KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY
I learned Culture - and the elements of economics - on my grandmother's knee. I came from a broken family. My father, a budding young biochemist, did not live with us. My mother's mother was especially present in my early years. My parents were East Coast transplants from New York, who migrated out West in 1948 after the War. My father's parents had been immigrants from Wales in the 1920s. My grandfather Thomas was a coal-miner, both in Wales and Pennsylvania. My father's mother, Gwen, left her husband after the War and eventually came to own and operate a bar and grill on Loch Sheldrake in the Borscht Belt of upstate New York. My mother's mother, a widow, and for years a short-story writer for the pulp digests, followed her children out to California, after the War. It was this grandmother, my Jewish grandmother, who taught me culture. Edith Liggett was born Edith Fleischer in New York City on January 21, 1901. Soon afterward, her family moved to the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where my grandmother was raised. Her mother, nee Ida Rosenblatt, the descendant of Baltic (East Prussian and Swedish) Jewish merchants, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised on the frontier in northern Minnesota. I once saw a photograph of a youthful Ida wearing an Oglalla-Sioux Indian deerskin dress. My mother's grandfather, Charles Fleischer, born in Vienna, was variously an inventor, photographer, and salesman. He met Ida at her father's trading post in Albert Lea, Minnesota, during the winter of 1896 when his train was stuck at the station because of an unscheduled blizzard. My grandmother, the second of four children, became a socialist and joined the local Flatbush chapter of the YPSLs in 1914, at the age of thirteen. She was a precocious child. Her elder sister, Caroline, became a zealous Christian Scientist around the same time. Her mother and younger sister Erna followed suit. Her father was broadminded, philosophic, and kind. Her baby brother, Walter, who anglicized his surname, grew into a dapper young journalist with the New York Times, who could be seen on Saturdays in a stunning white suit at the track. My grandmother was the only radical one. Had she been an Orthodox Jew and taught Judaism to me, I wouldn't regret it now. As it was, her religion was a kind of unvarnished Debsian Socialism - and I don't think that I'm any worse for having learned it. Plunging into journalism at the age of sixteen, she began, while still in high school, to work as a stringer for the Brooklyn Eagle. Soon, she was crossing the East River into New York City to listen to the socialist anti-war agitators haranguing on street corners in the Village. This was in the spring of 1917, just before the American entry into the World War. She spoke of the Little Red School- house and the Rand School, and of Emma Goldman and others whom I forget, at tables on the sidewalk cafes on Second Avenue, eating sauerkraut, in protest to the war madness. In 1918, at the tender age of seventeen, she became a full-time reporter, writing for The Call. When the Bolshevik Revolution took place, she and her friends sincerely believed "a glorious new day was dawning." Then came the arrest of Eugene Debs and his imprisonment in the Atlanta Penitentiary, the Red Scare of 1919, and the Palmer raids of 1920. She told me of her many friends, socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies, who were arrested for sedition in the sweeps, and of several who were killed in prison, kicked down the cast-iron steel-grated stairs by the prison guards. When I was three and four, my mother, grandmother, uncle, and I shared a flat at the corner of Taft and Broadway in Oakland. Much of what I learned of history from Edith hinges upon this location. She was always a wonderful storyteller, and she sang the old songs, as well. The songs my grandmother sang me as bedtime lullabies, were songs like The Internationale, The Red Banner, Casey Jones a-Scabbing On The S.P. Line, Solidarity Forever, and Joe Hill. Inevitably, as a small child, my imagination was vividly impressed with the images of my grandmother's Socialist cosmology. It was she who taught me the fundamentals of the class war, the use of the word "plutocracy" and the economic injustice inherent in the vast gulf between the super-rich, and the down-trodden, needy masses. My grandmother, cultured, and never strident, was an idealist who never found a reason to recant the faith she had embraced in her youth. She had seen the Revolution in Russia betrayed with Stalin's liquidation of the Kulaks. The Revolution in America had failed to materialize. She had seen the Farmer-Labor Party, which her husband had helped to found, and passionately believed in, co-opted and corrupted by Floyd B. Olson and his "gang." She had watched helplessly while her husband was machine-gunned down in Minneapolis by Mob assassins. She learned the hard way that the Communist Party was "financed by the plutocrats" - as she put it - when she sued the Daily Worker for libel in 1936, and stayed with the lawsuit until 1940.
The Socialist Party was moribund. The various socialist parties were small and fragmented. She still believed in socialism. Among the few hundred books she took with her from New York was one I truly treasured as a child, The Best of Art Young (Vanguard Press, New York, 1936), a collection of political cartoons by Art Young, whom she had known since the First World War when he was on trial for libel. The images of Art Young's cartoons served to illustrate for me the spiritual and economic realities of my grandmother's world-view, and became a kind of surreal counterpoint that transcended and explained the social mysterium behind the mundane reality of my surroundings in the Rockridge district of north Oakland. This was not the Art of Socialist Realism, as exemplified by Moscow Subway Art or by the unemployed and starving American leftist artists of the '30s who were employed under the W.P.A. to paint murals on the walls of Post Offices. Nor was it anything like the vulgar caricatures of Jewish Capitalists - the obscene Nazi racism found in Der Sturmer. This was an earlier, vibrant, brutally honest depiction of the Class War in black and white. The art of Art Young attained the status of archetype. I think it should be better known. It is a visual lexicon of Socialist Consciousness. Some of it is truly timeless. Studying The Best of Art Young again, in the 1980s, I was able to put the cartoons in their historical context. Although the image of the bloated Capitalist in the topcoat may be a little dated (Ivy Lee began working on cleaning up the Rockefellers' public image after the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1915, and John D. himself was lean), the reality of ruling class oppression is just as real now as ever. Laundered and glamorized in the sixties as the "beautiful people" and the "Jet Set," the ruling class, perhaps somewhat more aerobically fit and casual, have managed to disappear as objects of public approbation, while preserving intact their enormous and unjust control of the pie through the continuity of their family corporate holdings and the continuity of the bond system, the system of debt-created Usury Money. Some of the cartoons, like KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY, at the top of the page, speak for themselves. Notice that Government takes money out of Labor's pocket in TAXES ON EVERYTHING to pay Mr. Militarism. Art Young might have added that Mr. Bondholding Class is also served thereby through the interest on the National Debt. In Sonoma County, most everybody has heard about the ruling class retreat known as Bohemian Grove. This is a 2800-acre, privately owned, exclusive men's Club, where the bag-men and mid-echelon functionaries of the managerial class come every summer to enjoy themselves and celebrate the glorious system they are privileged to own and manage. It would actually be funny, if it weren't so tragic. In essence, this cartoon depicts the dominant thought that these men think when they get together. The mighty men of Capital, of Government, and the Military, having sifted the working and middle classes through wage-slavery and taxation, and having had the Government spend every last available cent on their vicious War-Machine, gather offstage, to congratulate themselves and gloat over their good fortune as Uber-menchen.
"Oh Lord, Control my appetite if you must, but don't take away my pie"
This cartoon questions the private ownership of the Pie itself. In the socialist ideal, the Cooperative Commonwealth, key industries: banking, minerals, transportation, and energy systems would be collectively owned, and all citizens would be stockholders - receiving dividends from the Common-Wealth. In hard reality, every concern that renders a steady profit in America has been delivered into the hands of private monopolists, who have also crushed and suppressed small-time "private enterprise" and the potential for numerous technological breakthroughs by minor inventors and entrepreneurs. At the same time, those systems which are inherently unprofitable, expensive, and run on a deficit, have been relegated to the Government to perform. The total Deficit itself, of course, is added to the aggregate National Debt - upon which the people as a whole, pay taxes, and upon which the bond-holding class, i.e. the stockholders of the giant Wall Street, London, European, and Japanese banks collect their semi-annual dividends. So, although the image of the bloated capitalist may be dated, the system these people collectively established at the beginning of the 20th Century remains intact for the benefit of their anonymous, and sometimes anorexic, heirs.
Rivals For The Monarch's Favor
The Money Power - Finance Capitalism - came under scathing rebuke by Art Young's pen. Above we have the two wings of the same bird of prey, Mr. Democratic Party, and Mr. Republican Party, esquire, bootblacks shining the boots and pedicuring the feet of the same Military-Industrial Complex, potentate. We might interpolate that the Democratic mistakes that Mr. Republican so assiduously corrects, were very deliberate Democrat implementations of Ruling Class policy, intended by the bipolar ruling-class academic technicians to be eventually corrected in the long-term see saw Hegelian-Thesetical process, by implementing further ruling-class Republican policy adjustments.
"Bring in the prisoner."
This cartoon refers to the Pujo Committee hearing into the existence of the "Money Trust." The elder Lindbergh, Congressman from Minnesota, had asserted on the floor of Congress in 1910 and 1911 the existence of a Super Trust, linking all the other Trusts together. As a result of much public outcry, a committee was established to investigate. Neither Lindbergh, nor any of the more radical legislators were allowed on the committee, or to question the principal Moguls of Wall Street who were called before the committee. They might have asked the wrong (right) questions. In spite of their absence, however, the Committee did determine that a Money Trust did, in fact, exist. The Money Trust was so powerful that it was able to maneuver the force of public opinion that had been aroused by the revelations of the Pujo Committee. Various elements, both within the Banking community, and within the kept "Progressive" movement, were calling for "banking reform." In 1910, a cabal of power brokers from Wall Street held a secret conference on Jekyll Island, Georgia. The fruit of their labor, the Aldrich Bill, was promoted by Republicans under President Taft, but came to naught. In 1913, Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., wrote and published his seminal work on the subject, Banking and Currency, and the Money Trust. Subsequently in 1913, under the "liberal" president, Woodrow Wilson, the same essential plan, with minor changes, was signed into law as the Federal Reserve Act. This Act bestowed upon the Money Trust the actual, legal power that it had been illegally amassing for the previous forty years. In 1918, the Money Trust was so powerful that it was able to use the Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, to enter the offices of the National City Press, in Washington D.C., and seize all of the books and destroy all of the plates of the books of the elder Lindbergh.
Organize the Un-organized
The above is an apt commentary on today's atomized and disintegrating society where alienation and chaos have been socially engineered to an all-time high. It is interesting to note that the robber barons, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and their minions, financed and fostered the dissemination of the doctrines of Social Darwinism - "the survival of the fittest" - by propagating the works of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, developed from Darwin's more theoretical and academic work. Simultaneously, they thwarted the propagation of the doctrines of social co-operation of the Russian theoretical anarchist, Prince Kropotkin, emanating from his seminal work, Mutual Aid. Kropotkin, no less a scientist than Darwin, established the historical and natural order of mutual aid in all species, including the human. His work, however, has been buried, and working class solidarity and society itself have been fractured through the propagation of a false paradigm, which has served, in the long run, to keep the Bosses in power. The plutocrats have been successful beyond their wildest dreams. They have fostered a world where it's "every man for himself" - a "dog eat dog" world where workers steal each others tools, and almost no one remembers the days when farmers would help their neighbors continually, and a barn-raising was a joyous social occasion.
The Origin of Holy Wars
As a sample of Art Young's not so gentle jibes at clerical hypocrisy and the kept nature of the establishment clergy, the cartoon above also speaks in almost prophetic clarity about the coming future war over the control of NATURAL RESOURCES in the Near East. Today, as during both of the Gulf Wars, establishment preachers like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Chuck Smith, and John Hagee stand in this minister's shoes and are doing their best to make the next war a "very holy war."
"How Absurd! He wants his own Country!"
The cartoon above depicts the looting of Mexico, both before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, by the vultures of American Capitalism. Lenin, writing in 1916, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism described how International Finance Capitalism had become predatory in the manner that this picture describes. Some of the specific interplay between imperialist rivals over the Mexican turf is detailed in Ferdinand Lundberg's magnum opus, America's 60 Families. In the 1990s a worse thing took place in the former Yugoslavia, with British, German, Austrian, American, and French cartels vying for a piece of the action. The cameras of the media cartels remained fixed on the very real horrors of ethnic cleansing and tribal warfare amongst the Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs. The role of British and German intelligence agents, agents provocateurs, and soldiers- of-fortune went largely unreported and unquestioned. The fact that the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia was bought up by German business interests in a series of Equity-for-Debt swaps (guess who sold arms to the Croatians?) was relegated to the business pages of The Wall Street Journal. Accurate and in-depth analyses of the fine hand of G-7 imperialism at work in the dismemberment of formerly Socialist Yugoslavia, such as Sean Gervasi's article in the Dec. '92 issue of Covert Action Bulletin, went almost totally unreported and unnoticed in the establishment media. The UN Security Council, essentially the continuation of Anglo-American and European imperialism, with its "peace-keeping forces," played the role of soft cop to the hard, nasty groundwork laid down by covert operatives, arms merchants, and G-7 businessmen.
The Lords of the Press
The above is as true now as ever. Witness, in our day, the vilification (and occasional redemptions) of such nations as the Soviet Union, Red China, Chile under Allende, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama under Noriega, Iraq, Serbia, and North Korea. Today, however, the Mass Media is far more centralized in the hands of a much smaller circle of monopolists than it was in the 1920s when this cartoon was drafted.
Killing Labor Unions - the Sport of Industrial Kings
This cartoon, also prescient, reminds one of the Nazi commandante of the slave labor camp in the movie Schindler's List, who hunted his Jewish slave laborers with a high-powered hunting rifle from the balcony of his Schloss. Nazism and Fascism were a manifestation of this murderous tendency within Capitalism. Unfortunately, they are also a manifestation of the greed and predatory spirit that has a deep hold on many human beings. Capitalism being, as it were, a manifestation of a stage of arrested human development. I refer the reader to the book Fascism and Big Business, by Daniel Guerin, New York, 1938. The last cartoon depicts with graphic bluntness a theme dear to Art Young's heart - the disparity between rich and poor, and the plight of the homeless. Needless to say, it's still going on.
Relativity
I cannot fault my grandmother's faith, for she was sincere; a genuine idealist and a true believer. At the age of seventeen, I saw a vision of the LORD, Yahshua Ha' Meshiach in the heaven of heavens, and that sight expanded my horizons further than anything that ever happened to me before or since. Yes, it is true, Art Young and the Socialists of his time were naive about the glorious future of Soviet Russia - and for a number of reasons - but they were right about much that was happening here, in America. Looking at my grandmother's book, The Best of Art Young today, with the benefit of years of living, and a whole lot of learning, I am still able to appreciate, and marvel at the contents. The Class War was real. And it's still going on, Denny. - Mark Walter Evans, modified from the - North Coast Xpress, 1995 -
