***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots – I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire …

…Yeah, we know his hard luck story, ten thousand returning guys’ hard luck story maybe million, know he was privately beside himself with the turn of events once he got off that god-awful troop transport in New York, and headed hopefully north (after a three day drunk just to even things out, although don’t tell her that) and so we pick him up some time after he got to that north he was headed for.

He had not been back a year, most of that year spent sullenly, quietly in a rage, in a rage that having served, served well, had done his duty, had done his job from what his discharge papers said, he was unable to find work, real work, found that in heading north he had avoided no traps, there was no need for coal-miners or a cold-miner’s son in the Olde Saco labor market. Damn, and those recurring nightmares, that feeling that he would always be unclean after what he did overseas, didn’t help either. But he stayed silent (and would like many in his generation remain silent, silent unto the grave, keep his hurts to himself, about went on over there), took the first low-rent job that came along, floor-sweeper in the MacAdams Mills just down the street from their house. Well not really their house, their home such as it was, in the quickly built Olde Saco Veterans Housing Project, built to ease the housing crunch with all the boys coming back home from overseas and hungry to get staretd on their dreams. Took that job, well, because with the baby, and another on the way, he could not do otherwise. And he thought just at that moment, that moment as he swept up the leavings from the mill floor that things had to get better, hadn’t they.

Jesus he knew he was no hell on wheels, no big wheel guy, never expected to be, had expected to dig coal like a couple or three generations of forbears down in those Harlan hills when the war freed him up from all of that. Freed him up to see outside the hills and hollows of home, liked what he saw and never looked back. Liked what he saw of a black-haired gal too. He knew he had no skills, no skills except as a crackerjack marksman but what was that worth in civilian life, no skills for the northern labor market and what with his seventh- grade education (all that was necessary to dig coal, hell, his father never went to school at all and his grandfather was illiterate signing his name with a simple X). He didn’t expect to be President. (Ha, that was a joke, he wouldn’t want to be.) But didn’t hunger to learn some skill (join the ten thousand, maybe million, other guys, buddy), didn’t his small dream, a little house of his own, a house not a tumbled down shack like back home in the hollows, a few kids and her growing old together figuring out things as they went along. And he still stuck sweeping somebody else’s leavings, stalling his small dream, it wasn’t fair, not fair at all…

**********

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting, Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr. Frank Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.

Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,” decidedly not your parents’ or grandparents’ (please, please do not say great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, who, in the words of brother Bobby quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their youth dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from, survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…

Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies, three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest, the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in. Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on its last legs. Hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.

Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink. Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.

Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts. And that day not him, not him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos) were dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the land of “milk and honey.” Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell, any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.

Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs, Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.

The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big, well big band, replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren ,no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare (nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to do a thing about it. Banished, all such things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.

Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II. A time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before, had taken their number when they were called. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell in line.

Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny. Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.

Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else. Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines, many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god-forsaken piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board, hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers were not afraid, or should have been), but who gave a good accounting of themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels that they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires burning, keep the womenfolk happy.

All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every war who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.

The music, this survival music, wafted through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized possession amid the squalor of second-hand sofas and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs, centered in the small square living room of my growing up house. My broken down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held with masking tape, no proof needed, overgrown lawn of a shack of a house too small, much too small, for four growing boys and two parents house.

That shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack houses, too small to fit Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams but which represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such weirdness then I just cried out in some fit of angst) the great good desire of those warriors and their war brides to latch onto a piece of golden age America. And take their struggle survival music with them as if to validate their sweet memory dreams. That radio, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard station manager knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the basics of the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and brides.

My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting generation, drove me crazy then, mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. As far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.

********

I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart

In my heart I have but one desire
And that one is you
No other will do

I've lost all ambition for worldly acclaim
I just want to be the one you love

And with your admission that you feel the same
I'll have reached the goal I'm dreaming of

Believe me

I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II- From Deep In The Songbook-The Inkspots – I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire …

…Yeah, we know his hard luck story, ten thousand returning guys’ hard luck story maybe million, know he was privately beside himself with the turn of events once he got off that god-awful troop transport in New York, and headed hopefully north (after a three day drunk just to even things out, although don’t tell her that) and so we pick him up some time after he got to that north he was headed for.

He had not been back a year, most of that year spent sullenly, quietly in a rage, in a rage that having served, served well, had done his duty, had done his job from what his discharge papers said, he was unable to find work, real work, found that in heading north he had avoided no traps, there was no need for coal-miners or a cold-miner’s son in the Olde Saco labor market. Damn, and those recurring nightmares, that feeling that he would always be unclean after what he did overseas, didn’t help either. But he stayed silent (and would like many in his generation remain silent, silent unto the grave, keep his hurts to himself, about went on over there), took the first low-rent job that came along, floor-sweeper in the MacAdams Mills just down the street from their house. Well not really their house, their home such as it was, in the quickly built Olde Saco Veterans Housing Project, built to ease the housing crunch with all the boys coming back home from overseas and hungry to get staretd on their dreams. Took that job, well, because with the baby, and another on the way, he could not do otherwise. And he thought just at that moment, that moment as he swept up the leavings from the mill floor that things had to get better, hadn’t they.

Jesus he knew he was no hell on wheels, no big wheel guy, never expected to be, had expected to dig coal like a couple or three generations of forbears down in those Harlan hills when the war freed him up from all of that. Freed him up to see outside the hills and hollows of home, liked what he saw and never looked back. Liked what he saw of a black-haired gal too. He knew he had no skills, no skills except as a crackerjack marksman but what was that worth in civilian life, no skills for the northern labor market and what with his seventh- grade education (all that was necessary to dig coal, hell, his father never went to school at all and his grandfather was illiterate signing his name with a simple X). He didn’t expect to be President. (Ha, that was a joke, he wouldn’t want to be.) But didn’t hunger to learn some skill (join the ten thousand, maybe million, other guys, buddy), didn’t his small dream, a little house of his own, a house not a tumbled down shack like back home in the hollows, a few kids and her growing old together figuring out things as they went along. And he still stuck sweeping somebody else’s leavings, stalling his small dream, it wasn’t fair, not fair at all…

**********

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, knew what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, Benny Goodman with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, Harry James with or without the orchestra, Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller with or without glasses, Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday with or without the blues, personal blues, Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather, Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting, Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts, Mr. Billy Eckstine, Mr. Frank Sinatra with or without bobbysoxers, The Inkspots with, always with, that spoken refrain, the Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops with or without whatever they were with or without, Mr. Cole Porter with or without the boys, Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, and Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother, is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the generation of ‘68.

Yes, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,” decidedly not your parents’ or grandparents’ (please, please do not say great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot. Who were, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, who, in the words of brother Bobby quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the newer world, to satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their youth dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away, all land worthless, the bankers taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable, survived empty bowls wondering where the next meal would come from, survived no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Building up those wants, name them, named those hungers on cold nights against riverside fires, down in dusty arroyos, under forsaken bridges. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…

Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies, three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest, the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even that ahead of the rent collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff and the streets are closing in. Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, with a common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink. Later moving down the scale a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, window looking out onto the air shaft, dark, dark with despair, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on its last legs. Hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind coming out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain, washed away. Yes, get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles. Tossed, hither and yon, about six million different ways but it all came down to when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses. Robbed them as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, in the days when in some quarters sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them.

Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait in the endless waiting line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, planning around Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink. Planning around city hall lunches, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the Saint Vincent DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee, had only, only if you could prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman and, in addition, under some terrible penalty, that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.

Jesus, out of work for another day, and with three hungry growing kids to feed, and a wife sickly, sick unto death of the not having he thought, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked, at least that is what it said in the Globe (ditto New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking), said that there was too much around, too much and he with nothing for those kids, nothing and he was too proud to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts. And that day not him, not him yet, others, others who read more that the Globe (and the dittos) were dreaming of that full head of steam day to come in places like big auto Flint, waterfront Frisco town, rubber Akron, hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago, hell, even in boondock trucker Minneapolis, a day when the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread to those three hungry growing kids who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics just hunger. Until then though he is left shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have nots throw nothing away, and on other horizons the brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anyway, anywhere but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the land of “milk and honey.” Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell, any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.

Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs, Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.

The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big, well big band, replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren ,no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare (nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to do a thing about it. Banished, all such things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.

Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II. A time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before, had taken their number when they were called. And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell in line.

Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny. Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.

Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else. Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines, many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god-forsaken piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board, hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers were not afraid, or should have been), but who gave a good accounting of themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels that they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires burning, keep the womenfolk happy.

All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every war who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.

The music, this survival music, wafted through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized possession amid the squalor of second-hand sofas and woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs, centered in the small square living room of my growing up house. My broken down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held with masking tape, no proof needed, overgrown lawn of a shack of a house too small, much too small, for four growing boys and two parents house.

That shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack houses, too small to fit Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams but which represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such weirdness then I just cried out in some fit of angst) the great good desire of those warriors and their war brides to latch onto a piece of golden age America. And take their struggle survival music with them as if to validate their sweet memory dreams. That radio, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard station manager knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the basics of the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and brides.

My harried mother, harried by the prospects of the day with four growing boys, maybe bewildered is a better expression, turning the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine,their songs, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs and so embedded, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her appointed household rounds. The stuff, that piano/drum-driven stuff with some torch-singer bleeding all over the floor with her loves, her hurts, and her wanderings, her waitings, they should have called it the waiting generation, drove me crazy then, mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. As far as I know Doc, knowing his demographics as well, did not, I repeat, did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure.

********

I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart

In my heart I have but one desire
And that one is you
No other will do

I've lost all ambition for worldly acclaim
I just want to be the one you love

And with your admission that you feel the same
I'll have reached the goal I'm dreaming of

Believe me

I don't want to set the world on fire
I just want to start a flame in your heart

***Out In Those Mean Urban Neon Wilderness Streets- “Midnight Cowboy”- A Film Review

Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, 1969

Recently in a review of Bonnie and Clyde, a film that also deals tragic-comically with lumpen life, in that case the mock heroics of bank robbery in the popular imaginations of an earlier generation, that of the Great Depression, I noted that I was familiar, too familiar with that place where the lumpenproletariat, the dregs of society, intersects and intermingles with the working poor. And also of the dreams, sometimes the plain, old ordinary get-rich-quick dreams to get out from under that inflame those who have nothing and have no way of getting more than nothing.

In Midnight Cowboy we get a very solid sense of the convergence of those two sets of social interactions. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, small town Texas twisted, second-hand dreams of making it in big time, big apple, New York as a hustler out in the neon wilderness of Times Square. And, Dustin Hoffman’s Ratzo Rizzo, home-grown boy, already on those mean streets scratching for nickels and dimes to keep body and soul together. And to get out the hell out of killer New York, as long as he does not have work to do so. Work, in real life, is the curse of this segment of society. I have known more than my fair share, and have had more than my fill of real Ratzos, including in my own extended family, complete with that bizarre logic that says black is white, as matter of course, and visa versa that drives their skimpy lives.

That said, this is a buddy story, in this case a male buddy film, that was a cinematic trend back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and at that level the movie works as old Joe Buck is ready to go to the mat, in the end, to get old Ratzo out of cold-hearted New York. But here is the “skinny” from personal experience, it is usually too little too late. And so it proved here. This film, moreover, despite my “high sociology” screed above is worth seeing for the outstanding performances of these two actors early on in their careers.

***IN THE TIME OF THE 'LOCO-FOCOS'- The Age Of Jackson

BOOK REVIEW

THE AGE OF JACKSON, ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, Jr., LITTLE BROWN, 1953

The recently deceased bourgeois historian Arthur Schlesinger first won prominent for his landmark studies later collected and published under the title The Age of Jackson. Along the way he was also a top ‘braintruster’ for the Kennedy New Frontier and stalwart intellectual defender of the traditions of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” long after that had lost its cache in Democratic Party circles. Thus, Schlesinger was a long time political opponent of mine and of all militants who have called for a break from the twin bourgeois parties of capitalism, Democratic or Republican.

Nonetheless, his Age of Jackson is an important book to study as an overall guide to understanding the formation of American capitalism, particularly finance capitalism, as it emerged in the 1820’s and the rudiments of creation of a politically conscious working class movement. The Age of Jackson may not be the last place to stop, given the immense increase in scholarship concerning this period since Schlesinger’s book was written in the 1950’s, but it is certainly the place to start. His copious footnotes and source references will aid one in studying the available sources from fifty year ago.

The central story line of the Jacksonian period economically, socially and politically was the fight over the establishment, continuation and rechartering of the Bank of the United States which despite its name was a privately owned corporation headed by the notorious Nicholas Biddle. In short the story was, as almost always under capitalism, about the money. Hard money, paper money, metallic money, federal money, state money, no money. It is all there. As confusing and, frankly, somewhat trivial as the issues may seem to the 21st century mind the various fights determined the path of capitalist formation for the rest of the 19th century. One does not have to be a partisan of any particular monetary policy to know that if the Biddle-led forces had won then capital formation in the United States would have taken a very different turn. Thus, the essential Jacksonian victory on the bank question is one that militants today can give a retroactive endorsement.

While this book does not go into the slavery question in any great detail or into the cultural and social milieu of the times except tangentially this Jacksonian victory is why, in a previous review on William Jennings Bryan, I noted that the last time militant leftists could seriously consider supporting a Democratic Party presidential candidate was in the time of Andrew Jackson. Just to list later presidential names and their political programs should make every progressive shutter. I also, however, noted in that review - "But damn, that was long ago". The continued dependence political support of the Democrats by the likes of Schlesinger and his progeny has politics in this country spinning in circles. It is time, more than time, to move on.

Although control of the money was the underlying premise for the political fights of the day they also represented some very different appreciations of what American society should look like. Schlesinger goes to great pains to highlight the various factions within each of the coalescing parties that would come to form the Democratic and Republican two-party system that we are familiar with today. Moreover, these fights had different implications for differing sections of the country. In that regard the names Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay and their various congressional devotees can generally stand to represent the various sectional interests.

One might also note that names that became familiar in the immediate pre-Civil War period, like Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan, John Bell, Gideon Welles, William Seward, etc. started to receive political notice as secondary figures during this period. One should also note that this was a period of political realignment and that the political situation was fluid enough that with changing political winds the various leading personalities were as likely to change sides as not. Readers should pick up the trail that Schlesinger only alludes to on the importance on the third party Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the 1840's. Despite that lapse dealing with the various political manifestations of the period is the strongest part of the professor’s book.


Of particular importance to those who want to learn about working class history in this country and are baffled by the lack of political class consciousness of today’s working class, as represented by an independent class party, is the story of the rise and fall of the first trade unions and working class parties. Although this is a period of the rise of industrial capitalism in America it is nevertheless still fairly rudimentary and agrarian concerns still dominate the political landscape. This is reflected in the programs, concerns and the organizations that various parts of the working class formed at this time mainly, it appears, among the more skilled workers. One should note that on a political level, although not uniformly, the American working class of the 1830’s was more politically class conscious than today’s working class. Which pretty well defines our problem today.

One should also note the tendency of working class organization to block with other forces, mainly urban Democratic Party Jacksonians. Today such a policy is called the ‘popular front’ and is the sole strategy of the American labor bureaucracy (the only question seemingly being which bourgeois faction to block with). Militants today, as a matter of principle, are opposed to that strategy. However, back in the 1830s there were issues on which working class organizations could have, and should have, blocked with bourgeois parties. That, unfortunately, would not have saved them from oblivion as it was just too early, the forces were too small and unorganized and too politically immature to break out of the general Jacksonian democratic aura.

***The Heroic Age of The Democratic Party

Book Review

Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party, Robert V. Remini, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1951

For those political propagandists, including this writer, interested in an independent working class political realignment in American politics an important point to understand is the way that political realignments are created- and taken advantage of. Thus a little look at history, in this case the history of American parliamentary politics, is called for. For openers careful study will show that such dramatic shifts do not occur often so that we had better be prepared when and if it happens. Elsewhere in this space I have commented on the creation of the Republican Party from the remnants of the Whigs, Free Soilers and other forces just prior to the Civil War. (See Review of Free Soil, Free Labor by Eric Foner in an entry entitled The Heroic Age of the Republican Party). The book under review here is a detailed look at the creation of the Democratic Party in the mid 1820’s that was solidified by the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 (and his reelection in 1832). And what better place to look at how that occurred that at the career of the master mind of that creation Martin Van Buren, who would ultimately benefit by that realignment himself both as Vice President in Jackson’s second term and as his immediate successor as president in 1836.

This book is narrowly focused on the creation of the Democratic Party and Van Buren’s role in it. Thus the time frame for the work is essentially the elections of 1824 and 1828. The story as it unfolds here shows that Van Buren did not come to prominence out of thin air but has done yeoman’s work in creating the embryo of the Democratic Party in New York State with the famous Albany Regency that controlled, or attempted to control, New York politics during this period. The strength of the Regency lay in its control of patronage, its policy of only rewarding its friends and devotees, its adherence to a uniform political line and of fighting for organization, organization and again organization. Those are not bad lessons to learn even today. Strangely in reading about this organization and its rules and regulations I was reminded of a proto-Leninist vanguard organization-without its revolutionary aims.

Of course strong organization only helps if you have some access, or potential access, to power and in American politics the coin of the realm is control of the American presidency. And for that purpose the election of 1824 gives a text book lesson in all the strengths and weakness of the presidential electoral process. Many changes had occurred in the first fifty years of the American Republic as it moved away from the bucolic agrarian/mercantile society of the 1780’s. These included the relentless driving of the frontier westward, the increased role of capitalist production and technology in linking communications and transportation systems and the cry of the masses for more political participation in the electoral process. Those factors were the social basis for Jackson’s ultimate victory.

But not in 1824. At that point the Monroe presidency and its so-called ‘Era of Good Feeling’ had theoretically blunted the political party concept at a time when, as now, the class divide was growing. One of the strange things about the 1824 election is that the several candidates all professed to be of the same ‘party’ from the closet monarchist John Quincy Adams to the plebian hero Jackson. Something had to give. What gave immediately, to Jackson’s detriment, was the popular outcry against the Congressional caucus system where that body essentially provided the official candidate. Van Buren was the master of that system and it died hard with him. In any case no candidate got a majority of the Electoral College votes and thus the election was thrown into the House of Representatives for settlement. In the end Henry Clay’s electoral votes and whatever promises he received from Adams determined Adams’s victory. 1828 would, however, be a different story


Van Buren learned the lesson of that 1824 defeat well. He went through out the country trying to build a coalition of forces that would create a national party based on a set of principles, essentially taken from Jefferson’s philosophy of government and a strict constructionist school of interpretation of the Constitution. In the process Van Buren basically formed the modern political party by uniting forces from the West, the South and New York to give the New England-centered Adams a thumping. Having a popular candidate like Jackson obviously did not hurt. One can argue with the author about the weight of Van Buren’s role in the Jackson victory however one cannot argue that Van Buren knew which way the wind was blowing and created a powerful plebian based party that fought for power up until the Civil War with some success. For good or evil Van Buren also became the proto-type for the professional politician that we have today come to know and loathe. But that is a separate story. Here we can give a retrospective tip of the hat to the old Red Fox of Kinderhook.

In The Struggle Against British Imperialism-Part II- Symbol Of An Age- 'Old Hickory' Andrew Jackson

Book Review

Andrew Jackson-Symbol for an Age, John William Ward, Oxford University Press, London, 1962

American democratic politics, as can be easily seen in this year's presidential nominating processes, has always been encumbered with symbols. That fact is hardly new or news. What is news is that today's seemingly modern notion of proper electoral technique has a fairly ancient pedigree. Although Parson Weems did more than his share to establish the iconic figure of George Washington, arguably the subject of this work, Andrew Jackson, really was the first president to get the full public relations `spin' treatment that we take as a matter of course in today's politics.

The present volume builds the case for Jackson symbolic virtues at a time when America, after a series of nasty encounters with the British, notably the War of 1812, developed an inward look westward and away from the `degeneracy' of the seaboard. If Jackson did not fit the bill to a tee then his agents, paid or otherwise, filled in the blanks. First place in those efforts goes to highlighting his military prowess and soldierly concerns in defeating (to what real purpose no one knows since the war was over by this time) against the British at the tail end of the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans.

From there it was fairly simple to make him a man of the' people'. In this case the people being empathically not the residents of the eastern seaboard but the `fresh' yeomanry of the Westward trek. You know- the ones who exhibited all the plebian virtues as solid tillers of the soil, holders of folk wisdom against the effete nabobs of the cities and the true patriots of rising American agricultural capitalism. The author builds his case by using a series of fairly common references beginning his work with an analysis of a Jackson poetic tribute `The Hunters of Kentucky' and dissects that bit of work to see how it fit into the scheme of making Jackson the first "people's" president. All the other tributes and, at the end eulogies, then fall into place.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then his Whig opponents do that by learning from his handlers by the time of the `Tippecanoe' Harrison campaign of 1840. And from there we are off to the races. Note this- as if to reinforce the argument presented by the book- can anyone today deny that that myth around Jackson built so long ago still, with the exception of a dent caused by his savagery against the Native Americans, stands as the way he is thought of in the American pantheon? The Democrats continue their traditional Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners without blushing. Enough said.

Workers Vanguard No. 1033	1 November 2013

Boston Job Action: No Reprisals Against School Bus Drivers!

Ever since Veolia Transportation took over the operation of the Boston Public Schools bus fleet in July, some 700 drivers, organized in United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751, have endured a steady stream of abuse from this vindictive employer. Trampling on the union contract negotiated by its predecessor, the new management has flouted long-established work rules, including by arbitrarily reassigning routes, and made a practice of shortchanging drivers on their paychecks when finally getting around to distributing them. Such a declaration of war on the unions is nothing new for Veolia, which is part of a multinational conglomerate with its hooks in several major industries across the globe. It is no coincidence that Bay Area Rapid Transit shelled out nearly $400,000 to bring in Veolia’s Thomas P. Hock as the chief negotiator with its unions earlier this year and had this notorious outfit run scab shuttles when union members went on strike (see article on page 12).

Boston’s embattled school bus drivers, who are largely Haitian, Cape Verdean and Latino, fought back. On the morning of October 8, they reported to work at their assigned hours but refused to board their buses until management agreed to meet with the union. The bosses would have none of it: workers were ordered off company property, and the gates were locked behind them. Pickets went up at all four bus yards in protest, even though the USW district director criminally disavowed the job action. The next day, bus service resumed as Veolia sat down with representatives from Local 8751. Here the union reps presented a list of demands, beginning with “complete and total amnesty” for all members.

In response, the company served letters of suspension to Local 8751 grievance committee chairman Stevan Kirschbaum and vice president Steve Gillis. A few days later, recording secretary Andre Francois and stewards Garry Murchison and Richard Lynch were also suspended. Even as the threat of further reprisals hangs over their heads, the workforce remains unbowed. Large numbers of drivers and other supporters turned out for rallies outside the disciplinary hearing for the “School Bus Union 5” on October 23 and 28. With Veolia gunning for their jobs, the hearing is scheduled to continue. All Boston city labor should demand: Reinstate all suspended union officials! No reprisals against bus drivers!

The city rulers and their kept media have fanned the flames against Local 8751, with Democratic Party mayor Thomas Menino vowing to “make sure this illegal behavior has consequences.” Ripping a page from the “red scare” playbook, the mayor especially wants the heads of Kirschbaum and Gillis, who are supported by the reformist Workers World Party (WWP), because they are a “rogue element” and “rabble rousers who cause trouble.” In a thinly veiled attempt to stoke the city’s ever-glowing embers of anti-black and anti-immigrant hostility, he also berated the workforce as “selfish people who only want to cause disruption in our city.” A City Hall aide contemptuously added that “most of these drivers did not know what was going on.”

The very opposite is true: the drivers knew the score all too well. They did not fold in the face of Veolia’s intransigence or the efforts of the USW regional leadership to squash the walkout. When the Local 8751 president tried to convince the drivers at the Readville bus depot to resume work with nothing to show for their protest by pleading that “we have to do it legally,” he was shouted down with cries of “no!” If workers over the years had confined themselves to what the bosses deem legal, as the labor bureaucrats preach, there never would have even been unions in the first place.

The school bus drivers union traces its history back four decades to the fight to integrate Boston’s public schools through busing. When these plans were defeated by an alliance of liberals in Congress and howling mobs of racists in the streets, the floodgates were opened to a nationwide assault on school desegregation, foreshadowing the rollback of hard-won civil rights for black people nationwide. (See “As Racist Mobs Rampaged, Liberals and Reformists Knifed Busing,” WV No. 921, 26 September 2008.)

At the time, the Spartacist League intervened into the struggles to defend busing as a minimal application of the elementary democratic right of black people to equality in education. We called on the integrated union movement, including the city’s bus drivers, to mobilize labor/black defense of the besieged black school children. But the WWP and Socialist Workers Party acted as lackeys for black Democratic Party liberals who sought to channel outrage over the racist backlash into calls for state intervention, spreading the illusion that the same capitalist state that murderously repressed black militants could be relied on to defend black rights. Workers World is still very much into burnishing the credentials of black Democrats, such as councilman Charles Yancey, for purportedly “fighting racism and injustice in Boston” (workers.org, 2 December 2007).

Countless defeats have resulted from hitching struggles to the Democratic Party—one of the two main parties of the class enemy. Yancey, who accompanied union officials to Veolia offices during the lockout, later announced on his Facebook page that he “DID NOT support the actions taken by the bus drivers.” He might take a different posture than the mayor, who wants to strangle Local 8751 and bring back neighborhood schools. Yet “friend of labor” Democrats are no less committed to maintaining the capitalist system of exploitation in which the roots of black oppression are lodged. Avowed socialists who are respected by their co-workers, such as Kirschbaum and Gillis, can help give militant expression to the immediate demands of a workforce. But lacking a program for the political independence of the proletariat, they cannot chart a way forward for the labor movement, much less for getting rid of the system of capitalist wage slavery altogether.

Stop Prosecution of ATU Militant!

The following letter was sent by the Partisan Defense Committee on October 28 to the Alameda County District Attorney.

The Partisan Defense Committee strongly protests the criminal charge filed by the District Attorney’s office against ATU 1555 union member George Figueroa, BART employee.

While working in Oakland as a BART station agent on June 8, Figueroa was physically accosted by an angry patron. As required by BART policy Figueroa, who sustained injury, filed an incident report for management, and also filed a report with BART police.

In the service of BART management’s public position that the unions’ concerns over safety problems at BART were a “fake issue” during contract negotiations, management sought criminal misdemeanor charges against Figueroa for allegedly making a “false report of a crime to a police officer.”

While assisting in preparing union picket line teams on the eve of the July 1 strike, Brother Figueroa was targeted by management because he is an outspoken union activist.

This bogus charge against him is all part of the attempt by BART management to intimidate transit union members during their recent labor strikes.

We demand: Drop the charge against George Figueroa now!

From the Archives of Marxism-On The Anniversary Of The Bolshevik Revolution

Workers Vanguard No. 1033	1 November 2013

From the Archives of Marxism

The Proletarian Revolution in Russia

By Louis Fraina

To mark the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, we print below excerpts from Louis Fraina’s introduction to The Proletarian Revolution in Russia (1918). The book mainly consists of articles by Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky that were written, as Fraina noted, “during the actual course of the Revolution,” from the overthrow of the tsar in February to the workers’ seizure of power and the birth of the Soviet state.

In 1919, Fraina and other members of a left-wing faction in the Socialist Party who were expelled for advocating Bolshevism went on to found the Communist Party of America that September. James P. Cannon, a leader of the early Communist Party and later of American Trotskyism, remarked that Fraina in that period “did more than anybody else to explain and popularize the basic program of the Russian Bolsheviks” (First Ten Years of American Communism [1962]). In later years, Fraina, writing under the name Lewis Corey, renounced Communism. But as Cannon put it, “The best part of Fraina—the young part—belongs to us.”

*   *   *

The persistence of Czarism in Russia after its historical necessity had ceased, its clinging to power after Capitalism had come into being, produced a dual political and social development. Within the shell of Czarism developed the bourgeoisie, the class of capitalists, and the proletariat,—a mature and aggressive proletariat. As the bourgeoisie developed power, the proletariat simultaneously developed its own power, while politically and officially Czarism retained ascendancy. When the shell of Czarism was burst by revolutionary action, Czarism disappeared as easily as a dream upon awakening, in violent and suggestive contrast to the painful and prolonged struggles required to overthrow the absolute monarchy in France, and in England; and the failure of the revolutionary movement in Germany in 1848. This unparalleled rapidity of accomplishment in Russia was directly and largely traceable to the development of the revolutionary proletariat.

Upon the overthrow of Czarism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat faced each other in battle array; where previous revolutions found the proletariat scattered and without decisive power, the Russian Revolution found the proletariat disciplined and inspired by traditions of revolutionary struggle, organized by the mechanism of capitalist production itself,—stronger than the bourgeoisie, and able to conquer for itself the power of the state.

This emergence of the proletariat, its independent class policy and class organizations, the Soviets, constitutes the decisive feature of the Russian Revolution,—an emergence definite and sufficiently aggressive to conquer power for the revolutionary proletariat....

As the tendency of action of the Russian proletariat was adumbrated [prefigured] in previous revolutions, so its class organizations, the Soviets, are, in general features, partially, incompletely apparent in these previous revolutions in which the proletariat instinctively tried to emerge for the conquest of power.

The revolutionary masses of the people, during the French Revolution, particularly in Paris, organized their own forms of revolutionary struggle and government, the sections and the Commune. While the average historian dwells minutely upon the action of the various parliaments and the Clubs, the sections and the Commune of the masses were of decisive importance. These sections and the Commune were not alone instruments of revolutionary action, but usurped certain functions of government, the tendency being to place all government power in the Commune, which was simply the organized masses trying to act independently of parliamentary forms and bourgeois representatives. This tendency was expressed in a more definite form in the Paris Commune of 1871, which completely dispensed with the forms and functions of the bourgeois parliamentary state, its purpose being to unite all France by means of self-governing communes, and from which Marx derived that fundamental canon of the proletarian revolution: the proletariat can not simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the bourgeois state, and use it for its own purposes.

The Soviets, the Councils of Workers and Peasants, are a much higher form and definite expression of this tendency of the proletarian masses to become the state. Originally created as instruments of the revolution, the Soviets have become organs of government, functioning through a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviets are revolutionary organizations of the masses; but they are more: they are forms for the creation of a new type of government, which shall supersede the bourgeois political state. Instead of being amorphous “mass organizations” as were the sections and Communes in the French Revolution, the Soviets are industrial organizations uniting the functions of industry and government. In the Soviets appears the true form of government of the proletariat, based upon the producers organized in the workshops. In the workshops lies not only the power of the workers for the revolution, but equally the groupings upon which is based the self-government of the oncoming communist society of Socialism. And the Soviets, combining temporarily political and industrial functions, are developing the forms out of which will emerge the communist, industrial “government” of the days to come. The tendency of previous revolutions is the dominant fact of the Russian Revolution.

The proletarian revolution in Russia has revealed clearly and in definite form the methods and the purposes, the action and the “state” by means of which the proletariat can conquer power and accomplish its emancipation.

The definite success of the proletarian revolution in Russia depends not alone upon the Russian masses, but much more upon the revolutionary action of the masses in the rest of Europe. The Russian Revolution cannot accomplish that which the French Revolution accomplished—wage war upon the whole of Europe. The strength and the weakness of the proletarian revolution in Russia is precisely that the other European nations are much more highly developed economically. Revolutionary France was the most advanced nation economically in Europe (except England), and this greater economic power was a source of unparalleled political and military vigor to France, making feasible a war against all of Europe. But the proletarian revolution in Russia is vulnerable to a concerted attack of European Imperialism, because the other nations of Europe can mobilize infinitely superior economic forces; simultaneously, this situation is one favorable to the Russian Revolution, since the higher stage of economic development in the other nations prepares the conditions for supplementary revolutionary action, which alone can ultimately preserve the Russian Revolution. Monarchic Europe could not produce a revolution in accord with that in France; modern Europe can produce a proletarian revolution in accord with that in Russia. The proletarian revolution in Russia requires and struggles for the Social Revolution in Europe. The revolution of the proletariat is an international revolution.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Folk Blues Revival Night- The 1963 American Folk Blues Festival- A CD Review

CD Review

American Folk Blues Festival, various artists, Optimism Records, 1981
Let’s go by the numbers, the musical year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worse), and just let it go from there. After a musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s where we put up with some awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff we stepped right into the hard rock and roll of the Rolling Stones and later groups that based their early work on the blues, the American- etched blues. Go figure.

Yes, go figure. Go figure that much of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, Chicago mainly, but those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it, the old country blues from down in the Delta, the North Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) came from. All of this is just around about way to pay tribute to the roots of our generational genre.

But more than that it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues Festival of 1963, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s search for roots to explain our angst and alienation, including the search for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our brains like a, well like an atomic bomb,we lose sight of where the music came from. More importantly what happened to those who created the music that once was the staple of hip music. Yes, the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just waiting to be “discovered”.

That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early 1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Lonnie Johnson, Victoria Spivey (a personal favorite on this CD) and legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon. This is history, maybe not world-shaking history but a very important slice of the people’s history. Listen up.

***On The Nature Of Love-For Kat Richards (and her unnamed Bicycle Boy), Adamsville High School Class of 1964

Peter Paul Markin comment:
For those astute enough to recognize a fundamental flaw in the dedication I will attend to your hurts in a moment. For those who are not insanely raider red-bled or who don’t recognize the “flaw” in the dedication you can pass this introductory comment by and go straight to the “moral” of this little sketch. As for those who do faintly recognize something wrong in the heavens an explanation, an unnecessary explanation as far as I am concerned, is in order.

Yes, one thousand times yes, I am dedicating this piece to a member of the class of 1964 from our hated cross-town rivals, the blue and white of Adamsville High. I can feel free to do so in the knowledge that our beloved raider-bled red and black trounced her fellow classmates in that glorious senior year Thanksgiving football game in 1963. So for just this minute, or as long as it takes to tell the story, all that business about “never the twain shall meet” and “don’t cross the line” (that Boyles Avenue dividing line that separated North Adamsville from the blue and white heathens of Adamsville) is off. I have called a truce, an armed truce considering the adversary’s usual unscrupulous ways, for this one. I think the story that this “innocent” woman who fell afoul of that alluded to line by, as far as I know, no evil design on her part is worth that consideration. Okay.
*******
I want to speak of love. No, not the coquettish, coy, cream puff, arch, Shakespearean wordplay, rhymed couplet, sonnet love (or whoever really wrote those things, I suspect Kit Marlowe, but we will leave that little academic pursuit for another time). Mere pretty words. Soft ashes to the bitter tongue and blown to some ocean wind with no more substance than the air that carries those cobbled sugars.

Neither shall I speak of rarified, sense and sensibility-driven, ethereal Robert Browning bon mots to one Ms. (formerly Miss) Elizabeth Barrett. Mere Victorian claptrap. High- tide suppression of the finer instincts beneath many bustles and bows. And worthy of that same ashen, sooted air send-off. Nor will I utter one word of the mock-heroic, blood-drenched deeds done in the name of love, the love of the face that launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy. Or Rowena, Rebecca, Rosamon, hell, even Betty and their sighing faint airs and perfumed handkerchiefs pinned death-prone to lanced braveheart chests. Humankind has had more than its fair share of such epic, red earth-bleeding battles, although not always done to satisfy lust for a woman.

And you should blush, you really should, if you expect me to hype roses sent, valentine reds or off-occasion whites, candies (are you kidding me that went out with garter belts and spats and with the life and death struggle slim down diets, get real) ordered, and fine dinners, (with wines and candle lights even) purchased as tokens of love.

Today I wish to speak of love. Simple, coming-of-age-love, plebeian love, but love that will now transcend all the noisy clamor of the above quizzed sentiments. Hear me out, it will not take long. Actually, the details are minimal. Adamsville South Elementary School down in the Adamsville projects classmate, Kat Richards, related a story to me about the old days, our 1950s old days, when coming-of-age love was handled more discreetly, with more naiveté and with a bit more pathos than today.

In those old days Kat had a boyfriend, unnamed, maybe unnamable, but unnamed to me for her own reasons, honorable I hope but her own reasons. Let’s call him Bicycle Boy because a bicycle figures into the story. This lad lived in Centerville a couple of towns over from Adamsville going toward Mechanicsville out on Route 3. Fair enough. Somehow, and the details really don’t matter, there was a conflict, a mother conflict I presume or older sister, who knows, and it was necessary for the pair to meet clandestinely.

And here is where the thing turns epic. In order to see his beloved he biked from Centerville to Mechanicsville, no mean task given the hills and miles that separated the two towns. Not just any part of Mechanicville though but the part directly across from the Adamsville projects by the Squaw River Bridge. And from there he swam, swam through the tide shifts and eddies, swam through the freighter-brought fetid, oil-slicked waves, swam as if his very life depended on it, to meet his love on a scrappy, shell-strewn beach on the other side. More importantly, after their rendezvous he had to swim back across that same treacherous channel.

Know this. When someone speaks pretty sonnet love words dismiss him or her out of hand. When someone speaks of heavenly love cast a jaded eye his or her way. When someone offers to die, and gladly, for battle love laugh in his or her face. And if someone tries to piece you off with some tasty tidbits or fragrant smells start walking the other way. For now, and for all cyberspace eternity, you have heard the siren song of real love.