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.

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.

Review of Embedded With Organized Labor

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of “Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” it sometimes seems that Steve Early’s new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades.  Not quite, but actually the volume’s thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that.  For instance, there’s stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you’ve likely never heard.  But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as “redeployed,” is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn’t seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn’t out on that day Early recalls “In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers … attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street.”  The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon.  The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nominee in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. Some see payback in McGovern’s current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.  But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill’s components is none other than Meany.

Still some, like Early, persisted.  A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer.  (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn’t see the labor movement as a collection of “real-life Archie Bunkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled ‘meathead’ college kids,” would even prevail, to a degree, and by “the fall of 1999,” Early notes, “steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization.”

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney’s 1995 election as AFL-CIO president.  Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, “Not Your Father’s Union Movement,” his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterward the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War.  Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early’s book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would  –  reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book’s first paragraph: “When I first got involved the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country’s workforce.  Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry.”  Sweeney had assumed the Federation’s leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation’s largest union.  And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney’s successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO’s membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not.  About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared.  The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor’s decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for.  He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar’s findings that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses” – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain.  The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of “Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement” are not part of political discourse today – “except in the speeches of Ralph Nader.”

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early’s book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism.  “Since 1996,” he writes, “when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU locals – or 14 percent of its 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers.”  While he grants that “[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms,” others just didn’t want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the “air of arrogance and exclusivity” emanating from some SEIU staffers or an “attitudinal style … closer … to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement” that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU’s now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early’s book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally.  There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do.  At the one end are the “colonizers” like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd’s “The New Rank and File,” who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant.  Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, “without the additional task of proselytizing.” The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is “SEIU’s ‘best and brightest’” who come in for Early’s criticism because “most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee.”  Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book’s first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then “looked me in the eye and said knowingly, ‘Ah, pencil hands.’”

And then there’s the question of why the labor radicals do what they do.  I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place.  They weren’t motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end.  For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early’s next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement.  But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment.  And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

Review of West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State

West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
by Mark Arax
Public Affairs: 350 pp., $26.95

It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst.

“Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

As America is to the world, so is California to America. If you’re looking for the greatest opportunities and the biggest dreams – along with the biggest absurdities and the greatest atrocities – well, you go to the U.S. of A. And if you’re already there, in one of the other forty-nine states, why then, you go west. Or, more precisely, as author Mark Arax notes, you go west of the West which is where Teddy Roosevelt said he felt he was when he was in California. You might say that California is America to the next degree – America squared.

Much of the rest of the country’s knowledge of the Golden State is limited to the Pacific Coast from San Francisco down to Los Angeles or maybe San Diego. Not that this doesn’t encompass a lot – this 550 mile stretch includes the country’s largest county, Los Angeles (whose nearly ten million population almost doubles that of runner-up Cook County, Illinois) along with four of America’s thirteen most populous cities. Arax wrote for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-seven years, so his new collection of essays, “West of the West” does cover this well known California, but ultimately he is not of it and his writing on it is not his best work.

“Eyre of the Storm,” for instance, is a bit of stereotyped mockery of the “far out” Bay Area that covers “Naked Day” in Berkeley, a convention of conspiracy theorists, and an old family friend in Berkeley who is “a believer in UFOs and past lives,” including her own past life as Mary Magdalene. Arax ends the piece lamenting the decline of meaningful political activism and “[t]he social transformation of San Francisco and Berkeley, its iconic foot bath and organic tampon self-absorption, [and] the inexhaustible consumption made possible by the ascent of the silicon chip.”

Unfortunately he appears not to have examined much past his preconceptions, otherwise he would have found a left wing majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actively involved in creating programs like a municipal minimum wage, maintaining rent control, and generally grappling with the problem of ensuring that the city’s working class and poor population is not swept away by the waves of wealth washing up from Silicon Valley. And quality aromatherapy is not high on their agenda.

Arax himself originally hails from Fresno, whose population of nearly half a million makes it California’s largest city not bordering on the Pacific Ocean — in other words, California’s largest unknown city. “If you want to see concentrated poverty,” he writes, “unlike any other city – Fresno number one, New Orleans number two – or witness the nation’s highest per capita IV drug use, come to our inner city.”
And it is in his reporting on the unknown California that Arax shines. As the state’s banks repossessed $100 billion worth of houses over a two-year period – 1,300 houses emptying each business day – he tells us that no area was hit harder than the Central Valley where Kern County had become so pro-growth that it abolished its planning commission, helping to make “Bakersfield, the most sprawled city in the West.”

Leading up to the crash, “[f]or every dollar the boom was generating,” he writes, “cities were spending roughly two dollars to provide streets and sewers and cops to serve the new suburbs. … When the city’s [Fresno’s] own economic impact studies began showing that each housing tract was putting Fresno deeper in the red, Mayor Jim Patterson stepped in. The city, he said, could no longer afford to do economic analysis.”

But the best parts of “West of the West” concern California agriculture – and its amazing extremes. “The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman” is a story of migrant farmworkers. Now, most of America thinks it already knows that one; after all, United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez has even had his own postage stamp. But these are not Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers. Today one out of every five farmworkers in the Valley – 75,000 – are Mixtec Indians who have left behind villages in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla now largely depleted of working-age men. Their children often struggle in California schools not just because they don’t speak English, but because they don’t speak Spanish either, but rather Mixtec languages such as Triqui.

Arax rides a farmworker bus headed to the raisin fields filled with speakers of six indigenous languages. “They had left villages of slash-and-burn farming for the most technologically advanced agriculture in the world,” he writes, and yet “the work could not have been more primitive.” He found the fastest pickers earning between $10 and $12 an hour; they might make $10,000-12,000 in a summer. The slowest “were not even making $30 a day – somewhere between $2 and $3 an hour.” He concludes that “[w]e are more than happy to buy a bag of plums for the same $5 we paid in the 1990s but give no thought as to how that trickles down to the farmer and his field hand.”

“Highlands of Humboldt” covers the other end of California agriculture – geographically and economically. Arax visits a plot where no one earns “less than $40 an hour, likely the highest piece rate in all of American agriculture.” These farmworkers harvest marijuana, “the biggest single cash crop in all of California, dwarfing the $10 billion a year agricultural bounty of Fresno and Kern – the number one and two farm counties in the country.” In the geographic top of California – 7,081 square miles, 215,000 people, 85 percent of them white – “nearly every standing thing in a two-hundred-mile stretch from Ukiah to McKinleyville … was almost wholly reliant on the unfettered cultivation of marijuana.”

Although the marijuana-growing “Emerald Triangle” pre-existed it, the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, the state’s medical marijuana law, took the industry to a whole other level as it made it quasi-legal. That is to say, legal – with certain restrictions – under state law, but still illegal under federal law. And about once a decade the feds will attempt to assert themselves as they did on June 24, 2008 “when residents awoke to a convoy of 450 federal, state, and local police – cars, trucks, all-terrain vehicles, three-wheelers, a mobile communications center, portable toilets – roaring up the hillside” to raid the fields and grow houses.

Meanwhile, the Emerald Triangle has become home to a cultural divide that few outsiders would conceive of. Arax attends a community meeting, complete with a professional facilitator, called to discuss the problems of “diesel dope” in the Humboldt County town of Garberville. As a grower from Mendocino County to the south had told him, “Weed is a spiritual experience here. We grow it in a sustainable way. We grow it in the backyards using the sun. [In Humboldt t]hey build these huge indoor grow houses and use diesel generators to keep the lights burning.” With the estimated seventy-five gallons of fuel needed to produce one pound of indoor pot being about what an average car burns in a trip from California to Texas, bumper stickers have begun to appear that read: “Diesel Dope: Pollution Pot.”

The Humboldt “rasta rednecks,” as Arax dubs them, are “hill people, the sons and daughters of the old lumbermen and fishermen” whose industries have died out. And he notes that some chapters of the county’s history are of the sort that the nation prefers to speed read through; In 1854, four years after California’s admission to the Union, the Sinkyone, Yurok, and Karok Indians of Humboldt had not seen a white man; ten years later their societies had been destroyed by them. An early edition of the Humboldt Times describes “the red-skin scourge that has long been preying upon their [the colonists’] lives and property.” Arax describes a massacre of three hundred natives, driven by “the calculus that for every white man killed by an Indian, 150 Indians needed to die in return.” (A cynic might note a similarity to the nation’s post-9/11 policy in regard to Muslim nations.)

Where California goes from here is an ever-fascinating question. Just the other day a University of Southern California study reported that for the first time in its history, a majority of the state’s residents were born and raised there. Meanwhile, renewed efforts to cover farmworkers under federal labor law and to legalize and tax marijuana for general use have surfaced. For now, if you want to catch up on a few developments in the state that so often seems home to what is best and what is worst in America, Arax’s book is a good place to start.