I remember it as a hot day in Los Angeles, that November 25, 1987, the day before Thanksgiving. That morning, Lee and I packed, pushed, filled our Toyota station wagon with everything I thought I would need for my move to Chicago. Only stopping to say goodbyes to neighbors interrupted our frenzy – especially the family who lived below us. Ah Ying, who was born in China, emigrated to New York where she gave birth to William and divorced her husband. When she moved to Chicago, her mother, Kwan Mo, came to live with them. Ying was unwell and supported the family as a garment worker – she had an industrial strength sewing machine in her living room and took in piecework distributed to her by clothing manufacturers in Chinatown. Kwan suffered from ailments I was not given to know. William was a thriving high school student who had just graduated and begun classes at CSULA. We had a close bond. At least Lee would maintain that bond when she returned without me.
We did not leave by 11 AM to avoid the Thanksgiving rush. Noon went by, time slipped by, the hours fell away until after 3 PM I climbed into the driver’s seat, Lee into the passenger side, and Lee’s sister, Marie, nestled in among the belongings packed into the rear seat, in a space we didn’t believe existed. We merged onto the freeway leading out of down town Los Angeles, just east of “the interchange,” and across three lanes into the track leading to the San Bernardino Freeway, “the 10.” As we settled into being stuck in the massive Thanksgiving traffic jam of everyone wanting to get out of Los Angeles for anyplace east of there, Lee turned on some music to soothe our nerves. And then the news, KFWB, “Give us 23 minutes and we’ll give you the world.” It turned out we didn’t want to know the world. It turned out that KFWB blared that Harold Washington, mayor of Chicago, had died approximately 7 hours earlier.
The commotion on the freeway subsided into a shocked silence inside the bubble that was our car. Lee kept switching stations to see if there was more news. Meanwhile I entertained a crazy hope that by turning on music we could deny the reality of Washington’s death. The news might morph into a delusion, a nightmare that would dissolve.
Both Lee and I had followed carefully Washington’s victory against the Chicago machine four years earlier. A majority of right wing members of the city council spent his entire first term blocking his working class program in what became known as the “council wars.” He’d been re-elected, and his working class constituents had claimed a new majority on the council. The prospect of being part of an experiment in social transformation made the move to Chicago an exciting opportunity. The heart attack that crushed Harold signaled all the closet reactionaries to come out of the woodwork and sabotage the movement. But we didn’t know that yet, as the traffic let up going through Banning into the pass between Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto, both snow covered peaks shrouded in the darkness. Passing Palm Springs, we pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop in Indio. We ate hamburgers in silence, and reached our destination at Lee’s parents’ house in Phoenix four hours later, before sunrise.
At lunch Lee’s father Frank sat at the kitchen table, under a portrait of Ronald Reagan. An immigrant from China in the 1920s, he defended the Kuomintang and had no use for the revolutionaries. We had little to talk about. More than a decade after I’d married Lee, he still didn’t know my last name. He asked if I was related to those Rosenbergs (pronounced as an accusation) who were executed. Other parts of the family who imported Chinese consumer products from Hongkong and Taiwan had made their peace with the mainland to get part of the nascent import trade. Another one of Lee’s brothers worked for the city, was a member of the public workers’ union, and part of the Phoenix Democratic Party apparatus. His first question when he saw us was: what did we think would happen to Chicago now that Harold was dead. We didn’t know.
We all feasted heavily on Thanksgiving day. The next morning Lee and I left Phoenix. Marie stayed to spend a few more days with her family. Then headed back to the West Coast. Our trek took us through Edmond, Oklahoma, where we stayed with one of Lee’s college friends and I scratched my cornea. Lee took over driving while I recovered. She drove from Edmond to stop at a motel in Rolla, Missouri. The next day we got a late start and reached Chicago as daylight ended, a nasty, drizzly day. As we settled into our temporary lodging in Humboldt Park, thousands paid their respects to Harold in a mass meeting that many hoped would revive the movement’s spirit.
After a few days Lee returned to Los Angeles, as we had planned. We expected that her move to Chicago would come within the next few years when she could retire with a full pension, but that never happened. I settled in at Guild Books for the next phase of my life, not fully prepared to watch the betrayal of the dreams of the movement. Harold had always told the voters, it’s not the man – it’s the plan. It’s the movement. We had front row seats to watch as the powerful movement which had brought Harold Washington to office was derailed by his “friends.”
I think about that week from the day before Thanksgiving to my first few days in Chicago often. The hope of that journey parallels the hope of a couple of years ago when Brandon Johnson was elected mayor in an election that wasn’t supposed to happen. No one expected Harold to win – especially when the Democratic Party turned against him and worked for Bernie Epton, the Republican candidate. No one expected Johnson to win, when all the big guns in the Democratic Party supported his opponent (the mayor’s race had become “non-partisan in the intervening years; Johnson’s opponent was a member of the Democratic Party, but in all other respects similar to Washington’s opponent forty years earlier).
But a movement swept Brandon Johnson into victory. The Chicago Teachers Union is given a lot of the credit; but Johnson’s support was much broader and more grass roots. People who had fought successfully for reparations for victims of police torture; people who marched and protested and petitioned after police committed wanton murder when they killed LaQuan McDonald; these inspired community activists worked the precincts for Johnson. A solid core of young people had brought the cause of justice for prisoners tortured by police Sargent John Burge to the United Nations, delivering a petition charging genocide. Parents and students throughout the Chicago area had been galvanized into action because of massive disinvestment in schools and actual school closings. Even so, as broad as the movement was, as much as Johnson’s victory was historic, it was dwarfed by the percentage of people who came out to vote for Harold in 1983. 88% of the electorate voted in 1983; not even 40% voted in 2023.
In another year we will be at the beginning of another mayoral and aldermanic election campaign. The vultures attacked Johnson from day one of his administration, now they are circling to challenge Johnson in 2027. The electoral question is whether the movement that put Johnson in office is strong enough to mobilize forces many times greater than put Johnson in office. Even deeper, the question is how well have the forces that put Johnson in office consolidated and organized, how have they used the last three years to develop their strength beyond the ballot box. I hope the resistance to ICE shows we haven’t squandered the opportunity we created.
Getzel Roisenbaum, my father, was born in 1890 in a Ukrainian city west of Kiev, Zhitomir. The early years of the 20th century were marked by anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, Moldova and neighboring areas. Similarly, Tsarist Russia was a prison of nations and a danger to Jewish residents. Getzel’s parents Leyba and Ita brought the family to the US in November, 1903 fleeing political persecution. At Ellis Island Getzel was assigned the name Eli George Rosenbaum and the birthday of January 1.
The family, including George’s brother, Abe, settled in New Haven, Connecticut. His brother Carl was born in the USA. I do not know why they settled in New Haven — it seems there was a cluster of Rosenbaum relations there as I grew up, but I don’t know who came first. Abe remained in New Haven, raising a family there. Carl moved to New York City and raised a family there. George was more itinerant.
I don’t know when George met Anna, my mother. I suspect it happened around WWI and the political maelstrom of the time. The Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut was home to many metalworking factories, and it’s likely George found work there during the war. At this same time Anna joined the Young People’s Socialist Alliance (the YPSLs), and as such corresponded with John Reed, who had in 1919 published Ten Days That Shook The World. The book aimed to tell the story of the Bolshevik Revolution, and faced censorship and suppression on its publication. The 23 year-old Anna became part of a grass roots effort to distribute the book.
George sits atop a gear in an unknown factory.
I imagine that within this network of political activists, along with socialist inspired labor activists that were organizing factory workers in New York and New England, George and Anna found common interest and became a couple. They were never formally married. Unlike Anna, George never became a citizen,
George had difficulty finding steady work. At some point in the mid 1920s George and Anna moved to Chicago for a couple of years. She got steady work as an order checker for Albert Pick & Co., but George still could not get steady employment. In January, 1926 they returned to New York and he began working for Sam Dauber and Nat Pine in their used bookstore just off “book row” (Fifth Ave. @ 12th Street) — Dauber and Pine would become legendary in New York’s bookselling scene. Then in May, 1928 George and Anna had their first child, my sister Greta.
The Corner Book Shop and George’s business card
In 1929 George struck out on his own and opened the Corner Book Shop on Book Row, 120 Fourth Ave. @ 12th St. It lasted only a few years before he had to close it. The store published several catalogs of its holdings — used and rare books — which was the main marketing tool of the antiquarian book trade at the time. Most of what was listed in the catalogs were literary titles. That is not what he brought home to stock his own bookshelves when the bookstore closed. Some books he thought were valuable (e.g. an old edition of Dickens’ Bleak House with a cellophane wrapper), others he kept because they were books about the history of the Russian revolution. He kept them with some pride; they worried him because he feared the anti-communism of the US government. I don’t know his personal experiences, but i did hear references to the Palmer raids. In 1919 and 1920, Atty. General A Mitchell Palmer had unleashed raids in cities across the United States. George, who had to register yearly as an alien, feared being deported then, and for the rest of his life.
Ita and Leyba seated, George in the back, Abe in front, 1913
After he closed the bookstore, George once again joined the reserve army of labor, finding work where he could, at times even a unionized job in the insurance industry (at that time one of the largest unions and employer groups). Greta told me about how she and Anna would watch him march with the union in May Day marches in NYC. But by the early 1940s, Anna moved to stay with relatives in Ansonia, Connecticut, where my grandfather — my mother’s father — had built a feed and grain store business, servicing the farming communities of the Housatonic River Valley.
Once the war came, and Uncle Sam reached out to draft young men, he found the Rogol branch of my mother’s family. Mayer Rogol (Uncle Mayer) owned a clothing store in Seymour, one of the Housatonic River towns. Sam drafted Mayer’s son Teddy, his main employee. George, who had been roaming around from town to town finding temporary work, came back to Ansonia and began to work for the Rogols. In 1942 Anna and George had their second child — me — and in 1945, with help from the family, and with the assurance that George had a permanent steady job with Mayer Rogol, we Rosenbaum’s bought a house on Thompson St. in New Haven.
George had a genuine interest in second-hand books — a skill he had acquired at Dauber and Pine and honed at the Corner Book Shop, but which was rusting with lack of use. Now he acquired a new interest: he began to collect stamps. Another of Mayer’s sons, Oscar Rogol, M.D., convinced him it would be a good investment and steered him in the direction of “First Day Covers” — stamps affixed to envelopes (often with a specially created image on the envelope) and canceled on the first day of issue. Beginning with the first United Nations stamps issued George collected those covers as well as most U.S. postage stamps. He kept them meticulously in albums (and loose stamps in special cellophane envelopes). And he began addressing the covers to me in his distinctive, fluid script.
Now that we had a real home, George also built a workshop in the basement, where he kept his treasured tools. He prized his only electric powered tool, an electric drill/sander. With that and his hand-held crosscut saw and hammer he built bookcases with adjustable shelves out of one inch oak planks, stained with an oak stain. I cried when he wouldn’t let me use his tools; I didn’t accept his excuse that I might hurt myself (or that I might break them; we would have had difficulty finding money to replace them). On those shelves I found treasures — I discovered Jack London’s Call of the Wild which I read and reread; later I found the special John Reed volume Ten Days That Shook The World with the letter from Reed to Anna carelessly folded inside the cover. I still have those 75 year-old shelves. When I moved to Chicago, I actually built special cardboard boxes to ship them from Los Angeles, via UPS.
George divided that basement with his workshop into two rooms with a makeshift wall. On the other side of the wall he built a table, that to my young eyes seemed a mile long and half a mile wide. We had gone on an excursion to New York, where we visited a Lionel Train store and bought a model train set. Coming home, we set it up on the basement table and my father installed it. This birthday present must have cost two weeks wages — looking back, I’m sure he was worried I would break it. Even more, he got a kick out of operating the transformer and sending the train around its track. But I don’t conjure up many memories of good times with my father. Just distant, and I wanted more from him.
Summers were alternate year trips with family friends Meyer and Mae Laderman. They had a big Buick, which we would load up with provisions and clothes for two weeks. The Rogols allowed George one week paid vacation each year — and he would take, or needed, one additional week unpaid. Our route often went through Tanglewood in Western Massachusetts where we would go to an afternoon classical music concert; stay over in the first cheap motel we could find (reservations weren’t required, prices were expensive if they were $6 for the night) and after a prodigious breakfast the next day at a local diner (my father exclaiming that he wouldn’t be able to eat for a week) we would drive to Cape Cod. One year we rented a cottage for a week in Denisport about 2 blocks from the beach. Most years we’d move from town to town along the cape, renting a motel in each for a couple of nights. Anna and Mae delighted in visiting the roadside antique stores, where they might find an occasional treasure.
Beginning in 1953, alternate summers were spent in Southern California. When my sister Greta married, they moved to San Francisco and, after a couple of years to Los Angeles. In 1953 Greta and Leon had their first child, Robin. That summer we flew to LA for the summer vacation, and again George took two weeks off, only one of which was paid. Anna and I stayed for another 6 weeks. Greta lived off San Fernando Rd. and Figueroa St., close to downtown LA, and the three of us would take a bus to explore the center of the city. My highlight of our trips was the Salvation Army or the Goodwill store where I would search their bookshelves for gems. I was almost 11, and had gotten the impression that there was something mystical about used books, something specially valuable. I had begun reading Dickens and began to buy what I fancied as collectable books at a cheap price for a hardcover book, and usually with copies of illustrations by one of Dickens’ famous contemporary artists — Cruikshank or H.K. Browne, more commonly known as Phiz ($1.00 was expensive). George dismissed my finds — usually book club editions. My enthusiasm and cleverness rebuffed, I retreated into resentment. But after he was gone for the rest of the summer, the first time my father was gone from the household for an extended period, i began to feel . . . out of sorts. It took a few weeks for me to realize: as much as I resented my father I missed him, missed his presence at least.
In 1953 we sold the Thompson St. home and moved to Chapel St., across from Edgewood Ave. Park. We lived on the second floor, the previous owner, the Weiner family, retained and now rented the apartment on the first floor, and the Neumans, who had lived on the third floor apartment continued to rent that space. We got our first TV set, a console with a black and white receiver. I knew about and followed baseball because of baseball cards; now I could watch Yankee games (they were the only ones broadcast, and they broadcast all games. I became a fanatic and regularly convinced my mother to tell my school that I was sick, so I could watch the ball game from the couch in the living room. Friday nights, George came home from work late but usually in time for us to watch the fights from Madison Square Garden together.
We didn’t have a car, so George depended on public transportation to get to work and back. It was a long bus ride and infrequent service, but the bus was only a block away from our Chapel Street home. On frequent Fridays Meyer and Mae Laderman would give him a ride home. Meyer was a tailor and had a cleaning store around the corner from where George worked in Seymour. Usually when they came over the four would play poker and I’d be allowed to sit in. Meyer had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son, whom we called “Hoody,” and he called himself “Pete.” I suspect his real name was Yehudi, and he didn’t like it at all. Pete it turns out was also a baseball fan, and one afternoon George called home from work and said that Pete was going to drive into New York to see the Yankees that night and invited us to come along. I jumped at the chance and was waiting anxiously when they arrived.
I don’t remember much about the game. I have no idea who won. I think we sat in the upper deck overlooking Hank Bauer in right field. And I was elated. Afterwards we went to a Bronx deli not far from the stadium for a corned beef sandwich. I wanted milk with my meal, but the waiter told my father no. In this restaurant we don’t mix milchige with fleishige — milk with meat — he said. I saw my father turn red, like he sometimes did when he got mad in a card game with his brother Abe, and told the waiter he’d better serve me or they would walk out. The waiter served us, I got my milk and corned beef, and I reveled in the unexpected: George defending his cub.
In 1957 the U.S. Senate created a committee to investigate corruption in unions, in shorthand, the (Senator of Arkansas John) McClellan Committee. McClellan hired Robert Kennedy as his chief counsel, and the committee went about investigating the Teamsters. Hearings were televised and reported widely in the newspapers. George followed this carefully and with disgust at the government persecution of labor. Countering my concerns about crooks in the labor movement, George argued “There may be crooks in the Teamsters and Longshore, but they’re our crooks. The government’s pursuit of the Longshore union (ILA) went back at least to 1951, because of reputed connections to various Mafia families. In 1954 the film On the Waterfront was released and we saw it in the theaters. George went along reluctantly— he knew something of the story of corruption in the unions, but he also knew that the filmmaker Elia Kazan and the screenwriter Bud Schulberg had spilled their guts to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. His face beet red, George denounced the film and its stars Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint and Rod Steiger for taking those anti-labor roles.
When we had a little extra for a treat on a Sunday, my father an I would walk to Fox’s deli on Whalley Ave., or perhaps to the corridor of Jewish food providers on Legion Ave. and Glick’s Deli. There we’d splurge on a quarter pound of lox, a half dozen pages, perhaps a piece of smoked whitefish, and cream cheese. What a special breakfast!
One morning in early October, 1957, I walked into my science class in Group Jr. High. I noticed a copy of that morning’s New York Times on the lab demonstration desk in front of the classroom, displaying the front page. The Soviet Union had launched a satellite that would orbit the earth for more than three weeks, much to the surprise of the rest of the world it seemed. The room was quickly abuzz, and Mr. Bodwicz, reclining as far back in his seat as he could, entertained a class discussion of what we 15 year-olds all thought of this event. By the time the class was done, the prevailing opinion seemed to be it was a false story, it couldn’t be true, and the photos that were on the front page to verify the story must have been trick photography (this was long before photoshop). When my father came home from work, the the dinner conversation centered on the satellite. Of course I shared the conclusion of my classmates. George dismissed their conclusion laughingly, pointed out the evidence was overwhelming. He related this story, probably the only time he talked about the Russian Revolution with me. He said that after the Bolsheviks seized power, the smart money said the government would fall in a matter of months at most. “They can’t even make a watch! How are they going to run a country?” Now my father said, with a triumphant smile glowing on his face, “They’ll never be able to say any more that they can’t make a watch!”
In 1959 and 1960 I had to start thinking about what would happen when I finished high school. I wanted to leave home, George wanted me to get a job — he was 70, tired of shouldering the year-in, year-out burden of supporting the family. Anna (who had always labored under the misconception that I was a genius) wanted me to go to university and then medical school. Looking back now, I can only imagine the horror my father imagined of working another 8 years to put me through school. It was difficult enough to pay for groceries. If I got a scholarship to Yale, then at least I could live at home — but the competition from others at Hillhouse High School was intense. I did get accepted to the University of Connecticut, and the tuition there was pretty low. But when I got a scholarship to the University of Southern California, that satisfied my great dream of moving as far away from Connecticut as I could, yet be in the same city as Greta. It was a city I knew a little about from summer vacations. So in the fall of 1960 I packed my clothes and moved to Los Angeles.
With both Greta and me both in Los Angeles, and with three young grandchildren in Los Angeles, my parents decided to pull up stakes in New Haven and move west. This was likely primarily Anna’s idea, another thing for my father to resent. So in 1961 they sold the house, packed all their belongings, said farewell to their Connecticut families, and flew to Los Angeles to await the moving truck. Packing everything — and probably discarding things that he thought precious — took a physical and psychological toll on George. Leaving his brother Abe in New Haven and Carl in New York dealt a severe blow as well. When we met them at the airport, I almost did not recognize the George who walked off the plane.
Greta found them a two bedroom apartment. I was living in a dormitory, staying with Greta during the summer. I lived in a dorm the second year as well, but when the third and fourth years came, I moved “home” to stay with Anna and George at a different place they rented. Los Angeles is filled with bungalows with red tile roofs, and this was one, a very pleasant second floor apartment over a garage, 1005 S. Hi Point at Olympic Blvd.
From the sale of our house my parents realized about $20,000 — more money than they had ever seen at one time before. One opportunity that had induced my father to make the trip to LA was the possibility of buying a bookstore again. At 72 under he didn’t have the energy to start from scratch. Coming into a new city, he didn’t have the contacts to start anew. And what he knew, as a bookseller from 30 years earlier, was the antiquarian book trade. Greta lived in Hollywood; from my experiences buying books for school classes I had scoured the used bookstores along Hollywood Blvd. And there were plenty of them. So George and I went on several excursions to look at bookstores. Partridge was a relative newcomer to the Blvd., and I never found much there I was interested in, but I spent many hours at Cherokee and at Gordon’s Satyr, occasionally Larry Edmunds, and a couple of others in between. But I wasn’t of much help; none of these were selling, and the price would have been too high, and there were no storefronts my father could consider renting (again the thought of starting from scratch was almost enough to provoke a bout of apoplexy). One of my favorites, Yesterday’s Books on the corner of Alvarado and Third St., was a mountain of disorganization and confusion. Like the others, it offered no opportunity, and was far off the beaten track of bookbuying.
My graduation from USC, front of Doheny library. L-R, Meyer Laderman, me, Mae, Anna, and George.
It didn’t take long for failure to turn into depression. I’m not sure which came first, the symptoms of Parkinson’s Syndrome or the depression. Even walking to the Bagel Deli two blocks away on Fairfax was a chore, in contrast to the joyful Sunday walks of my childhood to Fox’s. I watched with growing distress at his difficulty in initiating walking that Parkinson’s patients have. His hands trembled. Always something of a curmudgeon, he practically never smiled anymore.
In 1964 I graduated from USC. In the driveway outside the apartment on Hi Point we posed for graduation pictures. And then I can conjure in my mind’s eye the day Anna and George attended the dinner at which I received a scholarship to medical school, my mother’s smiling face glowing with pride, my father bent forward slightly, trying to smile, not to grimace.
And then he lost consciousness, was hospitalized, was non responsive and then unable to speak words that we could tell. I don’t know how long he was in a nursing home. He could no longer walk, made sounds that may have been intelligible to him, but not to anyone else. And in my mind so many years later, i wonder if I saw fright streaming from those agonized eyes as he could no longer communicate. I became more distant. I did not want to accept what was happening to my father. I denied it to the end. When Greta and Leon wanted me to take responsibility for making final arrangements for funeral and burial, I abdicated any responsibility. I don’t remember the funeral. I don’t remember the burial. I only know that Leon said we would want to visit the grave at some time in the future so we should do it.
I haven’t been back. I’m not interested in that. I am glad I still have my father’s hand made bookcases from 70 years ago. I am glad I have so many photos of him and his family. I’m glad that I can appreciate, from this distance, what my father went through to survive all those years, how he tried to live a life, putting one foot in front of the other, often not seeing much further. When I asked Anna about George’s political beliefs, she told me at one point he was more an anarchist than anything else. “If you give him a nickel, he’d defend any position.” He never joined an organization. It seems at times George must have been active in the fight for collective liberation. It seems as though his life must have frustrated any vision he had, and for that I grieve. I grieve that we were rarely able to share together his dreams and visions.
But if I my father ever taught me anything, I’ll always remember how those who did not know how to make a watch constructed the first socialist state and became a beacon of liberation to the world.
Whatever holiday you celebrate at the end of December, one thing is mathematically certain in the northern North America: the days will get colder, but the daylight hours will get progressively longer. One reason I look forward to December 21: I start counting the minutes of increasing daylight, a light shone into the world. This is all distinct from the various holiday hubbubs, gift giving, and Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells. For most of my life I have found the holidays alienating at best, “Merry Christmas” a taunt at least as often as a blessing. I imagine the memory from my childhood in a New Haven department store with customers fighting each other to get what shirt, or handbag, or socks were on the bargain table. The myth that suicides go up during December made sense to me.
Poet/novelist Richard Krawiec writes Sunday morning meditations or “homilies” of a sort. Reading them as I arise has become a blessed weekly opportunity to contemplate. He opened his Dec. 17 piece with these words: “I don’t care if you think this sentimental, but throughout my life I have often found this season to be magical.” Sentimentality is not a problem for me. After all, I love Tchaikovsky. But the season is not always magical, and Richard explores some of these contradictory elements. It triggered me to explore my own relationship to the season, a complicated one. None of the following is intended as a retort to Richard, whose explication is brilliant.
First of all, as a child this season was not quite somber – but certainly isolating. Growing up in a non-religious Jewish family in the 1940s and 1950s, I couldn’t understand why my classmates were getting presents and I wasn’t. All the celebratory stuff was about other people. I did not share in that. Except for the vacation from school part. Thank god Jesus was born. Otherwise we wouldn’t have two weeks off during the snowy time of year.
Chanukah is not a major religious holiday and it wasn’t much of a commercial holiday then either. So, no menorah, no presents, usually “Chanukah geldt,” which were coin-like circles of chocolate in a gold foil. On top of all that, my birthday fell on December 10. My parents, whose main goal in life was to continue to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads, never had enough for additional December presents. I didn’t get “Santa Claus,” and I didn’t get all the merriment. The merriest time was a Sunday morning, maybe for my birthday, bundling up to walk with my father to Fox’s Deli on Whalley Ave. or to Glick’s on Legion Ave. We’d stand in line at the counter inside, bask in the warmth and the smells of corned beef, edging up to order a half dozen bagels and a quarter pound of lox and maybe a piece of whitefish. And then back home to devour the breakfast treat.
On the other hand, my parents would on occasion take me to New York (we lived in New Haven, CT – a short train ride to the city) for the New Year celebrations. We would stay in the Hotel Latham, a cheap hotel, and visit relatives and friends, stop by Dauber and Pine’s bookstore, legendary in New York’s book row, where my father had once worked. We might go to a Yiddish theater production, see the Museum of Natural History, and experience the crowds on January 1. That was magical, exhilarating – Times Square, the lights, the noise, the midnight joy of the New Year, sometimes by the sheer size of it, frightening. A new year, though I didn’t see any difference the next day.
When I fled New Haven for college in Los Angeles, I settled in at the University of Southern California. I no longer recognized winter: no snow on the ground, temperatures never below freezing, actually swimming in the ocean on January 1. My brother-in-law and sister, who had moved to the Hollywood hills with their three children, confused and perplexed me: They really celebrated Christmas.
He was a lawyer, and on his behalf she would host a holiday party for their business friends. Los Angeles has a large, thriving Jewish population. Still, it was a small segment of the total population, and a successful legal practice meant breaking out of that isolation. To make more business friends, they appealed to the non-Jewish business community. Their living room, with its 14-foot ceiling, accommodated a substantial real Christmas tree, which required a ladder to reach to the top for decorating purposes. And then, on Xmas morning, their three children would appear around the tree to examine what looked to me like an overwhelming assortment of presents and, ultimately, open them and exclaim happily on the findings. I even found presents for me under the tree, and I began to shop for Christmas presents (usually books for the kids). The world of such abundant showering of gifts still did not seem real. I took photos.
My tuition scholarship to USC required that I work for the University. I was assigned to the employment office, where I put in 10 hours a week (and more during break periods). Hopeful graduates paraded through to avail themselves of the dangling carrot of a good paying job.
My wage (during holiday or summer breaks) was $1.00 per hour. The office had three full time personnel: Florence B Watts, the ancient overlord of the department who ruled from the building next to our workplace; Clarion Modell, who as office manager occupied an office on the second floor of our building (a repurposed house); and Mary Pershall, who had a degree in counseling and a desk of her own on the first floor. Mary had had polio as a child and as an adult walked with two crutches. At the end of the workday she’d often brandish one crutch in her fist, and leaving her desk, exclaim: “Another day, another dollar, and that’s about the size of it.” Part timers rotated through, mostly students trying to pick up a little extra cash. From time to time they gave a fourth person full time work, as long as he stayed sober.
Our tasks were to match student or graduate job applicants with job offers. My job was coding applicant punch cards depending on what kind of jobs they wanted, and then pulling matching cards for applicants when we got a job offering. We didn’t have enough hot-shot engineers in our files to fill all the Jet Propulsion Labs, Autonetics, Hughes Aircraft, and North American Airlines aerospace openings. Few of the people looking for secretarial jobs could type fast enough for the jobs we had. The whole thing seemed futile. Mary and we part-timers enjoyed a camaraderie of sorts – we were the comrades of the left-outs and the have-nots – so even when we celebrated a modest office party, the holiday season seemed a little desolate.
USC was known for two main degree programs. A BA or BS in business was a ticket to corporate Southern California; graduating in football was a good chance for a pro career. The football team was frequently in the Rose Bowl, and as a student I got cheap tickets to the extravaganza. The year was 1963. I took the bus from Hollywood to Pasadena early enough to watch the Rose Parade in the morning, then walk to the Rose Bowl, and finally get the return bus when the game was over. The parade proceeded up the mansion-lined Orange Grove Blvd and then along the fleabag hotel lined strip of Colorado Ave. The contrast was even more noticeable on the walk through the north side of Pasadena, along Fair Oaks Ave., to the Rose Bowl itself. Talk about desolate during the holidays. As an aside, USC beat Wisconsin 42 to 37 in one of the most exciting Rose Bowl games ever.
Six years later I was a social worker in Pasadena, CA. I had my BS from USC, I’d witnessed the 1965 Watts rebellion, I’d met and worked with San Joaquin Valley farm-workers, their medical clinic and the grape boycott. I had not graduated from USC medical school, I’d taken an unauthorized trip to Cuba, and witnessed the attack by the LAPD on the Los Angeles Black Panther headquarters. The attack on the Panthers in December 1969 made that year especially desperate. From the welfare office on Holly St. in Pasadena, you could throw a stone and hit the welfare, fleabag, Taylor hotel on Colorado Ave.
The Taylor ran a scam like other welfare hotels around the County. When a person presented a voucher for a week’s room, the Taylor would offer them cash for the voucher at a discounted rate – let’s say 50% of the face value of $16.00. For the hotels they were redeemable at face value from Bank of America, which held the welfare department account. A neat little profit for the hotel, plus they could still rent the room. The week before the Rose Bowl, the Pasadena police rounded up the welfare recipients and homeless on the streets and swept them out of town so the tourists wouldn’t see them. Season’s greetings.
Two or three blocks from the welfare office stood the restaurant where we would send clients with vouchers for their meals (if they did not have a place to cook). $10.50 was supposed to provide meals for a week at the B&C Café. New Year’s Eve, 1969, with the smell of tear gas still in my nostrils from the attack on the Panthers; with the knowledge of the circus about to appear in the streets of Pasadena to celebrate the Rose Bowl; and with the understanding that many of the recipients I had been dealing with were unceremoniously given literally the bum’s rush of town; I had the bleakest meal of my life at the B&C café, where the few people gathered for dinner ate silently, morosely. Apparently lots of people don’t find the season a time to rejoice.
My years as a bookseller, beginning in the mid 1970s, gave me another contradictory view of the season. Being a bookseller at Midnight Special Books in Santa Monica, CA and later at Guild Books in Chicago opened up a new way of looking at Xmas. First of all, a lot more people came in the stores in that month between Thanksgiving and Xmas. People I had come to know during the year, and who used the opportunity to engage in the kind of meaningful discussion that comes about around good books and good company. Second, their attitude was more upbeat in the season than the rest of the year, and that was contagious. But third, and most important, since most of our “customers” were also active in some social movement they were in the store looking for a recommendation about a book that we were passionate about. That we-the-booksellers and they-the-customers shared a common interest in. It was a time when we could “sell” our cherished books. As a retailer, I understood that if we didn’t sell a lot in these two months before New Year, we would not be around next year to sell books at all. But for the bookseller at Guild and Midnight Special, the quality was as important as the quantity. “Pick up the book, It is a weapon,” as Bertolt Brecht said.
I don’t even remember if the standard greeting was Happy Holidays or Merry Xmas.
My ten years as Barnes & Noble were a mirror image of this. Customers flooded into the store, usually with very friendly, smiling attitude. However, as it grew closer to the day, the outlook became more frenetic than upbeat. And the corporate nature of the retail atmosphere made our lives more frenetic as well – understaffed, running from one customer to the next, overtime and working both weekend days. As much as it was clear that people were there to buy, and did walk out with stacks of everything conceivable, every year reinforced one thing: my cherished books were not necessarily what they wanted. I “sold” lots of books, but I rarely convinced anyone about a book. And then, everyone told me Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, ad nauseam. By the time I was fired from B&N I came to hate the essence of the season: that everyone assumed I was Christian, or that everyone celebrated Xmas. In response to Merry Christmas I grimaced back through a thin-lipped smile, Happy Holidays. (A decade later my Catholic mother-in-law (who had known me for 25 years) said she thought Jewish people believed in Jesus Christ. Didn’t everyone? ).
Magic? Those years at Midnight Special and Guild, where I felt I was actually making a difference did have a magical essence. Now, as bombs rain on Gaza and one of my grandkids just took a plea deal in the Dept. of Corrections and over 20,000 people seeking asylum have been shipped to Chicago’s overburdened streets, Merry Christmas seems like a curse and Season’s Greetings a cruel joke.
In his essay, Richard Krawiec introduced Langston Hughes’ picture of this side of Xmas with these words: “During Christmas, wars and poverty do not take a holiday. They never have.”
Merry Christmas, China
From the gun-boats in the river,
Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
And peace on earth forever.
Merry Christmas, India,
To Gandhi in his cell,
And to you down-and-outers,
(“Due to economic laws”)
Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
With a bread-line Santa Claus –
Langston Hughes, 1930
But there is another side to the story.
We do have something to celebrate this year as never before. Never before have so many people – including Jewish people – been willing to take on the Israeli established organizations and support the Palestinian cause as their own; despite all efforts to divide us, the voices in Chicago raised in defense of the asylum seekers is unprecedented; the fight to end our carceral system has expanded, the rebellions following the murder of George Floyd continue to smolder and wait, perhaps just below the surface. These are the greetings of the season, harbingers of a new society that means peace and liberation for all.
[I wrote this essay at the end of the year 2000. With the current events in Palestine, the Masha Gessen affair, and the role of the United States in creating and maintaining the Zionist project, I decided to revisit it. With the rise of our own fascist movements, how we respond to our own Hitlers is a matter of some currency. Gessen, of course, was vilified for comparing the Israeli state to the Nazis. I made some modifications in the original, but the essay is substantially the same as when I wrote it. I refrained from making direct comparisons with the Republican and the Democrat fascists: but they should be fairly obvious. At the time I wrote it, I emailed it to my sister, Greta, to get her reaction. She took great exception to the concept of the “holocaust industry,” but I am convinced that with the 23 years experience in between then and now and in light of Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, if she were alive today, she would agree with these conclusions.]
I have been reading three books about Germany, but I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine. As the year 2000 ends, I finally finished Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum. I had promised myself a year ago to reread Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and I have finally gotten to it. And then by chance I this winter I came upon the story of Mildred Fish, one-time student at the University of Wisconsin, who winds up in the German resistance, Resisting Hitler.
600 Israeli soldiers are detained for refusing compulsory armed service. Their reason is the increasing severity of the Israel Defense Force atrocities against the Palestinians, who are engaged in what we are calling an intifada. One woman in the IDF, whose job it is to search the Palestinian women, complains about the indignities with which she is forced to treat Palestinian prisoners. At times, she says, she feels like a Nazi. A Jewish academic, appalled at the behavior of the IDF, compares them to Hitler’s Nazis. As this is broadcast to a progressive internet discussion group, objections fly across the screen: how is it possible to compare these two situations that are totally different. Germany’s Nazis were the real Nazis. YOU can’t have MY holocaust.
Surely this simplifies a very complex subject. But when presumably rational people react so strongly to the feeling of one human being for another; when a rabbi insults the woman who is merely expressing her disgust for the position she finds herself in, one questions what personal stake does this rabbi and other ordinary human beings have in maintaining that destruction of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe was unique in history?
Let’s not even consider this as a continuation of the thesis that the Jews must justify their existence as chosen people through examples like the holocaust. For, in the manner of thought I am posing, there are no examples LIKE the European holocaust. To suggest that the decimation (taken literally) of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a holocaust; that the millions who died in the middle passage from Africa to the Western hemisphere was a holocaust; that the calculated and calculating systematic working to death of millions of slaves (whose average working life when “sold down the river” was 7 years) was a holocaust evokes cries of protest. Eastern Europe was unique, you see.
Well, I suppose it was. And so was the Triangular Trade in human chattel. And it seems to me only reasonable to grant this uniqueness to seize upon their commonality as well. If one cannot understand the consciousness of Israeli Jews without understanding the Nazi era, one cannot understand the consciousness of North Americans without understanding the legacy of slavery, one certainly can’t understand the consciousness of Palestinians without understanding the occupation and all that means.
But no. When victim becomes oppressor, the situation becomes complicated. The oppressor must maintain some aspect of being victim. The Israeli government portrays itself as the object of terrorism. In the U.S. the government defends itself against “reverse racism.”
Of course to grant that the feeling of oppression conforms even in some general way to fascism undermines the ideals and dreams of many who still believe that the Israeli state could achieve the egalitarian goals it once professed. Israeli leaders in particular cannot grant the possibility, that the government in power is acting very like the state(s) from which Jews fled in the thirties and forties. “My power,” these leaders might say if they were candid, “depends upon my convincing the people of my country that they have more in common with me than with the common people whose land we have taken and who work, eat and even bathe at our pleasure.” The Nazi era is something that Israeli leaders have packaged as a commodity. These leaders trade the “holocaust card” on the market. It is the bargaining chip that they have in world politics because it keeps the majority of citizens of Israel in their hip pocket and in the Israel Defense Force.
Although I started this article with “I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine,” I really can’t stop thinking about what the Nazi era and what contemporary Palestine has to teach us about ourselves.
II
The biography of Mildred Fish-Harnack begins with its outcome. Hitler overturned the sentence of his own court and ordered her guillotined. That is, on Hitler’s direct orders she was the only American woman to have been executed. Born and raised in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Fish returned to Wisconsin to college. While a student at University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, who was studying for his doctorate (one of two he took). It was the 1920’s, they got married, and they settled in Germany. Harnack was a member of a leading academic family, a family which mingled among a social circle including Nobel prize winners, men of the clergy, lawyers and statesmen. They expressed their patriotism in their love for German culture. For them, Germany was synonymous with Goethe and Beethoven. For them, the rise of Hitler was anathema, signaled the death of that culture. In the meticulously researched pages of Resisting Hitler, you will not find any indication that the Harnacks considered joining the Nazis.
After 1933 the Harnacks began to develop discussion groups and study circles and social circles out of which they built a small anti-fascist network. Arvid was highly schooled in economic theory and visited the Soviet Union to study their planned economic formations. Mildred, who was taking her doctorate in American Studies, was doing work on the transcendentalists in literature and philosophy. Her lectures on Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson were highly regarded. She was engaged in translating work from English to German, when the censors allowed such books to be published. The two were close to the American Ambassador to Germany, but especially to his daughter, Martha Dodd. Resisting Hitler is filled with interviews and insights from some of the people who knew them well in this period. And from some of these interviews emerges the picture of people turning toward Marxism and the political-economic formation that was developing in the East, in the Soviet Union.
Of course many anti-fascists turned east. That was where someone was listening. They would have been as happy to find a receptive ear with Uncle Sam as with Uncle Joe. But Sam wasn’t listening at all, and even Martha Dodd offered her services to the Soviets. In addition, the author makes a good case for Arvid and his friends being as influenced by a promise of the future– central planning and egalitarianism — as much as by revulsion for the present.
Harnack fed information to both the US and the USSR. For months, the network in Germany reported on the expected attack to the East. When the attack finally came, network members were astonished as Hitler’s forces moved rapidly to the East. It appeared that the Reich was invincible. But when the tide turned with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, German papers did not report the change. A radio broadcast from the network to their Soviet contact was intercepted. In a matter of a few days the 17 key members of what Hitler branded the Red Orchestra were imprisoned. Their trial, in mid December, lasted only 5 days. Harnack and the inner circle of this conspiracy were executed in a few days later. The Court sentenced Mildred to six years in prison, but Hitler was furious. He demanded a retrial. Mildred, too, was killed. Hitler was determined that they would die without knowing of the prospect of success of the Russian counteroffensive.
III
Bernhard Schlink’s writing is very elegant in its simplicity. I cannot think of The Reader without thinking of Hesse, not so much for content as for style. The Reader has no “hero” in the usual sense. It’s two main characters are quite flawed. It’s a postwar tale narrated by a lawyer (Schlink himself is a lawyer) who, as a boy, a pubescent teenager, comes to know a woman who was a camp guard during the war. Comes to know first in a physical, sexual, sensual way. This rather odd couple, a woman and boy who could easily be mother and son, carries on an intense, curious romance. But know each other they do not. One day she disappears from his town, his life, under mysterious circumstances. And it is only later in the novel, after the young man becomes a lawyer, that he meets her again and finds out about her position as a camp guard. But does he even know her then? And what does he know of what she did?
As a young man he reads to her: he finds out that she cannot read herself. She never learned. He is such a good reader. And he makes her so happy by his reading. But does he really understand what he reads as much as she understands his reading, and even later, in what she requests from him while she is in prison? In the end, we readers are compelled to question which of the two is the reader of the title. It is perhaps this ambiguity, which makes this novel so provocative; while it’s resolution in the final separation and search for truth, which makes it so frustrating.
Much of German post-war writing is filled with concentration camp angst. It’s a genre like Westerns in the US. Except that in our Westerns the Indians are either noble savages or just plain savage. We don’t seem to have much angst over our concentration camps. And probably, looking at Germany from the safe distance of middle America, I can sit here and say “enough already.” The resolution of The Reader was frustrating because it was so indecisive. I don’t know who bears the guilt. ‘
It may not be clear who are the friends of the resistance, but there is no doubt in Resisting Hitler who is the enemy. And it’s important to put this novel in the context of the fate that befell the Harnacks once they were dead.
Within the German military, a patriotic group developed a conspiracy to kill Hitler. It was a high placed, anti-fascist formation that did not succeed. After the war they were given high honors, They were treated as heroes. In contrast, the Red Orchestra became the object of vilification. They were traitors, not heroes; they sold secrets to the enemy. They were Reds. I am tempted to say smugly, “The Germans are like that you know.” Chalk it up to the authoritarian personality and genetic fascism.
But the state of Wisconsin did the same thing. A proposal to celebrate Mildred Harnack day in the public schools was killed when a University of Wisconsin alumnus, an editor of an Oklahoma newspaper, argued that it was a damned shame his daughter would observe a holiday from school in honor of a damned Communist when she couldn’t even say prayers to her God in the schools.
After Germany reunified, the authorities found that a school in the east had been named to honor Mildred. Western authorities promptly changed the name to some cipher instead. The outcry from those “totalitarian East Germans” forced the government to concede on the question of the school name: It reverted back to Mildred’s school.
So maybe The Reader isn’t as superficial as I think it is. And just maybe I’m displacing my anger about America onto this book. But The Reader is not “about” middle America. It IS about Germany.
IV
In the 1800’s, two North American white women were appalled at the treatment of Blacks and Indigenous Americans. They wrote two novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ramona; they used the limited quality of 19th century moral force to cast a literary searchlight into the dark places of the national psyche. A century later the literary moment has degenerated to reflect the acceptability of ethnic boundaries of creativity. Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie and Diane Glancy write very well; but they are expected (are allowed?) to write only about the debacle and survival of the Native American. A whole generation of African Americans write about the experience of black America (are they allowed to write about anything else?). And when they do, they are criticized for not writing about universal human experience. August Wilson was chastised by the New York Times drama critic Robert Brustein for only writing about Blacks! In the same column, Brustein asked Wilson to write about universal themes, like Chekhov did. Mind you, he did not chastise Chekhov for only writing about Russians. Doesn’t Philip Roth write about Jews? In this country of 275 million people, are not more than a dozen white novelists writing about OUR holocausts, our ugly Americans, our Americans grappling with the blood history of our country? I am reminded of the incredible debate (who can debate this any more?) going on about whether Jefferson had children with slave mistress Sally Heming.
The philosophical approach of the “ethnic agenda” requires that each writer must write about his or her community. Then, by definition, the writing from that category is not universal and hence not of the same quality as . . . But wait a minute. What is “my community” and how does it relate to the whole? Doesn’t a truly American literature spring from the multi-faceted American experience? Isn’t the blues the quintessential American experience, in this most class-divided of all countries?
While the ethnic agenda frames questions in terms of color, it’s not so much a black and white issue any more. Increasingly the question to writers is: who will finally take up the cause of the least of us all.
V
The ethnic political agenda is part of a cultural assault that has Balkanized American literature. When David, my (at that time) 17 year-old step-son read To Kill A Mockingbird, it made such a huge impact on him. David’s father is African-American. The author: a white southerner attempting to come to grips with the American holocaust, but from the perspective of the white southerner. I emphasize that, because the examples of this are few and far between. And yes, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is flawed. But the impact on a 17 year old African American man was undeniable.
Who will take up the cause of the marginalized? Who will clarify that the experience of American survivors of the uniquely American holocausts merges with the universal? Denise Giardina, in her novels about the Appalachian miners, examines this relationship. Richard Price’s hard-bitten city dwellers connect to this reality. Russell Banks’ vivid portrait of the abolitionist family of John Brown in Cloudsplitter. Even John Grisham, in A Time To Kill, examines the brutality of Southern law from the viewpoint of a civil rights lawyer. But by and large, the angst over the American holocaust is left to the survivors to write about. There is an acquiescence that white Americans are not survivors also. I want to read someone who expresses the complexity of this relationship, it’s ambiguity and it’s decisiveness.
We are back to where we began. America must own up to its own holocausts. It must own up to its own fascist practices. We must recognize the reality that Germans drew up their proscriptions against Jews after reading about the American post Civil War black codes. America relies on certain ideas and institutions to guarantee that the holocausts remain the property of demagogues.
Literature can break this stranglehold. Literature arises on the foundation of experience. Forty and fifty years ago, this experience was segregated, balkanized and exemplified politically by liberation movements and civil rights movements. Those movements have gone as far as they could have: they have achieved integration of segments of those communities into the leading circles of the country. The leaders of those movements of yesteryear today are more representatives of the Democratic Party and all it represents than of the grassroots movements from which they evolved. The experience of today is a different experience. It is the experience of the fragmentation of those movements and the emergence of a class movement. Such a movement is calling forth its writers, its musicians, its artists. Only this kind of a movement can confront the past in all its ambiguity with unambiguous honesty.
V.
Many years ago I interrupted the peaceful ending of a family seder, after all the questions had been asked and answered, and after everyone had a warm feeling of democracy that the story of liberation from pharaoh always brings. I asked how we could end this celebration without at least commenting on the suppression of the Palestinians and questioning how this contradicts the notion of liberation in Israel. I was not a very popular person. Since then I have come to be encouraged by the number of people who share these opinions. I was encouraged in 2000 by the number of Israeli soldiers refusing to fight (just as their German anti-fascist forbears tried to undermine the Third Reich). I am encouraged today by the US Jewish Voice for Peace and its clear opposition to the Zionist state of Israel. And I find the broad social activity for housing, health care, abolition of the carceral state and other fundamental needs – movements to end our ongoing holocausts — very encouraging. These movements need a literary voice. It’s time for a class movement in literature, drawing on the unique and emerging 21st century experience of a newly forming class of disenfranchised: A class whose historic role is abolition of all previously existing conditions of exploitation and oppression.
On This Fourth of July: The Storm, The Whirlwind, The Earthquake
Lew Rosenbaum, 2022
Warning! This Fourth of July essay is not a diatribe against American oligarchy, nor a hymn to the original glory of the American vision. You can give up now if that is what you are looking for.
In 1763 the European Seven Years War came to an end, a war between colonial powers to divide up a world that was not theirs. In North America, the war is known as the French and Indian War, with the English colonies arrayed against the French. Indigenous peoples from different tribes fought on either side depending on what they believed was in their best interest. The French were nearly driven from their North American possessions. The Treaty of Paris established a Western boundary beyond which the English colonists were prohibited from advancing – a guarantee to the Indigenous peoples who had supported the British.
In Europe, and in the world, England achieved supremacy. The British monarchy was the most powerful among Western monarchies. The political form of government that prevailed was “monarchy” – along with all the varied political and economic trappings of feudal relations of production. There were no united states in North America. A bewildering and contentious variety of settlements from north to south along the Eastern coast satisfied the intentions of the individual groups of colonists – some were “crown colonies,” or land grants established by the British monarch to replicate what they left in Europe. Others were established by political or religious refugees. But all of them accepted the dominion of the British monarch. It just seemed like a divine right. Who could question it?
Title page of the pamphlet “Common Sense.”
In January, 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that did question just that. Paine was a craftsman and recent immigrant from England. Common Sense was an instant sensation, a best seller. 100,000 copies were distributed to the two million residents of the colonies. One out of every 20 people got a copy; even more read it or heard it read, as it was passed around and read in groups everywhere. It satisfied a need of a disgruntled, angry population. Whatever the discontent, the cause could be laid at the feet of a monarch who did not care about the needs of the people. Whether it was “taxation without representation,” the government’s right to requisition a citizen’s home to house soldiers, or the prohibition against colonial expansion west of the Appalachian mountains, the English colonist now had an enemy against whom it could organize.
Attempts by the British to export the feudal relations in the home country to the North American colonies failed, as the feudal agricultural system itself ground to a halt. Mercantile capitalism was on the rise, demonstrated by the wars for colonies, of which the Seven Years War was an example. All hitherto existence of class society has been a process of abolition of the former system of private property and the revolutionary creation of a new form. The “American Revolution,” declared on July 4, 1776 (six months after Paine published his little pamphlet), was in a certain sense an abolitionist revolution. Common Sense was an abolitionist manifesto. Paine himself left the new United States to foment a revolution in England itself. Under threat of death, he fled to revolutionary France, where he was at first welcomed as an apostle of the anti-monarchist creed.
Thomas Paine
The American revolution was a singular shot to abolish monarchies, and was seen that way around the world (especially in the halls of power in Europe). While it aimed at negating feudal private property and the feudal political power that protected it, it could not go beyond that. Many of the social trappings that came with feudal property continued, grafted onto the new capitalist society (e.g. the most egregious questions of women’s rights, of Indigenous peoples, of the enslaved and, in fact, all the propertyless working class). Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass referred to this time and the makers of this revolution in this way: “They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.” (From Douglass’ July 4, 1852 speech)
The emergence of a waged working class bound to seek employment from capitalist owners of the means of producing wealth in North America began to pose an entirely new contradictory form of private property. The earliest factories in North America had to be built near a source of power, and the only power of that sort available was along the waterways. After the invention of the steam engine and its application to machinery came the exponential growth of the factory, of industry, of the new class of a new era, the industrial working class. The new North American country was quickly divided into a section which produced manufactured goods and food and a section which lived by producing and exporting cotton. Wage labor in the North, enslaved labor in the South. The latter produced for the world market; the former produced for local consumption and for the South.
Politically and in terms of wealth, the South was dominant from the 1789 Constitutional Congress to 1860. To maintain its dominance, the South engaged in continuous battle to extend its influence west. Little by little the South saw its control whittled away as the population of the North grew and, therefore, northern influence in the House of Representatives outweighed that of the South. In the Senate, the dominance of the South depended on limiting the number of states admitted to the union that outlawed slavery. Northern states generally opposed the expansion of the slave states, in part because it limited the expansion of free landholders and limited the expansion of railroads (both of which would be taken from Indigenous lands). From the 1789 Constitutional debates throughout the 1800s up to the Civil War, a new movement arose which called itself abolitionist. Very small and isolated at first, it gathered steam as the United States itself expanded, at each step a pitched battle between the forces of expansion of the slave system and its abolition. The penultimate battle came in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857. Effectively slavery became legal in every state of the union, an African-American was deemed not a person, and had no rights that a white person was bound to respect. The intense reaction to that decision further split the already fractured Democrats and drove independents and disgruntled Whigs into the newly formed Republican Party. The Republican Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election sealed the fate of the pro-slavery political movement. The South seceded and, with a pre-emptive strike at Fort Sumter, began the Civil War.
If the American Revolution can be seen as a war to abolish the rule of the monarchy and monarch protected private property, the Civil War was a battle to abolish private property in human beings. In 1865, the military victory established the mixed vision of what abolition would look like. There was to be no compromise with the supremacy of Wall Street, and the ten years of Reconstruction that followed the signing of the peace broke the back of Southern resistance to Wall St. At the end of that time, the political compromise of 1877 restored control to the former slaveholders, using the terror of the KKK to drive the freedmen back into peonage. Washington removed federal forces, which had, until that time, provided some guarantee of the civil rights of the formerly enslaved.
Frederick Douglass
When Frederick Douglass gave his 1852 Fourth of July Speech, he had delineated how important the victory over England had been, and where it fell short. Many of us read the speech today to read this section, which might have been written in 1877 as Knight Riders resumed their reigns of terror: “Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Frederick Douglass
Almost 100 years after the defeat of Reconstruction a group of intellectuals assembled at the University of Virginia in the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. There and later at George Mason University, they began the difficult task of persuading the American people that “individual freedom” depended on their friends, the wealthy, that freedom is slavery, that government intervention (under which Social Security and MediCare laws had been enacted) is inherently evil. They were very much like the John Calhouns of the pre-Civil War era who saw the foundations of their society changing and fought tooth and nail to retain power first by persuasion, then by warfare when persuasion failed. Recognizing that they were greatly outnumbered, James McGill Buchanan and his colleagues tasked themselves with creating an infrastructure that would win people to defend what would crush them. In the words of scholar Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), “the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy instead of open declaration of what they really wanted.”If this makes you think of the decades long battle to overthrow Roe v. Wade, there’s a good reason for your thinking.
Their experiment came to fruition in the great dispossession – the development of a speculative section of the capitalist class grown on a failure to find a place to invest productive capital and hence to employ workers and create value. Unlike in the slaveocracy in the 1850s, this class is confronted by a new class created by a technology that does not need labor. Contrary to an industrial working class whose conditions of existence is the factory where it obtains its subsistence, this class has no place to go without abolishing the structures that keep it in thrall. We find the theoretical principles most clearly articulated from one section of the movement that has concentrated on the evil that is the prison system. They also call themselves abolitionists. Among them are people, such as scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, who state quite clearly that the abolition of the prison-industrial-complex (PIC) can only be accomplished by the reconstruction of society. You cannot have a society without prisons/courts/police without building a society in which everyone has what they need to survive and thrive. And this is possible today.
This Fourth of July we are compelled to reread Frederick Douglass 170 years after he wrote and delivered this important oration. We are compelled because of the hope he expresses and because of the fire he breathes. We are compelled to read it because the abolition of our time is substantially different from getting rid of monarchies and getting rid of chattel slavery. We can get rid of the chains that bind us to the vampirish private property that produces all wealth. We face the greatest challenge and possibility of emancipation ever. At a time like this we need audacity, not beggary. We need a moral vision, not just a recitation of facts and horrors. Returning to Frederick Douglass, this is what we need today:
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
With more than 800,000 dead from COVID in the US alone, the questions are urgent: Who will represent us, who will provide for us, who will make sure our political representatives don’t destroy our ability to live on earth? Do we need to rely on the bumbling dunderheads who run the Democrats and the open fascists who control the Republicans?
Political parties are not inherent in the DNA of the United States. In fact, the leading writers of the Constitution wanted a government in which the “most capable” (meaning the wealthiest, white men as individuals) ran the country. Madison and Hamilton, writing in The Federalist Papers, abhorred “factions.” The faction they abhorred the most, and feared would organize under a political party, was the poor. This was one reason why neither the President nor the Senate was elected directly. Within the first few years, however, life asserted itself and ousted the ideological purity intended by the founders.
In the very first administration debates arose around the major themes that would plague the country throughout its existence. What is the relation between the Federal government and the states (“states rights”); the power of the cities versus the rural areas; land-owning agriculture and industry and the power of the banks. Soon political representatives emerged to fight for these interests. Under the Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton articulated a plan to support the fledgling industry of the North, open a national bank, raise a standing army. Thomas Jefferson led the opposition faction, with position that the dependence of wage-labor on the employer was inherently inferior to the yeoman farmer. The Hamilton faction won this round, conceding to the Jefferson faction that the capital would be moved from New York to the District of Columbia. Thus the Jeffersonian (Democratic) Republican Party consolidated around the Southern slavery-based agricultural ruling class, and the Federalist Party formed around the emerging manufacturing sector of the North.
From 1788 to 1836, the Southern states had a firm grip on the Presidency. In those 48 years, four of the six presidents were Southerners – called “Republicans” — who controlled the White House for 40 of the 48 years. Congressional battles were fought over whether the Federal government should fund such projects as the Erie Canal, called “internal improvements.” Southerners opposed paying for the economic improvement of Northern states, arguing that if the states needed such investment, they should raise the money themselves. There is no reason, they argued, that South Carolina taxes should be used for the exclusive benefit of New York. Implicit in this argument was the recognition that the expansion of Northern manufacturing and the route westward would amplify the political power of the North. Increasing Northern population would improve its proportion of delegates to the House of Representatives. These dull battles over dollars and cents veiled the contradiction, dubbed the irrepressible conflict, between free and slave labor.
This conflict broke into the open in 1819 with the Congressional debates on admission of Missouri to the Union. Political leaders understood that should more states be admitted as free states, the balance of political power in the Senate would shift away from the South. This debate, which was settled by the “Missouri Compromise,” allowed Maine in as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It also established a line of latitude, Missouri’s Southern boundary, that separated slave and free states, extending west into the Louisiana Purchase territory. The most significant thing about this Compromise, for this discussion, is that it established a system of two parties that depended on each other to maintain the status quo. Nominally, the Federalist Party disintegrated after 1819 and the Republicans split into Northern and Southern factions. The Federalists of the Northeast as well as Republicans of the North united into the Whig Party; while Republicans North and South came together under the banner of the Democratic Party. Henry Clay, an architect of the Missouri Compromise, joined John Quincy Adams as founders of the Whigs. New Yorker Martin Van Buren engineered the foundation of the Democratic Party along with Andrew Jackson. In this gentleman’s agreement, both parties agreed to kick the can down the road. Both parties recognized that this compromise would accept the slave power ruling in the South. This paradigm, where two sections of capital made a political agreement to preserve some form of the status quo relation between owners of private property, ruled the country for the next 40 years.
Other battles took place between 1819 and 1850 to test and adjust the bonds of the agreements between the slave power and the growing manufacturing/industrial North. Following the 1837 “Texas Revolt” and the declaration of the “Republic of Texas,” Southern expansionists argued for the annexation of Texas and conquest of Mexico, turning the territory conquered into slave states. In the war with Mexico, the US stole one third of the Mexican territory, including California. Southern politicians brought to Congress demands to annex Texas and turn it into five slave states. As Texas was beyond the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, once again the slavery question came before Congress. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel Wilmot proposed that slavery be prohibited in all territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House, where the more populous northerners (Democrats and Whigs) supported it. It failed in the Senate where there was equal representation, North and South.
In response to the crisis presented by Texas admission, opponents of the expansion of slavery organized a new Party, the Free Soil Party, and ran former President Martin Van Buren in the 1848 election. Senator William Seward of New York recognized this achievement: With free soil on a national, presidential platform, “Antislavery is at length a respectable element in politics.” The appeal of the Free Soil movement was not a pure support of the cause of abolition; it was supported by people who saw their economic betterment only coming by homesteading what had been Native American land and what was now likely to become slaveholder plantations. Some saw this as insulating themselves from having to compete with an inferior race. It demonstrates the way in which the objective needs of social motion proceeds along a sometimes indirect path, a path that was nevertheless anathema to the South.
The Whigs won the 1848 election and the long delayed efforts to expand slavery to the lands stolen from Mexico came to the fore. California applied for admission as a free state, the South opposed it, and once again, in 1850, Henry Clay negotiated a compromise. Whig and Democrat again stabilized the slavery question. The main elements of the compromise allowed California to enter as a free state, but all other territories were allowed to determine their status by the popular vote of white men. The Democrat and Whig political factions, had one main goal: keeping the union together, under the status quo of the increasingly tenuous control of the slave power. As if they had discovered democracy, the Congress called this new formula “popular sovereignty.”
In 1854 Stephen A Douglas, Senator from Illinois, proposed that Kansas and Nebraska be admitted to the union. Because these were part of the Louisiana Purchase, their status was governed by the Missouri Compromise, north of the Compromise line and hence necessarily part of free territory. When the South opposed this, Douglas introduced legislation that would allow people in those states to choose their status – extending popular sovereignty to the Missouri Compromise area. The Kansas Nebraska Act passed, but the debates on this subject shattered the party alignment that had been containing the slavery debate.
The Whig Party, unable to respond, collapsed, joining with Northern Democrats, who opposed the nullification of the Missouri Compromise, and Free Soilers to form the Republican Party. Republicans were not abolitionists; they wanted to contain slavery in the territory it already occupied. The South became solidly Democratic. Another party emerged to play a role, the Know Nothings, whose basic outlook was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, but also anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act. The 1856 election, resultd in a Democrat James Buchanan winning the presidency, capturing all but one of the Southern states and five Northern ones. Nevertheless the Republican Party’s John Freemont won 11 Northern states and captured one-third of the popular vote. The Know Nothings ran Millard Fillmore, who won in Maryland alone.
In the short period from 1854 to 1856 the Republican party was born, solidified their position in the North, and grew into a legitimate contender in national elections. The Supreme Court threw a gauntlet at the political system in 1857, deciding, in the Dred Scott case, that slavery was legal in all states. The Know Nothings fell apart, the anti slavery members joining the Republicans. John Brown’s attempt to seize the armory and Harper’s Ferry and begin an insurrection against the slave power failed, but his execution in 1859 and the cause he represented galvanized the nation. The battle was on. Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the Presidency in 1860 with a platform stopping the expansion of slavery. Republicans won 18 Northern and Western states. Southern Democrat John Breckinridge won the Southern 11 states. Two other parties won the other four states. The South was convinced that they had lost the political battle. The only way left, the Southerners understood, was the military subjugation of the North.
While there is a line of abolitionism that runs through this entire period, it should be understood that never, in the period leading up to the Civil War, was abolitionism the majority opinion. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, only a small number of people carried on that propaganda war. At the opening of the Civil War, many abolitionists refused to take part in the Republican Party debates, seeing the ‘free soil” party program as too bound by compromise. Nevertheless, it was the Republican Party, in all its contradictory messiness, that shepherded the government through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Unconscious of the necessity of abolition as late as 1861, practical reality forced them to that conclusion and to the conclusion that the Southern planter oligarchy would have to be subjugated. Militarily, the Northern armies and freed slaves broke the back of the slave-owners political control of South as well as North at Appomattox in 1865. Politically, the Civil War continued in the period we call Reconstruction, until the election of 1876 and the Hayes Tilden Agreement of 1877. Once ready to swear allegiance to their Wall Street masters, the slaveocracy was restored to political power and the freedmen driven back into peonage.
Since the Civil War the two party system has maintained the status quo very well. And what is that status quo? At the end of Reconstruction, the Northern financial-industrial capitalists had established their supremacy. This victory unleashed the “robber barons” of steel, the railroads, oil, and Wall Street itself. The wars of extermination against Native Americans accelerated, in some cases using the same troops that had been stationed in the South to guarantee the civil rights of the freed slaves. Troops from the South were redeployed to suppress labor insurgency across the country. By the beginning of the 20th century, the system organized itself around the maintenance of political control by the corporate masters of private property.
Opposing wings of private property have used the party system to fight each other, often with significant differences. Sometimes those differences were so severe as to call into question their common interests. But at no time were their conflicts so severe as to make the parties abandon the rule of private property. Now, 145 years after the end of reconstruction we are approaching a severe political crisis that makes us look carefully at what is at stake.
A new form of abolitionism is in the air. For as long as people have looked to the Communist Manifesto as a beacon of future emancipation, we have talked about the abolition of private property. Marx explained the strategy of the working class in this way: “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” [Value, Price and Profit]. In 1865 that was an ideological current in the movement. Changes in the movement have forced this abolition question to the forefront. Various stages in the development of mechanical automation have produced predictions about the end of work and the distribution of the abundance that automation can produce according to need. The introduction of the microchip, the development of robotics, and the expansion of AI have brought something qualitatively new to the equation. We are actually witnessing the beginning of the end of labor power as a commodity, and hence the end of value. We are beginning to see the capacity to organize society around production for use, not for exchange. And none too soon, as the rapacious advance of technological change under the dominance private property threatens to end nature’s basis of providing abundance for all.
Unlike previous periods, when political battles were waged around the dominance of one form of private property or another, today we are beginning to see battles over whether or not private property should dominate at all. This is the meaning of demands for housing and health care as rights independent of the market. The abolition of the rule of private property is now the practical answer to the fight for basic needs.
One important way that abolitionism has been introduced into the contemporary conversation is the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. Similar to the earlier abolitionists, today’s fighters started as a small group ideologically and morally convinced of their cause. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, this abolition has entered the mainstream debate. Some of the leading theorists of this abolition talk about it in terms of ending the domination of private property over the conditions of life that make prisons the answer to the practical problems people face in the community. For so many years we have talked about abolition as a good idea to win people over to. No longer. Today abolition is being proposed as the only practical way to achieve what are the basic needs of the people.
Similarly, when Jeremy Rifkin wrote his book, The End Of Work, not many people paid attention to his prediction. That’s not the case any more. Guy Standing’s advance of the term “precariat” has been followed by Andrew Yang running for president on the political position of the end of work. In a way, Yang is the Martin Van Buren of our time (of course Yang was never president, but he is the first to elevate the qualitative importance of robotics to a presidential campaign).
How will this abolition thing come about?
The historical framework we come from is that the contending forces battle it out through the political arena, at first in the electoral arena through representative political parties. It is a truism that capital has two political parties. It is becoming better and better understood, and our history leading up to the Civil War confirms, that the system of party politics is keeping us enthralled, that neither party represents us. At the advent of the Civil War, the agreement between two sections of capital no longer could hold, because one section of capital was holding back the revolutionary development of the other. The great “democrat,” Thomas Jefferson, became (along with Madison and Monroe and Jackson), the leader of the agricultural section of capital that depended on slavery. The great aristocrat, Alexander Hamilton, at the outset of the country became the political leader of the fight for industry and banking (and hence for wage-labor). The development of machinery and modern industry created the possibility for abolishing private property in human beings. It did not make that abolition inevitable, but it established the possibility, and a war was fought to bring that into reality. Because the contending political parties still represented two wings of capital, another form of private property emerged triumphant, championed by its political party, the Republicans.
So how do we get a party to represent us?
A similar but different dynamic is happening around us. What’s different is that no section of capital can be relied on to advance the revolution, as the Republican Party could by representing industrial capital and free labor. What is similar? Today’s Republicans represent the rural areas and Southern states. Defections from the Republicans show just how reactionary they have become. In advance of the November election, a number of former members of the current administration declared that they cannot vote for Trump. Some even pledged to vote for a Democrat. On the other hand, John Bolton said that he will write in a “conservative Republican,” whom he will name later. The Lincoln Project also aimed at a section of the conservative Republicans to win them away from Trump.
Today’s Democrats are splitting as well. The Democratic National Committee has a difficult time controlling who gets elected to Congress. In the 2018 Congressional elections, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Boston’s Ayanna Pressley defeated powerful, long time Democratic “liberals.” Jamal Bowman challenged and defeated the DNC backed candidate Elliott Engel in New York in the 2020 election primary, and joined the “squad” in his general election victory. Charles Booker barely lost to Amy McGrath in the fight to challenge Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. In the Chicago suburbs in 2018, Loren Underwood ousted a long term Republican while campaigning on a program of expanded health care; and in 2020 Marie Newman ousted conservative incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in the primary, on a program including Medicare for All. Over the past 10 years, the composition of the Chicago City Council has changed to reflect some of these changes as well.
As with the Whigs and Democrats of 150 years ago, where one party could not contain pro- and anti-slavery positions, there is not room in one party for the advocates of expanding public property (like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) and those wanting to maintain the status quo. This reflects the fact that there is no room any more for capital to grant the demands for basic needs that the 40 million newly unemployed are adding to those being made by the already dispossessed. The most recent example of this is the passage in House and Senate of an infrastructure bill and a defense bill that provide plenty of grist for the corporate profit mill. Meanwhile a bill, dubbed “Build Back Better” has been cut in quarters, and the quarter left languishes in the Senate and won’t be passed unless it is further gutted.
What seems clear is that the Republicans are turning into the equivalent of the Democrats of 1860, a party based in the South and dedicated to the utmost reaction. The Democrats are looking like the Whigs of 1848. While Biden won the presidency in November, 2020, Democrats arrived in Washington in January ready to do battle on how to control or respond to the demands of the people. Just as the Whigs of 1848 splintered over the question of slavery and its abolition, Democrats today are splitting. No one will say it out loud. It’s not even necessarily conscious. The issue today is abolition as well, and the subject is public or private property. Will we have a public health system or one subjected to private corporate greed? Will housing be a human right, or will we watch increasing numbers of people in tent cities while real estate speculation runs rampant? Will the public take control of “policing” in America, or will we be further murdered and subjugated by private militias and militarized police forces? Will what happens to the earth be decided by the people, or will corporate/technological profiteers be allowed to place bets on how quickly the arctic ice sheets will melt?
It’s impossible to say how long it will take for this to mature. The Working Family’s Party can provide sort of a thermometer of how far along this process has gone, as it tries to balance its “fusion” politics with its stated declaration of the need for a third party. In different parts of the country, grass roots leaders are vying for political office; in most cases they estimate that they cannot win without the label of a major party (even when that party does not back them). Paula Swearingen, who tried to unseat Joe Manchin in the West Virginia Democratic primary, has declared her independence.
Of course there are various other political parties running candidates with varying degrees of success at this time, the Green Party and the Justice Democrats being perhaps the most prominent. As did smaller political parties in the political motion in advance of the Civil War, these parties will play a role. It is likely that a bourgeois third party will emerge first, then a workers’ party. Ultimately a political expression that represents the new, dispossessed class, an abolitionist class, created by the new means of production will emerge. And because it will represent people who cannot survive except by distribution according to need, it will be a practical communist party representing a practical communist class. It’s not likely to be as clean as that; but the process is well underway, and is likely to proceed from the splintering of the major parties and the accumulation of independent forces not affiliated with parties today.
Susan, my mother-in-law, would have turned 100 on Feb. 4, 2022. It’s a tossup whether it would have been more appropriate to post this on her birthday, or on International Women’s Day. It was bittersweet combing through the scraps of paper mentioned in the introduction — the sweet part being the many discoveries I made along the way, gaining more insight into her curiosity, inquisitiveness, and defiance.
February 9, 1971 – 50 years ago – barely after 6:00 AM I awoke. For a second I thought I might be in a nightmare. In the next second I realized that the house I lived in really was shaking. My bed was shaking. The brick and board bookcase perched on my desk swayed back and forth, threatening to spill toward me. In the third and fourth seconds I remembered that I lived in the fourth, flimsy wooden house up the side of a hill, 86 stairs from the street. It took me about another second to calculate that before I got up and out of the house (without clothes on), the house could go tumbling down the hill; and I had no idea of what manner of peril awaited me if I even got to the door.
I then wrapped myself up in my blankets. I told myself that if I were going to die on that day, I might as well die comfortably, or as comfortably as I could. And, curled in that fetal position, I waited through the next five or six seconds of the 12 seconds that the earthquake lasted, the most powerful earthquake in the Los Angeles area in nearly the century preceding it. It’s remarkable how many thoughts can pass through one’s mind in 12 seconds.
That was the Sylmar earthquake or the San Fernando Valley Earthquake of 1971. It played havoc with steel structures, demolished large sections of the Olive View Hospital in Sylmar, upended large sections of major highways, and collapsed a section of the Van Norman dam, which held 3 billion gallons of drinking water for the city. The city forced evacuation of some 80,000 people for several days because of the flooding risk, until the dam was repaired. No flood took place, but after all casualties were counted, 64 died that day. I lived about 20 miles from the fault on which the earthquake erupted that day. The story of the earthquake is remembered in today’s Los Angeles Times.
The 12 seconds ended, I breathed a sigh of relief, recognized the aftershocks as they continued over the next few minutes. Soon I realized I could not get back to sleep. Got up, got dressed, got breakfast, listened to the radio (KFWB – give us 27 minutes and we’ll give you the world) to understand what was going on, and figured I should go explore. I was due in at work in a couple of hours, but had no idea whether L.A. County had closed the welfare office where I worked. I don’t remember whether I worked that day. But I do remember driving along the streets the long way round to get from Cypress Park to Pasadena, normally a 15 minute drive on the Pasadena Freeway. I think instead I drove up along San Fernando Road, heading north to Glendale, and then approaching Pasadena from the West. I don’t think I saw anything as bad as the twisted steel poles of Sylmar, but I did see many storefronts with broken glass windows, plenty of small and unstable structures in disarray, a lot of businesses that would not open that day.
That was a natural disaster, a force of nature. A different earthquake is roiling society today, a specter is haunting the world. While not a force of nature, it threatens to upend the structures, which humans have built to govern the way we live. Every technological advance today encroaches upon the labor market, more and more people are thrown out of the ability to earn wages sufficient for them to survive. A fault line has developed and widened: just in the last year as millions are de-employed while corporations rake in trillions of dollars. The political structure of our country is at least as twisted as the steel columns holding the 210 freeway in 1971.
Today, Feb. 9 2021, begins the impeachment of Donald Trump on charges of inciting insurrection, a charge which reflects the turmoil wracking the country. Rep. Cori Bush gave the most accurate analysis of why impeachment and conviction is necessary. This is not a question of semantics or whether or not impeachment of a former president is possible. This is not even a battle around insurrection. This is the question: will the United States finally move beyond a government based on white supremacy as the tool to batter the working class into submission.
What is destroying society today is not the same as the earthquake as 50 years ago.
The battles around the changes at the economic base of society always take place in what is known as the superstructure, i.e. the cultural, social and the political arenas. Here the combatants wage the battle of ideas. Democrat leaders and Republican leaders alike are trying to contain the battle of ideas. What is the main idea, which is being fought out? On the surface, in the Congress, it’s whether Trump is guilty. The fundamental question, which is not being debated, is: Are we going to be a society in which everyone enjoys the fruits of the abundance that is being produced? Or will we continue to exacerbate the inequity of society and condemn the billions of worldwide poor to death by poverty? Will corporations strengthen their dictatorship over us, will we allow them to shore up the dam to keep us at bay? Or will we breach the wall of that dam and attain the power to reconstruct society in the interests of all?
There is a specter haunting the world – a real possibility to abolish private property, corporate property. In 1848 Marx said communism was haunting Europe. With capitalism expanding, it’s taken almost two centuries to get to the point that capitalism is contracting. Contraction means many are expelled from having any market relationship to capital. They cannot find work, they cannot buy the necessaries of life. What can be done, except reorganize society? A century and a half ago abolitionists led a battle to end slavery and thus the practice of holding people as private property. Their demand, resting on the legacy of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown, was that Black lives matter. That war ended legal slavery; but it also elevated industrial and financial private property, a corporate structure which has continued to this day. Conditions have changed. In the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, pickets carried signs saying “I Am A Man!” Black lives matter. In 2020 some 26 million people demonstrated against the murder of George Floyd, many carrying signs saying Black lives matter. The only thing left for this class of people who have nothing to lose but their chains of poverty and police terror, this world wide new abolitionist class, is to abolish corporate private property and distribute the goods and services of society according to the needs of the people. That time has come and the outcome of this quake is up to today’s revolutionary class.
In late November I often think of this picture, an advertisement that appeared in Family Circle magazine, available at checkout counters in every grocery store in the country. That’s my mother, Anna, the matriarch of the picture, and although it’s a pot roast, not a turkey, it’s always Thanksgiving that brings it to mind. She was now a bona fide celebrity.
Anna, ever a presence, presiding in her close encounter with celebrity
My parents became an item in the 1920s — I’d say they got married then, but they never did go through the formal paperwork. I was born in 1942, after they’d been together almost 20 years, and 14 1/2 years after my sister, my only sibling, was born. They celebrated their anniversary at Thanksgiving, because it was a chance to get family and friends together. My father’s brother, Abe, and at least two of his children who lived close to New Haven (Herman and Milly) and their families might be there. My mother was close to two of her brothers, but only one, Lou, lived near by and would stop by with family and also their father, Aaron, (before he came to live with us). My mother ruled the kitchen, she prepared a family feast, and her presence was immanent. That’s the other reason I am now thinking of the photograph: in a conversation with my friend Kathleen, she reminded me of the time I introduced her to my mother, probably 1968. She told me the other day that my mother “was a presence.” The words have been rolling around in my brain since she said them.
In 1960 I moved to Los Angeles from New Haven, Connecticut. I moved to get as far away from home as I could, and to be near my sister. One year later, home moved to Los Angeles: my parents settled in an apartment near Olympic and Fairfax on Hi Point. My sister, Greta, and her husband, Leon, lived in the hills above Hollywood, on Outpost Drive. It seemed to me like a mansion, with its huge living room with 14 foot ceilings, its large kitchen, dining room, breakfast nook, and three bedrooms. And the magnificent tiled bathroom next to the master bedroom, that had a stall shower, a bathtub, and a toilet separated in such a way that three people could be using the bathroom and would not see each other.
When Greta and Leon moved to the Outpost house, Leon had been an aspiring lawyer for the Alden Construction Co. since the early 1950s. That is how they had gotten a choice home in a tract built by Alden in Buena Park, not far from Disneyland in Orange County. But Leon decided to start his own firm, based in Los Angeles, and the commute from their home in Buena Park was expensive and prohibitive in terms of time. The move to Hollywood meant finding a school for their children, and Greta found the Hollywood public elementary school severely lacking. They found Oakwood, a school begun by other parents dissatisfied with overcrowding and what educational opportunities they found. The school began in 1951 in the back yard of Robert and Jessica Ryan, and by the time Greta and Leon moved into the Outpost house, the school had a real building and the school community included a number of families in the film and other arts industries.
One of the parents was a commercial photographer — someone whose name I have long forgotten. Although by 1969 Robin, Randy and Ronni — Greta and Leon’s children — had outgrown Oakwood, Leon’s law practice kept him in contact with that artistic community. The commercial photographer was shooting a magazine advertisement for Hunt’s. He was looking for a grandmother-type person; perhaps he had even met Anna at Greta’s for dinner. That I don’t know, any more than I remember who the photographer was. In my fantasy, it might have been Haskell Wexler (whose son went to Oakwood) and whom I met at the time. I just can’t imagine the filmmaker having to make money by shooting advertisements.
The advertisement was published, my mother was a presence at every grocery checkout counter in America and we were properly impressed by our association with fame.
A decade later Leon and Greta were divorced and their children scattered away from Los Angeles. Anna had declined into early stages of dementia — she was no longer capable of living independently, but I would pick her up from her nursing home residence and take her to the Midnight Special Bookstore, then in Venice, where she presided at the checkout counter, greeting customers and regaling them with her favorite story of the family hiding from the Tsar’s Cossacks at her grandmother’s home in Vilnius, Lithuania. Radical students from all different political stripes would attribute their own ideology to whatever she said and walk out of the store reaffirmed by their perception of her steadfastness. In 1979 the Bookstore gave her an 83rd birthday party barbecue in a park in Mar Vista. She was still a presence, although the light in her eyes did not burn as brightly. She was pleased that the party raised $125 to support the organizing work of the Texas Farmworkers Union, where coincidentally granddaughter Robin was involved.
Anna died in 1983 at 87 years of age. We held a celebration of her life in the backyard of friends Kathryn and Brad Stevens in Cudahy. I left Los Angeles four years later.
Chicago Labor & Arts Festival Blog 