Today in Writing History May 7, 1867: Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont was born. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Chłopi (The Peasants), which won him the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature. Also in 1924, he published his novel “Revolt,” about a rebellion of farm animals fighting for equality. However, the revolt quickly degenerates into bloody terror. It was a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. Consequently, the Polish authorities banned it from 1945 to 1989. Reymont’s farm animal rebellion predated Orwell’s by 21 years.
If you're in Vegas for the Punk Rock and Bowling festival this Memorial Day weekend, be sure to stop by Avantpop Books, Sunday, May 26, noon. I'll be reading from my working-class historical novel, "Anywhere But Schuylkill." Billy Bragg will be headlining, with his book, "Roots, Rockers and Radicals."
Today in Labor History May 2, 1919: Soldiers of the Freikorps murdered Gustav Landauer, anarchist, pacifist, and Education Minister, in the short-lived Bavarian Workers Republic. The Freikorps were right wing veterans of World War I. Many went on to become Nazis. Landauer believed that social change could not be won solely through control of the state or economy, but required a revolution in interpersonal relations. "The community we long for and need, we will find only if we sever ourselves from individuated existence; thus we will at last find, in the innermost core or our hidden being, the most ancient and most universal community: the human race and the cosmos." Landauer’s grandson is the acclaimed film director, Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood). British writer Philip Kerr wrote the novel, “Prussian Blue,” in which Hitler is one of the Freikorps militants who murdered Landauer.
Today in Labor History April 30, 1994: Richard Scarry died. Scarry wrote and illustrated humorous children’s books with elaborate scenes of anthropomorphized animals. Some of his recurring characters were Lowly Worm, Huckle Cat, Mistress Mouse the tow truck driver, and Dingo the reckless driver. His fictional world, Busy Town, is characterized by a strong sense of community and mutual aid. Over the years, he revised his stories in an attempt to eliminate racial and gender stereotypes.
Today in Labor History April 30 1945: Eva Braun and Adolph Hitler committed suicide, in Berlin, after being married for less than 40 hours. Many Nazis were tried, convicted and executed. And literally thousands were secreted into the U.S., given false identities, and put to work as spies, intelligence officers, informants, and rocket scientists in the Cold War. Some of them had even been high-ranking Nazi Party officials, secret police chiefs, and heads of concentration camps. In fact, during the first few years after WWII ended, it was easier to get into the U.S. as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish concentration camp survivor. There were policy makers in Washington who said the Jews shouldn’t be let in because they’re “lazy” and “self-entitled.” For more on this sordid history, read “The Nazis Next Door
How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men,” By Eric Lichtblau.
Today in labor history April 28, 1896: Na Hye-sok was born. She was a South Korean feminist, poet, writer, painter and journalist. She was the first female professional painter and the first feminist writer in Korea. In 1919, the authorities jailed her for participating in the March 1st Movement against Japanese rule in Korea. In 1934, she published an essay called “Divorce Testimony.” In that piece, she wrote about the repression of female sexuality. She also said that her ex-husband couldn’t satisfy her sexually and refused to talk about it with her. And she also promoted the idea of "test marriages," where a couple would live together before marrying to see if they really were compatible. These ideas were considered so scandalous and shocking that her career took a tailspin and never recovered.
If you're in Vegas on Memorial Day Weekend, come see all the great live bands...AND most of all, come see me read from my historical novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill. I'll be on the ticket with several other great writers, including Billy Bragg, and my good friend James Tracy.
Today in Labor History April, 21, 1913: Andre Soudy and Raymond Callemin, members of the anarchist Bonnot Gang, were executed. Callemin had started the individualist paper "L'anarchie" with author and revolutionary Victor Serge. The Bonnot Gang was a band of French anarchists who tried to fund their movement through robberies in 1911-1912. The Bonnot Gang was unique, not only for their politics, but for their innovative use of technology, too. They were among the first to use cars and automatic rifles to help them steal, technology that even the French police were not using. While many of the gang members were sentenced to death, Serge got five years and eventually went on to participate in (and survive) the Barcelona and Soviet uprisings. Later, while living in exile, Serge wrote The Birth of Our Power, Men in Prison, Conquered City, and Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
Today in Labor History April 21, 1910: Mark Twain died. William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature." He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” He apprenticed with a printer and worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. He later worked as a riverboat pilot before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. Twain was famous for his wit and brilliant writing. However, he also had extremely progressive politics for his era. Later in his life, he became an ardent anti-imperialist. “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem… And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” During the Boxer Rebellion, he said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success." From 1901, until his death in 1910, he was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the U.S. He was also critical of European imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II of Belgium, who attempted to establish colonies in African. He also supported the Russian revolutionaries fighting against the Tsar.
Many people have criticized him for his racism. Indeed, schools have banned “Huckleberry Finn.” However, Twain was an adamant supporter of abolition and said that the Emancipation Proclamation “not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also." He also fought for the rights of immigrants, particularly the Chinese. "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible... but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him." And though his early writings were racist against indigenous peoples, he later wrote that “in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by "whites" in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey."
Twain was also an early feminist, who campaigned for women's suffrage. He also wrote in support of unions and the labor movement, especially the Knights of Labor, one of the most important unions of the era. “Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.”
Today in Labor History April 21, 1816: Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet, was born. After her mother died of cancer, in 1821, her father sent the five Brontë sisters to Clergy Daughters' School, where the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted tuberculosis. The disease killed them both in 1825. Charlotte always said that the terrible conditions in that school stunted her physical development and caused her lifelong health problems. Charlotte wrote her first poem in 1829, at the age of 13. She would go on to write 200 more poems. In 1836, she asked Poet Laureate Robert Southey for encouragement as a writer. He replied, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and ought not to be.” Because of this advice, she chose to publish under the gender-neutral name of Currer Bell, to avoid prejudice. She published a book of poetry in 1846, and her most famous novel, “Jane Eyre,” in 1847. In Jane Eyre, she uses the Clergy Daughters' School as the model for the school attended by her eponymous protagonist, Jane Eyre. Bronte died in 1855, most likely from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy.
As young adults, my brothers and I thoroughly looted our parent’s library. I still have many of those books, with their dog-eared pages and faint whiff of mildew. I think of them as comfort food for the mind. I picked up some great Melville that way, and Jack London, too. But my favorite score was a matching set of Jayne Eyre and Wuthering Heights that I recently found in their library, after my father died. My mom told me that they had belonged to her mother, who passed them down to her. And now she was passing them down to me. Great literature, of course, but they also contain beautiful artwork. And provenance, with my grandmother’s name printed on the inside cover.
Today in Labor History April 17, 2014: Journalist and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on this day. Affectionately known as Gabo, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Two of his most famous books were, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Garcia Marquez was a socialist and an anti-imperialist, and critical of U.S. policy in Latin America.
Today in Labor History April 16, 1884: Anatole France was born. He was a poet and novelist and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921. Many of his works satirized religious and political ideas. The son of a bookseller, France spent much of his childhood in his family’s bookstore, reading voraciously, and meeting many of the writers who frequented the store. He was active in the movement to free Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of espionage. And he signed Emile Zola’s letter in support of Dreyfus, “J’accuse.” France wrote about wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel “Monsieur Bergeret.” France's novel, “Penguin Island depicts penguins transformed into humans after the birds have been mistakenly baptized by the almost-blind Abbot Mael. “The Gods Are Athirst” (1912), about a true-believing follower of Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror of 1793–94, is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism. “The Revolt of the Angels” (1914) it tells the story of Arcade, a bored guardian angel who starts reading his mentee’s books on theology and becomes an atheist, moves to Paris, falls in love, and loses his virginity causing his wings to fall off. He then joins the revolutionary movement of fallen angels.
Today in Labor History April 16, 1994: Ralph Ellison died on this day. Ellison was a member of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for his book, The Invisible Man. He was friends with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He became active in the Communist Party, as did many of his peers. But he became disillusioned with them during World War II when he felt they became reformist. He wrote The Invisible Man during this era (published in 1952), in part, as a response their betrayal. But the book also looks at the relationship between black identity and Marxism, the reformism of Booker T. Washington, and issues of individuality and personal identity.
Today in Labor History April 15, 1986: Author Jean Genet died on this day. Genet was a novelists, political activist and petty criminal. His book, The Thief’s Journal (1949), relates his experiences as a young prostitute and thief. That same year, the authorities tried to sentence him to life in prison for his ten convictions. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso successfully petitioned the government on his behalf. In 1968, Genet was censored in the U.S. and expelled from the country after they refused him a visa. But he returned in 1970, upon an invitation by the Black Panthers. He stayed three months, giving lectures and attending the trial of Huey Newton. Later that year, he went to Palestine and visited refugee camps. He supported U.S. political prisoners Angela Davis and George Jackson. He also supported the anti-prison, anti-police brutality work of Michel Foucault, in France.
Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.