Last night i watched this film for the first time in thirty years. I found it a daring tour de force by star-director-co-screenwriter Warren Beatty at the time. "A three-hour film about an American Communist who goes to Russia...and dies" as he puts it in the DVD commentary was not potentially the stuff of box-office gold in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan and the most heated time of Cold War America since the early Sixties.
But the film did do well enough at the box office to make a small profit and earn a number of awards, including an Oscar for Beatty as a director and Maureen Stapelton in her role as Emma Goldman.
The film follows early 20th Century American globe-trotting journalist and activist John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant as writers and political radicals. They fall in love and then, after moving from staid Portland, Oregon, to living a bohemian lifestyle in the Greenwich Village part of New York (and having some tumultuous old-fashioned Hollywood romantic complications) go to Russia to witness, report and (for Reed) participate in the October Revolution of 1917. Seeing the film the first time prompted me to go out and read John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and its a great piece of reportage, and historically significant even if some critics have found it too kind to one political movement in that revolution.
Written as it was at the beginning of such an epochal event in human history, Reed can be forgiven for being a bit too romantic about the possibilities of what was happening in Russia to empower workers and forgotten people all over the world.
The first half of the film shows us Reed's view of the Revolution and the growth of radical labor politics in World War II era America. The scene with the laborers in the barn in the clip is indicative of that.
The second half of the film shows how those around Reed (including Bryant and Emma Goldman) become more disillusioned with the chances of radical change in America and the high cost that Lenin's government is exacting on the Russian people. At the same time, Beatty and his fellow screenwriter, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, make it clear that Reed is a man who is a man trapped between his own country (where he faces jail for sedition charges stemming from opposing the entry of America in World War One) and his lack of total revolutionary fervor for some in Russia who increasingly use him as a tool to promote their own ideas as the Bolsheviks desperately try to fight off the attempts by disenfranchised revolutionary parties, moderate and reactionary groups and foreign armies who mean to bring down their government. He seems a man without a country, chasing a revolution that has little use for his true reflections.
I couldn't help wondering what would have become of Reed's view of Russia had he lived longer? According to a quote attributed to Bryant, he felt at the end of his life he might have misjudged the Bolsheviks. But there is controversy there. What we do know without controversy is that John Reed at his best was courageous and had no tolerance for censorship or the lies of politicians or bureaucrats.
It's clear though his is a tale that would be little known outside formal history classes in America were it not for the box office clout of a American film star. No matter what you think about the beliefs of these two main people when you reflect upon them, I think most would say this is a tale well worth the telling.
The 1948 Election was not unlike what America faces in 2012--a do-nothing Congress against a president with low approval ratings and an economy with problems (higher prices then, unemployment today) and trouble spots overseas.
Rather than play an accommodating "Associate Professor of America" as Barack Obama did in 2010 and most of 2011, the underdog candidate for the 1948 election, Harry Truman fought back and put the onus on the "80th Do-Nothing" Republican dominated Congress, which had pushed against increases in minimum wages, labor rights and a national health care program.
The result was a complete turnaround in voters perceptions of President Truman and his party. This is a good lesson for all Democrats running for office. A discouraged enlightened electorate does little but to encourage its adversaries.
Can history repeat itself? Let's just say this is how a Democratic President running for election SHOULD sound like.
"Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of of any service to them" ---from "The One Thing Needful", Chapter One, "Hard Times"
Reading this book for the first time, I found Charles Dickens 1853 novel "Hard Times" about a fictional northern English city of Coketown and its and its sterile and dark atmosphere an excellent read. It starts with a indictment of factory-based, facts-oriernted "model schools" for children. Then we meet the "Hands" workers with little life beyond work, and beauty and social amusement seen as a frivious luxury (Charity or justice is also frivilous to this doctrine of top-down industrial feudalism. ) And then we see the effect the doctrine has on the very people who promoted it. It is not a cheerful picture.
Dickens' indictment of misapplied utilitarianism,the factory-school system that existed to root out the hearts of the young and the hypocrisy that some of upper class and wealth, especially the loathsome "self-made man" Josiah Bounderby, try to foist on their factory "hands". The book succeeds as an entertainment with all the plot twists and come'upance you'd want from such a book. But also as a political novel in the same vein as John Steinbeck's humanistic "Grapes of Wrath" or his earlier novel about struggling workers in Depression-era California, "In Dubious Battle".
Mainly this is because it is not a political novel in the sense of a polemic, but one that serves as a dramatized plea for the better senses of human beings to be restored and put above base coinage, banks, and economic productivity. It does this by giving us characters and humor and changed minds of peole we can care about, not just straw characters and statistics.
And it speaks to our time as well, a plea to save human beings from the maw of simply being industrial (or, in our day) technological or retail/service industry cogs and tools to any of the masters of our community. There's a little Coketown wherever you go.
Humans need circuses in some form, time for drama and poetry and beauty and time to appreciate it all. We all have a divine spark that should be cherished. Those sparks shouldn't be starved of energy.
Below is an animated adaptation of the first part of the novel, from a graphic novel by Nick Ellis.
Below: a rare photograph of a northwest American group of men, travelling as members of the Industrial Workers of the World, at a stop in Ashland Oregon in February 1911. At was at this stop--hundreds of miles from their destination--that the men were forced to leave the train and rely on their own feet--and the goodwill of those good samaritans along the way---to take a stand for the rights of working people in America. (from The Medford Mail-Tribune article, June 13, 2010.)
The Wobblies were the nickname of an early 20th Century American labor group known as the Industrial Workers of the World. They were a more radical bunch than the much larger American Federation of Labor, an organization that helped skilled workers but left industrial laborers and their kind out in the cold so as not to cause fear in the hearts of business men and politicians who were concerned about organized labor becoming too large ar demanding too many laws protecting the welfare of industrial workers.
Because of the hostility engendered by some who had socialist and syndicalist views, "The Wobblies" were often not welcomed in smaller towns. This was certainly true in February 1911, when just over a hundred men set off from Portland, Oregon to ride freight cars nearly 700 miles south to Fresno, California.
This group of men made it through miles of railroad tracks, past large and small rural towns. It was not illegal for men to travel on freight cars in those days, but it was if the train carried passengers.
Some Oregon communities like Grants Pass, 200 miles south of Portland, welcomed them, others did not in part because of the IWW being vilified in local newspapers as "hobos" and violent revolutionaries. None of the men used their own names when talking to reporters or ordinary people, for fear of reprisals to themselves and their families. They referred to each other by a number.
It was at approximately at 250 miles into the journey, at the Ashland Oregon train station just 15 miles from the border, that the men were forced off the freight cars by railroad police. A few of the men turned back at this point, but most of them starting "riding the grits" in train parlance of the time. They began to walk in other words.
The trek took them dozens of miles up into the Siskiyou Mountains that separate the California and Oregon state lines. The railroad tracks were the only means of getting over the mountains in those days and it took the IWW up steep terrain 3-4000 feet above sea level into the mountains in some of the worst weather the area had seen in years. Over three feet of snow blanketed the pass. One man had severe frostbite when they finally made it to Yreka, California, the first major town just inside California.
The group pushed on...and on. It is estimated they walked over 150 miles. Then they were allowed to take a train to continue their journey to Fresno. Finally, at the small farming town of Red Bluff in the Sacramento Valley, the IWW men found out through local reporters that the Fresno strike was over. It was at that point that the leaders burned all records and notes of meetings to keep them from falling into the hands of the authorities. All in all, in much adversity, they had covered 550 of the grueling 700 mile scheduled trip.
The Trek of these disciplined and non-violent band of men would be all but forgotten were it not for a journalist, a professor at Southern Oregon University and a local historian in Oregon who have collected what information they could find through the newspaper records. Here is part of a front-page article on the journey,as written by Paul Fattig in the Medford Mail Tribune:
"Thrown off a freight train in Ashland this morning by special police in the employ of the Southern Pacific railroad, nearly 200 members of the Industrial Workers of the World are encamped just south of the city limits of Ashland," the Mail Tribune reported on Feb. 17.
"So far they have not made a single hostile demonstration," the article continued. "The police are on guard against their entering the city."
The Wobblies eventually decided to walk along the tracks — hit-the-grits in hobo parlance of the day — to Steinman, a railroad watering site some 10 miles south of Ashland, Mullen said.
When they arrived, hungry and without shelter, railroad section boss A.W. Nell loaned them shovels to clear an area in the snow and axes to cut wood and build warming fires, the historian said. Nell's wife gave the Wobblies apples and crackers, albeit not enough for all, he said.
In a Feb. 19 article in the Mail Tribune, a reporter who had spent the night with the Wobblies found no weapons, despite declarations to the contrary by the Ashland police.
"The railroad has given orders that no trains shall stop at Steinman, and mountaineers who know the Siskiyou pass say there is grave danger that the wayfarers may perish in the storm and snow," the journalist wrote.
Their aim was not to cause violence or intimidate ordinary citizens. They were simply supporting the rights of "working stiffs" like themselves to a better life. And they were willing to go peacefully to jail for what they believed.
Why have The International Workers of the World been all but forgotten in mainstream America? The major reason was the establishment backlash to the IWW, a process that picked up steam after the IWW opposed entry of America into World War I. And even though many major IWW national leaders, like Bill Heywood, soon moderated their opinions to save the union from anti-free speech laws pushed through by Congress, the rise of Marxists in Russia in late 1917 excited a great deal of worry. Coupled with bombings blamed on labor "agitators", the government under Wilson and his Attorney-General William Palmer introduced a massive series of raids. These "The Palmer Raids", against 43 IWW offices nation wide in May of 1919, were only the beginning of an anti-radical campaign that decimated the IWW and other organizations with hundreds of arrests, most of which were declared illegal after the initial fears died down in the 1920's. These arrests and political fissures between those who remained active in the concept of "One Big Union" ended the IWW as an effective force by the mid-1920s. It survives today as a shell of a group that once boasted tens of thousands of members.
Here's a bit of background on The Industrial Workers of the World and the polarized conditions between capital interests and undervalued labor which brought the organization into existence.
