Review, Hugh Kenner, Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings (University of California Press, 1994)

Columbia Missourian, March 26, 1995

In a 1989 music history class at Northwestern University, the professor began his section on Wagner by playing the Ring cycle. As the music began, the students filled the classroom with the chorus, “Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!”

As almost any member of the television generation would know, the reference is to the classic 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?, an inspired piece of lunacy featuring Elmer Fudd as a Valkyrie warrior and Bugs as both the intended victim of Elmer’s wrath and Brunnhilde, the object of his desire. When Bugs/Brunnhilde dies at the conclusion, a heartbroken Elmer carries off the corpse, prompting Bugs to turn to the camera and ask, “What do you expect in an opera, a happy ending?”

What’s Opera, Doc is a product of the cartoon genius of Chuck Jones, a giant of twentieth-century popular culture, whose effect on the cultural frame of reference of at least three generations of Americans has been incalculable. One of the four major directors responsible for the development of the modern-day Brer Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Jones also created several of Warner Brothers’ other most prominent cartoon characters, including Pepé Le Pew, the amorous skunk who speaks with a Charles Boyer accent and mistakenly believes a female cat is a lady skunk who adores him, and Wile E. Coyote, a contemporary Sisyphus whose eternal quest is a maniacal pursuit of the elusive Road Runner.

In addition to such series characters, Jones directed several brilliant one-shots, such as One Froggy Evening (1955), the story of the greed inspired by a singing frog; The Dot and the Line (1965), in which the hopelessly square Line is madly in love with the beautiful Dot, who only has eyes for the beatnik Squiggle; and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967), which used the menacing voice of Boris Karloff to bring Dr. Seuss’s characters to life.

Hugh Kenner, a literature professor at Johns Hopkins University, strikes a proper balance between taking Jones seriously as an artist and not letting that diminish the sheer pleasure of his cartoons. Jones comes across as a witty, erudite raconteur, whose conversation is peppered with references to a wide range of (primarily literary) sources, from Mark Twain to James Joyce to Georges Santayana. He is a master of comic timing; as he comments on the Coyote’s oft-repeated fall from a cliff: “Eighteen frames for him to fall into the distance and disappear, then fourteen frames later he would hit. It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn’t work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh.” (To put this in perspective, a single frame is briefer than the blink of an eye.)

The secret of successful animation, according to Jones, lies in the character’s way of moving. For example, Pepé Le Pew’s manner of running when pursuing the cat is the “pronk,” a South African word coined to describe the leaping movements of the springbok. “The Pepé pronk is a sequence of ecstatic vertical leaps, all four feet leaving the ground at once, forward movement perhaps half vertical, eyes wide, tongue lolling, the whole danced to a dream-tempo metronome that’s wholly decoupled from the panic of any springbok,” Kenner writes. “It’s contemplative, and what its contemplation postulates is leisurely future bliss, untarnished by any cynicism about ‘Jam Tomorrow but never Jam Today.’”

Furthermore, Jones comments, his characters need to be recognizable and comprehensible in both action and emotion. Thus his version of Bugs Bunny differed from the wildly anarchic character created by Tex Avery. Jones’s Bugs combined the “spicy, somewhat erudite introspection of a Professor Higgins, who, when nettled or threatened, would respond with the swagger of D’Artagnan as played by Errol Flynn, with the quick wittedness of Dorothy Parker—in other words, the Rabbit of My Dreams.”

Other recognizable character types include the Coyote, symbol, in Jones’s view, of fanaticism, for which he cites Santayana’s definition of the fanatic—“one who redoubles his effort, having forgotten his aim."

Jones’s genius rests on taking his work seriously without having pretensions that he was producing art. “I don’t know of any way to express it except by saying there are only two things that count,” he comments. “One is the love that you have for what you do, and the other is the work you’re willing to devote to achieve it.” But of the two, only the love should be apparent, he continues. “If the work shows, you’re in trouble. [In] Roger Rabbit, the only thing that showed was the work. But the love was nonexistent.”

Review, Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield (Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1999). Introduction by Ron Sakolsky

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2001

In the wake of the success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), Americans were inundated with literary utopias from points of view as diverse as the American people themselves. Novels describing socialist, populist, business, Christian, feminist, and an array of other utopias spoke to a people making the uneasy transition from a rural, small-producer capitalist economy to an urban, big business, consumer economy. Such works reflected the social and personal tensions of this period of transformation, but also an underlying optimism regarding Americans’ ability to adapt to the challenges at hand and fashion a more humane future. Such optimism, which fueled the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, had largely spent itself by the end of World War I, and in the wake of the mass destruction and social chaos arising from the war and the Russian revolution, the cycle of utopian literature largely came to an end.

Vachel Lindsay’s The Golden Book of Springfield (1921) stands as one of the final works in this wave of utopian writings. Recently reissued, with a lengthy introduction by Ron Sakolsky, it is an odd and idiosyncratic book, reflecting the eccentricities of its author. One of the most significant American poets of the early twentieth century, Lindsay wrote free verse that captured the American vernacular as reflected not only in the daily spoken language, but also the rhythms of the era’s popular culture, notably jazz and motion pictures. Moreover, Lindsay was fascinated with many of the intellectual strains of his time, including, at various times, socialism, feminism, Christian mysticism, and prohibition. In the best tradition of Whitmanesque democratic poetry, Lindsay contradicted himself because he contained multitudes. Thus he captures the heteroglossia of a time when the left wing of Progressivism merged with the socialist, social gospel, and feminist movements, and the residual influence of nineteenth-century political movements—from Lincoln’s republicanism, to transcendentalism, abolitionism, populism and Henry George’s single-tax plan—still carried meaning in American political discourse.

In a fine introduction, Sakolsky places Lindsay in this dynamic context and shows how the poet drew on a wide range of influences to fashion an eclectic radicalism. As Sakolsky comments, “Lindsay was not an ideological purist. Instead he attempted to creatively cobble together a variety of strains of thought. . . . In one sense Lindsay’s intellectual approach can be seen as lacking in rigor, but in a more favorable light it can be seen as the thinking of a person more interested in facilitating unity than in sectarian bickering.” Running through Lindsay’s utopian thought are not only the intellectual currents mentioned above, but also anarchism, Confucianism, slave culture, and the influence of such people as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, John Ruskin, Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, Jacob Coxey, and Woodrow Wilson. In Lindsay’s fertile imagination, such ideas interact in strange and unexpected ways. “It is as though,” he says at one point, “a work by Henry George has been changed into a work by Swedenborg!” Though perhaps incoherent ideologically, Sakolsky argues that this diversity of influence served its fundamental purpose, writing that Lindsay “is not a proselytizer for a particular utopian blueprint, but an advocate of utopian thinking per se.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Lindsay’s thinking was the influence of African-American culture. The major event influencing the writing of his utopian work was the 1909 race riot in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, which Lindsay witnessed first-hand. As in most things, Lindsay’s thinking regarding race was diverse and often contradictory. An admirer of both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, he once wrote a poem about the militant white abolitionist John Brown, which he dedicated to the black accommodationist Washington. But Lindsay was deeply troubled by racism and understood the crucial role African Americans played in the development of a broader American culture. Thus a significant part of his utopian vision is of “a non-racial future,” the result of frequent inter-marriage.

Overall though, Sakolsky’s introduction is much more substantial than the book itself. Virtually plotless, The Golden Book is filled with interminable discussions of religion and politics set against a bizarre backdrop of a war between the World Government (shades of the League of Nations) and an Asian league led by Singapore, Malaysian worshipers of the Cocaine Buddha. But Lindsay’s utopia remains interesting because it differs from others in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literature in significant ways. In the first place, his vision of life a century hence is not free of conflict, even war. International disputes, political intrigue, and social divisions (including lynchings) are still part of the landscape, as if Lindsay, who contained so many competing voices within himself, could not imagine a society without struggle. The other major difference between Lindsay’s and other utopias is the setting, which takes place entirely in his hometown of Springfield. As Sakolsky comments, “By focusing on a real place, and a small place, with all its imperfections, and attempting to re-envision its possible future, dreaming of ways in which it might evolve into a more desirable community, Lindsay departed radically from the one-true-path model of utopia, and at the same time achieved a concreteness and intimacy rare in utopian fiction.”

Review, Bruce Kuklick, To Every Thing A Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Princeton University Press, 1991

Columbia Missourian, August 25, 1991

Baseball fans frequently date their lives from the significant events they witness on the field. Old-timers can provide a sense of history by linking the exploits of current players to the achievements of past stars. According to Bruce Kuklick, the game provides spectators lessons about excellence, thus connecting them communally to something not available in their daily lives. Kuklick, a professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a micro-history of this relationship between a team and its fans by focusing on Philadelphia’s Shibe Park—later renamed Connie Mack Stadium—home of the Athletics from 1909 until their departure for Kansas City in 1954, and the Phillies from 1938 until 1970, weaving together an urban history of Philadelphia, a business history of baseball, a cultural history of the North Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding Shibe Park, and a fan’s appreciaton of the games excitement and lore.

The Athletics were formed in 1901 as part of the new American League. The two principal figures in the creation of the A’s were Connie Mack and Benjamin Franklin Shibe. Mack, a 38-year-old Irishman, had escaped a life working in factories through his skills as a ballplayer and later manager. Named to manage the team, Mack’s tenure lasted an unprecedented half-century. Mack and Shibe became partners, with Mack managing the team on the field and Shibe and his sons overseeing the business end.

The success of the A’s during their first years convinced the partners of the desirability of a new park. The construction of Shibe Park, Kuklick says, reflected a convergence of technological, economic, political, and social trends. The recent invention of reinforced concrete—steel rods imbedded in concrete—made physical construction of large ballparks possible. The optimistic reform impulse of Americans during the Progressive era created a desire that the park should serve as a beautiful, enduring monument symbolizing a desire to inspire the populace. The main entrance façade featured columns, arched windows and vaultings, and a domed tower designed to give an air of respectability to the nouveau riche entrepreneur Shibe.

In its interior the park was intended to accommodate a range of social classes, with expensive seats around home plate and plenty of cheap bleacher seats and standing room in the outfield. In this way the construction of Shibe Park and several other new ballparks between 1909 and 1920 served to more fully integrate the industrial working class into the emerging mass consumer society. But working-class spectators also had a significant impact on the atmosphere in the new parks, as the crowds were marked by an informality, physical intimacy, and mingling of sexes common in working-class culture.

Despite their magnificent new park, the A’s for the most part played mediocre baseball. The two exceptions to this general trend were the periods 1909-1914, in which the A’s won four pennants and three world championships, and 1925-1932, in which the A’s featured such future Hall of Famers as Mickey Cochrane, “Lefty” Grove, Al Simmons, Jimmie Foxx, and the aging Ty Cobb, and regularly compete with the New York Yankees for first place.

More often, the A’s were a second-division team. The 1916 team was one of the worst in baseball history, with a record of 36 wins and 117 losses. Kuklick attributes the A’s abysmal history to Mack’s managing philosophy. He wanted to win games, but not too many, figuring a dominant team would not draw as well as a team in the middle of a pennant race, and that players on a less dominant team could not demand too high salaries. Thus, after both peak periods, Mack set out to break up the team by selling off its top players.

Kuklick discusses how the team reflected the Irish culture of the surrounding neighborhood in the years before World War II. Many of the players were Irish and several lived in the area. Members of the community frequently gathered at local bars before and after games, but passage of Prohibition in 1920 closed the bars. Residents resented this attack on their traditional culture and in a Philadelphia tradition were not shy about expressing their dissatisfaction. When President Herbert Hoover attended a 1929 World Series game in Shibe Park, the crowd greeted him with chants of “Beer! Beer! We want beer!”

When the Phillies began sharing the park in the late 1930s, they brought with them a tradition of being the worst team in the National League. Shibe Park now featured the two worst teams in baseball. After the war, both teams rebounded slightly, with the Phillies winning their first pennant ever in 1950, only to be swept in four games by the Yankees in the World Series.

Kuklick gives’ a detailed account of the personal and economic troubles that eventually forced the A’s to leave Philadelphia. But he never lets the discussion of finances become too tedious, breaking it up with anecdotes of games played at Shibe.

In the period after World War II both baseball and large northern cities were affected by racial integration. In the neighborhood around Shibe Park working-class white families were moving out and being replaced by African Americans. The growing black presence in the city accompanied the integration of baseball. But both Philadelphia teams were among the most stubborn in accepting black players. Mack, in his last years as manager, passed up the opportunity to sign Larry Doby and Minnie Minoso for $5,000 apiece and Hank Aaron for $3,500 because of his reluctance to employ black talent. Similarly, by the mid-1950s, the Phillies remained the only all-white team in the National League.

In August 1964, Philadelphia erupted in a race riot that included the area around the ballpark. When fans came to watch the division-leading Phillies in the last month of the season, they had to pass through the wreckage left by the recent riot and face the neighborhood’s increasingly resentful inhabitants. Adding to this tension, the Phillies blew a six-and-a-half game lead in the season’s final twelve games to finish tied for second.

Kuklick is concerned primarily with the image of Shibe Park and the teams that played there in the minds of Philadelphians. He insists on taking Americans’ pastimes seriously, not seeing them as merely escapist entertainment. Baseball in Philadelphia, he concludes, has been more than the clash of teams on the field. It has also been the clash of different classes and ethnic and racial groups vying to establish their place in America’s mass democratic society.

Charlie Birger

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2004

Southern Illinois’s history of violence grows out of the myriad and overlapping rifts that have so fundamentally divided the region’s population—labor vs. capital; nativist vs. immigrant; Protestant vs. Catholic; wet vs. dry—as well as the periodic breakdown of the state’s law-enforcement function (largely because the law officers also have been local citizens, and thus products of the region’s deeply divided culture). This long and bloody history reached its apex in the 1920s as the broader processes of modernization that marked the first three decades of the American twentieth century gradually spread their influence into such culturally remote areas as Egypt (the popular term applied to southern Illinois), in such forms as the automobile and radio. Throughout the country, the rising ethic of consumerism characterizing this modern culture—with its emphasis on self-fulfillment and immediate gratification—produced deep conflicts with the older nineteenth-century culture of self-control, as seen in the country’s passage of, and large-scale violation of, prohibition. In southern Illinois, the battles touched off by the Eighteenth Amendment would leave a long trail of dead and wounded, a story frequently retold, most famously by Paul Angle in Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (1952).

WSIU Public Television’s documentary The Legend of Charlie Birger (2003) seeks to recreate this era by focusing on one of the most spectacular characters in the region’s history, gangster Charlie Birger, whose battles against law enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan, and rival gangsters would culminate in his 1928 execution on the gallows, the last public hanging in Illinois. Inspired by Gary DeNeal’s biography A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger (originally published 1981, reissued 1998), the film combines archival photographs, vintage footage, historical re-enactments, filmed interviews with eyewitnesses, taped interviews DeNeal conducted with many of the characters involved, and commentary by several historians to detail both Birger’s life and the continued fascination he holds for residents of southern Illinois. As expected, what emerges contains numerous conflicting versions of events, as memories have faded, while many of the accounts were self-serving to begin with. But as journalist and historian Taylor Pensoneau comments, “You have to, at some point, accept some account as [being] as close to the truth as you’re going to get.”

Like DeNeal’s book, the film is content largely to remain on the surface, simply relating Birger’s career in chronological order. Birger emerges as a man of fascinating contradictions, though they remain largely unexplored. He was, for instance, the area’s most famous gangster, but he also desperately wanted to be a respected pillar of his community; he was a cold-blooded murderer—sometimes even making a game out of executions—who became physically ill when he killed people; and despite the fact that the nature of his work required much of his activities be kept out of the public eye, he actively craved the limelight (unlike his major gangster rivals, the Sheltons).

Though he sought to portray himself as a modern Robin Hood (e.g., buying groceries for the needy), Birger was not a social bandit. He did not symbolize, as Eric Hobsbawm has described the historic role of bandits, the defense or restoration of the traditional order of things as it should be (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past). Birger was not a leader of the people, representing traditional values against the encroachments of modern society. He served, instead, as a harbinger of that modern consumer culture. His success in liquor, gambling, and prostitution was based on the consumer ethic of pleasure and instant gratification. Modern technology in the form of the automobile and machine gun made his career possible. He perfected modern business techniques, pioneering, as the film points out, the business practices of modern organized crime. And finally, he achieved success through that most fundamental of modern business practices, public relations, even to the point of running advertisements on the local radio station assuring citizens they had nothing to fear from his activities. In fact, as historian John Y. Simon points out, Birger’s ultimate downfall was largely a public relations failure—when he ordered the murder of Ethel Price. The public did not really mind when gangsters killed each other, but the killing of an innocent woman, even the wife of a crooked state patrolman, turned public opinion against Birger.

At 110 minutes in length, the documentary tends to drag and often seems redundant, with many of the vintage film clips, photographs, and re-enactments repeated several times. The music, composed and performed by the Woodbox Gang, charmingly recreates a nice period feel. But the narration frequently grows trite with lines such as, “Behind closed doors, that’s where the deals were struck and the plans were hatched”; “What went on in those sinister back-room meetings is only partially known”; “This is the nature of gangsters—money is their motive”; “They work deals, settle scores, and get rid of loose ends.”

The documentary is based largely on DeNeal’s research and DeNeal is the most animated of the talking heads placing Birger in a broader context. And for the most part, DeNeal’s comments are pertinent and acute. Thus it is disappointing that the conclusion features DeNeal’s puerile philosophizing, “If we were faced with the same choices that Birger was faced with, would we do it the same way? Can we blame him? . . . Are we better than he is? Did he deserve to hang on the gallows and are we too good for that?” The fact that the vast majority of southern Illinoisans did not resort to gangsterism and that very few shed tears at Birger’s execution would seem obvious, conclusive evidence that most people, faced with similar circumstances, chose differently than Birger.

Review, Manning Marable, The Crisis of Color and Democracy (Common Courage Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, August 2, 1992

“Democracy is not a thing,” Manning Marable writes, “it is a process of expanding opportunities for all citizens, and the ability to control decision-making from the bottom up. . . The challenge for all democracies is not to make the rich richer, but for all of us to exercise greater economic and political rights.” In The Crisis of Color and Democracy, Marable focuses on the interrelationship between race, poverty, and the current American political and economic system to show the paucity of democracy, which for most people consists largely of periodically voting in elections, choosing between two virtually indistinguishable candidates. Marable rejects this system as inherently racist and elitist; he calls instead for a democratic, multicultural socialism.

Marable is a professor of political science and history at the University of Colorado, but he is not content to write for a purely academic audience. One of the most visible African-American scholars in the country today, Marable takes seriously his position as a public intellectual, patterning himself after such exemplars of radical black thought as W.E.B. DuBois.

The book’s central theme is the need to find a new language and set of issues around which to build a mass democratic movement. Marable looks back to the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, paying tribute to the leaders of that movement and their successes. He says the problems have changed since then, yet the leaders of the black community continue to speak in the rhetoric of the civil rights period. Meanwhile, white leaders have infused politics and the economy with a new style of racism—what Marable terms “non-racist racism”--which avoids overtly prejudiced rhetoric or behavior but allows society’s political and economic structures to exacerbate the polarization of the races.

Ironically, the changing nature of American racism results largely from the successes of the civil rights movement in ending legalized segregation, which has fractured the black community. “A central factor which always kept different social classes and income groups together in the black community was the commonality of our oppression,” Marable writes. “Jim Crow segregation was in essence ‘non-discriminatory discrimination.’ Segregation equally affected the black middle class, blue-collar workers and the unemployed. Blacks on welfare and Ph.D.s alike were ordered to the back of the bus, or were denied positions solely based on race.” As the entire community was segregated, blacks developed their own economic institutions. The black middle class—doctors, lawyers, educators, businesspeople—depended on a black clientele. In this way, the black middle class saw its own advancement as directly tied to the black community as a whole.

In breaking down Jim Crow barriers, the civil rights movement largely succeeded in integrating this black middle class into the American middle class as a whole. Thus the movement was extremely beneficial for a minority of blacks. But in the process, it cut the ties between the black middle class and the black working and lower classes. No longer did middle-class blacks see their own advancement and that of their race as inextricably tied. The result has been the economic decline and continued, even intensified, segregation of the black majority.

The best essays in the book discuss the ways racism permeates our social structures and has gown worse in the nearly four decades since the rise of the civil rights movements. “Our cities,” Marable writes, “have become more racially segregated than ever before; public schools in urban areas have deteriorated with declining tax bases and the flight of the middle classes to the suburbs. The signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are no longer present in the doorways of the schools, but the segregation of income, poverty and the ghetto has, in effect, reversed the Brown decision (outlawing school segregation).”

The decline of inner-city schools has fostered what Marable calls an “educational underclass.” In many states, the high school dropout rate for minority students exceeds 50 percent. But even for those who graduate, many don’t receive serious training in mathematics, science and computers, the fields necessary for them to fit into the increasingly high-tech job market. “It won’t be long before a new form of ‘segregation’ will exist to threaten the prospects of millions of black youth. . . . [T]he new segregation of the twenty-first century could be the division between the educated ‘haves’ and the uneducated have nots.’”

Marable argues that race affects several issues not commonly seen as being racial. For instance, he says the decline of the American auto industry has had an especially severe impact on black Americans. U.S. car manufacturers employ a relatively high percentage of African Americans, and as these companies increasingly move their factories overseas or use cybernation, the resultant unemployment hits black workers especially hard. Meanwhile, many of the new Japanese auto factories are being located in areas with significantly lower black populations. The result has often been devastating to Northern cities with large black populations. After General Motors’ pullout from Flint, Michigan, Marable says, “sections of Flint look like they’ve been blasted with neutron bombs. Black youth unemployment is over 50 percent. Teenagers complain that they have only four real options: working at minimum wage; becoming pregnant and existing on welfare; joining the armed services; or selling drugs. The economic crisis has generated black-on-black crime, alcoholism, drug abuse and the disruption of many institutions such as the black church.”

But Marable’s focus is not exclusively racial. Poverty is not only the problem of blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities. More than 60 percent of Americans living in poverty and nearly two-thirds of people living in public housing projects are white. Marable encourages blacks to keep this reality in mind in seeking to build a mass movement, pointing out that in the last years of his life Martin Luther King Jr. moved beyond solely seeking to end segregation to try building an interracial coalition of the poor.

Marable is extremely critical of the current state of black leadership, claiming most black leaders lack sufficient vision. For example, he says of Marion Barry that his “greatest tragedy was his failure of vision. The great strength of the black freedom struggle’s political tradition, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., was the linkage between politics and ethics. What was morally correct was also politically correct. Barry’s contempt for the ethics of the black struggle, his contempt for his wife, children and constituents, could never be justified.”

The leadership of black conservatives, who urge blacks to quit emphasizing the harm done by racism and concentrate on solidifying their economic position, especially draws Marable’s fire. For instance, he labels Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “the black ideological twin of [Justice] David Souter,” both chosen for their mediocrity, not their “legal vision or moral compassion.” But Marable’s criticism of black conservatives misses a fundamental point. He portrays people such as Thomas, educator Joe Clark, and intellectuals Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele solely as sycophantic products of the white power structure. In fact, such people are indigenous products of the black community, part of a tradition of black leaders preaching self-help, running back at least as far as Booker T. Washington at the beginning of the century. Certainly Uncle Tomming has sometimes been a part of this tradition, but the ethic of economic self-help was also instrumental in the formation during the Jim Crow era of the black middle class Marable praises. When Marable says these leaders lack vision, what he really means is that they don’t share his vision.

Marable himself has trouble conveying a vision of how the mass movement he advocates will be created. He is much more convincing in pointing out the problems than in charting a path toward solving them. For instance, in his essay “Do blacks deserve reparations?” he states, “One central principle of international law is that people who have been the victims of systematic oppression . . . have the right to demand material compensation to redress their grievances.” A valid point perhaps, but he never makes clear who exactly owes these reparations and in what form they should be paid.

Even more disturbing, Marable frequently reflects the pernicious double standard all too common on the political left. For example, in his discussion of censorship, Marable says “the real meaning of tolerance is supporting ideas and values which enhance life and promote cultural and political pluralism.” By this standard, Marable rationalizes denying any right of free speech to the Ku Klux Klan because it promotes hatred and intolerance, but sees no problem with protecting the free speech of the rap group 2 Live Crew and those who burn the American flag. By Marable’s own logic, however, it could be argued that 2 Live Crew’s misogynistic lyrics promote hatred and intolerance against women, and it is difficult to see how flag-burning enhances life or promotes pluralism. The only consistent standard would be to extend the same rights of free speech (though not necessarily of action) to even objectionable groups like the KKK as to everyone else.

In his coverage of Jesse Jackson, Marable points out Jackson’s flaws but is much more willing to forgive them than he is those of other black leaders. Marable concedes, for instance, that the structure of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition is counterproductive to the kind of grass-roots mass movement he advocates. “Jackson’s frenetic, larger-than-life personality and his chaotic organizational style, consisting of a coterie of loyalists who rarely disagree with the boss, works against genuinely democratic decision-making.” Jackson’s stature as a national black leader is further complicated by his relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. According to Marable, Jackson “is personally repulsed by the anti-Semitism and authoritarian elements of the Nation of Islam’s ideology, yet feels constrained from denouncing this movement for fear of turning this militant sect against him.” If Jackson is so afraid of alienating an anti-Semitic and authoritarian group, one wonders, then where is the linkage between politics and ethics Marable says is so essential to effective black leadership?

Review, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937. Edited and introduced by Gale Ahrens. Afterword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2006

When Chicago’s Park District Board named a vest-pocket park on the city’s northwest side after Lucy Parsons in 2004, the local police union vigorously protested. After all, police representatives argued, Parsons had been a life-long agitator, widow of the executed Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons, who had herself advocated in her 1884 speech “To Tramps” that oppressed workers “Learn the use of explosives!” Parsons, no doubt, would be pleased to know that, more than sixty years after her death in 1942, she still can rattle the cages of the forces of social order.

Parsons’ place in the history of American radicalism usually focuses on her connection to the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing and subsequent trial, in which her husband, Albert, was one of eight anarchist labor leaders convicted of murder and one of four eventually executed for the crime. But as this valuable anthology demonstrates, Lucy Parsons’ career extended far beyond a single entry on the historical stage. In the decade before the Haymarket Affair, she already had established herself as a leading figure in Chicago’s labor movement, having been one of the founders of the Working Women’s Union in 1879, a pioneering effort at organizing women workers. And for a half-century after Albert’s hanging, Lucy continued to educate and agitate for the rights of labor, women, African Americans, and the dispossessed.

Much about Lucy’s early life is unknown, but it is likely that she was born a slave in Texas around 1853, of mixed black, Mexican, and Indian ancestry. In the early 1870s she married Albert Parsons, a printer and former Confederate soldier who had become a Radical Republican, and, a few years later, the two relocated to Chicago where they became involved in the city’s labor movement. The two moved steadily leftward in their politics, from reformism to anarchism, and in 1883 they helped found the International Working People’s Association and the next year Albert began publishing and editing the labor paper Alarm, to which Lucy contributed regularly. The Parsonses and other Chicago anarchists played a major role in organizing the original May Day demonstration on May 1, 1886, in which more than 100,000 workers demonstrated for an eight-hour workday, which was the context in which the Haymarket tragedy played out when the bomb exploded three days later.

After Albert’s death, Lucy continued to speak on a broad range of issues, drawing connections between the rights of workers, women (including the right to birth control), children, and racial minorities. In more than sixty years of radical organizing and agitating, Parsons associated with a wide variety of organizations and yet, as this collection shows, there remained a strong element of consistency in her thinking. Throughout her career she believed in the right of the oppressed to armed self-defense, advocating, for instance, that African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South fight back against white violence. “You are not absolutely defenseless,” she urged. “For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.”

Of all the groups with which Parsons associated, the one that was closest to her heart was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In Parsons’ speech to the 1905 founding convention of the IWW, included in this collection, she identified herself as speaking for the exploited child and women laborers (including, she specified, prostitutes) and urged the new labor organization to truly represent the entire working class. Parsons remained a strong supporter of the “Wobblies,” though she was not afraid to take the union to task for what she saw as its shortcomings. Writing a year after the founding convention, she complained, “the IWW cannot hope to gain and hold the confidence of the wage class long if it has no definite aim in view looking to a lasting betterment of economic conditions.”

Throughout her life Parsons continued to discuss the legacy of the Haymarket Affair. Decades after the martyrs’ executions, she sought to educate a younger generation of labor activists that many of the reforms they took for granted had been the result of the efforts of Albert and his comrades in the Chicago anarchist movement. “Does this generation know” she asked in 1926, “that those who inaugurated the eight-hour day were put to death at the command of capital?” Parsons also publicly defended labor activists and other radicals in later well-publicized court cases, including the 1907 murder trial of William Haywood and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, which she compared to the Haymarket trial. “In the Anarchists’ case it as the eight-hour movement to be suppressed; in the Haywood case it was the Western Federation of Miners [business interests] were after, and they wanted to make an example of its leaders.”

This book provides a good introduction to an often neglected figure in the history of the American left, and Gale Ahrens’s introduction and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s afterword admirably set the context for understanding Parsons’ writings. The major shortcoming with this collection is the absence of Parsons’ most famous (or infamous) speech, “To Tramps,” in which she forcefully advocated dynamite as a weapon in the class struggle. This omission is especially glaring given the fact that both Ahrens and Dunbar-Ortiz discuss the speech at some length.