A Review of The Empire Strikes Out

The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold US Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad
by Robert Elias, 418 Pages, The New Press, $27.95.

One thing you can’t accuse Robert Elias of being is a frontrunner. On the very first page of one of the most unusual baseball books you’re going to run across in this or any baseball season, he examines the origins of the name of the reigning champions of Major League Baseball and explains that we might as well be calling them the New York Wankers.  The Yankees don’t actually come in for any particular scorn, but Elias’s thoroughness requires that he start his story of baseball and foreign policy at the beginning, in the colonial era days when the song “Yankee Doodle” was at the top of the charts.

Any reader with a serious interest in both American foreign policy and the American League is going to love this book.  But I do mean a serious interest – with 97 pages of footnotes (so thorough as to include this writer) his book is no quick read but it is the sort you can open to any page and find something fascinating.  (For instance, when I just did so, I opened to Babe Ruth’s thoughts on Cuban independence and the story of the Washington Senators pitcher who led rebel forces against the Cuban dictator Machado in the 1920s.)  If you’re the kind of baseball fan who has thought about both Leon Trotsky and Hal Trosky, I’d say that Elias, who teaches history at the University of San Francisco, just may have written the definitive reference book for you. (He tells us that when the latter, a Cleveland Indians slugger of the 30’s, was having an off day fans might shout out that he should “go back to Russia.”)

Baseball’s earliest use in promoting Americanism abroad came in the world baseball tours that started in the late nineteenth century.  Elias reports that on the 1888 tour, organized by player, executive, and sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding, players tried to throw baseballs over the pyramids and to hit the sphinx in the eye. Their request to play nine in the Roman Coliseum was apparently nixed by archeologists with little appreciation for the game.

In 1878, the first league outside the US was established in Cuba, a country that would subsequently occupy a unique place in both strands of this book’s story. (Elias does appear to confuse the Cuban pitcher mentioned above with his brother who played outfield with the Senators, but as the serious fan knows, just as is the case with fielders, the best writers aren’t necessarily the ones that make the fewest errors, but the ones who make the most plays.)

The military has long held great fascination for the powers of the game who have had a particular thing for generals, starting with the now disproved claim that General Abner Doubleday invented the game.  Doubleday did actually serve at Fort Sumter, though, prompting baseball executive Branch Rickey to declare that “The only thing General Doubleday started was the Civil War.”  And the game served military purposes in sometimes surprising ways: Elias tells of World War I-era Boston Braves pitcher Bill James becoming an instructor in the U.S. Army largely on the strength of his expertise in throwing the new, smaller, more baseball-size hand grenade – the ability to throw a curve apparently being considered crucial at the time.  And one of the reasons Sun Yat Sen organized the Changsa Field Ball Society before overthrowing the Chinese monarchy was as a cover for teaching the art of grenade throwing.

So when baseball looked to hire its first commissioner, partially in response to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, it came as no surprise that there was serious interest in Generals John Pershing and Leonard Wood.  When they proved unavailable the club owners came up with someone who outdid the both of them in jingoism – Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Named after a (similarly but not identically spelled) Civil War battle in which his father had participated, Landis once told a group of American Legionnaires that “It was my great disappointment to give [Milwaukee Socialist Party Congressman Victor] Berger only twenty years in Leavenworth” for his opposition to World War I, rather than “having him lined up against the wall and shot.”

After former U.S. Senator Happy Chandler was dumped as the game’s second commissioner (ironically, Elias tells us, the final straw was his suggestion that the major leagues might have to suspend operations due to the Korean War), the job was offered to Generals Douglas McArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell, and Maxwell Taylor before ultimately going to National League President Ford Frick.  (The owners finally landed themselves a general when they named William Eckert (the “Unknown Soldier” as some wags called him) commissioner despite the fact that he had apparently not actually been to a ball game in a decade.

The World War II era, when so many stars joined the military that the St. Louis Browns even won the pennant, is replete with baseball tales.  When Congress was considering the internment of Italians, Elias reports that a San Francisco attorney making the case against the policy used the example of its potential effect on a family such as Joe DiMaggio’s, that had eight American-born children but two parents who remained Italian citizens.

And then there was Hank Greenberg.  In his book “Baseball in 1941,” Robert Creamer noted that he’d “been surprised to discover that few baseball fans of my children’s generation know how good Greenberg was. I think the current preoccupation with career totals – 3000 hits, 500 home runs, 300 victories has diminished the appreciation of superb players who had shorter careers. But you ought to know about Greenberg.” As one of that generation, I know that when we first looked into the home run hitters of olden times, not just before steroids, but even before the 162 game schedule, we found there were three players who had hit 58 or more home runs in a single season – Babe Ruth, of course, Jimmy Foxx, who turned out to have been the game’s second most prolific home run hitter up to that time,  and Hank Greenberg.   With 331 home runs, Greenberg had obviously had a good career and yet he didn’t seem to size up to the other two.

Greenberg was Jewish and while there were never any bars to Jews playing in the major leagues, as there were for blacks, there were those who were not all that happy about it.  Elias writes: “Except for Jackie Robinson. No ballplayer took more abuse than Greenberg, who asked, ‘How the hell could you get up to home plate every day and have some son of a bitch call you a Jew bastard and a kike and a sheenie without feeling the pressure.”  SO there was considerable irony when Greenberg was accused in the media of bribing a doctor to be declared ineligible for the military in 1940. He responded by asking for a new physical, was inducted for a one year term, reenlisted after Pearl Harbor and was out of baseball until 1945.  Given that in the four full seasons before he went into the Army, Greenberg had averaged 43 home runs and 148 RBIs a year, but played only two more seasons afterwards, we have our explanation as to why people have to be told “how good Greenberg was.”

Ted Williams, probably the only player with career stats more negatively impacted by military service than Greenberg, turns out not to have been the total enthusiast some might expect.  Having already served in World War II, he thought he was called back into the service during the Korean War for his star value.  Although he flew thirty-nine combat missions in that war and was hit three times, he later said, “If it were an emergency, fine.  But Korea wasn’t an all-out war.  They should have let the professionals handle it. Vietnam was another undeclared war.  If I had a kid [there] I’d have been screaming.”

Baseball players served in the Cold War as well.  After Paul Robeson’s 1949 statement that “It would be unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union,” Jackie Robinson was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to say that blacks would, in fact, “help their country … against Russia or any other enemy.”  Years later he would call this testimony “the greatest regret of my life” in part due to his “increased respect for Paul Robeson who sacrificed himself … sincerely trying to help his people.”

Political definitions were about as loose in baseball as in the nation at large. When Dodger owner Walter O’Malley accused Cardinal owner Fred Saigh of being a socialist for suggesting revenue sharing between teams on TV contracts — well maybe.  But San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark claiming that “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and tries to hit him is a communist” ?  Now that does seem like too much. And naturally, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players who organized the 1885 Players League were “terrorists” in the eyes of Albert Spalding. Elias even covers the Patriot League invented in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, written out of history because of the degree of its infiltration by Communists. And just like with Hank Greenberg, you should know how good The Great American Novel is.  You just couldn’t be too careful in those days – the Cincinnati Reds became the Redlegs for a decade or so, until it became clear that they weren’t really, you know, reds.

The beat goes on right through to the present day. The president of the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled a twenty-fifth anniversary showing of Bull Durham in 2003, because of stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon’s opposition to the Iraq invasion. Two years later, then- Oakland A’s pitcher Barry Zito founded Strikeouts for Troops, noting that “Baseball is ingrained in the fabric of America, just like the military.  We thought it was a good marriage.”  Elias tells us that the organization’s funds are distributed by “the Freedom Alliance, a right-wing, pro-war organization featuring the conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity and Alliance founder Oliver North.”

I could go on, but really you should get the book.

The Remarkable Resilience of This Socialism Thing

The timing was perfect – on May 1, President Obama would tell the University of Michigan graduates they ought to be able to discuss politics civilly, without fearing that people would start “Throwing around phrases like ‘socialist’ and ‘Soviet-style takeover,’ ‘fascist’ and ‘right-wing nut’” – words he thought had “the effect of comparing our government, or our political opponents, to authoritarian and even murderous regimes.”  Understandable enough, maybe, that first on the President’s lips would be “socialist,” seeing as how there were people who’d come to the commencement ceremony primarily to brandish signs calling him precisely that.  But only a couple of days later we got the latest reminder of just how many people apparently don’t feel a need to be sheltered from the word these days.

Twenty-nine percent of the nation, it seems, has “a positive reaction to the word “socialism” (with 59% in the negative) – according to the Pew Research Center’s latest findings.  Democrats are actually 44% to 43% in the positive column, while the President’s other perceived base, the under-30’s, were only 49% to 43% negative.  (Their view of “capitalism” was also negative, by the way – 48% to 43%.)  This latest news was actually not as good a showing for “socialism” as January’s Gallup Poll where 36% were positive toward the idea, including 53% of Democrats and 61% of those identifying as “liberals.”  And last year, when Rasmussen Reports asked a more pointed question, it found 20% of the populace preferring socialism to capitalism, compared to 53% who preferred capitalism, with only a 33% to 37% spread among those under thirty.

How can this be? we might ask, given that you just about never encounter any positive treatment of “socialism” in the mass media and virtually everyone in the public sphere has been running away from the word  for – well, for maybe sixty years now.  Yes, there may be liberal commentators who don’t trash the concept (and the polls suggest they may even privately like it – just as Rush Limbaugh has always said), but they sure won’t praise it either.  Likewise, there are politicians who may not get upset being called a socialist, but so far as I can see, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont remains the single member in either branch of Congress known to actually use the word in describing his views.  Socialism is simply not a concept in public circulation.

There was that one amazing moment, of course – the February 16, 2009 Newsweek cover announcing, “We are all socialists now.”  This extraordinary bit of journalistic exuberance now looks primarily like a reaction to the unity of purpose the Bush and Obama Administrations had displayed in their bank bailout bills.  And since then – except for those  periodic polling reports –  it’s pretty much been a year of Sarah Palin-type stuff about Obama leading us down the long march to “Soviet-Lite” socialism that FDR started, and so forth – you could look it up.  (And maybe a more recent Rasmussen Reports shows some of the effect – apparently capitalism’s edge is now up to 60-18%.)

Anyhow, with discussion of the topic nowhere to be found in the public realm, I figured maybe I should ask around – and here’s what I found.

Some were quite economic in describing the “positive associations” that “socialism” held for them, offering virtual textbook definitions:

“Socialism is the collective and democratic management of shared resources, whether cultural (education), financial (pensions), scientific (medical care), or natural (environmental laws).” Or, “Means equality doesn’t it?  Maximizes use values instead of exchange values.  But mostly I like it because it minimizes the anarchy of capitalist production.” And, “Ownership of natural resources by the people, ownership of the means of production by the people who work there.” Also, “In ‘social’ism, the focus is on society and people. In capitalism, the central thing is dead inert capital, and making IT all important.”

Others associated a broader meaning, calling it:

“Not an ideology nor is it an economic system. It is simply a national culture that prioritizes the reduction of human suffering;” or “Reflective of a set of values in which the community matters as much as the individual;” and “Solidarity – if I had to say just one word” or “belief in the common good.”

Some were more colloquial:

“It boils down to this: We can create a society in which people meet and respect each other’s needs, or a society based on the principle of dog-eat-dog. Which would you prefer?”

Others spiritual:

“Human compassion like that mentioned by every spiritual belief on earth.  Socialism to me is the political practice of one’s spiritual belief in life’s connection to each other person on this planet, every species on it and the planet itself.”

Humanistic:

“Emphasis on collective welfare rather than individual accumulation.  Concern for the least well off rather than the richest.  Recognition that economic rights are human rights and attempting to secure them.  State power exercised in the interest of the largest class of people rather than the smallest,” or “Worker involved, democratic, personal responsibility, society concerned, protection of the minority, universal good, individual working for the better of the whole.”

Ebullient:

“The first words that pop into my mind when I hear someone say “socialism”: kindness, decency, plenty, fairness, peace. God help me, I see an image of flowers and rainbows and children playing.”

Civic:

“Pride in and /or responsibility for public institutions. And the institutions, government, NGO, or privately held, hopefully are able to support and be responsible for citizens. It is democratic.   Capitalism –  1 Dollar, 1 Vote – is profoundly anti democratic”

Or religious:

My absolute favorite– someone explained how he held a “positive view of socialism because after all it’s what Our Lady wants.”  So, to the tune of the Internationale:

“Sing we a song of high revolt;
make great the Lord, his name exalt!
Sing we the song that Mary sang
of God at war with human wrong.
Sing we of him who deeply cares
and still with us our burden bears.
He who with strength the proud disowns,
brings down the mighty from their thrones.
By him the poor are lifted up;
he satisfies with bread and cup
the hungry men of many lands;
the rich must go with empty hands.
He calls us to revolt and fight
with him for what is just and right,
to sing and live Magnificatin crowded street and council flat.”

When pressed as to what in the world he had sent along, the respondent explained that “It’s a hymn based on the Magnificat of Mary that they actually sing in some churches in the UK.”

Arguably the only thing new I learned from all this was the hymn.  And yet, I could not fail to be struck by the breadth of response to my small survey.  Now this is something I think you’d have to call an underground culture at this point – one that runs deep as well as silent.  After all, my reference to “textbook definitions” above was intended on the wry side, given that it’s quite unlikely that any of these people really picked up much of what “socialism” suggests to them from actual text books.  Nor – the “Magnificat Internationale” notwithstanding – did they likely pick it up at services on Sunday – or any other day of the week.  This affinity for socialism seems to be an almost neutrino-like phenomenon – it’s all around, but it’s undetected.

One person argued that it was, “Probably better to talk about ‘economic democracy’ rather than socialism” because “once a word is tainted, I don’t think it can be rehabilitated, at least for a generation or two” – an argument many have made over the years.  But isn’t the upshot of the recent surveys that the “generation or two” may now have passed – more than half a century since the McCarthy Hearings ended?  And the younger you are, the more favorable you’re now likely to be toward socialism – at least so the polls say.

Another thought that “The great irony is that one of the reasons socialism polls well among young people is that the right has repeatedly attacked Obama and many of the things he supports as socialist. People look at it and say, ‘if that’s socialism, I’m for it.’”

(The one public figure who has tried to correct this misperception of the President’s policies is Texas Representative Ron Paul, who – whatever else you might want to say about him – does take these things seriously.  He argues that the President’s programs are “corporatist” rather than “socialist,” citing “the health care bill that recently passed [that] does not establish a Canadian-style government-run single payer health care system” but “relies on mandates forcing every American to purchase private health insurance or pay a fine.”)

So how does the effect of association of socialism with Obama compare with the fact that in the more than twenty years since the Soviet Union last “tainted” the word, “socialism” has come to now suggest places more like Sweden and France?  A good question for the next poll – no?

All of this is certainly not to suggest that there is no rhyme or reason to the President’s efforts to keep the word beyond the pale of polite political discussion.  Even if a third of the population is positive on the idea, you don’t win many elections in this country with a third of the vote, so better to find a way to identify with the two-thirds.  On the other hand, as for those who have “kept the faith” on socialism – or just recently picked it up, well they might want to discuss it a bit.

Our Foreign Policy Minsky Moment

If there can be any kind of silver lining to our ongoing “Great Recession” it might be that it has elevated the level of economic discussion, at least slightly. For instance, when’s the last time you heard anyone talking about the “magic of the marketplace?”  On the contrary, a fair number of writers and economists seem to have experienced recovered memories of things the country once used to know – like that a capitalist economy is cyclical and inherently prone to crises such as the current one.  In this, the ninth year of our Afghanistan War, the discussion of our foreign policy cries out for similar flashes of enlightenment.

The most interesting economic concept to emerge from recent obscurity is the “Minsky Moment,” Hyman Minsky having been an economist who described a type of social amnesia that occurs as people will themselves into believing that business cycles are things of the past as they engage in riskier and riskier financial activity.  Admirers of Minsky, who died in 1997, named the point when the dream comes crashing down into the nightmare of the next financial crisis after him.  Minsky saw several stages to the process, as gradual societal memory loss of past depressions and recessions leads to something of a state of euphoria when we may hear arguments, such as heard only a few years ago, that transformative innovations like computerization and the Internet have created a “new economy” of permanent prosperity.

Looking at the course of American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the current day, it is hard to miss a similar dream cycle playing out there.  After Vietnam, a new sense of modesty came over American foreign policy.  Yes, our military could unleash destruction upon southeast Asia that was in some respects unmatched in world history.  And, yes, we might be able to keep it up indefinitely – we would not be “defeated” in the conventional sense.  But the ultimate message of that war was No: No matter what our military might, we could not impose our will on a country that did not wish to have its system dictated by foreign armies from halfway around the world.

Not every one approved of this national dose of humility, of course.  The “Vietnam Syndrome” was roundly denounced in interventionist circles, as the new reticence toward foreign military intervention steered policymakers toward subversion rather than invasion.  Nicaragua can probably thank the Vietnam Syndrome for the fact that Ronald Reagan merely funded its government’s  political and military opposition rather than engaging in full scale invasion.

But slowly the memories faded and were replaced with new ones.  The first George Bush’s Gulf War did not turn into a quagmire. And Bill Clinton’s bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia sort of returned the country to its old habits. The euphoria stage surely arrived with the second George Bush when a senior adviser to the President could inform a reporter that he was merely ”in what we call the reality-based community” who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality,” while the White House recognized that ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

We have left that stage, clearly. A statement like the above now seems as unimaginable as it did in the first decades after the Vietnam War.  Yet the turnaround is obviously far from completed; the country has not really shed the omnipotence illusion.  For, while the rationale for the Iraq War may now be widely understood as farcical, the Afghanistan War remains on the upswing.

Every war is different, to be sure, and at one point the Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars appeared to have little more in common than the fact that they were on the same continent.  After all, who could be further apart than the communist Viet Cong and the fundamentalist Taliban?  But as time has passed an overwhelming resemblance has come to the fore: Both wars are attempts to “create our own reality” in countries that have many times demonstrated that they will not allow this to happen.

Our foreign policy Minsky Moment, if there is to be one, will certainly not originate in the White House or the Pentagon, though. The White House would be too afraid of the political consequences of facing the facts and the Pentagon would be too embarrassed to do so. We will have to figure out how some other way to wake the country from its dreams.

Nuclear Posture Review: Oops! We Missed One!

In one of the more remarkable public course changes Washington has yet seen, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has added Israel’s name to the previously released short list of exceptions to the general policies articulated in the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review. Originally released on April 6, the Review, which stands as the highest expression of the nation’s nuclear strategy, stated that nonnuclear nations abiding by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would generally not be threatened with nuclear retaliation for non-nuclear attacks.

The policy did note the exception of “outliers” which were identical to the “rogue states” referred to by the Bush administration. At the time of the document’s release, Gates told a press conference, “There is a message for Iran and North Korea here…if you’re not going to play by the rules, if you’re going to be a proliferator, then all options are on the table in terms of how we deal with you.” North Korea is known to have nuclear weapons and Iran is widely thought to be in active pursuit of a nuclear capability.

Now Gates has amended that list, noting that “upon careful consideration we have decided that a realistic appraisal of the situation requires that we acknowledge the existence of another nation widely believed not to be in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty – Israel.” President Obama himself immediately asserted that what he called a “simple policy clarification” implied no change in United States policy toward its closest Middle East ally, saying this “in no way alters America’s commitment to the existence and security of Israel.” The addition, he said, “should not lead anyone to believe that hostilities with our great friend are even remotely anticipated.” He described it rather as a “signal” that his Administration considered it “important to convey to all parties in the region that we see the situation as it really is, not as we might wish to see it.”

Although the President steered clear of further detail, this first American acknowledgment that Israel, a non-signer of the Nonproliferation Treaty, has amassed a nuclear weapons arsenal is seen by many Middle East analysts as representing a potentially tectonic shift in world politics. Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been an open secret for decades. Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in prison for telling the British press details of the nuclear weapons program in 1986. At the time, London’s Sunday Times estimated its production to be in excess of 100 weapons.

Israel’s first warhead is thought to have been produced in the late 1960’s. The country is also believed by many to have collaborated with South Africa in that country’s development of nuclear arms, before its force was dismantled in 1989 on the eve of the nation’s transition to majority rule. Current estimates put Israel’s warhead numbers at anywhere from 75 to 400; the high figure would likely make the country the world’s third largest nuclear power – after the United States and Russia. Israel’s official policy is to offer no comment on the matter.

Observers attributed this astounding “policy clarification” to delayed effects of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s surprising decision to name the President as the award’s recipient during his first year in office. One White House insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “As you know, the President in no way sought the Prize. In fact, a lot of people around him urged him to decline, thinking that it would place too high a burden of expectation around his future policies. But you see, the thing is the award seems to have gotten under his skin – to the point where he appears to have decided that if he’s ever going to play any kind of role in bringing peace to the Middle East, both sides have got to see him as being reality-based.”

Other sources noted that Gates was considered the right choice to be the messenger of such a bold policy alteration since he has altered it in the past – it is less than two years since the Defense Secretary declared that the U.S. would not forswear first use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for chemical or biological attacks upon the US or its allies, a policy that the new Review repudiates. At the time of his earlier statement, Gates was serving in his current position in George W. Bush’s Cabinet. One CIA source thought it would take several days for world opinion “to sort itself out over this shocking outbreak of candor.”

Okay, so Gates and Obama didn’t actually say anything about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the way it might make the highly touted new Nuclear Posture Review seem hypocritical. But since the new policy was unveiled in early April, we could hardly wait until next April Fool’s Day to satirize it, now could we? The point of this little thought experiment in candor is not to suggest that any of the actual nuclear policy changes Obama is currently making or proposing are in any way wrong or useless. It is rather to illustrate just how much further the U.S. would need to go in order to actually be seen as “reality-based” in many parts of the world.
Domestically, the current administration is widely viewed as relatively “dovish” on matters relating to nuclear weaponry – at least in comparison to its predecessor. Likewise, the idea of dissuading Iran from joining the world’s nuclear powers is hardly a controversial one here at home. But the presumption that our government therefore enjoys worldwide credibility in these matters runs up against some harsh perceptions: For much of the world, the global campaign to prevent Iran from getting what Israel already has seems to indicate only that the one nation to have ever used nuclear weapons has no immediate plans to change its policies in any serious way.

American Foreign Policy Scripted by Dead German Writers?

A recent headline, “Snuff out militant Islam’s lethal spark – kill bin Laden,” brought to mind a friend’s story about a graduate student he’d once had. This student had felt himself seriously wronged somewhere in the academic process and appeared obsessed with vindication. My friend’s prescription was that he should read “Michael Kohlhaas,” a novella by German writer Heinrich von Kleist.  Since the student’s field was modern American history, the main concern was not the study of literature but the story’s theme – the potential self destructiveness of the drive for revenge, even if a person is actually in the right. Joel Brinkley, the author of the article with the inflamed headline, looked like he might benefit from the same medicine.  And, unfortunately, he’s far from the only one.

When the legal system fails to provide Kleist’s protagonist (based on a real life figure of 250 years earlier) with proper redress after he is wronged by a minor noble, Kohlhaas decides to take matters into his own hands. Eventually he will burn the noble’s house down and raise a private army to repeatedly attack the city of Wittenberg in his attempt to capture the man. His wife will die of injuries sustained in the pursuit of his goal and Martin Luther and the Kaiser in Vienna will become personally involved in the matter. At the very end, he does find that some measure of justice has been done. Unfortunately, that realization comes as he is being led to his beheading.

There was a point when Brinkley, a former New York Times writer now teaching journalism at Stanford, would have raised few eyebrows in writing, “Right now, the most effective thing the United States could do to turn the tide in the so-called war on terror is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the terrorists’ shining symbol.” But that point was eight years, two wars, ten of thousands of casualties, and a trillion dollars ago. Today, such writing conveys the obsession of a real-life Michael Kohlhaas who wants to go on and on and on in pursuit of his concept of justice. Of bin Laden he writes, “We know where he is, more or less [sic],” but “Pakistan refuses to go after him.” His solution?  “I’m not talking about an invasion. Infiltrate the region with special-operations forces.”

How many countries can there be, I wondered, where a journalist writing that sending armed personnel into another country does not constitute an invasion will not be asked to seek professional help? But at least Brinkley does recognize that the Pakistanis might see things a little differently: “Let them scream,” he writes, “Over almost a decade, we have given Pakistan every chance to do the job. Now it’s time to do it ourselves.”

What seems to bother Brinkley most is that “Today, bin Laden must wake up every morning with a smile on his face for all he has inspired.” This he may well do, but probably not quite for the reasons Brinkley thinks.  Bin Laden’s stated goal, let us remember, it to maneuver the United States into a global war against Islam that will spiral out of control. So he’d have every reason to smile if he read an article like Brinkley’s. Ultimately, it’s not columnists like Brinkley who matter, though, but the Kohlhaasian spirit that seems to drive our foreign policy.  After all, while much of the country once dismissed George W. Bush as a hopeless, misguided warmonger and embraced Barack Obama as a peace candidate, this second post-9/11 President appears at least as committed to globalizing this war as his predecessor, if perhaps in somewhat different directions.  From the point of view of tying the U.S. down in endless war, what’s not to like?

But if the strategy of that war seem like something Kleist might have imagined, the tactics bring to mind a far better remembered German writer – Franz Kafka, the rare author influential enough to have his name turned into an adjective. While there are probably as many different definitions of “Kafkaesque” as there are readers of Kafka – and maybe more – “incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical” will probably do as well as any.  But whatever your personal definition of Kafkaesque may be, American military operations in and over Pakistan will probably fit it.

The current centerpiece of that campaign appears to be a program of missile strikes aimed at “terrorist leaders” from unmanned “Predator” drone planes flying above the country. Officially, though, there is no such program and as a spokesperson for the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

The New York Times reports the strikes are “carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia.”  The government of Pakistan regularly denounces them as a violation of its sovereignty. Unnamed U.S. officials claim there is an understanding under which the Pakistani government allows the U.S. to carry out the strikes while the U.S. allows the Pakistanis to publicly denounce the attacks. The government of Pakistan denies this.

Unnamed U.S. intelligence officials frequently name figures they claim have been killed in the strikes. A recent target was Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom, the Washington Post says, “a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” called “one of the worst people on the planet.”  As you might expect, this non-existent program is rather unpopular among the people of the country where its targets live: a Gallup Pakistan poll found it with 9 percent support among the Pakistani population.

The uncertain level of civilian casualties is a growing concern. A United Nations rights investigator complains that “the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” Unnamed sources within the U.S. government privately assure reporters that civilian deaths are lower than reported. One unnamed government official told the New York Times that the drone strikes are “the purest form of self-defense.”  The C.I.A. had no comment on a report that the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe Services LLC – was involved in the work of actually placing the bombs on the drones.  An unnamed defense official denied it to The Nation magazine – “on background.”

In response to repeated questions about the unacknowledged drone strike campaign at a press conference in Pakistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would only say that “there is a war going on.” She did not specify to which war she referred. The United States Government acknowledges being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. Appearing at a memorial service for seven CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan, some of whom were thought to be involved in the planning of the Pakistan drone strikes, President Barack Obama exhorted hundreds of their colleagues “to win this war.”  He also did not specify of which war he was speaking.

In regard to the acknowledged war in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said, “The Taliban, we recognize, are part of the political fabric of Afghanistan at this point.” He did not say at exactly which point this recognition occurred; the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government eight years ago and has been at war with the organization ever since. Gates went on to say that “The question is whether they are prepared to play a legitimate role in the political fabric of Afghanistan going forward, meaning participating in elections, meaning not assassinating local officials and killing families.” He did not say whether a simple denial of involvement in assassinations and other killings – on or off the record – would suffice in place of an actual cessation of such activities. Nor did he speak to the question as to when various Taliban officials might be removed from the United Nations “terrorist blacklist” that currently prohibits the Afghanistan government from negotiating with them.

I have to think Kleist and Kafka would have loved this material.

For a (bleep)ing Communist, You Sure Know Your Baseball: Conversations with Lester Rodney

One of the more remarkable aspects of the 2007 HBO documentary on the Brooklyn Dodgers was the inclusion of Lester Rodney as a commentator.  Up until his death on December 20, 2009 at age 98, Rodney had been famously not famous. By all rights he should have been famous for being a sportswriter calling for the integration of baseball a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the baseball “color line.” He wasn’t, though, because the publication where he had done his advocating was The Daily Worker, the American Communist Party’s New York City newspaper where Rodney edited the often one-man sports department from the 30’s through the 50’s (a fact I first learned in his byline for an In These Times article.)

As a Boston Globe op-ed put it a few days after his death “He was not a welcome ally to many in America’s civil rights movement of the early 1900s.” And he was even less welcome among those who ran the establishment media outlets that gave short shrift to the question of baseball’s exclusion of black players. But now, nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed that Lester just might have outlasted the people who didn’t care to mention him.  After all, as he used to say, he was the last sportswriter covering the 1938 Joe Louis – Max Schmeling heavyweight championship fight in Yankee Stadium who was still vertical and by now there weren’t all that many of them around who’d covered the 1955 World Series either.

On the television program, Rodney spoke of October 4, the day that the Brooklyn Dodgers won the seventh game of the World Series against the New York Yankees, the team that had beaten them in five previous meetings. As this Dodger fan recalls it, he said, “They say there’s no cheering in the press box. That day, there was cheering in the press box.”

When I’d first met Rodney more than ten years earlier, I decided that I’d do my bit to try to get him some attention and some of what follows was originally published in the article “Lester Rodney, the Daily Worker, and the Integration of Baseball” in the 1999 edition of the Society for American Baseball Research publication, The National Pastime.  Since that periodical’s circulation has unfortunately never matched its quality, expanding upon the original seemed to the point upon the occasion of Lester’s death.

“The whole history leading up to Jackie Robinson has usually been that an electric light went on in the head of the noble Branch Rickey one morning and he ended baseball discrimination.” As the lean, white-haired Lester Rodney spoke in his living room in Rossmoor, the sprawling retirement community east of San Francisco, these events were now nearly half a century and twenty-five hundred miles removed. Important details now seemed in danger of being lost forever.

Given the power of the pen he once wielded and its influence in baseball’s integration, the former Daily Worker sportswriter might well have written the history himself. But everything in life — no matter how long a life it may be — is a matter of priorities, and in recent years Rodney had switched his from writing about sports to playing them. Had he taken the time to write the book, he might not have stayed in such extraordinary shape and might never have become the first top-ranked tennis player in California’s 85 years-and-over bracket. So, for now, an important chapter in the story was known mostly to those who knew Rodney — and who happened to ask.

Although he scoffed at the notion that Brooklyn’s “Great Mahatma” acted alone, Rodney didn’t mean to minimize the credit due the Dodgers president — some club owner actually had to put a black ballplayer into a major league uniform and Rickey acted while the others mumbled. It’s just that he knew there were a lot of other people generating the electricity that finally turned on that light.

Not the least of them was Rodney himself. In fact, by the time Robinson took his position at first base in Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, more than a decade had passed since Rodney first took up the cause of integrating baseball as sports editor of the Communist Party’s New York Daily Worker newspaper.

Today the concept of a “communist sportswriter” seems a very strange proposition. In Rodney’s day it was not quite so exotic, but still no one would confuse the Daily Worker’s sports department with the “toy department” of any other newspaper. As Karl Marx might have said, heretofore sportswriters had merely interpreted the world of sports; the point, however, was to change it.

The first thing Rodney tried to change was what the 1923 Sporting News called baseball’s “tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible.”  In one respect the cause was a natural for a group that considered itself  “the Party of Negro and White.” The Communists had, after all, distinguished themselves in defense of the nine black “Scottsboro Boys” charged with the 1931 rape of two white women in Alabama when few others would touch the cause. They also supported the right to national self determination for a “Black Belt” in the American south, an idea that did not even occur to very many other people — white or black; and, on occasion, they were known to conduct internal party trials of members accused of racism.

The baseball part did not come so easily, though. The Communists displayed but a tenuous grip on the pulse of the nation, dating back to their early decision to take the party underground, in expectation of treatment similar to what the Bolsheviks faced under the Czar. It took three years for them to conclude that they would not be declared illegal after all, resurface, and set off in search of America. And eventually Lester Rodney took them out to the ballpark.

The basics of the Jackie Robinson story are, of course, familiar to baseball fans: Rickey signed Robinson — a man whose athletic achievements had already prompted one sportswriter to call him the “Jim Thorpe of his race,” took him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, sent him out of the country for a season of minor league ball in Montreal, and finally put him in Ebbets Field the following year. But, until the 1995 publication of David Falkner’s Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson From Baseball to Birmingham, no mainstream publication had ever provided any detail of how in 1936 “the Daily Worker began a steady and unremitting campaign for integration … spearheaded by sports writer and editor Lester Rodney,” or noted that it was not even until “A year or so after the “Worker” began its push,” that “the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely circulated Negro weekly in the nation, initiated its own campaign.”

Rodney’s method was quite simple. He would ask questions other sportswriters wouldn’t or couldn’t. He recalled, “First we’d go to the top officials and they’d say, ‘There’s nothing written, it’s up to the club owners.’ We’d go to the owners and they’d say, ‘My heart is with you but the players would never stand for it.’ Then you go to the players and shoot that down.”

A typical July 19, 1939 Worker story, “Big Leaguers Rip Jim Crow,” quoted members of the Cincinnati Reds. (The franchise often found its fate intertwined with that of Rodney’s organization: according to one team historian, each “crisis in affairs between the United States and Soviet Russia” brought new demands “that the management change the team’s name” despite the fact that “the Reds have been the Reds since 1869, one year before Nicolai Lenin was born and ten years before Stalin’s birthday.”)  Manager Bill McKechnie claimed, “I’d use negroes if I were given permission.”  Pitcher Bucky Walters declared them “Some of the best players I’ve ever seen” and back-to-back no-hit pitcher Johnny Vandermeer concluded “I don’t see why they’re banned.” ”Sensational stuff in 1939,” Rodney remembered.

Two seasons earlier he’d published an interview with Satchel Paige, the most famous Negro League star. Rodney recalled that “At the end of the interview I said to Paige that (Hall of Fame pitcher) Dazzy Vance came to the Dodgers at 29 years of age, which was old for a ballplayer, but that when he was 32 he won 25 games. Paige, who was then 29 himself, says, ‘I don’t think they can keep us out three more years.’ But he was wrong. He had to wait another eleven years. Very tragic and it bothers me that Paige is always portrayed as an egocentric guy, content to be a big fish in a small pond. It’s absolutely false.” (Joe DiMaggio, once told the “Daily Worker” that Paige, whom he’d played against in post-season exhibitions, was “the best pitcher I ever faced.” Paige ultimately became the first player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame primarily on the basis of a Negro League career.)

In 1941 Rodney and his confederates stepped up the campaign, sending telegrams to every major league team owner asking them to try out black players. ”The only fully positive response we got was from William Benswanger of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The next spring we arranged a tryout for Roy Campanella — who was about 20 then — and two other players.  And then Benswanger came under intense pressure — I’ve never known the exact nature — not to hold the tryouts and he backed out as gracefully as he could.

“I never slammed him for it, because he was the first honest guy who answered, ‘You’re right and I’m willing to give it a try.’ And then he came under all that pressure. So that was the first tryout that never happened.

“Imagine how baseball history would have been changed if Benswanger had told all the other owners to go fuck themselves and hired Campanella, Satchel Paige and maybe three other players from the (Negro National League) Homestead Grays who were the best team in baseball and played in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the heart of black baseball then. The Pirates would have immediately won five straight pennants.”

Invisible Men, Donn Rogosin’s 1983 history of the Negro Leagues, is fairly typical of the brush off usually given to the Communists’ efforts, dismissing the Benswanger affair as a “non-existent tryout,” and concluding that “The black players and the black press were unimpressed by the Communist campaigns.”

The Communists, however, clearly impressed at least one black player: Roy Campanella’s eponymous 1952 biography acknowledges that the “Daily Worker” had “pounded hard and unceasingly against the color line in organized ball.”  What makes this recognition particularly compelling is the fact that the book’s author, New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young, was known neither for left wing sympathies nor graciousness. According to Rodney, “Dick Young says to him, ‘We don’t want that stuff in there; you want to keep your skirts clean.’ And Campanella says, ‘What do you mean?  That’s what happened. You want to know my life story?  This is part of it.’

“Campanella believed that baseball was the most important reason why the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954. When I heard that I said, ‘Come on, Roy, what are you talking about?’ Campy said, ‘All I know is that the ballclubs going down south traveling together, playing together, living together, were the first all the time, they were the first in hotels; they were the first in trains. Don’t tell me it wasn’t the most important thing.” Indeed, at first Campanella’s conclusion may seem that of a man overestimating the significance of his own corner of the world. But the record shows that Birmingham, Alabama actually ended its prohibition of interracial sports a month before the Court ordered its schools desegregated in the landmark “Brown versus the Board of Education” decision. The reason? To allow Campy, Jackie and the rest of the Dodgers to play a spring training exhibition game there.

And a letter to the August 20, 1939 Daily Worker appears to give the lie to the alleged indifference of black sportswriters to the Communists’ efforts. The letter-writer takes the “opportunity to congratulate you and the Daily Worker for the way you have joined with us in the current series concerning Negro Players in the major leagues, as well as all your past great efforts in this aspect,” and goes on to express the hope for further collaboration. The author was Wendell Smith, sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper whose nationwide readership would exceed 400,000 during the following decade.

“You know, Jules Tygiel’s book (Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy) was the first to acknowledge our efforts and that wasn’t until 1983,” Rodney recalled. ”In that Ken Burns series (the nine part 1994 Public Broadcasting System documentary of baseball history) it mentions that (manager) Leo Durocher told a sportswriter that he would use some of the great Negroes in a minute on the Dodgers if he were given permission. I’m the sportswriter he told that to. Burns, of course, had a big corporate-funded series and he did manage to push the role of the Negro to the center, as he did with his Civil War series. But even PBS is not so radical on these things,” he adds with a grin, “as you can tell by how many radicals you’ll see on the McNeil-Lehrer news hour. So you can’t fault Burns for not mentioning the Daily Worker.”

At that point in the conversation the voice of Rodney’s wife Claire interjected from the next room, “I can fault him.” An active Communist herself, Claire was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee when she was teaching elementary school in Lawndale, California. ”They never realized that I was her husband,” Rodney noted.

It’s probably less accurate to say that Rodney and the integration campaign — that eventually included “End Jim Crow in Baseball” petitions with two million signatures gathered by the Young Communist League and labor organizations like the National Maritime Union — were written out of history than that they were just never written into it in the first place.  Some noticed, however – David Falkner’s book notes how “remarkable was the passion and the insistence of the campaign which was generally lost on white America — though not on those in government who were always vigilant on the twin menaces of communist agitation and black unrest.”

Foremost among the vigilant was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who singled Rodney out for individual mention in Masters of Deceit, the central text of anti-communism. “We’re sort of considered folk heroes by many young people now, but things like that created problems for our children in high school in the 1950’s,” Rodney would later say.

Rodney himself was no Red Diaper Baby; he recalled his Republican father displaying a window sign in their Brooklyn house mourning the death of President Warren G. Harding in 1923. But then “in 1931 or 32 — during the depression — three of us rented a cold water flat on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village — ten dollars a month. We were there for the bohemian atmosphere, the cellar clubs, poetry readings.  We were poor as hell but we didn’t know it.

“I wrote some pulp magazine stuff to pay the rent — cheap romances, love stories, just junk. Then we all did our creative writing and critiqued each other. We sold a few stories; I don’t even have them anymore. It all got lost or thrown out when I went into the army.  It was just about life and the torments of youth. It was a very heady New York, Greenwich Villagey atmosphere; the cafeterias were humming with literary discussions and the Communists at that time were impinging on everybody’s consciousness.”

Bohemianism never dulled Rodney’s interest in sports, so one thing that was clear to him about the Communists was that when they addressed sports it was an embarrassment. When he told them so in a letter to the Worker, he was invited in to discuss it and he wound up doing the occasional weekly piece — gratis. By 1936 the Communists were eager to shed strange and foreign identifications in the public mind and entered their “Popular Front” period: “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism” replaced “Towards Soviet America” as the party’s slogan. The Daily Worker now wondered whether it should deal with popular concerns like sports on a more regular basis. When a poll of Worker readers came back 6-1 in favor of daily sports coverage, the paper asked Rodney to take it on.

Of course, since this was the Communist party’s newspaper, the question would not be settled as simply as that — there were those who thought the paper should cover “people’s sports” like soccer, not “corporate sports” like baseball. But once the paper decided that a commitment to “Twentieth Century Americanism” required coverage of the “National Pastime,” that coverage would be activist — since this was the Communist party’s newspaper.

It should be noted that even if Ken Burns did not give Rodney his due, Leo Durocher did. In his 1993 book, The Era 1947-1957; When the Yankees, the Giants and the Dodgers Ruled the World, Roger Kahn quotes Durocher telling Rodney, “For a fucking communist, you know your baseball.”  “I was a fan,” Rodney said. ”That’s crucial.  They couldn’t have hired just an ideologue to run the campaign. You had to know baseball.”

The integration campaign was not the limit of the Worker’s innovative baseball coverage. By 1938 the Americanization of the party had progressed sufficiently to allow it to engage New York Yankee third baseman Red (hair, not politics) Rolfe to cover the World Series from a player’s point of view.

“I’d go up to Yankee Stadium after a World Series game and I’d jump in the locker room,” Rodney remembers, “I’m in a hurry. Our deadline is the earliest of any of the papers and so I’d try to speed things up.  I’d say, ‘Red, that was pretty much a key moment when Crosetti decided to go to third instead of going for the doubleplay’ and he’d say, ‘No’ — you couldn’t speed him up — ‘No, no, no.  I wouldn’t say that at all.’ And he painstakingly would go into his own view of the game. This guy was a Dartmouth College graduate; he had just got married and wanted to show his wife that he was more than just a jock. That’s why he agreed to do it for the nominal payment we could afford. He took great pride in these things.”

First hand post-season coverage has now become a commonplace, but “As the Communists used to say, ‘It’s no accident that we did it first.’ A lot of papers didn’t think of ballplayers as having brains. We went to the boxers and the ballplayers themselves and got their feelings. We probably sometimes exaggerated it and added proletarian horseshit about it, but still …”

Rodney once introduced heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to novelist Richard Wright, author of Native Son. “Joe Louis was training at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. Sportswriters were invited to go to these things as part of the pre-fight publicity, so I told them I had a guest along, a rather well known writer. Louis and Wright had about twenty minutes alone. Apparently Louis had once seen a collection of Wright’s stories, so he knew about him. Richard told me on the way back that although he wasn’t formally educated Joe was no fool and that they’d had a fascinating discussion. Wright wrote about it somewhere, although at this point I don’t remember exactly where.”

Since Rodney usually operated as a one-man sports section it might take him a while to get to every sport, but there wasn’t much he missed. Given that more than three out of every four current National Basketball Association players are black, it may surprise some to know that there ever could have been an issue about letting blacks play the professional game, but there was. And the Worker was in the middle of it.

“Joe Lapchick, who was the center on the original Celtics, coached the Knickerbockers, the first New York professional team, and his son Richard later told me that his father, a devout Catholic, said ‘That damned Daily Worker has done more good helping me to get Sweetwater Clifton (the team’s first black player) on the Knicks.’  This came after Jackie Robinson and it just flowed out of it. There was no big fuss about it. We wrote about it, but not in a scolding way as if the Knicks are the only sinners. There was actually more work done on basketball integration in Boston (where the Celtics signed the first black NBA players) than in New York.”

And, of course, there could be no good communist journalism without an international dimension. The Worker promoted the now largely forgotten Games for Spain, mostly basketball games held in New York’s old St. Nicholas Arena with proceeds going to the Loyalist side in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. As Rodney recalled, “Spain was just not a Communist cause. Any decent
person with humane liberal impulses who didn’t think that the government of Spain ran around butchering nuns was for the Loyalists against Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. So we got a lot of top college players who liked the idea and responded to a call to do something beyond just playing for their coach. One game we had a member of the original Celtics, Wee Willie Marron who had become a Communist organizer in New Jersey, put on a shooting exhibition at halftime.”

After several passport rejections and a Washington Post editorial mocking the State Department’s apparent fear of a Communist sportswriter posing a threat to American interests abroad, Rodney was finally cleared to cover the winter games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the first Olympics of any kind with athletes from the Soviet Union. Ironically, this trip gave Rodney his first exposure to the events that would cause his resignation from the Daily Worker and the Communist party before the next year was out.

“This was January and February of 1956. The twentieth Congress [of the Soviet Communist Party] at which Khrushchev threw the book at Stalin wasn’t until later that year. I stopped in Rome on the way to the Olympics and went to the Communists’ paper L’Unita, which was the biggest paper going in Italy. They wined and dined me and I met some party officials. The Italian Communists were always way ahead of us and they said, ‘What do you think about what’s going on in Russia?’ I said, ‘What’s going on in Russia?’  They said, ‘You don’t know what’s going on with Stalin and Khrushchev?’ They had the vibrations. Togliatti, the Italian leader, had been edging away from the hard Stalin line for years. They made us look like the rigid simpletons we were in the United States.

“We had a Communist party convention in 57, the famous convention in which the forces behind [Daily Worker editor] Johnny Gates wanted to transform the party and get the Soviet monkey off our back. That was our last gasp, but the good people were already leaving from despair. It was a psychological jolt to leave, but it wasn’t as painful for us as it was for the unknown heroes who had quietly left earlier. We were going out in a groundswell of popular opinion against what had become evident, so you know we were no great heroes in that sense.

“The real story which has never been investigated at all is the people who discerned all this years earlier and without leaving their ideals or becoming right-wingers or anything, suffered the blows and arrows and had their personal lives ruptured and sometimes their own families broken apart.  The people who left when the Duclos letter came [In 1945 a French Communist, Jacques Duclos, criticized the American party in an article that was widely assumed to indicate Soviet disapproval as well and resulted in the ouster of "twentieth century Americanism" party chairman Earl Browder in favor of hard-liner William Foster] or when the [1939 Nazi-Soviet] Pact was signed – those are the heroes and heroines. I always thought about that. I wished that I’d had the time and the energy and the will to look them up – to tell their story. It’ll never happen now; it’s too far gone.”

But for all his regrets regarding the Communist Party, Rodney never counted among them the goal of social equality that led him to join in the first place. Nor did he have any difficulty finding political relevance in events of half a century ago. He gladly explained his belief that Brooklyn Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese articulated the principles behind affirmative action years before anyone had given the theory a name.

“In 1947 when Jackie Robinson had first come up he was taking a lot of punishment because he had promised Rickey not to fight back, no matter what.  And the bad guys were taking advantage of him; Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals came down on his heel at first base; another time some little known shortstop for the Chicago Cubs pretended that Robinson had done something wrong sliding into second and jumped on top of him and began pummeling him and Robinson lay there until the umpires came and pushed the shortstop off. We sportswriters spent time in the dugout before games and knew some of the white players on the Dodgers were really troubled by what was happening. The discussions would go something like this: ‘Democracy means that everybody’s the same, so you treat everybody the same, so that means we don’t do anything special. You treat Jackie the same way as anybody.’

“Pee Wee cut a layer deeper and he scratched his Kentucky head and he said, ‘Yeah, democracy means everybody is the same, but things aren’t the same for Jackie because he’s the only colored guy and he’s catching special hell because of that, so maybe there’s a way we can make things the same for him.’ If that isn’t affirmative action! Here’s a baseball player saying this. That’s the special contribution of Pee Wee Reese.”

In 2007 I approached Rodney again for his thoughts on Robinson as the sixtieth anniversary of his major league debut approached.  He told me: “Today I’m curious as to whether Jackie Robinson means anything to a younger generation. The more I think of what he went through – he was a militant in the Army and at Pasadena Junior College – and he had the agreement not to fight back or even glare back for two years. Here was a 28 year old rookie – and you know that’s quite old for baseball – who had to submerge his personality.  He still won the pennant and the Rookie of the Year award. You know the Dallas Cowboys put red, white, and blue on their uniforms and said they were America’s team, but the Dodgers really were America’s team in those years. They won six pennants in ten years and it could easily have been eight, if Thomson hadn’t hit that home run and Dressen had put a runner in for Abrams. (The Dodgers lost both the 1950 and 51 pennants on the last day of the season.)

“He was an underrated American hero whose statue should be on the Mall in Washington, apart from the kind of ballplayer he was. So you ask why didn’t the Dodgers keep him as a coach? Could you see him coaching base running?  It’s because after the pact was over, he was truculent. He was an Eddie Stanky type. They held him to a double standard. They would have kept Campy after he retired because he was quiet. I was remiss in not doing something at the time.

“My respect for him has grown and grown over the years.  The effect he had on people! Carl Furillo, who wasn’t “going to play with any niggers,” at the end of the year was hugging cheek to cheek with him at the celebration when they won the pennant.  When he was invited to his first Old Timers Day at Yankee Stadium, he said, ‘I must respectfully decline until I see some progress in the front office of baseball.’”

Rodney moved to LA in 1958, ironically the same year as Walter O’Malley turned Pee Wee and the rest of the Trolley Dodgers into Freeway Dodgers. “I wound up working for the Santa Monica Outlook for about a year and a half. A dreadful paper – we called it the Santa Monica Outrage. One condition of employment was that you were not a member of the Newspaper Guild. That was the year that [U.S. Senator William]Knowland was running for governor against Pat Brown. The Outlook wouldn’t let you use the company parking lot if you had a bumpersticker for Brown.”

In 1964 Rodney got a bit luckier, landing a job with the Long Beach Press Telegram, a Knight Ridder paper where he eventually became religion editor. “How did I become religion editor?  How does the real world work? The managing editor is unhappy with the religion pages and comes into the press room and says, ‘One of you guys has got to be able to do a better job. Rodney — you!’ I found it quite interesting; it was the time of the ecumenical movement. I was actually cited by the National Council of Churches for my coverage of churches and the Vietnam War.”

Eventually he caught the attention of the Los Angeles Red Squad who visited the Press Telegram in the hopes of getting him fired. Rodney remembered, “The managing editor, a Republican ex-marine, told them to get lost. By this point he knew me and he didn’t care what they had to say about me.  If they had gotten there when I had just started it might have been another matter” – Religion Editor Exposed as Communist!

But unusual as it was going from Communist sportswriter to religion editor, his 1975 retirement from the Press Telegram gave him the time to do something arguably even more remarkable — pursuing the second career in sports that caused a local newspaper to dub him the “George Burns of tennis.”  He joined the senior circuit at age 65 with mixed results, but reached #7 ranking in Southern California in the 70+ bracket. From then on he just outlasted or maybe outlived the opposition. At age 79 Rodney and his wife Clare moved north to be closer to their children, but he still teamed with a southern partner to become the top ranked doubles combination in Southern California in the 80+ category. As a singles player he reached as high as #2 statewide and #6 nationally.

Rodney kept his hand in journalism with the occasional article for the Rossmoor News, a weekly with a circulation of 8,600. In a 1995 piece he explained the secret of his tennis success: a player’s best chance for attaining high ranking in any five year age bracket comes in the first year when they are still relatively “young” and he predicted that “Come 1996 yours truly will magically metamorphose from a tired old 84 to a frisky young 85.” And sure enough, after winning his first two singles tournaments, Rodney finally achieved the number one spot — at age 85. Although he lived for another thirteen years, Rodney did not make a run at being the first champ in any higher age brackets, dropping out of the tournament scene out of consideration for his (now late) wife’s declining health.

When asked about his current politics at age 85, Rodney said, “That’s a constantly evolving thing. There was a period when I said ‘I don’t know what socialism is any more; they’re going to have to call it something else anyhow, after what the Russians did with it.’  Now I’m ready to say, ‘Why give away a good word?’ Democratic socialism in some form is going to come back. Capitalism keeps creating new radicals. You can talk to a 45 year old conservative who no longer feels secure in his middle-level corporate life and sees his company begin to hire temporary guys or people who’re just short of the hours needed for benefits. And they’ll be making money hand over fist and they’ll downsize to compete for the future – probably in Asia with cheap labor, with no thought about the people, no loyalty to the people. There’s still life in the old boy yet, but some time in the future – and the way history is speeded up it may not be all that far – there’s going to be more people questioning capital than even when the Communist Party was in its heyday or the Socialists or the Wobblies before them.

“There’s got to be a lot of thought as to what replaces it, including individual freedoms and the right to own property – you know, things that we didn’t take into account.  But I have no profound wisdom on the future. If someone asked me how you would most closely describe yourself now, I would say I’m a democratic, bill of rights, American socialist and not only that, I don’t completely say that everything that happened in the name of communism was bad, as some of the Eastern European countries that are reelecting communists are discovering.  They realize, ‘We had a certain certainty to life and a certain humanity toward old people and children and priorities of culture that we don’t even see now – it’s all money.’ Of course, they’re not going to go back to Stalinism.” And he did allow as how there were a few memories that seemed silly decades later: “I used to think there’d be great boulevards named after American Communist leaders, like William Z. Foster Boulevard and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Street. The closest we came was Jack London Square.”

Since Rodney’s death the press has been all over the story of his role in integrating baseball. Wasn’t much like that when he was alive, though. But if the mass media didn’t pay all that much attention, there were those who did. Rodney recalled, “Nat Holman died in February [1995] at age 98 and his New York Times obituary mentioned the point shaving scandal that occurred when he was basketball coach at City College [of New York]. So I wrote a letter to the Times saying that it should be noted that point shaving didn’t just happen at City College, that it was widespread.  Two days after this appeared, the phone was ringing off the hook from New York … old CCNY guys congratulating me on writing this, saying that they had winced reading Holman’s obituary, as though it was only City College.

“One call was from a guy whose father was in the National Maritime Union and had told him about me. Then there was the guy at Newsday, the big Long Island paper. He was a young man; he didn’t know my name or my past. He said that my letter made him realize that his own paper was still running the point spread on basketball games and he was planning to go into the editorial board tomorrow and raise hell.

“And then I got one – and that’s where I’m going this afternoon –  from a guy who lives in Berkeley and reads the New York Times. He says, ‘Are you the Lester Rodney who was in Mindanao in 1945?’  I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘52nd Field Hospital?’ – which is amazing because guys who were in the 52nd probably don’t even remember the number of the outfit. ’Yeah.’ And so he says, ‘Well, you were my nurse.’ He was an 18 year old infantryman. The army was still segregated then, but there was one black guy in the ward – this guy tells me – and his bed was positioned out of the way up against the wall and nobody was talking to him.

“I don’t remember the incident, but the guy from Berkeley remembers it clearly. Apparently I told him that I’m going to change the bedding around and he was going to be next to the black guy so he wouldn’t be isolated. It sounded like nothing to me but he said it was so revolutionary to him that someone who had ideals would put them into practice and explain them. And so I became a sort of hero to him and he never thought he’d see my name again. I was 34, a father figure to him.”

This was another point in our conversations when a voice came from the next room. “How do you like that story?” Clare asked, “I was on the upstairs phone; this guy was checking – ‘Are you so and so?  Were you in this place?’ And then there’s a pause and he says, ‘you were my nurse.’  I had goose pimples. I just wish I had a recording of that.”  Lester insisted “It’s not an uncommon story that guys get together many years later.” ”Lester,” Clare retorted, “after 50 years it’s an uncommon story,” at which point Lester attempted to put an end to the debate with the declaration, “Ah, we’re going to do it every 50 years.”

Although I actually talked with Lester on the phone only a week or so before he died, our last exchange that touched upon politics was in 2008 when he asked if I recommended buying a copy of Robert Service’s  “Comrades: A History of World Communism,” after I’d sent him a review of the book I’d written for the National Catholic Reporter, shortly before that publication opted for a less secular book review policy. Never too late to learn a thing or two. My favorite memory of him over the last several years is the holiday party where he told me that although he was no longer on the competitive tennis tour, he was still playing friendly doubles twice a week at Rossmoor and described the end of one recent match.

The opposing team and their ways were very familiar to him from past play and he knew that when his team hit the ball to a certain spot this particular opposing player would try to hit it to the alley on the opposite side of the court. “So it’s game point for us and I hit the ball to that spot and immediately starting running to where I know he’s going to try to hit it. He does just that and I get to the spot and flick it over the net and it’s a game winner. By now, my momentum has taken me all the way onto the adjacent court where a woman who’s been playing there has seen the whole thing happening on our court and says to me, ‘You’re not ninety!’ And I went home with a big smile on my face.”

Oh, Massachusetts!

There’s sure been enough harsh talk around the health care bills coming out of the House and Senate – and I mean from people who support universal health insurance – forget the Tea Baggers and the Rush Limbaugh audience for the moment. On the one hand, you’ve got people calling for unseating Representative John Conyers because he voted for the final House bill – and he was the prime sponsor of the single payer bill! On the other, there’s people dismissing any objections to the bills’ shortcomings as the cavalier nitpickings of a privileged group that already has health insurance and doesn’t really care much about anyone else who doesn’t. But the hyperbole crown has got to go to the blogger who produced the headline “Raul Grijalva Flirting With History’s Greatest Monster Status.” And what crime did the Arizona Representative and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair commit to join the ranks of Hitler, Stalin, and Attila? Why, he said that instead of passing the Senate bill as is, the House should send the Senate smaller individual bills that wouldn’t include items such a tax on pre-existing health insurance plans. Imagine that!

The voters of Massachusetts have lately become notorious for forcing a total tactical regrouping on the national health care debate by electing a Republican to finish Ted Kennedy’s Senate term. But the politics of that New England state also hold some interest in this debate in a largely unrelated way – the similarity between the ongoing quandary faced by advocates of expanded government services there and the dilemma that the current national health bills have posed for supporters of health insurance reform.

The “Massachusetts problem” stems from the fact that it is not only one of just seven states in the nation with a “flat” income tax but it also has a constitutional prohibition against establishing a graduated income tax – i.e., the kind we’re all familiar with on the federal level, with rates that climb in higher income brackets – and numerous efforts to amend the state constitution have failed. The flat income tax, combined with the state’s sales tax, has the effect of making the state’s overall tax structure regressive, which seriously hinders any attempted redirection of resources within the state. You may be able to steer services and goods to the poor, but the money to do so will come from the middle rungs on the economic ladder and not the top. The Massachusetts dilemma, then, has generally boiled down to this: Do you ignore real needs or do you address them in a manner likely to eventually lead to a “middle class” taxpayer revolt such as the state’s 1980 “Proposition 2 ½” property tax limitation or California’s more famous Proposition 13.

The national health care debate has faced no similar constitutional barriers, but the political barriers have proven every bit as formidable. The President and congressional leaders could have put forth a bill offering a more serious solution to the problem – whether single payer, another type of universal nonprofit health insurance, a government-run health care system, or something else entirely – but they chose not to. The $20 million in campaign contributions the health care industry gave Barack Obama (nearly three times the amount given John McCain) may not have in themselves bought a non-health insurance industry-threatening proposal, but it was probably at least a good predictor of the type of bill we would ultimately see.

So far as the debate within the left goes, both sides might do well to simply concede the other’s central point: It is both true that the bills that came out of Congress would expand health insurance coverage significantly, although not universally, and that they would not fundamentally alter the expensive and wasteful private for-profit health insurance industry that lies at the root of the problem – except to further entrench it by mandating the purchase of its services.

If we’re willing to grant the significance of both the bills’ strengths and their weaknesses, we might find ourselves then able to sympathize with the votes of both of the individuals who are arguably the most left-wing members of each congressional branch, even though they voted the opposite way: Senator Bernie Sanders was a “Yes” when one more “No” would have brought the Senate discussion to a halt, while Representative Dennis Kucinich voted “No” when there were a few House votes to spare and he could thereby highlight the vast gulf between the bill as it was and what it ought to be.

Just a couple of weeks ago, concern about the potential downside of passing the Senate or House bill as currently written might have been dismissed as academic, but it can’t be now – or at least it shouldn’t be. And for the fact that we now know that, we are indebted to MoveOn.org and Democracy for America for having the foresight and wherewithal to secure the services of the Research 2000 polling company to ask a few questions of the Massachusetts electorate. What they found was so at odds with the general “anti-big government” or “anti-insider” interpretations that dominate the mainstream media as to demand the closest attention from anyone with a serious interest in finding a real solution to America’s health care problems.

The poll’s target group was people who had voted for Barack Obama for President but did not vote for Martha Coakley, the Democrats’ Senate nominee; and further divided into those who had actually voted for Scott Brown, the Republican winner, and those who stayed home. When asked if they favored or opposed “the health care reform proposal recently passed by the U.S. Senate,” not terribly surprisingly, both groups opposed it – the Brown voters by a 48–32% margin and the non-voters by a 43-34%. And here’s where things veered from the accepted norms of political discourse: when those opposed were asked if they thought the Senate bill “goes too far or doesn’t go far enough,” the 2008 Obama voters who’d taken a pass on the Massachusetts election said it didn’t go not far enough, by 53-8% margin. And so did those who voted for Obama in 2008 and Brown in 2010 – by a 36-23% margin!

And just so there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding as to what going “far enough” might mean, the pollsters also posed the question “Would you favor or oppose the national government offering everyone the choice of a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?” Both groups said yes – the Obama voters who stayed at home by a 86-7% margin and those who came out and voted for Brown by 82-14%.

Probably we shouldn’t entirely blame the mainstream pundits for the difficulty of incorporating the results of this poll into the national analysis. The fact is that the poll’s results are counterintuitive – people just don’t expect voters who felt the Senate health care bill did not go far enough to vote for a Republican. Counterintuitive, but true, however. Undoubtedly, some will simply reject the messenger like one woman who described her response to reading the MoveOn data thusly: “All I could do is roll my eyes. This is the second time I’ve been ready to unenroll.”

Others may find fault with the electorate itself, like one who thought, “I guess people do not measure the consequences of their vote.” But voters must deal with the choices they are presented as best they see fit (or stay at home) and the choices they have are not always logical. After all, there was no candidate on the Massachusetts ballot advocating going further than the Senate bill, now was there? It’s not just the voters who need to deal with the consequences of their actions – so do the members of Congress who gave us the bills currently at hand.

On January 1 of this year, a Rasmussen Reports poll found voters nationwide opposing the Congressional plans by a 58-39% margin. The poll also found a majority opposed to a single-payer health care system by a 52-34% margin. In other words, the spread against the Congressional plan – 19 points – was greater than the 18 point spread against a single payer plan, even though single payer has never had the benefit of so much as a single Congressional hearing or vote! Although it was dismissed as a non-starter from the outset, at this juncture it’s hard to see how the White House and Congressional leadership would have done worse if they’d had the political will to stand up to the insurance industry with a plan of which the President once said, “The truth is that unless you have a what’s called a single-payer system in which everybody is automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual.”

Opponents would have derided it as “big government,” to be sure, but it would have had the substantial asset of offering an actual solution to a major problem. Instead, the Democratic leadership chose to offer another type of “big government” solution, one that would involve ever more complex regulation of potential insurance company abuses, along with subsidies to allow lower income individuals to pay the bloated premiums those companies demand. And that’s big government that we can’t all believe in. As they’ve long known in Massachusetts, there’s consequences to these things.

Full disclosure: Tom Gallagher, Demockracy senior writer and columnist, served six years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

A Review of A Bomb in Every Issue

A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

by Peter Richardson, 247 Pages, The New Press, $25.95.

After struggling for the right superlative for Ramparts – Was it the most important magazine of its day? The most representative of the New Left? – I settled on one that wasn’t subject to debate: Ramparts was my favorite magazine – ever.  If we were to name the most significant magazine of the twentieth century American Left, it would be hard to deny The Nation, which has lasted the entire hundred years. Yet a couple of others arguably burned more brightly, although far more briefly.  The Masses, which ran from 1911-1917, comes to mind – and Ramparts, which spanned 1962-1975.

Ramparts didn’t just report news; it made news. It was a politically radical magazine with style. If you thought left wing politics ought to be hip, Ramparts was probably what you read.  And if it, indeed, had a bomb in every issue, as its nemesis Time Magazine once said of it, then we might say that Peter Richardson’s zippy new biography of the magazine has a firecracker on every page.

Ramparts was on quite a different course, however, when Edward Keating started it as a liberal Catholic magazine the year Pope John XXIII set about to renew the Church in the Second Vatican Council.  The first issue contained a symposium on author J.D. Salinger, but soon the magazine published Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk author of a widely-read autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” who was then in the process of engaging with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.  And then came an article by the magazine’s future editor, Robert Scheer, examining New York archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman’s enthusiastic support for the Vietnam War.  Ramparts was, Scheer said, “The only place willing to publish it.”  Warren Hinckle, a recent student newspaper editor at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco who was also rising to power at the magazine, explained the transition from there: “It was the idea of the church being wrong: If the church was wrong, then the government wasn’t far behind. If the government was wrong, then hell, all bets were off. Why should you believe anybody?”
National notoriety followed with the publication of an interview with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose new play, The Deputy, prompted international furor with a portrayal of a Pope Pius XII generally indifferent to the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.  Or more precisely, the notoriety came when the San Francisco based magazine held a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in defense of the play’s right to be performed on Broadway. The event typified the qualities that Hinckle – a figure about San Francisco to this day – brought to the magazine – brilliant promotion (Bloody Marys served at the press conference) and a flagrant disregard for budget.

Jessica Mitford, the author of “The American Way of Death” who loaned her name to the magazine masthead, described Hinckle and Scheer as “brilliant young bandits doing an extraordinary job,” but bemoaned their “ruthless handling of people.” This would include the ouster of founder Keating who had “found himself in the eye of a hurricane,” in the eyes of Ramparts art director Dugald Stermer, when Ramparts “became a national force. I don’t think any of us had that in mind when we started out.”  Keating himself said, “They threw me out like an old shoe.” The “bandits” were brilliant enough, though, to maintain connections with such Keating finds as Eldridge Cleaver, recently released from prison and on his way to fame with the Black Panther Party.

Until its final demise (it survived one bankruptcy), the magazine would play a signal role in the blowing apart of prior conventional wisdom that “the Sixties” are rightly or wrongly identified with.

Ramparts would never be accused of carrying concealed weapons – oftentimes the bomb in the issue was right on the cover: The December 1967 issue showed four hands holding the burning draft cards of Hinckle, Scheer, and two other staffers.  They later told a New York grand jury that those were their draft cards, but not their extremities – the photographer had used hired hands.  (No one was indicted.)  The April 1969 cover featured a young boy holding a Vietnamese National Liberation Front flag with the caption: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” And if irony was your style, there was all-American artist Norman Rockwell’s May 1967 cover drawing of Bertrand Russell for an issue highlighting the British philosopher’s withering critique of American foreign policy.

In its customary budget-be-damned style, the magazine sent ten reporters to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where they produced a daily Ramparts Wall Poster. Contributors of the day included Tom Hayden, who would be indicted for conspiracy to disrupt the convention and stand trial as part of the Chicago Eight; Adam Hochschild, future founder of Mother Jones magazine; Paul Krassner, editor of the intermittent and infamous The Realist magazine; past Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby, author of the seminal but now largely forgotten book, “Containment and Change;” and Richard Rothstein, future New York Times education writer. Pete Hamill and Hunter Thompson were also in the wings.

In 1970, David Horowitz – before his abrupt about-face denunciation of his New Left days and long career as a leading intellectual figure of the New Right – emerged as the new editor when a staff collective ousted Scheer (who remains a working journalist of the left to this day.)  Hinckle had already left to found the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly that famously paired Hunter Thompson with cartoonist Ralph Steadman and sent them off to the Kentucky Derby to drink mint juleps and report the decadence they found. The magazine lost the impish touch of the Hinckle/Scheer days, but its politics remained largely unchanged.

Ramparts published Che Guevara’s Bolivia diary and Robert Kennedy’s final interview. It exposed the Central Intelligence Agency funding of the National Student Association and gave early attention to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigations of the JFK assassination. Sports psychologist Harry Edwards’ article about the use of steroids was decades ahead of the curve. It interviewed Huey Newton and John Lennon, and published Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, and Seymour Hersh. When the stories themselves weren’t enough, Keating, Scheer, and Stanley Scheinbaum, another magazine affiliate, all ran antiwar campaigns in the 1966 Democratic congressional primaries. None won, but each shocked the local establishment with how many votes a newcomer could get by advocating withdrawal from Vietnam.

By the time its finances finally brought it down, Ramparts had touched upon – and usually in a memorable way – the lion’s share of the issues that dominated the remainder of the century.

Review of Freedom’s Orator

Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.

by Robert Cohen Oxford University Press, 532 pages, $34.95

It probably wasn’t until seven years after his death that a Mario Savio speech would reach its largest audience – albeit in altered form.  Anyone of a certain age who detected an echo of Savio’s 1964 “gears of the machine” speech in the 2003 season finale of Battlestar Galactica was not having one of those legendary acid flashbacks.  The show’s producer had been looking at a copy of the speech hanging on his wall for five years and it was with the permission Savio’s widow that the character known as “The Chief” delivered a paraphrase of the words that led into the famous Free Speech Movement (FSM) sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley’s Sproul Hall.

Probably more of Savio’s peers saw the clip of his original speech in another television show, though, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Bob Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home.”  Only fitting in that, as FSM principal Jack Weinberg told Robert Cohen, author of the Savio biography, “Freedom’s Orator,” back then “If you named … young people who were famous, all the rest were rock musicians … [the] Beatles and Bob Dylan–and Mario Savio was a celebrity of that caliber.” Since it was Weinberg’s arrest that set off the thirty-two hour blockade of a police car that created FSM, he may lack sufficient distance to make such a judgement, but then it is a fact that, upon finishing his speech that day, Savio turned the mike over to Joan Baez for a rendition of her friend Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin.”

When Mario Savio enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1963, it was his third college in three years.  Berkeley already had a free thinking reputation when he arrived.  That fact was the better part of why he was there: There was a serious student political party of several years standing called SLATE; Cal students had participated in major San Francisco demonstrations in 1960 at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing at City Hall and outside the 1964 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace; and the Civil Rights movement was a campus presence – Savio would be one of 167 arrested at a sit-in protesting the discriminatory hiring policies of the San Francisco Sheraton Palace hotel.  By the time Savio left, the campus had a free speech reputation as well – the man and the institution each having become a nationwide symbol of a new wave of student activism.

A ban on political advocacy on the Berkeley campus dated back to the 1930s, apparently a result of a West Coast Red scare that followed the San Francisco general strike.  There was, however, a twenty-six-foot-strip of sidewalk on Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues where such activity went on because it was believed to be city, not university property.  But in September of 1964, university administrators decided otherwise and shut the free speech area down.  A couple of brief sit-ins protesting the ban at administration offices followed over the next few days.  Then, at a Sproul Plaza rally called in defiance of the ban, administrators decided to arrest the above mentioned Jack Weinberg because he was not currently a Cal student, having dropped out of graduate math studies to concentrate on civil rights activities through a campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Cohen writes: “The method used to arrest Weinberg could not have been more provocative … he had been dragged into a police car in the center of Sproul Plaza.  It was the most crowded spot on campus and shortly before noon, the busiest time of day.” A “fairly major level of stupidity,” Savio later observed.  At that moment, the Berkeley sit-in moved to a new level: “Before the officer could start his engine students were sitting in around the car.” Savio, who had already emerged as the leader of protests against the free speech ban, had been sitting on the car’s hood and, he recalled, later, “Sometimes you’re just … gripped by the moment and you have a feel for what’s poetically right.” Then “I took my shoes off.  I didn’t want to hurt the car,” (although he would later bite a cop’s leg – and subsequently apologize profusely), stepped up into history and gave the first speech of the protest that would block the police car for the next day.

The American campus had never seen anything like this before.  And it grew – 6,000 came to a December 2 protest at which Savio gave “the speech” about blocking the machine with your body that swelled the numbers ultimately deciding to sit in at the Administration office building to over a thousand.  Jackie Goldberg, later an LA City Councilor and member of the California Assembly, remembered the people “who walked into that building who had come to the rally not intending to sit in,” but did “because Mario had given that speech that just lifted us four or five inches off the ground.”

But as a speaker at the Sproul Hall memorial service following Savio’s death recalled, it wasn’t just that speech, but the fact that so many students had already heard Savio many times articulate their growing sense that right was on their side over the preceding months.  Literary critic Wendy Lesser considered him “the only political figure of my era for whom language truly mattered … the last American perhaps who believed that civil, expressive, precisely worded, emotionally truthful exhortation could bring about significant change … The sentences he spoke were complicated and detailed, with clauses and metaphors and little byways of digression that together added up to a coherent grammatical whole.” Well, maybe there were a few more besides Savio, but he was definitely a carryover from a pre-sound bite era of detailed argument.

At least a bit of his style can be traced back to Savio’s experience a few months earlier with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Freedom Summer which he considered “the event which more than any other created the white student movement” by bringing together “privileged upper- and middle-class youths from northern campuses with the disenfranchised black community of Mississippi.” As Cohen writes, “Having defied the Klan in Mississippi, he was not going to be intimidated by campus officials in Berkeley.” And if there is another figure that Savio resembles, both in his plain spoken but powerful speaking style and his reticence regarding the limelight, it would likely be Robert Moses of SNCC.

The Berkeley free speech advocates ultimately carried the day, although not before Savio was hauled off stage by campus police in front of a crowd of 15,000 at Berkeley’s Greek Theater, another disastrous episode in a series of administration blunders.  His arch adversary, UC Chancellor Clark Kerr later acknowledged that he “was obviously a genius at understanding crowds, appealing to them, and handling situations like that – quite beyond the capacity of any of us in the administration.”

There was a down side to all this, Cohen notes – the “rift between the Left and liberalism [that] would benefit the Right and contribute to the rise of Ronald Reagan” who would win the governorship two years later promising to “clean up the mess” in Berkeley.  Savio was expelled from the university for his actions and would not complete his undergraduate degree for nearly two decades.  In the immediate aftermath of the FSM he was a sought after speaker, participating in the 36-hour 1966 Berkeley Vietnam War teach-in but, as he would say many years later, “ I had trouble during the anti-Vietnam days because it was hard for me to talk about something I had not seen.” He ran a desultory 1968 state Senate campaign as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate, but never showed any inclination to stay in the limelight just because he could.  On the balance celebrity was a burden to him and he retired from public view (although FBI files show that the agency followed his activities for the next decade.)

Jackie Goldberg certainly surprised a few of us at the memorial service who did not personally know Savio with her mention that he was “a very troubled person.” Cohen tells us that he was hospitalized for depression in 1971 and that his eloquence was all the more striking to those who knew him, as he suffered from a severe stutter that he did not shed until the Free Speech Movement.

When he finally returned to college in the 1970s, he was again brilliant, this time in physics, to the point where a professor later included “Savio’s Theorem” in his text book Analytical Mechanics for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.   When opponents of 1980s US Central America policy pined for a movement to rival that of the Vietnam era, it just came naturally to seek out Savio, whose subsequent seclusion had left his place in the annals of 1960s student activism untarnished.

Savio responded with speeches on a number of campuses that were every bit as thoughtful as before, particularly on the difficulties of mounting efforts against American foreign policy.  Recognizing that the anti-Vietnam War movement did not carry with it the physical dangers that pushing for civil rights did in many locations, he nonetheless defended it as, in some ways, the more difficult effort.  Compared to arguing for constitutional rights, the antiwar case was “less sweet.  I mean there is no way it could be otherwise.  It is an attack rather than a defense,” but “That’s what was needed because the war had to be stopped.” He thought “There was no way to have a decade to catch up so you could educate people so you could talk to them about these things.  In fact what was necessary was what the country got.  It got the best it could, given the time pressure.” Likewise, he thought opposing US Central America policy more difficult that opposing apartheid in South Africa.

In producing his definitive biography, Cohen has included nearly a hundred pages of Savio’s speeches and writings, starting with his 1960 valedictory speech at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, New York, apparently delivered without hint of his then severe stammer, and ending with a pamphlet co-authored with his son Nadav, “In Defense of Affirmative Action: The Case Against Proposition 209.”   (Some of his speeches are also available at www.savio.org.)

When Savio died of a heart condition at age 53, he was heavily involved in a fight against a tuition increase at Sonoma State University where he lectured in math.   One colleague found his method of continuing to bring student voices to the fore “really wonderful.” He would get journalists to the campus “because it was Mario Savio calling,” but “he would not be there when the reporters came” – so they spoke with student activists instead.

Review of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
by Mark Rudd
324 pages, Morrow, $25.99

In mentioning to people that I was reviewing his book, I’ve been surprised to find Mark Rudd less widely remembered than I’d expected.  It appears that if you didn’t arrive in college by a certain point, you don’t know who he is, the drop off in recognition coinciding with part two of the tale told in his new memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen.  Up to that point he was famous long ago, no doubt.  Chairman of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its 1968 student strike coordinating committee, he was the very model of a modern student radical.  (Although just how archetypical is disputed: a photo caption in the book calls him “the prototype of the Doonesbury character, Megaphone Mark,” but in Boston the word was that the model was local writer Mark Zanger who’d gone to Yale with Gary Trudeau.)

The events at Columbia very simply set the standard for the student activism of the day.  SDS and the Columbia Student Afro-American Society (SAS) had mounted a campaign fundamentally challenging their prominent university’s role – from the global to the local.  They wanted Columbia out of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), in Rudd’s words, “an obscure twelve-university consortium” that in the Vietnam era developed “such techniques and weapons as the use of chemical herbicides to destroy the insurgents’ jungle cover – the horrible ‘defoliation’ using highly toxic Agent Orange, and the use of airpower for counterinsurgency.”  And there “was even an IDA report on the suppression of ghetto insurgency.”   And the two organizations also opposed the school’s plan to build a new gym in Morningside Park, taking their lead from Harlem residents who considered it an unwanted encroachment upon their neighborhood.

Protests eventually led to the student take over of five university buildings.  There were over seven hundred arrests, several hundred injuries, and a student strike.  Columbia dropped both IDA and the gym.  Tom Hayden, SDS leader of an earlier day who had actually participated in the Columbia building take overs, wrote a Ramparts magazine piece calling for “two, three, many Columbias,” to echo Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams.”

After being expelled from Columbia, Rudd dedicated himself to helping spread the word through SDS, which was at the time the loosest of organizations.  Get five students willing to plunk down five dollars apiece for dues and you had a nationally recognized chapter and you could say and do what you wished.  But by 1968, there were many chapters where you would find a new flavor in the mix – the Progressive Labor Party.  PL were the Marxists your mother, J. Edgar Hoover, and the comic books you read as a kid all warned you about, humorless dogmatists who argued in terms that you knew must be (poorly) translated from some other language – Chinese, presumably, as they appeared to be Maoists.

PL did have the useful side effect of making some people curious enough to actually read Karl Marx and associates because they figured that no one would ever have heard of him if he was actually as ridiculous as these people made him out to be.  But as Rudd puts it, “The most pernicious effect of PL was that SDS regulars, myself included, became convinced that we needed a well-worked-out revolutionary theory – and dogma.”  And his crowd came up with a doozie: a manifesto called “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”  (after a Bob Dylan lyric) which gave the group the name that stuck – the Weathermen.

No one who took part is likely to forget the 1969 SDS national convention.  After having your picture snapped by photographers from every government agency that maintained an interest in such things and submitting to frisking (pretty much like an airport today, but unusual for the time), you entered the vast and gloomy Chicago Coliseum for a couple of days of theater of the absurd.  First up was a group from Ohio and Michigan – literally – they leapt up on their chairs in the midst of some procedural debate and start waving Little Red Books, chanting “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung!  Dare to struggle, dare to win!”  Rudd explains that the event was intended tongue in cheek, as a sort of mockery of PL, a possibility I had not previously entertained since it had seemed of a piece with everything else that happened at the gathering.

The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a faction that had developed in the organization’s national office, comprising the Weathermen and another group with which they had already split, controlled the agenda and brought in a representative of the Black Panther Party to denounce PL and when that maneuver went bad on them, they declared PL expelled from SDS.  But since it was not clear that RYM actually commanded more support than PL, rather than try to physically eject them, RYM opted to repair to an inner chamber of the Coliseum and the two conventions proceeded at odds with one another under one large roof.  (And separate friskings for each convention.)

In the inner hall, Bob Avakian (who has himself now been underground for nearly three decades even though it’s not clear if anyone’s looking for him) delivered an amazingly fast speech retroactively outlining the principles of unity that had necessitated PL’s expulsion from SDS.  They included support for the revolutionary governments of China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea.  And when someone from the crowd shouted out “and Albania,” Avakian added “and Albania,” without missing a beat.  Now, that’s comedy – and they used to say that Maoists had no sense of humor!  Mark Rudd was elected national secretary of the truncated organization.  He announced the need to “bring the war home.”

For many campus SDS chapters, the first order of business that fall was a name change.  For the new Weatherman leadership, it was organizing for an October national action scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the trial of the “Chicago 8″ for alleged conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention.  The more the Weatherman organized for it, the clearer it became that they intended to literally fight the police, and the more people decided to make other plans for that period of time.  Eventually only two hundred or so showed up for what had become known as the “Days of Rage.”

When a documentary film called Weather Underground appeared in 2003,  I went to see it with some hesitation.  It seemed a necessary enough film and yet wasn’t there still something of a glow of admiration for the Weathermen about it?  I was glad enough to find that most of the participants interviewed in the film now seemed to understand that their project had been insane. Still, I didn’t leave the theater thinking that these were a bunch of people whose political opinions I’d ever be likely to seek out.  There were a couple of exceptions, though.

I’d only met Rudd once, in 1968,  at a lower Manhattan, upper floor warren of antiwar offices in whose shared space he was, appropriately enough, running off something on the mimeograph machine, as radicals were wont to do “in those pre-Xerox, pre-digital days” he writes of.  (The book’s dates also suggest that it might really have been him that I spotted walking down Market Street, San Francisco with long hair and a beard a couple of years later; no conversation that time, however.)  But somehow I’d always had the vague impression of him sharing a certain arrogance common among some student leaders of the day – a perception that his book seems to confirm, as he notes that “In my speeches at rallies, I had taken to referring to [Columbia University] President Kirk as ‘that shithead.’”  So it came as a particular surprise to me that of all of the people in the film, the one who stood out as most profoundly chastened by the whole experience was Mark Rudd.

It is that same Mark Rudd you will find in the pages of “Underground,” which makes for a very useful book.  “Underground” gives you your fill of the background to the headlines – the “Wargasm,” the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the Timothy Leary jailbreak, and all the rest – with no suggestion that it was all okay because the participants meant well.

Considering it the most important student organization to have come along in decades, Rudd writes that “The destruction of SDS … was an historical crime,” a judgement buttressed by the fact that no organization of comparable significance has followed it, either.  As an anonymous analyst wrote in his FBI file, “By their stubborn adherence to pseudo-Marxist/Maoist dogma which is out of step with the present realities, RUDD and his colleagues have alienated a large segment of potential and heretofore willing followers.”  Rudd writes, “I couldn’t have said it any better.”

After seven years underground, during which “rather than doing any useful political work we were just surviving,” he surfaced to surrender.  Due to the federal government’s own illegal tactics, all of the major charges against the Weathermen had been dropped and Rudd slipped into a quiet life as a math teacher in New Mexico where he has been politically active on the local level.  Today, he calls the 1974 Weather Underground proclamation, “Prairie Fire: The politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” “omniscient to the point of arrogance” and the infighting that went on in its wake “beyond absurd.”  There is, however, a clear line in his mind as to when he went “over the cliff” and he writes of the Columbia Strike with pride, even including a campus map.

There’s more of Rudd’s sex life in the book than some might really want to know, but then his line “My penis was a magic wand of liberation” may make it all worthwhile.  And overall, even though you never needed a Weatherman to know which way the wind blew, in  “Underground,” Rudd has, after all these years, reestablished himself as someone whose opinion it might be worth asking.

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