This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
*****Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind
A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical work to do the same), and Stubby Tatum, probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, which to say the least were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works. After some thought I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months later, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land. Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate "rock and roll will never die" aficionados you have my support.
In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned outto be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming). I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.
After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, the Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush.
Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with the father and son Lomaxesdid so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie performer in the early 1960s treated like a bible). Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle.
Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked now if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days. The music is there to greet them in their new titanic struggles.
*****From #Un-Occupied Boston-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions!
Leon Trotsky -Lessons Of The Paris Commune-Listen Up
Defend The Working Class! Take The Offensive! - A Five Point Program For Discussion Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
Ralph Morris and Sam Lowell a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions but anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011. (That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Although Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy.” Ralph having gone back to work in his father's electrical shop in Troy, New York and which he took over when Ralph, Senior retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s after serving an apprenticeship with the main printer in town before he went out on his own. Having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns though, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, they had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time, especially after May Day 1971 where they first met in the bastinado at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium after being arrested with their respective collectives and where they got a full dose what the American imperial state could when it pulled the hammer down on dissent, as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.
So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011 meet in Springfield and travel down to the Wall Street plaza which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity for them personally and for their kind of eclectic left-wing politics (they had gotten more active in the wake of Bush-led Iraq invasion of 2003 when the seemingly endless wars first took hold of day to day American foreign policy but nowhere near the 24/7 efforts back in the Vietnam days when every minute seemed to desperately count against the monster). They were crestfallen to say the least when the movement exploded (or maybe better imploded, turned in on itself and wound up after a couple of years being just another cheap vehicle for left Democratic Party politicians on the make) after the then reigning mayor and the NYPD pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments did likewise in what was determined later when it was too late that had been coordinated efforts across the board to shut everything down, shut it down tight). Of more concern at the time since unlike the good-hearted but naïve younger people since they had already known from too many uneven battles (remember that May Day 1971 baptism of fire) about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer was in the aftermath when the movement imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on anybody's toes in the movement no matter how hare-brained the scheme or just plain recycled ideas that had not worked in the 1960s and had even less chance now that the state had even more weapons at its disposal, to let everybody do their own thing with or without some kind of coordinated plan that would make the thing more productive, do their own identity politics, you know gays can only speak of gay oppression straights keep out, women can only speak of women's oppression men, gay or straight keep out, blacks can only speak of black oppression, white males and females, gay or straight keep out and so on, defending their particular turf as furiously as any old-time Tammany Hall political hack, which did much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.
Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it even over drinks at Jack Higgin’s Grille more than once, how each generation will face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. Here working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well.
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
***Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, those who have just plain quit looking for work and critically those who are working jobs beneath their skill levels was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession of 2008-09 highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around to all who want and need it. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions when the union-run hiring hall ruled supreme in manning the jobs is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling, where, and at what skill level, and equitably divide up current work.
Here is the beauty of the scheme, what makes it such a powerful propaganda tool-without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce and less in the formerly pivotal private industries like auto production. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. (Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the North American auto industry employed almost a million workers but only a third or less are unionized whereas in the old days the industry was union tight.)
The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American service-orientedeconomy. Everyone should support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For $15.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution center workers, the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of individual retail stores and victimizations of local union organizers. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone, probably Bart Webber in his more thoughtful moments, once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant mainstay of the run to the bottom capitalist ethos. Well, as to the latter point that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Defeat all “right to work” legislation. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
*** Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray, the very strayRepublican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich, make that the very rich but don’t forgot to include them on the fringes of the one percent and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus fruitless efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea presented, an old idea going back to the initial formation of the working class in America, in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor” and the Republicans are the 666 beasts but the Obama administration does not take a back seat to the elephants on this one. The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement. They always have their hands out.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. One egregious example from the recent past from around the time of the Occupy movement where some of tried to link up the labor movement with the political uprising- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down when the deal goes down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle when some form of general strike was required to break the anti-union backs (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).
***End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we argued, Sam more than I did since he had been closer to the initial stage if the opposition that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (common moniker for the Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings In Syria, Iraq, Yemen! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East Especially To Israel and Saudi Arabia! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza-Israel Out Of The Occupied Territories. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of Every Single U.S./Allied Troops (And The Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- Despite a certain respite recently during the Iran nuclear arms talksAmerican (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran and Syria is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe us we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, like Saudi Arabia and France over the recent period have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get the drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
***Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states whatever political disagreements we may have with the Cuban leadership like Cuba, and whatever their other internal political problems caused in no small part the fifty plus year U.S. blockade, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has already been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take a big chuck from the bloated military budget and the bank bail-out money, things like that, if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast into some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
***We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guns, Guts and Glory-Free State of Jones: A Movie Review
By Salah Shami
Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, is a historically accurate and inspiring account of a racially integrated rebellion in the Deep South against the Confederacy during the Civil War. Based on a true story, the movie illuminates one of the pages that had, until recent decades, been redacted from American history. It is the first movie that provides a truthful—albeit too brief—account of the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War.
The Civil War and Reconstruction constituted the Second American Revolution. The war was a conflict between two social systems: Northern industrial capitalism and Southern slavery. The Union Army, which included 200,000 black troops who helped turn the tide of war, crushed the slave system. During Radical Reconstruction, black and white radicals of the Republican Party, protected by Union soldiers, sought to fulfill the promise of racial equality in the South. However, the victorious Northern bourgeoisie, in pursuit of its class interests, betrayed Reconstruction by making common cause with the vanquished Southern landholders. The defeat of Reconstruction has left a lasting imprint on American society: the black population was consolidated as an oppressed race-color caste, the majority of which is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.
The movie tells the remarkable story of Newton Knight, an antislavery, pro-Union white farmer in Jones County, Mississippi. During the Civil War, Knight deserted the Confederate Army and led an integrated militia of escaped slaves and other white deserters that fought fierce battles against the Confederacy. They eventually raised the Union flag in Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s home state, and declared Jones County and the surrounding area a free state.
As the movie unfolds, it tracks the evolution of Knight’s consciousness—from a disillusioned Confederate soldier to a defender of poor farmers, to a skilled and resourceful guerrilla war leader, to a militant defender of black rights during Reconstruction. To avoid conscription, Knight reluctantly enlisted in the Confederate Army, and chose to serve as a battlefield orderly attending to wounded soldiers rather than fire his rifle at Union troops. When the Confederate Congress passed the “Twenty Negro Law,” which exempted planters who owned 20 or more slaves from military service, Knight and his friend Jasper Collins were infuriated. The film shows Collins declaring that this law “makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as he threw down his weapon and left the Confederate Army for good. Newton soon followed Collins out of the Southern military, turning his back to the Confederacy and his guns against it.
Knight returned to a home ravaged by the Confederacy’s hated “tax-in-kind” seizures that left small farmers and their families destitute and near starvation. Appalled by these conditions, Knight decided to intercede on behalf of his neighbors, arming and training them to confront Confederate soldiers. In one scene, a mother and her young daughters, all armed under Knight’s leadership, successfully barred tax agents from pillaging their farm.
For those efforts, Knight was pursued by the authorities and their bloodhounds, and he found refuge among a group of runaway slaves living deep in the swamps of Piney Woods. He was led to them by Rachel (portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a domestic slave who provided the group with food and information on Confederate moves. She eventually became Knight’s lover, and later they lived together as husband and wife. Soon Knight was joined by other deserters, among them Jasper Collins.
As its ranks swelled, the band of deserters and runaway slaves organized themselves into a guerrilla force, elected Knight their captain and vowed to do what they could to aid the Union. They ambushed Southern troops, destroyed railroads, burned bridges and raided plantations and food warehouses. In one powerful scene, armed men and women, black and white, avenge the execution of their comrades at the hands of Confederate officials by using the funeral as a cover to launch a surprise attack on Confederate soldiers. The film powerfully shows the important role that arms have long played in the struggle for black rights—and the rights of all the oppressed.
In the spring of 1864, the Knight militia chased the Confederate forces out of Jones County and raised the federal flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The film shows Knight enunciating a series of principles in declaring the Free State of Jones, including: “Every man is a man—If you walk on two legs, you’re a man” and “No man ought to stay poor so another man can get rich.”
By 1876, Knight had retreated to his farm on the Jasper County border. He and Rachel had five children together. Knight also fathered nine children with his first (white) wife, Serena, and the two families lived on the same farm. He deeded Rachel 160 acres of land to secure her independence. Newton Knight died in 1922 at the age of 84. Defying segregation laws, he instructed that he should be buried next to Rachel. His gravestone, with an emblem of his beloved shotgun, reads: “He Lived For Others.”
The Myth of “White Skin Privilege”
Free State of Jones has generated a fair amount of criticism, notably from some liberal black commentators who have screeched against its portrayal of Knight as a “white savior.” In a June 27 article, New York Times columnist Charles Blow claimed that the movie “centers on the ally instead of the enslaved.” Blow willfully distorts the fact that it was the runaway slaves who saved Knight, not the other way around. They sheltered him, tended to his wounds and taught him how to survive in the swamps.
Blow claims that the film “purges” slavery “of too much of its barbarism.” Yet much of the power of the film is precisely that it portrays slaves not just as tortured victims of a barbaric system—though that reality is omnipresent—but also as members of an organized force in rebellion against their oppressors. Newton Knight was not a fiction. He was a historical figure, and the movie accurately tells his story based on historical research, particularly Victoria Bynum’s The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2001).
In fact, the film punctures many of the myths that have long been promoted to bury the true history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Under the racist ideology of the “lost cause,” the South supposedly fought for home and independence, while the North fought for the Union—with slavery all but written out of the account. Reconstruction was deemed the worst period in U.S. history, born of a vindictive North that forced military rule on the South and imposed “Negro domination.”
As Gary Ross, the director of Free State of Jones, points out on the film’s website, popular depictions of Reconstruction are captured by movies like Birth of a Nation (1915), “a racist film that misleads, rewrites, and obscures the truth about Reconstruction.” Similarly, Gone with the Wind (1939) mourns the destruction of the “Southern way of life” in the wake of the war. In reality, the “lost cause” of the Civil War was slavery, as Confederate leaders openly proclaimed at the time.
Yet today, Knight’s race rankles in an age in which “white skin privilege,” the lie that all white people benefit from black oppression, has become common currency on college campuses and in liberal milieus. This idea denies that class divisions exist within the white population and that racial oppression serves to deepen the exploitation of all workers. The horrific conditions of life—rotten schools and dilapidated housing, widespread unemployment and low-wage jobs, no health care—that blacks and immigrant workers have long endured are now increasingly faced by the working class as a whole. The mythology of “white skin privilege” is born of despair that rejects integrated class and social struggle to beat back the attacks of the capitalist rulers, or, at best, cannot even conceive of it.
In a hostile review in The Atlantic (28 June), Vann Newkirk wrote: “The film’s ideas about race and its main character Knight are textbook examples of how not to have conversations about white privilege, ‘allyship,’ and black struggle.” Newkirk charges that the film sidesteps “the racial politics of a mixed-race insurgency in the South” and portrays the escaped slaves as being “impossibly trusting” of Knight. In fact, the film does not shy away from depicting the race prejudice of some of the militia’s white members—and of Knight’s struggle with them, notwithstanding the liberal lie that racial divisions are fixed and unalterable. Whether consciously or not, the film reflects the vitally important reality that united struggle by the oppressed tends to break down racial, ethnic and other divisions.
Reconstruction: A Promise Betrayed
While overwhelmingly accurate, Free State of Jones does have at least one serious inaccuracy. After raising the Union flag in Ellisville, the film shows Knight sending one of his men to Union general William T. Sherman to appeal for aid, but only getting 100 rifles. Feeling abandoned, Knight then addresses his supporters, telling them, “we’re kinda our own country,” and issues the decree establishing the Free State of Jones. Actually, there is evidence that Sherman forwarded the support request up the chain of command and that there were several attempts by Union commanders to send aid, including 400 rifles, but they were captured by Confederate forces. As Knight himself explained in a 1921 interview, “The Federals sent a company to recruit us. That company was waylaid by some Confederates near Rocky Creek. It surrendered.”
The movie also gives short shrift to the period of Reconstruction, though it contains scenes, some of them unique in Hollywood cinematography, that powerfully evoke the post-Civil War reality in the South. We see a plantation owner cynically pronouncing an oath of allegiance to the Union and then getting back his land. The scene refers to the period of Presidential Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War. That period began when Vice President Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist, assumed the presidency following the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865. Later that year, the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery. However, Johnson carried out a policy of conciliation toward the South, amnestying leaders of the defeated Confederacy and returning them to power.
Meanwhile, many Southern states enacted Black Codes that all but re-enslaved blacks. They included forced labor contracts, which specified that black “servants” who quit their jobs would be arrested and returned to their “masters,” and vagrancy laws under which blacks could be arrested and “hired out” to white employers if they couldn’t prove they had a job. Another source of labor for white employers was provided by “apprenticeship” laws whereby black children could be forcibly assigned to employers.
Knight continued his fight during Reconstruction. In 1872 he was appointed deputy U.S. marshal for the Southern District, and in 1875 he became a colonel of the First Regiment Infantry of Jasper County, an otherwise all-black regiment. He was also assigned to rescue black children held by planters as virtual slaves. One scene shows Knight paying a plantation owner in order to free a black child who had been kidnapped and consigned to “apprenticeship.” In reality, the freeing of “apprentices” was often more forceful than depicted in the film.
In 1866, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which defined citizenship for the first time in U.S. history and granted it to the former slaves. By the following year, Congress had taken control of Reconstruction, overriding Johnson’s repeated vetoes and even impeaching him (though falling short of removing him from office by one vote). Radical Republicans in Congress carried out what became known as Radical Reconstruction—or “Military Reconstruction,” as it is termed in the movie. That brief, tumultuous and extraordinary period was the most democratic and racially egalitarian in American history. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and ’68 placed the Southern states under military rule and imposed manhood suffrage without regard to race. The right of all male citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was formalized nationally in 1870 with passage of the 15th Amendment.
The former slaves voted enthusiastically at rates as high as 90 percent, sending 14 representatives to the House and two to the Senate (both from Mississippi). P.B.S. Pinchback, a black man, briefly served as governor of Louisiana. Nearly 700 black men sat in various state legislatures, and hundreds of others served in local posts, including as judges. For the first time, a public education system for black people as well as impoverished whites was established in the South, although the schools were largely segregated by race. Union Leagues organized the vote and self-defense against racist terror. They offered education in citizenship and protection in numbers.
What made these achievements possible were the federal troops, many of them black, stationed in the South to suppress resistance by the former slavocracy, which was organized in the Democratic Party and its Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist auxiliaries. But while Radical Reconstruction provided unprecedented political rights for the former slaves, it did not address the fundamental question of land. Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens fought to break up the landed estates of the former slavocracy, and to redistribute the land to the freedmen and to landless whites, underlining that this would cement a political alliance between blacks and poor whites.
But the American bourgeoisie was not interested in a thoroughgoing social reconstruction of the South. Whatever their views on political rights for black people, the vast majority of Republicans adamantly opposed land confiscation. The bourgeoisie’s aim was not to create a class of independent black yeomen farmers but to get the black agricultural workforce back to toiling for the landowners.
The refusal to distribute land to the freedmen drove many back onto the plantations as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, where they were tied to the land through contracts and loans and forced into permanent debt peonage. The movie evokes that reality with a scene of former slaves toiling on a plantation under conditions of gang labor, not far removed from slavery.
As calls for “reconciliation” with the former Confederacy grew louder, the Northern bourgeoisie began a gradual retreat from Reconstruction. Laws disenfranchising former Confederate leaders were repealed. Quickly, the states fell under Democratic Party control. Scenes in Free State show KKK nightriders sowing terror and burning down a black church. Another scene shows a march of a mostly black Union League contingent on election day to cast their votes. The armed contingent forces local officials to accept their Republican ballots, which are then not included in the vote tally. The unstated background to that scene was the “Mississippi Plan,” an open campaign of terror by the Democratic Party and its murderous auxiliaries that effectively destroyed the Republican Party in the South.
The fate of Reconstruction was finally sealed in the Compromise of 1877. In exchange for Republican Rutherford Hayes getting the presidency, the few hundred federal troops remaining in the South were pulled out. Some of those troops were dispatched to wage war on Native Americans. Others were sent to repress the Great Rail Strike of 1877, the first nationwide strike in the country. While the Compromise of 1877 was the culmination of a process of treachery by the bourgeoisie, it did represent a decisive statement by the federal government that it would no longer intervene on behalf of black people in the South.
The post-Reconstruction period, cynically called “Redemption” by racists, was marked by a political counterrevolution aimed at black people and enforced by race terror. Black people continued to tenaciously and courageously fight for their rights. But, abandoned by the capitalist rulers, they could not stem the reversal of their hard-won rights. Within one to two decades, Southern states expanded the convict lease system and instituted rigid Jim Crow segregation, enforced through lynch law and given legal sanction with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision. (See “Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom,” WV Nos. 1039 and 1040, 7 and 21 February 2014).
For Multiracial Class Struggle
The story of Newton Knight’s militia puts the lie to the claims of a unified Southern white populace and loyal slaves resisting the “invading Yankees.” The farmers of Jones County were not alone in their opposition to the Confederacy. While most Southern whites supported slavery, only a quarter or so were slave owners. Many white farmers, forced to fight for a system in which they had no stake, turned against the Confederacy, especially in opposition to the seizure of their crops and livestock to support the war. Fully one-eighth of all Confederate troops deserted during the course of the war.
Counties in western Virginia seceded in 1861 from the Confederacy and joined the Union in 1863 as a separate state, West Virginia. In East Tennessee, Unionists declared the state’s secession null and void, and some 31,000 white Tennesseans joined the Union Army. The First Alabama Cavalry, a thousand-strong regiment, was the headquarters escort during Sherman’s march to the sea. They were among the more than 100,000 white Southerners who served in the Union Army. Meanwhile, with every Union advance, countless slaves escaped the plantations, depriving the Confederacy of its labor force.
The Civil War was the last great, progressive act of American capitalism, when, for a short time, the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with those of black people in the fight against slavery. To further the consolidation of industrial capitalism, the North was compelled to destroy the system of chattel slavery, which had become an obstacle to capitalist expansion. Slavery was smashed, but its legacy of racial oppression lives on as the bedrock of American capitalism.
The legacy of slavery is invoked in scenes threaded throughout Free State of Jones that fast-forward to the 1948 trial and conviction of Knight and Rachel’s great-grandson, Davis Knight. He was accused of “miscegenation,” the racists’ term for interracial marriage and sex. Two years before his trial, Davis had married a white woman. Based on the “one drop of black blood” rule, “anti-miscegenation” laws were enacted throughout Southern states during the Jim Crow era. They remained on the books until 1967 when, at the height of the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court invalidated them in the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision.
Karl Marx spoke the great truth about America when he wrote, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The central enduring feature of American capitalism is the structural oppression of the black population. Obscuring the fundamental class division between the capitalists who own the means of production and the working class who must sell their labor power to survive, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist exploiters based on the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color.
But black or white, native-born or immigrant—the whole of the working class has a common interest in combating black oppression and sweeping away the capitalist order. The key is to bring that understanding to the proletariat. The road to black liberation lies in the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party that will lead the multiracial working class in the fight for socialist revolution, a third American revolution in which black workers are slated to play a leading role.
As racist police terror continues to spark outrage, liberals and many leftists, including Black Lives Matter activists, remain wedded to the illusion that the cops, who are the armed thugs of the capitalist state, can be reformed to act in the interests of the oppressed. As elaborated in the 1938 founding principles of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the “democratic” American state is an instrument for enforcing exploitation and repression by the ruling class.
In any society, the real power is held by those who own and control the means whereby that society lives, the instruments of production, distribution, and communication. In capitalist society, such ownership and control is held and exercised by the big bourgeoisie, by the bankers and industrialists. Through its hold on the major natural resources, the factories, mines, banks, railroads, ships, airplanes, telegraph, radio, and press, the big bourgeoisie effectively dominates capitalist society, runs society in such a manner as to secure and maintain its own interest and privilege, and upholds the system of the exploitation of the great majority. The state or government, far from representing the general interests of society as a whole, is in the last analysis simply the political instrument through which the owning class exercises and maintains its power, enforces the property relations which guarantee its privileges, and suppresses the working class. In these essential functions all of the organs and institutions of the state power cooperate—the bureaucracy, the courts, police, prisons, and the armed forces. The particular political forms of capitalist society (monarchy, democracy, military dictatorship, fascism) in no way affect the basic social dictatorship of the controlling minority, and are only the different means through which that dictatorship expresses itself. The belief that in such a country as the United States we live in a free, democratic society, in which fundamental economic change can be effected by persuasion, by education, by legal and purely parliamentary methods, is an illusion. In the United States, as in all capitalist nations, we live, in actuality, under a capitalist dictatorship; and the possibilities for purely legal and constitutional change are therefore limited to those which fall within the framework of capitalist property and social relations, which later are severely curtailed by the circumstances of the decline of capitalism and in the long run, if the capitalist dictatorship continues, involve fascism for the United States as elsewhere. Genuine freedom can be realized only in a society based upon the economic and social equality of all individuals composing it, and such equality can be achieved only when the basic means of production, distribution, and communication are owned and controlled, not by any special class or group, but by society as a whole.
—Socialist Workers Party, Declaration of Principles (1938)
Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of The “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby” World -The 1950s
A YouTube film clip from the movie American Graffiti to set the mood for the piece below.
By Josh Breslin
A Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of Tom Wolfe's “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby.”
There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the hoary Cold War the- atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-and-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that around. Some people, mostly older, whom I knew along the way in my life, while I was doing one thing or another, got caught up in that dragnet, that “red scare” dragnet, and took a beating over it, sometimes a physically beating but definitely a beating of their psyche, with or without the physical part. All for the simple proposition, when you think about it, that working people, and the people I am talking about to a person were working people not the high-flown intellectuals who abandoned ship when things got too hot, that those who make the goods of this sad old world, I mean really make the stuff, should make the rules. I’ll tell you more on that some other time but today I want to about cars, just about cars, about guys crazy about them and the girls crazy about the guys crazy about them, and about what they meant, no, what they really meant back then.
Like I say there was a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more aerodynamically-refined, more powerfully-engined, especially the powerfully-engined part but also with a classy chassis, the better. Some people who ought to know, like wannabe “gonzo” journalist Tom Wolfe who got me started on this screed from an old article that I have used as part of the title here that he wrote in “Esquire” magazine in 1963 or a real “gonzo” journalist like Hunter Thompson, except it was motorcycles too, or maybe James Dean himself who knows, say the madness started even before then, the fifties that is, back at the tail end of the Second World War. Their idea is that there was so much money around, war boom production government dough, especially so much dough around for Depression-raised “no dough” kids that the kids, if you can believe this, started going after cars and, as kids will, taking the old-fashioned ones like Hudsons, Studebakers and old time Fords and “souping” them up. That is once cars started being produced again, instead of tanks, lots of tanks, in Detroit.
Not only that, according to the stories, the kids started to get a little whacky about it. Like spending all their time hammering down heavy chrome fender and bopping to get it just right, eternally , oil-drenched, grease-monkeyed engine-tweaking, forever high-end rear axle-lifting, and, don’t forget, applying rainbow color-coded flash-painting (and, maybe, decaling). And trying to look cool while doing it and…well, and trying to impress the be-bop, short shorts wearing, slinky, saucy, sultry (did I leave anything out) tweeny-teeny girls who just happened to be walking by.
And once you start trying to impress girls, or once you actually did impress them, then the only thing left was how you were going to feed them. I mean the girls not the cars, although come to think of it maybe I am thinking of the cars. Nah. Well, sure what else is a guy to do but run down to the ubiquitous now slice-of-nostalgic- Americana, save it for “American Graffiti” drive-in food shack, complete with short-skirted bunny hoppers waiting on you and your cravings natch. And then you were up against how you were going to excite them with all that power, car power that is, natch again, on those barely asphalt ,one lane, lonesome road Saturday night “chicken” runs out on the edge of the universe, at least it seemed like that on star-studded nights. So, the long and short of it is that a little cult kind of thing got going, or maybe it was just teenagers being teenagers. I don’t know but it sounds real good, doesn’t it.
Still I don’t really know about that story, good as it sounds, because it was suppose to be kind of a West Coast kid thing. Figures, right? You know, all those guys who couldn’t get close enough, or want to get close enough, to the water to be surfer guys, or just didn’t know what the heck “hanging ten” was all about, or didn’t care. Or, maybe, from another angle, because I have heard these kinds of stories too, just Southern good old boys running white liquor through the hollows and back roads of some woe begotten mountain valley beating hell out of the revenue agents. The easy part is beating those revenue guys but you need serious wheels to beat through muddy-encrusted back roads and hollows down Appalachia way and you had better have that big old V-8 “souped-up”, I don’t think a Super 6 would do it, to beat the band if you did not want to spent your sweet roll, high-kicking young life in some old jail, state or federal, take your pick. I am closer to the nut on that story seeing as my father came from there, down in those hollows and those winding roads and those mountain mists and breezes, but still it just ain’t my madness story.
Really, I want to tell you about what I know about the madness and so I have to go from the 1950s. Like I say I don’t know, first hand anyway, about those other locales, their ethos, their humors or their quirks. I just don’t. See I think, for one thing, that those guys telling those earlier stories are just piecing us off by making it a cult thing or a small sub-set of a subset of a cult, or maybe just trying to tell colorful stories to make up for that “red scare” stuff that doesn’t sound right about America. You know democracy and all that stuff while you are running people out of town on a rail for just talking “red talk”, or trying to.
Besides, this story wasn’t just about, deafeningly mad as they were, those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not types bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, no sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run. No way, it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t even just those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys either. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be) because this guy is “cute”. Go figure, right? , Aw, maybe I don’t like her all that much anyway, and we all have to fend for ourselves when the deal goes down. Jesus, a monosyllabic (uh) soda jerk. Come on, sis.
No, and, by the way, forget all those stereotypes that they, the writers and film guys, like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color”, or tap into “baby-boomer” nostalgia, to the desperately color-craving 1950s. With their monotonous line-up of blond, slick-haired, California sun-drenched, devil may care, second generation “Okie” car jockeys. This car madness really was driven, driven hard, driven white-knuckled hard right to the edge, by East Coast non-blond, non-slick, non-“Okie” guys like Stu who lived down the end of my growing up street. Down the car-wreck-filled, oil-slick splashed, gas-fume-smelling dead-end of my run down old working class, edge of the working class getting poorer not richer, neighborhood ready for the bulldozer anytime street.
And Stu was the “king” there. If such a place could have a king he was it, no question, and nobody, not us kids anyway, questioned his lordship. Stu, kind of non-descript, pimply-faced, deceptively Saturday afternoon television wrestler overweight although we swore, or we would swear, that he was just big. Hands so permanently oil-stained, so deeply gritted, that no Borax could ever penetrate. Wearing some kind of grease-ladened denims to accompany those hands too, when denim meant Farmer Brown more than fashionista. Mussed–up hair unfurled at odd angles like maybe he had just enough time for a “bowl cut” from some younger brother or maybe his mother before he got back under the hood or under the body where he “breathed’ the rarified air that kept him going. And always, always a “what the hell” smirk like he knew, and knew for certain, about the nature of the universe, as the smoke from his ever-present cigarette wrapped around in rings his (and your) head, and seemed to tell of new techniques learned and just a little more power gotten out of that old ’57 Chevy primo boss wagon that had all us neighborhood kids on the prowl for a ride (that we never ever got, but that’s a different story and you can figure out why after what I tell you next).
Ya, but that is not all, no, not by a long shot. Here is where you got to figure something is awry in the universe, or at least you’ve got to think of that possibility. “Stew-ball” Stu (that’s what we called him, although not to his face, for there was always the faint smell, and sometimes not so faint, of liquor, hard liquor like whiskey or scotch or who knows, maybe, Southern Comfort, it was cheap enough then, coming out of that tobacco-infested mouth of his) always had “babes” around. Hell, there were always a ton of them fussing over him and I swear I am not exaggerating because I would have been happy, very happy, to have one of his cast-offs, if I had been just a little older, and a lot wiser. And these were not just some old mirror-image Stu babes. These girls were “hot”, 1950s “hot”, ya, but still hot. A more mysterious, secretive, selective, “I wonder what she really looks like underneath” hot than today when you know, and know for certain, who is hot without having to ask that question.
I can still picture those oceans of flowing hair, that sea of tight jeans and stretch pants and those cashmere sweaters and who knows what else underneath, and what do I know what else, or care, because all I know is that to a supposedly oblivious young buck that I still was back then they smelled nice and a boy/man can dream, can’t he? And high school dropout, couldn’t care if school kept or not, getting grease all over him, and maybe all over them Stu just kind of ignoring them. Ignoring them! Can you beat that?
Ya, but see here is what I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the late night beach Stu. The Stu watching the “submarine” races down by the now tepid ocean shore, with the waves apologizing to the beach sand for splashing it, with some quick choice girl. And they, the girls that is, were standing to line, just to get in line. And who is to say, and at least who am I too say, that they were wrong. It was a ’57 Chevy, after all. Did you hear me? I said it was a ’57 Chevy that had all the girls trembling like Stu was Elvis or something. But here is what burns me up even today. Those girls weren’t interested, weren’t interested in the least, in what old Stu had read lately, or whether he even read anything at all, like I tried to use as my calling card back then to wow the girls, unsuccessfully. Hell, and you wonder why I speak of madness. Let me out of this place.
Sally Soren’s Folk Minute-With Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, 3 CD set, Smithstonian/Folkway, 1988
No question Sally Soren, Sal to her coming of age friends in Gloversville out in the wilds of Massachusetts, meaning outside of fifty miles of Boston and so a little late in most trends as they spread out to the radius had a voice that would make the angels weep for their inadequacies once she hit that high white note that every singer and every instrumentalist dreams of hitting. Hitting that big fat note and then have it drift unto the bay or the seas to head to far off lands to let them too weep like their brethren angels. Sal had dreamed of a career in music, maybe in opera, maybe in some chorus or choir doing the big finish solos, maybe on Broadway if things worked out. Of course that desire was tempered by the reality that her parents, Phil and Nancy, were devout members of the Brethren of the Common Life, an off-shoot about a hundred years before from the Mennonites out in Ohio. A schism of some sort which left both sides not on speaking terms since both sides saw the other as “infidels” and heathens when the heaven deal went down.
Now all of this schism business, all the religious factionalism wouldn’t ordinarily stop any young musical talent from sweeping the angels aside with their voices. Wouldn’t have stopped Sal if she had grown up in another family from taking a shot at opera, Broadway, whatever but these Brethren folk, Sal’s folks did not believe that the human voice should be used for any other purpose that to sing praises to the Lord, to God and certainly not be used to make those disgruntled angels weep. So one Sal Soren was forced to hide her light under a basket, had to sing, officially sing anyway, only come the weekly gatherings at church on Thursday night and Sunday morning. She was destined to not show her stuff.
Maybe the Brethren could have imposed their strict dicta a lot better when they were out in an isolated community in rural Ohio in the late 19th century. But Sal lived in the quick start 1960s, had come of age when things were jumping and although she might have been behind the curve where social trends were concerned she was not living in a bubble. So she came in contact with the wicked old world when she began Gloversville High after her family had moved there when her father’s company had moved to be nearer the high technology industries that were booming along Route 128 in the ring around Boston. Moreover beside that lovely voice Sal was a beauty, had long brownish blonde hair worn straight in the Brethren manner, had a slender figure, great well-turned legs and a winning natural smile and despite her somewhat social backwardness had a winning personality to match. Pretty smart too. In other words a target for every high school boy with blood in his veins to take a run at.
At first Sal dismissed every “hit” out of hand not knowing exactly what to do under the circumstances except she knew that her parents would not approve of her speaking to boys, especially non-Brethren boys of which there were virtually none in Massachusetts. Those that did live in the state were out in the Berkshires someplace. So Sal lived a life of what some long ago poet of quiet desperation. But go back to that time frame in which Sal came of age-the early 1960s in America. Put that together with the fierce determination of one Bradley Fox to get past step one with Sal, get way past step one that even an ignorant Brethren boy would understand.
One day as he was walking past the Soren homestead he heard Sal sitting on her front porch singing something he thought sounded like the old redemption hymn Amazing Grace although the words were different from what he had heard when it was sung by the choir at his church. That was his “hook.” That night he was almost feverish thinking up lines to use to break the ice with Sal, to get her to not dismiss him out of hand like she had half of his friends (the other half had given up before they even started based on that mass of previous strike-outs). The next day as he passed Sal at her locker he started humming the melody to Amazing Grace and out of the blue she asked him whether that song he was humming was Amazing Grace. Bingo. Bradley told her that was his favorite hymn at his church, that he really liked church music and so much other blather. Sal said she thought that was ironic since she was preparing to sing that hymn, or the Brethren version of that song at the next Sunday gathering. Naturally Brad asked what other hymns she knew and would she sing them to him. Sal gave him a bright smile and said she would not ordinarily do so but since it was church music she would meet him at Rockland Park after school and sing him some of the hymns that she knew if he was interested.
That afternoon started the education of Sal Soren in the modern world, the teenage world of Gloversville after she performed for Bradley. Of course Bradley asked her out and got a big blank from her. When he asked why she told him of her religious beliefs, really her parents’ which precluded going on any date with a non-Brethren boy.
Here though is where Bradley knew a thing or two about how to win over parents, or at least these parents. See Bradley was all hopped up on the folk scene in Cambridge where there had been an explosion of people singing roots music, searching for some kind authentic America that they didn’t see around them just then. So everybody was familiar with Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and familiar too that old crazy like a fox Harry had put a big helping of hymnal music from the folk, black and white, down South in the eighty or so songs that made up his anthology. Bradley told Sal that he wished to meet her parents to ask them for permission to take her on a date. Although he did not call it a date, said he was taking her to a place where they sang hymns that he loved and that he hoped she would too. To round out his plan he gave them a few hymns like Great God Jehovah and Higher Love that he thought would be played there. Told them that he and Sal would be going to a social (he didn’t say church social although he had that as a back-up if they balked he was that ready to tempt hell to get at Sal). Of course all he was really doing was trying to snow Sal parents since what he was going to do was take her to a folk club, a coffeehouse in Cambridge.
Somehow they bought his story, allowed Sal to go with him (except not on Saturday night since they had their gathering the next morning early). They had a great time after Sal got over the fact that Bradley wasn’t completely truthful to her parents, or to her for that matter. She liked the music played (not one hymn) and peppered him with questions about who was singing and where the songs came from. Sal and Bradley would go together all through the rest of high school and the first couple of years he was in college before Sal decided that she had to move to New York, to Greenwich Village, to see if she could make a go of it as a folk singer (she did, but not under the name Sal Soren). By then Bradley Fox knew every hymn in old Harry Smith’s anthology (and a few more) to get Sal out of the house. Knew them cold. What do you think about that my friends. For the rest of what Harry had gathered in his travels check this three CD compilation out.
