165	15 November 2019

A Page from Labor History

How Local 1199 Organized NYC Hospital Workers

In the spring of 1959, New York City was rocked by a six-week hospital strike. Thousands of workers, who were mainly black, Puerto Rican and women, fought to win union recognition and an end to poverty wages and long hours. The labor movement rallied to their side, with craft unions at hospital building sites joining the pickets. This union solidarity was key to eventual victory.

The strike came out of an organizing campaign started in 1958 by Local 1199, then part of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It transformed that small union local of mainly Jewish pharmacists into the huge multiracial hospital union that 1199SEIU is today, with 450,000 members across five states and Washington, D.C. During the strike, Jewish pharmacists, black and Puerto Rican cleaners and white skilled trades workers were on the picket lines together, showing that class struggle can cut against the bosses’ attempts to pit workers of different races against one another and that the unions can fight in the interests of all the oppressed.

Nonetheless, the militancy of the strikers was constrained by the Local 1199 leadership under President Leon Davis, which sought to bind the aspirations of the workers to the “good graces” of Democratic Party politicians. This subordination of the union to so-called “friend of labor” Democrats (and even a few Republicans), who in fact are the bosses’ agents, has been the hallmark of the 1199 officialdom ever since. Today, these labor statesmen sometimes give a nod to the importance of the 1959 strike, but avoid class struggle like the plague.

The 1959 Strike

Today, as in the 1950s, the majority of hospitals in New York City are private “voluntary” hospitals, often misnamed “not for profits” or charities. Far from providing charity, they extract exorbitant fees from patients and their insurers, and those who can’t pay are dumped on the city hospitals. The voluntaries, which pay no taxes because they are said to offer a “community service,” can make huge profits. Their boards of trustees are packed with financiers, landlords and industrialists—members of the capitalist class that derives its profits from the exploitation of the workers.

Today, the hospital bosses grudgingly tolerate the union under its current misleadership as an adjunct to their lobbying for government funds. But in the 1950s, the bosses were dead set on keeping the workers in the basement kitchens, laundries and workshops voiceless and unorganized. Most of these workers were recent migrants from the South, Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean. In the hospitals, as in broader U.S. society, where black people are segregated at the bottom and oppressed as a race-color caste, the racial hierarchy was rigidly enforced. For example, black men were restricted to the least skilled positions, while eastern and southern European immigrants filled more skilled jobs. Wages and conditions were even worse than those in the underfunded city hospitals, which had mainly white workforces. Indeed, many voluntary hospital workers were welfare recipients.

In 1958, amid intensifying civil rights struggles against Jim Crow segregation in the South, Local 1199 launched a voluntary hospital organizing drive. At the time, the membership of Local 1199 was largely Jewish, not least due to anti-Jewish exclusion in the medical schools, which drew many, like Davis, to become pharmacists instead. Through a series of strikes against the drugstore chains in the city, Local 1199 had won a 40-hour workweek by 1953. Union members were determined to extend such conditions to the harshly exploited hospital workers. They voted to pay an extra dollar in monthly dues to fund the recruitment of black and Puerto Rican workers into the union. Many joined the “crack of dawn brigades” that went to hospitals with union cards and distributed bilingual leaflets in what was called la cruzada. The union soon collected cards from a majority of workers at several locations who embraced the union, including because of its record of fighting on behalf of black workers.

The first big breakthrough success was at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where the board agreed to negotiate with Local 1199 in December 1958. But the boards of the other hospitals stiffened in their opposition to the union. In response, Davis sought to assure management that if it agreed to union recognition, Local 1199 would agree to a no-strike pledge and binding arbitration, which is nothing but a trap designed to give the bosses the upper hand in contract negotiations. This offer to give up the strike weapon curried favor with some Democrats like Eleanor Roosevelt, but it did nothing to break the resistance of the bosses. And why would it? The interests of workers and the bosses are entirely counterposed. The bosses exploit the labor of workers to make profits, and withdrawing that labor collectively is the only way to hit the bosses where it hurts.

The strike began at six hospitals on May 8, after the bosses’ Greater New York Hospital Association, a cabal of all 81 voluntaries, arrogantly declared it would never recognize Local 1199. The walkout was extended to a seventh hospital on June 5. The strikers fought back with great courage against the anti-union intransigence of the capitalists on the hospital boards. They defied injunctions, arrests and beatings, vilification by the bourgeois press and maneuvers by Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. to force them back to work empty-handed. This Democrat, who won office with the support of the labor officialdom, regularly unleashed his cops to attack the strikers.

The strike was very popular with the city’s working people and poor, who were all too familiar with the racist contempt of the capitalist rulers and their club-wielding NYPD thugs. Huge quantities of food and donations poured in for the strikers. Crucially, Teamsters and laundry workers refused to cross the Local 1199 picket lines, while other unions helped build the lines. As the Militant, the newspaper of the then-revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, observed: “Union solidarity has gone beyond financial and moral support. Skilled construction workers who make as much money in one day as some hospital workers do in a week have walked off the job on new buildings going up at three of the struck hospitals. The Building Trades Council declared that construction will not be resumed until the hospital workers win recognition” (8 June 1959). These concrete acts of solidarity on the picket line brought black and white workers together to advance their common class interests.

The conservative head of the IBEW electricians Local 3 and the NYC Central Labor Council, Harry van Arsdale, provided money and other support for the 1199 strike, but also insisted on limiting the strike to a handful of the hospitals, which is exactly what the Local 1199 tops did. Workers at other hospitals voted to join the strike but were not called out. Criminally, Davis kept offering management a no-strike pledge in exchange for union recognition. After six weeks, the strikers had no better offer than a deal the mayor had proposed early in the strike and which the strikers had decisively rejected.

The settlement, which was basically the same raw deal, did not include union recognition but allowed workers to elect a representative for grievances. Working conditions in the hospitals were to be reviewed by a “Permanent Administrative Committee” with six bosses and six “neutral” appointees who were chosen by a New York State court. However, the courts are not “neutral” but a part of the repressive state apparatus that defends the profits and rule of the bosses. At the ratification meeting before the vote, Local 1199 president Davis proclaimed: “We won backdoor recognition. But we’ll be in the front door soon” (quoted in Moe Foner, Not for Bread Alone, 2002). This was, however, by no means assured.

Building the Union, Winning Recognition

Despite not winning union recognition, strikers went back to work with Local 1199 buttons on and their heads held high. Management, try as it might to hold back the tide, had a new reality to deal with: Workers had an organization and identified with their new union. Members held regular meetings and elected stewards, who collected dues in person and handled grievances with management.

At the time, hospital workers were excluded from laws codifying collective bargaining rights. The Local 1199 bureaucrats peddled the lie that winning this right was a matter not of waging class struggle but of putting pressure on capitalist politicians to change the laws to favor the workers. In 1962, this dead-end strategy was behind the sellout of a strike for union recognition at Beth El Hospital (now Brookdale) in Brooklyn and Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. When this strike reached a stalemate, Leon Davis welcomed the intervention of Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller and pushed a rotten settlement on the strikers that included a promised collective bargaining law. The Militant (30 July 1962) warned:

“One political implication of the settlement is that in order for Rockefeller, a Republican, to live up to his promise, he will have to be re-elected this November. The labor leaders who made the deal with him previously supported Democratic candidates.

“Except for the retroactive pay, the strikers have won only promises from capitalist politicians. Similar broken promises forced them to strike in the first place. Even if the law is passed, it will not give the workers a union contract—not to mention good wages. It will only mean the hospitals are obliged to negotiate. But the proposed law bars strikes and experience has taught that these hospital managements grant nothing unless forced to.”

Sure enough, the Local 1199 tops called for a vote to Rockefeller. After his election, in 1963, state law was changed to grant collective bargaining to hospital workers only in the five boroughs, while compelling Local 1199 to accept binding arbitration of disputes; strikes were prohibited during the life of a contract. By preaching faith in capitalist politicians, the union misleaders betrayed the interests of the workers who had been militantly fighting for union recognition.

Despite this class collaboration of the Local 1199 bureaucracy, the strength of the union continued to grow, as workers eagerly fought to get better pay and work conditions. By 1963, the union had won a contract at 23 hospitals. Whereas in 1959 wages had been as low as $32 per week ($280 today), by 1968, when several managements formed the “League of Voluntary Hospitals” to negotiate a contract with 1199, the union secured a guaranteed minimum weekly wage of $100 with a pension. Local 1199’s organizing drive also awakened the desire for union representation among city hospital workers, who got a union contract under AFSCME District Council 37 in 1966. This growth of union power was due to the collective organization that came out of the militant strike of 1959.

The Early Years of the Integrated CIO Industrial Unions

The men who led the Local 1199 hospital organizing campaign in the 1950s had been supporters of the Communist Party (CP) during the tumultuous class battles for integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. These unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) represented all the workers in a particular industry, regardless of their race, ethnicity or craft—a significant advance over the AFL unions, which were steeped in race and craft prejudice. The CP provided a significant component of the CIO leadership at the time.

Fleeing Jim Crow terror and relentless poverty in the South, thousands of black workers were brought into huge industrial plants in the North, where they were segregated into the most menial and dangerous jobs. In the struggle to organize these plants, as well as various industries in the South, the unions had to take head-on the bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics meant to prevent the unity of black and white workers. As a result, the growth of the industrial unions was the greatest advancement for black rights since the Civil War and Reconstruction, and was a tremendous advance for white workers, too.

Leon Davis was active with the CP, which aimed to organize all workers in the pharmaceutical industry among many others, when in 1932 he helped found the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York (PUGNY), the precursor of Local 1199. The union went up against desperate conditions in Depression-era Harlem. In 1936, only seven black pharmacists were employed there. That year, PUGNY initiated a successful campaign in Harlem not just to secure jobs for black pharmacists in drugstores, but also to promote black workers from backroom porters to soda men, who dealt with the public.

PUGNY fought against racist exclusion by establishing the closed shop in the industry. When a store boss needed a worker, the union would send the first on the list. If the shop owner objected to hiring a black man or tried to hire a non-union worker, the union would close the store by picketing until the owner agreed to hire the union member dispatched for the job. Union recognition meant employers had to hire whoever the union sent, regardless of their race. In this way, the union showed how the struggles for labor rights and for black rights go forward together.

The labor upsurge that resulted in the organization of the CIO unions had begun to radicalize workers, with a layer open to the building of a workers party independent of and in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans. But the Stalinists of the CP and other CIO leaders diverted this incipient radicalism into support for the “progressive” Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which was designed to restore the profitability of American capitalism and prepare the country for interimperialist World War II. The unions’ support of the Democratic Party has handcuffed them ever since.

The CP’s futile reformist strategy of pressuring a supposedly progressive wing of the capitalist rulers underscored that it had long since abandoned the revolutionary internationalist program that animated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It was left to the Trotskyists to uphold that banner for the abolition of wage slavery and fight for the complete independence of the working class from the bosses and their political representatives. The Roosevelt administration was backed by not only Northern industrialists but also the Southern Dixiecrats, who administered the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation.

The CP got no thanks for its class betrayal from the capitalist rulers, who launched a ferocious anti-Communist witchhunt that entered every facet of life in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Democratic president Harry Truman enforced the strikebreaking 1947 Taft-Hartley law that outlawed such labor weapons as secondary strikes and barred Communists from union office. Thousands of union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases resulting in the destruction of whole unions.

Local 1199 had to defend itself against government harassment and raiding attempts by both AFL and CIO unions. In the late 1950s, black and other minority workers in the North were finding inspiration in the mass struggles for integration in the South. Local 1199’s hospital organizing campaign tapped into the clear will of black workers in NYC to fight against their own racist degradation, too.

In that campaign, Davis and Teddy Mitchell, a black leader of Local 1199, worked together with Moe Foner and Elliott Godoff, who had led a sit-down strike in 1937 to build a union local in what is now Maimonides Hospital. Moe Foner, the Local 1199 public relations officer, and his twin brothers Philip and Jack (both academic historians) were driven out of City College during WWII for Communist activities. As a pharmacist, Godoff was known to dispense the CP’s paper, the Daily Worker, along with medications.

No Reliance on the Democrats!

The 1958 deal that recognized the union at Montefiore Hospital was brokered by Mayor Wagner. Notably, it included increased city subsidies to the voluntary hospitals to help cover the medical costs of uninsured patients. These funds made it easier for the bosses to swallow the bitter pill of unionization. Government money has become an ever-increasing part of hospital revenue, especially since Medicaid and Medicare were introduced in 1965. In Upheaval in the Quiet Zone (2009), a history of 1199, Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg commented that a hospital boss “seems justified, then, in concluding that by 1968 collective bargaining between the union and the hospitals amounted to finding out how much the government was willing to pay.”

Today, a central activity of the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats is to lobby the government (be it City Hall or Albany or Congress) for money for management. Lobbying is also a rationale for them to support one bourgeois politician or another. But it is not the job of the union to figure out where management can get its money, or how to balance the state budget. The notion that the workers will get a cut of increased revenue is patently false; the bosses will give up only what the workers wrest from them through class struggle.

In all respects, the union bureaucracy operates within the framework set by the capitalist rulers. As Local 1199 took root in the hospital industry, the union tops created guilds within the union that separated off members with more training, like lab techs and clerical workers, reinforcing bourgeois prejudices of “professionalism.” The union didn’t attempt to recruit nurses, who had a professional association, until the 1970s. An industrial hospital union would join together all non-management titles, including nurses as well as clerical, skilled trades, cleaning, food service and laboratory workers.

Local 1199 (now 1199SEIU) represents a huge multiracial workforce providing an essential public service to millions of people, including in U.S. imperialism’s financial center, where many capitalists themselves receive health care. But the union leaders tell the membership that their power lies in the fact that they are voters and that the union Political Action Committee has a lot of money. In so doing, the bureaucracy keeps the workers atomized and demoralized, rather than mobilizing their social power as a union—an organization of workers who make the hospitals function.

The union tops promote Democratic Party constituency politics, with each oppressed group getting a page in the 1199News magazine, all for the purpose of being hustled into supporting the class enemy. The aura of 1199 as a progressive and democratic union is really a device for tying the workers to the Democrats.

For Socialized Medicine!

Since the 1980s, there has been a one-sided class war against the unions. Today, hospital executives take home seven-digit sums, and rents are being raised much more than wages are. In order to protect their own livelihoods and to fight for the interests of the class as a whole, hospital workers would do well to learn the lessons of the past in preparation for future battles. To counter the increasing immiseration of the class, the union movement must be invigorated through a concerted drive to organize the unorganized, not least in low-paying industries where black and other minority workers are concentrated.

There is a burning need for a class-struggle leadership of the unions, one dedicated to breaking all ties to the Democrats and building a revolutionary workers party to arm working people with a program for sweeping away the capitalist system in which class exploitation and racial oppression are rooted. A central component of that program is the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. Such a party would strive to mobilize health care workers, especially those in strategically placed unions like 1199SEIU, as a crucial part of the vanguard of a popular struggle for quality health care for all, free at the point of service. It would fight to get the capitalist parasites out of health care altogether by expropriating them without compensation.

The call for socialized medicine must be linked to the struggle for a workers government. Only in a society where those who labor rule will high-quality health care be provided based on need, not private profit. A workers government alone can bring about racial and social equality by ensuring a decent life for all through a planned, collectivized economy.

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren

If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren