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Frank Sinatra and the Popular Front: The Leftism of an American Icon

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Editor's note: This article appeared in another form in Science & Society (Fall 2002). Gerald Meyer has taught history for many years at Hostos Community College/City University of New York and authored the biography of leftist Congressman Vito Marcantonio titled Vito Marcantanio: Radical Politician. He also co-edited the book The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism.

Francis Albert Sinatra was "one of the most chronicled celebrities of modern times ... the focus of oceans of ink and miles of film and video footage" (Kuntz, 2000, xi, 40). Indeed, Sinatra may be the most documented entertainer in history. Aside from innumerable biographies, articles, and documentaries, he has been the subject of a scholarly conference and an encyclopedia. Despite this obsession to detail the ebb and flow of the life of "The Voice from Hoboken," relatively little attention has been paid to his brief, yet intense, involvement with the political Left, which among other things caused the United States government to deny him security clearance to perform before the troops in Korea and led to an extensive inquiry to determine whether he should be indicted for perjury because on his passport application he averred that he had never been a member of a subversive group (FBI Files 62-83219-28 and 36, 211-232, 244).

From 1944 until 1948, Sinatra contributed financially and gave his name to progressive causes and organizations; but he did what few celebrity progressives did in that period: He publicly confronted racism, prejudice, and red baiting. ("Progressive" here is defined as those who, although not Communists or even Communist sympathizers, were comfortable working together with Communists toward common goals.) Sinatra's connections with the Left abruptly ended when he became the target of red baiting which contributed to an astounding downward spiral in his career.

Sinatra's early Leftism-the activities, associations, and avowed beliefs-grew out of his early experiences and, in ways large and small, they reverberated throughout his life. Sinatra's "left phase" not only sheds light on the trajectory of this American icon, it also speaks loudly to two large and related phenomena: the Popular Front (in both its political and cultural manifestations) and its repression in the postwar period. His story shows how widespread Popular Front politics were in the United States, and it reveals the extent of the repression that ultimately defeated this movement.

Although only one of its eight chapters, "Sinatra and Communism," addresses the issue of Sinatra's involvement with the Left, The Sinatra Files: The Secret FBI Dossier, edited by Tom Kuntz and Phil Kuntz, has added to the public record this component of Sinatra's story. The 1,275-page dossier that the agency first opened on him in 1943 is the product of a forty-year surveillance on the single most famous and influential vocalist of American popular music. The largest part of Sinatra's FBI file is comprised of reports linking him to "the mob"; however, nearly 25 percent of the files are devoted to Sinatra's involvement with the Left. The Sinatra Files contains leads which help to reconstruct this slighted period in the life of the singer who raised American popular music to an entirely new level. However, by failing to independently assess these sources and by publishing the unevaluated and undigested materials that were stuffed into the FBI files, the editors of The Sinatra Files, albeit unintentionally, further disseminate hearsay evidence, which was collected and used for the purpose of isolating and disabling an individual who advocated a progressive political agenda. Here we will take another read of the relevant sections of Sinatra's FBI file and place them into a context that gives them meaning.

Sinatra's early life predisposed him to the Left. His parents were both immigrants from Italy-his mother, Natalia (Dolly) Garaventa, from a village near Genoa; his father, Anthony Martin Sinatra from Sicily-who settled in Hoboken, New Jersey (Fagiani, 1999, 20, 23). Located directly across the Hudson River from midtown New York, this mile-square waterfront city had a well-earned reputation as a tough working class town. In the 1930s, Hoboken was the most densely populated city in the United States. This gritty city's sixty thousand people formed ethnic sub-communities where by 1930 Italian Americans had supplanted the German and Irish Americans as the largest ethnic group (Federal Writers' Project, 1989, 262-269). In a full-page interview with the Communist poet Walter Lowenfels in The Daily Worker, Sinatra recalled, "I was brought up in a tenement in a very poor neighborhood. It was a real melting-pot, a cross-section of every racial group in the country" (Lowenfels, 1945, 3). Sinatra was referring to Hoboken's south-west corner (the only area of the city where wooden tenements predominate), which was an Italian urban village with its own Catholic Italian "national parish," St. Francis, which sponsored an annual festa (Proctor, 91-94; Brown, passim).

Sinatra's parents were integrally involved in the social fabric of that community. Anthony Martin had fought as a prizefighter before being injured and then worked in Hoboken's shipyards. Dolly Sinatra, who served as the Democratic Party's leader for Hoboken's Third Ward, played the political godmother of the neighborhood and accumulated eighty-seven godchildren. During the Great Depression, her ability to deliver six hundred votes at election time enabled her to secure for her husband a big Depression-era prize--a job in Hoboken's Fire Department (Talese, 113-15).

Sinatra told Lowenfels his left commitments and activities to his mother's political activities. He explained: "My mother is what you would call a progressive. She decided she didn't want to be just a housekeeper and studied nursing and is now a graduate nurse. She was always interested in conditions outside her own home. My father, too, but he was the more silent type" (Lowenfels, 1945). Dolly's politics was not directly associated with the Left. She served as a loyal liege in the Hoboken fiefdom of Frank [I am the law] Hague's political duchy of Hudson County. In its zeal to elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fourth term, the Communist Party actually endorsed Hague's mayoral candidacy. This was conceivable because for all of its corruption, this old-fashioned machine practiced a populist politics that made blatant class appeals and its carefully balanced tickets acknowledged the predominant nationalities residing in these communities. Perhaps more to the point, the Hague machine's enthusiasm for or indifference to the Democratic Party's candidates for statewide and national office was a critical ingredient in theses electoral outcomes in this closely contested swing state. Nonetheless, Sinatra stepped out on his own when he openly affiliated with obviously left groups and initiatives-something that was not customary to Hudson County's political culture.

Sinatra's involvement with the Left coincided with the extension of the Popular Front into the wartime years-which in the United States may have been its zenith of influence--and the advent of its repression. The Popular Front incorporated a strategy which embodied both a politics and a culture, whose raison d'etre was the defeat of Fascism. Largely because of the refusal of the Western powers to accept the Soviet Union as an ally, it had failed to prevent the rise of Fascism. Nonetheless, this political movement gained enormous support and prestige because of the wartime military alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union and the role of the American Left in fighting racism and anti-Semitism as well as fascism abroad. In the United States, the Popular Front was perhaps best enunciated in Vice President Henry Wallace's 1942 speech where he asserted that the world was entering "The Century of the Common Man," a new era where the danger was racism and the solution internationalism (Culver, 2000, 275-280). This politics flourished in the left New Deal coalition which intermingled Communists and much larger groups of left-leaning people. Politically, the Popular Front was epitomized by the CIO unions and especially by its formation of the Political Action Committee in 1944, which was undergirded by the CIO (and some AFL) unions. Other key components included the American Labor Party in New York, scores of fraternal and cultural organizations as well as a wide range of publications. In the graphic arts, movies, theater, poetry, prose, and music, the Popular Front utilized working class characters and settings, folk material, and ethnic and racial minorities in its production so that popular culture became elevated and high culture became more accessible (Denning, 1997). Communists and progressives-albeit for a brief moment-were at the very fulcrum of political influence (Abt, 1993, 83-84, 87).

Sinatra associated himself (as a sponsor, contributor, speaker) with a score of Popular Front organizations, including, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the Free Italy Society, the American Crusade to End Lynching, and the American Society for Cultural Relations with Italy, as well as publications such as the New Masses, the Communist Party-affiliated political-cultural biweekly and L'Unità del Popolo, the Communist Party's Italian-language weekly (Kuntz, 2000, 58-60; L'Unità del Popolo, 1947a). In December 1946, he served as the master of ceremonies at a dinner, which was broadcast over radio, sponsored by the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at which Joe Lewis was honored as a "great fighter and a great American" (Daily Worker: 1946a, 10; 1946b, 10; 1946c, 8).

Sinatra became especially visible in the struggle to oppose Congressional contempt citations of the "Hollywood Ten," the screenwriters who during hearings conducted in the fall of 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), refused, on First Amendment grounds, to answer the inquiries about their political beliefs and associations. Sinatra joined a long list of film-industry celebrities-including John Huston, Gene Kelly, and Katharine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda-in the Committee for the First Amendment, who fought back against HUAC (Caute, 1978, 614). The Voice from Hoboken added his signature to a petition of over three hundred Hollywood luminaries that held "these hearings are morally wrong because: "Any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy." On October 25, he joined a large and enthusiastic gathering (including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Groucho Marx, Gene Kelly, and Frederic March) at Ira Gershwin's home to organize additional activities (Buford, 2000, 80). Together with other movie personalities, including Judy Garland, Sinatra performed in a radio broadcast on November 22 1947, entitled "Hollywood Fights Back" (Kuntz, 2000, 57). He flew to Washington with Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, and Lauren Bacall to show support for the Hollywood Ten (Navasky, 1980, 80). In explaining his opposition to the Committee's inquisition, Sinatra stated: "Once they get the movies throttled how long will it be before the Committee goes to work on freedom of the air? How long will it be before we're told what we cannot say into a radio microphone? If you make a pitch on nation-wide network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie? ... Are they gonna scare us into silence? I wonder" (Kahn, 1948, 19). Here, in his own voice, "The Voice" tied the defense of leftists, some of whom were known Communists, not only to a defense of free speech in the abstract, but also free speech as an instrument for advocating for the "underdog." Although the FBI had immediately branded the Committee for the First Amendment a "Communist Front," Sinatra could not know that an informer had recorded the license numbers of those attending the meeting at Ira Gershwin's house, nor that Ira Gershwin would later give California's Un-American Activities Committee the names of those who had attended the meeting at his home (Buford, 2000, 80, 82).

The left organization that Sinatra was most closely associated with, however, was the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP), an expression of Popular Frontism that acted almost as a talent agency for the Left (Kuntz, 2000, 83; Caute, 1978, 31). Founded in 1944, the initiating sponsors and members of the board of the ICCASP included James Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Albert Einstein, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, and a long list of Hollywood celebrities including Bette Davis, James Cagney, and Orson Welles (MacDougall, 1965, 112, 112). It was at a September 12, 1946 meeting in Madison Square Garden sponsored by the ICCASP that Henry Wallace made his speech enunciating his insistence on peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, which led President Harry Truman to remove him as Secretary of Commerce. Sinatra spoke (and often performed) at any number of the ICCASP's functions. On October 28, 1945, he sat on the dais, along with Oscar Hammerstein and other celebrities, at a dinner in honor of the sculptor Jo Davidson (at which $22,000 was raised), where the keynote speaker, Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard Observatory, warned that the development of the atomic bomb meant that "the planet is too small for competing nationalities" (Daily Worker, 1945a, 9; PM, 1945a, 7; PM, 1945b, 200; MacDougall, 1965, 112). On May 16, 1946, at a Madison Square Garden rally sponsored by the Veterans Committee of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, "the Kid from Hoboken" argued: "The minute anyone tries to help the little guy, he is called a Communist." In 1946, at a time when the organization was taking a left turn leading to the formation of the Progressive Party, he was elected as one of its Vice Presidents (others included Fiorello LaGuardia, Archibald MacLeish, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Jo Davidson) (Kuntz, 2000, 47, 59-60, 80-90). In January 6, 1947, Sinatra wrote a two-column-length letter published in The New Republic, addressed to Henry Wallace, who was then serving as its editor, where he expressed his concern that "people's faces look almost as they looked in 1939." He went on to explain that "prices are high and people are kicking about them," and "fear seems to have more to do with the insecurity of everybody's future." He prioritized the need for "tolerance" among people of different backgrounds and then extended that attitude to "international understanding." When he stated that "it was pretty easy to march with the liberals and the progressives in the years of Roosevelt," there was an implied criticism of Harry Truman and an encouragement of Wallace to provide the type of leadership required in order to re-establish unity between "the liberals and the progressives," that is, the major constituents of the Popular Front (Sinatra, 1947, 2, 46).

Sinatra's unique contribution to the Popular Front is epitomized by his starring role in The House I Live In, a ten-minute film produced by RKO, that connected Sinatra's celebrity and artistic gift to this movement. It also brought him together with a trio of important Communist artists to create a dramatic setting for the song of that title. The House I Live In was composed in 1942 by the ardently left composer, Earl Robinson, who also composed The Ballad for Americans and Joe Hill, two of the most important musical expressions of the Popular Front in the United States. (Before Sinatra sang The House I Live In in the film, according to Robinson, its greatest success was its performance at the 1943 May Day rally in New York City (Robinson) (1998, 151-52) The lyricist Lewis Allan (pseudonym for Abel Meeropol), a New York City high school teacher and Communist Party activist, had also written other left standards, including Beloved Comrade. Lewis was the composer of Strange Fruit (whose lyrics had originally been published in The New Masses), a Billy Holiday standard that marked the emergence of Popular Front cabaret blues. Abel and his wife Anne (who had directed a nursery school and worked with "latch-key" children in Harlem) provided a home for Robert and Michael Rosenberg after their parents were executed in 1953. The Meeropols, neither of whose natural born children had survived infancy, were able to legally adopt the Rosenberg children in 1957. (Margolik, 2000, 31, 37, 138-39; Denning, 1997, 35, 323; Meeropol, 1975, 223). Albert Maltz, the screenwriter for The House I Live In, was an important cultural figure in the Communist Party's ranks, who (aside from his extensive screen credits) was an O'Henry Award winner whose short stories were widely anthologized (Navasky, 1980, 81). This remarkable artistic collaboration disseminated the Popular Front anthem to the widest possible audience.

In the film, Sinatra is standing outside the back of a theater smoking a cigarette between rehearsals, when he rescues a boy from a gang of roughnecks intent on assaulting him because "we don't like his religion." After informing them, "My father came from Italy, but I'm still an American," Sinatra sings the title song and the boys, including their intended victim, depart as buddies. This veritable hymn for the Popular Front opens by dismissing "a name, a map, the flag" as the meaning of "America to me." In a little more than two hundred words, its lyrics insist that America is "The town I live in, the street, the house, the room .... But especially, the people." The "people" of this song are "all races and religions ... the grocer and the butcher, ... the worker by my side." In addition, America becomes a place where anyone has "The right to speak my mind out." Sinatra, in a manner not significantly different from the way he sang any other song, evokes a racially and ethnically pluralistic America of producers determined to press forward with a social democratic project. The film diluted the progressive content of the lyrics by omitting a verse the included in this imagined America, "my neighbors white and black." The logic of the situation dictated that the gang of roughnecks in film were all white. But one could argue that the intended victim should have been a black youth. While conceding the truth of this observation, the degree of hostility, often erupting into violence, against members of ethnic groups, and especially Jews, was then a major problem that justified a response.

The House I Live In, and especially Sinatra's performance, was acclaimed: in 1945 Sinatra was awarded a special Oscar; in 1946, the producer Frank Ross and the director Mervyn LeRoy were awarded an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. (Neither Ross nor LeRoy were otherwise associated with the Hollywood Left.) Sinatra donated his royalties from the film and RKO gave all its proceeds from it to the California Labor School in San Francisco (which in 1947 the Attorney General placed on his list of subversive organizations) and other organizations fighting discrimination (Robinson, 1998, 155). Three months later, on August 22, Sinatra made a studio recording of the same Alex Stordahl arrangement that appeared in the film, which was released as a Columbia single (Mustazza, 1995, 46). As early as July 1947, a witness before HUAC testified that "short films [sic] by Frank Sinatra are also featured [by] the road show and film entertainment of an agitational nature" by the International Workers Order (Hearings, 1947, 106). L'Unità del Popolo organized screenings of The House I Live In to raise funds. In Cleveland, a "festival" in support of the weekly, which featured the film attracted 195 participants. (L'Unità: 1947b, 3; 1947c, 2)

Sinatra did not limit his attacks on bigotry to the movie screen; in real life, he repeatedly confronted intolerance. In 1945, he made thirty appearances around the country speaking against prejudice. He explained he took up this cause, "Since I seem to have some influence among a certain section of the population, I felt I ought to use it to do whatever I could to promote racial unity in our country" (Lowenfels, 1945, 3). In Carnegie Hall on March 21, 1945, he presented a twenty-minute speech at the World Youth Rally. This assembly represented a typical Popular Front effort which brought together liberals such as the New York City Council President Newbold Morris and representatives of the United States, French, and British armies with left cultural figures like Orson Welles and the dancer Pearl Primus (Daily Worker: 1945b, 8; 1945c, 5; 1945d, 4; PM, 1945c, 12; New York Times, 1945, 17). Its sponsors included liberal organizations such as the American Jewish Congress as well as left organizations such as the American Slav Congress, which had close ties to the Communist Party (Ryan, 1990, 45, 347; Thayer, 67, 554). Speaking at this assembly, Sinatra told the young people, "When I was going to school over in Jersey, a bunch of guys threw rocks at me and called me a little ‘Dago.' ... I know now why they used to call the Jewish kids in the neighborhood ‘kikes' and ‘Sheenies' and the colored kids ‘niggers.' That was so wrong." Sinatra then related this to the Nazis' persecution of the Jews and Catholics, which he argued they carried out in order to "weaken the people they wanted to defeat and enslave." He concluded by declaring that: "This country that's been built by many people, many creeds, nationalities and races ... [should] never be divided ... and can never be conquered" (Sinatra, 1945; FBI File 62-83219-6, 43, 116).

On October 23, 1945, Sinatra spoke at two convocations at Benjamin Franklin High School, which was located in the heart of Italian Harlem, (Meyer 1999) as part of a process of healing and repair following an outbreak of violence by Italian Americans against African American students that had occurred there on September 28, 1945. The campaign to regain the school's reputation and heal the racial breach was organized by Leonard Covello (the first Italian American high school principal in the New York City public school system and an important educational philosopher and practitioner), who together with East Harlem's Congressman Vito Marcantonio worked to defuse the tension and repair the damage to the reputation of the school, which had gained widespread recognition as a model for intercultural education and racial tolerance (Meyer, 1989, 54-66). The printed reports of this assembly relate that the only song he sang was Aren't You Glad You're You; yet, at least two interviewees who attended the school at the time remember him singing The House I Live In (PM, 1945d, 14; Daily News, 1945, 4; Daily Worker, 1945e, 4).

On November 1, 1945, shortly after the release of The House I Live In, Sinatra stood before a rowdy and antagonistic audience of white high school students in Gary, Indiana. They had been boycotting classes in support of the demand for an all-white school that had been proposed by a white-only PTA, which had broken away from the official PTA led by the wife of a Communist Party organizer. Staring down the crowd with his arms folded, he commanded silence from the unruly crowd. He then shouted: "I can lick any son of a bitch in this joint." Of course, he also sang The House I Live In (Weiner, 1986, 22). Within minutes, the students' hostility gave way to cheers. Nonetheless, his impassioned plea for tolerance failed to end the strike (Kuntz, 2000, 42). When he was interviewed about his campaign for tolerance, he related it to his own background: "I know the set-backs kids get from economic and educational shortages. Nobody will ever know how much I hated not going to college." When his press agent prompted, "How about the concert tour you're planning to raise a fund for youth centers?" Sinatra replied: "Later, we'll try to give a place to meet. Right now, we must give them a meeting place for their minds" (Sinatra, clipping, 1945; Meyer, 1996, 36-43).

Sinatra's activities brought him accolades from the Left. On December 6, 1945, by the unanimous approval of the Award Committee, because of his "crusade that included innumerable lectures, radio talks, and magazine articles all culminating in [the film] The House I Live In." the left-leaning Newspaper Guild of New York honored Frank Sinatra "for his courageous fight on behalf of all minorities," along with twenty-four other "Page One Personalities of the Year" (including Eleanor Roosevelt, Gen. Dwight D Eisenhower, and Jo Davidson) at a Madison Square Garden convocation (Daily Worker, 1945f, 11). On January 14, 1946, as one of twenty-two "peoples' heroes" (including Joe Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacob Lawrence, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson), he was honored by the Communist cultural magazine, New Masses for his "contributions towards [the creation of] an America for all peoples" (Daily Worker: 1946d, 11; 1946e, 8). Lowenfels noted that The House I Live In represented only one part of a campaign by Sinatra against "intolerance" and that aside from "Negro weeklies hardly a word about his crusade got into the press." Having recently returned from Gary, Indiana, Sinatra reported that the racial disturbance there was not spontaneous and that the student strike had been traced to a former German Bund leader. Sinatra told Lowenfels "I'm in it for life. ... This is a fight I intend to stick with" (Lowenfels, 1945, 3; Caute, 1978, 203-4; Wald, 1998, 679).

Despite his immense celebrity, Sinatra's involvement with the left bore grave consequences. In 1947, Lee Mortimer, a columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain, who had previously accused Sinatra of having a "penchant for veering to portside," initiated the red baiting campaign. Mortimer focused on Sinatra's connection with The House I Live In, which he characterized as "class struggle or foreign isms posing as entertainment" (Weiner, 1986, 21-22). The political climate had changes since the Hollywood Ten were subpoenaed by HUAC, now few fought back against these slurs and innuendos. In his weekly column, "Change the World," published in the Daily Worker, Mike Gold (when he was not being self-referential, in ways that were alternately patronizing, bombastic, and far-fetched) compared the attacks on Sinatra to the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance (Gold 1947, 6)! L'Unita del Popolo saw the incident from a different perspective. Coming to the defense of the country's most famous Italian American, it published a front-page headline "We Are in Solidarity with Sinatra in the Struggle against Racism." The article noted that: "For us Italian Americans, the Sinatra case recalls the brutal memories of the innumerable humiliations suffered, not so long ago, by our grandparents and parents." The article also reminded its readers that "[Sinatra] has rendered great service to the fusion of all the components of the grand community of American people. He has spoken against Jim Crowism ... against anti-Semitism, and against the denigration of his own people of origin" (L'Unità, 1947, 1).

Sinatra's career began to rapidly spiral downward. In 1947, he was attacked in the press not only for his leftism, but also because of his associations with individuals involved with organized crime. The collapse of his first marriage to Nancy, his childhood sweetheart, and her replacement with Ava Gardner also aroused widespread disapproval. Sinatra knew what was in store for those who were labeled "red." After defying HUAC in 1947, Albert Maltz was blacklisted and jailed. Yet, even worse was possible. All the while he was serving his term, Maltz feared that upon release he would be interned in the camps that the McCarran (Internal Security) Act had established for all those, who "during time of national emergency" the Attorney General deemed subversive. Earl Robinson was in his words "gray listed," that is, he did not lose any jobs; he just did not get any new ones, and his income declined from $25,000 in 1945 to $8,000 by 1950 (Robinson, 1998, 201-5, 217). Although Abel Meeropol had been called before the Rapp-Coudert Committee investigating left-wing activity at City College in 1939, he escaped the blacklist during the McCarthy era and was able to continue to earn a living writing television commercials for Schlitz beer and Ford (Meeropol, 1975, 223, 249; Leberstein, 1993, 91-122). However, he experienced an even worse injury: an extended court battle ensued in order to obtain legal custody of the Rosenberg children. At one point, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, by claiming the Rosenberg boys "were being exploited for fund-raising propositions," convinced a judge in New York Children's Court to remove them from the Meeropols' care. Before Michael and Robert were returned to the Meeropols, they had been subjected to yet another trauma, placement in a children's shelter (Margolick, 2000, 139). Although the decimated and damaged Left could offer some limited support to the victims of the repression, singing in drafty union halls and shabby auditoriums was a prospect that must have chilled the very heart of the boy who had crossed over the Hudson River to see his name in lights on the Great White Way.

Sinatra's involvement in Left activities caused him to be cited in testimony before HUAC in hearings on "Bills to Curb or Outlaw the Communist party in the United States" (Hearings, 1948). However, neither HUAC nor any of the other investigatory committees ever subpoenaed Sinatra (Cumulative Index). Consequently, he was never placed in a situation, where under oath, he would be asked to inform. Nonetheless, in the spirit of the raging witch-hunt, he did participate in politically purging activities. In April 1948, Sinatra joined Jimmy Durante and Joe DiMaggio in an hour-long show, in Italian, broadcast directly to the Italian people encouraging them to vote against the Communist Party in the first election since the establishment of the post-war Italian Republic. Louella Parsons reported that twenty-seven recordings of the program were made so that they could be "played in various parts of Italy in an effort to reach even the most remote parts of that troubled nation" (Daily Mirror, 1948, 5). By 1951, Sinatra participated in a rally held in Central Park sponsored by the "Stop Communism Committee" whose mission was to fight against "Red influences in the entertainment world." The FBI files do cite a report that "an intermediary" stated that Sinatra would be willing to volunteer to become an undercover informer for the FBI's search for subversives; however, there is no indication that this actually reflected Sinatra's wishes (Kuntz, 2000, xii, xxvi, 33-34, 78, 81; Daily Mirror, 1948, 6).

Although the chronology is not entirely clear, there is some evidence that Sinatra's leftism continued after his purported conversion to the official United States position on the Cold War. When interviewed about the blacklisting in Hollywood the actress Betsy Blair (Gene Kelly's wife and herself a victim of the blacklist) reported he aided financially victims of the blacklist. She declared, "He didn't care to know [what the money was going to be used for]. He didn't want to talk about things ... [but] he was usually generous. If anybody was in trouble, he was very attentive and very generous." Speaking about the period at least as late as the end of 1950, Ring Lardner, Jr., remembers Sinatra as part of a small group of "liberals ... who continued "staunch defense of our [that is, the Hollywood Ten] rights" (McGilligan, 1997, 412, 546).

His public denunciations of Communism satisfied neither the FBI nor the Federal Government In 1954, despite Sinatra's protestations that "I'm just as Communist as the Pope!," citing his "Communist affiliations," the Army denied Sinatra security clearance to entertain troops in Korea at Christmastime. Much worse loomed. In 1955, when Sinatra applied for a passport, the Assistant Attorney General Internal Security Division, William Tompkins requested an investigation by the FBI in order "to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to warrant prosecution ... inasmuch as the statements contained in his affidavit [that he had never been a member of the Communist Party or any other "subversive" organization for a passport], if false, would constitute a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1001 or 1542" (FBI Files, 244). What ensued was a painstaking inquiry involved the FBI's offices in Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, as well as interviews with informants in Scarsdale, New York, and in California: Burbank, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Canoga Park, Malibu Beach, and West Los Angeles-all of this to determine whether a "vocalist" (his occupation as described by the FBI) would either face prosecution for perjury or be issued a passport. Ultimately, a forty-page report concluded "the investigation fails to develop any positive evidence connecting SINATRA with the Communist Party or the Communist Party movement." This Kafkaesque inquest, whose monetary cost can only be surmised, was generated by the anonymous testimony of three witnesses repeating hear-say (FBI Files, 301-343).

Despite his roughing up by HUAC and the ultra right, Sinatra continued to oppose racism and ethnic slurs. In both 1961 and 1963, he appeared at Carnegie Hall benefits for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He remained a constant and valuable fixture of the Democratic Party's liberal wing. In 1952, for example, he campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, sang the national anthem at the Democratic Party presidential conventions in 1956 and 1960, and supported Hubert Humphrey's 1968 campaign (Mustazza, 1998, 285-89).

By 1972, Sinatra had made a dramatic shift in his political allegiances. Henceforth he supported the Republican Party. In part, this was due to his being snubbed by John and Robert Kennedy after he had provided much financial support. Sinatra can also be seen as one of the millions of people of European ancestry who felt uncomfortable with the shift of the Democratic Party from traditional New Dealism to the social agenda of the sixties. Now, he conspicuously associated with those Republicans who had been the architects and the executers of the Red Scare, that is, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Sinatra now supped with Nixon who, as a member of the HUAC, had once joined the interrogations and on the floor of the House upheld the subsequent contempt citations against Maltz and the other screenwriters who Sinatra had earlier defended. Sinatra now socialized with Reagan who, as President of the Screen Actors Guild, as Confidential Informant "T-10," had actively informed on his colleagues, helping to identify victims (some of them Sinatra's friends and colleagues) for the Committee persecution (Morris, 1990, 355; Caute, 1978, 492; Mitgang, 1989, 15). Sinatra also must have known that the Committee meant not only the blacklisting of artists deemed too left; it also signified the end of the production of movies with social themes. It would take more than a decade before a film such as The House I Live In could again conceivably have been produced.

The House I Live In disappeared from his repertory. It was not until 1964, the conclusive end of the McCarthy Era, that it again reappeared in a patriotic album with Bing Crosby. In 1973, President Nixon invited him to perform The House I Live In at the White House (Weiner, 1986, 23). During his 1974 national tour, he sang this forbidden song at every stop, and included it in the album Sinatra-the Main Event. At seventy-five, he sang The House I Live In in support of the troops in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (Robinson, 1998, 156, 41-43). He ended his singing career with the 1994 release of Duets II, which electronically weds his version of The House I Live In to Neil Diamond's (Mustazza, 1998, 46).

One observer of the Sinatra phenomenon described the difference in Sinatra's later performances in this way: "Now when he does The House I Live In, that creaky anthem of the New Deal, it sounds like empty Fourth of July oratory" (Brennan, 1995, 216). This leaves an important question unanswered: How could a song that was integrally tied to the Left and presented as evidence of Sinatra's commitment to the Left later serve as an endorsement of reflexive patriotism? One major difference between these two periods was that during the Popular Front the Left was contesting the nature of American democracy and even more to the point the very definition of American nationality; however, by the sixties the Left had become anti-patriotic, and the Right had appropriated all the national symbols including those earlier fashioned by the Left.

By 1960 an incident full of ambiguity occurred, which signaled Sinatra's interest in amending his self-serving denounciation of the Left. As the blacklist in the movie industry was beginning to crumble, a few blacklisted artists were openly hired. Otto Preminger announced that Dalton Trumbo had written the screen play of Exodus, and Stanley Kramer had retained Nedrick Young to write the scenario for Inherit the Wind. That same year, Sinatra declared in an advertisement in Variety that he had hired Albert Maltz to write the screenplay for The Execution of Private Slovik, which was based on the story of a World War II veteran who became the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion. Nonetheless, Sinatra reneged because of mounting pressure from the American Legion, the Catholic War Veterans, and the Hearst Press (The Journal American), which intoned "You are not giving employment to a poor sheep ... but to a real Communist pro" (Navasky, 1981, 327; Salzman, 1978, 129-30). The young Sinatra had placed his career on the line and confronted sources of real power in the United States in order to defend targets of the Red Scare and advocate for the equality of all this country's peoples. Now, when he had reached the pinnacle of prominence and wealth, he retreated where others held firm.

Sinatra's FBI dossier reveals a dismaying situation. At no time, does it contain anything that even hints at an activity disallowed by the Bill of Rights. In a jumbled careless manner, it documents Sinatra speaking, contributing money, advocating, associating: First Amendment rights that form the foundation of this country. He helps raise money for the Republican refugees from Franco's Spain, he joins those who argue for the continuation of the United States cooperation with the Soviet Union, he helps raise funds (albeit under leftist aegis) for war-ravished Yugoslavia, but most of all Sinatra fights against intolerance (FBI file 62-83219 [Section 2], 322-23; FBI file 62-83219 [Section 1], 20). His file was stuffed with completely unevaluated material from anonymous informants and random newspaper clippings. They contain references that indicate that the movement that he was a part of only engaged in Constitutionally guaranteed activities. When the FBI interviewed a former functionary of the Young Communist League in the Los Angeles area, he reported that his only recollection of Sinatra's name appearing in "CP circles was a frequently played recording played at CP affairs because it dealt with racial tolerance, a long-standing CP cause." In a similar vein, another informant advised that from 1946 to 1947 when Sinatra was vice president and a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles American Federation of Radio Artists he was "a member of the liberal faction of [the local]. He supported the liberal candidates whose platform emphasized unity, employment, labor laws, union corporation [sic] and welfare."

The shabby files of the FBI were almost useless in a court of law, but they could be employed to lethal effect in hearings (such as the federal and state un-American activities committees, as well as immigration and loyalty hearings) where the rules of evidence did not apply. Moreover, these files served as source material (for example, the information that Mortimer used against Sinatra) for right-wing journalists who used them as a means of destroying the careers of leftists or cause them to cower and join in the witch-hunt. The FBI collected information from federal and state investigatory committees whose stated purpose was the creation of legislation, but which in fact operated as kangaroo courts where the punishment was contempt for those who refused to cooperate and loss of reputation and employment for those who availed themselves of the only due process right (aside from the right to legal counsel) that obtained, that is, the protection against self-incrimination afforded by the right to remain silent. The FBI, together with the House Un-American Activities Committee, other federal and state "anti-subversive activities" committees, and private agencies such as Red Channels, functioned as part of an interlocking directorate for the political repression of the Left. Their intent was to identify publicly suspected leftists, and especially those actually connected to the Communist Party, so as to isolate and disable a political movement in the United States. The FBI and the federal and state legislative investigatory committees operated as a shadow judiciary operating outside the Constitution's parameters which explicitly forbid bills of attainder (that is, laws that are intended to circumvent due process rights) and provide for due process rights such as the right to examine evidence and confront witnesses (Fifth and Sixth Amendments).

Sinatra was dragged into this Kafkaesque process and, without informing on colleagues, emerged with his career intact. The fact that to some extent he buckled says less about the weakness of his character than the power of this repressive system that was permitted to operate in a democracy.

Grave damage to Sinatra's career or his integrity was averted because HUAC never subpoenaed him and he was never blacklisted. Why these two potentially devastating actions never occurred must be inferred. At least part of the answer can be derived from briefly reviewing a remarkably similar case, that is, Burt Lancaster. Like Sinatra, Lancaster had been raised during the Great Depression in an Italian ghetto situated within a larger polyglot working class community, Manhattan's East Harlem. In Hollywood, he had associated with the Left including those most clearly connected to the Communist Party. When the post-war repression began, he also became active in the Committee for the First Amendment and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. In ways similar to Sinatra's association with The House I Live In, Lancaster's involvement in the movie version of Arthur Miller's All My Sons caused him to work together with avowed leftists on artistic material that was clearly connected to the culture of the Popular Front. Unlike Sinatra, during the Korean War he had never volunteered to perform for the armed services, so we do not know whether he would have been granted security clearance. However, like Sinatra he had difficulty obtaining a passport. In 1953, the United States government limited his passport to one year exclusively for travel to Mexico for the production of Vera Cruz. Walter Bernstein, the blacklisted screen writer, and Mickey Knox, the blacklisted actor, explain HUAC's failure to subpoena Burt Lancaster and the industry's refusal to blacklist him on two grounds: he was a star and he was not Jewish. Bernstein noted that "an implicit anti-Semitism ran though the whole thing. They would go after a [John] Garfield much more than ... this nice Aryan fellow." In a similar vein, Knox stated: "They never got a star. The only one was Garfield and he was Jewish." The actor, Robert Ryan, further corroborated this line of reasoning, when he was asked by Montgomery Cliff why, despite his vehemently anti-HUAC views, he had never been blacklisted. Ryan replied, "I'm a Catholic and an ex-Marine, Hoover wouldn't touch that combination" (Buford, 2000, 80-82, 97-98, 122, 145, 385, 390). It may very well be that Sinatra's status as a star and his not being Jewish saved him from the worst punishments of the anti-Communist repression.

The editors of The Sinatra Files correctly assert that the "FBI was overstating their case when, in internal reports ... it referred to Sinatra as ‘Communist sympathizer' or a ‘CP fellow traveler.' " However, they overstate their case when they insist that the FBI "had nothing on him but the ordinary activities of a liberal celebrity" (Kuntz, 2000, 40). Sinatra was for a four-year period firmly in the camp of the Popular Front. That much is evident from his associations, activities, and spoken and written words. Most crucially, in 1947, he did not leave the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts Sciences, and Professions to join its anti-Communist competitor, the Americans for Democratic Action. Sinatra's deep connection to the left New Deal and his genuine commitment to tolerance for people of all racial, religious, and national backgrounds caused him to expend a great deal of his celebrity and energy for organizations and causes dedicated to furthering the New Deal agenda, as opposed to joining those forces that prioritized participation in the domestic and international anti-Communist crusade. The relentless repression of leftism, which was nowhere so thorough as in the entertainment industry, caused countless targets to remove themselves from the line of fire and even to renounce their former beliefs, activities, and associates. In the case of performers, there was no option of hiding behind a pseudonym, so that the blacklist meant the destruction of careers. Sinatra did not choose that course.

When Frank Sinatra moved to the Right, he replaced The House I Live In with another theme song, "I Did It My Way." This shift from a collectivist anthem, rooted in a mundane locale populated with working class people of different races and nationalities, to a defiantly individualistic show stopper is a course that many followed along with Sinatra. What remains moot is whether the Popular Front politics of the New Deal would have continued had it not been for the repression that: severely punished and stigmatized those who held these beliefs; destroyed the infrastructure of the left; and severed the Communists and the "progressives" from the CIO and the Democratic Party. Integrally tied to this question is whether the Popular Front culture would have continued. What is clear is that the politics and culture of the Popular Front were replaced with Cold War liberalism and a popular/cooperative ethos with a commercial/individualistic culture. Both, in ways subtle and gross, contributed to an obsessive and militant anti-Communism as well as to a set of values and concerns that ultimately rendered anti-Communism superfluous.

Notes:

[1] "Progressive" is an imprecise term. At the turn of the century, it had been used to identify a mostly middle class urban-based reform movement that sought changes in the political structure (primary elections, referendum, recall, proportional representation) as creating the means for resolving the pervasive poverty and political corruption that so offended them. The settlement house workers also termed themselves "progressives." Running on a populist platform in 1924, Robert La Follette's presidential candidacy on the Progressive Party line revived this term. In the Popular Front period "progressive" was a term used by adherents of the Popular Front to define those who were not necessarily socialists or communists, but who were part of this coalition. In this context, "liberal." connoted a closer loyalty to capitalism and to an adherence to a definition of democracy limited to political and legal rights. In that sense, "progressive" was a non-pejorative synonym for fellow traveler. The last time that the term "progressive" was widely used in American political parlance was the Progressive Party that in 1948 ran Henry Wallace for president, who polled an extremely disappointing 1,157,000 popular votes, that is, 2.4 percent of the total vote. Soon after its 1952 candidate, Vincent Hallinan, polled only 140,000 votes, the Progressive Party disbanded.

[2] An effective, albeit brief, effort to assess Sinatra's leftism is Jon Wiener's "When Old Blue Eyes Was ‘Red': The Poignant Story of Frank Sinatra's Politics," was published in the New Republic in 1986. For an example of how the FBI files can be judiciously and effectively utilized as a source, see: Herbert Mitgang's Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors.

[3] Unfortunately, we do not know to what extent, if any, Sinatra was influenced by the radical traditions operating within the Italian American community. Although the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 brought about a near-total collapse of the previously thriving anarchist movement, it still existed as a strong cultural undercurrent especially among first-generation Italian Americans. Moreover, both the Socialist and the Communist movements attracted significant numbers of adherents from this community. See: (Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds., The Lost World of Italian American Racialism (Westport CT: Praeger, 2003).

[4] Although there is no evidence of a Communist presence in Hoboken's Little Italy, in the adjacent town, Union City, there was a left center, the United Italian Co-operatives. This community center housed a lodge of the Garibaldi-American Federation, which was the Italian-language section of the International Workers Order, a Communist-led mutual aid society. L'Unita del Popolo, the Communist Italian-language weekly, regularly published May Day greetings from the Co-op and publicized on the activities of the lodge. In 1941, for example, it reported that in "the elegant hall of the Italian Cooperative" 150 persons saw a play Frutti di Guerra, which was performed by a dramatic group from another Garibaldi-American Federation lodge. As late as 1949, the lodge still functioned. It host a talk on the Italian elections, which was a fund raiser for L'Unità and the screening of an Italian movie sponsored by the Garibaldi-American lodge. At this point, we do not know whether any members of the Sinatra family circle had any contact with the Italian Cooperative, the Garibaldi lodge, or whether they read L'Unità (L'Unita del Popolo, 1941a, 1943b, 1949g, 1949h).

[5] The Popular Front, launched in 1935, represented a strategy of joining the Left and the Center in a political alliance to defend democracy against fascism. This movement tilted the political spectrum decidedly toward the Left because its underlying assumptions-that the Communist Party was a legitimate political force and that the Soviet Union was an essential component in the defense of democracy against the fascist menace-drew the much larger forces in the Center (social democrats and liberals) leftward. The failure of the Popular Front to bring about an alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies caused the Soviet Union to buy time through the Non-Intervention Pact with Germany. Ultimately, the anticipated alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies materialized in June 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. This brought about major goals of the Popular Front: an alliance of the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, and domestic policies that mirrored many features of socialism, such as government planning of the economy and a greater equalization of income.

[6] Among the most important of these organizations was the International Workers Order (IWO), a mutual benefit organization which at its peak in 1947 claimed 186,000 members organized into 2,500 lodges and a foreign-language press in over twenty different languages with a circulation of more than 400,000. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the International Labor Defense (which sponsored an influential publication, Labor Defender) were national organizations which widely impacted public opinion and influenced legislation.

[7] Although the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP) was never placed on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, the California Committee on Un-American Activities included it on its list as a "Communist front." Later in 1947, the ICCASP folded into the Progressive Citizens of America, whose purpose was to promote the Wallace campaign. In 1949, a somewhat smaller group of prominent literary figures and scientists (but no Hollywood celebrities) headlined the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, whose major accomplishment was the organization of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City in March 1949.

[8] At least in part, this letter was in response to the formation of "Americans for Democratic Action" (ADA) on January 4, whose manifesto stated: "We reject any association with Communism or sympathizers with Communism in the United States as completely as we reject any association with Fascists or their sympathizers" (Culver, 2000, 434-35; Wreszin, 1984, 255-85). The ADA represented the Cold War liberals who not only refused to coalesce with the Left, but who saw the Communists, and their allies, as their enemies equal to its enemies on the Right. Inasmuch as the Axis Powers had been defeated, the Cold War liberals' focus was almost entirely anti-Communism with only the most muted objections to the openly fascist and authoritarian dictatorships that ruled many of the countries of the world. From this point on, those who continued the politics of the Popular Front confronted ever intensifying vilification and intimidation from an increasing number of sources: the federal, state, and even local government (the FBI, loyalty boards, legislative committees); anti-Communist leftists (Trotskyists, editors and contributors to Partisan Review, and right-wing social democrats within the trade union movement); the "Cold War liberals" (whose major center was the ADA); and the mass media and mass organizations (veterans' groups and the Catholic Church) (Lieberman, 1995, 59-61).

[9] During the McCarthy era, The House I Live In became part of Paul Robeson's standard repertory. The blacklist foreclosed the possibility of Robeson performing at commercial concerts and his records were no longer issued or played on radio. In 195o the Federal government revoked his passport; thereby prevent him from performing abroad until 1958 when the United States Supreme Court ruled this decision un-Constitutional. During this dark period, he sang The House I Live In at Black churches with a bite and enunciation that made it a sacred song of a beleaguered and dwindling movement. The lyrics of Robeson's version differed from those in Sinatra's. For example, America is described as: "A land of wealth and beauty with enough for all to share." There is also mention of Frederick Douglass and "The people who just came here," which given his ties to the immigrant experience is oddly omitted from Sinatra's version (The Odyssey of Paul Robeson, Omega Classics).

[10] This version of The House I Live In is available on Frank Sinatra Sings His Greatest Hits (Columbia Records), and Frank Sinatra with Alex Stordahl and His Orchestra, 1944-1945 (Cedar CD 398).

[11] Soon after its founding in April 1942, fraternal, mutual benefit, and trade union organizations comprised of all the Slavic nationalities with a combined membership of ten to fifteen million members affiliated with the American Slav Congress. During the war years, the Congress mobilized public opinion in favor of the opening of a Second Front and collected material support for Russian War Relief. The American Slav Congress was placed on the Attorney General's list in 1951.

[12] Sinatra's FBI File noted that Narodni Glasnik, the Croatian-language Communist newspaper, reported that the Croatian section of the International Workers Order, had published a pamphlet entitled The Idea of Americans, based on Sinatra's Carnegie Hall talk, that could be purchased at the rate of sixty cents per hundred, which was issued in a second printing of 25,000 copies.

[13] This campaign's finale was the organization of a contingent of six hundred Franklin students carrying placards announcing that they were of various races and nationalities, the youthful marchers stepped along behind a huge banner which proclaimed that they were "Americans All." The dramatic demonstration of racial and ethnic solidarity was widely reported in the city's press. The New York Mirror noted that "A burst of applause greeted a float on which on of the girls from [Benjamin Franklin] High School personified the Statue of Liberty ... flanked by banners reading: ‘Americans All-Negro, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant' "(Tribune, 1945, 6; Daily Mirror, 1945, 6; Meyer 2003).

[14] Lowenfels, whose writings spanned a half century, developed a writing style that "seemed to embody a transcendentalist perspective on the world" that attempted "to decode the physical reality by reaching to what he called ‘Reality Prime.' " Much of his poetry was published by Communist media; however, in the sixties his reputation surged. In 1953, Lowenfels, along with five other Communist leaders in Philadelphia, was arrested and subsequently tried and convicted under the Smith Act. However, in what was a very early legal setback for McCarthyism, the Court of Appeals overturned his two-year jail sentence.

[15] With the assistance of the State Department, this campaign was organized by the Catholic Church and Generoso Pope, the publisher of Il Progresso Italo Americano. In some way, this anti-Communist mobilization of the Italian American community served as a mass demonstration of its Americanism, so as to absolve it of any lingering taint of fascism and overall "foreignness." At least in a public setting, this broadcast is the only instance where Sinatra was known to have spoken the Italian language.

[16] For the most extensive discussion on Sinatra and italianità see Fagiani.

[17] Curiously, Saltzman makes no mention of his subject's work in the creation of The House I Live In.

[18] There is no mention of Sinatra's involvement with the mafia in this article. During the period under discussion in the Sinatra article, the mob/the wise guys/mafia were a pervasive reality in all of the Little Italys where a great majority of the Southern Italian Americans lived. The mafia (to use a generic term) was a product of the semi-feudal conditions in Sicily and Southern Italy. The weakness of government and civil society there allowed it to survive and fulfill various functions. In America, it carried out functions which the masses of people did not believe to be illegal (for example, alcohol production and distribution, gambling, and lending money), and they provided security in neighborhoods where the residents did not trust the police. Consequently, they had the acceptance of the vast majority of the people in these communities. The more lurid activities of the mafia-and most especially the sale of drugs-were largely a post-World War II phenomenon. Sinatra's connections to members of the mob, took place after the period discussed in this article, and perhaps can be viewed as developing in response to his separation from the Left. In any case, these association are common knowledge, and his associations with the left are not.

Photo: Frank Sinatra at his local draft board in 1943. He would be excluded from military service on medical grounds. (Photo by New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, Library of Congress, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Why Class Isn’t Just Another “-ism”

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:56:00 +0000

During a 1787 debate on the new American political system, Alexander Hamilton expressed his disdain for "the mass of people." He demanded the political institutions being created under the new Constitution should empower the wealthy minority to keep control of the government in order to avoid the "imprudence of democracy." Because most of the "founding fathers" shared Hamilton's view, they created the US Senate and provided it with special powers to block or undermine political demands for reforms made by the people. More recently, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey described working people who join unions as "parasitical." Mackey and other opponents of workers' rights, following Hamilton, will rely on the Senate to stall reforms like the Employee Free Choice Act or health reform that would improve the lot of working families.

Both men viewed the majority of people as holding irrevocably different interests from their own and thus a potential threat to their fortunes and power. More than simple personal prejudice, their words betray an open class preference for undemocratic power relations. At bottom, they held a shared theory of class: what it is, how it works and our places within it.

People with Marxist, socialist or even radical democratic and liberal viewpoints, on the other hand, often talk and write about class, class struggle and class consciousness as if definitions of these terms are common knowledge, or as if experiences of class are shared widely enough that working definitions aren't needed. You know it when you see it, right? Unfortunately, this assumption may lead to misunderstandings, inaccurate analysis and misguided political action. For these reasons, taking some time to define class theoretically and concretely seems as important now as ever.

A book titled Class Matters, published a couple years ago and compiled by a handful of New York Times journalists and other commentators, makes an attempt to provide an explanation. Resurrecting the Weber-Marx split on the definition of class, the book's editors wonder in the introduction if class remains an issue of status or education, or if it is even relevant. Despite well-written, readable articles that handle a wide range of class issues from access to education, income, geography and the gender wage/wealth gap, the answers provided by the book are less than satisfactory. So even if class itself may not pertinent, the book admitted, social effects associated with class do.

Class comes out in the open

Notably, the Class Matters anthology came out prior to the collapse of the financial system and the subsequent economic crisis that now has seen about one in five Americans thrown out of work, one in eight on food stamps and 120,000 people file for bankruptcy every month. Accompanying this economic reality, the dominant values and ideas that make capitalism and its innate inequalities and abuses seem natural or normal or just have been shredded. A poll released in 2009 revealed that maybe just half of Americans continued to support capitalism, while the rest were split between a favorable view of socialism and indecision. Undoubtedly, the anxiety over and the palpable experiences of class before and since the economic crisis provoked this disillusion with capitalism.

Instead of asking whether can capitalism last, many people began to wonder if it should.

If the economic collapse and the ongoing jobs crisis teaches anything it is that we can safely dismiss right-wing claims that class is little more than the figment of Marx's imagination. After the Wall Street meltdown, it became patently obvious that financial giants like the Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and AIG never lacked access to the highest levels of political power. Government technocrats moved swiftly to protect their profits, even as bankers admitted to the corrupt practices that threatened the very existence of the banks and even capitalism itself. Bankers and their right-wing allies had successfully pushed for deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s that allowed a free-for-all in the financial sector. Deregulation was quickly followed by the installation of the Bush administration and his ideologically motivated refusal to pursue its legally mandated authority to regulate the financial (as well as other) sectors of capitalism.

During the 2008 election, the most politically engaged – and class conscious – workers were trade unionists (both white and non-white), people of color, women and others who vigorously fought the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin, rejected the myth of classlessness. They came to understand clearly that McCain's main political base, as he admitted openly, was the rich and powerful. A majority of working-class people of all races and backgrounds rejected the influence of racism and racial doctrines spouted by the Republican candidates and their allies in the media. Instead, they went to the polls with a shared view of working and living conditions and values as well as a common political strategy for change.

In general, basic facts about inequality in America came into sharp focus in that election. Funds for education never seem to be lacking in wealthy areas, while teachers in working-class school districts are forced to beg for donations of pencils, paper and other basic needs for their classrooms. The richest CEOs and corporate executives, a tiny fraction of the population, earn about one-third of the country's total income annually, while working families have seen their wages stagnant over the past decade, are forced to fight to keep their homes and struggle to pay health insurance premiums.

In 2010, the Obama administration earned the ire of the banking section of capital when he ordered a tax on banks to recover the remaining portions of the Wall Street bailout money. This proposal was followed up by a proposal to create stiff new regulations on banks, known as "the Volcker rule," that would limit their risky behaviors and set limits on how big they could get. Bankers threatened to sue to block the tax, and promptly rebelled at the idea of new regulations. Siding with the banks, Republican ideologues, like TV personality Sarah Palin, insisted that new oversight of the financial sector and its mostly covert activities wasn't needed.

Despite today's popular anger over the economy and the abuse of power by Wall Street, corporations have not set aside their class interests. For example, massive spending on Washington lobbyists, media campaigns and elections of Republicans by the health insurance industry effectively pushed the best ideas for health reform off the table even before the debate began. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court overturned decades of laws that slowed the influx of corporate dollars in elections, potentially handing the electoral system over to the richest multinational corporate interests.

Meanwhile, 750,000 people are homeless, one in five American children suffer due to "food insecurity" each day, and record numbers get food stamps. Unemployment remains a "lagging economic indicator" even as Wall Street profits have been restored.

Working-class people who get sick and expect their health insurance companies to pay for serious or chronic illnesses are likely to face rejections, exclusions and denials. Workers who try to organize labor unions at stores like Whole Foods, Target or Wal-Mart face threats of firings and other abuse. Working families who simply want the school district to hire a music teacher or the city to fix potholes in the road in front of their house are told there is no money. These people experience some of the worst realities of class in America. Ask any small business owner displaced by a newly opened Wal-Mart whether or not class exists. Indeed, in our hyper-media society, in which a mere six mega-corporations own close to 90 percent of every media outlet in the country, most Americans have some basic idea that the talking heads and pundits who favor capitalist values, ideas and agendas win most shouting matches. Take for instance the corporate-financed "tea-bagger" town hall meetings that significantly shifted media attention away from health reform to violent threats against reformers in the fall of 2009. Or debates about federal budget deficits; unlike the Bush deficits, most media bill current shortfalls as a "threat to national security" or as "generational theft."

But are the whole of these experiences and inequalities simply class-ism, that is, a kind of individualist prejudice aimed at poor and low-income individuals? Or are they symptoms of unequal power relations built into the system of production, circulation of commodities and reproduction of labor power known as capitalism?

Some modern views of class

Many academics commonly refer to the basic "trinity" of race, class and gender (some add sexuality, gender identity, ability, nationality, religion, age) that impact our individual and social lives. While these categories are necessary means for explaining why people live their lives the way they do and make the choices they make or are forced to make, these categories are often equated as "identities" emerging and developing on a field of neutral or equal economic relations, in which we all have equal say over where we've come from and where we're going.

Within this framework, class is typically reduced to its effects – levels of income and education, social status or attitudes, even physical characteristics like hair color or height - which may provide obstacles to achievement that individuals can overcome with the proper education and hard work. The term, "classist," has even been invented to describe the prejudices of middle- and upper-class people against the poor. In a society that usually pretends class isn't real and that all experience is individual, the reintroduction of some version of class, as the book Class Matters did, no matter how thin, is a remarkable event. Still, reducing class to feelings or to its effects fails to explain real causes or to provide a road map for change, except, at worst, self-improvement or a transformation of personal attitudes and, at best top-down reforms that make no serious attempt to amend the status quo in relationships of power.

Much worse is the right-wing point of view which denies the reality of class. This perspective demands individualist solutions that place the responsibility for change on the shoulders of the victims of class inequalities. For example, if a family is tired of a bad education system, the individualist solution is to work harder, take on another job and save up to move the kids to private schools (despite their dubious record in producing better educational experiences). Can't afford health insurance? Eat better, take vitamins and use the emergency room when you get ill. Can't find a job? It's because employers pay too many taxes or, because of union contracts, pay workers too much. Individualist solution: work for less, rat out other workers and vote for right-wing politicians who want to gut the social safety net.

On this latter point, see for example a recent article in the right-wing Weekly Standard, which placed the onus "on workers to relocate and retrain" in the current economic crisis. (And heaven forbid the government fund retraining programs; the deficit is too high!) Simply put, capitalists aren't responsible for the solutions to the collapse of the economy; individual workers and their families should be left on their own to find their own solutions to their own problems. That journal's general ideological line is against socially oriented solutions to rising unemployment, such as direct government intervention in the economy, unless that intervention is aimed primarily or solely at providing economic benefits to the wealthy or to powerful corporations. That same opinion piece further put its proposals for health reform strictly in the context of how reform - if it is needed at all – must guarantee high profits for the insurance monopolies.

Class in theory

Let's look at some of the classic literature on the subject. For Marxists, class in general always results from specific historical conditions in which it is developing. In other words, to speak of class today, we must speak of classes under capitalism and the specific historic and social conditions in which it has developed. Prior to capitalism, class worked differently and carried different meanings. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, for instance, use terms like "social rank," "orders" and "gradations" to name social classes before capitalism, which were proscribed by non-economic factors such as "divine right" or kinship.

In his essay "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," Engels examines how classes under capitalism were formed. He argues that "the products now produced socially [under capitalism] were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by capitalists." Private property and political power allows capitalists to own and control all of what workers made. Capitalism changed the "means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity" of people. In this way, "social rank" and "orders" of pre-capitalist days disappeared in favor of a capitalist class structure. This new situation "brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation," Engels adds. Laborers became permanent sellers of labor power for wages, the previous order of social classes was eroded and the social system of capitalism began to produce two great economic groupings, "the capitalists on the one side, and the producers...on the other." The antagonism between workers and the class of private appropriators (the capitalists), shared conditions of labor (or not) and dispossession (or ownership) turned workers and capitalists into distinct classes.

It should be noted that Engels's division of society into only two classes was a simplification of actual conditions. He made the generalization for the purposes of explanation. Or as Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman might put it, Engels deployed the "process of abstraction" in order to break down social complexities into "manageable parts." Abstraction, Ollman explains, is intended to aid in classifying and explaining a subject, in this case, class. In other books and articles, both Engels and Marx would speak of classes outside of this two-class concept, for example, peasants or small business owners. Lenin would even argue that multiple modes of production with competing class structures could exist side by side in a single society, especially those in transition. Engels's point here, however, is that a single mode of production comes to dominate over others, and when it is capitalism, the general trend is toward the elimination of other classes outside of the worker-capitalist class structure.

In his own discussion of capitalism's origins and development, Marx regarded class in general as a dynamic relationship of groups. What shapes class, Marx argues in Capital Vol. III, is "always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers." This relationship produces antagonism at the point of production and in society in general, transforming individuals, by necessity, into something greater than themselves. Individuals form a class, he notes in The German Ideology, only "insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class." This relationship also creates distinct class cultures. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx argues that class conditions forcibly separate one group's "mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes."

Once this relationship exists and antagonistic interests form, Marx states in The German Ideology,

The class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class.

Marx qualifies this generalization to say that other factors also influence class and the determining role it has for people. In Capital Vol. III, Marx argues that class, "due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc.," could show "infinite variations and gradations in appearance."

Class and non-class social factors

Important non-class factors (we might add gender, sexuality, nationality, ability and more to Marx's list) affect class, how it functions, what effects it has on the individuals living it out. In each society, non-class factors develop under certain historical conditions. They are the result of political and cultural struggles.

Here, Marx doesn't insist that class determines these other non-class factors. In fact he argues that they condition class - how it appears or is experienced. On this point, Marx should not be taken to mean that non-economic factors mystify or distort class's true essence, as if it could be magically removed some purer, even less difficult or less confusing form of class struggle would make itself known. Marx means that certain non-economic factors cause class to operate in different objective ways under historically specific conditions. These conditions cannot be wished away, but overcome only through the political and cultural struggles forged in such realities.

While the basic truth of the abstract concept of class underlies this objective reality, other factors make the lived experience of class – and thus the necessary modes of resistance – unique to each society or sections of a society. For example, in a predominantly African American city like Detroit with an unofficial unemployment rate of close to 50 percent and a poverty rate of probably double that figure, class experiences are infused with institutional racism.

Social realities like joblessness, poverty, racist "criminal justice," uneven access to health care, environmental racism, limited political power and unequal distribution of public resources make the experiences of class dramatically different from those of the people who live in the predominantly white working-class communities that border that city. As Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr. puts it in his book, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations, historical experiences and contemporary ideas and practices around race relations have produced "racially ordered capitalist relations of production." And as the late Henry Winston argued following Marx, such a system of relations has been generated and preserved primarily by "capital's material stake in racial dissension."

Preservation of the fundamental relations of power in a capitalist society is also aided by other forms of social "dissension." Consider the foundational role of the inequalities staked out along lines of gender both in the historical division of labor - both in public and in the private "domestic" sphere - and the role of family formation and the reproduction of human life under capitalism. Scholars such as Kathleen M. Brown (Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs), Benita Eisler (Lowell Offering), Alice Kessler-Harris (Women Have ALways Worked), Gayatry Chakaravorty Spivak ("Diasporas Old and New, Women in a Transnational World"), Angela Y. Davis (Women, Race and Class) and Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (Women and Globalization) have studied the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and labor in the US and global contexts, and have produced brilliant books and articles on this particular subject matter.

Also, consider how genetic variations that produce a diversity of sexuality and gender differences in the human family have been turned into the sharpest "cultural" conflicts exploited to divide working-class people and co-opt consent for rule by the extremist sections of capital. Similar differences around age, nationality, immigration status and religion likewise aid capitalist in fostering divisions of labor, uneven and unequal life chances, and modes of workforce and social discipline through their exploitation of cultural differences. While many cultural differences are unchosen or easy for most people to appreciate, understand and even value, individuals and institutions seeking (or designed) to preserve capitalist power relations cultivate suspicion, disapproval and even hateful attitudes among diverse communities through competition over material goods (such as wages) or through distorted cultural representations.

Class as process

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Lenin echoes Engels and Marx on the subject of class in his 1919 pamphlet titled "A Great Beginning." "Classes are groups of people," he argues, "one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy." But more than simply groups of people, Lenin argues two years later in Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, class is a "division according to status in the social system of production." Note that status is an effect of class, which itself is a "division."

Lenin builds on his view of class as a "division" in his 1919 speech "The State." Class is "a division into groups of people" he remarks, "some of whom are permanently in a position to appropriate the labor of others, when some people exploit others." More than being simply a division, class is a device for exploitation, or a relationship of power and dominance that permits one group to exploit another.

Lenin amplifies this concept in his 1921 speech on "The Tasks of the Youth League": "Classes are that which permits one section of society to appropriate the labor of another section." Here again, class is not simply equated with a "group" or "section" or "division," but with resulting power relations. In fact, Lenin regarded class as a power relation that propels capitalist production forward. Class, in other words, is the engine of the whole system.

Lenin also views classes in their dialectical relation to the different sides of production. "Classes are large groups of people," he argued in "A Great Beginning,"

differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production by their relation...to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.

In other words, Lenin defines class within a complex of relationships involving all sides of production. It is a process that includes performance of labor, as well as the methods of appropriation, the distribution of products and the resulting uneven and unequal life chances reproduced in society.

To sum up, Marx, Engels and Lenin define class from three fundamental sides. It is (1) an political economic community affected, proscribed and motivated by non-class factors, (2) the defining relationship(s) at the heart of any mode of production (other than communism), and (3) a process that makes up and conditions the process of the production and reproduction of capital and labor.

What does it mean today?

Is it still worth viewing class in similar ways to these three dead European guys from a different era, as opposed to how it was undertaken by the New York Times book Class Matters? I think yes. If class is viewed only as a series of social problems unrelated to the very logic and processes of capitalism itself, no systemic transformation is required. If reduced opportunities for social mobility, poverty and unemployment, the race to the bottom in wages, benefits and worker protections, the lack of access to education, health care and political power are viewed outside of a class lens, the solution from this point of view is to increase opportunities or create programs that ease social ills. Tweak the system. All that is needed is a mere shuffling of priorities, moving the marginalized to the centers of public life and ensure they to have access to basic social goods. But as scholar Victor Villanueva puts it in his autobiographical work, Bootstraps, this version of social reform doesn't address the class system directly. "[T]hose we call the marginalized are not in the margins of the class but are within the structure – at the bottom," he writes, following the thinking of radical pedagoguish Paulo Freire. Thus, a more fundamental thinking process aimed at realizing and envisioning inequality as systematically structured, rather than the result of accidents or personal prejudices is necessary.

In its specific aims, an approach like this is worthy; indeed, working people should be more and more a part of the fight for social programs that improve their lives, strengthen their collective hand for long-term battles and unite them in common struggle - an agenda or strategic outlook not advocated by the New York Times anthology. For this, a better book is Inequality: Social Class and Its Consequences, edited by D. Stanley Eitzen and Janis E. Johnston (Publishers, 2007). In the latter anthology of essays from a range of liberal and left perspectives, some key aspects of life under capitalism are dissected and important reforms, changes and improvements are proposed. Together they complete a puzzle of problems and solutions that promise, as Marx might have it, a comprehensively dialectical approach to the social problems that lie at the heart of a class divided society.

Discarding the right-wing's individualist lens through which they'd have us look at social issues in favor of a broader, dialectical social outlook provides a stepping stone to more systemic change. Indeed, such changes in a social system, as Marx in Capital showed about feudalism, can over time build up into an irreversible tipping point of more fundamental change. Such movements are rare in human history, but are possible.

But one of Marx's most significant contribution as a theoretician was his opinion that social change is not outside of human control. In order to strengthen our collective grasp on how to make meaningful change, a systemic view of class allows us to see capitalism as a system that always reproduces the social problems and consequences of class. As Nick Dyer-Witheford explains in his book Cyber-Marx, under capitalism, class "remains a definitive social power" with "privileged" status because capitalism compels all social relations to "revolve around hub of profit." Class antagonism - competing interests, not on an individual, but a social scale – is inherent to the system and disproportionate political power ensures that the interests of the minority override, evade, erase, even demolish the interests of the majority. Profits are put before people's needs. Wars for oil based on lies rage. Environmental catastrophe looms. People die of treatable illnesses.

We don't need no education

A brief look at basic inequalities in public education, for example, reveal the systemic nature of class differences that are more fundamental than simply differences of status or income. Education activist and author Jonathan Kozol has made his career out of documenting the massive inequalities in public education. They persist by race, ethnicity and national origin and by geography with the strongest determinant going to class. And, as he noted in a lecture for the Media Education Foundation, inequalities prompted by racial and ethnic segregation are worsening.

In her book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth, sociologist Heather Beth Johnson explains how wealth promotes the reproduction of class inequalities in a society in which we simultaneously promote the contradicting mythology of individual merit, free choices and social mobility. As Johnson demonstrates, more than simple individual chances or Horatio Alger luck, wealth inequalities reproduce society-wide patterns of living standards and future prospects that have been systemized and are protected by laws and social customs governing private property, inheritance, taxation and the general distribution of social resources.

Not only does segregation by race and class persist in public school systems, as well as uneven and unequal access to resources, but the style of teaching also differs widely by class, geography and race, producing and reproducing systematized ideological patterns that justify the status quo. As researcher Jean Anyon reports in her ground-breaking study of schools, "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work," class divisions (intersected by racial and geographic inequalities) have produced a system in which future prospects for students are carefully circumscribed.

For instance, in working-class schools, young people are expected to learn through memorization and repetition. Questions such as "why are we doing this" or "are there other ways of solving this problem?" are discouraged and silenced, sometimes even treated as hostile breaches of the authoritarian teacher-student relationship. Strict discipline is enforced. Working-class and minority students, in fact, are typically taught that what they hope for, believe in, or have to say about the world has little value or consequence. They are often trained to internalize a belief in their innate inferiority or their inability to contribute something of value to society. And they respond accordingly.

Whereas in schools located in wealthier districts with high populations of elites, professionals or upper-income families creativity, leadership and self-expression are modeled, encouraged and rewarded. As Anyon writes, "the ‘hidden curriculum' of schoolwork is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way." Thus, not only is social mobility through educational opportunities bounded by class, but the system as it exists now is designed mainly to reproduce, on one hand, a new generation workers experienced in obedience and the routines of the workplace in a capitalist system. And on the other hand, the luckier few already benefited by the privileges of wealth are taught to become the managers of the emergent workforce, bosses of the corporations and rulers of the next generation.

These same "Fordist" pedagogical models of repetition and discipline also persist in higher education, as scholar and university professor Vijay Prashad argued in his short essay, "Other Worlds in a Fordist Classroom." He writes, "Our classrooms are victims of a fordism of education in which the students read brief and scattered extracts and spend short, efficient periods ... learning as much information as quickly as possible." In addition, financial burdens typically force working-class college students to take on jobs in addition to their academic course loads and extra-curricular activities. Many suffer through the anxiety over the possibility of failure in the face of such schedules that far surpass in intensity the typical workload of wealthier students at elite universities. Indeed, the twin burdens of work and academic study reduce the quality of the educational experience of those who survive it, while easy passage through an elite university (aided by expected grade inflation and rich endowments and fellowships) ensures the wealthiest students access to the highest-paying, most satisfying and upwardly mobile positions. In this way, rather than guaranteeing the egalitarian social mobility of our national mythology, class divisions as they impact higher education work to ensure their own reproduction.

Exposing the hidden realities of class helps us understand how the power and wealth of the minority, in fact, depends on increasing the exploitation of the majority, and how both the institutions and values of the capitalist system serve to perpetuate its inequalities and realities. We can also easily see how the myths of meritocracy or of how individual action can lead to social mobility mean little or nothing to the vast majority of people. This point is born out by empirical data produced by the Economic Policy Institute. Since the 1980s, the EPI reports, the rate of social mobility has flat-lined, especially for working-class families and their children. In fact, the EPI concluded in 2006/2007 report "The State of Working America," that, even before the official beginning of the current economic crisis (December 2007), the data "belies any notion of a totally fluid society with no class barriers." With the recession comes "economic scarring" on working-class families with impacts that can be felt far into the next generation, EPI reported more recently as the second year of the current recession was coming to a close. For working-class families, in other words, the income, education and resources of the parents play the central determining factor for which income bracket (and consequently class position) their children will end up in.

Meanwhile, the EPI study adds, the children of the wealthiest families maintain the most options, opportunities and choice. Simply put, the Horatio Alger myth works best the higher you look up the income/wealth ladder.

Class is strategic

A systematized understanding of class also helps us realize that individualist action or social mobility does not and can not transform social relations and inequities. Individual hard work and mobility will never, by itself, produce a more democratic society. Collective, political and cultural action aimed at broad, dialectical approaches to reform and a revolution in customs and values, instead, are needed to make the changes which may ultimately prove to be revolutionary. In fact, the most progressive social changes, such as reductions in discriminatory job and wage practices, relief for health and safety violations, an end to exploitation of children and slavery, protection of citizenship rights and more, only came with concerted political struggle by working-class people.

For this we need a view of class that examines community (and identity) formation as the product of historical and current struggles. These include cultural contests for self-determination of meanings of symbols born by the community, its values. These also include the workplace and political struggles over equal access to the material benefits offered by society. Such a view should follow and reflect the more dynamic pattern of human life than is typically offered in non-class or anti-class analysis of how social systems work. We should link democratic struggles for equality inseparably to our view of the general class struggle. Such a viewpoint throws the diversity of communities into an intersecting (if not common) and strategic unity of interests and agendas. At each point of intersection, alliances are made possible and, consequently, an ever-expanding base of support for an alternative to a class society can be brought to life.

Alliances at these points of intersections of communities will necessarily center around struggles for reform. Struggles for reform have, at bottom, a fundamentally democratic character. In the US, such struggles have historically been couched in terms of civil rights: the right to vote, right to social equality, right to organize, right to health care, right to equal, quality education and so on. Thus, democratic struggles are foundationally related to the working-class struggle for power and fundamental social change. This fact makes working-class leadership on key democratic struggles both necessary strategically – for purposes of class unity and the adoption of a democratic platform – and theoretically – the fullest, clearest understanding of the nature and complications of "class" itself.

References:

Anyon, Jean. "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." Journal of Education, Fall 1980.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx. Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Economic Policy Institute. The State of Working America 2006/7.

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Janis E. Johnston. Inequality: Social Class and Its Consequences. Paradigm Publishers, 2007.

Engels, Frederick. "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," MECW, Vol. 24 International Publishers, 1989.

Johnson, Heather Beth. The American Dream and the Power of Wealth. Taylor an dFrancis, 2006.

Kozol, Jonathan. "Education in America." Video by Media Education Foundation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgkZKTPEspg

Lenin, V.I. "A Great Beginning." Collected Works, Volume 29, Progress Publishers.

-----. "The State." Collected Works, Vol. 29, Progress Publishers.

-----. "The Tasks of the Youth League." Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers.

-----. Left-wing Communism an Infantile Disorder. Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. III. MECW, Vol. 37. International Publishers, 1998.

-----. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. MECW, Vol. 11. International Publishers, 1979.

-----. The German Ideology. MECW, Vol. 5. International Publishers, 1975.

Ollman, Bertell. The Dance of the Dialectic. University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Prashad, Vijay. "Other Worlds in a Fordist Classroom." Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere. Edited by Amitava Kumar. New York University Press, 1997.

San Juan Jr., E. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps. From an American Academic of Color. National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

Photo: Workers circulate a petition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. (Photo by Casie Yoder, courtesy AFL-CIO Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Old Struggles in a “New Age”: The CPUSA and the 1960s

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:52:00 +0000

Although McCarthyite legislation and official government harassment targeting the Communist Party and its members continued in the 1960s, party leaders and activists contributed to and advanced a new mass upsurge, which developed in opposition to the political reaction and social stagnation brought about by domestic and international Cold War policies. Communists also struggled to decelerate a nuclear arms race whose only logical ideological outcome, the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson contended was "exterminism."

In this decade, the civil rights/Black liberation movement, in which Communists had played a central role since the 1920s, served as a catalyst for all others, making the tactics of mass protest outlawed by cold war policy legitimate in the eyes of millions of people.

Cold War gets hot

The 1948 "Truman Doctrine" globalized "gunboat diplomacy" as the foundation of Cold War "containment." The Cuban revolution brought the first regional challenge to a seemingly undefeatable US imperialism in this decade. Up to that point, Cuba had served as the regional model for US "gunboat diplomacy" in the name of "freedom" and self determination" since the Spanish-American War. In Vietnam, the US created a "containment state," a "new South Korea" in violation of the 1954 Geneva agreements. This led to subsequent military escalation in the face of defeat that would lead to the death of millions of Indochinese people and almost 60,000 US troops. Communists in the US campaigned, as they always had, against racism and imperialism in this new period, seeking to reach out to and strengthen the mass movements of the people.

The US escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 coincided with the Johnson administration's retreat on its "war on poverty" and Great Society programs. The result produced both the urban rebellions and political and cultural radicalization. Meanwhile, Communists struggled to ally labor with the campaigns for civil rights and peace and oppose the fragmentation developing inside the Civil Rights movement. Many sought to aid the agenda laid out by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his attempt in the last years of his life to bring the movement into Northern cities and focus the campaign on the struggle for economic and social justice, developing a deeper and broader sense of the basic citizenship rights for African Americans.

Angela Davis, an African American intellectual and scholar, was through these struggles drawn to the Communist Party. In 1969, the Reagan-appointed Board of Regents of the University of California fired Davis from her teaching position at UCLA for being a Communist. In 1970, she was charged as an accomplice in a "conspiracy" that led to a shoot out in a California court and forced her into hiding. Davis held the "distinction" of being the third women on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List in its history. A jury found her not guilty in 1972, in part because an international movement came to her defense and helped her win a fair hearing in court. She later won the battle to regain her teaching position in the University of California system. Both events stood as major victories against the Cold War political culture.

Angela Davis eloquently summed up what it meant to be a Communist in the 1960s when she wrote "as a student, as an American and as a Communist I have participated in common struggles for democratic liberties, for civil rights and for peace.... I am a member of the Communist Party because as I see that Party upholds principles which combine a particularly enlightened view of society with a sense of humanity and peace not found elsewhere."

"[The CPUSA stands for] an end to poverty," Davis wrote, "an end to racism; an end to US intervention in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.... In the holy name of anti-Communism this government has conducted witch-hunts and executed and imprisoned its victims. It has waged war, overthrown governments (by force and violence).... It is time to affirm the right to be a Communist, the right of Communists to speak and act; and the right of the American people to listen and think for themselves."

The Party and the student uprising

Winning these rights to speak and act as Communists remained a difficult battle. Unlike others on the left, Communists were not even afforded what Davis' old philosophy professor, Herbert Marcuse, called "repressive tolerance," that is the creation of marginalized niches into which dissent can be voiced but isolated enough to prevent serious influence. Communists still had to fight hard for elemental First Amendment rights

Prominent CPUSA leaders, Gus Hall, Ben Davis and James Jackson, among others, struggled to regain the right to speak on college campuses. When Ben Davis was invited to deliver a speech at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1958, authorities crudely denied his right to speak and for the students who had invited him to hear him. The FBI as part of its Cointelrpo program made it a priority to block CPUSA speakers on campus.

But the students at CCNY didn't give up trying to get Davis on campus. Davis beat the bureau and its friends in the administration by gaining the right to speak at CCNY three years later. A few years after that, I, a CCNY student, saw him speak at a meeting of the Marxist Discussion Club (of which sadly I was afraid to be a member at the time). He was the first Communist I ever saw live, and I was impressed. Gus Hall, CPUSA General Secretary who was a special target of FBI harassment (outrageously they used the fact that he had been jailed under the Smith Act to deny him a wide variety of basic rights, including a drivers license), spoke to 19,000 students on a tour of Pacific Coast Colleges in 1962. In speaking about the tour, Hall emphasized the achievement but put it in a Marxist context: "The realities of the 1930s were the Depression and the rise of fascism. Compared to the present complex realities they were relatively simple."

Hall went on to say that "this wonderful new young generation" wanted discussion not agitation, understanding that the First Amendment rights of Communists were not only essential to the defense of the rights of all, but a desire to hear Communists present their analysis. But Hall conceded that the odds against Communist were "tremendous," given the power of billions of dollars spent in propaganda to both isolate the CPUSA and "distort and confuse their [the American people's] understanding of the real problem, the real enemies they face." Hall saw that isolation as "the main obstacle." A point that still resonates today...mainly we isolate ourselves.... We have to break an ideological wall that we have built between ourselves and the people."

Black liberation

Breaking down ideological walls was an important part of the Party's work in the African American freedom movement. Claude Lightfoot, an African American leader of the party in Chicago, whom the FBI saw as a major threat, wrote with sophistication on the "ghetto rebellions" in an important analysis published by International Publishers in 1968. (J. Edgar Hoover personal hatred for Lightfoot had stemmed from a surveillance report that he had danced with a white woman. Hoover derisively referred to Lightfoot as "dancer" in private.) Of the period that the establishment presses across the spectrum called "ghetto riots" at best, "race riots" at worst. Lightfoot pointed to the social factors and causes of high poverty, unemployment and poor public services - motivated by institutional racism - that pushed so many in urban areas to discontent and revolt.

If one really wished to understand what was happening in Watts in 1965 or Newark and Detroit in 1967, The Daily Worker, edited by James Jackson, an important theorist of Black liberation, was the probably the best place to go. Nor were Communists dogmatic in their analysis, as their legion of official enemies continued to repeat.

For example, in an account of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965, William Taylor, chair of the CPUSA's Black Liberation Commission, wrote appreciatively of former Harvard President James Conant's book, Slums and Suburbs, in its analysis of the event as a rebellion against the poverty against which the Johnson administration declared war. Taylor also expressed approval of Michael Harrington's work The Other America. (Harrington was an anti-Communist socialist who opposed CPUSA activists participating in mass organizations).

Militarization is a class issue

Communists also pointed to the economic foundation for US military policy in the period. Although the historian Richard Hofstadter (himself a prominent liberal establishment figure and former Communist Party member) had spoken of "military Keynesianism" a few years before, Communist Party theoretician Hyman Lumer dealt with "The Economic Role of Armaments Expenditure" at a Disarmament Symposium in 1960, a year before Dwight Eisenhower used the term "military industrial complex" in his 1961 Farewell Address - a phrase and a concept which still resonates through the world.

Lumer contended that aside form whatever short-term stimulus effect it had, military spending had taken funds away from necessary social programs, "schools, hospitals, low-cost housing and other vital social needs." Disarmament was essentially a class issue, a major arena in the US of the class struggle. In words that are, if anything, more relevant today than they were in 1960, Lumer concluded, "Since the effects [the stimulus of military spending] are temporary and limited, they can be prolonged only by further increases in military spending. Such a course of action, if persisted in, leads to all out militarization of the economy, accompanied by extreme impoverishment of the working people."

Cuba

The Cuban revolution, initially welcomed by large numbers of Americans, as it moved in a socialist direction, faced the full wrath of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The CPUSA actively supported the revolution and highlighted its achievements. In their local groups and organizations, Communist denounced the blockade launched against Cuba by the Eisenhower administration, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion carried forward by the Kennedy administration, and the Cuban missile crisis, which almost resulted in a nuclear war.

During the Cuban missile crisis, Communists worked with a wide variety of peace activists to hold protests and demonstrations aimed at de-escalating the tensions. In addition, the CPUSA pointed out that the end of the crisis, which was hailed in the US as a victory over the Soviet Union, should be the basis for sober reflection. "Glad to be Alive, Say 10 thousand at Front of UN," the Worker headline read as the crisis ended. The Worker also pointed to the absurdity of the Kennedy administration's position as it contended, "Would we want the Soviet Union to stop, search or sink or ships headed for Turkish ports? Would we want China to stop, search or sink our ships headed to Japan or Okinawa?"

Rather than simply denounce US policy, the Worker, responding to the gravity of the situation, contended that "differences with Cuba can await negotiation and settlement at the conference table but the menace of war, embraced in the foolhardy blockade cannot wait.,,, [We call upon all to] demand that President Kennedy respect the good offices of the United Nations to enter into immediate negotiations with Cuba and the Soviet Union for the sensible and peaceful settlement of all matters under dispute."

Restoring civil liberties

Communists also revived an interest in Marxism rooted in real life in the 1960s. Young people and students especially gained more interest in Marxist writing and thought, which cold warriors had sought to eras through the postwar period. In 1964, Herbert Aptheker, distinguished historian of slavery and a leading CPUSA activist, founded the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) to help support work that would bring Marxism to as large an audience as possible.

Communist youth activists also founded the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America in San Francisco in 1964. The clubs brought together student and young workers. From their inception, the Du Bois Clubs were the special target of both the right-wing and the US government. When the clubs' national headquarters in San Francisco was bombed, the FBI refused to investigate the incident. In 1967, ten years after Joe McCarthy's death, the Justice Department attempted to destroy the Du Bois Clubs. That year, the Supreme Court heard the case of W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America v. Clark. After Attorney General Ramsey Clark filed a petition with the McCarthyism Subversive Activities Control Board as a "Communist Front" organization, the Clubs struck back and sued to have the whole "Communist Front" provisions struck down as unconstitutional.

Although the McCarran Act had been greatly weakened over the previous decade, and many regarded Clark's maneuver as an attempt to frighten potential club members from joining, the court majority upheld the Justice Department's "right" to pursue their case. In that ruling, Justice William O. Douglas made an eloquent dissent, joined by Justice Hugo Black. They wrote: "The members of the Du Bois Clubs may or may not be Communists. But as I said I see no possibility under our constitution of penalizing one for holding that or any other belief. The Du Bois Clubs may advocate causes that parallel Communist thought or Communist actions. They appear, for example, to advocate the termination of hostilities in Vietnam. But so far as advocacy is concerned, I see no constitutional way of putting restrains on them as long as we have the first amendment."

The court majority made no philosophical opposition to this point, which had been developing for many years - choosing instead to rule on procedural points. Ramsey Clark, ironically, years after he left the Johnson administration, became the champion of anti-imperialist initiatives and policies often more radical than those for which Communists faced persecution. One comical side-note to this affair is that Richard Nixon carried on the campaign against the Du Bois Clubs to the point that his supporters would insist that "the Boys Clubs of America" was a Communist Front.

Although anti-Communist repression continued, the civil rights of Communists were bit by bit being restored. One important struggle in this regard centered on the Landrum-Griffin Act, an anti-Communist addendum to the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1959 allegedly to fight "labor racketeering." When Archie Brown a prominent CPUSA member, was elected to the ILWU's National Board, he was prosecuted under the law and sentenced to six months in prison for winning an election, since Communists were barred from holding union office. This time, ILWU lawyers, joined by the ACLU (which did not defend the rights of Communists a decade earlier), won a reversal of the decision in an appeals court in 1964 and then a sweeping victory in the US Supreme Court in 1965. In his decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren said that the law as it applied to Archie Brown "plainly constitutes a bill of attainder."

In essence, all of the anti-Communist laws from the beginning had been bills of attainder, i.e., laws singling out one individual or group and depriving them of equal protection under the law. For a generation few had the courage to say that. Now, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said it.

In the fight against repression of the Du Bois Clubs and of the rights of workers, Communists helped advance civil liberties and free speech in the US.

Peace at last?

Communists also contributed mightily to the development of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the US. As the Johnson administration launched its escalation in 1965, Communist Party activist Betty Gannett wrote a powerful pamphlet, "End the War in Vietnam." In it she presented a concise historical analysis of US involvement in Vietnam - the sort of analysis that it helped the peace movement develop and which today is widely accepted in a watered down version in history texts. Gannett detailed the role of French colonialism, the US support for France's post World War II colonial war in Indochina regardless of the US anti-colonial history, the violation of the 1954 Geneva agreements and the installation of Ngo Dinh Diem, a tyrant from the North on the predominantly Buddhist South, using mainstream media sources.

With a keen eye for what was important, Betty Gannett quoted a Look magazine editor who wrote from inside knowledge about Diem. "Secretary of State John Foster Dulles picked him," she pointed out. "Senator Mike Mansfield (then Democratic majority leader) endorsed him. Francis Cardinal Spellman, the rabidly anti-Communist and allegedly corrupt Cardinal of the New York Diocese, praised him. Vice President Richard Nixon liked him and President Dwight D. Eisenhower OK'd him." Pretty much, I would say, the way a cabinet member is chosen with consultation with the Senate leadership.

Young Communists also played an important role in the development of rank and file opposition to the war. In 1966, three working-class draftees, James Johnson, an African American, Dennis Mora and David Samas refused to serve in Vietnam and were court-martialed. Mora was a member of the Du Bois Clubs, and Johnson subsequently served as an editor of the Daily World. Their case became a national cause célèbre spurring draft resistance and opposition to the war within the military, although all were court-martialed and given long sentences to be served at hard labor. In an unrelated case, Donald Lockman, a Philadelphia Du Bois club member, was sentenced to 2 ½ years in the maximum-security federal prison at Leavenworth for his refusal to go to Vietnam.

Labor turns against war

The anti-Communist leadership of the AFL-CIO under the thumb of George Meany actively supported the Vietnam War. In response, Communists worked to organize a left-center anti-war bloc within the labor movement. In November 1967, anti-war union members, supported by left trade unionists in many countries, held a National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, which was addressed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Writing about the Assembly, George Meyers, Labor Secretary of the CPUSA and former president of the Maryland CIO, noted the breadth of the gathering. It included "old left" activists like Harry Bridges from the ILWU and James Matles of the UE, and Frank Rosenblum from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, left anti-Communists like Victor Reuther and Emil Mazey from the UAW, and more labor activists like Cleveland Robinson, the eloquent president of the Negro American Labor Council. Among the speakers was Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., who would announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination a month later (with the support of many of these trade unionists). McCarthy's candidacy would set in motion the Johnson administration eventual limited attempt to deescalate the war be ending three years of troop buildup and seeking negotiations.

Meyers also noted the activities of Jay Lovestone, the one-time CPUSA general secretary who later defected to the right and emerged after World War II as the AFL-CIO and CIA organizer of anti-Communist, anti-left trade union activities. Meyers called him George Meany's "Secretary of the Cold War." Lovestone had tried to intimidate trade unionists into avoiding the assembly, contending that that it "is not the practice of the AFL-CIO to send representative to bodies organized by others where policy decisions are made."

As the anti-war movement increased, so did the involvement of labor against the war. Communists also made it a major point to challenge the chauvinist worker or "hard hat" image which the mass media and the right cultivated and much of the cultural left accepted, to condemn those who wrote off the organized working class as hopelessly reactionary and racist, the beneficiaries of "white skin privilege."

Turning 50

Although CPUSA membership remained small, the party felt that it could run a presidential candidate in 1968, the first time since 1940. Although ruling circles continued to systematically deny the CPUSA access to mainstream media and contend that the "Communist Party was dead," the 1968 campaign and the re-establishment of the party paper, the Worker once more as a daily, the Daily World, was evidence that the long political repression called McCarthyism, while not dead, was losing its institutional power, along with its ideological power.

As the CPUSA turned 50, Richard Nixon, the old red-baiter whom Adlai Stevenson in 1952 had aptly called a "white collar McCarthy," was President, seeking to turn back all peoples movements and restore the cold war consensus. The CPUSA would face new and complex challenges in the next decade as the long economic expansion that began in World War II ended for the US and even more complex political and economic crises developed.

(Photo by Nicholas DeWolf, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, cc by 3.0)

Obama and the End of Racism? An Interview with Jarvis Tyner

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:47:00 +0000

Editor's note: Jarvis Tyner is national executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA.

PA: In his concession speech in November 2008, John McCain basically said "Okay, we've elected an African American President. Now I want everybody who is discontented with things in America to just shut up. We did what you wanted, so now it's time to shut up and move forward." That's probably an attitude that's shared by a lot of people. What do you make of that kind of thinking?

JARVIS TYNER: Well, we elected an African American president, which is a wonderful thing. It is more than a wonderful thing. It was an historic turning point for this country, given its history, but that doesn't mean that structural, systemic racism has disappeared. It still is in every workplace. It is still in every public institution. It is still a part of education. It is still part of safety on the street. It still has half the prisons full of Black men and women. Therefore, to say that racism has gone away is an act of racism in itself, because it's a total rejection of the suffering, exploitation and oppression that people are still going through.

So John McCain doesn't know what he is talking about. On top of that there is a trend that says now that we have Obama in there everything will be fine, and all that. Nobody should believe that, certainly not anybody who understands what this country is all about. Certainly people of color shouldn't believe it. It is just another way to lead people down a path where they won't resist racism anymore. Then there are some right-wing pundits have been criticizing civil rights leaders and calling them a bunch of opportunists. But it is they themselves who are the biggest opportunists. These people consider the whole issue of civil rights to be passé. You're day is over, they say. Reagan started that stuff when he told Jesse Jackson and the movement that your time is not now - your time has passed and it is not coming back. He made that point very directly.

In the meantime, these right wing opportunists have gone out and organized one of the most racist movements we have seen in this country in 40 years. These are the Tea Party people and the astro-turfers who sprang up around the health care issue like they were some kind of spontaneous movement. We know that they were well financed and linked to extreme right wing think tanks and the insurance companies. This movement, the way they treat the President, is racist. I think people understand that. It is an intolerant movement. Look at the signs they carry, putting a white face on the President like a minstrel. And saying that President Obama is some kind of Hitler and things like that. Then there's the notion that he is going to introduce white slavery, as some of them are saying.

They also use red-baiting, which is something they have always done to the civil rights movement and fighters against racism - linking them to socialism and communism and red-baiting them. They can then claim that their actions against him aren't racist and that they are acting against him to save the Republic from socialism and that kind of thing. The linking of the two has been a long-term pattern of the ultra-right and their racist attempts to defend racism and protect Jim Crow, all the things that we have suffered through over the years. The reality is that we cannot be passive about what is going on. I think we have to make a real effort now to expose what this Tea Party Movement is about, and all the other similar groups that helped to elect Scott Brown in Massachusetts. If we do so, hopefully by November they will be more isolated and unable to achieve similar successes.

PA: The Obama election campaign and victory was probably the biggest national show of interracial working-class solidarity in decades. Now you have the Tea Party people and Pat Buchanan and some of these other right-wing talking heads trying to force a wedge between whites and blacks and other people of color who strongly supported that grassroots campaign. What is it going to take for the labor-led people's movement that elected him to maintain its unity?

TYNER: One of the great things about the last election was the role of the AFL-CIO. Richard Trumka made that fantastic speech calling on working people, particularly white working people, to get involved in the fight against racism and to elect Obama. And a lot of that happened. Even though a majority of whites who went to the polls voted for McCain, or other than for Obama, the fact is that 43 percent of the white voters did vote for Obama, which is higher than what Kerry got in the previous election. Now we're not satisfied with that, but we are happy that there was progress in that regard and that his campaign saw a lot of breakthroughs.

Secondly, the AFL-CIO is continuing to adopt an anti-racist posture by participating with Black churches, the NAACP, and other organizations around the fight for jobs and health care, and around all the issues that are vital to advancing things in this country, including being against racism. That is very very important.

Pat Buchanan really shouldn't be on the air, if you ask me. But who am I to decide that? Every chance he gets, if he can get away with it, he tries to drive a wedge between black and white. He says that white people are never going to accept this. He said that during the whole campaign when Obama was running. He said you just wait and see, white people will not vote for him. But the truth is that although a majority of white voters who went to the polls didn't, a larger minority of white voters voted Democratic and for Obama than in the previous election. The fact is this country is a multiracial country, and the majority of people who went to the polls voted for Obama-Biden.

We have to work with those who lag behind in their understanding. Martin Luther King said we have to work with of our less conscious sisters and brethren who do not realize how evil racism is. We have to work with them, especially those who are working people, in order to move them toward a more rational understanding of why racism is holding them back too. It seems to me that we really need an anti-racist upsurge against these new right-wing groups. To do that we need to emphasize the issues of jobs, health care, a cleaner environment, and schools - all the things that we as a people need, all the things that we can't achieve because of racism and disunity. I don't think we have fallen back from the election, in the feeling in the country and in the desire for change. But I do think there is a lot of confusion out there. The right has pushed very hard to foster racial division and it's had an impact, but I think it can be reversed and we can go forward.

PA: Let's talk a little about Black History Month. Do you think that a lot of whites today see Black History Month as something that only African Americans need to celebrate? Don't white Americans also have a reason to celebrate Black history too?

TYNER: I think that a lot of whites do understand this, but there is a constant struggle to elevate the anti-racist consciousness out there. I am not with those who want to abandon Black History Month, those who say white people can't be convinced, or you can't build unity. The last election shows you can build broad, multiracial unity based on democratic values and expanding democracy, on the question of jobs and peace, and all the other issues. I think the possibility of bringing more people into the movement is very important, especially when you have an African American President.

And, keep in mind, with an African American President you see the opposition against him taking on an inherently racist form, both in the nature of their rhetoric and the symbols they use. They are appealing especially to a certain racist, visceral feeling among many whites. To me the fact that Obama and the first family are African American requires an even higher level of struggle against racism than we had before. Remember when the right wing said that he couldn't speak to the school children because he would introduce them to socialist ideas? Now that wasn't about socialism (I'll say something about the socialist part in a minute), it was about the fact he was a Black president and that he would be fostering unity. It was about their fear that the younger generation would have an image of the President of the United States, the most important elected official in the country, as an African American, and that they would hear from him about the importance of staying in school. He would assume a hero status for them - which he already is with a lot of them. That is what they are fearful of, that black, white and brown, Native American and Asian, will all get together and fight for justice, peace and economic equality.

The fight against racism has to be part of every struggle for jobs, for health care, for the environment, all those things. You have to link it to them, because it is linked, and because the attack of the enemy is a racist attack against an African American President whom they deeply resent. In their mind this a "white country" and the president should be white. That is the kind of ignorance we are dealing with, and it is time that we take it on and advance everyone's thinking.

Now about the charge of socialism and the red-baiting of Obama. Obama is certainly no socialist, and socialism does not emerge out of some conspiracy. I keep saying that when I speak in various places. It is not a conspiracy. It grows out of human need. For instance, we cannot solve the health care crisis without some element of public ownership. You can't do it. In fact, I think that once we start going down the road of health care reform, people will see that it is necessary to have a single payer system that is accessible to everybody. Frankly, to me getting quality health care should come with your birth.

I think that when people see the economic problems we are facing - what happened on Wall Street and in the housing market, and the resulting massive loss of jobs, they do begin to question capitalism - and they have a right to question capitalism. I heard a reporter on television this morning saying he was in Europe and everybody there is questioning capitalism. He was with a number of CEOs at some conference, business executives from India, France, Germany and other places, and they were saying that they were all following the American path to prosperity, and now that it has collapsed they don't think that model is workable anymore. Has capitalism lost its viability? Yes, it definitely has, and as a consequence the right wing is stubbornly trying to block people from thinking in a healthy and natural direction. If capitalism isn't working, why not go in a socialist direction? Isn't socialism an alternative that at least ought to be examined?

Of course, in our view, there is no question we ought to be heading that way. But we Communists have to be very sophisticated in this period on how we respond to things. The main thing we have to do is build unity with the broad mass of people, those who are now going through a radical transformation in their way of thinking, those who want to see this country become a better country and want to see a more peaceful world. People are tired of 30 years of right-wing misdirection. They are fed up with that. They are looking for something better. According to a recent Pew Research poll a considerable percentage of people even have a preference for socialism - and they have the right to do that. To me this is healthy and natural, and it isn't any conspiracy - it's just people trying to live a better life.

PA: Could you give us your top moments in Black American history?

TYNER: Well, the first one would obviously be the overthrow of slavery, the beginning of Reconstruction, and the establishment of the new democracy. That was very very important. It was a turning point for the nation as a whole.

Next comes the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement, which did not just begin in the 1960s. It actually started happening in the 30s and 40s. I was at a book party the other night for a new book called Red Activists and Black Freedom by James and Esther Jackson. It talks about a period in the struggle for civil rights that, due to the McCarthy period, has been really erased from the history books. That struggle was based on the great efforts of the Left and the Communist Party, black, brown and white, who went into the Deep South to register voters and organize against Jim Crow. That was really the beginning. It laid the foundation for the great things that happened in the 60s. There are so many things.

I think that the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 was very important. Otherwise we would not have had a Civil Rights Bill and all the other social programs that Lyndon Johnson was won to support.

I also would include how our country renewed its anti-racism during the period of anti-apartheid. When 1991 happened and the socialist countries collapsed, all was gloom and doom for those of us who thought socialism was the best next step for humanity. All of a sudden, though, racist apartheid, really fascist apartheid, collapsed, and then came this new democracy in South Africa. That was a tremendous movement on a world scale. There are so many other things, the collapse of the colonial world, etc, etc. To me these things mean a lot.

I also think the freeing of Angela Davis was very important, because when Angela Davis, who was the target of racism and anti-communism, was freed it really established a great precedent that allowed us to move forward. Then there was Dr. Du Bois becoming a Communist in 1968. Martin Luther King said that he was a brilliant man and that was his choice. All these moments, in every period of our country's history, have helped to strengthen the ideological and political struggle against racism. I am just happy to have lived through a lot of it.

PA: In other words, collective movements and struggles are more important in your view than individual achievements?

TYNER: We as a people have never made any great change solely on the basis of individual effort. It has always been made by movements and collective action, and that is why we now need to go forward, more than ever maybe. That's our history.

(Photo credit: Phil Freedman, courtesy AFL-CIO/Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Health Disparities: When We Don't Have “the highest level of health for all people”

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:43:00 +0000

Early in 2008 I received an invitation to attend a regional meeting of Northwest states regarding the issue of health disparities. Where was this meeting held? In Scottsdale, Arizona, of course! Go figure. Anyway, in the spring of 2008 I hopped aboard a plane and left the chillier northern climate of my hometown, Anchorage, Alaska, and headed off to the warmer delights of Scottsdale, Arizona. This meeting was sponsored by the National Partnership for Action, a program out of the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health (OMH). The mission of the National Partnership for Action is to "mobilize and connect individuals and organizations across the country to create a nation free of health disparities with quality health outcomes for all people." The guiding theme of this regional conference was that "the existence of health disparities among minority populations is undisputed, and the question that confronts us is what actions can be taken by private and public partners that would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our collective efforts?"

The attendees at this conference were a rainbow of skin colors, ethnic groups, religions and lifestyles from all over the Northwest. For the most part these were people who were on the ground as healthcare providers or as activists struggling to turn health disparities into health equity. These were not stuffy people. During the evenings, after the last speaker had spoken, and after the last note was taken, we went out for beer and pizza. We had long discussions about our work in our communities and about the broader issues. We had some fun along the way, and many of us became good friends.

Some of the conference involved plenary sessions which were attended by the 250 or so people who were at the conference. In these plenary sessions we discussed some of the details of health disparities among minorities. A standard definition of a health disparity is,

"A particular type of health difference that is closely linked with social or economic disadvantage. Health disparities adversely affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater social and/or economic obstacles to health and/or a clean environment based on their racial or ethnic group, religion, socioeconomic status, gender, mental health, cognitive, sensory or physical disability, sexual orientation, geographic location, or other characteristics historically linked to discrimination or exclusion."

That definition is a little weighty, but you get the idea. The opposite concept is "health equity." The definition is much more concise: "Health equity is attainment of the highest level of health for all people. Achieving health equity requires valuing everyone equally with focused and ongoing societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities, historical and contemporary injustices, and the elimination of health and healthcare disparities."

Some examples of health disparities among minorities include:

* Among African American infants, the mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than for white infants
* Among African Americans, the rate for hospital admissions for diabetes related lower extremity amputations is 2.3 times higher than for whites.
* Among American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate for diabetes mellitus was nearly twice as high than for whites; and compared to white women, American Indians and Alaska Natives were more than twice as likely to not receive prenatal care in the first trimester.
* Asians, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific islanders are 1.6 times more likely to contract hepatitis A as compared to whites.
* Hispanics/Latinos are 3-1/2 times more likely to contract HIV/AIDS, and twice as likely to die from it compared to non-Hispanic whites.

Health disparities are clearly life and death issues. What causes them? The general understanding among conference participants and to some extent in the conference literature was that many of these factors predate the appearance of a disease state. These are social and environmental factors rather than medical issues, and are fundamentally and particularly toxic to health. Well known factors include low socioeconomic status, low educational status, and inadequate access and utilization of quality health care.

There are other adverse determinants of health as well. Examples include residence in geographic areas that have poor environmental conditions (e.g., violence, poor air quality, and inadequate access to healthy foods), racism, inadequate personal support systems, and limited literacy or limited English proficiency. These determinants are often associated with racial minority, ethnic minority, and underserved communities.

Some of us tried to go a step further and discuss the relationship of health disparities to a for-profit medical care system, combined with a for-profit health insurance system in the environment of capitalism. These two profit maximizing systems combine to produce and maintain health disparities among low-income and increasingly even among middle class families. Hospitals and most health care providers are primarily interested in maximizing revenue, and it does not matter to them if tens of millions of Americans are priced out of the "market." Health insurance companies routinely deny legitimate health care to their clients in order to maximize revenue, and racism sharpens this effect among lower income and minorities.

The conference lasted several days and it was very intense. Much of the conference involved smaller working groups of about 20 or 25 people. The participants in these working groups often formed close friendships during the course of the intense discussions that took place in the groups as well as in the bars and restaurants later in the evenings. It became clear that many of the participants at this conference were activists, community organizers, and health care providers in low income neighborhoods who did not need lengthy definitions of health disparities to understand the reality of them in their communities and to understand the variety of social causes in their communities.

Remember that this conference took place during the time of the Bush administration before the election of Obama. On paper the goals of this federal program looked pretty good, pretty progressive, and many of the attendees were very progressive organizers and activists in their hometowns. As a result, as a whole, the participants of this conference were not about to be led down a political garden path. As I noted earlier, most of the time in this conference was spent in smaller working groups.

According to the agenda, the goal of these working groups was to determine what the highest priority health disparities in our various communities were, and what could be done to address them. The conference facilitators had in mind bland and politically innocuous goals they repeatedly and forcefully attempted to influence and guide us to recommend, such as the creation of state offices of minority health, or various educational programs to promote awareness.

But as I said earlier, most of the participants in this conference had a long history of being engaged in struggle around these issues. They were way past proposed solutions such as bureaucratic and politically emasculated offices in some state bureaucracy, or ineffectual attempts at creating "awareness" of the issues in their respective communities. No, that was not going to work no matter how hard the facilitators pushed, cajoled, and manipulated attendees in the workshops to try to come up with these kinds of programmatic goals.

In the workshop that I was in by the third day the facilitator had become clearly quite exasperated with his charges. We on the other hand had become quite unified around one primary high-priority solution to the issue, and it was not at all what the facilitator wanted to hear, nor what a program goal in the Bush administration was supposed to be. We as a group finally and unalterably decided that the single most important thing that had to be done to address health disparities in America was universal access to high quality health care for all residents in the United States.

Participants were divided about whether this could be single-payer, or this could be a national health service. Perhaps it could take other forms, but it had to offer universal, unimpeded access to high-quality health care for all residents of the United States. We collectively understood that this single structural change would be the most effective way of addressing health disparities in the United States.

By the end of the third day that had become our highest priority goal. The facilitator, exasperated though he was, became resigned to formally placing our working group's proposed solution in the formal meeting notes. The last day of the conference all the working groups met in a plenary session. There were about eight or ten working groups that met and had gone through the same process we did. During that plenary session a representative from each working group got up and talked about their group's view of what the highest priority health disparities were and what could be done to address them. Despite the unanimity of purpose of the official group facilitators, nearly every group independently reached the same decision, that universal access to high-quality health care was either the highest priority to address the question of health disparities in the United States or was among the highest.

There is a moral to this story. The moral is if you are going to bring together 200 or 300 community organizers, labor activists, progressive healthcare providers, and progressive political street fighters, they are going to set their own agenda and they are going to achieve it. They understand health disparities. They understand health equity. Most importantly, they understand how to get from the former to the latter.

It is not too late to contact the White House and members of Congress and demand a strong public option, a strengthened Medicaid and Medicare, and a very significant increase in public support for the thousands of Community Health Centers across the nation, and vastly strengthened consumer protection regulations over the health insurance industry.

The underlying theme: people before profits! The health of the people comes first!

Photo by U.S. Navy.

African Americans and the Jobs Crisis

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:15:00 +0000

The economic crisis has brought suffering to every part of the country and every section of the working class. As in past recessions, this crisis has fallen most heavily on communities already suffering, and particularly on people of color and immigrants. This is true of every aspect of the crisis, including foreclosures and evictions and state and local government layoffs and cuts in services.

There are many attempts to divert attention by pitting sections of the working class against one another: white workers against racially and nationally oppressed, African Americans against immigrants and Latinos, young against old, men against women. Whatever the motives, these themes play into the hands of the Wall Street bankers and other corporate interests who are the primary cause of the crisis and obstacles to solutions that must come at their expense. This article, however, will focus primarily on the jobs crisis in the African American community as a critical part of the overall picture.

Even before the crisis, African Americans faced difficult, and in many ways worsening employment opportunities. This crisis has hit all workers hard, including white workers, with employment levels the lowest since the 1930s. But during the best boom years of 1988-90 and 1998-99, the percentage of African Americans employed in each age group just about reached the levels that white workers have fallen to today. Put another way, white workers today are just beginning to face conditions that African Americans faced in the best of times.

Jobs crisis by the numbers

The analysis presented here indicates that between one quarter and one third of all working-age African Americans are unemployed. Three quarters of Black teens are unemployed.

The "official" unemployment figures for December 2009, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), are 16 percent for African Americans, 13 percent for Latinos, nine percent for whites, yielding an average for all workers of 10 percent. [1] The BLS survey attempts to count everyone who is actively looking for work, regardless of whether they are collecting unemployment. The real situation is far worse. The BLS also counts the invisible unemployed - those who want a job but are not actively looking, and who want a full-time job but can only find part-time work. The BLS' U-6 rate, which includes the invisible unemployed, is a far more realistic estimate of actual unemployment. The U-6 rate for all workers is 17.3 percent. [2] The U-6 rate can be estimated as 28.0 percent for African Americans and 22.3 percent for Latinos. [3]

For African American men of prime working age (25-54) I estimate the "real" jobless rate at 26 percent. For African American teens (16-19), "real" unemployment is 74 percent. Even for white teens it is 52 percent! [4]

Causes of the Jobs Crisis

The numbers are shocking. African American unemployment rates above 25 percent for men aged 25-54, and nearly 75 percent for teens, mean that in many communities there is almost no chance of finding a job.

Looking at long-term trends is instructive. From 1980 to 2000, an average of about 50 percent of white teenagers (men and women) were employed. [5] The number dropped during recessions, then recovered. After the 2001 recession, white teen employment dropped to about 40 percent. In the current crisis, it has fallen to 30 percent.

In the 1980s, only about 25 percent of Black male teens had jobs. The fluctuations were large - in recessions, there were big losses, and employment peaked above 30 percent in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s. But it dropped to 20 percent in 2001, and in this crisis has fallen below 15 percent. The pattern for Black female teens followed a different pattern in the 1980s, but is similar today.

In the best years, Black teens were no more likely to be employed than white teens are at the worst time in at least 70 years. This tends to be true of other age groups as well. For men aged 25-54, the best year for African American employment about matched the worst for white workers.

There is widespread recognition that unemployment is at crisis levels in African American communities, although use of the "official" 16 percent jobless rate greatly understates the severity. But there is some confusion over causes. It is often said or implied that African Americans, and youth in particular, lack the eduction, social skills, jobs skills and/or attitude for employment. This explanation ignores the impact of the economic crisis, as well as the reality of discrimination.

Before the economic crisis, roughly 79 percent of Black men aged 25-54 held jobs. Two years later, the figure was 69 percent. Did 10 percent of Black men become uneducated or lose their job skills in a two-year period? Did one quarter of working African American teens suddenly develop a "bad attitude?" The more obvious and correct explanation is simply that the jobs are not there.

Causes of lower pay and lack of jobs: Overt Discrimination

Despite propaganda to the effect that discrimination is a thing of the past, or even that African Americans have an advantage due to "reverse discrimination," objective studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, indicate that deliberate racial discrimination in hiring is still widespread. Studies show that employers are less likely to even interview someone if they think the applicant is Black.6 Another study concluded that young Black men in general are assumed to be criminals and denied jobs by employers." [7]

At least since Reagan's election in 1980, the Federal government has moved away from fighting against racial discrimination. Even before George W. Bush became President, EEOC policy was to ignore clear patterns of unintentional discrimination unless there were specific (individual) complaints. [8] Judicial decisions on affirmative action cases have actually leaned to enforcing discrimination, by making it illegal to take any steps against it.

This trend intensified during the recent Bush administration. His Supreme Court appointments both have bad records. Justice Roberts was one of a close-knit group of conservatives who were part of the Reagan administration's efforts to dismantle civil rights and outlaw affirmative action. [9] In 2004, the staff of the US Commission on Civil Rights issued a blistering attack on the Bush administration's record. [10] In 2005, 20 percent of the Civil Rights Division's lawyers were forced out or quit over policies that reduced civil rights prosecutions by 40 percent.

The Obama administration is attempting to re-orient federal agencies toward supporting, rather than opposing, civil rights. But it is an uphill battle. Last year, the Supreme Court with its right-wing majority ruled against the city of New Haven's attempt to insure that promotions in the fire department would include African Americans.

Causes of lower pay and lack of jobs: Systemic or Institutional Reasons

Regardless of the attitudes of individuals, systemic or institutional reasons are probably at least as important as overt discrimination for the vastly higher number of unemployed African American workers. These factors operate independent of the deliberate decisions of the individuals doing the hiring.

• "About half of all jobs are still found through personal contacts of some sort... economists also suggest that network effects may help to account for income inequality between races." [11] Articles in the business press frequently cite the advantages of personal networks both for the jobs seeker and the person doing the hiring, a practice widespread in the IT industry amongst others. [12]

• Geography - jobs have moved from where African Americans live (often in central cities) to suburban and rural areas with few African Americans. The IT industry is a prime example.

• As a result of outsourcing in both corporate and government world, on-job training and promotion paths are disappearing. "'For too many of our people, entry level no longer means entry-level. It means dead end', says Rodney Glenn [of the NYC Transport Workers Union]." [13] African Americans are particularly affected, because they have fewer personal contacts or educational opportunities to provide alternatives.

• Education: Nationally, only two-thirds of all students and one-half of African American, Latinos and Native Americans graduate high school after four years. In New York City less than 10 percent of African American students get a regents diploma (preferred for college admission). [14] Teachers with less than three years experience teach in minority schools at twice the rate they teach in white schools. [15]

• A criminal record is a legal barrier to employment in many professions, and a practical barrier in many more. [16]

• During the 1960s African Americans made gains in the quantity and quality of manufacturing jobs, then concentrated in big industrial centers. Until the early 1990s, African Americans were as likely to have manufacturing jobs as other racial and ethnic groups. [17] The steep absolute decline in manufacturing jobs since the late1990s was accompanied by a geographic shift - as auto plants closed in Detroit and Chicago, new factories, employing far fewer workers, were built in rural counties of the South where few African Americans lived. As a result of these trends, by 2007 African Americans were 15 percent less likely than other workers to have one of the remaining jobs in manufacturing.

• From 1983 to 2006, union representation declined for all groups, but most sharply for Black and Hispanic workers, least so for whites. [18] For white workers, the union members earn 28 percent more than non-union. The union advantage is 29 percent for Black workers, 50 percent for Latinos, and 34 percent for women. [19]

Stimulus and Beyond

In February, 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), more widely known as "the stimulus bill" - not to be confused with the Wall Street bailout (TARP) which was passed under the Bush administration. ARRA has provided some relief from the crisis. It is now reaching its maximum effectiveness, and administration claims that up to 2 million jobs have been created or saved are credible. To what extent has ARRA helped African Americans?

ARRA provided substantial funding to help states pay for and expand Medicaid coverage. African Americans, who are more likely to have low incomes and qualify for Medicaid, probably benefited from this. African Americans also shared in any jobs that were saved or gained in nursing homes and other health care providers. And African Americans, who suffered the greatest job losses, may well have been the greatest beneficiaries of the ARRA's increase and extension of unemployment benefits and COBRA.

ARRA aid to local governments, including school districts, was distributed in part on the basis of need. Cities with large African American populations generally have high poverty, and qualified for significant assistance. This helped reduce layoffs in school systems and some other government departments, preserving jobs and education quality in schools where a large proportion of students and a significant number of teachers are African American.

On the other hand, according to a report by United for a Fair Economy, "Most of the job-creation projects in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and other federal initiatives are investments in infrastructure and transportation, "green" building retrofits, and pass-through funds that help states maintain schools and other important programs. All are worthy, but there is no evidence that the jobs these initiatives create are going to the communities most in need. In some cases, the opposite is true." [20]

What's Ahead?

The most optimistic forecasts call for a slow economic recovery, with unemployment declining slowly, but remaining high for many years. It is also possible - even likely - that there are new economic shocks ahead, which can cause even more job losses. The Administration and Congress are proposing measures that will, preserve some of the benefits of the existing stimulus. These are urgently needed. For example, beginning later in February millions of unemployed workers will lose their unemployment insurance and health coverage if those measures are not extended. State and local governments will budget for even bigger layoffs and service cuts later this year if help is not forthcoming. Even if passed over intransigent Republican resistance, these measures will not substantially dent the unemployment crisis.

The most effective solution would be to extend the existing stimulus programs on a much larger scale and, in addition, provide funding for direct government employment of millions of people, with special provisions for youth. This could replicate, in modern conditions, the WPA and CCC programs of the 1930s, when millions of people were employed in public works construction that we still use today, as well as community based music, art and theater.

More than 60 organizations have come together in the Jobs for America Now Coalition. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, NAACP, National Council of La Raza, and Leadership Conference on Civil Rights are amongst the leading forces. The Coalition has adopted a 5-point plan, which includes strengthening the safety net, relief for state and local governments, investment in infrastructure, direct employment through public service jobs, and job creation tax credits. It is significant that the plan includes provisions to direct maximum resources to communities and individuals who have been hardest-hit by the economic crisis. The total cost of the plan would be about $400 billion the first year, and would generate between 4.6 million and 6 million jobs.

The Jobs for America Now program is the minimum necessary to seriously address the jobs crisis in general, and particularly in the African American community. But it is also important to fight for measures in the design and implementation that direct greatest resources where the need is greatest. This is not automatic.

In its report State of the Dream 2010, the group United for a Fair Economy provides guidelines for stimulus programs. They include [21]:

• Target job creation in high-unemployment communities. One example, HR 4268, the "Put America To Work Act of 2009," would fund one million public jobs for workers who have been jobless for at least 26 weeks and low-income workers who have been jobless at least 30 days and need immediate assistance.

• To ensure that stimulus funds reach working class and disenfranchised communities, equity assessments should be required for all federal spending. Demographic data on race, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography will be required for an equity assessment.

• Recommit to affirmative action policies. Affirmative action has a successful history of making inroads for women, people of color, disabled and lower income Americans. This successful tool must be used to narrow the jobs and income gap that separates our "two Americas."

It is significant that the major labor unions have joined with civil rights organizations and others in the Jobs for America Now Coalition in emphasizing the need to target programs in the hardest-hit areas. It will take a tremendous fight to win.

We should take heart from and learn the lessons of history. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, with the support of most of organized labor and most working people, won significant gains for African Americans. This period also saw economic and political gains for the entire working class, as the political power of the racist, anti-labor Southern ruling class was challenged. Significant numbers of African Americans began to be elected to Congress, laying the basis for the today's Quad Caucus a large bloc of consistently pro-union, pro-worker votes - the Congressional Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, Asian American Caucus, and Progressive Caucus.

The huge movement that elected President Obama is a recent example. During the election campaign, union leaders directly challenged the racism that made some white workers reluctant to vote for a Black candidate. As a result of these efforts, a majority of white union members joined with African Americans, Latinos, youth to achieve a remarkable victory.

The same level of unity, organization and mobilization, as well as the willingness to challenge the racist practices and structures that result in massive job discrimination, are necessary today. The goal must be not only to restore employment to the level before the economic crisis, but for African Americans and all Americans to have the opportunity to be employed at useful, productive jobs with union wages, in full and equal proportion.

Notes

[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation for December, 2009. Figures are rounded.

[2] ibid, Table A-12.

[3] The BLS does not provide the U-6 rate for separate demographic groups. My estimate assumes all groups have the same proportion of invisible unemployed.

[4] Author's estimates based on BLS statistics. The method involves estimating how many would be working if jobs were freely available.

[5] BLS, from Current Population Survey Employment-Population ratio at http://www.bls.gov.

[6] The Ethicist, New York Times Magazine, 5/30/2005. An African American male reports getting more calls when he files resumes under middle name (Raymond) than first name (Malik). This anecdote confirms various studies. See, for example, http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html reporting on a 2003 MIT study. See also http://www.thewashingtonreport.org/?p=65 (August, 2009) which cites a long-time corporate recruiter to the same effect.

[7] Charles Stein, Economic Life, Boston Globe, 7/31/05.

[8] Sally Lehrman, Why Race-Based Data Matters, Institute for Justice and Journalism, Alternet, 10/6/2003, Page 5.

[9] R. Jeffrey Smith et al, Roberts Sought to shift course of civil rights law, Washington Post 7/31/2005 by way of MSNBC.com.

[10] U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Redefining Rights in America - the civil rights record of the George W Bush Administration, 2001-2004, Draft report for the Commissioner's review, September 2004.

[11] Daniel Gross, Economic View - It's Who You Know. Really. NYT August 22, 2004.

[12] For example, see Art Perlo, The Digital Divide and Institutional Racism, Political Affairs, 2001.

[13] Joel Millman, Promotion Track fades for those starting at Bottom, Wall Street Journal, 6/6/2005.

[14] Bob Herbert, New York Times, 7/21/2005.

[15] Urban League, State of Black America 2005.

[16] According to a New York Times editorial (6/6/2005), the TSA interpreted Patriot Act to make it almost impossible for ex-felons to become long-haul truckers. "Law-abiding ex-offenders will be barred from one of the few professions that have historically been open to them." (my emphasis). Ex-prisoners are proscribed from many service jobs as well as many construction jobs. A criminal record is associated with a 50 percent reduction in employment opportunities for whites, and a 64 percent reduction for Blacks, for entry level jobs requiring HS education. (Devah Pager, The Mark of a criminal record, University of Wisconsin Madison, June 2002.)

[17] http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/unions_aa_2008_02.pdf. The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Manufacturing, 1979-2007 by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

[18] www.cepr.net Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Manufacturing, 1979-2006 March, 2007.

[19] Figures for 2009. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, table 2. http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/union2.toc.htm.

[20] United for a Fair Economy, State of the Dream 2010: Jobless and foreclosed in communities of color.

[21] Excerpted from State of the Dream 2010, op. cit.

(Photo by AFL-CIO, Flickr, cc by 2.0)

Book Review: Two Must-read Biographies

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:02:00 +0000

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
by Carole Boyce Davies
Duke university Press, 2008

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
by Robin D.G. Kelley
The Free Press, 2009

Celebrations of Black History Month should not focus on the achievements of individuals or the status of personalities. Sometimes highlighting a speech by Dr. King or the wealth of Madam C. J. Walker or the discoveries of George Washington Carver every February replace a serious or comprehensive study of the whole contribution of the African American people to the culture and beauty of this country as well as to the general advance of democracy here over the past 230 years.

New biographies of two key 20th century African Americans, Claudia Jones and Thelonious Monk, however, put special focus on their individual genius, the social context of their lives and the personal details that make them more than stock characters in an historical drama. In the case of these books, studies of individual lives help tell a broader story.

Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk, published in 2009 after several years in the making, may prove to be the definitive work on this giant of jazz so much ignored by scholars. Its scope is deep and broad, elucidating the smallest details of Monk's life, background, development, politics, and creative genius. Both the use of Monk's private recordings and the interviews with family members, professional contemporaries, recording industry moguls, among others add sparkling details to the rigorous academic research that typifies Kelley's scholarly works, which include Freedom Dreams, Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!, Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970, Race Rebels and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.

Kelley rightly complicates ideas about individual genius usually attributed to major creative figures. The community in which Monk grew as a musician and intellect as well as the hard work that motivated his study of many forms of music are the catalysts in which his creative powers were concocted, Kelley shows. The book "is an intimate story of about the folks who shaped him," Kelley writes in his prelude. Of special note is Kelley's refusal to romanticize Monk's suffering from bipolar disorder, typically regarded as a stimulant for artistic activity, as well as his struggle with alcoholism, and identifies Monk's mental health as a major struggle for him and his family and the direct cause of the tragedy of his life.

Kelley also documents Monk's contributions to struggles for equality and freedom. Monk never explicitly identified with a party or a movement as such, but he did play at benefit concerts for Paul Robeson in the 1950s and for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s. For example, when CORE organized "jazz sit-ins" in support of the sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, Monk was there. He lent his talents to support community centers and the Negro American Labor Council. Throughout the work, Kelley carefully contextualizes Monk's life in the political and social struggles of the day. Indeed, those struggles and his conscious participation in them lend some of the most important meanings to his music.

As the subtitle of the work suggests, Monk was an American original, an artist who might be canonized along side of "Bach and Beethoven" but who at heart "was essentially a rebel." Kelley sums up the man's life beautifully with these words: "He demanded originality in others and embodied it in everything he did - in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions."

Another American original was Claudia Jones. A product of the African diaspora via the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Trinidad), Jones was for her times one of a kind, concludes Carole Boyce Davies in her recent biography. What seems to shock Boyce Davies above all is that very little scholarship of Jones life or political philosophy has been published, considering the fact that Jones stands as quite possibly the most important Black Leftist woman political thinker in the 20th century in the US and British contexts. Perhaps it was those very qualities that for so long have aided her marginalization.

Above all, Boyce Davies should be commended for her special work in recovering the biographical details of Jones' life, which had been lost to the Cold War and the McCarthyite attempts to erase the life of this Black radical woman from our collective memory. Boyce Davies, author of such works as Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject and editor of the anthology Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, revives both Jones' activist spirit as well as her sharp political mind.

Of particular importance is the fact that Jones may have been the first woman of color in the US context to theorize the "triple oppression" of working-class women of color, producing a concept of the intersection of race, class and gender at least two decades before it became an essential component of feminist theory and the thinking of the working-class oriented women's movement. It was through Jones' efforts as a leader in the Young Communist League and the Communist Party USA that her analysis - developed within the collectivist approaches of the party - became essential components of the Party's strategy and thinking around the middle of the 20th century, especially with powerful essays published by this magazine titled "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women" (1949) and "For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace" (1951), for example.

In her journalism, as a contributing editor of the Party's Daily Worker and as a founder of the London-based West Indian Gazette, Jones called attention to African American women historical figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who received little attention at the time in scholarly circles and the mainstream media. Jones helped build the peace movement in the early stages of the Cold War. Jones also led the way in developing analysis of US and British imperialism in the Caribbean.

Boyce Davies also details the political repression (along with the law enforcement incompetence) leveled against her in the depths of the McCarthyite period. After nearly a year of imprisonment in a federal prison that took a serious physical toll on her health, Jones was deported to Britain. But the story doesn't end there. Boyce Davies' account details her ongoing local and international activism.

One of the most wonderful parts of this book is its inclusion of dozens of images of document, newspapers, and photographs that really bring the story to life. Included are photos of Jones with prominent figures like Paul Robeson, Dr. King, Norman Manley, Cheddi Jagan and Jomo Kenyatta. Boyce Davies identifies Jones as a political and intellectual forerunner of giants like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, but I think Jones' legacy belongs to all of us - those white and Black and Brown working-class men and women, straight and gay and transgender, young and old, urban and rural who fight for the unity and power of our class and communities, who worked in 2008 for the election of Barack Obama, who are fighting for jobs and economic recovery, are demanding the most expansive health care system possible, the restoration of the rights of working people, a permanent break from endless war and the salvation of our planet from the ravages of climate change.

Boyce Davies uses the fact that Jones was buried in London's Highgate Cemetery on the left side of Karl Marx as a kind of metaphor. By challenging the thinking of many of the Marxist-Leninists of her time who insisted on a narrow view of industrial class politics in favor of a broader politics of alliances beyond those boundaries, Jones sought a politics that addressed the special needs of the oppressed and the exploited. For Jones this was a moral and a strategic question; success in building the broadest alliances of democratic and class forces could ensure a successful, fundamental social change. For Boyce Davies it is this special development of Marxist theory that puts Jones to the left of Marx and makes her burial plot appropriate. Whether this is "leftism" or simply common sense, this reviewer can't say. But this is an important book that deserves careful study and a place on your shelf.

During this Black History Month, these two books on the lives of Thelonious Monk and Claudia Jones are must reads.