Sometimes I think I´m gonna lose my mind
But it don´t look like I ever do
I loved so many people everywhere I went
Some too much, others not enough
I don´t know, I may go down or up or anywhere
But I feel like this scribbling will stay
Maybe if I hadn’t seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people´s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Just say, well, another man´s done gone
This clip is from the fabulous documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue record. Mermaid Avenue is the first in what has become a small series of recordings by artists tapped by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora to set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to music. After his death, it was discovered that Woody had left behind 1000 some lyrics that had never been recorded as songs with music.
I watched Man in the Sand last night on Netflix. I’ve loved Mermaid Avenue since it came out in 1998 but did not realize this documentary about the making of the record has been around nearly as long. It’s really, really good. It’s a like a diamond in the rough. So many sparkling, unpretentious moments of beauty. (Though it also grapples with the pretentiousness of Guthrie and of the artists who participated in the Mermaid Avenue recordings.)
The film worked on me emotionally on so many levels. The movie begins with Billie Bragg’s quest for Woody’s America, in an attempt to understand Woody well enough to approach the daunting responsibility of giving musical life to his unrecorded lyrics. These scenes and others throughout the film are deeply evocative of the times my father lived through and the left politics that shaped my family’s experience and world view.
Then there are all the approaches to Woody.
Bragg’s approach to Woody’s America, which I already mentioned.
Woody’s daughter Nora’s approach to her father—how she has used her work as her father’s archivist and as the midwife to the musical rebirthing of his songs to come to know him better and in ways that were not possible for her during his short lifetime; he was ill with Huntington’s disease most of the time she knew him and he died when she was 17. Inter-cut with scenes of Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others recording Woody’s lyrics are scenes of Nora speaking intimately, often fighting back her tears, about her family life, both her childhood memories of it and what she has come to understand later as a historian.
Arlo Guthrie appears in just one brief sequence—to recount how he learned that This Land Is Your Land was by his father one day when it was taught to him at school. He recalls running home in tears because the other kids knew his own father’s song better than he did. Woody was already ill and not playing much music. But Woody, with physical difficulty, showed Arlo the chords and helped him learn to play it. So much of Woody’s tragic complexity is in this brief story, which Arlo caps with a slightly coy rendition of one of the now famously long suppressed verses of the song.
Another tragedy that the film is now echo for is the untimely death of Wilco’s Jay Bennett, who died very unexpectedly this past May at age 45. While there are many other evocative scenes from the film that I wish I could have found on YouTube, this one is lovely, with Tweedy’s vocal more spare and plaintive than on the Mermaid Avenue version, accompanied just by Bennett, whose lovely piano playing is out of frame until the camera tracks around to the position where you can see the both of them in frame.
In many of the scenes with Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy and the others from Wilco and with Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, it looked to me like they, as well as others involved in the project, kept getting these jolts, as if they are repeatedly startled by beauty they are finding in Woody’s poetry and in the music it has inspired in them.
The film coveys the often painful contradictions among noble human values, the exultations of human creativity and the flawed humanity of the people who fight for equality and freedom and try to make enduring, beautiful things. It shows these many dimensions in Woody and in the people who came together to make more of his songs known and make him more knowable to us as an artist, as a social conscience and as a man.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm
My google alerts on “Hungry Blues” sometimes turn up interesting things. Steven Taylor of the Fugs has written a song that is also called Hungry Blues. It’s very much in the spirit of the original song that my blog is named after. It’s not quite as good, but it’s a tall order to be asked to measure up to Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson. May the visions of both songs come to pass.
If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).
Sometime early on in my discovery of YouTube I thought to search on Woody Guthrie. I found this one forty-five second clip, which noted that it was
[o]ne of the two surviving film clips of Woody Guthrie performing. This one is from 1945. The other, with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, is already on YouTube.
Somehow I can’t even remember if I ever found my way over to the other clip. You’d think I would have, since it sounds so cool—Woody with two Blues greats.
But what I just discovered the other night is that the one other clip of Woody Guthrie is actually one of two clips (making a total of three) from a sixteen minute, 1947 film, called “To Hear Your Banjo Play,” featuring Pete Seeger playing and narrating. Just recently clampittandgaddis posted the short film to YouTube in two parts. Conveniently the clips with Woody are at the beginning of the second part.
[youtube]y3ea1l_kpYY[/youtube]
The first clip is with Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, sometime member of the Almanac Singers. I’m not sure what the song is; if anyone out there can identify it, please leave a comment. The second clip is the one with Brownee McGhee and Sonny Terry—the three of them playing “John Henry.” This is pretty much the whole thing (the older YouTube clip cuts off and is blurry), though with some voice overs and jump cuts. It’s a great performance; and there is something incredibly thrilling about getting to actually see Woody perform: his recordings, and Pete Seeger’s performances of his songs, are some of the earliest musical memories that I have. And of course it should not be lost on us that this is a rare scene of racial integration in the sixteen minute film from 1947. (It looks like the the work crew laying down railroad tracks in one of the jump cuts from the “John Henry” clip is also integrated.)
Though the film presents itself as a history of the banjo, really, it’s a history of American folk music, which has an underlying message about race. Early in the film, in a contrived dialogue with an off camera Alan Lomax (who wrote the film), Pete says,
American Negro slaves made the first real banjos a couple of hundred years ago, out of old hollowed gourds and possum skins, I guess, but then the banjo spread all over the whole country. Everyone loved it. It traveled west in the covered wagons. Later on the banjo went out of style. Got countrified. Nowadays, you’re liable to hear it played by some old farmer…
And this brings the banjo into Southern white folk culture. Later in the film, leading in to the Woody Guthrie clips, Pete says,
Two races met here in the South. Together they built the South, and together they made a new kind of music.
Pete moves through a number of settings, from New York City, to the Appalachian hills of Virginia, to the deep South, and makes the point that much of what we think of as American has its roots in African American culture and labor. The energy and attractiveness of pop culture in NYC and of white Southern folkways and customs come from those places where Blacks and whites meet—as laborers and as cultural workers. While this may not be news to many now, it was probably a radical assertion to make in 1947.
The film closes with a hokey set up to get Pete sitting in with a guitar player and fiddler at a square dance. You watch as Pete wails on his African instrument to whip up the all white Margot Mayo American Square Dance Group (they are great!).
You should also watch for the near 80-year-old Uncle Buck, early in the film, as he tears up the dance floor. (JDJ: do you have any comment on the dancing he’s doing? Does it fit into the film’s scheme of cultural migrations and transformations?)
And for the Appalachian gospel rendition of “What Wondrous Love is This?” It’s beauty is unearthly and haunting.
The Black Commentator’s Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build “temporary detention facilities” in case of an “immigration emergency.”
The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.
Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton’s press release and then comments:
Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, “What immigration emergency?” If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won’t stop with them.
What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.
When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of “enemy combatants” these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.
Kimberly hopes for the “best case scenario” in which “this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America,” but she also entertains the more likely possibility that “our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas.” I say “more likely” because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover’s Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:
The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover’s decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI’s activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the “Communist Index” and later renamed the “Reserve Index,” as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of “key figures” and “top functionaries” and its own detention priorities labeled “Detcom” and “Comsab”(emphasis added).
Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle’s 1943 directive. The Index listed persons “who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R.” The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure “statutory backing for detention” (emphasis added).
After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of “Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau’s Security Index.” However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category “Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground.” Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:
The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)
The Director noted, “I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks.”
The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.
The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center – created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency – contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.
The keeping of large lists of “suspects” is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that
By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden “the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party.” The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on “allegations of Communist activity,” it was “a measure of investigations performed.” If this proportion applied “throughout the field,” as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.
The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise “only a very, very small fraction” of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository. “The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.,” a Bush administration official said.
The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:
We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they’re spawning faster than rabbits…. If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we’ve got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.
The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise “guidelines” for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that “the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past.”
[In 1919,] Blacks were damned as Wobblies, socialists, Bolsheviks, or anarchists simply for agreeing with ideas that went beyond political orthodoxy. Even black nationalist (and anticommunist) Marcus Garvey received the communist label because he rejected the subordinate “place” of African Americans. Some blacks, like Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, editors of the socialist Messenger, who coined the term “New Crowd Negroes” to describe the generation of militants, were genuine supporters of social and economic revolution but rejected communist affiliation. Others, like members of the African Blood Brotherhood, embraced the Communist Party. But the federal government and wider public were disinclined to distinguish degrees of adherence or advocacy. Any African American who dissented from Democratic or Republican politics and the socio-economic system of American capitalism was likely to be excommunicated as a “Bolshevist.
The parallels between the red scares of old and the war on terror of today have long been obvious. Worth noting now is that the link between communism and terrorism in the right wing lexicon has become quite explicit. Over the summer, I linked to this description of a talk at the Heritage Foundation, by John J. Tierney, Jr., entitled, “The Politics of Peace: What’s Behind the Anti-War Movement?“:
To describe current anti-war protest as a reaction to the invasion of Iraq or an anti-Bush phenomenon is to miss the point. A closer look at the protestors and their associations reveals a pedigree going back at least to the Vietnam era and beyond to the “progressive” and protest politics of earlier decades. The leaders of the “anti-war” movement today are leftists in ideology. Almost all oppose capitalism and believe in socialism; many are Communists. At root, they are anti-American rather than anti-war. Anti-war groups comprise an authentic political movement. They have distinctive forms of organization, outlets for propaganda, favored strategies and tactics, and access to information technology that increasingly allows their communications to be instantaneous and global. In short, they are a political force.
The phrase “seeing red” is from none other than former Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer of the the infamous Palmer Raids.
When Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in late 1919, submitted to the Senate a lengthy report on the Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, he warned that America stood at Armageddon: Bolshevists, anarchists, and seditionists were besieging the nation. As part of their diabolical plans, “practically all of the radical radical organizations in this country have looked upon the Negroes as particularly fertile ground for the spreading of their doctrines. These radical organizations have endeavored to enlist the Negroes on their side, and in many respects have been successful.” As a consequence, “the Negro is seeing red.” (Kornweibel, xiv)
I’m not sure everyone knows that it was Palmer who recruited J. Edgar Hoover to the Bureau of Investigation (what the FBI was first called) in 1919. Hoover was appointed to the anti-radical General Intelligence Division, where he began his legacy by orchestrating the 1919 Palmer Raids, in which 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested.
Why did the FBI and its domestic intelligence partners remain so consistently hostile to African American aspirations and advocates up through the 1960s? Those who have looked no earlier than the civil rights era have missed an essential point. It was during World War I and the postwar Red Scare that their response to Black Militancy for the next fifty years took shape. In 1917 and 1918 the federal government conducted wholesale investigations of “subversives” and domestic “enemies,” including many black suspects.
It was in this earlier period that coordinated domestic spying first came into play, with special emphasis on Black dissent.
The Justice, State, Navy, War, and Post Office departments coordinated these efforts to ensure a thorough crackdown on dissent and suspected treason, subversion, and sedition. Blacks were stereotyped as easily duped by enemy agents. Black disloyalty was assumed to be widespread. No sooner did the war end than fears of German intrigue were transformed into an even greater specter: Bolshevism would sweep across the world and engulf even America. Once again blacks were believed to be especially receptive to the diabolical manipulation of communists, socialists, or other radicals.
J. Edgar Hoover’s first major assignment within the Bureau of Investigation was to establish and systematize its anti-radical efforts. Immersing himself in the radicals’ own literature, he embraced its apocalyptic visions and became convinced that America was imperiled not only by white Bolsheviks and anarchists, but by black militancy as well. In his mind there was little difference between civil rights activism, Pan-Africanism, and promotion of communism or socialism; all threatened to unhinge the racial status quo and unleash internal dissension that would leave the nation vulnerable to attack from within or without…. By 1920 these assumptions had become fixed in the minds of those responsible for national security. (Kornweibel, 178-79)
For more on the parallels between the War on Terror and Cold War anti-communism, with specific connection to the Civil Rights Movement, see “MLK, Communist Training Schools, Cindy Sheehan, and Rosa Parks,” parts I and II.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2005 at 11:18 am
[The following is a large excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s closing address to the seminar, "The South Thinking Ahead," at the Highlander Folk School's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, September 2, 1957 (Labor Day Weekend), Monteagle, Tennessee. I made previous reference to this speech and the 1957 Labor Day Weekend events at Highlander in thistwo part series, as well as here and here. —BG]
I have been asked to speak from the subject: “A Look to the Future.” In order to look to the future, it is often necessary to get a clear picture of the past. In order to know where we are going, it is often necessary to see from whence we have come. So I begin with a survey of past developments in the area of race relations.
As we look over the long sweep of race relations in America we notice that there has been something of an evolutionary growth over the years. There have been at least three distinct periods in the history of race relations in this nation, each representing growth over a former period. It is interesting to note that in each period there finally came a decision from The Supreme Court to give legal and constitutional validity to the dominant thought patterns of that particular period. The first period in the area of race relations extended from 1619 to 1863. This was the period of slavery. During this period the Negro was an “it” rather than a “he,” a thing to be used rather than a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine. In 1857, toward the end of this period, there finally came a decision from the the Supreme Court to give legal and constitutional validity to the whole system of slavery. This decision, known as the Dred Scott decision, stated in substance that the Negro is not a citizen of this nation; he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner.
The second period in the development of race relations in America extended, broadly speaking, from 1863 to 1954. We may refer to this as the period of segregation. In 1896, through the famous Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal as the law of the land. Through this decision the dominant thought patterns of this second stage of race relations were given legal and constitutional validity. Now we must admit that this second period was something of an improvement over the first period of race relations because it at least freed the Negro from the bondage of physical slavery. But it was not the best stage because segregation is at bottom nothing but slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity. So the end results of this second period was that the Negro ended up being plunged across the abyss of exploitation where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.
The third period in the development of race relations in America had its beginning on May 17, 1954. You may refer to this as the period of complete and constructive integration. The Supreme Court’s decision which came to give legal and constitutional validity to the dominant thought patterns of this period said in substance that the old Plessy doctrine must go, that separate facilities were inherently unequal, and to segregate a child on the basis of his race is to deny that child of equal protection of the law. And so as a result of this decision we find ourselves standing on the threshold of the third and most constructive period in the development of race relations in the history of our nation to put it in biblical terms. We have broken loose from the Egypt of slavery; we have moved through the wilderness of “separate but equal,” and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration.
The great moral challenge that confronts each of us at this moment is to work passionately and unrelentingly for the complete realization of the ideals and principles in this third period. We must not rest until segregation and discrimination have been liquidated from every area of our nation’s life. As we stand at the threshold of this third period of race relations, we notice two contradictory forces at work in the South: the forces of defiance and the forces of compliance. On the one hand, we notice a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of White Citizens Councils. On the other hand, we notice constructive forces at work seeking to create a new respect for human dignity. In order to get a clear picture of the situation, we may look at each of these forces separately.
The past three years have witnessed the birth in the South of the U. S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost dead for more than two decades, the Klan has staged a new revival. This organization is determined to preserve segregation at any cost; its methods are crude and criminal. Unlike the Klan of twenty years ago, this new Klan does not list among its members the so-called respectable people. It draws its members from the undereducated and underprivileged groups who see in the Negro’s rising status a political and economic threat. And although the Klan will never regain the power that it once possessed, we must not take it lightly. Beneath the surface of all of its actions is the ugly theme of unleashed, unchallenged, racial and religious bigotry. There is always the implied threat of violence.
Then there are the White Citizens Councils. Since they operate on a higher political and economic level than the Klan, a halo of respectability hovers over them. But like the Klan, they are determined to preserve segregation and thereby defy the desegregation rulings of the Supreme Court. They base their defense on the legal maneuvers of interposition and nullification. Unfortunately for those who disagree with the Councils, their methods do not stop with legal tactics; their methods range from threats and intimidation to economic reprisals against Negro men and women. These methods also extend to white persons who will dare to take a stand for justice. They demand absolute conformity from whites and abject submission from Negroes.
The effects of the Councils’ activities are not difficult to determine. First, they have brought many white moderates to the point that they no longer feel free to discuss some issues involved in desegregation for fear of what they will be labeled. The channels of communication between whites and Negroes are now closed. Certainly this is tragic. Men hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they can’t communicate with each other; they can’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.
A couple of weeks ago, I read Cenk Uygur’s satire, What Fox News Channel Would Have Done to Rosa Parks. Meditating on the right wing smears of Cindy Sheehan, which were then still relatively new, Uygur wondered “how it would have been in the Civil Rights era if Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and the rest of the gang were around back then.”
Hannity: “Rosa Parks has turned this whole so-called civil rights issue into a public circus. We have information that Ted Kennedy might have put her up to this. That amazing story when we come back!”
Colmes: “You’re right, Sean. I’m sorry.”
O’Reilly: “To question the government of Alabama and implicitly the entire United States government by defying the political order like this has to be considered treasonous. Civil disobedience is a code word for I hate America. These people are criminals, simple criminals. It’s ridiculous that they think they don’t have to live by the same rules as the rest of us.”
Scarborough: “Yeah, whatever they just said on Fox News Channel! Well … I mostly agree with it.”
Kaplan: “Can we hire Shep Smith to cover this? Maybe give him his own show?”
Limbaugh: “What did I tell you folks? These libs like Parks would rather live in France where they can sit anywhere they want on the bus. They hate America. They want special privileges to be able to sit anywhere they want. They hide behind the color of their skin to try to undermine this country.”
Coulter: “Rosa Parks is a dyke!”
Blitzer: “Dr. King, is it true that you support the liberal agitator Rosa Parks in her defiance of America? Can you confirm whether she has in fact sat in the back of the bus before? Do you think this makes her a flip-flopper? If she has been so inconsistent on this, how can we trust her on anything?”
What’s funny about this satire is that there is nothing funny about it. It is pretty close to reality in the 1950s and 1960s. Today’s smears and provocations of dissenters fit into a profile of traditional right wing attacks. It is important to see this, so we who dissent can have more sophistication about the nature of the right’s tactics, learn how to protect ourselves and how to respond strategically.
The Mechanics Of Slander
In the two pages of photos inside the Georgia Commission on Education’s anti-Communist tabloid there are two photos documenting Mrs. Parks’ presence at the Highlander Folk School twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. The first image, on page 2, shows Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and two other unnamed individuals who appear to be white (the quality of the scanned reproduction is terrible). The caption reads:
Three outstanding leadership people of the infamous Montgomery, Alabama bus incident. The development, precipitation and financing of this inflammatory project called for behind the scenes planning and directions beyond the ability or capacity of local people. The relationship between Communist leadership and racial strife is evident from coast to coast and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.
What a marvelous mixture of red-baiting and racism: local Blacks could not have planned, financed and executed the Montgomery Bus Boycott themselves; therefore the resistance must have been engineered by a Communist conspiracy. On page 3, the caption for a second picture of Parks reads:
Rosa Parks, who precipitated the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, and Ralph Teffertaller of New York’s Henry Street Settlement listen to group training under the watchful eye of Abner Berry of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Now the watchful eye of Abner Berry, who was there as a reporter for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper, exerts magical control over Mrs. Parks and the others present.
Such conspiracies of Communist mind control in the Civil Rights Movement were not just whispered among die hard white supremacists. These slanders were propagated through broad, well funded media campaigns. The “Communist Training School” publication
became the Georgia Commission on Education’s widest distributed and most popular work of propaganda. [M.J.] Heale noted that “Copies were sent to every daily and weekly newspaper in the United States” and “to other federal and state investigating committees.” Once the pamphlet caught on, “The Commission was flooded with requests for more copies, sometimes for a thousand or more at a time,” especially in the South because “interest was strongest in other southern states” (emphasis added). The pamphlet also led other media groups like the magazine Human Events and the Atlanta Constitution to report unfavorably about Highlander.[1]
While the images of Rosa Parks as dupe of the Communists have not survived in popular memory, the Martin Luther King At Communist Training School slander is all over the internet, in relatively mainstream, right wing, anti-King, anti-civil rights propaganda and on many white supremacist websites. (I’m not linking them here, but a little googling yields plenty of examples.)
Defamation: An Enduring Tradition
The other thing that survives is the characterization of the left as morally debased and anti-American. Laura Grantmyre, whose senior thesis I quoted, above, on the dissemination of the Georgia Commission’s propaganda piece, sees that this is the fundamental message of their publication.
The pamphlet also proposed the idea that subverted religion and interracial sexuality were part of this Communist training school. The depiction that the Christian religion was a cover for Highlander’s Communism surfaced in the middle of the pamphlet on a page of pictures [Edwin] Friend [the reporter/spy] had taken. A picture of a church car with four men milling behind it had a caption that claimed it was illustrating, “how many units of the Communist apparatus are assisted by organizations purportedly charitable or religious in nature.” This statement claimed that Highlander and its friends were superficially rooted in religion and used faith to give themselves a public image cleaner than that of Communists. By divorcing Highlander from the Church in this way, the pamphlet was aligning them with atheism and Communism. The largest picture on the page insinuated interracial sexuality, where a white woman and a black man appear to be embracing or clapping behind each other’s heads. This was the only picture without a caption, illustrating that the Georgia Commission on Education assumed white people in the South would grasp the idea that not only was it an interracial embrace, but since it was a black man and a white woman, it conjured the idea of the hypersexualized black male rapist and the protection of white womanhood. Within the pages of the pamphlet, the southern ideologies of fear, Communism, atheism, and transgressions of interracial sexual boundaries, were intertwined to leave a deep impact on the elite and popular Southern mind. [2]
Thus we have commentary on Cindy Sheehan such as this from David Horowitz and his charming peace left = terrorist sympathizers diagram (yes, Muslims are the new “Unholy” Communists . . .):
She has made herself a willing tool of anti-American forces in this country that want America to lose the war in Iraq and the war on terror generally. . . . She has joined forces with an Unholy Alliance on the other side in the epic battle for freedom in the Middle East and has shown that she will do and say anything to discredit the United States and its commander-chief — acts which serve the enemy and endanger American lives. She is a disgrace to her brave son who gave his life for the freedom of ordinary Iraqis and the security of his countrymen. She has betrayed his sacrifice and embraced his enemies.
Cindy Sheehan is on a mission to figuratively urinate on her son’s grave and make his death stand for nothing. She represents and symbolizes all those who would cut the legs out from the men and women who are fighting now as we speak, to defend us and to build a new country in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan’s not interested in the memory of her son. She’s only interested in using her son as a prop to advance her own hatred for the American troops.
And next week, the Heritage Foundation will host an event (via Bill Berkowitz), “The Politics of Peace: What’s Behind the Anti-War Movement?”
To describe current anti-war protest as a reaction to the invasion of Iraq or an anti-Bush phenomenon is to miss the point. A closer look at the protesters and their associations reveals a pedigree going back at least to the Vietnam era and beyond to the “progressive” and protest politics of earlier decades. The leaders of the “anti-war” movement today are leftists in ideology. Almost all oppose capitalism and believe in socialism; many are Communists.
Contexts
The Georgia Commission pamphlet on the Highlander Folk School is by no means the first or only example of this kind of media campaign to smear dissenters. It is, however, a particularly potent example, the content of which continues to occupy public discourse about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Having made this alternative comparison between Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks, the question I want to ask is this: what popular perceptions led Cenk Uygur to find irony in an imagination of Rosa Parks and the right wing smear machine of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge et. al?
One answer lies in the insipid stories that pass for Civil Rights Movement history, emphasizing sanitized images of individual heroes rather than the movements Parks and King and others participated in. The Civil Rights Movement is not merely the story of noble African Americans using nonviolence to conquer the likes of Bull Conner and the Klan; it is the story of a mass movement to put power into the hands of Black people, power that is still being clutched greedily by an elite, white minority which has yet to travel very far from its racist roots.
The other answer lies in the race and class differences between Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks. In my experience, many of my white, middle class activist contemporaries have been spurred by the feeling that we in the US are witnessing unprecedented abuses of government power and that our core democratic principles are under siege by the Bush administration. While I believe this is true, most of these evils we are witnessing are not new. What may be new is that in this period a much broader section of society has been pushed to the outside.
There are certain technical words in the vocabulary of every academic discipline which tend to become cliches and stereotypes. Psychologists have a word which is probably used more frequently than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word maladjusted. This word is the ringing cry of the new child psychology. Now in a sense all of us must live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted. Well you see it may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. The challenge to you this morning as I leave you, is to be maladjusted — as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in terms that echo across the centuries, let judgement run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;” as maladjusted as Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, All men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yes, as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dared to dream a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. He looked at men amid the intricate and fascinating military machinery of the Roman Empire. And could say to them, “He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.” Jesus who could look at men in the midst of their tendencies for tragic hate and say to them, “Love thy enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.” The world is in desperate need of such maladjustment. Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
~
Notes
[1] Laura Grantmyre, The Attacks On the Highlander Folk School: A White Supremacist Response to Anti-Racist Activism (A Senior Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History in Candidacy for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in History, University of North Carolina at Ashville), p. 13. Grantmyre is quoting M.J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation 1935-1965 (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998). [.DOC, HTML]
[2] Ibid. 12-13.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 29, 2005 at 4:19 pm
The excerpt that I recently posted from the Church Committee Case Study on counterintelligence activities directed at Martin Luther King, Jr. provides some of the background for the “Martin Luther King . . . . At Communist Training School” flier I attached to a post about smears and opportunistic defamations of Cindy Sheehan.
On July 12, 1963, Governor Ross E. Barnett of Mississippi testified before the Senate Commerce Committee that civil rights legislation was “a part of the world Communist conspiracy to divide and conquer our country from within.” Barnett displayed a photograph entitled “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School” taken by an informant for the Georgia Commission of Education [sic], which showed Dr. King at a 1957 Labor Day Weekend seminar at the Highland [sic] Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee with three individuals whom he alleged were communists.
There is actually more to the story than what is explained by the Church Committee report (that’s Church as in Senator Frank Church). I want provide some elaboration in this new series of posts for two, related reasons: a) this history is inherently interesting and important to understand and b) this history can help us understand some of what is presently being directed at Cindy Sheehan and others voicing political dissent in the US.
The flier was not just submitted to the Senate; it was also part of a broader public relations campaign to defame King, as in the billboard pictured here. Furthermore, when the Georgia Commission on Education conducted its surveillance at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, they weren’t just going after MLK. The image of Martin Luther King as one of “‘four horsemen’ of racial agitation,” advancing the “Commmunist doctrine of ‘racial nationalism,’” was pulled from a larger publication that was disseminated by the Georgia Commission.
The image of King at Highlander is from a four page newspaper sized propaganda piece that was produced by the Georgia Commission in 1957. The Highlander Folk School had a special twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, which was attended by activists from around the country. The Georgia Commission sent a spy, who took pictures and produced a report naming many of the participants .
At right is the top half of page 1 (click on image for the full sized image on the MS Department of Archives and History website). Here is an excerpt from the lead article in the top left column.
During the Labor Day Weekend, 1957, there assembled at Highlander the leaders of every major race incident in the South, prior to that time since the Supreme Court decision. This meeting was directed by Reverend John B. Thompson, chaplain, University of Chicago. Reverend Thompson has a lengthy record of Communist affiliations which appears elsewhere in this folder. The direction of the entire school was under the leadership, as usual, of Myles Horton.
There were representative leaders of the TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA BOYCOTT, the TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA BUS INCIDENT, the MONTGOMERY ALABAMA BUS BOYCOTT, the SOUTH CAROLINA – NAACP SCHOOL TEACHERS INCIDENT, the KOINONIA INTER-RACIAL FARM – AMERICUS GEORGIA, and CLINTON, TENESSEE SCHOOL INCIDENT among others.
They met at this workshop and discussed methods and tactics of precipitating racial strife and disturbance.
The meeting of such a large group of specialists in inter-racial strife under the auspices of a Communist Training School and in the company of many known Communists is the typical method whereby leadership training and tactics are furnished to the agitators. This was a general workshop and would be the most common method of developing a long range program. (Emphasis added.)
The left most column on the front page also includes profile articles on the founders of Highlander and on its Executives. On the right half of page 1 is an incredible list of more than ninety liberal and progressive groups said to be Communist Front organizations. Also on the right half of the front page is an article profiling each of the supposed Communist Front organizations that is listed in the House Committee On Un-American Activities Committee’s “Guide To Subversive Organizations and Publications.”
Open up the newspaper and you get a fulltwopagespread* of photos of the Highlander Labor Day Weekend, 1957 attendees, with captions naming them and characterizing their alleged Communist affiliations. Running across the top of the two facing pages is a huge headline that reads, “Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School 1957.” An “Editorial Comment” on the back page* explains:
It has been our purpose, as rapidly as possible, to identify the leaders and participants of this Communist training school and disseminate this information to the general public. This Commission would appreciate your furnishing to us any further identifications you can make.
It behooves each of us to learn more of Communist infiltration and the direction of Communist movements. Only through information and knowledge can we combat this alien menace to Constitutional government.
Almost all of the rest of the back page* is a listing of the alleged Communist Affiliations of four of the purported leaders of HIghlander Folk School, James Dombrowski, John B. Thompson, Don West and Aubrey Williams. For each of these men, there is an extensive list of memberships, speaking engagements, political statements and petitions signed that the Georgia Commission would have us believe are evidence of Communist affiliations. Dumbrowski’s list has forty-five items, Thompson’s thirty-six, West’s eighteen, and Williams’ forty-three. The level of detail in these lists suggests that they were provided either by the FBI or by the House Committee on Un-American Activities or both.
*Because the Georgia Commission on Education report is printed as a newspaper, the pages are scanned in halves and therefore a little tricky to read on screen. For your convenience, here are the links again, more clearly specified:
Headline is from Bob Fertig at Democrats.com. He writes:
In order to trash Cindy, [FOX's John] Gibson called on Ira Stoll, editor of the rightwing New York Sun and author of “Cindy Sheehan’s Crowd.” Stoll attacked Cindy for working with “extreme groups and individuals”:
Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA.
Though red-baiting her is no worse than any of the other vile attempts to smear Cindy Sheehan, this particular tactic enrages me in a special way. I’ve been working on another post that relates to red baiting, not in connection to Cindy Sheehan, but I’m going to talk a little about it now.
In the late 50s the FBI’s New York Field Office decided that my father should be investigated for possible inclusion on the Security Index. What was the Security Index? That was the 1950s and 60s version of the Custodial Detention Program (CDP), whose purpose was
to enable the government to make individual decisions as to the dangerousness of enemy aliens and citizens who might be arrested in the event of war.
( Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)
The Security Index was the new name given the CDP after Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive to abolish the program in 1943 because
The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous. (Ibid.)
The primary basis of the investigation of my father for inclusion in the Security Index was his membership on the executive committee of the Socialist Unity Forum and his attendance at meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance. He had committed no crimes, but he associated with socialists.
What did the investigation entail? Here’s a partial list, gleaned from my father’s FBI file, released to my family under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts:
Trips by FBI agents to the NYC Marriage License Bureau and to the NYC Board of Elections to gather data on residences, employment and family
Reports from a neighbor in my parents’ apartment building who was spying for the FBI
Bogus phone call to my mother from an FBI agent claiming to be a NY County Clerk’s Office Representative. In the guise of being interested in empanelling my father for a jury, the agent grilled my mother about my father’s place of employment.
Bogus phone call from an FBI agent to my father’s place of employment. Pretending to be an insurance company representative, the agent verified my mother’s information about my father’s employment.
Agents who attended political meetings and made leading statements to provoke others in attendance to go on record with views that could make them eligible for further investigation or otherwise “incriminate” them.
A surprise visit from two Special Agents who started asking questions first and identified themselves second: “After the SAS identified themselves GREENBERG remarked ‘No, I have nothing to say to you!’ He refused any further approaches to conversation including possibilities for a later appointment.”
A significant basis for conducting these invasive and harassing procedures was information about my father’s affiliations and activities provided by civilian informants whose information was not necessarily reliable and whose intent was discernibly vindictive.
When we talk about invasions of privacy associated with the Patriot Act it is important to remember what the stated purpose of such practices were in the past: to create “a suspect list of individuals whose arrest might be considered necessary in the event the United States becomes involved in war” ( Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976).
If one qualified for the Security Index, one’s name was placed on a special Security Index card. If the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index and his or her card should be canceled,
[t]he cancelled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would he destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or “otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups.”(Ibid., emphasis added)
The practice of red baiting has had terrible ramifications in the lives of thousands of innocent Americans whose only crime was holding views or having political associations that challenged the status quo. In many cases the only evidence of their crime was unsubstantiated allegations that they held views or had political associations that challenged the status quo.
Please read the rest of Bob Fertig’s post and join him in telling Fox to stop smearing Cindy Sheehan and her allies.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 12, 2005 at 6:55 pm
In honor of this year’s Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father’s Political Autobiography.
By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.
When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the “staff intellectual” and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 6, 2005 at 9:33 pm
No, damn it. Albert Einstein was a political radical and anti-racist.
When it came to how to handle Einstein’s ashes or his house on Mercer Street, everyone involved meticulously adhered to his wishes. But when it involved his ideas, and especially his concerns about what he called America’s “worst disease,” the fact that Einstein wanted his views made as public as possible seems to have slipped past his historians.
I’ve been going through a bunch of the documents from when my father was Executive Director of the Greater New York Council For A Sane Nuclear Policy and getting back into the history of the Left and the peace movement in the early 60s.
Albert Einstein was always one of my father’s heroes. Maybe Dad knew the anti-racist part, but all I remember hearing is the bumbling genius pacifist in a wrinkled suit version.
More than one hundred biographies and monographs of Einstein have been published, yet not one of them mentions the name Paul Robeson, let alone Einstein’s friendship with him, or the name W. E. B. Du Bois, let alone Einstein’s support for him. Nor does one find in any of these works any reference to the Civil Rights Congress whose campaigns Einstein actively supported. Finally, nowhere in all the ocean of published Einsteinia – anthologies, bibliographies, biographies, summaries, articles, videotapes, calendars, posters and postcards – will one find even an islet of information about Einstein’s visits and ties to the people in Princeton’s African American community around the street called Witherspoon.
Oh this makes me mad…
Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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