Friday, October 09, 2020

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-All Honor To “General” Harriet Tubman

Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for “General” Harriet Tubman

February Is Black History. March Is Women’s History Month. Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits. Any one , or all, of those reasons can be used as the reason to honor “General” Harriet Tubman


Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

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The Revolutionary Vanguard of the Civil War

Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom


Toward the end of her long life, the black abolitionist Harriet Tubman commented on her years of service to the liberation of black people in a conversation with a journalist:

"She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: 'Do you like apples?' On being assured that I did, she said: 'Did you ever plant any apple trees?' With shame I confessed I had not. 'No/ said she, 'but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said, "Some day I'll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat," and I guess I did it'."

—Frank C. Drake, The New York Herald, 22 September 1907, quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman

In this simple metaphor, Tubman recognized the vanguard role she played in laying the groundwork for black freedom in the United States in the revolution that was the Civil War. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a military strategist and spy during the war, "General" Tubman, as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. Like John Brown, the heroic martyr of the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and the outstanding political leader of the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass, Tubman knew that freedom for the slave would come about only through blood and iron. Harriet Tubman's life is a microcosm of the struggle for black liberation in the
19th century; her life directly reflects the issues of the time.

Although the hope for a complete liberation of black people was later defeated in the cowardly betrayal of Reconstruction, Tubman's "apple orchard"—freedom for the slave—was a tremendous historical advance. The abolition of slavery and the fight for full citizenship for the black population was the great historic task of the Civil War, the second American Revolution, which carried forward the unfinished business of the first American Revolution.

The abolitionist movement was part of a broader bourgeois radicalism, the 19th century descendant of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. The abolitionists were part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820, encompassing such movements as Transcendentalism and Unitarianism. Particularly among the most politically radical wing, the abolitionists were motivated by a vision of human emancipation profoundly rooted in religion. To men like the clergymen Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker, slavery was an abomination to god and the Christian Bible and a gross betrayal of the rights of man as put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Although slavery was their pre-eminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers' rights. The women's suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. The most deeply committed and politically astute of these revolutionary democrats, like Frederick Douglass, understood that the fight against slavery must be generalized into a struggle against all oppression. As the abolitionist and women's rights leader Angelina Grimke' said at the May 1863 meeting of the Women's Loyal League, a convention of support for the North in the Civil War, "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours" (see "The Grimke' Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights," W&R No. 29, Spring 1985).

The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom—which included years as a soldier in the Union Army—she lived in poverty all her life.

A fugitive from bondage, black and a woman, Tubman triumphed over exceptional odds to become a leader of the second American Revolution. Like Frederick Douglass, she was able to generalize her bitter and brutal experience of oppression into a revolutionary social consciousness and a determination to fight for all the oppressed. She was an advocate of militant political action and revolutionary insurrectionism. As opposed to the "moral suasion" Garrisonian wing, she was part of the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement. As the "Moses" of her people on the Underground Railroad, Tubman was famous throughout the U.S. and beyond by the time of the war.

However, many details about her work are obscure, since she operated in the secrecy of what was essentially a revolutionary underground. She was illiterate, and much of what is known about her life comes from a biography of her by Sarah Bradford, who interviewed Tubman as an old woman (quotes from Tubman which were originally printed in dialect are here transposed into modern English spelling). Thus much of the story of her life must be told by others, especially by Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared the conviction, through the bleak decade of the 1850s, that the coming war must crush the slave system and break the bonds of black oppression. She was a co-worker and friend not only to John Brown and Douglass, but to many other key figures of her time, from abolitionist William H. Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, to Sojourner Truth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips and Gerrit Smith. She knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and most of the leading women's rights activists of her day.
Douglass honored Tubman's role in a letter written in 1868, in which he defended her right to an army pension as a Civil War veteran:

"The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encourage¬ment at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt 'Cod bless you' has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you."

—quoted in Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman; The Moses of Her People
Slave vs. Free in the Antebellum U.S.

Like Frederick Douglass, Tubman was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland, probably in 1820. At that time the country was embroiled in the first of the major fights over slavery and the expanding U.S. territory, "resolved" in this instance by the Missouri Compro¬mise of 1820.

Since the founding of the U.S. in the late 18th century, when the slave system was left intact throughout the South, two economic systems, capitalism and slavery, coexisted within one country. The inevitable clash of economic interest which must lead to the victory of one over the other was postponed in a series of "compromises" centering on the maintenance of control by the slave states over the relatively weak federal government. But. the underlying economic conflicts between the two systems eventually reached the point at which compromise was no longer possible. The development of large-scale industrial capitalism required wage labor to exploit, the source of its tremendous profits, as well as a mobile and at least somewhat educated working population. Key to capitalist expansion was control of a growing home market. In contrast, the slave system was based on primitive, labor-intensive agricultural production; the slaveowners sought new lands to increase the highly profitable slave trade and to move plantations to fresh, non-exhausted soil. The clash came to a head over the huge, expanding territories of the West: would they be slave or free?

Karl Marx described the slow but inexorable sweep of political power by the slave states in their effort to increase control of the growing U.S.:

"The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic
northwest of the Ohio... The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30' latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed."

—Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19

In 1820, when Tubman was born, news of the first of these bitter debates undoubtedly reached even the slave quarters, however isolated the slaves were kept from news of the day. Perhaps the slaves with whom Tubman lived as a child heard rumors about the deep split in Congress over the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have prohibited the introduction of more slaves into Missouri and provided for gradual emancipation of those already there. This first great debate on slavery was a harbinger of things to come. Abandoning even his earlier, contradictory anti-slavery position altogether, Thomas Jefferson strongly opposed the Tallmadge Amendment. In 1821 he wrote, "All, I fear, do not see the speck on our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later."

As a child Tubman was acquainted with all the horrors of slavery. By the age of five or six she was at •work and suffering from whippings on her face and neck by a vicious mistress. Later she worked as a field hand. She was still a child at the time of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, put down by the slaveholders swiftly and ruthlessly. In 1832, the opposition of the agricultural South to the federal tariff designed to protect Northern industry led to the Nullification Crisis, in ' which South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The slaveholders' fear of black insurrection, sparked by Nat Turner's revolt, fueled their intransigence against the federal government.
Tubman was around 15 years old when the incident that literally marked her for life occurred. While trying to defend a fellow slave from the vindictiveness of the overseer, she was struck on the head with a two-pound iron weight which cracked her skull. For months she lingered between life and death, lying on rags in her family's slave cabin. The injury left a deep scar on her head and left her subject to spells of unconsciousness, sometimes three or four times a day, which plagued her for the rest of her life.

But instead of being crushed by the brutality of her life, Tubman hardened and determined to fight. When she recovered, she built up her physical strength until she could lift huge barrels of produce as well as a man, despite her small size. Her master would exhibit her strength as one of the "sights" of the plantation. She let people think her half-witted because of her brain injury, and plotted her escape. She began to experience daily visions, which inspired her driving commit¬ment to black freedom as part of a deeply personal religion.

In 1849, although it meant leaving her husband, a freeman who refused to go with her, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery. Rumor had reached her and her family that their owners planned to sell them to the deep South, a dreaded fear of every slave in the bor¬der states. Already two of her sisters had been sent off in a chain gang, separated from their children. Her brothers lost courage for the escape; Tubman went on alone. As she later told Bradford: "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me."
Aided by a white woman who gave her the first address of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made her way North, traveling at night. "I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter.... But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also." Cooking and laundering to support herself, she began the life of a fugitive slave in the North.

The 1850s: The Irrepressible Conflict at the Boiling Point

Tubman arrived in the North on the eve of the biggest struggle yet over the question of slavery. Congressional debate sparked over California's petition for admission to the Union as a free state continued for months, while legislatures and mass rallies North and South adopted fiery resolutions. Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states. Over time a compromise satisfactory to few on either side was worked out, largely due to the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster, who was voted out of his Senate seat by an enraged Massachusetts legislature in 1851. Webster was replaced by the uncompromising abolitionist radical, Charles Sumner. Later a leader of the Radical Republicans, in 1856, after a stirring anti-slavery speech, Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by a Southern Congressman.

The terms of the Compromise of 1850 centered on a series of tradeoffs: while California would be admitted as a free state, no restrictions on slavery were to be made in the Mexican cession; and while Washington, D.C. ceased to be a depot for the slave trade, the 1793 fugitive slave law was to be replaced with a much tougher version. This new law was an unspeakable atrocity, a threat to the lives and freedom of black people in every state. In his scathing indictment of hypocritical American "democracy," "July Fourth and the Negro" (5 July 1852), Frederick Douglass described it:

"For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave taw makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to near only his accusers.'

—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2

Many Northerners vowed to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, a long-time anti-slavery radical, defied even the army to enforce the statute: "Let the President... drench our land of freedom in blood; but he will never make us obey that law" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction). When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was kidnapped in 1854 under the law in Boston by a gang of thugs organized by the federal government and Burns' Virginian master, the city erupted in seething conflict from the halls of government to the men in the street. The local vigilance committee, dedicated to helping fugitive slaves, organized mass rallies; a badly coordinated assault on the federal courthouse failed to rescue Burns. The federal government and the slaveholders succeeded in returning Burns to slavery. But he was the last fugitive to be returned from anywhere in New England. In fact, nine Northern states passed per¬sonal liberty laws, effectively nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1859, the Southern-dominated Supreme Court struck down the personal liberty laws as unconstitutional.

One of Harriet Tubman's most publicized actions was the courageous rescue of a fugitive slave, Charles Nalle, from the Troy, New York court where he was pronounced guilty in 1860 under the Fugitive Slave Law. For several hours a battle raged between the abolitionists and the authorities until Tubman, with the help of others, seized Nalle and started him off on the journey to Canada.

But the North was by no means free of pro-slavery or racist forces. Many states had "black laws"; Indiana, Oregon, Illinois and Iowa all eventually passed statutes banning black migration into the state. These measures reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.reflected not only the racism of many whites in the states, but were an open conciliation to the South, stating in effect that fugitives would not be welcome.

Indeed, opposition to slavery was all too often based on the wish to exclude blacks altogether. And throughout the 1850s, as the abolitionist movement grew in strength, so did the pro-slavery mob. Tubman had first¬hand experience with the violence of the Northern racists when she was part of a defense guard for Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison at a Boston meeting in 1860, raided by pro-slavery hooligans.

The Underground Railroad

Under these conditions of mounting assaults on blacks, free and slave, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. Marked by her scarred head and subject to spells of unconsciousness, she faced incredible dangers which grew greater as the years passed. She raised money for her trips through her own labor and by fundraising among abolitionists. Given the secrecy of her missions and the price on her head—the slaveholders offered rewards totaling $40,000, an enormous sum in those days—there were few records of her 19 trips back South. She always carried a pistol and threatened to use it on those whose courage failed, on the principle that dead men carry no tales. In her native Maryland, where she returned many times to rescue dozens, including all but one of her entire family, so many slaves escaped that a panic broke out among the slaveholders, leading to the 1858 Southern Convention in Baltimore. Ancient laws were resurrected to crack down on escaping slaves; 89 free blacks were re-enslaved under a new law.

But Tubman continued her work up to the Civil War. She personally brought out some 300 people altogether, from all parts of the South. In the 1880s, she spoke of
these years at a meeting of women's suffragists in Rochester, New York: "Yes, ladies...I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." As Frederick Douglass said of the Underground Railroad:

"I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work. True, as a means of destroying slavery, it was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but the thought that there was one less slave, and one more freeman—having myself been a slave, and a fugitive slave—brought to my heart unspeakable joy."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Indeed, the political impact of the Underground Railroad spread beyond the comparatively small numbers it freed, which have been estimated at probably less than 1,000 a year out of a total slave population of four million. As an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk imprisonment or death in their work, it was a rallying point in abolition work. Speaking tours of ex-slaves, who described the horrors of their lives in bondage, won over many to abolition.

The vigilance committees not only helped to settle newly arrived blacks, but tried to fight the racism of the North.

Most importantly, the Underground Railroad effectively allowed the crystallization of a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the black historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote:
"Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coordinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic."

—W.E.B. DuBois, John Brown

It was becoming more and more clear that liberation for the American slave was a national task beyond the scope of local slave insurrections like Nat Turner's or Denmark Vesey's. Leadership for black emancipation thus developed in the North, among the core of militant ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— people like Douglass, Tubman, Brown, Wendell Phil¬lips and Charles Sumner. A small but crucial element of experienced radicals existed in the "Red 48ers/' European refugees from reaction following the crushing of the 1848 revolutions. Black, white, foreign-born, many of these later formed the left wing of the Republican Party.

The abolitionists were by no means a homogeneous group. One of the most famous abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, opposed all political activity—running for office, petitioning the government—on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery. Advocating "moral suasion," Garrison opposed the use of force in the fight against slavery. He finally ended up by proposing the secession of the North as the "answer"—which needless to say would have done nothing to end slavery.

Although Douglass and Brown originally subscribed to "moral suasion," they both soon realized that it was doomed to fail. Even the Underground Railroad, although constantly defying the slave system and the federal laws which protected it, was not a critical weapon to end slavery and as such was more inspirational than strategic. Douglass, Brown and Tubman embraced all means to fight slavery, from petitioning and agitation to armed self-defense and insurrection. As Douglass commented in 1852 at a national free-soil convention, "The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check" ("The Fugitive Slave Law," The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2). When the war broke out, it was Douglass and the other radical abolitionists who argued for the immediate freeing and arming of the slaves. Black insurrection at last would destroy the slave power: only that way could the Union Army win the war.

Harpers Ferry: The First Battle of the Civil War

As the years passed,to anti-slavery forces it seemed that the slaveholders were winning every battle. Every "compromise" increased the power of slavery. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruling on the Dred Scott case effectively extended the boundaries of slavery throughout the country. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Southern Democrat, led the court decision that residency in a free state did not free a slave and that the Missouri Compromise barring slavery in the Northern territories was unconstitutional. As Marx said, "... now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery" ("The North American Civil War," Collected Works, Vol. 19). Most notoriously, Taney wrote that blacks had no claim to U.S. citizenship under the Constitution because blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

But many abolitionists and free-soilers were determined to fight with every weapon available. To the free-soil farmers of the West, the expansion of slave-based agriculture was a direct threat. The South hindered by every possible means the colonization of the territories by free labor, seeking instead new lands for the plantation system and for the immensely profitable slave trade. Outraged free-state settlers organized in self-defense. When the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened Kansas to slavery under the dubious slogan of "popular sovereignty," border ruffians from the neighboring slave-state of Missouri spread terror and murder throughout the area to prevent a free-soil government from forming. John Brown and his followers, armed with rifles and the determination that slavery would not triumph, were key in the eventual victory of freedom in Bleeding Kansas.

It was shortly thereafter that Brown began to finalize and execute his plan to initiate a slave insurrection to found a black republic in the South. When Brown approached Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass and others (among whom were the Secret Six) in 1858 with his plan for launching a guerrilla war against the slavocracy, they recommended Tubman as the key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen who had settled in Canada, beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Her work in bringing slaves out of the South gave her not only detailed knowledge of the terrain throughout Brown's planned Appalachian route, but invaluable military experience. Brown went to meet the woman he called "General Tubman" at St. Catherines in Canada; she enthusiastically embraced his plan for arming the slaves and setting up mountain strongholds from which to wage war against slavery.

Tubman agreed to recruit followers and raise money for the plan. She also may have attended the Chatham, Ontario convention in May 1858, where Brown and his followers discussed the constitution for the new black republic. A sternly religious man not given to superlatives, Brown wrote to his son: "Hariet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He Hariet is the most of a man naturally; that / ever met with. There is the most abundant material; & of the right quality; in this quarter; beyond all doubt" (quoted in Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood).

But when the time came to launch the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry which was to begin the guerrilla war, Tubman was ill and out of reach. Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, kept her from being with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Thus Tubman was not there when federal troops dispatched by President Buchanan and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart rounded up Brown and his men. A few escaped; of the rest, those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia. At his execution in December 1859, John Brown's last, prescient words spoke of the years to come: "I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done" (ibid., emphasis in original). In the North John Brown's martyrdom was a rallying cry for abolition, while hysterical fear of insurrection swept the South and led to lynchings of suspected agitators. In later years Harriet Tubman spoke of Brown, "We Negroes in the South never call him John Brown; we call him our Saviour. He died for us."

The Civil War Years

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 out of the struggle for Kansas. For the 1860 presidential election the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln as a moderate capable of winning wider support than more radical candidates. Although he opposed the expan¬sion of slavery, Lincoln's platform did not call for its elimination in the states where it already existed. Lincoln explicitly denounced John Brown's raid and declared his execution just. But Lincoln was still too anti-slavery for the South, and the secession of (eventually) eleven states led to the Confederate States of America. The Northern government, hoping for yet another compromise, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the war, which was forced on them by the slaveholders' cannons at Fort Sumter. To Lincoln and the majority of the Northern ruling class, the goal of the war was not to end slavery but to put down the secession of the South.
Harriet Tubman again saw further, earlier: that the war for the Union must become a war to free the slaves. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child quoted her words in a letter to the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (quoted in Conrad, op. c/t.):

"They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer and the ague in the winter— They may send them one year, two year, three year, till they tire of sending ortill they use upthe young men. All of no use. God is ahead of Mister Lincoln. Cod won't let Mister Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Mister Lincoln, he is a great man, and I'm a poor Negro; but this Negro can tell Mister Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free. Suppose there was an awfully big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. You send for the doctor to cut the bite; but the snake, he rolls up there, and while the doctor is doing it, he bites you again ... and so he keeps doing till you kill him. That's what Mister Lincoln ought to know."

But in the early months of the war Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in a military/political maneuver to woo secessionists and would-be secessionists into the Union. When General John C. Frernont, commander of the western depart¬ment, declared in August 1861 that all property of Missourians in rebellion was confiscated and the slaves emancipated, Lincoln fired him and rescinded the order. It took two years of ignominious defeats at the hands of the rebels to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the slaves. When it became clear by late 1862 that the North could not win the war in any other way, he made plans to issue the Emancipation Proclamation—finally ending the spirit of compromise which had immobilized the North:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."

Although the Emancipation Proclamation expressly left intact slavery in Union-loyal states like Maryland, January 1, 1863 was a day of rejoicing among all anti-slavery people. Douglass described his reaction:

"...I took the proclamation, first and last, for a little more than it purported, and saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter. Its meaning to me was the entire abolition of slavery, wherever the evil could be reached by the federal arm, and I saw that its moral power would extend much further."

—Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Almost as important as freedom itself was the government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. Harriet Tubman herself was within earshot of one of the first battles employing blacks in combat: the heroic assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863. It was here that the Massachusetts 54th, the first regiment of free Northern blacks, led by Tubman's friend Robert Gould Shaw, demonstrated before the eyes of the nation the courage and commitment of black soldiers. It was probably this battle Tubman was describing in her dramatic words: "And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped." From then on black soldiers were thrown into the fighting on all fronts, tipping the balance of power for the ultimate Northern victory against the slavocracy.
Fort Wagner was quite near to Port Royal, South Carolina, where Tubman spent most of the war years working for the Union Army. One of the earliest Union victories had liberated the lush Sea Islands from the slaveholders; from here the Union Army ran its Department of the South. Control of the port allowed Union gunboats to patrol the coastline from Savannah to Charleston and begin a blockade of Confederate shipping, cutting off trade between the cotton South and the textile merchants of Great Britain. Fugitive slaves and freedmen flocked to the protection of the Union Army. Abolitionists set up schools to teach the blacks, young and old, to read and write.

Here Tubman worked in the army's service in many capacities. Her authority as the "Moses" of the Underground Railroad was enormously important in reassuring the freedmen of the trustworthiness of the Yankees. As a nurse she first ministered predominantly to the blacks suffering from malnutrition. Later she nursed both black and white soldiers, going from camp to camp where men were dying of dysentery, smallpox and malaria. She set up a laundry and taught women to earn a living, while supporting herself by baking pies and brewing root beer at night after her hard day's labor.

Tubman's outstanding contribution to the war was as a Union spy and scout. General Hunter, the commander at Port Royal, recognized her expertise, tempered by her years in the Underground Railroad; under him Tubman organized a scouting service of black scouts and river pilots who surveyed and patrolled the Combahee River area in South Carolina.
In this capacity she was integral to a celebrated military action on the Combahee on 2 June 1863. Three ships under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the guerrilla battles in Kansas and a trusted comrade of John Brown, raided deep into South Carolina in a blow pointing forward to Sherman's march on Georgia. The Boston Commonwealth described the battle:

"Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy's country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch."

The liberated slaves were brought back to Port Royal, where the able-bodied men among them were inducted into Montgomery's regiment.

Reconstruction Betrayed

At the war's end in 1865, over 600,000 Americans lay dead—almost equal to the number of American deaths in all the rest of the nation's wars combined. It took this bloody conflagration to resolve two key questions in American history: the Civil War forged a loose confederation of individual states into a modern nation. And underlying this question of political power lay the conflict between slavery and capitalism. The black question is the linchpin of American history.

Northern industrialism, unfettered at long last from the opposition of the slaveholders, wasted no time. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. A federal protective tariff fostered the growth of domestic industry. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided for the free-soil colonization of the vast territories of the West.

But in 1865 the question of what position the newly liberated slaves should occupy in American society cried out for an answer. The initial conciliationist policy of the federal government under Andrew Johnson was strenuously opposed by the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Congressional legislation provided for full political equality for blacks: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are the legal codification of the gains of the Civil War. Slavery was wiped from the American Constitution, and blacks were made full citizens by law. The 15th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was passed to provide federal protection of blacks against Southern counterrevolu¬tionary violence. Black rights were enforced at riflepoint by the interracial Union Army.

But the foundation upon which black equality must rest was never laid: only confiscation of the huge plantation holdings of the ex-slaveowners and their distribution'among the ex-slaves would have laid the economic basis without which "equality" remained a legal formality. Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution— the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the econom¬ic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression.

Radical Reconstruction was destroyed in a political counterrevolution which stripped blacks of their newly won economic and political rights. Nightriding race-terrorists intimidated and murdered thefreedmen; the Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the war by ex-Confederate officers. The Compromise of 1877 codi¬fied the rollback of Reconstruction: the Republican Party bought the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops from the South. Over the years a new form of rural repression developed to replace the slave plantations. The Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement bound the liberated slaves to poverty and oppression as landless sharecroppers.

The betrayal of the struggle for black freedom was certainly experienced by Harriet Tubman. At the war's end, almost 50 years old, she was at last able to head for her home in Auburn, New York. Exhausted by her years of labor, subject to increasing bouts of sickness, and with family members looking to her for support, her active political life was essentially over. En route North she was beaten by a train conductor who ridiculed her Union pass, entitling her to free transportation as an army veteran. She was thrown into the baggage car, badly hurt and humiliated by this racist and sexist attack. She suffered from the effects of this injury for years. Then began a decades-long battle for the pension to which her three years of war service entitled her. Tubman commented scornfully, "You wouldn't think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds." She did not receive a penny until after the death of her second husband, Nelson Davis, in 1888, when she was awarded $8 a month. In 1899, when she was nearly 80 years old, the government made some recognition of her service to the Union. She received a full pension, much of which she used to establish a home, named in honor of John Brown, for indigent elderly blacks. Harriet Tubman died in 1913, over 90 years old.

Finish the Civil War!

At the time of Lincoln's re-election in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association, of which Karl Marx was a leading member, sent the president a letter of congratulation:

"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholdersdared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; whenon the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up,whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man wasissued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; ...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy crusade of property against labor... "

But the stars and stripes, the proud banner of the Civil War, has long since become mired in the filth of racism and imperialist war. Only the working class, under revolutionary socialist leadership, can lead mankind out of the putrid decay that is capitalist society today.

Marx said, "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the "American dream" is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx's words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is fhe race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.

Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, "Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!" to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolution¬ary party. A workers party as the tribune of the people will fight for the interests of all the oppressed. Liberation for blacks and women can be won only by a workers government which will smash the capitalist system and reorganize society on the basis of a planned socialist economy. Key leadership in the revolutionary struggle will be provided by the Harriet Tubmans and Frederick Douglasses of our time. We honor these great black leaders for their role in bringing the day of liberation one giant step closer.

Thursday, October 08, 2020

In The Thick Of The Great Depression-Daydreams Of Social Mobility-The Film Adaptation Of Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams” (1935)- A Review

In The Thick Of The Great Depression-Daydreams Of Social Mobility-The Film Adaptation Of Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams” (1935)- A Review    


DVD Review
Si Lannon
Alice Adams, starring Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, from a novel by Booth Tarkington, 1935   

Growing up poor is a tough dollar no doubt about it. Maybe that is why I was assigned this film Alice Adams (based on the Booth Tarkington novel) by site manager Greg Green although a number of other writers here have also grown up under those conditions. Perhaps Greg chose me because my family circumstances kind of mirror those of the main character Alice, played by Katharine Hepburn. I grew up in the working-class poor Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville south of Boston where we were kind of the “middle class” meaning nothing other than we had our own house, small and dingy but our own as my mother was always fond of saying until her dying breathe (to distinguish us from those who rented apartments in the array of triple-decker buildings that were peppered around the neighborhood). Which also meant that my father, Norman, always had steady if not well-paid work at the North Adamsville Gear Works which was a sub-contracting outfit for the shipbuilding operations which dominated the town’s economy and kept us going until that shipbuilding pulled out to off-shore locations well after I came of age in the 1950s. That steady work was an important difference in the area since many, mainly men in those days of male breadwinners and female housewives, like Peter Paul Markin’s father for one, were always last hired, first fired in the up and down shipbuilding economy. There was always a tension between those who looked like they had made and those who were going to be left behind-always left behind.
That though is where the similarities between Alice, once again played by severely beautiful Katharine Hepburn, in the film and I differ significantly. Alice was always “putting on airs,” always lying to herself and others about her class situation. Always doe-eyed daydreaming that she was someplace above her station only to be crushed more times than not-for a while. I, on the other hand unknowingly accepted that we were working poor and that I should stay with guys like Markin and some of the guys who work here who grew up in the same town or small circumstances. Maybe it was because the rich and poor classes in my town never mixed much, except maybe a little in school and that only in passing.  (The very rich or the strivers sent their kids to private schools to “escape” having to deal with the raucous public schoolers and gain some resume credentials-some sent their kids to Catholic parochial schools but they were poor as church mice too and just wanted their kids away from the heathens like me and my crowd.)      
It was almost painful to see Alice and her upward social mobility strivings at the cost of her dignity and her intelligence kowtowing to others in town who flouted their good fortune fortunes. Of course some of this is just the myth of the American dream come to small-town America via a small town American girl who maybe read too many romantic novels, Cinderella stuff, when young. Abetted by a social striving mother who harpooned her father into giving a up a steady if underpaid and underutilized his skills job in order to rise economically for Alice’s benefit. Jesus, no wonder Alice was ready to debase herself at every moment in her quest for a rich man who would carry her off.  
Maybe I better set the story and you can figure out whether she was a holy goof or had more sense than I did in trying to get out from under that small- town girl rock. Alice, via her father, lives in an old-fashioned working- class house which befitted an employee, a clerk working for somebody else. Alice though had dreams and maybe some small connections to the upper classes via a tenuous friendship with one of the town debutantes. In order to “fit in” or believe she did she developed a whole persona who denied reality and lived in cloud cuckoo land. Except at one key dance she “met” Arthur, a rich young man played by Fred MacMurray last seen in this space bleeding like a sieve after Barbara Stanwyck threw a few off-hand slugs into him after the pair plotted the murder of her husband for dough and freedom in Double Indemnity, who somehow despite her wanderlust was attracted to her. Attracted despite being in some kind of relationship with that debutante who threw the party where they met.
Despite Alice’s antics, despite her slavish devotion to her dreams of upward mobility and her willfully false consciousness about her family’s financial condition Arthur stays the course. Stays the course even when she invites him to what turns out to be a disastrous dinner. Stays the course despite her brother’s getting into legal trouble and her father too in attempting to move up in class for her sake. Ms. Hepburn in the early days had a certain refreshing rose-cheeked charm and beauty but I will be damned unless Arthur was an airhead how she snagged that guy. But she did.

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”



In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
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Markin comment on the lyric here:
While I have always considered this a very good anti-war song the tone of the lyrics leave me a little off-put these days. There are, in this wicked old world, some just wars, the Northern side in the American Civil War, The American side in the struggle for independence, The Irish side in the struggle against the British on Easter, 1916 and so on. Thus, until we take the guns away from those cruel oppressors of the mass of humanity we had best keep our own guns at the ready-and our class struggle soldiers prepared. Then someday this song will be an interesting relic for archeologists to uncover and laugh about the follies of primitive humankind.


Universal Soldier-Buffy Sainte-Marie
He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.

Tuesday, October 06, 2020

One More Johnny Blake, More Or Less, Is Not Worth Dying Over…With Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s “Bullets Or Ballots” (1936) In Mind

One More Johnny Blake, More Or Less, Is Not Worth Dying Over…With Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s “Bullets Or Ballots” (1936) In Mind   


DVD Review-of sorts
By Josh Breslin who re-enters the film review wars after a long-term assignment working through the effect on cultural workers who went through World War I which will be published in this space in November during the 100th anniversary commemorations of Armistice Day which ended that war on November 11, 1918.
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The only thing as far as the law went worse that a crooked cop was an honest one. That was the familiar ring around my growing up neighborhood in the heavily French-Canadian Ocean View section of Olde Saco up in coastal old-time mill country Maine. That sentiment came to mind the other day when I watched the 1936 classic Bullets or Ballots where an honest cop, a public cop, tried to break up the rackets and got nothing but a diet of lead and maybe a big sent-off funeral from cop departments around the country.
(This saying obviously applied only to the very visible public coppers who ruined our young man-hoods although I will draw a distinction between the corrupt and honest a bit below after I mention that this only applies to civil servant coppers. Definitely not to private coppers, private eyes who we held in high regard off of the movie screen come Saturday afternoon at the Majestic in downtown Olde Saco. Although some of them might like Sam Spade, Nick Charles, Phil Larkin, and Phillip Marlowe have started out as public coppers they soon came up against that “go along, to get along” idea that most cop departments worked under and split that scene when they were looking for a little rough justice in this evil world. Tilted at windmills for a living although none of us every came in contact with any real P.I.s so that might be all hooey.)
Since this screed is as much about the cops, corrupt and honest, in that growing up town up in Maine let me give a short overview of that situation before going to the “what is what” of this film. Ocean View was heavily F-C as we used to say (F-C on my Le Blanc mother’s side with relatives who still live up there). There was always a tension between the Down-East Maine Yankee mill-owners and their hangers-on and the immigrant F-Cers from Quebec who came down to get off the dead-ass farms and make a little money when the mills were thriving mostly in my great-grandparents and my grandparents’ generations before and during World War II. In my parents’ generation those mills started to go south, to the low-wage non-union southern states before heading off-shore altogether. That did not stop the mill-owners and their hangers-on from lording it over the F-C community every way that they could. This included direct harassment of my crowd of guys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner (owned by Jean-Jacques Renan who Anglicized his diner’s name to draw the old swamp Yankees in for lunch breaks and after work) mainly wishing and maybe a little thought of larceny which I will keep silent about.
Any given Friday or Saturday night during the school year, any given night in the ocean spray summer, Billy Babcock and William Smith, public coppers, and so crooked they needed a corkscrew to get into their respective uniforms would move us along even though Jimmy Jack could have cared less about us hanging around, at least outside in summer since this was peak tourist season when the place was jammed between mill-workers and “foreigners.”  During the winter, during the school year especially when we were in high school we could be inside o or outside since Jimmy Jack (sorry for not using his F-C name but we were so used to called him by his English moniker it is hard to change up even now) thought we added “class” to the place. By that he meant our hanging around brought guys with cars-and girls around. Girls to endlessly play his jukebox to perdition and back.
This is where a small example of how crooked Billy and Will were comes into play. They got a cut of the jukebox money, got a cut of the waitresses’ tips and a bunch of other small-time hoods hustles that even we from hunger kids would not stoop to do. They also make dough on their “protection” racket for small shop owners who didn’t want hoods hanging around their stores. Like I said crooked like pretzels. Which did not stop them from trying to shake us down as well to keep us out of jail when we were doing those un-said larcenies, or to just try to run us in as vagrants. A few groin kicks and police batons to the knees, front and back, were also part of their arsenal. Naturally every once in a while, the Yankee brethren who ran the mills and town would get in a reform mood and guys like Billy and Will would be bounced out. Replaced by a copper, an honest copper as far I know, like Officer Baker, that is what we called him, that is what he wanted to be called by guys like us. This guy wanted to be our friend, tried to get us to play basketball, Jesus, tried to wean us from jailbreak rock and roll whenever he came into Jimmy Jack’s’ to tell him to keep the jukebox music lower. (Like he couldn’t see that we had girls to die for who wanted louder music and no fucking basketball bozos hanging around them.) Like I said, and will say again, the only thing worse that a corrupt cop is an honest one.                 
Which brings us to one Johnny Blake, one honest copper in the red hot corrupt big urban city of New York in the film under review. This Johnny Blake, played by Edward G. Robinson who would later in one of his gangster films, Key Largo, play another Johnny, Johnny Rocco, who also fell down in a hail of bullets from a guy who didn’t like him much, made me feel the same way I had about the latter Johnny. As somebody said in that film “one Johnny Rocco, more or less, is not worth dying over.” You can figure six, two and even that nobody is going to cry much over this honest cop after he gets that big cop send-off. And they don’t except maybe some small-time hooker, bar girl, whatever, Clara,  who was running a small numbers racket while Johnny looked the other way. Yeah, she was sweet on Johnny boy but he was all cop, bled blue, although red when the deal went down.      
As Sam Lowell, my dear friend with his own public copper stories from down in the Acre section in North Adamsville south of Boston to tell, used to say here is the skinny. Gotham, or the do-gooder reform element in it were in one of their periodic “tired of the rackets” moods so they grabbed a head cop who they thought would clean up the town. Fat chance but they were trying anyway. This commissioner grabbed Johnny as a guy who knew the guys running the rackets, or who they thought were running the rackets. Brought him in to go palsy with Big Al Kruger the front man for whoever was really running the operations, the guys who were getting the big pay-offs. Some of Big Al’s underlings, especially one dope named Bugs, played by Humphrey Bogart who turned out to be the guy who said that remark about the Johnny Roccos of the world in Key Largo, and who liked to use his phallic symbol weapon, his gun, regularly or he got nervous suspected that Johnny Blake, ex-cop, was a stoolie, was working undercover.
Although Bugs, the guy with the itchy trigger finger, wasted a few too many people he shouldn’t have, was right about Johnny Big Al wouldn’t hear a word against Johnny once he conned him into doing the numbers racket big-time. Of course there had to be tension between “shoot and loot” old time Bugs and what he had represented back during Prohibition when a handy gun was a necessity and “businessman” low over-head Big Al. Johnny played to those irreconcilable tensions, played as well once he got in Big Al’s confidence the info-wars to find out who Mister Big really was. Well Johnny found out, found out the hard way after confronting Bugs after Bugs had wasted Big Al in a fit of hubris and was ready to take over the rackets himself. Johnny figured he was the guy the big boys would want to run things and he was right. Dead right once Bugs was tipped that Johnny was a stoolie. And the big boys-guess what-this ending is maybe something out of Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera the big boys were the biggest robbers of all-the leading town bankers. That didn’t mean much to Johnny though as he fell down with the life draining out of him on Wall Street. I wonder if he heard the noise of wings before the end-or Bugs’ ironic laugh.     

Monday, October 05, 2020

Oh What Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice To Deceive-With The Film Adaptation Of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” In Mind

Oh What Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice To Deceive-With The Film Adaptation Of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” In Mind

By Josh Breslin 
“I swear I wish sometimes I could be a woman. NO, I am not talking about turning from male to female or anything like that. Society in the year of our lord 1936 would not put up with it, would not put up with such an idea even though anybody who is anybody who has read any amount of history, the history of sexual experiences anyway knows, that cross-dressing, cross-sexing I guess you could call it has been going on since Eve came out of Adam’s rib, maybe before,” Roger Saint John mentioned in passing to his dear friend Bernard Baron. The causes for Mister Saint John’s comment were two-fold. He had just read his close friend Somerset’s latest novel, The Letter, after having avoided the pleasure as long as possible since he did not like the subject matter as a rule of whatever concoction Somerset had cooked up to titillate the literate reading public here adultery and murder, murder most foul. Moreover this same Bernard Baron had insisted that they go see the opening of the film adaptation of Somerset’s novel starring Bette Davis and he had had quite enough of the whole thing. However Roger was intrigued by the craziness, his term, that the woman would go through to hold a man, a man who was no longer interested in being with her.
This Clara, Bette Davis’ role in the film, starts off directly in scene one doing her version of rooty-toot toot on her paramour who went south on her, Roger something. Yes, dear Clara was in a tizzy over hard fact than this Roger cad was smitten by another woman. Maybe it was that Roger had gone “native” on her, had taken up with a beautiful Polynesian woman whom he swore he was pledged to eternal devotion. For that transgression he paid with about two fistfuls of bullets and plenty of splattered blood (to speak nothing of the defamation of his character as this Clara came up with the usual tart story that this Roger had made improper advantages toward her and she had to defend her honor, her womanhood in the only way that woman can-with a handy revolver.
But Saint John once he started to get up a head of steam decided that perhaps it would be better for the reader to have a little background as to why he was at pains to try to figure out what made the female sex tick. The ploy was pretty simple. Clara, married, unhappily married to Donald Smythe, the famous geological engineer for the East Coast Oil Company, was stuck unto death in dreary Indonesia where Donald was often called away on business for his company. Clara none too strong on Donald anyway except as a meal ticket out of the West End of London from whence she came got easily bored and started hanging around the Leeward Inn where she met this guy Steven who would wind up with many holes in him before Clara was through with him. They became hard and fast lovers for over a year and Clara, at least had dreams of getting out from under her Donald burden and leave the goddam archipelago and then Steven lowered the boom on her. Told her that he was in love with his native woman, Sisil. End of story. No, end of Steven. Clara was going to have her man or else she was going to take care of business her own way.
Here’s where things got dicey, where Saint John was at a lost to figure out what was running behind a woman’s mind when she has been unceremoniously dumped. She developed this whole elaborate plot about how her lover, now dead, and unable to contradict her had really being public nuisance number one, had thrust himself upon her. This weak sister of  an alibi which anybody who ever spent ten minutes at the Leeward Inn would know was false since Clara and Steven had their little corner love nest spot in the bar got her easily past her gullible and witless cuckolded husband, No problem. More importantly got her past the friendly constabulary which was friendly with Donald and wanted to be friendly toward whatever wishes East Coast Oil had. She was ready to walk after a perfunctory trial which was necessary given the death in the case,
Then the fucking letter came to light, the letter where Clara expressed her undying devotion to Steven and gave the back of her hand to the foolish Donald. She moved might and main to get that fucking letter back from whoever had found it. Of course it was Sisil who figured to cash in on Clara’s school girl indiscretion, cash in for then thou in cold hard cash. So the suppression of the letter got her off the murder rap. Didn’t get her off the rub out list though which Sisil had compiled just for her after taking her man from her. Maybe the whole thing should have been centered on what Sisil was going through rather than white girl Clara but that was a different time and maybe Somerset was deaf to such inklings. Go figure.             
[Afterword- we live in deeply troubled times, cold civil war times as almost every event over the past decade or so had indicated so this piece had a certain resonance for today even though the book, the subject matter and the film represented a very different look at what in the old days writer Seth Garth, quoting the late Peter Paul Markin a boyhood friend, was called the “Woman Question” in radical Cambridge circles. (In those halcyon days every political issue was framed as a question as in the Black Question, the Russian Question, the Party Question and so on so the Woman Question took its place in that context with the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s.)
Perhaps Josh, who after all had as a moniker the Prince of Love in the Summer of Love, 1967 according to that same Seth Garth mentioned above, had been writing this piece today in 2018 rather than just five years ago he might have been a bit more circumspect about how he framed this version of the woman question which would be quite different today. Josh, with three unsuccessful marriages and many affairs, some while he was in various marriages, has made no bones about the fact that he doesn’t understand women, never has, since he was brought up with four brothers and no sisters to kind of pave the way and beside the time of his growing up time in Maine in the mid-1960s were not times that would lent themselves to develop any kind of equitable feelings toward women. And he didn’t-then-as he freely has admitted.    
But men can learn something in this wicked old world and Josh did, at least in a way, via learning about being on the right side of the angels on the question of war, now endless wars, having served in Vietnam during that hellish period. As an adjunct he “learned” to respect what the burgeoning women’s liberation movement was doing to step up the fact rather than the fiction of social equality. So, despite fits and starts, and despite that life-long habit of not understanding women, Josh has been very sympathetic to the #MeToo movement which has galvanized the country, pro and con pushed, on these days be those daughters from the various marriages.
This matter came to the fore when he had to deal thoughts of his own past mainly youthful ways of dealing with women, women as sex objects rather than social equals since that is really what is what a lot of the controversy has been about. Josh not only confesses to not understanding women but has been rather shy around them despite his reputation in various incantations of that original prince of love business. So he has never used whatever authority he had to get a woman to submit to his desires, or wants. When I asked him if he would change what he wrote when he wrote this review back a few years ago he said probably not because that would be anachronistic-moreover he really believed that Maugham’s view given his proclivities was a way of dealing with women not so foreign these days. He did say he thought running Sisil as the main character rather than Clara would be a better fit today but that was for somebody else to work on. Site Manager Greg Green]            

Once Again On The Death Of A Super-Hero-With Ben Affleck’s “Batman vs. Superman”(2016) In Mind

Once Again On The Death Of A Super-Hero-With Ben Affleck’s “Batman vs. Superman”(2016) In Mind




By Associate Editor Alden Riley 
   
Okay, okay I expected some blow-back from my put upon review of Ben Affleck’s Batman vs. Superman from 2016 where I mentioned that I cried no tears over the death of Superman in that film. Although I expected it from a closer source, mostly from Sandy Salmon who “ordered” me to write the review since he was personally emotionally too distraught to do so since he had apparently wasted away his childhood (and later years at it turned out) endlessly reading comics and watching super-heroes go mano a mano against the bad guys of this good green earth. Although Sandy read the review before it was posted he made not huff and puff about it except that he was a little miffed by the last couple of sentences where I make it seem like it was my job if had not done the review which I had done in any case without good grace.

No the source is one Sam Lowell, the longtime film editor here now in emeritus status. (Beside a few maniac readers who decided for some ill- conceived reason to enter the lists in defense of the caped crusader out of old time nostalgia or simply to write something since they nothing better to do-I do not question motives but that is what I think they were about given the hyper-tense tenor of the collective indignation.) His objection. We, meaning me, should not be denigrating the idea of super-heroes in a time when we are desperate for such figures. He argued against my idea that just plain ordinary heroes, people who step up and organize against the ills of the world, are what we need today as models. Argued, vociferously argued, that super-heroes are the only ones capable of taking on the mad men (and women) who run the world and those in the waiting like ISIS and a million other tin-pot desperados too numerous to mention by name. And that is exactly the nub of my objection to the man from Krypton. I am writing this in early October, 2107 shortly after the horrific mass murders in Las Vegas proved once again some very heroic actions by those same ordinary citizens. It was wearisome for me to watch this film and see people running for cover, running like rats, as the forces of evil descended on sweet Gotham hoping against hope that Mister S would show his face and save them. Like very resilient New Yorkers who put up with a ton of hell on a daily basis needed this dude to work things out. No, a thousand times no.             


Sam further went into this spiel about how Superman had done more than yeoman’s service in the fight against evil having taken out whole generations of bad guys and evil empires-until that last tough stretch where it looked for all the world to see like he had lost a step or too. He even alibied the caped crusader on that one charging it off to known bad guy Lex Luthor’s evil schemes. Come on now Superman was way over twenty-one, had free will and he just quit, went out with a whimper on that front until he gathered in that last ditch bit of remorse by falling on his shield (but only after honey Lois and sweet mother were taken hostage).  When I read that response I called Sam up and asked him with as much aplomb as I could muster if he was serious-if he believed that Superman had actually done anything except make his creator and the film companies rich. Frankly I was glad that he had retired since he seemed to have gotten a serious case of senility or something like that. 


Here is the kicker though. Sam accused me of either willfully neglecting to point out that last scene where something seems to be levitating around Clark Kent’s grave. Some arising from the dead like Lazarus or Jesus Christ. (Kent Superman’s alter ego and earthly persona had the official funeral while empty casket Superman was being honored in Washington by a cover-up government which wanted the people to cower and rely on their good services now that he was gone.)  I finally figured out what Sam’s real deal was about. It’s all about a religious experience. Sam has Superman as the modern savior, the messenger from God at first misunderstood but come to save the world in end times. That graveyard scene was the “second coming” of Jesus Christ arisen from the grave. We walked that one around for a while until I realized that whatever Sam’s mental state talking religion with a true believer is always a waste of breathe. Yeah, as I told Sam I stand by my original statement-no tears are shed in this corner for Superman’s demise, none. And plenty for those real citizens like the firefighters in New York on 9/11 and the average citizens who saved lives in Las Vegas heading to not away from the danger.