bloodygranuaile

I have been busy as all get-out so it took me way longer than I’d have liked to finish my April nonfiction commitment, Eric Jay Dolan’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.

This book, as you can probably guess from the title, covers the fur trade on the North American continent, from the first European fur trappers (mainly the French) to start kicking around Canada as early as the 1500s, up through the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, once the near-extinction of the buffalo managed to shock even jingoistic American capitalist types into noticing what destruction they had wrought. Dolin brings his characteristic naturalist’s eye to this story, focusing on the ecological effects of the fur trade nearly as much as the political and cultural ones, and giving the fur animals themselves their due–beavers, buffalo, fur seals, and sea otters are nearly as well-developed characters here as the various humans.

Fur trading was often the “tip of the spear” for European colonization in North America, which lacked the huge and immediately findable gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish set up shop early in the 1500s. The history of the fur trade in what would become Canada, the U.S., and the northern parts of the Mexican territory is therefore basically synonymous with the history of European colonization of those parts, and many of the events recounted here were familiar to me from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, including the complex trade relationships with Indian tribes, and the Russian colonization of Alaska (they did it to obtain fur seals after they’d basically wiped out sable in Siberia).

The story is tragic on basically every level: the fur trade massively upset the ecological balance that Indian nations who hunted fur-bearing animals had lived in pre-colonization, leading to devastation of the habitats and populations of the animals in question; it rendered the Indians dependent on European trade goods and simultaneously vulnerable to European-introduced diseases, gun violence, and alcohol abuse, which facilitated the seizure of their land; it led to the growth of big monopolistic fur companies that mistreated their workers and put them into debt peonage. Lots of human beings died in addition to the animals being hunted. Also, I’ve been watching Blue Planet II when I need some downtime, and have you seen sea otters? They’re so cute! How could you kill so many of these lil guys?

https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/globalassets/mba/images/animals/marine-mammals/sea-otter-327-surrogate-mother-toola-rw05-082.jpg?width=966&height=644&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=60

That said, it’s still quite a fascinating set of stories, and I certainly feel much more educated about stuff I didn’t really know much about before, like the settling of the Southwest and California. Someday I need to read a proper history of California.

The February entry in my Year of Reading Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. In November I had gone to a talk by the author about this same subject, and it was a lot of fun, even if I was the youngest person in the audience.

My thoughts on this book are a little scattered and I can’t tell if it’s because the content, while a lot of fun, actually is a little bit disjointed, or if it just seems that way to me because I read it in two- and three-page spurts at random times and kept getting interrupted, because I had the February from Hell, and somehow it took me upwards of ten days to read this even though it’s not very long and I’m sure if I had read it, like, by the lake in the summer, it’d have taken me one day, max. But anyway, it’s largely exactly what it says on the tin, which is a bunch of information about privateering in the American Revolution, and that is a very fun subject that is not usually talked about much, in my experience of people talking about the American Revolution, which does happen quite a bit when you spend your entire adult life in the immediate environs of Boston.

Some of the moral framing that is used in the marketing for this book annoys me, because it’ll be like “Some people think that privateers are basically pirates or war profiteers, but they were actually instrumental in winning the American Revolution,” even though the two parts of that sentence don’t contradict each other. The moral assumptions about piracy, war profiteering, and the American Revolution contradict each other, so the sentence only makes sense if you read it as “Some people think that privateers are [bad] but they are actually [good]” and this type of talk where people use words as if their only meaning is their moral connotation and their actual denotative meaning simply doesn’t exist drives me batty in the extreme. Fortunately, the moral assumptions made in this book only descend to this level of illiterate idiocy in the marketing; the rest of the book takes a pretty standard level of sympathy for the American Revolution and its ideals, as one would expect from an American author writing for an American audience, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not to the point of forgetting what words mean. My own understanding of the morals of the American Revolution is a bit more complicated than your standard American propaganda but only when talking about the American side; the few things in this world that can make me feel patriotism include sentences like “This annoyed the English considerably.”

Anyway. Privateering! The first of the rebelling colonies to legalize privateering and start issuing letters of marque was my own dear Massachusetts, a state full of little coastal trading ports and inhabited by very intense people. Salem, being a much more economically important place then than it is now, features fairly heavily; we sent out a lot of privateers. Eventually the fledgling US started sending out privateers as a country in addition to the ones being sent out under state flags; this was largely to supplement the just-founded US Navy, which was having a bad time getting off the ground. The new American privateers were pretty successful, wreaking havoc on British shipping and bringing badly needed commodities into the colonies, and making a pretty profit at the same time. The practice has its naysayers but mostly people thought this was a fantastic way to stick it to the English and men signed up for them in droves.

Disposing of the ships after they were captured added a whole other level of politicking, with Americans conspiring with the French and other supposedly neutral nations to turn prizes into cash at foreign ports, in defiance of various treaties with England. The English were big mad about it, and eventually started trying to do a bit of privateering back, although they never caught up to the Americans.

There is also a chapter on what happened to privateersmen when they got captured, which is pretty sobering. Some of them got sent to regular jails on land in England, which wasn’t fun but seems to have been humane enough by the standards of the time. Others got stuck on prison ships, including the notorious Jersey, a pestilential, overcrowded hulk in the Long Island Sound where the only way to get off the packed ship for even a little bit was to go bury corpses on the nearby beach.

Overall, I liked this book! I think! I’m glad I read it but I wish I’d gotten to read it… better? I was not at the top of my reading game lately and I wish I had been able to read it in big relaxed chunks on Derby Wharf, but alas, sometimes February happens. We’ll see how March’s reading fares in comparison.

A friend of mine has been running an online weekly history class since early in the pandemic, when I absolutely did not have the time to do any such thing. But I have much more time now, so I joined the most recent iteration of it when they wrapped up their last “unit” on 19th century Asian empires (which I regret missing) and turned instead to working their way through the Penguin History of the United States, beginning with Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America.

We did one chapter a week for 20 weeks, which means that I’ve already discussed a lot of my thoughts on this book, at least on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m trying to come up with more holistic thoughts for the last class. Here are a few as such:

The book does a very good job of not centering the British as the, like, main characters of what would later become the United States. The book also doesn’t limit itself to only discussing what would later become the United States, as the whole of both American continents were subjected to various overlapping imperial colonization projects that would only much, much later firm up to today’s national and state borders. So we got to learn a lot more about the Spanish in North America, the French, the English outside of the “thirteen colonies” that would later rebel, the Dutch, and even an interesting segment near the end on Russian Alaska, which I had not previously known anything about. The book also doesn’t shy away from talking about just how brutal colonization was and how delusional and self-serving these imperial “civilizing” missions were, nor does it reduce the native population to one-dimensional, helpless innocents.

The book’s discussion of native nations and their political, cultural, and military developments–both before and after European contact–is a real strength here, at least compared to most US history textbooks, and really makes me want to read more Native American history. Among non-native Americans, even among ones who intend to be pro-native rights and stuff, there is a tendency to see “Native Americans” as one group, which was uniformly one way from time immemorial until 1492 and then a second way (sad and poor) from 1492 onward. The main contribution towards Awareness that not all native nations are the same in even minimally mainstream discourse in the past 15 years or so has been telling people not to use the term “spirit animal,” partly due to concerns about cultural appropriation but also partly because Twitter discourse warriors are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella term. American Colonies instead talks a lot about the various political maneuverings of different native nations and the alliances and enmities thereof, the differences in the ways they resisted, traded with, and sometimes allied with the Spanish, French, and British empires, and the ways they exploited intra-European enmities just as the European empires exploited various intra-Native American tensions. I’m not saying this book is predominantly or even largely about Native American history or viewpoints, but it makes an effort to not reduce them to picturesque little backdrops to the drama of grand European conquest, and as such it made me think about how little I really know about Native American civilizations and how unconscionable that is given that I have lived here my entire life.

This book also doesn’t pussyfoot around the almost total centrality of profit to the European colonial projects. While many of the people involved in these projects were motivated, in whole or in part, by genuine beliefs in other things–mainly religion, science, and nationalism–these colonies were often largely and sometimes wholly commercial projects. Many of the initial colonies were settled by corporations before coming under control of the associated European crown, and the most common motivation for settlers to rebel against the orders of their home countries was when the governments back in Europe tried to mess with their ability to make money. Murder, theft, enslavement, abduction, lying, cheating, smuggling, and every vice or crime you could possibly think of was transformed into an inalienable right on the part of colonizers to set themselves up with land and money. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric otherwise (which was also there from the beginning), we are all living with this legacy of hypercommercial violence to this day, as anyone who’s looked at the news lately can see.

For Black History Month, the politics book club decided to read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I had read this back in college as part of a survey course of early American literature, and while “enjoyed” seems maybe not quite the right word for the experience of reading a slavery narrative, I did think it was very good and–well, frankly, I did enjoy reading it, because it was a tense and dramatic story, and things that make good reading are different from things that I approve of.

Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.

Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.

After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.

Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.

Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.

Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.

After some lobbying I persuaded the politics book club to read Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. This is a sort of case study in the labor and other organizing of Black auto workers in Detroit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, focusing mostly on the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the spinoff RUMs at other plants, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, although plenty of other orgs come into and out of the picture at different times.

This is a really nuts-and-bolts study of organizing and many of the concepts explored and debates had by the people involved will be familiar to anyone who has done socialist or labor organizing–the uses and limitations of the media, of art, of the court system, of electoral politics, of student organizing. What does it mean to believe in revolution? How much of following its own stated rules will the system “allow,” and when and how will it play dirty in the face of its own contradictions? What is the most effective way to talk to people, and what are the limitations on the effectiveness of talking, anyway? I would not go so far as to say these questions are definitively solved, but it’s helpful to look at how they played out in concrete ways in the past.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying does not really cohere into a single narrative with main characters and all that; it’s the history of a time and place in organizing, not of a single person or even group of people. This occasionally made it hard for me to remember who was being talked about. On the chapter level it tended to be a little easier, as there were usually just a handful of key organizers doing any one project, such as taking over the student newspaper at Wayne State University and turning it into a radical community paper. There is also one extremely interesting chapter that does focus on just one guy–“Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder’s Court.” This is an excellent look at how much of a ruckus you can cause in the legal system merely by taking the things it says about itself seriously, although it also looks at the limitations of the time and attention it takes to do so–and the ways in which the people who didn’t want Ravitz to take the Bill of Rights seriously started to counter-organize.

Other very useful chapters for current-day organizers include the one whose chapter title I am not going to repeat but which is about automation (real and fake) and work speed-ups, and “Finally Got the News,” about the one good feature film they made before everyone got too excited about films and came up with a thousand half-baked ideas they were never able to follow up on.

Of particular interest to me were the retrospectives from the second edition added to the end of the main text–at “thirty years later,” they are now themselves nearly 20 years old, and it is sobering to read what has and hasn’t (mostly hasn’t) changed since then. They are also interesting because they stick with one person’s perspective longer than is usually the case in the body of the book, and there’s an interesting contrast of perspectives.

Highly recommended for organizers of all stripes, just don’t expect to zip through it in one sitting. This book is for studying a chapter at a time.

According to my records I had already read Thomas M. Truxes’ Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, but I absolutely do not have any memory of reading the entire thing, and I do have what might be false memories of reading only selected chapters as assigned in my Pirates and Smuggling in the Atlantic class, back in 2009 or whenever the hell I was in college (help, I’m old). My professor for that class, Wim Klooster, is cited in the acknowledgements for this book, which is perhaps why all of us had to go out and buy it. That sounds cynical but is not actually a complaint; that was one of my favorite classes and I got to write a really fun paper on rum-running for it.

Anyway. Defying Empire is definitely an academic rather than a journalistic read and as such feels a little drier than a book about smuggling and defying empire (and water, heh heh, sorry I’ll see myself out) ought to be. On the other hand, the subject matter, while classed under the sexy term “smuggling,” is largely just a bunch of rich merchants falsifying paperwork, and “falsifying paperwork” can only carry so much drama on its own. There are however also a lot of ship captures and that ought to be Fun And Exciting; alas, one must sub in one’s own pre-existing mental footage of eighteenth-century boat chases since the captures themselves are heavy on “who was captured and what they had in the hold at the time” and light on the details of the battles. Nevertheless, while it doesn’t make much of an adventure novel, if you are interested in How Colonialism Works it offers some interesting light into the contradictions of mercantilist economics.

All that said, I did find the subject matter here very interesting! It specifically focuses on the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, and the various ways in which merchants in New York and surrounding ports managed to keep regular business going, directly or indirectly, with the French, with whom they could get pretty good prices, instead of patriotically allowing themselves to get fucked over by only trading with the British, who necessarily needed the Crown to be the ones to make the profit off the trades and not the merchants. Also, the people wanted sugar, dammit. It’s not really the kind of story that has good guys but it was sort of satisfying seeing the Crown, having set up all these guys as British citizens for the purpose of doing trading, be all “no, not like that” when they insisted upon exercising their liberties as British citizens to do trading. Like all American history it makes me wonder what the world would look like if the British and French empires had ground each other down to attrition and the “Indians” had reconquered North America, but alas, I don’t think that was ever going to happen.

There is a sort of plotline, or at least recurring figures, surrounding a whiny failed wine merchant who decides to turn informer for the Crown about all these rich guys breaking the trade laws, and has a very bad time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic to inform to who will take him seriously. He is almost killed in a riot instigated by the rich guys he’s accusing and spends quite a while in jail, at the center of a whirl of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, while Crown forces struggle to install some people into the New York administration who will crack down on trading with the enemy. It really highlights how small and incestuous the old New York power elite was, but eventually two merchants are publicly tried for smuggling, where their main defense is that they are being unfairly singled out for punishment because, like, everyone is doing it, man.

Overall I did find this a really intriguing and informative look into a very specific aspect of pre-Revolutionary America, and the workings and contradictions of the British empire at this time. I’m definitely keeping the book around as a future writing resource in case I ever get back to writing silly piratey historical fiction, because it has a lot of really solid information about smuggling practices and popular semi-legal trading ports.

I can’t remember what sale I picked it up at but for some-odd years now I’ve been in possession of a copy of something called The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I had hesitated to actually read it for two reasons: one is that it is like 700 pages long, and I only have so many of those in me per year. The other is that I was not sure if it would turn out to be a total crank book, and I wasn’t confident I was familiar enough with the subject to tell. The author is David Talbot, the guy who founded Salon, who at least seems to be a real person in journalism, although certainly more than enough otherwise respectable writers turn out to be cranks about something. This book tells you right on the back cover where it’s going: It’s going to give you a biography of Allen Dulles, it’s going to give you a bunch of dirt on the CIA, and then it’s going to try to convince you that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I was not originally going to suggest this for book club. But when we had to skip July and take an extra-long time between book clubs, I somewhat jokingly put this forth for consideration, mainly because it was the longest book on my history-and-politics shelf. But apparently the rest of the book club thought it sounded fun and spicy, so here we are!

First of all, let it be known that David Talbot really, really hates his subject here. There is no pretense of academic neutrality; the book is just like “This is Allen Dulles, he sucks and I hate him and he ought to have been tried for treason before WWII was even over, and the world is a worse place because he was in it, and he was a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty person and have I mentioned, fuck this guy.” I found this extremely funny, which was for sure a badly needed bit of levity because David Talbot is not wrong; Allen Dulles sucked enormously and so did all the ex- (for varying degrees of “ex”) Nazis and robber barons and Cold Warriors he surrounded himself with.

The book does not dwell for long on Dulles’ early life, just enough to set the scene and check in with his siblings a little about what growing up with him was life. The story really kicks off during World War II, when Dulles, a corporate lawyer at a firm that did lots of business with Reich-affiliated German clients until it got too embarrassing, is hired into the OSS, basically the precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, operating out of an office in the theoretically neutral but very strategically placed Swiss city of Bern, Dulles promptly begins giving the runaround to FDR’s very clearly stated policy of extracting total surrender from the Nazis. Dulles, his rotten heartstrings pulled on by the sad thought of rich guys being treated like criminals just because they did horrific crimes, starts cutting deals with various Nazis to try to broker a surrender of just Hitler that leaves something of the Reich intact for these ghouls to continue ruling. When that doesn’t quite work, he pivots to operating “ratlines,” running Nazi war criminals to safety to keep them out of the dock at Nuremberg and set them up as respectable citizens in other countries, or in some cases, back in Germany.

The most egregious of these schemes was his protection of Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the Eastern front, who Dulles wanted to keep around to keep spying on the Russians. It seems clear that Dulles–like a truly unconscionable number of rich people–always thought the Bolshies were the real enemy, with the West’s alliance with them against fascism merely an unfortunate minor detour to clean up a moment of embarrassing excess on the part of the otherwise perfectly fine Nazi Party. Dulles, and the other right-wing Cold Warriors, kept that attitude throughout his entire life, eagerly collaborating with literally anybody, no matter how awful–Nazis, the Mafia, various mercenaries, autocrats and theocrats and other kinds of -crats and -garchs and -ocracies–in his total war against “world Communism,” here defined as anyone who thought regular working people maybe ought to have some kind of support or dignity in life, or that capitalism could stand to maybe have a single regulation put on it ever, or that brown people in the Third World actually maybe did have a reason to think being crushed under the violent bootheels of oil companies or United Fruit kind of sucked. A lot of the language Dulles and company used about “Communism” sounds suspiciously like the things we all actually learned about fascism the hard way, and it seems clear to me that guys like Dulles not just thought that Communism was worse than fascism, they psychologically needed Communism to be worse than fascism in every single particular and were not about to let piddly stuff like “the New Deal was an entirely different thing than the Soviet Union actually” stop them.

Anyway, the book walks us through the creation of the CIA under Truman (who initially envisioned it as just an intel-gathering agency and later regretted having created it at all), the consolidation of the Dulles’ brothers’ power under Eisenhower, and the tumultuous relationship between the national security services and the Kennedy administration. The stuff here that I did already know some things about, such as the coups in Iran and Guatemala, track with my prior knowledge and seem very well documented and credible. The things I didn’t already know about, like the MKULTRA program, also seem well documented, and I know there’s lots more information about these things available now than there was when I was a very young person being told they were just conspiracy theories. The setup here doesn’t try to hide itself, really: look at all these other things the CIA tried to have dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades, which turned out to be real; isn’t it likely the JFK assassination is the same?

And I will say, I am not sure I am entirely convinced that the CIA definitely killed JFK, but I for sure would put it in the “not nearly as far-fetched as it ought to be” bucket. I have not made much of a study of the JFK assassination, but from the cheap seats it kind of looks like every version of the story is kind of far-fetched and shady, which is maybe to be expected for something that unlikely.

The thing that really bothered me, though, about reading about the Kennedy administration’s, ah, difficulties in wrangling its various three-letter-agencies into doing what Kennedy wanted instead of doing whatever they wanted (mostly murdering anybody they deemed to be left of Eisenhower anywhere in the world), is what it might mean for the rest of us who would like to someday get the US off the path of being a vicious imperialist bully on the world stage. We’ve since elected presidents who got us out of individual wars–I think Nixon was the last Republican to maneuver us out of one, after deliberately tanking Johnson’s ability to do so, even though I think Gerald Ford was president by the time the war was declared officially over–but it looks like Kennedy was the last guy to be like “We should change our entire approach to foreign policy and stop being imperialist douchebags” and he simply could. not. get. the American imperial apparatus to follow his damn orders. Whether they actually killed him, or just kind of sat back and slow-walked doing presidential security because hey, this guy doesn’t respect the national security apparatus, or had nothing to do with the murder and were actually just planning to keep doing regular insubordination and sandbagging until the clock ran out, there are real serious questions the left needs to wrestle with about how to engage with a position like the imperial presidency, where the president has basically unlimited power to do whatever he wants as long as whatever he wants is violent imperial bullshit, but risks having the violence machine turn on him if he tries to rein it in. This was not fixed by electing Kennedy president and it wouldn’t have been fixed by electing Bernie Sanders president and it won’t be fixed if we elect the reincarnation of Eugene Debs president either.

Anyway, I think the book was good–depressing, but good. It’s always good to know more about the full depth and breadth of evil that America has committed in the world, if only for the sake of not being a gormless idiot. Figuring out what can actually be done about it, though, is a much more difficult task.

Given the bookmark it would appear that it was at Brattleboro Books some years ago that I picked up a copy of Bruce Chadwick’s I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing that Shocked a New Nation. I think I bought it because honestly, how can you pass up a book titled “I Am Murdered,” especially when it’s just a few dollars? Also I enjoy a good historical crime book.

This book did not quite follow the plot twists and turns I’ve apparently come to expect even from nonfiction–the historical events that get picked to be turned into this type of popular history book are apparently the more novelesque ones–in that the ‘shocking twists’ involved seemed mostly to be every conceivable party except the defense lawyers bungling an open-and-shut case. Nothing got pulled out of the bag at the last minute; it just bungled, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the surprising verdict was anything other than a colossal cock-up on the part of numerous parties, from the complacently over-respected medical doctors to the fucked-up laws of Virginia, which, in a twist of irony that mostly just makes me as a reader make a sort of “ugh” face, the murder victim in question was largely responsible for having written.

The real short version here is that George Wythe, a highly respected judge and the U.S.’s first law professor, was poisoned by his gambling addict grandson, along with two other members of his household–Michael Brown, a free Black teenager who was studying with him and who died a week after being poisoned, and Lydia Broadnax, the cook, a formerly enslaved free Black woman who survived the poisoning, and who witnessed the grandson slip something into the coffee but whose testimony was inadmissible in court due to her race. As a narrative, it’s a little thin.

The book, while not very long, is therefore filled out with a bunch of historical context, covering Judge Wythe’s entire biography, a careful accounting of his prodigious social network, and the decline of Williamsburg and the rise of Richmond as Virginia’s capital cities before and after the Revolutionary War. I thought the history of these two cities over a few decades was really the most interesting part of the book, with the life and death of George Wythe providing an interesting skeleton to build such an account around. We learn about boomtown Richmond’s out-of-control gambling culture, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s attempt to update its laws from English law to a new American body of law, the trials and tribulations of the College of William and Mary, and an interesting foray into the state of the medical field and medical training in the early 1800s. It’s a little all over the place–and there’s a distinctly moderate political sensibility to the whole thing, resulting in a few side-eyes on my part–but overall it’s an intriguing look into a dramatic news story at a very particular time and place.

Last Christmas I picked up a copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred at the Strand, because everything I’ve ever read by Butler has been absolutely steller, and then every time since then I’ve looked at my shelf to decide what to read I’ve decided to pick up something that seemed less depressing. I finally got past that a few days ago because it is February so a) good depressing reading time of year and also b) it’s Black History Month but I wasn’t in the mood for nonfiction quite yet.

Kindred tells the story of Dana, a modern young Black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, because that was basically present-day when this book was first published in 1979. On her 26th birthday, Dana gets unceremoniously yoinked back to the 1810’s to save the life of a redheaded young white boy named Rufus, the son of a plantation owner in Maryland. Rufus, it turns out, is one of Dana’s ancestors a few generations back, and so apparently it is Dana’s cosmic responsibility to bail his accident-prone ass out of near-death situations to ensure he survives long enough to father her however-many-times-great-grandmother Hagar. In what is a short span of time on the 1970s end but over the course of about 20 years on the 1800s end, Dana makes six trips back in time to save Rufus’ life, as he grows from a bratty but more or less innocent child into a complicated, vicious douchebag of a propertied antebellum Southern man. Dana does what she can to complicate his understanding of the world but he’s still the son of a slaveowner who will grow up to be a slaveowner himself, and he’s nowhere near heroic enough to transcend his upbringing. Dana manages to talk him into a couple things that are progressive-for-the-time, like acknowledging his children and allowing Dana to teach some of the enslaved children to read, but every advance is a long hard slog and Dana has to fight Rufus and his shitty parents about everything.

The trips vary in length; the first trip she’s barely there for a few minutes; some of the others last months. On one of them her white husband, Kevin, gets carried along for the ride; he gets left behind when she goes back to the ‘70s, and she has to find him again the next time she’s pulled back, a week later on one end and five years later on the other. On these visits to the past Dana witnesses and endures all the horrors of slavery; she is reasonably privileged by being enslaved standards in that she “gets” to be a house slave instead of a field slave (minus one memorable episode where she gets sent into the fields as a punishment); she still endures various beatings and assaults and getting shot at and a dizzying array of indignities large and small. The novel also provides a fascinating psychological portrayal of learning to navigate–and, in the process, acclimatize to, a process that Dana is self-aware about–the degradation of enslavement.

The book is not just “torture porn,” though. The real horrors here, which Butler portrays thoughtfully and deftly, are the warped relationships and manipulations that characterize the internal politics of the plantation–the use and abuse of child slaves to keep their parents in line, the ways the adults do and don’t submit to abasement to try to “manage up” their capricious masters, even the tragic warping and destruction of whatever capacity for human decency the white masters might have been born with. Life on the Weylin plantation isn’t just straightforwardly horrific; it is complicatedly horrific, intensely dysfunctional even for the people who are on top of the heap–the Weylins are some of the most miserable bastards you’ll ever meet, with absolutely no coping mechanisms for their miserable bastardness other than inflicting even greater misery on everyone around them. Dana is constantly in danger; while she gets pulled into the past when Rufus’ life is in danger, she only goes home when her own life is–and she goes home six times, too.

A lot of critical literature has been written about Butler’s writing in the last few decades, and it’s been long enough since I engaged with any sort of literary criticism that I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything intelligent to say compared to the people who are still practiced in thinking deeply and critically about literature. But I will say that this book–and everything else by her that I’ve read–is a masterpiece and I recommend it highly.

The politics book club decided to read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and, after a short bout of being like “But I’m in the middle of reading one of his other books” and “But that’s one of the Ten Books Every White Person In the US Is Reading Right Now,” I’m glad they did. Kendi is a truly excellent writer in a way that few people with Ph.D.s are, and so despite being about a lot of extremely distressing material, a lot of it was actually quite a joy to read, and I ended up spending a lot of time examining the writing to see if I could learn a thing or two about that in addition to learning things about racism.

Much of the book is framed around Kendi’s personal journey through adopting a variety of theories and hot takes about race in varying levels of half-bakedness, beginning with a high school speech competition in which he gave one of those “you’re letting down Martin Luther King Jr.” harangues that James Forman Jr. skewers in Locking Up Our Own (predictably, he won an award for this entry) and going through a variety of self-deprecating learning experiences until, after publishing a weighty tome on the history of racist ideas, he founds a policy research center, on the suspiciously left-wing idea that the secret to defeating racism is not focus on ideas in isolation, but to change the policies that these ideas were created to naturalize and provide justification for. I can’t tell to what degree this “history of my own wrongness” framing is intended to actually widen the audience for the book beyond white people and how much it is just intended to make it less threatening to white people by pretending not to be aimed at them--I can only speculate based on how cynical I’m feeling--but it does provide us with an entertainingly impressionable central character to follow as we explore every take anyone in the US has ever had on race, from the Nation of Islam’s origin story of white people (i.e. we were bred on an island by a mad scientist to be terrible) to the assimilationist logic behind the bussing policies of the ‘70s. (I admit I wasn’t expecting the moment’s foremost scholar on racism in America to take the “bussing was stupid, actually” line, but his argument checks out). Chapters in the second half of the book focus on the intersections between racism and other major categories of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, immigration status, and class. The class chapter does not shy away from calling out capitalism explicitly as the historically and intrinsically racist system it is, including a couple of polite but firm digs at Elizabeth Warren’s well-meaning but ahistorical “capitalist to her bones” comment. (There are also quite a number of much less polite digs at assorted stupid things Dinesh D’Souza has said; I don’t know why Dr. Kendi specifically singles out D’Souza so much but it is extremely satisfying, because D’Souza is a fucking idiot.)

Kendi is very big on providing clear, concrete definitions of terms and then sticking with them, which is an enormously important writing practice and something that nearly everyone should do more of. Some of these are extremely funny, such as when he defines and contextualizes the term “microaggression” and then goes on to explain why he doesn’t use it anymore (short version: it got popular and then all the meaning got beaten out of it). Others are just, like, very no-nonsense! I approve greatly and I hope that once Kendi is done writing how-tos on having better opinions for every conceivable market segment (I’m not sure where he can go from smol babby but I’m sure the publishing companies will figure it out) he writes a book of writing advice.

Plotwise--to the degree that nonfiction books have plots--the climax of the book is Kendi’s battle with stage 4 colon cancer, which gave him only a 12% chance of survival. As you can probably tell by the fact that he was hired at BU this year, he did, in fact, survive. This allows him to set up a somewhat cheesy but surprisingly workable metaphor for racism in America, where it has metastasized throughout our entire society, is making us horrendously sick, and is probably going to kill the country stone dead any day now--but there is still a fighting chance, even if it is hard and unpleasant and the odds are quite bad. In this scenario, developing antiracist ideas is analogous to the exercise and eating healthy portion of the recovery regimen, in that it is extremely important in order for the heavy medical intervention stuff to be able to work and not leave you completely fucked up, but the idea that you’re going to diet and exercise the cancer away without the rest of it is delusional hippie shit.

Anyway, the book is very good and deserves a more thoughtful review than I can muster at the moment, but I finished it more than a week ago and have been slowly forgetting things as I put off writing this by taking a nap every time I have a spare minute instead. So I’m going to wrap up my rambling now and go take another one.

Somehow over the last couple weeks I got myself into reading the Oxford World Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings. It started when I decided that I had to read “Agrarian Justice” for the same stupid DSA presentation that I made myself read four other books for. “Agrarian Justice” is only 40 pages, out of a nearly 500-page book, so I could have left it there. But then I went back to the beginning to read “Common Sense,” and then I felt like I had already spent enough time reading that I should read the whole book so I could count it as A Book for my Goodreads. So then I had to read all 500 pages, at which point, it promptly began to feel like a chore instead of a fun thing. I’ve also now read like six political nonfiction books in a row and I really should have read something fun instead because now I’m looking at having less than four weeks to also read the 500-page Naomi Klein book on climate change that I suggested and I feel like I’m going to cry. HELP I NEED A BREAK. I’m at MurderBooze and I can’t make myself write and I can’t make myself do anything and I still managed to make myself finish this book and I don’t even feel good about it even though it’s the only thing on my enormous to-do list I have done all weekend. I didn’t even make breakfast this morning like I signed up to do.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a book review and not a chronicle of my current emotional breakdown, so here goes.

::stares at wall::

Honestly, as far as 18th-century political treatises go, most of it’s quite readable. There’s a lot of stuff about specific tax policies and naval resources and whatnot where the specifics are quite dated, and I skipped over most of the tables of proposed revenues and expenditures that he puts forth because it’s more than 200 years later and I do not care, but there are a lot of jokes at the expense of conservatives at the time that are still mildly amusing. “Common Sense” is still pretty stirring and contains a lot more in the way of actual arguments put forth than anything that’s ever had the phrase “common sense” appended to it in the intervening 250-odd years; either Paine is a very singular writer or the phrase had not yet acquired the meaning of “I adamantly refuse to put forth an argument for my beliefs” that it currently has. One interesting argument that Paine puts forth in that one is that the 13 colonies together constituted a country that was, like, the proper size to have a revolution, because if it were much larger it would be ungovernably large and it would be basically too hard for it to make functional decisions. I think he might have been on to something.

“Rights of Man” had some interesting stuff about, well, the rights of man, but most of it actually consisted of either insulting Edmund Burke or proposing tax policies. The dunking on Burke was quite satisfying but the tax policies were less fun than the ones put forth in “Agrarian Justice,” which, although it was the last piece in the book, was the one I read first. “Rights of Man” takes up about half the book, and unfortunately was for me the least interesting to read. There are some short works, including two of the “American Crisis” installments and an interesting piece called “Letter Addressed to the Addressers,” which seems to concern Paine’s libel case that resulted in “Rights of Man” being banned in England.

“Agrarian Justice” is the piece I got the most out of, though, and I do think I could well have just read that one. In it, Paine puts forth not just a plan for Social Security that would only be implemented 150 years later, but he also puts forth a plan to give everyone a lump sum payout upon reaching the age of majority so they could establish themselves within civilization. This does seem to me to be a smarter economic move than ensuring that everyone reaches the age of majority one year’s salary in debt in order to establish themselves, but I digress. Paine also puts forth a thought-provoking political theory that the earth is everyone’s natural heritage, and that the system of landed capital therefore robs everyone who isn’t a landowner out of their natural inheritance, and that landowners should pay a “ground-rent” as reparations to everyone else, to manage the difference between the value added to the land by the labor of cultivating it, and the value of the land that occurs because the land exists without anyone creating it.

Much ink has been spilled recently about how the guys behind the American Revolution were largely rich white dudes who didn’t want to pay their taxes, and this is in large part true, but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that that’s not all there was to it and there really was a lot of new thought and revolutionary ideals that went into the American and French revolutions. Paine in particular was not a rich landowner or a fancy lawyer, and who was willing to go out and get into all sorts of trouble for his beliefs, including a yearlong stint in a Luxembourg prison and getting personally banned from France. His writings are a fascinating look into an early form of left-liberalism that the conservatives who try to cast him as some sort of right-libertarian (probably because they want to be able to yell “It’s just common sense!” instead of defending their arguments) would likely be horrified to find if they ever read any of his stuff besides the first two lines of “American Crisis 1.”

Anyway, the important thing here is that now I can finally give the damn book back to the library. Hurrah!

Current Mood: sick

For book club this month, we decided to read Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture (1920-1940) by Lorraine Elena Roses, a study of the Black art scene in Boston during the interwar period. It's a bit more academic than many of the other books we've read in this book club, but not overly so.

The book seems very thorough but is not very long, for the unfortunate reason that there's not a lot of surviving records about a lot of the arts projects that the Black population in Boston was involved in during this time period. The Black population in Boston was also very small in the interwar period, but that didn't stop them from producing quite a lot of art. The educated black elite in Boston was even smaller, which meant that much of the Black arts scene was organized and sustained by a relatively small cast of influential families. Two women's clubs, founded as relief groups for Black troops stationed in Massachusetts before being shipped off to fight in World War I, were especially important drivers of art initiatives, carefully navigating Boston's institutional segregation to occasionally cross the color line in the high arts. Black Bostonians discusses Black Bostonian's contributions to newspapers, theater, visual arts, music, and literature, as well as the institutions that facilitated these contributions, from private writing clubs to the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to employ theater workers.

While the overall pattern is a bit depressing -- short periods of brilliance and successful artistic output, soon crushed by larger political forces -- the discussion of the works is quite interesting and there's an abundance of intriguing personal stories. Some of the editorializing rubbed me a tiny bit the wrong way; Roses' discussion of William Monroe Trotter carries a distinct tone of disapproval that he neglected his high culture training in favor of dedicating himself to public political protest, which she seems to find a bit embarrassing. I think he sounds friggin' awesome, and if he thought getting arrested and running an inflammatory newspaper were better uses of his time than "high-culture activities" then he gets to think that. He was a principal organizer on the protests against Birth of a Nation showing in Massachusetts, which is rad. (The movie aired anyway, and sold out repeatedly, because Boston is racist and disappointing.)

The relationship between the Boston scene and the Harlem Renaissance that was going on in New York is portrayed as complex, with New York providing both inspiration and a sense of rivalry, somewhat related to it being bigger with a much larger Black population, but also related to the fact that Broadway was there. (Still is, I believe.)

I'm not sure how much of the art discussed in the book is actually still available for consumption. Some of the visual art certainly is; the plays, on the other hand, don't seem to be ones that are still staged, and Roses assures us that a lot of the ones by the older generation would sound pretty goofy and Victorian to modern audiences if they were. This does exactly zero to make me not want to see a staging of The Trial of Dr. Beck; in 2018, as in 1939, "There's always room for a good murder trial in the theatre."

I think we will have an interesting discussion this weekend, especially if I can brain enough to pull together some halfway decent questions.

Alright, well, I went to go reserve that little Jacobin pamphlet The ABCs of Socialism at the library so I could see if it's a decent thing to recommend to people, and discovered that actually you can just read the entire thing as a PDF online? It's not even pirated; the URL for the PDF is at jacobinmag.com. But also it turns out it's really short, it is much more of a pamphlet than a book, and I read the whole thing in like two hours -- and also did some work in the same two hours (it is, admittedly, a slow day today). The pamphlet is 148 pages, but that includes a bunch of illustrations and a few pages at the back dedicated to taking notes, which is very considerate.

The book is a collection of short articles by a variety of modern socialist writers, including the excellent Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, editor of How We Get Free which I read at the beginning of the year, and Nicole Aschoff, whomst I have met twice and is very cool. Also some dudes. At least some of the writers are fairly serious academics, but the book is not especially academic or theoretical; in register, in seems pitched at roughly the same educated, reasonably politically aware audience as most middlebrow news glossies. There are moments of humor via pop culture references, including a real good dunk on the Rolling Stones' "Harlem Shuffle," which is indeed not their best effort.

The framing here is "rebuttals to common objections/myths about socialism," and as such seems more pitched at fence-sitters than at folks who already consider themselves socialists, but is probably also a pretty good starting point for folks who are like "I am pretty sure I am on board with this socialism thing because capitalism is terrible and I would like to do something else" but have not done much reading and are not sure where to start. The pamphlet also contains a lot of links to further reading; in this case, "further reading" means Jacobin articles, which one would probably expect given that this is a Jacobin publication. Jacobin is pretty good at giving short overview-y things that easily point people towards More Things To Read (just this morning I bought Haymarket's James Connolly Reader, largely on the strength of Jacobin's Connolly at 150 profile from the spring), and I'm generally of the opinion that given the total marginalization of socialist thought in American political discourse for my entire lifetime, brutally sacrificing depth in favor of breadth is a perfectly acceptable thing to do for the sake of bringing the scope of socialist history and socialist writing from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown" in people's minds. And ABCs of Socialism does quite well in that regard. If one is so inclined, one could fill up the Notes pages with a robust list of Interesting-Sounding Things To Check Out Further--historical writers including Marx, Trotsky, and Martin Luther King Jr.; modern writers like the authors of the articles; ecosocialism; socialist feminism; at least five separate instances of the U.S. government overthrowing democratically elected governments that we don't talk about anymore; the interconnections between racism and capitalism (especially in the U.S.).

One criticism I do have is that the grand and glorious history of bitter interleftist infighting is a bit handwaved, frequently written in a way like "Democratic socialists were on [the good side] and some other blokes were on [the other side]," which definitely muddies the attempts to explain who was doing what and sometimes comes off like they're claiming certain parties/thinkers/movements were socialist when they succeeded and not socialist when they fucked up. While it is true that the history of socialism is much more complex than "Stalin did gulags and some people went along with it," this borders on No True Scotsman-ing in a way that I think deals some damage to credibility, although given the brevity of the piece in question I'm not as disturbed by it as I would be in an otherwise more in-depth work. Anyway, the CPUSA did both good things and messed-up things, and anyone whose brain cannot handle that level of complexity is probably not someone you should be relying on to teach you history anyway.

Anyway. Where was I? Right, driving myself nuts trying to read every Socialism 001 book published in the U.S. So, this book does pretty much what it says on the tin, which is great if that's what you're looking for. I should go read some fiction.

I've been a big fan of Erik Loomis' writing over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money for years. Additionally, as I believe I mentioned in my review of John Nichols' The "S" Word, I had an American history event to run for DSA and nowhere near enough time to read Zinn for it! Fortunately, Loomis' new book A History of America in Ten Strikes, which I have been waiting for for several months, had the goodness to be published only three weeks ago, and the BPL system had some copies. I was able to cram about the first third of this book before I left for Vegas, which I was able to use to flesh out the presentation, and read the rest of it on the T and the plane, taking mental notes about stuff to use to fix the second half of the presentation when I got back to a computer the morning of the event.

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Sittin’ in the T station, readin’ about strikes #fridayreads

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Fortunately, this book is extremely readable and covers a lot of ground, which made it both immensely helpful for the presentation and easy enough to cram into my brain that it didn't feel like entirely inappropriate vacation reading (although the last time I went to Vegas I was reading a poker strategy book on the way out, which has math, so I guess I'm just bad at vacation reading). It's also vintage Erik — straightforward, dryly funny, relentlessly judgmental about the left's strategic weaknesses, but still militantly supportive of the dignity of all working people. One of the recurring themes, which is also a recurring theme in his blogging and also a recurring theme in American politics, is the role of racism in tanking attempts at labor solidarity and class consciousness in the U.S., or, more bluntly, that white people consistently decide they'd rather be racist than have nice things, and that's why we as a country can't have nice things.

The book covers a pretty well-rounded range of strikes, from the early industrial strikes of the Lowell Mill Girls up through the Justice for Janitors strikes and the current hubs of action in the labor movement. In between, we read about the big IWW-led strikes in heavy industry that everyone stereotypically associates with the labor movement, but ample attention is also given to strikes in female-dominated industries such as garment work and strikes by workers of color, such as the mass self-emancipation of slaves during the Civil War.

While there are some really great stories in this book — Loomis isn't going to miss a chance to recount my favorite failed historical assassination, Andrew Berkman and Emma Goldman's bungled attack on Henry Clay Frick — it's certainly not intended to be merely a repository of historical curiosities. There are valuable lessons that the current activist left can learn from the successes and failures of the past, and if you don't pick up on them just from hearing the stories, Erik will explicitly spell them out for you. Big ones include "It's important to get some less-terrible people into office so that you can work them" and "Workers of color are the future of the labor movement, and white people should strongly consider stop being so fucking racist, although there's no reason to assume they'll actually do that." He also makes sure you don't miss how incredibly violent much of labor history is, both in terms of the lengths to which capitalists and the state have gone to suppress even the mildest, most reasonable forms of worker organizing, and the militancy with which our labor ancestors worked to obtain the rights that we take for granted and which are being rapidly degraded as the New Gilded Age marches on (you know, stuff like "weekends"). The contrast with -- and parallels to -- the current whinging over "civility" in our current political discourse is illustrative.

Anyway, strikes are rad and they're making a comeback, so this is a timely book for anyone looking to be informed about them. It will make you fun at cocktail parties, assuming you go to the kind of cocktail parties that are full of weird nerds who like stories about anarchosyndicalists fucking up the Paterson silk mills, which are the only good kind of cocktail party to go to anyway.

This past six weeks or so in Clare Making Good Decisions, we have the following: Decide to do a DSA presentation on American history right when I get back from Vegas. Wait three weeks before putting in a request at the library for Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Pick it up from the library and panic that it's like 700 pages long. Remember that you picked up a shorter book on American socialist history from Verso at one of their ebook sales last year. Then, even though it is less than two weeks to the presentation and you only have it blocked out and not fully drafted, procrastinate on finishing the slides by reading all of John Nichols's The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition... Socialism first — much of it in the bath, with the Kindle in a plastic bag, in order to panic less.

Anyway. The "S" Word is pretty much the right book for the job here, although I should have started reading it at least a week earlier than I did instead of reading all kinds of Thomas Paine that wasn't Agrarian Justice. At about 300 pages, it's short enough to be readable but long enough to give a decent treatment to the figures it discusses and the stories it tells.

This book is very definitely Of Its Time, and in this case, its time was the year 2010, given its January 2011 publication date. While the history it covers is presented more or less chronologically, the framework for the whole book is basically Glenn Beck Is Wrong About Obama Being A Socialist (and about Thomas Paine being a right-libertarian, and about... well, everything). It's a very strong reminder of the particular flavor of bananapants stupid the political discourse was at a particular political moment, and man, there is basically nothing I miss about 2010. I graduated college that year, and it sucked. (To be clear: I loved college. The 2010 job market, not so much.)

The author himself is not quite a socialist; he identifies with the Midwestern progressive populist tradition, which has a strong history of socialist influence but is not always explicitly anti-capitalist. The book is also not necessarily pitched toward socialists; Nichols is very clear that his purpose in writing the book is, besides dunking on Glenn Beck, to give Americans of any political stripe a better appreciation for the actual history and influence of socialism in America so that we can broaden the political discourse and not be a bunch of idiots. The book is somewhat implicitly aimed at the liberal-left half of the political spectrum; it is full of values assumptions that would not necessarily speak to American conservatives, like that slavery was bad and helping people is good, not to mention the notion that it would be a positive development to broaden the political discourse and not be idiots.

I was pleased to see that the chronology of this book kicks off with lots of appreciation for Thomas Paine, the most left-wing of the Founding Fathers, and contains much about both his politics in life and his influence on later generations of American, French, and British radicals. Paine, obviously, was not actually a socialist, since socialism wasn't a thing back then, but he was a definite intellectual precursor to it, and many of the 19th-century early socialists were referred to as "Paineites," which is a great term that we should start a caucus for.

Moving on from Paine, Nichols discusses figures as diverse as the poet Walt Whitman, labor activist Fanny Wright, Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a radical young lawyer called Abraham Lincoln (who was in correspondence with Karl Marx during the Civil War), and Socialist Party heads Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to Victor Berger, the first Socialist elected to Congress, who was blocked from taking his seat by the rest of Congress, TWICE, because he was elected at the height of the First Red Scare, and then launched a bunch of high-profile lawsuits to "put teeth" into the First Amendment. Nichols also discusses the "sewer socialists" of the early 20th century and the few holdouts that continued electing Socialist leadership well into the 20th century, such as Milwaukee.

Another chapter is dedicated to A. Philip Randolph, mentioned in many high school history books in passing as the founder of the first majority-black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It turns out that organizing that particular union was a massive 10-year endeavor, and somehow Randolph still had time to do like 50 other awesome things that nobody ever told me about. He stared down FDR into desegregating the defense industries and Truman into desegregating the armed forces. Later, he mentored a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was lead organizer of the March on Washington in '63. From this, Nichols segues into the role of socialists in the "new left," and the occasionally strained relationship between the "old left" and the "new left."

Toward the end of the book there's some very interesting stuff about the career of Michael Harrington, which should be of especial interest to DSA members, particularly new ones who might not know anything about Harrington other than that he founded DSA (and that people occasionally try to use him as a club for or against their comrades in poorly defined sectarian infighting). I've never read any Harrington but everything I've read about Harrington makes him sound like a very interesting character, so I should maybe read some of his books one of these days (I have been saying this since I joined DSA, though, so what really needs to happen is for somebody else to run a Harrington reading group and I may or may not attend).

In terms of actionable lessons that current-day socialists can take from the book, there are some, although they're probably a bit open to interpretation, since we're already a) not afraid of the word "socialism" and b) aware that Glenn Beck is a twit who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. Leaning on constitutional redemption rhetoric seems to be a good idea, one that's not always effective immediately but which can eventually make inroads in a way that straight anti-Americanism generally doesn't. Another lesson is that socialists can get quite a lot of stuff done when they can convince non-socialists to back them up on a specific issue or policy, but this often has the effect of eventually disempowering them as a unique voice — it is never really the socialists or socialism itself that goes entirely mainstream. Also, we really need to get louder about claiming the memory of activists who have been watered down into respectable single-issue reformers in the public memory.

Anyway. I need to finish this presentation, don't I? Aaaaaaaahhhhh.

Hey, I actually attended a DSA reading group for more than one session! I've not had the greatest track record with actually attending reading groups, probably because I am already in five million book clubs. But the Electoral Working Group's read of Richard W. Judd's Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism ran only three sessions, of which I have attended two (one via Zoom, god bless Zoom) and will be attending the last one on Friday.

Socialist Cities covers the successes and failures of the Socialist Party in the early years of the 20th century, mostly in the Midwest. Much of the book focuses on various cities in Ohio between 1898 and 1924, although states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin make appearances, and there's a chapter dedicated to Flint, Michigan. The book specifically focuses on municipal electoral politics, and the accomplishments -- and, sometimes, lack thereof -- of Socialist parties in electing members, enacting a policy agenda, and navigating the institutions of municipal politics.

The "navigating the institutions of municipal politics" is by far the most interesting stuff, although I've already talked a lot of it out at length at book club so I don't feel like reiterating all my thoughts here. But let's just say: HOO BOY there are a lot of things that sound familiar! We see the Socialists's opponents playing all kinds of procedural hardball, breaking longstanding norms and rewriting the rules every time they could to block the Socialists from enacting their agenda, even for things that the other parties would have supported if it hadn't been the Socialists proposing it. While the Socialists were often beset by infighting, because that's how we do, their ideological opponents managed to set apart some pretty big political differences to form blocs and fusion tickets with the sole object of preventing Socialists from taking power.

There are also some moments of humor in the book, not the least of which is some poor dude saddled with the last name of "Sharts." And there are even moments of triumph -- some of the early Socialist mayors and city councils did pull off some impressive feats of "sewer socialism," such as establishing health departments and improving city services. One small town in Pennsylvania even managed to abolish the police (granted, the police force was only two people to start with).

An interesting topic in the book is not just the relationship between American socialism and American liberalism, but the specific interplay between Socialist movement politics and the politics of the Progressive movement, which was a more middle-class type of reform orientation that sometimes aligned with the Socialists but often didn't. This is an especially valuable bit of context to work through today, when the identities of socialism, liberalism, and progressivism are so thoroughly confused and mashed up with each other in the popular discourse.

While the prose style isn't thrilling, neither is it particularly dense; the result is a thoughtful, concise, and readable account of pre-World War I electoral radicalism in American politics. It's also a good source from which modern U.S. leftists can draw Useful Lessons From History when strategizing about electoral work, although, being leftists, I am sure different people will draw different conclusions.

Current Mood: accomplished

I have a lot of friends that are into superhero stories. Like most of my friends, these tend to be fairly left-wing friends, and ones with strong critical thinking skills about literature and whatnot. They haven't shied away from or gotten defensive about the discussions going on in SF/F right now examining the strengths and weaknesses of superhero stories as a genre, the inherent sort of regressiveness of the individualistic, vigilante, strongman sort of narrative deep in the structure of the superhero concept even when an individual superhero story takes on other, more progressive politics. And some superhero stories do take on politics pretty head-on, with powers that embody the fantasies of marginalized people or directly rebuke regressive myths.

Libba Bray's The Diviners series is, pretty much, a superhero story, though that word is never used in it. It's about a bunch of teens that all have special powers, powers they don't understand and that society doesn't really believe exist. It takes place in the 1920s, which is a fun twist, but overall, so far so X-men.

I've never before read a superhero story, especially not a YA gothic historical fantasy novel, that was so explicitly about eugenics.

Earlier in the series the eugenics was lurking a little more in the background while the main plot revolved around Ouija boards and solving highly occult-signified murders, but as the series has progressed, the story of the Diviners has gotten more and more explicitly mixed up with a storyline about the myths of American progress--a storyline about medical experimentation, who counts as a person and an American, the violence of industrial capitalism, the narratives of "progress" and "science" used to provide cover for bigotry and exploitation.

We're currently at a tumultuous time in American history that has no small number of parallels to the 1920s. It's a time when we're being called to confront the sins of our past, where the inherent contradictions of trying to build -- or telling ourselves we're building -- a land of liberty and justice for all, on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and land theft are coming to the forefront. It's a time when technological advancement is being turned to regressive, invasive, and inhumane ends. It's a time when the government is disappearing people, although the government has done that to those it considers expendable throughout most if its history. It's a time when white supremacists are marching through city streets and anti-immigrant sentiment is high.

Sadly, there are no flappers. That's going to come back into style real soon, right? We're going to make this happen. Rouged knees and cupid's bow lipliner, the whole deal. It's not any dumber than purple highlighter.

Anyway. We're on to Before the Devil Breaks You, the third installation of what I thought was going to be a trilogy but is apparently going to be a quartet, which means Jake Marlowe isn't dead and the man in the stovepipe hat isn't defeated, although we do certainly learn a lot about both of them over the course of the book, in addition to learning a lot of other things about our main characters and how the Diviners were made and what Project Buffalo was really up to. It's a huge sprawling complex narrative spiced up with delightful banter, lots of toothy murder ghosts, some arson, some drunken escapades, and other fun stuff like that. The Italian anarchist dude who I have wanted to have a plotline for two books now finally gets a plotline, which sadly relies heavily upon Bad Ideas Anarchists Were Really Into In The 1920s And From Which Their Reputation Has Never Really Recovered, by which I mean blowing stuff up. Johann Most has a lot to answer for. This is also the book wherein everybody gets laid, which is how you know we're 3/4 of the way through the story (most of it happens almost exactly 3/4 of the way through this book, too).

In this book, though the sleeping sickness from Lair of Dreams is gone, the city is being haunted by angry ghosts calling themselves the Forgotten, who can possess people and get them to kill each other. A lot of these ghosts are attacking the Kirkbride asylum on Ward's Island, which is one of those little islands in the river around Manhattan where they put institutions for socially undesirable people (much like Blackwell's, which was operating around the same time). Others are wandering around the city. The Diviners all get together and learn to develop their powers, which they then use to go around killing the ghosts, which is only a temporary measure since the ghosts are being somehow activated by the man in the stovepipe hat, and also the ghosts have a point that it's bad that they've been forgotten. All our main characters, whether they're Diviners or not, are wrestling with various things in their past that are resurfacing, and how. In Theta's case, a person she thought she'd left behind literally shows back up in New York; for Evie, she learns a lot more about her dead brother James and what Project Buffalo has to do with everything. A lot of people besides Sam are being sort-of haunted by the telepathic voice of Sam's mother Miriam, which Sam has many feelings about. Jericho is being blackmailed about his iron lung juice that keeps him alive, so he ends up going up to Jake Marlowe's estate/lair/secret government agency to get shot full of more weird serums that basically turn him into a science project for Marlow's Future of America exhibition, like a rapey, irradiated Captain America. (Jake Marlowe firmly believes that radium is good for you. I hope his jaw falls off in the next book.) Memphis and Isaiah learn who Bill Johnson is and draw the attention of the wrong people. The dead are mad at Ling, probably because she keeps helping blow them up, and Ling has to wrestle with the disappointment of learning more stuff about Jake Marlowe, like a 1920s version of all those weird nerd dudes who get mad when people dunk on Elon Musk. Mabel, of course, is hanging out with anarchists, plotting to blow up Jake Marlowe's uranium mine. Why is he mining shit-tons of uranium in the middle of New Jersey? For plot purposes, obviously.

Anyway, it's all barreling towards some kind of major showdown for the contradictory soul of America, and I'm mad that I have to wait another entire year to find out what it is. America continuing to be what it is, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily going to end in the final defeat of the man in the stovepipe hat...

Despite how much it hurt me to not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, I was disciplined and did not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, partly because I am moving and have so many books to pack up and possibly get rid of, but also partly because I have an absolute shitton of books acquired at previous warehouse sales that I have not yet read. Most of them are history books but I do have a book of T.S. Eliot's cat poems (it is the one illustrated by Edward Gorey, because I am extremely on-brand).

One of these books, which I picked up like three years ago, is Cait Murphy's Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe & Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Age. I had never heard of Howe & Hummel before I spotted this book in the warehouse, but the lengthy subtitle indicated strongly that this was likely to be something extremely Up My Alley.

Turns out: It was! Howe and Hummel were exactly the sort of wacky, corrupt mob-lawyer type weirdos that make reading about the Gilded Age so fun. They defended on cases that were ahead of their time on issues like free speech and obscenity; they also covered for a lot of absolute garbage fire humans doing garbage fire things. They knew everybody. They had all kinds of organized and disorganized crime ties. They ripped off their clients shamefully, except for the rich ones, whom they ripped off shamelessly, because the Gilded Age rich sucked and I don't feel bad for them.

One of the best parts of the book was the coverage of the anarchist trials. Howe & Hummel defended numerous anarchists, generally quite skillfully on political freedom grounds, drawing upon the jury's self-images as patriotic Americans who should defend their fellow Americans' right to have odd and possibly misguided political ideas. They got no help from their clients on this, who apparently could not be arsed to keep a lid on their insurrectionary leanings even for the duration of one cross-questioning while on trial for inciting riots that they didn't even incite. Hummel & Howe ended up defending self- and explosives-obsessed gasbag Johann Most, father of the "propaganda of the deed" (i.e., blowing stuff up and calling it theory) when he got hauled in on incitement to violence charges for like the one speech he gave in his life that actually wasn't about how great blowing stuff up is. (There are many anarchist theorists that I have respect for even though I am not personally an anarchist; Johann Most is emphatically not one of them.)

The other best parts of the book are obviously the chapter on theater scandals, complete with burly cops attempting to "demonstrate" belly-dancing in court, and the chapter on gangs, including the most legendarily successful fence I'd never heard of, Marm Mandelbaum. I need an overproduced Netflix or Showtime show about Marm Mandelbaum's life and career, yesterday.

The worst part of the book was the bit where Murphy talks about the Pinkertons in relation to their doing private-eyeing in some bank robberies and never mentioning their strikebreaking activities even once. How do you even do that? Even though this case was about something completely different, how do you introduce the Pinkertons and be like "The Pinkertons, who were famously honest" instead of like "The Pinkertons, who were famous for strikebreaking." I know the author is a Wall Street Journal reporter, but Jesus. Like I'm sure some of them had some detective skill since they did ID and catch the Dunlap gang but they're really most famous in history for being nasty thugs and cracking strikers' heads. It was weird and jarring to read.

Anyway, apart from that, as far as I could tell all the other weird and jarring things were in fact because history is full of goddamn weirdos, like the "animal welfare" zealots whose concern for animal welfare consisted solely of chloroforming cats.

The book also does a pretty good job of sketching out the disparities, contradictions, and miseries of Gilded Age New York. Some of this historical background was at least vaguely familiar to me--no one who likes gang shit as much as I do could grow up an hour outside of New York and not know at least the outlines of the Five Points neighborhood--but I also learned about the Tombs, an incarnation of which still stands today, and Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island, which was basically the precursor to Rikers. (There's a new book about Blackwell's called Damnation Island, if that gives you any idea of how miserable a place it was.)

I finished this book a week ago and it's been the longest week in the world, so I don't have the most coherent thoughts (as is becoming increasingly common for these reviews) on what this book does and does not accomplish and what it illustrates about our legal system and how it compares and contrasts to modern law (contrast: going to law school was apparently quite optional). I could probably come up with some thoughts if anyone wants to give this lovely book a good home and then we can talk about it and I'd be incentivized to try and not look stupid, but otherwise I'm going to go with "It entertained me with true stories about how wacky people were back in the day," which is honestly all I'm looking for in most of the history I read these days.

Covering gambling news on the day-to-day, I sometimes feel like the industry doesn't change nearly fast enough. It's been almost seven years since Black Friday, and only three U.S. states — Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware — offer regulated online poker. (Soon to be four, thanks to Pennsylvania, but not soon enough.) Some states, like California, seem to bang their head against the same wall every year and get nowhere. And of course, we're all biting our nails waiting to see what the Supreme Court decides about PASPA, and when they'll get around to deciding if legalized sports betting could actually become reality in the U.S.

But, despite all of the above, it's actually quite a rapidly changing industry. It's worth it, every now and again, to look back at how we got where we are and appreciate just how much batty stuff has happened over the course of gambling's establishment as a legitimate entertainment industry.

Enter David Clary's Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America, which was published in October from Rutgers University Press. Clocking in at about 250 pages (plus a lot of notes), this new history of American gambling focuses first on how gaming fell under the control of crime syndicates, and then on how the state drove those elements out, turning control of the industry over to "clean" private corporations, Indian nations and the states themselves. Clary also provides a nuanced, even-handed analysis of the pros and cons of states' use of gaming revenues to balance their budgets.

***

I posted a book review over at the day job.

I had a bit of a time getting hold of a copy of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, including ordering direct from the publisher and getting notified it was out of stock, but I finally acquired it. Yay!

I'd been on the lookout since the organizers for the DSA SocFem Working Group gave a presentation on it as part of the WG's inaugural meeting, and they gave another presentation to the general membership during December's GM.

One thing I had not known before these presentations: While the Combahee River is in South Carolina, the Combahee River Collective was based right here in Boston. Learning this definitely bumped this book right to the top of my priority list, because my knowledge of Boston radical history is not great.

Another thing I learned in these presentations: the Combahee River Collective Statement is the first known time a text used the term "identity politics."

The book is a small one, coming in at just under 200 pages and about the dimensions of an iPad Mini. It consists of a reprint of the Combahee River Collective Statement itself, which here is a mere 12 pages long, and then interviews by Taylor with several members of the Collective and with Alicia Garza, the founder of #BlackLivesMatter.

The Statement and the interviews are absolutely packed with history and analysis. While the CRC was only in operation for a few years, they brought a wealth of experience in organizing in the various '60s and '70s political movements and were able to synthesize it all into a radical, anticapitalist queer Black feminism that combined analytical rigor with a deep respect for lived experience.

While the Statement is an excellent document, the interviews are really the meat of the book (and not just because you can find the text of the Statement online for free). The interviewees who wrote the Statement--Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier--discuss the founding of the Collective, their political awakenings and prior activism, the difficulties in coalition-building that they experienced, the work the Collective did in Boston, the development of the terms "identity politics" (used in the Statement) and "intersectionality" (coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, but the theory of which maps pretty closely to what's in the Statement), and the state of Black feminism today. There's some discussion of cooptation, aspiration, and the rise of a very small number of highly visible elite Black women that I think ought to be required reading for all white leftists, if only because this is an area where white leftists sometimes really put their foot in it.

The interviews also give a really important look into the ways in which the various -isms plaguing the disparate '60s-era political movements were hindrances to the women's participation and hindrances to effective organizing, while also recognizing what was important and effective and meaningful in them, and thus avoiding the tiresome Good Actually/Bad Actually dichotomy that's so irritatingly common in political discourse these days.

Overall, a very, very important read for anyone who's interested in not replicating the failures of the past in whatever strain of activist work is most important to them.

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Entries tagged with american history

Ecocide for hats

Elbridge Gerry strikes again

The transformation of a continent

It's still Black History Month here in decent-people-land

I don't mind workin' but

"Frenchified bottoms" and other shady tricks

What the "deep state" was back when that term referred to something

Arsenic and an old case

From the river to the rope

How to write a how-to on being antiracist

Some men say that I'm intense or I'm insane

The Boston renascence

Reviving the art of the pamphlet

Uphold Rose Schneiderman thought

A spectre is haunting the U.S.

The brief but glorious history of sewer socialism

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

Cable address: LENIENT

Mobsters and CEOs and state legislators, oh my

Boston's history of radical Black socialist feminism