Review, Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (Routledge Press, 1992)

Columbia Missourian, December 6, 1992

In his brilliant 1935 antiwar novel Paths of Glory, Humphrey Cobb described the conversation of foot soldiers as an ongoing dialogue that is “inexplicably, always the same and always new. It seemed to be part of a larger conversation which had been begun way back in the past and was going to be continued monotonously into a future whose duration no one could guess. It had a strange quality of self-perpetuation which made one feel that, while men might die or go away, the talk never would, because other men would come and give it fuel, negligently and in passing.”

Similarly, Tobey C. Herzog characterizes the literature of the Vietnam War as a continuation of a public discussion, beginning in the early twentieth century, regarding the effects of war on modern culture. Focusing his discussion on ten major texts—nine by Vietnam veterans—Herzog traces the thematic development of the standard Vietnam War story through four stages: innocence, experience, consideration and aftermath.

Herzog, a Vietnam veteran who teaches English at Wabash College, adapts his model from Paul Fussell’s classic study of the effect of World War I on British literature, The Great War and Modern Memory. As Fussell wrote, “Every was is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The disparity between the idealism with which young men enter war and the horrors encountered on the battlefield forces soldiers to come to grips with both the falsity of the culture that sent them to war and the depths to which human nature can sink.

For American soldiers in Vietnam, Herzog labels major cultural influences “the John Wayne syndrome.” “The name of John Wayne was invoked as a verbal shorthand to describe the larger-than-life character of the American warrior gentleman and to represent for young males the elements of manhood.”

Fueled by images of heroism and patriotism drawn from popular culture, American soldiers entered the early days of the war with a strong sense of confidence. But fantasies of John Wayne-style heroism bore little resemblance to the reality of the war.

Herzog terms the resulting process of disillusionment the “heavy heart of darkness trip,” after Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In the 1902 novella, the mysterious character Kurtz utters with his dying breath the final cryptic words: “The horror! The horror!” Herzog sees this encounter with the “horror” at the bottom of the human soul as the second stage of Vietnam War stories, or, as war correspondent Michael Herr called it, “the fascination of the abomination.” Soldiers who witness the destructive capacity of modern technology and of humans turned into killing machines cannot come away unchanged.

Having confronted the savagery of which humans are capable, the next stage for Vietnam authors is a period of reflection, in which soldiers, having understood the capriciousness of modern war, seek to establish some sort of personal strategy for coping with this realization of their own powerlessness. This theme is common in the literature of all modern wars, Herzog says, but it is especially acute in writing on this war. “Vietnam with its fragmentation, complexity, and seeming illogic presents special problems for an author attempting to order the chaos in a meaningful way.”

There are two primary, contradictory responses to this sense of impotence, Herzog says. First, some soldiers harden themselves, accept the nature of the war and give up any sense of self-control. The protagonist of Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters reaches a point where he says, “All I wanted to do was kill and kill and burn and burn and rape and pillage until there was nothing left.” The other response is for the soldier to create some sort of mental order out of the chaos surrounding him. In Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the main narrative takes place entirely within the imagination of a soldier as he stands guard duty one night and seeks to find a meaning for his tour in country.

Finally, many stories about Vietnam feature a discussion of the residual effects of the soldier’s experiences, especially after he has returned home. Vietnam provides many unique variations on this theme because of the nature of the fighting itself, the unpopularity of the war, and the fact that it was the first war the United States lost. Thus returning veterans met a variety of responses, from those who branded them baby-killers, to those who felt they had given the military a bad name, to those who wanted to forget the whole thing. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, for example, focuses on the interaction between Sam, a 17-year-old girl whose father died in Vietnam before she was born, and her uncle Emmett, a veteran who had done little with his life since returning from the war.

Herzog’s book admirably fits the major themes of Vietnam War literature into the broader context of writings on modern war, indicating how Vietnam introduced some new variations but basically fit an older thematic pattern.

But without denying the thematic continuities in modern war literature, Herzog fails to emphasize adequately the specific socioliterary context of the Vietnam era. The soldiers who fought in Vietnam were products of a culture marked both by the existence of the atomic bomb and material abundance which, to many critics, seemed to foster an increasingly bland and homogeneous society. Thus, in Susan Sontag’s words, “We lived under continued threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror."

Similarly Herzog fails to emphasize how Vietnam provided authors the opportunity to convey the nature of war, in Fussell’s words, with a “full, appropriate obscenity.” Before Vietnam, Fussell said, various cultural constraints had prevented authors from using the kinds of language and description necessary for a graphically realistic portrait of war. The problem is crucial because obscenity is an integral part of a true war story. As Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford wrote in his 1979 novel The Short-Timers, “The ugly that civilians choose to see in war focuses on spilled guts. To see human beings clearly, that is ugly. To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.”

A Musical View: 100 years after his execution, Joe Hill’s music still resonates

For the centennial of Joe Hill's execution, I submitted opinion pieces to various newspapers and journals in the U.S. and Canada, trying to give them local or regional interest. Here's one that appeared in the Duluth (Minnesota) News Tribune on November 13, 2015.

Joe Hill was the bard of the itinerant and the immigrant, the unskilled and the unwanted. He took the raw material of working-class lives and turned it into music: songs to amuse, to organize, to “fan the flames of discontent.”

And 100 years ago this month, the forces of capital and the state of Utah executed him.

Born Joel Hagglund in 1879 in Gavle, Sweden, Hill emigrated to the United States in 1902, bummed his way across the country, Americanized his name and eventually joined the Industrial Workers of the World. Popularly known as the Wobblies, the IWW was formed in 1905 with the goal of organizing those workers more mainstream unions avoided — migrants, the unskilled, immigrants, minorities — in an effort to combine the entire working class into one big union. The Wobblies had success organizing workers in various regions: migratory farm workers in the West and Midwest, lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest and South, immigrant factory workers in New England, and miners in the West and Southwest.

The IWW also made a strong mark in Duluth, for instance, running the Work People’s College in Smithville from 1914 through 1940.

As a Wobbly, Hill was active in free-speech fights in Fresno and San Diego, a railroad strike in British Columbia, and even a revolution in Mexico. And all the while, Hill composed songs to be sung on soapboxes, picket lines or in jail.

Though he did occasionally compose his own music — as in songs like “Rebel Girl,” his tribute to Wobbly organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn — most of Hill’s songs, such as “Casey Jones—Union Scab” or “It’s a Long Way to the Soupline” parodied popular tunes or hymns.

“With all his tune choices,” musician and labor scholar Bucky Halker said, “he was like other working-class writers and had the same goal: Use tunes that workers knew already for labor songs and then they’d be easy for workers to sing.”

In 1914, Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City for killing a storekeeper, allegedly in a botched robbery. Despite the lack of motive or evidence, Hill was convicted and sentenced to death, with the prosecutor urging conviction as much on the basis of Hill’s IWW membership as any proof of his guilt. An international amnesty movement pressed for a new trial, but the Utah governor refused, and Hill was executed on Nov. 19, 1915. In a final message, Hill urged fellow workers, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.”

The year after Hill’s execution, Rebel Girl Flynn helped organize a strike of iron miners on the Mesabi Range.

Since his death, Hill has strongly influenced later generations of socially conscious songwriters, including Duluth’s and Hibbing’s Bob Dylan, who wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, that, “Joe wrote ‘Pie in the Sky,’ and was the forerunner of Woody Guthrie. That’s all I needed to know.”

Halker, an Ashland native, is honoring the centennial of Hill’s death with a CD of new interpretations of Hill’s music. Anywhere But Utah: The Songs of Joe Hill, which is available online at CD Baby, takes its title from Hill’s dying wish that his remains be transported out of state because he didn’t want “to be found dead in Utah.”

Music was essential to Wobbly organizing campaigns, Halker believes.

“The IWW cleverly used singing and chanting as a way to garner attention from workers, the media, and the authorities,” he said. “Fifty workers singing makes a lot more noise at a rally or in a jail cell than one speaker on a soapbox or one person ranting in the joint.”

Hill’s mastery of American vernacular is especially impressive given that English was not his primary language. As Halker commented, “His work is filled with humor, irony and sarcasm, hardly easy skills to gain in your second language.”

“I think there are many people who hear his songs and immediately sense that the issues raised by Hill remain important to our national discussion,” Halker said, “including decent wages and working conditions, immigrant rights, discrimination based on race, the oppression of women, the right to form a union, and the right to free speech.”

Halker added, “I think that Hill and other Wobbly bards and writers should get some credit for their use of sarcasm and irony in the development of American literature. They had sharp wits and tongues that worked deftly and at great speed. The authorities and their lackeys dislike radicals and they really hate them when they’re much smarter than they are.”

Populism

American History Through Literature, 1870-1920, Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, Editors in Chief (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006)

“What’s the matter with Kansas?,” journalist William Allen White asked in 1896, as he surveyed the political landscape of his native state and wondered at the preponderance of politicians “who can bellow about the crime of ’73, who hate prosperity, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street.” The frenzy of the state’s ruling Populists had not been slaked, in White’s view, by having created a climate hostile to investment and become the laughingstock of the rest of the country; “then, for fear some hint that the state had become respectable might percolate through the civilized portions of the nation, we have decided to send three or four harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas is raising hell and letting the corn go to weed.” In his essay, widely-reprinted in the Republican press, White dripped sarcasm as he sought to convey how his state had lost touch with reality: “Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts on the altar, and bow down and worship him. Let the state ideal be high. What we need is not the respect of our fellow men, but the chance to get something for nothing.”

The bewilderment of White and other Republicans notwithstanding, Populism resonated among southern, Midwestern and western farmers because it bespoke their situation and articulated their often inchoate sense that America had betrayed its democratic principles. As Seagraves, the small-town editor in Hamlin Garland’s 1890 story “Among the Corn-Rows,” thinks after speaking with a Midwestern farmer, “This working farmer had voiced the modern idea. It was an absolute overturn of all the ideas of nobility and special privilege born of the feudal past. . . . Seagraves felt that it was a wild, grand upstirring of the modern democrat against the aristocrat, against the idea of caste and the privilege of living on the labor of others. This atom of humanity (how infinitesimal this drop in the ocean of humanity!) was feeling the nameless longing of expanding personality. He had declared rebellion against laws that were survivals of hate and prejudice. He had exposed also the native spring of the emigrant by uttering the feeling that it is better to be an equal among peasants than a servant before nobles.” Seagraves tells the farmer he would like to use his ideas in an editorial, prompting the farmer to comment “My ideas! Why I didn’t know I had any.”

The Farmer Feeds Us All

In the post-Civil War era, farmers increasingly found themselves victimized by the growing incursion of market forces into formerly remote areas, ensnaring them in a web of national, and even international, commercial relations. With the goal of contracting currency, Congress had demonetized silver in 1873—an act Populists would later decry as “the crime of ’73,” though it was little noticed at the time—and moved the country onto the gold standard by the end of the 1870s. For many farmers, the result was the cycle of ever-increasing debt that was sharecropping, tenancy, peonage or the crop-lien system, leaving them caught, as Garland termed it in the title of another story, “under the lion’s paw.” In the South, the lien system came to be viewed by farmers as a new form of slavery as they were forced to sign over to the furnishing merchant first their crop and eventually their land. “In fact,” the historian C. Vann Woodward has concluded, the crop-lien system “came to be more widespread than slavery had been, for it was no respecter of race or class; and if it be judged objectively, by its economic results alone, the new evil may have worked more permanent injury to the South than the ancient evil.” Dominant economic and social theories, with their emphasis on laissez faire capitalism and Social Darwinism, offered no sympathy for debt-ridden farmers in the same way they offered none for the growing number of unemployed wandering the country in the many depression years of the late-nineteenth century. As an editorial in the Lincoln, Nebraska, Farmers’ Alliance described the situation, “The actual state of society to-day is a state of war, active irreconcilable war on every side, and in all things. . . . Competition is only another name for war. It means slavery to millions—it means the sale of virtue for bread—it means for thousands upon thousands starvation, misery and death. After four thousand years of life is this the best that we can achieve? If so, who cares how soon the end may come?”

Farmers frequently joined together in singing Knowles Shaw’s 1870s-era ballad “The Farmer Feeds Us All” with its chorus:

Then take him by the hand,

All ye people of the land,

Stand by him whatever troubles befall;

We may say whate’er we can,

Yet the farmer is the man,

Yes, the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

But integration into larger market networks drove crop prices down while increased reliance on monopolies like the railroads, over whose rates they had no control, made it more difficult for the farmers to feed their own families. In an era of spectacular economic growth, the irony was not lost on farmers that their desperate straits existed in the midst of economic abundance. In the words of Alabama populist Milford Howard, “The granaries are bursting with wheat; the bins are filled with corn; the stock-yards are overflowing with cattle, hogs and sheep; the fields of the South have been white with cotton—an abundance everywhere throughout the entire country. Of it we can say, as was said of the Promised Land of Canaan, ‘It flows with milk and honey.’ Notwithstanding all this, the people are starving.”

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, farmers in all regions had responded to the situation with the formation of a variety of cooperative organizations, including the Granger and Northern Alliance movements in the Midwest, the Agricultural Wheel in the South, and the Texas Alliance in the Southwest. These cooperative organizations had been crucial in the development of what Lawrence Goodwyn has termed the “movement culture,” which allowed the farmers to understand the commonality of their interests and the nature of those who opposed them, whether furnishing merchants, land companies, banks, railroads, or grain elevator companies. Out of this movement culture developed the collective self-confidence necessary to allow the farmers, en masse, to formulate an alternative to the dominant cultural understanding of the American economy and their role in it. Economists told the farmers they were responsible for their own troubles, having overproduced the market and thus driven prices down. But farmers found a different culprit in the monopolies and trusts that wielded such extensive control over Gilded Age society. “Between [the] plenty ripening on the boughs of our civilization and the people hungering for it,” wrote Populist muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd in his 1894 classic, Wealth Against Commonwealth, “step the . .. . syndicates, trusts, combinations, with the cry of ‘overproduction’—too much of everything. Holding back the riches of the earth, sea and sky from their fellows who famish and freeze in the dark, they declare to them that there is too much light and warmth and food. They assert the right, for their private profit, to regulate the consumption by the people of the necessaries of life, and to control production, not by the needs of humanity, but by the desires of a few for dividends.”

The People’s Party

With the failure of the attempts at economic self-help, farmers increasingly realized that a turn to politics had become necessary, and so in the early 1890s was born the People’s Party. In its major statement of purpose, the 1892 Omaha Platform, the party called for a flexible paper currency to be distributed through the sub-treasury plan, a system of government-owned warehouses in which farmers could store their crops while borrowing against them; the public ownership of the railroad, telegraph, and telephone companies; a graduated income tax; and the direct election of U.S. senators. With precious few allies in the universities, the mainstream press, and other traditional seats of cultural power, the populist movement developed its own processes for spreading its message, including the National Reform Press Association, with its hundreds of newspapers spread across the nation. “For a fact,” Nebraska’s Platte County Argus commented, “this ought to be a campaign of education.” And the Populist leaders took seriously their role as educators, as can be seen in the extensive use of statistics in the writings of Kansas’s Populist Senator William Peffer; Lloyd’s densely detailed descriptions of corporate malfeasance; the many case studies discussed in 1892 presidential candidate James Weaver’s campaign book A Call to Action; and the learned disquisitions on such subjects as the Indian caste system and English labor history that peppered the speeches of the South’s most famous Populist, Tom Watson. Such raw material provided fodder for the extensive network of stump speakers who campaigned across the country. The message spread rapidly, as the Populists won elections in several southern, Midwestern and western states, and their presidential ticket in 1892 gained more than one million popular and twenty-two electoral votes.

In his dystopian novel Caesar’s Column (1890), Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly described American republicanism as a sham—“We are a Republic only in name; free only in forms. Mohammedanism . . .. never knew, in its worst estate, a more complete and abominable despotism than that under which we live. And as it would be worse to starve to death in sight of the most delicious viands than in the midst of a foodless desert, so the very assertions, constantly dinned into our ears by the hireling newspapers, that we are the freest people on earth, serve only to make our slavery more bitter and unbearable.” Seeing themselves as inheritors of the republican ideology of “producerism” dating back to the American Revolution, Populists believed they were completing the unfinished democratic project of the Civil War. As Weaver said, “We shall proceed to show that in the very midst of the struggle for the overthrow of the slave oligarchy, our institutions were assailed by another foe mightier than the former, equally cruel, wider in its field of operation, infinitely greater in wealth, and immeasurably more difficult to control. It will be readily understood that we allude to the sudden growth of corporate power and its attendant consequences.”

The growth of corporate power had come to dominate government, the courts and the press, but its fundamental impact was even more pernicious in that it ensconced greed as the dominating nexus of social relations. As the Texas Populist intellectual Thomas Nugent described it, “The spirit of plutocratic capitalism is the dominating force in our organized social and industrial life. . . . It robs genius of its glory, makes of intellect a drudge and a slave, and utilizes the achievements of science to raid the stock markets and enlarge the margin of profits. Thus it wipes out as with a sponge the distinction between right and wrong, makes merchandise of the noblest ideals, sets gain before the world as the highest end of life, and converts men into predatory human animals.”

At its base, the Populist argument rested on the labor theory of value, that labor created wealth, which then became capital. But as capital became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, it began to dominate political channels, and the combination of concentrated capital and state power served to impoverish the working classes, both rural and industrial. In Nugent’s words, “Capital could never have attained such ascendancy, but for the legislation which has given it unjust advantages and enabled it to monopolize both natural resources and public functions and utilities.” Or as Weaver claimed, “Labor can create wealth but it cannot create money. It requires a statute to speak money into existence. It is the creature of law, not the product of nature.” In boiling the issue down to its most fundamental level, Watson pondered, “What is the labor question? In a nutshell it is this: Labor asks of capital, ‘Why is it you have so much and do so little work, while I have so little and do so much?”

The Populists’ wide-ranging and penetrating critique of Gilded Age capitalism rested, ironically, on a belief in the sanctity of competition and private property. Populists sought some degree of individual economic independence and private property was essential in achieving it. In their view, as historian Norman Pollack has stated, “property was only a threat when it became integrated with mechanisms of domination” and thus worked contrary to the interests of the community, and the Populist goal was to use the power of the state to prevent the growth of monopolies where practicable and assume ownership of natural monopolies in order to serve the public interest. Existing monopolies thwarted genuine competition and the philosophy of laissez faire left only the brutal competition among surplus laborers that drove wages downward and among farmers working to pay off their debts in a deflated economy.

Self-consciously standing against the dominant ideology, Populists challenged such justifications of excessive wealth and poverty as Social Darwinism, arguing instead that government had a responsibility to protect the weak. In the words of Lorenzo D. Lewelling, Kansas’s Populist governor, “The survival of the fittest is the government of brutes and reptiles, and such philosophy must give place to a government which recognizes human brotherhood. It is the province of government to protect the weak, but the government to-day is resolved into a struggle of the masses with the classes for supremacy and bread, until business, home and personal integrity are trembling in the face of possible want in the family. . . .. If it be true that the poor have no right to the property of the rich let it also be declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.” Populists also delighted in subverting the dominant discourse and using the language of the business classes for their own ends. In an age when the specter of anarchism haunted capitalists, the Decatur, Texas, Times argued the monopolists were the true anarchists: “Red-handed anarchy is fast developing in the soldiery of our beloved Republic, in the courts, the elections, in the legislatures and congress.” Similarly Henry Demarest Lloyd could use the language of self-interest and Social Darwinism for Populist ends, arguing “the whole problem can be argued out from the point of view of self-interest, putting the self-interest of the community against the self-interest of the individual; the self-interest of the better against the self-interest of the worse; and reading the survival of the strongest to mean the survival of the stronger virtues, not the stronger greed.”

Populists saw their movement as very much in the American grain and presented themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution and the law. In their view, the corporate hijacking of the courts and law-making bodies represented a betrayal of the American constitutional system. This commitment to established constitutional means also set the parameters of acceptable Populist activity, largely defined by party organizing and participation in elections, and a rejection of violence as a political tool. As Nugent cautioned, “in combatting monopoly, let us never forget that neither force nor infringement of individual liberty is justifiable or safe. Let us remember that we ought above all others to set ourselves against anarchy in every form, against every measure calculated to break down the security which the laws afford to private property, and in favor only of those lawful and orderly methods which can always be successfully defended, and the observance of which will never fail to enlist for the workingman the sympathies of the good and worthy people of every class. .. . . A good cause committed to violent methods inevitably finds in them its grave. An intelligent ballot is the only refuge of justice and liberty.” Similarly Donnelly’s cautionary tale, Caesar’s Column, warned of a coming apocalypse when the workers turned to violence, culminating in “a hell of injustice, ending in a holocaust of slaughter.”

Breaking Down Barriers

A special project of the Populists’ efforts to build a mass movement was the attempt to form alliances that bridged several of the deepest rifts in Gilded Age America. From their agrarian origins, farmers reached out to industrial workers and the unemployed, fellow victims, in their view, of the war between the classes and the masses. The Omaha Platform championed the cause of industrial labor with its call for the limitation on immigration to reduce competition for jobs, enforcement of the eight-hour workday, the abolition of the strikebreaking Pinkerton Agency, and support for the Knights of Labor. The party stood with labor in all the era’s major conflicts. In the 1892 strike against Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Plant, Mary E. Lease, one of Populism’s most famous stump speakers, specifically called on Kansas farmers to send the striking workers a trainload of supplies: “We have been told by those who deal in misrepresentations that the farmers were not in sympathy with the wants and demands of laborers in town and city. Let us hurl this falsehood back, and show to the world that the farmers of Kansas are imbued with the spirit of 1776, and in sympathy with the toilers and oppressed humanity everywhere.” In his book A Strike of Millionaires Against Miners (1890), Henry Demarest Lloyd described miners caught in a circle of debt similar to the crop-lien system. “Sometimes it was one thing, sometimes another; but the upshot of it was that, mostly, when the miner came to settle with the company for the preceding month’s work, he found that, after paying for his oil, and the sharpening of his tools, his rent or his monthly installment on the lot he had bought, his monthly contribution to the doctor, and his bill at the company’s store, there was nothing left. He had just made ends meet; perhaps he was a little behind.”

Similarly the Populists supported the cause of the unemployed. In their critique of industrial capitalism, Populists like Lewelling viewed the growing number of unemployed as a direct product of the combination of monopoly and increasing mechanization. “In this country, the monopoly of labor-saving machinery and its devotion to selfish instead of social use, have rendered more and more human beings superfluous until we have a standing army of the unemployed numbering even in the most prosperous times not less than one million able-bodied men.” In his 1891 novel Congressman Swanson, Charles C. Post described the business classes’ response to the growing number of unemployed: “And as the machinery of legislation was in their hands, or the hands of their dupes and tools, the politicians, ‘Tramp laws’ were passed, and it became a crime for a man out of employment and out of money to ask for bread.” Standing as staunch supporters of demonstrations of the unemployed like that led by Jacob Coxey in 1894, the Populists called for the federal government to create a program of public works to provide jobs for the unemployed.

Finally, in trying to build a national movement, the Populists found themselves confronting the sectionalism and the regional hold the two main political parties had on American politics. In an era in which the bloody shirt was waved regularly, the Populists called on farmers and workers to break with their traditional political loyalties and support a third party. And in the South especially, this split involved even more basic social issues, as existing party politics intermingled at a fundamental level with the region’s racial divisions. Populists in the South, then, in challenging the dominant Democratic Party, confronted directly that party’s ideology of white supremacy. Not all Populists were willing to make this break with the past, but many southern Populists proved ready to stand in economic and political solidarity across racial lines. Speaking of black and white farmers, Watson said, “Now the People’s Party says to these two men, ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.’ ” Similarly, the Louisiana People’s Party adopted a resolution proclaiming, “We declare emphatically that the interests of the white and colored races in the South are identical. . . . Legislation beneficial to the white man must, at the same time, be beneficial to the colored man.” Black Populists too, realized that joining the movement involved a wrenching break with traditional loyalties; as a black Georgia farmer wrote, “It seems to be a hard thing for us colored men to give up the republican party [sic], but let us stop and consider: We are living in another man’s house, working another man’s land, and our smoke house and meal-tub are in town. Let us quit the old party and vote for wife and children and a chance for a home.” And yet, as white southern Populists stressed, this willingness to break with the region’s racial heritage and withstand the Democrats’ fearmongering cries of “Negro Rule” had its limits. As one white Alabama Populist wrote, “This has nothing whatever to do with social equality. It is a question of the material interests of both races.”

Fusion

By allowing itself to be contained largely within existing political processes, Pollack has said, Populism’s “protest was largely, if not exclusively, confined to the channels that the society had established to neutralize dissent.” These self-imposed ideological parameters created a profound dilemma for the party in 1896 when the question of fusion with the Democrats seemed to offer the best chance for electoral victory. As historian Robert McMath commented, “Here the logic and history of Populism as a movement collided with the ultimate political question: how to get more votes than the other guy.” Within the Democratic Party, the “free silver faction” emerged in the mid-1890s calling for the free and unlimited coinage of silver. Fueled by such popular works as W.H. Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School (1894), bimetallists called for a policy of inflation that, in the Populist view, still left the fundamental issues unresolved; it did nothing to counter the trend toward monopoly, nor did it create a flexible monetary system that could keep up with population or industrial growth. When the free silver faction took control of the Democratic Party and nominated William Jennings Bryan, Populists faced the choice of fusion with the Democrats, and thus jettisoning most of their platform, or running their own candidate and guaranteeing the election of the gold standard Republican William McKinley. Led by such fusionists as Watson and Weaver, the party chose to ally with the Democrats, though many Populists never accepted the decision. As an outraged Donnelly said, “The Democracy raped our convention while our leaders held the struggling victim.” Having channeled its militancy into electoral politics, defeat in 1896 proved devastating, and the Populist Party never recovered. In Pollack’s words, “Populism did not decline gradually. It fell over a precipice, to some extent a situation of its own making.”

Bibliography:

Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Revised Edition. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1995.

McMath, Robert C. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Pollack, Norman. The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Pollack, Norman, editor. The Populist Mind. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967.

Ridge, Martin. Ignatius Donnelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971 [originally published, 1951].

Woodward, C. Vann. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. 

Review, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, February 16, 1992

The recent political success of David Duke among white working-class voters prompted many commentators to attribute his popularity to economic hard times rather than his racist politics. Analysts of all political persuasions argued that the Duke campaign was only superficially about race, and that the underlying issue was economics, or class. But as historian David Roediger writes, this analysis overlooks the fact that Duke’s supporters self-consciously viewed themselves as a white working-class constituency. For some reason, or combination of reasons, the white working class chooses to define itself as much along racial as class lines.

In The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger seeks to trace this racial self-definition of the white working class to its origins in the late eighteenth century. In a process that took place between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Roediger argues that white workers, forced to adjust to the new industrial order, used African-American slavery as a point of reference in defining their own place in society. By this standard, a wide range of ethnic groups were integrated into a single, racially-defined, white working class. In the words of the historian W.E.B. DuBois, white workers accepted an inferior economic position for the higher “public and psychological wage” that whiteness entailed.

As Roediger argues, white workers used the ideology of republicanism—with its emphasis on personal independence and public good—to criticize the new social system. But they paid significant costs, he says, through their racially exclusive identification, “not only in terms of race relations but also the wedding of labor to a debased republicanism.”

Before the American Revolution, Roediger says, contrasting white labor and slavery was problematic, because whites themselves worked at a variety of levels of relative unfreedom. Many whites labored as indentured servants, apprentices or impressed sailors, all positions in which they were legally bound to their employer. But the experience of the revolution affected the nascent white working-class ideology in several ways. First, the metaphoric uses of the term “slavery” by political leaders to describe the American relation to Britain spread the ideal of independence among workers. Second, the political ideology of republicanism provided white workers with a world view explaining their role in the struggle for freedom. Finally, the proximate existence of African-American slavery provided a reference by which white workers could constantly measure themselves.

White workers maintained a strong sense of republicanism and independence as they entered the industrial era in the nineteenth century. As work gradually changed from the skilled labor of the craftsman to the unskilled labor of the factory employee, workers sought to define their role in the new order. Once again, slavery served as a negative reference point. Only in the United States did slavery exist simultaneously with the formation of the industrial working class.

Roediger focuses much of his attention on the development of language in this transformation. White workers actively sought to mold the language to fit their developing self-definition. For example, in the early nineteenth century, white workers rejected use of the term “servant” as applicable to whites. As the British visitor Frances Trollope commented in the 1830s, “It is more than petty treason to the republic to call a free citizen a servant.” Similarly, white workers differentiated themselves from slaves by dropping the term “master.” In its place they substituted the Dutch word bos, which they Americanized as boss.

This growing racial consciousness was apparent in the popular culture of the white working class. Roediger looks closely at minstrel shows, one of the favorite working-class cultural activities of the nineteenth century. The racism of the minstrel shows conveyed multiple meanings, Roediger argues. The performers in blackface represented the values of the white workers’ own pre-industrial past, a past they simultaneously scorned and missed. Using this “blackness” as a reference point, whites gradually and hesitantly formed a unified working class based on the concept of “whiteness.”

The symbolism of the minstrel blackface worked at a variety of levels. By poking fun at the pretensions of the character Zip Coon, for instance, minstrels commented not only on race relations but also on social relations among whites. Songs such as “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” and “Dixie” appealed to the recent rural past of many in the audience, whether migrants from the American hinterland or Ireland. But fundamentally, minstrel shows created a sense of solidarity among white workers because, as Roediger says, “all whites could easily participate in minstrelsy’s central joke, the point of which remained a common, respectable and increasingly smug whiteness under the makeup.”

This sense of belonging was especially important to Irish immigrants, Roediger says, because for some time it was hotly debated whether Irish were white. Many of the same characteristics attributed to blacks were also applied to the Irish, including such terms as “savage,” “bestial,” “lazy” and “simian.” Coming into America near the bottom of the social order, the Irish struggled to establish their racial identity to gain the higher “public and psychological wage” whiteness offered. Crucial in their effort was the Democratic party. The Irish came in large enough numbers that they constituted a sizeable voting bloc in several Northern cities and thus were actively recruited by the Democrats. In joining the Democratic party, which labeled itself as being “made my white men, for the benefit of white men,” the Irish effectively precluded any question of their qualifications for citizenship.

The Civil War challenged the ability of whites to be satisfied simply by defining themselves as “not slave” or “not black.” The emancipation of blacks during the war—and particularly blacks’ role in their own liberation by quitting work and leaving the plantations en masse in what DuBois termed a “general strike”—held ambiguous meaning for white workers. On the one hand, whites feared economic competition with freed blacks; on the other hand, the emerging Northern working-class consciousness viewed the liberation of black slaves as a model with lessons for the growing labor union movement. But in the end, Roediger says, established patterns of white supremacy reasserted themselves.

This pattern of racism had several important legacies, Roediger argues. Perhaps the most important is that white workers, believing they had nothing to learn from black culture, failed to see the potential value in what historian Eugene Genovese calls the “black work ethic.” As white workers fully entered the post-war era of industrial labor, they spurned the knowledge derived from the work experience of blacks, who knew better than any other group how to cope with and effectively resist regimented systems of mass labor. The failure to share experiences across races and cultures, Roediger says, has left the American working class impoverished ever since.

Most books by academics feature prose so turgid and terminology so arcane they seem designed specifically to scare off the lay reader. But, despite an occasional obeisance to other scholars that at times makes reading the book seem like invading a private club, The Wages of Whiteness is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Roediger draws on a wide variety of sources from nineteenth-century popular culture to describe the elusive struggle for status by the white working class. He shows how common people took an active role in defining themselves, and also the ways in which the social order served to severely limit the range of choices. The implications for the present are clear: The ideology of racial superiority is not natural but historically conditioned and overcoming it will involve escaping patterns of thought and culture that extend back over two centuries.

Review, George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City (University of Missouri Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, March 22, 1992

The ethnic, racial and class diversity of American cities frequently creates a volatile mix as different cultures often encounter each other with suspicion and hostility. But as George Lipsitz argues, this interaction of cultures can also lead to cross-breeding, producing a stronger, more vibrant hybrid culture. In this study of St. Louis, Lipsitz says that the city’s cultural greatness derives from the inter-mixture and mutual influence of the numerous minority groups that have composed the city’s population.

Lipsitz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, lived in St. Louis from 1963 to 1982. His love affair with the city, he says, grew out of his experiences as a student at Washington University in the 1960s, where he lived in proximity to various ethnic neighborhoods, listened to radio stations that played blues, soul, rock and roll and country-gospel, and participated in the city’s political life, particularly the civil rights movement. As a scholar, his fascination with the city has continued; one of his previous books was a biography of St. Louis civil rights organizer Ivory Perry.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis gathers together articles that originally appeared in a column Lipsitz wrote for St. Louis magazine. Taken together they present an impressionistic portrait of the city’s history, focusing on, as Lipsitz says, “the lives of oddballs and outcasts, immigrants and artists, women and workers, and many of those whose influence is rarely acknowledged in the standard histories.”

The history of St. Louis is filled with fascinating characters who left a lasting impression. For instance, there was Edward Gardner Lewis, a flamboyant con man who designed the suburb of University City. Lewis arrived in St. Louis in 1895 hawking mosquito repellents and patent medicines. In 1899 he began publishing a magazine, The Winner, in which he advertised another of his businesses, the Progressive Watch Company, promising readers a fortune if they would become Progressive Watch salespeople. Postal inspectors charged Lewis’ watch company was an illegal pyramid scheme and began an investigation of him that lasted more than twenty years. In 1902 The Winner became The Woman’s Magazine and soon claimed a readership of 1.6 million. Advertisements in The Woman’s Magazine reflected the range of Lewis’ business investments, including the “People’s University,” which allowed students to take college courses by mail.

Lewis designed University City to be the center of his business enterprises. As Lipsitz says, “Lewis spared no expense designing and implementing his vision of suburban life as an enclave free from the pollution and overcrowding of the industrial city.” He hired sculptor George Julian Zolnay to design the lion statues overlooking Delmar Boulevard. University City was incorporated in 1906 and Lewis served as its first mayor before leaving the area in 1912. His shady business dealings eventually caught up with him and in 1924 Lewis declared bankruptcy and in 1928 he was jailed for postal fraud.

“The strange career of Edward Gardner Lewis,” Lipsitz comments, “reminds us that history is made by both saints and sinners, and that it sometimes takes an eccentric to impose a bold vision on the commonplace realities of everyday life.”

Another largely forgotten character in St. Louis business history is Chris von der Ahe, a German immigrant who, in the 1880s, owned a small store selling beer and groceries on the city’s north side. When someone suggested that von der Ahe sponsor a baseball team, he replied that he knew nothing about baseball, but “if it sells beer, then I’m all for it.” Von der Ahe’s club, the St. Louis Browns, became St. Louis’ first championship team, winning the American Association title four straight years in the late 1880s. Von der Ahe promoted the team with a variety of gimmicks, including constructing an amsement park at the ballfield and hiring an all-female band to play before games. But he never learned much about the game itself, once telling player-manager Charlie Comiskey that the Browns had the “biggest diamond” in the league. When Comiskey responded that all baseball diamonds were the same size, von der Ahe replied, “Well then I’ve got the biggest infield.”

St. Louis had a lasting influence on several figures who were in the city only a relatively brief time. Theodore Dreiser lived there only sixteen months in the 1890s, working as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Covering the urban scene, Lipsitz says, “Dreiser cultivated his understanding of and his ability to write about everyday life in the modern city,” a talent that flourished in his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Josephine Baker lived in St. Louis only during her formative years. Born in 1906 in the slums of Mill Creek Valley on the city’s south side, Baker learned to dance by hanging around the taverns and dance halls in her neighborhood. She escaped to New York in 1921 and to Paris four years later, where she became an international sensation as the lead exotic dancer in the Folies-Bergere revue. Her childhood experiences of being poor and black gave her a life-long sympathy for the downtrodden. During World War II she served in the French resistance and after the war she returned to the United States to work in the civil rights struggle.

Short stays in St. Louis by two musicians left indelible marks on the development of American music. W.C. Handy was a young, itinerant musician who spent two weeks in the city looking for work during the severe depression of 1893. Sleeping in vacant lots and under Eads Bridge, Handy experienced misery first-hand. He also saw it in others, especially a woman walking along the levee moaning that her man “had a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” Twenty-one years later Handy recalled this scene and used it as the basis for the St. Louis Blues, one of the most popular songs in American history.

Like Handy, Bix Beiderbecke lived in St. Louis only briefly, but that period marked a major transition in his career. The son of a wealthy Davenport, Iowa, family, Beiderbecke arrived in 1925 to play trumpet in the orchestra of Frankie Trumbauer. While in St. Louis, Beiderbecke frequently spent his days attending concerts of the St. Louis symphony, listening to the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. Then at night, after playing, Beiderbecke frequented the clubs of Mill Creek Valley, where he learned the wild, free improvisational jazz played by black musicians. Beiderbecke drew inspiration by fusing the two musical styles, Euro-American classical and African-American jazz.

This fusion of cultures has marked St. Louis history as a whole. Lipsitz looks briefly at some of the groups that have had a permanent influence on the development of the city. He begins with the American Indian culture of the era before European settlement which, in the thirteenth century, had established a city of more than 40,000—more residents than lived in London at the time—just east of St. Louis in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Similarly, he examines the legacies of the French, German, Polish and African-American groups that have settled the area.

Lipsitz manages to avoid any romanticization of the American “melting pot.” If at times these cultures intermixed to produce a dynamic synthesis, Lipsitz makes clear that normally prejudice and cultural segregation prevented them from mingling. In discussing the black influence on Beiderbecke’s music, for instance, Lipsitz says the trumpeter “gained an enthusiastic following among white jazz fans for playing music that they could have heard everywhere if segregation had not limited black artists to mostly black audiences.”

Lipsitz also points out the tragic consequences of racism on the great ragtime pianist Scott Joplin. After making a fortune composing such songs as Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin sought to expand the concept of ragtime, writing extended pieces and eventually a ragtime opera. But such an idea ran up against the majority of Americans’ view of ragtime as the music of “happy darkies.” Joplin’s more serious compositions were commercial failures and he died, broke and embittered, in 1917.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis will not replace traditional histories. But in exploring the city’s neglected nooks and crannies and the various ethnic influences that are frequently overlooked, this book serves as an excellent supplement to more standard narratives. Lipsitz asks the reader to explore St. Louis’ history in the same way he describes Beiderbecke exploring its streets in 1925: “when we walk streets that he walked, we might want to remember the wealthy, young white man drawn to the culture of the working-class blacks, the wild-living jazz musician who spent his afternoons at the symphony. Beiderbecke understood that these worlds were not so far apart, that everyone has something to offer others, and that the best cultures are those that are fused from the contributions of everyone.”

Review, Chester Himes, Plan B (University of Mississippi Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, January 30, 1994

From 1956 through 1969, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones patrolled the streets of Harlem as representatives of the New York City Police Department in a series of eight crime novels by the African-American expatriate author Chester Himes. As black detectives on New York’s toughest beat, the two meted out their own peculiar brand of justice with their fists and signature long-barreled .38-caliber pistols on .44-caliber frames, seeking to maintain order in the violent, absurd world that was Himes’s fictitious portrait of Harlem.

As the series progressed, Himes’s vision grew increasingly chaotic, mirroring the cultural changes during the late 1960s. At the end of the final book, Blind Man With a Pistol, Harlem erupts in a riot sparked by the title character, who opens fire on a subway while the police, including Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, stand by helplessly. As Himes wrote in the prologue, the novel’s metaphor was based on a true story he heard, “and I thought, ‘damn right, sounds like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East.’ And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

But before writing Blind Man With a Pistol, Himes had worked on a different type of crime novel, in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are called in to help foil an organized black rebellion. Titled Plan B, the novel was to end with Grave Digger joining the revolution and killing Coffin Ed for his efforts to prevent it. Himes never finished the novel, though, and after completing his Harlem series spent the years until his death in 1984 writing his two-volume autobiography. Plan B was published as an unfinished novel in France in 1984 and now, for the first time, in English.

The disordered and absurd vision that marks all of Himes’s Harlem novels grew out of his life experiences. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, Himes was raised in several border and Southern states, where his father taught blacksmithing at black colleges. His family history was one of downward mobility as the family fell victim to a combination of personal and professional misfortunes.

Ending up in Cleveland as a teenager, Himes began consorting with the city’s underworld. After graduating from high school, Himes spent a semester at Ohio State University before being expelled. He was then arrested for armed robbery and spent seven and a half years in the Ohio State Penitentiary before being paroled in 1936. The violent and absurd world of prison in many ways mirrored the portrait of Harlem in his crime novels.

While in prison, Himes began his writing career, publishing short stories in Esquire. After being paroled, he moved to Southern California and wrote two protest novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, dealing with black workers in the booming war industries. The first was a modest success, but the failure of the second convinced Himes of two things. First, he was determined to leave the United States as soon as he could afford to, and in 1953 he emigrated to Europe. Second, he felt he needed to define himself as something other than a “protest writer,” then virtually the only available option for black authors. “I had the creative urge,” he would later say, “but the old, used forms for the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break through the barrier that labeled me as a ‘protest writer.’ I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism. We were more than just victims.”

Himes found this form when his French editor suggested he try writing detective stories. Only by allowing himself to be typecast as a writer within another fictional genre—one relegated to second-class citizenship in the field of literature—could Himes escape the confines of being a black writer. The Harlem series was extremely popular in France, while also slowly gaining popularity in the United States.

The universe of Himes’s crime series was marked by ambiguity, violence and what he described as “that bitter self-corroding irony which white people call ‘Negro humor.’” In his stylized portrait of Harlem, he discovered a perfect metaphor for his worldview.

Largely missing from this universe, though, is a specific political vision. Himes understood the difficulty of formulating a coherent political program from a worldview built on irony, ambiguity, chaos and absurdity. Thus, after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he largely avoided political writing.

As Plan B demonstrates, no one should mistake Himes’s silence for a lack of interest. In his own way, Himes was seeking to understand the possibilities and consequences of a full-scale black revolution, which he believed would need to employ urban guerrilla tactics and violence on a massive scale.

But Himes could not make up his mind what type of book he wanted to write. Occasionally powerful vignettes are mixed with interminable political discussions and gratuitous history lessons in which the ribald humor falls flat. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger pop in and out of the story but are not really integrated into the events. Finally, the book’s heavy-handed moralism diminishes the complexity and irony of the worldview of Himes’s other works.

There are two types of unfinished novels—those the author intended to complete but died before being able to, and those the author never intended to finish. Plan B is obviously the second type. As such, it is valuable for those wishing to know more about Himes or about African-American culture in the late 1960s. But for most readers, Plan B is important primarily for the cathartic function it must have served for Himes, allowing him to go on and write the brilliant Blind Man With a Pistol.

Review, Michael Cassity, Defending a Way of Life: An American Community in the Nineteenth Century (State University of New York Press, 1989)

Missouri Historical Review, July 1991

Hindsight allows historians of industrialization to assume an air of condescension toward opponents of the process. Because industrialization, and the social and cultural changes it produced, eventually triumphed, many historians view the transformation as inevitable and dismiss resistance to it as parochial and reactionary. In this study of Pettis County, Missouri, in the nineteenth century, Michael Cassity focuses on opponents of the new order and portrays their ideology as a creative, dynamic attempt to protect the preindustrial value of community.

Pettis County’s isolation from the burgeoning market of the early nineteenth century proved to be its major attraction for many settlers. Cassity cites General David Thomson as the best example because, unlike many others, he had alternatives. Already a successful planter in Kentucky, when he moved to Pettis County in 1833, Thomson disliked the growing commercialization of his life in Kentucky and, in moving to Missouri, sought escape from the economy and culture of the market.

Early settlers of Pettis County created a culture based on this determination to avoid the market. Economically, production was for use. Socially, mutual obligations, not individual rights, received emphasis. In fact, Cassity says, the “supreme accomplishment” of the society proved to be its ability to suppress the tension between the individual and the community. The politics of the society remained paternalistic, creating “an equilibrium between the gentry and the people.”

The transformation of Pettis County began in the 1850s and accelerated during and immediately after the Civil War. Led by George R. Smith, Thomson’s son-in-law, a business class developed which sought to end the county’s isolation by bringing in the railroad. Rebuffed by the citizens of Georgetown, the county seat, Smith created Sedalia, which developed as a railroad town. The presence of Union troops during the war, the commercial growth it spawned, and the restriction of the franchise during and after the war proved tremendous boons to the growth of Sedalia, which became the county seat in 1864. The railroad destroyed the isolation of Pettis County and introduced an industrial form of work organization. Cassity separately discusses the effects of the new market economy on workers, farmers, and women.

The author effectively captures the varied, often contradictory, ways people resisted the new industrial order, which broke down the notion of community based on mutual obligations and replaced it with one built on market relations. But the book suffers from poor organization, which causes Cassity to repeat himself, for instance, giving two separate play-by-play accounts of railroad workers’ strikes in 1885 and 1886. And though the book largely avoids the cloying romanticization of preindustrial culture that has marred some similar works, Cassity appears uncomfortable with the implications of his own study. Arguing that the triumph of market society was not complete, he concludes that whenever people joined together on the basis of a shared vision of community they, in fact, created that community. But, as this book shows, such resistance took place within the increasingly narrow parameters allowed by the new market capitalist system.