Death To The Fascist Insect!

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's Death To The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People Day at Booktryst. On this day thirty-eight years ago, Patty Hearst was on the lam with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

She had, on April  3, 1974, announced that she was now one of them and had adopted the pseudonym "Tania." Now she was in prep for her debut, on April 15, as an urban guerilla bank robber. Death To The Fascist Insect Blah, Blah, Blah, was the SLA's mission statement, radical politics at its buggiest.

In its dehumanization and abstraction of the individual it's a line, however, that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own, except, of course, for the anti-Fascist part. No little irony there. No matter  the politics,  the wider the division the more they all begin to look, sound, and behave alike until you reach, as here, the absurdum ad reductio, a Fascist anti-Fascist motto that, out of context, reads as a parody of political propaganda. But no laughing matter. When  radical extremists act out individuals tend to die.

The Secularist's Adopted Grandfather
N.p., n.d. [ c. late 19th century].
Handbill with unattributed woodcut.
 
Flanking the woodcut is text reading,
"Secularists, are you proud of your Grandfather?"
and " We should respect our Parentage - Dr. Darwin."
A previous owner has inscribed the words,
"Orang Outang - horrid beast - I am not like you in the least."

And so on this day we celebrate polarization in American politics. It's poisoning our political landscape but makes for entertaining, if somewhat frightening, reading when radicals of both the Right and Left come out to play, commit themselves to their cause in print, and wreak havoc on rational discourse. The fright aspect is heightened when one considers that radical seems to have  become the new mainstream and moderate the new extreme. 

International Workmen's Association. North American
Section, Pacific Coast Division, Organizer's Circular.
[San Francisco]: International Workmen's Association, [c. 1881].

Buried in the text is an offer to members of a "scientific and
comprehensive course of chemistry," i.e. explosives training.

Coincidentally. Lorne Bair, the social and political history rare literature specialist, has just issued a new catalog, delightfully devoted, as usual, to the often strident and out there voices of yesteryear, reminding us that extreme political expression has always been a part of the American character, an All-Terrain Vehicle cycling though the American psychic velodrome. Now, however, the stakes are higher, and we need to get the poles back on the true American path, a bicycle built for two heading in one direction. Good luck and God help us all.

BOYCOTT Campbell's Cream of Exploitation Soup -
In Support of Mid-Western Farm Workers.
Toledo: FLOC [Farm Labor Organizing Committee], c. 1980s.

"Mmmm, Mmmm, [not so] Good."

When Campbell's Soup refused to negotiate with Ohio
farmworkers, a brilliant functionary of FLOC appropriated
Andy Warhol's classic pop image and created a propaganda
poster that sharply crystallized their message without
inflammatory slogans or wild-eyed declarations of evil.
The boycott worked. In 1986, Campbell's finally sat down
and entered into a collective bargaining agreement.

FAGAN, Myron C. Moscow Over Hollywood.
Los Angeles: R.C. Cary, 1948.

Josef Stalin looms over Tinseltown in this, the foundation
document of the Hollywood Blacklist, preceding the notorious
Red Channels by two years.

Note the cinematic chorus line, presumably singing and
dancing their hearts out during a performance of
The International while a sinister director looks on with
satanic satisfaction.

Protection To American Labor and American Industries.
New York: Ballin & Berman, 1888. Silk bandana.

Republican souvenir of the 1888 election, based upon
the campaign's Protection v. Free Trade issue.

Department of Strange Political Metamorphoses:
In 1888, the Republican Party was anti-Free Trade and pro-Labor.
Their Presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, won the election.

The Most Exciting Story of the Century Will Be Printed
in the Utica Saturday Globe.
Utica: Utica Saturday Globe, 1889.

The post-Civil War period saw more than one brand
of white-hooded racist. Here, the Utica, NY Globe advertises
a series of exposés based upon an undercover agent's
infiltration of The White Caps, a vigilante group based in
southern Indiana and contiguous counties in Kentucky and
Ohio. By 1900, the White Caps had disbanded or had been
hijacked by local Ku Klux Klan chapters, which, apparently,
believed that their territory wasn't big enough for the both of them. 
How can you tell them apart?

Is There a Pink Fringe in the Methodist Church?
If so, what shall we do about it?
Houston: The Committee For the Preservation of Methodism, 1951.

Exposé of the Methodist Federation for Social Action,
a faith-based organization following the precepts of
Jesus Christ, written by Methodist followers who
had forgotten them in the midst of paranoia.

WHARTON, Charles S. The House of Whispering Hate.
Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1932. A presentation copy.

If only the current U.S. House of Representatives
kept their snarls at a whisper.

Actually, a memoir of three years imprisonment at Leavenworth.
But it might just as well been a memoir of three years imprisonment
in Congress, for most of us a fate worse than death.

491 years ago, on April 19, 1521, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and proclaimed in defense of his convictions, "Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me. Amen." It is Western Civilization's preeminent statement on individual liberty, conscience, and thought.

Now, however, that eloquent declaration has become debased coin, its currency counterfeit in a culture that has gone mad with self-interest. Martin Luther has transmogrified into Sammy Davis singing I've Got To Be Me (Whether I'm Right. Whether I'm Wrong. What Else Can I Be But Who I Am)," the national conversation deep in schlock-infested waters, the  cacophony of political savagery the diet of worms in the U.S. Diet, leaving the rest of us undernourished.

It's the result of political movements that assert, as Sammy did in that anthem of juvenile yearning, "I won't settle down. I won't settle for less, as long as there's a chance I can have it all."

Calling Dr. Spock...

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera, with our thanks.
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Down With Wall Street! (1920 version)

Ninety years ago anti-Wall St. sentiment exploded.
 
by Stephen J. Gertz

"Direct Action." New York: 1920.
Broadsheet (28 x 22 cm)
On newsprint, recto-only.

At 12:01PM on September 16, 1920 a massive blast outside the headquarters of J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, the Financial District's busiest corner, left thirty-eight people dead and 143 seriously wounded.

It was the deadliest bombing on U.S. soil to date. The Washington Post declared it "an act of war."

Just prior to the explosion flyers were found by a Post Office letter-carrier in the District. Printed in red ink on white paper, the text read: "Remember, we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you." It was signed "American Anarchist Fighters."

The case dragged on for over three years yet no indictments were ever issued. The I.W.W., the Communist Party, the Union of Russian Workers - the usual suspects - were investigated and cleared.

Curiously and quite coincidentally, dramatist Booth Tarkington wrote a play, in four acts addressing the radicalism of the times, that opened exactly one week before the bombing, on September 9th.

"Written as a light satiric comedy, Booth Tarkington's Poldekin (1920)...was intended to laugh Communism out of existence. A comic rendering, he offers, was 'more effective than to fall into a fury at mention of the word, as so many Americans are doing.' The title character...leads a group of Russian revolutionaries, who, seeing themselves as sociopolitical missionaries, intend to launch a rebellion in the United States by publishing propaganda and inspiring a class war. Referring to postwar upheaval, a professor among them intones: 'We take advantage of the violent mood to produce universal war between the classes'" (Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914-1929, p. 172).

The play, which only ran for one month,  inspired the anonymous author of this broadside, published without imprint or any identifying information whatsoever. All we know is that is was issued between September 16  and sometime in October 1920, when the curtain rose for the last time; Poldekin closed after only forty-four performances. Though a  light satire it was, apparently, too heavy for theater goers prior to the bombing and afterward, when nerves were frazzled and fear was dominant.

(Famed stage, later film, actor George Arliss played the title role. Twenty-seven year old Edward G. Robinson portrayed Pinsky. Sidney Toler, who later starred in the Charlie Chan movies -  assuming the role after Warner Oland's death - acted the character, Welch).

Wall Street, September 16, 1920.
Photo credit: World-Telegram

This broadside is one of the many items concerning Social Movements that rare book dealer, Lorne Bair, features in his most recent catalog, Catalog Ten: Fall 2010. 

MARLEN, George (pseud. of George Spiro).
Earl Browder: Communist or Tool of Wall Street -
Stalin, Trotsky or Lenin?
New York: By the author, 1937.

"Our mission," Bair writes, "is to seek out unusual and obscure material relating to (mostly) American social movements and to approach it with the respect and scholarship it has long deserved but only rarely received from collectors and booksellers.

The Pink Iconoclast. No. 49 (Nov. 14, 1903).
Colorado Springs, CO: E.E. Sonnanstine.
Quirky, scarce newspaper devoted to
freethought and radical politics.

"Though our sympathies lie decidedly on the Left, we feel a responsibility to document as much of American social history as we can stomach...So in this catalog you'll find George Lincoln Rockwell butting up against Big Bill Haywood, and primitive racist lost-race fantasies rubbing elbows with civil rights manifestos.

"SLEUTH" (pseud. of S.O. Berg?)
Capitalism's Last Struggle: Fascist Terrorism
Just Around the Corner. Manifesto of the
United Workers and Farmers. Revised
from Prosperity Around the Corner.
Seffner, FL: S.O. Berg, [c. 1934].
A fictional parable of Depression-era class warfare.

"Don't let this bug you. Or, rather, go ahead, let it bug you; get worked up: that's what nearly every item in this catalog was intended to make you do. 

WHITE, Bishop Alma.
Heroes of the Fiery Cross.
Illustrated by Rev. Branford Clarke.
Zarephath, NJ: The Good Citizen, 1928.
Racist, and anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic
encomium to the Klu Klux Klan.
Published in New Jersey.

"It's strange times we live in, and we could do worse than to remember that even stranger times preceded us." 

For example: KKK activity in New Jersey.

ADAMS, Samuel Hopkins. The Flagrant Years:
A Novel of the Beauty Market.New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.

The beauty business had, by the time  The Flagrant Years was published in 1929, evolved into the the beauty industry, and the beautification of the average American woman became a social revolution that triumphed over all religious and moral objections. It was, in its way, as radical as any contemporary political movement. Case in point: the  Marcel Wave.

Lorne Bair Rare Books logo.
Based upon that of The Vanguard Press,
the venerable radical publishing house.

The culprits to the Wall Street bombing of 1920 were never apprehended. It had been suspected that  sympathizers to Luigi Galleani, the Italian anarchist active in the United States until his deportation in 1919, were to blame. It appears that Galleanist Mario Buda was behind the attack; never questioned in the bombing's aftermath, he skipped to Naples, never to return to the U.S.

And Booth Tarkington's Poldekin has, to the best of my investigation, never been published, separately or within an anthology. As playwright, director, humorist, and drama critic George S. Kaufman famously declared, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night." But when the satire concerns radical politics it closes on Friday night and theatricals publisher Samuel French wants nothing to do with it.

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

A special thank you to Peacay at BibliOdyssey for a key assist.

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