====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
The anecdotes referenced in Rakove's book are hardly new, but periodically academics "discover" what was common coin to the American Left eighty years ago. Having done so, they are feted by fellow academics and then left critics or reviewers as though the source of new revelations. There is nothing wrong in this, as such, other than a little fudging on intellectual integrity, but at least the information gets out again, circulates and perhaps informs another generation. Louis Hacker wrote "The Triumph of American Capitalism," an excellent work, in the early thirties, still available through the net in various editions and one of the best Marxist histories of the U.S. fro the colonial period. At this point Hacker was around the Marxist Quarterly Magazine and, I suspect, heavily influenced by the Lovestone Group. Will Herberg, also in the early thirties, wrote an excellent pamphlet on reconstruction, and was a leading figure of the Lovestone Group. The work is very obscure but deserves reprinting - repugnant as it is to think of the later career of Lovestone, Hacker or Herberg. One of the sources of the Lovestone Groups' interest in Reconstruction was probably their familiarity with Herman Schlueter's "Lincoln, Labor and Slavery." Schlueter was a German emigre and editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung during the 1880s. The book was published in 1913. I came across it in a used bookstore, never having heard of it before. Lovestone's signature was on the flip side of the cover. Which I guess means he read something other than a CIA pay check. Anyhow, the most remarkable rendering of pre-Colonial, then abolitionist and reconstruction history can be found in yet another Lovestone member's work. This is "Portrait of America" by Bertram Wolf and Diego Rivera. In shorthand form Wolf relates the class character and content of each of these periods of history. But it is the vehicle of the illustrations that the book is modeled on. The book starts with Rivera's first American murals in the San Francisco Stock Exchange, moves on to the Detroit Institute of Art work, then the Rockefeller Center adventure and ends with the longest single part of the book the murals from the New Workers School of New York. This was Lodestone's institution and Bertram Wolf was its director. For them, Rivera painted 27 large panels of American History, from the Colonial Period through the rise of fascism. Beginning with the famous quotation from Marx "The history of all human society...has been the history of class struggles..." and noting that this dictum is the source of the dynamic of Diego's Rivera's "Portrait of America." In a few quickly moving paragraphs Wolf sketches the disintegration of feudalism, growth of merchant capital a revolutionary force that generated cities, promoted travel, taught geography, developed navigation, astronomy and other sciences, expanded the earth "and made heaven more remote," the destruction of feudal relations, the driving of peasants from the land, the Peasant Wars, national economic unity, the quest for trade routes and the colonization of America. All this is by way of introducing the first panel. On this painting, a vast panorama, are to be seen the conquerors, the conquered the transported, the white slaves, the black slaves. The methods of conquest, the priest, the whiskey, the soldier, the prostitute, burning of Indian villages, destruction of the native people, the lash of the overseer. Just about everything that symbolizes the actual history of the initial period. Each of the twenty seven panels is a masterpiece of revolutionary art. Wolf's commentary a masterpiece of historical materialist interpretation and political journalism. These paintings cover all American History of the period mentioned. All the figures of importance to Marxists and their understanding of American History and a guide to its use by Marxists in teaching and exhortation is there. Washington not as "First Leader of His Country" but first as a colonel in the French and Indian Wars, working for the British, then as slaveholder at Mt. Vernon, Washington the land speculator. Tom Pain and Samuel Adams, agitators for revolution, tarred and feathered colonial tax collectors, the Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Committees of Correspondence, agitational literature. On to the growth merchant capital and slavery with Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe arrayed against J.P. Morgan and civil war financiers, whigs and slow moving Republicans, Harper's Ferry and the hanging of John Brown. The war and its aftermath, lynching, burning of blacks, the KKK. And, yes, Emerson, Thoreau Bronson, Whitman, Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Wade, President of the Senate and but for one more vote for impeachment of Johnson the President of the United States, and who said: "After the abolition of slavery, a radical change in the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day." The northern capitalists would overthrow these Jacobins as land grants, war profiteering, land speculation and big capital would liquidate radicalism. Wolfe explains all of this in brilliant fashion, always using the murals, the depictions as the basis of his text. This book and the immediacy of its murals is an amazing short hand course in the Civil War as the Second American Revolution, the real bourgeois revolution, following the course of the French Revolutions itself which it had in its own inception inspired. The work goes on through the growth of the working class, the great railroad strikes, Haymarket, Parsons, Spies, the hanging, the American Railway Union, Pullman, Couer D'Alene, Debs. Then in other panels to Imperialism, Militarism, Wilson, Reaction, War and the Russian Revolutions, the organization of workers unions, the depression, the rise of fascism I'm going on too long, but do want to encourage anyone interested to get this work at the library if possible. The murals themselves were probably inspired in content by Wolfe as conductor for Rivera into American History. Wolfe had met Rivera in Mexico in the twenties when Wolfe was a functionary there for the Comintern. Wolfe was eclectic in his relations with the revolutionary left at this era. The New Workers School murals include Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Jay Lovestone, Bertram Wolfe, James P. Cannon, Bucharin, Zetkin, Luxembourg, Engels and...Brandler. Rivera's early thirties plea for left unity. The point of all the above is also that the American left - especially in its pre-World War I days published a remarkable amount of literature, mostly through Charles Kerr & Co. but also through the Rand School. James Oneal's Workers in American History. A. M. Simons, Class Struggles in American, Scott Nearing's American Empire, Austin Lewis' Rise of the American Proletarian and also The Militant Proletariat, works on socialism and evolution, works on colonial history - The Puritans by Clarence Meilly, an excellent work - other works by Dietzgen, Labriola, Boudin, Lewis Henry Morgan and C. Osborne Ward, "The Ancient Lowly." Just about everything necessary to turn the literate worker away from religion, superstition or respect for capital, works specifically devoted to the question of women and socialism and women's oppression, even socialist novels and books for children. All this during the period of 1900 - 1914. And all of it forgotten. All of it, apparently for naught. But it still affords a good education today. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
