Tidbits - February 10, 2013
Re: The White South's Last Defeat (John Franklin Crawford, Juanita Rice)
Re: Henry Wallace (Victor Grossman)
The Americanization of the United States (Carl Proper)
Climate RALLY - Bay Area - Sunday Feb 17
► Re: The White South's Last Defeat
• This article glosses over a related regional issue that further complicates the matter of racial hegemony in the United States. This is in the Southwest.
The homogeneous British and Irish white population that occupies a large part of the Western United States has sustained an ideology of triumphalism against its neighbors in the region, both Native American and Mexican, with social and political victories against the indigenous populations in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas along the Rio Grande, not to mention the expropriation of Mexican territory in Texas and as a result of the Gadsden Purchase across the Mexican border to California in 1848. In fact, the Mexican border has been contested territory politically and demographically for nearly two hundred years. Far from being losers in this continuing struggle, the Anglo Americans have consistently oppressed the indigenous population.
Recently, a powerful cabal of white Anglo Saxons in Arizona, many with connections to Southern California, has exacerbated the existing hostility to Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout the region. The attempt of the Anglo Saxon government in Arizona to restrict not only immigration but the public education of present-day Mexican Americans is a striking case in point. In common usage these days, Arizona's legal and civil responses to people of Mexican ethnicity has been compared to that of Mississippi and Alabama in Civil Rights days.
This white population has never lost a war. It has simply asserted its national, racial, and class privilege wherever possible. The roots of such a racist and triumphalist resistance require deeper analysis, and open up the question of continuing civil unrest between two widely differing views of the American experience, regardless of past victories or defeats of the factions.
John Franklin Crawford
• All these articles ignore places like Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and the anti-labor and anti-woman fervor. I don't understand why we keep targeting "them" while right under the north's noses the white-male factor is going wild.
Juanita Rice,
Nebraska
The Progressive Party campaign for the courageous Henry Wallace was a highpoint in many of our lives - until the election results came in! What a feeling of hope that fight represented; an old friend from the youth movement at the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia said it clearly: "How wonderful that we are now fighting not against but FOR something!"
And how we fought! 10,000 signatures in North Carolina! I spent a week helping to collect them - and saw poverty, black and white, but sharply separated, such as I've never seen since. In Massachusetts, where I was a student, we somehow were able to collect over 100,000 signatures! It's still hard to believe, since we often had to knock on ten doors to get one signature. It was only a relatively small band of the faithful who went out every weekend and as many evenings as they could, with no glory attached, including Harvard Professor F.O. Matthiessen, completely modest and unassuming. Another was my friend Jack Lee, of Jamaican descent, I believe, who chaired the Young Progressives in MA and (with me) got showered with eggs and tomatoes- and briefly arrested - while demonstrating for a rejection of the draft law.
Like Jack I was a Communist, but we "comrades", though always among the very most active and devoted, were super-cautious not to frighten away non-Communist progressives, and very carefully kept our more radical views to ourselves. We wanted no splits! But then, in the final big rally, Paul Robeson sang (without any payment). As usual he spoke first in that magnificent voice which was even more wonderful than his singing voice. When he then broke all taboos and said almost proudly: "After all, we all dream of a socialist America some day!" there was a moment of seemingly stunned, amazed silence - and then everybody in that big hall broke out in tumultuous applause! An unforgettable moment! I don't know how many had had other convictions. But even for them: Robeson's voice, his presence, his deep sincerity and devotion could almost win over trees or stones!
But it all ended tragically. The world was in turmoil; events like the big switch in Czechoslovakia, the advance of Red armies in China, the Berlin airlift were all used to hit at Wallace and, more damaging, the same racism present today, the blind rejection by most labor leaders and the fears about Thomas Dewey which made even some of the staunchest vote for the lesser evil, Harry Truman. I think that defeat broke the back of the Left for many, many years (and of the CP most fundamentally). Poor Prof. Matthiessen was driven to suicide. Robeson was isolated and silenced. (Jack Lee died quite young, I believe - does anyone know about that truly heroic guy?)
But it was a good fight, with great songs, for the best causes: labor rights, equal rights for black and white, peace and disarmament - to name a few. How good that Oliver Stone has recalled it!
Victor Grossman
► The Americanization of the United States
"The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people."
So said Robert Frost, at President Kennedy's inauguration, in 1961.
Europeans began their New World occupation by taking the land. Then the land, and the experience of taking it, Frost said, made them and their descendants something new.
But the story was far from over.
We know now that Europeans had encountered a land greatly emptied by their very arrival, with the diseases they unwittingly brought killing up to 90 percent of the original population, easing the path to bloody conquest. Over time, Europeans occupied the American hemisphere, ruling as a majority in some regions, and a minority in others. Eventually, as they "realiz[ed] westward" in what is now the United States, a democratic spirit developed, where the wealth of the new population grew from the hard work of many.
The land, the new owners believed, had created in them a new kind of people - Americans.
Then, November, 2012 -- a rude shock for generations raised in Frost's Euro-centric world: an "alien" population, original Americans - descended from immigrants 15,000 years ago - had grasped the reins of power. They joined more recent immigrants by choice or by capture from all parts of the world, with women, with the young -- and a new majority was born. The older white population still had their guns, but what could they do? So many of their children found the new situation quite normal.
What could be next?
Well, November, 2112.
A population of brownish people, from Alaska to Patagonia, descended from original Americans, as well as from Africa, Asia and Europe. No borders. No aliens. All minorities.
We WILL be what the land and its people make us -- Americans.
Carl Proper
► Climate RALLY - Bay Area - Sunday Feb 17
http://www.350bayarea.org/forward_on_climate_ba y_area_rally
Join us in San Francisco to rally and march in solidarity with the huge Forward on Climate demonstration in Washington DC. Both events February 17.
Join over 50 organizations and thousands of citizens to encircle the State Department Office at One Market Plaza - Demand that the Department reject Keystone XL permit.
RSVP BELOW
Why this matters - The way forward on climate is clear: President Obama must start cutting carbon from today's biggest polluters-power plants-and stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to avoid adding more carbon pollution tomorrow.
Why march now - President Obama understands the severity of the climate crisis and can lead the world to solve it, but he needs to hear from his constituents that this is a priority. Let's march together and give the President the support he needs to move Forward on Climate!
WHEN February 17, 2013 at 1pm - 3pm
WHERE One Market Plaza 1 Market St San Francisco, CA 94105
CONTACT Pierre Delforge · forwardonclimatebayarea@gmail.com