Thursday, January 07, 2016

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Material for a Study of British Trotskyism-The Government And The Trotskyists

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The British Cabinet discusses the Trotskyists

The first reference (CAB65/41) by the whole Cabinet to the Apprentices Strike was on 3 April 1944 where it was said by Ernest Bevin, then the Minister of Labour, that the Apprentices Strike on Tyneside, on the Clyde and in Yorkshire had been ”instigated by a group which had broken away from the Communist Party when Russia became our ally” and “The Trade Unions are doing what they can to get the strikers to return.” Bevin had provocatively refused to see a deputation and notices calling for medical examinations of strikers (prior to military call-up) were being issued while the DPP was considering the possibility of using the Trades Disputes Act of 1927. What really seemed to worry the Cabinet was the problem of coal supplies and in the document that follows some time is spent demonstrating (with considerable relief) that the Trotskyists had little support among the miners.

Two days later at the Cabinet meeting of the 5th April there was a discussion on the activities of those “fomenting strikes”. Herbert Morrison stated that he had information that the organisation referred to by the Bevin numbered about 1-2,000 members. An examination of the report shows that this was apparently learnt from his press cuttings. (It was of course a gross exaggeration, the RCP never numbered more than 400.) The Home Secretary said that he was examining documents with a view to doing something about this and submitting a report. On the 13 April the report on the Trotskyists was submitted and the Cabinet, after summarising it, simply noted it. It was initialled by the Minister but was clearly drawn up by the Security Services. No decisions were taken and it seems that the RCP was not considered important enough to warrant special measures. At about the same time in the preamble to the suggested legislation about strikers (CAB/75/19) Ernest Bevin wrote about unofficial industrial action proposing very savage penalties.

Morrison was clearly much cleverer than Bevin and was much more worried about the Communist Party. He therefore may have wanted to maintain the Trotskyists as an annoyance to the CP in the post-war period. He was very shrewd when he says “It is too early to say what the relations of the party with the International will be, but the International is loosely organised and is not likely to have the will or the means to do more than advise the party on broad issues; nor is the party under its present leadership likely to submit to any attempt at dictation.” He knew more about them than they did themselves.

Ted Crawford, July 1998

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THE TROTSKYIST MOVEMENT
The following document (found at KV4/56 in the PRO) on the activities of the Trotskyists during the war is later than the Cabinet document and should be compared and contrasted with it. It is in two folders, one summarising experience with internees and enemy aliens and the second with Communists and Trotskyists. There are 52 pages devoted to the Communists and 6 pages to the Trotskyists. This probably accurately reflects the relative time and attention devoted to the two tendencies. The tone is very different from Morrison’s Home Office Report and reflects police and secret service agendas rather than political ones. The gross over-estimate of the size of the RCP (double what it had at its peak) should be noted in the final paragraph on the movement’s history as well as the suggestion that it had influence in the mines which was never the case. The date in the final History paragraph looks as if it should be 1945 rather than 1943 and so is probably a typographical error while in paragraph 4 the Proletarian Military Policy is misunderstood – not surprisingly.

A “HOW” is a Home Office Warrant which allows opening of mail and tapping of phones. It has to be signed by the Home Secretary. “MS” is M Section, the somewhat “semi-detached” agent-running organisation run by C H Maxwell Knight. Knight was the former Director of Intelligence of the British Fascists. (There are grounds for thinking that Maxwell Knight tipped off the traitor William Joyce [Lord Haw-Haw] at the beginning of the war so that he was able to get to Germany. Dave Turner has more information on this.) Under the 1989 Security Service Act, Home Office Warrants can also cover burglary (in which case they are called “property warrants”) though until the Act was passed it was strictly illegal for MI5 to break in anywhere - but, of course, they still did it (“while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way”, Peter Wright Spycatcher, William Heinemann Australia, Richmond, Victoria 1987, p.54).

Ted Crawford, November 1999


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THE TROTSKYIST MOVEMENT
History

In 1939 the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain consisted of several small and disorganised groups. The official section of the Fourth International was the Revolutionary Socialist League, a cluster of theorists working in the Labour Party. The only other grouping of any significance was the Workers’ International League, an independent body founded in 1938 by two South Africans, Raphael and Mildred LEE. Raphael LEE left England before the outbreak of War, consigning the leadership of the Workers' International League to his wife and James Ritchie HASTON, a young Trotskyist of some years' standing. They controlled a membership of under fifty and their monthly paper, Workers' International News, printed 1,000 copies.

In the late summer of 1939 several of the leaders including HASTON and Cyril NOSEDA, publisher of Workers’ International News, went to Eire partly to make contact with the Irish Trotskyists and partly to avoid military service and the repressive measures which they expected to be taken against their organisation. They returned to England some months later travelling on papers procured in Eire by false representation of identity. They obtained National Registration Identity cards and Ration books in the names of J.F. GLOSTER and J.F. SMITH, and were not recognised and prosecuted until June and August 1941. Until well into 1942 the WIL continued to regard itself as a semi-legal body, and its leaders relied on assumed names, rapid changes of address, and generally furtive behaviour in order to conceal their doings.

During this period they were occupied in forming a programme, training a leadership and organising the rank and file. Until this process was well advanced, no outward activity could be attempted. The danger of premature action was shown by the Sheffield conspiracy case of August 1940 in which four members were prosecuted for stealing blank medical grade cards in order to help their associates to avoid military service. One man was discharged but the others served terms of imprisonment. It is worth noting that the culprits were reprimanded by the leadership for indiscretion and indiscipline.

The war crises of 1940 compelled the Workers' International League to adopt the much disputed Military Policy of James Cannon. This admits the necessity for workers to defend their native land from attack provided the defence is operated under their control. It departs from the traditional Marxist-Leninist policy of revolutionary defeatism and has caused bitter theoretical quarrels both in this country and in the United States of America. Party members now joined the Forces instead of trying to evade service.

This modification did not affect the general tone of the WIL’s attacks on the government nor its opposition to the “imperialist” war. Passages in the July 1940 number of its paper Youth for Socialism caused the Ministry of Information to forward the Paper to the Home Office for possible action under DR2c. There was considered to be grounds for action, but on account of the very limited circulation of the paper (2,000 copies), no measures were taken.

The period of consolidation ended in the summer of 1941, and by the time of German attack on the USSR the League was ready with - “a fighting programme to mobilise the masses for the struggle against fascism, whether of the German or the British variety, and for the defence of the Soviet Union”. The main point of this was the placing in power of a Labour government. The Trotskyists held that the Labour leaders had sold themselves to the capitalists and would no longer provide a militant leadership. But to convince the masses of this, they held it necessary to have a Labour Government in power so that its alleged failures could be made the subject of propaganda. Then, it was hoped, the people would turn towards Trotskyism, which claimed to supply the only surviving militant policy for the proletariat. The rest of the programme aimed at control by the workers of all national services and of production - in fact the full Marxist programme. It was taken for granted that revolution was the only means of achieving workers’ control, but as England was not yet ripe for it, the Transitional Programme of “Labour to Power” had to be adopted first.

1942 was notable for the first National Conference of the movement. A constitution was adopted, comprising a Central Committee, a Political Bureau, and a District organisation on classical communist lines. The “basic documents of the Fourth International” and the Transitional Programme were formally adopted as the foundations of policy.

Negotiations were then opened by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International for the union of the Workers' International League with the Revolutionary Socialist League with a view to establishing a single British Trotskyist section under the discipline of the International. An American seaman representative was sent to England to report. The difficulties, personal and doctrinal, were many, and it was not until 1944 with the assistance of another American “observer” that the fusion was completed. At a conference in March 1944 the new British Section emerged under the name of “Revolutionary Communist Party”. HASTON was elected General Secretary, Millie LEE organising Secretary, and Edward GRANT editor of Socialist Appeal (formerly Youth for Socialism).

Considerable importance was attached by the WIL to strikes, which they regarded is being the principal weapon of the proletariat and the beet means of preparing a revolutionary situation. They therefore endeavoured to make contact with strikers in as many parts of the country as their limited forces could reach.

In 1941 the first moves were made in the industrial world. In August 4,000 women employed at Rolls Royce, Glasgow went on strike in sympathy with a WIL member who was discharged on account of his political activities in the factory. At the Dalmuir ordnance factory in October a strike broke out following the transfer of the factory from Government to private control; a conference of Ordnance Factory Shop Stewards was called at Nottingham as a result of which the ROP Consultative Committee was set up. Two WIL stewards were elected to the controlling positions and the committee continued under Trotskyist influence for the two years or so of its existence. It only achieved a very limited influence. In 1943 WIL interference was discovered in the Yorkshire bus strike (May), the RCP Barnbow strike (June) and Rolls Royce Glasgow (July).

The Betteshanger colliery strike in December 1941 was the first of the mining stoppages in which WIL influence was brought to bear. HASTON visited the district, made contacts among the strikers by selling Trotskyist literature, and afterwards wrote up the story in Socialist Appeal. They used similar methods in a number of other coal strikes throughout 1942. The mining industry they regarded as a particularly fruitful field for work owing to the chronic unrest existing in the industry. A storm in a teacup blew up in 1942 when the Yorkshire Miners’ agent in a somewhat exaggerated protest gave them publicity in the national press.

By this time the Workers' International League found its old method of canvassing at the scenes of strikes to be too primitive, and the machinery of the ROF Co-ordinating Committee was used to put forward a more ambitious plan. At a conference of militant shop stewards summoned in Glasgow by two Trotskyist convenors a provisional ”Committee for Co-ordinating Trade Union activity” was set up (June 1943). The WIL won effective control of this body and placed one of its undercover members, Roy TEARSE in the post of secretary, hoping to draw to itself the leadership of the local committees of militant workers which were springing up in some industrial areas. The strike at Vickers Armstrong’s, Barrow, in September provided the first occasion for action. TEARSE made contact with the men's leaders and undoubtedly exercised some influence on the progress of the strike. Useful publicity was also given to the existence of the committee which had been re-named Militant Workers' Federation.

In January 1944 apprentices working in the Tyneside shipyards organised themselves into a Tyne Apprentices' Guild in order to oppose the mining ballot scheme. The boys' leader was strongly under the influence of the WIL organiser in Newcastle, Heaton LEE, and received constant advice and help from him. Having this direct contact, the WIL did not need to rely on the Militant Workers Federation. TEARSE gave his instructions direct to LEE and LEE to the boys through his protégé DAVY. In March a strike of some thousands of boys was declared.

Searches under DR39A were carried out at the Trotskyist headquarters in London, the Militant Workers' Federation headquarters in Nottingham, and the houses of TEARSE, LEE and DAVY in Glasgow and Newcastle. On the evidence found, proceedings were started against TEARSE, LEE, Ann KEEN (his mistress) and Jock HASTON under the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927. DAVY appeared as a witness for the Crown. The four were sentenced to imprisonment for one year (TEARSE and LEE), thirteen days (KEEN) and six months (HASTON), but on Appeal the sentences were quashed on a point of law.

The Revolutionary Communist Party (now so called) started Defence Committees on behalf of the accused and by working in co-operation with the ILP and other left wing organisations, improved its claim to recognition as a party of the Left. It also gained some prestige from the arrest of its leaders. The legal expenses of the trial and appeal were raised with some difficulty, but after the release of the prisoners the main object of the committees was removed and they collapsed.

The arrest of TEARSE and the coming into force of D.R.l.AA put an end to the open activities of the Militant Workers' Federation and the summer of the Second Front proved to be unpropitious for industrial agitation. The somewhat spectacular progress of the Revolutionary Communist Party in industry came to a standstill. Many discussions were held on the future of the Militant Workers' Federation and of industrial work generally, but the time was not ripe for action and the future could not be usefully forecast. The party turned to purely political issues, the chief being its post-war relations with the ILP at home and with the Fourth International abroad. Party members in the Forces, were instructed to seek out the Trotskyist groups in Belgium and France, and to establish an exchange of information between them and the RCP leaders. The same method was used in Italy, and also in Egypt, India and Ceylon.

In January 1945 the Revolutionary Communist Party decided that its political position had sufficiently improved to justify its contesting a Parliamentary election. At Neath there was a move to put forward a militant left wing candidate and it was arranged that this should be Jock HASTON standing openly as a representative of the RCP. Heaton LEE was made his election agent. The Party did not hope for success, but expected to consolidate its position in South Wales and to receive an amount of national publicity which would not otherwise be obtainable. It polled 1,786 votes and forfeited its deposit.

In February 1943 the full members of the Party numbered eight hundred, with an outer circle of two thousand active associates. Twelve full time organisers were employed. All the membership must take an active part in the work and life of the organisation or they are not allowed to retain their membership.

Investigations

A small amount of work on the Trotskyist movement has been done by F2a as long as this section has formed part of the Security Services. Up to the outbreak of war most of the material in our records consisted of Special Branch reports and the products of occasional Home Office Warrants. The movement was too small and chaotic to form the subject of sustained investigation.

At the outbreak of war the Workers' International League transferred much of its activity to Ireland, and those members who remained here kept quiet. Little information came to notice, and owing to extreme pressure of communist work, few enquiries were initiated about the Trotskyists. In September 1940 many of the more up to date Trotskyist records were destroyed by enemy action; they were later reconstituted with the assistance of Special Branch. Special Branch themselves however had reduced their enquiries to a minimum as they considered as we did that the groups were negligible for the time being.

When the Workers’ International League settled down to more regular habits, a HOW was taken out on their office at 61 Northdown Street (February 1942). This yielded a great variety of interesting information particularly on industrial activities, recruitment, Armed Forces work and organisational developments. A Censorship watch on the headquarters of the Fourth International in New York and on Irish contacts also produced good results. An agent was introduced by MS into WIL circles in the summer of 1942 and produced results which later proved to more valuable than was realised at the time.

Until 1942 when the Workers’ International League made its early appearances in industry the provincial Police forces knew little about the Trotskyist movement. In the letters which F2a began to send out to the Provinces in increasing number care was taken to add a paragraph explaining the growing security interest of Trotskyism. As a result many of the more enterprising forces undertook their own regular investigations, and by the end of the war at least five police agents had been placed in the movement. Two of these (Glasgow and Birmingham) produced first class information of general interest. Our own placing of agents was not so successful. MS's man failed in 1943 and it was not until a year later that a second was found, who only lasted a few months. In this connection may be mentioned an interesting attempt by the Revolutionary Communist Party in the autumn of 1944 to run a double-cross agent against Special Branch. The latter had approached an RCP contact who reported the fact to the secret sub-committee of the Political Bureau. They instructed him to accept the proposals of the Special Branch officer and to report to them the kind of questions he was asked. From this they hoped to estimate the amount of information which Special Branch possessed and also to distract them with false information. The plan broke down however through the indiscretion of their go-between who spoke of it to an unauthorised person; it was then considered unsafe to continue.

In the middle of 1943 the activities of the Workers' International League had increased still further, and a memorandum was drawn up in F2a recommending an enlargement of the section's powers to make inquires and record the results. The recommendations which were agreed to by DDG and DDO included a more general use of HOWs, a spell of regular observation by B.6. (which had, not previously been used for Trotskyists), and the establishment of a personal link with the SB officers concerned in Trotskyist work. The historical survey attached to the memorandum was circulated to the Regional Officers, most of whom conveyed the gist of it to the Police.

Early in 1944 the Workers’ International League (now the Revolutionary Communist Party moved to new offices and asked for the installation of a telephone. A telephone check was taken out which proved to be of great value in revealing some of the inner workings of the organisation. Special facilities were also used which though fitful in working, produced several vitally interesting accounts of future plans and policy which could not possibly have been obtained by other means.

This brief survey will show the remarkable progress of the Trotskyist movement during the war period from being an unimportant handful of talkers to a disciplined body of some size, having programme, finance and organisation and the determination to use them. The investigations conducted by F2a expanded correspondingly.

The investigation of Trotskyism was found to differ considerably from that of the Communist Party in the latter stages of the war. The Revolutionary Communist Party used conspiratorial methods for its more important work. It only became an open organisation at all towards the end of the period. It conducted few public meetings and attached minor importance to them. Its chief work - industrial and international - was carried on clandestinely. Cover organisations such as the Militant Workers' Federation were favoured in industry. As far as possible only trivial correspondence went through the post and cover addresses were resorted to. Initials instead of names were used in all Party documents. Talk on the telephone was guarded. Impending members were closely scrutinised. Communications with Fourth International headquarters were carried on by courier service and by personal visits of seaman delegates. RCP members working in the ILP used pseudonyms.

It followed that the simpler methods of investigation failed to discover any of the important aspects of Trotskyist work, and if used alone would convey a false impression. It was found that close study of the Party's methods over a period of time was necessary if an officer was to interpret at all adequately the material reaching him. Often it could not be interpreted at once and had to be put aside until later developments provided a clue. This meant that the study of Trotskyism demanded a larger proportion of the Section's time and records than the smallness of the organisation seemed at first sight to warrant.
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The Security Services and Alien Trotskyists
The following excerpt from the document KV4/57 pages 22-23 relates to the Security Services war-time management of different types of aliens and comes at the end of the file. The only individuals named in it are Pierre Frank and Resi Weltlinger but it is doubtful if this last was ever a Trotskyist and he is not claimed to be one in the document. Pierre Frank was arrested in July 1940, sentenced to six months in prison and immediately re-arrested on release to be interned on the Isle of Man under regulation 18B for much of the rest of the war. These events are described by Harry Ratner in his autobiography, Reluctant Revolutionary, (details of the book on this website in Socialist Platform Publications) but, surprisingly, Molinier, who had left for South America just before the police raid in July, is not mentioned. Since, according to their own documents, the Security Services were fairly paranoid about the left wingers who were savagely sentenced for breaking the Official Secrets Act on civil liberty issues though right wingers, guilty of far more serious militarily sensitive leaks were given a reprimand, it is clear that the “Alien Trotskyists” were considered as very unimportant.

The work of contacting German prisoners of war by using the paper Solidarität, whose first issue was in May 1946, only occurred after this report was written in late 1945 and crucially, after the war. Of course there were very few German prisoners in Britain until after the Normandy landings in June 1944 as those captured in Africa and Italy earlier in the war were generally held in South Africa and Kenya where food was plentiful locally.

Ted Crawford August 2000




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ALIEN TROTSKYIST ACTIVITIES.
The Trotskyists were opposed to the war on the grounds that it was an act of imperialist aggression which served only to hinder world revolution and the establishment of the Fourth International. Despite this attitude, directed against the efficient prosecution of the Allied war effort, Trotskyists presented few serious problems of a security nature as they lacked outstanding leaders, were numerically small and their activities were adequately controlled by the Defence Regulations.

There was reason, however, to anticipate that known Trotskyists would hinder the war effort wherever possible and therefore they were not given employment in key positions or factories engaged on work of national importance.

In some instances, the provocative nature of their publications overstepped the mark and it was then necessary to prevent further repetitions. Pierre FRANK, one of the founders of the French Trotskyist Party, was arrested by the Police in 1940 and subsequently interned for complicity with a group of foreign Trotskyists in London in the production of Internationalist Correspondence, published by the Foreign Delegation of International Communists for the building-up of the Fourth International. The issue dated June 1940 included an Open letter to British workers which urged workers to set up committees in every factory and street and soldiers to set up committees and seize arms and munitions. There was no doubt that the activities of this group were directed against the war effort and that FRANK was a leading member.

In 1944, a German refugee, Resi WELTLINGER, was arrested for the forgery of two National Registration-stamps which had enabled two British Trotskyists to avoid military service.

With the end of the war in sight, alien Trotskyists, in common with British comrades, increased their activities. The Revolutionary Communist Party, aiming at leadership; of the European bloc formed a European Sub-Secretariat, through which foreign members were trained for the tasks awaiting them in their own countries. It was noticeable however that in the light of past experience; aliens were careful to keep secret their Trotskyist membership and admit only to political affiliation with the I.L.P.

Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind


Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the young nations part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back then, like could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute one you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked now a days, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) And Edward did win her a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics (and “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way) down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later. No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when the hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley, who read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late (for the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was nine o’clock at night just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a resident professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him. But he was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music (what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that) that had passed for rock.  Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic out in the streets, in the school lavs, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little longer than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and have purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck though, young travelers, good luck.

 

* Out In The Be-Bop Night- Fragments Of Working Class Culture- In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- Neola Blues

Markin comment:

The scene below stands (or falls) as a moment in support of that eternal search mentioned in the headline.

Scene Eight: In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- Neola Blues

Christ, this is something out of a Woody Guthrie ballad, maybe Pastures Of Plenty where he talks about all the crops that migrant farm laborers pull out of the earth’s soil as they proceed through the harvest season cycle, I thought to myself as I helped Angelica bring her things down from the farm-fresh cab of that farm-fresh truck that I just jumped down from, as we started heading to our new "home." In this case a small, simple, solidly built and well-maintained white-painted cabin on a huge corn stalk-waved, yellow-sunned Neola, Iowa farm where I was to sweat it out for a few days (and maybe more) doing farm labor until I could get enough money for us to move on. Hell, we were down to our last pennies, pennies that we thought would last us until Denver where I had some friends who we could stay with and who had jobs for us but that dream petered away well before Neola, Iowa.

Now we are at the mercy of Farmer Brown. I swear that was his name and that was how he wanted to be addressed by me out in the fields, probably some old Protestant remnant Mennonite, Hutterite heretic custom that got carried along because nobody thought to change it with the change of centuries. When he picked us up many miles back he must have had some ESP sense that we needed dough, and that he had some "wetback", Okie-Arkie-like-we-were-back-in-the-Great-Depression-1930s help at hand if he played his cards right.

On top of that to say things were strained, strained in comparison to idyllic Steubenville cottage nights, Prestonsburg mad mountain hi-jinks and Lexington great American night thrills, between Angelica and I since we had our Moline meltdown would be an understatement. If you don’t know that story, that Moline story, you had really better go back and read that one, if you want to understand how the road, even the voluntarily taken good night hitchhike road can twist things around. This strain between us was not, as you might think, the way that I have presented things, mainly because I had not been a good "hubby" provider. Rather because now that we were hard into September, had been on the road a couple of months, and all around us school and life were starting back up in their usual annual build-up season Angelica, I believe, sensed that the road, the real road, was not for her, at least not until she had gotten a better grasp of what her dreams were all about. Frankly, most of this had been unspoken on both our parts, more glances and sighs as things got tougher, but I couldn’t help but think that I had spooked her a little bit with that Captain Cob story in Moline, the so-called "real" story of the quest for the blue-pink great American West night. That’s another good reason to read that scene.

Let's get it straight though. Straight as the Iowa corn rows which are now stretched out to infinity before me as I look over at the fields directly across from our new cabin home. As I have told this tale you could see the build-up of some tension between Angelica and me as we drove on, especially since we left Lexington, Kentucky. And that seemed the right way to tell you about it. I haven't spent much time filling you in until now about the things that round out the story and bring us to the current seeming impasse. Or about things that were going on in Big Earth time, like the Woodstock breakout gathering of youth nation back East, guys, guys from NASA nation, walking on the moon in the great Earth breakout, guys and gals in the great Stonewall gay breakout in New York City or the Days of Rage white lumpen breakout in Chicago while we were hell bend west and earth-bound. That Big Earth stuff you know, or can look up. Let me tell about the personal stuff though and then you can see why I used that word impasse.

Let me tell you, for example, about the tearful telephone calls home (collect calls, okay) that Angelica had periodically made back to Muncie and her parents. Tearful not because she was on the road against her will but tearful because her parents were raising holy hell that she was out on the road; that she was out of the road with no car; that she was out on the road with a "hippie", Bolshevik, dragon, beast, you can fill in the rest; and, that she was out on the road with a guy who, unquestionably, was up to some kind of nefarious scheme to corrupt their daughter's virtue. Angelica was good though, she defended her "gentleman hippie." But, of late, I have noticed that when she finished on the phone (usually a pay phone out on some desolation highway or in some noisy Main Street store) when she gave me an instant replay on the conversation she seemed to defense her "old man" of the road less and less fervently as she has gotten more road-weary.

Of course I had been running my own "battles" with the phone as I had, occasionally, been calling back to Boston to check in with my friends, and once or twice with the, in my new mind's eye view of things increasingly delightful, Joyel. Hey, I'd told Angelica about Joyel in the beginning (what hadn't we talked about, at least superficially, since we had spent so many hours on the road) and about my runaways so she knew the score (as I did on a special guy that she mentioned from back in Muncie). See, like I said before when I didn't tell Angelica about the blue-pink great American West quest until my back was to the wall in Moline, it was never clear where we were heading except we liked each other, liked each other’s company and wanted to be together for a time. The problem right this minute was I wanted to be on the road and I had this sneaking feeling that Angelica had some little white house and picket fence ideas, or what passed for those ideas out of 1960s Muncie.

And, of course, I haven't told you about the various running battles we had over this and that on the road because frankly this is a story about a quest and not about the kind of stuff that happens in every day life to everybody and their brother (or sister). Not sexy enough, okay? You know what I mean though little stuff like having her thumb to get quick rides when she was feeling blue, or stopping or not stopping soon enough so she didn’t get too tired. Or real life stuff like having to get to a motel, cheapjack motel or not, so she could wash her hair the right way, etc. and feel human for a few minutes. Sound familiar, sure it does. But the big thing was that the road was a lot harder than she expected, a lot harder than she wanted, and a lot harder than she was willing to put up with. Especially when, like just before dear old Neola, we had no dough, and no prospects. Still Angelica was an old pioneer trouper when the deal went down, a Midwest pioneer trouper and that ain’t no lie. I had no better road companion before or since. She just didn’t want to do it endlessly. But never forget, because I surely don’t, that it was only those times, those mad breakout times, that allowed us to even hook up at all.

I guess I should tell you about the money deal now because that tells a lot about why we were at odds with each other, although like I said before it was more a feeling than anything she had said, at least said since the Moline meltdown. After Moline our luck went from bad to worst as the weather just plain got balky after a few days of clear skies. That meant more cheapjack motels, and more unexpected cash outlay to take us off course, and then our rides started to dry up. About half way through Iowa we were hitching on this state Route 44 that takes you across to Route 191 and then to Neola (and Omaha, Nebraska further on). This farm-fresh guy (Farmer Brown) offered us a ride in his big old hay truck (okay I won't use farm-fresh anymore you get the drift but I swear I had never seen so much flat, cultivated, green and yellow scenery before. I thought I died and went to Grant Wood heaven). Right away, like I said, he sized us up as from hunger and offered us jobs (or at least me) working to bring in the now ready crop. A ride west, a job of sorts, a place to stay, and a place to rest up and sort things out just hit both of us at the same time as right. We said sure thing. And that is why we are now unloading Angelica's backpack on the ground in front of this tiny lean-to of a cabin on old Farmer Brown's farm.

But here is the kicker, for now. No sooner had we got settled into our new "home" (which actually turned out to be cozy in a primitive way) old Farmer Brown called us out and asked Angelica whether she wanted to work at Aunt Betty's diner in town. Be still my heart. Of course, old hand at serving them off the arm Angelica (about six weeks worth) to do her part in jump-starting our future said sure. So off we went in Farmer Brown's Cadillac (that should tell you something) to downtown Neola. In those days (and maybe now too for all I know) this Neola was nothing but a huge grain storage place for all the wheat and corn farmers in western Iowa, a couple of stores and, of course, Aunt Betty's, which seemed to be the hub of the universe here, at least until they rolled up the streets at dusk.

Aunt Betty's, and Aunt Betty herself, however, were something else again.Think about your grandmother, think about your grandmother's cooking, think about your grandmother's wisdom, think about your grandmother not being your hardball mother, that was Aunt Betty, and Aunt Betty's. See that was why these old time farmers hung around there. Hell that was why I hung around there for the time we were there. This was no highway truck stop feed the buggers whatever calories you want because they are moving on anyway and they are so benny-high that they will not notice but some kind of slice of Norman Rockwell America. This was a place of stews, of chicken pot pies, of pot roasts, of Indian puddings, a place to get corn-fed mid-American-sized not emaciated Eastern-dieted. You could practically smell the old-fashioned values in the place, you could feel as you sat in the hand-woven cushioned chairs and tucked in your monogrammed linen, yes, your monogrammed linen napkin that you were in some other time, a place worthy of the blue-pink night if only it was further west, like California west, but if it was there then it would not be a real Aunt Betty's.

But enough of nostalgia. The main thing is that Aunt Betty immediately took to Angelica, a fellow Midwestern pioneer woman, even if from different generations. I think, or I like to think, that what Aunt Betty kind of instinctively saw in Angelica was what I saw that first night in Steubenville -what you see is what you get. And what you saw and got was just fine. Toward me she granted a certain scornful tolerance because of Angelica, and her "silly" whim for an eastern hippie boy. Ya, Aunt Betty was, maybe, the last of that breed of Iowa women that filled a man’s stomach but also took no guff from friend or foe, alike. At least the last time I spent any time in Iowa a few years ago I didn’t see any Aunt Bettys, all huge corporate farms and peon stoop labor now and no time for slow simmering stews and homemade pot pies.

So Angelica, who was the talk of the diner for days as the old geezers finally had something nice to look at while they were downing their pot roast and, despite all high Protestant caution, lazily lingering over that refilled cup of coffee (coffee pot brewed, naturally). And the nice tips to accompany those looks didn’t hurt either. What I didn’t know though, is that through all of this time Aunt Betty was killing my time (meaning putting the bug in Angelica’s ear about getting off the road). Then I was kind of mad about it, especially when as we overstayed the time when we thought we would have to leave (to avoid the October Denver-bound squalls) old Aunt Betty mentioned it in my presence. Now I can see that it was nothing against me but just an old grandma watching out for her granddaughter. Fair enough, wise Aunt Betty wherever you are.

And how was my work going back on Maggie’s, I mean, Farmer Brown’s farm. Well, I have done all kinds of odd jobs, and worked a fair number of excessive hours but life on a farm, a big prosperous farm, come harvest time was really beyond me, although old Brown never complained about my work and getting to know him a little better he surely would have if he had cause for complain. But after about ten days I was ready to move on, and get the cow shavings and corn shucks out of my system.

Needless to say, at night, each night it seemed the longer we stayed, Angelica and me, tried to put the best face on it but I have not built up this story in just this way to now avoid a parting of the ways. Between road-weariness, Aunt Betty urgings, parental moanings, a few road bumps and bruises, her own highly developed Midwestern practical sense, and her own worthy dreams Angelica put it straight one night when I was getting antsy about making tracks before bad weather set in the rockymountainwest. She was going home, going back to school to see how that worked out and she would meet me out in Los Angeles in January during school break to see where we stood. Fair enough, although that is just a little too easy way to put it. I saw the sense of it though, and was thrilled that she would come west later. That night we started to pack up after I told Farmer Brown we were moving on.

Next day old Aunt Betty showed up at the cabin in her vintage 1930s pickup truck, something out of The Grapes of Wrath except this beauty was well-kept up. She already knew about Angelica’s decision and came to offer us a ride to Omaha where Angelica could catch a bus back to Muncie and I could pick up Interstate 80 West. We drove to the bus station in Omaha in some silence, only speaking about various addresses where we could be reached at in Denver, Los Angeles and Muncie and other trivia. Finally we got to the Greyhound station; Aunt Betty let us off, and went off to wait to give me a ride to Interstate 80. With mixed emotions Angelica and I made our farewells. I felt strange, and maybe Angelica did too, to part in a bus station. Bus stations to me always meant paper-strewn bench sleeps, tepid coffees and starched foods, noisy, smelly, sweat-filled men’s rooms that spoke to infrequent cleanings and paper bag luggage poverties. But there we were. I put her on the bus, waited for it to pull out, and then headed to Aunt Betty’s pickup truck. As she drove the short distance to the entrance to Interstate 80 Aunt Betty said in her Aunt Betty way that she thought I was probably the best thing that ever happened to Angelica, and Angelica thought so too. We came to the highway entrance too soon for me to pick up on that idea. All I had was the blue-pink west road and that thought to keep me warm as I got out of the truck.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
Reviews
Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism, Open University Press, 1990, pp.103, £6.99

This short work contains a handy outline of the development of the Trotskyist movement and the first half of it can certainly be recommended, though it is heavily slanted towards the discussion of ideas alone and gives little of the flavour of the activity of their proponents in the labour movement at ground level. It is also slanted towards Britain and America, on the excuse of “the bias of my knowledge towards British and American Trotskyism” (p.3). Since the number of Trotskyists in one Latin American country alone well outnumbers the Trotskyists of Britain and the USA put together many times over, we may well question this affidavit, and our suspicions receive confirmation when out of a list of 16 supposedly prominent Marxist thinkers of today three of them were modestly attributed to the British Socialist Workers’ Party three pages earlier.

Thus the wisdom of the publishers in inviting this book from a representative of so aberrant and peculiarly British a group, which apparently now sees itself as the founder of something which is “generally known as the International Socialist tradition” (p.74) may well be doubted, for the link of the SWP with Trotskyism is very tenuous indeed, rejecting as it does transitional politics, the theory of permanent revolution, and the analysis of Soviet degeneration. Thus, for example, Callinicos appears to believe that it was the second half of the Bolshevik slogan – ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ that constituted its transitional character, as opposed to the first (‘All Power to the Soviets’, in effect calling upon the Menshevik and SR leaders to take power) (p.40). His definition of entrism as “a kind of raiding party for members” (p.34) says volumes for the politics of the SWP, but next to nothing about Trotskyism.

For it is when he turns to the politics of his own milieu, in the last two chapters, that he confirms Lenin’s dictum that a spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey. This is most clearly shown when he tries to justify his previous contention that whereas Shachtman and Castoriades carried out “revisions of orthodoxy”, Tony Cliff’s endeavours marked a “return to classical Marxism” (pp.4-5).

We may well agree with him, for the truth is that state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union do not originate within the Trotskyist movement at all, but within Second International Social Democracy in general, and in Menshevism in particular. It is true that he very easily disposes of a straw man when he repudiates Perry Anderson’s opinion that the father of ‘state capitalism’ was Karl Kautsky (p.77), pointing out correctly that Kautsky's concept was not the same as Cliff’s at all, hoping in this way to draw a blind over the whole topic. But the fact of the matter is that the credit for this particular form of state capitalism should go back to the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who taught Jock Haston his Marxism in the first place (cf. Against the Stream, p.251) and had promulgated the theory as far back as 1918. For it was Haston who first raised the question of state capitalism within the Revolutionary Communist Party, not only as a purely Russian phenomenon but in global terms, both in the group’s internal bulletin (War and the International, pp.182-5) and in a series of articles in Socialist Appeal (mid-August to mid-September 1947). In fact Cliff’s remit from Mandel when he first came to Britain was specifically to argue against these incipient ‘state capitalist’ heresies, and what happened was that in the course of the dispute the contestants changed sides. Anyone who wishes to make a serious investigation of the whole topic should consult the above sources, as well as the SPGB’s position, which was reissued as a pamphlet in the same year as Cliff first published his own, though we have to admit that Cliff’s logic is inferior to theirs, since they dated Russia's capitalist revolution back to 1917.

Al Richardson

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
******
Reviews

Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings of 25 September and 2-3 October 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp.318, £34.95


In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.

On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.

But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.

Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).

When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.

Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.

So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.

Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)

What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.

And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]

Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]

Peter Fryer

Notes

1. Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.210.

2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.

3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.

4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.

5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.

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