Review, Taylor Pensoneau, Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons, Southern Illinois’ Legendary Gangsters (Downstate Publications, 2002)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2002

The 1951 report of the Kefauver committee—a Senate committee investigating the influence of organized crime—dated the rapidly rising influence of criminal syndicates to the Prohibition era of the 1920s and stated that, in the entire country, the criminal gang wars in St. Louis and southern Illinois “reached a peak in bloodiness unparalleled in United States history.” And at the center of this maelstrom stood the Sheltons, a trio of brothers from Wayne County, Illinois, who formed a gang that dominated, at various times, East St. Louis, Herrin, Peoria, and Fairfield, and whose control of illegal activity in southern Illinois was so total that even Chicago’s Capone gang kept a respectful distance. In Brothers Notorious, Taylor Pensoneau, former Illinois political correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, narrates the story of Earl, Carl, and Bernie Shelton, from their origins in rural, late-nineteenth-century Wayne County, through their rise to power and their glory days in the early 1930s, to their eventual downfall and its aftermath in the late 1940s. Much of the story has been told before, and better, in such books as Paul Angle’s Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness and Gary DeNeal’s A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, but Pensoneau’s is the first full-length study focusing specifically on the Sheltons, and thus fills a significant niche.

The Sheltons’ father, Ben, came to rural Wayne County in the late 1800s, part of a larger migration of people moving into the area from the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. In the new location, as in the old, the migrants earned a hard-scrabble subsistence, supplementing crops raised from the poor farming soil with the region’s more bountiful fish and game. In this context developed a culture founded on a handful of imperatives. The migrants, Pensoneau says, “continued to insist in their new homeland on raw, simple rules for conducting their lives in which individualism was tempered only by strong allegiance to family. Government was regarded with suspicion by these individuals who often persisted in settling disputes on their own instead of through authorities. Independence was cherished.”

After having, variously, served time in prison and the military, and worked in the coal mines of Williamson County, the Shelton brothers ended up in East St. Louis in the aftermath of World War I. For the brothers it was fortuitous timing, bringing them into a city with an active underworld and thriving vice district at the dawn of America’s great experiment in social engineering, Prohibition. “If not for Prohibition,” Pensoneau says, “the Shelton gang might never have gotten off the ground. Without question, the history of organized crime in the country would have been far less recognizable.” The brothers quickly perfected the combination of force, intimidation, bribery of public officials, and satisfaction of public desires that would prove the foundation of their success for more than a quarter-century. Pensoneau does an adequate job of limning the characters of the brothers, especially hot-headed Bernie, and Carl, who in many ways epitomized the quintessential mid-twentieth-century American Character, the salesman, but who was always denied the social respectability he craved.

As the Shelton organization grew in strength, it expanded beyond East St. Louis to cover much of southern Illinois by the mid-1920s, where it came into conflict with other powerful forces, primarily Charlie Birger’s rival gang and the Ku Klux Klan, led by erstwhile federal agent S. Glenn Young. The intersection of these three organizations in and around Williamson County resulted in several frontier-style shootouts in the streets of Herrin, the murders of the mayors of Colp and West City, and the aerial bombing raid of Birger’s hideout, the Shady Rest. “Few place in America,” Pensoneau comments, “had been more torn asunder by the powerful and very emotional forces unleashed by Prohibition.”

Significantly, it was the Sheltons who emerged from Prohibition-era Bloody Williamson intact, reaching the peak of their power in 1930. The gang’s influence was such that it survived the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, shifting its emphasis from liquor to gambling and its base from East St. Louis to Peoria. Pensoneau sketches a portrait of Peoria in the 1940s greatly at odds with the city’s stereotypical image as exemplar of wholesome, middle American values. Under the Shelton influence, order was maintained in Peoria’s active red light district and gambling dens while large pay-offs smoothed relations between criminal syndicates and city hall. But this cozy relationship unraveled in the late 1940s as the Sheltons lost their grip on their empire, culminating in the assassinations of Carl in 1947 and Bernie in 1948.

Pensoneau argues that the reverberations from the fall of the Shelton gang would be felt for a long time. Following his brothers’ murders, Earl cooperated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a series of exposés delineating corruption in local and state political and law enforcement offices. The resultant outcry from reform groups and public anger at the largely Republican office-holders exposed bolstered the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Adlai Stevenson—who made the drive to clean up vice a centerpiece of his campaign—leading to a clean Democratic sweep in the fall elections, including a narrow victory for presidential candidate Harry Truman. As Pensoneau concludes, “Without the strong showing of Stevenson, Democrat Truman most likely would not have carried Illinois, a state that turned out to be crucial for Truman in his upset victory over Dewey.”

The Sheltons, Pensoneau concludes, were transitional figures in the modernization of American crime. “Historically, the Shelton boys and their gang were a bridge in Illinois between old and new. They had one foot in the past when lawlessness featured independent gunmen and their henchmen preying on society at their own will without regard to other outlaws. In that world, the Shelton brothers were very successful in defending themselves. On the other hand, Carl, Bernie, and Big Earl were forerunners in the move to major organized crime, to the consolidation of far-flung criminal enterprises under the iron hand of one individual or ruling gangland clique.” If, in the long run, the Sheltons could not compete with the modern crime syndicates, it may have been because their roots were too firmly in turn-of-the-century rural Wayne County.

The Sheltons’ story is so compelling it virtually tells itself, which is fortunate because Pensoneau’s leaden style consistently gets in the way. He too often falls into the passive voice, and his writing is filled with malapropisms, clichés, sentence fragments, and other grammatical errors (especially an ignorance of the difference between lie and lay). But, despite Pensoneau’s pedestrian telling, the intrinsically fascinating nature of the story propels the narrative.

"Oh Freedom": Songs of the Civil Rights Movement

Southern Illinoisan, February 3, 2016

 Faced with the violence—both legal and extra-legal—inherent in the Jim Crow system, civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s forged a culture of strength and resistance. And, as Macomb, Illinois, musician and music historian Chris Vallillo says, music played a crucial role in the development of this movement culture. “Songs filled the movement. They bred inspiration, courage and solidarity in the face of the ever-present threat of violence. Freedom songs would be the glue that held the movement together.”

Vallillo has released a new CD, Oh Freedom: Songs of the Civil Rights Movement (available online at ginridge.com) including such well-known songs as “We Shall Overcome” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” as well as several lesser-known songs.

In Vallillo’s view, music both connected the movement to the long history of African-American struggle and provided commentary on more timely issues. “Singing has always been a critical part of African-American culture. Many of the songs that became known as Freedom Songs had their roots in the spirituals of the slavery era. For instance, the lyrics of ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’ stretch back to the days of slavery. The song evolved through time from a gospel tune to a labor song in the 1930s sung by coal miners before becoming a civil rights song. ‘Oh Freedom’ started out as a song believed to have been written in response to the Emancipation Proclamation and sung in public as a response to the news of freedom.

“At the same time,” Vallillo continues, “music served as commentary on issues of the moment. New songs evolved from old songs. Most had a simple structure that allowed for easy improvisations with the lyrics. By changing a few words in a line you could adapt the song for any situation. For example, in ‘Ain't Gonna Let Nobody (Turn Me Around)’ the verse is just one line with repetition. A song leader could improvise a new lyric on the spot and call it out to the group which could immediately sing the verse together.” The Albany, Georgia, Chief of Police, Laurie Pritchett, for instance, was notorious for his department’s brutal treatment of demonstrators. In response, local activists added a verse specifically naming him.

Other songs emerged out of various local movements. As Vallillo comments, “'If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus’ chronicles the early victories of the Civil Rights Movement. Charles Neblett of the Freedom Singers, and a student at Southern Illinois University, wrote this in 1962 to the tune of ‘O Mary Don’t You Weep’ in support of a demonstration in Cairo, Illinois, where white residents swam in an outdoor municipal pool, while African Americans had to swim in the Mississippi River. It would help win the desegregation of the municipal Cairo swimming pool. After they won that fight a new verse was added to the song. ‘If you miss me at the Mississippi River and you can't find me nowhere, come on down to the swimming pool and I'll be swimming right there.’" 

While these songs are very much of their era, Vallillo believes they remain timely given the resurgence of a civil rights movement around issues like Black Lives Matter and the student activism at the University of Missouri and other campuses. “One of the main reasons I had for creating the project was to bring this music and these issues back into the forefront by highlighting the struggle that brought us this far. Very few artists are taking a stand on issues of social justice these days, but many of the issues that existed in the ‘60's are still with us. If anything, it seems as if we are moving backwards in terms of race relations given the particularly nasty nature of politics today. Movements like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and the recent campus demonstrations all can—and do—draw an important lesson from the way music was used as a tool in movements of the ‘50's and ‘60's. Ironically enough, I recently saw a segment on the national news showing students out west protesting recent gun violence on campus with a sit in style candlelight memorial. They were singing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’”

Review, George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (University of Illinois Press, 1994)

Gateway Heritage, June 1996

Historians usually have portrayed the years between World War II and the Vietnam War as a period of cultural and political consensus. But as George Lipsitz argues, that consensus was only achieved after a bitter and protracted struggle between capital and labor over economic policy in the postwar era. Immediately after the war ended, American workers engaged in an unprecedented series of strikes, both official and unofficial, culminating in general strikes in such places as Oakland, California, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The implications of this struggle, Lipsitz shows, extend far beyond the specific issues of postwar economic reconversion, significantly affecting the subsequent development of social, political, diplomatic, and cultural history. In this brilliant portrait of the era, the late forties emerge as a defining moment in U.S. history when the options available to Americans immediately following the war were foreclosed in the interests of an increasingly symbiotic relationship between big government and big business.

In a substantial revision of his 1981 book Class and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight, Lipsitz breaks down traditional distinctions between social, political, and cultural history. He draws on a wide variety of sources, ranging from the tactics of wildcat labor strikes to the development of the cold war, from the country music of Hank Williams to roller derby, from the working-class background of Marilyn Monroe to the rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan, from zoot suits to images of workers in postwar Hollywood films. The book’s title comes from country singer Ernest Tubb’s 1946 hit, “A Rainbow at Midnight,” a song that conveyed the ambivalence Americans felt as they looked toward the postwar future. As Lipsitz writes, “their recent experiences made it possible for them to imagine the future as a time of material abundance, as a time of cross-cultural cooperation, or as a time of deliverance from the trials of war. But they also might have viewed the future as a time of peril, encapsulated in the existence of the atom bomb and exacerbated by the uncertainties of postwar politics and social conflicts.”

In a series of examinations of specific labor struggles in various locales, Lipsitz shows that the struggle for control over the labor force was complicated by division among both capitalists and workers. The wartime policy of large-scale government contracts primarily had benefited big industries which, to preserve industrial harmony, had made their peace with organized labor. But many smaller, more competitive industries had accepted unions only grudgingly, if at all. Thus, in the postwar period some smaller industries sought to break their unions while most large industries worked merely to limit the role of labor. Unions were also divided, because many of the work stoppages during and after the war were unofficial “wildcat” strikes, originating on the shop floor, which further fragmented the unions. Labor leaders, seeking to prove to industry heads that they were responsible and able to keep union members in line, often cracked down on such rank-and-file militancy. The result of this struggle for hegemony was the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act, which sought to prevent mass strikes and maintain management’s control of the production process. At the same time, organized labor ensured a measure of economic stability through the permanent militarization of the American economy brought about by the cold war, which guaranteed lucrative government contracts for large industries.

The consequence of this process was that, by the late forties, labor militancy had been eviscerated. But as Lipsitz convincingly argues, the struggle for legitimacy takes a wide variety of forms, only some of them obviously political. “Working-class dissent did not disappear in the fifties. On the contrary, aspirations denied expression through politics, suppressed on the shop floor, and contained in the community often found powerful expression with emergent forms of popular culture and commercialized leisure.” As examples, he cites the popularity of such working-class pastimes as automobile customizing and stock-car racing.

The major example Lipsitz uses to illustrate the persistence of the working-class culture of dissent, and the way in which this subculture emerged into the mainstream, is the development of rock-and-roll. Growing out of the intercultural, urban, working-class environment created by the mass social migrations caused by World War II, the music provided a critique of the increasingly regimented and antidemocratic work culture of American capitalism. “Rock-and-roll lyrics talked about loving, working, eating, sleeping, buying, and the connections between all those activities. If one views politics as only the public struggle for political power, then rock-and-roll songs were apolitical. But if one defines politics as the social struggle for a good life, then those songs represented politics of the highest order.”

This argument, however, is problematic because it tends to underestimate the ability of the dominant culture to absorb dissident subcultures. In celebrating the oppositional nature of rock-and-roll’s commingling of working-class racial and ethnic traditions, Lipsitz largely ignores the ways that white, middle-class adolescents came to dominate the music’s audience, thus altering the nature of the music. As music critic Nelson George has written in his book The Death of Rhythm & Blues, the very term rock-and-roll—consciously chosen to replace the racially specific rhythm and blues—began a subtle process of transforming the music. According to George, “the generational schism and teen-eye view that has always been the crux of the rock-and-roll ethos was mostly foreign to black consumers, young as well as old. . . . Rock-and-roll was young music; R & B managed to be young and old, filled both with references to the past and with fresh interpretations, all at the same time.”

Despite an occasional tendency to overstate the dissident legacy of the era’s working-class culture, Rainbow at Midnight is an excellent survey of the forties, impressive in both its argument and the diversity of its sources. Lipsitz recaptures the period’s Zeitgeist in all its complexity. As he demonstrates, the consensus of the fifties—based on a global foreign policy and hysterical anticommunism, suburbanization, the nuclear family, conformity, and consumption—was neither preordained nor acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness. Rather, it grew directly out of the social struggles of the late forties. And while Lipsitz shows that Americans have reaped many cultural benefits from the contributions of the working class, he also reveals something of the world we have lost in the effort to deprive labor of more direct control of the workplace.

Review, Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin

Columbia Missourian, November 20, 1994

The jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, one of the greatest musical innovators of the twentieth century, once heard an elderly ragtime pianist. After listening intently for a while, Mingus embraced the pianist and exclaimed, “Now I know where I came from.”

Ragtime served as the theme music for Americans as they made the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Its syncopation and invitation to dance “cakewalks” were incitements to cast off the staid self-restraints of Victorian culture. Its African-American origins signaled the increasing racial integration of American culture—ironically, at the same time that social interaction was becoming, in many areas, increasingly segregated. Finally, its fusion of African rhythms and European instrumentation inaugurated the breaking down of traditional distinctions between civilization and primitivism that would provide one of the motivating forces behind modernism.

In her biography of Scott Joplin, the self-proclaimed “king of ragtime,” Susan Curtis focuses on the ironies of white Americans’ enthusiasm for black culture. Joplin’s life symbolized the tenuous position of minority artists. Born in Texas during Reconstruction and the son of ex-slaves, Joplin achieved wealth and fame as the nation’s leading composer but died penniless and confined to a mental institution. Although his career coincided with Americans’ self-conscious search for an indigenous musical style, Joplin’s attempts to compose serious ragtime pieces, including ballets and operas, consistently were rejected in favor of shorter, popular tunes. Finally, Joplin’s efforts to use his art as a means of educating and uplifting African Americans were ignored by America’s black intelligentsia.

One of the major problems Curtis faces in reconstructing Joplin’s life is the absence of standard primary resource material. Joplin left few written records, and during many periods of his life he disappeared from historical view, such as the late 1880s and early 1890s when he toured the South as an itinerant musician. Curtis creatively overcomes this dilemma by describing the broader milieu in which Joplin lived and worked. She details black life in Reconstruction-era Texas, emphasizing the musical culture, to outline the social forces that produced Joplin. Similarly, she discusses the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where ragtime first gained national popularity, because it is claimed—though not proven—that Joplin was there.

In fact, Joplin did leave a large amount of primary material in the form of his music. But, as Curtis points out, “Of all the fields of culture, music is perhaps the most difficult to use as a historical source because the audial experience is so fleeting, and the meaning is so elusive.” Drawing on a wide variety of theorists of music and popular culture, Curtis shows how ragtime both reflected the dominant social changes of the late nineteenth century and commented on these transformations.

While living in Sedalia, Missouri, Joplin established his reputation as America’s leading ragtime composer with the 1899 publication of “Maple Leaf Rag.” The success of Joplin and the vibrant local black community that had sustained him briefly made Sedalia an important cultural center in the emergence of ragtime. But, as Curtis says, the growing popularity of ragtime had ironic side effects for Sedalia’s entertainment district. As the sheet music for such songs as “Maple Leaf Rag” became best-sellers, people no longer needed to go to clubs to hear the music, but could play it on their own parlor pianos. Similarly, the popularity of the Sedalia style led the city’s talents to leave for bigger more lucrative markets. Joplin himself left for St. Louis in 1900.

Until his death in 1917, Joplin lived in St. Louis and New York, working unceasingly to expand the boundaries of ragtime. But while white Americans eagerly listened to ragtime as popular entertainment, they rejected any attempt to present the music as serious art. For instance, Joplin’s longtime publisher, John Starks, refused to print his longer works and Joplin failed to find enough financial support to stage his opera, “A Guest of Honor.”

Many African Americans also increasingly rejected Joplin’s music. As Curtis argues, black intellectuals were engaged in an intense debate during the early twentieth century over the best strategy to pursue. Many, influenced by Booker T. Washington, emphasized education and racial uplift, while others, following W.E.B. DuBois, urged blacks to focus on integration and political empowerment. Most of the leading black figures in Harlem during this period fell into the second camp. Thus, when Joplin, then living in Harlem, composed his opera “Treemonisha,” a story of life on a Southern plantation in which the heroine leads her people out of ignorance by teaching them to read, it was greeted with silence on the part of Harlem intellectuals. Highly educated and cosmopolitan in outlook, they could not relate to Joplin’s portrait of poor, ignorant, superstitious sharecroppers.

The tragedy of Joplin’s later career symbolizes the difficulties black artists traditionally have encountered in American society. Although whites frequently are fascinated by black culture, they typically have allowed blacks success only in rigidly-defined, stereotypical roles. Curtis’s fine biography makes clear the hazards minority artists face when they are not satisfied with such roles.

Review, Ira Glasser, photographs by Bob Adelman, Visions of Liberty: The Bill of Rights for All Americans (Arcade, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, March 29, 1992

“All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper!’” Thus spoke Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of his assassination. As Ira Glasser says, these words capture a major tension in American legal history. In its Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution embodies the highest expression of individual liberty any government has ever made. Yet in its performance, the U.S. government usually has lagged far behind its stated ideals in respecting the rights of large numbers of Americans.

The history of the Bill of Rights, then, is largely one of a dream deferred. But the existence of the dream of equal rights has often been a major source of inspiration to minorities excluded from the provisions of the Constitution. Glasser, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, argues that the Bill of Rights has always been “more than a set of laws: it was also a beacon of hope to people who had little reason to hope; it was a set of ideals to which the vulnerable might aspire, something to strive for, even when the horizon seemed distant.”

In the past several years, Americans have engaged in a variety of debates over the meaning of the Bill of Rights. During the Supreme Court nomination hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, such constitutional theories as “original intent” and “natural law” entered public discussion. The ongoing debates about such issues as abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights similarly demonstrate that, at age 200, the Bill of Rights has lost none of its ability to provoke controversy.

Glasser effectively demolishes Bork’s theory of original intent. Bork argued that the Constitution must be understood according to its precise wording, and that there was no room for interpretation. He said, for instance, that there was no such thing as a constitutional right to privacy, because that right was never explicitly stated. But Glasser places the creation of the Bill of Rights in context of the centuries-long development of English and American jurisprudence. He begins with the Magna Carta of 1215 which, for the first time, placed written legal limits on the power of the king. He traces the idea of placing restraints on the power of government through the American Revolution, when the colonists realized that not only the king, but parliament also, could abuse its power. The Founding Fathers drew on this history in drafting the Constitution, but as Glasser shows, the debate about its meaning has continued to the present. The Constitution then was part of a dynamic process of legal evolution. By trying to freeze it in time and extract a single original intent, Bork ignored this process.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights derived from the political ideology of republicanism, which had guided the Americans through the Revolution. One of the basic tenets of republicanism was that politics is a continuous struggle between power and liberty. Both needed to exist in proper balance, but this balance was constantly threatened by the fact that power was naturally avaricious and sought to expand at liberty’s expense. It was through this ideological lens that Americans viewed such British actions s the Stamp Act and other taxes, the arbitrary searches of colonists’ homes by royal agents, and the denial of the right to trial by jury. Such depredations of Americans’ rights, the colonists believed, indicated that British power threatened American liberty and this threat justified the Revolution. The lessons of the dangers of excessive government power informed the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights a decade later.

In stressing the importance of the concept of the struggle between power and liberty in republican thinking, Glasser is correct, but he overstates the emphasis the revolutionary generation placed on individual liberty. Another basic principle of republican theory was “virtue,” by which the Founding Fathers meant that the individual subordinated his own rights to the interests of the community. Such activities as the patriotic group the Sons of Liberty’s smashing of Tory presses during the Revolution indicate that freedom of expression was not the highest value in republican theory. Republicans saw individual liberty in delicate balance with social order and community good. Too great an emphasis on liberty would result in anarchy. Under the United States’s first national government, the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781, many Americans believed this balance had fallen too much toward social chaos. The Constitution was seen as an attempt to restore virtue. By ignoring this perceived balance between individual rights and social order, Glasser oversimplifies the nature of the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights itself was added to the Constitution as a political compromise. As originally written, the Constitution said virtually nothing about individual rights. But in the process of ratification, the new government met with staunch resistance. One of the major criticisms of the Constitution was that it granted too much power to the national government. To allay these fears and gain ratification, the Constitution’s supporters agreed to include a Bill of Rights.

As drafted by James Madison, the Bill of Rights listed several specific individual rights that would be protected by the Constitution. In order to make clear that this was not an exhaustive list of protected rights, Madison also included what became the Ninth Amendment, stating that “the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In September 1789, the first ten amendments were submitted to the states; in December 1791, Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify them, making the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution.

But significantly, as Glasser points out, the Bill of Rights did not include all of Madison’s proposed amendments. Realizing that individual rights could be threatened not only by the federal government, but also by the state governments, Madison proposed an amendment stating that, “No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.” Madison called this “the most valuable amendment on the list,” but it was rejected by the Senate, with severe long-term consequences.

Without this “most valuable” amendment, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state and local governments, which, for most of the past two centuries, have been allowed to restrict individual liberties with impunity. After the Civil War, Congress sought to remedy this situation with passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which prohibited the states from violating any of the privileges and immunities of American citizens, or denying them “life, liberty or property without due process of law,” or excluding anyone from the “equal protection of the laws.” But this guarantee of federal protection of individual rights against state governments was short-lived. In 1873, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade state governments from violating only national rights, such as the right to interstate travel, but it otherwise did not restrict the power of the states.

By this decision, the court withdrew constitutional protection from black Americans and allowed Southern states to begin instituting a policy of legal racial segregation. Official sanction of this policy of apartheid came in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. In the twentieth century, the court gradually backed away from this decision but only because of a concerted and long-term legal attack by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Not until the 1950s and 1960s did the court rule that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to the states and thus extended protection of the Bill of Rights to black Americans.

Glasser discusses the gap between the Bill of Rights’ stated protections and the treatment of other minority groups, including various religious minorities, women, and Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during World War II. The result is a generally useful popular survey of the modern concept of individual liberty.

Bob Adelman’s photographs are included to make this a coffee-table book, but serve little other purpose. A few of the pictures are effective, but most are either banal or irrelevant. For instance, in the section on freedom of expression, there is a photograph of Sylvester Stallone’s hand and footprints in the sidewalk at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. There is also a photographic self-portrait of artist Robert Mapplethorpe; admittedly, Mapplethorpe’s art has raised serious First Amendment issues, but this photograph is decidedly uncontroversial.

Review, Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, by the youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (Westview Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, September 8, 1991

History is much too important to be left to the historians. As cultural critic Dwight Macdonald once said, “A people which loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic.” Yet academic historians have largely abdicated their responsibility to educate the public, choosing instead to engage in esoteric debates of interest to few people except other historians.

Minds Stayed on Freedom represents an attempt by a group of young people to recapture their own history and make it relevant to their lives. Eighth- and ninth-grade black students in Holmes County, Mississippi, enrolled in a summer project sponsored by the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center in which they conducted a series of interviews with veterans of the civil rights movement in their home county. Several of the activists are relatives of the students, and yet a sense of discovery marks the interviews as the youths realize for the first time the courage and commitment necessary to gain the basic rights they take for granted.

This dialogue between generations goes both ways. Just as the students are amazed at the sacrifices of an earlier generation, the former activists are thrilled that these youths understand the importance of the civil rights movement. As one woman says, “I’m so proud of these young peoples because I have always wanted young people to get involved so they could know the struggles we came through to get them where they are today. . . . I really feel like shouting just to know these young peoples really interested in the movement and to carry on after we have gone to glory.”

For most Americans, images of the civil rights movement center on a few key events and figures. The Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the confrontations between police and demonstrators at Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.’s rousing speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his assassination in 1968 largely constitute the popular memory of the movement. But this focus on a handful of major events and leaders oversimplifies the history of the civil rights struggle and minimizes the fundamental grass-roots nature of the movement.

In the book’s introduction, project director Jay MacLeod places the story of the Holmes County civil rights movement in the context of local history from the time of the region’s first white settlement in 1833. Even under slavery, Holmes County blacks developed a tradition of resisting white domination. Though the experiences of emancipation and Reconstruction failed in the long run to fundamentally change the plantation system, they provided blacks with a brief taste of political power. Even in the century after the re-establishment of white supremacy, blacks in Holmes County continued to make some economic advances—notably the creation of a black landowning class—that were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement.

As MacLeod says, events that gained national coverage, like King’s 1963 campaign in Birmingham, represent the entire black community mobilizing large numbers of people. On the other hand, the events in Holmes County represent the local community organizing. This process began in 1963 when a small group of independent black farmers invited representatives of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help them organize. Throughout the state, SNCC helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated organization to challenge the dominance of the all-white regular Democratic party. In Holmes County, the MFDP was extremely effective, winning in 1967 the election of the first black state representative since Reconstruction.

This community study indicates the diversity of the civil rights movement by showing how local interests and tactics often differed from national ones. In Holmes County, for example, unlike in the national movement, the church and its ministers did not play a major role. Rather, the lead was taken by black landowners. Despite the fact that many were barely subsistence farmers, landowners had achieved a degree of independence from white society that gave them the economic freedom and personal courage to withstand white resistance to the movement.

When northern civil rights workers came to Holmes County to help organize, they stayed with these independent farmers. As one landowner remembers, being a private property owner allowed him to stand up to whites who resented his housing a white female civil rights worker. “I say, ‘What you go to do with this here?’ This ain’t none of your place is it? I’m tellin’ you right now, that house belongs to me. I don’t owe nobody nothin’ on it. If I get a bunch of white-faced cows and put ‘em in there, it’s nobody’s business. If I want to sleep with them, if I want ‘em to stay with me, nobody have nothing to do with it.’”

The crucial, early role played by landowners created resentment when, as the movement grew, the more educated classes stepped in to take over leadership roles. As one farmer says, “It was the so-called dumb people. Up from the grass roots, they call it. But now, the school teachers, the educated people, they ain’t did a damn thang! The preachers ain’t neither. The so-called dumb people open the way for everybody. See, the table was set. Yeah, and when the table got set with cake and pie, school teachers and everybody come in helping eat it up.”

Activists in Holmes County also differed from some leaders of the national movement in their view of armed self-defense. While the Holmes Countians express admiration for King’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, they did not believe they had the luxury of strict nonviolence. Faced with regular confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan and other threats of force by whites, most black civil rights workers in Holmes County kept loaded rifles on hand.

Violence pervaded the history of race relations in Mississippi and Holmes County was no exception. Most of this violence was carried out by whites against blacks, often in the form of lynchings. But occasionally blacks resisted violently. The most famous such local episode was that of Eddie Noel, a young black Holmes Countian who, in 1954, shot and killed a white store-owner in an argument, then escaped from a large manhunt, killing two more whites in the process, before eventually turning himself in. Noel was a folk hero to blacks in Holmes County by the time of the civil rights movement a decade later. One civil rights veteran says Noel’s experience gave “some of the black peoples the idea that they didn’t have to take the beatin’ and runnin’ and the abusement like they had been. I’ve heard a lot of ‘em say it was good that somebody had the courage and the nerve to stand tall like a man than be treated like an animal.”

Similarly, Hartman Turnbow, an early movement leader who once fired into a crowd of whites that had set fire to his house, became a hero to local civil rights activists. Holmes Countians never defined such self-defense as violence. As Robert Cooper Howard, another black who once fired into a crowd of Klansmen outside his house, said, “I don’t figure that I was violent. All I was doin’ was protectin’ myself.”

In conducting the interviews, the students leave gaps of information that more experienced interviewers would have filled. For example, several people are mentioned as having been important to the local movement, yet their specific roles are not clearly explained either by those interviewed or the editors.

But such faults are overshadowed by the book’s virtues. Most notably, the students’ enthusiasm is contagious. In talking to their relatives and neighbors, these young Holmes Countians learned that history is not solely an impersonal process made by great leaders, but also can be made when ordinary people join together to display extraordinary courage. 

Review, I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Little, Brown and Co., 1988)

The IRE Journal, Winter 1989

After a half-century of covering current politics, I.F. Stone has turned his muckraking skills to ancient Athens. With a fresh perspective that only a scholar outside the academic mainstream could bring, Stone seeks to reinterpret one of the most famous trials in history—the conviction of Socrates in 399 B.C. In the process, he shows the skills of the investigative journalist and those of the historian are not so different.

One advantage Stone the historian has over Stone the journalist is a more relaxed deadline. Since the 2,400-year-old trial is hardly breaking news, Stone figured he could take extra time covering it. When in December 1971 he ceased publication of his one-man investigative newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Stone decided to undertake a history of the ideal his career as a journalist and his belief in democracy had taught him to hold most dear—freedom of thought and speech.

He began his study with the two English revolutions of the seventeenth century, but quickly decided he could not understand these without fuller knowledge of the Protestant Reformation and the connection between religious freedom and freedom of thought. One antecedent led to another until Stone’s studies took him back to ancient Athens, “the earliest society where freedom of thought and its expression flourished on a scale never known before, and rarely equaled since.”

Realizing he could not fully understand Socrates’ social environment by reading ancient classics in translation, Stone taught himself Greek. Then, just as he had been famous for doing as a journalist, he plunged into the primary sources. The painstaking work paid off, as Stone frequently points out the subtleties of Greek words and the possible misconceptions arising from various translations. Near the end of the book, Stone defends his premise that Athenians not only enjoyed free speech, but considered it a basic principle of their democratic government. The Athenians had not one, but four, words for freedom of speech, “more, I believe,” Stone comments, “than in any other language, ancient or modern.”

Stone seems comfortable in his role as historian. But then his attitude always has been that most specialized knowledge is accessible to ordinary people if only they are willing to take the necessary time to understand.

Having made his reputation through his painstaking perusal of official documents, Stone faced the problem of researching a story in which there are no surviving official sources. Stone tackled this problem through careful study of the three surviving contemporary portraits of Socrates—by his followers Plato and Xenophon, and the dramatist Aristophanes, whose play Clouds is about Socrates—and the writings of Aristotle, who was born fifteen years after Socrates’ death. On the points of common agreement between these four, Stone believes he has a fairly accurate picture of the historical Socrates.

Stone’s Socrates is an authoritarian, disdainful of the common people, cruel to his devoted wife, and a favorite target for lampooning by Athenian comic poets. Stone characterizes the famed Socratic method as a “negative dialectic,” by which Socrates “asked for definitions he himself was never able to attain and then easily refuted whatever definitions his interlocuters offered.”

Socrates differed from the dominant Athenian thought on several key points, all of them concerning man’s political nature. Athenian politics was divided into two class-based parties. Both sides agreed the city should be governed by its citizens. But the upper class believed government should be by the aristocratic “few,” while the poorer class supported rule by the democratic “many.” Socrates, however, supported neither view, instead believing in government by a philosopher king, “the one who knows.” People are not virtuous enough for self government, Socrates, said, and so they should unquestioningly obey their rulers. This view placed Socrates outside the bounds of common political debate, Stone comments, making him “not just antidemocratic, but antipolitical.”

Athens, according to Stone, was a vigorous democracy. Two centuries before Socrates, Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, had opened membership in the assembly to all male citizens, even those from the poorest classes. There was widespread freedom of speech, and philosophers from all over Greece came to teach in Athens. But Socrates advocated complete withdrawal from political life in the city. “Socrates is revered as a nonconformist,” Stone points out, “but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed.”

The trial of Socrates was politically motivated, Stone says. The Athenians tolerated him as a harmless crank until he was seventy, but events in the last years of Socrates’ life made him seem more threatening. In both 411 and 404 B.C., conspiracies of disaffected Athenians, aided by the enemy city, Sparta, overthrew the democracy and established dictatorships. Both conspiracies had been led by former pupils of Socrates, the first by Alcibiades, the second by Critias. According to Xenophon, Critias and his associates murdered 1,500 Athenians during their eight-month reign. There is no evidence to suggest that Socrates supported these dictatorships, Stone says, but they certainly were fresh in the minds of Athenians during Socrates’ trial, making his antidemocratic teachings seem far from benign.

None of this evidence, in Stone’s view, justifies the death sentence given Socrates; Athens betrayed its own ideals in convicting the philosopher. Socrates, though, easily could have won an acquittal, Stone argues, if he had defended himself on the basis of freedom of speech. But “Socrates would have found it repugnant to plead a principle in which he did not believe; free speech for him was the privilege of the enlightened few, not of the benighted many. He would not have wanted the democracy he rejected to win a moral victory by setting him free.” Thus, the great irony is that the antidemocratic Socrates became the first martyr of free speech.

Stone realizes he is contradicting the mainstream view of Socrates. But after a career spent standing alone against the dominant intellectual and political current, he is used to the position. Stone is playing the same role he did when he risked his career to publicly criticize the Korean War, began his own radical newsletter at the height of the McCarthy era, and singlehandedly discredited the Pentagon’s 1965 White Paper on Vietnam. After braving such opposition, Stone must have been singularly unaffected by the thought of incurring the wrath of a relative handful of ancient historians.

It must seem ironic to Stone that the journalistic community is taking this book’s publication as an opportunity to praise his entire career, when for so many years he was an outcast from that community. During the 1950s, Stone was blacklisted from the mainstream press and New York Post columnist Richard Rovere once called him “a writer who thinks up good arguments for poor communist positions.” Today he is considered an elder statesman and model for investigative journalists. As this independent-minded study shows, it is not Stone who has changed.

Review, David F. Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, April 10, 1994

The word sabotage derives from the French word sabot, a type of wooden shoe worn by workers in the early nineteenth century. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, workers faced increasing unemployment, the erosion of labor skills, and the devastation of their communities as the introduction of machinery destroyed their traditional crafts. They fought back by tossing their sabots into the machines, causing breakdowns.

This pattern became widespread, especially in northern England, where workers celebrated the mythic Ned Ludd, champion of machine wreckers. As David Noble argues, the Luddites have been widely misrepresented and their movement dismissed. But as we find ourselves in the midst of the second Industrial Revolution, faced again with increasing unemployment and the destruction of communities because of new technology, he argues we might have much to learn from the Luddites.

History is written largely by the winners; therefore, our understanding of Luddism is based primarily on the accounts of the defenders of mechanization and progress. In this view, the advance of technology was inevitable, powered by social forces beyond human control. In opposing this process, the Luddites sought to accomplish the impossible by turning back the hands of time. But, as Noble says, when factory owners and workers struggled over whether and how machinery would be introduced into the workplace, the story was complex and the outcome in doubt.

The mechanization of the workplace was not primarily an economic issue, Noble says, but a political one. The struggle was one for power, as owners sought to establish unquestioned dominance over their employees while workers fought to maintain control of the conditions of labor by preventing the destruction of their crafts. In the process of defending their interests, the owners articulated an explanatory paradigm to justify the advance of technology and the displacement of workers. This ideology portrayed society as governed by vast social forces, or “invisible hands,” in Adam Smith’s classic phrase. Immutable “laws” of supply and demand rendered the actions of individual capitalists and workers irrelevant.

Developed in the midst of the struggle between workers and owners over control of the workplace, this ideology gradually became the dominant cultural view in Western society so that even opponents of capitalism and defenders of labor accepted its basic premises.

By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had become an abstract doctrine and, in the process, the immediate and tangible experiences of workers on the shop floor grew increasingly irrelevant in the grand theories of both capitalism’s defenders and opponents.

The struggle, in short, effectively had been removed from the point of production—the shop floor, the one place workers wielded the most potential power. Determined not to seem antiprogress, labor unions accepted the mechanization of the workplace and focused their attention on such bread-and-butter issues as wages and hours.

In 1983, Business Week proclaimed, “Everyone believes the United States is in the midst of an economic transformation on the order of the Industrial Revolution.” Whereas mechanization propelled the original Industrial Revolution, automation has guided the second. Growing largely out of the state-sponsored developments in technology made during World War II, the second Industrial Revolution has been based on programmable machinery as well as self-correcting machinery. With the growth of multinational corporations and the creation of a global labor market, it has affected labor’s development worldwide.

Once again, technological developments have given rise to an official ideology justifying the process. As Noble explains it, “Economists revealed that the very idea of technological unemployment was simply a semantic confusion, since technological development invariably created more jobs than it eliminated.” Union leadership accepted the official optimistic explanation and confined its criticism to areas besides the increasing automation of the work place. But workers themselves have not been so quick to assume the beneficence of technological advances. Thus they have found themselves in opposition not only to their employers but to their unions.

Ned Ludd lives and has shown a creativity in the struggle for power in the workplace. In the late-1970s in Australia, for instance, telephone workers went on strike to oppose the introduction of a computerized system that would have displaced many of them. Striking technicians switched over the local-call system and the long-distance system, enabling the public to make unlimited long-distance calls at local-call prices.

One of the dominant forms of power in society is the ability to define what constitutes “common sense.” For nearly two centuries in Western society, technological progress has been common sense, and those who oppose it thereby are defined as either misguided or insane. But Noble asks us to look more closely at such common-sense assumptions and recognize that they are the results not of hidden hands but of power politics. Furthermore, Noble argues, it is necessary to look at the experiences of the workers who have been displaced by the mechanization of the first Industrial Revolution and the automation of the second. In demanding that we recognize the tremendous costs that are glossed over in the optimistic dominant ideology, Noble displays the same critical spirit that prompted the British poet Lord Byron to condemn the authors of the Frame Bill which made machine breaking a capital offense:

Men are more easily made than machinery—

Stocking fetch better prices than lives—

Gibbets on Sherwood will heighten the scenery—

Showing how Commerce, how Liberty thrives.

Review, Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (The Free Press, 1989)

The IRE Journal, Fall 1990

At the 1963 March on Washington, John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, planned to ask, “I want to know, which side is the federal government on?” While more moderate leaders of the march convinced Lewis to cut this particular section of his speech, the question remained valid—probably even more valid than Lewis realized. For, as Kenneth O’Reilly shows, the federal government, at least in the form of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, engaged in a systematic effort to discredit and destroy the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

O’Reilly details the Bureau’s attempts to undermine one of the largest mass democratic movements in twentieth-century America. Under the leadership of its director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI consistently stood on the side of the status quo, which in Hoover’s mind meant the continued supremacy of white Americans. Acting out of a variety of considerations—personal, bureaucratic, political and ideological—the FBI undertook a range of campaigns from failing to enforce civil rights laws to smearing the movement’s major leader, Martin Luther King, to infiltrating and sabotaging black organizations. Parts of this story have been told before, for instance in the reports of the Church Committee of the U.S. Senate in 1975-1976, and in books like David Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King (1981), but the strength of O’Reilly’s book is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the FBI’s racial politics and places them in the broader context of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ civil rights policies.

Drawing on FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and personal interviews, O'Reilly details the way Hoover used bureaucratic decision-making processes, both within the FBI and between it and other departments, to serve his own ends. He demonstrates Hoover’s attitude by showing the drastic difference in the Bureau’s enforcement of civil rights laws compared to its investigation of civil rights organizations. Intra-departmental memos reveal that, when told by the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights laws more rigorously, Hoover engaged in “a campaign of bureaucratic resistance.”

But when, in light of the 1961 Freedom Rides, administration officials asked for better intelligence information enabling them to anticipate outbreaks of violence, Hoover responded with a vigorous program of surveillance.

Using FOIA requests to follow the flow of Bureau memos, O’Reilly shows this policy of surveillance was tailored to fit Hoover’s preconceived views. In the summer of 1963 the FBI Domestic Intelligence Division issued a summary of communist attempts to infiltrate the civil rights movement. The Division’s sixty-eight page brief concluded that communist influence was minimal and that Marxist-Leninist ideology made it irrelevant to the struggle for black equality. Hoover, however, rejected the report and ostracized Division chief William Sullivan. Realizing his miscalculation, Sullivan issued a new report a week later saying, “The Director is correct. We were completely wrong . . . the Communist Party, USA, does wield substantial influence over Negroes, which one day could become decisive.”

The FBI’s policies markedly changed after the movement reached its pinnacle of popularity with the 1963 March on Washington. O’Reilly argues the march convinced Hoover that the movement posed too great a threat to the status quo and needed to be destroyed. Thus the FBI set out to discredit King, the movement’s most visible figure. King had been the target of FBI surveillance before the summer of 1963, largely because one of his chief advisers, Stanley Levison, had been a high-ranking member of the Communist Party in the 1950s. But according to O’Reilly, Levison merely provided a pretext for Hoover in his attempt to undermine King and, through him, the movement as a whole.

As a result of the surveillance of King, the FBI discovered that he was carrying on a variety of adulterous affairs. In light of this knowledge the FBI shifted focus in its efforts to smear King, concentrating on the issue of morality. The FBI’s vendetta reached its apex in November 1964 when Sullivan, with Hoover’s approval, sent King an anonymous letter, purportedly from another black pastor, threatening to release damaging information unless King committed suicide. Sullivan’s letter read, in part, “King, look into your heart. You know you are a fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. . . . You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

The FBI found willing accomplices in its campaign against King and the movement generally among members of the media. Hoover had developed a symbiotic relationship with selected members of the Fourth Estate, feeding them inside information in return for good publicity. By the early 1960s, O’Reilly says, the FBI had cultivated over 300 television, radio, and print journalists who “could be counted on to publicize the FBI’s position on virtually any issue.”

Despite its efforts to destroy King, in some ways the FBI’s work aided the civil rights movement. For instance, the Bureau undertook a campaign to investigate the Ku Klux Klan.

The greatest success of this effort came when the FBI solved the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. In O’Reilly’s view Hoover sought to defeat the Klan in an attempt to distance the FBI from white extremists who were giving the struggle against civil rights a bad name. A less Machiavellian—and more plausible—explanation of Hoover’s motives was offered by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in their 1988 book We Are Not Afraid. Hoover, according to Cagin and Dray, held a typical lawman’s hatred for all secretive, vigilante organizations. Regardless of motive, O’Reilly certainly is correct in saying, “From beginning to end, the Klan wars remained a sideshow to the real war against the black struggle for racial justice.”

O’Reilly traces the FBI’s relationship with black Americans through the rest of the decade as calls for integration were replaced by cries of “black power” and the language of anti-communism was supplanted by the rhetoric of “law and order.” As he had with the “communist menace” of earlier decades, Hoover came to view all blacks as a potential threat to America and thus he justified the FBI’s violating their civil liberties.

Under its counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO-Black Nationalist, the FBI worked to infiltrate and destroy a range of radical black organizations, especially the Black Panthers. The FBI attempted to stir up intra- and inter-organizational strife amongst black groups by such tactics as falsely telling individuals that others had issued death contracts on them. As O’Reilly says of the FBI policy, “Physical violence, as opposed to violent rhetoric, was never more than a peripheral part of the black struggle for equality. Political violence, in contrast, was a central part of the FBI response to that struggle—something located within the mainstream of policy toward blacks.”

Responsibility for this policy cannot be confined to Hoover or the FBI, O’Reilly argues, but most be shared by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Hoover may have been extremely powerful, but he was still answerable to the president. As O’Reilly points out, even the attorneys general most sympathetic to black Americans, Robert Kennedy and Ramsey Clark, acquiesced in Hoover’s policies. Ironically then, O’Reilly concludes, the FBI’s war on the civil rights movement was as much a legacy of the Great Society program as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

O’Reilly occasionally overemphasizes the racist motivations of the FBI’s policies. Infiltration, “dirty tricks,” and attempts to discredit individuals were also part of the FBI policy against white dissidents in the anti-war movement and the New Left. But, though his argument is occasionally tendentious, O’Reilly’s research accumulates enough evidence to mark this story as one of the most shameful in recent American history. With the government abuse of the FOIA that has occurred over the last decade, it may be a long time before we get another look at how irrational fears and prejudices can be transformed into official government policy.